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The Ripple Effect, and how we are all connected and related — I so thank this morning’s commenter for his words!  I was brought back circle at this critical juncture in my work to remembering what this is all about!

I had just been sitting with my morning coffee in my backyard under my gangling tree thinking with self pity, “I can’t do this work!  I don’t want to allow my thoughts to even turn in its direction!  I want to find something meaningless to do, and spend my days dawdling.  NO!  I won’t go ‘back there’ for my truth or my story!  I will not ever turn my eyes again upon the words my mother wrote!”  I could have just as well imagined myself in Calgon’s “Take me away” commercials!

Then I came inside and sat down at my computer screen, and there was the PLEASE MODERATE COMMENT email — and here I am.

When I wrote my last post, +REMEMBERING WHAT REALLY MATTERS ABOUT ALL OF THIS, what I am most reminding myself is that AGAIN I KNOW that it isn’t the thousands of individual beatings my mother did to me, it isn’t the forced isolation and confinements, it isn’t the continual and effective verbal erosion of my entire sense of self (let alone my esteem, worth, concept, etc.) that mattered.

It wasn’t having my mother bash my head in the toilet when I was four that matters.  It wasn’t being chased across our wilderness mountain fields by her brandishing a log intent on killing when I was ten me that matters.   It wasn’t even that she never called me “darling.”  It wasn’t that she prevented me from playing.  It wasn’t ANY of this that mattered, over the entire 18 year span that she so brutally abused me that matters MOST to me, or that lies as the motivation behind the work I have done and have yet to do.

WHAT MATTERS is that during the moments running into hours running into days, then weeks, then months of my VERY EARLIEST time on earth that matter to me most — that hurt me the most.  Her madness, complete with her psychosis, prevented her from interacting with me in a resonating, Linda-mirroring way that would have reflected back to me my own self in my own emotions as I was expressing my own inner needs.

The social-emotional dysregulation built into her own infant brain by malevolent and neglectful caregiver-infant interactions were directly downloaded into MY FORMING AND DEVELOPING infant brain — along with all the patterns of severe dissociation that affected her.

From these earliest beginnings not only was my brain development completely altered away from ‘optimal’ and ‘normal’, so too was the development of my entire nervous system and my immune system.

I don’t think I have mentioned it here, but both of my sisters who were able to be included in the massive 50,000 ‘subject’ Sister Study after I was diagnosed three years ago with my advanced, aggressive breast cancer receive a thorough assessment once a year.  This year my sister told me for the very first time this study has included a HUGE number of questions about these sisters’ earliest years PRIOR to the age of 6.

My sister who told me this and I celebrated this addition of these questions to the once-a-year survey the Study requires.  My guess is that it is that the study is accessing financial support now from the Center for Disease Control who no doubt finally mandates that this information be gathered in all studies that use their resources.

(Do a blog search on this site for ACE study and for Center for Disease Control)

ALL aspects of a traumatized and neglected, abused and maltreated infant-young child’s development are affected and CHANGED — and that is what matters to me of ALL the horrendous treatment that my mother did to me.

In the end it doesn’t matter one single HOOT what we ‘name’ any of this.  What matters is this rock bottom truth.  It isn’t even degrees of secure versus insecure attachment that matter.  It isn’t what we might call mental illness that matters.  What matters most are the very concrete and very real ACTUAL interactions an infant prior to the age of one year old has with its primary caregivers AS THE BRAIN, THE NERVOUS SYSTEM INCLUDING THE STRESS RESPONSE AND VAGUS NERVE SYSTEM, AND THE IMMUNE SYSTEM IS BEING BUILT.  These earliest interactions determine how our genetic DNA information will manifest in our body.  It will tell the machinery that tells our DNA what to do — what to do!!

These earliest interactions are feeding into the infant as it grows and develops information about the state of the world — be it benevolent or be it malevolent — that will last for the rest of that grown up infant’s life time.  Once these earliest trauma-affected changes have happened, down the road we will see patterns that we name as insecure attachment disorder, mental illness, etc.

We need to name it for what it is:  Trauma Altered Development.  We need to know what these changes are, how they affect us, and what we can do to moderate, modulate and live better with these changes — that can NEVER BE REVERSED.

As I summon the courage and willingness I need to plow ahead in the creation of the text of my own horrific childhood of abuse, I must not lose track of the importance of what I am saying in this post.  THIS is all that really matters.  It is what lies at the core for all of us who did not receive the benefits of early caregiver interactions in a safe and secure, LOVING world that would have let us build our best body possible — not for a continued life of trauma, abuse, turmoil, scarcity, deprivation, pain, suffering and misery — but for a world of safety, security and plenty.

The fact that we were resilient enough to stay alive has given us the chance to learn for ourselves as survivors what this MATTERS MOST actually means and what we can do about it.

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