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Perhaps being raised from birth as a solitary, isolated and battered infant-child prepared me for being a ‘lone voice in the wilderness’. I did a Google search last evening for the terms ‘infant abuse language development’ and was shocked at the pitiful range of information that appeared on my screen. I added the word ‘mother’ to my search terms and still found little that could help me understand what I wanted to study.
As a complete lay person it is NOT a good sign to have my own blog page show up on the first page of such a search. What this tells me is that either what I think is so far outside the realm of ‘correct’ and ‘relevant’ that it bears no further thought — or it tells me that what I know is of critical importance and needs to be researched and studied by the people who receive the BIG BUCKS to study what matters to human beings forever stuck in the trenches of life as survivors of infant-child abuse.
One study I found is so old it represents only the beginning of the research that Dr. Allan Schore and other more ‘modern’ developmental neuroscientists have more currently written about. Although this paper (what I could access of it online — The Rhythmic Structure of Mother-Infant Interaction in Term and Preterm Infants) describes patterns of infant-mother interactions that are critical for infant body-brain development, it was written before the photographic technology even existed that Schore uses to highlight the fact that accurately measuring the infant-caregiver interactions that are forming the infant happen NOT in the range of one-second intervals, but rather occur at rates in the millisecond range.
(Do a Google search for ‘schore mother infant brain development’ and take a look at THIS information.)
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Most simply and effectively put, those of us with severe infant-child abuse and neglect in our developmental early history are MOST likely to experience processes that are lumped together under the descriptive word DISSOCIATION. When I look at the information about the natural patterns of connection and disconnection that take place between infants and their caregivers from birth as they are required for brain-nervous system development (including infant consolidation of information as it builds the body-brain) I understand that when an infant is born into a completely chaotic, traumatic and UNSTABLE environment these patterns DO NOT operate correctly.
Too much information, too much of hurtful information, too much information being bashed at and into the infant, not enough information, chaotic unstable patterns being forced upon the infant by a MOTHER or other early caregiver that have NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with the infant itself, etc.
There is NO POSSIBLE WAY for an infant to develop in a normal or ordinary fashion given the extremely upsetting nature of the interactions and transactions it is exposed to and forced to experience with an abusive, traumatizing, terrorizing early caregiver.
HOW DO WE EXPECT THAT THERE WILL NOT BE SERIOUS AND PERMANENT CONSEQUENCES TO THE INFANT from these kinds of interactions — along with the nearly complete exclusion of CORRECT, sustaining, regulation and HELPFUL interactions that the infant MUST have to build its best body-nervous system-brain?
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Now, getting to my present reality: What I experienced yesterday while trying to obtain fuel assistance money from a county-operated program that is supposed to do its job was so far past unsettling to me that I headed back to my infancy to look for information about how I experienced what happened yesterday — inside of my own body.
I don’t want to go into the details of how inept both this program and its administrators are (in the state of Arizona). Life is life, and it’s a fact that Big People are LIKELY to experience stressful, disturbing and unsettling experiences.
What matters is that when an infant was built from birth in the kind of malevolent (not pampered!) environment I am describing, we do not have built within our own body-nervous system-brain ‘normal or ordinary’ circuits and pathways to DEAL with the stress-distress that life throws our way.
I can find no reference online to this direct connection between infant lack of well-being and the adult consequences of being built in those terrible environments that DIRECTLY affect our inabilities and disabilities to sail through difficulties in our adulthood that normal and ordinary people usually can.
The best that we survivors are likely to hear is, “Oh, there’s something wrong with you. Let’s diagnose you with a ‘mental illness’.
GIVE ME A BREAK, you idiots!
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I will describe here as clearly as I can what happens to me when I am at my wit’s end stress-distress wise and have to deal with people. This happened to me yesterday, and is an experience that I do not remember having consciously between the time I left home at 18 (I had it prior to that) and the time I received my very serious breast cancer diagnosis and began treatment at age 55.
(My daughter tells me she has an idea what I am talking about based on her experience of meeting people in a stress-filled situation, like in an important interview, when she is so involved with dealing with incoming information that is NOT VERBAL — (now experts say that 95% of information transmitted in our conversations IS NONVERBAL) — that she cannot HEAR a single word being spoken. I also believe people under pressure of serious medical treatments experience related difficulties when trying to understand what their medical providers are telling them — like in cancer treatment.)
ANYWAY, the woman behind the fuel assistance program’s desk was trying to explain to me that all the rules for the program had been changed (in stupid ways) that directly and negatively affect ALL people applying for help.
The more desperate I felt inside knowing that my ability to heat my home were being increasingly threatened, the more I could NOT understand what she was telling me. The not understanding was at the level of watching her mouth move its tongue and lips with no sound attached to those actions. At the same time an extremely annoying DISSOCIATED and disconnected SOUND filled my awareness that was extremely noisy and irritating. I could not connect the sound to the lips to the words to any kind of sense at all.
Because what I needed for my own well-being and security (the ability to heat my house) mattered so much, I HAD to understand what this woman was saying to me. How humiliating and extremely AGGRAVATING it was to finally have to say to her, “I need you to tell me what you are saying as if you are talking to a two-year-old — or I will NOT be able to understand you.” (I did not receive the help I needed yesterday and in one month’s time have to jump through all of their hoops again — for the third time in three months.)
I absolutely believe, because I could FEEL it, that my lack of ability to understand a DAMN thing in that conversation happened because the very earliest PREVERBAL, PRE LANGUAGE neuronal wiring in my body — built there during extremely abusive and chaotic nonsensical interactions with my traumatizing mother — was in full action.
I also absolutely believe that I am not ALONE! I am certainly NOT the only adult who survived severe infant abuse.
Does anyone talk about how it IS for us survivors and how it FEELS to us in our BODY to have been so negatively impacted in our development that these alterations affect how we learned and process language — ESPECIALLY WHEN STRESS/DISTRESS IS PRESENT?
No, they do not.
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While I believe the malevolent experiences during my infancy directly formed my body-brain wiring patterns that are the root of how I am forced to operate in the world, I do not believe that ‘dissociation’ is the correct description of the state I am forced into when these earliest wiring patterns overwhelm my ability to make sense of myself in/and the world.
Based on my experience that my cancer treatment interrupted all the later learning I had acquired that allowed me to circumvent the baseline language patterns that I acquired — I believe it is more accurate to say that the earliest beginnings and what THAT felt like is the REAL us in our body. Everything that we managed to piece together to ‘feel more normal’ and to ‘operate more normally’ are themselves the dissociations from what was native to us — that which was built into and built our body-brain in the first place INCLUDING OUR ABILITY TO COMPREHEND AND USE LANGUAGE.
When I experience (and I HATE IT) what I did yesterday, I am very clear that I am ACTUALLY without ‘a first language’. No doubt my brain could be watched during these times and SOMETHING DIFFERENT would be detected about how my brain-mind is processing language.
I suspect that the foundation of language abilities as they happen from birth (actually from before birth) in patterns of connection-disconnection with the mother cannot possibly follow magically along normal pathways if the infant is being treated in traumatizing ways. We infant abuse survivors therefore cannot possibly have learned language in normal and ordinary ways.
This is a BIG PROBLEM, folks, at the same time it COULD be a fascinating journey into understanding the resiliency of infants who can STILL adapt to spoken language. I also believe, however, that the same alterations that occurred due to early abuse and affected how we process spoken words and nonverbal signals with our ‘different balance from ordinary’ in terms of how we receive information, process it and ‘take action’ (listening and speaking) — also affects how we use words in our thinking.
All of this has to do (in my mind) with the different way our right brain, our left brain, and our abilities to transmit, synthesize and understand information between the two were changed through trauma-altered development (and infant abuse) so that our experience of being alive has been fundamentally impacted.
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Doesn’t anybody out there think these facts are worth investigating? We are absolutely WAY IN THE DARK AGES if the best our culture can do is ‘call us mentally ill’. We infant abuse survivors are the most sophisticated examples of the range of environmentally adaptive developmental abilities our species has.
That our language development was changed right along with the rest of our body due to severe early trauma should surprise NO ONE. Why, then, is there not only no USEFUL information available that will explain to us how this process happened and how these changes affect us all of our life — there is NO INFORMATION available at all!
Battered babies don’t simply fall off of the face of the earth. We survived, we are here — and because we were battered and because we survived — we are different beings from ordinary. I for one want to know what that MEANS!
The patterns of interaction an infant has with its mother and other earliest primary caregivers not ONLY build our right limbic emotional brain with its patterns of ability to have either emotional regulation or dysregulation for life, these patterns also build our social brain (same hemisphere) at the same time.
Our resulting ability to ‘read social cues’ normally is directly tied along with the development of our body-nervous system-brain through our earliest interactions to the development of our VERBAL LANGUAGE ABILITIES that are intimately connected to our NONVERBAL LANGUAGE ABILITIES. All of the patterns of communication an infant has with its earliest caregivers ARE a language being spoken.
It is time that all of us understand that being able to communicate efficiently and effectively with others and with our own self are directly formed within us at the same time. We cannot exclude a study of infant abuse and trauma from the consequences to all of our development – including our language abilities.
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Stop the Storm 
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