+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

In light of the formative nature of the mother-infant interactions that lead to the development of the human right limbic emotional-social brain as presented in my last post, +HOW DOES THE SELF GET FORMED? HERE’S A WHOLE LOT OF IMPORTANT INFO, it is perhaps one single range of related emotions that creates the most ongoing, lifelong problem:  Terror.

See search:  fear and infant brain development

For those of us who were maltreated as infants, it might well be that this emotional range was not only NOT regulated by our interactions with our mother as this last post describes, but our terror was also AMPLIFIED by the very person who was supposed to protect us and keep us safe and secure.

I suspect that within this emotional range related to terror we live the rest of our lives with both the inability to adequately regulate it — but also with far more terror experience built into us that most people might be able to imagine.

The terror range includes not only fear, anxiety and panic, but also dread, foreboding and uneasiness that includes the sense that we are always waiting for something bad to happen – something scary and overwhelming.

As my last post explained, these emotional reactions were created in us long, long before the reason-able abilities of our brain were formed and developed.  They exist on a very physiological level within our body itself.  Our body, in its feedforward and feedback information signaling loops, keeps us continually aware that danger and threat are not far away.  We cannot rest, relax, or ever assume that we are safe and secure.  Instead, we are always prepared to survive what we cannot see – that which we have anticipated (and often received) since the earliest times of our life = trauma.

Ours is a cellular early warning system.  Ours is a continual state of warning and high alert, operating often well outside our range of conscious awareness.

Our terrorizing and terrifying experiences happened to us often way before we had words to think thoughts with.  They happened while the very brain that we NOW think with was forming itself.  If the mothering we received was inadequate and/or scary, the nameless fear became a fundamental part of who we are from the time of our beginning.

Most of us are thus naturally so used to the presence of this ‘structural terror’ that we cannot imagine ourselves in the world feeling any other way.  This state is a ‘given’ one for us.  If we can be honest with our self, the times when we have truly felt (while not under the influence of a drug) absolutely safe, secure, relaxed and calm are the exception in our life rather than the rule.

If we don’t consciously feel this state of ill-at-ease all of the time, we know it is never far away because we know we risk this terror state overwhelming us unexpectedly and often seemingly out of nowhere.  Our entire body-brain-mind-self exists as a trauma alarm system that never runs out of batteries and never turns itself off.

We can experience this undercurrent of trauma-response in our body as a hypersensitivity to anxiety (e.g. anxiety, PTSD) or as a hyposensitivity (e.g. depression).  If our earliest caregiver-infant interactions were not as positive as the one’s described in my last post, we need to understand and expect that our vagus nerve system and its connection to our autonomic nervous system (ANS – ‘stop’ and ‘go’ branches) have been disrupted.

I just wanted to point this out today in response to the post I just published.  I KNOW what this chronic state of underlying dread feels like.  I live with it nearly every single moment of my life.  I have become unbelievably aware of this fact since my children have all left home.  During the 35 years of my adult life I had dependent children living in my home, my caregiving system’s operation superseded my awareness of my chronic inner state of alarm.  Now that they have left home and live on their own, I notice that my alarm system runs nearly all of the time.

Being able to dissipate the power my inner alarm system has over my states of being requires nearly continual conscious monitoring.  I do not know how to shut it off or how to regulate this inner state of foreboding so that it will go away.  I doubt that is even possible.  At least by studying the kind of information I posted earlier today I at least have a much clearer understanding of where this alarm system came from and how it was formed very early into my right limbic emotional-social brain and body through traumatic early experiences with my out-of-control violent and abusive mother.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++