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Earlier this week I had plans to go into town and meet my friend for lunch. It took me four hours of steady movement to get out the door. I noticed that even my cell phone seemed to take HOURS longer to charge itself, longer than usual. EVERYTHING seemed to take a long time – a long, long time.
I was reminded of an image that appears in Dr. Bruce Perry’s PowerPoint –Neurodevelopmental Impact of Childhood Trauma: Focus on Dissociation –about how the sense of time passing builds itself into various brain regions as an infant-child’s body grows and develops as shown in his diagram on page 10:
The ‘Sense of Time’ is broken down to show the primary and secondary brain areas involved, along with the kind of cognition and the mental state related to each. I don’t have the text that accompanied Perry’s original presentation of this information, but he is evidently describing the processing of time related to childhood trauma experiences and dissociation:
Extended Future – NEOCORTEX is primary, Subcortex is secondary, cognition is abstract, mental state is CALM
Days and Hours – SUBCORTEX is primary, Limbic is secondary, cognition is Concrete, mental state is AROUSAL
Hours and Minutes – LIMBIC is primary, Midbrain is secondary, cognition is Emotional, mental state is ALARM
Minutes and Seconds – MIDBRAIN is primary, Brainstem is secondary, cognition is Reactive, mental state is FEAR
Loss of Sense of Time – BRAINSTEM is primary, autonomic is secondary, cognition is Reflexive, mental state is TERROR
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Once I carefully ordered and transcribed all of my mother’s Alaskan homesteading letters that found their way into my possession after she died, I realized that she had meticulously omitted writing to her mother about anything related to the terrible abuse my mother had committed against me.
I also realized that over and over again my mother DID complain to my grandmother about how obnoxiously SLOW Linda was. I know now that my mother had, through her nearly constant brutalization and traumatization of me from my birth, had created my body-brain not only so that it continually had to dissociate but also so that my body became permanently weighted down under the yoke of lifelong depression.
One of the clearest connections I know of for myself between the patterns of dissociation and the connected depression (hypoarousal) is that my sense of the passing of time has NEVER worked the same in my body-brain as it does for a non-severely abused infant-childhood abuse survivor.
All the experiences an infant-toddler has are building its body-brain, including how the senses process the passage of time. What are we doing so wrong in the earliest attachment-caregiving environment of our offspring in our nation (see yesterday’s posts on United Nation’s studies) that is CAUSING these levels of suffering to change the physiological development of our children in adaptation to a malevolent environment?
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Children’s Exposure to Violence in U.S. at 60%
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I located a book online today that presents information both about what happened to me and about raising a child who does NOT end up living a life of depression.
Raising an Optimistic Child: A Proven Plan for Depression-Proofing Young Children–For Life
By Dr. Bob Murray and Dr. Alicia Fortinberry
If you click on this title’s active link it will take you to a page that talks about the skyrocketing rates of increasing childhood depression in both the United States and in Australia. This is part of the information you will read:
Childhood Depression Statistics
“The rate of childhood depression is increasing by 23% a year according to a Harvard Medical Center study.
The rate of depression is doubling every 20 years.
1 in 3 American children suffers from depression, 4% of children under 6, according to 2001 National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) statistics. Depressions are on average e similar in Australia.
Preschoolers are the fastest growing market for antidepressants.
There is absolutely no evidence that antidepressants work for young children….”
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We need to be VERY WORRIED about the conditions in our nation that are creating these kinds of stress-anxiety responses in our offspring! These reactions are being built into little people’s bodies directly in response to the caregiver environment that they are being raised in and by.
TIME online: Genes and Posttraumatic Stress by Claudia Wallis
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Can Early Abuse Change Our Genes? It’s Possible
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The Link between Childhood Trauma and Depression
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January 4, 2011
Controversial Gene-Depression Link Confirmed in New Study
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Gene Protects From Depression After Childhood Abuse
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Stop the Storm 