Year: 2010

+MORE THINKING ON CRASH-DUMMY BABIES – THE SOUND/PITCH OF THE DISTRESSED INFANT CRY

alchemynowLeave a comment

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I found an interesting article online that describes the pitch range of ordinary infant versus distressed ‘sick’ infant crying:

Impact of the Cry of the Infant at Risk on Psychosocial Development

PHILIP SANFORD ZESKIND, PhD

Carolinas Medical Center, USA

(Published online April 4, 2005)

Recent Research Results

“Whereas research originally sought to find whether cries elicited by discrete eliciting conditions could be perceptually differentiated, (4,25) more recent research has centered on cries as representing a continuum of sounds. (26,17)  A model emphasizing a “synchrony of arousal” between infants and caregivers describes how increases or decreases in infant arousal produce corresponding changes in the temporal and acoustic characteristics of infant crying that then typically produce corresponding increases or decreases in the perceived arousal and motivation of the caregiver. (27)  For example, as the infant becomes increasingly hungry and aroused, cries become increasingly higher-pitched, resulting in increasingly higher-perceived arousal in the caregiver. In this way, the cry sound mediates a symbiosis between the conditions that result in infant crying and the caregiver’s responses to the infant.”  [please see the references noted by numbers embedded within this text by clicking on the title of the article above]

“Whereas typical cries may range in fundamental frequency (basic pitch) from 400 to 650 Hz, hyperphonated cries are defined by a qualitative break in the cry sound to a fundamental frequency above 1,000 Hz that may range to 2,000 Hz and more.”

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I wanted to get an idea about what this range of crying pitch might sound like, so I found a list of the hertz range for notes on a piano keyboard.

PIANO KEY FREQUENCIES

The sound range of the crying of a ‘sick’ baby is way up there on the piano keyboard, at and above ‘soprano C’.

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“Reflecting a special condition of infant arousal, the high-pitched hyperphonated cry of the infant at risk elicits significantly stronger perceptual and physiological reactions than typical infant cries. Across cultures, (14,28) hyperphonated cries are perceived to be more irritating, aversive, arousing and “sick” sounding than typical cries and to elicit more immediate responses that include holding and cuddling. (29) Several studies indicate that there are at least two distinct dimensions underlying the perceptions of hyperphonated cries ― one in which the infant sounds “sick” and requires ameliorative care and one in which the cry is perceived as unusually aversive. (14,30) A higher cry pitch has been directly related to these particular perceptions. (30)”

“The presence of at least two dimensions underlying the perceptions of infant cry sounds underscores the importance of considering how the same cry sound may have different meanings to caregivers, depending on the listener’s emotional set.”

“In contrast to the typical response of increased arousal to higher-pitched cry sounds, adolescent mothers, (34) women suffering from depression35 and women who use cocaine during pregnancy (36) perceive cries of increasing pitch as being less arousing and less worthy of immediate care.”

“These differences in caregiver responsivity to infants with higher-pitched and hyperphonated cry sounds have been shown to be related to the infant’s subsequent psychosocial development.”

Conclusion

“The psychosocial development pathway of the infant at risk will reflect the combined effects of the infant’s altered neurobehavioural organization, the resulting behavioural repertoire of the infant, and how individual caregivers respond to the infant. As part of this behavioural repertoire, the hyperphonated cry of the infant at risk is a two-edged sword. So aversive are the physical properties of high-pitched infant crying that caregivers will often try to do whatever is necessary to try to stop the noxious sound. In most cases, these attempts will provide the kinds of auditory, visual, vestibular and tactile-kinesthetic forms of stimulation that promote infant development. This process may be accentuated when caregivers respond with attentive, more immediate ameliorative care to an infant they think sounds “sick.”

“In some cases, however, caregivers may respond to the aversive quality of the cry with unusually heightened arousal that provides that basis for “defensive” reactions, actions that are physically detrimental to the infant’s well-being and/or emotional and physical withdrawal of the mother from the infant over time. When a mother suffers from depression, for example, her emotional condition may make her even less able to respond to the crying infant as the needs of that infant increase. In extreme cases, her response patterns may include an increased risk for physical child abuse and/or neglect. These divergent response patterns and [have] effects on several aspects of the infant’s psychosocial development have been supported in longitudinal studies.”

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What happens to an infant’s development when the mother/caregiver, who is supposed to be the infant’s comforter is, instead the SOURCE of an infant’s distress and hence of its higher pitched cry of distress?

Reading this information makes me wonder about my own stress response and aversion to high pitched sounds.  I have almost NO tolerance for them at all!!  They are a trigger for my trauma that is often hard to understand — but maybe the facts that this article points out are part of the much bigger SOUND picture — including verbal abuse — that set our nervous system off down the trauma-changed road from the beginning of my life.

This — a “synchrony of arousal” between infants and caregiver — does not happen for battered babies and hence our development is trauma-changed.

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+BEING AN ADULT BATTERED BABY SURVIVOR – A UNICORN IN MY OWN SECRET GARDEN?

alchemynow2 Comments

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The approximate 5% of the population that I deem to be battered baby crash-dummy survivors of a severely abusive, neglectful, traumatic and inadequate early caregiver-interaction, insecure and unsafe attachment (to others, self and the world) environment truly comprise what our society terms the ‘at risk’ percentage of our population.  You name the stressor, the difficulty, the negative consequence and there you will find us standing with our ‘battered baby survivor’ crash dummy flags waving high above the crowd.

Or rather, there you will find us struggling along in the ranks of the homeless, the jobless, the underemployed, the chronically ill, the troubled relationship involved, the poor ones, the sick ones — in other words here we are among the ones MOST in need of understanding, compassion, and assistance.

The older I become the more I realize that I was lucky to get through my mothering years as well as I did (which by most socioeconomic standards was still bopping along the bottom).  The older I become the more I suspect that whatever resources I could muster and use to survive my first 18 years of total hell, and then the next 35 years of being a parent and an adult trying to ‘fit in’ and ‘get along’, the more I realize that whatever assets I had in my resource account are pretty well used up.

My cancer came.  People who loved me pushed, pulled and dragged me through treatment so that I am still alive.  But I feel just about bankrupt.

Financially I am completely dependent ‘on the dole’ – and not living in a nation like, say, Sweden, I punish myself continually for my inability/disability to ‘pay my own way’.  That ALSO wears on me heavily.

My expiration date was up — and I pushed it.  Here I am.  But I am here to say that I think I feel more like a unicorn than I do a ‘fully functional adult human’ (MAN!  What we do to one another and our self!)

Here I am, increasingly unable to leave the sanctuary and sanctity of my own Secret Garden because of the cresting effects of the damage that was done to me in my earliest years of development in trauma.

I hate the limitations these consequences of created within me and for me.  My world grows smaller and smaller.

I am soon to transfer all my medical records to a woman doctor in this small town, one I hope will listen to me so that she can begin to comprehend what I am saying:  I have my bags packed and I am ready to go.  I am soul weary and tired of the battle.  I see nothing ever getting any better for me.  I believe the long term permanent trauma changes that happened to me have caught up with me — for good (or for worse!).

I do not see my point of view as being unnatural given my condition, or as pessimistic.  My condition is a fact.  If we wish to tackle the problems that someone like me faces, we must accept that some babies are born to be their caregiver’s crash dummies, and there is a price to pay when those conditions are (were for survivors) allowed to exist.

Except for the 5% of the population I write about, to and for, the rest of our culture has a long, long way to go before they will begin to have a single clue about what I am talking about.

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+BATTERED CRASH-DUMMY BABIES — AND OUR LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

alchemynow2 Comments

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Perhaps being raised from birth as a solitary, isolated and battered infant-child prepared me for being a ‘lone voice in the wilderness’.  I did a Google search last evening for the terms ‘infant abuse language development’ and was shocked at the pitiful range of information that appeared on my screen.  I added the word ‘mother’ to my search terms and still found little that could help me understand what I wanted to study.

As a complete lay person it is NOT a good sign to have my own blog page show up on the first page of such a search.  What this tells me is that either what I think is so far outside the realm of ‘correct’ and ‘relevant’ that it bears no further thought — or it tells me that what I know is of critical importance and needs to be researched and studied by the people who receive the BIG BUCKS to study what matters to human beings forever stuck in the trenches of life as survivors of infant-child abuse.

One study I found is so old it represents only the beginning of the research that Dr. Allan Schore and other more ‘modern’ developmental neuroscientists have more currently written about.  Although this paper (what I could access of it online — The Rhythmic Structure of Mother-Infant Interaction in Term and Preterm Infants) describes patterns of infant-mother interactions that are critical for infant body-brain development, it was written before the photographic technology even existed that Schore uses to highlight the fact that accurately measuring the infant-caregiver interactions that are forming the infant happen NOT in the range of one-second intervals, but rather occur at rates in the millisecond range.

(Do a Google search for ‘schore mother infant brain development’ and take a look at THIS information.)

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Most simply and effectively put, those of us with severe infant-child abuse and neglect in our developmental early history are MOST likely to experience processes that are lumped together under the descriptive word DISSOCIATION.  When I look at the information about the natural patterns of connection and disconnection that take place between infants and their caregivers from birth as they are required for brain-nervous system development (including infant consolidation of information as it builds the body-brain) I understand that when an infant is born into a completely chaotic, traumatic and UNSTABLE environment these patterns DO NOT operate correctly.

Too much information, too much of hurtful information, too much information being bashed at and into the infant, not enough information, chaotic unstable patterns being forced upon the infant by a MOTHER or other early caregiver that have NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with the infant itself, etc.

There is NO POSSIBLE WAY for an infant to develop in a normal or ordinary fashion given the extremely upsetting nature of the interactions and transactions it is exposed to and forced to experience with an abusive, traumatizing, terrorizing early caregiver.

HOW DO WE EXPECT THAT THERE WILL NOT BE SERIOUS AND PERMANENT CONSEQUENCES TO THE INFANT from these kinds of interactions — along with the nearly complete exclusion of CORRECT, sustaining, regulation and HELPFUL interactions that the infant MUST have to build its best body-nervous system-brain?

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Now, getting to my present reality:  What I experienced yesterday while trying to obtain fuel assistance money from a county-operated program that is supposed to do its job was so far past unsettling to me that I headed back to my infancy to look for information about how I experienced what happened yesterday — inside of my own body.

I don’t want to go into the details of how inept both this program and its administrators are (in the state of Arizona).  Life is life, and it’s a fact that Big People are LIKELY to experience stressful, disturbing and unsettling experiences.

What matters is that when an infant was built from birth in the kind of malevolent (not pampered!) environment I am describing, we do not have built within our own body-nervous system-brain ‘normal or ordinary’ circuits and pathways to DEAL with the stress-distress that life throws our way.

I can find no reference online to this direct connection between infant lack of well-being and the adult consequences of being built in those terrible environments that DIRECTLY affect our inabilities and disabilities to sail through difficulties in our adulthood that normal and ordinary people usually can.

The best that we survivors are likely to hear is, “Oh, there’s something wrong with you.  Let’s diagnose you with a ‘mental illness’.

GIVE ME A BREAK, you idiots!

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I will describe here as clearly as I can what happens to me when I am at my wit’s end stress-distress wise and have to deal with people.  This happened to me yesterday, and is an experience that I do not remember having consciously between the time I left home at 18 (I had it prior to that) and the time I received my very serious breast cancer diagnosis and began treatment at age 55.

(My daughter tells me she has an idea what I am talking about based on her experience of meeting people in a stress-filled situation, like in an important interview, when she is so involved with dealing with incoming information that is NOT VERBAL — (now experts say that 95% of information transmitted in our conversations IS NONVERBAL) —  that she cannot HEAR a single word being spoken.  I also believe people under pressure of serious medical treatments experience related difficulties when trying to understand what their medical providers are telling them — like in cancer treatment.)

ANYWAY, the woman behind the fuel assistance program’s desk was trying to explain to me that all the rules for the program had been changed (in stupid ways) that directly and negatively affect ALL people applying for help.

The more desperate I felt inside knowing that my ability to heat my home were being increasingly threatened, the more I could NOT understand what she was telling me.  The not understanding was at the level of watching her mouth move its tongue and lips with no sound attached to those actions.  At the same time an extremely annoying DISSOCIATED and disconnected SOUND filled my awareness that was extremely noisy and irritating.  I could not connect the sound to the lips to the words to any kind of sense at all.

Because what I needed for my own well-being and security (the ability to heat my house) mattered so much, I HAD to understand what this woman was saying to me.  How humiliating and extremely AGGRAVATING it was to finally have to say to her, “I need you to tell me what you are saying as if you are talking to a two-year-old — or I will NOT be able to understand you.”  (I did not receive the help I needed yesterday and in one month’s time have to jump through all of their hoops again — for the third time in three months.)

I absolutely believe, because I could FEEL it, that my lack of ability to understand a DAMN thing in that conversation happened because the very earliest PREVERBAL, PRE LANGUAGE neuronal wiring in my body — built there during extremely abusive and chaotic nonsensical interactions with my traumatizing mother — was in full action.

I also absolutely believe that I am not ALONE!  I am certainly NOT the only adult who survived severe infant abuse.

Does anyone talk about how it IS for us survivors and how it FEELS to us in our BODY to have been so negatively impacted in our development that these alterations affect how we learned and process language — ESPECIALLY WHEN STRESS/DISTRESS IS PRESENT?

No, they do not.

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While I believe the malevolent experiences during my infancy directly formed my body-brain wiring patterns that are the root of how I am forced to operate in the world, I do not believe that ‘dissociation’ is the correct description of the state I am forced into when these earliest wiring patterns overwhelm my ability to make sense of myself in/and the world.

Based on my experience that my cancer treatment interrupted all the later learning I had acquired that allowed me to circumvent the baseline language patterns that I acquired — I believe it is more accurate to say that the earliest beginnings and what THAT felt like is the REAL us in our body.  Everything that we managed to piece together to ‘feel more normal’ and to ‘operate more normally’ are themselves the dissociations from what was native to us — that which was built into and built our body-brain in the first place INCLUDING OUR ABILITY TO COMPREHEND AND USE LANGUAGE.

When I experience (and I HATE IT) what I did yesterday, I am very clear that I am ACTUALLY without ‘a first language’.  No doubt my brain could be watched during these times and SOMETHING DIFFERENT would be detected about how my brain-mind is processing language.

I suspect that the foundation of language abilities as they happen from birth (actually from before birth) in patterns of connection-disconnection with the mother cannot possibly follow magically along normal pathways if the infant is being treated in traumatizing ways.  We infant abuse survivors therefore cannot possibly have learned language in normal and ordinary ways.

This is a BIG PROBLEM, folks, at the same time it COULD be a fascinating journey into understanding the resiliency of infants who can STILL adapt to spoken language.  I also believe, however, that the same alterations that occurred due to early abuse and affected how we process spoken words and nonverbal signals with our ‘different balance from ordinary’ in terms of how we receive information, process it and ‘take action’ (listening and speaking) — also affects how we use words in our thinking.

All of this has to do (in my mind) with the different way our right brain, our left brain, and our abilities to transmit, synthesize and understand information between the two were changed through trauma-altered development (and infant abuse) so that our experience of being alive has been fundamentally impacted.

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Doesn’t anybody out there think these facts are worth investigating?  We are absolutely WAY IN THE DARK AGES if the best our culture can do is ‘call us mentally ill’.  We infant abuse survivors are the most sophisticated examples of the range of environmentally adaptive developmental abilities our species has.

That our language development was changed right along with the rest of our body due to severe early trauma should surprise NO ONE.  Why, then, is there not only no USEFUL information available that will explain to us how this process happened and how these changes affect us all of our life — there is NO INFORMATION available at all!

Battered babies don’t simply fall off of the face of the earth.  We survived, we are here — and because we were battered and because we survived — we are different beings from ordinary.  I for one want to know what that MEANS!

The patterns of interaction an infant has with its mother and other earliest primary caregivers not ONLY build our right limbic emotional brain with its patterns of ability to have either emotional regulation or dysregulation for life, these patterns also build our social brain (same hemisphere) at the same time.

Our resulting ability to ‘read social cues’ normally is directly tied along with the development of our body-nervous system-brain through our earliest interactions to the development of our VERBAL LANGUAGE ABILITIES that are intimately connected to our NONVERBAL LANGUAGE ABILITIES.  All of the patterns of communication an infant has with its earliest caregivers ARE a language being spoken.

It is time that all of us understand that being able to communicate efficiently and effectively with others and with our own self are directly formed within us at the same time.  We cannot exclude a study of infant abuse and trauma from the consequences to all of our development – including our language abilities.

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+RAH! RAH! RAH! LET’S HEAR IT FOR THE SUPED UP STRESS RESPONSE!

alchemynowLeave a comment

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I swear my stress response accelerator pedal is GLUED to the floor — stuck on full throttle and WHAT A PAIN IN THE U KNOW WHAT!  Not up for whining about my ‘dis-abilities’ or my day now that I am home after a long day which included ridiculous and stupid state-of-Arizona stupidity bureaucratic STRESS — so just posting THIS from New York City’s Blog — which contains information that alone didn’t get my day off to a happy start:

The Recession and Child Well-Being

Posted: 30 Nov 2010 08:07 AM PST

When the economy takes a downturn, it often hits the most vulnerable children and families the hardest. The recent recession is no exception. As a result of increased poverty, approximately 43 percent of families with children report difficulty in affording stable housing. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of households classified as “food insecure” – 21 percent of all households with children fell into this category in 2008, the highest percentage since 1995 when yearly measurement started, and a nearly 25 percent increase from 2007.

These are the findings of a new series of papers, The Effect of the Recession on Child Well-Being, written by researchers from PolicyLab at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. The report examines four areas – health, food security, housing stability and maltreatment – and reviews the relationship of each to the well-being of children during recessions both past and present. According to the report, it will take years for families to return to pre-recession income levels, with low-income families struggling even longer to rebound. A second key finding is that public programs play a pivotal role in moderating the negative impacts of a recession. A companion set of policy briefs consider the role of public programs in economic recovery and provide recommendations for improving the provision of services to vulnerable children and families as we bounce back from the recession.

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+OUR HEALING WORK: EXPECTING THE BACKLASH

alchemynowLeave a comment

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I might as well include the rest of today’s story here in another post.  Perhaps there is a warning in here for other severe infant/child abuse and trauma survivors about how the SENSES of the body interplay with the choices and actions taken with our mind.

I could say, “It’s your own dang fault, Linda.  You touched the raw nerves, awakened the sleeping giant today with those two posts you wrote.”

Yup, I did.  But there is no fault in doing that.  The warning is this:  The memory of every experience we have ever had is stored in the cells of our body, most often as implicit memory that will never be available for conscious semantic/autobiographical FACTUAL or literally verbal recall.

We ALWAYS live with these memories as long as we are alive in a body.  Those sense-based memories are alive and well and often glue themselves together to form what we might notice consciously as a ‘feeling state’, a ‘mood state’, or even as a generalized SENSE about our self in our body in the world.

If and when we turn our attention to consciously considering the severe abuse and trauma that we endured when we were babies and growing up from there, we can then feel very physical reverberating sensations within our body that are most likely NOT going to be comfortable — or comforting.

I am experiencing trauma memory reactions in my body in part as a consequence of going as close to my childhood as I did in writing my last post.

At the same time I am ALSO aware of body-based memory reactions as this winter begins to settle in that I have never noted before in my life the way I am now.  There is something about winter — its increasing darkness, its clamp of cold, its demands to increase time spent indoors — that is triggering some form of memories of abuse and trauma from my childhood that I DO NOT want to know about specifically.

It’s enough to know that winter is a big deal in Alaska.  It’s enough to know that given the chronic cramped quarters our family lived in that the pressures of my mother’s madness escalated during the winter months.  If there are experiences that my body is just ‘popping’ to tell me about — well, let’s just say I am not going to listen to specifics willingly.

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I suspect that both body-based sense-related memory experiences are active as I write this.  Last night reached 16 degrees, cold for here, especially within houses that have zero insulation — and for those of us living on poverty incomes that mean increases in heating costs — hurt.

I am also extremely aware of the sense my body has right now — and it IS very much a foreboding one.

I feel as if I am a tiny mouse, or a little rabbit, on the run from a gigantic predator that flies above me.  It’s talons repeatedly rake across the top of my head and along my back as I race as hard and as fast as I can to find a place to hide where the great taloned beast cannot reach me.

I am very aware that I cannot extricate myself from the shadow of this beast that follows me every place — and I mean EVERY PLACE.  There is no safety.

My body remembers what this condition not only FELT like during the 18 horrific years of abuse from my mother, but also remembers NOW what if felt like-feels like.  I am not sure HOW a person can change what the body remembers about things.  Is it even possible to do so?

Only my MIND today can rescue ME from these influences.  I think about how now, as I approach age 60, it has been two-thirds of my lifetime since I experienced those traumas that filled the first one-third of my life.

Today I think/feel that the first one-third does overshadow and outweigh the succeeding two-thirds of my life experiences — because the trauma was built into my growing and developing body-brain from the time I was born.

For example, my recliner sits in my living room with its back to the wall and to the picture window.  Every time I sit in that chair I have to exercise being able to do so with a lesser degree of ‘sense of impending trauma’.  I don’t move the chair or sit in another one because that would be, to me, the same as admitting defeat.

Often my body senses the prowling darkness because it has way, way too many memories of this feeling.  As winter approaches the feeling is getting worse.  I have spent as much time as I can outside in the daylight/sunlight, but I ALSO hate to be cold.  My body with its memories of trauma and I with this mind of mine have to negotiate all of this.

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So when people suggest that severe early trauma can be ‘dealt with’ and moved past — personally I don’t think so — not for me.  I work to be OK with this fact — the dealing with it is the living with it — learning where it came from, how it feels, what triggers it, what I can do to help sooth it/myself.

And one of those ways is for me to be very, very careful about returning to any specific memory and its details from my abusive/traumatic infant-childhood.  I DO NOT advocate returning to the ‘scenes of the crimes’ as if we can ever do that easily.  If there is good reason to do so, I will — but never do I go any closer than I have to for any longer than necessary.

My body ALWAYS remembers EVERYTHING that happened to me ‘back there’ — and always will.

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+RESLIENCY FACTORS AND THE ‘AT LEAST….’ GAME

alchemynowLeave a comment

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When it comes to being outside the circle of ordinary/normal infant/child socialization, I might just about be an expert.  SO ‘at least’ my unusual perceptions as an ‘outsider’ allows me to think/perceive/suspect/wonder about things that ordinary/normal people (NOT severely abused and traumatized from birth people) might never consider.

Before I even write another word about resiliency factors I want to introduce the importance of HUMOR (dark, light, gray) when it comes to considering the context of your abusive/traumatic early life.  I’m not sure there even IS any other way to think about the unthinkable — what went so RIGHT in an infant/childhood where so much obviously went so WRONG!

Yes, humor can put a different twist on things, shed a different light, allowing us to notice what tends to be invisible and overwhelmed by the darkness of terrifying and terrible infant/child abuse and trauma.

So — with a very important twist of enlightening humor –the following comes to mind…..

So — my mother forced me to spend weeks on end lying in my bed alone as a component of some bizarre punishment scheme of hers or another — at least I had a bed!

So — my mother forced me to stand in corners for days and days from sunup to after sundown — at least we had a shelter to live in — and at least the sun went DOWN though, “SHUCKS, too bad it came back up!”

So — my mother forced 99.5% of her insane abuse on me while my siblings (though witness abuse and trauma bonding must have been their fare) went out to play, ate dinner as a family, dragged in a Christmas tree, WHATEVER they were doing — at least I had siblings and was NOT absolutely alone with my mother as an only child and I had hearing so that I could listen to everyone else having a life…..

So — never once did my father intervene to stop my mother’s abuse, to acknowledge me as a loved daughter (etc….) — at least I knew who my father was, at least he never abandoned his family, at least he had a job and provided for us……

So — I was terrified at school of doing something ‘wrong’ so that my mother would get a ‘report’ from the teacher — at least I got an education and stayed smart and still love learning….

So — my mother belittled and shamed me that I wrote ‘stupid stories’ and drew ‘the ugliest pictures’ — at least our family valued ‘art’ and provided me access to the basics of paper, scissors, pencils and crayons.

So — my mother kept me most of my childhood from going outside to play — at least on our Alaskan homestead I always knew that the perfect beauty of the wilderness was just on the outside of the walls….

So — my mother violently bashed my head and face into the toilet bowl when I was four because she believed I was trying to murder my 2 year old sister when I was just showing her the beautiful bubbles the sunlight made on the pattern of the shadow of the hair ball floating in the water — at least my mother NEVER removed from me my powerful love of beauty…..

So — my mother viciously verbally abused me when my pet rabbit died — at least I had been allowed to HAVE a pet to love….

So — my mother abused me at times with too little or too much food to eat — at least there was always something in the house to eat…..

So — my mother took the family to Alaska when I was five, to a large extent to remove my grandmother from my life — at least I had SOME attention from my grandmother before then and I knew she was alive in Los Angeles….

So — my mother liked to place me in the center of the car’s back seat so she could train the rear-view mirror directly on me so she could stare at me and give me the perpetual evil eye — at least our family had transportation…..

So — we moved a bizillion times in my childhood — at least when my mother was en-captured in her move-a-thons she had less time to traumatize me and at least some of those moves took us up to the homestead I loved….

So — my mother beat me many times ‘to within an inch of my life’ — at least there was always that inch….

So — holidays were among the very, very few times my mother’s direct abuse of me abated — at least there were holidays…

So — ‘being in public’ meant that my mother bit her tongue and restrained her fists — at least there WAS public (sometimes)….

So — my mother let me clearly know she hated it that “Linda is never sick” and let me know she wished I was and that none of her other (precious) children had to suffer (as if it was my fault that I refused to take on THEIR sickness) — at least I had a healthy strong body with incredible stamina that allowed me to endure and endure and endure her…..

So — my mother screeched at me when I was 17, “You are no better than a snake!  You would be a terrible mother!  I hope God never sees fit to give you children.” — at least I proved her DEAD WRONG!

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+’MAKING SENSE’ OUT OF ABUSE/TRAUMA – FINDING THE CONTEXT

alchemynowLeave a comment

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The comments to my last post have stimulated and challenged my mind.  I know myself well enough to say that I will only ‘make sense’ of my own thoughts if I write them.  Putting words down in order satisfies both sides of my brain, and I as the participant in the middle need to know what all of me believes in response to those comments.

First of all some part of me wishes to apologize to my readers that my perceptions are so completely limited to my own experience.  In conversation with my friend last weekend the point was made that the reason why I absolutely lack the ability to understand ‘normal/ordinary’ (I note my ‘new’ use of slashes as I find a way to expand and include thoughts that are bound together in meaning to me) people’s strong prejudices, biases, and rigid closed-mindness about so many important aspects of being human.

My friend vehemently insisted that the foundation of beliefs that govern people’s values (and their expression in word and action about them) comes from what people LEARN.  My friend then treated learning as if it is fact.

I see nothing whatsoever factual about what people tend to believe about themselves in relationship to so many other people.  “How,” I ask myself, “can something LEARNED not be continually and fluidly subject to change through MORE and NEW learning?  How is it possible that people get absolutely STUCK with something they learned before regarding beliefs that (to me) have no basis in fact AT ALL?”

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Well, leaving that track of thought I understood that my nearly complete social isolation for the first 18 years of my life (with the exception of pantomiming being a child in school), I MISSED out on the kind of learning that binds and packs people together.  And because I missed being socialized on so many levels I did not learn what most people evidently do learn.

Therefore I cannot understand WHAT they learned any more than I can understand HOW they learned it or WHY they can’t learn something new that would be far more conducive to a pleasant world citizenship all the way around!

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THESE thoughts are feeding themselves into the channel of reactions I am having to the comments to my last post.  “What it is about making sense of trauma that MATTERS so much to me?  What is it about learning as much information as possible about the CONTEXT of infant-child abuse/trauma that FEELS so vitally important to me?”

I look around and look around and look around at the context of ME as a survivor of nearly constant, continual and terrible abuse for the first 18 years of my life and realize that I can no more expand my thinking about what it might be like for others who DID experience terrible early abuse/trauma but ALSO experienced BREAKS IN THE ABUSE/TRAUMA THEY EXPERIENCED.

The particular context of my history is that there were no breaks of note in the 18 year ongoing panorama of abuse toward me.

So why do I write a blog about abuse/trauma if I cannot form a bridge and cross it between what I know and what other people know?

Good question.  My writing is completely biased.

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So back to making sense of early abuse/trauma and context.  Humans have active sensing abilities before we are born.  Then we are born with these abilities to gain information through our senses fully active and growing in their power.

To me, ‘making sense’ of all aspects of our self in the world is just a simple, basic fact.  That is what being alive MEANS to me.

When I think about connecting all the information that we are constantly sensing from outside our body and from within and THEN take my thinking to the next level, all I see is more of a natural continuum.  As humans we take all we SENSE and use this information to ‘make sense’ that we can detect with the complex abilities of our brain.

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All these words above paved the way for me to think through what I need to say next here:  The MOST important tool we have as human beings, no matter WHAT or HOW our life has played itself out since our conception, IS THE POWER TO MAKE SENSE out of ourselves in the world.

When it comes to infant-child abuse and trauma, if we DO NOT gain as much information as possible about the biggest-picture-context of the environment (most importantly about the people in it) we cannot possibly LEARN what we need to know that will assist us to be free of the NEGATIVE impact of what was done to us.

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I am talking about RISK factors as they are intricately interwoven with RESILIENCY factors.

RISK factors lie on the side of what ruptures safety, security and calm peacefulness.

RESILIENCY factors lie on the side of what repairs the ruptures so that safety, security and calm peacefulness return.

Because we are members of a social species, and because all of our experiences including abuse/trauma happen in relationship to another member of our species (one way or the other), the entire STORY of our life is a story about our degrees of safety, security and calm peacefulness IN RELATIONSHIP WITH AND IN CONNECTION TO OTHERS OF OUR SPECIES firstly and most importantly.

THERE IS NO STORY WITHOUT CONTEXT.  THERE IS NO COHERENT STORY WITHOUT SENSE.

IF there is abuse/trauma the story will NOT be truly coherent.  The sense of the story will be lost.

I believe that looking for the CONTEXT of one’s life is the most certain way of healing our stories — and therefore our LIFE and our SELF.

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These conditions I share with all others.  I find this fact very comforting.

Everyone’s life has a context.  Some people don’t have to pay this fact much attention.  Those of us who suffered severe early infant-child abuse/trauma HAVE to find the biggest context possible because it was the power that this CONTEXT had to traumatize US that matters most in our process of healing from the abuse/trauma’s consequences.

The more the CONTEXT of our early life ran us over as individual little people the more we can benefit now from identifying this CONTEXT so that we can separate our SELF from it.

HOWEVER!!!!!!  I must say this:  The context of our earliest life DID NOT CONTAIN ALL BAD!  If it HAD been all bad, we would be dead.

I believe it is extremely important that we locate within the context of our earliest life, no matter how terrible the abuse/trauma was, what the GOOD aspects of our life were at the SAME TIME.

This is where we will find the RESILIENCY factors that WERE there in the midst of the terrors and horrors of our abusive/traumatizing early years.

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In fact, we cannot find and describe the big picture of the CONTEXT of any part of our life without including these powerfully positive resiliency factors.  This is, to me, one of the necessary components of MAKING SENSE of what happened to us — no matter how BAD that part of our experience might have been.

I also believe that we cannot accurately name the risk factors that allowed trauma to topple down the generations and land in/on us without at the same time naming the resiliency factors that ALSO toppled down the generations to land in/on us.  CONTEXT allows us to name the BAD of what happened to us at the same time we name the GOOD of what happened to us.

The more information we can INCLUDE in our conscious efforts to heal so we can ‘move on through our life with increased well-being’ means at the same time that there is LESS information being EXCLUDED.

The EXCLUDED information lies in the realm of the ‘secrets’.  Unresolved trauma thrives on secrets.  Trauma needs to communicate its wisdom toward a better future.  When trauma resides in secrets important information it needs to share remains out-of-reach and worse than useless.

Unresolved trauma creates HARM.  I believe it does so largely to MAKE US PAY ATTENTION TO IT.

Importantly, when the secrets hidden in unresolved trauma are kept alive, what helps us SURVIVE trauma resiliently remains obscure as well.

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I will say one other thing here:  As one commenter pointed out to me, my life story is about what my mother did to survive HER trauma (I think I paraphrased this OK).  Nothing about my mother’s infant-childhood abuse/trauma was openly acknowledged and understood — until I investigated the CONTEXT of the abuse that happened to me and came to understand that what happened to me was distinctly a part of the context of how my mother survived what happened to her.

And on down the generations bludgeons unresolved trauma.

As twisted as this may seem at first glance, what happened to me in the context of the bigger picture WAS a good thing.  What happened to me was a direct result of how my MOTHER survived what happened to her.  If survival is the ONLY real concern, it was all GOOD.  If my mother had not found a way to survive the horrors of her own childhood I would never have been born at all.

Looking for and at the resiliency factors that were available to my mother, she used the only ones that were available to her.

Right along with looking at what went so WRONG for my mother in her earliest life (due to risk factors) I ALSO look at the absence of BETTER resiliency factors than the ones she had available — and used.

Moving forward just a little bit along my current thinking here I want to add that it wasn’t JUST the terrible abuse that my mother perpetrated against me that was the RISK factor for me.  It was also if not equally a risk factor (and a missing resiliency factor) for me that NOBODY intervened to protect me — just as nobody intervened to protect my mother when she was little, either.

All severe infant-child abuse survivors had heavy-weight risk factors AND heavy-weight resiliency factors.  How can we move toward healing if we don’t know the fullest context possible of what happened to us so that we can consider both?

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+DEAD CHILDREN: LEAVES FALLEN FROM THE FAMILY TREE

alchemynow4 Comments

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I do not mean for this post to be a morbid one, only an informative one.  In looking at the power than unresolved trauma has to follow in families on down the generations I want to write about two discoveries I have made regarding important MEN in my family tree that have to do with the ‘missing’ children, the dead ones, whose initial ‘being in the world’ no doubt impacted the entire lives of these MEN, albeit perhaps invisibly.

Perhaps it is simply my own limited range of thinking and vision that alerts me to the possibility that it is NOT so much the stories that are told in a family — as few or as many as there may be or have been — that truly matters most.  It seems more likely to me that it is the stories that are NOT told that are the ones that contain the storms of intergenerational unresolved trauma that can combine to impact future generations in traumatic ways that TRULY MATTER.

Those of us living today receive the benefit of medical advancements that have lessened or eliminated especially the risk of premature death for infants and children.  It was not too many generations past that the continued life of one’s offspring could be counted on.

There are schools of thought that suggest that modern efforts toward the protection of children did not come into play until the survival of children was more likely to happen than it did in the past.  Before medical advancements came along to help protect the life of people from diseases we can now prevent and treat,  so many parents lost their little ones that a sort of emotional (and affectionate) vacuum existed to lessen the profound grief that losing one’s infants and children had on parents in the past.

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It was not unusual in the past for infants and children to be treated as possession-objects rather than as human beings with needs, feelings and rights of their own.  In order to more fully understand how we, as early infant-child abuse survivors experienced the ongoing trauma that DID come down to us from our family’s past history, we need to gather for ourselves as much information as we can about the possible CONTEXT that is NOT told in the stories that belong to and within our family tree.

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I contrast to what I am writing here don’t consider myself especially interested in a genealogical search for my ancestral connections.  Yet at the same time I have devoted many, many hundreds of hours to transcribing the writings of my mother, even of her mother, letters of my father as these words filtered down over time into my possession.

I only through accident have come across two streams of information that directly apply to my words here today.

The first piece of information relates to the contextual history of my own father.  The stories told within my family of origin always included the fact that my father was an ‘unwanted’ child that arrived late among his siblings.  We were told that his sister (unwillingly) was given responsibility for his care when he was young and ‘raised him’.

Much later when I was an adult over 30 my father told me that during his childhood his mother ‘never left the house unless she had to go to the store’ and ‘never had company come to her home’.  This information gives me a sense of the context of my grandmother’s depression and/or sadness that I am quite certain PROFOUNDLY affected my father’s infant-child development.

It has only been in the past few months since my daughter began gathering family records to connect herself to my father’s mother who was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution that an important NEW piece of information arrived about the context of my father’s family.  Included on my father’s birth certificate is the fact that there were FOUR children born living while only THREE were living as my father was born.

A MISSING CHILD among my father’s siblings.

This fact was NEVER mentioned in spoken words at any time that I know of, and yet is SUCH an important one that it has rearranged and changed everything I know about myself, as the daughter of a man who never stood up to his abusive wife, who never ONCE intervened to protect me or any of my siblings from my mother’s insanity and abuse.

I know enough to understand that the grief of losing a child affected my father’s parents — and siblings — and within the bigger picture, the enlarged context of my family of origin — that missing child affected me.

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This past weekend I had a woman come visit me overnight who has been a friend of mine for 30 years.  She lives in Annapolis but was in Arizona visiting her sick brother and popped on down to visit me.  My friend has been deeply involved in researching her family tree, and generously spent time online showing me information that can be accessed on my own family history.

I chose to have her look into my mother’s father’s ancestral line.  While she couldn’t go back very far, what was found is fascinating.

And NOTHING that we found was EVER mentioned in story by my mother whose parents divorced in 1930 when my mother was five.  My mother’s mother remained angry and embittered, full of hatred for her ex husband until her death.  She forced her hatred into my mother so that my mother ‘disowned’ her father and never saw him again past about the year 1932.

My mother’s father’s side of the family tree was amputated and erased from the spoken history of our family, but the effects of even this bitterness and the family trauma it was connected to DID affect not only my mother, but also impacted me, and through me, my offspring.

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We could find no information further back than the 1881 Canadian Census, and moving forward to the 1900 United States Census.

Perhaps because my friend is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church she immediately noted that my mother’s father’s father (my great grandfather) had listed himself as a member of the Universalist Church on the 1881 census.  His father was listed as born in England, his mother as born in France and French speaking.  We could not find the name of either one of these ancestors of mine.

We did find that the first Canadian Universalist (Unitarian) church was started in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canaca in 1937, and that my great grandfather was born there in 1845.  (His wife was also born there).  These people immigrated to the Boston, MA area in 1882 and by the 1900 census were listing three children:  Ada (23) who I know nothing about, her brothers Howard (11) and Charles (9).  Charles became my mother’s father.

ALSO included in the census information is the fact that there were FIVE dead children probably between Ada and Howard.  No matter what happened to them, that is a LOT OF GRIEF AND TRAUMA that I never heard anyone ever say anything about.

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What this tells me in simple fact is that my mother’s father was the youngest child in his family as was my father in his.  I know enough to suspect that the silent, invisible grief in BOTH of these families affected these MEN — right on down the line.

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The other piece of information about my great grandfather’s connection to the Universalist Church in Nova Scotia has provided an avenue for continued ancestral search because according to my friend’s online search that church still has all of its records.  I have emailed them asking for help.  I would like to know if my unknown great great grandparents were involved in the founding of this first church in Canada.

I am also intrigued with the unique religious affiliation that these ancestors of mine had outside of the ‘mainstream’ of Christian culture.  Learning this piece of information rearranged how I think about free-thinking self and my own very free-thinking children.  That all of these ancestors, all the way back to the French ones (I hope to find my great grandmother’s maiden name from the marriage records of the church in Halifax), were NEVER mentioned by my mother is a clear sign to me that just as there are road signs to unresolved trauma within families carried in the death of children, there are also road signs to unresolved trauma carried within other family history that is encased within silence.

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I do not believe that severe infant-child abuse EVER EVER simply pops up within a family out of nowhere.  If there is abuse, it came from somewhere and is a part of a much bigger picture of trauma and is part of a much larger context that we MUST find as much information about as we possibly can to further our own healing process.

It might seem like nonsense within our culture to put the emphasis that I do personally on the need for severe infant-child abuse survivors to go back through any safe way they can to gather ANY and ALL POSSIBLE INFORMATION about family history so that our understanding about how unresolved trauma FROM THE PAST directly impacted what happened to us can be broadened.

Trauma does NOT easily resolve itself in silence — not when it happened and not as it passes down through the generations.

I also believe that blaming and shaming the perpetrators of abuse is NOT helpful to gathering the kind of contextual information that we need to know.  If, as I suspect, trauma does not resolve itself until somebody, somewhere at sometime LEARNS what the trauma has to teach, we need to learn as much as we can about what the signals/signs/symptoms of unresolved trauma are.

Finding that there are amputated branches from the family tree, such as there are in mine, and finding that we had ancestors that died as babies and children so that the unresolved trauma of grief passed down the generations and no doubt affected our parents IS NOT MEANINGLESS TIDBITS OF INFORMATION.

Every bit of unresolved trauma from ‘back there’ found its way, sometimes in trickles, sometimes in roaring rivers, into the ocean of sadness, violence, confusion, loss and rage that fed the traumatic abuse that happened to us.  The more we can know about these histories, the more we can find, hear, tell and learn from the stories (especially in the silent ones carried within families), the more coherent our OWN life story and our telling of our own life narrative will become.

Because the inability to tell a coherent life narrative is the number one sign of an adult insecure attachment system-disorder, it is critically important that we find and use anything we can find that helps us make sense out of trauma.  We can make progress this way in smoothing out the pathway that leads through us from the past into the future.

Our individual participation in this ‘smoothing out’ process, gained through knowledge that leads to understanding and compassion, will increasing contribute SOOTHING healing and equally soothing calmness for our own self and for all those we are in contact with as we work to put trauma to rest.

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+GUEST POSTS ALWAYS WELCOME! AN INVITATION

alchemynowLeave a comment

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If any reader ever wishes to write a guest post for this blog you are more than welcome to do so!  The best way for you to do this is to add your post as a comment at the last tab that appears with the pages at the top of this blog:

Your Page – Readers’ Responses

We can all describe and document our experiences as infant-child abuse survivors.  The growing body of this information, as it is contained in our stories and experiences, is growing online to become a most valuable resource for everyone — no matter what stage of our journey of life we are writing about.

The ‘professional’ community at the ‘top’ has been missing the truth of what we at the ‘bottom’ truly know about living our lifetime in a trauma-changed body that was altered through our experiences of having to adapt our physiological development to an early environment of trauma.  It is time for us to find our words to describe a reality that those at and near the ‘top’ (the Pampered Ones) cannot — on their own — even begin to imagine.

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+CONVERSATIONS CONTINUED: DIFFERENCE BETWEEN NEED AND GREED

alchemynowLeave a comment

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Following my thinking from my previous post, +PATTERNS OF CONVERSATION – SOOTHING OR NOT? I find myself wondering how, even if we do detect subtle or blatant competitive aggression in conversations, how do we know whether or not a person is ACTUALLY experiencing their unsafe and in-unsecure attachment system as ON — which means they have needs that are present in the conversation but are not being recognized or addressed — versus someone who is being greedy rather than needy?

Greed implies to me that a person has their basic needs met through access and utilization of adequate resources but WANTS and intends to guarantee to themselves that they will have MORE THAN THEY NEED.

I suspect the only way anyone knows (about someone else or about their self) whether greed or need is operating ‘below the surface’ and intertwined in conversations that feel unsettling and stressful rather than sustaining and soothing is that an honest degree of awareness of INFANT-CHILDHOOD has been gained so that this history (as if absolutely affected development of body-brain) is KNOWN.

It is probably not ‘good enough’ to note the ‘symptoms’ of need-greed being present in self and/or others.  If the context, the earliest history is NOT known, a wide open space exists within which determination between actual need related to an insecure attachment system versus outright greed cannot be made.

We can watch someone operate who appears competent and confident — perhaps self-righteous and arrogant and selfish — but still appearing as if they have everything ‘all together’ — and not be able to detect whether their aggression-competition in conversation (and action) is due to their UNDERLYING, unknown, unconscious (even implicit-memory based) woundedness or to outright greed.

Either way, what I most often experience is that it is not considered appropriate to ASK someone for clarity regarding these issues.  Humans operate with supposed conscious choice in our culture at the same time most of the platform for conversation is built on ignorance of important factual information.  Even if we know someone a LONG time, and know a LOT about their background — enough to expect that their NEED is at the bottom of their inability to truly express empathy and compassion — it is STILL not appropriate to bring up the truth.

This awareness leads me to feel dissatisfied, empty, and often drained after engaging in conversation with nearly everyone.  If I had NOT been built in a world of trauma, abuse and isolation I strongly believe that I would be able to abide by the ‘rules of social engagement’ along with nearly everyone else on their terms without question.  Most importantly, I would participate in the ignorance and NOT know what I do detect.  How easy that would that be?

Meanwhile, I believe that greed is one of America’s most powerful mainstream cultural ACCEPTED values.  That not even THIS fact can be ‘politely’ addressed and usefully conversed about just further contributes not only to the drain that our society creates for the planet, but also for the individuals within it that choose to remain blinded to and by this fact.

As long as we continue NOT defining personally and culturally the difference between what we NEED from our expressions in word and action of GREED we will never grow into our mature wisdom.  We will continue to toddle along with hoped for impunity until somewhere down the line the consequences of our ignorance catches up to us — because it will.

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I further think that severe infant-child abuse survivors, once we let the reality of how awful our early years REALLY were, can have a distinct advantage over ordinary people in that we KNOW we didn’t get our basic human rights or needs met.  This means that perhaps we can become more honest, more clear, more conscious — and more responsible for how we interact with others than ordinary people might EVER decide they need to.

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