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Saturday, May 30, 2015.  How long does humanity have to put the right pieces together, to gather the right information, to make the right decisions, to take the right kind of action before we create planetary conditions that are beyond our ability to cope with them?

I was raised on a wilderness mountain homestead upon this land – in the news now for – something that grips my fears and welds them together in ways I would never have thought possible in my lifetime of nearly 64 years.  Alaska.  The land my heart has never left.

Alaska’s Spring Is Becoming More Like California’s Summer

“Climate change’s new normal is causing record-breaking heat and wildfire risk.”

We can only make use of what we know to move forward at any given time through the changes that life puts us in the middle of.  I want to know, “How do we prepare our children for the world we have borne them into?”

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I have an undetermined – at present – set of moments to think and write before one of my grandsons comes to visit me sometime today.  I cannot think clearly enough or quickly enough through the kinds of thoughts that crowd upon me swarming like billowing clouds of unwelcomed gnats.

Gnawing themselves into my conscious thinking space are tangles of thought threads demanding my attention that simply begin to present themselves in the pages that appear in my online search of these terms:  “imaginative play empathy”

What I remember from my prior studies does nothing but alert me that there are things I need to know that I do not know yet.  I remember from Dr. Allan N. Schore’s writings about the pivotal early brain building processes through attachment interactions with primary infant caregivers that when these relationships fail in their purpose to build a healthy body-brain-self not only do insecure attachment disorder patterns come to rule a person’s life but so also do empathy disorders.

On the blade of that double-edged sword, we DO have one with the other – and we DO NOT have one without the other.

Yes safe and secure attachment = yes healthy empathy abilities.

No safe and secure attachment = no healthy empathy abilities.

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Here is a link to an Autism Quiz.

There is a known link that exists between Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and early detection in children that is connected not ONLY to empathy disabilities but also to a lack of the ability to engage in imaginative “pretend” play.  Autism presents varieties of serious attachment interferences related to inabilities to interact with other members of our social species emotionally – and socially.

I want to think my way through these connections.  Is there some kind of a fork in the road of development, a kind of “Y” presented in situations where safe and secure attachment is denied to a human being that fundamentally alters  the direction that development can take?

What is it about humanity AS A WHOLE right now in our evolution that has prevented us from being able to experience healthy empathy with OUR ENVIRONMENT?  What kind of DENIAL supplants truth when humans cannot or will not (refuse to) IMAGINE what the consequences are of their actions?

Someone on the spectrum (ASD) lacks the ability to comprehend how their way of being in the world is different from what is now termed “neurotypical” people.

Severe early trauma as it exists in unsafe and insecure attachment conditions often creates Trauma Altered Development in survivors who then are not “neurotypical” people, either.

What links of the ladder, what spokes of the wheel, exist that connect in a kind of overlay of realities between these three (in general) kinds of people, ways of being in this world?

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Evidently what is termed “Climate Change” has not captured the IMAGINATION of our species to the point where we can, on the whole, comprehend what is happening and is going to happen not only to life on this planet but to – dare I say of our ego-infected species – ALL OF US.

I just did a search of my own blog here, typing the word “denial” in the box at the top of this page.  MANY posts appeared!  I am certainly not going to stop to read them at this point.  I did not see any of those posts with a title about my thoughts “back then” connecting the operation of denial in human thought and action with a form of “pretend play.”

If we PRETEND something is not happening or did not happen – then – it did not happen and it is not happening now.

I did not, for example, have ANY idea that I had been abused until I sought out professional help when I was 29.  I did not have any CONCEPT for what had happened to me.  That was not due to DENIAL – was it?

The truth of what happened to me and how that impacted everything about how I am in the world continues to unfold within me.  That is a process of life.  Of MY life.

And yet the stage of imaginative, pretend play that toddlers enter and that lasts for ensuing “ages” of childhood is VITAL to the “neurotypical” development of members of our species.  When that stage does not appear in early development – most simply put – there IS something wrong.

But how do we use our human powers of imagination throughout our lifespan?  If I had time I would find a great deal of information I need to solidify my own thoughts if I studied the connection between “imagination and empathy” for a while.  As it is I now have a very strong sense that this connection is profoundly important to understand – full circle.

I will simply live with my questioning for the time being as I carefully watch my nearly-age-3 youngest grandson as he now exists in this (mentioned) stage of his development.

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There is a kind of interesting “inter-think” possible with today’s marvelous internet world.  If you do an online search for these terms – “grand forks nd air force shooting” – you will find information that in my mind is related to my undercurrent thinking presented in this post.

This young Air Force man, as you will soon see on the pages that appear with this search, walked into a Walmart store and opened fire on others and then shot himself.

Gee, not surprisingly, reactions center upon “Nobody saw this coming.”

Now – when I look at this picture of this young man I no doubt SEE something most others do not see.  Look at, focus on, stare into his eyes.  Eliminate every other thought and listen to your heart.  ESPECIALLY if you are a survivor of severe early trauma I think you will sense and then see what I do.

Am I imagining what I see?  Look again with Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) in mind.  (Take a look at this site if you are not familiar with ACEs.)

Imagine the connection between the tragedy of that young man’s shooting – and the very likely possibility of his having had some SERIOUS trauma in the early years of his life that NOBODY “let” him talk about.

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Did nobody notice the inner reality of this young shooter?  Did nobody care?

These thoughts lead me to questions.  What is the connection between ignorance (not knowing) and denial?  How does ignorance interact with imagination along a continuum of “pretend play” and denial?

How does what we do not know we know hurt us?  How does not knowing what we DO know – but deny – hurt us?

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In my mother’s boxes of papers that came into my hands when she died in 2003 I found a small 2” by 3” black and white picture of myself in kindergarten before our family moved from Los Angeles to Alaska.  I cannot find that I have any digital copy of this photograph.  I have it placed along the narrow propped shelf I created to hold my music books above my keyboard.  When I sit down to play I look at this picture of my young self – and I play for HER-ME.

When I look into the eyes of that young shooter I see those same eyes in my just-turned-5-year-old self.  The same eyes.

It has taken me a long time, decades, of learning about my history of early abuse to be able to now empathize with myself.  My eyes in that picture seem to exist BEHIND the body of the young girl in the photograph.  That girl me existed within – and had always from my first breath existed within – such a world of horror, terror, pain and abuse that there is NOTHING showing through of ME – the actual real ME – in that picture.

Sure there is a small face, a small body.  I can see the crookedly chopped bangs of my hair, the wide starched white collar on a cotton plaid dress.  But in my EYES?  In my so-rare, so light sky blue eyes?

Oh so lost, so sad beyond words.  So overwhelmed by the world I was forced to live in, by what I had suffered.  The question in those eyes?  “IS THERE ANYONE OUT THERE?”  I was ALL ALONE inside myself.  Inside that world.  All.  Alone.  In a terrifying, terrible world.

I made it through.

But I was NOT OK.

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Those are the eyes I see when I look at that young man’s picture.  We need to begin to let ourselves KNOW one another!  Really KNOW one another!  There is a price paid for remaining ignorant of suffering.  There is a price for creating worlds as is so often the case in mainstream American culture where people MUST pretend that all is fairytale perfect.

When it comes to the pain being inflicted by humans upon this earth and within the environment that is an extension of each of us, this earth is beginning to SCREAM back at us.  That is what, I am imagining, this young man finally did.  HE SCREAMED – and his screaming came far, far too late.

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Unbidden my thoughts this morning include my vision I experienced on the mountain when I was 15.  Consciousness of the spirit of life that exists inseparably throughout the entirety of creation in this material world.  Everything and everyone is connected.  Empathy allows us to accept accountability for our part in sustaining life.

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

Story Without Words:  How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.

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Leave a Comment »

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NOTE:  I am still stuck with this new version of the blog’s posting page that I do not like and cannot get out of.  It has refused to post or include my chosen tags:

adult attachment disorders, adult reactive attachment disorder, anxiety disorders,borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, brain development, child abuse,depression,derealization, disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorder, empathy, infant abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factors, PTSD, resiliency, resiliency factors, risk factors, shame

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Tuesday, May 26, 2015.  It is not the ordinary that defines the outer limits of human potential.  In the case I am highlighting here it is the mysteries of the outer extremes that affirm there is much we have yet to learn about the human brain.

You will find a link below to a video of a story about great disability paired with the great ability of genius.  It leaves me thinking about what an ability to focus could do without any impediment created by fear (including self-consciousness).

It would not be advantageous for the survival of our species to have our abilities paid for at the cost of this much loss.  Yet most of us probably do let go of degrees of what could be our own unique genius because we really are spread out so thinly as we disperse our energies by attending to so many signals of wants and needs within ourselves and others that we sacrifice dedication to focus in favor of multitasking our way through life.

Ours isn’t a wrong way to live.  But it is a choice.  Our ability to make our choices is our gift.  The man this movie is about has an entirely different kind of gift.

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I watched this movie spellbound and mesmerized.  What an incredible story!

The Musical Genius

DocuFilm (Focus 2006) Video

“Derek Paravicini is autistic, blind, retarded, and yet, is a genius at the piano. He can play anything he hears just once. This report follows him to a major concert where he teams up with another genius pianist…with the same handicap.

“Born three and a half months prematurely, Derek Paravicini miraculously survived, but his twin sister did not. Technically, he died three times in the hospital and his eyesight was destroyed by an oxygen overdose. He has been left completely blind, partly autistic, can’t tell left from right and cannot count to ten, but despite his disabilities he has an incredibly acute sense of hearing, and is a musical genius.”

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Here you will find a follow up on musical savant co-star of the above movie – Another incredible story —

Rex Luther-Clark (at age 13) by “60 Minutes”

Notice in both of these shows the complications regarding emotions these musicians experience as described by other people.  Emotions.  What are they, anyway?  And where is it “written” that emotion is an integral component of music?  Does music itself exist separately from emotion?  Actually, from watching these musicians it appears yes, it does.

Yet I also notice that no specific mention is made in either documentary about rhythm and timing as they ARE essential aspects of music.  (This makes me think of prosody in languages, as well – including tone, pitch, pauses, inflections, etc.)  Is “emotion” anything more than a nuance of music itself?  Emotion – is it ALL that really matters in Beethoven’s piano sonatas, for example?

Is music primarily created of patterns (simple and complex)?  How patterned are emotions?  Is there pure music?  Are there pure emotions?  Are emotions essentially music?  Can music be deleted from emotions?  Can emotions be deleted from music?

(This line of thought could include “machine made” or “digital” so-called music – but I am not prepared here to pursue this thread.  I do know that, obviously, even in these circumstances humans are involved in these productions.)

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In Modern English:

Origin of MUSIC

Middle English musik, from Anglo-French musike, from Latin musica, from Greek mousikē any art presided over by the Muses, especially music, from feminine of mousikos of the Muses, from Mousa Muse

First Known Use: 13th century

Origin of MUSE

Middle English, from Middle French, from Latin Musa, from Greek Mousa

First Known Use: 14th century

(Muse) (In Greek and Roman mythology) each of nine goddesses, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, who preside over the arts and sciences.

The Muses are generally listed as Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Euterpe (flute playing and lyric poetry), Terpsichore (choral dancing and song), Erato (lyre playing and lyric poetry), Melpomene (tragedy), Thalia (comedy and light verse), Polyhymnia (hymns, and later mime), and Urania (astronomy)

Origin of EMOTION

Middle French, from emouvoir to stir up, from Old French esmovoir, from Latin emovēre to remove, displace, from e- + movēre to move

First Known Use: 1579

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Certainly the discovery of music fundamentally “stirred up” both of the musicians in the above films.  Therefore, it seems to me, nothing but emotion MOVED them at the same time – simultaneously – to their discovery.  In the video about Rex his introduction to music through the gift of a keyboard on his second birthday is documented as having an immediate and PROFOUND impact on that boy!

A greater level of questioning would be to explore what listeners’ requirements are of musicians if musicians are expected to take responsibility for listeners’ emotions.

Do listeners demand a “relationship” with musicians?  Do listeners demand a “relationship” with the music?  Do  listeners demand of musicians that they reach into listeners and massage their emotions with the music they create?

If these are the conditions set for musicianship then must music itself be only a vehicle for emotional relationship communications based on “tonal” titillation of outsiders’ emotions?  If this is so, then do we demote music to the role of promoting a listener’s relationship solely with their own self?

How petty!  How demeaning of one of the greatest gifts known to humankind.

And yet, if music CAN be played without emotion is such music sterile, void and dead?

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Certainly cultures vary greatly around the globe in their tastes for music as do cultures within cultures.  My thinking takes me to tune, tunes, tunings and attunement.  Attunement is the basis of attachment in relationships as it is coupled with appropriate response to signals.

Do people tend to seek “attachment attunement” to musicians?  To themselves through the effect music has on them?  To a wider group of others also listening to the same music?  If this is true then music is a mechanism for attachment.  Because autism is considered to interfere with both emotional and social development, how is musical talent including outright musical genius affected?

Is there a subtle expectation that music somehow “save us” from being-feeling all alone?  Isn’t that the same thing that safe and secure attachment interactions do for us?  Isn’t being attuned to HOW we KNOW we are not alone?  Does music let us KNOW that we are human?

Through music are we connected to an infinite feedback loop that lets us know we are who we are (human) and we are NOT ALONE?  Isn’t that the same thing we want to know from the first moment we are born?  We are a social species.  Yet we are told that autism presents us with a variation – perhaps – of what being human MEANS.

Do we naturally seek a special kind of wisdom through our experience with music as it echoes back to us the very nature of our species as we have named ourselves?  We, the sole survivors of the genus Homo.  We, being modern humans who began to evolve 200,000 years ago.  We, being the subspecies called, Homo sapiens sapiens.  Sapiens — meaning “wise” or “sapient” ones.

Of course we would question the meaning behind being a savant – of music – or of anything else.

Origin of SAVANT

French, from Middle French, from present participle of savoir to know, from Latin sapere to be wise — more at sage

First Known Use: 1719

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Did humans invent music?  — “Did Neanderthals sing? Is there a “music gene”? Two scientists debate whether our capacity to make and enjoy songs comes from biological evolution or from the advent of civilization.”

Evolutionary musicology – Is “a subfield of biomusicology that grounds the psychological mechanisms of music perception and production in evolutionary theory. It covers vocal communication in non-human animal species, theories of the evolution of human music, and cross-cultural human universals in musical ability and processing.”

NOT to be confused with — Evolutionary music — !!!!!

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From the Centers for Disease Control site on Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

Data & Statistics

Prevalence

• About 1 in 68 children have been identified with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) according to estimates from CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network. [Read summary] [Read article]
• ASD is reported to occur in all racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups. [Read summary] [Read article]
• ASD is almost 5 times more common among boys (1 in 42) than among girls (1 in 189). [Read article]
• Studies in Asia, Europe, and North America have identified individuals with ASD with an average prevalence of about 1%. A study in South Korea reported a prevalence of 2.6%. [Data table] [Read article]
• About 1 in 6 children in the United States had a developmental disability in 2006-2008, ranging from mild disabilities such as speech and language impairments to serious developmental disabilities, such as intellectual disabilities, cerebral palsy, and autism. [Read summary]

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

Story Without Words:  How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.

++++

Leave a Comment »

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NOTE:  I am still stuck with this new version of the blog’s posting page that I do not like and cannot get out of.  It has refused to post or include my chosen tags:

adult attachment disorders, adult reactive attachment disorder, anxiety disorders,borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, brain development, child abuse,depression,derealization, disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorder, empathy, infant abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factors, PTSD, resiliency, resiliency factors, risk factors, shame

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Monday, May 4, 2015.  On the one hand I am thinking Poor Me!  On the other hand I recognize that having the ability to THINK the way I am this morning is a gift.  Only it doesn’t so much FEEL like a gift.  The Poor Me thinking self feels cursed to wake up on a Monday morning with no ability to sidestep the currents of CDC ACE Study-related thoughts that are streaming through my mind.

This having been said, all those words that really mean nothing and are a waste of time (and of internet space), just leave me with those same currents of thought that I seem to have little choice about what I do with them.  I write.  Here I am at this juncture of my life in time and space within the masses of billions of human beings alive on this planet….  Having something to say….

My lengthy telephone conversation yesterday afternoon with one of my sisters stirred up the pot of what I know and of what to do with what I know.

My sister lives in the country on her organic farm south of Austin, Texas.  She told me that her chiropractor in Austin has a flatscreen TV on the wall of his waiting room that does nothing but continually stream ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study information.  She also told me that even her primary care physician is asking questions right along with increasing numbers of people (“the public”) who want to know, “What are we supposed to DO with high ACE score information?”

People are asking, “Does a high ACE score mean I am doomed?”

I hear these things and my mind does not acquiesce into any belief that all these problems are not my concern.  They are somebody else’s.

I don’t have the LUXURY of shutting of my seemingly unbidden near-torrents of thinking about how do we take the in-the-air findings of scholarly research that is confirming what to me is simply common sense:  Truly traumatic childhoods undermine well-being over the course of a lifetime.

Is there a Niagara Falls worth of complexity ahead as more and more people begin to understand what the ACE studies are showing us?  How do humans even begin to constructively counteract these patterns within a culture, society, civilization?

When it comes to influencing the impact and even the existence of ACEs — What can be done?  By whom?  How?  When?

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I do not want to be burdened with thoughts about this subject.  I seem to have no choice.  I was born into an extremely high ACE infancy and childhood.  I might as well be telling myself, “I don’t want to have blue eyes.”

A good friend of mine told me that currently most ACE-related information is online and is being discussed via blogs.  My morning torrents tell me we have to take these concerns out of the air, make them visible, and ground them into the very real material level of existence where we all reside.

How is this going to happen and who is going to do it?

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I just discovered a word I have never heard before.  It summarizes my psychotically mental ill mother’s severely abusive relationship with me – ANATHEMA.

There is a straight arrow track from the first breath I ever took as her accursed newborn to each breath I take today.  I might complain all I want about the horrors of my childhood and what they did to even change my physiological development.  I can complain all I want to about what feels like “a burden of proof” that resides within me.  I could not escape my mother or what she did to me.  I seem equally incapable of escaping what I feel now.

These two ends of the trajectory of my life are fundamentally bound together.  There I was.  Here I am.

I ask myself the same question about my own high ACE experience as I ask about the WHOLE MESS!  What is the MEANING of THIS?

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I might yet live long enough and in the right conditions to foster whatever good I am supposed to accomplish with what I know, which is the same thing as saying, with who I am.

There is a mighty reservoir of information IN EXISTENCE about this entire subject from start to finish.  I seem to hold within myself a portion of this information.

All I know at this moment is a kind of vague and nebulous image connected to answering the questions I pose in this post.

I see an hourglass.  Instead of grains of sand moving from top toward and through a narrow opening towards the bottom I see PEOPLE.

I think that if I could devise only one single kind of intervention for high ACE score people it would be tailored to create a “net” set to capture as many young people close to age 18 as could be found.

It is there I would begin the work toward resolving these kinds of high ACE concerns for the future (which is coming one breath at a time for all of us).

I would work to create a way to catch the next generation of parents exactly as they slip through that tiny hourglass hole from childhood into adulthood.

All of my thinking is, therefore, is beginning to narrowly focus on THIS!

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I am finding this hourglass image helpful as I think about the upper triangle’s base, its widest part as the circumstances in the earliest months of life (attachment interactions) as they dictate even physiological developmental patterns in body-brain.  Research NEEDS to demonstrate the high correlation between high ACE scores and insecure adult attachment.

From there movement to and thru that tiny hole in the middle — if we could catch those young people transitioning from childhood to adulthood and educate them right there about ACEs – we could change where they land on the lower pyramid levels.

We could prevent high ACE people from finding their way to the broad base of the pyramid at the bottom where the greatest lifelong difficulties from high ACEs currently resides.

It is here I would apply pressure to those great trauma wounds to minimize those traumas from being passed to the next generations, as well as to help survivors to heal ASAP.

Every step of positive change accomplished in this way will also have a “lateral” impact as the ripples of informed healing begin to increasingly move out into the wider circle of cultures to permeate a new culture of trauma healing.

In this war on trauma a strategy is needed.  A way to focus all available resources in the most effective way.  My thinking?  This is the direction it is leading me.

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

Story Without Words:  How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.

++++

Leave a Comment »

++++

NOTE:  I am still stuck with this new version of the blog’s posting page that I do not like and cannot get out of.  It has refused to post or include my chosen tags:

adult attachment disorders, adult reactive attachment disorder, anxiety disorders,borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, brain development, child abuse,depression,derealization, disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorder, empathy, infant abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factors, PTSD, resiliency, resiliency factors, risk factors, shame