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I can’t say I want to write this post.  I HAVE to write this post, because I don’t believe there is anyone — not ANYONE — who will truly understand what I have to say except for infant abuse survivors.  Even if we don’t know that we know what I am going to say here, we DO KNOW it because we live with this condition all of our lives because it was built into our body-brain from the time we were born (or even before that time depending on our pre-birth experiences).

It won’t be until we realize consciously as survivors that we have this ‘condition’ that we will be able to talk about it.  Conscious realization might not so much change HOW this condition operates so much as it might change how we feel about ourselves and other people.

A week of out-of-town guests (family) has concluded.  I am left feeling confused and bogged down by (almost) unnameable feelings from this past week’s experiences of being around people I love and who love me.  But at the same time I am working to gain some clarity about all of this I realize that I have nobody to verbalize my process or insights with.  While our nation is itself increasingly suffering from this unnameable and invisible malady to one degree or another, it is those of us who suffered from the most trauma, neglect, abuse and maltreatment from birth (and/or before birth) who — I believe — have the truest capacity to recognize this first (other than developmental neuroscientists who very well know what this condition is and where it comes from — though I don’t believe they know PERSONALLY what it FEELS like as we infant survivors do).

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How can we talk about a condition that seems to be so unnameable and so invisible?  Where are the words we can use to talk about something that is becoming dangerously prevalent in our culture in the degrees of damage it creates within people — and within all of our relationships to self, others and the world around us?

My first comment would be that I can’t say (or feel as if I KNOW) the true reality of any single human transaction that just happened during this past week.  Next, I would say that I am a survivor of such severe infant abuse (followed by the next 18 years of abuse) that I am far, far, far over on the ‘this sure happened to me’ continuum.  So although it is therefore easier (and even possible) that I would be the one to identify that whatever it was that happened this past week,  it was the HOW of HOW it all happened that most disturbed me.

Don’t get me wrong.  There were no fights, no cross words between any of us.  All that happened remained in the realm of the ‘silent and unspeakable’.

When experts talk about less-than-optimal infant-caregiver attachment interactions in disturbed early relationships they speak – yes – of resulting insecure attachment disorders.  They are ALSO saying at the same time that ’empathy disorders’ directly connect to the same painful, neglectful, frightening, inadequate and non-loving interactions.

As I look around at our nation and consider that our cultural and societal platforms of safety and security that are needed to provide support on all levels to young infant-children and their parents, I recognize that degrees of these ‘insecure attachment disorders’ and their related-connected empathy disorders are GOING to be the lifelong ‘condition’ of most little ones that are suffering today.

While it might take obvious and direct abuse to create such a trauma-changed body-brain in survivors of the worst of infant maltreatment, there is no possible way that little ones who experience deprivation even unintentionally committed against them can escape having some form of insecure attachment-empathy disorder created in their developing body-brain.

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We will recognize these patterns as confusing interactions between others (and within our self) as they contain emotional messages that are communicated within social exchanges.  We are members of a social species, and all the ‘wiring’ we receive during ESPECIALLY our first year of life establishes the physiological capacities we will use the rest of our life to relate as social-species members.

I just went through a week where most interactions I experienced fell squarely into the GUESSWORK category.  When the emotional-social circuits in a little one’s body-brain form under duress, patterns of communication and interaction simply WILL NOT work RIGHT (optimal-health).  Emotions existed on all levels this past week and NONE of them were directly expressed — or even recognized — for the entire week.

I will never claim that I have the ability — or ever will in this lifetime have the ability — to be able to clarify or make clear any aspect of human exchange that the OTHER person can’t do the same for within their own self.  When OTHER people have suffered in their earliest developmental stages enough trauma that their own body-brain wasn’t built to process emotional-social information ‘correctly’ (optimal health) — I am LOST LOST LOST!

I can ONLY function smoothly (safely and securely) when I am around people who had enough safety and security in their earliest attachment relationships that they were able to form a body-brain during the first year of life that processes emotional-social information ‘correctly’.  Certainly not one single person connected to my own family of origin received what they needed for this to happen.  Even though I was most definitely the ‘chosen one’ to receive the horrors of the direct abuse, all of my siblings were witness and also grew from birth being ‘trained’ by a mad woman who NEVER processed emotional-social information correctly.

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I HATE how I end up feeling — like every single tiny interaction this past week was a ‘misdirect’.  I will NEVER truly comprehend or be comfortable with human emotional-social exchanges.  I am absolutely dependent upon the ability of the OTHER PERSON to know how all those interactions are SUPPOSED to work.  If the other person suffered from some degree of ‘damage’ to their physiological development in their RIGHT emotional-social development I am LOST LOST LOST.

The problem nearly ALWAYS IS that the other person (people) don’t even begin to realize that these trauma-altered patterns are going on.  The problems appear invisibly, are unnameable, are left unidentified and unresolved.  The ‘ruptures’ in conversations and in the communication of need and intent are left without ‘repair’.  The most critically important quality of human interaction that relates to FEELING FELT does not exist, and everything lands in the murky world of ‘what the heck is actually going on here’?

I don’t understand myself how to overcome these difficulties because I was nearly entirely built in a world of trauma and extreme abuse.  All I know at this point is that what I just experience this past week was very, very real — and equally invisible.  It is NOT, however, completely unnameable to me because I have spent a great deal of time and effort trying to learn about how I was trauma-built in my body-brain.

In addition I can FEEL what just went wrong last week even though I have no clue how I personally could have made anything ‘better’.  So this is one of those ‘I am writing a message and stuffing it into a bottle hoping someone will know what I am trying to say’ posts.

We are obviously not living in an infant-child friendly culture, no matter what words we mouth as a nation to the contrary.  Problems with empathy and its resulting potential for true compassion and for truly feeling felt and for helping others to feel felt are flying into our nation’s past the same way they flew into my past when I was born.  I NEVER was allowed to experience these most precious and vitally important emotional-social patterns of interaction from the time I left my mother’s womb.  Those deprivations built themselves into me at the same time they built me during the formation of my emotional-social earliest-forming right brain.

To know that I am not alone in this, and that many, many others experienced ‘degrees of damage’ through the same process (though not so extremely) actually greatly disappoints me!  What hope do I have to find large numbers of optimally love-formed, non-early-traumatized people that can help ME understand what it means to be a well-being-human?

I KNOW all this now!  I know that anything less than clear, open, loving, appropriate and stable patterns of interaction between a mother (and other earliest caregivers) and an infant ESPECIALLY until age one  cannot possibly create those same optimal patterns and their corresponding capacities-abilities within a growing infant’s body-brain.

When these optimal patterns are missing all emotional-social patterns for a lifetime will be reflecting their absence.  As a consequence, healthy empathy, quality compassion and complete communication between suffers will be missing.  What is left, then, are patterns of missing information, distortion of priorities, incomplete communications (transmissions), misdirected efforts to interact with others, absent critical emotional information, vague recognition of self and others, and some degree of dismal-abysmal relationships that do not (because they most often cannot) include the fullest potential of what human beings can actually accomplish as emotional-social beings.

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