The most important work we can do, individually and globally, is the healing and prevention of traumas so that we don't pass them down to future generations. This blog is a working tool to contribute to this good work.
As so often happens I have no idea what I need to say until I write it. If I don’t write my thoughts just continue to roll around in a jumble like long scarves swirling around in a tumble drier. I am thinking about how one’s social-emotional early forming right limbic brain develops must appear in action during conversation. (I almost said human-to-human conversation, but is there other kinds? Yes, I do think so.)
If patterns of safe and secure or unsafe and insecure attachment revolve around patterns of rupture and repair, then I suspect these same patterns govern our ‘people’ conversations. (My thoughts are spinning around very quickly so I will have to hope what I pick out of this swirl applies to what I really want to say!)
Resonance and mirroring, sending and receiving signals — along with activated safety and security attachment needs versus the ability to deactivate one’s own attachment system so that caregiving can happen — are a part of human interactions we have with others from the moment we are born.
What about the patterns of rupture and repair in conversations?
I wonder: If true empathy and compassion are present in conversation MUTUALLY do the patterns of rupture and repair never have to occur? Is this kind of conversation, then, the kind that leaves us feeling ‘balmed’ – listened to, hear, appreciated, valued, understood and BETTER for the conversation?
I would contrast these soothing, balming kind of conversations to ones where there is a disturbing competition between the speakers. Who is right? Who is wrong? Who is smartest? Who knows more than the other? How does the competition for the ‘goodies’ of conversation play itself out?
In patterns either of rupture with repair or rupture without repair. And we KNOW the difference. A competitive conversation leaves us feeling disturbed if not distressed like neither participant was able to truly say from the heart what they would have liked to say — and neither truly listened to or heard the other.
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I believe that some people are by nature, by design, or by trauma-altered early development far more competitive than others. There is a spectrum of aggression and on this spectrum lies those people who thrive on competition and those who find competition troubling and unnecessary.
I am one of those who see very little need for competition. When competition appears in conversation it means to me that someone is trying to override (in disrespect) the other. To me, competition does not happen when there is a mutual acknowledgment of ‘there’s plenty of resources to go around’.
Traumatic backgrounds often leave people feeling desperately unsafe and insecure in the world so that their attachment system never actually turns itself off. Rupture WITH repair allows for attachment needs to be met so that the system can turn itself OFF.
Rupture WITHOUT repair in relationships and conversations happens, I suspect, when one or both people’s insecure attachment systems remain ON so that one or both peoples CAREGIVING system cannot truly (honestly) be activated. Our attachment and our caregiving systems are so linked together than diminishing activation of one system allows for increasing activation of the other. Humans are not designed to operate with these two system dissociated from one another.
I am NOT saying that either attachment or caregiving remain separate from one another. I AM saying that the way that they are always linked together affects our patterns of human interaction either toward a center point of soothing calm or toward a center point of competition for scarce and needed (depleted) resources.
The fact that we are not educated in any way to usefully recognize these patterns so that we can identify them, name them, own them and then bring under our power of conscious choice our ability to ALTER how these patterns are operating creates (I believe) far more unsatisfying than truly satisfying conversations with others people in our world.
I suspect that the more we are in competition with one another (nearly always on the unconscious level) the LESS able we are to help ourselves and others increase our sense of safety and security in the world. This means we are then NOT increasing our ability to feel empathy and compassion because degrees of safety and security are what allows true empathy and compassion to operate.
Our body is designed this way. Our safety and security ‘sense’ system is directly tied to our (anxiety producing) stress versus calm/connection (soothing) response system. I do not believe that genuine connection between people involves active competition — on any level (I am not talking about ‘friendly games’). I also suspect that if a person has unacknowledged need competition with others for scarce resources will be present on some level.
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For the first 18 years of my life I was nearly completely barred from social opportunities to participate in banter, gossip, or any other (more?) meaningful human conversation (some experts suspect that humans acquired verbal language due to our motivation to include more members of a social group in gossip). I DID witness, listen and watch others any time I was around them. Nearly all of the time to this day some aspect of who I am is involved with this same process — which contributes to my sense of remoteness and disconnection from others. I believe I was wired this way from birth.
Being involved in this kind of remote watching even when I am involved in conversations with others often feels awkward — if not just plain ‘wrong’ — like part of me is spying upon and critiquing ongoing patterns of conversations, detecting what others were built-from-birth to know instantaneously and automatically and can simply accept as givens and ignore.
Because solitary confinement and social isolation was such a large part of the patterns of abuse I experienced the first 18 years of my life I do not believe that ordinary human conversation (even in my native English tongue) will ever be natural to me. I am an ‘outsider’ who can somehow ‘cheat’ in conversation like I am watching a movie and can detect in human conversations what others do not(though I was the one initially who was cheated and deprived of what most people take for granted).
Then after conversations I have participated in I have a whole basket full of information I have gleaned by watching the patterns that I have absolutely NOBODY to share the information with. So today I share this with you.
I was able to sit in my garden this morning to watch the first sun rays touch the delicate leaves of the Ballerina Rose bush I moved yesterday. “Ah-Ha!” I thought to the rose. “I can tell you will be happy there, and I am glad! No longer will you have to wait too long each morning for that light you so desperately need. You will grow into a beautiful plant now. Just wait until next summer. You will see!”
I hope 'my' rose reaches this fullest expression of beauty -- in its own time.
It was cool last night, though still not quite a hard freeze. There is no breath of wind, and I was able to hear each leaf collapsing off the branch of the old Mulberry tree I hard-pruned last summer. Plink! Click! Clatter! Each single leaf marked its falling with a sound hitting the hard adobe walkways.
Does a falling leaf remember its life growing upon the twigs and branches of a tree each year? Does it remember its falling? Can a leaf remember itself once its eaten by a worm and becomes new soil that in turn can feed the growth of something else?
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I thought about how hard my day was for me yesterday. I realized how critically important my garden is to me — for a reason I have not until now clarified in words.
My garden is a collective storehouse of my memories.
This helped me to understand more clearly that just as a leaf is not likely to remember itself in its life, I cannot really remember myself in my life, either. My memories are not ‘attached’ to me as I suspect ‘ordinary’ people’s memories are attached. My memories are attached externally to objects and to people.
Semantic memory is a memory for facts, I think always available in their connection to descriptive words.
Autobiographical memory is SUPPOSED to form so that a self is in the middle of the memory — because they were in the middle of the experience of not ONLY the experience as it happened in time — but most importantly they were in the experience of HAVING the experience as it happened.
This is connected to the critical FEELING FELT process that is supposed to happen for an infant as its body-brain is building through interactions it has with its earliest caregivers. The nature of the infant-caregiver interactions are SUPPOSED to mirror back to the infant, reflect back to the infant, and resonate with the infant in such a way that the infant begins — through the experience of FEELING FELT — to know that it has a SELF inside of it that is having the experience of feeling its own self in its own life.
I MISSED THIS STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT, and once this stage was missed and the ‘feeling felt’ neurons did not develop in an ordinary way, I have lacked the ability to FEEL FELT in my body in my own life — for ALL of my life.
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I thought again this morning about the very first time I encountered a literal awareness of the passage of time. When I was 18, fresh away from home and just out of Naval boot camp, I met a man I fell in love with, had a child by, and eventually married (and soon divorced).
This man had friends with money who lived high on a hill somewhere in the San Francisco Bay area. We went to visit them one day and I saw my first hammock. It was pure white, strong and new looking, hanging in the sun from the branches of two trees that overlooked a vineyard.
Nothing should have been especially noteworthy about my seeing the hammock, and there wasn’t until I returned 2 years later on another visit with my partner and encountered the hammock again.
There is STILL something intangible about my experience of having the experience of encountering this hammock a second time. There it was, the same hammock, but now it was sun rotted, broken and shredded, dirty and in threads half hidden in a growth of weeds.
I remember standing there gazing at the hammock in SHOCK!
It wasn’t the hammock itself that I was responding to so much as it was my very first experience of SEEING the passage of time.
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As I remember this memory this morning — the hammock as I first saw it, the hammock as I saw it next — and as I remember the stunned sensation that filled me at realizing PHYSICALLY in my body that enough time had passed by since I had first walked upon that spot that the hammock and disintegrated into nothing but a tangled web of broken strings — I realize that this is the clearest example I have in my life of how the passage of the time of me in my life is connected NOT to my own internal experience of myself passing through time but is rather connected to how everything I can notice OUTSIDE of myself passes through time.
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My memory returns to the second experience I am clearly aware of that again involves a physical object (as if these things have a life of their own — like a leaf) with its own ‘life in and over time’.
When I was 20 and first moved with my little daughter to Fargo, North Dakota I was blessed with the sweetest landlady anyone could every have — Lily. Over the few months that I lived in Lily’s basement apartment I often sat with her at her kitchen table and shared coffee with her and visited.
After many such encounters one day something came into my awareness — again with a sense of shock. There on the lowest shelf of her narrow shelves built into the wall next to her kitchen table was the exact same sand-filled, metal-topped, plaid cloth-bottomed ashtray — that had ALWAYS been returned to sit in that same exact spot.
Thinking about my own inner reaction to my realization that the ashtray ‘resided’ in that spot over time reminds me of something my son said when we were eating burgers at a restaurant when he was three. Well, actually, he was NOT eating his hamburger — a fact that created this specific memory for me.
We were ready to leave and as I looked at my son’s plate with its burger still intact I said to him, “You haven’t even touched your hamburger!”
He replied from his three-year-old’s perception, “Here, momma, I am touching it now,” as he gingerly placed the tip of his right pointer finger on the bun.
“Oh,” I said next. “I guess we’ll just have take it home.”
My son, in his young thinking-processing stage was NOT being sassy when he responded back. “But Momma! We can’t take the hamburger home! It already is home! This is where it lives!”
At three years of age and beginning at the end of the second year a child “can construct accurate representations of events that endure and are accessible over time.” These are imprinted into the right brain hemisphere as AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY.
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My son was very much involved in related growth and developmental processes that happen as ‘Theory of Mind’ develops — as he went through them HIS WAY. Eventually, of course, he grew to understand that hamburgers don’t ‘live’ anywhere and don’t have a ‘Theory of Mind’. Hamburgers also don’t have memory — at least not as we usually think of memory.
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I have a whole collection of sticky notes attached to this growth chart I am looking at. I have been waiting for years to be ready to address them, in all their simply stated accuracy, in my writing. These statements are about critically important inner growth processes that happen from age one to age four. These stages of development are built upon the first foundation of body-brain development that happens from birth to one through early attachment relationships an infant has with its caregivers.
So far I cannot look directly at these next stages of development because I personally know that NOTHING went as it should have in my development up until age one — and therefore all of my future development was altered, as well. I have not wanted to face what all these changes did to me!
Yet I also know that my ability to have ‘ordinary’ experience of having experience with the FEELING FELT in my own body as the experiences happen — and then storing those memories autobiographically — was stolen from me by severe abuse from birth. I was amputated from my own life, separated from it as surely as each leaf I watch plummet to the earth on a windless morning has been amputated from its tree.
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Identifying specifically HOW I experience my life is hard enough. Finding words to describe it is equally as hard. While I know I am the person who watched those leaves fall this morning, I cannot FEEL it.
As I have worked toward being able to write my own story about my own experience of my severely abusive infant-childhood I have struggled with being able to remember what remembering myself in my first 18 years was REALLY like.
As I do this work I increasingly realize that how I experienced those first 18 years is the same as how I have ALWAYS experienced myself in my life.
Perhaps nature had no better way to assist me in surviving those 18 years of traumatic hell other than to remove from me the ability to truly FEEL myself feeling myself as I went through those experiences.
Instead every experience, as an amputated individual snippet in time, appears to me as if I had remotely WATCHED what happened from a very great distance away (like watching a hammock or an ashtray over time). Today it is becoming even more clear to me that the process I use — have always used — to remember my life is SEMANTIC recall of the facts as they happened and does not involve what ‘ordinary’ people would use as autobiographical memory building and retrieval.
I have always been left outside rather than inside my own life. I believe I lack the neurological underpinnings that would have formed the circuits and pathways inside my body-brain so that I could CONNECT and ASSOCIATE and ATTACH my own self in a ‘feeling felt’ way through time as I live in this body in my lifetime.
On this physiologically-trauma-changed level I ALSO lack those same required neurological pathways and circuits that would enable me to truly feel felt WITH and BY anyone else. I am left wondering what the ‘ordinary’ experience of life is even like for other people — and I truly believe I will never know. Once these emotional-social patterns are built into the body-brain BEFORE THE AGE OF ONE they cannot be changed.
The earliest foundations of body-brain growth and development happened for me in the midst of terrible trauma in such a way that my pathways and circuits were made in a different-than-ordinary way.
As surely as the body of the little girl me in those two pictures I included in my last post look like they were cutout and pasted into a picture of ongoing life of OTHERS that had nothing to do with the reality of my life, I am STILL a cutout-and-pasted-in person in the midst of a stream of life that I experience very, very differently from others.
Yes, I experience feelings. Intensely. But somehow my emotions are disconnected from my memory process in such a way that the literal facts of events are stored (as they are for everyone) separately from the emotions. In my case the emotional of memory (stored by a different process in the body as it is for everyone) is ALWAYS disconnected, unattached and dissociated permanently from my memory recall.
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In rewinding the ‘movie’ of my thinking process this morning I need to add in the part about going to visit yesterday’s post commenter’s blog and reading what he says there about Dissociative Identity Disorder from his experience and perspective. As I read I found myself being envious of people who can experience the experience of having ANY identity — from inside their own self — at all!
I think about looking at my newly moved rose bush shining away in the sunshine this morning. I can only begin to try to imagine what the rose bush’s experience MIGHT be like. As I look at my newly planted apple tree, also shining away and gently swaying in the emerging morning breeze I can wonder what it MIGHT be like to be that apple tree.
As I remember myself yesterday I try to IMAGINE what it was actually like to be me, to have my feelings and thoughts as I did yesterday, because I cannot FEEL myself in my memory from yesterday any more than I can feel what it might have been like to be anyone else — yesterday.
I document all of this simply because I know I was formed in an extreme environment — yes, like in a perfect storm. My mother was so insanely focused on what she did to me from birth that she was able to effectively beat, terrorize and remove from me all of my own ability to know what it was like to actually be me in my own life in any way except in the exact present moment as it was/is happening. Not only did she cut me off from nearly all human contact other than with her, she also cut me off from my ability to be in contact with my own feeling-felt self in my own life.
I therefore have a version of Dissociative Identity Disorder without any real, stuck-together, feeling felt version of any identity at all. I exist from one moment to the next because I semantically (factually) KNOW that I do — and because I exist to other people. No wonder I responded powerfully to the quip about “If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” when I first heard it shortly after I left home at 18.
This post is for this girl — I am still the same person and feel the same way.
Me left out -- I have felt that all of my life, just a few times less left out - very much feeling this today (me with my father's back turned on me - in a different universe than my siblings were - and I still pay the price for that)So sad. Sadness beyond 'in my bones' - in all the cells of my body -- and still there
I know I can’t think my sadness away, but I spent the day garden-building and trying to ask ‘God and the angels’ to show me what I can learn from it.
I miss the man I love (who prefers another’s company) and I miss my children and all my siblings more as the holidays arrive than usual. I HATE ‘the holidays’.
One of the ‘helpful’ insights today was knowing that I am not alone in how I feel, and ‘things could always be worse’.
Far from happy thoughts — either of THOSE two.
Not that I did actually arrive at any happy thoughts today — but I did end up (perhaps mixing up my holidays) thinking about Jesus on the cross and how alone He was there — but for his Father and the angels.
Then I thought about how easy it might be for humans to forget about God when they are happy with one another — well, I don’t fit THAT picture!
Tomorrow on Thanksgiving I am going to a friend’s house to help her in the kitchen — be with people — eat good food. My friend feeds anyone in the community who wishes to come every Thanksgiving.
I went last year, and ‘hiding’ in the kitchen suit me. Serving food to others suit me. Being quiet suit me. Watching and listening to others (as if they belonged to a different species than I do) suit me. I am not sure that I have ever truly felt any more a part of a group than I did in the picture of my father and his three favored children on the big Alaskan rock.
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At 59 knowing that I can’t CHANGE how I feel pisses me off more than anything else. I no longer have the false desire to try, either. I am soul tired.
People say, “Everyone feels alone in a crowd sometimes.” I believe it takes a special kind of severely traumatic and abusive infant-childhood for anyone to REALLY even begin to have a glimmer of a clue what ‘feeling alone’ really feels like.
Then I thought some more about Christ on the cross. I thought some more about my horrible, horrible childhood and the ‘special hell’ my mother reserved for me (as my oldest brother put it once). I thought about how NO INFANT or CHILD ever deserves the treatment that some of us had any more than Jesus deserved what happened to Him during His time on this earth.
This thought cheered me up a TINY bit.
Maybe it is because I feel so sad and soul weary that I cannot find any way at all to fight to ‘get better than this’ any more. I can’t run around and ‘try this’ and ‘try that’ and ‘run here’ and ‘run there’ like I used to. I can’t distract myself any more. I can’t fool myself any more. I can’t pretend any more.
I was, most importantly, able to be different for the 35 years of my life that I had a child under 18 in my care to raise. My ‘caregiving system’ was able to combine with my attachment to my children to get me down the road without having to have to FEEL the depths of my sadness.
I know now that the sadness has always been at my center since my insanely abusive mother built it into me from the time I was born. I am so proud of myself that I was able to let my children GO, to let them fly, to let them create for themselves their OWN life. I certainly wish they didn’t live — all three of them — in Fargo, North Dakota!
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Another train of my thoughts today (again) followed the course of my wandering lost life that seemed to most importantly enable all three of the very special people my children are to be born. Yet I also NEVER felt that the life I lived along the way was mine, meant for me, belonged to me. Maybe it is ONLY to the future that the meaning of my own life will come true — in my children, in their lives, the people they encounter and affect — and in the next generations.
If my body processed experience and stored my memories in a safe and securely attached fashion (autobiographical memory) I know I would feel different and be different today. My dissociational patterns means that all of my memories feel remote to me and NOT a part of ME. That is so WRONG — and so directly connected as a consequence of my having to build a body-brain in the midst of such terrible and continuing trauma.
I don’t believe my memories comfort me in the way that they do more ‘ordinary’ people — and they never have.
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I think knowing and feeling all of this is directly connected to the most fortunate opportunity I have to work outside with the soil to build a garden.
I laid a big piece of the drip irrigation in the back yard yesterday, and today I planted there. In went poppy seeds, larkspur seeds, pansy seeds — all waiting now for winter rains to nourish them — and for spring.
I planted a lilac today and I planted an apple tree. (I moved a rose bush to a happier place for it with morning light so I could better improve the spot for the apple tree.)
I am digging out an area by the back turquoise wood fence as I imagine perhaps — just perhaps — I can tear down the remains of the old shed on my back fence and use that lumber to build a chicken coop.
I use the adobe from that digging to fill in a long planter along the tall yellow metal fence.
I have an adobe bench back there I can sit on in the sun and watch the apple tree grow now. If I can build a chicken coop I could sit there and watch my chickens. I would LOVE to be able to do that — though I don’t have transportation to get to a feed store to buy them feed — even if I can afford to buy it — and can find three chickens.
And maybe a little rabbit. I could sit like I did when I was a child with my warm fuzzy so-gentle rabbit on my lap — pat it and get to know its spirit.
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Someday I hope somebody comes to visit me. I find down here in southeastern Arizona that people do not go to one another’s house to be with one another like they do up north. I couldn’t handle the ‘stimulation-noise’ of too many people — or the ‘wrong’ people. But SOMEONE?
My daughter will bring my grandson down about the 4th to the 8th of this January. That will be — well — fantastically wonderful! Then they will go and then I will miss them…….
Meanwhile………. Perhaps the angels like it if I talk to them.
(Oh — and yesterday I laid the drip over the large compost pile filled with delicious garbage and the thousand worms my sister sent me from Seattle! I moved the buried tomb that contained all my mother’s writings into the big compost — and guess what? For the first time in the four years I’ve lived on this property I saw centipedes — nested within my mother’s papers. HOW GROSS! I hate centipedes! Very unsettling, but somehow didn’t surprise me — certainly not after my recent posts about eliminating the hideous oleanders! The wonderful composting worms can have those papers now — and I KNOW they will make me wonderful garden soil out of them by spring!)
“Spikins and colleagues have embarked on what they call the “unique challenge” of charting the development of human compassion. They studied archaeological evidence for the way emotions, as they claim, began to emerge in our early ancestors and then developed to more recent humans such as Neanderthals and ourselves. The research by Spikins, Andy Needham and Holly Rutherford is published in the research journal Time and Mind.”
“In modern humans starting 120,000 years ago, compassion was extended to strangers, animals, objects and abstract concepts, according to the Spikins group’s model.
“Compassion is perhaps the most fundamental human emotion. It binds us together and can inspire us but it is also fragile and elusive,” Spikins said. “This apparent fragility makes addressing the evidence for the development of compassion in our most ancient ancestors a unique challenge, yet the archaeological record has an important story to tell.”
“Neuroscience research has shown that similar brain regions are involved when we think about the behavior of both humans and of nonhuman entities, suggesting that anthropomorphism may be using similar processes as those used for thinking about other people.
Anthropomorphism carries many important implications. For example, thinking of a nonhuman entity in human ways renders it worthy of moral care and consideration. In addition, anthropomorphized entities become responsible for their own actions — that is, they become deserving of punishment and reward.
Although we like to anthropomorphize, we do not assign human qualities to each and every single object we encounter. What accounts for this selectivity? One factor is similarity. An entity is more likely to be anthropomorphized if it appears to have many traits similar to those of humans (for example, through humanlike movements or physical features such as a face).”
“Scientists who specialize in brain development do agree on one thing: The ways in which babies sort objects into groups is a key sign of brain development.”
“Infants are learning how things move around in the world by watching their caretakers do actions and then deciding which things are like those objects, based on having the same parts,” Rakison says. “Then, they model the action.”
Young infants will learn nearly anything, Rakison says. As they get older, they become less likely to accept scenarios that don’t make sense—like cows with wheels or cars that hop.
Certain categories, however, may be so important that even very young infants learn them quickly. In his most recent experiments, Rakison showed spidery images to 5- and 9-month-olds.
The babies looked longer at realistic-looking spiders than at squished or scrambled spiderlike shapes. Babies as young as 10 months were also quicker to respond with fear to fake snakes and spiders than they were to cute stuffed rabbits, even when researchers acted as if they themselves feared the fluffy toys.
The results suggest that babies are born with some sense of what spiders and snakes are. “I’m not saying that they know [these animals are] bad or scary or dangerous,” Rakison says. “They’re simply prepared to learn.”
“By now your baby is paying close attention to how people and animals, as compared to objects, move. Baby realizes that animate objects (you, the cat, her big brother) move on their own, and inanimate objects (her binky, chairs, the balls she loves to watch roll) move only when carried, pushed, pulled, or tossed by an external agent. Baby seems driven to understand that animate objects engage in self-motion and that inanimate objects don’t.”
“By now, Baby has a firmer grasp on how the world gets around. She understands how people and animals move as compared to balls and toy cars. She’s likely surmised that animate objects don’t necessarily move in straight lines but may change direction without any obvious force acting upon them (although no, she doesn’t get that whole “free will” concept yet). And she seems to understand that a person has the capacity to look like he is going to get a drink or water but then changes course and turns on the computer instead.”
“Overall, oxytocin’s role in the brain appears to be to link social contact with pleasure. Without it, social species could not function. This, of course, includes humans. Evidence is emerging that oxytocin plays a central role in many aspects of human life, including romantic and social interactions and parenting. “It’s the glue of society, so simple yet so profound,” says Paul Zak, director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies in Claremont, California.”
“Eric Hollander of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York is studying what happens when you give oxytocin to autistic adults. He has found that it improves their ability to recognise emotions like happiness and anger in people’s tone of voice, something autistic people struggle with. A single intravenous infusion produced improvements that lasted two weeks (Biological Psychiatry, vol 61, p 498).
Hollander has also found that oxytocin increases his volunteers’ ability to recognise faces and interpret emotional expressions. Prior studies have already shown that when autistic people see faces, they activate brain areas normally used to recognise inanimate objects. Hollander says his preliminary results show that when given oxytocin intravenously, autistic people are more able to recruit the normal face-recognition area, the fusiform gyrus. Oxytocin also reduced their repetitive behaviours.”
“One argument for starting oxytocin treatment early in a child’s life is that it appears to play a crucial role in braindevelopment during infancy, helping babies learn to associate social contact with calmness and pleasure. For example, rats that receive more grooming from their mothers are better able to manage social stress. “In rats which get lots of attention from mom, there is a higher level of oxytocin in certain parts of the brain than in those that get less. These are systems shaped by early life experience,” says Young.
Zak adds: “We find in animal studies that if the mother neglects the baby, the number of oxytocin receptors atrophies.” Similarly, studies of monkeys raised without mothers find that they have lower oxytocin levels than monkeys reared normally.
The influence of oxytocin on mother-infant attachment can be seen in humans, too. Children who suffer severe early neglect – for example, raised without individual attention in a bare orphanage – often have symptoms indistinguishable from those of autism. A 2005 study found that children who had spent the first few months or years of their lives in a Romanian orphanage had lower than normal oxytocin responses to contact with their adoptive mothers (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 102, p 17237).
As a result of such work, Hollander is interested to see whether oxytocin can help alleviate disorders associated with early neglect. One of these is borderlinepersonality disorder, which is overwhelmingly associated with childhood trauma. People with this disorder have severe relationship problems, find social stress difficult to cope with and rejection unbearable.
If oxytocin can help treat borderlinepersonality disorder, then it could help rescue abused and neglected children from a lifetime of mental health problems. These children are at higher risk of developing virtually every psychiatric illness, from post-traumatic stress disorder to addiction, depression, anxiety disorders, antisocial personality disorder and schizophrenia.”
By IRINA TITOVA, Associated Press Irina Titova, Associated Press – Sun Nov 21, 7:26 pm ET
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia – Wild tigers could become extinct in 12 years if countries where they still roam fail to take quick action to protect their habitats and step up the fight against poaching, global wildlife experts told a “tiger summit” Sunday.
The World Wildlife Fund and other experts say only about 3,200 tigers remain in the wild, a dramatic plunge from an estimated 100,000 a century ago.
Just noting how absolutely uncomfortable I am with being angry — at anyone or anything for any reason. I have no idea what ‘healthy anger’ might be — no idea if there even is such a thing. No idea if some of this ‘healthy anger’ might be useful in combating sadness?
I heard a long time ago that ‘depression is anger turned inward’. No idea if that statement might be remotely true, either. It’s all a muddle to me — but today? Angry and afraid of it.
I just know that I NEVER NEVER feel my anger is ‘justified’ or that I have a right to EVER be angry. Therefore if I do feel angry, I am WRONG to feel it and I have to ‘make it go away’ ASAP. So how am I going to learn anything useful about or from my anger if I cannot tolerate even feeling it? Hum…
I answered it with my response 24 hours later. What I think about the article and the ideas contained within it doesn’t matter to anyone, really. Simply put, leave Maslow’s Pyramid alone.
What interests me most about this topic is my thought process. I took a look at the information when my daughter’s email came in, didn’t have an immediate response, and relegated-delegated any further thoughts on the subject to ‘the future’.
This future arrived suddenly as I worked outside in my yard. I wasn’t remotely aware that I was even ‘thinking’ about this article and my daughter’s request until THERE IT WAS! My response!
The process I evidently went through in this past 24 hours about this silly little subject fascinates me. Once THE ANSWER appeared — literally like it came as a boulder falling out of the sky and hitting me on the head in a cartoon — I now understand a little bit more about HOW I think. (The email I sent to my daughter once I had THE ANSWER appears at the bottom of this post.)
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Because of the information I now understand about how I am different as a result of the Trauma Altered Development I had to go through to survive my extremely abusive infant-childhood I am always interested to learn a little bit more about ‘how I work’. On this particular point I have no idea what an ‘ordinary or normal’ thought process might be like so have nothing to compare what I just experienced with.
What I DO know is that humans (I would say ESPECIALLY women!) are capable of ‘thinking’ in ways that our culture might not value. When my daughter presented me with her question I simply tossed the whole dang question ‘into the hopper’ and ‘forgot it’.
Obviously I DID NOT forget it! On all sorts of levels within my body-brain I have evidently been sorting through LOTS of information so that when THE ANSWER appeared, I KNEW instantly it was MY right one.
The image that came to me about this ‘whole body-brain’ ability to ‘think’ is that I didn’t so much toss the question to ‘a committee’ as I did to some part of my being that knows how to run an elevator! Over these past 24 hours that elevator operator has been moving up and down all the floors in the skyscraper of my body-brain. The operator stopped at each floor, opened the door, wandered around the groups of ‘people’ who live and work on each floor, gathering information on the topic from all of them.
Up-down-up-down, returning more than once to some floors to converse again with some members of ‘the group’ until finally a synthesis was made of ALL this information — and (as a commenter said this week) POP!! There was THE ANSWER!
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For those of us severe infant-childhood abuse and trauma survivors being able to think without attention and without ‘attachment’ or ‘association’ to the thought process that is going on ‘behind the scenes’ — I believe — is something we learned to do in part because trauma was likely to and did appear ‘out of nowhere’ without our being able to predict or control it nearly ALL OF THE TIME.
Being able to form a MIND at all meant that we grew a body-brain that honed to perfection the human ability to apply the greatest flexibility possible to our knowing and thinking processes. I believe these abilities are connected to ‘dissociation’ — but as my experience of these past 24 hours showed me — our abilities can be amazingly efficient, effective — and impressive!
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — the fundamental human rights declared in 1776 as The United States of America took its form as an independent nation. Where do abused infants and children look for their portion of these rights? To their caregivers.
As I work again today out in the sunshine on this glorious day, and as I pay attention to how I feel in my body, I know I am not happy. I am aware that what I am accomplishing is to lessen my continual sadness. “What, then,” I ask myself, “might contribute to something MORE than a lessening of sadness? What — if you use the powers of your mind to think and dream, might actually give you some measure of happiness?”
Well, at least I am in PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS! That’s the right direction for me to go as far as I can tell.
Happiness is NOT ‘just’ a lessening of sadness.
I’ve also been thinking about the ‘all right’ feeling as being a measure of a state of well-being. Oh, how seldom, how very, very seldom have I EVER experienced THAT feeling state: All is right. I am all right.
Knowing one is all right in the world is, to me, the rock bottom accomplishment given to an infant-child by its attachment-caregivers from birth so it can build this feeling state into its body-brain from the beginning of its life. From that time forward this feeling state remains built into the body and is therefore accessible to a person.
Being slapped and hit and yanked and punched and dragged around by hair and limb, having one’s skin punctured by grasping talons of fingernails, being screamed at and…….. Well, as I an other severe abuse survivors well know, these threatening, dangerous, traumatic and terrible-terrorizing conditions of infancy and childhood simply COULD NOT POSSIBLY build into our body a feeling of being ALL RIGHT.
Nope.
Never happened.
So here I am in adulthood sunk in the ‘depression’ of terrible sadness in the Meteor Crater I found myself born and battered in (not perched precariously at the top of a high precipice fighting to the death with her anger and rage against all perceived attacks, as my mother was).
Today I am practicing using my mind, thoughts and dreams to see if I can modulate-moderate the feelings of sadness into something that might resemble what I guess happiness is — or at least make progress toward an inner feeling of ALL RIGHT.
This is what I have come up with so far: If I could finish this garden, and name it The Secret Garden, then perhaps I could search out programs in this region of Arizona that work with abused children and invite them to come visit.
When I was five, and before our family moved from Los Angeles to Alaska, we visited an immense garden somewhere on a hill. I have never forgotten that glorious garden, and every single time in all my 54 years since that day when I think of that garden I feel not only a little-bit-less-sad, but for a brief flash of time I feel almost-happy.
Perhaps if I can create a magical garden here, designed especially for the eye level and imagination of five-year-olds, and then these little people who have been traumatized, battered and abused could come wander around here, MAYBE they too could carry within their body-brain-mind-self a memory that would ALWAYS be happy enough to displace their sadness (or rage) and provide for them a glimmer of true — ALL RIGHT — joy!
Big people could come, too — but it is to the little ones’ joy that I now return to my digging and adobe creation. May all of us today pursue our happiness!
I don’t want to write this post at the same time that I know I must write it. I don’t believe that what I am about to say is going to make any sense at all to very many people.
If we wrote books so that when we reached the very end of the story we found ourselves exactly right back at the beginning, we might more easily understand that as we look at some things from the inside, we are at the same time looking at them from the outside, as well. I don’t think we would be comfortable realizing the truth of being alive as members of our species if we were forced to understand that what we value so influences our judgments that we cannot easily find that line — the one that separates beginning from end or inside from outside.
My mother judged the world differently from normal — on every single level. Who she was made to be at the beginning of her life was exactly the same person that she was at the end of her life. Looking at my mother this way I understand that there really WAS no middle. Everything that happened to my mother and everything that she did for her entire life was the same — beginning to end — as she followed a pattern that was built within her body from birth. That pattern WAS the choice of her life, and I do not believe that my mother could EVER override it.
She never changed because she could not.
And the pattern that was my mother meant that she could never distinguish what was inside of herself from what was outside of herself.
I believe that it is fortunate that very, very, very few people would ever be able to understand who-how my mother was in her life.
I also believe that as we look around at some others within our species whose actions seem to defy all that we judge to ‘be human’ we are at the same kind of loss-to-comprehend that we would be should we try to understand my mother.
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I believe that there are extremes at the very, very, very far ends of the pampered-not pampered, of the benevolent-malevolent continuum of environmental conditions infants are born into and formed by.
I can’t imagine an outcome where too much benevolence (too much pampering as I define it as the absence of abuse and the provision of what we consider normal and necessary) could create truly desperate variations in human development that are as destructive as what too much malevolence (too much being not pampered) can and do create.
I do envision outcomes for infant-child development where the malevolence is mixed with inappropriate and false pampering that pushes development off the charts on the destructive-outcome end. (This is a combination that I believe destroyed my mother.)
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What I need to say here requires for understanding a perspective that lies beyond how I believe most people think. I believe there are circumstances that combine malevolent early infant-childhood deprivation and trauma in such a way that the result is on the long, far end of what Teicher describes as the ‘evolutionarily altered’ brain-being.
I see this as happening when enough external and internal pressure is put on a tiny developing person that something inside of them literally SNAPS. A break occurs that destines the not pampered infant-child down an impossible road of such desperation that no recovery from it will ever be possible.
These little ones grow up to become dangerous people. Their physiological development (I think) so closely matches the most ancient human patterns that kept our species alive in the most desperate circumstances in the most desperate environments we lived in — that few among us today can even begin to imagine those conditions. When THESE people change in their development, all hell breaks loose.
Yet we are doing ourselves a disservice to believe that just because we cannot easily ‘begin to imagine’ something that this something isn’t real.
If we continue to believe this way, we will not be able to critically think about the implications and consequences that are as equally real as ‘that which we cannot begin to imagine’.
We have to recognize this challenge to both our belief and to our ability to think about what we do not want to believe.
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Enough of wandering in circles here. I will go for the big circle — as ‘long ago’ trauma altered developmental response to terrible malevolent conditions meant the exact same response THEN that it still can today.
There are circumstances where the trauma-altered development of infant-children create monsters.
My mother was such a monster.
Yet if my mother had been a bitch wolf who found herself with a litter to raise in the worst environment of scarcity, deprivation and threat — and if THEN she had chosen to parcel out her attention and resources in such a way that perhaps some of her litter would survive and others wouldn’t — we would not raise our eyebrows very high over her actions.
Truly terrible terrifying trauma can, in some infant-children, trigger altered development that creates horrendous results: “Mothers, limit and/or kill your offspring.”
My mother was astute enough NOT to kill me, but the pattern was there. But I was tough, and I survived the worst she gave me anyway.
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Picture a primitive, hostile human world of tough times, much threat, dangerously scarce resources: Sexuality and violence changes. Males, having their own physiology, are more likely to end up creating havoc in the wider world (under a biologically-based imperative to ‘find food, create more offspring, expand territory, gather possessions, eliminate competition’), while females create their havoc close to and within their home — which always impacts their children.
We call what these people do in today’s world ‘crimes’ — the most serious, heinous crimes we cannot imagine — until they happen.
My mother was one of these desperate few. And if I am correct in my thinking there is absolutely no mystery whatsoever on its most basic level about why and how she was able to do what she did to me.
Stop the Storm 
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