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If there’s one thing I have learned from my work with words it is that if words have something they want to say they will not only haunt me, they will swarm around inside of my head like a cloud of busy, nasty gnats that will pester me continually until I write them down.  Who am I to argue?  I have some errands to run and I need to leave the house and go into town, but before I do I choose to give these words their say.

For the resource-hungry among you, I am thinking this morning about something I read in the writings of Dr. Diana Fosha a few years back.  Without taking the time at this moment to explain what her Accelerated Experiential-Dynamic Psychotherapy is all about, I will simply suggest that you follow these active links as well as do a Google search about the work that Dr. Fosha is involved in.

What my words want to say this morning is that when Dr. Fosha says that human beings ALWAYS know deep inside of their self at their core what they need to heal and how they need to do it – like we instinctively know which way to tip a picture hanging at a crooked angle on the wall to straighten it out – when early infant-child trauma, neglect and abuse change the way a person’s body-nervous system-brain-mind-self develops from the start, well, we can simply lose ‘our way’.

In the grand picture of life, my mother did no more and no less than any other living organism, on their most basic, fundamental cellular level will do.  Everything my mother did was in effort to correct something within her that was wrong so that she could make it right.  In other words, taken from this perspective, all of life only has one choice if it is going to continue on being alive:  HEAL or DIE.

When I wrote the other day about the human specie’s opioid system as it is designed to help us form our required life-sustaining attachment systems (see post:  +FEELING GOOD AND A FULL TOILET TANK) I wasn’t joking.  Being born as a healthy infant into an early safe and secure attachment caregiving environment means that when we have a need someone appears to help us so that the blissful state that is innately ours (when our opioid system’s receptors are full) is continually reinstated.  That, to me, is what heaven on earth is all about no matter how we want to think about it.

When early attachments to caregivers are NOT safe and secure, something changes inside of our body as we develop and, as Dr. Allen Schore describes, our inner SET POINT that is supposed to be developed to return us to a state of balanced equilibrium and calm (what I call bliss) simply never gets formed in the right way or at the right ‘place’.

So when a survivor of the kind of early experiences during development doesn’t get this calm center set point, it doesn’t mean that the body won’t continually try to balance itself out, anyway.  This, to me, is the fundamental task of any immune system.  A continual, never-ending quest for healing in ones lifetime will happen, but unless there is enough of the right information, healing itself will not happen.

My mother’s life followed this pathway.  Everything she did, although of course she had no way of knowing it, was in some way related to her physiological need to reach this calm, safe and secure balance point of inner equilibrium that was denied her in her earliest development.

I have some things to do right now, so hopefully letting these words line themselves up in order across these pages will be enough to stop them from pestering me for awhile.

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