Year: 2010

+A COLLECTION OF THIS BLOG’S LINKS ON DISSOCIATION AND DISORGANIZED-DISORIENTED INSECURE ATTACHMENT

alchemynow5 Comments

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Today I am just moving some blog links to the front burner on self-organization, dissociation and disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment patterns.  I sure can’t claim that reading any of this information is fun, but it might be helpful in some way to add a few new ideas into the Think Pot!

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IN MEMORY OF MY BORDERLINE MOTHER:

From Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD, your Guide to Borderline Personality Disorder
Scientists Explore Ways to Alter MemoriesI stumbled on this interesting article recently published in the Wall Stress Journal on scientists’ attempts to alter fear memories. Researchers are finding that memories that produce fear and anxiety… Read more
Physician on Trial for Allegedly Assisting a BPD SuicideLast week Newsweek ran this article on Dr. Lawrence Egbert, the head of the right-to-die group Final Exit Network (FEN). Dr. Egbert is currently facing charges in Georgia and Arizona… Read more
How Will Healthcare Reform Impact BPD Treatment?Readers in the United States woke up to the news that the House of Representatives has passed massive healthcare reform legislation. The road to this legislation has been contentious and… Read more
Understanding Borderline Personality DisorderLearn more about the symptoms and associated features of borderline personality disorder, including emotional and relationship instability, impulsivity, suicidality, self-harm, and more.

What is BPD? Symptoms of BPD Diagnosis of BPD Treatment of BPD
Living with BPD

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+’DIS-ASSOCIATION’ BETWEEN RIGHT-LEFT BRAIN HEMISPHERES AND DISMISSIVE-AVOIDANT INSECURE ATTACHMENT DISORDERS

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Dr. Daniel Siegel, in his book The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (2001), describes how “dis-associated hemispheric processing” between our left and right human brain regions each contribute to differently as he describes in what he calls a “laterality-attachment hypothesis.”  This hypothesis seems to be particularly related to what attachment experts refer to as ‘dismissive-avoidant’ insecure attachment disorders (one I suspect my father had and ‘got’ from his depressed mother).

In this post I am presenting some of Siegel’s creative and thought provoking ideas on the subject:

“Patterns of representations differ markedly between the left and right halves of the brain.  An important distinction, often underrecognized within the fields of clinical psychiatry and psychology, is the distinction between the modes of representation within the two hemispheres of the brain.  The left hemisphere has been described as having a logical “interpreter” function that uses syllogistic reasoning to deduce cause-effect relationships from the representational data it has available to it.  The right hemisphere specializes in the representation of context and of mentalizing capacities.  It is therefore uniquely capable of registering and expressing affective facial expressions, developing a “theory of mind,” registering and regulating the state of the body, and having autobiographical representations.

“How are these bilateral processes relevant to relationships?  Communication is crucial in establishing neural connections early in life and involves the sharing of energy and information.  Levels of arousal (energy) and mental representations (information) are very different on each side of the brain.  The sharing of arousal and representations from one brain to another — the essence of connecting minds — will thus differ between the hemispheres.  One can propose, in fact, that the right brain perceives the output of the right brain of another person, whereas the left brain perceives the left brain’s output.

“In intimate, emotional relationships, such as friendship, romance, parent-child pairs, psychotherapy, and teacher-student dyads, what does this look like?  The left brain sends out language-based, logical, sequential interpreting statements that attempt to make sense of things [in a particular way].  The left brain receives these messages, decodes the linguistic representations, and tries to make sense out of these newly arrived digital symbols.  At the same time, the right brain is sending nonverbal messages via facial expressions, gestures, prosody [the music of speech], and tone of voice, which are perceived by the other’s [sic] right brain.  OK.  So what?

“The “what” of it is that the right brain takes this information and uses its social perceptions of nonverbal communication to engage directly in a few very important processes.

— It creates an image of the other’s [sic] mind (“mindsight”).

— It regulates bodily response while at the same time registering the somatic [body-based] markers of shifts in bodily state.

— It creates autobiographical representations within memory.

— It appraises the meaning of these events and directly affects the degree of arousal, thus creating primary emotional responses.  Intense and primary emotional states are therefore likely to be mediated via the right hemisphere.”

“When we examine these findings alongside the independent set of data from attachment research, certain patterns are suggested.  The early affect attunement and alignment of mental states can be seen as a mutually regulated hemisphere-to-hemisphere coordination between child and parent.  In this view, we can propose that avoidant attachment involves a serious lack of this form of communication between the right hemispheres of child and parent.  The extension of this finding to laterality research raises the possibility that the left hemisphere serves as the dominant mediator of communication between an avoidant child and a dismissing parent.

“In support of this perspective, it turns out that in 1989, [attachment experts] Main and Hesse examined exactly this hypothesis in two large-scale samples of Berkeley undergraduates, each of whom were asked about their degree of right (or left) handedness, as a rough approximation of brain dominance….  At the same time, Main and Hesse had devised a set of self-report items that they considered indicative of a “dismissing” state of mind.  Although this type of scale was not ultimately able to predict AAI [Adult Attachment Interview] classifications [of attachment styles] statistically, and therefore these findings were never published, in keeping with the hypothesis both studies found that the degree of right handedness was significantly correlated with elevated scores of the scale for “dismissing” state of mind.

“Further extensions of these ideas to relationships allow us to look more deeply into why certain couples may be “unable to communicate” with any emotional satisfaction.  When we know about the different languages of the right and left hemispheres, it is possible to make hypotheses  about why interactions may be frustrating:  Individuals may not know how to understand the particular language being expressed by their significant others.  If we then integrate past attachment history in understanding the pattern of these difficulties, it is possible to create a framework of understanding that can help the partners in such relationships escape their well-worn ruts.   [My note:  I would think parents, as well, would benefit so that the intergenerational transmission of dismissive-avoidant insecure attachment patterns could be eliminated.]

“If this laterality-attachment hypothesis is correct, then a logical implication would be that any experiences that help to develop the processing abilities of each hemisphere and/or the integrated activities of the two hemispheres may improve certain individuals’ internal and interpersonal lives.  Such movement toward more coordinated interhemispheric functioning would be quite welcomed by many people (especially the lonely and frustrated spouses [and I would say infant-children0 of dismissing individuals).

“The developmental and experiential histories that have led to a lack of integration of the functioning of the two hemispheres may leave individuals vulnerable to emotional and social problems.  Unresolved trauma and grief, histories of emotional neglect, and restrictive adaptations may each represent some form of constriction in the flow of information processing between the hemispheres.  This proposal of the central role of the dis-associated hemispheric processing in emotional disturbances is supported by the finding that insecure attachments in childhood may establish a vulnerability to psychological dysfunction.

“Emotional relationships that enhance the development of each hemisphere and its unrestricted integration with the activity of the other can thus be proposed to be likely to foster the development of psychological well-being.  In this way, a secure attachment can be seen as a developmental relationship that provides for an integration of functioning of the two hemispheres, both between child and caregiver and within the child’s own brain.

“At the most basic level, right-hemisphere-to-right-hemisphere communication can be seen within the affectively attuned communications that allow for primary emotional states to be shared via nonverbal signals. Left-hemisphere-to-left-hemisphere alignment can be seen in shared attention to objects in the world.  Reflective dialogues, in which language is used to focus attention on the mental states of others (including the two members of the dyad), may foster bilateral integration between the two hemispheres of both child and parent.  The resilience of secure attachments can thus be proposed as founded in part in the bilateral integration that these relationships foster.”  (pages 205-207 – all bold type is mine)

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+ANTI-DISSOCIATION: REMEMBERING THE FEELING OF FEELING ONE’S SELF IN ONE’S LIFE

alchemynow2 Comments

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While a mouse like the one I just described in my previous post is under attack and threat of attack, there is nothing else in its life that matters except for its own self-preservation.  Such a mouse will not be finding a mate, or likely return to take care of a nest of its young.  It will not be looking for food or eating.  It will not be playing or exploring its environment.  All its usual safety- and security-based activities will be suspended.

From the point of view of a 18 year survivor of my mother’s insane and persistent abuse of me from birth, I know that nearly every opportunity that could have been and should have been mine to simply BE an infant, toddler, child and teenager was sabotaged or stolen from me by my mother.  I was left in a perpetual state of trauma at the same time that my life was passing by.  In my condition of emergency and near emergency I was not able to form a story of myself in my own life, and could do very little of what a child is naturally supposed to be doing.

Autobiographical memory preserves the ongoing story of a person having a felt experience of their own self in and moving through their own life.  Because there wasn’t enough time (or times) where I was allowed to simply BE safely and securely in my own life as an infant-child, my ability to form, exercise, consolidate and use autobiographical memory circuitry and networks in my body-brain was nearly completely eliminated.

Imagining the ongoing life experience of a little mouse being preyed upon by a cat, and knowing that the mouse’s ongoing ordinary life has been interrupted, interfered with and eliminated, reminds me that not being able to make sense of my early life or to influence what happened to me contributed to the ongoing sensation of being ‘unreal’ and depersonalized in my life today.

When developmental neuroscientists like Dr. Daniel J. Siegel write about the effects and consequences of early attachment-caregiver related trauma and abuse, they are describing what is known about memory and dissociation from the outside.  Those of us who are survivors of severe early ongoing trauma and abuse live with the consequences as they have built our body-brain differently from normal.

As we take Siegel’s following words, found in his book, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (2001), and let this information resonate with and connect to what we survivors experience from the inside, we can begin to understand how profoundly different we were formed because we were forced to live through trauma in our early life.  Trauma all but filled all the time and space of our infancy-childhood, leaving us very little time and space of our own to associate our experiences together with who we were and who we were becoming.

Of course we ‘dissociated’ ourselves from our experiences of trauma.  They were too big, too awful, too overwhelming to incorporate into any ongoing story of our life or to be included in our ongoing memory.  Dissociation is like a detour taken by the self safely and securely around an accident scene.

Although the abuse and trauma my mother perpetrated on me affected me, influenced the way my body-brain developed, encircled me, endangered me, hurt me, terrified me – it WAS NOT ME.  The me that was supposed to be connecting to the world and finding associations stayed in hiding.  All the trauma continued on with me at its center, BUT IT WAS NOT ME.  ME is something ELSE completely, and it is that ME that matters now.  It is that ME that I want to connect to and forge associations with now.

Inbuilt physiological, neurological patterns of dissociation interfere with this process of experiencing ME now in my own life, and prevent me from remembering myself in my ongoing autobiographical FELT experience of myself in my life.  These patterns have always influenced how I experience my self in time and space.  Unlike Siegel, I know on the inside of me what living life with these patterns built within me FEELS like.  It is by adding my own awareness of this fact to the following words he gives us in his book that helps me understand the reality of his words.

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From The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are by Daniel J. Siegel (2001)

STRESS, TRAUMA, AND MEMORY

“Stressful experiences may take the form of highly emotional events or, when overwhelming, overtly traumatizing experiences.  The degree of stress will have a direct effect on memory:  Small amounts have a neutral effect on memory; moderate amounts facilitate memory, and large amounts impair memory…..  Recent studies suggest that the HPA axis involves the release of stress hormones that directly affect the hippocampus, a region with the highest density of receptors for these blood-borne agents.  Chronic stress may produce elevated baseline levels of stress hormones and abnormal daily rhythms of hormone release.

“The effects of high levels of stress hormones on the hippocampus may initially be reversible and involve the inhibition of neuronal growth and the atrophy of cellular receptive components called dendrites….  High levels of stress not only transiently block hippocampal functioning, but excessive and chronic exposure to stress hormones may lead to neuronal death in the region, possibly producing decreased hippocampal volume, as found in patients with chronic posttraumatic stress disorder….

“Activation of the autonomic nervous system [our STOP and GO stress response and calm, connection response system] leads to the release of epinephrine and norepinephrine (known as the catecholamines), which are thought to affect the amygdala directly.  The amygdala…plays an important role in establishing the value of an experience and integrating elements of encoding with the hippocampal processing of the event.  Excessive stress hormone or catecholamine release appears respectively, to impair the hippocampal and amygdala contributions to memory processing….

“Under some conditions, explicit memory [conscious] may be blocked from encoding at the actual time of an experience.  Trauma may be proposed to be such a situation.  Various factors may contribute to the inhibition of hippocampal functioning needed for explicit memory at the time of a severe trauma…. During a trauma….the release of large amounts of stress hormones and the excessive discharge of amygdala activity in response to threat may impair hippocampal functioning.

“The outcome for a victim who dissociates explicit [conscious] from implicit [unconscious] processing is an impairment in autobiographical memory for at least certain aspects of the trauma….  Implicit memory of the event is intact and includes intrusive elements such as behavioral impulses to flee [hide/freeze, fight, etc.] emotional reactions, bodily sensations, and intrusive images related to the trauma….

“As we’ve discussed, chronic stress may actually damage the hippocampus itself, as suggested by the finding of decreased hippocampal volume in patients suffering from chronic posttraumatic stress disorder….  Under such conditions, future explicit processing and learning may be chronically impaired.  Furthermore, in addition to damaging the hippocampus, early child maltreatment may directly affect circuits that link bodily response to brain function:  the autonomic nervous system, the HPA axis, and the neuroimmune process….

“These ingrained ways in which adverse child experiences are “remembered,” and directly affect the development of regulatory brain structures that govern basic brain-body processes, may explain the markedly increased risk for medical illness in adults with histories of childhood abuse and dysfunctional home environments….

“On the basis of this information, one can propose that psychological trauma involving the blockage of explicit processing also impairs the victim’s ability to cortically consolidate the experience….  With dissociation or the prohibition of discussing with others what was experienced, as is so often the case in familial child abuse, there may be a profound blockage to the pathway toward consolidating memory.  Unresolved traumatic experiences from this perspective may involve an impairment in the cortical consolidation process, which leaves the memories of these events out of permanent [conscious] memory….

(pages 50-52)

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I believe that this is what I experienced as a child, what was ‘built into me’, represents the way my body-brain grew and developed, and is now a permanent condition and not a ‘may be’:

“chronic stress may actually damage the hippocampus itself….  Under such conditions, future explicit processing and learning may be chronically impaired.”

The way I remember EVERYTHING about myself in my life has been affected because the severe trauma happened while my remembering capacities were being physiologically created.  It isn’t just “ingrained ways in which adverse child experiences are “remembered”” that I suffer from.  These so-called “ingrained ways” are actually the physiological circuits and pathways built into my body-brain that form my ‘remembering’ abilities.

Because of the extensive and very severe abuse I endured, I take Siegel’s term INGRAINED absolutely literally.  Patterns of dissociation, derealization and depersonalization formed themselves – ingrained themselves – physiologically into my body-brain.  I could say the same thing Jessica does in the wonderful movie, Who Framed Roger Rabbit:  “… I’m just drawn that way,”

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The only way I know of to try to combat the ingrained dissociation built into my remembering brain is to try to make implicit explicit.  Those readers who were built with a dissociational body-brain will know from the inside what this feels like:  Every evening as I stand holding my hose with a stream of water flowing onto my lovely flower beds, I ‘remember’ and recognize ‘the Linda how stands and waters.’

I am every evening in the SAME time and space of the watering Linda, so I FEEL her.  I recognize her.

While I have a shovel in my hand and am bent over stirring water into my bucket of adobe mud, involved in that process, I am in the time and space of ‘the adobe-making Linda’.  I remember and recognize her.

Today I am giving my muscles a rest.  I sit outside and look at the adobe blocks as they soak up the heat of the sun and turn a lighter shade of brown – and become lighter weight in the process.  I can explicitly and consciously force myself to remember that ‘the Linda sitting in the chair in the yard watching the adobes dry’ is the same person who made them.  She is the same person who waters the flowers, who planted them, who enjoys them.

‘The Linda sitting at the computer typing’ is – I intellectually understand – the same Linda who has done and might do in the future all kinds of things.  But all the different Linda’s that I am do not FEEL connected, nor can they always remember things that have happened at all.

As I wrote in a reply today to a blog comment, it’s not just that I struggle with a detached, remote, dissociated sense of ‘things have always been this way’.  (The Linda aware of watering flowers has ALWAYS been watering flowers because that’s what she does.)

Going all the way back to the patterns that began at my birth and continued to form me for the following 18 years, one incident of terror, pain, trauma and abuse – while it was happening – found me in a state of ‘it’s always been this way’.  Then, when there was a pause in the abuse, and often when I was isolated in a corner or in bed, that was another ‘it’s always been this way’ experience.

When one of the dissociated experiences happened (and happens) it is its own reality and the person autobiographically remembering the ‘in the moment’ experience is not connected at that moment to any other time in space.  When something is ‘always happening’ it precludes anything else from ‘ever happening’.

In this strange dissociated web of events, experiences are both ‘always happening’ and ‘never happened’ at the same time.  The only ‘thing’ that links our life experiences to us, and to one another, is HOW we remember them – both while they are happening and after they have happened.  (This sense of ‘it never happened’ is about time, space and how events are remembered.  It is NOT the same as denial in any usual sense of the concept, although the end results can be nearly the same in regard to ‘dealing with’ traumas that of course DID actually happen.)

Because the physiological stress chemical reactions have changed the way our body-brain processes information, those of us who were formed while our self was in hiding do not link ourselves in the events of our lives in ordinary ways.  I am fortunate that nothing inside of me ever put together complete constellations of ‘personalities’ that might hold together collections of memories.

The fragmentation of my ongoing experience was nearly complete.  I can ‘cortically process’ information intellectually that always allows at least some ability to place ‘a Linda’, and ‘only a Linda’ as being somewhere in the vicinity of the one doing the autobiographical remembering.  But it doesn’t take much turning up the heat of stress or anxiety to instigate disorganization and disorientation of my entire experience-processing and remembering system.  But that’s the subject of future posts.

Right now I will just say that if I were the mouse I watched today being captured and hauled around and dropped arbitrarily into ‘hiding places’, there would be a ‘different mouse’ for each stage of the ‘hauling’ and for each one of those locations I just posted the pictures of.  There would be ‘a mouse in the clover’ and ‘a mouse in the pansies’ and ‘a mouse in the poppies’.  Each of these different and separate entities had a different and separate experience in time and space.

As a child, for the entire first 18 years of my life, I had no more of an ability to THINK about these different time and space Linda’s than a mouse would.  Each experience, and the self who had them, were dissociated from one another so completely that Linda didn’t exist as a separate (remembering) self at all.  Any associating I might now do to bring together the autobiographical experience of my life, because I was formed as an ‘ingrained-dissociator, requires application of conscious effort.  But not even this effort can give me the feeling of feeling FELT as a complete being having the experiences of and within my own life.

So if anyone who did not build a body-brain from the start of their life within a severely abuse-trauma environment (without reprieve) wants to talk about ‘dissociation’ OR ‘being in the now’, I simply know that they will NEVER know what they are talking about.  Those people’s ‘ingrained’ physiological patterning doesn’t work that way and never really will.  Lucky them!

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+DISSOCIATION: MEMORY OF ONGOING EXPERIENCE FROM THE PREY’S POINT OF VIEW

alchemynow2 Comments

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I intended today to write a post about dissociation when I went outside to sit with my morning cup of coffee.  What greeted me there was a trauma-drama in full play, and not a pleasant one for me to watch.  Yet I know that life, and nature itself shows us things that often allow our right brain to watch visually as drama and image at the same time our left brain is offered information to THINK about.

I am going to separate my two ‘streams of information’ this morning.  This post is about how a severely abused and traumatized infant-toddler’s body-brain is forced to absorb information about the world, and about itself in the world in relation to its early attachment caregivers.  The information I am going to present in my NEXT post will be the scientific, rational, logical and far more abstract information.  We NEED this more technical information, but as survivors we will not be able to really understand it or make good practical use of the dry information that developmental neuroscientists provide for us if we cannot ASSOCIATE this information with our own ongoing experience.

People often use this term in the English language, “a game of cat and mouse.”  What I watched this morning as one of my cats toyed with a furry little mouse could have looked like a game from her point of view.  But what was this experience like for the little, tiny mouse?  Its life was at stake, and there was anything BUT a game going on from its point of view.

Those of us who were raised especially by extremely hate-filled abusive and traumatizing mothers from the time of our birth were like this little mouse.  Yet we were even more helpless against our giant predator.  At least this mouse was fully developed and could use all its possible defense abilities – not that they would in the end be effective at allowing it to escape and go on living.

I knew how this ongoing drama would end.  Yes, my cat WAS playing with her prey.  She was fully focused and concentrated on her ‘game’.  The mouse was fully focused on trying to avoid being killed.  And there I was, the bystander at the same time I was the only hope that little mouse had for staying alive.

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The mouse was quick, but the cat was quicker.  Every time I tried to sidetrack the cat she out maneuvered me, grabbed her little ‘toy’ and ran off to continue her ‘hunt’ somewhere else.  How could I help to give the mouse a chance to escape – to where?  There’s nowhere in my yard that mouse would be safe and secure.  There was no way I could catch the mouse and move it somewhere out of danger’s way, either.

There are a lot of mice here.  Part of the reason why, I know, is because my east neighbor whose property I just fenced off from my yard visually, continues to heap all his garbage for a family of seven against that fence, thus encouraging rodents to multiply.  Where there are rodents, there are rattlesnakes to eat them in this country.  Elimination of mice is normally a good thing.  I just didn’t want to WATCH the elimination happen.  Not today.  Not as I prepared to write a victimized-survivor post about dissociation!

But what I thought about as I continued to try to dissuade my cat from continuing her mission was how that little mouse, in the midst of the insecurity and lack of safety involved with its ongoing trauma, would NEVER do anything else but focus on its own survival.

These thoughts became entangled and intertwined with the technical information I was thinking about for my post on dissociation.  Because my mother was a predator, and because I was just as much her ongoing prey as this mouse was to my cat, there was NEVER a time in my infant-toddler-childhood that I was assured of enough safety and security to do ANYTHING ELSE other than survive.

At the same time I was more powerless and helpless than a mouse is under the attack of a cat, my brain, my nervous system, my immune system, my entire being was growing and developing in interaction with the experiences I was having in my early environment.  Nothing else but surviving the trauma of my mother’s attacks against me mattered.  Never was there a TIME when trauma wasn’t immediately threatening and impending, happening in the present moment, or just having finished happening – so that it could happen again.

My childhood was spent in a state of heightened trauma alertness from the beginning of my life.  As I watched my cat, she periodically caught the mouse in her mouth and carried him to another ‘play ground’ where she then let it go long enough that it could run a short distance and do what a little mouse will do:  Hide itself in an area that it thinks MIGHT best conceal it.

Of course the cat knew exactly where the mouse went, and right where it was.  She poked her paws into the spaces in the hiding places, batted the little creature, pushed and prodded it, and when it didn’t come out at a full run, she’s simply stick her head in, grab the mouse again, and move it on to another (to her) intriguing hiding playground.  Of course the most obvious places for this game to go on were in amongst my flower beds, a process which of course would have eventually led not only to the death of the mouse but to the destruction of my much-loved plants!

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Yes, watching my cat’s play-filled species determined extermination of this mouse was a trauma trigger for me.  I could not help but try to intervene on behalf of the little one who was going to lose its life if I didn’t.  I couldn’t catch my cat, so I sat out there for a long time chasing her away from the vicinity of the hidden prey.  I opened the back door thinking she would eventually get bored with out-waiting me and venture into the house.  Nope, that didn’t happen.

Instead, two of my other cats wandered out of the house.  They could tell immediately that Goldilocks was after prey, and all I could think of was, “Oh great!  There’s no way out of this.  I’ll take some pictures and then exit the playground so I don’t have to watch what I know is unavoidably going to happen.”

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So here are some pictures.  It’s been about an hour since I stopped watching the trauma-drama outside my door.  I just went outside again to see another one of my cats sitting under the Oleander bush satisfyingly smacking its lips and cleaning its jaw daintily with its paw.  “Mouse gone.  Game over.”

So, now in thinking about dissociation as the experts like to write about it, I have to say that nobody, absolutely nobody actually knows what dissociation is, what it does, what it feels like, how it operates, or where it came from like survivors do – particularly and especially those of us who endured and survived repeated, ongoing predatory attacks in our very early life of infancy and toddlerhood by our mothers.

If we then continued to endure trauma, abuse and attacks into and throughout our childhood, there is (in my thinking) no possible way that so-called dissociation did not build itself into our growing and developing body-brain.

I will never believe that dissociation is a so-called ‘defense mechanism’ for such survivors.  Our dissociation is simply HOW our brain regions, circuitry and networks were forced to grow and develop.

The mouse I watched today was in an ongoing peritraumatic state which was broken up A LITTLE TINY BIT by the moments the cat allowed it to nestle within its hiding places.  But these periodic reprieves from direct terror and assault were not enough to ever allow this mouse to go on about its life in anything like an ordinary (safe and secure) way.

Everything that mouse experienced both during direct assaults upon its life and during its reprieves, demanded that trauma-based body-brain operations continue to happen.  Those experiences are completely different in the midst of trauma and its trauma-based allowances of semi-reprieve than are ongoing experiences where trauma is not present or immediately threatened.  When any creature is forced to adapt to trauma environments during critical growth and developmental stages, both the experiences of trauma and reactions to it build themselves in.  The trauma in effect ‘moves in to stay’.

What this means to an early abused and traumatized human is that the emerging self goes into and remains in hiding as surely as this mouse did.  I don’t believe our parental-predators could ever reach our hidden self.  Yes, they could reach our little bodies with the attack of their words and blows, but our inner own self remained protected simply because of the nature of being human.

Every single person is a separate, individual entity that can only be accessed from the inside.  Even though everything that happens to us from the OUTSIDE profoundly affected our development, and could and did change the way our body that our self lives in, our self – its own self – remains ours and ours only.

The problem became one of us not being able to experience our self in our own life.  Experts refer to alterations in memory capacities (which is what the next post is about).  Dissociation means that we do not remember ourselves as being connected to our own ongoing experience in ordinary ways because our capacity to REMEMBER was affected PHYSIOLOGICALLY during our earliest development.

Enough said at the moment.  As you look at the following pictures think of each one as representing an environmental context for ongoing moments of my cat’s life – but from the point of view of the mouse.  No way was it important for the mouse (forget the cat here) to remember itself in one of these ‘pictures’ in any particular order.  All the mouse could do was attempt to stay alive.  The only way it could do that would be if it could find a safe enough place to hide and remain hidden.

Safe enough.  That is what every living creature needs so it can continue to remain alive.  But growing and developing a human body-brain as time moves on and the trauma continues means that the inner experience of being in the midst of trauma never leaves us.  Trauma is not only what happened to us, but became how we grew a body-brain to remember ourselves with.

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It's only a GAME of hide-and-seek if we play it with equal peers. It's only a GAME of cat-and-mouse if you are the predator.
Where could a victimized-prey hide to escape? Under the blue flax and sage bush?
Is there a tiny little self tucked into hiding within the clover?
Under the poppies among the petunias? Is this a safe place to hide for survival?
Where is it safe for an abused and traumatized mouse -- or infant-child -- to hide?
Is it safe enough to stay alive under the newly blooming rose bush?
When I finally turned away from the trauma drama, the little mouse had hidden itself here among the tiny pansies.
The mouse was hiding in here last I saw of it. Each of these hiding places can be thought of as a momentary segment of the mouse's endangered life -- like victimized tiny children forming their abilities to remember their self in their life -- the separate events are just that -- dissociated experiences linked together only by one thing: Ongoing experiences of individual events of enduring and surviving trauma. Meanwhile, the SELF remains hidden unless we can contact and connect with 'self' within its own world

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+LOVING THE POSSIBILITIES – OUTDOORS WITH THE MUD

alchemynow7 Comments

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Light cloud cover screened the intensity of the sun today, creating a temperature veil that made it a most perfect day to work outside.  I was out there for hours, digging and hauling dirt, sifting for gravel that’s getting moved to the front of the house’s walkway.  I made 15 grand adobe blocks today and have dirt ready for tomorrow if the temperature stays cooler.  (More ‘modern’ people would be able to ‘make hay’ with a power cement mixer — it is WORK mixing in the 10% cement evenly and the WATER!)

My vision of the back yard is taking form.  I want to tear down what’s left of that old, raggedy shed.  I’ll save the wood, clear the cement pad, and build a little adobe chapel!  There might not be another chapel so close to the Mexican-American border line anywhere in America!  How sweet that will be!

I will dedicate the little place as a prayer chapel for peace and tranquility.  Somehow I will include within it a very simple plaque with my most favorite words in the whole world on it (in English and in Spanish):

“Never sadden anyone, no matter whom, for no matter what.”

by The Bab

(This was on page 31 of the edition – not sure of the year – I found this in when I wrote it into my prayer book nearly 40 years ago – in Release the Sun: An Early History of the Baha’i Faith by William Sears)

I am beginning to see more clearly what isn’t here yet.   Let the fair winds continue to blow, I’ve got work to do!  Give this woman a shovel, a pair of gloves, a plastic bucket — some dirt and water — and WATCH OUT!  There is nothing better for my healing and well-being I could be doing right now – absolutely nothing.

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These only bloom in the spring
The first of many-yet-to-be gravel and adobe mines!
15 today
Lovin' it
Accumulating - continuing to dry and cure
So, this shed's gotta go. This is where all the rusty corrugated steel came from, blew off in 4 separate high winds last winter, Mexico-American border wall behind it - and - a Mesquite tree I believe I can trim and beautify (Can't see it, it's behind the shed)
For many years 'illegals' stayed in this shed, even since I've lived here until the 2nd wall-fence was put up that they can no longer cross behind my yard
Wait 'til you see what's gonna take its place! I can SEE it!

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+TRAUMA AND DISAPPOINTMENT – POINTING TO OUR TRAUMA WOUNDS

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All trauma is upsetting.  That’s what trauma does.  It upsets the status quo.  That’s what trauma is.  It’s an upset.  By its very nature, trauma involves disappointment.

The more an organism is prepared with resources to ‘cope’ with trauma the better off they are because this means they can ‘get over’ the trauma and get back to a state of status quo faster.  Without enough of the right kind of resources, the slower a return to the state of status quo becomes.  Or, without enough of the right kind of resources, a return to a state of status quo is impossible.

Available resources are directly tied to a very real state of safety and security in the world.  Having enough of the right resources means that we can achieve a return to the desired state of safety and security relatively quickly and easily.

Survivors of severe early infant-childhood abuse trauma had things happen to them in their lives way before they had the inner or outer resources to effect a return to a state of safety and security – because if they’d had an environment filled with the plenty of safety and security in the first place the traumas of abuse would not have happened to them in the first place.

That’s what an insecure attachment ‘disorder’ actually is.  The state not only of trauma but of scarcity and depletion of inner and outer resources, which creates unsafe and insecure status in and to the world, built itself right into the growing body-brain-mind-self from the start.

This means that the necessary status quo state of safety, security and calm connection is missing.  The normal physiological state for early abuse trauma survivors never was a status quo state of well-being.  Because this calm, safe, secure state is missing in our very body itself, survivors of early abuse trauma can struggle the rest of their lives just trying to figure out what this GOOD status quo state even feels like.

From there we have to figure out how to GET THERE from HERE – HERE being our trauma-built state of inner disequilibrium.

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Dr. Diana Fosha is one of the most hopeful and positive experts within the field of trauma, attachment and healing that I have encountered.  Here’s a link to one of her 2002 articles that I highly recommend, written primarily for professionals working with traumatized clients.  Because so few of us have access to any therapy at all, let alone to effective therapy with truly competent trauma experts, what Fosha says in this article is important for we survivors to know on our own:

TRAUMA REVEALS THE ROOTS OF RESILIENCE

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Here is the link to her book:  The Transforming Power of Affect : A Model for Accelerated Change by Diana Fosha (Hardcover – May 5, 2000)

I haven’t had the opportunity to read it myself, but I include it here because it is the feelings related to trauma that tend to trap me in some other place than a calm center of connected well-being.

Sometimes it seems as though all the powerful abuse trauma-related emotions that were going on within my body from the time I was born, that were not identified, recognized, differentiated, named or understood, just sat there within the cells of my body waiting.  Well, not only did they wait for a time they could make their presence known, they expanded and multiplied astronomically until they broke through the numbness and the blankness of all of my dissociation to become the ‘animals’, the rampaging beasts they often seem to me to be within me today because I did not grow up with a body-brain-mind-self that was able to recognize them as friends and allies.

Rather my reactions to life, with all the trauma triggers that are built into me, often disrupt my ongoing equilibrium – what little of it I can manage to find for myself.  My reactions to trauma triggers stimulate emotions that are not integrated together in a modulated, right-limbic-social-emotional brain built with stability, safety and security within it.  This region of my brain along with the rest of my brain and all the nervous system components that it is connected to, was not built with ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’ regulatory abilities within it.

Where my experiences within my environment should have been able to hook themselves together in ongoing ASSOCIATED patterns of being, they were instead created in DISSOCIATIONAL patterns that are often profoundly disorganizing and disorienting to me today.  Often the best I can do is try to identify these patterns so that I can find the ‘willy-nilly’ way things were connected together inside of me and try to piece them together differently in more orderly, organized and oriented ways.

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Here is another book, again one I haven’t yet read but that looks vitally promising:

Sweet Sorrow: Love, Loss and Attachment In Human Life – Paperback (June 2009) by Alan B. Eppel

“In this volume the author proposes that it is the interplay of love and loss that lies at the epicentre of the human story. Support for this proposal is taken from neuroscience, art and psychoanalysis. It will also introduce the reader to important ideas and findings from Attachment Theory. An exploration of the relationship between love and loss can lead us to some understanding of the meaning of our lives. It shows how love and loss are inextricably bound at the centre of human experience, and form the essential dynamic of the human struggle.”

“Alan B. Eppel has been a practicing psychiatrist over the past thirty years and currently is director of Community Psychiatric Services at St. Joseph’s Hospital, Hamilton, Ontario, and an associate clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.”

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I mention this book in connection with the topic of my last post, +MY FOGGY POST ABOUT DISAPPOINTMENT AS A TRAUMA TRIGGER, because the state of feeling disappointed is for me a very real experience of being in a state of disorganization and disorientation in my body in the world.

Expectations are a required ‘food’ for our brain as it works to combine information we have about our self in the world in an integrated way.  Our body-brain-mind-self processes life through ongoing feedforward and feedbackward information loops that take into account everything we know about our self in the world – IN TIME.

I complained in my last post about the invisibility of the root word origins for the word ‘disappointment’ in our English language.  Thinking about it more clearly today, I realize that just as individual people begin very early in their lives (hopefully) to recognize, identify, discriminate between, name and manage all the different emotional experiences we are capable of, so must the words that name these emotional states of being also go through some kind of growth process themselves.

‘Disappoint’ is a word related both to ‘appoint’ and to ‘point’.  Our right brain is our imaginal link to experience and contains within it a veritable ocean of potential meaning.  As we use words the two hemispheres of our brain pass information back and forth between them – sort of like pouring water from one glass to another until a level of balanced equality exists between the two containers – as we seek to gain understanding about our own self in our experience of our life.

I believe that ‘disappointment’ is intimately connected with overwhelming heartbreak.  As our brain-being tries to get along in life, we orient and organize our self IN TIME by using information as reference POINTS.  In fact, without reference points, we cannot orient and organize ourselves at all.

These reference POINTS IN TIME exist in us where associations have been successfully and satisfactorily made.  Those of us whose body-brains were formed within abusive traumatic early environments suffered far more dissociations in our experiences than we did associations, and are therefore suffering from a scarcity of these required reference points in time.

What could our inner self compass possibly find as reference points in a world of madness, abuse and trauma?  How could we establish our self with any stability in a dangerous world of chaos?  What could I point to as a KNOWN, as a dependable GIVEN in the world as I grew up?

I knew really only one thing as a given and one thing only:  I was terribly BAD and not only deserved everything that my mother did to me, not only earned everything she did to me, but I evidently liked and wanted her to do what she did to me because I CHOSE TO REMAIN BAD.  According to my mother, she magnanimously offered to me every possible (saint-given) opportunity to change my ways, and I never made the right choice.  I chose to defy her efforts with every breath I took.

How could I possibly use any information I got from that environment to find a stable inner or outer POINT of reference in the world?  What was the POINT in my even trying, though I DID try as hard as I possibly could to BE GOOD, not knowing I was absolutely and fundamentally and permanently being set up to fail?  After all, according to my mother, being born ‘the devil’s child’ did not even get me started off in life at the starting point of even being a human being in the first place.

Did I ever reach the POINT as a child of not trying?  No.  Did I ever surrender or give up?  No.  I didn’t see that I ever had a choice.  I just formed my entire being around the information I was given and kept on going.

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It is not a stretch of reality to consider ‘disappointment’ within the context of its right-brain meanings.  It involves every aspect of ‘point’ we can think of with our left brain.  We really come into this world as a single one-dimensional POINT in time and space.  From there we are supposed to be able to grow and blossom and bear fruit in our lifetime.  Some of us are born to parents who seem completely intent on stomping the life out of that little tiny point that is us from the moment we are born.  What we do, then, is survive IN SPITE of our parents.

That is the primary POINT of life – to stay alive in it.

When we experience our emotions and reactions in the present, the POINT of origin of our emotions lies in our body as it was formed way back there.  A pinhole-sized point of light continues to expand over distance and time.  The older we get, the more complex life becomes, the wider becomes the range of influence that our emotions can have in our life.

When severe trauma of abuse forms a person, the expanding rays of light from the early origin point of emotions suffers from distortion.  We then live with those distortions unless and until we can bring healing to all the wounded places within us – a job of a lifetime.

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Looking at Webster’s:

POINT

Date 13th century

Etymology: Middle English, partly from Anglo-French, prick, dot, moment, from Latin punctum, from neuter of punctus, past participle of pungere to prick; partly from Anglo-French pointe sharp end, from Vulgar Latin *puncta, from Latin, feminine of punctus, past participle — more at pungent

And tracing connections back through

PUNGENT

Etymology: Latin pungent-, pungens, present participle of pungere to prick, sting; akin to Latin pugnus fist, pugnare to fight, Greek pygmē fist

Date: 1597

1 : sharply painful…..

and through the synonyms to ‘pungent’ to

PUNGENT implies a sharp, stinging, or biting quality especially of odors <a cheese with a pungent odor> POIGNANT suggests something is sharply or piercingly effective in stirring one’s emotions <felt a poignant sense of loss — applies to what keenly or sharply affects one’s sensitivities <a poignant documentary on the homeless>

POIGNANT

Etymology: Middle English poynaunt, from Anglo-French poinant, poignant, present participle of poindre to prick, sting, from Latin pungere — more at pungent

Date: 14th century

1 : pungently pervasive <a poignant perfume>
2 a (1) : painfully affecting the feelings : piercing (2) : deeply affecting : touching b : designed to make an impression : cutting <poignant satire>
3 a : pleasurably stimulating b : being to the point : apt

synonyms see pungent, moving

STING

Etymology: Middle English, from Old English stingan; akin to Old Norse stinga to sting and probably to Greek stachys spike of grain, stochos target, aim

Date: before 12th century

Here I begin to see and feel the ‘image in the word’ as it relates to the origins of disappoint – sticking one’s self with a dry, sharp spike of rustling, life sustaining grain

PRICK

Etymology: Middle English prikke, from Old English prica; akin to Middle Dutch pric prick

Date: before 12th century

1 : a mark or shallow hole made by a pointed instrument
2 a : a pointed instrument or weapon b : a sharp projecting organ or part
3 : an instance of pricking or the sensation of being pricked: as a : a nagging or sharp feeling of remorse, regret, or sorrow

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And of course, looking from the angle of Latin pungere – related to the origins of ‘poignant’ I see this connection:

PUNCTURE

Etymology: Middle English, from Latin punctura, from punctus, past participle of pungere

Date: 14th century

1 : an act of puncturing
2 : a hole, wound, or perforation made by puncturing
3 : a minute depression

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Our abusers punctured us full of holes.  Full of wounds, we continued onward.  Every time we were physically, emotionally, mentally hurt, our chance for building an ongoing safe and secure, organized, oriented attachment with our self in the world was ruptured and not repaired.  Every time we were hurt in any way, deprived, terrorized, terrified, we suffered from a disappointment based on how things are MEANT to be in the world for little ones who are completely dependent on their early caregivers.

How possible would it be to empty the ocean with a sieve?

First we were ‘poked full of holes’, wounded nearly beyond belief by the same people who were supposed to love us, cherish us, protect us, provide for us, defend us, and help us become integrated ‘associated’ people.  Then we are supposed to take our punctured selves out into the world and NOT be disappointed?

Maybe every single time I recognize the state of disappointment in myself I can learn to identify how that disappointment POINTS to my wounds.  From there, maybe I can begin to find ways to exercise my resilience to repair them.

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+MY FOGGY POST ABOUT DISAPPOINTMENT AS A TRAUMA TRIGGER

alchemynow2 Comments

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I’ve been doing pretty good these past few days.  I think I got spoiled.  Today was a crasher.  My word for my mood, or state of emotional being is FUNK.  I’m trying to sort out how I got here today thinking that maybe it will help me get out of this dark grey-blue-black mood, or feeling state.

So far, I can think of at least ten things that happened today that I reacted to with disappointment.  That’s one sure thing I know about myself:  I do not handle disappointment very well at all.  I also know that disappointment IS a feeling I felt as an abused child – often.  My mother was an expert at setting me up and then knocking me down.  She took sadistic pleasure in my innocent hope knowing she could shatter it in a heartbeat – which she always did.

Because I WAS a child, I could not out-guess her.  I walked blindly into her traps over and over and over again.  I was unsuspecting.  Part of how all this operated, I know, was because of the dissociated states I slipped into between all the violent attacks, that state where time always seemed suspended as if it didn’t exist at all.  My mother’s forced isolation did this to me, also.  Nothing made sense.  I could predict nothing, anticipate nothing.  But, unfortunately for me I still believed my mother when she said something good was going to happen, even though every time she took it away.  (see **FAMILY TIME – by Brother (1965) for my baby brother’s experience with my mother about this.)

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Main Entry: dis·ap·point·ment

Date: 1604

1 : the act or an instance of disappointing : the state or emotion of being disappointed
2 : one that disappoints <he’s a disappointment to his parents>

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Why in 1604 did this word suddenly appear in the English language?  Why does Webster’s not include any reference to this word’s roots?  Elsewhere I found a reference that the root is in ‘appoint’.  Somewhere else I read online it’s in ‘point’.  It all seems very confusing to me.

I think when I experience disappointment in my life it ALWAYS acts as a trauma trigger for me.  ALWAYS.

That means when something disappointments me NOW in my life, all the ick attached to disappointment in my 18 year abusive childhood comes plowing right on through and catches up with me every single time.

I don’t know how to NOT let this happen.

I didn’t catch the warning signs this morning when I encountered my first disappointment.  Looking back, I see that my disappointment was connected FIRST to a feeling of being surprised.  I had hoped to buy 3 (cheap) climbing roses bushes today at our local Alco store.  I looked at my bank balance online.  It was far lower than I had expected, and it ruled out flowers along with just about anything else until the 3rd of next month when my next disability check shows up in the account.

So, I EXPECTED the balance to be higher.  I was SURPRISED when it wasn’t.  Then I was disappointed not only that I’m about broke (again), but also that there will be no roses or anything else.  Then I was disappointed because I couldn’t have lunch today as I usually do with my woman friend.  I NEED that social contact.

I was swept up in the twisting snake of down-the-emotional-drain and didn’t catch it – in time.  On the day went.  No major disaster, just a series of expectations, hopes, surprises, and disappointments.

They pile up, and then knock me down.  Flat.

Now, how exactly do I pick myself up again?

Is there some way I can avoid this crash in the future?

How can I expand my “Window of Tolerance” for disappointment?

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One big disappointment of my life right now is that I’ve been working on this blog for a year now, and I am not one single word closer to being able to put together and publish a book than I was before I started writing here.  I see publishing a worthwhile and SELLING book as my ONLY hope out of my poverty.  It’s a big disappointment.

If I tell myself that it doesn’t matter if there’s ever a book, that it only matters if I can write something that might make sense to someone – and there’s nothing wrong with FREE info – then I’m better, but that has to be processed for me on some kind of ‘spiritual’ level having to do with my ‘purpose in life’ and ‘my mission’ in being alive.  I have no idea, most of the time.  I just TRY…..

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It was too hot today to work outside on my adobe-making project.  That was disappointing.  All-in-all, my disappointment ALWAYS cycles around to my difficulty in not being angry at my self.  GEE, I sure don’t have to wonder how that pattern came to be!  Every single time my mother punished me with intentional disappointment, I was blamed for it.  It was ALWAYS my fault because I was bad, because I wanted to be bad, because I wanted to ruin my mother’s life.

I am going to quit writing – enough said.  I imagine there are plenty of readers who know exactly what I am TRYING to say.  I am going to watch my NetFlix streaming Australian TV series, “McLeod’s Daughters,” which I am enjoying.  I could see myself living that life.  I would have loved it.

Or, as that other great movie puts it”  “Never give up!  Never surrender!”

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+DISSOCIATION RISK FACTORS IN UNEXPECTED PLACES

alchemynow3 Comments

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Well, here I am back again in my writing about – “how to stop” —  dissociation in regard to the book, Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle my sister is sending me.  Because I spent all of the 18 years of my abusive childhood in a dissociated state between the frequent, random and extremely traumatizing events of trauma my abusive mother rained on me from my birth, I have an inner need to be careful in using any so-called meditative or relaxation technique — and here’s why.

I am still not exactly sure that what I am going to post here is the exact form of the information I first encountered over six years ago that I have been trying to re-find ever since, but it’s close enough to what I was looking for that I will post it here.

It comes from Dr. Jon G. Allen’s book, Coping With Trauma: Hope Through Understanding, as I mentioned in my last post, +ONE READER’S SEARCH TERMS: ‘HOW TO STOP DISSOCIATION’.
This information comes from Allen’s chapter, ‘Emotion Regulation’ in a subsection titled, “Self-regulation Strategies’.  He says things here of specific relevance and importance to severe trauma survivors – especially to severe early relational trauma survivors – that is very affirming to me.  Remember that early attachment-related traumas alter the way the limbic, right, very ancient emotional brain develops and thus alters our abilities to moderate and regulate ALL of our emotions.  I keep Allen’s words in mind as I prepare to read Tolle’s book my sister is sending me.

Allen states:

“Trauma and stress aren’t new.  Techniques of self-regulation are ancient.  You may not have studied them, but you have used them.  Most methods of self-regulation, such as exercise and relaxation, are simple.  In relation to meditation, Jon Kabat-Zinn uses the phrase, “simple but not easy,”….  For persons struggling with traumas, I put it more strongly:  simple but difficult.  If it weren’t difficult, you’d already be using these strategies successfully rather than reading this chapter.  Three sources of this difficulty are worth thinking about:  methods of self-regulation require practice; they can be fraught with complications for persons with a history of trauma; and they require caring for yourself.

“The first source of difficulty:  learning to regulate your emotions is like any other skill – it requires practice and persistence….  Developing competence in emotion regulation is a lifetime task…..  To become proficient and to maintain your proficiency requires determination and commitment.  Such a major effort is no short-term project.  If you’re dealing with trauma, you’re in for the long haul….

“The second source of difficulty:  trauma-related problems can complicate the use of these techniques.  Techniques designed to enhance self-control may instead trigger anxiety, flashbacks, or dissociation.  Persons with a trauma history can easily be demoralized when the very things offered as helpful prove instead to be unusable or retraumatizing.  Fortunately, because of such a wide range of techniques there’s bound to be something for everyone.  But finding what works for you may be difficult.  It may take time and effort.  You may be in for a period of trial and error.  Caution is in order.  Many self-regulation techniques …have been studied extensively in the context of stress management, but they’ve just begun to be researched in the context of trauma, although they’re routinely employed in conjunction with other facets of trauma treatment….

“The third and often most serious difficulty:  techniques of self-regulation are intended to help you feel better – to even feel good.  This means taking care of yourself.  How can taking care of yourself be a seemingly insurmountable obstacle?  Taking care of yourself implies valuing yourself.  To the degree that the aftermath of trauma entails self-blame or self-hatred, taking care of yourself will go against the grain.  “Why should I do anything good for myself when I don’t deserve it?”  Your self-concept has a steering function, and this train of thought can lead to a self-perpetuating stalemate.  If you hate yourself, you won’t take care of yourself, then you’ll feel bad, hate yourself, ad infinitum.  You might believe that you must feel better about yourself first, then you’ll be able to use these techniques to take care of yourself.  Logical, but maybe self-defeating.  A good way to start feeling better about yourself is to take better care of yourself.  Working on self-regulation could come first.  It’s difficult, but some of the rewards start occurring right away, and they can enhance your motivation to continue.”  (pages 228-229)

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RELAXATION

“Relaxation is the simplest of the simple techniques, and it’s the direct antidote to the fight-or-flight response….

“It’s hard to imagine anything more innocuous than relaxation.  But relaxation can be problematic for persons who have been traumatized.  This paradoxical response has been observed frequently enough to acquire a name:  relaxation-induced anxiety….  With this anxiety, you might associate relaxation with letting your guard down; thus, in a relaxed state, you may feel vulnerable to attack.  You may feel that you need to be alert at all times.  Therefore, before letting yourself relax, you may need to do whatever is necessary to assure yourself that you’re in a safe place, protected from any intrusion.

“Relaxation entails focusing inward, on your breathing and on your muscles.  Your attention is directed away from outer reality onto you body.  When you let go of focus on outer reality, you might be prone to dissociate….  Rather than feeling relaxed, you might begin to feel spaced out or unreal.  Dissociation is the opposite of feeling grounded in outer reality.  Relaxation exercises tend to remove this sensory scaffolding.

“Fortunately, it’s not necessary to do body awareness exercises to relax.  Sitting quietly may be enough…..  (pages 231-232)

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IMAGERY

“Picture a field of wildflowers.  Hear the sound of a waterfall.  You’ve been using imagery all your life.  For most persons, visual imagery is especially vivid and powerful.  Interestingly, creating visual images activates the same parts of the brain involved in visual perception….  As traumatized persons know best, the power of imagery is a double-edged sword.  Imagery is tied to memory and to emotion.  Intrusive images of traumatic experience are common symptoms of PTSD [posttraumatic stress disorder].  Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and body sensations all can be associated with reexperiencing trauma.

“Think of yourself as having a library of images.  Picture a section of the library devoted to traumatic images – but don’t open any of the books in that section now!  You have a section for imagery associated with positive experiences.  This is a section worth browsing in.  Spend lots of time there.  You may not have checked out some of the volumes for a long time.  Put them back in circulation.  Check them out regularly in your spare moments.

[My note:  Even an additional word of caution is needed here for severe infant-child abuse and trauma survivors:  Our positive experiences were very often as entangled with trauma as any other ones.  Our insecure attachment disorders in adulthood also can completely entangle positive emotion in negative and hurtful relationship histories.  See:  *Age 9 – BLOODY NOSE for an example of how trauma and abuse can contaminate the experience of positive emotion to create ‘trauma triggers’ where we might not expect them to exist.]

“You can use imagery flexibly and creatively.  You can piece together images from memory to imagine something that you’ve not actually experienced, like floating on a cloud.  Much of your anxiety and worry revolves around imagery, anticipating the worst.  Your images are also accompanied by changes in your physiological state, so anticipating the worst tends to promote it.  But you can create library shelves devoted to imagined scenes that are pleasurable and calming.  {my note:  I would add, safe and secure as a first requirement!]

“Many therapies use guided imagery…which simply means that you’re provided with suggestions for images that will evoke certain ideas and emotions [hypnotherapy].  You may be told to picture yourself lying on a beach on a beautiful sunny day, watching puffy clouds float by, hearing the sound of waves gently lapping at the shore, feeling the warmth of sand against your skin.  Many persons benefit particularly from imagining themselves in a safe place, for example, a secluded and protected place….

“In managing anxiety we use imagery in a virtually instinctive way, and mental escape through imagery is one way of coping with trauma.  Some persons in the midst of traumatic experience can dissociate themselves from the trauma by imagining themselves to be elsewhere….  [my note:  This presentation of one single aspect of ‘dissociation’ is NOT what dissociation IS, any more than a single leave of a gigantic tree IS the whole of the tree.]  But comforting imagery developed in situations of desperation may be problematic.  Some soothing images will be so closely linked to traumatic experience that bringing them to mind will also tend to revoke the traumatic memories.  These well-worn images may be haunted by trauma.  This section of your imagery library may be adjacent to the traumatic images section.  You might be better off moving to a new area and creating new volumes of fresh imagery.”  (pages 323-233)

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MEDITATION

“Of all the techniques described here, meditation probably has the most venerably history…having evolved in the context of early Eastern religions.  Meditation and prayer have much in common, and for many, the spiritual dimension forms the foundation of meditation.  But meditation can be separated from religion and spirituality.  Meditation overlaps with relaxation….

[I am skipping a great deal of what Allen is saying here about meditation – get this book, it’s a good one!]

“Mindfulness can be the antithesis of dissociation – the opposite end of the spectrum.  Dissociation is associated with a sense of unreality, mindfulness is a state of being highly aware of reality, not spaced out but tuned in.  This attunement is why meditation may be helpful in relation to dissociation.  Mindfulness could enhance grounding techniques that focus attention on current sensory experience.

“Like every other technique of self-regulation, meditation is not without risks….  Meditation can be used as an escape from living….  Mindfulness is the ideal antidote to dissociation, because it entails heightened awareness of reality, a sense of being fully grounded.  Yet sitting motionless for prolonged periods can have a trance-inducing effect.  For persons who are prone to dissociation, meditation can lead to a sense of loss of control rather than to enhanced control.  Like relaxation and guided imagery, meditation is conducive to opening up the inner world of thoughts and feelings.  For this reason, it can evoke anxiety, painful memories, or distressing images and ideas.  Although the intent may be to foster your ability to concentrate on one thing (your breathing), the actual effect may be that you get stuck in painful experience.  If you become emotionally overwhelmed, you may not be able to gently bring your attention back to the focus of awareness.  When coping with trauma, you might best be cautious, starting gradually and seeking the support of a therapist, a teacher, or a meditation group.”  (pages 233-235)

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BIOFEEDBACK

“Compared with most of the age-old methods of self-regulation described thus far, biofeedback is a recent innovation – only several decades old.  And, unlike the rest, biofeedback requires some technology.  The basic idea behind biofeedback isn’t complicated.  You can change what goes on in your body by your behavior and by what you imagine and think about.  Sid down, breathe deeply, imagine being in a pleasant spot, and you’ll relax – your heart rate will slow, and your muscles will relax.  [my note:  You will initialize the “STOP” arm of your autonomic nervous system (ANS) and activate your vagus nerve system – or the opposite with the following].  Start imagining your traumatic experience or anything else frightening, and your level of physiological arousal will zoom back up.

[I am leaving much of this information out here….]

“Fortunately, there’s a simple and inexpensive window into the physiology of one important aspect of the relaxation response – a little thermometer that measures finger temperature.  Finger temperature is a sensitive gauge of autonomic nervous system arousal.  With sympathetic nervous system arousal [the “GO” arm], blood flow is diverted into the large muscles in preparation for vigorous action.  With parasympathetic activation [the “STOP” arm], blood flows into the periphery – the tips of your fingers and toes.  When you’re nervous, your hands get cold; when you can warm your hands, you become calm.  You can tape a little thermometer designed for that purpose to a finger and have an excellent barometer of autonomic nervous system activity.  If you can get your finger temperature above 95 [degrees F] and hold it here for several minutes, you can rest assured that you’ve lowered your sympathetic nervous system arousal [my note:  and activated your calm and connection vagus nerve system], resulting in a pleasant, emotionally relaxed state….

“Once you become aware of how this relaxed state feels, and you’ve discovered how to get yourself there, you can do it without the little thermometer.  You can do it anywhere in the midst of any activity, to remain or restore calm.  Although we often think of relaxation in connection with slowing down and resting, it’s possible to be relaxed and active….

“Like any other technique that enhances relaxation, biofeedback can backfire.  It can contribute to a sense of vulnerability as you release tension and let down your guard.  And the inward focus may also open up traumatic memories and imagery.  This openness to inner experience can be productive and healing in the presence of a competent therapist; otherwise it might lead to overwhelming emotion and retraumatization.  When carefully prescribed and monitored, biofeedback has the specific advantages of bolstering awareness of the body and providing a sense of control and mastery.  Feedback is ideal for providing tangible evidence of self-regulation and mastery.”  (pages 235-237)

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See also online search for terms:  NEUROFEEDBACK and NEUROFEEDBACK ATTACHMENT DISORDER

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Well, this is a lot of information, I know.  Hopefully there will be something contained in this post that can help severe trauma survivors approach some potential helpful-healing techniques that we may have been intentionally avoiding because we knew on some level that there are very real risks involved for us because of our trauma history.  We need to ALWAYS trust what our body-brain-mind-self tells us, even if we can’t explain what we know in words – either to our own self or to anybody else.

We have to be very careful with anything that creates a sense of disequilibrium, disorganization, disorientation and/or dissociation within our self!  We have to always trust what we instinctively and intuitively KNOW about our self in the world.  When my sister described the book she is sending me, I immediately knew I had to refresh myself on this information I first read over six years ago — because I know I am different from my sister.  In fact, I am different from just about everybody else EXCEPT other severe early abuse and trauma survivors.  I really do know what is best for me just as I can tell when I have a sneeze coming on.

What Dr. Allen writes in his book is a ‘must read’ for all of us who come from truly malevolent backgrounds — or as adults have suffered from severe trauma.

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+ONE READER’S SEARCH TERMS: ‘HOW TO STOP DISSOCIATION’

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WordPress keeps a running list on my Admin page that shows me the kinds of search terms people are using that lands them on my blog.  Here’s one from yesterday:  “How to stop dissociation.”  Hey, now that’s quite the question?  Do I have any kind of answer at all?

For the most part, I think the truth is that neuroscientists (along with everyone else) is stumped by ‘dissociation’.  The word is thrown around like tumbleweeds in early fall high speed desert wind.  From my point of view, at every point where the brain can perform an action using circuits-regions-pathways-networks TOGETHER yet also perform an entirely different set of activities through a recombination of these areas or in solo operation, a risk for dissociation exists.

Add to this wide open field of possible dissociation factors the complex and sophisticated operation of our body as a whole, which uses all its known abilities to moderate and modulate stress and calmness levels through our many nervous system responses.  The truth of the matter is that those who suffer most from so-called ‘dissociation’ are probably the closest to being experts on the topic of any human on earth.

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My sister is graciously sending me a copy of the book, Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.  There’s certainly nothing either new or original about the topic, but I hear the book contains very useful, practical, and do-able exercises for changing – basically – how our brain and nervous system processes information in the present moment.  I’ll bite.

Until I lay my eyeballs on the printed words in Tolle’s text, I don’t have a single clue how what he says is different than what’s in this book, for example:  Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (P.S.) by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

But after I thought about it for a little while the day my sister told me of her recent experiences implementing some of Tolle’s techniques, I realized that the state of mind, or state of being that she described to me sounded extremely – and eerily – familiar to me.  I KNOW that state, in the deepest regions of my being.  If it is anything like what it sounds to me, it’s the state of what I named for myself of MAJOR DISSOCIATION.

How interesting is that?  The problem for me at this moment, not having yet read this book, is that I’m not at all sure I want to intentionally exercise myself to reenter that state.  Supposedly it relates to NOT thinking and NOT feeling.  Sound familiar?

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CAUTION becomes the word for the day for me in regard to anything that non-severe early infant-child trauma and abuse survivors seem to find useful in their own process of achieving increased well-being.  Because I had to develop a very different body-brain, I need to be very careful about which doors I open and leap blindly through.

My inner sense of warning about ‘messing around with’ anything that can alter my state of being in any way comes from the knowledge that there are black holes, abysses and pitfalls within the operation of my bio-chemical makeup that do not exist for a ‘normally built from infancy’ person.

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I just went to my bookshelf to search for something I read about six years ago on this topic and have never been able to find again.  I ‘accidentally’ found this, written by Dr. Jon G. Allen in his book, Traumatic Relationships and Serious Mental Disorders.  Because I couldn’t find what I was looking for in it, I immediately stuffed it back among its multi-colored-spine relatives.

But wait a moment!  Why did these words appear at this moment?  I give up.  I don’t know, but I suspect there is a perfectly good reason.  So, having reclaimed the page, here’s what I ‘accidentally’ read:

“Although we generally admire persistence and deplore giving up, Carver and Scheier argue that being unable to give up unattainable goals is a huge problem:  ‘the person experiences distress (because of an inability to make progress) and is unable to do anything about the distress (because of an inability to give up)….  This situation – commitment to unattainable goals – is a prescription for distress’ (p. 195).  Many clients struggle with this plight in treatment.  They courageously persist in treatment for years in the face of ongoing symptoms and relapses.  In the midst of relapses, they become profoundly demoralized, often feeling as if they no longer have the will to keep trying.  At these junctures, many become suicidal – the ultimate expression of disengagement and giving up.  Working on trauma is a prescription for slow progress toward goals, the guaranteed precipitant of negative affect.  If the client has adopted the completely understandable goal of cure, freedom from symptoms, and freedom from relapses, depression will ensue.

“Particularly in the midst of relapses, clients long for wholesale and dramatic change.  But we must help them go in the opposite direction.  To ensure success and positive emotion that builds confidence in treatment, we must orient clients toward a view of improvement based on small, gradual changes….  Gollwitzer (1999) proposed a two-step strategy for goal attainment that I introduce to clients in the context of self-regulation.  The first step is goal setting, an important challenge.  What are realistic treatment goals?  Over the long term, gradual improvement with ups and downs is realistic – but by no means guaranteed.  But we must focus on the short term, where clients can experience concrete progress.  Gollwitzer emphasized that goals must not only be achievable (within the person’s capacity) but also be specific rather than general (e.g., ‘Say, “No!” when I do not want to do something’ rather than ‘be more assertive’).  Goals should be proximal (near future) rather than distal (distant future).  The combination of specific and proximal goals allows the individual to identify clear feedback that promotes self-monitoring.  It is helpful to formulate learning goals (e.g., learning how to calm oneself or discovering capacities to distract oneself).  Approach goals are preferable to avoidance goals.  For example, rather than setting the goal of not feeling anxious, the client might adopt the goal of calming himself by listening to music at the initial signs of anxiety.  The client must also eliminate distractions and temptations in the environment.  Perhaps most difficult in light of clients’ ambivalence and depression, success requires high motivation to attain the goal and a strong sense of commitment to it.

“Gollwitzer made a convincing case that goal setting must be accompanied by implementation intentions, that is, specifying when, where, and how the goal will be implemented:  when situation x arises, I will perform response y.  This entails forming a clear idea of situation x in advance.  Situation x could be an emotional state in an environmental context.  For example, the client might formulate the implementation intention, when I am afraid and alone at home during the daytime, I am tempted to cut myself, I will take a walk abound the neighborhood.  Mentally rehearsing implementation intentions is helpful, and adhering reliably to plans ensures that intentions become habitual.”  (pages 316-317)

NOTE:  Mental rehearsal makes use of our mirror neuron system, essential for learning anything that involves actions taken by our body.

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Well, I can easily see how this passage from Allen’s book relates to “How to stop dissociation!”  From my personal perspective, stopping dissociation isn’t actually possible for those of us infant-child trauma survivors who actually have a nervous system-brain that was forced to build itself with major dissociation as one of one of our prime operating patterns.

I believe we can set the realistic goal of learning more about what conditions, situations and circumstances in our present-day life contribute to an all out pandemonium of dissociation.  But STOPPING dissociation as if it never built itself into our body-brain in the beginning is not going to be possible.  Finding ways to lessen the trouble that dissociation causes us NOW and lessening the opportunity for it to happen (be triggered) NOW is a possible goal.

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To give you an idea about how oblivious I truly believe the neuroscientific community is about dissociation, in the book, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are by Daniel J. Siegel (Paperback – Oct. 22, 2001) – I so far have added 12 page numbers of references in the text to dissociation that are not mentioned in the index of this book  (only 2 references are actually in the index)!  If I can follow through on a ‘motivational intention’ to do so, I will add the information I have found in Siegel’s book into a future blog post.

This is another great book by this author:

Coping With Trauma: Hope Through Understanding by Jon G. Allen

In fact, what I am looking for is in this book – and I will include this information in my next post.

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+MY SIMPLE LIFE – AT SUNSET TODAY

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Just a few simple pictures from my simple life around sunset today.

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Life in decorated, recycled 5-gallon pickle buckets!
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Drying adobe bricks - I can stand them up in less than 24 hours - YAY US!

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