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My daughter emails me videos to watch of my grandson who is nearly 15 months old.  We live 1700 miles away from one another – and I wish we didn’t.  Just life, I guess – but I love the videos!

The one I received yesterday shows my grandson learning to walk and what JOY he has — and showed him pushing the buttons on his toy that plays him songs so he can dance and sing along.  What JOY!

There are no words for how happy I feel for him, or for how happy I am that his parents are taking care of him right!  My grandson has his secure attachments to them and to the other important people who love him right where they are supposed to be — exactly at the center of his body, his nervous system, his brain — and as he continues to make great strides toward growing up all this goodness will be a part of his mind and his self, and at the center of his relationships with this self, with other people and with the world for the rest of his life.

I watch the complete freedom that little one has in his body to move – to express with that freedom the joy in movement that I believe ALL severely abused infants and young children completely miss!  How can a little one move with joy and freedom IN THEIR BODY as they experience their life in a world of joy once that little one — in their body — has been hurt, harmed, traumatized and terrified?

I don’t believe they can.

That just made me think that the sadness severe early abuse survivors feel is NOT only about what trauma was done to them.  It is ALSO about missing WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN.  This is a ‘double-whammy-sadness’.

Healing for survivors certainly CAN include ‘body work’ to bring some of these experience of freedom and absolute joy into their body.  I just know for myself that this is hard for me to do.  I am learning something about how hard it really is – and why – as I see the contrast between what my and other abuse survivors’ beginning life was like compared to what it was SUPPOSED to be like.

I’m just ‘documenting’ this today.  That’s all…….

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