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I would rather not write this post.  I would rather that abuse never happened to me in the first place — and I mean FIRST place because my mother’s severe abuse of me started when I was born – and lasted the 18 years of my childhood.  But after what happened to me yesterday I convinced myself to write this today as a way to document what I know is simply a natural process, no matter how strange or impossible it seems to me if I think only with the mind of acceptable modern-day ‘logic’.

But what, really, is logic?  The other day I was sitting outside enjoying the early morning’s first sunshine when I noticed a motley crew of grasshoppers beginning to hop around on a low growing plant six feet away from me.  I hate grasshoppers, and this is the second generation to hatch out of their earth nest this year.  So I stood up, intent on showing the three closest to me exactly how I feel about them.

At the instant I stood they froze their motion.  As I lifted my foot and began to move toward them the three, in concert, each took a flying leap through the air six feet away from where they had been — each in a different direction away from me.  How did they know to do that?  Grasshopper logic.

Today I scooped a half eaten mouse onto the end of my shovel, not wanting to step on it later as it lay right in the middle of my walking path.  Which half was eaten?  The head half.  What cat logic was this?  Cats, who are designed to ONLY eat meat cannot live without the amino acid, taurine, which is found naturally in brains.

And these illustrations have WHAT to do with this post?

Well, I am writing about body logic, but not just about body logic.  I am writing about body memory as we begin to accumulate it — yes — from the moment we are conceived (I believe DNA represents the body logic of the memories of our species).

MOST specifically I am talking about infant memory — and infant abuse memory and its retrieval.  Possible?  Yes.

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Researchers know that the area of our brain, the hippocampus, that is responsible for processing our real-time ongoing memories is one of only two brain regions that grows new brain cells (neurons).  (The other one, the olfactory center, builds new neurons so we can remember new smells throughout our lifetime).

Researchers also know that these new neurons can not only be damaged through the presence of stress hormones as memories are being processed, they can also be heated up and be disintegrated and destroyed by them — yup FRIED — before the facts of a memory can be stored.

However, it is also a fact that another totally separate process stores the body-based information of our experience and hence has no chance of being exposed to this stress hormone neuron frying fiasco.  So, absolutely, our body remembers everything that ever happens to us.  As long as our body lives, those memories exist, and this time line of body memory storage includes our infancy.

I imagine that massage and other healing body workers already know much about body memory and its retrieval.  I, however, am learning.

Experiences humans have before the age of one are called IMPLICIT memories, meaning they are stored not only IN the body, but MAKE the body-brain in may significant ways (as this blog describes).  Supposedly those very early body-based memories are NOT EVER going to be in a form that we can consciously recall.

Memories that we CAN recall are called EXPLICIT memories, and include both SEMANTIC memories of the facts of our experience and AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL memories that we recall very much with our SELF as the ‘recipient’.

What I am documenting today is an infancy-arena memory that came to me in far more detail yesterday than what my LEFT brain wants to realize or accept.  “Tough, left brain!  This is very, very real.  Deal with it!”

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The long-term experience of living with unresolved trauma includes actions our body-brain is taking that we might think we have no control over.  Severe infant-child abuse survivors often experience, as a part of their trauma altered development, changes in how their hippocampus memory processing region gets formed (which is often smaller than normals’).

Another region that is often seriously affected in its development by early abuse is the region of the brain, the corpus collosum, which lies between our left and right brain hemispheres and transmits information between them for processing and integration (something that always occurs to some degree while we are sleeping).  The long-term experience of EVER HAVING unresolved trauma within our body happens for us because the processing that needs to happen so that integration between our brain hemispheres of all experience does not fully happen.  This leaves parts of our trauma experience inevitably ‘unresolved’.

Our right hemisphere, most active in its growth and formation, takes its biggest giant leap in development birth to age one.  Along with forming its networks and circuits to process social attachment information this region is also establishing its connections between our body-based sensory experience and its translation into emotion.  Infant early experience of course does not begin with words, but it does begin with feelings which are fed through the right brain from the body as they are stored in memory in both places.

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Enter what I am talking about.

In 1988 I had what was then one of my oddest experiences.  For no obvious reason that I have ever figured out something must have triggered my first direct infant memory.  I was walking across my wide deck on a warm May afternoon when suddenly as I lifted my right foot off the boards to take my next step this memory appeared — seemingly out of nowhere.  I put my foot back down on the deck and froze there.

At the instant the memory came to me it did not come in words.  It came as sensory-input information.  Of course, immediately following this sensory memory the verbal description of this memory came:

I am a very small infant lying in a very large white crib.  My point of vision was in perspective so that the bars of the crib were very wide apart and the top rim of the crib was very far away.

I hear the pounding of her stomping feet coming toward me on a carpeted hallway behind a closed bedroom door.  At the same time I hear the terrible rage filled voice of my mother shouting and screaming — I know at me.

I wait for her approach.  I watch the door knob I can see a long ways away.  I see it turning.  The door is slammed open, the Monster rushes in.  I see her wide eyes, her open mouth.  Most importantly (to me in this memory when it came) I see her arm up to her elbow with her massive hand rapidly descending towards me.  The gigantic size of this hand gave me an instantaneous sense of how small I was lying in that crib, both as I watched it coming toward me, and as it clamped itself over my nose and my crying mouth — pushing me down and forcing my head and body hard into the crib mattress — as she hurt and terrified me.

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Although this memory appeared seemingly unbidden, it did appear during the days I was making preparations to move with my children from northern Minnesota to Albuquerque, New Mexico to attend a masters degree program there in art therapy.  I have always trusted this memory with only minimal skepticism because I sensed it somehow contained something I needed to know.

In these past six years that I have been studying developmental neuroscience and the long term consequences of severe infant-child abuse the memory I just described has grown in value to me.  This memory is strongly tethered to and grounded in all the factual information I have about my mother, her psychosis, and about the perpetual terrible abuse I received.

But I still wasn’t consciously prepared for what I experienced yesterday as it ‘in-formed’ me about my infancy experiences of terror and trauma.

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I have mentioned in previous posts about my ‘anxiety’ difficulties in covering for my sick friend in her little office job.  I knew last Saturday that I could only manage to do that work for her through yesterday — or so I thought.  As it turned out, I overshot my capacity to deal with that reality by one day.  Yesterday I prepared myself, went to work, and lasted exactly one hour before my body reacted with  terrible diarrhea and I had to come home.

I spent the rest of the day deescalating, which for me does NOT mean going to bed.  I cleared myself of all connections to that experience of trying to be out there ‘in the world’ when I can’t be.  As a part of my ‘cleansing’ I donned by scrubby work clothes, took the giant pair of tree trimming loppers I borrowed from my dearly beloved man friend, and began to attack the hundred year old gargantuan mess of an oleander that has taken over an entire corner of my back yard.  I wore heavy gloves because this plant is poisonous.

Chop, hack, yank, cut, clip, snip, drag away.  Hard at work I gave my body-self permission to ‘do’ whatever it needed to ‘clear the air’ of my living space.

My thoughts wandered in and out between my 14-month-older brother and the man I love and my attachment to him.  At the same time I was hyperly aware of my sadness, my deep, pervasive, all encompassing chronic sadness.  (As I have recently been blogging about, this sadness is where the central set point of my nervous system was set during my earliest development.)

Such sadness.  Such terrible sadness.  “What, dear Linda, would help you feel better right this instant?”

“I want to hear his voice.  I don’t even need to see him.  I need to hear (this man I love’s) voice.”

His voice.

About two years ago during conversations with my sister I clarified that there definitely is a connection between This Man’s voice and the voice that belonged to my father.  Yesterday as I worked hard to deplete the gangling mess of the oleander I thought, “Is there a single NOTE on the musical scale that is the ONE NOTE that resonates between the voices of these two important men in my life?  Is it a tone?  Is it a range of notes?”

My thoughts wandered off into imagining that a test could be devised whereby I could actually pinpoint as I listened to This Man a single note that would signify his voice.  Could I find it by holding a cell phone and testing his voice among the notes contained in a dialing sequence?

His voice.  My father’s voice.  I was questioning, wanting to discover another clue that might help me not only to understand this terrible sadness that I live with but a way to make even a tiny portion of it go away — either permanently or on command.

His voice.  My father’s voice.  His voice.  My father’s voice.

I allowed the words to flow through my thoughts as if they were traveling liquid.

His voice.  My father’s voice.

And suddenly I was back in that crib — only this time I knew a little bit more.  My body-based memory awareness became more flexible and more inclusive.  More of the context appeared.

When, as a tiny infant, I could hear the DRONE of my father’s voice, the HUM of my father’s voice, the rise and the fall of it, the TONE of my father’s voice — obviously from way before I was able to probably know the connection between THAT SOUND, THAT VOICE and the man it came from — there was a pattern that I began to identify.

When I heard THAT SOUND the rest of the horror that was my life with that woman who came to terrify and hurt me DID NOT HAPPEN.

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As I hacked my way into the body of the oleander yesterday my brain-mind-self then brought up the files of information I know about attachment:  TO FEEL SAFE AND SECURE.

FEEL!  Not know in words, but to FEEL in a very real sensory way IN THE BODY that I was SAFE AND SECURE.  This meant in MY infant world that the hurtful terror was NOT THERE.  I directly knew from my earliest age, and certainly as soon as my nervous system-brain-body developed enough to make any connections at all — that the ONLY time I felt safe and secure was in the ABSENCE of trauma.

Not the other way around.  I wasn’t formed in a world were safe and secure were the norm and trauma was the exception.

When I heard the sound of my father’s voice I was not terrified, terrorized, traumatized — and in pain.

When I heard the distant sound of the hum, the tone, of my father’s voice the storm stopped.

There’s more from yesterday………

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Suddenly thoughts and impressions, feeling and senses about my brother reappeared as I worked away yesterday.  My brother.  I thought about the piece of my mother’s writing I discovered on a scrap of paper and transcribed onto my blog — SEE:  *1951 – October 15 – Linda’s 6-week Checkup (and brother John)

My brother.  He would have been just under 16 months old at the time my mother wrote this piece.  There he was, on the bed beside his beloved baby sister, me.  HIS voice.  HIS shining eyes.  HIS mirroring expressions.  HIS gentle touch.  Those are what saved me.  (I am very certain that in his very young innocence and love for me — even before he could talk — that my brother intervened and interceded on my behalf as much as he possibly could until both he and I grew older and his interventions were no longer honored, heeded or allowed.)

On the day of this six week checkup, baby doll Linda all dressed up.  My mother HAD to act the part of the doting, loving mother in front of her mother, in front of my father who accompanied her carrying her doll baby to the doctor’s office.  She had to pretend she loved me to the doctor.

HOW EXHAUSTING!

In this little piece my mother wrote she describes how as soon as she possibly could, once she arrived at her mother’s after this torture of pretense, she laid tiny me down on her mother’s bed and walked away.

She writes about her thrill in arriving at her mother’s and seeing her truly beloved little boy playing with HER collection of toy dishes that she had as a child.  (I wondered yesterday, “What happened to that set of dishes?”  I have no memory of them every existing in our childhood.)

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Now in this memory retrieval documentary I am writing today I will tell you what happened next.  In the midst of my hacking and chopping and sawing and clipping and dragging chunks of that oleander away, I suddenly heard my own voice as if it was in two places at the same time — far, far away in the distance and right inside the center of my body.  My own voice said:

“I am having a painful day.”

“I am having a pain filled day.”

“I am having a day full of pain.”

“I am pain full.”

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The next thing I knew I was doubled over from a sharp knife stabbing-like breath-stopping gut-grabbing PAIN in my body centered at my solar plexus.

“What on EARTH?”

(Every time I have thought about this since yesterday’s attack I experience a much smaller version of what I describe here.)

I HAD to start burping out air that seemed to be filling my insides to the point of near explosion!  Call it a belch, call it a burb — I was painfully FULL OF AIR!

I had to drop my tools and attend to my burping with a vengeance!  I HURT!

It was during the releasing of all this pain-full air that I realized my body was having a POWERFUL memory — at I knew instantly what this memory was.

The same mother who could barely tolerate having to pretend she loved and cherished and cared about six week old me long enough to fool my father, and her mother, and the doctor COULD NOT BEAR TO TOUCH ME!

The REAL mother of infant me HATED me.  I was the devil’s spawn to her, not human, a curse upon her life.  I was the one the devil sent to kill her while she was in labor with me.  (I have written much about this before.)

The REAL mother of infant me propped my bottle whenever she could.  She disdained to touch me —

AND

THEREFORE

SHE DID NOT BURP ME!

Oh, so SAD!  So painful!  So WRONG!  SO TRUE!

And yesterday I instantly knew more about the memory that came to me in 1988 about her attack of me in the crib.  She had propped the bottle, NOT burped me, I was in PAIN.  I was crying.   (I know in my body this was not an isolated occurrence.)

And………

Now I know more about THAT story!  And today my woundedness is a little more healed.  The ruptures trauma created in my body-self is a little more repaired.  Cool!

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NOTE:  After this whole experience yesterday This Man called, and I also saw him in person, and for the first time I DID NOT hear the overlay that has evidently ALWAYS been in my range of hearing in the ten years I have been hearing my friend’s voice.  I DID NOT hear the overlay (or underlay?) of the tone of my father’s voice merged with my friend’s.  My friend’s voice sounded different to me, almost like it was ‘hollower’ and shallower — it was not as full, deep, resonating, dimensional and rich as I have always heard it to be before.

For the first time in these ten years I evidently JUST heard the comforting sound of my friend’s voice without hearing the comforting sound of my father’s very similar voice at the same time.  Fascinating!

I believe for those of us who were traumatized from the time of our birth (that unfortunate 5% I wrote about this week) that our primary senses of smell and hearing (along with touch) carry much connection to our earliest experiences — as these senses were developed under the duress of trauma.

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Maybe I am preaching to the invisible choir.  At age 59, a lot of time has gone by for early infant abuse survivors of the Baby Boom era to die.  If you Google Center for Disease Control – ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) longitudinal (long range) studies, you will find those statistics that say the more abuse and adverse experiences a person had who started the CDC studies, the more likely they were not to finish the study.  These severe early trauma survivors died on the average 20 years sooner than the less traumatized study participants.

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