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Another important piece of information about resentment and bitterness!  Safe and secure, appropriate, adequate (does NOT need to be perfect) parenting and early infant-child caregiving IS SUPPOSED TO include LOTS of practice with what is called RUPTURE AND REPAIR.

Parents who were not parented correctly are most likely to not recognize the opportunities life gives us through its patterns of RUPTURE to ‘learn’ how to REPAIR them.  All these patterns — adequate or not — build out nervous systems-brain-body-mind-self from the beginning of our life.

Done well, CALM and CONNECTION is the middle set point for our nervous system-brain-mind.  This happens when every rupture is met with an opportunity for repair.  The entire feel good-feel bad chemical system in our body is tied into these systems and is built by these patterns.

When an infant cries and has its needs met appropriately in a safe and secure environment, calm connection builds the center point.  Crying represents a rupture, having needs met is the repair.

We never leave these patterns behind.  All our lives we negotiate what we want and need with the environment, most often with other human beings.  We bump into one another in all sorts of ways, but a well built nervous system-brain-mind-self has all sorts of feedback loops built into it including REMORSE and EMPATHY to let us know what works and what doesn’t — to increase calm and connection for everyone.

Severe child abusers like my mother did not have the right kind of patterns built into them from early on, and as their developing body-brain adjusted – like in my mother’s case, the vagus nerve system was also affected and the ability for empathy and remorse was removed from her.

In our adult years when resentment and bitterness begin to solidify and ‘control’ our ability to respond – decreasing our calm and connection and our sense of well-being — we can bet our body-brain-nervous system-mind-self was built with LOTS OF RUPTURES that did not have adequate or appropriate repair.

My mother could beat me and beat me, etc. and NEVER, not one single time, feel remorse.  She offered NOTHING toward helping me build patterns of repair into my body.  These ruptures without repair ARE what dissociation is all about – plus!

A short post here — but important!  Healing means we recognize the patterns of rupture without repair from the time of our birth and name them for what they are.  Then, if resentment and bitterness are present – and again, they are IN OUR BODY, in our stress-calm response system — we can learn NOW how to live well with these patterns and to find ways to improve and change them!

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