Month: November 2010

+DISSOCIATION: THE SURVIVOR’S CURSE?

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Those of us who suffered severe trauma and abuse particularly during our earliest infancy — so that our physiological development was forced to change in adaptation to the trauma — need to speak out and begin to think about our resulting difficulties in getting along during our lifetime in a world that really (fortunately in many ways) does not have a clue what living in a trauma-altered body is like.

We need to realize that dissociation is NOT a clearly understood phenomena.  There is no clear trail of understanding about dissociation laid out for us to follow by the experts in any field of research or practice.  I believe dissociational experiences need to be documented in any way that we can manage because it will only be in the future that survivor’s who were forced to build a body-brain that contains dissociational patterns will receive the help needed to understand how we are in the world — along with HOW we are in our body in the world affects WHO we are.

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If you have just landed at this post, please first read the post that immediately precedes this one.

Living requires that everyone continually process incoming information so that it can be responded to.  Through safe and secure earliest caregiver relationships we are supposed to build a body-nervous system-brain that can smoothly take in new information, match it up with related and relevant information we have gained during our past, and then be able to respond in the present (responding to the future is a different topic) in appropriate ways.

This process is supposed to be both ongoing and coherent.  That means it is supposed to make sense.  We are supposed to be able to make sense out of what happens to us.  We are supposed to come up with responses, reactions, and actions continually that make sense — make sense to US and make sense to those around us.

Early maltreatment of infants during their first year of life, during the period in which the body-nervous system-brain is undergoing its incredibly fast and complex building process, interferes with this process.  When primary caregivers confuse, hurt, terrify and terrorize, neglect and in other ways mistreat an infant, the information the infant receives cannot possibly be received by the infant in positive ways.

The only alternative a maltreated infant has is to physiologically adapt its development in response to horrific conditions that signify to its growing and rapidly developing body that the world is not safe, that the infant is vastly insecure, and that the infant is ALONE in the midst of all of this.  Dissociation is one of the natural consequences of being overwhelmed, traumatized, and of being fed not only too much information to handle (process, make sense of and respond to), but too much of the WRONG information about the self and the world the self has been born into.

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Now, to simply get to a nitty-gritty description so that I can document a dissociational episode I experienced yesterday.

The first phase of trying to document dissociation involves the reaction (I believe) of shame and embarrassment.  “What’s wrong with me?”  This stage also includes the sense that what happened made no sense at all and that there was no ‘reason’ for it.

We must be careful here.  I am NOT saying that shame and embarrassment TRIGGER the dissociational episode.  I am saying that these feelings are a very seductive temptation to fall into when we go back and try to document such an episode.

Humans are supposed to gradually build into their body-NS-brain from birth the ability to smoothly transition between experiences.  Traumatized infants cannot build this ability into their body because nothing about what they experience allows them too.  Being traumatized and frequently overwhelmed creates a different body-NS-brain because it has been fed, as I said above, too much of the wrong kind of information.

I see an image:  Picture someone saying to an infant, “Eventually in your life, when you are bigger and ready to handle it, life is going to give you a LOT to deal with.  Right now our job is to build you a body-NS-brain that will have good, healthy strong channels in it so that when this time comes, everything you need to get along in the world well is prepared and ready.  This way you will nearly always (overwhelming trauma can hit anyone down the road) be able to take in stride all that you encounter in your life.  You will be able to transition, or change smoothly with the changes as you move along through the rest of your life.”

Dissociation is a DIFFERENT way to handle transitions and changes.  As we document dissociation we do not need to judge it.  We need to pay attention the best that we can and describe it.

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So there I was yesterday, already hyper aware of my well overamped stress response system that had been overtaxed during the week by my efforts to take care of my friend’s job so that she would not worry as she heals from her illness.  Of course all kinds of other stressors went on all week, and the end result is that my entire self, living as it does in a trauma altered body, was on overload.

Standing in line at our small town’s local hardware store — did I notice the BLANK instant that would have let me know dissociation was going to take over the job of handling me in relation to the changes of the world?

Nope.  I did not.

But as always happens sooner or later, once dissociation has occurred and a DETOUR is in progress, something happens to make sure we know we are on a different track in our life from the one we were following prior to the dissociational experience.

What I find fascinating as I make the effort to document yesterday’s experience is that somehow I switched the identity of the person I was speaking to.

Within my own self I simply reorganized certain information within me and reoriented the entire scenario so that as the DETOUR was in progress everything made sense to me.

Did it make sense to the woman I was speaking to?  Of course not!  Did it make sense to me once she put the roadblock in the middle of my DETOUR route?  Not at the time, not even yet — but I respect who I am and how I am in the world as a severe early trauma survivor to try to look at this without criticism and judgment.

I don’t believe dissociation happens without the presence of both stress and a stressor.  Because at the same time I had a permanently turned on/activated stress response system (that I am coming to believe is the exact same thing as the insecure attachment disorder-system I also have that also cannot be turned off), I am ALWAYS experiencing stress (call it anxiety — but it is a very particular kind of anxiety).

It could take a book to adequately document just this one episode of dissociation that happened to me yesterday standing in line at the hardware store.  I believe, when I talk about honoring and respecting the dissociation severe early trauma survivors experience, that this fact is true for every single dissociational experience any survivor has.

Present with any single instance of dissociation is an entire lifetime of accumulated knowledge about what trauma is, what it feels like to endure it, what it takes to survive it, and about what the risks continue to be as we stay alive in a vulnerable body in what our body knows to be a dangerous, threatening and hostile world.

THAT IS A LOT OF INFORMATION!  All of that information is both vital and very near to us (because it is IN us) all of the time.  So-called ordinary-normal people do NOT carry this vast storehouse of trauma-related information.  Therefore, they are NOT at risk for becoming overwhelmed at any given time with a wealth of survival based information — which means they are not at risk for a dissociational episode that seems to come from ‘out of the blue’.

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If I were writing this in a book format I would start another chapter here.  Because I am writing this in a blog format, this post is simply going to get longer!

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I feel like I am inching my way out on a precarious branch that few before me have traveled so far out on.  As I described in my previous post, dissociation is always connected to our physiological adaptation in our body-NS-brain to terrible trauma that overwhelmed, and therefore confused, disorganized and disoriented us.  Those earliest traumatic experiences that built us always happened at the same time that chaos was present.  Within chaos — all possibilities exist simultaneously.

Our tiny growing body-self had to find a way to continue-on-being in the midst of these experiences.  At the same time we brought right along with us into our future life, one instant at a time, all of this UNRESOLVED trauma experience information.

Trauma remains alive in the body of all survivors until somebody somewhere somehow pays the right kind of attention to its message.

Why?

Just as trauma involves the experience of chaos where ‘all is possible’, at the same time it carries the parallel message that if the human race is going to survive and endure the information contained in the trauma has to be understood so that in the future the same kind of trauma can be first of all AVOIDED and if that doesn’t happen, then the same kind of trauma can be responded to when it happens in a new and better way.

Just as trauma=chaos=all is possible, any individual member of our species who experiences trauma is connected to the ALL — we each contain within us the genetic information that made us members of our great species in the first place.  And along with being a member of our species we are given an inescapable mandate:  What each of us experiences in our lives as individual representatives of our species belongs to the WHOLE.

If any single one of us continues to carry information within us about a trauma that was NOT resolved, that information is designed by nature and by evolution to be of critical importance to every single member of our entire species.

Problem?  We do not think this way.  But not thinking about something accurately does NOT make the faulty way of thinking accurate.

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So, again, there I am standing at the counter in the hardware store having a verbal exchange with the cashier.  I am interacting with a woman I will call Anna, though I do not actually remember her name.  I know her through associated experiences I have had in the past.

This woman’s brother is married to my neighbor in this trailer court where the house I live in is located.  I will call my neighbor Ruth.

Over 95% of the population of the border town I live in is of Mexican heritage.  (The town 8 miles away where the hardware store is located is probably 50%.)

Now, looking closely as I try to describe and document what happened to trigger what happened next I verify my own statement above.  All the trauma related information of my entire lifetime was present in that instant I stood in line — and dissociated.

How is that possible?  Again as I stated above, all of this information is present with EVERY early trauma survivor because our bodies changed in their development to make sure we remember.

Dissociation is a part of this trauma-related altered remembering ability that we survivors are blessed-cursed with.

Entering into the context of the hardware store exchange came all the information that I have about my being unable to attach to others in the world.  My insecure attachment disorder exists in nearly absolute contrast to what I see happening between family members, neighbors and friends in this area I live in.

These people are above all else supremely social from the time they are born.  They love one another and they show it — all of the time.  They are designed from birth to value one another in social interactions — Anna and Ruth being no exception.

I lost track of certain facts yesterday, things I consciously KNOW about the relationship of these two women.  I know about the connection by marriage that socially makes these two women very real sisters.  I know Ruth lives two trailers to the west of my house, just over the chain link fence of the neighbor that lives between us.

I know Ruth drives a little silver car.  I know Anna lives in another town 13 miles away and drives a large four wheel drive.  Both women work at this hardware store but seldom on the same shift, and on this day only Anna was working.

Enter my dissociation.

Enter my attempt to document what happened.

Anna cheerfully made a light comment that she loves this time of year, that the night previous she enjoyed lighting her wood stove.

Enter my dissociation.

Enter my WAY TOO MUCH RELATED INFORMATION.

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I must take a moment here to mention something that has happened to me in recent weeks — at least that I have certainly become aware of in recent weeks.

Never before in my life have I consciously noticed that I occasionally think in smells.  Over the past two months I have noticed that sometimes if I think ‘lilac’ I simultaneously literally SMELL lilac.  If I think vinegar, I smell it.  If I think sour milk, I smell it, etc.

How and why this is happening to me (and not all of the time – randomly — and I can not predict it and do not expect it when it DOES happen) I do not know.

But it happened yesterday.

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As soon as Anna mentioned her wood stove three things happened simultaneously.  (1) I remembered that I sometimes think in smells, (2) I remembered actually smelling very real woodsmoke wafting through my back yard this week, and (3) I was overwhelmed with the connection made inside of me to everything I have EVER known about wood smoke and wood stoves.  With an Alaskan homesteading childhood and a long time spent living in the cold winters of northern Minnesota my memories of these experiences are vast.  Because I was built the way that I was, trauma is connected to many of these wood smoke memories.

Strange trigger.

I am not sure that I would have reacted the way that I did yesterday if I had not already been near my complete stress overload point from all the other things that are happening to me (none of which would overstress a ‘normal-ordinary’ person).

So, yesterday suddenly out of nowhere I dissociated in such a way that I lost track of the real time information about who Anna and Ruth are, where they live, etc.  Suddenly I was talking to Anna AS IF SHE WAS RUTH.  In my trauma-stressed-altered reality suddenly Anna lived in the trailer as my neighbor and Ruth disappeared as a person from my reality.

The conversation included me telling Anna that I have tree branches in my yard from the trees I have trimmed, and that she could have them for her stove.  At the same time I could ‘see’ Anna coming down the driveway to get them.  Discussion turned to stray dogs because I was purchasing T-posts so that I can try to build a fence along the east side of my yard that the stray dogs cannot penetrate.  Anna told me about her fence that keeps her dog in her yard.  I responded, “I didn’t know you have a dog over there!”

Abrupt crash – detour ended.  Anna:  “I don’t live there in the trailer, Ruth does!”

Me?  Embarrassed and shaken, confused at my own self, “What HAPPENED, Linda?”

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Even though we are most certainly operating within the cultural norms of our society to take dissociational experiences personally — after all, word of my ‘faux pas’ is no doubt going to spread like wildfire around this small, closely knit neighborhood I live in — my documentary’s point is that dissociation happens to us as individual people because trauma has ALWAYS been bigger than we are as separate people.

We did not survive, evolve and endure as a social species by being alone as separate individuals.  We endured as a group.  When trauma-related memory information overwhelms us — FOR WHATEVER SEEMINGLY INSIGNIFICANT REASON IN THE PRESENT MOMENT — at the instant that it does, at the instant we become overwhelmed and dissociate as a consequence, we are being humbled as an individual self.

At the instant something around us connects with something within us that triggers dissociation, NATURE itself — along with the human specie’s mandate to carry trauma information until someone somewhere at some time can solve the riddle so THAT won’t happen within our species again — takes over and overrides in real time our ability to be a cognizant person with free will and free choice.

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So, yes, patterns of dissociation can wreck absolute havoc with a survivor’s ongoing experience of being an individual person ‘equal to all others’.

Severe infant-child abuse survivors ARE DIFFERENT.  We carry information about terrible things that CAN and DO happen within the reality of our species.

Nobody listens.  Nobody learns a damn thing.  Nobody cares.  The trauma information gets carried forward because NATURE is NOT going to let a species member forget what ALL species members need to know.

A traumatized, maltreated, abused, neglected infant is not given any other choice but to endure the best that it can.  This endurance includes trauma altered changes to its physiological development.  From that time forward ALL early trauma survivors are not given a choice about whether or not to carry the torch that blazes with signals that this kind of trauma DOES exist in the world.

When we experience dissociation we are experiencing what it is like to carry this torch.  What was it yesterday in that conversation that caught my trauma survivor attention?  The detailed specifics no longer mattered about who the actual individual was who lit a wood fire to stay warm.  What mattered was the ability to stay warm to survive in the cold.

The detailed specifics no longer mattered about whose dog lived where.  What mattered is that dogs that are not cared for adequately by owners cause all kinds of problems and are threatening.

The detailed specifics of who these women were as individuals ceased to matter, as well.  What mattered is that they are connected and closely attached to one another and share each others lives.  Their reality is fundamentally in contrast to my own where I live alone, am alone — because I pay this price for being formed as an isolated and severely abused and traumatized tiny human being.

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Severe early trauma survivors are at risk of dissociating ALL OF THE TIME.  It is nearly a superhuman task for us to anticipate what is going to trigger the overwhelming reactions to trauma that were built into our body.

What really matters to me is that I am prevented in real time within my society from approaching my neighbor and her ‘sister’ to tell her what happened to me yesterday, and what has happened to me all of my life as a direct physiological consequence of having been born as a beautiful, whole tiny baby to a vicious psychotic mean, dangerous mad woman who was supposed to be my mother.

I cannot tell them that even my mother was a torch carrier for trauma-related information.  I cannot tell them that really awful things happened to my mother when she was tiny and that she passed trauma on down to me.

So I say all of this here and now, knowing that whatever backlash that is likely to surround me — silently and invisibly — as a result of yesterday’s social fiasco will be detectable to me.  I still have the same basic choice I have always had as a trauma survivor:  survive or don’t.

That my species does not care about the information about trauma that my body has stored and carries is NOT my problem — really.  My job is to carry this torch — and carry it I do, no matter what awkward and puzzling ways this torch sheds its information.  What matters to me is that I figure this all out the best that I can.

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+DISSOCIATION: THE SURVIVOR’S GIFT?

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Never do I consider dissociation to be either a primitive ‘defense’ or a passive coping ‘mechanism’.  I consider dissociation to be a pattern of interaction between brain regions in concert with the nervous system-stress response system that is very simply ONE THING — its own pattern of processing information.

In light of the mention I made in my previous post concerning the difference between calmness and numbness I want to clarify my thoughts by adding that I can consistently count on one of two inner states within myself that, when I can notice them, alert me to the active operation of dissociation in my information processing and response patterns.

I believe these two inner states are actually one and the same.  I notice them as being different only as I experience one AS IT IS HAPPENING and the second IN RETROSPECT after it has happened.  It is, therefore, only how I notice dissociation IN REAL TIME that I am describing when I name these two separately.

Neither of these two states feels comfortable to me.  Neither of these two states would be ones I would choose to experience — if I had ever been given a choice when dissociation was built into my body by severe infant-child abuse in the first place.  Both of these states are equally real.

Because both of these states mean the same thing to me — dissociation is happening/has happened, I will simply pick one by the tail and describe it first.  I will start with “dissociation is happening.”

When I experience dissociation as it is happening — and I mean at the millisecond it occurs — there is ALWAYS a ‘shift in the world’.

I experience this shift as a ‘split’, meaning that what was the millisecond earlier an ongoing, coherent, reasonable pattern of interaction suddenly, and I mean SUDDENLY simply ceases to exist.  What was — comes to a stop, ceases to exist, breaks, shatters, falls apart — and changes into something else.

I NEVER anticipate such a break in my continuity of interaction with or understanding of my experience in the world.  I never did beginning in infancy when these breaks were forced upon me due to my mother’s insanely abusive disruptions of my ongoing experience.

The single word I would use to describe this state of awareness of dissociation as it is happening is this one  — BLANK.  Yet as I write the word I also understand that it is not enough to document what I want to say.  Blank implies that ‘there is nothing there’.  In real time, in real life the experience is exactly the opposite.  EVERYTHING IS THERE AT THE SAME TIME.

Some describe chaos as being a state where all things are possible.  Everything is there at the same time.

I believe that survivors of severe early caregiver terror, trauma, maltreatment and abuse have had the awareness of the state of absolute chaos built into their entire body on all of its levels.  Very few such survivors (I would say NONE) made it through their earliest developmental stages of brain-nervous system development without dissociation being built right into the circuitry of their body as a result of their experiences.

When dissociation happens, when the break in the continuity of millisecond-past experience STOPS and the state of BLANK appears, what we actually have happening is the experience of TOO MUCH INFORMATION.  In other words, we are experiencing the state of being overwhelmed.  That state is a familiar one to us on every level of our being — and it is the same experience as being in chaos.

I INTUITIVELY KNOW THIS IS NOT IN AND OF ITSELF A BAD HAPPENING!  It absolutely is NOT a ‘bad thing’.  It is not ‘sick’ or ‘wrong’.  It is supremely (and I do not use that word lightly) creative.  It is a miracle of life, has a purpose, and can come to good end.

So, what is the problem with dissociation?  Well, for one thing, it can be dangerous.  At the instant that dissociation is happening I am  not ACTUALLY in full awareness of any world at all other than the full perception of all that is possible within my mind and being.  That awareness does NOT keep me safe in my body in real time in a physical world — and hence, I believe, this instant of dissociation is an ACTIVE coping state and not a passive one.

What I know about this statement is that the exact instant of dissociation happens SO FAST it cannot be measured in any normal way.  It happens this fast because the body knows whatever state is being left and whatever state is being created to move into happen in the physical world where body-awareness (certainly not required to be conscious) has to be connected as fast as possible to accomplish ongoing life should a physical danger appear during this time (which an abuse survivor is especially geared to anticipate).

Say you had a working lamp turned on and two extension cords.  The lamp is plugged into one cord which is receiving current from being plugged into a wall socket.  How fast could you disconnect the lamp from one extension cord, plug it into the other one, and switch the cords plugged into the socket?  Could you do this fast enough that the lamp would not visibly flicker?

Believe me, that would not be a passive action.  It would be a very very active one just as I believe dissociation is.  While no human can physically manipulate cords and plugs at or near the speed of light, I (as a lay person) have the image that these interactions, transactions, manipulations and actions as they happen on the level of electrical pulses and impulses within the brain DO happen that fast.

Pretty sophisticated if you ask me, no ‘primitive defense mechanism’ here, even though this ability has been built into the human brain since we began to advance the development of our brain untold centuries ago.  There is nothing shabby or accidental about dissociation.  It has a purpose and a natural intention — to allow us to survive under conditions that are ORDINARILY un-survive-able.

Trauma is, by definition, an experience that is outside the range of ordinary experience.  Trauma is extraordinary, beyond the ordinary, and so are the people who survive it.

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I am going to carry my lit lamp and cord switching image on with me into my description of what I call the second state of dissociation.  If I imagine that the information that has been transpiring just prior to a dissociation being triggered as the body-knows overload has been approached, I imagine that the first cord this lamp has been plugged into has instantaneously become one that is too wimpy, too light to carry the load.  A much heavier duty cord is required — and the body-nervous system-brain of trauma survivors just happens to have one handy.

If the heavier cord is suddenly required, and the survivor just happens to have one at hand — why not use it?  Believe me, we do.

What’s the problem?  The switch to the heavier cord designed to carry the full current of what is happening in the real time present moment — AND the load of past traumatic awareness associated with it that lie outside the range of consciousness — does not happen through conscious free choice.

This results in what I call the second state of dissociation — THE DETOUR.

Experience of the first state, the switch that leads THROUGH the experience of blankness is very seldom consciously identified.  Time moves on so fast we cannot actually measure it, and as it does so we are now following a detour.  We are NOT on the same path in the same world in the same way that we were before the millisecond split of dissociation occurred.

Being able to recognize that we are on THE DETOUR path varies by individual and by each dissociated experience we have.  I believe we can live not only seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months IN THE DETOUR, we can live large portions of our life on these altered pathways.  This is a huge topic, and certainly too vast for this post.

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Someone on the outside watching dissociation occur can very possibly SEE the blankness when it happens.  Very few people are knowledgeable enough to actually recognize what they are watching, but this does not mean they don’t see it.  My hope is that bringing discussions about dissociational experience out into the open will help all of us understand both our own self and also other people better as we all learn more about what dissociation is, what it feels like, why it is possible, how it happens, what creates the ability within humans, how it is helpful and how it is disturbing.

As I work to become increasingly aware of dissociation when I experience it, I find words that help me connect to my self in both my past and in my present.  This leaves the playing field of the future wide open.  I have two complications currently in two of my main attachment relationships that both involved dissociation when the ‘rupture without repair’ (so far) happened.  I am not free to really talk to either of these two people about my experience.

People who are not severe abuse and trauma survivors seem to want to rush right on past any dissociation-related conversation — because the experience of serious dissociation is NOT a part of their reality and is therefore NOT truly important to them.  They do not want to truly listen to us — and they don’t.  This is NOT OK TO ME.

Yet at the same time when others react this way, and cannot be honest with themselves about the basis of their reactions to a ‘dissociator’ they are in relationship with, they are discounting not only our experience, but OUR SELF at the same time.  Dissociation has been built into us.  It is a part of our body.  It is a part of our patterns of operation and of being alive in the world.  Dissociation is a part of US!

And as a consequence dissociation is BOUND to appear in our interactions with others — both those who mean a lot to us as well as with those who are passing folks in our life.  There will come a time when the dissociations cannot be ignored.  They have to be talked about like any other fact of life.  If these open, honest, compassionate, exploratory, learning conversations do NOT take place, there will be ruptures in our lives that cannot possibly be repaired.

Dissociation is something we are supposed to be curious about.  Dissociation is ALWAYS connected to something extremely important — something that has to do with life and death, with threat of death, with trauma.  As we continue to treat dissociation as something flawed, pathological, wrong, inconvenient, mysterious, troubling, or inconsequential, we are missing out on some of the most important lessons that life has to teach us all:  How do you survive the un-survive-able?  What gifts and abilities enable that to happen?  What are we supposed to learn from trauma?

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+INFANT-CHILD MALTREATMENT DURING EARLY DEVELOPMENT – WOUNDS THAT NEVER HEAL

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Perhaps this is really what I believe:  I am living a documentary on the physiological changes that severe early and chronic child abuse can cause within a human being and what it is like to live a life with these changes.  If this is what I believe, than what I am doing at age 59 is living a documentary and recording what I notice about this experience as a survivor.  It just seems that life moves too fast for anything else to be accomplished.

I finished four days of working in my friend’s small office while she recovers from her illness — only she isn’t well enough yet to return so next week I will probably be gone from  home and in the office another four days.  This SHOULDN’T BE A BIG DEAL for me, but it is.  I can feel the powerful impact of stress in my body — and what I have been doing is NOT STRESSFUL in any ‘normal’ person’s way.  I know it isn’t.  But it nearly more than I can bear.  I have the weekend to try to calm myself down — on all my levels.

So from my documentariast point of view I would say that any time I am out in public and interacting in ANY way with other people I am nearly completely overwhelmed by the complexities of human interactions.  At the same time I notice this, it’s like I can look backward through a long time tunnel to my infancy and feel the affects of my mother’s maniacal, violent, unpredictable, inappropriate,  chaotic interactions with little infant me — and what those interactions did to my body, nervous system and brain as I tried to grow and develop in that insanely abusive and malevolent environment.

I did not have the opportunity for experience I needed in face to face mirroring, reflective, compassionate interactions that would have built into my right brain the ability to ‘read social cues’ or to send back and out to others ‘social cues’ that they could read, either.  Every interaction I participate in with others borders on panic.  All the information that passes back and forth is moving so fast — just like it is supposed to — but is also well beyond my ability to understand correctly or to process.

As a result, I am easily just plain exhausted in ways that are difficult to describe.  It all seems to damn NOISY to me — and it IS noisy.  And all the interactions just amp up my stress-distress level, which my continually turned-on stress response/attachment system DOES NOT NEED.

There is no possible way to turn everyday human interactions into slow motion events.  If my ‘documentary’ was able to run at the speed that allowed me to work with human social information, nobody except someone like me who had suffered from a truly MAD, insane mother birth to age one would be able to tolerate watching it.  The tables would be turned.  Instead of ME being the one out of my element and lost in the mad panic of the high speed communication patterns between people, I would be far more comfortable in ‘slow-mo’ while others would amp up their stress levels.

And in the end the result is I am terribly lonely.  Normal social interactions do not ‘feed me’.  They drain me, and I have to escape them back to the only comfort I now know — my quiet home.

I can’t say to other people, “Slow down!  You are so loud, you talk so fast, you move so fast, you send out far too many signals all jumbled up and tumbled over one another.”  I am supposed to ‘be normal’ and ‘act normal’ — just like they do with one another.

My mother overwhelmed every sense I had from the time I was born.  There was no reciprocal, balanced, compassionate, tender loving interactions between us — ever.

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I was thinking about all of this when I got back from a series of errands I had to do in town today (I didn’t have to go to my friend’s office).   I realize that much of my life — all of my 18-year childhood and most of my adulthood — I have survived and endured through using an invisible (to me) ability to dissociate so that masses of information could remain separated from one another so that they did not overwhelm me by being present at the same time.

Thinking about it today I realized that this process allowed me to have large ‘areas’ of quiet within me that were actually empty because information was segmented and presented to me in little pieces not connected to one another — but only present as the information was immediately needed.  Other information was somehow put away where I did not have to focus on it, be aware of it, be distracted by it — or have to FEEL it or pay it any attention.

Something about my cancer diagnosis July 2007 and my subsequent experience of treatment and survivorship changed all of these patterns — or ways I had of being in the world that seemed to work for me all those years.

Most simply put in this documentary as I experience it today, I would say that the NUMBNESS disappeared.

Now I would say I have too much information without having any other in-built adequate ability to process or tolerate it.

I still experience dissociation, but not from one numb state to another.  Now I can distinctly note that most dissociation happens in response to very clear demands being made on my processing abilities (brain-nervous system-mind-self) that surpass my in-built ability to flow along smoothly and comfortably in response.

This lets me know very clearly that numbness is NOT calmness!  I never needed to clarify this or name it for myself before now.  Now, not only can I not get to a state of calmness within, I cannot get to a numb state, either.

In other words, I cannot turn down the volume of noise that comes from too much stimulation in too short a period of time, too much information, too many demands on my inadequate abilities to receive, understand, tolerate and appropriately respond to information coming to me continually from the world around me — most especially when I am in contact with other people.

In other words, I am living my life now post-trauma of cancer directly with the body-brain-nervous system my MOTHER built into me before the age of two — and not with the systems that I put together, instinctively and intuitively figured out and Gerry-rigged all on my own throughout my life that allowed me to make-do with how abuse built me in the first place.

Now I live with the whole raw deal.  And that is, I will note in my documentary, very often how I feel — very raw.  I think about the terrific harm that was done to me while I was a developing little person.  I think about the wound that has created in my trauma altered body as a consequence.  I think about burned skin, how sensitive beyond belief it is, and I realize that my whole being is wounded, not my skin — at least not the OUTSIDE of my skin.

It might take generations past mine to begin to comprehend what trauma altered infant-child development really is, let alone how to truly begin to live well in spite of these changes.  Meanwhile we of the current generations have to make do the best that we can — and document what we have and do experience so that our understandings can help those in the future both STOP infant-child maltreatment at the same time its survivors are respected, honored and assisted to live better with what nature gave us as a result of the terror-able tempest that was our physiological formative beginning — that enabled us to stay alive at all.

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+A COLLECTION OF POSTS RELATED TO — CALM — AND ABUSE RELATED COMPLICATIONS

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Here is a big collection of posts on this blog related to CALM — CONNECTION — (NOTE:  WordPress does not automatically create a new tab or page when you click on one of these links – be sure to right click and choose!  Or, click on a link, check it out and hit your back button up at top left of your screen!  WordPress does, however, automatically correct the capitalization of its own name — SPOOKY!)

*EMOTION AND ATTACHMENT

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+CALM THE CRYING BABY — IMMUNE SYSTEM STIMULATES VAGUS NERVE TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT

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+SAVE THE BABY FROM ROTTEN EARLIEST CAREGIVING

alchemynowLeave a comment

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I am going to write something here for very selfish reasons.  I have been away from the peace and quiet of my home during the day for the better part of two weeks as I take care of my friend’s office while she recuperates from her illness.  The more time that passes for me away from the peace and calm of my little universe here at home the less able I am to stop the disturbances of emotion and thought that swirl, tumble and spin around in my body and in my thoughts.

So many thoughts whiz around me during the day.  I end up just feeling disorganized and disoriented, true to the insecure attachment disorder that built me through severe infant-child abuse in the first place.

Can I order some of my thoughts here now and feel a little bit better?  Let’s see…..

Everyone uses their attachment relationships to help regulate their emotions sometimes.  Humans, as members of a social species, are built to have human attachment as the mainstream of their being.  As I come to understand how profoundly my terrible infant-childhood insecure and unsafe attachment relationships affected my physiological development, I find overlapping thoughts tumble around my mind because of overlapping words we use to talk about our attachment relationships — the good and the bad.

“Oh, that person is SO insecure.”

“Oh, that person is being so paranoid — again.”

“Oh, that person has trouble with intimacy.”

“Oh, that person has abandonment issues.”

“Oh, that person just uses other people.”

“Oh, that person is SO dependent.”

“Oh, that person is so LOST without so-and-so.”

“Oh, that person is in an addictive relationship.”

What do any of these expressions really mean?

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If we suffered from unsafe and insecure attachment relationships with our primary caregivers from the time we were born and through our earliest years — as I have said so often — our development is changed and instead of having good ‘ole peace and calm at the center of our nervous system as its set point, we end up with a mid set point at anger, fear and/or sadness.  Forget the left brain happy center — if we have any neurons left there we have an extremely hard time FEELING them.

My peace and calm comes to me through some kind of manipulation of the OUTSIDE world I live in — if I can manage that.  Any sense of safety and security I might experience is dependent on what is happening around me in my world — NOT on my own nervous system’s set point.

This makes me very vulnerable.  It makes me dependent on all sorts of ‘things’ in ways that people who did not suffer early trauma and abuse probably cannot imagine.

Today I thought, “It’s like being on a life support system.  Because my nervous system-brain-mind-self DID NOT develop outside of a malevolent world, and because it adjusted its development to trauma, my well-being is far more dependent on external sources — just like if I was dependent on a life support system to stay alive.”

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I don’t LIKE IT that my body had to form this way.  But it’s a fact.  I would rather learn as much as I possibly can about my trauma altered development and what it did to change me than remain ignorant.

For example, two of my very close relationships are currently ‘threatened’ by the primary attachment person’s illness.

Enter guilt.  “Here I am, yes concerned about their recovery and sickness for THEIR sake — but the track running parallel to that concern is my own concern for my own self.  I NEED these people.  I cannot any more afford for anything to really happen to these people than I could afford having someone cut the power to my life support system if I was dependent upon it for my life.”

I am not at all sure that people who talk about abuse survivors being able to form ‘earned secure attachments’ when their primary attachment system is tuned to ‘insecure attachment’.  I don’t believe severe infant-child abuse survivors, who did not have at least ONE strong safe and secure attachment bond to some significant person when they were forming their body-nervous system-brain will EVER have anything like a normal attachment.

‘Earned secure attachment’ is NOT normal safe and secure attachment.  I believe if we look at the truth we will know that our attachment figures are our life support system in ways that non-early abused people DO NOT NEED.

I thought about this today in terms of the great sadness, fear and/or anger that built itself into child abuse survivors.  Those emotions have immense power.  They have a force within them, and because one of the consequences of NOT having safe and secure early caregiver attachment relationships is that we did not develop a right social-emotional brain normally so that we can regulate emotions normally or form social attachments normally.

My close attachment relationships contain an element of desperation because that element was built into me right along with my attachment system that can never turn itself off (this is NOT normal) — which is probably directly connected to the fact that my stress response system was set to ON ON ON ON through child abuse and cannot turn itself OFF (again, this is NOT normal — except for severe early abuse survivors).

So even when I am feeling the benefits of close attachment relationships, the undercurrent within my body is always running in the background.  I cannot regulate this sad-fearful-angry emotional current for the reasons described above.

So the PEOPLE that I am attached to actually act in my world like massive DIKES to hold back the ocean of my emotion and like massive retaining walls to hold back mountains of emotions, as well.

Knowing this at least alerts me to why my reactions are overly strong (think adult reactive attachment disorder) as I feel, yes, threatened, insecure, unsafe when my ‘earned secure attachment’ to these important people in my life feels shaky to me.  It is no different, I don’t believe, than how I would feel if my life was dependent on an external life support system.

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It is vital, I believe, for severe early abuse survivors and the people who love them to understand NONE OF THESE INTENSE REACTIONS ARE PERSONAL.  They are PHYSIOLOGICAL.  They are connected to a nervous system-brain that did not develop with peaceful calm at its center, that did not develop an adequate happiness center in the left brain, that did not acquire normal ability to read social cues others send out, did not learn how to react to social cues normally (including emotional messages others send in their facial expression, vocal tones, body language, etc.), that did not develop either an attachment system or a stress response system that can be turned off in normal ways, etc.  (Our empathic abilities did not develop normally, either — no matter how ‘sensitive to others’ we are.)

I am not BOOM-DOOM-GLOOMING it, either.  These trauma related alterations were built into us through early trauma AT THE SAME TIME WE DID NOT HAVE ANYONE TO SAFELY AND SECURELY ATTACH TO.  Ours (mine) are very real body-based changes that we can FEEL and that stimulate, modulate, and often control our reactions – including our emotional ones and then the reaction-actions we take in response to our own emotions.

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Perhaps the hardest aspect of being me is that the current popular terms our culture uses ‘against’ severe early abuse survivors (like I listed at the start of this post) do NOT describe what is really going on.  They do not address what matters most — not in terms of what caused our difficulties to be built into our body-nervous system in the first place and not in terms of the very real physiological body-felt consequences we live with all of the time.

This dearth of information about the long term consequences of ‘insecure attachment disorders’ that built us in the first place and that we then are forced to carry within us for the rest of our lives IS improving.  But for the most part we cannot really talk about what our body tells us about what is REALLY happening within us to anyone.

When our attachment relationships are threatened or end — for ANY reason — our world is rocked to its core.  There is nothing minor about what happens within us when our life support relationships radically change or end.

I am not even beginning to describe the fractured, fragile, altered relationship we are forced to have not only with the world around us, but also with our OWN severely traumatized relationship with our ‘self’ – if we are fortunate to have one.  The mirroring that we desperately needed from our earliest caregivers DID NOT HAPPEN, which means we are desperately needy for the rest of our lives on the mirroring that any of our present-day attachment people give to us.

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All is simply not what it might appear to be from the outside looking in at we severe early abuse survivors.  In some ways I wish I could have remained ignorant of the devastation early abuse caused me.  That didn’t happen.  Over time, over the length of my life, the reality of my trauma-changed development could no longer be kept behind dikes and retaining walls so that I could pretend to ignore it.

It does help me to know I can name what I experience — both in terms of what I experience and where-how what I experience came from.

Yes, I have great strength in many ways, but I am fragile.  I cannot tolerate being gone from the safety and security, the peace, quiet and calm of my home for very long.  If my friend is still sick much past the early part of next week someone else will have to be called in to take her place in that little office.  When it comes to what ‘ruptures’ my universe and to what I need to make some ‘repairs’, I know that my sensitivity to external stimulation of ANY kind severely limits what I can tolerate in my life.

This is classic Posttraumatic Stress Disorder — call it ‘complex’ or not — and it is directly tied to insecure attachment in our body and to the world we live in.  Because our stress response system cannot be turned off, we have to find ways to turn it DOWN so that our inner disorganization-disorientation can diminish.

Do I feel my ability to live a real and full life has been stolen from me as a consequence of trauma-altered development due to severe early abuse (even though it lasted 18 years – it was the early birth to age one abuse that so changed my body)?  Yes, I most certainly KNOW THIS NOW.  But this is the only body I will ever have to live in during this lifetime, and what was done then, even though in minor and positive ways it can be influenced, cannot be undone.

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The day I wrote one of my latest posts about my happy grandson I had another thought more akin to my own reality when I was his age:  “When a baby screams it hears the whole world screaming.  When a baby screams it feels the whole world screaming.  When a baby screams all that exists in its universe is screaming.  Everything everywhere is screaming when a baby screams until someone cares enough about the baby to come to it and help make the screaming stop.”

If nobody is there to consistently do this for an infant, and worse yet, if the primary caregiver hurts the baby and makes it scream, this scream and its physiological reaction in the entire body will build itself into this infant.

That’s what happened to me and to others who resonate with what I am saying here.

I realized very clearly last week that I fundamentally believe that if someone had removed me from my mother from my first breath so that I had been loved and cared for well for the first year of my life, and then had I been returned to my mother for all the exact same abuse I suffered until I left home at 18, my life would not have been stolen from me the way that it has been.

NOTHING anyone could have done to me after the age of one could have created the kind of body-nervous system-brain changes that the trauma of my first year of life built into my body.

It is the birth to age one changes that cursed me, that create nearly all of my difficulties now.  It is not that I wouldn’t have had serious ‘issues’ to deal with as a result of severe abuse after age one.  It IS that the body-nervous system-brain that I would have had to deal with and to process with and to integrate with and to heal from abuse with (no matter how severe) AFTER the age of one would have been 100% more ABLE and CAPABLE to accomplish exactly these things.

NOTE:  I call ‘earned secure attachment’ ‘borrowed attachment’.  All I say about trauma altered development includes changes to the immune system and to epigenetic changes and alterations in the expression of many genes and their combinations.

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+OH, THAT GRANDBABY OF MINE!

alchemynow4 Comments

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Although my little grandson lives near the Canadian border (Fargo, ND) and here I am on the Mexican border, my daughter sends me frequent and fantastic videos of the little guy.  Got his first tooth yesterday.  Just watched two, one he’s in his lion costume (one of his middle names is Leo after his grandpa) and another video of him in his peanut suit with his Auntie.  He’ll be 8 months old on the 11th.

I don’t know if it’s my ‘advanced age’, or if it’s THIS baby, or if it’s being able to watch the wee one on video, and/or all the studying I have done in recent years about baby development where it matters most — left brain happy center, right brain social and emotional development, nervous system set point at PEACEFUL CALM — but what an incr5edible experience!  I get to see grandson, mom and pop just after Christmas when they come down to visit.

I WISH I had more babies around to watch!  I don’t.  But what I see in this little boy is that his parents and other loving caregivers have GOT IT RIGHT!  Such joy.  Such enjoyment he has in being alive, even in learning to sit up and tipping over backwards, even in watching the puppy jump out of his reach, even in making the most fantastic and ever advancing vocal sounds — he is IN JOY!

I know enough now to know that kind of joy only happens for a baby if it FIRST and foremost has a nervous system set point at peaceful calm.  Sure he gets startled at times, tummy hurts, soon to be MAD sometimes, even scared.  But always and for the rest of his life he has a nervous system-brain and immune system set at its mid balance point at peaceful calm — which translates in his world to absolute trust that he is loved, well cared for, and exists in a universe of safety and security.

From THERE his left brain happy center is being built — is WELL on its way — to being filled with as many happy center neurons as his brain can possibly produce in that center.  He is so vibrantly alive, so thrilled to be alive, so joy-filled — I have never seen its equal!

He will be, no doubt in my mind, one of those children and adults that other uninformed people point to and say, “Look at him!  He is so happy!  Grief doesn’t get him down.  Change doesn’t get him down.  Stress doesn’t get him down.  Why aren’t I like him?  Why aren’t YOU like him?”

Without the foundation that his parents and caregivers have given him over these earliest months, he would not develop the way that he has.  If he had been left in a cold harsh world, left with cold harsh (or even bored, uninterested or abusive caregivers) all his wonderful genetic material would have been forced down a different road — to a different end — a harsh one.

This little one will be able to ENJOY himself in his life.  For the rest of his life.

In this little one I see exactly what all the millions of years of human evolution has created — how humans are designed to respond to life with joy when they are loved and well cared for.  This is what nature has intended for us all from the time we are conceived.

But life doesn’t always go as nature has planned.  Many times the detour in development has to be taken.  We all need to understand exactly what this means.  There is no time in a human being’s life more critically important than conception to age one.  What happens to us during that time period determines the course of our lifetime — believe it or not.

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