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Yet again I must remind myself about the special characteristics of my life, my infancy and childhood, my story and of my body as it had to change in its development within an 18-year environment of trauma as these characteristics are unique and extraordinary (out-of-the-ordinary). As I begin today to allow words about ‘my relationship with my father’ to take form on paper and digitalized screen I am coming around full circle to thoughts that came to me in 2006 when I first began my ‘developmental neuroscience’ research into my experience of life – and how it got to be the way that it is.
I started then and I am back there today thinking about brainwashing, mind-control and thought-control that was first formerly identified in 1950 related to techniques the Chinese used to alter the lives of people in drastic ways through trauma, torture, terror and imprisonment. In 2006 I read stories written by survivors of these Chinese brainwashing efforts, but even as I did so I found not ONLY the similarity between what was done to these survivors (and their experience of surviving them) but also began to understand at the core of my being that every one of these survivors seemed to have had access to a tool that saved them. I understood that I never had this tool.
What allowed these survivors to retain deep within their brain-mind-self at least a tiny corner of resistance and self-identity that the brainwashing could never touch was a sense of having BEEN a self prior to their torture experiences. That self was directly tied to memories, very often of deep love and secure attachment to others, from their life prior to these terrible times. I never had the opportunity to experience anything before my mother’s torture of me began because I had suffered from the same kinds of brainwashing patterns the Chinese used on their prisoners from the moment I was born.
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These thoughts are tied to my beginning response to Question #4 about my father that is a part of the book my daughter and I are writing about my infant-childhood. I have no reason to believe that my mother wasn’t able to brainwash my father. But at the moment that is not my concern. What I am thinking about still is my response to the snake on my door yesterday.
I just did a Google search of the terms “child abuse startle response,” and encourage readers to do the same and spend some time poking around with the information that appears on the screen. The single word that pops out to me on this search page is this one: “obligatory.” Everyone’s body is ‘obliged’ to respond one way or the other to perceived threat to well-being and life, but if a body has been built within environments of severe trauma from infancy the entire process of obliged-to-response will have been changed during earliest development.
I believe it pays all abuse survivors to become familiar with some of the information presented in the Google search I mention because we LIVE in and with a body that has been changed in development and will ALWAYS respond differently to the stress of trauma (real or perceived).
I suspect nearly everyone would experience a startle response to suddenly finding a great big snake wrapped around their doorknob of a door they just approach. But for someone like me the reverberations from my initial startle reaction lasted for hours and hours, long past the actual experience with the snake. Unlike what a nonabused person’s reaction would have been, mine involved and included a reawakening of many of my body’s old traumas along with my body’s ‘obligatory’ reactions and responses to them.
I doubt that I will ever look at or touch my front security door again without having the thought (and the image) of that snake’s body wrapping and twisting and slithering itself all over it. I also know that my body-brain-mind-self never formed any procedures to release trauma from the present moment so that it doesn’t become added onto the entire massive collection of trauma that I have physiologically been ‘obliged’ to remember.
At the same time I understand that I am certainly not in any exclusive club when it comes to reactions to snakes, I also understand that the startle response I had yesterday and all the feelings I am STILL feeling in my body as a result are the SAME ONES I was forced to have in response to my OWN MOTHER on most occasions I was forced to endure my encounters with her – in one way or the other.
These patterns of startle, trauma and pain built themselves into me in such a way from the moment I was born that I most often experience some degree of ‘startle’ and resonating discomfort when I am in the company of nearly ANY human being other than those people, like my children, with whom I share my closest love-attachments.
These are the kinds of lifelong difficult consequence that infant abuse in particular creates.
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Stop the Storm 
so interesting. I work with a group of seniors who are Holocaust survivors. What I always find interesting is the differences between them. I am amazed at the resilence in them. I wonder how they were ever able to go on and have “normal” lives after living and witnessing such horrors. Many lost their family members. One man lost his family,a wife and child.
Yet even within the group, you have the kindest ,loving people who have raised loving families. There is one lady within the group who is not always nice to other members.
She has a troubled relationship with her children as well.
I also know that this particular woman lost her mother when she was only a year old. Her father later remarried a very abusive woman who was terrible to her. All this proir to the camp experiences. She has many issues today,I personally think she is BPD although she was not diagnosed.
I really believe to truly know a person and how they respond especially to later traumas one would have to know their first 33 months of life – primarily with their mother but also with all other primary caregivers who have attachment relationships (or not, most unfortunately) with that infant. The foundation for EVERYTHING in a person is set during those most critical months conception to 2. It is also likely there is child sexual abuse in the suspected BPD individual (and, like with my mother, my guess there are LOTS of adults who have no memory of sexual abuse in childhood — the proof is in the way the individual gets along thru life!).