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Perhaps this is really what I believe: I am living a documentary on the physiological changes that severe early and chronic child abuse can cause within a human being and what it is like to live a life with these changes. If this is what I believe, than what I am doing at age 59 is living a documentary and recording what I notice about this experience as a survivor. It just seems that life moves too fast for anything else to be accomplished.
I finished four days of working in my friend’s small office while she recovers from her illness — only she isn’t well enough yet to return so next week I will probably be gone from home and in the office another four days. This SHOULDN’T BE A BIG DEAL for me, but it is. I can feel the powerful impact of stress in my body — and what I have been doing is NOT STRESSFUL in any ‘normal’ person’s way. I know it isn’t. But it nearly more than I can bear. I have the weekend to try to calm myself down — on all my levels.
So from my documentariast point of view I would say that any time I am out in public and interacting in ANY way with other people I am nearly completely overwhelmed by the complexities of human interactions. At the same time I notice this, it’s like I can look backward through a long time tunnel to my infancy and feel the affects of my mother’s maniacal, violent, unpredictable, inappropriate, chaotic interactions with little infant me — and what those interactions did to my body, nervous system and brain as I tried to grow and develop in that insanely abusive and malevolent environment.
I did not have the opportunity for experience I needed in face to face mirroring, reflective, compassionate interactions that would have built into my right brain the ability to ‘read social cues’ or to send back and out to others ‘social cues’ that they could read, either. Every interaction I participate in with others borders on panic. All the information that passes back and forth is moving so fast — just like it is supposed to — but is also well beyond my ability to understand correctly or to process.
As a result, I am easily just plain exhausted in ways that are difficult to describe. It all seems to damn NOISY to me — and it IS noisy. And all the interactions just amp up my stress-distress level, which my continually turned-on stress response/attachment system DOES NOT NEED.
There is no possible way to turn everyday human interactions into slow motion events. If my ‘documentary’ was able to run at the speed that allowed me to work with human social information, nobody except someone like me who had suffered from a truly MAD, insane mother birth to age one would be able to tolerate watching it. The tables would be turned. Instead of ME being the one out of my element and lost in the mad panic of the high speed communication patterns between people, I would be far more comfortable in ‘slow-mo’ while others would amp up their stress levels.
And in the end the result is I am terribly lonely. Normal social interactions do not ‘feed me’. They drain me, and I have to escape them back to the only comfort I now know — my quiet home.
I can’t say to other people, “Slow down! You are so loud, you talk so fast, you move so fast, you send out far too many signals all jumbled up and tumbled over one another.” I am supposed to ‘be normal’ and ‘act normal’ — just like they do with one another.
My mother overwhelmed every sense I had from the time I was born. There was no reciprocal, balanced, compassionate, tender loving interactions between us — ever.
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I was thinking about all of this when I got back from a series of errands I had to do in town today (I didn’t have to go to my friend’s office). I realize that much of my life — all of my 18-year childhood and most of my adulthood — I have survived and endured through using an invisible (to me) ability to dissociate so that masses of information could remain separated from one another so that they did not overwhelm me by being present at the same time.
Thinking about it today I realized that this process allowed me to have large ‘areas’ of quiet within me that were actually empty because information was segmented and presented to me in little pieces not connected to one another — but only present as the information was immediately needed. Other information was somehow put away where I did not have to focus on it, be aware of it, be distracted by it — or have to FEEL it or pay it any attention.
Something about my cancer diagnosis July 2007 and my subsequent experience of treatment and survivorship changed all of these patterns — or ways I had of being in the world that seemed to work for me all those years.
Most simply put in this documentary as I experience it today, I would say that the NUMBNESS disappeared.
Now I would say I have too much information without having any other in-built adequate ability to process or tolerate it.
I still experience dissociation, but not from one numb state to another. Now I can distinctly note that most dissociation happens in response to very clear demands being made on my processing abilities (brain-nervous system-mind-self) that surpass my in-built ability to flow along smoothly and comfortably in response.
This lets me know very clearly that numbness is NOT calmness! I never needed to clarify this or name it for myself before now. Now, not only can I not get to a state of calmness within, I cannot get to a numb state, either.
In other words, I cannot turn down the volume of noise that comes from too much stimulation in too short a period of time, too much information, too many demands on my inadequate abilities to receive, understand, tolerate and appropriately respond to information coming to me continually from the world around me — most especially when I am in contact with other people.
In other words, I am living my life now post-trauma of cancer directly with the body-brain-nervous system my MOTHER built into me before the age of two — and not with the systems that I put together, instinctively and intuitively figured out and Gerry-rigged all on my own throughout my life that allowed me to make-do with how abuse built me in the first place.
Now I live with the whole raw deal. And that is, I will note in my documentary, very often how I feel — very raw. I think about the terrific harm that was done to me while I was a developing little person. I think about the wound that has created in my trauma altered body as a consequence. I think about burned skin, how sensitive beyond belief it is, and I realize that my whole being is wounded, not my skin — at least not the OUTSIDE of my skin.
It might take generations past mine to begin to comprehend what trauma altered infant-child development really is, let alone how to truly begin to live well in spite of these changes. Meanwhile we of the current generations have to make do the best that we can — and document what we have and do experience so that our understandings can help those in the future both STOP infant-child maltreatment at the same time its survivors are respected, honored and assisted to live better with what nature gave us as a result of the terror-able tempest that was our physiological formative beginning — that enabled us to stay alive at all.
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Stop the Storm 
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