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There is a day-and-night difference to me between depression that falls like the sun does at nightfall and depression that falls away.  One of my several so-called clinical diagnosis is “reoccurring major depression.”  There is never any mania with this kind of depression.  But the fact that it is “reoccurring” means that I am fortunate enough to have the worst of the depression fall away in time — until next time.

I have to find my gratitude where it comes to me.  While I never am depression-free except on the rarest occasions, at least my chronic depression is “minor” rather than “major.”  Life is nothing if not relative!

I tend to notice subtle shifts in how I react to how I feel as they appear in the language of my thoughts.  “I feel depressed” (sad) is not as scary to me as are the words I hear now:  “I AM depressed.”  The difference between these descriptive phrases alerts me to the fact that once the “I AM depressed” words appear I am in need of serious work to find my way through to the other side.

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What sends anyone from “tumult” into “plummet” is intensely personal.  I recognize that my thoughts and feelings have been tumultuous for weeks heading into months.  I know I have very real needs that are not being met yet I have no clear – or even at this point possible – way to make changes at this time. 

My inner self is always called upon to keep me upright but it is the nature of how longterm severe traumatic abuse affected my physiological development during the first 18 years of my life that has left me rarely, rarely at ease.  I have to work very hard on every level to ever feel simply OK.

I am used to this.  Yet every time the major depression threatens to swallow me whole I have to search for the iron will of my survival instincts.  Nobody can do this work for me.

I force myself to do everything I do right now.  My “conditions” are completely “medication resistant.”  What happened to me in the first place was too complicated and caused so many complicated changes within my developing body that I am always left with only one solution:  What can I do to help myself?

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 I force myself to do my 45 minute daily walk, to make and drink my green vegetable juice, to take my vitamins.  (Oops!  I better go do that now.)  I take a total of 21 pills of 14 different supplements daily.  I am even juicing organic carrot tops now and have added quinoa, spelt noodles and organic stewed tomatoes to my diet.  I am making progress through my pH Miracle dietary changes in my effort to help my body be able to heal itself.

Today I found and added the clear words, “I am fine.  I feel wonderful.” into my thought patterns whenever I detect conscious negative thoughts.  I force myself to pick up gardening scissors to trim dead flowers off of at least one rose-bush.  I force myself to find a rag, wet it, and wash at least part of my kitchen floor.

I can finish nothing right now except perhaps this post.  Success in accomplishment for me right now is simply IN THE DOING of whatever I can force myself to do.  I feel as though I am in a body moving under the weight of a very deep sea.  Everything about life right now takes my concentrated effort.  This is tiring.

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I do not care what “they” say about depression.  I believe it always comes from a sad and breaking heart.  It is only a loving gentleness that can tend such a vulnerability in anyone’s soul.  Everyone I love lives over a thousand miles away from me.  And it even was my recent travel to see some of those people that so sunk my heart at returning home — alone.

I long ago left behind the silly notion that anyone or anything outside of my own self awareness, initiative and action can help me through those times when my depression falls from being minor to being major.  In the meantime I have to look for, notice and value every little piece of life that is beautiful to me.  I have to work to add something to that beauty in any and every way that I can.

These depressions as they began very early in my childhood in response to horrific abuse are deeply about the crumbling of my hope, and without hope I become so very, very, very sad.  So sad!  At those times being alive in the physical world feels like a trap.  I struggle.  I pray.

When I am up enough I go where there are people but most human interactions exhaust rather than feed me right now.  My healing always seems to require quiet (very typical for PTSD and dissociative healing). 

I am naming a malaise that I know came to me directly from exposure to unremitting horrors of traumatic infant and child abuse.  This is all very difficult to live with, to cope with or to change.  The reprieves do come.  I wait for them while I work for them in any way that I can.

It helps me to write about this here.  It helps me to not feel so terribly alone.  Thank you for reading.  Thank you.

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I misunderstood my American history lessons at school when I was a young child.  I find this interesting as it took me 50 years to finally learn that The American Revolutionary War  began in 1775 and did not end with our independence from Britain until 1783.  Therefore what I always knew as the 4th of July celebrations was just plain wrong! 

The signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 began our war in earnest, and this we celebrate yearly, but it is the forward actions of “bombs bursting in air” that are commemorated, not the END of the war as I somehow gathered from whatever postdated news my early history teachers were telling their students. 

We do not celebrate victory or the winning of the war, which was what I thought since childhood.  Rather we recognize and celebrate our intention to throw all those bombs into the air, to sacrifice greatly and to achieve what we wanted:  Our independence as a nation.  My brain-being didn’t comprehend why anyone would make such a big deal out of an intention! 

Why, I knew from the moment I was born that intention to remain intact was not going to keep me alive, nor was simply fighting that war going to do so.  If I was going to survive what happened to me during those long 18 years I was going to have to WIN the war.  Now THAT, in my mind, is something to celebrate!

(Interestingly, the end goal of safe and secure early attachment, whose benefits continue for its recipient throughout their lifespan, is AUTONOMY.  This state is the healthiest, most balanced and advanced state of being for humans and other mammals, and it all begins with healthy mothering.)

Because it is nearly my total concern to find ways as a survivor of being a brutally abused infant and child to heal from what happened to me I figure that my own Independence Day celebration began with my first breath.  This is a long war, as long as it takes for me to get from the start of my life to the end of it.  The more I learn about how early trauma changed my physiological development so that I did not even end up living in the same BODY I would be in if that trauma had not occurred, the more weapons I have in my conscious arsenal to fight this war with.  Always I learn how I am different because of being an early trauma survivor.

America as a whole chose to fight that war.  At what point as trauma survivors do we realize what a war it is that WE fight?  When do we make our choice to fight it?  We did not choose to be hated, abused, traumatized and CHANGED as human beings by the experiences our earliest attachment people gave to us.  I am sorry “new agers” but we DID NOT choose our trauma!

What choices do we – and can we – make now on our own behalf?

I had yet another conversation with friends yesterday about diet changes and about the topics of many of my June posts related to helping our body heal.  Two of us at the table had extremely abusive and traumatic childhoods and two of us did not.  The two who were spared kept remarking that “It’s all a matter of attitude.  I can eat anything I want to just so long as I keep stress out of my life as much as possible and think positively.”

OK.  WOW!  Lucky YOU!  I reminded both of these people that THEY do not live in a body formed in, by and for trauma.  They were loved, cherished and well-parented as little people.  I reminded them that there are some of us who were not so fortunate.  We live in a body that was severely distressed and built the responses of our body to those “distressers” right into it.  Our body is fragile in ways that their body has never been and will never be.  I reminded them of the Center for Disease Control’s studies on Adverse Childhood Experiences that clearly shows that the more troubles a child has when little the more likely they are to die an average of 20 years earlier than their non-traumatized peers.

We are not making our troubles up, folks.  But we can be as lost in the history of how trauma has affected us as I was lost about how fireworks came to be in the skies of America every 4th of July.  Once we educate ourselves we are helping everyone by finding times and places to respond to others with the TRUTH about what early trauma and abuse does to infants and children IN THE DEVELOPMENT of their body-brain that troubles them for the rest of their lives.

This means that we survivors use up a lot of our life energy trying to stabilize ourselves in our life that “regular” non-survivors can spend on all kinds of other occupations.  Certainly nobody lives an easy or a perfect life.  But fairness matters, and it is simply FAIR that we all realize what happens to us long before we can consciously remember it shapes the body we live within all of our life in very significant ways.

This blog is packed with information about those changes.

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My father’s mother was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, which my daughter has now joined.  Family rumor has it that my mother’s mother’s side of the family were Loyalists and left America to return to Canada.  I have seen no record that these ancestors were ever within American boundaries prior to 1910.  They immigrated from Scotland and England into Canada around Prince Edward Island to begin with.  Supposedly there was much animosity between my father’s and my mother’s sides of the family about these loyalties when my parents married.

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Because I am on some sort of book writing sabbatical I found it hard to get to the task upon my daughter’s request to put together a list such as this one (below) to include in the upcoming books she is editing.  But I forced myself to enter the nefarious world of cerebral thinking-drive to pull these titles out.  There is so much material on the subject available it seemed like a shot in the dark to select just a few representative authors and video stars to include in this material.

I seem to be living now in an entirely different world than the one I lived in while I prepared the 10 manuscripts that are heading through the editing process.  My book writing self just disappeared, taking all her words with her.  That is fine by me!  If and when it is time to get back to that task it needs to be when all 10 books are OUT THERE – wherever there turns out to be.

In the meantime, here’s my effort to point readers of these books in some kind of a helpful direction on topics they may have never considered before.

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Suggested Reading and Resource List for Books (to be published)

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Allen, J. G. (2001).  Traumatic relationships and serious mental disorders.  West Sussex, England:  John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Child Welfare Information Gateway (2009).  Understanding the effects of maltreatment on brain development.  Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Retrieved July 1, 2013, from www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/issue_briefs/brain_development/

Citisite (2009, November 9).  NeuroScience.  Early childhood:  A. Schore. D. Siegel.  Brain Development.  Retrieved July 1, 2013, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOp4s1PXQGs

Citisite (2011, July 11).  Allan Schore.  JOY & FUN.  Gene, neurobiology.  Child brain development.  Retrieved July 1, 2013, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0iocZu1mVg

Fields, R. D. (2010, October 30).  Sticks and stones — hurtful words damage the brain:  Verbal abuse in childhood inflicts lasting physical effects on brain structure.  The New Brain.  Retrieved July 1, 2013 from http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-new-brain/201010/sticks-and-stones-hurtful-words-damage-the-brain

Kestenbaum, R., Farber, E. A., Sroufe, L. A. (1989).  Individual differences in empathy among preschoolers: Relation to attachment history.  New Directions for Child Development, 44, 51-64.

Lopatto, E.  (2012, February 13).  Childhood abuse interferes with brain formation, Harvard study shows.  Bloomberg News.  Retrieved July 1, 2013, from http://bangordailynews.com/2012/02/13/health/childhood-abuse-interferes-with-brain-formation-harvard-study-shows/

Mason, P, and Kreger, R. (2010).  Stop walking on eggshells:  Taking your life back when someone you care about has borderline personality disorder (2^nd ed.).  Oakland, CA:  New Harbinger Publications, Inc.

Neufeld, G., & Mate G. (2006).  Hold on to your kids:  Why parents need to matter more than peers.  New York, NY:  Ballantine Books.

Perry, B., and Szalavitz, M. (2006).  The boy who was raised as a dog:  And other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook — What traumatized children can teach us about loss, love, and healing.  New York, NY:  Basic Books.

Schore, A. N. (1994).  Affect regulation and the origin of the self: The neurobiology of emotional development.  Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Schore, A. N. (1997). Early organization of the nonlinear right brain and development of a predisposition to psychiatric disorders.  Development and Psychopathology, 9, 595–631.

Schore, A. N. (2000). Attachment and the regulation of the right brain.  Attachment and Human Development, 2, 23–47.

Schore, A. N. (2001).  Effects of a secure attachment relationship on right brain development, affect regulation, and infant mental health.  Infant Mental Health Journal, 22 (1-2), 7-66.  Retrieved July 1, 2013, from http://www.allanschore.com/pdf/SchoreIMHJAttachment.pdf

Schore, A. N. (2003).  Affect dysregulation and disorders of the self.  New York, NY:  W. W. Norton & Company.

Schore, A. N. (2003).  Affect regulation and the repair of the self.  New York, NY:  W. W. Norton & Company.

Siegel, D. J., and Hartzell, Mary (2004).  Parenting from the inside out.  New York, NY:  Tarcher/Penguin.

Siegel, D.J., (2012).  The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (2^nd ed.).  New York, NY:  The Guilford Press.

Siegel, D. J., and Bryson, T. P. (2012).  The whole-brain child:  12 revolutionary strategies to nurture your child’s developing mind.  New York, NY:  Random House.

Teicher, M. H. (2000).  Wounds that time won’t heal:  The neurobiology of child abuse.  Cerebrum:  The Dana Forum on Brain Science, 2 (4).  Retrieved July 1, 2013 from:  http://192.211.16.13/curricular/hhd2006/news/wounds.pdf

Teicher, M. H., Andersen, S. L., Polcari, A., Anderson, C. M., Navalta, C. P., Kim, D. M. (2003).   The neurobiological consequences of early stress and childhood maltreatment.  Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 27, 33-44.

Teicher, M. H., Samson, J. A., Polcari, A., McGreenery, C. E. (2006).  Sticks, stones, and hurtful words: Relative effects of various forms of childhood maltreatment.  American Journal of Psychiatry, 163 (6), 993-1000.  Retrieved July 1, 2013 from http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?articleID=96671

Tvoparents (2012, April 5).  Gordon Neufeld on what makes a bully.  Retrieved July 1, 2013, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7mznfMI1T4 

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