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Did you grow up in a meteor crater?  How safe and secure were you in there??  Were you left alone to try to grow your best body-brain-mind-self while showers of dangerous and life threatening rocks continued to bombard you?

I treated myself to an online search yesterday to try to figure out exactly what the difference is between analogy, metaphor and simile.  Which way does my mind work when I go to write and think in terms of images that do not let go of me?

Metaphor:  My home of origin was a meteor crater.

Analogy:  My home of origin was LIKE a meteor crater?

Simile:  This is how I write!  A simile happens when a writer goes on and on and on — continuing to use an image to interweave it with words in a long drawn-out thought.  That’s me!

Soooooo……

When the infant-child developmental experts write about how a little one’s body-brain changes in response to the stress of trauma, neglect and abuse in a malevolent world — I now translate that fact in my own thinking to this:  These little ones ARE NOT THE PAMPERED ONES.

Their home of origin was a meteor crater.

When the experts write about how in a ‘good enough’ safe and secure environment their best body-brain self is formed in a benevolent world, I translate that now to mean — THEY WERE PAMPERED!

Their home of origin was was NOT a meteor crater.

(Again – please read especially the last paragraphs of this paper:  *SYMTPOMS: 120909 Scan of Teicher’s Research – Trauma Altered Development Paper.)

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At age 59 I am beginning to realize that the ‘conditions’ that trauma built into my body from the start of my life while I tried to exist and grow within a nearly completely non-pampered environment — seem to be getting worse with each passing day.  I feel as though I am engulfed in a downward slide — but from where, to where?

As I asked myself (and my body) this question, the image of myself growing up in not only the bottom of a massive meteor crater but also of being bombarded nearly every moment with torrents of meteors continuing to fall on me, I knew that when I say ‘sliding’ I mean the bottom of the pit is SINKING at the same time the edges of the crater are eroding away and crumbling down on top of me.

“Oh, dreadful!  Oh, great!  After all this time THIS is only as far as I have gotten in this so-called process of recovery?”

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Well, for ME understanding about the meteor crater and how I have always felt in my body, and feel now is a HUGE step of progress!  How strange it seems for me to say this — but discovery of REALITY versus swimming around in ignorant denial IS progress!

THIS matters:  It took me until I was 29 before anyone ever TOLD me I had been “an abused child.”  LORDY!

It has taken me double that number of years (plus) to begin to understand what that REALLY means!

While it certainly is nobody’s contest to stand around and make claims “MY childhood was worse than yours was!” I am now understanding that there are VERY REAL FACTORS that describe what happened to each of us individually during our little years — and these factors group themselves together in such a way that they are actually providing for us descriptive layers of filters.

You know that term — falling through the cracks.  Well, imagine that as you are falling through the cracks — down, down, down — you hit another level with cracks that are closer together.  Do you fall through those narrower cracks as well?

Down, down, down you go as you examine all these layers of filters that descriptions of infant-childhoods actually create.  Down, down, down you fall until — if your mother was truly TRULY unable to provide for you from birth even the most remote aspects of true mother love, you end up falling into a sieve made of the finest mesh — and STILL you continue to fall until you hit — and only THEN discover — what really happened to you.

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I didn’t know this fact.  When I was first told “You were an abused child” I thought, “OK.  All THOSE people have the answers I need to make myself better.”

I have always thought in terms of those where were abused when they were little and those who were not.

It is NOT that simple.  This is NOT a clear black-and-white affair.  Degrees of infant-child trauma MATTER — as do the resiliency factors that were ALSO there in our body and in our earliest lives.

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So today I ask, “How big was that meteor crater you were born into?  How dangerous to you was the continual stream of meteors that fell upon your little head?”

There is NO SHAME in letting ourselves know the truth.  As members of a social species — even though we live in an American culture that pays a whole lot of attention to ‘individuality’ and ‘uniqueness’ of people — being of a social species we ALWAYS feel best when we are more like others than we are different.

Being raised in a meteor hole in a meteor shower that DID NOT mean we were pampered or safe or secure — or even LOVED — means that we grew up (and grew our body-brain-mind-self) in EXCEPTIONAL rather than normal, ordinary or usual conditions.

That what trauma IS — out of the ordinary — extraordinary.

And those conditions CHANGED our development in ways that leave us reeling for the rest of our lives as we TRY to be more and more ‘like everybody else’.

We are NOT like everybody else!

In severely traumatizing childhoods — and I usually count this to be in the 5% category although in my thinking I am coming to realize it well might be 20% of our population who find themselves born into Meteor Craters and ongoing Meteor Showers — we will NEVER be like those others who are in the 80% – 95% of people who received some degree of pampering in their earliest years.

Remember:

Pampering = benevolent world = ‘good enough’ safe and secure

Not pampered = malevolent world = not ‘good enough’ safe and secure

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So when I say I the bottom seems to be falling in the meteor pit I have ALWAYS been in, and the sides are crumbling over my head, I am also saying that for all the ‘self-help’ information that I have found these past 30 years was actually like (analogy!) random, disconnected, irrelevant and misleading bits of ‘facts’ scribbled on tiny pieces of confetti paper, tossed down to me over the edge of my crater into hurricane winds by ‘others’ whose lives exist either on solid ground way above my head or ‘others’ whose lives exist in a little pit MUCH shallower than the one that I know.

Maybe those same ‘others’ who read what I write now will say, “Oh, that is SO NEGATIVE!”

I no longer care a single tiny TWIT what those people think or say.  I can’t see them or hear them from where I am ‘down below’.

None of them ever helped me to understand how the extreme abuse I suffered changed my physiological development.  None of them even MENTIONED that this was possible, let alone that it happens and HAPPENED to me.

None of them ever told me that it was the ABSENCE of having anyone in my life during all of this trauma that actually provided for me a safe and secure attachment opportunity.  THIS MATTERS because in the midst of ANY TRAUMA over a lifetime, it is the presence of safe and secure attachment relationships that HEAL TRAUMA.

In the case of infants and children suffering from horrible traumas, the presence of SOMEONE to safely and securely attach to MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD to that little one’s outcome — PHYSIOLOGICALLY.  These safe and secure attachment relationships are ALWAYS the number ONE most important and powerful resiliency factor that mitigates the impact of trauma.

While it might be an unusual and uncomfortable way to look at infant-childhood to say that treating a little one WITH LOVE and caring kindness means that infant is a PAMPERED one — and therefore of the fortunate group — this is true.

Being treated this way was NOT a given for all of us.

So, who was there to pamper you when it mattered most?

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So when I look at my poverty, at my inability today to tolerate stimulation or ‘excitement’, when I feel what it’s like to be alone, to not have a quality partner relationship, to be at a worse than dead-end ‘career wise’, when I struggle through the moments of my life toward WHAT for a future — I do NOT need to blame or shame myself.  I simply have to look around me at the vastness of this meteor crater that was built into my little body from the start and ask myself, “What CAN you do today to help yourself feel better?”

There IS always something, though that something be as tiny a little thing as are the spaces in the filters that I have fallen all the way through since the time of my birth.  And EVERYTHING that I long for, that I grieve for, EVERYTHING that helps me today — IS A FORM OF SOME KIND OF PAMPERING because PAMPERING is what I completely missed from the start of my life (except for the critical basics of shelter and food, etc.) and for the rest of my life pampering is what I desperately and RIGHTFULLY need.

At the same time I am negotiating within myself HOW it is that nothing I ever experience actually fills up this PIT.  I know today, “How could it?”  If I can stop the bottom from sinking out from under my feet, if I can stop the continual crumbling of that ‘way up there’ crater rim, I am accomplishing something good.

I also know that it will never be possible for severe infant-child abuse survivors — who were left alone without pampering BY ANYONE and terribly hurt by the ones who were SUPPOSED to take care of us — to know WHO we are in the world until we also realize HOW we are in the world.  In order to know for ourselves what we MOST need to know, we have to have the dedication to our own well-being to dare to leave the pack behind us as we search for our OWN truth about what REALLY happened to us — and how that changed us in our body-brain — for our lifetime.

Finally discovering that we were abused infant-children is a critical beginning — but it is ONLY the beginning for some of us.  We have a long, long way to travel toward comprehending our reality because the Meteor Crater we were raised in was really, really deep.

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