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Being five years old – we left my grandma behind in Los Angeles when we moved to Alaska summer 1957:

I have always remembered my grandmother’s large walk-through closet that seemed big as a bedroom to me.  I can feel the smooth curved edges of the cool glass of the knob I turned when I entered from her bedroom.  There were little windows high up on both closet doors that let in enough light during the day I could see my way to walk through from one end to the other.  I slid my feet slowly through the darkened wide isle of Grandmother’s clothes.  They hung around me on both sides.  I just barely touch the soft fabrics with my fingertips as I passed.

I arched my neck back so I could gaze toward the ceiling at rows of pretty round hat boxes stacked high on the shelves.  Down below her shoes were perched at strange angles from what I was used to, lined up neatly on shoe racks.  At the far end of the closet there were hooks on the walls.  On one side was a little wooden bench.  Her bathrobe hung at this end, her belts, even some long scarves and handbags.

I remember the smell of my grandmother stayed behind me in that room when I went out the other door into a long wide curved dim hallway painted dark shiny green on the bottom to just above the height of my eyes.   The ceiling was far above my head.  As I walked down it into her kitchen at the back corner of her house I thought about that mysterious room and about Grandma.

Grandmother carried her smell around with her, but in that closet there was so much Grandma smell I could breathe it in and breathe it out, in and out slowly and there was always more.  Tears flow down my cheeks as I write these words.  In the 18 years of my childhood I know that it was only in this place, in this amazing closet that I ever felt safe.

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These links are to posts from May 2009 – a long time ago in blog time!  This is information about insecure attachment disorders.  These contain information related to the work of Nancy Collins of the Department of Psychology, University of California in Santa Barbara.

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part One

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Two

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Three

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Four

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Five

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Six

**Attachment Styles and Caregiving from Collins Article

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Before I start my writing for the book this morning I thought I’d clear my thoughts a little over here.  I am thinking about what happens when early stressful trauma changes development especially from conception to age two in environments that are unsafe and insecure and in which those who are supposed to meet all the needs of their little ones cannot do the job right because their OWN development was changed through stressful traumas during their own first 33 months of life.

Of course all trauma from neglect and abuse during childhood contributes to the longterm developmental changes a survivor faces, nearly ALL of those having affected the physiological development of the nervous system and brain — but it is always those first 33 months that build the platform and foundation — permanently — for ALL later human development.

I keep seeing two images this morning and as odd as it might seem, these two images are directly related.  The first one is of a funnel and the second is of the sinking Titanic as it was portrayed in the movie of the same name.

I am also thinking about what happens when early stressful trauma alters growth so that personality disorders and addictions end up the lines along which a body develops.  I think about ALL addictions as having a very similar end consequence:  Trauma altered development can create what I see as a funnel.  Everything and everyone in such a person’s life is ‘trapped’ at the top and the ‘relationships’ have no other end but to run through this funnel as experience becomes increasing narrower and more focused to one end and one end only:  Survival of the trauma changed person.

Of course it can be very hard for an outsider to this ‘system’ to understand how the usually very harmful behaviors of these people is possibly contributing to their survival.  But on the physiological level this route is exactly the one that early development of such an individual was forced to take if the body was going to survive the intolerable, overwhelming harm within the early environment.

Now, the Titanic image:  From the point of view of those whose body took this trauma altered developmental course that led directly to a ‘personality disorder’ and/or an addiction, life for them is absolutely NORMAL.  They have no choice (except when outside intervention forces consciousness) but to live their lives from the perspective their trauma-changed body-brain has given them.

No matter how terrible their life may be as they live it, no matter how the deck of the ship of their life is splitting and falling apart around them, no matter how tilted this deck — even to the point that the entire ship is sinking forever under the surface of a cold dark sea taking all on board to a certain death — there are trauma-altered individuals who will NEVER see the reality they are in and that they create for others in ANY OTHER WAY.

Everything about these people has been changed very early in their life to create for them a different ‘evolutionarily altered’ trauma built physical reality that does not allow them to see the world the same way as other people do.  These people do not have the same powers of conscious choice or of free will that other people do.

Expecting a different outcome from people, say, like my mother and father were — as trauma changed as I believe they both were in the direction of personality disorder — Mother with Borderline, Father with Narcissistic — both with terrible insecure attachment disorders that built their physiology from birth (or before) – my Mother with disorganized-disoriented insecure and my father with dismissive-avoidant insecure — lived their life in the only way that they could.

In these cases the dis-ease of the earliest life in malevolent infant/toddler/child/teen unsafe and insecure attachment relationships CHANGED these people.  They ended up with a survival funnel that all information in their life was channeled through and focused by — so at the end tip all that made it through was “I will survive at all costs and to hell with everyone else.”

Duh!  These people make TERRIBLE and very dangerous parents who in turn create so much traumatic stress for their offspring (and usually to their mates) — that there is no such thing as a normal life of well-being.  Yet on these people’s sinking Titanic all is normal and fine from their point of view.

The only hope that can come for those who are suffering from someone else’s terrible sickness has to come from OUTSIDE intervention!!  And in the end those who CAN survive long enough to begin to work toward their own healing must understand the nature of the funnel world and the Titanic world those that harmed them lived in — and dragged their children (and mates) through right along with them.

In most cases all that can realistically be hoped for is that other people be kept safe from the dangerous, destructive lifelong patterns of repeated trauma-drama that some early maltreatment survivors have very little (if any) choice over.  These most harmful patterns are manifestations of terrible  sickness — and in the big picture all of these harmful patterns are a symptom of how a person’s body took control over basic survival and left no possibility for anything else BUT survival.  When a human being is reduced to that one action — survival of self — nothing but a grim, grim life will follow.

Nature, pushed to its final edges for people with overwhelming infant/child trauma doesn’t care at all about quality of life.  All it cares about as it adjusts a human being’s development is that this person survive long enough to create offspring.  That’s it.  And in a natural world rather than a ‘modern’ one I am convinced that these survivors would only live that long.  They would NOT raise their own offspring.  Others would.  Others who had not been raised in hell, who had not had their physiological development so drastically changed.

That is where the picture of preventing infant-child abuse will ALWAYS lie.  With the OTHERS.  We are a social species and it is the loss of the power of OTHERS to take care of infants and young children that will be our society’s demise.  It is the regaining of this power OTHERS have to ensure adequate safe and secure beginnings for every human being that the hope of ending trauma-changed development lies.

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The long-range purpose of a safe and secure early attachment between an infant and its caregivers is that it provides humans with a body (including our nervous systems (central and autonomic) and brain) with its own internal and rock solid inner sense that no matter what happens in life one can know “I will be OK.”  Either we have all the active and passive coping skill abilities within our own power, OR if we encounter a threatening situation that we can’t handle alone, we trust that SOMEONE else will be there to help us do what we cannot do our self.

Given that AT LEAST half the population in America never really had a safe and secure attachment with an early caregiver from the time we were born, this half DOES NOT have a safe and secure attachment-built body and brain.  Once our society recognizes that the quality of these earliest attachments determines how our genes are activated as it determines how our body builds itself to process social-emotional information (primarily through our right brain hemisphere with its deepest connections to our body itself) IN INTERACTION WITH ALL ASPECTS OF OUR ONGOING ENVIRONMENT, we will begin to look at ourselves as human beings differently.

True empathy and true compassion are the most important natural gifts that humans possess to get along as members of a SOCIAL SPECIES.  If early attachments are not safe and secure, empathy and compassion systems in our body-brain will NOT operate as they are intended to.  What is left for the half (or more) of our population that didn’t get a safe and secure earliest (before age one) attachment relationship is a lack of ability to process emotional-social information correctly.  This means that all our body’s ‘chemicals’ that connect to and run all of our systems including our stress response system, will always operate to some degree as if danger is always present somewhere.

This state does not give us a ‘feeling’ of well-being.  No amount of pills and drugs, no matter in what form they are consumed, will ever replace the natural inner balanced state a safe and secure early attachment environment is designed to give us.  All attachment and all ‘addictions’ use the exact same body chemicals to transmit information.  There is NOTHING magic about this fact.  Humans (all mammals) are built this way.

Our inner stress response system moves to “ON” any time we do not feel safely and securely attached to others, to our own self, and to the outer world we live in.  The half of the population without a body-brain built by safe and secure earliest attachment relationships will have a GREAT DEAL OF TROUBLE turning their insecurely attached system to “OFF.”  Humans will then search outside of their self in every possible direction to meet the needs that most of us DO NOT UNDERSTAND are directly connected to how our early attachment system was built – and then built us – from our conception to primarily the age of two.

When our attachment system is insecurely built, we will ALWAYS feel some degree of lack of well-being that creates pain of some kind within our body.  Many times this translates into our awareness as a chronic state of ‘anxiety’.  We operate like a furnace system would operate that does not have a well-built thermostat to control it.  Too hot, too cold, inappropriate responses to the actual environment will result.

Once these insecure attachment patterns are built into our body they are very very real and the underlying physical construction of our body will always on its own naturally keep us in some state of fear and/or sadness.  As this happens our abilities to use what we should have been given through safe and secure attachment – the properly operating empathy and compassion CONNECTION end of our stress response system – will be interfered with.  This means, as I have said so often before, that we are not only NOT getting the correct information as it actually exists in the environment, we are ALSO not able to process the information we get appropriately in relationship to how we actually are in the environment.

Our body-brain was built in the beginning in an environment that was not safe and secure, and our body-brain WILL NEVER let us forget that we are not safe in the world because we were NOT safe when this body we live in was built in the first place.

If we wish to change the architecture and structure of this ‘building’, this body we live in we have to understand that what is going on for us traces all the way back to those earliest infant-caregiver relationships we had in the first place.  THOSE are the ones that constructed this body we live in from the start of our life.  There is no magic here!  There is NO WAY to erase the consequences of what early neglect, abuse, maltreatment and stress did to change how our body-brain was designed and constructed at the start of our life.

What we CAN do is identify exactly how we were built from the start and then learn to consciously REMODEL how we live in our body-brain today.  This is NOT the same thing as tearing the whole ‘building’ down so we can start over – beginning with a new foundation.  We can NOW learn as a society what is possible, what is not possible, and how to realistically work within the parameters of how our body ended up after being so traumatized at the start of our life.

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From the center of my being I daily send out a silent cry that those developmental neuroscientists that absolutely know the facts and details of what I am talking about will get off their proverbial butts or high horses and WRITE the information we need to know in an understandable, readable and workable format.

While the information exists in all kinds of complicated and too-hard-for-us-regular-folks to understand, it needs to be clearly communicated TO ALL OF US!

At least 50% of our population is SUFFERING from the consequences of how early unsafe, insecure and inadequate MOTHERING changed the way our body-brain was built in the first place.  That means that this half of the population is suffering in ways that the OTHER HALF are not – and never will be.

Given also that within the 50% of the population that DOES HAVE a trauma-changed body-brain there are degrees of changes that create increasingly difficult living conditions, this matter is SERIOUS.  As the Center for Disease Control is clearly demonstrating just within their Adverse Childhood Experiences research, the lifelong difficulties created my early stress and trauma impact everyone – especially those living in these trauma-changed bodies.

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Until the needed information is presented clearly in my thinking not one single person of the 50% of our population with some degree of trauma-changed body is going to be accurately assessed or ‘diagnosed’ no matter what physical health (including so-called mental health) ‘symptoms’ they are showing.  That this information is not collected and translated for us is a symptom itself of the terrible and fundamental splits we have within the different fields of study in the ‘healing’ professions.

I cannot fix these massive societal malfunctions.  I can work my way through the writing of my share of the book my daughter and I are working on that will end up making exactly this same plea to THOSE WHO KNOW what matters about early infant-child traumatic stress and what it does to permanently change physiological development.  I better get to work now on my part of this important project!!!!!

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In some ways I feel as if I am abandoning my post (HA!  I made a pun!)  by diverting my attention into the writing of this book.  I am working hard on it — making progress — so far I am nearing the age of my 6th birthday — and what an old-soul child I was by that age.

I have a long way to go, and a lot of work to do, but with my loved one’s help I am ‘coloring within the lines’ so to speak, which means I am writing within the box, the parameters of the questions my daughter is sending me to respond to with my written answers — the best that I can.

We had our first heavy monsoon rain down here in southeastern Arizona yesterday, but I was disappointed to see that my plants showed signs of stress already today wanting more water!  Oh, I hope more good rains come.  We haven’t had rain for 9 months, and that’s a LONG time – an unusually long time!

So, time to relax for the rest of the evening — back to book writing work tomorrow!!!!

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