Category: Child Abuse

Child abuse and the lifelong plague

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Child abuse is most often linked to a cycle, but when considering a cycle where do we break into the loop to start our investigation?

I want to make the point that what comes around goes around – but it all starts somewhere so can also end somewhere.

Before someone figured out that rats carried the plague nobody could attack the terrible problem at its roots. I believe that we have to, as parents and adults, recognize the true reality of our own childhood traumas so that we can understand how they have impacted us. Child abuse does not just hurt little people. When those little people grow up they carry those wounds with them for the rest of their lives. So far, I don’t see that we understand exactly how these consequences are all linked together. Advances in developmental neuroscience tell us that child abuse, especially to infants and the very young during brain developmental changes, in fact gives the survivor a brain built for a malevolent rather than a benevolent world.

Until we educate ourselves about this fact we are in effect killing the horses and sparing the rats that are the cause of the plague among us in the first place. A malevolently-formed brain is designed for a different world. If we don’t understand this we are screaming our loudest across a chasm trying to change those who hurt the little ones without realizing they truly aren’t able to hear what we are saying to them. Their brains hear and understand information differently. It’s our job to face this truth so that we can find a way to reach the abusers who were themselves abused. Otherwise – and obviously – the cycle is not only continuing but is growing in force and magnitude.

Most of the time we are ‘preaching to the choir’ about child abuse.  Those 50% at the top of the heirarchy who came from safe and secure childhoods are screaming to those down below about what to do and what not to do.  Those at the very bottom can never hear those words.  It’s time we empower those at the bottom, those who had truly horrific childhoods from birth, to know their own reality and do their own screaming from the bottom up.  Will those at the top hear us?

HOW DID THE ABUSE CHANGE US?

alchemynow3 Comments

The fact that children raised from birth (and trauma can happen from conception due to changes communicated to the infant from the condition of the mother’s body if SHE is stressed) end up with changed brains, nervous and immune systems that have been prepared for survival in a hostile, toxic, traumatic, dangerously malevolent world does not mean that we grow up to be hurtful or malevolent people ourselves.  It does not mean that we will grow up to perpetrate against or victimize others, not even our own children.

It simply means that because nature has the ability to enable us to make physical adjustments within our bodies (including internal relationships between our body, our self and the world) and including even the expression of our DNA on an ongoing basis long after the abuse has ended — that we had to develop differently AS we survived the abuse from birth.

It is not only because of the abuse that we are now different, but we are different BECAUSE we survived it.  There was only these two alternatives:  Either adapt and adjust our development so that we could BE in the world (as in “To be or not to be”) or we would have ceased to exist.

As Dr. Allan Schore repeats in his writings over and over again, an infant is driven to “go on being” no matter how traumatic the circumstances are that surround it during its development.  The fact that we HAVE survived has turned out for many of us to be both our blessing and our curse.

We have been turned lose in a ‘benevolent’ world in which we are expected to function just like everyone else (in my section on ATTACHMENT I will describe in detail the approximate breakdown of percentages about how many of us actually grow up in a secure ‘good enough’ home and how many of us don’t — and what happens to our development in the storm).

Our changed body, brain, nervous system and immune system mean that we are literally geared differently than those who were told through their experiences that the world was a safe and secure place.  My intention is to describe what our differences mean to us as we try to get through every day of our lives.

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