The most important work we can do, individually and globally, is the healing and prevention of traumas so that we don't pass them down to future generations. This blog is a working tool to contribute to this good work.
I think I have them all straightened out now. As I Googled myself around regarding the titles and topics represented by those links I found myself being awed for those of us severe infant-child abuse and trauma survivors who actually MOSTLY are able to function!
What a menu of terrible difficulties this area of study contains! I don’t believe there is ANYTHING more important for us as survivors to understand than the information is you will find at the end of these links.
That no professional EVER even MENTIONED how early severe trauma and neglect can change an infant-child’s physiological development is, to me, CRIMINAL!!!
There is NO, and I MEAN NO psychological or psychiatric ‘theory’ that can begin to remotely help us if it does not address the neurobiological CHANGES that happened to our growing and developing BODY on all of our levels as we survived our traumas!
The kinds of changes that are described in these articles presented in yesterday’s post are what happened to my mother, to my father — and most definitely happened to ME!
We CANNOT consider our healing as severe early abuse and trauma survivors without understanding the FACTS as these articles present them. THEORIES are of no use to us WHATSOEVER!
We have to educate ourselves with this critically important information. Any survivor who is seeing a therapist must determine if that person KNOWS this information. If they don’t, give them this actual link to my post of yesterday,
If your therapist will not listen to you about this critically important information, I would suggest that you find one that WILL! So-called ‘mental health treatment’ that does not operate for survivors from this informed foundation of information is no better than BLOODLETTING treatments for disease.
The Trauma Altered Development we endured changed our PHYSICAL body — the same one we have to live within for the rest of our life. Any treatment for a ‘physical problem’ that is not based on facts is useless!!
I know that I am not alone on this 2010 Christmas Day in my awareness that nothing special about this cultural holiday is going to alter who I am or how I am in the world as a severe infant-child abuse and trauma survivor. Forty three people have come to my Stop the Storm blog already this morning – and it for them that I offer this post because considering the lifelong forced physiological adaptations an abused-traumatized little body makes leaves us on EVERY day of our life to face its consequences.
For all of us who on this Christmas Day find ourselves having to think about this topic, I say that what follows is the tip of the iceberg of what truly happened to us as a consequence of the early infant-child severe abuse and trauma that we have survived — and that changed our physiological development.
++++++++++++++++++++
Although this article isn’t the newest one on the block (1995), I absolutely trust its foremost author, Dr. Bruce Perry, and therefore know that it is an important one for what I am thinking about today. This entire article can be read online by clicking on the following link:
“Childhood trauma has profound impact on the emotional, Behavioral, cognitive, social, and physical functioning of children. Developmental experiences determine the organization and functional status of the mature brain. The impact of traumatic experiences on the development and function of the brain are discussed in context of the basic principles of neurodevelopment. There are various adaptive mental and physical responses to trauma, including physiological hyperarousal and dissociation. Because the developing brain organizes and internalizes new information in a use-dependent fashion, the more a child is in a state of hyperarousal or dissociation, the more likely they are to have neuropsychiatric symptoms following trauma. The acute adaptive states, when they persist, can become maladaptive traits.”
Conclusions
“Children and infants use a variety of adaptive response patterns in the face of threat, and, in a use-dependent fashion, internalize aspects of these responses, organizing the developing brain. There are a variety of neuropsychiatric symptoms that result when these patterns of neural activation persist. This has implications for research, clinical assessment, intervention, and prevention.
“More important, however, is that understanding the impact of experience on the developing child by using a neurodevelopmental conceptualization offers certain directions for our culture…. Profound sociocultural and public policy implications arise from understanding the critical role of early experience in determining the functional capacity of the mature adult – and therefore our society. Persistence of the destructive myth that “children are resilient” will prevent millions of children, and our society, from meeting their true potential. Persistence of the pervasive maltreatment of children in the face of decreasing global and national resources will lead, inevitably, to sociocultural devolution.
“It need not be so.”
++
In other words, these patterns not only BUILD the brain, they are BUILT INTO the brain (and nervous system, stress-calm response system, immune system). This is the same process that Dr. Perry is describing is the one Dr. Martin Teicher concludes leads to “an evolutionarily altered brain.”
Phenomenology and Psychobiology of the Intergenerational Response to Trauma by Rachel Yehuda, PhD, Jim Schmeidler, PhD, Abbie Elkin, BA, Elizabeth Houshmand, BA, Larry Siever, MD, Karen Binder-Brynes, PhD, Milton Wainberg, MD, Dan Aferiot, MSW, Alan Lehman, MSW, Ling Song Guo, MD, Ren Kwei Yang, MD (1997)
I feel today like a survivor of an evil experiment designed to determine exactly how much a human infant-child could be deprived of and still go on living. I feel like an inhabitant of a freaks-only sideshow as I realize gradually over the span of my lifetime how completely, thoroughly and vilely abusive the first 18 years of my life truly were.
In some ways the absence of overt sexual abuse just makes my own personal experience all the stranger because that’s about all that was missing short of broken bones and actual death to make the first 18 years of my life so unique that I doubt I will ever encounter anyone who will ever be able to share with me what their own experience of a similar infant-childhood was like — or what it did to them.
My mother’s sense of her own needs for self preservation was enough to keep me from ending up at a doctor’s office or a hospital as a result of her violence toward me. That and the fact that as soon as I was old enough I participated actively with her violent beatings to prevent my body from being broken to bits as I avoided calamitous crashes into solid objects.
Yet after all the years I have spent trying to ‘get real’ about the reality of my infant-childhood, it is only now at age 59 that I am finally finding myself face-to-face with one of the most critical factors of my mother’s unique abuse of me — the solitary confinement and isolation she encapsulated me within.
As a survivor of the 18-year abuse experiment I endured, right now I would say that for all the thousands of physical beatings, for all the nearly constant verbal abuse I endured, for all the terror and sadness I felt, my reality today was probably most powerfully and negatively influenced by extreme isolation.
And again, the same as with all the other abuse my mother did to me, she isolated and confined me as early as she could after my birth — because she COULD.
My mother was perfect at what she did. She was perfect at making sure nobody interfered, nobody questioned, nobody noticed. She created the perfect prison for me, the perfect trap, the perfect living tomb that I had no hope of escaping from. She spun me into the center of her madly abusive psychosis and kept me there for 18 years.
Yet today I would say that for all the voracious physical and verbal attacks against me it was the fact that she completely disallowed me from having any meaningful human contact that was the aspect of her abuse that has most contributed to my lack of well-being. All the damage my mother did to me impacted the way my body-brain physiologically developed, but with the theft of my opportunity to engage in positive meaningful human contact nearly all of my permanent internal ‘wiring’ was created to operate within a human vacuum.
Understatement: NOT GOOD for me as a member of a social species.
Does it give me any consolation and comfort to know that, given parallel deprivation and abuse from birth, there isn’t a member of any mammal species on earth whose physiological development wouldn’t have been as equally and negatively interfered with as mine was?
No.
My only ray of hope is that there is something about my extreme and bizarre story of infant-child abuse that can offer something of vital importance to somebody about what humans truly NEED from birth to live a life of well-being.
What I would say today is that for all the different kinds of abuse, neglect, trauma and malevolent treatment little ones might be forced to endure and survive it is the deprivation of caring, positive meaningful human contact that damages us the MOST. The absence of this contact, call it safe and secure human attachment for ease of translation across the various fields of human developmental study, most detrimentally alters the physiological developing wiring in the body-nervous system-brain of an infant-child.
Given the most extreme and severe cases these changes are permanent and irreversible, and in members of our human species they are accompanied by corresponding FEELINGS of suffering and awareness of loss.
++
I don’t write to gain sympathy or pity. I write to document as accurately as I can what the long-term permanent consequences of severe abuse and deprivation from birth can and will most likely do to its survivors.
Through my own process I am clarifying what I see as priorities — no matter how severely abused an infant-child abuse survivor was. Digging around for the actual specifics of this event or that one — no matter how fundamentally overwhelmed with sorrows someone’s formative years actually were — pales in importance when compared with what we need to understand about the entire array of human contact experiences we had.
Social species’ members are NOT designed to be raised in solitary confinement or isolation. Without positive and caring human contact within our immediate circle of infant-childhood life — no matter what other abuses are going on — we cannot escape the consequences of physiological developmental changes that happen to us and leave us as outsiders in the great circle of humanity.
As I become increasingly clear about the worst damage I suffered during the 18 years of abuse I suffered from my mother, and as I reconsider some of the stories I have written of my experiences, I am realizing that it was the power my mother had to remove me from human contact that has made me continue to suffer in my life.
It was the isolation my mother enforced to keep my father, my grandmother and my siblings away from me that removed the most important resiliency factor I needed to have come out of those terribly abusive years better than I did.
It was the thousands and thousands of hours of being made to lie in my bed as a child and the thousands of hours of being stood in corners all alone while everyone else went on with their lives as if I did not exist, as if I were dead that created the internal isolation burden that I suffer most from today. It wasn’t the beatings or the terrible screaming and verbal abuse or being dragged around by my hair, not the bruises and cuts and abrasions to my flesh that damaged me most.
Well, if this is the jolly time of year I sure don’t feel one bit jolly. Family is too far away. Trying to go ‘out in public’ to make some kind of human connection is, well, just about hopeless. So here I am home alone again, as usual.
by Petr Kratochvil -- on publicdomainpictures.net
I wouldn’t MIND that so much if the ratio weren’t so completely lopsided. Maybe one percent of the time when I am ‘out there’ where the ‘other people’ are I MIGHT feel a little bit connected to someone. But like a groove worn all the way through one of those old fashioned LP vinyl records, my being alone just seems to be a fundamental fact of my existence – no matter how much I wish it (I) were otherwise.
I will go out on Christmas day to a local community dinner and that will help — in part because I know the people who have no other place to go that gather there are more like me than most people are in the world. That still won’t guarantee that I will feel CONNECTED, though, because of my lack of ability to feel connected to other people is a consequence of the serious insecure attachment pattern built into my body-brain from the time I was born (thanks to my insanely abusive mother who was able to pull off her horrific abuse of me without anyone’s intervention).
So while I would much rather be able to write of a different tale, I am left with the one that is the true one for me. It is NOT that I ‘don’t need people like other people do’ as someone told me once. It’s that I desperately need people and always have — but I honestly don’t believe I have the internal wiring necessary to ever feel true connection with others even when I am around them (with the exception of a very very very few people who are closest to me).
++
Even though I am living in the same body that trauma built during my first 18 years of life, I didn’t know THEN that I would eventually, as an adult, have to try to consciously PRETEND that my being around others is the same for me as it looks like as I watch most everyone else. In fact, I didn’t even know as an adult that I pretended to be a socially-engage-able person.
Now I know that I didn’t have a safe and secure attachment with ANYONE during my childhood — not ANYONE — and therefore all of the incredibly complex wiring didn’t get put into place for me. I can no longer genuinely pretend that being with others is remotely satisfying or soothing to me.
++
There is always The Watcher. The Watcher is not alone, of course. There are a multitude of Others who watch the Watcher. The Watcher is never truly engaged with other people. The Watcher ‘goes away’ if I am EVER truly and wholly engaged. But that is so seldom that it rarely happens.
There are The Coaches, too. There is the one that tries to help me keep up with others during social engagement, trying to give me cues to help me read other people’s social cues. I can’t keep up. I can’t trust or know or believe or act like I know what all the social cues people learned through human interactions from the time they were born even ARE — let alone how they operate and how I am supposed to respond to them.
There is a Verbal Coach who tries to help me stay in synch in conversation, tries to keep me in beat with the rhythm of the verbal exchange. The Watcher is always there watching me AND the coaches — because The Watcher has no emotion (more like a Razor’s Edge).
Mostly when I am attempting to engage with other people I am extremely aware of being The Outsider. I was an outsider in the life of my family for the first 18 years of my life. Being The Outsider is probably as natural a state for me as being an adequately engaged human social being is for most other people.
I say ‘most other people’ because the ONLY people who are not naturals in their essence at social engagement are those who were either born with rare shyness genes, autism spectrum genes (etc.), or are those of us who suffered from extreme trauma, abuse and unsafe and insecure attachment relationships — alone — birth to age one and most usually AT LEAST birth to age two while the social-emotional-preverbal language brain-nervous system was forming itself.
ALL of these people who are not ‘naturals” (with the exception of the shyness gene people as long as they were not an abused/neglected infant) are NOT native language speakers and are missing most of the most primary and fundamental human social connection body-brain wiring/circuitry necessary to truly be able to connect — and to FEEL connection to and with other people.
++
So here come the holidays. At least I am fortunate that I do not have to deal with any negative family charades which must be very difficult for severe infant-child abuse survivors that DO.
++
I used to pretend to be a socially OK person because I used to be able to BORROW the attachment patterns of other people. I was very very good at being an attachment-chameleon — which by itself was NOT a ‘bad’ thing. Being able to borrow the attachment patterns of other people enabled me NOT to abuse my own children because I could borrow the attachment abilities they were born with at the same time I was able to respond appropriately to them so that their attachments could grow and develop in safe and secure ways. Borrowing attachments also allowed me NOT to be as socially isolated all of my adult life as I am now.
I know this now, looking back from my age-59 vantage point at all the different kinds of relationships I used to be able to maintain at different stages of my adult life.
Borrowed Attachment is directly connected to having a Disorganized-Disoriented (Reactive) Insecure attachment pattern. I simply was able to organize and orient myself around other people’s attachment patterns. (And yes, as I have said before on this blog, being this dependent upon others was like being on life support. I was borrowing from them what I did not and could not have myself — like being dependent on a life support system.)
At least in my life my own insecure attachment patterns have not caused undo hardships on others. While these others might WISH that I was able to form strong, clear and sustained attachment connections with them, I simply can’t, and these others are not harmed. They are simply unable to form the kinds of connections with me that they might rather have because I cannot form attachments of my own with them.
++++
Rather than go into any more detail here about any of this, I just want to present a stark contrast to how I am feeling and to how I am as an isolated being unable to form attachments in the world (except with the ‘chosen few’ who love me enough in spite of all my difficulties).
My daughter told me of how my 9-month-old grandson attended a meeting with his mother and father today at a bank. One of the women there wanted to take the baby off so that his parents could concentrate on paper signing. Back came the woman in only a few moments with baby and his tear streaked cheeks and hearty bawling.
Back to his parents he quickly quieted back to contentment.
“Most excellent!” I assured my daughter. “That’s EXACTLY what you want the little one to be doing at this age. He is wonderfully demonstrating his secure attachment.”
I also told my daughter that a baby that will, at this age and up to around the age of one, happily go off with strangers is NOT likely to have a happy life. A healthy infant HAS to have powerfully strong safe and secure — loving and happy — attachments with its earliest caregivers FIRST AND FOREMOST because EVERYTHING else in its growth and development has already depended on this and will for the rest of its life depend on this firm, good and RIGHT foundation.
++
Given my mother’s severe Borderline (abusive) condition I never stood a chance and I will the price for what she did to my attachment system as it built itself into my growing body-brain for the rest of my life — holidays or not.
Here are a few photographs of my current adobe garden building along the west side of my house:
New 40' painted metal fence - irrigation lines going in. I cut down the two hideously ugly gnarled Quince trees here and entombed them in adobe like I did the Oleanders (in that BIG block of adobe back there) - I will build adobe planters on the dead Quince blocks! That's a piece of cedar branch sticking up there with a silver spoon wind chime a friend made years ago.New trellis being built for roses yet to come, right outside my back door. There is a small lawn area along fence here (I get nice tree shadows on the new fence) You can see the adobe block drying over the (hopefully) dead Quince Leaf compost along east fence with sleeping plants with irrigation, latest adobe 'mine' there by white buckets (looking north - new fence up there behind the El Camino) - I raked strangers' yards in town for the leaves - adobe along fence line to cut down on weeds, especially noxious Morning GloriesI would like to build a chicken coop/run in this SE back corner (this red clay is hard as cement when dry, and still can't dig this corner even when WET! I want to let chickens 'heal' this soil.)Old shed still has to go, hope to use lumber for the chicken coop/run. Want to free the Mesquite tree between shed and Mexican border fence.Front north yard, mostly in shade until the days lengthenWinter rye doing well in front
I am trying to learn how to get the big fat awful root-eating grubs out of my yard. Sustainable way is to plant peony plants that attract a wasp that lays its eggs on the grubs –
I really want this peony. It does not come from China but from the Mediterranean instead – making it better suited to high Arizona desert growing climate. Unfortunately these are $30 PER ROOT/plant!
It will take probably three summers for one of these plants to really bloom – so meanwhile I will have to try some other organic treatments against those grubs – horrible beasts!
It’s 7 a.m. now, and I’ve been waiting since 2 this morning for the sun to rise. Silly me. My waiting doesn’t make the sun come up one second earlier than it will otherwise.
Maybe my waiting is connected to my worrying, the same worrying that no doubt got me up out of bed so early this morning. I have a whole palette of things to worry about, yet worry itself seems like such a complete waste of time.
Because I already know that my insecure attachment pattern-disorder to and in the world forms the bedrock of EVERYTHING about me, I have cause to wonder this morning what the connection might be between ‘attachment’ and worry. Let’s see:
“Expectation and attachment are the worst enemies of man. These two simple words keep humanity trapped in a place of anxiety, fear and worry. Fear can only exist if you have an expectation and an emotional attachment to an outcome either happening or not happening.
In Earth society expectation and attachments are actively promoted and humanity is encouraged to adopt these as part of its psyche. Humanity is conditioned to chase after this and to chase after that. Humanity is conditioned to form emotional attachments to many different things. Yet the cost is great.
The cost is humanity suffers and its inner peace is now gone. Whenever you “expect” an outcome to happen or not happen – and it either does happen, or doesn’t happen, or doesn’t happen quickly enough, anxiety, fear and worry is created within your mental body and your emotional body. You then feel disappointment, anger, frustration, inner turmoil and suffering. Your inner peace is now gone.
It is not the outcome that stole your peace – it is your decision to have expectations and emotional attachments to a specific outcome that stole your inner peace.” (Click on above link to read the rest of this article)
++
My “inner peace,” huh? Severe early infant-child abuse survivors are not likely to have had any ‘inner peace’ built into them in the first place. Can we find it NOW? Infants don’t ‘decide’ to expect their early caregivers to do exactly THAT – take care of them!
Yet as I think about all the things I can find to worry about in the middle of the night (and in the middle of the day), I realize that every one of those worries is fundamentally about TAKING CARE OF SOMETHING, OR HAVING SOMETHING I WORRY ABOUT INVOLVE TAKING CARE OF MYSELF OR SOMEONE ELSE I CARE ABOUT.
“Where do I get the money I need to pay my heat bill? How do I get rid of those ugly finger-sized “C” shaped grubs lying in wait in my soil to eat every root of every living plant I cherish in my garden? How do I baby proof my house before my very very active 9-month-old grandson comes with his mommy to visit the first week of January? Why don’t I want to do a single dang thing for Christmas and will that make my children upset with me? How do I build yet ANOTHER stretch of fence to keep my stupid neighbors’ stupid rampaging buffalo dogs out of my yard? When I go to my early January oncologist appointment will they find my cancer is back? Etc.”
“This investigation examined the relation between perceived alienation from parents and peers, anxiety sensitivity (AS), and current worry and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) symptoms with the goal of expanding the knowledge base on factors that may contribute to the development of AS and its role in worry.”
“Creating the Capacity for Attachment looks at how we, as a society, have raised our children with the expectation that they become totally self-reliant and autonomous rather than with the hope that they have the capacity to form close, loving, intimate relationships with others.”
“This unhealthy pattern of reliance on objects is encouraged in the detached parenting styles so common in Western society, and it’s easy to see how, from this tendency, as adults we continue to seek comfort in other non-human objects, such as drugs, food, money, etc.”
“Very early on, children are generally taught not to disclose to others when feeling “weak” or scared, “needy” or alone. Many of the emotions we felt in childhood – what people call the “negative” emotions – we were taught not to share. So, we sought comfort from blankets, pacifiers, and teddy bears, and we learned not to seek comfort from our mothers, our fathers, our family. As we got too old for blankets and teddy bears, we turned instead to other comforts – food, alcohol, money, etc. As adults, we struggle with holding our emotions within because we fear that by sharing our inner souls with others, we will – as in childhood – be discounted, dismissed, or denied.”
“Many people spend their lives feeling like nobody hears their cries – they feel alone, afraid, and powerless. When children are not responded to, in their earliest and most primary relationships, they learn that their thoughts and feelings are burdensome to others and that their needs are shameful. As adults, these same people often go underground with their feelings and seek comfort in substances. Or, alternately, these same people become so vocal in their neediness that, again, they are met with disdain from others and go on to find comfort, as well, in non-human substances.”
++++
OK, I get it – yet again. Worrying about the fact that I worry is just another piece of my insecure attachment puzzle. Dropping the worry bundle and looking at myself instead as a whole person living in and with a body that was altered in its development due to terrible trauma as I grew this body in the first place allows me to look up at the brightening skyline with hopes that today I will heal some part of myself rather than worrying that I won’t.
While I have not spent time sitting down to further contemplate the amazing attachment-compassion article I posted the link to earlier (Attachment, Caregiving, and Altruism: Boosting Attachment Security Increases Compassion and Helping), I haven’t stopped thinking about it. Because ‘exploration’ really describes our entire LIFE actions, I believe it is the end-product of the quality of early attachment patterns that build our body-brain. This article also clearly describes how our ability to feel compassion and empathy, and to ACT response-ably with the information we receive in relationship with all of life — and in some small way this post is about that compassion.
(I add a WARNING to this post that it contains descriptions that might be difficult for some people to read!)
Yesterday I received transportation to a doctor’s appointment for a bone density scan from a medical agency. The driver, I will call him Fred, was a 73 year old man who talked about himself on that 75-mile round trip.
As I sat down to write this post I realized that for all the difficulties I have been describing recently about my inability to process verbal information when I am under stress/distress/duress, when I feel OK (as per the article noted above) I have a GIFTED ability to listen to what I will call ‘genuine people’ who are speaking from their heart.
After some of these kinds of conversations I later wonder why I didn’t respond with ‘this or that’, yet I realize that it is often another person’s NEED to simply speak and receive the listening I have to offer.
We were traveling in the medical transport van past the low-lying hills that crop up at the tail end of a line of higher mountains along the highway. Perhaps there was something about Fred’s gazing along the rising hills that reminded him about what he spoke of next.
Fred told me that from childhood hunting had been an important part of his life. He told me that among his many truck driving jobs he drove for a cement mixer company. One day (I think about 20 years ago) as he was delivering a load out to a house in the desert he was gazing along the road to the right and then as he turned his head to the left he saw them coming.
Out of the desert shrubbery right at the edge of the highway appeared in a line five pure white puppies heading straight out in front of him. He told me there was no possible way he could swerve that massive loaded truck to miss them, and sure enough, ‘thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk’ he heard the sound of each of them being crushed to death under the wheels of the truck he was driving.
++
As the writers of the above article describe compassion, it was evident to me as this man who had been a complete stranger to me when he picked me up at my house for medical transport must have had the need to express to SOMEONE the fact that he has never hunted again since that day. As he told me all of this tears were streaming down his face. He said he sold his $8,000 gun collection to his son for $1,000, having kept for his own possible need only one handgun.
I wondered to myself if this man could ever possibly shoot another person even under the most extreme circumstances. Then I thought perhaps he could do so if his beloved wife was threatened. At the same time I marveled at Fred’s wide-open expression of absolute sorrow for his actions the day he killed those five pure white puppies.
++
Now, my next image — not a pretty one at first glance but an important one to me nonetheless…..
I shed my town clothes as soon as I arrived home around noon yesterday and put on my work clothes to go outside and work on my adobe garden. I am preparing an adobe walkway that runs along the western line of my back yard, along the new tall metal fence I just built where it runs along behind the big ‘berm’ I built to kill those ancient monster oleander bushes.
The desert soil here is now extremely dry and hard and cannot be dug into unless it is first thoroughly soaked with water. In preparation for this next extension of my adobe work I laid the gray water hose from my outside-perched washing machine along the fence the other day and let that water do its work so I could follow with mine.
I am well aware that there are parts of my yard that I am digging into now that include soil that has never been dug into since time began making it millions of years ago. Even though I live in a small town, there is something profound for me in knowing that.
As I dug into an area of dark red clay (normally hard as cement when dry) I began to find ‘stored’ frogs sleeping. One by one as I dumped a load of soil off of my shovel and found these tiny guests in my yard I picked them up quickly and cupped them gently in my stiff black plastic work gloves so I could move them as fast as possible over to one of my damp, soft compost areas in my garden.
As I carried them each I talked to them, thanking them for being, and for being here. I apologized for bothering them, and wished them a long happy winter sleeping now in a safer place where they will not be further disturbed by my digging. (My compost areas are covered with layers of leaves I have raked up in town and hauled out here, and are being kept moist through a drip irrigation set-up I have carefully installed in each bed full of worms.)
++
As I dug along the fence yesterday I began to hear myself telling me that the odds were pretty dang good that one of the times I stuck my shovel edge into that red clay I would sooner or later accidentally kill a frog. I thought about Fred and his story about the five puppies. I told myself to prepare myself for this possibility.
Five dug-up frogs later it happened, I am very sad to say. I saw the little frogs movements within the dirt on the end of my shovel and yet again reached for its little body to save it. Oh, dear! —
Now I only tell you this because there is something here I believe is important (again, what opportunities all traumas offer us for learning something new in a new and different way — if we can).
That little frog a-wiggling its body was upside-down in the loosened dark red dirt on my shovel. I could tell it was trying by flailing its little legs to right itself, to turn itself right-side up — to right itself, to restore its ‘normal orientation’. So I reached to help it, gently moving the dirt from around its body — at the same time I realized — Oh, dear! — that the tiny little being was missing its head.
++++
Of course I will always feel bad when I think of this, just like Fred does about those puppies. I wondered this morning about both Fred and myself, and about self-compassion and forgiveness — and about whether or not we can ever release ourselves from the feelings we have if we hurt another life in some way.
I don’t know.
But what came to me about the frog reminds me of the writings on healing our woundedness from trauma that Diana Fosha writes about in regards to attachment. I remember that she says every living being knows exactly how to heal itself — given a possible chance. She says that human attachment-related body-brain wiring remains in existence in us from before we were born — no matter how traumatized we were later by our earliest caregiver interactions of trauma, neglect and abuse.
Fosha says we all know HOW TO RIGHT OUR SELF INSTINCTIVELY in the same way we can all look at a picture hanging askew on a wall and INSTANTLY know which way to move it to RIGHT it — to make it RIGHT.
++
One of the things that strikes me about the headless frog was that EVEN WITHOUT ITS HEAD its BODY absolutely knew that it was upside down. Its body knew exactly what to do to make its body RIGHT by taking body actions to turn itself over.
Yes, this is all unsettling — and perhaps a bit preposterous in what I am concluding from my strange line of experience yesterday. There seems to be something about the words Fred spoke to me yesterday — and something about his obvious caring emotional compassionate nonverbal expressions — that primed me for what happened as I dug in my backyard.
It seems very likely to me that we all know instinctively IN OUR BODY exactly what we need so that we can heal. In our culture, what we learn IN OUR BRAIN-thoughts is probably likely to interfere with what we actually need to do for ourselves to heal. How do we listen to our own BODY as it tells us what it remembers both about all that has happened to us AT THE SAME TIME it can tell us what it needs so that it can heal?
++
I am going back out today to work some more on that walk way — at the same time I don’t really know how to miss harming another little friend-frog as I do so. Digging just carries that risk — and I can not set aside the softness I feel for those frogs even though I am going to run the risk of a repeat from yesterday. I will be as care-full as I can at the same time I know that living carries risk — for all of us. And sometimes it carries healing.
I found an excellent, very informative article (2005) online today as I was searching for the ‘difference between empathy and compassion’ as they relate to attachment. The article represents the thoughts of an Israeli and three American researchers, and is titled:
These researchers use the attachment measures for amounts of anxiety about attachment and avoidance of attachment. Anxiety and avoidance are found in the insecure attachment patterns – and are absent in the secure attachment patterns.
This article takes some thoughtful time to read, but is well worth the investment. There is a lot of information here, and as I read it I could place people I know and have known along the dimensions the authors describe as I realized that people FIT PATTERNS of attachment that then makes them very much like one another depending on these pattern types.
I am too tired at the moment to say anything more right now, but I hope you follow the above link and take a look at this article. I hope to spend some more time taking notes in a few days as I process the information this article contains.
Depending on the variety of early caregivers around us that we could form attachments to — or not — our body-brain development was set down a course before we were one year old along the attachment pattern dimensions this article describes.
Once we reach adulthood these patterns, built right into our physiology, can be extremely difficult to change. I believe that for the most part people with the avoidant dimensions of insecure attachment live their lives in such a way that they can appear cold and self-absorbed and don’t seem to even know it, let alone care. On the other hand, people with the anxiety related insecure attachment patterns are far more likely to KNOW there is something wrong so they are most commonly the people who might identify their problems so that they can find new ways to relate to others.
It is important for me to understand the reality of my own words. If I wish to write about the intergenerational transmission of unresolved trauma – most usually through abuse and neglect of offspring (as well as through the epigenetic transmission of trauma-caused genetic changes) I have to know where my own limitations are.
Through my recent thought processes about writing a book I am coming to understand that it will most probably be my daughter who will need to ‘step up to the plate’ and accomplish that task. I have presented the idea to her very clearly and in her very busy schedule at present, she is considering my request.
I know that I more than cringe at the thought of relegating the lifelong consequences for infant-children who are/were raised under the burden of active transmission of intergenerational trauma through abuse to the professional categories of ‘mental illness diagnostic categories’. As a very severe infant-abuse survivor I now understand that my entire physiological development was altered through trauma exposure, I now understand that I am NOT ill I am simply different from those who were raised in the ‘pampered’ worlds of love, safety, security and supportive attachments to caregivers.
It is my job from the place I hold in the generation chain of my family to understand as fully as I can what happened to me that changed me, what those changes are, what living with those changes is like, and how learning new information about what ALL of this means will contribute to all of the positive changes I seek.
As I define how my language development, along with its social-emotional body-brain developmental channels has been changed through trauma, I realize that I do not speak the common language of ‘the masses’ and I never will. I realize that this limits my ability to write a book that will accomplish the goals I hope for.
As I understand that ‘mental illness’ is NOT what about I am coming to recognize that a sociological rather than a psychological or psychiatric perspective would be the most accurate frame of reference for every word a book about my topic needs. My daughter is a professional sociologist, and is also a professional researcher, interviewer and writer. She is also has a gift for language.
Looking back as far as I can at the chain of my family’s history that directly impacted the severe abuse trauma I experienced I can point vaguely to my mother’s grandmother, more clearly at my mother’s mother, VERY clearly at my own mother, most clearly at myself, and from there I see my daughter who now has her first child, my first grandchild.
It is HER perspective as the survivor of being MY daughter that matters to me most, and from there it matters to me how what my daughter knows is impacting the raising of her children (which of course also involves her husband).
In recognizing my limitations I am understanding that I AM NOT THE BRIDGE. I have continued to work as hard as I possibly can ALL OF MY LIFE at surviving as a trauma altered individual to the best of my ability. I have massive amounts of information, and through a very tailored interview process that my daughter can orchestrate and accomplish, I can transmit that information to HER — and she can write ‘the book’.
I can never physiologically take my feet out of the burning building that represents what is left of the edifice of intergenerational transmission of trauma that came to me through my father. My daughter has some ‘smoke inhalation’ problems from being raised as my daughter (mostly due to my depression at the time she was born that altered my patterns of interactions with her). But I did not abuse my children (with one exception noted), and there is NO WAY in the known or unknown universe that my grandchildren will EVER be abused in any possible way.
With every fiber of my being I hope that my daughter decides to undertake this mission I ask of her. For all my recurring discouragement that overtakes me at times because the more I understand my story the more I realize that it was so unique in its trauma that probably very, very few people can truly relate to or find anything useful in what I have to say, the more I realize that THIS FACT IS EXACTLY WHAT WOULD MAKE THE TELLING OF MY STORY a BEST SELLER.
If there is anyone on earth that can find a helpful common threat between what I have experienced (and what I know about the consequences of those experiences) so that something can come out of the ‘fire’, be polished and perfected, and then passed onto others in the form of useful information for their betterment, it is my daughter.
I cannot consider any part of my story without fully understanding that it was the job of the society I was born into to rescue and protect me. My story exists as it does because my society failed me as much as my mother and father (and grandmother) did.
That ‘arm’ of intergenerational trauma transmission HAS to be addressed head-on, and as far as I can tell that is a sociological issue. My daughter can do that, also.
In addition, translating the language I know as a society of one into the language of the many is also a job I cannot do, but she can. She will also be able to address how language forms a fundamental core of society itself.
All I can do now is hope, pray and wait…….. It is her decision. It will require great dedication — and time — and effort — on her part to help me with this vital project. Nothing on this earth would make me feel happier than for her to decide “Yes.”
Stop the Storm 
You must be logged in to post a comment.