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Based upon my own experience as a severe infant abuse survivor (followed by an accumulated history of 18 years of child abuse) I will say that I do not believe that dissociation is the same thing as ‘forgetting’ such as the kind of forgetting that the research in my last post seems to suggest.  In fact, I believe dissociation accomplishes the exact opposite of forgetting.  Dissociation allows-forces us to retain the ability to remember trauma in a very unique way.  Under the ‘right’ circumstances I believe we survivors are able to remember everything about every trauma that happened to us in  our childhoods (if not also in much of our infancy).

If anyone should ever need a recount of a specific trauma told to them in order to help a similar trauma from never happening again to someone else, or if a recounting of such a trauma was needed to help a survivor of a similar experience reach some healing – dissociators are the people to ask.  I believe we are a treasure-trove of memory about trauma.  We do not forget.  We dissociate.

I will also say that saying that a trauma is/was ‘overwhelming’ is not the same thing as saying that a trauma is/was ‘unbearable’.  I make this distinction because while I had vast experience of suffering overwhelming brutal traumas over 18 years caused by my mother, I did not ‘turn out like her’.  Even though my traumas were probably MUCH more extensive and intolerable than were the ones my mother suffered when she was little, I was somehow able to BEAR my overwhelming traumas in ways that my mother evidently could not.

The fact that my mother was overwhelmed by traumas that were unbearable to her meant that her body-brain-mind changed in response in ways that mine did not.  I have do doubt that my mother continually dissociated, but my mother was ACTING OUT her traumas by projecting them outside of herself while I – most fortunately — do not.

When it comes to an early recognition of the completely-alone and suffering self, and when it comes to an early ability to attach ongoing experience in memory form to this self, and when the experiences the early self is enduring are brutally traumatic, dissociation is the only way out.  The memories of such a self are simply ‘put somewhere else’.  But they are NOT forgotten.

I don’t believe that dissociation works that way.  I suspect that for severe infant and child abuse survivors, dissociation actually works to preserve memory of overwhelming traumas rather than to evaporate it.  I personally make absolutely NO EFFORT to EVER recall any memory of my traumas.  On my own, I see no purpose to doing so.  If, however, I lived among a different culture that valued what trauma has to teach and knew how to ‘handle’ trauma wisely, I have no doubt that my own experience of being a survivor would be far different than it is – and would be better.

I leave my packed-to-the-rafter memory banks alone.  Often I can sense-feel trauma memories as if they are physically in another part of my house.  I make conscious effort to ignore even the fact that I know those memories exist and are a living part of me that COULD be remembered accurately if I wanted to or chose to.

Without having a clear and direct reason to allow any of my memories to appear – and that reason would ONLY be to assist someone else somehow through what a trauma memory might offer them – I will NEVER make any effort to associate myself with what the wisdom of my body-brain-mind-self has selected to dissociate myself from.

That of course means that I do not allow myself to THINK about most of the experiences of my infant-childhood.  What I DO know is enough for me to deal with.  In fact, I don’t want to say another single word about this topic.  Goodbye.

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+THINKING ABOUT THINKING (PART ONE): WHOSE PROBLEM IS IT?

+THINKING ABOUT THINKING (PART TWO): FIRST, SELF-RECOGNITION

+THINKING ABOUT THINKING (PART THREE): ‘GROUPTHINK’ and ‘GROUPFEEL’

+THINKING ABOUT THINKING (PART FOUR): SEVERE INFANT ABUSE SURVIVORS’ UNIQUE WORLDVIEW

These posts follow along my line of thinking presented in the posts at this link:

WE the U.S. and the WORLD

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The title of this post alone is enough to let all of us know this post is about pain and sadness – along with all the accompanying ‘survival emotions’ that we most often think about as being the ‘negative ones’.  I want to counterbalance this reality with another one.  I suppose because I certainly AM a survivor of severe infant abuse (along with abuse for the rest of my 18 years of childhood) I KNOW something ELSE – and this something else is POSITIVE.

I, along with this body I live in, have had to travel a long road of suffering to get to this point today where I can examine my own reality and then come to this conclusion:  In my uniqueness lies my gift.  And in my uniqueness I am most fully connected with other people who are equally as unique as me.  Those other people belong with me in a different kind of a reality because we were forced, as severe infant abuse survivors, to endure our suffering in a world separate from other people around us.  We therefore now share a unique worldview within our own ‘culture’ and ‘society’ that is unlike any other on earth.

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At this point I will say that I do more at this moment than simply HOPE that I can do this post justice.  I PRAY that I can!  What needs to be said here is critically important – and perhaps this is MOST TRUE for those who do NOT share an infant abuse survivor’s universe and worldview that I am going to attempt to describe here.

Yesterday as I wrote part two (link below) to this series I encountered very accidentally a piece of research that in fact split the tree of my own personal knowledge in two as if it had been struck by a massive bolt of lightning.  What this means to me personally is that the ROOT of my tree of personal knowledge is completely intact, but the tree that will now grow again from that root is going to be somehow a completely different Tree of Knowledge.  How different is something I expect to uncover-discover in the writing of this post.

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An infant’s pathway of physiological development on all levels and in every way is directed by the nature and quality of the human caregiving environment (the attachment environment) that an infant is born into (and includes the prenatal environment, as well).

If an infant is born into an environment of severe attachment-related abuse, neglect, trauma and maltreatment its physiological development WILL CHANGE in response to the stress present in that environment.

My previous Tree of Personal Knowledge has included an understanding based on the newest neuroscientific and attachment-related scientific research for quite a long time.  But there was something entirely new and different about what I encountered yesterday as I wrote my post Part Two.

I presented research in that post that states AT THAT POINT IN TIME researchers did not believe that insecure attachment within an infant’s malevolent early caregiving environment had the power to change the TIMELINE of required physiological development that every infant needs to reach in order to recognize its SELF (you DO have to go back and read this post and watch the videos there to understand what I am going to say next:  +THINKING ABOUT THINKING (PART TWO): FIRST, SELF-RECOGNITION).

HOWEVER, the next piece of research I encountered NEGATES that statement!  I am going to transcribe into this post what I found yesterday (see below), but before I do I am going to try to describe what happened inside of me when I read it.

Thinking about THINKING as it relates to each of us having a SELF as researchers describe in Part Two MEANS that this SELF is already operational by this stage.  Self-recognition is an identifiable developmental milestone that is reached somewhere between 15 months and 2 years of age.

ALL aspects of the development of this emerging SELF have already been directly and profoundly influenced by the nature and quality of the infant-caregiver attachment (safe and secure versus not safe and secure) that this developing little human being has experienced since it took its first breath (and before).

NOW – what we severe infant abuse survivors MOST share in common is that there was NO human being available to us that we could rely upon to protect us.  This protection INCLUDES the need not only for the physical needs of the body of the infant to be taken care of, but ALSO includes the necessary CARE of the individual SELF that resides in/with the body.

In essence – WE WERE ALL ALONE in an extremely dangerous, traumatic, chaotic, threatening universe WITHOUT ANYONE ELSE.

Human beings can describe and discuss all they want to the variety of worldviews (tied to societies and cultures).  But NONE of them describe one of these different worldviews:  The worldview of a human being who was born into a completely hostile world that they were left to endure in and survive ALONE with no human safe and secure attachment person available to them.

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The research I encountered yesterday (copied below) hit a ‘nerve’ in me so profoundly that, as I say, it shattered the Tree of My Personal Knowledge.  There is a TRUTH in the description of this piece of research that literally TOLD me how uniquely different my own (and other severe infant abuse survivors’) pathway of development actually was.  Our pathway, determined for us by both the horror we experienced AND our adaptive responses in our development that allowed us to survive these horrors, means to me that we were ALWAYS citizens of a different kind of world – and will be that different world’s citizens for the rest of our life – compete with our own distinct and unique corresponding worldview that is unlike any other on earth.  We simply share it with one another as survivors.

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OK.  Without taking the time and effort to ‘scientifically’ back up what I am going to say next (all this backup is already on this blog), I am going to say what I know.  WHAT I know, based on the background research I have already done, is that STRESS causes CHANGES in human development.  Research clearly shows that even babies born to mothers who were in their third trimester of pregnancy and near the epicenter of the 9/11 disaster transmitted their OWN stress response to their unborn child so that their baby was BORN with PTSD physiology.

A mother’s stress level affects the development of her unborn so that her infant’s own DNA machinery is already adapting in the womb to the stressful conditions of a world the baby’s body is preparing itself to be born into.  These changes alter important ‘temperament-personality’ parameters at the same time they change how the developing fetus will react to stress over the course of its lifetime.

Now, enter the baby into the world and these same processes continue to happen directly in response to the amount and kind of stress that exists in the baby’s universe – as communicated to it DIRECTLY by the quality and nature of the interactions it has with its earliest caregivers – ESPECIALLY and often PREDOMINANTLY with its mother.

So, when I read the research I copy here below I already knew the IMPLICATIONS of what these words were saying.  NOBODY can know what a human infant’s ‘innate-OWN’ temperament or anxiety-stress-response patterns were ever POTENTIALLY capable of being because the influences of the infant’s environment POWERFULLY change these factors at every single stage of the infant’s development –in womb and out of

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Before I continue I want to pause here and say, “I know this post will be a long one, but it has to be.  I cannot break apart into parts what I need to say here.”

I will also say a word about the supreme GIFT I think results from the patterns I present here for severe infant abuse survivors.  WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AND WILL ALWAYS BE – THE OUTSIDERS.  Because our earliest experiences happened to us in a malevolent environment that placed us completely (except for basic food, warmth and shelter such as we received to keep our body alive) we have ALWAYS BEEN ALONE.

This means to me that I possess as a direct consequence a UNIQUE GIFT OF FREEDOM unknown to all others except survivors of the kind of abuse I endured from birth.

While obviously our families DID exist embedded within a society that shared a mutual worldview, because our earliest body-brain formed while we were forced to be ALONE, WE WERE NOT INFLUENCED BY THAT OUTSIDE WORLDVIEW in the same way that non-severe infant abuse survivors were.

OUR universe was a malevolent trauma-filled world such as few others can begin to imagine.  While we were at our most vulnerable, helpless, dependent, precarious and VITALLY IMPORTANT stages of body-brain development our malevolent universe of trauma changed us!

That means to me that NOW, because I was formed ALONE in an extremely UNIQUE environment, I am free to basically do this:  I can stand alone within myself, turn around in a full circle and view every other social worldview objectively BECAUSE I AM A PART OF NONE OF THEM.  Not in my essence.  Not where it matters most.

This means to me that I — along with all other severe infant abuse survivors who did NOT do some version of what my own mother did in reaction to her earliest malevolent environment (form such an altered body-brain that her mind was locked into a destructive pattern that could NOT be changed) — can NOW experience a freedom in our thinking that allows us to contemplate both problems and their solutions without being burdened by or trapped in a constrictive worldview such as non-survivors are bound by.

Of course this means (as I so well and deeply know) that the price we pay for the benefit of our unique position of being outside of ALL social circles of worldview-thought is that we are deeply and painfully ALONE without the ability to form ‘normal’ human attachments because our body-brain formed in an environment that excluded the safe and secure attachment relationships that would have built our body-brain to INCLUDE them.

(This is not to say that there aren’t ways to begin to heal this fundamental (physiological) aloneness that build our body-brain.  It is possible in very special circumstances for healing to happen on these deepest levels – but in today’s world and in this culture those opportunities are so rare as to hardly exist at all.)

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Now, to say what next needs to be said as simply as possible:  Those infants who display heightened sensitivity (temperament) along with those infants who display heightened anxiety (stress response) are FAR MORE LIKELY TO REACH THE DEVELOPMENTAL MILESONE OF BEING ABLE TO SELF-RECOGNIZE AT AN EARLIER AGE THAN ‘NORMAL’.

IN ADDITION, THE INFANTS WHO DO REACH THIS STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT ‘AHEAD OF THE PACK’ EXPERIENCE AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT EMOTIONAL REACTION TO THEIR SELF-RECOGNITION than their less-advanced peers do – A SAD ONE!

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Now the most fascinating point for me here is that I CANNOT THINK ABOUT  THIS SITUATION objectively!

THIS INFORMATION is INCLUDED in MY PERSONAL WORLDVIEW and is NOT OUTSIDE my own worldview.

In fact, it was at the instant I read this information that my Tree of Personal Knowledge was shattered because at the same time I read it, my body profoundly and deeply told me, “THIS IS YOUR REALITY!”  At that instant I recognized myself at the same time I recognized myself as being INSIDE this reality, not outside of it.  This reality IS IN ME.  It formed itself into me at the same time it influenced ALL of my physiological development – and did so VERY EARLY IN MY INFANT LIFE.

I am fascinated by the fact that it was in my investigation of the ‘stage of infant self-recognition’ that I so fundamentally FINALLY recognized my SELF!

I am going to use two very specific words here:  Trajectory and bifurcation point.

For nearly all infants except for those of us who were born into malevolent non-attachment environments that nearly defy description, the earliest developmental TRAJECTORY happens along ordinary human lines.  The infant is connected within a social environment of attachment (even when those attachments are not perfect) that DO NOT REQUIRE that the infant take that developmental quantum leap that happens when the infant is ready to identify ITS OWN SELF as being ‘separate from the social group’.

When these attached infants DO reach the milestone step of self-recognition, this step IS NOT A BIFURCATION point, but is rather an ongoing linked-together stage of development that happens WITHIN THE SOCIAL GROUP and in interaction with it.

From my outside point of view I would say it’s like this:  An attached infant is learning about itself in a ‘both/and’ reality.  There are BOTH other people AND (when the stage is reached) an individual self.

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Now, for myself (and for other severely abused infant abuse survivors who did not have any early attachments) we experience this entire process differently.

Bifurcation points are CHOICE POINTS.  A bifurcation happens at a BRANCHING point at which point, of all possible and available options (like in chaos theory) ONE particular branch is followed that means all other possible options cease to exist.

Those of us who were born into malevolent non-attachment environments of abuse reached a bifurcation point VERY EARLY in our development (I believe very closely to the time of our very birth) when our BODY (if not also our ‘soul’) knew we were in very, very, very BIG trouble!  We KNEW we were in danger, that our lives were at risk, AND THAT WE WERE ABSOLUTELY ALONE.

This knowledge, gained by us in a very real way from information our environment gave us, forced our body to take a different BRANCH in our development that forced us into an entirely different developmental TRAJECTORY.

All of this – the forced bifurcation away from ‘optimal normal development’ into a different trajectory of Trauma Altered Development – happened for us a LONG TIME BEFORE WE WERE SUPPOSED TO REACH THE DEVELOPMENTAL STATE OF SELF-RECOGNITION.

For us, there never was an option for the ‘both/and’ pathway of development.  There really was no ‘human other’ in our universe.  Those that were supposed to protect us, those to whom we were supposed to be connected to and able to form a safe and secure attachment with were absent and did not exist in our world.

We therefore existed as a SELF WAY BEFORE WE WERE SUPPOSED TO, at the same time we existed as a SELF ALONE in a dangerous and hostile universe without anyone else in it (‘anyone else’ being someone we could form a safe and secure attachment with).  These factors AUTOMATICALLY forced our physiological development to change its pathway in every possible way so that we could endure and survive.

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For all the ‘talk’ I have ever encountered about ‘recovery’ from child abuse, I have never seen a reference to how massive an effort this so-called ‘recovery’ has to be for those of us who were completely engaged in our very SELF survival from the time we were born.

I feel like a floodgate was opened inside of me yesterday as I naively traveled back in time to look at the stage called infant ‘self-recognition’.  I had no idea that my travels would take me back to such a profound level of FELT recognition of my own SELF as I recognized my SELF as being completely alone well before I was two years old.

That I recognize my SELF as being a ‘completely-alone-self’ within the physiology of my entire body to this day (I’m 59) is a staggering realization.  My THINKING has made a direct and powerful connection to my FEELING about my own reality that has always exited within a worldview that only other severe infant abuse survivors can understand.

I suspect that we recognize our SELF in a precocious way primarily because of our aloneness:  In the universe of our experience we were the ONLY ONE THERE.  In that world, Monster Abusers were NOT PEOPLE to us!

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There is a direct developmental connection between the onset of the stage of self-recognition in infancy-toddlerhood and the onset of the ability to form and access ‘autobiographical memory’.

THE RESEARCH

As presented in a section of Chapter 3, “Early Memory, Early Self, Emergence of Autobiographical Memory,” (pages 45-72) in the book  The Self and Memory (Studies in Self and Identity) by Denise R. Beike, James M. Lampinen, and Douglas A. Behrend (Aug 2, 2004)

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

“As already mentioned, when adults are asked to recall their earliest experiences there is considerable individual variability in the age from which they can date their first autobiographical memory (e.g. Eacott & Crawley, 1998; Usher & Neisser, 1993).  One reason for this may simply be that there are individual differences in forgetting rates.  A more attractive possibility from my perspective is that these differences are related to individual differences in the age of onset of the cognitive self or perhaps individual differences in the propensity to encode self-relevant features into memory traces for early events.  Although this second possibility has already been discussed [previously in the chapter] it is also important to note that there are substantial individual differences in the age of onset of mark-directed behaviors in the second year of life (Bertenthal & Fisher, 1978; Lewis & Brooks-Gunn, 1979; Lewis, Brooks-Gunn, & Jaskir, 1985; Schneider-Rosen & Cicchetti, 1984, 1991).  For example, research on mirror self-recognition has show that whereas about 25% of 15- to 18-month-old infants showed mark-directed behavior to the red spots [put] on their noses, others did not show self-recognition until the end of the second year, at which time about 75% showed mark-directed behavior.

“These individual differences in the age of onset of visual self-recognition have not been fully explored, although the weight of the available evidence to date indicates that they may have their origins in maturational rather than social or experiential factors. {my note:  This is a perspective I view as ridiculous because EVERY experience an infant has within its social environment is affecting EVERY physiological developmental activity the infant’s body-brain is accomplishing every step of the way.] For example, Lewis and Brooks-Gunn (1979) reported that neither the child’s sex, maternal education, family socioeconomic status, birth order, or number of siblings were related to onset of self-recognition.  Likewise, Ciccetti and his colleagues (Ciccetti & Beeghly, 1987; Ciccetti & Carlson, 1989; Kaufman & Cicchetti, 1989; Schneider-Rosen & Ciccehetti, 1984, 1991) have found that maltreated infants whose abnormal caretaking environments are associated with delays or deviations in their emotional development as it relates to the self are also not delayed in the onset of visual self-recognition.  In contrast, infants who have delayed maturation (e.g., Down syndrome, familial mental retardation, autism) do show delays in visual self-recognition (Cicchetti, 1991; Hill & Tomllin, 1981; Loveland, 1987, 1993; Mans, Cicchetti, & Stroufe, 1978; Schneider-Rosen & Ciccetti, 1991; Spiker & Ricks, 1984), although they usually succeed at the self-recognition task if and when they reach a mental age comparable to that of nondelayed infants who succeed at the task.  Thus, the near universal appearance of visual self-recognition among infants who have attained the maturational prerequisites supports the hypothesis that its emergence is not influenced by variations in social or childcare experiences in any obvious way (but see Lewis, Brooks-Gunn, & Jaskir, 1985).  Consistent with Kagan’s (1981, 1994) work and the evidence just reviewed, more recent data demonstrate a link between the onset of the self and constitutional factors such as stress reactivity and temperament (DiBiase & Lewis, 1997; Lewis & Ramsay, 1997).  For example, DiBiase and Lewis (1997) found that differences in temperament were related to variation in the age at which self-recognition emerged and that these same differences were predictive of when self-conscious emotions such as embarrassment begin to be expressed (see also Lewis, Sullivan, Stanger, & Weiss, 1989).  Thus, infants with a difficult temperament at 5 months were more likely to show earlier self-recognition and embarrassment than were infants with an easy temperament.  Using a longitudinal design, Lewis and Ramsay (1997) found that children with higher stress reactivity (measured both in terms of cortisol levels and behavioral responses to inoculations at 2, 4, 6, and 18 months) also had an earlier age of onset of self-recognition.  Thus, self-recognition and self-conscious emotions such as embarrassment seem to be linked to a variety of constitutional factors, including temperament and stress reactivity. Specifically, a cognitive sense of self seems to emerge earlier for children who are classified as having a more difficult temperament or whose reactivity to stress is relatively high. [bold type is mine] Given this evidence, then, it is perhaps logical to assume that individual differences in the onset of early autobiographical memories are related to these maturational, not social or experiential, factors associated with the emergence of the cognitive self. [my note:  It is important to note that this writing does not take into account information gained through the newest developmental neuroscientific information.]

“I have argued here that differences in the onset of autobiographical memory in atypical populations may well be directly related to delays in the establishment of the cognitive self rather than to the child’s chronological age.  Importantly however, there is evidence that the mirror behavior of children with atypical cognitive development or those with adverse social environments is different from that of normally developing children. For example, normally developing children as well as those with maturational delays are generally quite positive in their response to their self-images, even when a spot of rouge has been applied to their noses (Cicchetti, 1991; Lewis et al., 1989).  However, children who have been maltreated show more neutral and negative behavior in response to their mirror images (Cicchetti, Beeghly, Carlson, & Toth, 1990), which raises the intriguing possibility that although social and experiential factors may not determine the onset of early autobiographical memory, they may contribute to the contents of these early memories.” [bold type is mine] (pages 58-60)

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WHEN SELF AND LANGUAGE MEET:  SUBSEQUENT DEVELOPMENT IN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY

I believe that the research being described here has missed the fullest meaning of the variables being described.  Those of us who were severely maltreated infants would have fallen right through the cracks of this research.  That fact would NOT mean that we – and our condition – did not exist.  This chapter continues its discussion of onset of autobiographical memory abilities and includes the following:

“Only recently has there been any empirical research that examined the role of the onset of the cognitive self and early language conjointly.  In the first such study, Harely and Reese (1999) examined 58 mother-child dyads first when children were 19 months old, then at 25 months old, and finally at 32 months of age.  Mother-child dyads were tested on a number of dimensions including language, self-recognition, deferred imitation, and memory conversation styles.  For this latter measure, children’s verbal memory and maternal reminiscing style (low or high elaboration [of details]) concerning real, one-time events in the past were evaluated at each interview.  In order to evalutate the roles of self-recognition and maternal reminiscing styles in the development of children’s talk about the past independent of children’s language and nonverbal memory abilities, analyses were conducted on data in which variability in the language measure and nonverbal memory (deferred imitation measure) were removed using an analysis of covariance.  The results showed that both self-recognition and maternal reminiscing style contributed independently to verbal memory with self-recognition emerging as a stronger predictor.  In fact, memory appeared to be developing faster in early than in late self-recognizers.  That is, self-recognition was a better predictor of later verbal memory especially for those children who were early self-recognizers.  The authors concluded that their data provide the first direct empirical support for the argument that it is the advent of self-recognition that spells the end of infantile amnesia. [bold type mine]

“In an ongoing series of cross-sectional and longitudinal studies (see Howe et al., 2003), the conjoint development of the cognitive self, early memory, and early language are being examined in infants from 15 to 24 months of age.  Infants’ self-recognition, mirror knowledge, mirror experience, event memory, and language development were assessed with a series of standard tests and procedures.  Preliminary findings indicate that children’s memory performance on a toy-finding event when retention was tested at 3, 6, or 12 months after acquisitions was best predicted by their success on the mirror self-recognition task, with recognizers performing significantly better than the non-recognizers.  This work supports the view espoused here that self-recognition, not language, is critical to very early memory for events.  Consistent with this, preliminary findings from the longitudinal work indicates that all infants who achieved self-recognition were successful on the event memory task, independent of age.  Among nonrecognizers, none recalled the location of the toy or were using self-referent pronouns.  Clearly, there is a need for more research of this kind and there will be additional reports of data of this kind in the near future.”  (pages 62-63)

CONCLUSION

“In summary, the data accumulated to date are consistent with the position that the emergence and subsequent development of autobiographical memory are governed by the discovery of the cognitive self and increases in the ability to maintain information in memory storage, respectively.  Consistent with the function and development of other knowledge structures in memory, once infants acquire a cognitive sense of self, they possess a new organizer around which event memories can be personalized and “preserved” as autobiographical.  Like other structures, categories, and concepts in memory, the cognitive sense of self first emerges and is represented and expressed nonverbally, only later to be articulated (but not determined), using language.  Subsequent achievements in language can serve to strengthen (or possibly distort) personal memories through mechanisms such as rehearsal, reinstatement, or interference that also affect memory more generally.  Verbally expressed memories related in conversation with others also serve a social function of creating a personal “life story” that defines for others who we are.  Thus, it is my contention that the offset of infantile amnesia and the onset of autobiographical memory does not require the appearance of a separate memory system per se nor must it await the developments in language, autonoetic awareness, or metacognition that occur late in the preschool years.  Rather, it is the natural consequence of young toddlers’ more general tendency to develop nonverbal representational structures that describe the world around them (e.g., Karmiloff-Smith, 1992; Mandler, 1992).

“Because this cognitive sense of self does not emerge until around 24 months, it is unlikely that personalized memories for experiences would be available before  this age.  Although this sets the lower limit for the formation of autobiographical memories, it does not guarantee that such memories will be formed at that age.  Indeed, personalized memories may not be formed until sometime much later with the timing dependent on factors such as the number of features available for encoding and the distribution of sampling probabilities during encoding.  The subsequent ability to retain more autobiographical information with age in childhood develops largely as a natural consequence of global improvements in children’s general memory abilities, namely, the capacity to maintain information in storage over longer and longer intervals.  Although a number of skills may be involved in, or at least correlated with, this improvement, including developments in language, strategies, knowledge, and gist extraction, the one common denominator to changes in children’s retention over time is the basic ability of keeping information intact in storage.”  [bold type is mine]

– This point is, I believe, connected to where patterns of dissociation in maltreated infant-toddlers probably begins to come into play when we are overwhelmed with experience that we cannot POSSIBLY keep “intact in storage.”  Severely abuse infants and toddlers experience more intense overwhelming trauma in their first months of life than ordinary people could possibly experience in several lifetimes.

The impact and flood of their trauma experience, I believe, overwhelms all physiological possibilities of being able to retain an ongoing ‘coherent memory of life experience’ from the beginning of life.

The final paragraph of this chapter states:

“So, what happens to event memories that are formed prior to the cognitive self?  Although a discussion of the role of consciousness in memory is beyond the scope of this chapter, given our current understanding and the data gathered to date, it seems unlikely that these very early memories persist for a lifetime. [my note:  They are, however, stored and kept in the body itself as implicit (never consciously recalled) memories.] One reason for this expectation is the fact that even under optimal conditions memories appear fragmentary and poorly organized when recalled. [bold type is mine]  Few, if any, of these early memories become verbalizable (e.g., see Bauer, Kroupina, Schwade, Dropik, & Wewerka, 1998), even when based on traumatic events at the time they were encoded (Howe et al., 1994).  Although the number of investigations is admittedly small and the evidence usually anecdotal, it is unlikely that without an organizer like the (cognitive) self, such events will persist unchanged in memory.  Indeed, unless they have been recoded and reorganized within the framework of the cognitive self, making them distinctive and meaningful against the background of our other memories, it seems unlikely that they will remain intact in storage or to affect us even at the behavioral level.  [my note:  Developmental neuroscientists now know that this statement is blatantly false.  ALL of our earliest experiences are remembered in our body as these experiences interact with our genetic material to form our developing body-brain from before we are born.] Just as our earlier concepts and categories become transformed and even supplanted by more mature forms of understanding, so too do our memories of early events.  Because storage is dynamic and malleable in response to new experiences, it is extremely unlikely that what we remember of very early events, especially those not encoded with respect to the self, remains unaltered by the cumulative experiences of a lifetime.”  (pages 63-64)

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It is my opinion that the perpetuation of the myth presented here that suggests that earliest experiences 0-3 don’t really matter because nobody remembers them anyway is the single most powerful deterrent to getting the public to comprehend the vital importance of improving 0-3 well-being in any way possible.  These earliest experiences are forming the body-brain that a person will live in and with for the rest of their life – and malevolent early interactions with the environment during these developmental stages ESPECIALLY contribute to lifelong problems of all kinds that could have been prevented.

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+THINKING ABOUT THINKING (PART ONE): WHOSE PROBLEM IS IT?

+THINKING ABOUT THINKING (PART TWO): FIRST, SELF-RECOGNITION

+THINKING ABOUT THINKING (PART THREE): ‘GROUPTHINK’ and ‘GROUPFEEL’

These posts follow along my line of thinking presented in the posts at this link:

WE the U.S. and the WORLD

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Day two of the ‘frozen pipes’ saga.  As most readers know, I live in southeastern Arizona with the Mexican-American border wall (actually two fences here) in my back yard.  This is about as far south as I can go and still remain in the Western U.S.  Having been mostly raised on an Alaskan mountain homestead, and having spent much of my adult life around Fargo, North Dakota, I know ‘life in the north’.  But here?

As I mentioned, most of us in this rural area have no insulation in our houses and only the flimsiest of single-pane windows.  Last night our temperatures dropped to 5 degrees above with a windchill of minus 20.  Because of the lessons I thought I learned yesterday (as I mentioned in Part One) I was all geared up last night before I went to bed to do things RIGHT.

I thought about it and decided that rather than tax the hot water heater (and its corresponding gas bill) that it would probably be ‘good enough’ if I just left my cold water faucets running enough to keep them from freezing.  OK, but then comes the part I didn’t anticipate — along with some more DUMB LUCK.

My cold water was still running out of my faucets this morning — but!!!  I’m not sure how my luck allowed this to happen, but both of my sinks were filled within a quarter inch of their brim as the sewer lines appear to be frozen.

I did not anticipate THAT, and boy am I glad I didn’t wake up to completely flooded floors!

So, where is the problem?  In thinking about it, I really don’t know.  I don’t know if these frozen lines are ONLY MINE or if they are frozen just in this trailer court my house sits in the middle of or if they are frozen in this entire unincorporated little town of 700 people.  I COULD ask someone, but I am much more aligned personally with the ‘wait and see’ solution.

Meanwhile I notice the town itself is eerily quiet this morning.  Because over 98% of the town has connections in Mexico, I imagine that many families (if they are having problems in their homes similar to mine) simply packed up and headed south to their family there.

I know the poverty on THAT side of the border is far worse than it is on this side, but I also understand that even if all of the town’s water and sewer lines are frozen ‘down south’ that wouldn’t make a whole lot of difference to these people.  I have watched these families over the 11 years I have lived among them and know that BEING TOGETHER is their best solution to everything — good or bad.

And here I am, Ms. White Chick (not sure at 59 that I’m still a chick, but??) alone in my house wondering — thinking — about all of this.

Of course my children living in Fargo know cold (as I well remember it) far worse than ours here.  But they EXPECT the cold up there and are far better prepared in every way to cope with the problems it does and can create.  At this point in my life  ‘down south’ is where I choose to be — alone or not!

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This all has me thinking about how likely it seems to me that bonds that connect members of our social species evolved within environments where we directly and immediately NEEDED ONE ANOTHER.  Most importantly, WE KNEW THIS FACT!

In today’s very urban America it seems that perhaps many of us do not live lives where our need for one another IN THE BIG PICTURE remains on our mental ‘front burner’.  In thinking about the growing gaps in the world between those that HAVE more than they need materially in contrast to those that DO NOT HAVE enough of what they need, I also think (wonder about) the fact that what is true in the United States is equally true around the globe.

For the most part the wealth-gap planet wide exists between those in the NORTH versus those in the SOUTH.  This is demographically very true in the United States at the same time it is true around the globe with the economic well-being and lack of well-being split that exists between humans who live in the Northern hemisphere versus those that live in the Southern hemisphere.

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I am not a Scholar so I am not mentally prepared to contemplate the answers to the many questions I find myself asking about ‘life’ — particularly human life.  Due to the way my body-brain was changed in its physiological development due to severe, extreme, chronic terrible abuse and trauma from the time of my birth, I already DO KNOW that the way my OWN right and left brain hemispheres do not collect, process, store or contemplate any information in a ‘normal or ordinary’ way (like it is meant to and does with people who benefited from safe and secure attachment relationships in their earliest body-brain formative years).

I mention this because I can FEEL my own questioning in MY BODY.  My questioning exists probably primarily in my right brain hemisphere, fed by my feelings that my body feeds to my right brain — but my questions seem to lie mostly in some unseen vast deep ocean ‘over there’ where my rational, logical, linear, sequential, verbal language-based LEFT brain hemisphere can’t get to them!

Even this experience of WONDERING can be an extremely intense and difficult to regulate emotional state.  WONDERING — connected to HOPE on the one end and to FEAR and awareness of the unknown on the other.

I don’t expect that our species made huge progress toward survival by being stuck very often in the state of simply WONDERING.  WONDERING when the next big animal was going to pounce, or when the next rival tribe was going to appear for a competitive slaughter, or wondering where the herbs needed to heal MIGHT be — or wondering how to stay warm in the north, or wondering how to even care for a newborn — NOPE!  Minimal survival benefit to being stuck in the wondering stage UNLESS it can stimulate thinking toward a positive solution.

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BUT, for our species thinking ALONE probably had little to do with our mutual survival as a species unless the thoughts of the ONE were shared with the MANY.  I believe we are designed for this GROUPTHINK.  If I add here a fact that is primarily left out of the Western worldview way of thinking, and that is that FEELINGS are also a form of thinking without words, I would also say that GROUPFEEL is just as important as GROUPTHINK.  In fact, if feelings are left out of the equation for survival, we suffer from our own LEFT-RIGHT brain hemisphere split that in itself creates a form of poverty for humans individually and collectively.

When I feel-think this morning about the probable evacuation of many of my neighbors over the southern border as they seek to be among those closest to them right now in this rare cold spell and the problems it is causing, I am the one out-of-place in being alone.  As I think about the global economic North-South split I think about the cultural worldview differences that seem to mean that so many in the north are alienated from feeling-thinking unity in their own body as they are split off from feeling-thinking in GROUP.

That means to me that the true values that matter most are abundant within the economic poverty of the Southern arm of the human species, while these most important GROUPTHINK (groupfeel) connections are far more likely to be shattered into tiny fragments in the North.

If I think about HUMANS being HUMANS’ most important resource, it isn’t the isolated materialistic disconnected (even in one’s own body between feelings and ‘thoughts’ — body and mind) Northern (European-rooted-‘Western’-thinking) arm of our species that has kept this resource at the center of their lives, their value systems and their civilization.  If I connect my feeling thoughts with my word thoughts I know that being ‘a part’ (which is the foundational assumption in the mechanistic Western worldview) leaves us being apart from one another in profound ways that do not happen among members of our species who have NEVER truly adopted the Western worldview.

I can sit here alone, heating large pans of water to pour down my drain in hopes I can thaw frozen sewer lines IF they are frozen only at MY source, my house, all I want to.  At the same time my heart-of-hearts would much rather be ‘over the border’ in a different land so that I could be ‘a part’ of a much larger connected community.  I would rather be sitting in a tiny adobe house crammed with all ages of people from babies to old people joshing around in a sea of warmth, humor and community as we together pass time while a mutual solution is found to all problems one moment to the next using GROUPTHINK that INCLUDES GROUPFEEL

+THINKING ABOUT THINKING (PART ONE): WHOSE PROBLEM IS IT?

+THINKING ABOUT THINKING (PART TWO): FIRST, SELF-RECOGNITION

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This article provides an excellent, clear and informative description of the purpose of attachment systems and of the variations that can be noted in the attachment patterns of infants:

Explaining Disorganized Attachment:  Clues from Research on Mild-to-Moderately Undernourished Children in Chile

By Everett Waters and Marta Valenzuela — in J. Solomon & C. George (Eds). Attachment Disorganization. (1999) New York: Guilford Press  [See Table of Contents for this book]

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And – and interesting study on the early research toward the ‘disorganized/disoriented’ insecure attachment category:

“This study reanalyzed the attachment relationships of a sample of 12-month-old maltreated and nonmaltreated infants using the Main and Solomon (in press) classification system for disorganized/disoriented (Type D) attachments. As predicted, we found a preponderance of disorganized/disoriented attachments in the maltreatment group (82%). In contrast, only 19% of the demographically matched Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) comparison group exhibited such Type D relationships.”

Disorganized/disoriented attachment relationships in maltreated infants.

Carlson, Vicki; Cicchetti, Dante; Barnett, Douglas; Braunwald, Karen

Developmental Psychology, Vol 25(4), Jul 1989, 525-531.

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