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I don’t want to write this post at the same time that I know I must write it.  I don’t believe that what I am about to say is going to make any sense at all to very many people.

When I think about the malevolent (not pampered) world that is being described at the end of Dr. Martin and Fellow’s paper here *SYMTPOMS: 120909 Scan of Teicher’s Research – Trauma Altered Development Paper I think about my mother — and about others like her.

If we wrote books so that when we reached the very end of the story we found ourselves exactly right back at the beginning, we might more easily understand that as we look at some things from the inside, we are at the same time looking at them from the outside, as well.  I don’t think we would be comfortable realizing the truth of being alive as members of our species if we were forced to understand that what we value so influences our judgments that we cannot easily find that line — the one that separates beginning from end or inside from outside.

My mother judged the world differently from normal — on every single level.  Who she was made to be at the beginning of her life was exactly the same person that she was at the end of her life.  Looking at my mother this way I understand that there really WAS no middle.  Everything that happened to my mother and everything that she did for her entire life was the same — beginning to end — as she followed a pattern that was built within her body from birth.  That pattern WAS the choice of her life, and I do not believe that my mother could EVER override it.

She never changed because she could not.

And the pattern that was my mother meant that she could never distinguish what was inside of herself from what was outside of herself.

I believe that it is fortunate that very, very, very few people would ever be able to understand who-how my mother was in her life.

I also believe that as we look around at some others within our species whose actions seem to defy all that we judge to ‘be human’ we are at the same kind of loss-to-comprehend that we would be should we try to understand my mother.

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I believe that there are extremes at the very, very, very far ends of the pampered-not pampered, of the benevolent-malevolent continuum of environmental conditions infants are born into and formed by.

I can’t imagine an outcome where too much benevolence (too much pampering as I define it as the absence of abuse and the provision of what we consider normal and necessary) could create truly desperate variations in human development that are as destructive as what too much malevolence (too much being not pampered) can and do create.

I do envision outcomes for infant-child development where the malevolence is mixed with inappropriate and false pampering that pushes development off the charts on the destructive-outcome end.  (This is a combination that I believe destroyed my mother.)

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What I need to say here requires for understanding a perspective that lies beyond how I believe most people think.  I believe there are circumstances that combine malevolent early infant-childhood deprivation and trauma in such a way that the result is on the long, far end of what Teicher describes as the ‘evolutionarily altered’ brain-being.

I see this as happening when enough external and internal pressure is put on a tiny developing person that something inside of them literally SNAPS.  A break occurs that destines the not pampered infant-child down an impossible road of such desperation that no recovery from it will ever be possible.

These little ones grow up to become dangerous people.  Their physiological development (I think) so closely matches the most ancient human patterns that kept our species alive in the most desperate circumstances in the most desperate environments we lived in — that few among us today can even begin to imagine those conditions.  When THESE people change in their development, all hell breaks loose.

Yet we are doing ourselves a disservice to believe that just because we cannot easily ‘begin to imagine’ something that this something isn’t real.

If we continue to believe this way, we will not be able to critically think about the implications and consequences that are as equally real as ‘that which we cannot begin to imagine’.

We have to recognize this challenge to both our belief and to our ability to think about what we do not want to believe.

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Enough of wandering in circles here.  I will go for the big circle — as ‘long ago’ trauma altered developmental response to terrible malevolent conditions meant the exact same response THEN that it still can today.

There are circumstances where the trauma-altered development of infant-children create monsters.

My mother was such a monster.

Yet if my mother had been a bitch wolf who found herself with a litter to raise in the worst environment of scarcity, deprivation and threat — and if THEN she had chosen to parcel out her attention and resources in such a way that perhaps some of her litter would survive and others wouldn’t — we would not raise our eyebrows very high over her actions.

Truly terrible terrifying trauma can, in some infant-children, trigger altered development that creates horrendous results:  “Mothers, limit and/or kill your offspring.”

My mother was astute enough NOT to kill me, but the pattern was there.  But I was tough, and I survived the worst she gave me anyway.

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Picture a primitive, hostile human world of tough times, much threat, dangerously scarce resources:  Sexuality and violence changes.  Males, having their own physiology,  are more likely to end up creating havoc in the wider world (under a biologically-based imperative to ‘find food, create more offspring, expand territory, gather possessions, eliminate competition’), while females create their havoc close to and within their home — which always impacts their children.

We call what these people do in today’s world ‘crimes’ — the most serious, heinous crimes we cannot imagine — until they happen.

My mother was one of these desperate few.  And if I am correct in my thinking there is absolutely no mystery whatsoever on its most basic level about why and how she was able to do what she did to me.

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