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I often ponder the combination of information about safe and secure infant attachment (and the opposite). Pondering means I still wonder about how these patterns work — and don’t work — according to how ‘nature’ designed them for mammalian survival. In the simplest of patterns I can actually WATCH (because human behavior is SO complicated!) I notice my two grown cats.
Each of them is let out for the night. They go off and do their cat thing, and in the morning they return. But the gold tiger female, Goldilocks, nearly always returns hours before her brother, Hunter, does. I don’t think she even goes very far afield. He probably does.
Neither Goldilocks nor my dog settle in on the mornings that Hunter comes home late like he did this morning. They pace around, sit by the door at attention, or scamper the reaches of our yard searching for him until he arrives. Then, as was the pattern today, they greet him gladly once he’s safely home. All eat their breakfast, and then the cat-rest of the day begins.
I have an old sheet spread over my blankets on my bed. No matter how much I wash it within moments of cat-sleeping upon it it is dingy again. I also don’t ‘make’ my bed in any sense of the word. I plump up my blankets in inviting piles under this sheet because if I don’t the cats don’t like it there. Then they go wander around the house and sleep in whatever location they decide is more inviting than a correctly smoothed out bed thus dragging dirt and cat hair all over the house!
So up both cats hopped onto their daytime domicile this morning once all had eaten his breakfast. I had watched his entire string of actions from the moment he appeared at the screen door meowing softly to be let in. SUPER AWARE and HYPER-VIGILANT at first, he startled at every tiny sound. This is how he survives his nightly travels, I know.
Yet after a few moments of being indoors he settles down. His entire body language shifts to that of being an indoor cat. Once on the bed both cats luxuriously stretch out to their LONG full length, doze for a few moments and then disappear into deep long sleep for the rest of the day.
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SO – obviously they feel safe in the house, but it is not I that is providing them protection. It must be the total environment of these four walls with entry barred by windows, doors and their screens that lets these cats know they have nothing to fear. The end result is that in safety they REST.
This intertwining (as I still see it) pattern of safety, protection and relaxation-rest still leaves me with some confusion about how they all operate together. As an abused infant-child I NEVER had a ‘place’ to go where I felt as safe within a parameter of protection as my cats do. I obviously found ways to rest in spite of this fact.
I have talked to battle-worn war survivors who express how sleeping on an active battlefield happens differently than otherwise. Some of these altered patterns might never leave a war veteran for the rest of their lifetime. Being able to sleep at the same time one is hyper-alert is possible, but I believe there is a high cost to the well-being of body and self if this is the chronic pattern of one’s life.
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My point? I don’t have a clue. As I say this topic is still swirling and unclear to me. I cannot view this from the ‘outside’ as if I ever knew in my body from my birth what resting in safety and security ever meant. So, I guess I still can’t figure this out even now!
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Stop the Storm 
I haven’t wrapped my mind around it all but when I wrote that humans have choices…in our mothers cases…when I say..unconsious..I think we are saying the same things. I dont believe my mother had the ability to make a loving, compassionate decision . I guess I need to understand what unconsious actually means. She still did what she did…she chose it out of all that she had which had which was nothing. She still chose it. Did she know what she was doing…the impact of it ..I dont believe so..because BPD mothers are missing that component.
I agree. In humans we use this word ‘unconscious’ to describe what other animals, birds, etc. do BY NATURE. When human development happens so that the ‘animal’ responses in the body take over, it will take a concentrated and deliberate CHOICE to change these patterns CONSCIOUSLY so that the patterns in the body are overridden that CAN certainly create positive change probably in ALL humans, no matter how trauma-changed their body-brain might be.
Any later changes that a person makes are still based on the physiological platforms created in the body early in life (changed by trauma) and most often IN SPITE OF the changed body-brain. There is always HOPE.
I wrote the trauma of lovng a child..sorry..I meant LOSING a child. As I write this I think,and for those of us who had BPD mothers…to add The trauma of losing a mother to that illness.
I hear you! One of my acquaintances wrote some quote as her facebook status that was along the exact same lines….something like,I wouldn’t take away a moment of my life because that made me the person I am….and that would be saying God makes mistakes.
I read that and while everyone wrote all kinds of comments of agreements mine was different. I had to write something for those of us who were in abusive environments..not to mention what about those who experienced the trauma of loving a child, or has been raped or any other kind of significant pain? Thats just plain naive.
I also don’t believe God makes mistakes…I believe people choose their actions .(whether unconciously or not).
I appreciated what the pyschotherapist on the Oprah show said yesterday…Children are born with a clean slate and they will behave and believe what ever is told to them whether in words or actions. (my own interpretation). And that children need one essential component…to be HEARD which gives them validation and VALUE.
That was a powerful show yesterday(May 19, 2011).I would suggest that if you missed it, to take a look at it via the net.
I don’t watch TV.
I believe that yes, God created humans to choose. Yet in cases like my mother’s I am not at all convinced that she had what ‘ordinary’ humans know of as free choice past her age of five. If humans have a dual nature, both animal and spiritual it is the choosing to follow one or the other of these pathways – at every moment of our life – that determines HOW our life (and those we influence) plays itself out.
Super or SUPRA- trauma altered development removes a range of options because the response to trauma during earliest development can take over the show – like it did for my mother. God allowed that other people COULD have taken action to intervene with what happened to me. They did not.
We have both spiritual laws to follow and societal ones. When I think about the big picture I think about how immature our entire species still is. It will remain that way until humans become willing to truly acknowledge that all good we experience in life comes from our Creator and all bad comes from US!!!! It is society’s responsibility to pay attention, educate themselves, rearrange their priorities so that criminals are not allowed to commit crimes. Crimes against infants and children are just that: CRIMES.
And…..this leaves me thinking about ‘natural disasters’ which happen as a result of natural processes – often in combination with human choice (building in dumb places, etc.). I see Trauma Altered Development as being a natural process that happens when the ‘animal’ side of especially mammals requires these changes happen so that survival in malevolent environments can continue.
The consequences of these developmental changes can be as disastrous (past simple physical survival itself to reproductive age) as any other kind of ‘natural disaster’ can be.
After reading your blog..I began to think back to my life living in the chaotic and frightening environment and wondered how I was ever able to sleep at night?? I know that in the day or evening when she would start her rageing screaming fits …I would literally shake and tremble uncontrollably.But then I think..I slept at night?
Maybe a fairy God mother whisked me out of my bed into a safe cozy loving environment where I was held tenderly all night long?
Home was never a safe place.I wanted out! But tell me,where can a child go to find safety if not in his own home?
There is a high cost to living in a state of hypervigence. For me, its having what professionals call”generalized Anxiety”. And what I call “,the after effects ‘ of the war I lived through at home. Really?? How much can a body and mind take?
Maybe if I was spared this environment I would be anxiety free…well not completely but at least I wouldnt jump out of my skin when someone walks in a room unxpectantly and gently says Hello?
Howdy there! Yes, we would have very different bodies had we been raised without the terrible traumas!! I had a conversation (cheating in a way, asked two women I know when I went to town the question #3 I will begin to write about on Saturday – but thought I would LISTEN to them, of course saying nothing about myself ’cause of my book-writing-vow-of-silence!!).
One of the women had what’s called a ‘good enough’ childhood – well, really much better than that. (Google search ‘good enough parenting’ – is interesting and important term.)
The other woman described hers in all the terms one would use for a terrible childhood with abuse from both father and mother. But I called her this morning to clarify and asked her if her mother was ‘OK’ when this woman was born. Turns out, yes she was. Both her parents began to drink heavily when she was 10!! Her father had PTSD from Vietnam, her story has some HORRIBLE parts — but she was OK until 10!
Confirmed my hypothesis, really – won’t go into all that now — but there is such a difference here between her story and yours and mine it’s hard to even compare the after effects — and she DID have some and always will. But the changes that happened to those of us with terrible trauma especially 0-2 and from there until age 5 had serious physiological changes to our development that this woman did not experience. I believe this pattern makes a huge difference, also, in ‘recovery’ ’cause those without the early, early abuse have a very different set of powerfully positive things to fall back on (especially in their own body) that you and I don’t have.
But we heal ANYWAY just as we survived ANYWAY. I think part of what made me question her further today was her statement: “I have absolutely NO REGRETS because everything I went through made me the person I am today and I forgive everyone.”
I compared myself to her yesterday. I can’t say I have ‘no regrets’. I KNOW this is not the body life could have given me without that terrible trauma – and I think to make a ‘blanket peace’ with our hellish infant-childhoods can come awfully close to denial about how truly devastating and permanently harmful INFANT CHILD ABUSE IS!! I will never in any way join along with the idea that this abuse doesn’t DESERVE regrets!!