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Part of what I learned yesterday is that my dissociational difficulties with verbal language happen not only when my stress response system is accelerated when I am in the presence of other people and THEIR words disappear.  It also happens within my own body as it did yesterday so that MY OWN access to words disappears.

This discovery just serves to answer some of my own questions about HOW I experienced my 18 years of severe abuse and trauma as an infant-child.  Mostly I had no ability to assign words to my experience, which served to bar me from being able to THINK in words about anything I went through.  This reality also means that ‘returning to my childhood’ to remember myself as I went through that hell doesn’t happen in words, either.

Sum of the matter:  For those of us who were deprived of protection in a safe and secure early caregiver-infant attachment environment our ability to USE words, including our ability to THINK in words was altered.  Because all the PREVERBAL interactions that are supposed to happen between infants and their caregivers didn’t happen correctly, our communication platforms built into our developing body-brain regions, circuits, and pathways were changed.

These changes affected how we process and store memory.  They also affected how we remember our own SELF in relationship to/with our ongoing experiences.  Even though developmental neuroscientists (and others) can now describe what infant-child abuse looks like in the ‘changed brain’, nobody describes what the experience of living with a trauma-altered body-brain FEELS like and IS like from the inside out.

It seems to me that only survivors of early neglect, deprivation, trauma and severe malevolent abuse actually KNOW this insider information.  It is our important job, then, to describe and document our own experience of living in a trauma-changed body.  Sometimes as I do this in my writing I feel like I am in effect writing messages to put into bottles to toss into the vast internet sea.

Will anyone find them?  Are all survivors waiting for some future time, long past most of our lifetimes, for ‘science’ to catch up with the living reality of what the longterm consequences especially of malevolence 0-3 actually MEANS to the people who survive it?

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That gives me the image of some far-distant-future internet archaeologists who have skills to dig around in the invisible world of then-ancient internet archives for bits of information those of us alive today are sending out into internet ‘space and time’ right now.

These archaeologist web-hackers in the future will probably accomplish their work via programming computer systems that act as ‘crawlers’ and ‘probes’, sent into our invisible past to find out who we were – ‘we’ being the then ancient ancestors of the still-surviving members of our species.  I think about what it would be like now if we had a verbal record of the experience of OUR ancestors.  Spoken stories, stories carved in symbols on stone, words written and printed on paper, and then there’s NOW where our history is transferring itself into digital formats that exist as long as the computers of our planet continue to hold them.

And in the digital world OUR words, our lay words, our ‘common folk’ words, our survivor words are really as equal as the ‘educated’ people’s words, as the ‘wealthy’ people’s words, as the words of those who hold the power.

So in the future when our internet world of words is ‘dug up’ what we are saying now as survivors of severe early trauma will be equally as TRUE as what everyone else is saying.  But in our words will be reflected a reality about being super-tough and super-strong and super-resilient because we endured from infancy what humans are NOT meant to ever experience in the first place.

Nature did not design infants to be abused, hated and traumatized by their caregivers.  That our stories tell the story in words about what enduring the unendurable is like means that whatever it is that WE HAVE and that WE KNOW will be directly connected to whatever it will be that carries our specie’s survival into the distant future.

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