+THE WAYS IN WHICH ‘COMPETITIVE DEMOCRACY’ CANNOT SOLVE OUR PROBLEMS – (essay link)

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Saturday, July 30, 2016.  If I had more mental energy right now I would construct a very nice introduction to the essay a friend sent me today at this link below.  As things are, I am just very VERY glad I read this!  I am not left with many questions about what is going on with the upcoming election in America.  In fact, after reading this I have so many answers to questions I didn’t know enough about politics to even ask:

Western Liberal Democracy as New World Order? (2007)

“In an age of increasing global interdependence, Dr. Michael Karlberg asks whether the Western model of democracy is the natural and inevitable way to organize free and enlightened societies.”

I have spent much of these past three years caring for my young grandson who just turned 4 last week.  As I read this essay I realized it left me realizing that to improve the world, and our nation, we can really think about things in ways basic to the care of our youngest.

When little people are troubled in any way, and have no language to tell us what they need, we just pay very very close attention to all the signals they give us – and then we provide for them what they need.

This article did exactly that for me.  It gave me what I needed and addressed my concerns so that I don’t feel troubled anymore.

I am impressed! I have nothing profound to say here.  Karlberg does.  Nothing about our political system is BROKEN – it’s just not finished yet.

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Click here to read or to

Leave a Comment »

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Here is my first book out in ebook format as it provides an outline of the conditions of my malevolent childhood.  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.  A daring book – for daring readers – about a really tough subject.

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Tags: adult attachment disordersadult reactive attachment disorderanxiety disorders,borderline motherborderline personality disorderbrain developmentchild abuse,depression,derealizationdisorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorderempathyinfant abusePosttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factorsPTSDresiliencyresiliency factorsrisk factorsshame

+CONSIDERING PERSONALITY-TYPE FILTERS

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Tuesday, July 26, 2016.  Sharing life within the sphere of what being human is leaves us in-common = in community in probably far more ways than it leaves us being unique.  Or is that a maybe?  A might?  What if the ways in which we are different from one another REALLY MATTER a LOT – considering we are truly alike in so many ways?

We do not (yet) know what the ‘givens’ of being human even are.

I wish to mention a few of my thoughts – again – about this –

FREE PERSONALITY TEST

I view this as an information accessing tool.  Of course what I consider to be possibilities/potentials for the helpfulness of having this information is at least 1/16th different than it might be for other people.

I think that human resources are what matter most on the planet.  We need to know what capacities and talents we have, which way we tend to be in the world in order to better cooperate in community to create a better world.

(I am certainly not interested in ANYTHING that would make this a WORSENED world!  Although understanding how others think in ways I do not agree with and/or do not understand is important!)

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Yes, as a Myers–Briggs Type Indicator, this test IS subjective!  NOBODY but our Creator can know us better than we know our own self.  “Cell” differentiation/specialization?  We all have inborn capacities, gems of talents, unique potentials – and it may be that we quite simply DO more-or-less line up in a portion of the human circle of personality types along the lines the simple online test reveals.

It’s not that I AM simply a “mediating/diplomat” – but that I might exactly process the experience of being alive through such processes that feel significant here.  I find this a helpful angle to consider for myself.  I mediate potential – in material art and craft creations and in invisible information-gathering and THINKING ways.

Both of these applications of my abilities lie in the 4%-of-people range, which means I very easily dance upon the feet of the other 96% (being more of a ‘burr under the saddle’ type when it comes to thinking and opening my mouth to say things I think – than I, or it seems, anyone else actually LIKES).  Nobody likes to have their toes tromped.  I don’t like to tromp toes.  It sure does seem to happen!

I am thinking that this social awkwardness, if considered in terms of this personality assessment, is NOT solely due to the incredible and unique malevolency of the conditions in the environment I was raised in.  I would have processed even all those experiences with my mediating/diplomat personality style.  I would have done the same thing even if I had been whisked away from my psychotically mentally ill abusive mother into a PERFECT infancy and childhood.

I find these thoughts comforting.  Affirming.  Informative.  Empowering.  And my curiosity is tickled by thinking I wish everyone I interact with in my life would take this test and then give me their information – because I THRIVE on processing life with exactly that – INFORMATION!

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Of the few I do know who have taken/shared this info I can see it’s exactly accurate.  One is in something like a .03 (as an ‘architect combination’minority of people.  I know two people who came out with “defender” personalities.

I think they kind of operate in protecting ‘those in need’ as a kind of immune system, providing a kind of cellular wall that means they will naturally be somewhat suspicious of anything new and different.  They need to assess safety, reliability, relevance – all kinds of things before new information/practices, etc. are let through their defensive barricades.

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Oh, not me.  I can play around with all kinds of invisible concepts.  I can sometimes FEEL the future as if it is a tangible, physical wad of warm clay that I can hold in my hand.  But when I run into the reality that although I would LIKE it if EVERYONE could hold their idea of the future in the palm of their imaginal hand – if it’s not in their ‘personality’ sphere of activity – it maybe won’t happen “that way.”

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Now – with this particular test – my particular responses =

MIND:  extroverted 16% – introverted 84%

ENERGY:  intuitive 82% – observant 18%

NATURE:  thinking 19% – feeling 81%

TACTICS:  judging 25% – prospecting 75%

IDENTITIY:  assertive 30% – turbulent 70%

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If you run through the test for yourself you will be able to read about what these patterns mean in your personality pattern.

The most striking observation right now for myself is that THINKING for me happens INTUITIVELY – this is how I imaginally create possibilities, explore them, attempt to connect to others so we can mutually explore – which for me happens through deep intuitive listening for the ‘images’ within others.

A kind of ‘invisible seeing’ only for me what I FEEL (gut/visceral/metaphoric right brain access to info) IS visible to me – in a different way.  This is how I communicate, for example, with young children.  I think it is how we all communicate with infants from the time they come into our lives.

It’s not a mysterious process to me.  But the toe-tromping happens OFTEN – and yes, a lot of how and why this happens is due to the horrendous isolation/forced solitary confinement, forbidden human contact other than Mother, etc. within the malevolent world that formed me.

Yet I wonder, did those conditions in some way just work to amplify my particular gifts?  (Everyone has gifts!!)

VERY importantly:  Were these particular aspects of my personality trauma ‘protective factors’ so that with a different personality I might well have been obliterated?

Certainly MY personality allowed me to develop an incredible, deep, sustaining relationship with the Alaskan homestead wilderness mountain I was so fortunately taken to for my ‘growing up’!  I do not in any way believe I would have survived if I had not been given this land and my spiritual relationship with it.

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So this test version gives me = INFP-T = Intuitive Ethical Introvert.  As I approach my 65th birthday, how can I not absolutely CHUCKLE at this???  (“T” stands for – ‘turbulent’, evidently – which to me suggests a creative universe of potentials.)

I wander away now in my thinking – leaving this link for some further information on this online test’s THEORY AND RESEARCH, which even includes national personality profiles!

Acronyms also described at this link

Introversion (I) or Extraversion (E)

Intuition (N) or Sensing (S)

Thinking (T) or Feeling (F)

Judging (J) or Perceiving (P)

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Well, it has been said that “it takes all types to make the world go ‘round.”  Yeah.  And it will also take all types in cooperation to make the world a better place for all.  I think that knowing more about our self and others (where relevant) at very least empowers our consciousness.

Then what?

I think that trauma survivors, once they know more clearly what their propensities for being in the world via their personality styles can view their healing more clearly with this information.  I am certainly finding this to be true for myself.  I can see how I was able to keep my own self firmly intact to matter what brainwashing tortures Mother devised to put me through.

I NEVER would admit to doing something I was being beaten for no matter what she said I did.  I NEVER would cry when she beat me physically.  I was firmly intact within – although I NEVER questioned what happened to me in any way.  Now I know in a truly psychotic abuse situation it was not possible to make any sense of the universe I was so terribly trapped within.

This makes me wonder for everyone that lived through early years when going on living was impossible – what aspects of our innate personality allowed us to do this?

I do believe that personality is tied to our soul, and that we retain our personality when we leave this world.  Therefore, this kind of learning about self is fundamentally, to me, a spiritually illuminating process.  Nothing about our soul is ‘bad’.  Nothing.

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Click here to read or to

Leave a Comment »

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Here is my first book out in ebook format as it provides an outline of the conditions of my malevolent childhood.  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.  A daring book – for daring readers – about a really tough subject.

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Tags: adult attachment disordersadult reactive attachment disorderanxiety disorders,borderline motherborderline personality disorderbrain developmentchild abuse,depression,derealizationdisorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorderempathyinfant abusePosttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factorsPTSDresiliencyresiliency factorsrisk factorsshame

+TWO PERCENT HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH

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Tuesday, July 26, 2016.  There is not topic on earth that any human being can consider that includes a process that is not a part of (connected within, integral to) – our SHARED human specie’s mind.

If you have not listened to this very short video segment by Dr. Daniel Siegel describing his first-ever shared definition of mind, please do so!

DEFINITION OF MIND

Many related and very informative/important links appear on the right side of the screen beside this video.  If you are not familiar with Siegel’s work, watching any of these videos will give you a view of a universe of human experience that matters to ALL 7.4+ billion of us on the planet at this point in time.

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Next I want to present a link to the ONLY election-related article I have or will read.  I mention at the same time the work of Dr. Carl Jung, especially as it was studied in the art therapy master’s program at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque I went through 1989-1991.

Jung’s psychology describes what he termed the human shadow.  Within that shadow lies all that is “good” and all that is “bad” in terms of potential for individuals separately and collectively.

He also described the fundamental archetypes of humanity.  He described the “collective unconscious” in terms of the appearance of patterns within human life that are ‘dramas’ played out over and over and over again over time.

In the particular post-Jungian archetypal theories of art therapy program that I studied within, we can to learn how to do two very important things:  (1) identify IMAGES in all their forms as they are expressed by humans, and (2) identify what images human/humanity’s actions – as we might consider them even to be symptoms – are communicating about our individual/shared experience of being alive.

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It has taken me not quite 24 hours since reading this article

ELECTION 2016 — Understanding Trump:  To stand up to Trump, first we have to understand who he appeals to, and why— by George Lakoff / AlterNet July 22, 2016

to do enough of my own personal inner thinking correction work necessary so that I could achieve a more objective assessment of what the content of this article MEANS to me.

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Essentially, humanity is one unified family.  We are essentially a “one being” in many bodies, operating not unlike the individual cells and molecules of our body does.

Using Jung’s concepts I can now begin to talk with myself about the fact that what we are seeing in America today, as it is impeccably described in  Lakoff’s article, is the splitting of a whole archetype of the potential in our collective/individual SHADOW – our potential for ‘good’ and our potential for ‘bad’.

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While we are half-organic beings living in an organic universe, I believe we are also a unique species in that we have potential for CONSCIOUSNESS – which I believe comes from the spiritual half of who we have been created to be as beings.  Just as we elementally share all organic existence as a “one thing” with ALL existence here, we also share our collective mind (Siegel) including ALL our potentials (Jung).

Every one of us has prejudices, blank spots in our percentage of consciousness, human elements of greed, injustice – whatever any of us are capable of ALL of us are capable of – like it or not.

Where and how can we CHOOSE among all the inner and outer options possible for humankind?

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If you read the above article you will have the straight-line (all the ducks lined up in the proverbial row) of the kind of thinking that I certainly deem ignorant, unwise, dangerous and WRONG.  Yet at the same time my marvelous right-brain-body-based image-making poetic metaphoric-information processing shows me that the row does not need to be side-to-side.  If it is one-in-front-of-the-other in line, the right considerations, the just, fair, honest, kind, truthful actions, can work to knock these ducks out of action – an image more like a great toppling line of dominoes.

(NOTE:  Just as I wrote those words the battery in my mouse died.  Yesterday in considering the above article as soon as I went online to look for the origin of the word “bigot” my computer crashed.  Chuckle folks!  It’s all good!  The human race is moving through our collective stage of evolutionary adolescence into our next destined stage of mature adulthood.  This IS happening – now.)

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My essential main point of this post as it involves the important information in this article is that I am not at all sure that the suggested 98% unconscious/2% conscious operation of the human brain is not good enough at this point in our history.

One way I walk around this concept in my mind is to consider the writings of Stephen Porges with his Polyvagal Theory.  Somewhere within my reading of his work, and I can’t tell where at the moment, is that the vagal nerve system (Porges tells us evolved from the nerves of ancient jawless fish, highly geared into our more modern facial expression and brain reading of those expression-networks) – feeds different information in different ways to female versus male brains.

Most simply put, as I comprehend it, is that female vagal nerve system, as it collects visceral information (gut), and more, feeds the info through a split in the nerve to both hemispheres of the brain so that information arrives and can be processed in both hemispheres at the same time.  The nerve system for males runs straight to the left brain so that they process it in the left hemisphere first and THEN have to transfer the info across the ‘great divide’ into their right brain hemisphere to integrate information.

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This isn’t the time for me to broaden this description.  I mention it only as I think these processes might influence the 98%/2% split.

Because I am preparing to move my library is in complete disarray.  I cannot locate the neuroscientist’s book – so was it Damasio….

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Not in this book but I see this is another one I need in my library on these topics

Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (March 6, 2012) by Dr. Antonio Damasio

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….or another — who talks about the operations of our brain — being POETIC?

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What IS the poem being written in America right now – by ALL of us?

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In example – I DID NOT KNOW THIS!!

African-American Women Now Top the List of Most-Educated Group in the Country

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….to be continued….

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One of my next need-to-read books:  Education for Critical Consciousness by Paulo Freire

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Click here to read or to

Leave a Comment »

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Here is my first book out in ebook format as it provides an outline of the conditions of my malevolent childhood.  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.  A daring book – for daring readers – about a really tough subject.

++++

Tags: adult attachment disordersadult reactive attachment disorderanxiety disorders,borderline motherborderline personality disorderbrain developmentchild abuse,depression,derealizationdisorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorderempathyinfant abusePosttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factorsPTSDresiliencyresiliency factorsrisk factorsshame

+TRAUMA? RESILIENCY? BIGGER PICTURES….

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Sunday, July 24, 2016.  Here comes another post in what seems to be my resiliency-conflict series.  In consequence of learning my personality description through this online simplified test I mentioned in my last post —

Free Personality Test | 16Personalities

— I am pondering what my category of “Mediator/Diplomat” means to me.

I think I mediate invisibles.  Sometimes the invisibles take shape and form through art.  Sometimes they appear in my mind in image forms, I think directly through my gut/heart/right brain super highway’s efficiency, that in-forms me in ways that no amount of linear thought possibly can.

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I want to mention yet another book mentioned by Dr. Christopher Phillips in his book The Philosophy of Childing: Unlocking Creativity, Curiosity, and Reason through the Wisdom of Our Youngest (2016)

First published in Portuguese in 1968, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. The methodology of the late Paulo Freire (1921-1997) has helped to empower countless impoverished and illiterate people throughout the world. Freire’s work has taken on especial urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is increasingly accepted as the norm. With a substantive new introduction on Freire’s life and the remarkable impact of this book by writer and Freire confidant and authority Donaldo Macedo, this anniversary edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed will inspire a new generation of educators, students, and general readers for years to come.

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So Pedagogy of the Oppressed is yet another book I need to buy and read that will become a part of my thinking-about-resiliency palette.  Yet as I ponder the words I put into bold type above, I encounter one of my inner images.  I imagine a massive bridge being built, or a massive interconnecting web of superhighways or skywalks or skyscrapers.  What holds them up? Gigantic pilings.

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What I am ‘sensing’ regarding the dangers of trying to quick-fix trauma problems for human beings by creating a packet-of-resiliency information and techniques — well before THE PROBLEMS have truly been identified and OWNED by the powers-that-be (up there) — is that those who suffer the most from trauma are just going to be beaten down even further

than they already are

as those ABOVE pound down these quick fixes

upon the traumatized –

driving those who suffer ever further

Down

Down

Down

Down

?

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I certainly do not say that everyone concerned with targeting ‘assets’ that might/can ‘counteract trauma’ is ‘doing bad work’.  (I think of Laura Porter and her incredible ACEs healing work in the state of Washington, USA.)  I do say that the problems creating trauma discrepancies are systemic and symptomatic.  They concern everyone the globe over.

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I have been watching the Netflix streaming series, Marco Polo, although most of what I see sickens me.  At the same time, I must be adding some kind of counterweights to my own thinking-about-trauma platform.  I did some additional reading about the “Kahn” episodes of human history as they included the butchering of MILLIONS upon MILLIONS of people.  (Online search terms “kahn people killed” to get a speck of an idea about these horrors. )

In reading today an introduction written in 1953 (I was age two in this year) by Marzieh Gail to yet another book I wish to get into my library — I especially noted his words:

We, the two billion people currently on the planet, are living at a time when not only the pulpits of all the religions, but all things must be condemning us, each in that voice which, according to the Qur’án, God has given to all things: “God, Who giveth a voice to all things, hath given us a voice….” (41:20). We who have killed some forty-five million human beings in the past thirty-five years, strangers whom we did not even know by name. We who have denied our qualitative difference from the animals and have tried to live in their world, an attempt which has proved as successful as would be the animal’s to turn into a tree or the tree’s to be a stone. We who spend our time devising elaborate excuses to justify our ways; who always blame someone else, who always want someone else to save us.”

Another book I am reading in my ‘perspective search’ is Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (2014) by Pulitzer Prize winning author, Katherine Boo.  I have a bright green sticky tab stuck to every page where the word “hope” is mentioned.  So far, I am entirely under-impressed with any concept called hope being alluded to in this book.

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There are 7.4 billion of us right here right now on this planet — and counting.  What is the quality of life for the majority?  For the smallest minority?  Who among us defines trauma?

Is resiliency anything other than a tourniquet-attempt to squelch the hemorrhaging-to-death of our species as we take the well-being of life on our planet along down with us?

What IS the quality of life on this planet?  We BE better.

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What do we know about resiliency?

I am NOT alone in asking questions.

What are the answers?

Is humanity ready yet to know answers that will lead to true solutions – and to then get to work to REALLY heal all harm?  I do not believe resiliency is any kind of solution.  We have to – and we can – end almost all trauma on the planet – when we are ready to.

The following provides the basis of the structure that is called for as we work to bring the OPPOSITE of trauma – true and lasting prosperity and peace — into existence around the globe.

Define the problem.  Find the solution.  Learn together how to accomplish what this biggest-picture-possible document tells us MUST – through steps and stages – be done to heal us all:

 

THE UNIVERSAL HOUSE OF JUSTICE

October 1985

To the Peoples of the World

The Great Peace towards which people of goodwill throughout the centuries have inclined their hearts, of which seers and poets for countless generations have expressed their vision, and for which from age to age the sacred scriptures of mankind have constantly held the promise, is now at long last within the reach of the nations. For the first time in history it is possible for everyone to view the entire planet, with all its myriad diversified peoples, in one perspective. World peace is not only possible but inevitable. It is the next stage in the evolution of this planet—in the words of one great thinker, “the planetization of mankind.”

READ COMPLETE LETTER HERE

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Please click here to read or to

Leave a Comment »

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Here is my first book out in ebook format as it provides an outline of the conditions of my malevolent childhood.  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.  A daring book – for daring readers – about a really tough subject.

++++

Tags: adult attachment disordersadult reactive attachment disorderanxiety disorders,borderline motherborderline personality disorderbrain developmentchild abuse,depression,derealizationdisorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorderempathyinfant abusePosttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factorsPTSDresiliencyresiliency factorsrisk factorsshame

+ANOTHER USEFUL CONCEPT IN THE RESILIENCY DEBATES? “NEGATIVE CAPABILITY”

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Saturday, July 23, 2016.  I have yet to find anything I would call solid ground upon which I can stand to consider any aspect of the study of “resiliency.”  Being an extreme abuse survivor from birth-18 leaves me questioning everything about this term.  What is it?  Who has it?  What does it do?  How can people (supposedly) become more able to “have resiliency” so that they can – WHAT – exactly?

When I consider what others are saying about resiliency, my personal thinking scales easily tip in the direction of “Why be concerned with whether or not your children sleep in flame-retardant pajamas if you are not concerned with providing them a house to sleep in that is not at risk of blowing up and burning down with your children in it in the middle of the night?”

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The quote I am including in this post today, again from the book The Philosophy of Childing: Unlocking Creativity, Curiosity, and Reason through the Wisdom of Our Youngest (2016) by Dr. Christopher Phillips directly follows the one I posted yesterday.

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“Neuroscience didn’t exist as a field in John Keats’s day, but the early nineteenth-century romantic poet (1795-1821) offered a prescient [having or showing knowledge of events before they take place] paean [a song of praise or triumph; a thing that expresses enthusiastic praise] to plasticity with his coinage “negative capability,” which denotes our capacity to transcend preconceived limitations, and hence rewrite the story of our lives.  To Keats, the most standout thinkers and doers demonstrate negative capability to an unsurpassed degree.  They are at home with a world of “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”  Exemplars of negative capability (he considered Shakespeare the foremost among them) embrace paradox, dissonance, ambiguity, the unpredictable, and the unknown, and unhesitatingly venture into existential terrain where others fear to tread.  It’s not that fact and reason don’t have a place in their seeking.  Rather, it’s not the be-all and end-all.  Sense and imagination also are equal partners.

“Keats’s coinage has been appropriated in modern times by the progressive Brazilian philosopher, social theorist, and progressive politician Roberto Mangabeira Unger, who equates negative capability with that element in our nature that enables us to overcome the most daunting cultural, socioeconomic, and institutionally imposed barriers to healthy human flowering.  In The Self Awakened, Unger (one of Barack Obama’s professors while a student at Harvard) insists that

we are not exhausted by the social and cultural worlds we inhabit and build.  They are finite.  We, in comparison to them, are not.  We can see, think, feel, build, and connect in more ways than they can allow.

“Adolescents in particular should take this as a clarion call.  Unger’s take is that it is up to adolescent [sic], to take the bull by the horns, rather than passively waiting for the unlikely time when adults will treat them as equals.  Many adolescents today are doing just that, putting their negative capability on grand display.  Through social entrepreneurial initiatives like Do Something, Be the Change, and Youth Venture [DoSomething.org; BeTheChangeInc.org; https://www.youthventure.org/www.genv.net], adolescents are showing just what innovative, active agents for change they can be.  They are making real the vision they have of themselves and of their rightful role in fashioning a world of their liking and making.” pp. 123-124

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NOTE – if you haven’t see this yet —

Teen’s Poem “White Boy Privilege” Goes Viral

New poem – “All Lives Matter, But…,” a New Poem from Royce Mann

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For readers interested in the “defining resiliency” process, especially in light of healing efforts connected to the CDC ACE study, perhaps do an online search for “negative capability” and begin reading.

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Here is a link to an interesting personality test – helpful, I think, even on the basic-free level.  I think it is very important for researchers to consider inborn personality differences when trying to discover trauma-resiliency processes in people – (and even in families and communities) –

Free Personality Test | 16Personalities

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Phillips points to connections through Unger’s writings to chaos (and creativity) – and to what early child developmental experts say about infants and young children who endure/survive/live-through impossible malevolent conditions of deprivation and harm — which is termed surviving-the-unsurvivable, surviving “an unsolvable” paradox , meaning:  “going on being when going on being is impossible.”

What does THIS say about resiliency?

WHAT is the cost of this kind of surviving?

From the above quote:  “negative capability” being connected to an ability to “embrace paradox, dissonance, ambiguity, the unpredictable, and the unknown” — infants and small children cannot possibly develop optimally in environments where these conditions remain present.

These conditions, which those with negative capability can presumably endure well, are toxic and traumatic to little people, and are, indeed, the antithesis of safe and secure attachment conditions especially IF these conditions directly involve shortcomings within early caregivers’ interactions with little ones.

These conditions WERE my childhood – and a whole lot worse.  So, I ask, what on earth does “resiliency” have to do with any of this?

I do not know.

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I typed “paradox” into this blog’s search box – no idea how many of the posts that appeared are actually about paradox, but the search will bring up some interesting past posts.

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Click here to read or to

Leave a Comment »

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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.  A daring book – for daring readers – about a really tough subject.

++++

Tags: adult attachment disordersadult reactive attachment disorderanxiety disorders,borderline motherborderline personality disorderbrain developmentchild abuse,depression,derealizationdisorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorderempathyinfant abusePosttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factorsPTSDresiliencyresiliency factorsrisk factorsshame

 

+THOUGHTS ON “Right, Wrong, and Plastic Brains”

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Friday, July 22, 2016.  I continue to find extremely thought provoking insights in the book I am reading by Dr. Christopher Phillips, author of Socrates Café, titled –

The Philosophy of Childing: Unlocking Creativity, Curiosity, and Reason through the Wisdom of Our Youngest

Right, Wrong, and Plastic Brains

“The Harvard neuroscientist Joshua Greene has made it his forte to scan people’s brains while they consider moral dilemmas.  In Moral Tribes [ I need to also read this book ASAP!], he shares his findings that when we agonize over matters of right and wrong, our brains’ “standard-issue moral machinery” equips us with “automated behavioral programs that motivate and stabilize cooperation within personal relationships and groups.  These include capacities for empathy, vengefulness, honor, guilt, embarrassment, tribalism, and righteous indignation.”  On the other hand, our so-called moral brains fail us when “our” group is vying against other ones.  In such instances, our better angels are “thwarted by tribalism…, disagreement over the proper terms of cooperation,…a biased sense of fairness, and a biased perception of facts.”  Greene believes our ability to reason morally boils down to how well we wage the struggle between our atavistic [“relating to or characterized by reversion to something ancient or ancestral”] gut instincts – which drive us toward more combative and selfish behavior – and our more advanced rational capacities that enable and inspire us to bridge differences.  He concludes that our tendency toward tribalism is driven by older parts of our brain, while our will to cooperate and empathize stems from our more recently evolved neocortex.  Greene maintains that we can override our more destructive impulses because our brains endow us with “a general capacity for conscious, explicit, practical reasoning that makes human decision flexible.

“If this is so, who is by far the most flexible among us in this regard?

“An array of studies makes clear that adolescents have unrivaled brain plasticity, and that when this is properly tapped into, it allows them to learn and adapt far more quickly and adeptly than adults.  (One among many articles on the subject is “The Teen Brain:  Primed to Learn, Primed to Take Risks,” by Jay N. Giedd of the National Institute of Mental Health.  A child and adolescent psychiatrist, Giedd specializes in brain imaging.)

“What if we older folks exploited this capacity of theirs?  To do so, we’d have to see this highly transitional stage as a window of opportunity.  We might learn how best to evolve this capacity for conscious, explicit, practical reasoning, so that it stays with us and progresses over time.  The problem is that those of us in the best position to realize this happen to be those with the least plasticity.  We’re not inclined to reach out to adolescents, no matter how much insight we might gain about how to remain more malleable, adaptive, and responsive to rapid changes.”  — pp. 121-122

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In my thoughts this connects to this very short video statement made in 2011 by actor Rainn Wilson within which he states that the youth of the world most likely hold the answers to national and global issues – suggesting that adults, perhaps, CANNOT solve our problems.

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There are multiple other layers connecting to these thoughts of mine.  As we are increasingly able to understand, high levels of early trauma – including abuse and neglect – change developing brains so that in some cases adolescents ALREADY have been deprived of being able to develop higher cortical thinking abilities correctly.  Severe early maltreatment, as Dr. Martin Teicher asserts, can cause early atrophy of higher cortex so that it never even finishes its development correctly.

So what might happen to members of our social species through attachment trauma abuse and neglect on these fundamental physiological levels?

What if it is “tribal trauma” that harms us most?  Being born and then being treated as if we were all alone?  Harmed so that we fundamentally learned we were flawed and had no right to resources – including our life?

How would these intergenerational trauma patterns appear along the lines stated in the book excerpt above?

And what might ignorance and denial of any of these interrelated critically important processes accomplish?  (And, during American election years?)

Would there be a difference if we adults WERE to ‘mine the gems’ of adolescent plastic brains’ benefits – would it ONLY be safe and securely attached, non-severely traumatized young people whose brains can then NOT do what Phillips is describing?

(I am considering how all these dynamics are contributing to America’s current political processes….)

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And then – take a look at the articles that pop up with an online search of these terms, “brain chasing Pokémon” – is this the best we have to offer our younger brains – the hope for our species at play?

Don’t ask me.  Fiddling while Rome burned DOES come to mind, however….  We certainly are an interesting species.

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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.  A daring book – for daring readers – about a really tough subject.

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Tags: adult attachment disordersadult reactive attachment disorderanxiety disorders,borderline motherborderline personality disorderbrain developmentchild abuse,depression,derealizationdisorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorderempathyinfant abusePosttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factorsPTSDresiliencyresiliency factorsrisk factorsshame

+COMMUNITY MATTERS: MY PLAN IN PINK

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Friday, July 22, 2016.  As of lately life seems too complicated for me to begin to feel that I can ponder it effectively.  If I cannot ponder I cannot write.  Hence – few posts here!

I am not certain that this kind of silence ever satisfies a writer, so today I will at last put SOMETHING connected to what concerns me in the streams of my thoughts.

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Take this, for example.  We are, in my thinking, a species with WAY (times a trillion) too much capacity for learning and problem solving to be continuing to make such a huge mess of so much of what concerns ALL of us on this planet at this juncture in our evolution!

Thinking?  Truth is behind us in the field of neuroscience and development of our brains as it clearly shows that HOW we come into this world and what happens to us through our connections with other human beings directly forms how our capacities develop.  What we miss at the start of our life – and all the way through the final stages of the development of the higher cortical regions of our brain by age 25-30 – will leave us with depleted capacity to fully be our own best self.

Developmental deficits leave us unable – individually and collectively – to create TRUE happiness and well-being.  Along this altered pathway we also make huge problems for the next generations to deal with.

Then all the aftermath of accumulated trauma leaves those next generations also depleted, very often because those people did not receive optimal care during their early development – and on and on and on things go – a process which found in my thinking a kind of image to express what en masse really cannot be put into words:

An Ancient Device Too Advanced to Be Real Gives Up Its Secrets at Last

by ROBBY BERMAN (June 15, 2016)

Gears affecting gears affecting gears – in the process of acquiring information – and in the process of applying that information in specific ways to create a more coherent life.

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So, skipping forward from the power of optimal human interactions that build optimal brains, I will write for a moment about something I invented today I call Pink Progress.  This is in the arena of community interaction.

Lately as I complete the circle pathway on my evening walks once the glaring heat of the sun has diminished, the end part that takes me through a city park not far from the apartments where I live has had a gathering of beautiful African refugee/immigrant (not sure without asking) Muslim girls dressed in their glorious patterned and colored “traditional” clothing.

Last evening those 8 or so girls approached me as soon as I stepped from pavement onto park grass to form a semicircle around me as they in great animation began to engage me in friendly, curious, intelligent conversation.  During this time they described to me that they can no longer play soccer because “the boys” took their ball.  Missing also was their volleyball I saw them playing with a few days ago.

Now in this culture the girls are closely cared for by parents and grandparents never far from their loved ones.  I will need to consult both with the girls this evening and with someone in their “caring cluster” about my Pink Progress plan I hope to put into action.

This was possibly the funnest investment of money I have ever made – depending on how this plays out.  I now have one brilliant pink volleyball, one brilliant pink soccer ball and one brilliant pink triangle boomerang to contribute to these girls.  The plan must include a firm commitment by all those involved that the BOYS do NOT play with any one of these items without the girls’ specific permission.

Sports?  I have decided to frame this effort toward community enhancement within the sphere of athletics.  I will tell the girls that I will also get them a basketball if they wish provided that diplomacy create a period of play time where the boys will leave the basketball court and two hoops to the use of the girls.

In this whole effort I also want to make clear that no one girl owns the equipment.  It is being given to all of them.  The girls will need to figure out how to manage this cooperative equipment.

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Fargo, ND has hundreds of jobs open.  It is a prime location for the acceptance of both refugees and immigrants in the USA.  Fargo has always been a homogeneous town of predominately Scandinavian ancestry Lutherans.  There is, as you can imagine, a very complex change happening here.  (In this city of 105,000 – 5,000 of the people are “New Americans” – all have arrived here having survived earlier extremely traumatic circumstances.)

Although ONE God originated every world religion through a Chosen Manifestation throughout the duration of human evolution, this fact is far from being universally recognized.  All the issues regarding the oneness of the human “race” as being ONE family are and will be in play here as time moves forward.  The needs of the people coming here matter.  How these processes will be negotiated I do not know.

I just found my one small “area of influence” as a dear friend of mine terms it.  So far – I am very hopeful for a fun and positive empowering outcome!

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LATER:  Oh such a delight delivering the balls to the girls in the park this evening! So much precious beauty!! They LOVED the balls!!! The most touching part was when I was crossing the park grass heading home, and passed a group playing soccer with a lady – the kids were about 6-7, about 150′ from the older girls but they were sure watching. At least 6 of these little ones stopped me and so genuinely, so sweetly, THANKED me for giving the balls to the girls, for “being so kind to them.” I will NEVER forget this!

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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.  A daring book – for daring readers – about a really tough subject.

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Tags: adult attachment disordersadult reactive attachment disorderanxiety disorders,borderline motherborderline personality disorderbrain developmentchild abuse,depression,derealizationdisorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorderempathyinfant abusePosttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factorsPTSDresiliencyresiliency factorsrisk factorsshame

+THE TRAGEDIES OF FAILURES OF SECURE ATTACHMENT = FAILURES OF EMPATHY, COMPASSION AND ALTRUISM

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Thursday, July 7, 2016.  I know myself well enough to know that it is never a good sign for me to feel speechless.  Is speechless a feeling?  I don’t argue that point.  It sure is for me.

I have been contemplating for days now the action of creating a post connected to the powerful thoughts Dr. Christopher Phillips has placed within the pages of his book — The Philosophy of Childing: Unlocking Creativity, Curiosity, and Reason through the Wisdom of Our Youngest (2016).

This book is important.  Few among us have the capacity that Phillips has to speak for the essential humanity of children.  I not only finished reading his book — Socrates Cafe: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy – I notated the margins and underlined in profusely before lending it to a woman who has opened a fantastic new coffee shop in Fargo, ND (where I currently, and temporarily, reside).

I found a section of Childing yesterday that I have delayed copying into a post until I could summon the inner ‘force needed’ to get this job done.  This morning I hit ‘another brick in the wall’ of difficulty – as I cannot separate myself from the ‘lot of humanity’ (for reasons connected to the passage from Childing I include in this post).

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Today – I need to also mention processes in America that are continuing to tear apart the heart of our nation.  Last night —

Philando Castile Shooting in Minnesota Leads Governor to Seek U.S. Investigation by RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA and JONAH ENGEL BROMWICHJULY 7, 2016

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This is part of a massive problem in our nation, most recently following this police shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana

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One of my dear friends feels “righteous anger” in response.  I feel deep, deep grief.  I know myself well enough to know I can become immobilized and trapped in grief – so this post is at least a small effort of mine to contribute to the greater good – because being human is a JOINT venture!

So, here from The Philosophy of Childing: Unlocking Creativity, Curiosity, and Reason through the Wisdom of Our Youngest – — — In my thinking early ATTACHMENT experiences are intimately connected to the descriptions Phillips offers about our experiences – and although Phillips is not mentioning the exodus of mothers away from their infants and young children as they “dump” their precious “luggage” in what I call “day orphanages” – I do believe what makes us most human is in this regard also taking a serious and devastating hit in line with what Phillips writes about as the “decrease in genuine intimacy” that IS the basis of safe and secure early attachment and therefore of the fruits the following words are concerned with.

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“If compassion in the US these days is missing in action toward our most vulnerable, how might this be remedied?

“In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle asserts that it is imperative for us to be raised from our “Very youth…so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought.”  Who are those with the most highly attuned sense of compassion, altruism, and empathy, and as a consequence most adept at determining what we ought to delight in, and what to be pained by?  Many cognitive scientists and developmental specialists today believe the evidence points to children, hands down.  Alison Gopnik’s disturbing, important question is, “If children are so good, if empathy and altruism are such a deeply rooted part of human nature, then why are adults so bad?”  [I am adding some paragraph breaks for ease of online reading]

“Is it because, as she speculates, that “the impulse to evil seems to be as deeply rooted as the will to do good”? If so, why is it, as she claims, that the impulse to do good is so much at the fore when we’re young, and how is it that it is so often supplanted by the impulse to do evil as we grow older?

“To Gopnik, it is indisputable that “early empathy and altruism emerge in the close face-to-face intimate encounters between babies and their caregivers – the most intimate relationships we ever have.”    If this most intimate relation [sic] we ever have is getting less and less intimate, then it almost goes without saying that it will lead to an ever earlier development of less healthy – or more harmful – impulses.

“Even when parents are with their kids these days, they’re often not with them.  Rather, they’re ensconced in their home media centers or are absorbed in their smartphones or tablets – when they’re not sharing them with their babies and toddlers, quite often to distract or calm them so they aren’t disruptive.

“Studies also indicate that the predictable outcome when parents spend scads of time on their potpourri of electronic devices rather than engaging with their infants is that their language development takes a huge hit.  Same goes, in even more abysmal scales, for parents who allow kids to use these devices, even when parents are in their close company.  Surely, it will soon be found that this decrease in genuine intimacy not only impacts language development [and I would add, therefore, of development of the ability to THINK, as well – along with impeding the development of self], but spills over to hinder or stunt the development of empathy and altruism.

“Surely, the dearth of kinds of intimate encounters between child and parent or caregiver also severs kids’ deep empathic and altruistic roots, which are pushed aside by darker impulses that otherwise would never have taken firm root.  This is a tragic outcome, needless to say.  As Gopnik recognizes, “for genuine global morality we need to extend those feelings beyond our intimates to the six billion other human beings out there.”  {Today there are over 7.4 billion of us sharing life on earth.]

“First, though, we need to nurture those feelings for our intimates.  When intimacy is stillborn during one’s youngest years, we never develop much of a local morality, making the prospect of realizing a more global morality a pipedream.  If we lost the innate ability to empathize with our nearest and dearest, we can’t come to feel the pain and suffering of those we don’t know nearly as well, or don’t know at all.”  pp. 118-120

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This morning on my Facebook page I posted this in response to the horrible news from North Dakota’s eastern neighbor state:

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Such actions as these belong to all of us! Freedom? Justice? Shelter? Not ONE of us ever has ONE of these if ONE of us does not:

The incomparable Friend saith: The path to freedom hath been outstretched; hasten ye thereunto. The wellspring of wisdom is overflowing; quaff ye therefrom. Say: O well-beloved ones! The tabernacle of unity hath been raised; regard ye not one another as strangers. Ye are the fruits of one tree, and the leaves of one branch. Verily I say, whatsoever leadeth to the decline of ignorance and the increase of knowledge hath been, and will ever remain, approved in the sight of the Lord of creation. Say: O people! Walk ye neath the shadow of justice and truthfulness and seek ye shelter within the tabernacle of unity.” — Bahá’u’lláh

[written circa 1854]

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Leave a Comment »

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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.  A daring book – for daring readers – about a really tough subject.

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Tags: adult attachment disordersadult reactive attachment disorderanxiety disorders,borderline motherborderline personality disorderbrain developmentchild abuse,depression,derealizationdisorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorderempathyinfant abusePosttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factorsPTSDresiliencyresiliency factorsrisk factorsshame