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I woke up this morning to find my mind raring to GO like a team of healthy horses all hitched up, prancing around and chomping at their bits.  “WHOA!” I have to say to myself.  “I can see you have something important to say but I have no idea where I’m going with this!”

“Sadly,” I might add.  Sadly I have to remain poised at the beginning of writing something I know about infant-human development as I put myself on ‘pause’.  “How do I begin to write about something that is so critically important to the creation of a human being at the same time that the most accurate information about the topic lies only within the most densely-packed, difficult to read, most unnatural form that any lay readers could find it — ensconced in the tombs of writing created by the best-of-the-best developmental neuroscientists?”

I ask, “Who am I to assume that I might be the one to translate this critically important information into words that make perfect, clear, digestible and usable form for regular people?  Who am I to be the one that believes I can make logical connections between bits of scientific information that so-far mostly remain within the vernacular realm of ‘open to debate’ or ‘not remotely related’ to what people need to know about being alive in a human body in a culture that really doesn’t seem to care what being a human being MEANS, anyway?”

And I — simple I.  “Why me?”

“Why should I be the one trying to make these important connections about being born a tiny human being in a body that has so far to go before it can even grasp the reins of its own great potential to be a separate person among billions of others on the planet today?”

“Why — I — who had removed from me (through unbelievable trauma, torture, neglect and abuse from the time of my birth) perhaps as effectively as is humanly possible nearly ever single chance, nearly every single possibility of being the ME I was born as, of having a chance to grow that ME into a self in a healthy body so that I could have gone off in completely different directions with my life so that I would have ended up a different person in a different body living a different life than I am today?”

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I am not an ‘acadamian’.  I don’t have, and never will have a doctorate or a string of impressive degree titles strung after my name to prove to anyone that I know what I’m talking about.

I don’t even know what I’m talking about.  The only strength I possess is my determination to FIND OUT what I know — inside my own body — as I work as hard as I can at being TRUE to what I know and try to communicate that information as it matches what the developmental neuroscientists know.

NOT AN EASY TASK.  None of this is.  And the two intimately connected subjects I WANT to write about, that I WANT to understand, that I believe are so important for ALL OF US to understand surround me at this very instant as they threaten to do what they do BEST — obliterate ME.

Those two subjects are DISSOCIATION and SHAME as they both utilize the same human physiological pathways within our body that, when they exist in a person’s body, lie within our Autonomic Nervous System (ANS).

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Part of what keeps me sitting here this morning on complete ‘pause’ is that I am realizing how profoundly I have been guilty of allowing an obstacle to sit in my own pathway that has continued to limit what I understand about how the malevolent trauma of my earliest physiological developing moments, days, weeks, months and years not ONLY changed how my brain developed, and not ONLY changed the development of this collection of living tissue referred to as my BODY — the pervasive traumas that happened to me ALSO changed how my BRAIN and my BODY communicate with one another.

Dissociation and shame, both happening as BRAKES on experience a person has as they operate within a human’s ANS, can shatter the continuity of one’s experience of being alive at the same time they disrupt and destroy the formation of those physiological routes WITHIN THE BODY that a person MUST HAVE to become and to remain a healthy, whole SELF.

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It is at this point, as I sit reins in hand with my prancing, chomping, raring-to-go team of horses ahead of this too-flimsy cart I sit perched on that I realize I have no clear idea about which direction to go in.

At the same time I recognize that I know that eventually ‘all roads lead to Rome’ and that it doesn’t matter which direction I head off to.  In the end, ALL OF WHAT I KNOW from the 18-year infant-childhood of horrific abuse, trauma and malevolent treatment that I survived — coupled with every shred of neuroscientific information I have sought for and attempted to comprehend about human infant-child development and about how neglect, abuse and trauma changes the development of our BODY itself — means the same thing.

If a human infant is not given as nearly as possible EXACTLY what it needs — safe and secure early attachment interactions with its earliest primary caregivers most essentially with its mother — OPTIMAL development on every single level of its developing body will NOT happen as a consequence.

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Perhaps for the first time in the 59 years of my life I am finding myself as the severely abused infant-child I was, falling-drifting into place among all the other members of my species.   As horrifically an exception to the ‘norm’ that my severely abusive-traumatizing infant-childhood consistently was, there is NOTHING about what happened to me that was in any way an exception to the rule of ‘human is, human does’.

The more I understand that any form of interference with or neglect of providing (especially for a human being ages 0-3) OPTIMAL conditions to develop RIGHT results in negative changes to the development of the BODY and of all its components, the more I understand that our culture is creating a nation of people who do NOT have an optimal body at the same time they do not have AN OPTIMAL SELF.

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As I sit upon my flimsy cart of ‘trying to figure out how all the FACTS fit together into a whole’, I realize that in some ways all the color is draining out of my view of the world.  As I make the inner agreement with myself to just relax and let this color-draining happen so that I can come a little bit closer to KNOWING WHAT I KNOW inside my body-self, I am beginning to see that when it comes to forming OPTIMAL people from the moment of their conception, there really doesn’t appear to be much GRAY in this world at all!

It is into this very black and white world that I can see myself slipping-sliding-drifting-falling as just one more person among no doubt millions of others whose earliest most critical stages of development deprived me of the chance to become an OPTIMAL human being.

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Black OR white world:  Either an infant-child is born into an environment that provides (as exactly as possible = ‘good enough’) what it needs to recognize its own self at the same time it is given what it needs to GROW that self into a BODY that forms with this SELF front-stage-and-center — or it isn’t.

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I don’t WANT to write this post.  I don’t WANT to think about ANYTHING I seem now-destined to think about.  I would much rather have been immediately whisked away forever at the instant of my birth from my severely abusive mother into a DIFFERENT world, one in which I would have been raised OPTIMALLY so that right now I would be a DIFFERENT me living a different life in an entirely different body.

It is a tragedy beyond measure that I am sitting here being who I AM, not because I am flawed as a SELF, but because my development of my SELF included the development of this body on all its levels that my SELF has to live in/with.  THIS IS NOT THE SAME BODY that I would have had if the whisked-away had happened.  THIS BODY was permanently changed in its development ON ALL ITS LEVELS in response to the deprivations and trauma I was formed in and by.

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Not being a computer literate person I can’t truly begin to understand the analogy that is stuck in my thoughts today.  I will loosen the brakes on this wagon I am perched on and gently shake the reins and speak to my team of horses in a quiet, gentle voice.  “Inch forward a little tiny bit,” I tell them.  And then SLAM, back on go the brakes.

I would say at this point that building a human being from conception forward might involve on the molecular level a process similar to booting a computer.

As I understand it, I push a button (baby conceived) and then let the computer proceed through whatever stages it invisibly accomplishes all on its own until VOILA!  I can use the computer for my intended purposes.

I don’t begin to understand what my computer is ACTUALLY doing as it goes through its necessary stages to make itself operational.  Nor do I tamper with, attempt to rearrange, or in any other way interfere with my computer’s ‘developmental stages’ to reach its operational abilities.

I simply let all that happen on its own.

NOW – enter a MOTHER of a human infant into the picture (and I intentionally say MOTHER because, by hook or by crook, it is MOTHERS who bring these new human beings out into the world).  Of course MOTHERS exist within environments that hopefully contain other people who can assist her in her job of ‘booting up’ the full operating potential of her infant-toddler-child.

In this black and white world of ‘do it right’ or ‘do it wrong’ that I am thinking within at this moment, we humans are not only fully capable of interfering with a human being’s ‘booting up’ process, we can so disturb it that we essentially RUIN it.

Then we blame and shame, wring our hands, whine, complain and in other ways HATE that the human beings that emerge at the end of a thwarted ‘booting up’ interactive developmental process are LESS THAN OPTIMAL or nearly completely BROKEN as a direct consequence of not accomplishing what NATURE requires for the ‘booting up’ to happen right.

True, human infant-children are malleable.  True, resiliency and risk factors that exist within their body and within the environment their body is growing itself within seem to give us certain additional options that a booting computer doesn’t possess.

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At this instant I am going to close my proverbial mind’s eye and then open it again — a sort of slow blink.  Now I see a wide open straight smooth track ahead of me as it disappears into the horizon.  I look to my right and see all of my favorite developmental neuroscientists, developmental pediatricians, human attachment experts beside me in a row.

“Ah-ha!”  I experience a split second of elation because I know that I am NOT alone in my considerations about how HUMAN development happens in direct interaction with existing infant-caregiver interactions in the earliest of human environments.

But wait!  I look at myself.  Here I am in my thrift store clothing, holding reins and a harness made of twisted, braided ducktape.  My pathetic little cart has been built and rebuilt using scraps of wood and metal I found tossed into the growing pile of trash behind my neighbor’s fence.  Not only are my wheels missing spokes, but as I look ahead of me I see that the only source of energy I have to move me forward into new understanding about what I in fact SHARE with other human beings is a tired old gray mare — and I mean THE old gray mare.

To the side of me sit the others on their fabulous rigs, their well-heeled horses ahead of them in equal health and splendor.  Off we go!  Or, I should say, off THEY go!

Pounding hooves toss up clouds of dust but the stunning racers stretch out way ahead of it.  Here I am, having barely moved ahead by a fraction of an inch watching all those ‘professionals’ eat up the miles and disappear into the distance.

I do what any sane lay person would do.  I get out and walk.  But because this old gray mare has been such a good and loyal friend to me, I will not leave her behind.  I unhitch her from this shabby contraption of a cart, reach into my pocket and pull our a carrot and give it to her.  As she munches it happily I wrap my fingertips into her soft warm mane and together we saunter along after the others.

At the same time I think about the words I have heard to be attributed to Gandhi:  “There go my people.  I must follow.  I am their leader.”

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This post is a collection of my thoughts that are connected to the horrific experiences my just-turned-10-month old grandson had in his new day care last week.  It’s enough to say that this VERY safely and securely attached infant experience a radical breach in his reality in that experience directly related to his mismatch between his OPTIMAL attachment at his developmental stage and the NOT optimal attachment environment that his day care provider considered ‘normal’.

After three days my grandson was ‘expelled’ as the provider told my daughter and her husband that they better go get some ‘behavioral health’ counseling for their baby.

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The other collection of thoughts that lies behind this post today has to do with my thinking about two articles that I have recently read and am heavily pondering:

One of them was referenced in this recent post: +A START ON THE TOPIC OF TEARS, CRYING, WEEPING, THE ANS AND ATTACHMENT….

and refers to this article:

THE MEANING OF CRYING BASED ON ATTACHMENT THEORY

In it the author describes that the bottom-line purpose of the human attachment system is for protection.  That makes sense to me on one level.  Why else would we talk about human attachment in terms of being safe and secure — or not?

But I, with my lay-rig-thinking ALSO know that because we are HUMAN the bottom-line below this bottom-line is that our attachment needs are not ONLY about protecting the existence of our body itself, but  are fundamentally about PROTECTING AN INDIVIDUAL’S SELF both as it forms at the beginning of our life and as it continues to exist as long as the body that contains this self remains alive.

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The other article of immediate importance to me in my pondering is this one:

Shattered Shame States and their Repair

The John Bowlby Memorial Lecture

Saturday March 10, 2007

Judith Lewis Herman, M.D.

This is the article I mentioned in my recent post that asserts that Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) may well be a shame-based disorder.

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Yet at the same time I am considering the information presented in these two articles I understand that I am reading second-hand what the developmental neuroscientists say about human infant development as they describe what needs to happen during the initial 0-3 ‘booting up’ time of human development for things to go OPTIMALLY WELL  and what happens when OPTIMAL doesn’t happen.

I am dismayed to realize that I have to AGAIN go back to the source of the information all the other writers are speaking about second-hand.  Believe me, this will entail yet another long, difficult and arduous effort on my part to present this first-hand information to my blog readers.

But that is what my WORK truly is — WORK!

If what is now known about human development actually was in fact a perfect grapefruit sitting in the middle of a Round Table, and if all the ‘experts’ were sitting around the table using the terminology of what they KNOW about that fruit, they would all approach its description differently.

Some might say “It is certainly round.”  Others might say “It is certainly yellow.”  Others, “It is certainly a fruit” or “It’s certainly edible” or “It’s certainly yellow on the outside, but I bet it’s pink on the inside.”

My point being, I have yet to see all of these divisions of knowledge ABOUT WHAT’S REALLY IMPORTANT unify their thinking into a single whole that can be presented WITH MEANING to those of us not sitting at that table.

Nor is what we infant-child severe trauma survivors KNOW about this entire area of study INCLUDED equally in intelligent discussion.

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Back to the proverbial drawing board I will have to go now.  When I encounter something new I have to go back and straighten out my own thinking about what I have already studied so that my INNER understanding within my body can match the increasingly simple yet increasingly BIGGER picture about what all of this means.

Right now — at this single solitary moment in time — I am coming to the conclusion that as we follow all of the ‘scientific’ information back and back and back to the beginning of human infant development at birth, all of it is about MAKING A HUMAN BEING versus creating an entity that DOES NOT HAVE A HEALTHY SELF.

Without a healthy self, a human being is NOT fully human.

I sense that this statement approaches heresy.

Without having a healthy self — which includes any degree of interruption in the development of an infant’s BODY that HAS to happen for a healthy self to recognize and express itself (healthy in my mind meaning the same thing as WHOLE) — an individual cannot possibly tell itself apart from AN OBJECT.

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While I might bemoan the fact that I will never be able to understand all the physiological connections within the human brain and body that connect to one another and than come ‘online’ in the human ‘booting up’ early developmental process, at the same time I can trust my sense from my own experience about what all the research is probably saying.

Everything within us IS connected in critical ways, and I suspect that the connections between our brain and our visceral body happen within our Autonomic Nervous System in some critically important way so that non-optimal early experiences change our ANS development.  Traumatic non-optimal early experiences that happen to us before our ANS has developed an optimal safe and secure attachment system by the age of one (or, in cases like mine when safe and secure attachments are left entirely out of the picture for an entire childhood) dissociational patterns somehow contaminate the development of what is supposed to be healthy and normal shame reactions.

As far as I can tell dissociation and shame are physiologically THE SAME.

My guess is that early relational trauma distorts the healthy optimal development of the ANS in such a way that dissociation rather than a healthy shame reaction form themselves into a body that will henceforth be deprived of the development of a healthy WHOLE self that has been enabled (in its ‘booting up’ process) to separate itself entirely from any contamination with ‘being an object’.  (This level of trauma-caused developmental damage, by the way, creates butcher-killers and severe psychotic child abusers like my mother was.)

Because we are members of a social species, this entire ‘coming online booting up process’ 0-3 fundamentally affects all of our interactions not only with our OWN self, but with the selves of others.  If in our own development we were not enabled to cross the invisible line between being an object and being a separate HUMAN entity, we cannot possibly know what any other person truly is, either.

All the intricate information feedback and feedforward loops that exist in our body make sure that WHAT we know about WHO we are and about HOW we are in the world is known at all levels of our physiology.  What information we have gained about being a whole self or a partial self-partial object permeates our existence in the same way that our DNA does.  My guess is that every caregiver-interactional experience we had within our earliest environment literally left its footprint in the development of our Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) and its corresponding attachment-experience related stress-calm response patterns.

It would then seem entirely possible to me that the more I can identify the dissociation-shame reactions being expressed within my ANS the more I can wrest away from my unconscious automatic ANS responses my own conscious SELF.  This is not a meaningless process for me of objectively finding ways to describe the grapefruit in the middle of the table.  If I liken that unique grapefruit to being a unique individual human being — well — my mother blew up my grapefruit BEFORE I WAS BORN.

The psychotic break that my mother evidently experienced while birthing (breach) me in which she was convinced that the devil sent me to kill her while I was being born meant that from that point onward I was not only not a SELF, I was not even a human being but rather was the child-tool of the devil.

I can’t imagine a scenario more guaranteed to completely obliterate the development of a human self.  To be born as a non-human devil-child intent on murdering my mother meant that ‘SHAME on YOU’ was all I ever knew from before my first breath.  If shame and dissociation are the same physiological response, I was BORN dissociated at the same time I was born being the epitome of shame.

(The premature introduction of shame into an infant’s experience before its ANS has developed physiologically to the point where it is has advanced enough that it can process this abrupt ANS-STOP reaction at about the age of one is extremely damaging (creating dissociational circuitry and pathways in body-brain that will be reused over a lifetime).  In addition, nature’s intent in giving humans the ANS-STOP reaction related to the experience of shame was that it be entirely connected not ONLY to the rupture in attachment relationships that shame causes and represents, but to the REPAIR of these shame disruptions-ruptures.  Shame is meant to bind humans together in appropriate social interaction — not to destroy the movement of the creation of SELF out of the murky fog of being an object into the realm of being fully human.)

Because I was born into and formed by this far, far extreme away from an optimal infant development environment perhaps I can come closer to describing ‘the grapefruit’ not from the OUTSIDE of it, but from the inside.  My entire being from my first breath was nothing but a stress response to the trauma of my mother.

It is from this extreme vantage point that I make my guess that any serious breach in optimal safe and secure 0-3 infant-toddler attachment directly damages the infant’s developing body-self connection by interfering with the human need to differentiate being human from being an object.  These changes directly appear in the operation of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS)/stress-calm connection response system on a continuum of healthy versus not healthy human dissociation-shame.

(i.e. Our degrees of safe and secure attachment or degrees of NOT safe and secure attachment are directly connected to the operation of our ANS and its stress-calm connection response system.)

The more an infant is not enabled through safe and secure optimal attachment to develop its SELF as separate from being an object the more associated it will be with patterns of dissociation-shame within its ANS that prevent its body from responding within the environment in optimal human ways.  Because we are members of a social species, these changes will ALWAYS be reflected in impediments related to social interactions — with self, with other people, and with the world.

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Note:  I am using a simplistic division between ‘object’ and ‘human’.  Actually, I believe it is true that an infant’s developing brain learns quite early that there is a category in between the two:  that of animal.  Evidently the single most useful piece of information the early brain uses to distinguish between ‘object’ and ‘animal’ is that the latter has the inherent ability to move in erratic ways all by itself while the former does not.

For simplicity I am not arguing the point that humans might evolve as fully individual human selves more directly from the level of being ‘animal’ rather than from being ‘object’.

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