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As my daughter and I prepare to write our book, it is so important to me that SHE understands what I mean when I tell her, “It’s NOT the individual specific details of what my mother did to me as contained in any story I could tell about my severely abusive infant-childhood that truly matter.  What matters MOST is what the trauma my mother caused me DID to change my physiological development.”  The article contained in my last post, +WHAT EARLY ABUSE/NEGLECT SURVIVORS MOST NEED TO KNOW (AND ARE LEAST LIKELY TO BE TOLD) is EXACTLY what I mean.  Yet the changes highlighted in that article are only the tip of the ‘trauma changed physiological development’ iceberg.

It is critical to me that what my daughter and I write will communicate that it isn’t the actual specific details of ANYTHING that happened to ANY of us as survivors that TRULY changed us — or our entire lives.  As a result of the physiological impact of the stress hormones our body was forced to create in us in response to trauma, abuse and neglect we ended up with a DIFFERENT body-brain with which we process every experience of our lives — then and now.

I personally believe it is criminal that early severe maltreatment survivors are NOT GIVEN THIS INFORMATION.  Everything any of us hope to achieve in the way of healing hinges upon how we learn about the trauma-changed body we live in/with so that we can identify how we are different from OTHERS who are not early severe maltreatment survivors.  We do NOT have the same body that they do — and EVERYONE needs to understand this fact — and what it means.

It is so easy for ‘professionals’ to ‘diagnose’ my ‘condition’ with labels and categories at the same time the important information about my trauma-changed physiological development is left completely out of the picture.  I am sorry, but the truth is that I have done amazingly well considering the changes my body-brain was forced to make!!  But simply suggesting something like “You have an anxiety disorder” does nothing to reflect my true reality.

Tell me, rather, what ‘limbic kindling’ really is, what it feels like, what it means to me from the INSIDE of my body.  Tell me what ’emotional dysregulation’ really is, what ‘the inability to self-sooth’ really is, what is really happening when my right brain, my left brain, and the region that processes information between them was built differently from ordinary under terribly traumatic and stressful conditions.

If there are practicing professionals out there that do not KNOW about the information such as Teicher’s article presents — and at this point this includes nearly ALL OF THEM —  then in my mind they are unethically applying inappropriate techniques AND MEDICATIONS to their clients.  These professionals — all of them including doctors — need to obtain the education about these facts before they EVER begin to treat early abuse survivors for ANYTHING!

Excuse me, but not only our lives but the quality of our lives depends on our being told when we ask for help what trauma altered development is, how and why it happens, what it means, and how we can live a better life with the trauma altered developmental changes that happened to us.

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