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Thursday, April 9, 2015. My dear friend and fellow student of attachment-related trauma (of all possible kinds) done to infants and children, himself a fellow “tadpole” as he named survivors with Trauma Altered Development, just gifted me with two intriguing books – thank you!
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Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers (2006) by Gordon Neufeld (Author), Gabor Mate M.D. (Author)
Again, the book description from the above title link:
“International authority on child development Gordon Neufeld, Ph.D., joins forces with bestselling author Gabor Maté, M.D., to tackle one of the most disturbing trends of our time: Children today looking to their peers for direction—their values, identity, and codes of behavior. This “peer orientation” undermines family cohesion, interferes with healthy development, and fosters a hostile and sexualized youth culture. Children end up becoming overly conformist, desensitized, and alienated, and being “cool” matters more to them than anything else.
Hold On to Your Kids explains the causes of this crucial breakdown of parental influence—and demonstrates ways to “reattach” to sons and daughters, establish the proper hierarchy in the home, make kids feel safe and understood, and earn back your children’s loyalty and love. This updated edition also specifically addresses the unprecedented parenting challenges posed by the rise of digital devices and social media. By helping to reawaken instincts innate to us all, Neufeld and Maté will empower parents to be what nature intended: a true source of contact, security, and warmth for their children.”
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Now here I am at the part of the post where I get to say something! In nearing the end of another intense grandchildren caring week there is not much left of me to garner thoughts in language much beyond what a 32-month-old can understand. But, really, that IS the point.
As Dr. Siegel – what is the word? SHOUTS? Preaches, screams, expounds? What Siegel knows, what Siegel tells us is that what happens conception to age 3 not only wires up the body-brain of a new human being for a lifetime BUT also INTEGRATES the activity between brain (a part of the Central Nervous System) regions – connected together with everything else within us.
By age 3 new humans are essentially ready to roll onto the show room floor. The rest of childhood? A whole lot of fill in the blanks of missing information as it is fed INTO that most incredible structure in all known existence – THE HUMAN BRAIN – which will make the best use out of information that it can based exactly on what happened to that new person conception to age three.
PLEASE investigate this important information if you haven’t discovered Siegel before now!! An online search for “daniel siegel” will enable you to access many valuable YouTube videos of his talks and a host of links to his life work’s expressions. (His latest envelope-pushing, state-of-the-art thinking is currently not in the free access domain. Sadly.)
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Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect (2012) by Jonice Webb (Author), Christine Musello (Contributor)
This book description is from Amazon.com at the title link (above):
“Running on Empty is the first self-help book about Emotional Neglect: an invisible force from your childhood which you can’t see, but may be affecting you profoundly to this day. It is about what didn’t happen in your childhood, what wasn’t said, and what cannot be remembered.
Do you sometimes feel as if you’re just going through the motions in life? Are you good at looking and acting as if you’re fine, but secretly feel lonely and disconnected? Perhaps you have a fine life and are good at your work, but somehow it’s just not enough to make you happy.
If so, you are not alone. The world is full of people who have an innate sense that something is wrong with them. Who feel they live on the outside looking in, but have no explanation for their feeling and no way to put it into words. Who blame themselves for not being happier.
If you are one of these people, you may fear that you are not connected enough to your spouse, or that you don’t feel pleasure or love as profoundly as others do. Perhaps when you do experience strong emotions, you have difficulty understanding or tolerating them. You may drink too much, or eat too much, or risk too much, in an attempt to feel something good.
In over twenty years of practicing psychology, many people have arrived in Jonice Webb’s office, driven by the threat of divorce or the onset of depression, or by loneliness, and said, “”Something is missing in me.””
Running on Empty will give you clear strategies for how to heal, and offers a special chapter for mental health professionals. In the world of human suffering, this book is an Emotional Smart Bomb meant to eradicate the effects of an invisible enemy.”
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The emotional neglect book…. At first thoughts those of us who endured horrendous direct emotional abuse (along with other horrors of trauma most cannot imagine) might approach this topic as a “fluff” kind of reading that could not possibly apply to us.
Although this book (I have only read to page 73 and then loaned the book to my daughter to read – hopefully) carries what I consider a “lighter” kind of message, it is an essential one. At the very top of the list of people who so powerfully impacted me as a non-rescued child is my father who was essentially destroyed as a person by the emotional neglect he suffered from birth.
He LOST his chance 0-3 to build safe and secure attachments to ANY caregivers. He LOST his chance to build a strong, clear self-within. He was a complete sitting duck to be Mad Mother’s enabler and he fulfilled that role perfectly!
Every infant/child who did NOT have safe and secure attachment – which absolutely includes, in my thinking, people who PROTECT children from all harm – did experience emotional neglect on an essential level upon which all other abuses were heaped. We were all human beings with emotional needs and we did NOT get them met. In fact the evil opposite happened to us. This matters.
Enough said for now. I will not say anything more than this, as well: I am greatly concerned about the high numbers of infants and children being left in large day care centers 50+ hours a week. I do not think it is a good sign-of-the-times when mothers of a species abandon their offspring during their most critical stages of (attachment) development 0-3 into the care of strangers.
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Here is our first book out in ebook format. Click here to view or purchase –
Story Without Words: How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?
It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.
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NOTE: I am stuck with a new version of the blog’s posting page that I do not like and cannot get out of. It has refused to post or include my chosen tags:
adult attachment disorders, adult reactive attachment disorder, anxiety disorders,borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, brain development, child abuse,depression,derealization, disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorder, empathy, infant abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factors, PTSD, resiliency, resiliency factors, risk factors, shame
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