++++

Tuesday, January 21, 2014.  I know no other way to tether my thoughts down other than to write them down.  I am eternally grateful to WordPress for providing me this free blog space in which to do that. 

Yesterday I watched the wind swirl snow around in tendrils of drifts and movements of snow that looked like the dirt pillars from dust devils so common during certain seasons in the high desert I recently left behind me.  Because these big brick block apartment buildings are situated to face one another in a square with open space between the ones in each of the four directions so that they face the small cat tail area in the center the wind plays around here in ways that only allow me to determine the actual direction wind is coming from by watching the smoke rising above each building from their massive heating systems.  (Windchill temperatures here are currently -30 degrees below zero F.)

Memories work like that I think.  There is no reason for any collection of memories to arrange themselves in anything like proper order all by themselves.  I don’t think they belong anywhere.  They are creative avenues to help us place ourselves within the experience of our life.

++

Around the time I recently arrived back here in Fargo last fall I used my fearlessness to attend a public gathering my family was present at to face a selection of my own memories from the last time I spoke with my ex-husband (“Joe”) nearly 28 years ago.  I had to – one way or the other – find a way to make myself as comfortable in as possible for the sake of my children and grandchildren with this man who is a central part of their lives.

At this gathering was a man who was as foreign to me as any stranger could be.  Except that he wasn’t SUPPOSED to be a stranger.  Evidently I certainly knew him from at least 32 years ago at a stage of my married life. 

“You don’t remember me, do you?” 

Nope.  Not a chance.

Where did those memories go?

++

The subject came up again last Sunday when I had the conversation with my ex I mentioned in my last post.  I was reminded again that there are some things about my being a trauma changed person in my physiology – which of course shows up in billions of ways as I live my life though I don’t often actually consciously detect them – that I cannot explain to anyone else. 

The truth is that this is not actually ANYONE else.  It’s just so unbelievably rare to find anyone who cares enough to spend the time listening to me as we negotiate the distance between my life reality and theirs that those people might just as well not exist at all.

On Sunday my ex commented that just as “You don’t look the same” this man doesn’t look the same, either.

That is so NOT the important point to me!  I evaporated that man from my reality.  In my world it does not exist that I EVER met him before.  In my world (filled with amazing powers of dissociation that it is) I can change my reality.  If there are people within those memories I can easily change the part they played in my life.

This is an ongoing process that is only challenged on those occasions when I encounter some of those people.  A little over a year ago I wrote about re-meeting a woman when I was visiting up here who took herself out of my life 30 years ago.  We had been best friends for a long time (since 1970) but when I really needed her as I realized that my ex and I were headed pell-mell for divorce, and when I drove the 100 miles to tell her this, she simply walked away from me saying, “Go back to your husband where you belong.”

We did not speak for those 30 years.  I did not see her.  Yet in my memory I replaced the fact that she and I had – each with our babies under the age of two – shared the rental of a small house up here in 1972-73,  In my reality and in my memory after she and I “broke up” I replaced her in any memory of the time I spent in that small house with her older sister.  I had NO MEMORY and still really don’t of the fact that her sister lived nowhere around here at that time and certainly NOT with me and my baby.

Fascinating, yet troubling – if it mattered much – which it doesn’t.  It would take a skill and knowledge of a process I do not possess for me to be able to return to periods of time where dissociation took over my memory process to correct (change) memories.

++

Why did I evaporate that man I met again at that gathering?  Was it the fact that I think he sided with my ex come divorce time as did everyone we jointly knew?  My ex told me Sunday that this man had had “feelings” for me.  Oh YUCK!!! 

Whatever happened he evidently meant absolutely nothing to me and with a Rod Sterling Twilight Zone candor I simply erased him.

Can I tell my ex what I MEAN when I say, “I don’t remember him?”  Not a chance.  My erasing that man was so through that should I even be shown a picture from way back when of he and I standing together I WOULD NOT remember him.

++

What does any of this mean for trauma survivors who are trying to heal from their past?  What memories do we carry that are accurate versus not accurate?  How much of this is the same for non-traumatized people?

Are we supposed to question everything we know about our past simply because we have been faced with the fact that we certainly can change our memories?

++

I am reminded of words written by Dr. Allan N. Schore in one of his extremely dense and scientific book about early severe trauma and how it changes physiological development of the nervous system and brain.  It is a relatively COMMON situation that in the midst of ongoing trauma the stress hormones present in anyone’s body at that time so “heat up” the new neurons being formed to process those ongoing memories that the neurons are fried.  There will never be a trace of the factual events of such an event under these circumstances.  Yet because body memory and emotional memory are processed in different ways entirely they WILL exist.

++

I have another recent encounter with memory-making that seemed rather trite until the swirls of wind stirring my memory processes return to pick up this experience and blow it back into my thoughts.

At the family gathering this past Christmas Eve (at which my ex was present) the present opening went on rather willy-nilly.  I had not been at a Christmas with my girls for nearly 30 years.  Once my ex and I split up he had the girls for holidays.

What was my stress level on this eve?  I won’t pretend to guess.  I do know that I was given a total value of $350 in various gift cards.  They were in a cute small gift bag.  Joe gave me a tin of his fantastic peanut brittle and some of the glorious flower photograph cards he creates out of love for his garden.  There were other items – but what matters is that as far as I knew NONE of these items made it from my daughter’s house to my apartment later that night.

A three day family panic set in as everyone searched for what disappeared.  Now, in my memory I remember holding the shallow rectangular tin of candy while I carefully placed it AT THE BOTTOM of something it exactly fit size and shape wise.  A box?  A bag?  I could NOT remember!

I can STILL remember making this movement of placing the tin down into the bottom of something.  I remember putting the flower cards, the gift cards, a set of two knives — all in this same container.  I worked and worked to remember “What did I place those things inside?”

In the end after much searching my son-in-law called me to ask, “Is there any chance you put those things inside the box with the wood block and big knife set?  There was a lot of room in that box.”

“Hold on a minute” I told him as I pulled the box out from under my kitchen table where it had been since the eve.  Yes, there placed at the exact angle of the knife holder block and flush against it SIDEWAYS was that tin.  The gift card bag and everything else was there carefully packed into the remaining space in that box.

++

False memories?  I choose not to worry about this at all.  I just maintain a very respectful and flexible approach to myself in my life.  It was NOT important for me to remember a single thing about “that man.”  It evidently WAS important to me to enjoy the sensation of me placing that tin into a space that exactly held it as if the object and space had been brought into existence just for one another, just for that moment!

Why clutter up, muss up, mess up memories of a happy time living with a woman I liked in that little house by keeping a roommate in the memory who later greatly hurt me, betrayed me and abandoned me (in my world thinking)?  Zip-Zap!  GONE!

Cool, I think, although yes, a BIT troubling!

I am being given opportunities to learn more about how I survived 18 years of the most pervasive, invasive, consistent and continual HORRIFIC abuse in my early life.  I suspect my memory processes somehow protected me from being broken by it all.  I moved forward in my life and did not accumulate awareness of the horrors I went through because, after all, who was there to give a damn or to help me?

NOBODY!

JUST ME!

My way of getting through hell was creative, effective and pretty darn positive!  That my way has evidently followed right along with me into my adulthood and through it is not surprising even though it is somewhat unsettling because I want to know — where is my CHOICE ability when it comes to remembering myself in my life?

I think it is automatic, physiological and immediate in my ongoing life that some part of me unconsciously is selecting how I am going to filter and store most of what I experience.  I do not seem to carry grudges, resentments or regrets.  I had 18 years of nearly the best practice possible at not doing that.  If I had not found another way to live my life the horror of my 18 years’ of experience would have left me no space whatsoever to continue living my ongoing life.

I suspect I would have gone completely mad – as Mother did – or I would have died.

Evidently I am very, very good at what I do.  I am a survivor.  I am an expert at all processes that have enabled me not only to do that but to also survive with bitterness.

++

Whenever my writings are published as they include my early trauma memories I stand behind everything I say about everything I remember.  I have most fortunately five siblings who stand behind me 100%.  When it comes to memory processes none of us are really unique.  We are all humans and our processes share the same foundation.  That severely traumatized early abuse survivors had to maximize all possibilities of memory processes is not surprising.  That those same patterns of memory are present throughout our lives makes perfect sense to me.

In the end I believe what Baha’u’llah, founder of the Baha’i Faith says.  In the next world we will clearly remember everything about our lives here on earth.  We will each be held accountable for our own part in our lives.  We will be told how everything fit together here. 

Forgiveness?  HUGE!  Judging others in this life?  Not huge!

That does not mean that I need to clutter up my memory channels into my own past by accumulating and holding onto memories involving people who in some way have (really) peripherally hurt me.

I am OK with that – just so I don’t lose track of the gifts those people have truly given me along the way.

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Monday, January 20, 2014.  I can think of other titles for this post.  One could have been PULLING MY MATRIARCH TRUMP CARD – FOR THE FIRST TIME.  Another could have been FINDING A FEARLESSNESS I DIDN’T KNOW I HAD.  The list could go on but I guess those remaining words will find their way into the body of this post rather than at the top of it.

Maybe my own message within this post is tied to stopping the intergenerational flow of the effects of trauma and traumatic stress by identifying and naming “mental illnesses” that appear in families through births and through marriages.  There are all kinds of other ways to think about families, but this morning I am considering myself and my own family especially because of the intense interactions I faced yesterday.

I have the highest regard, respect, admiration and compassion for my ex-husband who I will refer to as Joe.  Returning to this town I am again in his presence occasionally during family interactions.  He and I had a rough marriage ending 28 years ago this month.  He married the woman he was involved with – without my knowledge – for 3 years prior to our divorce.

Now he is trying to divorce her 25 years later having finally reached a point where he can no longer bear dealing with her (diagnosed) Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).  I can tell he deeply loves her and yes, that hurts – BUT.  And now is one of those times when BUT becomes a mighty and a very big word.

++

My heart goes out entirely to ANYONE having or coping with BPD.  It is the disease that caused my mother to severely abuse me from the moment of my birth until I left home at 18.  It is the disease that infiltrated my father’s fragile psyche and allowed him to allow her to do what she did to me.  In the end this disease killed both of my parents.  I know its horror and I know its power — and sorry folks!  I know how hopeless it can be to treat it, to cure it or to stop its deadly progression over the life-course of a person who has it.

As I approach the publication of the books that are connected to this blog and its topics I need to toughen up.  I need to become extremely realistic about the kind of NASTY feedback from the BPD “community” that I am likely to receive.  So perhaps what I found myself being compelled to do yesterday was simply a powerful exercise in that direction.

++

I was able to talk with Joe yesterday for 2 hours about what I know about BPD.  As the matriarch of my family which includes Joe’s two grown daughters and very young grandsons I found myself opening my heart and mind to including HIS current wife in MY family thinking.

How odd, really, is that?

Joe has been engaged with his wife for years now trying to finish a divorce.  Anyone who knows something about BPD can imagine the hell of that process and it is none of my business — EXCEPT for the fact that this point hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks yesterday. 

If my girls’ father does not end his marriage with his BPD wife, and should he EVER suffer from a serious medical condition while he is married to her my girls’ — and Joe — will have hell to pay.  I am basing this fear upon what I saw happening when my father came out of pituitary tumor surgery in 1990 wrapped tightly in a straight-jacket and out of his mind from a massive brain hemorrhage during surgery. 

Had my father not divorced his BPD wife three years prior all of his 6 children would have been powerless to avert the emotional mayhem and crazy decision-making about his future that Mother would have trapped us all within.  As it was, because they were divorced, the hospital itself placed a restraining order and mother which prevented her from coming near Father or any of us.  We were able to get Father out of Alaska to the best brain trauma rehabilitation treatment he could receive in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

If my father had not divorced Mother what would have happened during those terrible and extremely stressful and distressful times?  Father NEVER recovered from that surgery and lived another ten years under the loving supervision of one of my sisters.  Would the 6 of us have been forced to find an attorney while Father was tied to his intensive care hospital bed to prove Mother mentally ill and incompetent to make decisions regarding Father’s future?

What kind of HELL would THAT have been?

So it seemed clear to me yesterday after all these years of history that I pull out my matriarch trump card for the first time in my life and USE it.

++

Joe has invested much time in learning everything he can about BPD.  He is continually faced with close friends who are on his side and hate to see him having such a hard time and who wish to support him fully make statements about his wife that profoundly reflect an absence of understanding about mental illness, especially about BPD.

I affirmed yesterday what I know Joe knows:  His wife is NOT present in her life any more than my mother was present in hers.  I have learned so much about my history of abuse and about BPD in the 28 years that have passed since Joe and I last had conversations — and I told him what happened to his ex-in-laws during the marriage he and I shared for a decade.  It’s a tragic, horrible story. 

I told him about the abuse I suffered.  Oh but that I had had SOME tiny clue about who I was based on what had happened to me while Joe and I were married!

++

Did I want to protect his wife?  How strange.  Yes, I did.  I also, leaving ALL of my emotions out of the entire conversation except for one “tiny time,” confronted him with the fact that his wife is very likely to get worse and that when she tells him she fears she will become a bag lady if he does not support her post-marriage — HER FEAR IS VERY VERY REAL!!!

Joe’s response to me at that point was understandable:  “Oh!  I so DID NOT want to hear that!!” 

Tough!

It is the truth.  What part of me has any possible business in attempting to protect JOE?  I am doing that.  I feel it inside me.  I want him to DO THE RIGHT THING according to his conscience so that whatever happens next for him and his wife HE has no regrets.

My father did that.  I asked him shortly after he divorced Mother after 37 years of miserable marriage why he had not done that sooner.  He told me that he married her for life.  My ex feels a similar way now in some way tied to how he feels about what happened between he and I.

Father did have the means to support Mother even after his death.  Mother also got the homestead and Father took the debt.  She of course sold the land and squandered the money.  My point was that she still died destitute and suffered greatly.  I see no end-of-life for a severe BPD person that does not include suffering.

What is the “right way” for him to complete a divorce process that his wife has dragged on for years while finding a way to get her husband to even assume the debt for her attorney fees?

I have no idea and it is not my business.  I was called within, however, to give my ex the facts about what happened in my family, facts that were not available to me in any way while he and I were married.  I found myself relying upon a kind of powerful freedom of fear yesterday that allowed me to walk right — and rightly — through this time that WAS extremely difficult for me.

I thought about that fearlessness.  I was no doubt BORN with that capacity.  It has not left me!  When times get really hard — which described the entire first 18 years of my life — I seem to have a kind of fearlessness cloak that I can wrap around my entire being so that I can walk through what I KNOW could wipe out a person who does not have that gift.

I was given that gift so that I COULD make it through my life.  I used that gift yesterday on behalf of my family with in some nearly bizarre way now includes my daughters’ stepmother whom they detest, the 2nd wife of a man I have always loved.  I am, however, FIRST WIFE and mother of Joe’s kids.  I AM the matriarch and I guess part of why I moved back that 2000 miles from my HOME in the high Arizona desert to this HINTERLAND I detest (truth!) was exactly because life called me here so I could use both of these gifts. 

A matriarch without fearlessness is a true force to be reckoned with!  I guess that could have been another title for this blog post!

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Saturday, January 18, 2014.  No other person can be there except me.  Just me.  The center of my life is a spot within which only I reside.  Everyone has such a spot.  It’s like a reserved parking place we never leave until our body dies.

Sometimes I don’t have enough words to talk about this place.  Sometimes I have too many.  Occasionally I feel I have the right ones.  I really like those times when words favor me and I struggle at those times when they don’t.

Sometimes words crowd me and I don’t have room to breathe and only a little bit of space within which I can think.  Think reflectively, I mean.  Thoughts that fly over, by, around me like a jet plane at full speed are too close by me and not one bit helpful as I try to find out who I am at any given moment. 

What do I want?  What do I need?  How did I get THIS way at THIS time in THIS place?  What does it all mean and how much of my experience of being alive am I actually sharing with other human beings?

After all, I can’t be THAT original.  Or am I?

What is this loneliness I feel and why does it keep coming back to me?

Am I living my life rightly?  How do I know — one way or the other?  What could I, should I have done differently?  Is differently required of me now?  What does THAT mean?  What would differently look life, or have looked like at any past moment of my life?

How much of who I am and how I am in my life has ever been under my control?  How can I tell what was and is “just destiny” versus opportunities for choosing how all of this plays itself out?

How do my destinies interplay and interconnect with the destinies of other people in this world?  How did they play out with those who were once here in a body and now are gone?  (Where did they go, anyway, and what is their reality like now?)

If I could find my way back, way back, to how I was before I even knew what a feeling or an emotion even WAS — would I turn around and go there?  What is the use, the purpose of FEELING so damn much without having a clue how to rein in or CHANGE those feelings?  Why do I seem forced to ride them out as they take on MY life as if it were their own?

++

In the end I always arrive at the same conclusion:  I am here on assignment.  One assignment after another one. 

“Stay out of the minefields.  Stay out of the swamps.  You can choose where in the current you want to be but you cannot change the current or avoid it or escape it.”

Everything happens for a reason.  There are lessons to be learned.

++

I believe there will come a time I will understand “all of this” but it will not be in this lifetime and it will not be without the help of souls very much advanced in their evolution.  In the meantime this is again a period of my life requiring great patience of myself toward myself.

At the end of my 50+ hour week of caring for baby last night as he left with his daddy I thought, “Now would be a wonderful time to meetup with friends for something fun to do.  Now would be a great time to contact my support network.  Wait!  I have neither one and I have no single clue how to change that fact.”

Roads covered with ice and snow I cannot drive upon.  A blistering cold that rides the wind.  Knowing nobody who has me in mind as a choice to spend a Friday night with.  That’s OK.  It has to be.  I will wait.  I always have the work to do of getting to know myself better.

Does that matter?  What does that even mean?

I return to the warping of the new rigid heddle table loom I bought with the gift money sent to me by my youngest sister.  It has been too many years for me to remember how to do this job with confidence and finesse.  I am careful.  I move slowly through each step consulting books written by experts before me.

I must complete this step the best that I can because once warped the loom can be filled with weft threads of wool I have spun and dyed myself.  I want to make something beautiful.  Something useful.

This is a solitary task that I must do by myself.  Yet this process pleases me.  This kind of work is evidently a consistent part of who I am in this lifetime.

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Friday, January 17, 2014.  While the information I went online to find this morning applies to all children in general I am seeking it in line with two particular areas of concern:  (1) How does this information apply to children who have been exposed to unrelenting patterns of abusive trauma perpetrated against them by their early primary attachment figures?  (2) What happens to the development of young children who spend 9 – 10 hours of their 5-day week in the challenging daycare environment?

I woke thinking of two particular words that I am using in my search:  distraction and stimulation.  My thinking involves questions about what age and stage of development do children reach that allows them to engage in self-entertainment without the direct interaction of someone else be it an adult or peer.

Unlike sibling home environments daycare centers group many children together of the same or very close to the same ages.  Unless a parent were to give birth to or adopt a “potfull” of children who are crossing the same developmental thresholds at the same time a home setting of siblings provides entirely different patterns of interaction between children

If I imagine even a glimmer of what close tribal or clan life might include or did include I would imagine that groups of peer age children probably did find one another to pursue play and interaction time.

I also think of the families I shared a life next to for seven years on the American side of the Mexican border.  Those families never left children alone to play.  Very large families which included many cousins did a great share of the infant and young child care.  Very often without any toys present they entertained themselves and one another entirely within a social network that included many ages of children and continual access to caring adults – parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and neighbors — all of the time.

Are daycare centers reproducing versions of the “same old wheel” or has our society invented something entirely new and different in the lives of so many if not the majority of our nation’s children today?

I would opt for the latter suggestion.  Primary attachment people are available only at the smallest numbers of daycare centers.  Do trained professional caregivers of young children adequately replace the interactions between young children and the adults in their early lives?  Does continual interaction primarily with peers of their same or very similar developmental ages – which does not include interaction with very young or older children in their “group” – change the course of development for daycare children?

What is the level of dedication to funded serious research that explores the entire range of consequence for the developmental range of children whose bulk of early waking years takes place in daycare settings?  Is high quality unbiased longitudinal research being done that could present the true picture of the costs of daycare as those prices are being paid by children who do not have the “usual” opportunity to interact within environments that were far more typical of our human evolution?

It seems very typical for adults who basically are among the “haves” in America to immediately support daycare as “the best option” for children from “have not” families and for children who are in neglectful and/or abusive or otherwise “deprived” homes.  I have not yet heard these suggestions followed by “What could and MUST BE be done to improve the family life of these children so this sad scenario could be changed?”

It seems to be a very topsy-turvy if not top heavy logic is being used to unequivocally support the OKness of daycare.  If America did not consistently appear in UNICEF yearly research among the world’s top 29 richest countries at the bottom when it comes to the horrific and growing gap concerning the well-being of children in our nation between the “haves” and the “have nots” I MIGHT be open to listening to “have” people support their daycare thinking with such an argument.  What kind and quality of daycare are the families of “have not” children able to access

As it is I have no reason to believe that any single layer of our society is yet willing to include the well-being of ALL children in their reasoning about what is “good” for ANY child on a blanket-level.

++

At the same time I suspect that what used to be the national fairly wide gap between what was considered parents’ concerns in the home in their raising of children and public concern for children once they entered the school system at age 5 is very close to disappearing entirely.  The current national obsession with preparing very young children for “school readiness” is, in my opinion, leading us astray as we can justify in our thinking that “After all, daycare TEACHES my child to be ready for school.”

At the same time the burden being placed upon very young children to supposedly learn information that is entirely irrelevant to them in their young lives such as counting, colors, the entire alphabet etc. before they start public school is happening at the same time these children are being made to sacrifice many other critical stages of their development THAT DO MATTER!  Nature has made them matter!!

++

When I consider the important information Dr. Martin Teicher and his Harvard research group have concluded about how a child raised in a stressful environment ends up with a brain that does not match that of a child raised without that stress I cannot help but broaden my thinking about what “maltreatment” of children can include. 

How do we KNOW that daycare is safe?  How do we know that those experiences are not creating STRESS in children that will change their physiological development in the same way STRESS from maltreatment does?

How do we know that we are not creating a wide, wide area of “mismatch” (see last paragraphs of Teicher article) between environments of daycare versus non-daycare raised children that is on the negative rather than the positive end of social adjustment?

It seems to be unpopular to even ask questions about the impact of daycare on young infants and children.  I am not judging or condemning anyone, but I do believe the risks are here.  We have introduced a “social system” on the youngest, most vulnerable segment of our society without asking them what they think or feel about what is happening in their lives.

Can we ask them?  Are they telling us?  Can they tell us when they have known nothing different?  Will “daycare” in some way be eventually recognized as one of the “Adverse Childhood Experiences” that the Centers for Disease Control are researching to discover links to lifelong negative consequences?  If there is even a risk that daycare is harmful to the nervous system, brain, body of children due to the stress it creates, etc. shouldn’t we ask the serious RIGHT questions sooner than later?

++

If nothing else daycare centers seem to me to provide a complete overload of incoming information without in any way being able to provide alone quiet calm time for children to process and integrate that information along the way.  What is that reality doing to the development of young nervous systems and brains?  How will developmental changes affect these children for the rest of their lives?

This is just ONE area of concern.  What are the rest of them?  Just asking….

++++

Preschool and Primary Grades —

 Meeting the Sensory Needs of Young Children

Children differ in their ability to process and respond to information from the environment while engaging in activities. For example, one child may have difficulty sitting still during group time; another may move little during free play outside. They react in different ways because they in­tegrate the information obtained through their senses from the environment differently. Most children process their daily experiences and regulate their responses with ease. But when a child is consistently having difficulty main­taining a level emotional state or engaging appropriately in activities, the child may be overstimulated (environ­ment provides more stimulation than the child can handle through sensory integration) or understimulated (environ­ment does not provide enough stimulation for the child). Teachers can use an understanding of sensory processing to meet the child’s unique needs. CLICK ON TITLE ABOVE TO READ MORE

++++ 

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Thursday, January 16, 2014.  I SO WISH this body of information was available in book form but so far it isn’t —

Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

By Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate M.D.

A dear friend let me listen to his copy of the expensive version available in dvd format.  If you do an online search for Dr. Gordon Neufeld you will discover a vast body of important attachment-related information that points to the many flaws in current attitudes toward caring for children as well as extremely helpful and hopeful information guiding concerned people on “how to fix it!”

++

I bring this up this morning because I am holding my breath on one of the approaches I am determined to retain (for now) in how I am caring for my 18-month old grandson.  I am FEEDING HIM!  My daughter, I can tell, is not enthusiastic about my determination to retain what Dr. Neufeld calls “being alpha over food.”

From a practical standpoint living in this small apartment I don’t want to deal with the mess of rapidly discarded food from the table that flies through expert baby flings anywhere but into his mouth.  I do not want to deal with an extra carpet of smashed cracker crumbs and lose cereal all over my floors.  I don’t want to argue about any of this.  I don’t want to spend one split second worrying about whether or not this little one is getting enough of the right kind of food down his gullet.  In his LONG day away from his home and parents and brother — as is true Dr. Neufeld points out for so many little people in today’s world — my grandson’s reliance upon me to be alpha over his food is going to HELP and NOT harm him, although my daughter questions this. 

Doesn’t he need to “practice” feeding himself?

Why?

We know perfectly well he CAN get his food into his mouth in a coordinated manner — when he wants to.  I am not convinced that when the food goes airborne that it has anything to do with being full or with not liking a certain taste.  I think the risk is that other emotions related to stress in his life just appear in that arena out-of-place as they literally “mess up” our shared life.

Dr. Neufeld describes how forcing our little ones to become self-sufficient and independent when they are TOO YOUNG is interfering with their ability to live in a safe and secure world provided for them by their attachment adults.  Littles MUST be dependent and NOT alpha during the stages when that is what nature intends for them.

One part of the problem is that if little people can not experience their dependent state appropriately and feel their dependency feelings in safety Dr. Neufeld says that they will cease to grow their compassion circuits (my short version of his very detailed accounts of these processes). 

When it comes to food it is through the toddler years especially that caregiving adults can maintain their “safety and trust” alpha powers over young children.  Having understood my version of what Neufeld is saying (and being unable to pick up a book and flip to those pages) I am flying by instinct.  I watched my grandson who is OF COURSE able to hold his bottle while being rocked before his morning nap LET GO of his bottle yesterday.  Every time he has done that in the past I have taken that action as he hands the bottle to me to mean he is finished with the portion he wants to consume.

Yesterday I tried an experiment.  I held the bottle and touched its nipple to his lips — he relaxed and drank the rest of it.  It made me think of when I breastfed my own children, the 3rd until he was 26 months. 

The breast is not something little ones are responsible for holding to their lips.  The amount of relaxation they can feel is then much greater than it is when they have to hold their own bottle.  Certainly as old as my grandson is none of this is about independency or manual skills.  It is about dependency in a safe and secure attachment environment with his alpha people!

It is about being dependent at an age when it is appropriate and NECESSARY for his development — at those times when encouraging that dependency is NOT interfering with the rest of his growth process.  We do NOT need to worry about that!

I do not wish to do battle with a young child or to overrun their developing self.  I think there is a line of pretty perfect balance that can be SENSED by a caregiver — a kind of tipping point that can be felt and then acted upon regarding the natural need for dependency that will allow infants and children to grow into optimal health all through their developmental stages.  I am sensitive to the feelings within my grandson at the same time I am sensitive to the feelings within myself.

If mealtimes are stressful it is up to me to find the effective pathways of least resistance.  Eating is not gametime.  It is not fight time.  It is time — in a shared social context — to participate in the ancient task of consuming nutrients to sustain a body. 

Consuming food has always been a social-system related process for our social species.  When we — as we – break that link between self and others regarding our food patterns in a profound way we are replacing the comfort of social connection with the supposed “comfort” of the food we consume. 

It is pretty obvious where THOSE patterns are getting us as a nation.  Is it as obvious where most of them came from?

++

With maybe one hour of chaotic exhausted family time when everyone gets home during the week who has time to cook a good balanced nutritious meal — let alone to eat one?  Without THAT food available baby cannot eat right, either.

I don’t cook anymore and baby won’t patiently chew up my salads.  I don’t have the food at my apartment to cook for his family and my talent has evaporated, anyway.  Jar food is what I am asking for on my end for now — and NOT the kind stuffed with pasta and rice (which I accidentally picked out the other day while shopping with my daughter ’cause I was after the cutest animal pictures on the Gerber lids – which make great toys!).  Just vegetables and meat and a bit of fruit. 

Baby can be picky.  One day he loves bananas.  The next day they are stimulus for face-scrunching head-turning howling exercises.  No thanks!  Same with fresh apples.

++

Baby just arrived for the day.  Strapped into his little booster chair I sang him songs and spoonfed him very soupy sweet potatoes from a jar.  He made it 3/4s through and then suddenly – DONE!!  Well, he is all tidy and satisfied, down and off carrying new Pamper diapers around in each hand because ELMO-MO-MO is on them as he heads toward his plastic handheld mirror toy.  Seeing himself in that mirror literally cracks him up with giggles!

Oh that he can feel that way about himself for the rest of his life!!

++

NOTE:  Any time I write a post like this I am reminded of the currents of thought I have about what it was and is like for infant and early childhood abuse survivors.  Many received NOTHING of what we needed and in fact received the OPPOSITE.  I marvel at “HOW did we survive?”

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment

++++

++++

Wednesday, January 15, 2014.  When I pay attention the interrelatedness of life makes perfect sense and fascinates me.  Life as I notice it does not unfold in a linear fashion but rather as an organic “one thing” that includes surprises along the way.  SHAME can very often be an instinctive and automatic response to something that crosses our path that involves some kind of social risk.  Social risks open a door to surprises we might not feel competent to handle.  Then what?

A few moments ago I responded back to an email a dear and very knowledgable friend sent me today that included mention of SHAME and relationships.  He and I have both studied the writings of developmental neuroscientist Dr. Allan N. Schore who clearly describes the inception of the shame reaction at around age one that can only begin to operate once an infant’s central nervous system has matured in its development far enough to let shame happen.

Schore describes the purposes of shame and what happens when early attachment relationship failings turn shame in the direction of toxicity that is most often then compounded by failings within the infant’s entire attachment environment.

It is not my point in this post to delineate specific details surrounding a discussion of shame other than to say it is tied to the “hide” and “freeze” response stage of the stress response system.

I want to mention a dream I woke from when my alarm went off this morning.  I know I dream often but rarely remember dreams any more.  When one is kind enough to leave me a trailing of its imagery I am very grateful — and very interested in what the dream might “be about.”

In this dream I was among a group of about 12 very nice people.  We were all walking along a road carrying small items that were personally significant to us in a variety of containers.  Carved and embellished wooden boxes, well-crafted baskets and other containers held our various objects.

Suddenly (and this kind of turn of events is always significant in dreams) we were overtaken by a BLOCK OF ICE as we and all of our objects were frozen within it.  The ice was crystal clear so that we could watch what happened next.  Our block was lifted by a crane onto a semi-trailer and we were hauled to “a place of thawing.”

Somehow, the way dreams operate, myself and all the people were free from the ice chunk as soon as we arrived at this place which itself did not appear to be anyplace especially unique.  We visited as we waited and we each took an interest in whose special belongs were unthawing next.

Nothing was damaged, nor were we harmed in any way.  Our items were not even wet as they became freed.  As my alarm woke me the last woman’s objects were nearly ready to pick up.  I remember that they sat atop a wooden stool (like I sit on here as I write with my computer above the reach of eager baby fingers).  I do not remember what any object was!

++

It was not until I was responding to my friend’s email that mentioned shame to which I mentioned in return something about the “hide” and “freeze” response each being connected to our inner need to feign death to stay alive and to keep ourselves safe from threat and attack.  I think we do this with our talents, too.  My present considerations about the upcoming publication of the first book in our series, Story Without Words, and my thinking about creating a new blog and steering book readers even further in my direction was probably connected to this dream.

I find it fascinating that I was among friends who all experienced the same event that I did.  Together we had no fear at all about what was happening and perhaps it was this companionship (within an “attachment village”) that prevented any harm from coming to our favored belongings, as well.

I think healthy shame gives us wisdom about keeping ourselves safe, about our limits and boundaries, about the possible intentions/actions toward us of other people (a “Theory of Mind” (TOM) concern) and about the timing of the ventures we take on in our life.  Shame in its true sense is about negotiating social relationships with others so that they work best for all concerned.  Shame is something to pay attention to but it need not be something that keeps us stuck in life patterns that do not serve our best interests.

We can recognize it when we feel it, examine what triggered it, decide what we want to do next as we find a way to move on in our life rather than letting a part of us atrophy and die along the way.

++

All of this enticed my mind to connect to a movie I watched that described the purpose of two stages of our dreaming.  I am not yet reconnected to Netflix so I cannot say specifically which stage was which — one being pre-REM and the other being REM — one allowing us to integrate experiences we have already had and the other allowing us to practice for the future.

Because dreams do not distinguish themselves separately from one another I imagine a dream like mine left me with a sense of wholeness because I was doing both jobs at once!

++++

NOTES:

I highly recommend (available streaming on Netflix) this NOVA program – What are Dreams?

Watching this show was the first I learned that there are two different kinds of dreaming that happen during two different stages of sleep – and depression (and probably all other anxiety difficulties) seriously interferes with both of them.

++

An informative website about the general stages of dreaming:

How Dreams Work

by Lee Ann Obringer

++

I came upon this dream website in September 2010 and thought it might be helpful to anyone, especially severe trauma and abuse survivors, for gaining new information that can assist in our healing work:

North of Eden – Dreams Illuminate the Soul

About Archetypal Dreamwork

Every dream has an intention.

Every dream has a plan.

Every dream wants to lead you back to your heart, your core, your essence, the very fiber of your real being-ness. We forget our real being-ness. We forget our pure child hearts.

We forget who we are.

Every dream wants to lead us back to the soul within that remembers who we are.

 ++++

Some of my notes on the writings of Dr. Daniel Siegel here popped up in connection to this post (in some mysterious way) – SHAME – as a state of mind

++++
Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Wednesday, January 15, 2014.  I could have titled this post “IN DEFENCE OF A PROPOSITION.”  I flew some of my thoughts about questions I would pose to WordPress technical support about the growing needs of my writing efforts to my lovely and brilliant daughter who is my partner in the book publishing process.  This morning I found in my email box what she offered back to me in her thoughts which only make me more certain that at this point I need to clarify further what I am sensing.  Here are her concerns thus far:

++

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Tuesday, January 14, 2014.  As I begin to think about the BIG idea of starting a new blog that would connect to “the cover story” under which the books relating to my childhood will be published I return full circle to the words of my abusive mother I had in mind as I opened this Stop the Storm blog in April 2009.  I found them while transcribing the half-million words contained in the boxes of Mother’s disorganized papers that came into my life after her death in 2003.

Mother was raised in Boston,MA and moved to Los Angeles, CA in 1945 with her mother and grandmother.  Although growing up she spent many summers on her aunt’s farm in Maine she had never even been camping before she began her Alaskan mountainside homesteading venture in 1959.

She recorded this dream in her diary during the first months we spent on that mountain.  It was a time of great stress and of great hope.

I would start a new blog from this same point, and it is a troubled and troubling one:

++

MY MOTHER’S DREAM – March 29, 1960

The whole family was out walking and suddenly we looked up to see a dark rainbow appear – then it got bright and behind it a skyline appeared outlining massive dormed buildings such as I’ve never seen and skyscraper buildings – then it all disappeared and a big wind came.

We realized it was a hurricane. We could hardly stand up against the wind. We saw big apt buildings on the sides of the streets but the entrances faced another street and we were on the wrong side. The wind grew stronger – finally a door appeared and we went in the building and the person asked us what was wrong? We told her of the great wind but as we pointed outside – all was silent and the wind was gone … and I awoke.

++

As I pursue the trail of my own truthful thinking about a next blog connected to this one and centrally connected to the books I find that these words appeared to me immediately after again reading Mother’s dream:

CALM THE STORM

Interesting….

++

I read every word of the Wikipedia entry on The Netherlands last night to give myself a tiny slice of background about why that nation is #1 in the world on taking care of their children as mentioned in this post

+AMERICA, WHERE IS OUR SHAME/GUILT? ‘Child Well-being in Rich Countries: A comparative overview’, Innocenti Report Card 11– UNICEF Office of Research (2013).

America’s ranking is miserable.  Abysmal. 

The longer I write for this blog the more I think about what I might have to contribute to the process of stopping the storm of the transmission of infant and child abuse trauma through the generations.  I am maybe one tiny molecule of one tiny drop of water in the ocean of life.  What could it possibly matter to anyone anytime any place EVER what I think or feel about anything?

How can one person — HELP?

++

It is a big storm, this “trauma thing.”  Unlike citizens of The Netherlands, I am living in a nation that does not seem to take the well-being of its offspring seriously.

What do I see if I shift my focus from a macro lens that looks outward to a micro lens that examines what I dearly believe?

What do I have to offer toward improving the bigger picture that this Stop the Storm blog was intended to address?

What do I know?  What I have learned since I started this blog?

++

I live in a body that had to change the course of its earliest development in reaction to severe abusive trauma so that I could stay alive.  These permanent changes that were adjustments to surviving severe ongoing unrelenting infant-child abuse trauma have affected how I have experienced my entire life and will do so until I die.

All of these changes make my life difficult in ways that nonsurvivors of early trauma cannot comprehend from the inside out.

All of these changes happened through early RELATIONSHIP trauma with my parents within an ATTACHMENT environment.  They were ALL preventable!  Every single one of them.

It has ceased to matter to me much what the exact nature of any particular abuse incident was that happened to me.  It was not the specifics of the abuse I suffered that changed the course of my physiological development. 

What changed the body I live in was my physiological response to the STRESS the torment of abuse created.  These kinds of changes to the developing nervous systems, brain included, immune system, stress response system, etc. are now clearly documented in developmental neuroscientific research.  This research is extremely difficult for members of “the ordinary public” to understand.

How does this critically important information make its way into the “operating system” of our society to the point that we understand that early attachment trauma changes the life of a survivor primarily because it changes the BODY of that survivor in ways that make continued life – yes, possible – at the same time these changes make our life very difficult?

The horrors my statements point to in the very real life of infant and child trauma survivors were entirely — ENTIRELY — preventable!!

Who gives a damn?

++

It has been the hope of my writing work that something I might say can create a trickle of change in thinking of someone toward a positive end of ending preventable human-caused trauma.

It has been my hope that in some way through my personal accounts I can ground attachment theory and developmental neuroscience in the everyday world — be it so humble — that I live within along with everyone else.

We survivors need to know about our Trauma Altered Development.  We need words to think about and to communicate to others about what it is like for us to LIVE in a trauma changed body.  This information is not arbitrary, peripheral or insignificant to our healing.  IT IS CRITICALLY CENTRAL!

++

My mother of course did not ever recognize that she was dangerously, severely (psychotically) mentally ill.  My father did not recognize this, nor did anyone else that ever came into contact with our family.  This fact does not negate what I have come to understand about what was REALLY going on within my home of origin and what the abuse I suffered did to me.

If I could turn my thinking into a mathematical formula I would say that (1) the sum of all the life force it takes me to believe in myself enough to continue my writing work, added to (2) the sum of all the life force it took me to survive the 18 years of horrific traumatic abuse I endured, added to (3) the sum of all the life force it has taken me to make it age 62 the best way I have known how — does not begin to equal the damage that was done to me as a human being by the abuse I suffered WHICH WAS ENTIRELY PREVENTABLE!

The pattern of my mother’s life and that of my father’s was not far different from mine.  In my thinking the pattern of the life for any early severe neglect and abuse survivor is similar. 

Early traumatic stress changes the physiological development – importantly including the brain – of all but the most fortunate survivors who themselves had some other contributing powerful resiliency factors that thwarted the negative effects of the trauma they suffered.  Personally, I don’t believe ANYONE is in this last category I mention unless those salvation factors existed within strong safe and secure attachment relationships with earliest caregivers (which in my case was primarily my 13-month older than I was baby brother!).

ALL of this suffering was — and is — preventable!

The changes that this article describes (at these links) were all PREVENTABLE –

+Dr. Teicher’s ARTICLE ON TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT

*Notes on Teicher

Direct link to the article is here:

*SYMTPOMS: 120909 Scan of Teicher’s Research – Trauma Altered Development Paper

++

It is important for me to realize that the changes traumatic stress caused in my early development did not BREAK me — they changed me.  I am a trauma CHANGED individual.

That I would have had an entirely different and yes, BETTER life had these changes from abuse not happened to me does not take away from the joys I have and do experience in the life I have now.  I DID NOT need to SUFFER what I did to be a good person or to have made the best out of the life I am living.  There is NO advantage to unnecessary, preventable SUFFERING!!!  (BIG DUH!!)

My mother and even my father were also changed by the stress of the early traumas they endured, and these changes were, I believe, directly the cause of the abuse I suffered – and my siblings suffered in different ways. 

If I were to pick one entry point that had the power to create the most powerful impact in how we think about infant and child abuse and about “mental illness” and the hosts of troubles that cover the lifespan of most early trauma survivors I would say it would be to highlight what these trauma changes are and what the experience of living in a trauma changed body feels like (is like) in the only way I can do it:  By describing my life.

++

What does any of this thinking contribute to my clarity regarding a new blog and its title?

Sidetracked.  Sideswiped.  Derailed.  Sabotaged.  Misled.  Blindsided.  Tricked.  Betrayed.  Overrun, overtaken, overruled and overwhelmed.  Hijacked.  Detoured.  All of which leave us troubled, confused and exhausted much of the time!

What I find myself describing is what if often feels like to live in a body whose physiological development was changed by infant-child abuse and neglect trauma.

Words that are used to describe our experience include dissociation (which I think involves both reaction and memory processing changes), anxiety, depression along with disoriented, disorganized and dysregulated.  All of these conditions happen because of the trauma altered development our body experienced in response (reaction) to severe early traumatic stress (distress, duress).

Many of these conditions have genetic underpinnings from gene combinations that research shows would not likely have been triggered had the trauma not been present.  These factors always interacted with resiliency factors that were within our range of access to either lessen or exacerbate (worsen) the effects our traumatic experiences had upon us.

Where does this leave us?  Most of us have one “psychiatric” diagnostic label or “price tag” or another strung around our necks (hamstrung).

We are not flawed.  We are not broken.  We are not damaged.

We are changed.

Many of these changes are very hard for us to live with.  We need to learn as much as we can about this entire topic….

Along with the changes that happened to us came the development of many gifts such as heightened creativity, stamina, strength, courage, determination, compassion, generosity and sensitivity.

++

I understand that trauma exposure later in life can physiologically change individuals without early trauma histories in ways that I don’t know about.  However, my area of focus is on the changes in early development that gave us a different brain, different nervous system, different stress response system and different immune system FOR LIFE than the one we would have had without our trauma exposure.

++

Insecure attachment disorders are a direct result of early trauma and a direct cause of it.  Any survivor of early abusive trauma probably has an insecure attachment disorder that is physiologically built into the  body brain.

++

“What happened to me as a result of what happened to me” is what matters to me, which is to say that “How what happened to me changed the body I live in” is what actually matters, as I mentioned above.

Around and around and around I go to see what is at the center.  It’s TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT (TAD) — which is not outside of our body.  Not only is it inside our body, it made our body, snf our body is MADE of TAD in this lifetime.

Because it happened to us so early and during such rapid and extremely important initial stages of our development – post womb – those interactions that reflect the conditions of the world we are born into and thus have to adapt to – TAD has crossed “the line,” the boundary that if it could have been protected could have allowed us to keep the impact of our traumas at some distance from our SELF.

Here in my thinking I encounter the myth that says, “If something bad happened to you before you were old enough to remember it – well big deal!  It doesn’t matter then.”  This could not be further from the truth.  Those early traumas BUILD our body as they also determine how our memory processes themselves work for our lifetime.

++

But I cannot take on and do battle with all these problems that are in effect a kind of schrapnel from TAD itself – or more accurately from the trauma that caused the TAD to happen.

TAD that is not recognized or understood is a dangerous breeding ground for infant and child abuse and neglect.  It is within the wounds that created TAD that the most verile seeds lie for the transmission of unresolved trauma down through the generations.

TAD is not invisible.  We can learn to detect it by the troubles it causes in people’s lives.  TAD is the key player in “trauma drama.”  (I am not talking therapy, a subject I am not qualified to discuss in detail.  I am talking education.)

TAD, in my opinion, does not touch the core (essential, soul) self although because it can make the body sick, as it did in my mother’s case most clearly, it can prevent the core self from entering one’s life in the truest sense of the word.

Living well with TAD requires an increasing consciousness over the difficulties trauma built into the body creates in terms of its automatic sidetracking, etc. reactions to experiences, choices and decisions that to more “ordinary built” people appear to come naturally.  We do not have the SAME KIND of body that non-early-traumatized people have.  The sooner and more profoundly we realize this truth the better off we will be.

++

Just as TAD presence or absence lies at the hub of the wheel of our life in our body so it also needs to be at the hub of how we assess and redress problems we detect in our own response to life and in the responses of others that do affect and have affected us. 

I do suspect that the more extreme severe cases of TAD are forms of Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) although “professionals” do not recognize that adults can “have” that condition.  A high number of readers seem to find their way to this blog using RAD as their search parameter and that tells me a lot.

Because I am not a professional of any kind (other than art therapist) I can say what I want about what I personally suspect and believe.  I think RAD is the closest over-arching umbrella term I have yet found to describe my personal conditions.  RAD would fit within the more formal structure of a disorganized (rather than organized) insecure attachment disorder.

This thinking would clearly put TAD and RAD in the same blog space.

++

I first began to clearly delineate TAD on this blog within my first year of its creation:

+TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT (TAD) – A NEW DESCRIPTIVE CONCEPT

November 29, 2009

+

This post as among others related to the topic:

+PTSD AND SEVERE CHILD ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – PART ONE

+PTSD AND SEVERE ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – PART TWO

+RETHINKING THE CONSEQUENCES OF EARLY (DEVELOPMENTAL) TRAUMA

November 29, 2009 by

++

I see as I do a Google search for Trauma Altered Development that I am finding my blog among the best possible company:

Traumatized Children: How Childhood Trauma Influences Brain Development
by Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.
http://www.aaets.org/index.htmwww.childtrauma.org

+

Along with this:

The Effect of Childhood Trauma on Brain Development

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Tuesday, January 14, 2014.  I struggle even with the inclusion of “I” in the title of this post.  I struggle with being able to identify and own the fact that I might NEED anything.  If one has no needs — as I deeply learned as a traumatized infant and child — life is safer!  After all, what else could I control in the dangerous madhouse of a home I was raised in other than the internal status of myself? 

Of course when severe trauma begins at birth most of the “control” over a self being harmed happens through physiololgical changes in development so that these adaptations can help a little one survive.  In the beginning the choices for survival are entirely automatic — and unfortunately because these trauma changes build themselves into the developing body-brain of a developing child — they STAY there operating outside the range of consciousness for much of our lifetime.

Something as basic as needing ANYTHING can become a threat-to-life for a little person under the burden of early relationship trauma.  Who is there to depend upon to have any need met?  At least for me my family did have its most essential needs met — although even that was pretty iffy on many occasions. 

Self needs?  Not a chance.  This was true for all of us in the family with our psychotic Borderline Pesonality Disorder mother ruling her roost. 

++

Our body is essentially programmed to know one thing:  “I need to live.”

Everything and anything a body can do to make sure its life continues is what it is going to do in any way that it can.

When trauma begins very early in life, and that includes life as it happens in the womb, the rapidly developing body will make all possible adjustments to adapt to THOSE traumas as they are being perceived by the body.  Because we only go through our early essential body developmental stages ONCE, the changes made in adaptation to trauma remain for our lifetime.

It is THOSE trauma changes that are the cause of so MANY of the difficulties we face as adults.

Nobody tells us this….

++

When it comes to the possibility that “I need a new blog” I want to pull I out of the sentence so that I cannot be a target for anything.  Threat?  Why am I reacting to threat?  Where is the threat of harm?

My trauma changed body is ALWAYS asking that question in some way on some level. 

The issue appeared last night as my daughter emailed me about the “social media presence” platform that “needs” to be in place before we publish our first book, Story Without Words.

Just to give you an idea of what so intimidated and frightened me about this process here is a snippet from her email as editor and co-author of this book:

++++

Tuesday, January 14, 2014.  A dear friend just sent me a link to this article and I GET IT!  Our little ones are our greatest teachers.  Letting ourselves know this might be the biggest step we take as adults toward our own healing.  We were little once.  Knowing who paid what kind of attention to us when it mattered most can give us the most important information of our lives toward understanding HOW we are in the world.  WHO we are?  Well, we were born knowing that as every baby can show us if we pay attention.

Making A Soul Connection With Your Baby

Posted by janet on May 15th, 2012

Now that I spend my week days caring for my 17-month-old grandson I am reminded of how fragile the connection is between the soul-self of a little one and the world it lives in.  Especially tenuous is the connection a wee one has on its soul-self level to the people who matter most in its world — its adult early caregivers.

The interactions a little one has with these adults happen ONLY within attachment relationships because that is the only kind of relationship a young one CAN have.  Being dependent for its absolute survival upon the care it receives from the big people in its life make a little person vulnerably open to the reception adults give it.

I like how this article highlights HUMOR in little people!  Humor abilities, however, are directly tied to the left brain’s happiness center that has neurologically been shaped in its formation by the quality of especially MOTHER-INFANT interactions the infant experienced during the first year of its life.  Great safe and secure attachment interactions = the formation of the biggest, most solid and best working happiness center a person can acquire.  Shabby and/or hurtful interactions and an early forming happiness center in the brain will be less-than-optimal for a lifetime.

Another characteristic I am beginning to see in my grandson is a periodic display of shyness that clearly places him on one side of “a great divide” and me as his adult caregiver on the other side.

What happens at these times is important.  I cannot rush in and swoop him into MY world so much as gently recognize the presence of another soul-self “over there” as I make connection and invite him to join me on THIS side.  (Yes, “boundary issues” are very present concerns for humans of all ages!)

Humans are a social species and how we negotiate the space between our soul-self and another soul-self defines the quality of our shared lives.  Obviously when horrendous relationship trauma exists in a little one’s world the soul-self has no way to safely — and in trust of that safety — cross over into the material world where it is meant to reside in this lifetime.

This is connected to the great sorrow and grief and to the great feelings of loneliness and isolation as well as to the deep mistrust of humans that many of us severe early trauma survivors experience near our core.  We could not cross that “great divide” safely when we were little and were supposed to be given what we needed to make our soul-self (essential self) transition into this life. 

How do we now negotiate that transition as adults?  This entire blog is my attempt to answer that question!

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++