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I am going to write something here for very selfish reasons.  I have been away from the peace and quiet of my home during the day for the better part of two weeks as I take care of my friend’s office while she recuperates from her illness.  The more time that passes for me away from the peace and calm of my little universe here at home the less able I am to stop the disturbances of emotion and thought that swirl, tumble and spin around in my body and in my thoughts.

So many thoughts whiz around me during the day.  I end up just feeling disorganized and disoriented, true to the insecure attachment disorder that built me through severe infant-child abuse in the first place.

Can I order some of my thoughts here now and feel a little bit better?  Let’s see…..

Everyone uses their attachment relationships to help regulate their emotions sometimes.  Humans, as members of a social species, are built to have human attachment as the mainstream of their being.  As I come to understand how profoundly my terrible infant-childhood insecure and unsafe attachment relationships affected my physiological development, I find overlapping thoughts tumble around my mind because of overlapping words we use to talk about our attachment relationships — the good and the bad.

“Oh, that person is SO insecure.”

“Oh, that person is being so paranoid — again.”

“Oh, that person has trouble with intimacy.”

“Oh, that person has abandonment issues.”

“Oh, that person just uses other people.”

“Oh, that person is SO dependent.”

“Oh, that person is so LOST without so-and-so.”

“Oh, that person is in an addictive relationship.”

What do any of these expressions really mean?

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If we suffered from unsafe and insecure attachment relationships with our primary caregivers from the time we were born and through our earliest years — as I have said so often — our development is changed and instead of having good ‘ole peace and calm at the center of our nervous system as its set point, we end up with a mid set point at anger, fear and/or sadness.  Forget the left brain happy center — if we have any neurons left there we have an extremely hard time FEELING them.

My peace and calm comes to me through some kind of manipulation of the OUTSIDE world I live in — if I can manage that.  Any sense of safety and security I might experience is dependent on what is happening around me in my world — NOT on my own nervous system’s set point.

This makes me very vulnerable.  It makes me dependent on all sorts of ‘things’ in ways that people who did not suffer early trauma and abuse probably cannot imagine.

Today I thought, “It’s like being on a life support system.  Because my nervous system-brain-mind-self DID NOT develop outside of a malevolent world, and because it adjusted its development to trauma, my well-being is far more dependent on external sources — just like if I was dependent on a life support system to stay alive.”

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I don’t LIKE IT that my body had to form this way.  But it’s a fact.  I would rather learn as much as I possibly can about my trauma altered development and what it did to change me than remain ignorant.

For example, two of my very close relationships are currently ‘threatened’ by the primary attachment person’s illness.

Enter guilt.  “Here I am, yes concerned about their recovery and sickness for THEIR sake — but the track running parallel to that concern is my own concern for my own self.  I NEED these people.  I cannot any more afford for anything to really happen to these people than I could afford having someone cut the power to my life support system if I was dependent upon it for my life.”

I am not at all sure that people who talk about abuse survivors being able to form ‘earned secure attachments’ when their primary attachment system is tuned to ‘insecure attachment’.  I don’t believe severe infant-child abuse survivors, who did not have at least ONE strong safe and secure attachment bond to some significant person when they were forming their body-nervous system-brain will EVER have anything like a normal attachment.

‘Earned secure attachment’ is NOT normal safe and secure attachment.  I believe if we look at the truth we will know that our attachment figures are our life support system in ways that non-early abused people DO NOT NEED.

I thought about this today in terms of the great sadness, fear and/or anger that built itself into child abuse survivors.  Those emotions have immense power.  They have a force within them, and because one of the consequences of NOT having safe and secure early caregiver attachment relationships is that we did not develop a right social-emotional brain normally so that we can regulate emotions normally or form social attachments normally.

My close attachment relationships contain an element of desperation because that element was built into me right along with my attachment system that can never turn itself off (this is NOT normal) — which is probably directly connected to the fact that my stress response system was set to ON ON ON ON through child abuse and cannot turn itself OFF (again, this is NOT normal — except for severe early abuse survivors).

So even when I am feeling the benefits of close attachment relationships, the undercurrent within my body is always running in the background.  I cannot regulate this sad-fearful-angry emotional current for the reasons described above.

So the PEOPLE that I am attached to actually act in my world like massive DIKES to hold back the ocean of my emotion and like massive retaining walls to hold back mountains of emotions, as well.

Knowing this at least alerts me to why my reactions are overly strong (think adult reactive attachment disorder) as I feel, yes, threatened, insecure, unsafe when my ‘earned secure attachment’ to these important people in my life feels shaky to me.  It is no different, I don’t believe, than how I would feel if my life was dependent on an external life support system.

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It is vital, I believe, for severe early abuse survivors and the people who love them to understand NONE OF THESE INTENSE REACTIONS ARE PERSONAL.  They are PHYSIOLOGICAL.  They are connected to a nervous system-brain that did not develop with peaceful calm at its center, that did not develop an adequate happiness center in the left brain, that did not acquire normal ability to read social cues others send out, did not learn how to react to social cues normally (including emotional messages others send in their facial expression, vocal tones, body language, etc.), that did not develop either an attachment system or a stress response system that can be turned off in normal ways, etc.  (Our empathic abilities did not develop normally, either — no matter how ‘sensitive to others’ we are.)

I am not BOOM-DOOM-GLOOMING it, either.  These trauma related alterations were built into us through early trauma AT THE SAME TIME WE DID NOT HAVE ANYONE TO SAFELY AND SECURELY ATTACH TO.  Ours (mine) are very real body-based changes that we can FEEL and that stimulate, modulate, and often control our reactions – including our emotional ones and then the reaction-actions we take in response to our own emotions.

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Perhaps the hardest aspect of being me is that the current popular terms our culture uses ‘against’ severe early abuse survivors (like I listed at the start of this post) do NOT describe what is really going on.  They do not address what matters most — not in terms of what caused our difficulties to be built into our body-nervous system in the first place and not in terms of the very real physiological body-felt consequences we live with all of the time.

This dearth of information about the long term consequences of ‘insecure attachment disorders’ that built us in the first place and that we then are forced to carry within us for the rest of our lives IS improving.  But for the most part we cannot really talk about what our body tells us about what is REALLY happening within us to anyone.

When our attachment relationships are threatened or end — for ANY reason — our world is rocked to its core.  There is nothing minor about what happens within us when our life support relationships radically change or end.

I am not even beginning to describe the fractured, fragile, altered relationship we are forced to have not only with the world around us, but also with our OWN severely traumatized relationship with our ‘self’ – if we are fortunate to have one.  The mirroring that we desperately needed from our earliest caregivers DID NOT HAPPEN, which means we are desperately needy for the rest of our lives on the mirroring that any of our present-day attachment people give to us.

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All is simply not what it might appear to be from the outside looking in at we severe early abuse survivors.  In some ways I wish I could have remained ignorant of the devastation early abuse caused me.  That didn’t happen.  Over time, over the length of my life, the reality of my trauma-changed development could no longer be kept behind dikes and retaining walls so that I could pretend to ignore it.

It does help me to know I can name what I experience — both in terms of what I experience and where-how what I experience came from.

Yes, I have great strength in many ways, but I am fragile.  I cannot tolerate being gone from the safety and security, the peace, quiet and calm of my home for very long.  If my friend is still sick much past the early part of next week someone else will have to be called in to take her place in that little office.  When it comes to what ‘ruptures’ my universe and to what I need to make some ‘repairs’, I know that my sensitivity to external stimulation of ANY kind severely limits what I can tolerate in my life.

This is classic Posttraumatic Stress Disorder — call it ‘complex’ or not — and it is directly tied to insecure attachment in our body and to the world we live in.  Because our stress response system cannot be turned off, we have to find ways to turn it DOWN so that our inner disorganization-disorientation can diminish.

Do I feel my ability to live a real and full life has been stolen from me as a consequence of trauma-altered development due to severe early abuse (even though it lasted 18 years – it was the early birth to age one abuse that so changed my body)?  Yes, I most certainly KNOW THIS NOW.  But this is the only body I will ever have to live in during this lifetime, and what was done then, even though in minor and positive ways it can be influenced, cannot be undone.

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The day I wrote one of my latest posts about my happy grandson I had another thought more akin to my own reality when I was his age:  “When a baby screams it hears the whole world screaming.  When a baby screams it feels the whole world screaming.  When a baby screams all that exists in its universe is screaming.  Everything everywhere is screaming when a baby screams until someone cares enough about the baby to come to it and help make the screaming stop.”

If nobody is there to consistently do this for an infant, and worse yet, if the primary caregiver hurts the baby and makes it scream, this scream and its physiological reaction in the entire body will build itself into this infant.

That’s what happened to me and to others who resonate with what I am saying here.

I realized very clearly last week that I fundamentally believe that if someone had removed me from my mother from my first breath so that I had been loved and cared for well for the first year of my life, and then had I been returned to my mother for all the exact same abuse I suffered until I left home at 18, my life would not have been stolen from me the way that it has been.

NOTHING anyone could have done to me after the age of one could have created the kind of body-nervous system-brain changes that the trauma of my first year of life built into my body.

It is the birth to age one changes that cursed me, that create nearly all of my difficulties now.  It is not that I wouldn’t have had serious ‘issues’ to deal with as a result of severe abuse after age one.  It IS that the body-nervous system-brain that I would have had to deal with and to process with and to integrate with and to heal from abuse with (no matter how severe) AFTER the age of one would have been 100% more ABLE and CAPABLE to accomplish exactly these things.

NOTE:  I call ‘earned secure attachment’ ‘borrowed attachment’.  All I say about trauma altered development includes changes to the immune system and to epigenetic changes and alterations in the expression of many genes and their combinations.

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