Month: March 2010

+HEALING TRAUMA WITH THE TIME ASSET

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I have a few other thoughts related to my encounters with people-families-children at the Saturday children art festival where I did the spinning demonstration.

One collection of thoughts has to do, again, with small and big people and how humans relate to one another in ‘tearing down’ or ‘building up’ ways.  A young man about 12 years old stopped by my demonstration and immediately showed not only rapt interest but quite a bit of knowledge about spinning, weaving and the fiber arts.  His mother was with him, and in talking with these two I was given a picture I’ll try to relay to you here.

Last year this boy enrolled in a beginning weaving class held by Bisbee’s local Fiber Arts Guild.  He was fascinated, learned quickly, warped his own loom at the Guild studio and made his mother a scarf along with a baby blanket for his newborn cousin.  In the middle of the weekend class schedule his mother became ill.  The Guild was notified, and the boy missed three of the 10 week class sessions.  When he was able to return he found not only that the Guild members had passed off his loom with his next project on it to someone else, but they had not bothered to call and ask or tell him this was being done.  The adults participating in these activities were evidently quite demeaning, rude, disrespectful and hurtful to this child.  They let him know they did not want him around.

I have been given a solid and working handmade table top loom that I told this boy I will bring into town and leave off at his home for him.  I will collect all of the related items I can find here that go with the loom, look for a book or two I might have here at home that can help him, and also see what I have in the way of extra yarn I can give him.  Once I have all of this collected, I will pile it all into my trusty 1978 rather worn El Camino and drop it off at his house.

With all the troubles our nation is having in engaging our youth in their own lives, let alone in the life of their community and nation, it is beyond my comprehension how ANYONE could be rude to any child, period!  Let alone to a child like this boy is who is obviously motivated with passion to learn the fiber arts and is committed to doing so!

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The next collection of thoughts I have is related to an 8-year-old boy and his parents who stopped by my demonstration.  This child is obviously brilliant, as are his parents.  His father is a professional musician, a drummer.  His mother is a computer programmer web designer.  The child is fortunately home schooled and very much loved.

From the first instant this child spotted the very simple and basic, actually rudimentary gizmos and gadgets that are used in the process of preparing wool and spinning it, I could see that his brain did not work like an ordinary child’s.  His parents sat most patiently for over two hours on a stone bench in the middle of the Central School hallway while their son explored every avenue not only of the wool preparation process, but most noticeably of the equipment – how it was constructed, how it worked, why it worked.

Not knowing anything by fact here, I can still think that this child’s tool region of this brain is forming major connections.  The child certainly wasn’t intimidated by people.  In fact, he hawked the process from his newly found and claimed station at the drum carder.  He instantly memorized every step of the process when I first told him, and continued to instruct every passerby he could rope in about how this all worked.

At one point I was vaguely aware of him giving his spiel while I sat at my spinning wheel visiting with his parents.  All of a sudden I hear the boy say in a rather loud, commanding voice, “Hey!  What’s wrong over there!  Why aren’t’ you working?”  I had to laugh.  There I sat like a broken machine.  He had educated his audience completely up to the point where they needed to see the final stage in process, and there I was having dropped my end of the bargain.

The boy was not being rude, though certainly his attitude could have been interpreted that way.  This boy, I could tell from watching him, treated human beings exactly as if they had gears and mechanisms and programming that made them tick.  He is a brilliant, absolutely brilliant child, but I would not expect him to ever have an ordinarily developed right social-emotional limbic brain.  His brain is special, as he is.

This brings me to mentioning the Asperger autistic spectrum giant, Temple Grandin.  A made-for-television movie about her life has just been released:  “The HBO movie “Temple Grandin” honors its heroine’s priorities, stressing deeds over tearful setbacks and joyous breakthroughs.”  If you haven’t heard about Grandin and her work before now, please spend a little time checking her out.  In the meantime, I will specifically mention that Grandin has a LOT to say about so-called GEEK children who have brains that are gifts to the world.  This little boy might well fit into the schemata of the children Grandin is talking about.

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This brings me to my third thought collection for today which is related to yesterday’s post, +SO MANY NEEDY PEOPLE IN DENIAL OF THEIR NEEDINESS.  Due to the insane and terrible abuse I suffered during my childhood from birth, complete with extended manipulation of any opportunities I might have had from tiny on to interact with people, my right limbic emotional-social brain did not have the chance to build itself in an ordinary fashion (as this blog’s readers have heard me write about repeatedly).

As a part of the spectrum of consequences to the adaptive brain changes my body made, I do not read, understand, process, or respond to the emotional-social signals other people send out easily or well.  In some ways, I am realizing that I have a rather unique ability to not automatically buy into the send-receive-respond social signal-cue communications cycles that people with ordinarily built early brains (through safe and secure early caregiver attachment exchanges) are designed for.  I can notice, attend to and translate actions that ordinary-brained people probably miss — because they CAN.

(Similarly, I suspect, to how the 8-year-old boy’s brain gains and processes information about machines that few other brains would, or can, notice.  Temple Grandin’s brain gets this altered information about animals.  These are abilities that do not come primarily from choice.  They reflect in manifestation different body-brain constructions — changed in part or wholly by combinations of genetics interacting with the environment.  Our abilities give us resources that more ordinarily-brained people probably do not have.  These differences and changes are part of what makes us exceptional and extra-ordinary people.)

Lest any of my readers suspect that I am exaggerating the differences I experience in my emotional-social interactional abilities with people, let me again mention that these transactions normally occur in the hundredths of a millisecond response signaling range.  They are happening physiologically about at the speed of light, or however quickly electrical signals are sent and received between neurons and other bodily cells.

These extremely fast, and supposed-to-be automatic electrical signals are operating according to how a person’s body-brain was constructed primarily from conception through age one.  Connections between pathways, circuits, brain regions and the body are constructed very early on and all growth and development past these early critical window stages of development follow along accordingly as we finish our early (and later) development.

This matters in many, many ways.  When, as a commenter to yesterday’s post mentioned (See: +SO MANY NEEDY PEOPLE IN DENIAL OF THEIR NEEDINESS) those of us with these changed brains are faced with awkward, uncomfortable, disquieting if not down right mean interactions with other people, we have an extremely difficult time doing what this commenter suggested when she noted:  Eleanor Roosevelt said “no one can make you feel inferior without your permission.”

Our body-brain does not read social-emotional cues and signals in the same way as Ms. Roosevelt’s no doubt did.  As a result, our attempts to decipher all of the signals other people are sending out in the hundredth of millisecond range do not mean the same thing to us as they do to ordinary brains.  If we are even going to get a clue about what is actually happening in our interactions with others, we need the one thing to happen that SO RARELY DOES HAPPEN that we could consider it impossible.

We need time to slow way, way down.  Because these communication signals are designed (normally) to occur near the speed of light, because they are outward manifestations of electrical impulses traveling invisibly within a person yet STILL manifesting themselves in visual and auditory signals that we are supposed to automatically read, understand and be able to respond back to in kind, we are at a serious disadvantage when it comes to doing what dear Ms. Roosevelt (and this commenter) suggest.

There is a universe, and I MEAN A UNIVERSE of information necessary to process information between people according to this maxim:  “no one can make you feel inferior without your permission.”  The brain has to know who-what the self is completely, it has to know who-what the other is completely, it has to process what-where the boundaries are between them, it has to be able to process the “feel” emotional information appropriately (and FAST), it has to make determinations as to what the emotion means, what the value is connected to the emotion, whether it is an ‘approach’ signal or an ‘avoid’ signal, it has to assess what’s at stake, what the degree of risk of threat to self and/or life is, what is being asked or demanded by this nebulous ‘other’, who has the power, what are the control stakes, where free will and choice (higher cortical functions) can fit into the picture……..  In other words, there is NOTHING simple about humans interacting with humans!  NOTHING!

This brings me to my last critical point.  When infant-children do not enjoy body-brain development in interaction with SOMEONE in the earliest caregiver department that allows for a safe and secure attachment to others, to the self, and to the world as a whole, none of the emotional-social processes the early brain is building itself upon will include the same information as will the body-brain of those who DID have the benefit of these more optimal developmental experiences.

We would be better off to NEVER automatically assume that the person we are engaging with in any way has a NORMALLY built optimal body-brain.  I would never expect that the woman I mentioned who needed to put me down regarding my spinning had an optimal emotional-social brain any more than I would ever expect that the rage filled passive-aggressive (in complete denial) worker at the laundromat I mentioned has one either.  They are operating in survival mode just as I do, just as my mother did.

True, individual personality blends with individual experience to create individually unique selves (by ratio with conscious awareness).  I recognize more and more my own inability to negotiate complex human transactions and interactions BECAUSE I no longer opt out by assuming that my automatic responses are the ones that are best for me.  At the same time – quite literally – TIME is RARELY my friend.

In a culture of hit-and-miss, hit-and-run, of brushing past one another at near breakneck speeds, very few of us are allowed or given the kind of TIME we would need to slow these interactional processes down far enough that we could manage to HONESTLY, with integrity, and ACTUALLY do the kind of processing Ms. Roosevelt must have assumed could happen automatically for everyone always – IF ONLY a person chose to do so.

When the emotional-social brain has not been built optimally, and the corresponding wiring in the body is not either (i.e. vagus nerve, autonomic nervous system, stress versus connection system, etc.), the only hope we have of processing information in any other way than the automatic trauma-built way we are designed for is to have TIME to include conscious processing.  Our social milieu is too invested on shallow and speedy interactions to let this happen.

We end up operating without enough information relevant for the present instant of time we find ourselves in with other people.  Our version of automatic creates ripples upon ripples of inward discomfort that we don’t even usually know about.  As we DO begin to become aware of the changed way other people and ourselves process emotional-social information, we begin to notice details of information – in our feelings, emotions, grounded in our body – that time does not let us process within usual fast moving social interactions.  That does NOT mean we are WRONG if we claim that many of our interactions with others leave us feeling sour inside as if we swallowed a toxic poison.

To no longer deny the truth behind many of the intentions, needs, demands, assessments and assumptions humans in our culture are wont to dish out back and forth – often in disguise so as to appear socially appropriate – means that we are returning back to the very beginning of our emotional-social brain’s formation so that we can do things differently than was done to us.  We are learning to no longer deny what we know on our insides to be true for us.

I believe this is healing, no matter how uncomfortable the process might be to our self or to anyone else.  We must take the TIME we need to figure out these uncomfortable interactions with others and our responses to them.  This, to me, is where the hope for change truly lies – not in therapy chambers, not in pills and drugs.

Hope and healing lies

in our being willing and patient enough

to find our own questions

so that we can find our own way

to answering them.

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+SHARING SOME PHOTOS FROM MY LIFE, AND A STORY

alchemynow4 Comments

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What is play and what is work?  I am including here some photographs of my spinning demonstration for our community’s children’s art festival held Saturday, March 6, 1010.  I also write here about an encounter I had with a family at the carnival that made me think again about denial and empathy, both of which are complex aspects of the human experience.

Before I begin, let me share with you a few pictures I took on Saturday of a tiny slice of Old Bisbee, Arizona.

These cacti grow at one end of a retaining wall above a part of one of the town's parking lots.
This is a picture of part of the yard above the retaining wall, a simple, humble and creative homage both to gardens and to water.
Here is the retaining wall below the yard (you can see the Central School tower at the top in the background). Notice how thoughtfully someone included old door knobs and a water faucet handle that people can grip to help themselves step from the parking lot onto the little dirt pathway.
I'll show you next some of the little things embedded into the wall. This is just one of thousands of similar creative additions to this little town's environment.
This little face is tiny, no more than three inches across, visible on the right side of the picture above this one.

This is also very tiny.
He's about four inches tall, set with the fish next to the door knobs.
On my walk, passed by this store front, just one of many quaint and special establishments in this little town.

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Next I’ll share some pictures with you of Central School where the children’s art festival was held.  This old school has been purchased by a nonprofit community art collective.  The class rooms are rented individually as studios.  You will see the giant papier mache taco made by 6th graders, the cloth sculpted cacti with their artist sitting beside them, and my spinning demonstration area before the children arrived with their families en masse.  I was too busy to take pictures at that point.

Showing the raw greasy fleece in the bag from the farmer, the green fleece having been washed and oven dyed still needs to be teased-fluffed and then carded prior to spinning -- also some finished yarn.
That's an umbrella swift used to wind skeins into balls, attached here to turquoise bench with drum carder.
This is a $665 Louet spinning wheel from Holland, specifically designed to spin three different weights of heavier texture yarn.

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Now, for a little story.  Among the many families that brought children to this event, one stands out for me in particular.  For all the families and children who seemed delighted to have a chance to play with the wool, this one family had an entirely reaction.  The man who brought the children was at least their grandfather, if not their great grandfather.  He was not a young man.

When I first became aware of the presence of the family, three of the four children present with this gentleman stood close enough to my spinning wheel that I could demonstrate for them how the big wheel transferred a twist into the lose, fluffy wool I held in my hands.  These three, all girls ranging in age from about 4 to 7, watched raptly.

When I asked them if they wanted to see how the wool looked at the beginning when it came off of the sheep, they nodded their heads.  So, I walked to the other end of the set up here and began to show them all of the various steps involved in making yarn.  The oldest of these three girls was captivated by the pile of fluffy yellow fleece that by this time surrounded the drum carder.  Lots of children had had their hands in the pile of soft wool as they had sat to turn the crank of the drum carder to watch all the hairs sort themselves into straightened order for spinning them.

The older of the girls wanted to try the carder, but as I was explaining to her how to lay bits of wool under the teeth of the drums, her grandfather person began to speak more and more loudly to her.  At first I was oblivious to him because I was entirely focused on helping the little girl learn and enjoy herself.  But it didn’t take very long before the words this man was speaking became very clear both to me and to the girl.

“You don’t want to do that,” he was saying when I first tuned into his words.  As he continued I began to understand that this girl’s experience with the fluffy yellow fleece was going to be interrupted and aborted.  It became obvious that this man couldn’t get the little girl away from this scene fast enough.

“This isn’t fun.  This is work.  You don’t want to do this.”  The man was obviously gearing up.  “It wasn’t that long ago that nobody had anything to wear if someone didn’t do this kind of work to make their clothes.  It hasn’t been that long since children had to work long hours every day without stopping.  You don’t want to do that.  That is work.  We didn’t come here to work.  We came here for you to have fun.  This isn’t fun.  We came here so you could make a kaleidoscope.  Come with me.  Come with me right now.  Leave this and come have fun.”

The little girl had not heard this man right away.  It was obvious to me that she, like all the other children who had stopped by the demo before her, loved the feel of the soft wool.  She was intrigued with the steel-toothed drums that she could turn as they tugged and pulled the fibers into their teeth.  It struck me how large the drums looked with her little hands next to them holding onto the fluff so it didn’t get yanked at one time and get stuck between the wheels.

When the girl noticed this man’s words, as he became more intense and more insistent and more chagrined, I could see that she didn’t share his thoughts of the moment.  Although she never said a word, I could tell she didn’t want to leave.  I could also tell that if I didn’t act quickly even a bigger scene was in the act of creation.  I looked into the little girl’s eyes and spoke to her quietly.  “It’s OK.  You can go upstairs now and see what’s up there for you to do.  I will be here when you are done if you want to come back.”

The family immediately disappeared up the stairs.  I did not see them again.

There are more levels to this story and to this encounter than I will ever understand.  The family was African American.  Would I feel any different about the encounter if the family had been Anglo?  I don’t think so, because I was tuned into the interaction as it happened because of the child being a child.  I could sense a universe of hurt behind the voice of the thin, intense, disturbed and agitated man.  I can imagine that he, having been born perhaps in the early 30s or before, having deep personal history about labor, including child labor, both for himself and for his ancestors.  I can imagine a similar story coming from people whose lives as children revolved around farm work, as well.

At the same time I understand that he was not, at this instant, tuned into the life experience of the silent, shy, thin and beautiful child with her hands clutching handfuls of soft yellow fluffy fleece.

Yes, spinning and weaving IS WORK.  Yet work done by choice and with happiness is different than the kind of work this man seemed to be referring to.

It brought me to thinking about how easy it is for adults to miss the moments of empathy that children require to find in their own interactions with the environment what things feel like to their own self.  These experiences of what attachment experts refer to as ‘exploration’ happen as soon as an infant’s body has developed enough to begin to understand that the hands waving around in front of their eyes belong to them, and that they can move them around at will.

The end result of what is called safe and secure attachment to caregivers in the world is exploration.  Interferences in safety and security impinge upon this process of exploration.  Yes, it was obvious to me that every caregiver that cared enough to come with their children to an event such as this art festival cared a great deal for their little ones.  Yet in this small interactive encounter I thought about how histories of trauma affect grown ups who in billions of small ways communicate unresolved trauma on down the generations.

This, in turn, makes me think particularly of something I have said very little about thus far on my blog:  What is preoccupied (ambivalent) insecure attachment?  (see:  +SIEGEL – DESCRIPTION OF ATTACHMENT STYLES).  In unconscious ways, orchestrated most effectively through denial of our own trauma triggers, we can remain preoccupied with our own reality of unresolved trauma and project that reality onto children in our care.

I sensed that something about seeing this little girl that he loved probably more than he loves his own life with her hands in that fleece, standing by that drum carder intent on the process of ‘working’ with the wool, was a trauma trigger for this man.  That was his reaction.  I could FEEL it big time.  I felt sad at the same time I couldn’t help but feel happy that what this man wanted for this girl was to have fun — aka, for her to be happy.

Yet in the short term perhaps making a kaleidoscope was the happier choice, the more fun option at the moment, but was there a pattern of not being able to notice the reality of the child from her point of view that could be short circuiting her explorations of herself in her own world?  I certainly cannot say, nor will I ever know.

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I will share with you here just a few more pictures related to the spinning work with wool that I do.  As a woman, I have always worked with my hands.  Beginning with the pop beads I had when I was two, I have always enjoyed this WORK.  Would this be less of a fact if I hadn’t had such a miserable abusive childhood that this work became a solace for me that allowed me to survive?  Would I be making kaleidoscopes if things in my own infant-childhood past had been better?  I don’t know that, either.

This is the drum carder, outside where I sit working with the wool after it's been washed, dyed, and teased-fluffed.
Drum carders are much faster than the small hand carders.
When I have enough colored yarn, I will warp and weave on the loom to the right.
Washed, dyed, ready for teasing, carding and spinning a variegated yarn.
Wahed, dyed, teased, carded and ready for spinning -- this is SOFT! Like putting your hands into a cloud might be like
Oven dyed

The purple fleece spun - the crinkly yarn still has to be wet again and stretched outside with weights hung from it to set the twist.

So, yes, the old man is correct.  This is work, but work — for whatever reason, I love.

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+SIEGEL – DESCRIPTION OF ATTACHMENT STYLES

+SO MANY NEEDY PEOPLE IN DENIAL OF THEIR NEEDINESS

alchemynow4 Comments

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I have a whole collection of thoughts from my experiences of this last week, but I don’t know which thought – like a star in a constellation – actually belongs in what pattern with other thoughts.  There seem to be three main areas of my observations that are probably divided so:  (1) denial, (2) what empathy isn’t, and (3) many people must feel small.

To begin with, I want to say that being around people I do not know exhausts me.  Of course if I leave my house and go out there into the public domain, that’s who I encounter:  people I do not know.

The tip of the iceberg regarding my observations from last week is that people seem to me to be constantly jockeying for a one-up position when they interact with others.  I see nothing that would lead me to suspect people are conscious of how small they must feel that they need to find ways to make themselves feel bigger than other people.

These patterns would be tiring enough to negotiate even without the fact that people seem most skilled at making themselves feel bigger by finding subtle, ongoing ways to make other people feel smaller.

OK, so I see I am beginning with my third point, though I don’t yet know why.  How do these three topics connect to one another?  If I think about each one of them in terms of being like nets that filter aspects of our human experience, which one of the three has the biggest holes in it?

I am thinking in terms, again, of the vagal nerve system and its connection to the flight-flight response or the calm, connecting, caregiving, compassionate response.  What I sense around most people when I have to interact with them is that it doesn’t take very long at all before what is supposedly communication disintegrates into some strange kind of invisible power negotiation.  In that power negotiation one person works to feel bigger and more power-full by in some way denigrating, devaluing, and disrespecting someone else.  In other words, the OTHER must be made to feel smaller.

Language experts have found that fully two-thirds of human language interactions concern some form of gossip.  Taking those patterns as a given, what does it actually FEEL like to be in interactive communication with people?  How much of what goes on are we supposed to automatically IGNORE – and surprise!  Surprise!  Here is a direct connection to my first point above:  DENIAL.

Is denial actually the main tender that we use to negotiate most human-to-human interactions?  When people are not consciously aware of their own needs, or their wants, and instead constantly denigrate others to get these needs and wants met, aren’t they expertly practicing denial?

And then, on the other hand, the recipient of the denigrative comments is NOT supposed to consciously be aware of the true nature of the interactions.  We are supposed to unconsciously, automatically and in a state of denial of our own perceptions ACT our part in return.

Let me give you just one simple example from an interaction I had with a woman who is evidently a spinner.  This woman passed by my spot in the hallway yesterday at the public art carnival for children where I was demonstrating and stopped to have what is probably a typical kind of accepted human interaction with me.  I had never seen her before.

One of the facts that this woman evidently was oblivious to is that when a spinner is showing anyone, especially a child, how the wheel is sending a twist into the collection of wool fibers being held in one hand so that the twist creates yarn, one has to keep this section of the process clearly visible to the child.  This means that when I spin on my own I hold the fibers differently in my hands, usually meaning much farther away from the wheel.

So this woman found no reason at all not to just tell me with a snicker and a snide look on her face, “You are obviously doing that wrong.”  And then she proceeded to instruct me on what I was doing wrong – exactly – and to tell me how to do it better.  During this whole verbalized judgment and criticism process, during this denigrating, shaming, down-putting ICKY experience, did I tell her to shut the hell up!

I am proud of myself that I didn’t fall into the trap of explaining to her why I was holding my hands in a position other than the supposedly correct one she was asserting.  I did not defend myself.  But I did not tell her my truth in any other way, either.  I just suffered along with her in this transaction.

I have been spinning off and on for 35 years.  I know what I am doing.  I spin what I want the way I want.  My spinning is a part of me.  Nobody, and I mean nobody has the right to criticize this process that is a part of who and how I am in the world in my lifetime.  I mean that.  Literally.  Nobody has that right.  If they do it, I know without denial that this person is throwing their ugliness at me and I want NO PART of it or of them, either.

This would be no big deal if I didn’t understand what I do now in my heightened sensitivity state.  What I DO KNOW, if I let go of denial, is that this interaction is exactly typical of most human interactions I witness.  These transactions are meant to victimize someone else.  They are bullying transactions.  I hate them, and as a consequence, I don’t like to have any more to do with other human beings at this point in my life than I absolutely HAVE to.  There is nothing pleasurable or good about constantly having to be on guard against these subtle and no so subtle attacks on one’s selfhood.

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My simplest terminology I use for myself is that many people are just simply passive-aggressive.  The truth is, they are geared to fight.  I can sense another person’s denied rage in the isle of a grocery store, when I walk into a laundromat, when I stand in line a bank.  We are all familiar with road rage.  We can spot drivers who are displaying aggression with the way they handle their vehicle.  The way people handle themselves in their body is no different.  The signals are plain.

On my side of the center line, I can say that it’s too bad I don’t have the energy or the motivation to feel either empathy or compassion, barely even tolerance, when I put myself in any position to have to interact with such people.  I do not have the energy for it, the desire to engage, or any hope that anything I can do will sooth these people in any way.  I just plain don’t wish to be around them.

The truth is that I can no longer play this denial game.  It never does any good to stick up for myself, to take a stand on my own behalf.  I find that the only way not to escalate the denied rage in others is to pretend it’s all OK, to remain silent, to let them do their digs and get away with it.

That woman was victimizing me yesterday.  She appeared to need to assert her ‘betterness’ by stabbing me in any way that she could.  I might feel sorry for her, but I am frankly tired of that!  Do I expect that strangers could ever walk up to one another and clearly state, “I am feeling small.  Please, I need you to help me feel bigger” in a culture that has somehow managed to create so many of us that feel so small in the first place?

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I happened to meet a young man who came through town for a few months with his wife and children and moved on again last week.  He radiated.  I’ve so rarely seen such perfect joy, happiness and well-being in a grown up that I’d almost forgotten what it looks like.  Never, in one single interaction with this gentlemen (who temporarily took a job working in the local laundromat and cafe) did I ever feel anger.  Not his, not my own.

I went to visit my friend there while she did her laundry the other day, and this young man’s position has been filled by a woman who carries around her denied rage that I find absolutely tangible.  I cannot escape that she is toxic; nor can I pretend that I don’t notice her rage that fills the expanse of that building.  I will never again step into that business as long as she works there.

My thinking travels next to my second point above:  empathy.  I don’t want to empathize with her.  I don’t want to be anywhere around her.  I don’t have the energy to pretend I don’t notice, to dodge all the hatred she sends out with her every word and action.  I will not be her unconscious target.  I spent my 18 years of childhood taking my mother’s rage, and I don’t play that game any more.

For me, these are no-win transactions.  Now, the young shining man I mentioned can move throughout his life and his presence heals.  There is something about him that vanquishes rage from the space he inhabits in ever expanding circles.  I am not strong enough to do that.  I know that.  I admit it.

Another problem I have being out in public is that these transactions I am describing are not isolated or sporadic events.  They happen continually.  They don’t happen only in rapid succession to one another, they happen on top of one another and simultaneously!  People are at battle with one another in this small-big war and they don’t even know it.

Evidently to be social beings we are all supposed to operate in denial about what’s going on between us.  If this is supposed to be a dance, it’s an ugly one.  Perhaps if I hadn’t grown up with so much isolation as a part of the abuse I experienced, I would have gradually received some sort of inoculation that would allow me to go through my entire life being able to comfortably negotiate these sad interactions that so few people seem to even notice.

But I do notice them.  Like I mentioned in my last post, evidently I am geared to live comfortably in a perfect world where people appreciate one another, respect one another, affirm rather than condemn one another, build something positive when they interact rather than tear one another down as they tear them apart.

I see little that is calm, compassionate or connecting about most human-to-human interactions.  Sadly, this makes someone like the gentleman I mentioned appear to me like a rare angel of goodness.  Sure, I’d like to be more like him.  But cutting out denial, the truth is I am not.  Evidently the best I can do right now is sit here alone at my computer and whine about what I see out there without having a single darn thing to offer about how to make things better – except to suggest that honest awareness about our own internal states might let us be more gentle and kind not only with our self, but with other people.

But while the public is out there begging for attention and affirmation by insidiously and unconsciously trying to steal ‘bigness’ from others so they don’t have to feel so small, I would rather just avoid the whole ugly mess.  These emotional pariahs, these unconscious beggars will continue to ply their skills with everyone they meet.  I, quite simply, have absolutely nothing to give them.  I just want to stay out of their way.

I am too worn out to be constantly on guard to defend myself from their attacks.  I don’t want to fight back against them and to even try would only escalate every single situation.  I have to step back and let the safely and securely attached people like this gentleman I mentioned go out there and walk among the people who seem to be so emotionally wounded.  I don’t believe he carries the same kind of woundedness within himself, so he probably doesn’t even have to notice the war that IS going on.  He carries a natural immunity, and as a result he can heal just by his shining.  I thank the universe for the existence of people such as him.  We need to make more people just like him.

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POSTSCRIPT sent to me by my sister:

I think this is related to the ‘one up, one down’ mentality…

Brooke: Your findings related to crime and imprisonment rates seem to be particularly illustrative of the way inequality can lead to social corrosion.

If you grow up in an unequal society, your actual experience of human relationships is different. Your idea of human nature changes: you think of human beings as self-interested.

Richard: We quote a prison psychiatrist who spent 25 years talking to really violent men, and he says he has yet to see an act of violence which was not caused by people feeling disrespected, humiliated, or like they’ve lost face. Those are the triggers to violence, and they’re more intense in more unequal societies, where status competition is intensified and we’re more sensitive about social judgments.

http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/want-the-good-life-your-neighbors-need-it-too

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Here are some photos that go with this post!

+THE LIFE ENHANCING NATURE OF SHARED THOUGHTS

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+PTSD: DANCING FOR THE FALLEN DANCERS

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Sometimes serendipity tugs not only at my mind, but at my heart strings.  I almost feel guilty now beginning this post because what I wanted to talk about is how my Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is acting up this week.  In way of a visual image I saw dancers on a stage, only the stage is lumpy and bumpy, with lose boards, even with some missing.

I committed myself to participate in a community art project tomorrow.  I have no real idea at all about what this event is going to be like, but these people asked the local Fiber Arts Guild for a spinning demonstrator for it.  Most of the Guild is going to a workshop tomorrow, so I thought, “What the heck.  I used to do these demos all the time 30 years ago and I did just fine.  It will be good for me to get out of the house, be in public, do something nice for somebody else.”

Added to that, as I look back over my self this past week, I went a bit too far in my eager attempts to take myself out of the house into the wider world (remember, I live in a small town, so I am not talking major PUBLIC).  So, tomorrow will be my 4th day OUT.  Only already the consequences of my PTSD are causing me trouble.  I am like a dancer on a shoddy stage, I swear.

My sensitivity to sensory input of any kind is astounding!  I had lunch yesterday with my friend at a downtown restaurant I have been to with her many, many times.  Only yesterday I could not tolerate the music blaring through the loudspeakers.  My friend told me it was no different that it’s ever been before.  I could not sit in the booth facing the window.  I could not tolerate the sunshine, even in the distance, so my friend and I had to change sitting places in the booth.  By the time our meal was done, the din of voices from other diners sent me reeling out the door.

This is no fun.  This doesn’t feel like the me I knew in my past.  I see the image of a roulette wheel spinning and spinning, slowing down — that’s me.  I need to be WAY slowed down.  This all makes me think about running down a hill.  All my life I’ve been able to stay ahead of the house-sized boulder rolling along behind me.  Not now.

This also makes me think about dissociation, about how handy dissociating has been in my life.  I used to have access to a confident, competent, socially gracious Linda that has vanished from view.  I am raw when I go out.  I no longer have an ability to ‘make things go away’.  I no longer seem to switch into different versions of myself that used to be able to participate fairly appropriately in different scenes, with different stimuli or different demands.

I don’t know how tomorrow’s event will play out for me.  I will load up all my equipment and show up like a good soldier.  But I won’t do this to myself again.  I evidently have to pay a high price internally to now do even the simplest things.

This has made me think today about those of us with PTSD, that maybe we are so burned out, physiologically, from what we’ve endured that there just isn’t enough life force left to tackle life head on any longer.  It’s like my body-brain wants to be in a PERFECT WORLD now.  I need that sense of peaceful calmness around me in my environment as if the world ever COULD be perfect.

PTSD has our entire system on hyper-vigilant super-scanning while at the same time we have a severely diminished capacity to tolerate stimuli.  To give you an example of what today showed me:  My friend works at a building with low income roomers that has a washer and dryer.  Once a month she collects the quarters, and I go through them looking for the 1976 bicentennial ones as I roll the rest of the quarters into their paper wrappers.  I’ve done this for a long time!  But today, from an arm length away I could barely stand the metallic smell of the money in the box my friend brought them to me in.

I mean, how ridiculously overly sensitive  is THAT!  Even the sound of them dropping into the little plastic tube thing we put them in to make sure there’s $10 worth in each paper was hard.  This little sound was a roar to me!  I swear!!

So, then I thought I’d look for an image of a fallen dancer online because of its connection in my thoughts to PSTD — and found this terribly sad story.  I had told my kids a week ago that I can no longer tolerate watching the Olympics because of the tension I feel knowing how much these athletes have invested in their art.  I can’t bear even the anticipation that one of them might fall.  I somehow care too much!  And now I see this, a tragic, tragic tragedy:

FALLEN DANCER

“Liu Yan, considered one of the top classical dancers in China, was seriously injured while practicing a solo routine for the opening ceremony for the Olympics in Beijing, and she may be paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of her life. On July 27, the 26-year-old dancer was practicing in the National Stadium when a platform malfunctioned and she fell 10 feet, landing on her back and suffering nerve and spinal damage. At the moment, she cannot feel anything below her chest, and she cannot move her lower body. Organizers for the opening ceremonies initially told witnesses and friends to not disclose the accident until after the Olympic Games, but news began to leak after several newspapers began inquiring about Liu. [NY Times]”

dance for the fallen – Korean dance performance Suwon

Who will love all of us enough to dance for us?  Can we find a way to safely dance for ourselves?

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This IS really what I am talking about.  Every single one of us who suffer from PTSD and trauma-related changes ARE fallen dancers.  My heart goes out to this fallen Chinese dancer and to all of us who have suffered so from trauma — and I need to include ME in the US.  I need to not judge myself harshly because the smell of quarters or the brilliance of sunshine or even the sounds of voices sets my nerves to vibrating worse than fingernails on the chalkboard.  I need to learn what this all means to me, having PTSD and now only really being fit for a perfect world.

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+A WORD ON TRAUMA TRIGGERS AND FALLING APART

alchemynow17 Comments

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Have you ever played the Jenga Stacking Game?  Have you ever felt so emotionally and mentally fragile that if even one block of what gives you calmness and stability is removed that you and your life will topple into a pile of rubble?  It is far too easy for severe infant-childhood trauma and abuse survivors to stumble and crumble if our inner and outer resources are at times not adequate to meet the unforeseen challenges of our adult lives.  We need to anticipate events that might trigger our trauma overload reactions ahead of time if we possibly can.

I’ve never played this game, but my sister brought the image of it up tonight in our telephone conversation about the life long consequences of living within a body that was built in childhood by trauma.  Players are supposed to pull blocks out of the stack with care without toppling the tower.  My sister was talking about how fragile infant-child trauma survivors really are, and about how we have to be so very careful when changes have to be made in our lives not to topple over whatever precarious sense of safety and security we might have constructed within our lives.

I am thinking again about the image I posted yesterday:

I have no idea how life is for people who were not abused as children.  From my point of view as a survivor, finding ways to fill the positive side of this scale is a full time job.

I also want to note that as hard as I try to be in my posts about the possibilities and opportunities we can find for healing, trauma survivors have to ALWAYS be realistic.  When the trauma side of the scale is overloaded, and when our body-brain formed within these terrible conditions, not only is our center point not set at calm and balanced equilibrium in our body-nervous system, but terrible pain and suffering is also built into us.

We need to know, identify, understand and recognize not only the factors in our lives that trigger our pain, but also the signs that we are being triggered and are in danger of melt-down.  We need to know the nature of our woundedness.  Because of the unsafe and insecure attachment experiences we had as our body-brain formed, we can think of our vulnerabilities to threats to our present safe and secure attachment to and in the world as if we have a severe, deadly allergy that if triggered without adequate resources to combat our reaction can destroy us.

If and when we reach a point where our full-blown trauma reactions have been triggered, we are in a state of emergency that is every bit as life threatening as any other kind we can imagine.  The emergencies happen to us when in-built, body-brain based infant-childhood traumas (or any other unresolved, overwhelming traumas) emerge beyond what we have the inner and outer resources to handle, regulate and resolve.  We need to learn how to avoid, if at all possible, reaching these critical states because once we do reach them, we will be caught within what is, for severe trauma survivors, a reaction that is as completely understandable and natural for our body-brain as it CAN be predictable.

As we begin to understand how trauma built our physiology we begin to realize that we have to be as careful as possible to not topple our internal tower.  Not only did our emotional right brain not receive what it needed so that we can smoothly and easily regulate our emotional states, but our emotions were overloaded early in our lives.  These emotions for the most part have gone NOWHERE.  They remain in our body and can overwhelm us in our present life when stress, threat, danger and trauma threaten us just as they did when we were very small.

I remember years ago telling someone that if I ever (so-called) “got in touch with my pain” that I would start crying and never stop.  I knew there was an ocean of tears inside of me.  One time I got myself into a relationship with a man — well, skipping the story — I will just say that the relationship patterns triggered my insecure attachment patterns.  I of course did not know this.  At one point my ancient infant-childhood emotions caused by my severely traumatic childhood exploded through a fissure created in my present within this relationship.

I started crying.  I could not stop crying.  I cried for three weeks.   I cried myself to sleep.  I woke up crying and I could not stop.  (Talk about puffy, sore eyes!)  I fortunately had many close women friends at that time in my life.  One by one they came to visit me, sitting beside me on my bed, stroking my back, patting my hand, bringing me and my children food.  I could not talk about the pain, I could only cry it out and it took a long time for this pain outbreak to begin to diminish.

I do everything I possibly can in my life today to avoid that precipice.  I cannot afford to let the depth of my pain overwhelm me again if I can possibly help it.  That kind of crying is like having an emotional jugular vein sliced wide open.  We can hemorrhage tears like we are imploding and bleeding to death.

As I have written about the chemical that signals our body that we are in pain — Substance P.  Pain, the physiological signaling of it and the experience of the pain itself,  is equally as real for emotional pain as it is for any physical pain.

We cannot afford to allow this pain we carry to be triggered if we can find any way to avoid it.  We need to realize our well-being is at best precarious.  We need to realize that a proactive consideration about how to make changes in our lives, especially major ones, can mean the difference between life and death.  We have to understand that there are times when our inner resources will not be available to match the demands of situations that stress and distress us.

No matter what else happened to us, our deepest and truest childhood trauma, at its core, was our lack of safe and secure attachment at the time of our beginnings.  We have to remember that child trauma survivors who were deprived of the benefits of safe and secure early attachments that would have built a well-regulated emotional right brain translate stress immediately into distress on occasions in adulthood when their safety and security is threatened.

These threats can be caused by such things as change in relationship status including loss and absence of loved ones (including ’empty nest’), threat of loss and of actual loss of financial security including job loss and change, moves, sickness — you name it, anything that makes our precarious tower of safety tremble if not collapse.

Even though these types of situations might not seem to be directly related to our infant-childhood traumas, we need to realize that anything that threatens our degree of safety and security is a trauma trigger because we did not escape our earliest trauma with a strong sense of safety and security built into us as it should have been.  It is also important to realize that some people will react violently, radically and drastically to threat that triggers pain, loss and sadness because they CAN come up with ways to escape the experience of their own pain (dismiss-avoid and/or fight back actively or passively).

These people cannot tolerate the experience of their own childhood pain and will defend themselves against it (often true of men but also true for my mother).  These people will protect and defend themselves first, and anyone dependent upon them is at risk for some kind of harm.  All trauma reactions are un-reason-able because they are automatic and come directly from body memory connected to an unregulated right emotional brain and trauma built nervous system.  Our body-brain does not process threat or stress information ‘normally’ in a way that includes the slower reason-able processes of the higher cortex.

At those times that circumstances of our life threaten to or actually trigger the pain of our deepest traumas, we can so lose our sense of safety and security, of calm, peacefulness and connection in the present that our self seems to completely disappear.  We can become overcome and overwhelmed with the physiological experience of our body, including its emotions.  In this maelstrom it is critical that we find ways to reestablish the anti-distress, anti-trauma conditions that support and affirm our SELF so that we can regain the functions of our higher cortex as we find ways to address the conditions that triggered the severe trauma reactions in the first place.

As my sister mentioned tonight, we need to be careful not to topple the tower of our lives if we can possibly avoid it.  If we have found ways to begin to fill up the un-stressed side of our inner selves, the sense of balance we might be able to finally feel in our lives MUST be maintained.  Our life can depend on it.

We need to understand what our trauma triggers are so we can avoid inner disaster.  The threat and the danger of crumbling inside is very, very real and I do not believe we can survive it without supportive and appropriate help from others.  (So few of us can access the kind of quality therapy we need that I can’t even consider therapy a realistic resource.)

I believe that human beings are more than the sum of our parts.  We are more than the automatic physiological reactions that our body creates in response to threat and trauma in our lives.  We most need to find a way to connect with our own sense of our strong, clear SELF at those times that we experience our ‘falling apart’.  Of course proactive prevention is best for us, but when our trauma is triggered knowing that we are able to accomplish this critical action of regaining our own SELF in the midst of the storm empowers and heals us beyond words.

PLEASE NOTE:  The experience of severe and overwhelming emotion that is related to right limbic brain sensitivity, irritability and lack of adequate ability to regulate emotion — due to having been formed in early infant-childhood malevolent environments — not only FEELS like some kind of ‘seizure activity’, but actually IS closely related.  Please spend some time taking a look at some of the online information about emotional KINDLING in the right limbic brain and its connection to infant-child abuse.

Think of our emotional injuries affecting us like deep splinters and bad burns and other wounds do — all sharing the Substance P physiological pain signaling systems within our body-brain.  Severe infant-childhood trauma and abuse leaves us bruised and battered inside.  Even as we heal gradually over time, we will always still have scars.  Some of us have a broken heart that will never heal in this lifetime.  We have to try to be as gentle and kind to ourselves as we possibly can.

This process must include our being as aware as we can possibly be of what is coming down the road at us so we can be prepared to take wise and protective steps to take care of our self before we get overrun with the ongoing changes and traumas that everyone’s life is prone to.

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+HEALING TRAUMA AT OUR BODY-BRAIN CENTER

alchemynow2 Comments

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I didn’t realize it when I wrote my post last Sunday, +TRAUMA TELLS THE BODY WHAT TO DO, that I was preparing my own way for the study of Dr. Kerstin Moberg’s book, The Oxytocin Factor: Tapping the Hormone of Calm, Love, and Healing.  But then I don’t imagine that Dr. Moberg knew exactly as she was writing her book how much its information can help severe infant-child abuse survivors and other traumatized people.

When I take a look at this next image that I scanned here from her book, I think about how it is for a tiny growing body-brain when it has to develop in adaptation to the environment it was born into when the stress scale has bottomed out and the calm and connection scale (of safe and secure attachment) has completely inadequate weight to it – or is nearly completely empty.

It is important to realize that what this image is showing is a required balance between stress and calmness.  Adequate early body-brain forming environments must include this balance for a body-brain to form and operate correctly.  Obviously too much stress and the wrong kind of stress for anyone is not a good thing.  But too much calmness isn’t good, either. Infant-child neglect often causes such a lack of stimulation during early developmental stages that critical regions of the brain do not receive the stimulation they need to grow hardly at all!

Another point I want to make is that if grave imbalance exists in an infant-child’s developmental environment the set point of the nervous system is NOT set at this central balance point where calm is even possible.  For people who survived terrible trauma in their early lives such as I did, the set point for our nervous system is AT the stress reaction point.

As odd as it might seem, looking back at my own infant-childhood with my new neuroscientific and physiological development insights, I can see that the long, long periods of forced isolation that were part of my mother’s patterns of severe abuse of me where probably – and actually – a very good thing.  During these periods when she had me ‘out of her sight’, even though during these times I was also out of any kind of loop that would have offered me normal infant-child opportunities to interact with others and with my environment in play and discovery, overall these times offered my developing body-brain opportunities for NOTHING TO HAPPEN.

These periods were actually rest and restoration times when my overwhelmed and over stimulated senses, forced into overload from the beginning of my life through the terrorizing and terrifying actions and presence of my Mean Mother, during which my body could actually calm itself down so that internally the effects of her nearly continual earthquake-tsunami abuse of me could somewhat dissipate before the next attack came.

Of course these patterns of wild, severe, over stimulating and overwhelming abuse paired with long periods of my being forced to endure the silence of remote, isolated aloneness harmed me greatly.  This pattern became a most fertile ground for patterns of dissociation to build themselves into my body-brain because nothing but the deprivation of being left completely alone to physiologically try to end my suffering alone (unconsciously, of course), offered me to possible way to connect my ongoing experiences to one another on any level other than the physiological one.  Nothing ever made sense, and nobody or nothing ever helped me to make sense of my malevolent experiences, either.

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So leading back to the topic at hand, oxytocin and Dr. Moberg’s book, I want to say that importantly I completely TRUST everything this researcher says.  Because I have continual problems with trust that happens in relationship to a sense of my feeling safe and secure in the world (and NOT), I hold this trust in high value.

At the time Moberg published this book she had already published over 400 scientific articles.  She is considered the world’s leading expert on oxytocin and on the calm-connection half of our autonomic nervous system (ANS) and all the processes that are connected to it.  She is talking about what severe infant-child abuse survivors missed most during our earliest growth and developmental stages:  The opportunity to experience safe and secure attachments that would have allowed us to experience peaceful calmness and connection to others so that our body-brain could build into us a body-brain-nervous system with the balance depicted in the above image included.

Because my infant-childhood was filled with extreme, chronic, ongoing and severe abuse and trauma, I read Moberg’s book from a perspective that means I want to know how things SHOULD have been so that I can better know what I am MISSING at the same time I hope to find information that can help me to consciously CHANGE this set point within my body-nervous system-brain for the BETTER.

As I read Moberg’s account of current research patterns being weighted at 90% study of the stress response compared to 10% of study on the other half of the system, I understand why I am still searching for help, healing and answers.  There is no hope for truly understanding what was so damaging during our early physiological development about being immersed in continual overwhelming trauma if we don’t have the information we need about how things were truly SUPPOSED to be different.  I believe the best hope for healing ourselves on every level does not lie in the drugs we might take to override systems in our body.  We need to get the true picture of what is REALLY GOING ON.

No matter what we read, no matter what anyone tells us, we cannot fool our body.  Our body, the Earth Suit we live in, absolutely knows the truth.  When we encounter the truth in research it will resonate inside of us.  Our body knows the truth when it-we hear it.  Moberg’s book, her work and dedication to research about the calm connection system in the human body as it is designed to operate in counter-weight with our stress response system holds truth that I believe is imperative for us to understand.  As we gain these understandings, we will FEEL them in our body and know them in our brain-mind.  Once I have completed my reading of this book, I will enter the universe of the internet to look for research related to this topic that has occurred in the 6-7 years since the book was written.  I can only hope that the scientific world has taken Moberg’s work seriously enough to pick up this critical study of what contributes to the other half of our well-being as a species:  The ability to calm ourselves down and connect to others.  This is absolutely the study, in my mind, of safe and secure attachment of ourselves in our body in the world we live in.  Again, I will keep you posted.

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I wanted to make a little note here today at my sister’s suggestion about my present experiences as I teach myself to read music and play this amazing piano keyboard that I was blessed with being able to bring into my life.  As my sister pointed out, as I continue applying myself to this study and practice and as I gradually improve, I will probably not remember the process of learning itself.

I don’t remember learning to tie my shoes, but I do have faint memories of being at the age of trying to learn my right hand from my left.  I invented a learning strategy that involved remembering a pattern of freckles on my right wrist where I would have worn a watch if I had one (like the one my father wore).  All I had to do was connect the freckles with ‘watch’ with how right in my mind a watch would have looked on my wrist to learn which side of me was right and not left!

I know this music learning experience is similar also to when I learned to ride a bicycle.  Once the motor learning has taken place, I expect that I will never have to consciously think about it again.  In the meantime, my actual process of learning is fascinating.  There’s nobody here to judge my process or progress but myself, and in the clear, plain and good spirit of PLAY I am able to leave all self judgment out of the picture.

What I am left with is the process of literally and consciously experiencing what it is like for ME, in this body, with this brain, to learn something this new and strange.  I also know that because of the severe trauma I was immersed in as my brain developed, neither my left nor might right brain hemisphere formed themselves ‘normally’.  I also know that the corpus callosum that transfers information between my brain hemispheres did not form correctly, either.

As I teach myself this new language of music and gain the motor skills required that will let me actually PLAY music, I am experiencing what I believe is a true healing in these regions of my brain.  Last night I began to practice playing scales with both hands at the same time.  I figured there is no way I am going to get my hands to be able to each first play different notes in different ways in different timings if I can’t get them to cooperate and first play the same notes in the same patterns at the same time.

Well, I am here to tell you I can’t remember the last time I experienced such a giggle session!  Part of me was directly the physical process complete with the intention of desired result – while another part of me fell into giggling bursts of delight to watch what my hands were ACTUALLY doing!  Instead of tangoing they were tangling, each finger with a mind of its own tumbling and fumbling over the keys.

Yet I believe that learning good things is healing.  All the healing I have ever done has been about learning.  Learning how to let myself learn is a learning itself both about what learning is like AND what healing is like.  That process is delightful in itself as I gently and kindly, slowly, patiently and firmly open my own channels for change within myself so that I can let something good and new grow itself into my body-brain-mind-self.

I have hopes, a goal, a direction.  I want to play music.  I know I can do this.  I give myself permission to move forward, to make the mistake-errors, to correct them, to learn-heal at my own pace. As I experience such delight even in this process of learning itself I realize this is just a bonus gift I could not anticipate and did not expect to love and enjoy.

So, needless to say, I have a long long way to go to begin to even get the two hemispheres of my brain to operate harmoniously, cooperatively and well together.  But what I look forward to and DO EXPECT TO HAPPEN is that eventually the two hemispheres of my brain will dance on that keyboard in relationship to one another.  Sometimes they will follow the same patterns together.  Sometimes they will be able to ‘say’ something musically that will be very different, one from the other.

I nearly absolutely and entirely and completely missed the opportunity as an infant-child to be safe, secure, and to play.  And I certainly did not get to giggle.  So, if at 58 I am finally able to giggle myself into this amazing new skill of reading and playing music, that’s a very good thing indeed!  No doubt I am helping myself heal at the center of who I am in this trauma-changed body.  I’ll keep you posted on this process, as well!

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+HOPE FOR HEALING TRAUMA IN THE BODY

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Where can severe trauma survivors look for our best-guess for healing?  In a way this next direction I am going with my study, reading and writing surprises me.  Yet at the same time I am grateful for both this inner guidance system I seem to have that tells me what I most need for healing and for the fact that again and again, I trust and follow this guidance.

Not long ago I wrote a post about an article I had found sometime in the past, printed, and added to the ever expanding pile of papers that grows here on my desk in front of my computer.  By the time I picked it up and read it through and wrote my post about it, I had no memory of how, where or when I had found it online.  The information I will be working with next for as long as it takes me to understand it as thoroughly as I possibly can comes from a book that was referenced in that article.

I ordered this book, written by this Swedish doctor:

The Oxytocin Factor: Tapping the Hormone of Calm, Love, and Healing by Kerstin Uvnas Moberg, Roberta Francis, Kerstin Uvnäs Moberg, and Translated by Roberta Francis (Hardcover – Sept. 16, 2003)

The book is lovely, solid and comforting even in its design and construction.  It is well made and well written, and as I hold it in my hands and begin to explore its message and teaching, it gives me great hope of healing for any trauma survivor, especially for those of us whose body-brain was designed and built by, for and within early infant-childhood environments of malevolent treatment.

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I first want to share with you a copy of an image that appears within the introduction to this book.  It is a simple graphic illustration about what everyone needs, especially trauma survivors who will have to work extra, extra hard to reach this desired balance in our body, nervous system, brain, mind and self between states of alarm and states of calmness:

Infant-child abuse and other survivors of severe trauma DO NOT get to experience what this balanced harmony feels like -- if at all possible, it's time that we DID!

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As we look at this picture we are really looking at a visual depiction of what safe and secure attachment gives to us.  If this balance had existed in our parents, especially our within our mother from the time we were conceived and born, our physiological systems including our brain would have been able to develop within us to match this desired state for ourselves.

In early environments of threat, danger and trauma, this picture was missing within our universe because it was missing within our earliest caregivers whose job it was to MAKE an equally safe and secure environment for us so that we could have safe and secure attachment relationships that would have built our body-brain into an entirely different one that the one we ended up with.

I believe that the more we can learn about the information presented in this book the better we will be able to begin to recreate safe and secure patterns within our body-brain-mind-self NOW, no matter what our early forming environment was like.

In fact, we might be able to think about our condition in these most simple terms.  A trauma-built body-brain, formed through unsafe and insecure attachment conditions, continues to run on the fuel of cortisol and the stress hormones creating patterns of freeze, flight and fight response that translates into ‘anxiety problems’.

On the other hand, early safe and secure attachments design and build a body-brain that can run on the fuel of oxytocin or the ‘feel good’ chemical of peaceful calmness and positive connection to self, others and the world.  It is the body-in-balance as the above picture describes that is our goal for our healing.  Oxytocin is a critical neurotransmitter of peace and cooperation.  Cortisol is a critical neurotransmitter of stress, threat and danger.

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I find a powerful confirmation of my intuition that I am moving in the right, good and healing direction in my studies when I read in Dr. Moberg’s introduction that she immediately mentions the biases that exist in MOST mainstream medical research.  Those readers who followed the difficult time I had in my struggles with Dr. Dacher Keltner’s book will understand how affirming, comforting and freeing it is for me to find an authority on the subject of human ill- and well-being who recognizes the biases up front that Dr. Keltner seemed to be oblivious to yet relies upon and utilizes heavily in his work.

Moberg notes that fully 90% of published research focuses on the stress response, or sympathetic GO branch of our nervous system while only 10% is devoted to the parasympathetic STOP branch (remember:  pair-a-brakes) branch.  She states about this bias:

“…an interest in the physiology of performance, exertion, and defense has dominated existing scientific knowledge and current research to an extent that we do not always recognize.  This way of looking at things, or shall I say those blinders, has until now kept those of us who work in the medical sciences from seeing the calm and connection response as a separate and valuable physiological system.  Thus, for me, studying this system has involved an element of swimming against the tide with respect to the political mainstream in my profession.”  (pages xii-xii of her introduction)

This imbalance in research focus HIGHLY impacts infant-child abuse and maltreatment survivors, as it does anyone experiencing difficulties with so-called anxiety (including dissociation, PTSD, depression, personality disorders, etc.)  We are in desperate need not only of healing, but of accurate information that can help us DO SO.

As Moberg writes:

“The neglected physiological pattern I will describe in this book is the opposite pole to the fight or flight reaction.  Like most other mammals, we humans are able not only to mobilize when danger threatens but also to enjoy the good things in life, to relax, to bond, to heal.  The fight or flight pattern has an opposite [effect] not only in the events of our lives but also in our biochemical system.  This book deals with the other end of the seesaw, the body’s own system for calm and connection.

“This calm and connection system is associated with trust and curiosity instead of fear, and with friendliness instead of anger.  The heart and circulatory system slow down as the digestion fires up.  When peace and calm prevail, we let our defenses down and instead become sensitive, open, and interested in others around us.  Instead of tapping the internal “power drink,” [of stress-related neurotransmitters] our bodies offer a ready-made healing nectar.  Under its influence, we see the world and our fellow humans in a positive light; we grow, we heal.  This response is also the effect of hormones and signaling substances, but until now, the connections among these vital physiological effects have not been fully recognized and studied.

“The neglect of this system tells us much about the values that underlie scientific research.  The calm and connection system is certainly as important for survival as the system for defense and exertion, and it is equally as complex.  Nevertheless, the stress system is explored much for frequently….

“One reason why research has been so slanted may be that goal-directed activity is emphasized so strongly in our culture.  We are used to defining activity as something moving, something we can see.  But many of the calm and connection system’s processes and effects are not visible to the naked eye.  They also occur slowly and gradually, and they are not as easy to isolate or define as are the more dramatic actions involving attack and defense….physiologists have studied the clearly visible fight or flight mechanism but have been less able to perceive the more hidden and subtle calm and connection system.

“The calm and connection system is most often at work when the body is at rest.  In this apparent stillness, an enormous amount of activity is taking place, but it is not directed to movement or bursts of effort.  This system instead helps the body to heal and grow.  It changes nourishment to energy, storing it up for later use.  Body and mind become calm.  In this state, we have greater access to our internal resources and creativity.  The ability to learn and to solve problems increases when we are not under stress.

“I believe that it is extremely important to increase our understanding of the physical and psychological workings of this antithesis to the fight or flight system.  We need both, since for each individual in each situation there is an optimal way to react.  But it is now well known that long-term stress can produce a variety of psychological and physical problems.  If we are to be healthy in the long run, the two systems must be kept in balance.”  (pages x-xiii of her introduction)

Moberg states very clearly that her interest in the connection system is rooted in her experience of mothering her four children.  Her description of mothering would be the antithesis of my mother’s experience with mothering me.  As I have already noted, it is very clear that the vagus nerve and autonomic nervous system of Borderline’s works with a distortion of the stress-caregiving response systems.  Moberg’s writings are about how things are SUPPOSED to work:

“In pregnancy, nursing, and close contact with my children, I experienced a state diametrically opposed to the stress I was familiar with in connection with life’s other challenges.  I was aware that the psychophysiological conditions associated with pregnancy and nursing fostered something entirely different from challenge, competition, and performance.  Inspired more than two decades ago to explore this life experience scientifically, I learned that there is a key biological marker – the subject of this book – on the trail to a physiological explanation of this state of calm and connection.”  (pages xiii-xiv of her introduction)

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It does not surprise me one bit that it would be not only a female researcher, but also one that has her roots on interested grounded in her experience of mothering that I would now turn to for answers about how the terrible imbalance that survivors of severe infant-child trauma have in their body-brain as a consequence of being formed by trauma can be healed.  In profoundly critical ways early abuse survivors were deprived of the safe and secure early attachments – especially with our mothers – that we desperately needed to grow a healthy balance of peace and calmness into our body-brain from the start.

For all the millions and millions of American children and adults that suffer from obesity, depression and other anxiety-related problems, from addictions, from relationships dis-orders, I believe that it will be in gaining factual information about how our body-brain can be rewired for safety, security, connection, and peaceful calmness that our best chance will come for healing.  I am most hopeful that Dr. Moberg’s writings will give me many important answers that I seek.  I will literally keep you posted on what I discover!

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