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There are some things that I find I cannot contemplate without including a spiritual dimension to my considerations. Even though I live a simple life I am not oblivious to the disintegration that is happening all around this glorious globe of a planet we live on. I have known trouble. Billions of people on this planet know trouble with every breath they take. Why is there so much trouble on this earth and what will it take for people to understand that it is we who create most of it and therefore it is we who also have the power to change things for the better – for ourselves, for all who share life at this moment, and for the generations that are coming along behind us.
I am participating in a series of Study Circles lead by a local Baha’i woman who is kind enough to make the trip to the little town I live in to teach it. There are at present 8 books in this Ruhi (‘Persian’ for ‘spirit;) series of studies. The first one is titled Reflections on the Life of the Spirit. These studies are designed for every culture the globe over, and all include phrases from the Baha’i writings.
There are two passages from the second class that we finished this week that I can’t help but tie together with what I understand about Trauma Altered Development and how it both happens during extremely malevolent infant-childhoods – and what it does to people.
The first one:
“Truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues.” (‘Abdu’l-Baha, cited in The Advent of Divine Justice, p. 26)
The second one:
“Without truthfulness progress and success, in all the worlds of God, are impossible for any soul.” (Same citation)
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I have a very simple, delicate rose that has begun to bloom in my back yard. The flowers have few petals, meaning that this rose is very close to its wild relatives. Its small buds have a faint yellow-peach tinge to them, but when they open the flowers are light pink-white. As I stop in passing to gaze at these flowers I think about how perfect they are – how pure and how perfect. Although each one of them is a new creation, a flower that has never before now bloomed in all the history of this world, each is also following a pattern over which this rose has absolutely no choice but to fulfill. These roses are both their own unique self at the same time their range of existence is extremely limited.
I think about all the rest of creation, but when my thoughts wander to the realm of the species of man my thoughts begin to follow a different course. Spiritually it is the race of humankind that is unique in all of our Creator’s vision and intention. To humankind has been given options as to how we behave and what we do because we have been given free will and the power to make choices that this simple rose – and all other creation – have not been given.
All the other forms of creation are true to their ‘mission’ in life. They all fulfill their destiny. And yet this rose will always be subject to the conditions of the environment that it lives in. Good environment that meets its needs = great flowers. Bad environment that does not meet its needs = degrees of disintegration and death.
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Of course because this blog and my writings are concerned with the consequences of severe infant-childhood abuse and trauma, I think about my abuse perpetrator (my mother with my father’s cooperation) and about other perpetrators of abuse and harm upon others. How did my mother continue to choose to act the way that she did against me? Did she have a choice? Could she have chosen to act differently – and BETTER?
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According to the Teachings of the Baha’i Faith it is only the human race that has been given free will and the power of conscious choice. This can happen because of all creation humans have two dual natures: One is our mammal-animal nature and the other is our spiritual-soul nature. When humans do ‘good’ we are choosing to operate with our higher spiritual nature. When humans do ‘bad’ we are choosing to operate with our lower animal nature.
When I think about Trauma Altered Development that changes the way a traumatized, maltreated infant-child physiologically forms its body-brain (no choice on this matter) I understand that the altered development happens in direct response to the overwhelming stressful challenges of its earliest harmful environment. These changes, because they happen IN THE BODY and to the body absolutely affect how an individual experiences its entire life.
I believe that there are degrees of change that automatically affect a survivor’s range of free will-choices because the body-brain itself has been prepared for primarily one thing: Physical survival in an incredibly hostile world AT ALL COSTS. Unless and until such a biologically programmed person can achieve a stance of truthfulness about what happened to them that changed their physiological development in the first place, and about how those changes affect how they live their life with every passing moment in time and space, it is the ‘lower’ or animal side of their nature that will govern their life.
Rules of GOOD do not rule this animal side of our nature. All that is GOOD belongs to and comes from the spiritual realm of existence. When the GOOD is missing – well, humans are capable of doing BAD that is nearly beyond imagination. Here enters the concept of ‘evil’ as it manifests the absence of GOOD – or higher human nature qualities.
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It strikes me that these passages I mentioned above are making clear that the ONLY starting place for any of us to begin to examine how we live in relationship to how our Creator wants us to live happens at the point where we allow truthfulness – itself being a primary spiritual quality – to enter into our consciousness. I can say without any question that my mother lacked the ability to do this. Her truth existed in her altered vision and experience of reality. According to HER version of reality everything that she ever did was RIGHT. Her body-brain had not formed in such a way that she could detect, let alone experience, any other version of reality.
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Harshness in the early environment of a rose is not going to turn it into a mean and dangerous creation. Harshness in the early environment of a human being can – and does – do this. While it is certainly possible that people who were given an excellent infant-childhood can make incredibly harmful choices and decisions, my concern will always primarily be with people who make those decisions because their biology was changed in their earliest development that caused them – on their deepest levels – to become nothing more than a single-point-of-focus I-will-survive-at-any-cost BODY of a human being.
Here I entertain the thought that it then becomes the responsibility of the society people live within to find the truth about Trauma Altered Development and then to act on it in a responsible and GOOD way. Education and intervention from the outside not only CAN begin to bring the light of truth into the lives of trauma-altered people – it WILL bring it.
NOBODY ever brought the light of truth to bear upon my mother’s life – EVER.
Some people (perhaps many) do not believe that there is such a thing as ‘truth’. Instead they might say “Everything is relative.” I believe there is TRUTH and that it is described for humans by God. Because ‘religion’ has always been progressive over time, and God has sent us ‘Messengers’ over time that have described both the enduring Truth and the age-appropriate instructions for living our lives, it has always been humankind’s choice to listen-follow-obey or not to.
But I see from my perspective that there ARE exceptions along the range of ability to know ‘the truth’ that stem directly from trauma alterations to physiological development that change a body-brain so that it knows and responds to the oldest biological imperative that there is: I will survive at all costs.
This is, fundamentally, what my mother did. How her biological imperative came to include all but destroying me – I believe – can truthfully and accurately be explained, described and understood. I do not believe it is a mystery that defies explanation. While I still struggle about coming to my own definite conclusion about how I feel about my mother, neither have I wavered in my 59 years of life from making a pretty good guess that my mother did not have any other choice but to act the way that she did BECAUSE nobody on the outside intervened.
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Humans are always engaged in ‘building up’ or in ‘sinking down’ – either to our higher spiritual nature or to our lower animal nature. In cases like my mother’s her instinctual animal survival BODY had such power over her that what should have been her more highly evolved options did not exist for her.
There is only one place I can go in my thinking when I think about my mother because I believe it is within this realm of ‘mothers who kill their children’ that my mother’s truest biological trauma-altered in their earliest physiological development kin would be found. The fact that this is a grim picture of possible reality does not make it any less true – or real.
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Women Who Kill Their Children — 11 Women Are on Death Row for Killing Their Kids By Charles Montaldo, About.com Guide
Mother Kills Son And Daughter For Being ‘Mouthy’ By TAMARA LUSH
Child Murder by Mothers: A Critical Analysis of the Current State of Knowledge and a Research Agenda By Susan Hatters Friedman, M.D., Sarah McCue Horwitz, Ph.D., and Phillip J. Resnick, M.D.
When Parents Kill — Why fathers do it. Why mothers do it. By Dahlia Lithwick
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From my point of view, and in the interest of what is most likely the truth, every parent who kills (and those who severely abuse infants and children) suffered from trauma altered development so that their physiology was drastically changed. I have do doubt that if my mother could have ‘gotten away with it’ that she would have killed me (except she also needed me alive to work her own ‘troubles’ out on!).
What matters to me is that society at large has the obligation – and it is a spiritual one – to discover the truth about how early severe infant-child maltreatment operates in tandem with biological mandates for survival to create human beings who live in a different reality than ‘ordinary’ or ‘normal’ that other people live in. Their reality IS ordinary and normal TO THEM because their trauma-changed body-brain says that it is.
I will never waste my time to read anything anyone says about parents who murder their children because I already know that in nearly all cases the evolutionary power to change the development of such a person during their own malevolent early years will not be included in these considerations – therefore the truth is being left out. It is ONLY by considering the information presented by researchers such as Dr. Martin Teicher that the truth can be known about terrible parents.
If we do not choose to consider the facts as they are becoming known about Trauma Altered Development and the degrees of changes it creates in a growing body-brain during especially the first 33 months of life we are choosing to participate in the lie rather than the truth. I choose not to walk down the pathway of ignorance. It does not lead to the goodness I wish for myself – or for the larger world I am a part of.
Biologically programming a human being for survival-at-all-costs in the worst of worlds has devastating consequences for many survivors of this process. This is what happened to my mother.
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Stop the Storm 