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For all the variety of difficulties adult survivors of early severe infant-child abuse might have that land them into one kind of therapy or another, how many opportunities are we given to understand the bare-bone underpinnings of how our body-brain gets made in the first place so that we can better understand how what happened THEN directly affects how our body-brain operates now?

For those of us who either STRONGLY suspect or know as clear fact that we were born into madness, chaos, trauma, neglect and abuse, here is a website that describes infant development in simple words and can be read from the beginning to help us to better understand how things are designed to move along in safe and secure early attachment environments where babies are loved, attentively and appropriately cared for, and get their needs met..

Check out BABYZONE – Their section on ‘Baby Week by Week’ provides a wonderful description of an infant’s physical-social-emotional developmental ability stages during the first 52 weeks of life as they are designed to be met, matched, and resonated with by its earliest caregivers.

Their ‘Toddler Week by Week’ pages describe the critical stages of development and an older infant’s needs through week 104 of life.

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It is nearly always ASSUMED that every single person goes through these same stages equally and comes out at the other end, say entering week 105 of life, having achieved, accomplished and acquired whatever happens ‘naturally’ and is therefore equally prepared for ‘what happens next’.

Not true.

In cases where the range of early trauma means that safe and secure attachment patterns do not exist, development – which means the growth and formation of the body-brain-nervous system can very easily be trauma-altered.  Through the process of reading the 104 week descriptions BABYZONE provides, and by using even just a little bit of imagination about what YOUR earliest days of life (the most critical ones for all development because they establish the physiological foundation of the body a person lives in for the rest of their life) I believe we can begin to untangle the knotted twisted thread of our lives in a ‘reason-able’ fashion.

What the information on this site provides is a straightforward account of how the interactions an infant has with its earliest caregivers, who establish the quality of the environment an infant is building itself within, need to feed an infant the RIGHT information in the RIGHT way at the RIGHT time.

Read these descriptions and then imagine what happens to an infant that is being influenced by terror, physical harm, deprivation/neglect, trauma and malevolent treatment.  While we might, as a culture, wish to ALSO imagine that these conditions NEVER surround infants that fantasy does not bear itself out in everyone’s reality.

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Sometimes I wonder what the course of my own ‘recovery’ journey would have been like if 30+ years ago when I first received ‘help’ someone had been educated enough, informed enough, and patient enough to go back to the roots of who I am in this body in this lifetime and assess what the conditions of my earliest life (during critical developmental stages) were like so that I (and ‘them’) could have determined how trauma had changed me way back there at the start of my life so that I ended up with a different trauma-changed body that was forced to find ways to continue down the road of life no matter how traumatic the world I was in actually was.

I encourage anyone who already knows that something was very, very wrong with their childhood to stretch their thinking back as far as they can in an effort to understand that severe child abuse does not necessarily begin at some magical ‘later age’.  Truly mad, abusive and neglectful parents were just as likely to maltreat an infant as they were a child of 2, 3, 4 plus.  Just because nobody wants to think or talk about these realities does not magically mean they don’t and didn’t happen.

Remember, also, that INCONSISTENT treatment of infants is damaging to their patterns of development.  The inability of caregivers to respond appropriately to ‘the person inside’ the baby body is also extremely detrimental to development.  Nature has provided a range of ACCEPTABLE flaws in early infant-toddler caregiving patterns – but beyond that (and in interaction with the susceptibilities of the infant), patterns of trauma change patterns of development.

This website gives us an idea – for our own selves regarding our own possible early environmental conditions – exactly what we needed to build the best body-brain possible.  Those of us who end up with troubled adult lives very probably did not get these most important early needs met RIGHT and in some cases got exactly the opposite — what we LEAST needed.

Bear in mind that our body KNOWS what happened THEN.  If we consider this whole arena of information about trauma in our earliest critical stages of development WITHOUT allowing the internal adult censor to shout and scream distractions at us, our body will simply tell us, “This is what happened to me, and it still matters.”

The clearest way I know of to listen to our body tell us what we most need to know about our earliest developmental trajectory is to imagine our severe abuser from childhood, and then imagine THAT person having little bitty baby us in THEIR hands!  How well did THAT go for you — THEN?

AND please remember:  Going back to our body for this information is HARD tough work.  Be gentle and careful of yourself.  Journaling/blogging along the way is highly recommended as is art work of any kind (and movement/music).  The information our body often holds was given to it before we had words though certainly NOT before we could — did — and tried to — communicate with those who mattered most to us — our earliest caregivers.

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