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Sunday, May 21, 2017. Well, it seems I need to go back to read CDC ACE study basics. I also need to locate the ‘fleshed out’ version of the ten study questionnaire is not good enough to capture the complex, difficult reality of what is going on in this world around us.
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Vincent J Felitti MD, FACP Correspondence information about the author Vincent J Felitti, Robert F Anda MD, MS, Dale Nordenberg MD, David F Williamson MS, PhD, Alison M Spitz MS, MPH, Valerie Edwards BA, Mary P Koss PhD, James S Marks MD, MPH
American Journal of Preventive Medicine, May 1998, Volume 14, Issue 4, Pages 245–258
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I also need to locate information about possible expansions of the basic questionnaire – if there are any in progress – that might include sibling abuse and death of a sibling, abuse of fathers, and suicide within families as these experiences can also severely traumatize children and families.
I am also wondering how ‘separation and divorce’ are being addressed in today’s culture where the commitment of marriage is missing all together while parents pop into and out of their relationships dragging all combinations of offspring along with them through their immature and conflictual chaos.
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As I struggle with being what I call “a carrier of solutions” (as someone might be a carrier of a disease) I seem to run around in circles. I think of the common recycling image of arrow pointing to arrow pointing to arrow – and ‘round and ‘round I go.
What and where are the problems? What and where are solutions?
Now, I know an incredible woman here, I will call her Rose. She’s 74, low income/poverty but grateful for everything in her life. Her antique trailer has wiring problems she cannot afford to fix. The beat up replacement door someone put on years ago is too small for the door frame, creating large drafty spaces.
Long ago the roof leaked, and although a pitched metal roof was added on top of the original flat one, nobody ever replaced the mostly ruined large ceiling tiles. Stained, warped, sagging, patched with tape and plastic bags, it’s still a roof over her head, for which Rose is eternally grateful, as she is for every part of her home, including the totally worn and torn kitchen linoleum.
Rose does not drive, has no car, walks up and down very steep hills and miles between to take her 5 year old great granddaughter to HeadStart – and back – every day – winter and rain included — her pitiful shoes literally in shredded threads. She is also raising her 6 year old great grandson, while these children’s birth mother, Rose’s grand daughter, offers absolutely nothing (but heartache) to her little ones’ care (their father is in prison). She ‘lives’ with her grandmother, Rose, though disappears for nights, for days, no word to her children, to ‘hole up with’ her abusive boyfriend….
Who has in HIS custody his two little ones — ages 1 and 3 year – with THEIR mother also absent – running around from one abusive man to another one.
(This grand daughter reported to Rose last Friday that she ‘wants to have a baby’ with her abusive boyfriend — who, evidently, is again cavorting around with the mother of his children although she does not wish to have a thing to do with raising them! I don’t think anyone sane enough to be able to WRITE could possibly be crazy enough to invent stories as nuts as the trauma lives that some people are actually living!)
So – in Rose’s history…. She was an only child whose father was killed in a mining accident when Rose was 12. Her mother was wise, kind, quiet, an expert seamstress who worked hard and lovingly raised Rose with strong values. Rose’s mother’s mother over a century ago ran away with her two children from her terribly abusive husband in Mexico north to New Mexico. The warrior woman is in Rose’s blood.
So where, I muse, did things seem to take a direct turn toward hell in Rose’s life? When Rose fell in “L-O-V-E” as a young woman, she did not remotely heed her mother’s warnings that her choice of a mate was at best a rotten scoundrel. Rose married in spite of her mother’s resistance, and YES! Her husband was an abusive, womanizing drunk – who eventually divorced Rose, leaving her penniless to raise their children alone.
Rose’s youngest son, a terrible alcoholic, shot himself in the head in his bedroom when he was 20. His age 15 sister was outside, heard the shot, ran into the house and found her brother dead. When this girl ran out of the house that day she never went back home. She moved in with her boyfriend, and…… Well, this mother was TOTALLY incompetent to raise her own children, and is the grandmother of the two little ones Rose is raising.
Rose worries terribly that there is no one in this family competent to raise her two little beloved great grandchildren if/when something happens to her! True!
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And, then there is Angelica and her family. This grandmother has been raising her 5 grandchildren since their mother, Angelica’s daughter, who was in her mid 30s, was murdered five years ago by her drunk, insane, violent boyfriend, who, after shooting his wife in the face, tossed their 2 year old son on his dead wife’s bloody body, ran out of the house in horror at what he’d done, and blew his own brain out in the front yard. The dead woman’s 13 year old daughter is the one who found this death scene. Anyone wonder why this now 18 year old is deeply addicted to drugs, involved in a truly insane, abusive relationship life?
Still, Angelica sallies forth and carries on like any warrior grandmother would. Yet she lets sneak out of her mouth once in a while, “This is NOT what I wanted for my life! I wanted to travel……” And the thoughts disappear along with the words that might describe some other life….. (This woman’s son hung himself when he was 16.)
I mentioned to Angelica the day I listened to her spew out the entire story of the mayhem in her family’s life if she might wish to attend a mothering support group if one was started in town. Her response? “Oh, no. I couldn’t do that. My husband wouldn’t like it.”
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So…….. Where does anyone start with this CDC ACE information? I have been writing above about Hispanic women I have met in this small town. Last week I also heard about another woman I haven’t yet met – who is “Anglo” on “this side of town” — who has several friends, evidently (and this is within the aging baby boomer population), who are in horribly abusive relationships and will not listen TO ANYONE or do ANYTHING to extricate themselves from their hell-lives.
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Meanwhile I run in those arrow-pointing circles from hopeful through hopeless back to hopeful. I realize as Dr. Nadine Harris Burke asserts, that ACEs healing in the N.E.A.R. science paradigm is a MOVEMENT – and movements take time….
I am currently working around THIS idea – ANY place to begin this critically important healing work in this area!
STOP THE STORM
Changing inter-generational trauma drama into patterns of peaceful calm
An open consultation group for positive community change
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> EVERYONE WELCOME <
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Ongoing discussions based on the Centers for Disease Control’s Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (CDC ACE Study) and the global grassroots’ work to apply N.E.A.R. Science to individual, family and community healing (N = neuroscience; E = epigenetics; A = ACEs; R = resilience). Information about the critical role of Safe and Secure Attachment relationships will also be included! (search topics online for background)
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Tuesdays at Two
TRANQUILBUZZ Coffee House
112 West Yankie St., Silver City, NM 88061 (NE corner of Yankie/Texas)
Info: FaceBook message One Global Family Little School of Creative Living
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Where WILL those arrows lead? If there is a place where people get ON to these cycles of horrendous inter-generational trauma — is there a way and a place to get OFF of them?
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Click here to read or to
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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 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
Stop the Storm 