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While a mouse like the one I just described in my previous post is under attack and threat of attack, there is nothing else in its life that matters except for its own self-preservation.  Such a mouse will not be finding a mate, or likely return to take care of a nest of its young.  It will not be looking for food or eating.  It will not be playing or exploring its environment.  All its usual safety- and security-based activities will be suspended.

From the point of view of a 18 year survivor of my mother’s insane and persistent abuse of me from birth, I know that nearly every opportunity that could have been and should have been mine to simply BE an infant, toddler, child and teenager was sabotaged or stolen from me by my mother.  I was left in a perpetual state of trauma at the same time that my life was passing by.  In my condition of emergency and near emergency I was not able to form a story of myself in my own life, and could do very little of what a child is naturally supposed to be doing.

Autobiographical memory preserves the ongoing story of a person having a felt experience of their own self in and moving through their own life.  Because there wasn’t enough time (or times) where I was allowed to simply BE safely and securely in my own life as an infant-child, my ability to form, exercise, consolidate and use autobiographical memory circuitry and networks in my body-brain was nearly completely eliminated.

Imagining the ongoing life experience of a little mouse being preyed upon by a cat, and knowing that the mouse’s ongoing ordinary life has been interrupted, interfered with and eliminated, reminds me that not being able to make sense of my early life or to influence what happened to me contributed to the ongoing sensation of being ‘unreal’ and depersonalized in my life today.

When developmental neuroscientists like Dr. Daniel J. Siegel write about the effects and consequences of early attachment-caregiver related trauma and abuse, they are describing what is known about memory and dissociation from the outside.  Those of us who are survivors of severe early ongoing trauma and abuse live with the consequences as they have built our body-brain differently from normal.

As we take Siegel’s following words, found in his book, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (2001), and let this information resonate with and connect to what we survivors experience from the inside, we can begin to understand how profoundly different we were formed because we were forced to live through trauma in our early life.  Trauma all but filled all the time and space of our infancy-childhood, leaving us very little time and space of our own to associate our experiences together with who we were and who we were becoming.

Of course we ‘dissociated’ ourselves from our experiences of trauma.  They were too big, too awful, too overwhelming to incorporate into any ongoing story of our life or to be included in our ongoing memory.  Dissociation is like a detour taken by the self safely and securely around an accident scene.

Although the abuse and trauma my mother perpetrated on me affected me, influenced the way my body-brain developed, encircled me, endangered me, hurt me, terrified me – it WAS NOT ME.  The me that was supposed to be connecting to the world and finding associations stayed in hiding.  All the trauma continued on with me at its center, BUT IT WAS NOT ME.  ME is something ELSE completely, and it is that ME that matters now.  It is that ME that I want to connect to and forge associations with now.

Inbuilt physiological, neurological patterns of dissociation interfere with this process of experiencing ME now in my own life, and prevent me from remembering myself in my ongoing autobiographical FELT experience of myself in my life.  These patterns have always influenced how I experience my self in time and space.  Unlike Siegel, I know on the inside of me what living life with these patterns built within me FEELS like.  It is by adding my own awareness of this fact to the following words he gives us in his book that helps me understand the reality of his words.

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From The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are by Daniel J. Siegel (2001)

STRESS, TRAUMA, AND MEMORY

“Stressful experiences may take the form of highly emotional events or, when overwhelming, overtly traumatizing experiences.  The degree of stress will have a direct effect on memory:  Small amounts have a neutral effect on memory; moderate amounts facilitate memory, and large amounts impair memory…..  Recent studies suggest that the HPA axis involves the release of stress hormones that directly affect the hippocampus, a region with the highest density of receptors for these blood-borne agents.  Chronic stress may produce elevated baseline levels of stress hormones and abnormal daily rhythms of hormone release.

“The effects of high levels of stress hormones on the hippocampus may initially be reversible and involve the inhibition of neuronal growth and the atrophy of cellular receptive components called dendrites….  High levels of stress not only transiently block hippocampal functioning, but excessive and chronic exposure to stress hormones may lead to neuronal death in the region, possibly producing decreased hippocampal volume, as found in patients with chronic posttraumatic stress disorder….

“Activation of the autonomic nervous system [our STOP and GO stress response and calm, connection response system] leads to the release of epinephrine and norepinephrine (known as the catecholamines), which are thought to affect the amygdala directly.  The amygdala…plays an important role in establishing the value of an experience and integrating elements of encoding with the hippocampal processing of the event.  Excessive stress hormone or catecholamine release appears respectively, to impair the hippocampal and amygdala contributions to memory processing….

“Under some conditions, explicit memory [conscious] may be blocked from encoding at the actual time of an experience.  Trauma may be proposed to be such a situation.  Various factors may contribute to the inhibition of hippocampal functioning needed for explicit memory at the time of a severe trauma…. During a trauma….the release of large amounts of stress hormones and the excessive discharge of amygdala activity in response to threat may impair hippocampal functioning.

“The outcome for a victim who dissociates explicit [conscious] from implicit [unconscious] processing is an impairment in autobiographical memory for at least certain aspects of the trauma….  Implicit memory of the event is intact and includes intrusive elements such as behavioral impulses to flee [hide/freeze, fight, etc.] emotional reactions, bodily sensations, and intrusive images related to the trauma….

“As we’ve discussed, chronic stress may actually damage the hippocampus itself, as suggested by the finding of decreased hippocampal volume in patients suffering from chronic posttraumatic stress disorder….  Under such conditions, future explicit processing and learning may be chronically impaired.  Furthermore, in addition to damaging the hippocampus, early child maltreatment may directly affect circuits that link bodily response to brain function:  the autonomic nervous system, the HPA axis, and the neuroimmune process….

“These ingrained ways in which adverse child experiences are “remembered,” and directly affect the development of regulatory brain structures that govern basic brain-body processes, may explain the markedly increased risk for medical illness in adults with histories of childhood abuse and dysfunctional home environments….

“On the basis of this information, one can propose that psychological trauma involving the blockage of explicit processing also impairs the victim’s ability to cortically consolidate the experience….  With dissociation or the prohibition of discussing with others what was experienced, as is so often the case in familial child abuse, there may be a profound blockage to the pathway toward consolidating memory.  Unresolved traumatic experiences from this perspective may involve an impairment in the cortical consolidation process, which leaves the memories of these events out of permanent [conscious] memory….

(pages 50-52)

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I believe that this is what I experienced as a child, what was ‘built into me’, represents the way my body-brain grew and developed, and is now a permanent condition and not a ‘may be’:

“chronic stress may actually damage the hippocampus itself….  Under such conditions, future explicit processing and learning may be chronically impaired.”

The way I remember EVERYTHING about myself in my life has been affected because the severe trauma happened while my remembering capacities were being physiologically created.  It isn’t just “ingrained ways in which adverse child experiences are “remembered”” that I suffer from.  These so-called “ingrained ways” are actually the physiological circuits and pathways built into my body-brain that form my ‘remembering’ abilities.

Because of the extensive and very severe abuse I endured, I take Siegel’s term INGRAINED absolutely literally.  Patterns of dissociation, derealization and depersonalization formed themselves – ingrained themselves – physiologically into my body-brain.  I could say the same thing Jessica does in the wonderful movie, Who Framed Roger Rabbit:  “… I’m just drawn that way,”

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The only way I know of to try to combat the ingrained dissociation built into my remembering brain is to try to make implicit explicit.  Those readers who were built with a dissociational body-brain will know from the inside what this feels like:  Every evening as I stand holding my hose with a stream of water flowing onto my lovely flower beds, I ‘remember’ and recognize ‘the Linda how stands and waters.’

I am every evening in the SAME time and space of the watering Linda, so I FEEL her.  I recognize her.

While I have a shovel in my hand and am bent over stirring water into my bucket of adobe mud, involved in that process, I am in the time and space of ‘the adobe-making Linda’.  I remember and recognize her.

Today I am giving my muscles a rest.  I sit outside and look at the adobe blocks as they soak up the heat of the sun and turn a lighter shade of brown – and become lighter weight in the process.  I can explicitly and consciously force myself to remember that ‘the Linda sitting in the chair in the yard watching the adobes dry’ is the same person who made them.  She is the same person who waters the flowers, who planted them, who enjoys them.

‘The Linda sitting at the computer typing’ is – I intellectually understand – the same Linda who has done and might do in the future all kinds of things.  But all the different Linda’s that I am do not FEEL connected, nor can they always remember things that have happened at all.

As I wrote in a reply today to a blog comment, it’s not just that I struggle with a detached, remote, dissociated sense of ‘things have always been this way’.  (The Linda aware of watering flowers has ALWAYS been watering flowers because that’s what she does.)

Going all the way back to the patterns that began at my birth and continued to form me for the following 18 years, one incident of terror, pain, trauma and abuse – while it was happening – found me in a state of ‘it’s always been this way’.  Then, when there was a pause in the abuse, and often when I was isolated in a corner or in bed, that was another ‘it’s always been this way’ experience.

When one of the dissociated experiences happened (and happens) it is its own reality and the person autobiographically remembering the ‘in the moment’ experience is not connected at that moment to any other time in space.  When something is ‘always happening’ it precludes anything else from ‘ever happening’.

In this strange dissociated web of events, experiences are both ‘always happening’ and ‘never happened’ at the same time.  The only ‘thing’ that links our life experiences to us, and to one another, is HOW we remember them – both while they are happening and after they have happened.  (This sense of ‘it never happened’ is about time, space and how events are remembered.  It is NOT the same as denial in any usual sense of the concept, although the end results can be nearly the same in regard to ‘dealing with’ traumas that of course DID actually happen.)

Because the physiological stress chemical reactions have changed the way our body-brain processes information, those of us who were formed while our self was in hiding do not link ourselves in the events of our lives in ordinary ways.  I am fortunate that nothing inside of me ever put together complete constellations of ‘personalities’ that might hold together collections of memories.

The fragmentation of my ongoing experience was nearly complete.  I can ‘cortically process’ information intellectually that always allows at least some ability to place ‘a Linda’, and ‘only a Linda’ as being somewhere in the vicinity of the one doing the autobiographical remembering.  But it doesn’t take much turning up the heat of stress or anxiety to instigate disorganization and disorientation of my entire experience-processing and remembering system.  But that’s the subject of future posts.

Right now I will just say that if I were the mouse I watched today being captured and hauled around and dropped arbitrarily into ‘hiding places’, there would be a ‘different mouse’ for each stage of the ‘hauling’ and for each one of those locations I just posted the pictures of.  There would be ‘a mouse in the clover’ and ‘a mouse in the pansies’ and ‘a mouse in the poppies’.  Each of these different and separate entities had a different and separate experience in time and space.

As a child, for the entire first 18 years of my life, I had no more of an ability to THINK about these different time and space Linda’s than a mouse would.  Each experience, and the self who had them, were dissociated from one another so completely that Linda didn’t exist as a separate (remembering) self at all.  Any associating I might now do to bring together the autobiographical experience of my life, because I was formed as an ‘ingrained-dissociator, requires application of conscious effort.  But not even this effort can give me the feeling of feeling FELT as a complete being having the experiences of and within my own life.

So if anyone who did not build a body-brain from the start of their life within a severely abuse-trauma environment (without reprieve) wants to talk about ‘dissociation’ OR ‘being in the now’, I simply know that they will NEVER know what they are talking about.  Those people’s ‘ingrained’ physiological patterning doesn’t work that way and never really will.  Lucky them!

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