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How many people can erase the awareness of pain from a bone break with their mind?  How many people can make a toothache disappear with their mind?  Does our society call these people ‘mentally ill’ because their pain is real and their mind is not doing the trick of changing their condition — for the better?

I almost feel like the fog is clearing that I have lived in blind all of my life.  I keep thinking today, “How would my life as an adult turned out differently if anyone had EVER told me along my life’s pathway what I know now more clearly every passing day to be true?

I can feel my terrible, terrible sadness today.  I feel weighted by it physically.  Moving is difficult as if my being is so heavy.  It’s a beautiful clear, sunny, warm, breezy day.  I am working outside.  I sit in the sun when I want to and gaze south over the Mexican wall at the tall trees over there swaying, at the tall mountain behind them — gorgeous!

I have absolutely NO reason to feel sad in my body today.  Yet I am.

This is NOT depression!  This is Substance P I bet, telling my body that pain is present — and has been since I was born.

I wish there was some kind of surgery that could be done to remove this sadness.  I pay close attention to my body — and to my mind — as this sadness permeates my life.  How would I feel if THIS feeling were GONE?  Can I make it disappear and vanish WITH MY MIND?  Nope.

I live with this sadness, in spite of this sadness — which I believe is at the set point of my nervous system.  If someone had told me as a young adult that I would be sad all of my life — and to be aware (beware!) that every single choice and decision I was going to make in my life would be a REACTION to the pain of this sadness — could I have learned a long time ago how to consciously construct my choices and decisions to better insure a LESSENING of this chronic sadness?

I don’t know.  I do know the body-brain built during the first year of life forms permanent connections that cannot be changed.  It is also true that the cortical ‘higher thinking’ region of our brain is still maturing until age 25-30.  Yet it is ALSO true that severe child abuse can make this brain region atrophy early (see Dr. Martin Teicher’s work) so that it never develops ‘on schedule’ or ‘correctly’ at all!

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I would NOT call what I live with a mental illness anymore than I would call a broken bone or a toothache a mental illness.  What I feel is equally physiologically present IN MY BODY!

What I am beginning to think, though, is that IF everything I ever do is really in reaction to the pain of sadness — then I have an adult version of a Reactive Attachment Disorder (do a Google search on adult reactive attachment disorder – fascinating reading).

This is, in my thinking, a very real physiological-biological REALITY that has very, very little to do with the MIND.  When I read blog comments by readers that use the worn-out terminology all the self-help books preach, I want to SHOUT “IT IS IN OUR BODY!!!”  All of the difficulties we experience are NOT IN OUR MIND.  Our MIND IS NOT SICK.  We live in a trauma changed body from the infant-child abuse we experienced — and how we feel in our body IS THE CONSEQUENCE.

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In my thinking quieting my life and myself as much as possible — a form of eliminating the variables as a scientist would do in an experiment — and then paying the closest attention possible to how my body FEELS and what it tells me I will learn more than any self-help book will ever be able to tell me about ME and my experience.

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I think about a television set that was built in its factory-of-origin so that it over-shows one of the three primary colors ALL of the time unless the watcher manually adjusts the color ranges every time the television is turned on.

Too much red, or yellow, or blue — similar to infant-child abuse survivors whose nervous system was formed under the stress of trauma so that peace and calm is not their set point at center.  Instead they have too much anger, too much fear, or too much sadness at center.

I don’t have to question where my center set point lies.  I feel it, and it’s my guess that all survivors can detect their set point in one of these three powerful survival-based emotional arenas.

Because our body reacts to what we do (the people we are around for example) we can ‘lift ourselves’ away from our center set point on occasion.  But in my thinking we have a body built under so much stress, with so little safety, security, peace, calm and happiness when we were little that we ARE IN THE HOLE.

Just to escape the chronic nature of the emotion that is our center set point requires huge input.  We might just escape our central feeling — but to get to PEACE and CALM — and from there to HAPPY?  HUGE input is needed!

And we do NOT stay in the peaceful or happy place once we are not in contact with whatever/whomever HELPED us out of our hole temporarily because we are REACTING to external rather than internal conditions.

Again, this is not a ‘mentally ill’ condition.  It is body-based in our physiology.  Although I am nothing like an expert, I FEEL the truth of what I say.

Adequate early caregiver interactions in a safe and secure environment transmit to the infant’s growing body-nervous system-brain the ability to grow into itself a drastically reduced tendency to REACT to external stimulation and conditions.  THAT state, as different as it is from that of severe infant-child abuse survivors, IS IN THEIR BODY-physiology, too!

All the self-help razmahtaz in the world can be confusing jibberish to early abuse survivors, more like dandelion fluff blowing in the wind than it is useful.  What happened to us was not in our mind.  It affected how our body developed.  These trauma changes affected how our body FEELS every moment of our life except when we are reacting to the world around us — which creates temporary feeling changes that do not last.

I don’t HAVE any answers today other than STOP INFANT-CHILD ABUSE because it hurts for a lifetime!  And don’t call us ‘mentally ill’ because we FEEL the consequences of this hurt for a lifetime.  What we endured built itself into us from the beginning of our lives and guess what?  We cannot simply ‘get over it and move on’, ‘put our abusive childhoods in the past’, ‘forget our past’, or magically ‘forgive our abusers’ so that we will be ‘better’ and more like ‘normal people’.

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