++++

Tuesday, December 22, 2015.  I feel I need to apologize for writing so few posts during these months of my tenure up north here in North Dakota, but I also know no apology is needed.  There are simply times and seasons of life.  At least now we have passed in this hemisphere into the time of growing day length.  I am happy for that although several months of winter still lie waiting ahead.

This winter has been very warm.  That is a good thing.  Yet it may also be a bad thing.  I am not one who knows about such things.  I am a wonderer.  (A wanderer, too, I must admit.)

I am into my third year away from my adopted Arizona-Mexican border land that was so kind to me for fourteen years.  I still have no real idea what lies ahead for me in my life.  Will I return there next September after my lease here is up?  Time.  It will tell.

Meanwhile I continue to battle with the noise from the apartment above me that is so unsettling to my so-sound-sensitive ears.  Things seem to be better – most of the time – and I have not yet had to call the police with a noise complaint as the apartment managers suggested that I do on November 9^th.  It is not the children’s fault up there who are not put to bed before midnight and who are allowed to sleep until noon.

I have contacted Head Start to see if they will send me some information I can anonymously slip under the door up there.  It has been suggested that if a time approaches when my own well-being means a noise complaint must be made that I call social services first.  I don’t want to do that, either.

I do pray for myself – and for that family up there – and for the world – and for EVERYTHING!  Which brings me to the point of mentioning what has inspired me to finally attempt to place a few words on the blog this evening.

Someone on my Facebook feed posted this quote.  “Star of the West” was an early magazine published in the United States.  I don’t know how to access those to see if I could find the volume the following appeared in.

What I do know as a very high ACE score, terrible child abuse survivor for the first 18 years of my life, is that trauma seriously impacted every stage of my early development so that now I am a Trauma Altered Development person (my friend calls this being a tadpole).

This means that my nervous system/brain, stress response system, immune system, etc. is different – entirely different – than would have been the case if someone had intervened, stopped that abuse, rescued me and my siblings from our severely mentally ill psychotic mother.

This means – in regard to this quote I am posting – that very often it is impossible – IMPOSSIBLE for me – and for many ‘tadpoles’ like me – to “simply” change our “mood.”  We experience our life differently than other people do through absolutely NO FAULT of our own!!!

In my older age I am experiencing cumulative effects of the traumas in my life and am now “on disability” for them.  I cannot simply “forget the past” and “be OK.”  I cannot will myself to “be happy.”  I work every moment of my existence to endure – and endure some more – and endure….

Some moments and hours, some days, are better and easier than others are.  Being down south, as readers mostly know, was very much better for me than is being up here in an apartment, in a city, in this climate, etc.  I can’t get out to see friends, work in my garden, more etc!!!!!

So – here is the quote!!  This is what I do in every way I possibly can.  It includes why I came back up here, so that I could help my daughter and my little grandsons in any way that I can, especially now at this juncture in the family’s lifespan.

But – still – there is NOTHING easy about my life right now.  True, “things could be much worse,” but knowing that is no panacea for tadpole people!  THIS helps my heart!!  THIS feels realistic to me and within the realm of possibility!!

And – at this “holiday season” there can be many complications for people and for families!  I thought these words might be helpful to people who might be struggling with extra difficulties – realize they are NOT ALONE!!!!!  We care!!!

++

“Be not the slave of your moods, but their master.  But if you are so angry, so depressed and so sore that your spirit cannot find deliverance and peace even in prayer, then quickly go and give some pleasure to someone lowly, or to a guilty or innocent sufferer!  Sacrifice yourself, your talent, your time, your rest to another, to one who has to bear a heavier burden than you – and your unhappy mood will dissolve into a blessed, contented submission to God.” –

By Abdu’l-Baha, in Star of the West (sometime prior to 1921), a Baha’i publication

++

Certainly an ongoing and repeating process!!

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

Story Without Words:  How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  A daring book – for daring readers – about a really tough subject.

++++

Leave a Comment »

++++

Tags: adult attachment disorders, adult reactive attachment disorder, anxiety disorders,borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, brain development, child abuse,depression,derealization, disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorder, empathy, infant abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factors, PTSD, resiliency, resiliency factors, risk factors, shame

 

++++

Wednesday, November 24, 2015.

I cannot kill these pansies

Little bit of life

That they are

+

As winter’s cold and darkness

Settles outside my door

+

I hauled them inside

In their five gallon plastic buckets

After I left them out there

Long enough to freeze

Several times

+

Their blossoms have given up

Yet not their buds

And not the emerald green of their leaves

And certainly not their tenacious roots

+

I MUST love them

I MUST care for them

I MUST

I will

It is a part of who I am

+

April through November they have blessed me with their beauty

They did not ask for life

They do not crave death

Theirs is a certain kind of bravery

Courage to the end

+

And these earthworms

Are they as silent as they seem?

+

What, my dear, can I give to them

Remnants from a summer garden confined

Gathered in a gelatinous mass

Having seeped themselves down through and out of the bottom holes of these buckets onto the plastic beneath them

Only to have found no real possibility of escape?

+

Do they live?

Are they dead?

+

I bury them again in now warm so-black bucket dirt

I can wait

We will see

+

I must apologize

I am so sorry for my own confusions

My uncertainties

+

I, too, share this life and death cusp

With all of you

+

This seek for safety

This holding on to life

This approach to death

To transformation

First

+

O worms!  I feed you water soaked cardboard and bits of paper for a winter in these buckets

In this apartment

Stashed so cleverly in a spare corner

On my kitchen floor

+

Unlike my species

If there is even one of you left alive

You will reproduce.

More.

+

I

Would be glad

For that.

++++

Note:  I cannot create my chosen spacing here without using “+” as markers

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

Story Without Words:  How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  A daring book – for daring readers – about a really tough subject.

++++

Leave a Comment »

++++

Tags: adult attachment disorders, adult reactive attachment disorder, anxiety disorders,borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, brain development, child abuse,depression,derealization, disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorder, empathy, infant abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factors, PTSD, resiliency, resiliency factors, risk factors, shame

 

 

++++

Tuesday, November 24, 2015.  These few words came to me last Sunday at a time when the horrible stomping romping wall and ceiling shaking so threatening my peace from the apartment above me had abated for a time.  For the past two years I had neighbors up there who were quiet adult men.  I NEVER in ten billion years would have renewed my year’s lease if THIS family had been up there.

I really do NOT know how I can endure and survive a long North Dakota winter being trapped in here with them up there.  I am losing entire nights of sleep.  Scary.  Hard.  Very, very disturbing having people up there with no pattern to their life I can detect, little children romping hard until 2 am….

++

Right on the surface of the glass

Looking inward

Looking outward

That’s where our psychology will be

+

Where on a spectrum does light become sound and sound become light

To humans?

+

There is a quiet there – at these places.  In these spaces.  A kind of pause – the quiet both before and within the storm.

Calmness.

Life, though, is never easy.

+

There is a pause

Where darkness turns into light

(and the other way around).

+

When a flying bird’s wing beats downward

That point just before the wing

Turns up again

There is an instant of

Perfect peace.

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

Story Without Words:  How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.

++++

Leave a Comment »

++++

Tags: adult attachment disorders, adult reactive attachment disorder, anxiety disorders,borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, brain development, child abuse,depression,derealization, disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorder, empathy, infant abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factors, PTSD, resiliency, resiliency factors, risk factors, shame

 

 

++++

Wednesday, November 17, 2015.  I remember those days, weeks, months, years when never did a blog post topic come into my thoughts that I didn’t simply write and post it.  Those times seem to me now to have been part of a different lifetime.

I could sit at my funky old desk with my laptop gazing at brilliant blue skies, across the range of my adobe flower gardens, past the tall rusted Mexican-American border fence at the topmost peaks of San Jose Mountain in Mexico, and write.

I could think.  I could ponder.  I could feel and sense and I could write.

I was living in an environment that fed, nurtured and sustained me.  Fargo, North Dakota?  Nope.  Winter is coming, etc.  Simply put, “Too much darkness.”  Working to remain positive is, well, A LOT OF WORK for me here.  A great deal of work.

There doesn’t seem much of me left over to write with (or from),

This, too, shall pass.  Everything does.  Sooner or later.

++

So, (a) when given a situation with a lot of depletion going on and not much for restoration, (b) how does one FEEL?

I KNOW everyone goes through (a), but the older I get (I am 64 now) and the more American society changes, the more I see that it is certainly not true that everyone experiences (b).  At least not that they know about.  Not that they are forced to accept or ‘deal with’.

There are many, MANY ways not only NOT to feel, but in tandem with not feeling their own reality people DO NOT FEEL other people’s feelings, either.

Bye bye EMPATHY!

And WHERE on earth are we as human beings without EMPATHY?

Oh, shake, quiver and quake!

Answer?

In trouble.

++

If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

If a feeling is a response to life itself and nobody FEELS it, does that feeling exist?

++

The word “void” comes to mind here.

Without the information that our feelings give to us about being alive in this world as members of a profoundly social species, are we creating voids all around us without even noticing?

Do we then expect other people to simply ignore the fact that these void-living (absence of feelings/empathy) people CANNOT truly be reached or communicated with?

OR TRUSTED – in the deepest safely and securely attached sort of way (so that we do not feel all alone in a nor-really safe world)?

++

“Knock knock.”

“Nobody is here.”

Nobody is an island?  You bet that they are in current American society.

They certainly are.

++

I know that I am a dreamer.  I am always looking for and in some way hoping for a world that probably does not exist.  A friend told me the other day that he heard that humans are only capable of truly attuning to another person about 30% of the time.  That’s why, as developmental neuroscientist Dr. Allan N. Schore describes, the process of “rupture with or without repair” is so central to the processes of being human.  Of being alive.

But we must care enough and be able to NOTICE when a rupture occurs so that it can even be repaired.  And we have to know how to sort out the causes of ruptures and learn how to orchestrate repairs.

Yes, in my dreamer world I believe that humans are BORN (given good enough uterine conditions of earliest life) to DO all of these things.  But I also see, with great concern and sadness, that an increasing number of mothers in America are perfectly fine with bringing their children into the world and then abandoning them into the care of strangers.

The building of all of the essential structures within a human’s body-brain to process feelings and then to be able to live with true, healthy empathy, is a job that nature has always given to mothers of infants.  This is a vast area that I will not address specifically here except to say that on the one hand we have Autism Spectrum Disorders where social and emotional information which includes the empathetic processes is not a part of those people’s reality.

And then on the other hand we are fine with having larger and larger numbers of people who are placed into the care of “professional” childcare providers who have to intimate investment in using attuned empathy to communicate with these little ones – so that the end result – seems to me – is our current building of a nation where empathy is nearly entirely missing.

What do I think about all of this?  One word:  Uh-oh!

++

I do note that those who endured and survived horrific early life filled with trauma, we have had to learn about empathy through different channels.  Those of us who HAVE done this were, for whatever reasons, highly motivated to do so.  I have HUGE concerns that with the proliferation of infants and young children now being abandoned for most of their waking life by their mothers (essentially) – nobody is going to even notice — what is going so wrong OR what is missing:  Feelings and Empathy.

These are processes that I believe are essential to being fully human.

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

Story Without Words:  How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.

++++

Leave a Comment »

++++

Tags: adult attachment disorders, adult reactive attachment disorder, anxiety disorders,borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, brain development, child abuse,depression,derealization, disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorder, empathy, infant abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factors, PTSD, resiliency, resiliency factors, risk factors, shame

 

++++

Sunday, October 25, 2015.  I haven’t felt calm enough to muse since I wrote this post that sits here on my computer – waiting.  Erase or post?  Well, I might as well put it online and be done with this.  Until next time….

++++

Friday, October 22, 2015.

Muse.  Musing.

ntransitive verb

1

:  to become absorbed in thought; especially :  to turn something over in the mind meditatively and often inconclusively

2

archaic :  wonder, marvel

transitive verb

:  to think or say reflectively

++

I am reminded that the core of “cognition, to cognate” is female.  Of “the mother.”  Muses?  Female?  Contemplate.  Contemplative.

I would say as “of the moon.”  Reflective of light within.  Inner light reflecting inner light.

Always with a tinge of The Great Mystery.”  Things unseen.  Things unknown.  Not a Mountain Goat surety of step and climb.  More of a slippery thing.  More about things that are wet rather than hot and dry.

Not a far flung reaching for the sun.  More of a depths-plumbing experience.  Perhaps more gentle.  Perhaps a kind of inner whispering.

Not grapping or gripping.  Not even grappling.  A kind of holding things loosely.  A kind of active watching.  Wandering without demands.  But, yes, with questioning!  With curiosity.  A kind of puzzling things out.

A process of defining.  Defining shapes of processes that don’t even need to be delineated with concretized boundaries.  Process.  Construction in process.

Kind of sounds like life.

Kind of like “mothering.”

A kind of safe and protective ALLOWING of “things” to evolve, to show themselves without critique or control.  Gentle.  With pride and encouragement and joy.

++

No confusions.  No predictions.  And yet the nurturing-ground is CHAOS in its purest forms.  No fear.

Very much like pure play.  The same required conditions present for both processes.  Signaling an “OK enough” condition in “the world” during such moments of time.

This is about having a home.  Being at home in one’s self in the world.  Blossoming.  Or, on the other end of seasons, about preparing the ground for the resting time of winter.

No pushing thoughts around.  Letting them appear in images, in sensations, through the senses.  As memories – past and future moving through the now.

I think it’s important, helpful, significant to NOTICE these times of wandering wondering – to recognize them – and even to cherish them.  They happen in the absence of immediate toxic stress pressure.  We are feeling degrees of peacefulness, of calmness, of safety and security when these moments appear.

They might not stay very long.  That’s OK.  That’s the wonder-full thing about daydreams.  No pressure!

These moments will return again like the small gifts of life that they are.  Our inner selfie time.  Our a’musing time.  These are times we are not lost to our self.  In fact, I think we are MOST present WITH our self.

++

By my own definition I do NOT include stress-filled-thoughts/feelings in this category of thinking-without-THINKING (passive-instead-of-active)!  Yet inspirations can certainly appear during these times that seem to magically help us resolve difficulties we face.

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

Story Without Words:  How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.

++++

Leave a Comment »

++++

Tags: adult attachment disorders, adult reactive attachment disorder, anxiety disorders,borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, brain development, child abuse,depression,derealization, disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorder, empathy, infant abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factors, PTSD, resiliency, resiliency factors, risk factors, shame

++++

Wednesday, October 21, 2015.  I never thought of myself as “old” when I began this blog 6 ½ years ago.  I never even thought of myself as “aging” back then.  What has changed so much for me in those few years that I now feel like I am an entirely different person?

I could just as well simplify this question by asking myself, “What resources did I have then that I lack now?”  Is that what aging IS?  Nothing but a depletion of available resources?

Real or imagined?

How do we know the difference between these two states?

++

I have a dear friend who is what he has termed for all of us high ACE score people – a TADPOLE – a Trauma Altered Person from way early in our development.  My friend talks a lot about “bandwidth” in terms of our continued experiences of our self in our life.  Huge amounts of trauma take up huge amounts of “space” within our bandwidth.

We FEEL this!!

But it’s not “just the trauma” – past and present – that so taxes our resources.  It is – as Laura Porter describes – the TOXIC STRESS of trauma that wears us down and wears us out.  Nearly all the transactions a very high ACE score person experiences involve some kind of stress because the stress is IN our body.  Toxic stress BUILT itself into is as we were getting built in the first place.

So I don’t think we ever really escape the stress of toxic stress.  We are stressed by stress.  Or, more specifically, are distressed by stress.  All of this being caught within this “bandwidth” of resource we negotiate our self through our life with.

Aging?  When I was younger I did not need to KNOW what this felt like.  I can no longer, it seems, avoid feeling what this feels like!

No more ignoring the effects of toxic stress in my life.  No more “back burner.”  If “working memory” includes ALL of who we are and what we know about our self in our life including how we FEEL in every way – then my “aging” self’s working memory is packed with information that I did NOT HAVE TO have any awareness of on an ongoing basis – when I was younger.

++

Maybe I am thinking about a process that could be talked about in terms of “saturation.”  Be stressed enough long enough – and live long enough being stressed too much – something is going to give.  It won’t be “anxiety” that gives way.  It will be a sense of well-being.

That “Peaceful Easy Feeling.”

NOT FAIR!!

Nope!

SO?

I think we need to pay very close attention to even the smallest, tiniest, perhaps nearly insignificantly-seeming experiences in our life that are on the side of INCREASING our sense of well-being – because as these things help us feel BETTER they – even for the briefest of moments – diminish the impact of toxic stress in our life.

Toxic stress is, for high ACE score people, present all of the time BECAUSE it is built into our body.  BUT we have a RIGHT to figure out positive ways of claiming some space in the bandwidth that is our ongoing life – for things that bring us calm, peace and, if we are lucky, joy.

++

Yesterday I woke up to the roar of a big Bobcat mower destroying the cattails in the only small area of natural beauty in Fargo anywhere near where I live.  The Bobcat got stuck in the wet black clay mud.  The yard service hired to complete this (dastardly) task brought in a 4×4 pickup to tow out the mower.  It got stuck.

Round and round they went until finally – my one positive soul-stirring visual tie to ME – was turned into a smashed, rut-scarred ruined horror of a mess where once I was able to look out my window and at least see a little bit of beauty.  A little bit of nature.

I felt devastated. I called one of my daughters in town who so kindly called to talk to management about this, to me, bandwidth shattering experience.

Today my daughter heard back from management that every few years they have to mow down the cattails (which are part of the rain water control system for the land these apartment buildings are built upon) so that they can then grow BETTER for the next few years.  Most importantly, nothing is going to be BUILT in that space!

RELIEF?

Oh, yeah, I feel relieved!  Did I OVERREACT to the horror I watched happen?  NO!  Did I REACT?  YES!

There are not many experiences up here in this northern land that feed my soul.  I suffer in this apartment (my friend calls this a Gulag – he is not wrong).  I hate it.  I suffer in this city.  I hate it.

But it is very clear to me that for reasons I don’t even understand, or even NEED to understand, it is not yet time for me to leave here to return south.  But another horror of a North Dakota fierce-wind-driven winter marches closer to me every moment of each of these days.  My escape has been to watch the birds among the reeds.  The rabbits.  The neighbor children playing hide’n’seek there.

To watch the wind shifting among the reeds solaces me.

Now what?  A different kind of hope?

The raving meanness of a material life – when that happens – when “things” tough happen – and people – and other life – get stronger and better for the battles?

When the Pruning happens.  So that new and better life can appear.

Don’t like it necessarily.

Nobody asked me.

++

I may be feeling very fragile and vulnerable right now, but I am NOT helpless.  And, I have a plan.

Sometime in the next few weeks I am going to thin my son-in-law’s packed bed of hardy orange lilies.  I am going to gather a hoard of sturdy roots and I am going to surreptitiously find a way to sneak-plant them at the edge of this cattail area.  I am not going to ask management for permission.  I am not going to risk being told NO.

Once those lilies are in place they will not only survive among their cattail neighbors, they are going to thrive there for as long as these buildings stand and this area is draining water into that muddy place.

Long, LONG after I am gone from here.

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

Story Without Words:  How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.

++++

Leave a Comment »

++++

Tags: adult attachment disorders, adult reactive attachment disorder, anxiety disorders,borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, brain development, child abuse,depression,derealization, disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorder, empathy, infant abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factors, PTSD, resiliency, resiliency factors, risk factors, shame

++++

Wednesday, October 14, 2015.  Oh my HEAVENS!  I feel as though I have been living all my life in one world, and now that I am discovering this next stage of the evolution of healing human trauma – I am NOW living in an entirely different world!

PLEASE watch/listen to Laura Porter’s talk in this YouTube video!!!

Laura Porter Keynote: NEAR Science & New WA State Resilience Factor Findings

The front image that appears at the start of this video reads:  ACTIVATE – ACCELERATE – TRANSFORM

I have NEVER in my life heard words as glorious as those Laura is speaking here!  (And the Hopi elder’s quote at the end is PRICELESS!)  This is about HEALING trauma through the generations so that before too long – if we ALL pay attention and become informed – FLOURISHING can increase for everyone.

And the steps that must be taken?

WATCH THIS VIDEO!

PLEASE!

I have been waiting all of my LIFE for exactly THIS information!

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

Story Without Words:  How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.

++++

Leave a Comment »

++++

Tags: adult attachment disorders, adult reactive attachment disorder, anxiety disorders,borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, brain development, child abuse,depression,derealization, disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorder, empathy, infant abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factors, PTSD, resiliency, resiliency factors, risk factors, shame

++++

Tuesday, October 13, 2015.  Nobody comes to read anything on this blog because it is entertaining.  Nothing about what is presented here is FUN.  Is it enlightening?  In-lightening?

Is there anything that I can say here that turns that inner light of comprehension on for readers?  I don’t know.  What seems to be happening not only for me but for a growing number of people on every “level” of our society is that THE WORK is being increasing defined as it CAN change the world.

Change the world for the better for children – change the world.

I am disappointed with myself that I am not feeling more thrilled about this growing tide of awareness accompanied by facts about damage done to suffering children across their lifespan and about how these situations can begin to REALLY be changed.  Personally, across the decade of involvement in studying these issues I have become tired.

I am not used to such feelings!

As another horrific North Dakota winter approaches, as I have chosen to remain in this tiny apartment (and not yet return south) in a place I do not remotely like, I am beginning to panic.  How will I endure and survive the next 6 months?

I try nearly every moment to override these concerns with asking myself, “What is my useful purpose in being here?”

I don’t really know.

But after taking a look at this article — “Economic Costs of Adverse Childhood Experiences in Alaska: The price of not intervening before trauma occurs” – that my friend sent me this morning I had a concept come into my thoughts that is a new one for me:  SOCIAL ENGINEERING

++

Because of the power inherent in such a process, along with possible sinister intentions, I would ordinarily be suspect of supporting such a process.  But isn’t that what ending childhood traumas – as the above article describes — would actually accomplish in the most positive ways possible?

Isn’t this the reason I established this blog in the first place?

Everything we do especially with our children in a society is about engineering them to participate in a society we MUST be in favor of.  If we decide as a society that we no longer wish our children to SUFFER, can we put an end to the conditions that cause this suffering?

Yes.  We can.

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

Story Without Words:  How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.

++++

Leave a Comment »

++++

Tags: adult attachment disorders, adult reactive attachment disorder, anxiety disorders,borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, brain development, child abuse,depression,derealization, disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorder, empathy, infant abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factors, PTSD, resiliency, resiliency factors, risk factors, shame

++++

Monday, October 12, 2015.  I remember the years I felt enthusiastic writing posts for this blog.  I was enthralled with hope and discovery.  I was in a process of revelation as I devoured detailed information about the neuroscience of human development.

Then I began to sense the holes in what I was reading.  What about THE REST OF US?  Those of us who lived through hell from birth with nobody around to help us?

Lost.

We were, it seemed, left at the bottom of paragraphs with a word or two that always seemed to include descriptions of inevitable doom wrapped around that single – horrible word – pathology.

Sometimes I would read entire pages and chapters without finding my points of personal resonance – but!  There!  Inevitably at the end?  Pathological development.

++

And then I discovered that one article of Dr. Martin Teicher’s research group describing, in its essence, what I have come to know as Trauma Altered Development.  These words appeared on my researching tableau at the same time I encountered “epigenetics,” although then, around 2006, I could find very little in the research about what that meant.

But.  Teicher’s article!

I have traveled years now with this drowning-in-the-reality-of-truth information in hand, mind and heart:  Severe early trauma survivors are not broken.  We are not ruined.  We are manifestations of the most vital intelligent-design-for-survival known to our species – over all the time of our existence.  But our lives have always been very, very hard.

We ARE different from our more safely and securely attached, more benevolent-world-survival designed peers.

++

Then what?  Now what?  What is next?

I discovered the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) research and its findings as mentioned in these posts:

CDC Adverse Childhood Experience Study

+THE ACE SCORE REVOLUTION (Adverse Childhood Experiences and Trauma Altered Development)

+WHAT ADVERSE EXPERIENCES IN CHILDHOOD CAN DO

Some “older” – LINKS for CDC Study

++

NOW?  Do an online search for these words – “ace interface training”

The top link that will appear will take you here:

Master Trainer Education

There is now an opportunity for ANY and EVERY community in the United States of America to organize a local training in ACE healing-trauma so that the first 25 people trained are then able to themselves train others.  This “movement” is beginning.  It will spread like wildfire.  This work will turn the tide on early trauma.  It will reverse the storm!

++

Serious stuff.  Hopeful.  Powerful.

To get an idea of what is turning the tide, even reversing the STORM of the transmission of intergenerational trauma – PLEASE take a few moments to listen to these critically important words of Laura Porter about “the largest public health discovery” at this link!  (This work is what the film Paper Tigers grew out of.)

I cannot imagine any more important information coming into public awareness anywhere on the planet at this juncture in the evolution of our species than what is presented in its essence in this talk:

Laura Porter on ACEs – 2013 Community Summit

++++

To tell the truth about how I am reacting personally to the information I just posted above is more than I can manage to do.  I am literally feeling overwhelmed.  I think I could best describe my current state like this:  I feel as though I contracted a most deadly disease, and have lived until my current age of 64 having learned everything I could about what has happened to me to give me this disease (dis-ease), what this disease has done to so harmfully impact me in my life, and I have lived as well as I can, nobly in a good way to the best of my abilities, but there has been no SERIOUS word about a cure until RIGHT NOW?

And – for me – the information we are now able to access is coming far far too late.

I am in transition.  What I have always told myself I believe is at this moment being tested on every level of my being.  If I REALLY care that the storm of early trauma is STOPPED – I have to care about EVERYONE!

What is happening now has power, as the words in the above video talk link will tell you, to change in powerful ways the quality of life of those in high-risk-for-early-trauma environments in – TWO generations.

I am in the do-the-work, provide-any-support and assistance I CAN generation.

But the deep grief that I believe ALL unsafely and insecurely attached severe early trauma survivors of ANY age feel – is at these moments being triggered.

++

Topmost in my thoughts are memories of myself at age seven when my parents began their great Alaskan mountain homestead extravaganza at THIS SPOT.

Being taken to that mountain saved my life.  I have no doubt about that whatsoever.  I had no human being to care a damn about what was happening to me at the hands of the psychotic, abusive madwoman who was my mother.

But I was able to bond to the depths of my being with the natural world of the Alaskan wilderness once we found THIS SPOT.

There are lots more pictures HERE – But these are the two pictures that are the portals for the expression of my place in this family.

In THIS ONE – that is me behind my father – the rejected, hated, spurned, horribly abused child who was by no fault of my own (although I could not know that) kept permanently in the hell my mother created to contain me within.

But it is THIS PICTURE that is at the top of the pile of misery that I cannot avoid having triggered after listening to the talk above.

You will see the “rest of the family” surrounding my brother on his birthday.  I am standing rigidly in my little plaid flannel shirt like a cardboard prop pasted into the photograph.  I KNOW what I felt like – TERRIFIED ALL OF THE TIME!  Oh how I suffered ALL OF THE TIME!

I do not remotely wish to remember any of these things that happened to me from the first breath I was able to take in this world.

I was SEVEN in these pictures.  When you listen to the talk (above link) you will notice that it is the brain/self developmental stage around seven, as it correlates with the information Dr. Martin Teicher has given to humanity, that this is the earliest point the “new movement” to end childhood trauma is focusing on (and then beyond through the adolescent stages).

What about the critically important brain building 0-1?  From then on BEFORE the age of seven?

“We” aren’t there yet.  But I DO agree with the idea that is would be the best place, the most essential place to begin stopping the storm of the transmission of intergenerational trauma to reach young people (as this talk describes) BEFORE they become parents themselves!

It is just that NONE of this work is going to “heal” me.  My hope has to solidify and crystallize more than ever before on the next generations.

I am just caught in an incredibly complex storm of my own right now – unable to escape what all of this FEELS like to me – right now – in my body, in these moments of my aging life.

++

I have known for a long time that the healing for the generations has to start somewhere.  It is starting NOW with the info I posted above.  There is a kind of shock wave when such a storm begins its reverse.  I am feeling THAT.  In many ways.  On many levels.  And that is OK.  Just not easy.

++++

+GLOBAL RESPONSE TO LIFELONG EFFECTS OF EARLY TRAUMA IS GAINING STEAM

+PAPER TIGERS – A FILM ABOUT HEALING THAT MATTERS

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

Story Without Words:  How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.

++++

Leave a Comment »

++++

Tags: adult attachment disorders, adult reactive attachment disorder, anxiety disorders,borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, brain development, child abuse,depression,derealization, disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorder, empathy, infant abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factors, PTSD, resiliency, resiliency factors, risk factors, shame