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Monday, August 11, 2014. There are many comments and replies accumulating in response to my April 11, 2012 post,
+ADULT REACTIVE ATTACHMENT DISORDER – THE GREAT UMBRELLA!
The most recent comments made on August 6, 2014 frankly — break my heart. My first suggestion is that either copy of this book be immediately purchased and read —
Parenting From the Inside Out by Daniel J. Siegel MD and Mary Hartzell (Apr 22, 2004)
Parenting from the Inside Out 10th Anniversary edition: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children… by Daniel J. Siegel MD and Mary Hartzell (Dec 26, 2013)
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Dr. Siegel gives an excellent presentation of what attachment is, how we form our attachment patterns, what creates secure and insecure attachments, and how we can recognize these patterns operating in our own and in others’ lives. Without this basic knowledge we cannot begin to think rationally about what patterns found in Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) might mean.
If someone wants to understand more about the harm terrible mothering does to a person for their lifetime please search Google for the terms “stop the storm trauma altered development” and go to work studying what can be found at the links that appear. The few blog pages that appear with the search are just a small beginning of what this blog contains on the subject.
There is a search bar on this blog – You can also type in “attachment” and a universe of information will appear here.
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There is no simple or magic solution to what is happening in the lives of the family members as mentioned in the August 6th comments I noted above. Because there is a child in the family it is imperative that the chaos and disorder in the family be addressed ASAP — not for the comfort of the adults in the home but for the necessary healing of this child. Nothing, in my (layperson) mind tops the needs of this child.
I understand the RAD sufferer’s reaction to the “forgive” subject (please read the comment). Again with “forgiveness” typed into this blog’s search bar a host of relevant posts will appear. The kind of trauma and abuse I suspect is the history of this sufferer is something I can understand from my own history.
As I have mentioned on this blog, my abusive mother — who was actually psychotically, severely mentally ill — would have deserved a minimum prison term for what she did to me of no less than 15,000 years in my estimation. We survivors of these kinds of hellacious infancies and childhoods are basically “in another kind of world.” We need to honor that fact, and we need to learn what that means.
It is imperative that anyone considering these topics read the article posted here –
+Dr. Teicher’s ARTICLE ON TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT
We won’t understand all of the technical terms in it, but the essence of what this article says is crucially clear — especially by the final paragraph.
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Learning the facts about Trauma Altered Development as it happens through unsafe, insecure and DANGEROUS traumatic early attachment relationships is essential to moving forward!! The light will go on for us as we study this kind of information. We need to learn about OUR world – and it is never too late to do this work. Please — do!
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Here is our first book out in ebook format. Click here to view or purchase –
It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge. Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are welcome.
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Stop the Storm 
I forgot to mention – there is a book that might be helpful to you, written by two women: Marie H. Browne, RN, Ph D, and her daughter, Marlene M. Brown, Esq. (she’s an attorney). The book’s title is: “IF the Man You Love Was Abused.” I haven’t had a chance to fully read and digest it, but I’ve skipped around in it enough to sense that it is a good resource…
Dear Ivy626: Linda’s comments are spot on.
I also feel moved to write a reply to your recent posts describing your husband’s behaviors towards you. I sense your deep frustration and pain at the way he has been treating you; none of which is ‘your fault.’
He is obviously a deeply wounded person, who got that way through no fault of his own. Someone – it sounds like that someone is his mother – left him feeling bad about himself – and, as you’ve noted, he now he appears to be projecting her onto you.
Please understand that by recognizing that he is deeply wounded I do NOT mean he is not ultimately responsible for any suffering he inflicts on others as a consequence of that wounding.
I’m guessing that he wasn’t showing this side of himself in the early stages of your relationship. He probably managed to come across as a pretty nice, even-tempered kind of guy. He’s probably spend his entire life trying to rid himself of his ‘bad’ feelings…but feelings denied are feelings ‘undigested’ and ‘un-metabolized,’ and are trapped in the central nervous system, fighting for a way to get out and be dealt with.
Unfortunately…in my experience, I’ve observed that most men usually have little awareness of their own emotions, especially compared to women. (I’m speaking in sweeping generalizations here, and there are certainly exceptions to this rule.) I attribute the widespread emotional illiteracy of men partly to our historically toxic male-centric culture in the U.S., which has historically promoted the idea that ‘males are better than females,’ (not a belief that I hold) while simultaneously putting males in a kind of emotional strait-jacket that cuts them off from almost all emotions – except the culturally-approved male emotions of anger, triumph (such as when ‘their’ team wins a game), indignation, etc. Men are ‘allowed’ those feelings and women are mostly denied them (because that supposedly makes them ‘bossy’ – or the other “B word”).
Prior to 2005, I spent 15 years doing domestic violence treatment with male perpetrators in a major metropolitan area (I also was a chemical dependency counselor; the two issues often go together). So I’ve seen a lot of families go through the kinds of things you’re going through.
(I do want to be clear that I no longer do any kind of counseling work of any kind, so please take my words as just me offering my own perspective on situations like yours. Not as any kind of credentialed ‘expert,’ but from my own life experience.)
Being male myself, and having grown up in an extremely dysfunctional family, I’ve spent my entire life trying to understand why men in our society commit so much violence. Violence against each other, and violence against women and children. I’ve come to believe that most violence is driven by unrecognized shame that gets acted out in an attempt to ‘get rid of it’ – usually by pushing it off onto someone else. Blame = rejected shame.
A person’s shame can have many sources. Usually one of the forms of Insecure Attachment is one such source. Children who grow up without Secure Attachment to their primary caregiver usually live in a state of constant anxiety, though they often don’t recognize that.
When someone who cannot recognize, feel or acknowledge their own shame, they learn to reflexively deal with it by pushing it away. Psychiatrist Donald Nathanson created a concept known as the “Compass of Shame” that describes the 4 ways that most people deal with shame (and usually the shame itself, as well as the defenses against it, is totally unconscious and out of the person’s awareness): by withdrawing, avoiding, attacking themselves, or attacking someone else.
I your second post you asked “how can you rationalize with someone like that?” You obviously care about your husband, and for your son who is also being affected by your husband’s negative behavior. My experience has led me to the conclusion that you CAN’T reason with someone who exhibits the behaviors your husband is showing towards you. When he (or anyone else) is in the middle of anger-rage, they don’t have access to their cerbral cortex’s higher functions – they’re in the grip of their amygdala (the fight/flight/freeze part of our brain). There is likely NOTHING you can say to him that he won’t find fault with. I realize this is not good news (but I suspect you already know what I’ve said here is true).
Since you are a reader of the “Stop the Storm” blog, I’m guessing that you have an awareness that what you’re dealing with in your family is the result of past traumas that haven’t been dealt with or processed effectively. The blog contains more information about trauma, attachment theory, and neuroscience than I’ve ever seen in one place, so it is a great resource for educating oneself about those issues.
But please don’t fall into the trap of believing that you can do anything to heal his wounds. You can’t ‘be his therapist.’ The motivation for change has to come from within your husband. If he continues to blame you for his problems with his anger, the prognosis is not good.
Your husband needs to get GOOD outside help to get past his reflexive defensiveness enough to deal with his unprocessed trauma(s). I’m guessing you’ve probably suggested to him that he get help, and he probably refused and took your asking him to get help as yet another sign that his anger is ‘your fault.’ Dealing with someone who shifts blame in that way can make a person wonder if maybe the blamer is right about it being your fault. Please know that IT IS NOT YOUR FAULT. Period.