15 thoughts on “+IS THERE ROOM FOR AN ACEs DEBATE? (Long post)”

1. Trying to murder one’s children is a serious sign of mental illness, but only occurring at very early childhood may be different from constantly trying to do so throughout the life of the child is another. I had a letter from one person whose mother taught the other kids to also try to murder her, even after she got married and had kids of her own. The terror she felt was from real circumstances and not just from memories of memories of memories…

2. Boy, do I agree. No one wanted to blame the mother because, at that time, in many states, the children were always property of the father, and everyone was aware of the powerlessness of the mother over her own body. I am not sure my mother was psychotic, since she was a threat to my existence, and also possibly, to my brother’s existence. It is difficult to say, since she did not display this behavior when I was a teenager, nor to any of the younger children. There was something going on, no doubt, but she did not display a borderline personality later when she still had young children to take care of. I am picking up memories of her trying to kill my younger brother, and abortion was a very tough topic in my family, since my father was a very firm Catholic. However, I am not getting any memories suggesting that she was as bad toward my brother as she was toward me. He clearly shows the effects of that treatment, though.

3. I read Medea in high school, so the story brings back memories. I talk about the biological imperative in one of my blog posts (https://marthalhyde.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/the-four-pillars-of-support-affect-mothers-decisions/ ), where the woman decides if it is worthwhile to continue a pregnancy if she lacks the resources. With 60% of all households being headed by a single woman, it is quite obvious that the biological imperative belongs as a choice for the woman.

4. I had never thought of it like that, but it does make me wonder.

5. People have written to me of their stories. Some were the only ones in their families to be rejected. One had an older brother who constantly tried to protect her, so not all families respond as mind did. Others told of how all the kids were rejected. When that happens, they tend to band together and offer some support to each other. So the outcome of rejection will be different, if only in degrees.

6. As I had said before, when I was around 10, and later when a teenager, I remembered that I was extremely unhappy, earlier in life, and often attributed it to how my older sisters treated me. That was an “indication,” certainly, and not a real memory. Most of my life I had felt that all families did this to each other. It was only when I was able to grab those images/sensations that came to me, and as a result of questioning with MRT, that a full memory of those years came to me. Yes, from those retrieved memories, I could answer that I was left behind many times as an infant, toddler, juvenile, pre-teen, and teenager, alone in a dark house (I had to find them all to disconnect the panic attacks from them, thus stopping the toxins inside my bones from coming out before they were diluted enough). When I was 4 I could not reach the switches to turn on, so when I awoke from a nap one day, and discovered no one was in the house at all, I was extremely frightened. I walked up and down the stairs to all flights of the house, in the dark, repeatedly, just trying to find someone. I checked beds to see if they all had gone to sleep. Then I went to the front bay windows, pulled up a chair and looked out to see if there was our car parked there. I did the same to see if anyone was in the back yard. Mom always acted surprised to see me when they came home, but the siblings just walked past me as if to say, “same as usual.” No wonder they felt I was the interloper and did not belong with them!

7. Yes, did your mother try to kill you during those years? However, most of us will never know that. Most people would not be able to remember anything, happy or sad from those years. Just 8 years ago, a chiropractor found that the neural spine to C3 was not attached to the vertebral body. He was the first one (of around 3 I had visited) to notice it. It explained the sensitivity I had in the area when I pressed there (tingling in the neck and shoulders). But I certainly did not catch the significance at all back then, before I had developed my skills in mindfulness and muscle reflex/response testing. However, when the memory of my mother strangling me as a baby on day two of my life came to me five years later, it vividly explained the lack of fusion. I had no visual memory, but I had a very strong response when my little brother slipped a rope over my neck and started to pull. I was 10 and he was 7. I freaked out and he really was apologetic, not realizing how potent the trigger to that baby memory was, long before I was able to find out about it, or even recognize its significance.

   In a recent NPR newscast, I heard one author say she remembered the feel of the bottle on her lips from babyood when she watched her son suckling. I suspect anyone would have to be particularly mindful about things to recognize that the fleeting image, feel, sound or sight that comes to mind is from babyhood.

8. Fascinating! I am sure that there needs to be a combination of attachment scales with ACE scores, but I strongly suspect that will not be enough. There are some nitty gritty details not being addressed by either. It would be great if your daughter were to figure out something that most of us who suffered so badly could not.

9. I appreciate where you are coming from. I had to use extraordinary techniques to figure out what happened, and when I did, I was amazed at how so many pieces of the puzzle fell into place. The only thing I remembered before discovering these techniques was that when in my teens I figured out that earlier in my life I was extremely unhappy. When I went away to college, I discovered that others did not treat me as badly as my own family did and went into deep depression. I knew I would have to return to that family in the future.

   The answers I got with these techniques even made sense of what I saw others do in the past that stuck in my mind, no matter how minor that behavior was (e.g. my mother deliberately making a move to step onto a baby doll, how she hid the fact that she was listening to me talk to my younger siblings and their friends by “cleaning up” the front porch. How the words “kicking herself” came to mind just as this memory came to my awareness). I suddenly could reinterpret what I saw in a very different light, and even more was understood. How I was so right when I asked my mother about my sister who was a year older than me, because I had come to the conclusion that something very bad happened to her at a very young age, based upon her difficulty in interpreting the behaviors she saw in others. My mother said that nothing had happened. She was not ever going to tell me about it, her behavior was so shameful. It finally explained to me why my siblings never considered me part of the family, why they would attack me over anything I said. They had learned to do it to me from my mother when they were young. Even though she changed her mind about me later, it was too late. She could not change their minds without revealing what she had done.

   The power of a mother over her children is truly great (despite the total powerlessness they have over their own bodies in many states). Ask the many men who divorced, only to lose touch with their own children, despite many attempts to keep in contact. When you grow up with only one side of the story, you can hold it with such ferocity that it is impossible to negate any details of it without causing real mental trauma. It is normal to resist that risk, even to the detriment of others.

10. The discussion has to occur in many venues, but it may finally be so possible today. We will just have to wait and see. Since men are becoming involved in the very early years of infancy in increasing numbers, this discussion may well catch fire in the broader population. This next generation wants the truth badly. They want transparency. And they care about even complex topics such as what we discuss here (despite what our present day election has produced in some cases).

11. Totally in agreement with you there. Our society doesn’t seem to value it that much, but that lack of value may be more because it has been the job of women for so long.

12. You gave an extremely thoughtful response, and I am grateful for it. I have read Allen Schore’s papers, along with Dan Siegel’s and Martin Teicher’s. Yes, there is research showing that those earliest years are the most difficult to make up for later in life. I do not think they are impossible. However, we have to re-think what the triggers are for the development that does occur during those years. The key to “making up” for the absence of baseline circuitry lies there. Researchers have not gotten there yet, but there are some who are beginning to understand the incredible detail we have to look for, e.g. when do people blink, look away, re-connect to the eyes of someone with whom they are speaking. All of these signals are important for others to recognize that we are engaged with them. They only become part of our body language when we have the chance to engage with a parent who is interested in us from day 1. Not everyone who lacks these cues ends up completely unattached to anyone later in life, but that attachment is not capable of what one can do if they had those cues (among others not built into their repertoire).

    Schore & Teicher, and others are extremely convincing that changing the baseline circuitry in the brain is unlikely, but I think it is only because we do not fully understand how it is established. Since it occurs during the first three years after birth, when the most critical steps toward socialization occur, when parental involvement is so important, it stands to reason that it is far easier to study than what happens before birth. We use possums for the latter because most of in utero brain development in mammals, occurs “in pouch” in possums.

    There is so much new stuff out about DNA that I do not think of DNA as memory. It is just a blueprint. Because the sampling of DNA is fraught with problems (much research is based upon cheek swabs when those cells in particular are susceptible to mutation by toxins) that it is difficult to tell what research is based on good sampling. Then there is the new stuff on epigenetics, which many people equate with anything that happens outside of the cell. Environment is always the ultimate determination of what a gene does because it supplies the trigger for turning on and off a gene. Sometimes it is difficult NOT to trigger a gene because we can’t control the environment that well. But the meaning of epigenetics is still restricted to chemical reactions involving methylation of DNA, activity of histones and non-coding RNA. Period. And much of epigenetics research has to prove that effects are transferrable from one generation to more than two or three of the next generations (because of stripping of epigenetic influences during two windows of development). And we also have to remember that an epigenetic propensity doesn’t make the change permanent. It may just make it harder to change. If that stripping is “inefficient” as some claim, it may not stay “inefficient” in later generations.

    I, too, like Dan Siegel, think that mind and body are truly intertwined. But he does think that present-day methods of therapy can help even those people who suffered early childhood trauma from birth. I disagree, since most psychotherapists cannot determine if their patient suffered that kind of trauma because most people cannot remember those years.

    However, I strongly suspect that human development of language has undermined the connection between conscious and unconscious brain (the mind and body), because we appear to depend upon language so much that it often makes us less “mindful” of what our unconscious brain does. That unconscious part of the brain is what people have called “instinct” for too long. Our conscious brain analyzes things differently from the unconscious brain, for many reasons. That makes it difficult to understand what unconscious thoughts mean, but not impossible. Other vertebrates have that integration and so can respond very quickly to danger, when we usually cannot without processing something cognitively.

13. You and I are in complete agreement about the effect of handing one’s child over to strangers for large amounts of time. People who say that “quality time” is better than “quantity time” are greatly disillusioned. I have figured out that often, to develop the right circuitry in the brain, “quantity” is more important than “quality.” The number of times your mother responds to your cries, early in infancy, may well determine whether or not a center for a specific function ever develops (I take that conclusion from understanding how a computer program works in artificial intelligence. It is no accident that our brains came up with the concept of computer programming). When I discovered that, I could direct my dreams better to start the process of making some of those long-missing baseline circuits. (I think dreams are a way to test circuits that have been repaired in earlier stages of sleep).

    I think when we really examine the effects of very early child maltreatment, compare them to effects from later child maltreatment, and then to the zero ACE scorers, we will see a continuum, where the bad effects of part-time parenting will become obvious.

    In fact, in thinking about how heros are made, I realized that the “heros” (broadly defined as extremely successful people who are completely comfortable with themselves, can draw up the self-esteem whenever needed to handle things in enormously admirable ways) probably had mothers who so wanted them at birth, that the mothers often anticipated their needs long before the child was ever aware of them. The mothers would show up at the cribside, knowing when their babies awoke before the first signs, knowing when the baby was going to pee before the baby would do so (making toilet training incredibly easy), would know before the baby was even aware of being hungry, ready with food, bottle or breast before the initial whimpers. How many mothers today have the luxury of being able to anticipate their baby’s needs like that? With the advent of “social” media (which seems to be the epitomy of “asocial” because it lacks face-to-face and voice communication), the problem with lack of social development will only get worse in the next generation.

14. There is more to this discussion that I thought about. There are 2 properties of the nervous system that relate to this discussion. (1) The nervous tissue is unique from all other tissue in that neurons are assigned a role to represent something, much like the statement in a computer code, “let x = [some number].” The location of the neuron is probably more important than its physical properties in determining its function.

    (2) Another property of the nervous system is the way efficiency in functioning of the nervous tissue, as representative of something else (as in 1 above), is achieved–by associating all neurons with something in common. Thus, every memory is associated with one from earlier in life, when it has anything in common. Since “a” memory is, in reality, a sum of all of its parts, each of which is represented by neurons in different places in the brain, there will happen to be many associations across the memory catalog. This leads to a memory of a memory of a memory…, etc. In this way, traumatic memory only gets amplified with age, even if all we consciously remember is the fact that something bad happened. But the unconscious mind remembers all these bits and pieces.

    The efficiency comes from the unconscious connections that allow us to react physiologically extremely fast. Some may say that isn’t good for us, but it definitely contributes to our surviving when we should not. It just makes it that much harder to change course when others think we should, especially those whose mothers/fathers accepted them at birth, reducing the likelihood of accumulating ACE points. Only those with Zero points can afford to ignore the survival factor.

    There are the psychologists who claim we can re-wire the brain. That may be true, but it is clearly impossible to do if it means establishing circuits that should have been there already. At least it is impossible if we do not know what is needed to establish that circuitry to begin with, which we don’t.

    There is an “archeology” to the brain’s circuitry. It is much like trying to put in new copper wiring in an old house with aluminum core wires, and the people still live there, needing electricity to carry on life in any reasonable way. You can get by with suggesting changes to circuits established later in life, even though it generally means not pulling out the old circuitry but just developing another pathway to getting something done. It pretty much describes what the brain does anyway, block one pathway that proves to not be a good idea, and force the brain to use another one which doesn’t have such horrible consequences. Until it does, again.

    This pretty much describes the accumulation of “fixes” that defines the house of cards that falls apart as we enter our last years of life. The more emotional trauma we had earlier in life, the harder later in life will be on us (the accumulation of memories of memories of memories…). I have a theory that those who develop Alzheimers’ do so because of the traumatic “overuse” of emotional circuits. (Although there is increasing evidence of its association with the accumulation of aluminum in the brain, too).

15. You are so right about how the ACE score does not really measure all the effects of early childhood trauma. There is a reason why it is so difficult to treat. All the therapists using various techniques to help those who were traumatized in childhood do not recognize how different those kids who were abused before the age of 3 are from those who were not.

    There is a reason why the period of most extensive development of the brain happens after birth and not before. Humans rely so heavily on a social world that kids under 3 who are abandoned die rather than survive. The extensive brain development during that time happens to coincide with a period when a baby needs to interact with its parent the most. It stands to reason that the interaction is as important to brain development as having been born. Those pathways formed during the first 3 years of life are those we need to interact with other humans.

    In fact, the circuits developed during that time help to form “step one” in life, whenever we have to make a decision about anything. The problem with those with low or zero ACE scores, the ones without early childhood trauma, the ones who were accepted by a parent at birth, is that they cannot imagine what that “step one” is. They think “step one” occurs at some other point in the processing chain. So they keep thinking that those who just can’t get “started” need some other help when they actually need the baseline for making decisions. I describe the dilemma in my blog post, “Special Case of Type I PTSD–Rejected Children” at http://marthalhyde.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/special-case-of-type-i-ptsd-rejected-children/ in the section, “What Rejected Children Feel”.