NOT THE USUAL INFORMATION ABOUT TRAUMA

I am, at this point, quite convinced that I ‘have’ to talk about something that nobody else is talking about.  That makes even blogging difficult because I don’t care about my personal daily activities as subjects to write about.  Those things I do because I HAVE to.  Working on my ‘mission’ is something I do because I both HAVE to — in an entirely different way — and because I HAVE to do this writing then I WANT to do this writing.

But I have never been a trivial minded person.  I was robbed of that luxury by growing up under constant threat of terrible abuse in every arena of my life — except for what precious few hours I escaped to school.  That was it.  That was the only chance I had to escape from my abusive mother.

I know now that our brains are developing during all the experiences we have as very young people.  After we are 2, we are building a life using everything that was inputted into us by the age of 2.  But even after the age of 2 I was still in the same traumatic environment and things didn’t get any better.  So I never had a chance to build and develop a ‘social brain’, and I don’t have one now.

I am mostly all business.  My ability to focus is amazing.  I had the potential and had plenty of experience in being able to focus in order to stay alive.  This ties into the fact that what I feel I HAVE to do might as well be what I WANT to do because the focus is in me.  It is me.

When I say nobody is talking about what I feel I NEED to talk about I am talking about something that is so thought provoking people have not realized yet they need to think about it.  If they aren’t thinking about it, then they won’t be talking or writing (or blogging or twittering) about it, either.

What I know, and what I have to, want to, and need to say — if an when people out there pick up on the facts and then begin to think about them — has the potential to turn much about how we view ourselves and one another within our society.

We need to know what our mother’s environment was like while she carried us, because her level of stress hormones affected how our DNA expressed itself as our bodies grew.  We need to know her state of being when she delivered us, and how she — or any other early caregiver interacted with us.

We need to know WHO any other possible early caregivers were, and how they treated us because how they treated us determined how our bodies, including our brains (as a part of our nervous system), our entire nervous system and our immune system developed.

If we did not get our basic needs met on a regular basis as little tiny people, the environment that we were in basically communicated to us that we were evolving/developing to face a hostile world.  We therefore ended up with a very different body on all levels than we would have developed if we had been taken care of as nearly perfectly as is possible.

I say this thinking can change our society because once we know this crucial early information about our beginnings, we can look at how our lives developed from that point onwards.  If we have troubles in our lives — with our emotions including grief, sadness, depression, rage, aggression, isolation and loneliness, motivation, attention, general states of being related to anxiety and phobias, feeling overwhelmed and over stressed and often with a sense of foreboding for the future moment by moment — troubles with our relationships, friendships, with our children and parents, with ourselves — if we have (prior to this economic near-mayhem) had trouble with work, with peers, with our income, suffered from extremes of poverty and deprivation — committed crimes, violence, ended up in the criminal justice system — have repeatedly relocated due to stress or have been or are homeless, have mental health diagnosis, troubles with addictions — if we have to rely on psychiatric medications to maintain anything like a balanced equilibrium — then we DO NOT have optimal well being.

Chances are when we go back and realize that the brain (etc.) that we were forced to develop during very early infanthood and toddlerhood changed the trajectory of our lives and basically sent us off without all we needed to live the best life we deserved.  Once we realize this fact, we can begin to link up categories mentioned above and begin to understand the common ground so many of us are standing on.

At present, when I attempt to search the web for connecting factors I find isolated sites devoted to a focus on their particular piece of the broken or breaking puzzle.  If we don’t consider fully the impact of our early experiences, consider the kind and quality of the caregiving we received as infants and toddlers and young children — then we are missing the most important piece of information that can help us understand how our current life difficulties started in the first place and how they changed the very brain we use to face every aspect of our life.

If we are honest with ourselves, we know who we are.  I suspect that most people are already using nearly every bit of courage they have to get from morning to night each day.  We mostly know that no adequate care exists or is accessible to us to help us untangle the many tangled ties we have that connect us from the moment of our birth to our present situation.  We have been willing participants — because we have to or want to or need to — in the ‘substance consumption’ plan of getting through life.  It mostly seems more possible to take prescribed drugs, smoke pot, consume other illegal drugs, drink too much, eat too much, etc. than it is to make the changes we need to make in our lives to be happy, to live in a state of well being.

SEE:  http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/07/09/antidepressants/index.html

 

None of us are getting any younger.  None of us are going to get another chance to go back in time and make changes we wish we could.  So we keep on blindly struggling through our lives while rarely having the time or the means or the motivation to look at the bigger picture, to see how what’s wrong in our lives now is directly connected to what was wrong in our lives during our first 2 years of life — the very essential brain development and formative years that gave us the brain we use to get us through this very moment.

 

When a few people died as a result of someone tampering with aspirin bottles by adding poison on the west coast in the early 70s ALL human consumption industries figured out immediately how to protect us from such a problem happening again.  Maybe 4 people died?

 

What kind of mass actions do we take to address all the social and psychological problems (as mentioned above) that continue to plague our society?  What kind of dedicated effort do we put into making sure that EVERYONE has the same chance to grow up in a safe and secure home so that they can develop the best brain possible to have the best future in a benevolent world?

 

What are your thoughts?  What do you know?  What are your questions?

 

Based on what you know of the first 2 years of your life, did you get to grow a benevolent brain or one designed in, by and for a malevolent world?  Have you always thought that there was something more unfortunate about your life — then and now — than the lives other people get to live?

 

There is NOTHING wrong with knowing the truth about these things.  It is most helpful, actually, to admit the facts.  Facts are a good thing to know!  What were the factors that put you at risk for living a life more of struggle than of ease and well being?  Are you afraid to look back there?  It all ties together, what happened to you in those first 2 years.  Our caregivers download their own minds into ours, and if theirs was built in a hostile world chances are they were lacking in what they needed to give you the best start possible.  Believe me, it affected you.  Way back then, and it affects you now.  The beginning is the essential place to start anything like a recovery, change or healing effort.

Child abuse and the lifelong plague

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

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

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

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

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

HOW DID THE ABUSE CHANGE US?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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