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I have no doubt that our human species participated in dance and music long, long before we had the ability to use words in speech.  I also know that as a newborn infant I could first experience the terrorizing sounds of my mother’s trauma ‘music’ and feel how she physically treated me through her trauma ‘dance’ long, long before I could begin to comprehend what a word was.  Those earliest experiences with my mother affected how my brain developed.  I want to go back now and specifically try to heal my ‘infant’ musical brain.

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If someone explained to me, for example, that the reason I couldn’t walk as well as others was because my feet had been bound tightly from the time I was very small, and the bindings were not removed until I was a teenager, I would be able to make that connection.  I understand what feet have to do with walking.

I took the ability to send and receive spoken word communication and to think in words for granted all of my life until two years ago.  After the shocking stress of being diagnosed with advanced, aggressive breast cancer, and then after following through with all the radical treatments, including chemotherapy, that have saved my life, I now have a different understanding of my own speech related processes.

I understand now that my brain did not learn to process language normally.  I understand that somehow I was able to continue forward in my infant-child development and all the way into adulthood without anyone, my self included, recognizing that my mother’s severe verbal abuse of me had changed the way my language processing abilities developed, and thus changed the regions of my brain and their operation that language-processing abilities rely on.

What I know about myself now post cancer and its treatment is that what I really did from the time I was very, very small was create the equivalent of a house of cards within my brain that gave me the illusion that I processed spoken language in the same way that other people do.  Chemotherapy’s affect on my infant-child abused brain on many levels was that it erased most of the post-critical windows of early development abilities I had ‘learned’ to use so that I could get along in the world.  In other words, chemotherapy erased my memory of how I pretended to be normal.

My language processing abilities were not spared.  I see the image of a beautiful (and believable) brilliantly colored and intricately designed paper Chinese lantern that represents the ways I managed to incorporate enough of how regular people interact with one another in verbal ways so that even I was fooled into believing I was no different from others.  Yet my experience with cancer and its treatment has been that a soaking rain has disintegrated the fragile paper structure of pretending I was ‘OK’.

I am left with a barely flickering candle of what normal human verbal-social interactions are supposed to be like – and none of the extraneous trappings.  By finding the developmental brain research and by trying to understand it, I am learning that the balance of information processing between the two hemispheres of my brain has been altered.  Not only did my right emotional social limbic brain not develop normally, but neither did my left brain (as a right-handed person).

With the secondary (later learned) structure of my language processing abilities wiped away, I am left with the experience of what my primary language processing abilities are really like.  It is only now that I am beginning to gain willingness to look behind the illusions of normalcy for myself that I am beginning to understand what my mother’s extreme verbal abuse of me from the time I was born did to me.

At the same time I consider myself fortunate to be living in the period of human history when understandings about the intricate workings of the human brain are being discovered.  I am fortunate also to be living at a time when I can find related important information in my own world through the internet.  In some strange way that I cannot pinpoint or name exactly, I also realize that my having cancer, being treated for it, and still being alive – now with this NEW information about the way my brain REALLY processes language combined with access to new brain discovery information – is giving me the fantastic opportunity to combine my personal story of surviving severe infant-child abuse with new-found awareness of how early verbal abuse impacts a young brain during its critical-window periods of rapid growth and development.

I am the living, breathing, walking, talking, hearing, listening result of my mother’s incredible infant-child severe abuse experiment.  I don’t suffer from anything as blatantly obvious as having the consequence of bound feet.  I suffer from the invisible, internal, brain structural changes that her abuse of me created.  At the same time I don’t have any understanding of what brain regions look like.  Words used to describe them are foreign to me, and most of them I cannot form my mental tongue around enough to grasp what these words even sound like!

But understand them I must because I am out of the loop of normal social interactions, home alone with an invisible 100% disability that frankly enrages me and causes me great sadness.  Not only did my right brain not learn how to read ‘social cues’ or facial expressions normally, my left brain did not grow in such a way that verbally expressed words are connected and associated with the underlying expression of emotion and intention of the speaker in normal ways.

If I were to be given the choice between two gifts, one being a platinum jewel studded necklace worth millions and the other being the information that research such as Dr. Martin Teicher’s presents about how early abuse changes the brain, I would not hesitate to accept the latter.  Most unfortunately my body-brain knows within its every fiber what Dr. Teicher is talking about when he writes the following:

“The study on verbal abuse is the first to be published, though the overall hypothesis on distinctive sensory damage has so far panned out when the unpublished work is also considered.  The findings of this study “set the stage for what we’re seeing in the other ongoing studies—that sensory systems are vulnerable,” said Teicher.   “The brain is probably suppressing the development of sensory systems that are providing adverse input.”   That is, children’s brains seem to “turn down the volume” on abusive words, images and even pain.   The result is diminished integrity in these sensory pathways.”

At the same time I know it wasn’t JUST the “deleterious effect of ridicule, humiliation, and disdain on brain connectivity” that changed the way my brain grew its language abilities.  In fact, I suspect I would be far better off today if the development brain changes I suffered from my mother’s verbal abuse of me had at least WAITED to happen once I even understood what ridicule, humiliation and distain even were.  Because my mother’s hatred and abuse of me began at the time of my birth, my body-brain had to change its development from my very beginnings.

My suspicion is that dissociation began to find its way into my body-brain development during the first interactions I had with my mother.  As a result, my body-brain has NEVER stored memory in an ordinary way.  Because of this fact, I have what is probably an unusual ability to both remember things I should not remember and to NOT remember things that I should.  Repeated patterns of abusive interactions, which began at my birth, formed themselves into my body-brain in such a way that dissociation itself became a superhighway of connectivity rather than the desired patterns of association.  I can remember my mother’s interactions with me well before I reached the age of words.

This is true because I was born into an infant world that was about as different from normal as it could possibly be.  I didn’t forget these patterns of interactions with my abusive mother from birth, either.  They built the body-brain I have as they built themselves INTO the body-brain I have.  There’s nothing unusual about this fact, either.  ALL of us have the patterns of our earliest interactions with our infant caregivers built into us – because they BUILT us.

When an ordinarily-built person encounters a group of strangers, how they interact with them on all levels, including verbal exchange, happens through a remembering of their earliest caregiver interactions that built them.

I find that I am surprised by the next thoughts that entered my mind as I wrote this last sentence.  My mind is telling me that I thought I’d made progress as I came to understand that interactions between people, including verbal ones, could be looked at as if they were mostly on one of a continuum or the other.  I thought that continuum was about prosocial interactions or antisocial interactions.  Now I realize that I see another entirely different continuum that exists in its own right as an entirely different way.

People like me, who suffered enough severe abuse from birth, operate in our human interactions on this other continuum.  I suspect that the Austic brain shares the features of this continuum, a continuum that simply shows the degrees of unsocial interactions our brains were built with.  The unsocial brain has a different set of rules than does a brain that includes on the ends of its continuum degrees of prosocial or antisocial abilities.  The unsocialized brain is based in its foundational construction on dissociations rather than associations.  It is a brain built from social isolation and ‘maternal deprivation’.

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As I mentioned above, I had no way to know that I had a dissociational unsocialized brain until my experience with cancer and its treatment erased all the secondary human social interactional abilities that I had somehow learned far later, and far down the road from ‘normal’.  They could be erased and ‘forgotten’ because they were secondary and not primary.  Now I am left with two ongoing parallel experiences.  I experience myself with my unsocial brain at the same time I remember when I could ‘act as if’ I had a socialized brain.  But I do not believe I can ever get back the secondary socialized brain I had before cancer.  That brain, with its complex set of secondary (learned) patterns of ‘normal’ human interactional abilities has vanished as certainly as a paper Chinese lantern in a hard rain.

Because I live with this unsocial brain I can say that two simultaneous experiences I know about first hand are (1) I do not receive or process sensory information normally, and (2) I have a fundamentally altered sense of time – and therefore of timing.  While these two aspects of the way my brain formed affect every experience that I have, they create the most difficulty for me as a human being in my relationships with others.

Words become words in any language we might speak because we can recognize where each one starts and where it ends.  Next, we understand the agreed upon meaning that each word refers to.  If we listen to a language that is not our own, we do not recognize word starts and stops, nor do we understand their meanings.

I now recognize for myself that I don’t actually have a first language at all.  The language that I began to learn from the time I was born was a language purely of emotion.  Not only that, but the first language I learned was about extremely overwhelming SOUND coupled with physical pain caused by brutal and violent motion.  My mother didn’t wait until I had the advanced mental abilities formed into my brain that would have let me begin to comprehend what the words “ridicule, humiliation and disdain” might actually mean.

The associations being made in my infant brain were that the sound, the feel, the look of my mother threatened my existence.  I believe my body knew this fact profoundly.  My mother’s roaring, screaming voice were coupled with (associated with) the look of her distorted, contorted, twisted, wide-eyed, wide-mouthed psychotically violent hate-filled face.  The sound of her, the look of her face, were coupled with (associated with) the rage-dilled steely hard grip of her hands, with her pinches, slaps, thumps, slaps along with the heavy thundering stomp of her feet.

So why would I be surprised now to find that the actual words that fall out of people’s lips are far from being my first concern?  Why would I wonder now why there is often a great distance of time between when those words fall out and when I can actually make any logical sense out of them?  Why would I wonder that my verbal interactional space is slow and loose and broad and wide with ill-defined edges rather than being tight and clear and succinct and efficient and FAST?

Language spoken by other people (all but those I am closest to and most safe and secure with) is about how the sound of that person first affects me.  What they actually say means very little to me at all.  If there is stress for me in the interaction, often I can watch a person’s lips move without hearing the sound of their words at all.

Listening to spoken language happens for me mostly in the realm of courtesy and consideration, not because I am comfortable with it – or even need it myself.  I am always concerned on my most fundamental levels with assessing information for threat and risk of harm and for another person’s TRUE intentions.  That level of meaning is, for me, nearly completely divorced from the actual words a person rattles out of their mouth.

It can, therefore, take me a very long time to understand others’ questions and to respond to them.  There is often a wide blank dissociational pause in the conversation while I work very hard inside of myself to negotiate this human social space.  Even though I try hardest to determine intention and risk of harm, at the same time I did not build within my brain the normal capacity for reading nonverbal social signals.  I now completely understand that social verbal interactions with others are exhausting for me, and that I do not do them well.

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That leads me to the next step in my own thinking.  At 58 years old I am now approaching my own logical conclusion.  I probably had developed within me what might be a supremely musical brain.  This suspicion brings to my mind the writings of Daniel J. Levitin about the human brain and music.  It makes me think about the writings of Arnold H. Modell on the human mirror neuron system as he describes how the essentials of human movement might be best described in terms of dance from before we are born.  It also makes me want to include what Dr. Dacher Keltner says about the brain stem connection between laughter and later-developing human verbal language (Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life).

How strange it might seem to think about my mother’s profound abuse of me from birth in these simple terms:  The terrible and terrifying noise and sound of my mother was her music toward me.  The terrible and terrifying, traumatic movement of her was her dance toward me

If we suspend all the intellectual concepts we are tempted to apply in our thinking about newborns in interaction with their mothers – as they begin to happen to all of us from the moment we are born – and begin to understand that it is the patterns of our mother’s music and of her dance that are impacting our developing body-brain, perhaps we can begin to think in terms of a different kind of medicine that might help in our healing.

About a year before I ever knew I had the cancer, I experienced something that actually scared me.  I had bought myself an electric guitar.  One day I decided to give myself permission to play with it for as long as I wanted.  Four hours went by as if they were four minutes. After I put the guitar backing its case and walked away, I realized that my mind was full of music.  Not words, just patterns of notes and rhythms in ongoing streams without beginning or end.

What scared me was that I could not alter this flow of musical patterns  for nearly 48 hours except when I consciously forced myself to focus momentarily on some other action.  – notice the stop sign ahead of me when I was driving, or going through the actions to make a pot of coffee or a piece of toast.

At that time I was committed to my developmental brain studies and to my writing.  I decided not to let myself return to that level of music involvement because I believed it would interfere with my ‘work’.  Well, many thousands of hours and probably millions of written words later, I am making the decision to pursue an experiment with myself.

I accept that I will not be able to achieve the kind of mastery over guitar technique that I want or need, so I am making the very big decision to pull $519.95 out of my pitiful total savings of $1,800 and buy myself an electric piano.  I am choosing to spend that (to me) very large chunk of money because I am beginning to understand that allowing myself to think in music might be the single best medicine I can provide for my brain.  I am also purchasing and Audiogram so I can record myself thinking and go back and follow my conversations with myself – and between my brain hemispheres.  (The more perfect-pitch and consistent sound quality, the better)

I don’t have a history of musical study.  I cannot (yet?) read music.  But the more I come to understand that this last subject I am considering in my studies, how my mother’s verbal abuse of me FIRST affected my brain-body development as a dancing-musical human being, the more profoundly I am beginning to understand that at no time in my life have I actually been ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’.  I was not built that way.

So if wordless music and dance is the human first language, and if it is the language that continued to build my brain far into the stages when patterns of prosocial verbal speech should have taken over my associational brain patterns, then I think it’s time I gave myself permission to think and speak in my own first language.

Who knows?  Maybe I can go all the way back in the very structure of my brain and rewrite and overwrite what was put in there by the monster from the very beginnings of when I could listen to sound.  Maybe I will find my own first and primary language.  Maybe I will create it.  I will certainly be able to express it.  Of that I have no doubt.

NOTE:  Although this might seem to be an unrelated topic, it is not.  When I was 13 and in 8^th grade, I was able to discover in PE class that I was extremely gifted in playing basketball.  If ever I was to know what living in a state of perfect magic is like (other than what I expect to experience now with music), it was the experience of gliding around a basketball court with many other bodies while being oblivious to their existence as real physical objects.  There were only three objects on the full and busy court:  My body, the basketball, and the hoop.  I never took aim.  I never thought.  And I never missed a shot, not even if that shot took place halfway down the court, over everyone else’s head.

As an out-of-shape 58 year old I don’t expect to ever experience the magic of that game as it was for me when I was 13.  I know it was a related ability to autism in some way I don’t quite understand.  Part of how it happened was because I lived in dissociated space where self consciousness did not exist.  I fully expect to be able to recreate that space in the privacy of my own home, hooked to a perfectly tuned electric piano keyboard through head phones.

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I was going to present today a study of these three brain regions that Teicher talked about in his article, Cutting Words May Scar Young Brains, but evidently there were other things I needed to write about.  When I think about his other article, Abuse and Sensitive Periods, from my post +THE ‘TERROR-ABLE’ CONSEQUENCES OF INFANT-CHILDHOOD VERBAL ABUSE, I realize that I already know the truth of what he is saying even if I can’t yet literally understand the specific brain region information he is also writing about.  Right now it is more important to me to get my electric piano keyboard ordered and on its way.  The rest of this study can happen later.

“Among those who [solely] experienced parental verbal abuse, three statistically significant disturbed pathways emerged:

— the arcuate fasciculus, involved in language processing;

—  part of the cingulum bundle, altered in patients with posttraumatic stress disorder and associated with depression and dissociation; and

— part of the fornix, linked to anxiety.  The degree of disruption of the normal flow correlated with the severity of abuse.”

PLEASE READ FULL ARTICLE HERE

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