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I received a great comment on one of my other related blogs to this post that was such a welcome affirmation of the work I try to do in my writing.

POST:

+What I Suspect of My Mother’s Early Childhood

COMMENT:

Thank you for having written this blog. I haven’t finished reading all of it, adding bits and pieces every week… I really don’t know how to thank you properly.
I come from a dysfunctional family, my grandmother came from a loveless abusive childhood herself (great-grandma pushed into insanity by a criminal great-grandfather; grandmother an evil lost soul, my own mother only partially “saved” by her father who was such a good man he remained loyal to my grandmother even to his dying day while she robbed and condescended him daily.)

In your writings I find explanations to so many things that are going on in my head. Chemicals gone wrong, neural pathways built wrong…
I’m stubborn enough to cling to the hope that with enough good examples I still have time to “rewrite” my brain, you know scientists have recently determined there is SOME amount of neuronal regeneration going on after infancy? Won’t be looking too deeply into that in case I debunk it by accident, it keeps my hopes up, “I may find a way to change my brain makeup” after all…

Your writing somehow shows me the way.
Thank you ever so much.

MY REPLY:

Thank you for your wonderful comment! Have you been over to my main blog?

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/

I also have the entire collection of my mother’s writings that I transcribed at

http://hopeforamountain.wordpress.com/

These writings have not been totally proofed for punctuation, etc. but they are complete. The link at the top there for “Mildred’s Mountain” leads to a selection only of the basic Homesteading tale.

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Two regions of the brain actually grow new neurons. One is the hippocampus so that we can process memories of ongoing experience. The other is the olfactory region that lets us gain information about new smells we encounter in our life.

Otherwise, the neurons we are left with past the age of two are all we get. What neuroscientists mean when they talk about our brain’s incredible abilities to ‘rewire’ itself, and its resiliency is that the ‘little arms and fingers’ — the axons and dendrites that neurons have can form and reform their connections extensively — and there IS much hope for improving our abilities!!

What you are reading about, and what my writings on the Stop the Storm blog are mostly about is our need to understand how profoundly the experiences we have MOST PARTICULARLY birth to one affect our entire physiological development. Nothing I ever read in self-help books adequately told me what I most needed to know about the trauma altered development I experienced.

My search began 6 years ago at a time when internet access to the most current developmental neuroscience findings that new technology has enabled became available. This is a thrilling time!

Knowing that our body adapted itself to the trauma that our caregivers fed us — and that trauma in turn fed them when they were little — lets us know at the same time that we are not ‘sick’ or ‘wrong’ in any way — simply different.

Your comment gives me great comfort, encouragement and hope for the work I do. I am not a professional, but I sure am an expert about what happened to me. Neither my father or my mother were wanted or loved babies!! Who they became, HOW they became, and the horror they were both able to accomplish in raising their own children (and indeed, in living their own very sad and tragic lives), I believe was a direct consequence of deprivation, neglect, lack of love and maltreatment not only birth to one, but for their entire childhoods.

Thank you for visiting! Never give up hope. The more we learn about the truth about our trauma altered the development the more empowered we become to live a better life moment to moment — no matter how trauma-changed our body is! All the very best to you, and I hope to hear from you again!!

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