++++

Many thanks to Sandy Mitchell for forwarding the information to me about these important free webinar sessions about how TRAUMA impacts the BODY and about HEALING. 

I am not very techno-savvy, but given the fact that I very much NEED to know this information personally – I have registered for the upcoming webinar for this Wednesday, May 8, 2013.

These are offered through the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute:  Professional Training in Somatic Psychology.  (“Soma” = Body.)

++++

This is the information contained in the email Sandy sent to me just now:

Dear Colleague,

As you know, helping people heal from trauma often means knowing how to go beyond talking to resolve symptoms by working with the body.

Our friends from NICABM are doing a webinar with SPI founder/educational director Pat Ogden, PhD, and I highly encourage you to take part.  Dr. Ogden will be discussing how important the link between the brain, mind, and body is in understanding trauma.

This Wednesday’s webinar with Pat will air at 5pm Eastern and is free to watch at the time of broadcast – you just have to sign up.

Pat will also demonstrate how physical exercises can help patients develop a solid sense of self.

Here’s the full agenda for the webinar:

• Uncovering Root Causes – The Long-Term Effects of Attachment Issues
• The Big Things We Miss When We Forget the Body
• Work in the Now: Why the Present is So Important
• How Trauma Sounds: Interpreting Prosody
• How to Capture Fleeting Bodily Expressions
• Why Experiments Are So Effective in Therapy
• How Interoceptive Awareness Becomes Compromised and Why this Matters
• Building the Resources that Stabilize Arousal

This webinar is part of NICABM’s New Treatments for Trauma series, in which the latest ideas and practical applications are explained by other experts like Peter Levine, PhD, Bessel van der Kolk, MD, Stephen Porges, PhD, Francine Shapiro, PhD, and Ruth Lanius, MD, PhD.

Watching the webinar is free at the time of broadcast – just click here to sign up.

Or, you can get a Gold Membership to get the videos, audios, and transcripts for every webinar in the series, even if you’ve missed one!  But, the price for the Gold Membership will be going up soon, so be sure to take a look now.

Sincerely,

Nate P. Mariotti

Director of Training Operations

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy® Institute (SPI)

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy® Europe (SPEU)  

PS Gold Members get 3 additional bonuses just for signing up, so please take a look.  The price for this series is going up soon! 

[REMEMBER – YOU CAN WATCH THESE FREE IF YOU CATCH THE RIGHT TIMES!  VERY GENEROUS OF THESE FOLKS, I THINK!]

   This webinar series is sponsored by our friends at NICABM

Click Here for complete information

For questions please contact   

Phone: (860) 456-1153  

Fax: (860) 423-4512

respond@nicabm.com 

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy® Institute (SPI) is an educational organization founded by Pat Ogden, PhD.  SPI is dedicated to the study and teaching of a somatic approach to clinical psychotherapy practice. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy® is a body-oriented talking therapy that integrates verbal techniques with body-centered interventions in the treatment of trauma, attachment, and developmental issues.

SPI offers trainings and workshops for psychotherapists and allied professionals in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy® and courses for body therapists on somatic resources. The courses taught by SPI are based on principles of mindfulness and mind/body/spirit holism and informed by contemporary research in neuroscience, attachment theory, trauma, and related fields. 

www.sensorimotor.org 

++++

I am not good with math (!!) but I do know it is important to notice the time zone this free webinar is being listed with.  We have to make adjustments for our individual time zones in order to catch the free sessions for these webinars – there is an automatic time zone adjustment on the page you reach after you register.  I believe there will be many more intriguing and important ones coming up soon.

After I completed the registration I received this email:

Hi Linda,

Thank you for signing up!

Just click on the link below to see the schedule for the 2013 Trauma Therapy Webinar Series:

• ·       Treating Trauma 2013 series: webinar schedule & timezone converter

The webinars take place every Wednesday at 5:00pm EDT, with a rebroadcast at 6:30pm EDT.

We’ll also send you email reminders with links to the webinar on each broadcast day.

Enjoy the program!

All best,

NICABM

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

One of my Alaska brothers sent me this article yesterday published in the Anchorage Daily News.  He told me it reminded him of me and of our childhood.  Although my mother kept an insanely clean house, although she was the abuser and not our father, although there were no criminal charges against my parents, no criminal sexual assault, and no alcoholism, the grim-beyond-words environment this young man was raised within – coupled with the failings of any kind of “system” or individual that could have spared this young man – will sound extremely familiar to many of this blog’s readers.

In case of Alaska teen who killed dad, self-defense argument takes shape By CASEY GROVE

It has taken me nearly 24 hours to decide to highlight this article of the account of the horrible mess one young man is now in as he picked up a gun and slaughtered the madman that was his father.  Such a horror story raises thousands of questions for which I certainly have no answers.  Does anyone?

I am reminded that my writing work about my abuse history is, as one of my sisters called it yesterday – what I can do.  But it is hard to find a perspective that lets me know what I can do is good enough.  It will take a combined investment of many, many people to create solutions to the kinds of troubles this young man faced/faces – and that I and so many others also face.

My sister wrote me:

“And the words that you have worked so hard to craft and your story which is so hard to tell WILL help many people I am sure. Just think of the ripple of the stone in the pond affect…how each small thing works to bring large change. I am so proud of you and the absolutely heroic effort you have made!”

The ripples.  This newspaper story and the very real people that belong to it are also part of the rippling.  I cannot completely ignore this young man’s plight just because I don’t know how to do anything to help him!  That young man needed help a long, long time ago.  Yet how are we as a society going to find a way to protect children within the home of their parents as long as our standards are so incredibly low for what we believe ALL infants and children need and deserve?

++

I am reminded of one of my “crime report” stories that I suppose will need to be rewritten when I reach that point in the books I am working on now.  For now, this is a part of my own experience that is resonating with the history of the young man in the above article:

• +Age 14 – SCRUBBED IN THE TUB

One of the absolute stupidest questions people ask me is “Why didn’t you fight back against your mother.”

I am not even going to begin to write here what I have to say about that question.  What is in this post is enough to give anyone who asks that question a run for their pitiful money.  There are reader comments at the bottom of the newspaper article written by people who I would most certainly add to the “pitiful” category.

For as positive as I try to stay while working through trauma concerns I would have nothing coherent to say in response to some of those readers’ words.  Sometimes this entire subject DOES seem impossible.  I NEED to find ways to believe that it is NOT!

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

The Dark Side of Mildred’s Mountain series – Angel book 2 beginning with the POP!  Goes Alaska letters – chapter 42

°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°

42.  When their pain becomes our own

May 4, 2013.  I spoke with Joe Anne Vanover in a telephone conversation again yesterday after I finished the writing of chapter 41.  She has now read all nine of the manuscripts for the books that precede this one and is waiting for more.  Although this amazing woman has a unique vested interest in this entire story having been Mildred’s friend for 46 years, she assures me that what she is learning through her reading of these books will come clear to many other readers, as well.  I feel even more inspired and empowered to complete my writing by the encouragement and support Joe Anne so kindly, generously and enthusiastically gives me.

Joe Anne has always loved children, yet through her growing understanding of the truth of this mother-daughter saga she has learned much more about the importance of the information every infant and child clearly communicates in their eyes, through their body language, expressions and actions that CAN be recognized by everyone who knows what they are seeing.   Joe Anne told me she can now clearly tell just by watching children which ones are not wanted, not loved, abused, neglected and traumatized.  She told me she can clearly see now that these children are obviously “very different” from other children who do not suffer from these troubles, and that these differences can be seen in very young children well before the age of two.

It seems to me that through her reading of these books nearly all of the many, many questions Joe Anne has had for over 50 years about her “odd friend” Mildred are turning into answers that include important new information about how the troubles in Mother’s earliest life affected and changed her, how they manifested throughout Mother’s life in her severe mental illness, and about the terrible child abuse and trouble in our family that went on “behind closed doors.”  Yet what matters most to me and excites me for my further writing work is the fact that Joe Anne finds the information in these books can be applied very simply to the understanding of the life conditions of all children a person comes into contact with everywhere.

Once child abuse and neglect becomes clearly visible to us – as troubled children naturally express it with their every movement – our society will change its attitudes and actions concerning child well-being.  We will no longer be able to deny or ignore what we are seeing all around us.  Once the “language” of troubled children begins to scream at people, and as these troubled children no longer remain hidden in silence and invisibility around us because we finally understand what we are SEEING in their every action and expression, all of our lives are going to change in some way by what we have been willing to learn.  These children DO tell us their stories unequivocally even without speaking it in words.  They tell it in their being every instant of their lives.

Once we clearly understand that infant and child abuse and neglect happens all around us we will naturally move in the direction of creating changes in our shared social environments that have positive effects upon the quality of these children’s lives.  We will find ways to diminish the numbers of little people who are suffering from preventable human-caused trauma, and we will eventually stop it from happening all together.  Our combined consciousness has to be raised and our conscience has to be awakened on behalf of our infants and children. 

First we need to SEE these children and their suffering by learning their unspoken language of trauma and what it tells us.  Once we do this we will never be able to forget what we have learned.  Then we need to understand what causes abuse and neglect, what negative impact it has on the quality of a person’s entire life, and we need to learn how to stop it from happening.  We can do this.  We WILL do this because we will want to.

As the unnecessary hardships, difficulties and traumas of children’s lives begin to become increasingly obvious and therefore real to more and more of us their discomfort and suffering will increasingly become our own.  This is how our human empathy, compassion and caregiving systems – all physiologically built into our body-brain – are designed to operate.  Problems we cannot deny, ignore or tolerate will cause us to change in positive ways so that these problems will be matched with solutions and go away.  Then we will ALL feel better!

Everyone reading these words is already a part of this solution process!  It is as simple as that.

°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

The Dark Side of Mildred’s Mountain series – Angel book 2 beginning with the POP!  Goes Alaska letters – chapter 41

°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°

41.  Forced patience

May 3, 2013.  I return today to my work on this book after having taken two weeks off from its writing to settle myself down from my anger that flared so hotly when I reached Mother’s statement in her letter about the excellence of my first grade efforts:  “Linda never makes a mistake and I have to watch that she doesn’t get too proud.”  I have never chosen to carry anger toward my parents for the horrors they did to me.  I consider an angry road to be one of treacherous crossing for me.  I cannot afford anger for anger’s sake. 

When I awoke this morning it became clear to me that I have accomplished the goal I set for myself two weeks ago:  I no longer feel angry.  Instead I feel the familiar sadness that has accompanied me in my life for as long as I can remember.  Some say there is a righteous anger that can be reasonably turned toward solving problems that create injustices in the world.  Certainly infant and child abuse and neglect qualify as injustice.  I know that.  Yet I prefer compassion rather than anger for my companion.

I find I can afford compassion because it allows for a sensitive discovery of the complexities that flesh out the bigger picture of what happened to me.  No traps of sudden danger spring open to lure me into the oblivion of rage if I can stay on my own pathway through my mother’s words and the writing of my story.  The rage was hers.  She beat my anger out of me before we ever moved to Alaska.

Anger was no longer mine by the time I turned six years old except for one time when I was a senior in high school, and even then that one flash came as an awareness that I was going to stand up to Mother.  This was more an action of resolve and determination than it was of outright anger.  I resisted her force.  I did not act against her.

There was another time during my middle childhood when I made a decision to test Mother.  I do not consider that I made any kind of an anger-based choice.  At that time I used the growing sophistication of my developing rational mind to consider what seemed to be the facts of my childhood as I opted for mutiny.  The consequences were disastrous on all but the most inward and meaningful level.  At least I can look back on those long horror-filled 18 years of my childhood and see that on those two occasions I DID defy my mother.  (Those stories belong to later books in this series.)

In all but those two cases my having been rendered incapable of feeling anger left me without the ability to fight back against my mother.  Perhaps it was my unspoken recognition of this fact that suddenly and unexpectedly broke through to me when I read Mother’s “too proud” comment and triggered my rage in defense of my young self.  Far deeper than the harm and hurt that Mother’s comment did to me was the wreckage she had created within me even on a physiological level that had left me completely helpless to even begin to have a fighting chance against my perpetrator.

There is a kind of patience that can be forced upon a young child that enables continued survival simply because it offers no sign of resistance to its attacker.  This is a patience that does not appear through choice.  It is an infallible humility designed by instinct to retain ongoing life.  It is a body-based physiological response and is the standard which defines all possible reactions such a child can have in its environment and still remain alive.

There can be nothing else but ongoing patience within such a child as I was.  When faced with the continual brutalizing hatred Mother had for me either I patiently endured everything she did to me or she would have killed me.  The absence of anger coupled with the presence of patience was an effective coping mechanism that allowed me to survive. 

°<>°

Stress response train

While I see that anger at current injustices can be used constructively to end them, anger at past injustices that cannot be changed is a useless waste of inner resources.  While the survival-based emotions of anger, fear and sadness can be seen as negative, I see them as spots on a wheel of change that each involve specific processes that are designed to produce a positive end – restoration of our being to peaceful calm in an environment of safe and secure connectedness.

The simplest way I envision the activity of a calm-stress response system that has not been forced in early development to adapt itself to chronic stressful trauma is to picture a train station and a train with an engine and three cars labeled anger, fear and sadness sitting on a circular track.  When some challenge in the environment creates a disturbance some part of our being – consciously or not – assesses degrees of threat versus safety and decides to respond when needed in the fastest, most effective way possible to restore equilibrium.  If we are fortunate such a call for action finds us fully capable of using responses familiar to us to solve any problem immediately.  In these cases we do not need to leave the station of our ordinary life to jump on the stress response train at all.

In cases where such immediate competent, confident response actions cannot solve the problem that has challenged our state of peaceful calm we hop on the train and off it goes around and around on its track, passing the station with every loop.  I take the liberty of simply calling the first car anger even though we might not notice that the FIGHT systems in our body are in action.  There are many seats in each of these cars, and in the case of the anger car we could find seats for everything in a range from cold to hot rage on to mild annoyance or irritation.  In this car we search for every known response we know of that has solved a problem in the past similar to the one we are now faced with.  If we find a solution the train will stop in front of the peaceful-calm station, off we get, and on with our continuing life we go.

If there is no solution available a person can get stuck on this car circling the track in anger.  The most effective next step is to move on to the next car labeled fear which I see as the FLIGHT stress response.  Fear is best designed to instill in us the increased motivation necessary to reach further afield in our search for solutions to a problem.  It is a response that gears us as members of a social species to seek help from safe, secure, supportive attachment people in our life. 

Although it often feels to be a desperate stage, fear is meant to be an open-ended learning stage of the stress response cycle.  In ideal circumstances other people will help us solve the problem as we use our combined knowledge and experience.  There are many seats in this car, as well, ranging through stages of terror through to the varieties of anxiety experiences.  Here again, if a solution is found that can be implemented the train will stop at the station and normalcy will be restored to our systems and hence to our life.

In cases where the train is speeding up with us still on it we often must move on from the fear car to the last stage of sadness, or the FREEZE state of the stress response cycle.  While this can be a most difficult stage to find ourselves in as we shift seats from inner agony and anguish through all those seemingly filled with nothing but unending, hopeless despair, in the world of human survival I see this last stage as being one of great hope and positive potential.  This stage of sadness is a great stage for learning something entirely NEW!

If we find ourselves circling the track seeming (or being) stuck in the final sadness car it can seem that everything slows, slows, slows…down….  But the train does not stop and we do not get off until either we alone or we in connection with others of our species discover or create an entirely new solution to the problem we are plagued by that has never been used before.  To move out of this stage a quickening is required. 

Just as developmental experts call the stage an infant-toddler reaches when it stiffens up and arches its way off of its caregiver’s lap into the greater wide world “hatching,” the new life that comes with the invention or discovery of an effective entirely NEW solution to a big problem is an exciting and important stage in development many of us repeat throughout our lifespan. 

Our society is currently invested in applying pharmacological (and addictive) solutions to the experience of ongoing sadness and “depression” that seems to be unresolvable by any other means.  As we do so we are doing nothing to find solutions to the problems that have created the chronic states of sadness that are being treated.  Most of the time real problems are denied and remain unidentified as millions of people find ways to create the illusion that the calm-stress response train has stopped at the station and all is well – when it probably is not.

°<>°

In cases where the trauma of abuse and neglect affects infants and children nothing about how the calm-stress response system operates can happen in ordinary, normal or optimal ways.  The amount of information that needs to be presented to describe what happens in these cases is beyond the scope of this current writing.  For those of us who are adult survivors of early severe abuse and trauma our systems have all adapted to those conditions so that our entire experience of being alive in a body is beyond the ordinary.  However, it is my belief that while we may experience “dis-abilities” directly connected to our trauma altered development we also have different, or “diff-abilities” that are tied to our greatest assets. 

°<>°

Solutions?

I imagine that without the severe abuse of my childhood my body would have developed to include a healthy and effective anger FIGHT energy stage in my calm-stress response system’s repertoire.  For reasons that I have been describing in this chapter such an anger stage is not a part of my own natural physiology in ordinary ways.  Although I do include any highly energized problem solving response to a stressor in the environment as being connected to the “anger” spectrum, the patterns of my life have grown from my earliest years to incorporate the various areas of my effective competence, confidence and active coping skills within the arena of WORK itself rather than of anger.

The more I focus on writing my way through the story of my childhood the more I realize that this was exactly what surviving abuse always was for me – a whole lot of very hard WORK.  I forever wrangle with my physiological stress response patterns designed in, by and for a life of severe trauma (again, refer to Teicher’s article previously mentioned).  I feel fortunate that I can filter my ongoing efforts through a work psychology that feels positive, constructive, productive and helpful to me.  I am grateful not to be stuck in a negative, destructive war psychology such as my mother was trapped in.

Trauma has always been our teacher in the ever-changing environments we live in.  Our best quality of life relies upon our ability to prevent them from ever happening in the first place.  Once one does occur everyone in our species is best served by learning the lessons trauma can teach us so that whenever possible we will prevent the same trauma from happening to anyone else – anywhere – ever again.  Repeating patterns of unresolved trauma continue to happen because we have not yet learned how to stop them from doing so.

Even though I woke today very aware of the great sadness that accompanies me through my life I also know that my sadness awakens my compassion and helps me to face the fact that many injustices remain in this world.  These injustices and the traumas they create need to be recognized, named, addressed and stopped.  This is critically true for the great problems that continue to harm our species’ offspring. 

°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Life is a process.  I just wrote off a few emails to my middle daughter who may well be approaching a new dawn in her life where a major career decision will be made.  This decision when made will determine much of the course of the rest of her life.

After I wrote my last post I had one of those ‘inner visions’ that come to me as images (I know deeply rooted in my body as they come into my awareness through my right brain hemisphere) of how I see all of us in our lives — myself and my children and my grandchildren included.

We are all part of familial spiritual legacies.  I believe our DNA carries spiritual evolution of family lines just as it carries all the other information we need to interact with and adapt to this life we live.

It happens that I accidentally discovered that on the forgotten side of my mother’s family there is a history that fascinates me.  Because Mother’s parents divorced when she was five, and because that divorce (and probably the marriage, as well) was consumed with such hatred and bitterness my maternal grandfather’s side of the family was disowned.

It turns out that my mother’s father’s parents — one of Scottish heritage and the other of French — were registered Unitarians when they arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada by 1844.  That is RARE!  I know it is!

It might be equally rare that I, as one of their physical/spiritual descendants, understands the significance of that fact and is THRILLED by it!!

I won’t go into detail here about the meanings of this spiritual legacy that I am a part of, that traces directly through those ancestors, but I will say that my middle daughter, Ramona (who will be the editor for our series of books), is (I believe) directly in the flow of our familial spiritual legacy.

Going back to the idea-image I mentioned above:  I see that each human being occupies a small stretch of water on an ever-flowing river.  We each flow along, travel over and around rocks and sticks and branches, view our own piece of the scenery along the banks of the river — until we reach our own end of time in our body and move on.

Sometimes when we approach certain points in the river we are a part of major decisions get made!  I personally believe that asking for spiritual assistance, protection, guidance (and yes, forgiveness) makes our journey a whole lot better in every possible way!  Our life and our experience of our life can feel much more complicated when we approach those major decision points along our flowing river journey.  That is OK!  How could it be otherwise!

But as I told my daughter, I believe that our American society, and in fact most societies on earth, are very immature and unhealthy right now.  We do not, as a species, have ourselves “sorted out” correctly.  Humans are designed to happily share live together in a sharing, caring, giving, cooperative way.  That is what our physiological potential is designed for.

Trauma, of course, early in our lives (and later) can change our physiological development which means we end up on the stress/distress competitive end of our potential.  Trying to especially make career decisions in such a competitive (resource greedy and unreplenishing, unsustainable) environment can be very difficult.

We need to settle down, calm and sooth ourselves as best we can (an action very difficult for early severe trauma survivors but not impossible) so that our inner self connected to our SOUL can guide us!  We need to discourse with our true self — not compare ourselves to others in a sick world that are as lost as lost can be — and worse yet — have no clue this is so.

Integrity is everything to me.  I believe in truth, rightness and goodness.  I believe all of us can move closer to this angle of flow down the river of our life.  It’s worth the effort!

++

Which reminds me, I am going to ‘study’ this image in its journey toward expression for a while:

The abuser for cover of Story Without Words

Ramona mentioned to me yesterday how fitting it is that I am creating this cover work.  As a nationally registered art therapist it is natural that I do so.

Visual arts require the interaction of light.  Because the scene I am creating will of course need to be photographed I need to consider very closely how light will interact with the objects in the scene being created.

When it comes to my image of the abuser in this piece – do I want light to reflect off of this figure as happens with a gloss Mod Podge finish?  Or do I need to find some matte finish for it, something that is difficult for me because I can’t get to stores where I can buy such a product.  I can order it online.  Do I need to?  Do I want to?  (The abuser will be holding a belt with a buckle on the end of it in its right hand.)

Child abusers to absorb massive amounts of light out of the life of their victims.  My guess is that matte finish will give me what my heart sees better than a gloss finish will.  Outdoor natural lighting will be much better for the photograph, as well.

But abusers can never absorb all of the light out of a child’s life — the light is a part of the child!  But children need things — and with abuse present they are simply WITHOUT what they need to grow and develop optimally for an optimal world.  (See information in previous post: +A REAL KEEPER OF A TRAUMA HEALING WEBSITE!)

And, speaking of outdoor – the humble Snapdragon in bloom!

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

May 2, 1013.  I am in effect writing what feels like a guest post on my own blog this morning.  My dear friend and fellow sojourner on the road of search for the truth about what surviving severe early trauma actually does to change our experience of our life, Sandy Mitchell, sent me an email this morning that includes reference to one of the fantastic trauma recovery sites he has just discovered online.

Sandy is a master lay scholar!  I am extremely grateful to him for providing this source of information which I consider valuable enough to present here in this post.  Please take a look!

++

“Because the stress response disrupts  general information processing, survivors of trauma live in a somatic world  rather than a world of language.”— McFarlane

I am not sure who McFarlane is (at this point) but Sandy also sent me this quote.  I agree with the truth of these words absolutely!

++

Very clear information about what trauma does to us is presented on Dr. Janina Fisher’s website.  She is a psychotherapist, consultant and trainer (expert) in the field of trauma.

At this link you will be able to click through a series of 4 of the 22 images that Dr. Fisher has created in a flip-chart format about trauma consequences to humans (makes sense we must buy the rest to view them):

“A Psychoeducational flip chart with 22 diagrams and charts summarizing the most current research and theoretical concepts in trauma treatment in simple graphic designs. The use of these simple diagrams increases the ability of the client to understand the nature of the symptoms and the treatment. Clients feel a sense of relief as their puzzling and disturbing reactions begin to make sense,* and therapists find the flip chart a road in to helping the change process begin. Topics covered: common symptoms and difficulties related to experiences of trauma, effects on the nervous system and brain, traumatic attachment, addictions and trauma, dissociative phenomena, and stages of treatment.“

TRAUMA FLIP CHART HERE – sample of 4

The information about how to order this flip chart with reasonable cost with choice of sizes is AT THIS LINK.  This page includes this information:

Psychoeducational supports for trauma treatment

Available in two convenient sizes:

A small size: 10X13. $45 (plus shipping and handling).

A large size: 17X22. $80 (plus shipping and handling).

Download an order form to see shipping charges.

++

This is exactly the kind of information that I believe all in the ‘helping’ profession have to have in their own minds as they need to be prepared to offer this information to all clients!  The knowledge presented through the work of Dr. Fisher is most empowering to trauma survivors!  It takes the primitive guesswork out of all attempts to “figure out” how we are changed by early trauma and therefore different from ordinary people in many, many significant ways that we need to understand.

Please take a look!

++

Dr. Fisher says on her TRAUMA MODEL TREATMENT page:

“We don’t survive trauma as a result of conscious decision-making. At the moment of life threat, humans automatically rely upon survival instincts. Our five senses pick up the signs of imminent danger, causing the brain to “turn on” the adrenaline stress response system. As we prepare to fight or flee, heart rate and respiration speed oxygen to muscle tissue, and the “thinking brain,” our frontal cortex, is inhibited to increase response time. We are in “survival mode,” in our “animal brains.” Later, we may pay a price for these instinctive responses: we have ‘made it’ without bearing witness to our own experience.”

++

I am actively involved in the “bearing witness” to my own experience stage as I work through my book writing (my official self-assigned break is over tomorrow).  Looking out over the vast sea of those who survived severe abuse, neglect and related unsafe and insecure attachment trauma during their earliest most formative stages of life I would be there are so few who can access the kind of therapy that Dr. Fisher offers that they could hardly be seen.

Yet I am highly respectful of and appreciative to the work offered on this site because it offers those of us who cannot access therapy at least a beginning place to reframe how we see ourselves in our life.  Those who do attend therapy can recommend this site and make dang sure their therapist is open to learning this info (if they don’t already know it).  I would seriously question the effectiveness of any therapist who does NOT know these facts presented on this site.

We ultimately are the experts about our own body.  Resources like this one give us the language we need to understand what we already know!

Thank you yet again Sandy for your brilliant research abilities!!

++++

Related info:

+BELOW THE SURFACE – THE CONNECTION BETWEEN SEVERE EARLY CHILD ABUSE, EAGLES AND BUZZARDS

+A COLLECTION OF LINKS ON BODY-BRAIN CHANGES CAUSED BY EARLY INFANT-CHILD ABUSE

+THOUGHT SALAD: HAVING ‘THIS’ TO SAY ABOUT ‘THAT’

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

I don’t like this abuser image as it is being created.  (Following previous post, +BOOK COVER ART – NEXT FOR ‘STORY WITHOUT WORDS’ – THE ABUSER)  I’m done working with it yet.  It’s color shows too brightly with the camera flash, that’s for certain.  Why the shades of purple?  I know why there’s black.  But the purple?  Perhaps that no person can be all bad?  That’s not how this scene feels to me as it’s being built.  Time will tell how this all comes out….

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

I wondered what my image of my abuser would look like before I started forming it.  My initial idea in my mind has obviously been tempered.  I first saw ‘the monster’ as HUGE and much more solid.  However, I think the image that is forming reflects a trans-generational abuser as my grandmother and even my great-grandmother abused my mother – as she then grew up to abuse me.

I had also pondered the color of tissue I would use for the abuser, and realized I did not have any appropriate color in my collection.  Then I visited our local thrift store and there it was — the perfect color!  You will see that color soon….

It is also important to me that the abuser will not be fixed within the scene of the front cover image, hence it is fixed to a stand that I can move around to get the perfect angle and placement of it for the cover photograph.  I also have plans for how the front image will be taken apart and changed for what will hopefully be the images for the back cover.

Motion is an integral and critical factor in the process of children being beaten.  As I have written elsewhere when I stopped a few years ago to consider the minimum jail sentence my mother deserved (mentally ill as she was) for JUST her physical attacks on me, I came up with 15,000 years.

How does abuse of little people, assaults by giants, even begin to be described in words or in illustrations?  I am certainly working toward coming up with at least one way to do it.  Treating this heavyweight topic with such lightweight materials as plastic grocery bags wrapped with masking tape and tissue paper creates its own irony certainly not lost on me.

In the end, I find that letting go of my emotions regarding my history of abuse happens in a way like opening my palms and letting the horrors blow away like so much dandelion fluff.  Keeping those emotions harms me.  This is why I am taking this two-week book writing break — to find my own way to let my ANGER go at what was done to me!!!  The negative emotions belong to the abuser who created the situations of abuse of me.  It does not need to be MY anger.  I do not want it.

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

I have an idea for the cover picture of this our first book to be published, Story Without Words.  I have realized that to me my simple art style is whimsical, and as my friend describes what I am doing, these are action figures.  Sadly, the action that will be portrayed in this book is most unpleasant.  But to begin with, here are some pictures of the making of this first completed cover artwork piece – the bed.

The foundation….

Beginning the bed….

Mattress made of wadded newspaper stuffed into a plastic grocery bag, all wrapped with masking tape….

Tissue paper and Mod Podge added….

And here is the whimsical child’s bed….

My thoughts for the background scene for the cover picture include a visual presentation of something I know well from my abusive childhood:  The environment that belonged to me as a child was a world that should have been safe and secure for me, but was not.  Every time my mother (my abuser) split off into her dark psychotic world within which I as her all-bad child was the sole occupant, when she interrupted my ongoing child life of being my own self with her abuse, another reality was created that I was forced to endure.

This reality is going to be portrayed symbolically in the scene for the cover of this book, Story Without Words.  But specifically to this book is the reality that patterns of abuse Mother perpetrated against me were perpetrated against her by her mother.  This is an intergenerational portrayal of what happened to Mother when she was a child as I believe that abuse directly changed her into the abusive monster she became toward me.

This will not be a pretty picture in the bigness of it all.  It will not be an easy one to look at.  I don’t believe personally that there is any other way for the scene I am creating to be illustrated in anything like a tolerable way other than the way I intend to do this.  Nobody wants to SEE child abuse in action.  We cannot tolerate its imagery.  I believe part of the way our society excludes not only very real awareness of the reality of child abuse but also avoids facing its reality head-on happens in part because we will not even begin to let the imagery of its reality into our mind.  How are we going to solve the problems that create and sustain infant and child abuse if we cannot even visualize it — or — THINK about it?

It has struck me during these days I am taking my break from writing for the 10th book in this combined series that MANY people were hurt in their earliest years by violence and abuse.  MANY people!  Not just a few!  The entire topic of child abuse then becomes personal perhaps to nearly the majority of people who are intent upon denying how what was done to them hurt them.  Denial is NOT helpful!

There are 3.3 million confirmed cases per year of child abuse and neglect in the U.S.  1,825 confirmed cases per day!  This says NOTHING about the stories that are not being given words — the silent and hidden cases of unreported infant and child abuse and neglect.  This book and its provocative cover image will address the invisible silence of one intergenerational story of abuse that is finally finding words for its telling. 

My hope is that the primitive, simple and whimsical cover of this book — and the book itself — will help us all to address what is perhaps the darkest side of human nature as it conveys a message of hope that resolution of the problems that create infant-child abuse and neglect IS possible!

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++