Category: Depression

+WORDS DO NOT MEAN SOCIAL CONNECTION TO ME – THEY ARE OBJECT-TOOLS-WEAPONS

alchemynow3 Comments

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I know I better write a post right now before I head out to do some serious adobe work in my garden today because if I don’t track the process of my thinking at this moment I know I will soon make such a quantum leap in what I know about myself, my trauma altered development that happened because of the severe infant-child abuse I experienced, dissociation and my language development that I will never be able to go back and track how my conclusions about the connections between all these vitally important topics actually arrived.

As I ‘play around with’ the experiences I had last week with the medical clinic, and as I anticipate the medically-related appointments that I am going to have to go through in the near future, and as I sift through the facts of MY experience to gain information about what happened last week I am finding myself headed straight for some amazing discoveries.

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Much of what I experience as dissociation when I am engaged in a stressful situation with people who actually escalate my stress response rather than sooth it — dissociation that includes an inability to hear spoken language, to process verbal information or to even THINK in words (the blank state) — is directly related to the way my physiological development was affected by severe trauma from birth.

The trauma that matters most to me as I consider the consequences of it that I live with DAILY at age 59 happened from birth to age two.  I have focused much of my writing so far on this blog on the critically important right-limbic-social-emotional brain development that happens directly through early attachment relationships with caregivers.

I have to move forward now in my thinking to age two.

While there are specific developmental stages and milestones that happen during this second year of life, the one I want to look at right now has to do with the continuation of the development of LANGUAGE.

An infant begins its breathing life with the ability to send and receive signals in the form of PREVERBAL communication.  All ‘attachment’ interactions with early caregivers happen on the level (from the infant’s point of view) of this PREVERBAL communication.

An infant’s caregiver is also using NONVERBAL and VERBAL communication signals with the infant.  As the infant’s body-nervous system-brain grows and develops, its physiology has been built by the PATTERNS of the earliest (attachment) interactions.  These patterns literally tell the DNA and the cells of the infant’s body WHAT TO DO.

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As an infant moves toward the acquisition of WORDS and the ability to understand and use them, it uses ALL the patterns that have been built into it as ‘traffic flow channels’ for its growing abilities to communicate.

If everything the infant has experienced has happened in an extremely traumatic, abusive, neglectful environment of malevolence, chaos, unpredictability and NONEXISTENT contact between the infant’s SELF and its caregiver, the infant’s ENTIRE REPERTOIRE INVOLVING VERBAL LANGUAGE HAS ALREADY BEEN SENT DOWN A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PATHWAY than the kind a safely and securely attached infant’s has.

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‘Ordinary people’ are familiar with part of what I wish to describe if they think about trying to communicate with a police official after a serious car accident, or if they think about how words failed them in an important interview, or failed them at the moment they received a cancer diagnosis.

This tells me that the ‘dissociatable’ regions of the human brain that can separate emotional experience from verbal articulation (both spoken and in thinking abilities) is perfectly POSSIBLE for everyone.

What happens to me is that I experience these changes in how words include themselves in my ongoing experience at times that ‘ordinary people’ would NEVER experience.  That is the difference between how I operate and how they do — not that ‘I dissociate words from my experience’ and they do not.

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Researchers know that a ‘bad mother rat’ is a nervous, over amped-stress response rat who will NOT LICK HER OFFSPRING like a safely and securely NON stressed mother rat will.

Researchers also know that if they switch offspring between a high licking rat mother and a low licking mother (meaning highly stressed and nonstressed), the offspring RAISED by either of these types of mothers will build into their developing physiology the corresponding high or low stress level responses.

Researchers now know that the degree of stressed-out response in the offspring is NOT due to genetics.  It is due to the ability an offspring’s body has to alter its physiological development in direct response to the nature of the environment is is formed by and in.

In human terms we can translate this very basic fact into what happens to infants raised in secure, safe, loving, appropriate, adequate MOTHER-early caregiving environments versus those who are raised in opposite conditions.

Severe infant abuse and neglect constitutes a LOW LICKING environment — which is the same as a HIGH STRESS environment.

Most simply put, there is NO POSSIBLE WAY THAT THESE CONTRASTS IN ENVIRONMENTS COULD NOT AFFECT AN INFANT’S LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT.

The stages of preverbal to nonverbal to verbal development are directly affected by the level of stress and trauma present or absent from an infant’s universe during its most critical windows of early physiological development.

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Now, to switch thinking tracks:  There are language development experts who look back over the word-utilizing history of the human species who see in our verbal-language development a pattern that suggests the following.

Many other living creatures (bats and primates included) have the same gene that humans eventually made use of to develop our ability to TALK.

This is the FOXP2 gene.

Researchers believe that it was ONLY about 140,000 years ago that this gene was activated in humans so that it could directly alter the development of our brain AND OUR LARYNX so that we could begin to talk.

All the interactions that mother’s have with their offspring are part of how this ability evolves in all of us now as they are directly tied to the development of our infant body-brain in our earliest attachment caregiving universe.

Some researchers also believe that once the world became benign enough that more early humans had safety and security to spend more time sitting around socializing with one another — which amounts to GROOMING BEHAVIOR in both primates and rats.

The quality of grooming behavior in both primates and rats is used as a measurement of HIGH and LOW stress.

It is evidently very possible that humans began to utilize their FOXP2 gene simply to expand their ability to sooth, bond and communicate with one another — researchers refer to this in humans as GOSSIP — with spoken language as an advancement over gesture that could then include more people within the circle of communicative signaling — or GOSSIP.

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Human infants, as they interact with their earliest caregivers, are engaged in a mutual dance of signaling communication — sending and receiving — with their caregivers.  In abusive, neglectful, traumatic and malevolent early infant environments, the signaling DOES NOT GO ACCORDING TO OPTIMAL PLAN.

The infant’s language-communication-signaling patterns are therefore correspondingly altered within its physiological body-brain development.

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Use of signaling in patterns of listening and responding (rupture and repair) in ‘healthy’ early attachment environments are tied to the development of emotional regulation abilities in an infant’s growing right-emotional-limbic brain AT THE SAME TIME that this same brain region is also developing its SOCIAL-emotional patterns.

Because I was abused and traumatized from birth I did not participate in ‘normal or ordinary’ preverbal or nonverbal communication patterns with my caregivers.  There was no possible way that my physiology could pattern itself AS IF I had magically grown them in a safe, secure, optimal or even adequate environment.

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I therefore suggest that for every single person who has been given the so-called ‘mentally ill diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder’ and that KNOWS that something was NOT OK in their early infant-caregiver interactions that DISSOCIATION as it includes the component of verbal communication with others and within our self in our thoughts HAS BEEN CHANGED right along with all our other Trauma Altered Development.

What happened to me the other day at the medical clinic has also highlighted a critically important point to me:  When I was born nobody gave a single solitary HOOT about what I needed.  They didn’t respond to me as if I existed as a human being at all.  Because all my patterns of communication included patterns of abuse and trauma, I DID NOT DEVELOP A RIGHT BRAIN THAT INCLUDES ‘NORMAL OR ORDINARY’ use of preverbal and nonverbal social-emotional cuing.

What this means to me when push comes to shove NOW is that — as a component of my nonattachment reality tied to the so-called insecure Reactive Attachment Disorder or Disorganized-Disoriented attachment disorder — is that not only can I NOT include ‘normal’ nonverbal social communication cues in MY communication to others, I cannot read the ones they send to me, either.

In the end — I DO NOT CARE ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE.  That level of signaling caring was NOT built into my infant (birth to 2) physiology during my precursory stages of verbal language ability.

Nobody cared about ME so very realistically, how could CARING possibly have been included in my language acquisition physiological patterning?  (This is part of the ’empathy disorder’ Dr. Allan Schore describes as a component of all insecure attachment disorders within the 45% of our population that has some version of one.)

Because the ability to include EMOTIONALLY relevant information and to read its signals and clues was not a part of my preverbal-nonverbal-verbal physiological development, the bottom line TO ME is that I am excluded from the highly developed human social specie’s GROOMING and GOSSIPING behavior.  I was not born into an environment that included me as a PART OF THE GROUP to be safely and securely attached to and within.

The solitary confinement and isolation I experienced due to my mother’s abuse continued to one degree or another to profoundly affect me through my entire 18 year childhood.  (No play included.)

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Language – spoken and nonverbal — not only does not work the same in my body-brain, it does not mean the same to me as it no doubt does to ‘ordinary people’, either.

Although I obviously am able to understand words themselves, I do not believe that my language abilities are wired into me in anything like a normal way when it comes to interactions with members of my species.  And who the hell else would CARE if I could talk or not?

I am an excluded-from-ordinary person, and my latest clarity of discovery is that THIS is perhaps one of the MOST IMPORTANT consequences of being raised from birth so that my development was physiologically patterned in and by trauma.

I am excluded from being truly attached in my lifetime to members of my species who developed normal and ordinary language abilities.

This does leave me to wonder if I could learn more about how I am in the world by coming to understand how language develops in people who are blind and/or deaf from birth (and Autism-spectrum brain holders).  These people also would have to move through the preverbal-nonverbal-verbal developmental stages differently.

But even here, it would only be those who were NOT LOVED or treated kindly in safe and secure attachment earliest caregiving infant environments that would have experienced the kind of base-line, bottom-up truly altered right-limbic-emotional-social-preverbal brain development that I did.

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So when my stress response is activated like it was at the clinic last week, other people can feel extremely threatened and defensive around me and interaction with me because we are from completely different worlds when it comes to the use of words.

Words are simply a tool to me — to be used as a tool to accomplish an end.  I was not built with words included in my development to be primarily about exchanges involving emotion between people that belong to and in a human group (involving degrees of social bonding).

I believe the more I clarity I can gain about this topic the more I might be able (if I am willing) to NOT move very quickly between using words as TOOLS and using these TOOLS as weapons.  This means to me that words are OBJECTS to me — and I suspect this happens for me on very deep, profound, fundamental levels of my Trauma Altered physiology.

I tried to explain to the doctor at the clinic that all stress has to be deescalated in that environment for me to begin to understand verbal exchange.  I also know that written words are ACTUALLY my primary language.

Social-emotional spoken language exchange, with its normal roots in preverbal and nonverbal language development, IS NOT MY FIRST OR MY PRIMARY LANGUAGE.

If this fact is true for many people with the a so-called ‘anxiety-dissociation diagnosis of mental illness’ — what I am saying is IN HIGH NEED OF SCIENTIFIC VALIDATION.

If what I am discovering about myself as a survivor of extreme early and long-term infant-child abuse is correct, much of the ‘mystery’ and therefore of the social stigma based on misunderstanding about DISSOCIATION can be traced back to Trauma Altered Development as it affected our ability to communicate with others of our species AND MOST IMPORTANTLY in verbal cognition-verbal thought WITHIN OUR OWN SELF.

When I ‘go blank’ during ‘dissociation’ I have followed back a track of development in my physiology that moves far more quickly to a place where words do not exist in information gathering and processing interactions or transactions (either with others or within my own thoughts).

The ONLY hope-for-balm to heal this in the moment it happens would be for all around me to recognize INSTANTLY the need to erase all threat of harm and stress from the encounter.  More importantly, once the ‘dissociation’ involving my altered language processing happens, it is too late to fix it at that moment.

AWARENESS that allows for proactive prevention of the conditions that lead to this dissociation of word meaning from language transaction would be most helpful, along with the very real understanding that I, and others who were abused as infants like I was, do not have the ‘ordinary’ connection between emotional information and ‘verbal fact’.

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It struck me after I published this post that one powerful effect of my mother’s horrific verbal abuse of me all of my life is that I KNOW what the end product of words as object-tools-weapons REALLY can mean.  All verbal abuse survivors know this.  But when it comes to the ADDITION of terrible verbal abuse as it bombards an infant that is ALSO being neglected, physically abuse and traumatized, there is no possible way that profound physiological development of language abilities can be avoided.

We survivors of trauma on these most profound language-development levels are therefore language exiles from our species and are probably ONLY able to truly communicate with survivors whose brain-language abilities were built with these same altered preverbal-nonverbal-verbal physiological Trauma Altered patterns.

This all must tie in on the deepest human physiological levels with the reasons why it is the ability or disability to tell one’s life narrative ‘coherently’ according to compliance with or ‘incoherently’ in deviation from Grice’s conversational maxims that is the foundation of the assessment tool used to determine a secure versus insecure attachment pattern-system-disorder in adults.  (Adult Attachment Assessment Interview)

Those of us raised in extremely malevolent early attachment environments did not have the same communication ‘rules’ built into our body-brain.  We do NOT, therefore, speak the same language as do those who were not equally as exposed to severe trauma during critical early physiological developmental stages.

(To know a LANGUAGE is a far more complex and expansive operation than simply knowing a collection of WORDS.  There are, for example, nearly 3000 words in this post, but I believe it is only those who have some ‘cultural immersion’ experience in the universe of severe infant-child abuse trauma that will know exactly what I am actually talking about here!)

The Meaning in Words by Dr. Bruce Perry

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+FACTS OF THE MATTER

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I am more convinced today than I have ever been in my life that no one would arbitrarily ever choose to wake up one day and write what I have to say.  I offer a prayer every night of my life that something I present on this blog will help someone else.  For all those infant and child abuse survivors who have NO POSSIBLE ACCESS to any kind of therapy let alone access to the quality of therapy we survivors ACTUALLY need, I say, “Never give up!  Never surrender!  Never stop standing up and sticking up for yourself!  Listen to your inner voice that tells you what YOU KNOW AS FACT about who and how you are in the world!”

For all the terrible abuse I suffered during my first 18 years of life, I somehow still fundamentally believe that the world is a good place, that other people care, that if we stay alive long enough we will find the truth we need to make sense out of what happened to us — somehow — and that things CAN get better than they are now.

When people search online using terms that matter the most to them, asking questions for which no answer has YET turned up that feels like the right key that will open the lock of their deepest understandings, I want them to find something on this blog that matches their search.  I want to add something truthful and useful into the great pot of ‘this is what infant-child abuse TRULY DID to its survivors’.

‘Professionals’ can argue all they want amongst themselves about which diagnostic slot to drop us into.  The fact of the matter is that if we have troubles that might bring us to anyone’s attention in the first place, what we suffer from — no matter what slot THEY decide to drop us into — is Trauma Altered Development that changed the patterns of our physiological development on profound levels that affect us for our lifetime.

If these same professionals ever choose to turn the brilliant light of their intelligence upon this fact, then and only then will the kind of assistance we need in order to understand ourselves and to improve our well-being as Trauma Altered Development beings will begin to rise to the surface as it becomes available to those of us who need it most.

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+MY MOTHER AS A ‘BORDERLINE CHILD’ – HER GOOD/BAD STORY

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I believe that within the ending sentence of this story my mother wrote when she was ten years old (1935) lies a powerful clue to the continuing demise of my mother’s mind that led to the terrible abuse she was later to perpetrate against me as ‘the devil’s child who could do no right’ at the same time she relegated to my younger sister the status of being ‘God’s child who could do no bad’.

Both my sister and I became projections from her own disturbed externalized-mind.

From all the stories my mother told us from her own childhood, her mother also created a profound dichotomous split in her feelings toward and treatment of my mother as the ‘bad’ child and her brother as the ‘good’ one

I am presenting this post as my own response to my previous post

+THE TIN WOMAN’S BRAIN: INFANT-CHILD ABUSE AND DISSOCIATING EMOTION FROM FACT

because from my point of view my mother COULD NOT dissociate or differentiate ’emotion from fact’, while I, as the woman created in response-reaction to the profound continual abuse she perpetrated against me for 18 years experience an in-built (in response to developing a body-brain in my mother’s environment of terror and trauma) ability to certainly dissociate emotional information from factual information when my dissociation is triggered in reaction to stress/duress in the environment.

In what might appear to be a bizarre twist of consequence, I would suggest that my mother DID have one of the ‘organized’ insecure attachment patterns (extreme preoccupation) while I, in response to her insane abuse, ended up with primarily a ‘disorganized’ insecure attachment pattern.

My mother’s inability to differentiate or dissociate emotion from fact (although ‘fact’ was tied to her OWN reality) ended up creating within her brain-mind a condition that was designed to enable her to tolerate what would have otherwise completely overwhelmed her.  She was able to contain her own ‘rejected in-tolerate-able badness’ by including me as an externalized projection of her own mind by projecting all of ‘her badness’ onto me.  That entire process was about her EMOTION being absolutely and permanently confused with FACT (so that she could not differentiate between the two) — and I was forced to pay the price.  Her entire being was ‘organized’ around the profound splitting of good from bad that my mother was unable to recognize.

Neither I nor any of my siblings continued this good-bad splitting with our children.

Because my mother perpetrated continual horrendous abuse against me, I was not able to form an ‘organized’ attachment around anyone including my own self.  It’s like my mother was able to create and absolute vacuum that she placed me within that removed from me any ability to develop my own self whatsoever.

As a consequence, my body-brain was designed and built in this environment of trauma ONLY to ‘react’ to the continual threat, violence and danger that was my mother as I knew her.  I could not possibly ‘organize’ my own self within my environment or take anything but the most basic actions during the first 18 years of my life.  Everything else about me was a reaction to her abuse.

Nearly all my efforts to become an ‘organized oriented self’ and to take action on my own behalf as I grew up were thwarted with very few notable exceptions (my feelings about our Alaskan mountain homestead and my childhood-built ability to learn objective facts).  As a result, I have a ‘disorganized-disoriented’ and ‘reactive’ insecure attachment pattern.

I KNOW I suffered abuse ‘profound enough’ to ‘earn’ me my own diagnosis of the attachment patterns I describe here.  In part due to the ‘solitary confinement’ and extreme isolation my mother enforced upon me I suffer from the Reactive Attachment Disorder component of nonattachment.  (See:   Reactive Attachment Disorder in Adults and Child Abuse and Neglect, Reactive Attachment Disorder)  I react profoundly to all stimulation/information I am exposed to in my external environment.  I believe my mother’s reactions were to the universe created in her brain-mind well before she was old enough to write this story.

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Jane and Charles were sitting on the porch wondering what to do outside little snowflakes were playing tag about.

Jane looked up. Their was her mother she said come and get cleaned up. For we are going to call on Uncle Robert. The two children jumped up quickly for they know that he would tell them a story. They jumped into the car and drove up the snowy road the trees wer covered with snowflakes they stopped at a farm rover came to meet them he barked a welcoming. Uncle Robert got up from the chair where he was reading and met them at once.  Jane and Charles [she had Jimmy written in and crossed it out to put in Charles] asked if he would tell them a story he said yes they sat around the fireplace and Uncle Robert began.

Uncle Robert Tells a Story

He started long long ago a bear had three cubs their names were blackie curly and last of all mischievous this he was named because he was always up to some prank this time his mother was going away he told the three little cubs to stay in their cave blackie and curly did but Mischievous did not Blackie and Curly warned him. But this cub was like some children thought he know it all nothing can hurt me he said boldly he trotted down the path not knowing the danger ahead of him.

He looked around not knowing where he was going or thinking about it. He was following a trickling [actually written trickting] brook it was singing him a melody [actually written moldy] of bells.

The cub was so concerned on the music and tree and things around him that he did not [three letter word scratched out here] hear footsteps behind him a hunter was creaping along in the bushes on the other side.

Now let us see what is in the cave of mother bear blackie cub was badly frightened for he knew the dangers ahead of his little brother. Curly meanwhile was having a feast of berrys. Little footsteps entered the cave mother bear was home she looked around yes their was Curly and Blackie but Mischievous [she actually abbreviated this to Mis.] was no where to be seen. Oh mother bear cried where is my mischievous [again abbreviated to mis.] little cub curly cried I told him to stay. Blackie who was [misspelled crying here and scratched it out] crying hard said I told and told him but he said nothing would happen to him no time to cry there’s only time to hunt said mummy bear so out they all went to hunt for Mischievous [again, mis.].

Mischievous [mis.] did not know that they were hunting for him all he thought about was where the little running brook stopped and of how many berries he could [spelled correctly after written wrongly and crossed out] eat the hunter was thinking about how he could catch little Mischievous [Mis.] without harming him, for he wanted [written wan’t] to catch Mischievous [Mis.] and put him in the zoo [spelled zo] for he know he would get a [crossed out and rewritten] lot of money for him.

Oh mother and Blackie and Curly saw the hunter and all three jumped right infront of him for they all three saw Mischievous [Mis.] and that is why they all jumped right infront of the hunter oh he was so startled he jumped higher and quicker than Mother Bear Curly and Blackie had the hunter took head to heals and ran as fast as he had [word correction, crossed out and rewritten] jumped.

Now said Mother Bear, Mischievous [Mis.] come with me and ended Uncle Robert. I don’t think you would like to hear what happened in the cave that night but I will tell you I heard some little bear yells and I know that Mischievous [Mis.] name was changed to sonny bear and don’t you know why? I will tell you because he was always behaving his mother and being sunshiny to people.

[two duplicate sentences are written at the top of this next page that do not seem to be connected to the story:  A little boy came – is underlined, and again:  a little boy came, both sentences are surrounded with a pencil line circle]

Oh tell us another cried Charles and Jane Oh no we will have to go home now and that night Jane and Charles dreamt about bears and cubs Charles dreamt [that is written twice and crossed out before being written a third time] that they were being good and Jane dreamt that they were being bad.

Mildred

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[Charles was both my mother’s father’s name and her only sibling’s name.  Her brother was 2 years older than my mother]

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Links to the rest of my mother’s childhood stories:

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My mother’s full writings:  Hope For A Mountain

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[I hope the following links remain active — if not, search Google for pre-borderline (preborderline) child]

On the Borderline Child

The American Psychiatric Publishing textbook of psychiatry – Google Books Result

Robert E. Hales, Stuart C. Yudofsky, Glen O. Gabbard – 2008 – Medical – 1786 pages
These traumatic experiences appear to occur within a context of sustained neglect from which the pre–borderline child develops enduring rage and self- …

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The borderline psychotic child: a selective integration – Google Books Result

Trevor Lubbe – 2000 – Medical – 218 pages
In defining the defensive set-up of the borderline child from a Contemporary … described how a pre-adolescent borderline boy employed pseudo-congeniality, …

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Parent-child relations: new research – Google Books Result

Dorothy M. Devore – 2006 – Family & Relationships – 219 pages
But now these affective representations are organized (or in the case of a borderline child, can never be organized) and accessible in verbal utterances, …

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Borderline Personality Disorder Online Support Forums: Safe …

Mar 24, 2009 … The relationship between mother and pre–borderline child is often revealed to have been confrontational or even hostile.”

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core wound of abandonment – Borderline Personality Disorder, Self …

Many cases show an ongoing hostile or confictual relationship between mother and pre–borderline child.”In his book, New Hope for Borderline Personality …

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Personality disorders: toward the DSM-V – Google Books Result

William T. O’Donohue, Katherine A. Fowler, Scott O. Lilienfeld – 2007 – Psychology – 398 pages
… insensitivity to the pre–borderline child’s feelings and needs, and serious emotional discord in the family, perhaps leading to separation or divorce. …

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Severe Emotional Disturbance in Children and Adolescents

Part I: The Young Child. Internal Conflict and Growth in a Pre-school Child. Early Identifications in the Borderline Child. Part II: The Child in the Family …

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Coping with the Borderline Behaviour of Our Children – Borderline …

Jul 20, 2008 … How can we as parents cope with our Borderline children or adult-children? … on the infantile emotional nature of an ego-centric pre-teen …

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Borderline pathology in children and adolescents

by C Meekings – 2004 – Cited by 5 – Related articles
trauma in the borderline children suggesting that the experience of multiple traumatic events is more pre– dictive of borderline pathology than any singular …

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Child and adolescent psychiatry – Google Books Result

Michael Rutter, Eric A. Taylor – 2002 – Medical – 1209 pages
Studies of adult populations in relation to borderline personality disorder … study of pre-morbid adjustment, onset pattern and severity of impairment. …

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+LINKS – PREVERBAL COMMUNICATION and DEVELOPMENT (RISK FACTORS, INFANT ABUSE)

alchemynow1 Comment

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“Maltreatment itself constitutes a risk for language disorders”

“language development is particularly vulnerable because of the disruption in social interaction it [abuse] entails”

“attachment has been significantly related to language development”

(Coster & Cicchetti, 1993))

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“Coregulation emerges from nonverbal and preverbal communication in both human and nonhuman species; it can be distinguished from simple synchrony, matching or attunement because it is defined by the same patterns of emergent novelty and mutual creativity that have been recognized in dialogical and narrative approaches to interpersonal communications.”

“The infant self being essentially dynamic and relational, we can observe relational narratives arising from self-other dialectics from the very beginning of parent/infant relationships.”

New approaches to the study of Mother-Infant Interactions:  A case of Child abuse

By Maria Luisa Genta

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“In an article on knowledge and skills from the Health Sciences Department of La Trobe University in Australia, it is said that there are around ten preverbal communication skills that a speech pathologist expects to see a baby to be able to use from the age of eight months.”

Read more:   When we Use or Lose Preverbal Communication

By Sophie Sweatman

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Preverbal communication skills

[This article includes some exceptionally important information about preverbal communication skills of infants.  When severe infant abuse and neglect happens, I believe the development of all these skills is altered – which in turn alters how communication patterns continue to develop for the duration of childhood so that consequences appear in adulthood.

I experienced serious alterations in these areas and patterns of development as a consequence of the infant abuse my mother did to me.]

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“Communication is the transfer of information from one person to another. Most of us spend about 75 percent of our waking hours communicating our knowledge, thoughts, and ideas to others. However, most of us fail to realize that a great deal of our communication is of a non-verbal form as opposed to the oral and written forms. Non-verbal communication includes facial expressions, eye contact, tone of voice, body posture and motions, and positioning within groups. It may also include the way we wear our clothes or the silence we keep.”

Non-Verbal Communication

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“…other functions such as assistance to the speech encoding processes, probably account for the abundance of nonverbal behaviours among speaking subjects.”

The elimination of visible behaviour from social interactions: Effects on verbal, nonverbal and interpersonal variables

By Dr. Bernard Rimé

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Nonverbal Communication

By Albert Mehrabian

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Nonverbal Communication Started When You Were An Infant

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“Preverbal communication plays a key role in the environmental support to infant cognition, communication, and social integration.”

Beyond emotional bonding: The role of preverbal communication in mental growth and health

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Pre-verbal communication and gesture in infancy; parent-infant communication.

Children’s play.

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“In the first five years of life, the evolution of communication can be divided into three periods (Adamson & Chance, 1998).  The first period begins at birth when infants communicate through their cries, gazes, vocalizations and early gestures. These early

communicative behaviours are not intentional, but set the stage for later intentional

communication. In the second period, from six to18 months, infants’ communicative

engagement with adults becomes intentional. A major turning point is the appearance of

joint attention (Bakeman & Adamson, 1984), which involves infants coordinating visual

attention with that of another person regarding objects and events (Mundy & Gomes,

1998). In the third period, from 18 months onward, language overtakes action as

children’s primary means of learning and communication.”

The Impact of Language Development on the Psychosocial and Emotional Development of Young Children

Written by: Nancy J. Cohen, Hincks-Dellcrest Centre and Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto

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+DISSOCIATION AS AN ALLERGIC REACTION TO ABUSE

alchemynowLeave a comment

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I believe that the greatest risk factor for triggering dissociation in severe infant-child abuse survivors is for us to be in a parallel state to the one we were in when we were little.  When we are in NEED we are vulnerable.  Because our body-brain was created and built through trauma altered development to process different information in different ways than ordinary, when we are NOT recognized for the trauma altered beings that we are we are in AN ABUSIVE ENVIRONMENT.

In America, if I had gone to that medical clinic yesterday in need (why else would I have gone?) and had been in a wheel chair, and if the clinic had absolutely no access available, they would have been in violation of law.

Would the medical staff have vehemently insisted that I was NO DIFFERENT than they were (as they did to me when I tried to explain in a PROACTIVE way about how I process information under stressful duress)?

Would they have insisted I was exactly the same as they were if I had been blind or deaf?  Would my difference from them be acknowledged at all if I had been?

Access to the building itself is ABOUT being able to meet one’s needs to gain vital information.  Access FOR ME to the same vital information needed to happen through enlightenment of the staff about HOW I AM IN THE WORLD differently from others especially in the ways I process information under stress.  Denial of this fact is ABUSE — and it is that ABUSE in that environment and situation yesterday that tortured me into the dissociated state I described in this post:  +DURESS AND DISSOCIATION

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DID THAT CLINIC HAVE THE RIGHT TO ABUSE ME?

Absolutely.  (The more they abused me the more stress I experienced.)

They evidently had the same perfect right to abuse me that my mother had.

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Am I exercising fantastic thinking when I come to this conclusion about my experience yesterday?

No, I am not.

I am NOT MENTALLY ILL.  I experienced severe enough trauma during my earliest stages of development that I ended up with an INNER body-nervous system-brain-mind that completely adapted itself to that environment of abuse.

I would not have survived otherwise.

When I think about the myriad interactions that happened yesterday at the clinic, I could say that THOSE PEOPLE were mentally ill.  They were not able to stretch their thinking — because of their blatant ignorance of very basic facts about trauma altered development for early abuse survivors — at the same time they stubbornly refused to recognize MY REALITY as I tried to express it to them.

That is exactly what my mother did to me in the beginning:  She disallowed me to have my own reality — in nearly every possible way.  Of course I could NEVER express myself or be heard by my mother any more than I was by the staff at that clinic.  SEE  +THE TIN WOMAN’S BRAIN: INFANT-CHILD ABUSE AND DISSOCIATING EMOTION FROM FACT

Being made to feel by any public service representative I am sick, pathetic, wrong, disabled, ineffective, strange, odd, different, bad, stupid or in any other way being made to feel like an inferior human being who is ‘mentally ill’ is AS ABUSIVE TO SEVERE EARLY ABUSE SURVIVORS AS THE ORIGINAL ABUSE WAS.

Shame on those people!  Shame!

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+THE TIN WOMAN’S BRAIN: INFANT-CHILD ABUSE AND DISSOCIATING EMOTION FROM FACT

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I have spent a lot of time wondering how I would ever be able to write a book about my abusive childhood if I can’t, won’t or don’t ‘go back there’ to remember how I FELT inside during those 18 years of severe trauma.  After my experience yesterday of trying to manage being in a medically over-stimulating and challenging appointment environment — as I wrote about in my last post — +DURESS AND DISSOCIATION — I am beginning to understand that how I felt yesterday and how I tried to describe my experience in my post is EXACTLY how I felt during most of my childhood.

When the words ‘information machine’ appeared in that post, and as I thought about it since then, what I am beginning to understand is that the regions of my brain that process semantic-factual information never became integrated with the parts of my brain that process emotional, social or autobiographical ‘feeling felt’ information.

The ‘information machine’ child COULD and DID go to school and learned complicated bits of facts about the world I live in.  These facts were connected to facts I began to learn about the factual environment around me from the time I was born.  I was able to become oriented in the world of physical objects and information about them as if I had a separate brain from my OTHER brain — the one that was built in terror and chaos from a time well before I even had words.

As I spoke with my daughter last night about what happened yesterday the word BOMBARDED appeared to me almost as an overarching umbrella description of how my experience of being alive in a body in the world feels to me at those times the ‘information machine’ becomes overwhelmed.  Never until my experience with aggressive cancer and its treatment starting July 2007 did I ever have to experience what it feels like in my adulthood to experience what I evidently nearly ALWAYS felt during my infant-childhood.

The ‘information processing machine’ part of me continued to grow as I grew during my first 18 years because it was invisible and was something my mother could seldom outright attack as she DID attack every other part of me as I grew up.  No other expression of LINDA as an individual being-person-identity was allowed to even appear, let alone grow, develop, express herself, become visible, or flourish.

After the extreme duress that cancer and its treatment caused me it has seemed that some important ‘functional-in-this-world’ part of me was erased.  When I need ‘her’ to be HERE to process the factual nonemotional, nonsocial information that being a human being in a human world involves, she is no longer available.

The ‘information machine’ operated more like the Tin Woman than a human being, and did NOT process emotional information (that is physiologically intertwined with social information in our early forming right limbic brain).  The part of our brain that handles “Just the facts, Ma’am” does NOT need emotional information.

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These brain operations evidently CAN be dissociated from one another.  Not even mentioning what I experienced of my mother’s abuse from birth, even by the age I was in these stories there is no way ‘factual information’ had a place in my experience of trauma and abuse such as these.  My mother’s insane abuse had nothing to do with ME or with reality — I could ‘make sense’ out of nothing she did to me — the FACTS — and MY reality — meant nothing.

+MY 6-WEEK NEWBORN CHECKUP – THE MONSTER WAS BORN WHEN I WAS

see also on my mother and the devil: +WORD WARRIOR NEWS: MY BROKEN, BROKEN, BROKEN MOTHER

*Litany from Start to Finish

*AGE 2 – CINDY BORN – 1953

*Age 3 – THE TOILET BOWL

*Age 4 – THE BEDSPREAD

*Age 5 – THE BUBBLE GUM

*Age 5 – THE FOX

*Age 5 – SHARON AND THE FIRE ANTS

*Age 6 – THE MARBLES

*AGE 6 – FIRST GRADE — NIGHT ON THE STOOL

*AGE 7 – MUD PUDDLE INCIDENT

*AGE 8 – MY BLACK RABBIT, PETER

*Age 9 – BLOODY NOSE

*Age 9 – JOHN and the CHERRY TREE

*Age 10 – THE SHAMPOO LIE AND RUNNING AWAY

*Age 11 – MY EYEBROWS

*Age 13 – DIRTY DIAPER AND PEPPLES IN MY KNEES

+Age 14 – SCRUBBED IN THE TUB

*Age 14 – SILENT TREATMENT

*Age 14 – Gardening and the Sabotage

*Age 15 – FORCED TO WATCH AN ALASKAN SUNRISE

see also for background information:

++SCHORE ON DEVLOPMENT OF RIGHT BRAIN

***Notes on Siegel’s writings

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+DURESS AND DISSOCIATION

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At the doctor’s today — too much, too much, too much, too much information streaming from strange faces, strange mouths, strange eyes — too much information

overload

overload

Where is that safe place?  When facing what needs to be faced is the only right option because I need something I can’t run or hide from.

Noise, too much noise, too much information.  Words dissolve, faces dissolve, my thoughts dissolve.  I can hear nothing, focus on nothing, understand nothing — without tremendous will power concentration.

I can’t explain that although I LOOK like an adult, a person — I can vanish inside, vanish, vanish, vanish.  Empty inside.  Nobody there.  Nobody for you to talk to because there’s nobody in here listening, nobody to hear you.

Too many words, like icicles stabbing stabbing stabbing stabbing.  I can’t tell them, QUIET PLEASE.  I can’t read your lips, your words don’t match the movement of your mouth.

What has happened to me that it’s come to this?  Everything they tell me is complicated complicated complicated.  I cannot understand a word that you are saying.

I have gone backwards in time, all the way back.  Does anyone understand what it’s like to be a nobody?  Body here, nobody else.  Nothing else.  You on the outside moving around, doing people things, I can’t tell you what it’s like inside for me.  There are no words on the inside to meet and match your words on the outside.

All gone.  It’s all gone.”Be here, Linda.  Be here.  Focus.  Pay attention.  This is important, you cannot go away.  There is nobody here with you to help you.  You are alone in this.  You have to do this.”

Appointment after appointment, things I need taken care of.  How can I do it?

The terror I cannot name overtakes me and I can barely bash it back.  It comes like a cloud of locusts, out of the void, out of the unknown world I do not feel a part of

unless

unless

all is calm.  All is slowly given, carefully spoken, like drops of nectar, drops of dew, one at a time slowly sinking in below the surface, into my awareness.

I wish I knew what happened to one of my competent selves, a confident one, one who could fool herself as she fooled everyone else — an information machine.  Very efficient.  Ticking words, in and out like gushes of breath, all held in check, in their places, in their order

But not now.  The words don’t work that way any more.  Not when there are things at stake and I am a stranger in a strange place and there’s too much to take in — and I go away, fighting not to, like the dark spook shadows in the movie “Ghost,” dragged away I go into the darkness while they all stay where they are in the light.

And the tears come rushing out of my eyes and I can’t outrun them, sidestep them, just they gush

What I can manage to grasp in my attention is like a thousand diamond’s thousand facets — spinning spinning spinning

How to make sense of THAT?

There is no dissociational OTHER to take over when things inside fall to pieces.  Nobody there.  Nobody there.  I am barely here and then gone again

gone again

gone again

It is frightening.  Walls and floors and doors and ceilings disappear along with meaning behind the sounds.

“Stay here, Linda.  Pay attention Linda.”

In the two hours I spent in that clinic today I vanished a million times.  All that remains behind is this body with a gossamer thread of me attached somehow — I am NOT dead yet, not dead yet, not dead yet.  I am this body, I am supposed to be in this body.

But we part ways, go in different directions, and nobody here can pay any attention to anything except how the storm feels inside feels inside feels inside.

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+WHEN THE GOING ISN’T TOUGH: CYCLING THROUGH THE TRAUMA STATES

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There.  It took an hour to get set up and to put a coat of my super-mixed paint on my new aluminum fence.  I am happy to report that the color is perfect!  I couldn’t have picked one out of a paint card lineup and done any better.  The color blends well with the dirt (a big coordination plus in the desert) and contrasts beautifully with the blue sky above the fence as it sets off anything that still happens to be growing green.

I had the opportunity to notice very specifically how fast a person can cycle through the five states I mentioned in today’s earlier posts.  There I was, carefully adjusting my upside-down plastic five gallon ex-pickle pails, making sure they were as firmly planted in the uneven dirt as I could manage so I could perch on tiptoe to reach the top fence line and not fall over.  Down the corrugation I flicked my sloppy 1/3 water logged paint, getting my rhythm as I watched for the inevitable paint drips leaking down from the screws I so carefully put into the fence yesterday.

But that’s the problem with getting your rhythm, finding your beat.  You can lose it.  But I guess if you never find your beat in the first place you don’t even notice!

Fortunately I was near the end of the fence when I went to readjust my pail-stands a little bit further to my right, holding the greasy wet paint bucket by its side.  OOPS!  Wet bucket, slippery wet fake latex gloves (I guess Latex is a new endangered species) — and the bucket went flying — down, of course.

Enter my emotional reaction.  No more “Gee I am content spending an hour doing this job.  I sure am glad the sun finally came up so I could get at it.”

No more “Gee I sure am happy with this color!”

Just as the bucket left my hands and even before it hit the ground (and spilled all over my overturned pail-stools):

ANGER – “Linda!  Now look at what you’ve done!  Obviously you should have been holding onto the paint bucket handle not its sides!”  Too late at the moment for that admonishment based on wisdom.

FEAR:  “Oh, Gosh!  There goes the paint all over the ground” as I reached as fast as possible to pick up the bucket and right it.  “Is there any paint left?”

SADNESS:  “What a loss and what a waste of paint!”  That was true.

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Then, as I flicked paint off of the overturned pickle pail to swipe it onto the fence as fast as I could before it all ran off into the dirt, “Gee, I could stand on that now burnt-orange pail again, get paint all over the bottom of my shoes, and walk around my yard leaving fancy footprints!  How cool would that be?”  Made me smile, though I denied myself that footprinting treat.

Silly is good.  Humorous is good…..

At the same time I sure was glad, though, that I only lost half of what I had started with instead of all the paint because I was so far down the fence line when my ‘accident’ happened.  Had ALL the remaining paint spilled, and had I no more to finish my job, my resiliency would not have been so resplendent.  Of that fact I am quite certain.

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+AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS: OUR BASIC STATES OF BEING

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How our primary physiological states FEEL is directly related to how things in our life (including our self) SEEM.  I actually SEE it this way (though the balance and operation is altered for early severe infant-abuse survivors):

+ PEACEFUL CALM CONNECTION WELL-BEING at the center of our nervous system-brain-being:  Our cup is full

+  JOYFUL HAPPINESS (built into the left brain birth to age one):  Our cup runneth over

+ ANGER as a survival emotion to resolve problems using what we know:  Our cup is half full with high positive hopes of filling it up again SOON

+ FEAR as a survival emotion means we have to try HARDER:  Our cup is empty

+ SADNESS as a survival emotion means we better learn something COMPLETELY NEW:  Our cup doesn’t seem to have any bottom to it at all — or perhaps we don’t even seem to have a cup (can’t find it?)

The bottom three emotions involve an activated stress response/attachment system — designed by nature in safe and secure early attachment relationships to never be ON for very long.

The top one is supposed to be our NORMAL state (through ‘good enough’ early environmental design).

The second one, JOYFUL HAPPINESS is the creme de la creme!

Most simply put, discovering how these states of being were built to operate as our body developed is ALL we need to know about our infant-childhood.  We cannot work to change what we do not know.

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See today’s previous posts:

+DAYS WITHOUT WORDS – FOCUSED SURVIVAL AND DISSOCIATION

+’FIGHTING ANGER’ IS GOOD FOR US

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+’FIGHTING ANGER’ IS GOOD FOR US

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This post is a follow-up to my previous post,+DAYS WITHOUT WORDS – FOCUSED SURVIVAL AND DISSOCIATION, as I complete the cycle (the continuum) of relationship as I see it between anger, fear and sadness.  I stated, “Anger is NOT so much about learning something completely new as it is about using what one knows in a new and different creative way.”  What about the other two related emotional states?

If one finds within the state of anger that nothing one knows, and no creative combination of what one knows can actually solve a problem (usually one that involves threat of some kind to well-being), then the next step by default becomes fear.

“Oh, no!  NOW what can I do?”

The place of fear reflects increased pressure to find a solution.  It is extremely motivating, more so (perhaps strangely!) than anger is!  Anger reflects the use of KNOWN active coping responses.  Fear happens when none of them actually WORKED!

Fear belongs to the “Learn something new FAST” category of response at the same time it reflects response to increasing levels of ‘danger’ because it is by nature’s design a stance of increased NEED and vulnerability.

Fear is NOT a place to remain stuck in!  Actually NONE of these three primary survival-based emotions are meant to continue very long.  They are stress response reactions that drain the body, and can do so to exhaustion!  They reflect a lack of safety, security, well-being and peaceful-calm-connection to and in the world — the state we are supposed to return back to as quickly as we possibly can.

If something new CAN be learned while in the escalated state of fear, a person then returns to the productive energy state of ‘anger’ and goes to work competently and confidently solving the problem and overcoming the obstacle to well-being.

If nothing new can be learned, the slide now is into sadness!  Oh, dear, sadness!!  The biggest risk to remaining very long in the state of sadness is that its deeper ends lie in hopelessness and despair.  Yet at the same time sadness carries this risk for remaining powerlessness, it also reflects the other end of liability:  Sadness allows for an openness to NEW learning.

Letting go — finally and not without a fight — of everything that we know of to solve a problem is NOT FUN!  Realizing that we DO NOT KNOW how to protect ourselves, how to solve a problem, how to avoid or escape a threat is extremely humbling.  Yet at the same time sadness reflects a lessening of our grip on all that we know, of all that has worked in the past, or might have worked now allows us to be open to the newest, latest, BEST and POSSIBLE solution.

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In following this thinking of an ever-activated stress response system (caught perpetually and uselessly in one of these primary states of anger, fear or sadness) it seems obvious to me that the pattern of movement through the cycle has its purpose — and always has.

What gave our species the cutting edge we needed to meet all challenges to our survival has always been not only our brilliant brain’s ability to combine and recombine what we have learned in the past, but most importantly our ability to LEARN SOMETHING NEW.  Learning something new — finally!  Can feel like stepping off the edge of the known universe completely into the unknown.  “Will this work?  Do I have this right?  Is there any hope?”

What makes sadness evaporate (at least somewhat and temporarily for those of us who had sadness built into our body as our center set point) is that magical leap reflected in these words:  “I think I’ll try this something new.  I have nothing left to lose.”

Making this leap takes the will to live, the will to survive, the will to TRY, the will to risk, the will to hope against all hopelessness.  Making this leap to learn something entirely new and then to APPLY whatever we come up with or whatever comes to us, can often require of us that we access just a tiny bit MORE energy than we can possibly imagine we have.

This is endurance, the endurance of the long distance runner, the mountain climber, the swimmer who cannot POSSIBLY run or climb or swim ANY MORE.  “YES, we CAN!”  And in this “YES, we CAN!”  place lies the completion of the cycle because it involves a level of fighting ANGER that is damn good for us!

This is an energy of “I can do it!  I can fight against the unfightable — and win!  I will take this new piece of information I have learned in my wide open most vulnerable state of sadness — and I will FIGHT back!”  Here we have come full circle back to a stance of active coping, of confidence and of competence.  Nothing wrong with that!

But survivors of early abuse have an extra obstacle to overcome:  We have been stuck in one of these states so long that moving forward or backward can seem impossible.  The first step to rocking ourselves out of the deepest rut is to “Give it some gas!”

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NOTE:  In my thinking having a continually active stress response system is the same thing as having an insecure attachment system/pattern/disorder.  When our stress response system is ON so also is our attachment one.  BOTH mean that we do not feel safe and secure in the world and do not feel peaceful/calm/connection/well-being.

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