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Sometimes when severe infant-child abuse survivors feel crappy, the reason why we feel the way we do — along with what we are actually feeling — might surprise us.  I have ‘this feeling’ often, and now that I better know where it comes from, why I have it, and what it actually IS I find living my life a little easier.  Sometimes.  The trick for me is to recognize ‘this feeling’ when I am having it — so that I can name it specifically for what it is and not for what it is not.

Humans have potential to experience a wide array of feelings, and MOST of them are actually not entirely pleasant.  Why might this be so?  I figure it’s because our actual survival far more depends on our ability to find ways to take care of ourselves so that these unpleasant feelings either shrink or disappear — at least temporarily — than it does on our being outright giddy with glee (my term of choice at the moment for all we might call our feel-good feelings).

If we happen to get caught with our hand in the flames, our jerking it out doesn’t so much make us immediately giddy with glee as it does STOP the pain.  That’s a good thing.  Much of what I suspect we humans do is geared toward stopping pain (thus enhancing our survival).  Nothing wrong with that, and nothing to surprise us here.  Not really.

If life on this planet had always been a giddy party-for-all free-for-all, full of plenty, full of safety and security, a NICE place to survive in we would no doubt be sharing our current breathing space with members of at least SOME of the other 18-plus other hominid species that vanished trying to do what our species did:  Remain flexible and adaptable enough to stay alive.

So while it must sure be nice to have a big fat left-brain happy center, all full of early-formed happy neurons that can be relied on to add humor and a more pleasant focus on life than severe infant-child abuse survivors managed to hold onto in the midst of the tragedy and terror of their body-brain formative years, it’s not anybody’s happy left-brain neuron center that most guarantees they are going to survive if the time ever comes to put their survival to the absolute test.

I have to remember all of this on days that often come to me when I feel far from giddily gleeful.  It’s not ONLY that my early forming left-brain happy center had only sporadic Kodak Moment opportunities for happiness that contributes to my difficulties in staying buoyant today.  It’s not ONLY that fear and sorrow, terror and confusion — and all the rest of my survival-connected emotions got an Olympic sized workout from the time I was born that increases my difficulties in experiencing joy.

What did the most damage was the fact that the malevolent, dangerous, abusive, unsafe and insecure world that I spent the first 18 years of my life trying to grow up in was the fact that all the abuse I experienced happened because both my mother and my father ALSO grew up in unsafe and insecure worlds.  This gave them — and in turn gave me — an ‘insecure attachment disorder’.

What that means to me now is that severe abuse, tied into severe attachment disorders (for both the perpetrators and then for their offspring), left me with an attachment system that CANNOT TURN ITSELF OFF!

THAT is what I am actually feeling on most days that I might otherwise be tempted to describe what I feel in some other survival-based emotional terms.  It isn’t anger or resentment or bitterness or despair or hopelessness or helplessness or fear of the future that gets to those of us who suffered in and survived the kinds of infant-childhoods this blog is dedicated to.  It isn’t boredom or loneliness or even often hunger or thirst or some other physical depletion that we feel.  It isn’t grief or sorrow or depression.  It isn’t isolation or confusion or longing we feel.

What we most often feel does not even have any more of a name in our culture than what I call it here.  What we feel when we do not feel ‘happy’ and can’t seem to find our way even to peaceful calmness (which as I have said is SUPPOSED to be the middle set point for our nervous system and for severe early abuse survivors is NOT) — is the very real physiological body-based FEELING of having an active insecure attachment system THAT CAN’T BE TURNED OFF.

Certainly sometimes we know what it feels like not to have this feeling.  Some use addictions or chemicals from the drug store or addictions to everything from gambling to work to sex to over spending or over eating or relationships (or even as my mother did by abusing someone else and by her constant moving).  What I am describing ACTUALLY is that LOST feeling I mentioned several posts back.  It is the feeling we are born with that motivates us to express our needs in such a way that someone comes and takes care of us (or does not).

Our feel-good and feel-bad chemicals in our body are all tied into this attachment system we have been either fortunate enough to have had built right in safe enough infant-childhoods — or unfortunate enough not to.  It is those of us in the latter group — way way way way over in this latter group — who are left with the same insecure attachment patterns that built our entire body-nervous system-brain-immune system-mind-self from the start back in those truly malevolent earliest years.

Early abuse survivors are left with circuitry in our body that operates differently than does the attachment circuitry built into people who had safe and secure-enough infant-childhoods.  There’s no way around this fact.  What nobody ever told me, what nobody ever tells ANY of us is that THEY have a secure attachment system that can be turned off.  Our insecure attachment system was built to KNOW we will never be safe — and ON is (to our trauma-formed body) BEST.

There are times as a severe abuse survivor that I have been distracted from the experience of having to FEEL my forever turned on insecure attachment system.  Fortunately.  Those distractions include the 35 years I spent mothering children in my home before they reached their own adulthood.  Those distractions really are the story of my adult life.  But the older I have gotten the more difficult it has become for me to find ways to distract myself from feeling WHAT I FEEL LIKE — really feel like — feels like!!  This is all a direct consequence not only of the hell of abuse I was formed in and by throughout my infant-childhood — but is also a direct consequence of the fact that I survived it so that I am still alive to have feelings today (and to write about them).

Typing into the search box on this blog ‘insecure attachment’ will bring up many, many pages on the topic.  I am mentioning it again today because I periodically have to remind myself of how real my insecure attachment ‘disorder’ is — because there are days when I feel it in my body so strongly it is difficult to feel anything else.  Then I have to remind myself it isn’t because I am a flawed person, that there’s something wrong with me, that I ‘should’ be doing something better or differently than I already am.

On days like today I am just face-to-face with myself as a trauma-formed person with a body who will feel that reality for the rest of my life.  At the same time I know that has to be just fine with me because the only escape from it will be my death — that’s a reality.  But I have survived this far and will keep on keepin’ on because that, after all, is what every living member of our species does best.

But I am always in the market to find new tricks for backing off this unpleasant survival-based feeling so that it doesn’t overwhelm me.  Some days that becomes my nearly full-time job.  At the same time I wonder if it isn’t those of us who survived intolerable infant-childhoods of abuse and deprivation — and pay the price for our survival every day that we have to live with ‘this feeling’ that our insecure attachment ‘disorder’ creates in our body — who really have the greatest right to celebrate that we are — in fact — that we are still here and we are AMAZING!

*NOTE:  In dismissive-avoidant insecure attachment disorders (which I believe was the kind my father had) the brain actually creates its own distractions against emotions so that the brain keeps the person from even being aware that they are having a feeling in the first place.

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