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Well, at least I slept last night, though I woke numerous times with odd thoughts in my head!  One of them is related to parenting and eggs.  How?  Think:  Pickled Eggs.

If I picture the early caregiving environment an infant-child is born into as being ‘trauma-toxic’, and then think about pickling eggs, I can better picture how the effects of early trauma changes a little tiny developing body-brain in parallel ways to how soaking an egg in vinegar (with or without spices) will completely change an egg!

When I woke up from whatever odd dream about parents and eggs that I was having last night, I also ‘saw’ one of those nifty hardboiled egg slicers.  If I were to peel a pickled egg and an unpickled egg, and then submit their nice oval shape to the effects of an egg slicer, I would find that what the environment did to the egg completely permeates its constitution.  While the eggs would still equally be eggs, they would be very much changed from one another through and through.

How early maltreatment, trauma, neglect, abuse can stimulate trauma-altered early development is very much like this process.  In cases like my mother’s was, the changes that her body went through in her earliest development (certainly from birth through the age of six) completely changed her through and through.  By the end, nothing was left of her original egg-self.  Influences from her early environment, which also affected the way her genetic code manifested itself, resulted in an entirely different egg-self – through and through.

When I refer to MY mother as ‘My Borderline Mother’ I am referring to this fact.  I had a trauma-changed mother.  If I look at what I know about her very, very closely, I can see the true-egg part of my mother present in her love of the natural world.  That part of who she was born as was not lost.  That part of who she was, I believe, existed so close to the core of who she was that nothing (no one) could change that, in the same way that all the maltreatment my mother did to me never took away from me my love of nature, of plants, of beauty, or of artistic expression through creative use of my hands.

Trauma in infant-childhood CAN and DOES create body-brain changes in development that last a lifetime!

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