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My daughter and I are working out the terms by which we intend to write a book for publication about the most central ideas contained on this blog.  Without my daughter’s help I cannot write a book.  The nature of the dis-abilities I live with — especially as they connect directly to my disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder’ which are direct consequences of the severe infant-child abuse I endured — that dis-allows me from putting all that I know into the linear format that a book requires.  My daughter will be the guiding force of ‘organization and orientation’ needed for this project.

Without my daughters guidance I am left alone as a rudderless ship adrift in a stormy sea doing nothing but writing around in circles.  I cannot force myself to become someone I am not.  My daughter will be like my mental tugboat or like my containing canal.  She will be the director and producer of a body of written work that will represent what she and I know in combination with each other.

She, as my daughter, now with a child of her own brings to this project a unique perspective created by her place in the line of ancestral events that I write about.  Looking backwards in time as far as we are able to we have in our mental hands a picture that includes patterns that cross six generations.  Because I do not believe that the stress-distress-duress of familial trauma (which can but does not always include abuse) ever happens in a vacuum, it will be by connecting her and my experience and knowledge together that the spark of life for this book will be truly ignited.

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My daughter is about to embark on a new stage of her journey as she begins work on her doctorate in Human Relations with an emphasis on gerontology.  While this specific degree would not be her first choice, it is the only doctorate available to her where she lives that matches her interest in applied sociology.  As I send her emails with ‘ideas’ for our book for her to file away until it is time for the information to be connected to ‘the rest of the story’ I am discovering specifically how I think what I know connects both to the field of study she will be entering and the field of sociological study that she has already accomplished.

Most simply put, as measured by the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) data collection and research, those people who endured the most traumatic early infant-child traumas are also most likely NOT to reach the far end of the gerontology age range.  They are the people who will NOT be considered in her PhD studies except as they invisibly present themselves by already being dead!

Yesterday during our telephone conversation my brother mentioned an article in the most recent issue of The New Yorker magazine that synthesizes better than I will ever be able to the CDC-ACE study findings.  He is sending the article on to my daughter and I.

A Reporter at Large — The Poverty Clinic

Can a stressful childhood make you a sick adult?

by Paul Tough March 21, 2011

See also THIS LINK

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One of the stumbling blocks that has so far prevented my daughter and I from collaborating on a book is the fact that she cannot read my childhood stories.  They are too painful to her.  At the same time I have moved forward in my own thinking to the point that I say to her, “The actual specific details of any story I might tell about the abuse I suffered do not matter.  My actual story is not important.  What matters is HOW the abuse that was done to me changed my physiological development so that ‘dis-abilities’ were built into my developing body-brain that I have had to live with for my entire lifespan.”

I am quite certain that my daughter does not yet understand what I am saying to her.  Obviously she will have to eventually ‘get it’ for this book to be written.  I take this quandary as a blessing:  Whatever it takes for my daughter to ‘get it’ is exactly what we need to convey to the reading public!

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Alongside the critically important, very simply and clearly relayed information about the long-term consequences of early trauma as presented in the CDC-ACE study – which I am THRILLED to see coming to ‘lay light’ in this most recent mainstream magazine’s article on the topic – will ride the most fundamental information about how ATTACHMENT patterns created during the first 33 weeks of life direct the flow of all human physiological development.  (Good safe and secure infant-caregiver attachment = one kind of body; bad unsafe and insecure infant-caregiver attachment = a different kind of body)

These ‘kinds of bodies’ can be discerned through assessment of attachment patterns at all ages past the age of one.  I personally consider the creation of an adult attachment assessment tool that could be widely used (reliably) on the public-service level to be the single most important recommendation my writing can possibly make.  The tool currently in existence – the Adult Attachment Interview (SEE for example:  ADULT ATTACHMENT INTERVIEW PROTOCOL by Mary B. Main) has never made it into mainstream use (and no doubt never will).

Yet I still believe that assessment of attachment patterning provides the most important body of information that anyone can ever have about people (self included).  An accurate assessment of attachment patterning reflects in a different way the same information that the CDC is gaining through their ACE assessments.  I believe these two assessment processes need to be linked together, which can never happen until a simpler version of the adult attachment tool is developed-invented.

Once this simper and accessible/useable tool exists, and once these two sources of information are used in combination where it matters most, humans will be able to gather information about the source of most personal and social ills.  The picture that will emerge through these two channels of information will be about what happened during the first 33 weeks of a human’s life as it impacted their physiological development.  These patterns are what I call ‘The Source’ for most lack of well-being that humans experience across their lifespan.

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The Adult Assessment Interview is NOT gathering information of concern about the details of what happened in a person’s early or later life.  This tool is measuring HOW a person narrates their life story.  It is in the narrational patterns of the telling our life story that the underlying patterns of attachment are reflected – secure (organized) attachment, insecure organized attachment or insecure disorganized attachment patterns.  THOSE patterns in turn reflect the underlying physiological developmental trajectory a person experienced during the first 33 weeks of their life in response to an early environment of STRESS-DISTRESS or of protection from (‘too much’) stress-distress.  The CDC-ACE tool is showing the same thing.

If for no other reason than for a concern with economy, efficiency and effectiveness in regard to the dispensing of human-need resources (of every kind) we need this information FIRST and FOREMOST in order to make positive changes in life-patterns.  Anyone working to improve human well-being and quality of life is working blind without it.  This source-information needs to inform every action we take to improve our life (or in our efforts to help anyone else improve theirs).

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As I wrote to my daughter this morning, not having this source information is like trying to fill a car’s gas tank at a pump that is not connected to a fuel bank; turning on a faucet and expecting water when that faucet is not connected to a water source; trying to breath in a vacuum; expecting light to show up when we flip a switch that isn’t connected to a source of electricity.

What happens to a human during the first 33 weeks of life, primarily within the infant-caregiver interactional environment, is the source for how a body-brain physiologically develops in response.  Overly harmful attachment-based experiences during this time of life both build the body-brain at the same time they build themselves INTO the body-brain as they alter the course of development. This is true for all animals that researchers study, and it is true for us.

I believe that most human lifelong suffering can be traced back to this source.  I would like to see a run for this current March 21, 2011 issue of The New Yorker such as this magazine has never seen!  I personally believe it contains the most important article they have ever printed.

I wouldn’t give a broken twig for anything my mother ever did to me if what she did hadn’t had the power to change the way this body I live in developed.  It wasn’t having my head brutally shoved into a toilet bowl when I was four or being locked in a shed when I was sixteen that actually hurt me.  It was what my mother effectively did to me in her reign of terror before I was two years old that mattered most.   I cannot tell those earliest stories although my body can in the way I narrate everything that has happened to me ever since.

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Having just written my last post, +DO EARLY ABUSE SURVIVORS HAVE THE GIFT OF QUESTIONING? and as I prepare to enter my arena of garden creation for today I had the thought:  “Can I apply what I wrote in that post to my own abuse survivor mother?  Can apply it to my father who so perfectly participated with my mother in her insane, terrible abuse of me?”

Well, I both can and can’t apply my ‘theory’ about severe early abuse survivors having the ability to ask questions!  To my knowledge my mother never questioned the rightness or wrongness of anything she ever did to me.  My father never questioned it, either.

I am not talking about minor crimes against an infant-child here — if such a thing even exists!  All crimes against little ones are major crimes – but my parents performed HORRENDOUS acts of abuse that went on and on and on for the 18 years of my early life.

This awareness of patterns of abusive realities makes me wonder if there might be something very specific about the way early abuse can combine to create trauma altered development in body and brain that completely excludes the ability to ask meaningful questions.  This seems to indicate a rigidity of harmful thought and action that could defy belief if we didn’t know that they DO happen.

My mother seemed incapable of asking questions from the OUTSIDE of her psychosis, so pervasive to her complete existence was her ‘mental illness’.  Thus, no opportunity for self-intervention of extremely damaging patterns of living could possibly exist.  Questioning would have had to come from the OUTSIDE of our family.  This did not ever happen.

It seems to me, from my point of view, that the inability to question the perpetration of the horrors of abuse especially against one’s own child might be particularly related to personality disorders including Borderline and Narcissistic.  In these patterns of survival-mode within such a trauma-altered body-brain all ongoing patterns of action are a PART OF the disordered personality — by definition as demonstrated by repeated, ongoing and unquestioned thoughts, feelings, perceptions and actions.

When ‘experts’ note that the inability to ‘self reflect’ is a key side effect of personality disorders perhaps they are at the same time describing what happens when a trauma-altered person has LOST the ability to question anything that might really matter.  Without the ability to question there will be no opportunity to find answers that can lead to critically-needed self-change.

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Of course this post reflects my bias that given the possession of the ability to question how is it possible that someone wouldn’t USE IT?  Did my mother actually possess the power to question?  If she did, could she have chosen to question and change?  Or, did she have the power to question but had lost the power to choose?  More of my questioning…….

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I could say ‘long ago and far away’ I spent a quarter of a century being around, participating with, studying from the heart, and learning about Native American Indigenous ways of being.  Yet what I learned and what I came to understand has, I most hope, become connected within my soul-self with all that I was born to be.  In this way, all of those experiences have become a integral part of who I am this moment in some important ways.

Even though I grew up a white child within a mostly white culture, the abusive environment within my home was its OWN culture.  I don’t believe, therefore, that I was ‘acculturated’ the way an ordinary child would have been.  Of course my infant-childhood left many holes within me because I was so deprived of early interactive experiences with any other world (except for my very narrow experiences at school) other than the abusive world that encased me.

Yet as I struggle to learn who I am as a person I know that my mother’s abuse of me changed my physiological development but it did not SATURATE me.  I was left with one of  my greatest gifts:  Questioning!

As time has gone by in my adult life I have used my ability to question to my advantage.  Left with huge gaps in my social development, at the same time I was deprived of any ordinary pattern of acculturation within my own ‘society at large’, my open, questioning soul-self-mind has been able to range freely to find answers to my questions.

I hardly believe that I have accepted the dominant ‘Western worldview’ that would probably have filled so many questioning gaps within me that there would have been little room (or freedom) for me to INVENT myself the way that I have.  I have been able to seek — search for — answers to my inner questions without being overly hampered by a solid mass of cultural beliefs, prejudices, and assumptions about life that COULD have automatically filled me up from the time of my birth.

In many ways the emptiness that followed me throughout the first 18 years of my life and on through into my adulthood has been my greatest gift.  That emptiness, coupled with my ability to question, has left me free to learn on my own based on a matching-up process within my own self.

I can notice things like, “Does what this person believe make sense to me?  How does what they say and what they do FEEL LIKE to me?  Do I truly believe ‘it’?”

I look instinctively for what resonates within me.  And I have evidently used my freedom to fill up the empty spaces the abuse left within me with goodness.

The Native American people were banned by national law from outwardly practicing any aspect of their Indigenous spiritual ways until they were legally given their freedom to do so in 1974.

One of the most fundamental aspects of Indigenous belief that I discovered is the understanding that every aspect of life is engaged continually in a CO-CREATIONAL process.  Humans are not only included in this process, they are prime movers on its stage.

Creation was never a static activity that some obscure and distant Creator performed alone.  Creation PARTICIPATES together at all times.

My innate desire to ‘make things’ or to ‘be creative’ is intimately tied to my desire to both ask questions and to look for answers.  These patterns within me are both intimately tied to my desire to find – and to contribute to – that which is beautiful.  Although any contributions I might make to adding into and onto the beauty that exists in this world are humble and meager, I also understand that the Most Great Picture of how everything fits together is beyond my ability to comprehend.

But because I was left without human relationships for the first 18 years of my life I am free to explore relationships on many levels that I might not otherwise have looked for them.  I wonder about the breath I just exhaled – how does it relate to the bird I hear outside my door chittering away as it pecks tiny insects off of my sidewalk.  I wonder how the action of my fingertips clicking away on this keyboard are connected to the motor that just kicked in for my refrigerator.  I wonder how my every thought connects to my past and to my future as I wonder about this great web of life that envelops this globe – and beyond.

While I try not to be prejudiced or judgmental about other people, I can’t help but often notice how so many people don’t seem motivated in any way to question!  The more complex the world becomes the more narrow I see so many people becoming in their thinking.  As if the process creates some illusion of safety in response to threats people feel helpless to combat, so many people simply takes tiny pieces of information and put it together in such a way that no questions need to be asked – and therefore no solutions need to be found.

To me, that way of being excludes opportunities for ongoing creativity.  Humans are innately creative!  Perhaps I share with many, many early abuse survivors the need, desire and ability to QUESTION in ways that ‘ordinary people’ do not have.  At this moment I would not want to miss the opportunities this gift of questioning I possess!  This ability has kept me anchored in the co-creational process of life on a conscious level.  I like that!

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Haven been given only a small handful of truly useful information about how to be a happy, healthy human being during the first 18 years of my childhood (coupled with continual severe abuse during these years) has left me trying to create a patchwork quilt of a life.  Just like I would choose a pattern for a quilt and place within it color and fabric combinations that will work together to create something useful and beautiful after my work would be done, I continually try to piece information together about how humans actually ‘work’ compared to the overwhelming information I received as a child that showed me how humans are NOT supposed to ‘work’.

I learn a lot from the nonhuman world of earth and plants.  Even animals are a source of mystery to me.  I have been given my daughters long-haired Pomeranian-Pekingese mix 3-year-old dog, Who Who.  She is absolutely NOT child friendly and will never be safe to trust around little people.  She growls and snarls, snaps and will bite them if allowed to.  That’s evidently who she is.  She bit my grandson — and was flown 1700 miles south from North Dakota to be my friend and companion down here where I life along the Mexican-American border line.

I don’t really even understand animals.  While a lot of people might be in my similar shoes, at least most people can understand their peers – fellow human beings.  But being abused and mostly sequestered in isolation even away from my 5 siblings taught me nothing about how humans relate to one another except on the most surface of levels — in other words, I could see the ACTIONS (including the abuse) but I did not develop an emotional-social brain that would allow me FROM THE INSIDE to FEEL the feeling-felt experience of being a member of a social species.

Of course I never actually new what was being done to me from the time I was born was wrong.  I never knew what being treated RIGHT felt like.  I simply endured and survived until enough time went by that I was ‘all grown up’ so that I could enter a different life.  Here I am at 59 a long long way into that different life, but with so much emotional-social information missing (as my body-brain was built in the midst of terror, pain and trauma) I simply spend every waking moment of my life trying to learn how to get along better in a world I doubt I will ever truly understand.

So I watch – even my new dog’s eyes.  I watch her movements, her body language, and listen to the changes in the tone of her voice.  Most humans, formed in safe and secure attachment environments – who are not abused, neglected, maltreated and traumatized – naturally develop well before the age of four with enough information of the right kind given to them that they can be ‘people whisperers’ for the rest of their lives.  People take these abilities for granted.  We are NOT meant to develop in such a way that members of our own social species are a mystery to us.

But, mystery they are to me (myself included).  This mystery is no less great to me as the mystery of how I heal the soil of the land I live on so that it can grow food to nourish me (and to be given to others to help nourish them).  Every positive interactions humans have with one another is actually a form of nourishment for all involved.  To learn about how to nourish my soil — and believe me, this soil that was long ago the floor of a great ocean was never built to provide nourishment to any but the most hardy native plants — I have to learn what a healthy soil is.  Then I have to take steps to provide the nourishment this soil needs so that it can be, in fact, healthier than it has EVER been since the time it was made.

I have lived up north much of my adult life.  I took nourished and nourishing soil completely for granted.  In an abstract way I knew that over-farming and maltreatment of the land could hurt soil, but this is the first time in my life I have been faced with the kinds of problems this soil actually has if it is expected to produce something quite basic to my life:  FOOD!

I did receive basic FOOD of the physical kind as a child (yet even my need for food was manipulated in abusive ways).  I DID NOT receive the food of kindness, compassion, love, respect, or any other kind of nourishment a human being needs to build a body-brain-mind-self on the INSIDE that could come out at the end perfectly able to be what is called in agricultural (and cultural terms) SUSTAINABLE.

I fully believe that humans around the globe are soon going to be forced by the backlash of misdirected greed and ignorance to redefine and to change patterns of living toward a SUSTAINABLE way of living so that both the health of our planet and the continued survival of our species (and MANY others) can be supported.

As I work now to build my chicken coop and run, as I work to add all kinds of amendments to my soil – in the proper amounts and combinations, in the proper depth, at the proper time, in the proper way – I think a lot about what I am working to achieve on this little piece of property with my little financial resources reflects what I have done all my life as a human being who somehow grew to know absolutely that violence and the maltreatment of all life is the incorrect way to live.  Correcting mistakes — my parents’ grave, profoundly hurtful and damaging mistakes  toward me — has been the major job of my lifetime.

Animals (in my thinking) do not make mistakes that they, on their own, would choose to correct later on.  They simply move forward through time being their self!  Plants don’t make mistakes.  If they are in a damaging environment they have very limited ways provided to them to improve their condition.  As a gardener and as a person who might be fortunate to have a few animals in my life (my Mexican-American neighbor children, all native Spanish speakers, refer to every tiny bug they see as an ‘animal’) I come to understand how to take care of these life forms so that they can be happy and healthy.

I am most grateful that I somehow came out of my hell of a childhood instinctively and intuitively knowing what nurturing is so that I could be a wonderful mother.  I learn by watching others – people and animals alike – who they are and what they need.  I am learning about this soil here so that I can work to heal it toward a health it has never known – but I am not fooled into thinking that this healing process will ever NOT need repeated tending.

All this learning is not unpleasant.  Much of it should have happened a long, long time ago.  Now it happens at a different pace, in different ways – but often I approach the world from a simple place as if I were still a child.  At least at my age I know enough to understand that if this is what it takes for me to repair at least some of the damage done to me through 18 years of continual abuse — so be it!  I have found a niche on this planet, and have been given plenty of gifts from without and from within, that allow me to continue my simple path one single breath, one single step, one single feeling and one single thought at a time.

I’m not sure that even if I had been loved and protected, not abused and maltreated from the time I was born, that I could ever ask for more than this!

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Maybe like an astronomer who has detected an anomaly in the sky, I have my telescope trained upon the spot where this ‘irregularity’ first appeared.  I watch it hoping that someday what I learn will turn what seemed so strange into something that is just plain ordinary.

Trauma triggers are often like that for me.  Even if I can detect what the trigger actually was, I don’t usually understand how the trauma trigger and my reaction to it are even connected.  So I train my inner telescope on both the trigger and my reaction to it, hoping that in time whatever the trigger turns out to be can be made benign to me.  Maybe someday at least that trigger will no longer create any reaction in me at all.

Yet today I feel my ‘crater’ inside, my ‘black hole’ of deep and enduring sorrow.  I didn’t feel it yesterday.  Why it is resonating within me so strongly today?

As I track backwards in time (and event) I realize that what I suspect triggered my deep sorrow was not a ‘single thing’.  The trigger was actually an accumulation of experiences that I never knew were even related – until my inner telescope showed me that they WERE connected.  These seemingly tiny triggers all seem to add onto one another until – like a log jam that can grow so big it can change the course of a river – suddenly I find myself ‘somewhere’ inside of myself that I don’t want to be.

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A cumulative trigger can show me something helpful if I know how to look at it.  But this looking can be difficult when I am in the middle of my reaction to the trigger!

What I see THIS time is that as I encounter people in the world around me I am often comparing myself to them on some level I am not even aware of, and I come up lacking.  Then I begin to notice in someone else’s honestly cheerful approach to life, or in their competent management of their life and resources that keeps them from poverty, or in their ability to maintain a stable partner relationship – whatever the POSITIVE is that I detect in someone else I see myself having lost my own ground to the negative.

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As a severe infant-child abuse survivor I understand that whatever I was given in my earliest environment was enough to keep me physically alive, but not enough to allow me to gain ground in important ways that ALL non-infant abuse survivors (in particular) have.  I know enough now to translate this thought into its truest meaning:  I did have resiliency factors available to me that kept me alive, and inner ones that kept my self intact (although not integrated into my body-world).  At the same time my earliest environment of severe abuse by my mother created overwhelming risk factors that – in truth of fact – could not possibly balance themselves out with an equal ‘number’ of resiliency factors.

In other words, I was robbed of what I desperately needed to grow up as a happy, healthy infant-child.  Being robbed changed the course of my physiological development so that today there are certain abilities non-abused, non-traumatized (during their earliest years) people take absolutely for granted.

Why should it occur to these people to appreciate or be grateful for what they received as infants and children?  WE NOTICE!  We severe early abuse survivors DO NOTICE – and I suspect that we have ALWAYS noticed that other people have ‘things’ we do not have – because they were given these things just as every little person SHOULD be given them.  These ‘things’ we were robbed of (at the same time we lived in an environment of pain-filled terror) were not trivial extras.  They were essential to the growth and development of an optimal human being.

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It has never occurred to me so clearly as it has today that being around BOTH ‘optimally formed’ people AND being around sad and troubled people that were obviously deprived in their own earliest years of what they needed to grow up ‘well’ are BOTH triggers for my own grief and sadness.

I can’t go back and change what happened to me in the first critical months/years of my development that so changed the body-brain I live with.  What I want to achieve is some kind of immunity against the triggering of my deep, deep grief-filled sadness that lies within every cell of my body and that can snag me out of a day of ‘well-being’ like a gigantic fish-hook that captures me and drags me down to the bottom of the sea.

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In case I might try to take a simplistic and erroneous path toward my hoped-for goal, I have an image that appears to me every time I think I am ‘making a mountain out of a molehill’.  I see a young child, one old enough to notice, having been invited to a birthday party.  The child is left out of all the games and laughter, ignored like it is invisible.  When it is time to sit at the table for lunch and cake with the other children, who all gaily giggle with their party hats on, everyone else is served the party sustenance while this single child receives nothing (not even a party hat)!

In our culture I believe we are trained not to complain (or ‘envy’ others).  The child says nothing.  Nobody even notices what is happening.  The child experiences all this sadness, and to make matters worse it does so ALONE.

I do not wish to blame my own self for noticing the deprivations and traumas, the horrendous abuse, or minimize anything that happened to me or be ashamed to speak my own truth.  Just because very few if any people want to hear what our reality was (and is) doesn’t mean our reality doesn’t matter.  When the contrast between non-abused people and our reality as survivors strongly catches our attention – when we notice consciously or not that there is difference between us – I believe those experiences of contrast will most often trigger our trauma in our body memory.  Being as aware as possible when this is happening might be able to thwart a full-blown trauma ‘allergy’ attack in reaction to these subtle (and very common) and extremely powerful triggers.

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A corner of my thoughts has been with those in northern Japan who are enduring the great trauma (see video footage of water here) caused by the Tsunami created by the massive earthquake last Friday, March 11, 2011.  Japan lies on the ‘Pacific Ring of Fire’:  “About 90% of the world’s earthquakes and 80% of the world’s largest earthquakes occur along the Ring of Fire.”

I was 12 in 1964 when the great earthquake struck Alaska, and how well I remember that experience.  Yet to me, a survivor of severe and nearly continual child abuse, the aftermath of that earthquake actually felt good to me.  My mother, like most adults in Alaska at the time, was completely focused on that disaster, which meant she completely ignored me.  Being ignored felt like heaven to me.

Yet as overwhelming an experience as a major earthquake and tsunami can be, that kind of trauma – not one caused by human beings – is actually easier to bear and heal from for people than is a major trauma of the other kind – one that IS caused by humans.

When I think of severe infant-child abuse I always think about it within the realm of great traumas, knowing that all the parameters of suffering, distress, terror, pain and confusion are actually greatly increased for young infants and children when faced with trauma caused by the very people who are supposed to love and care for them.

Even though today was a gorgeous day, and I spent all of it outside working toward being able to plant my garden, I could not entirely block out my awareness that there are things happening to others of all ages around this nation and this globe that are causing them to suffer.  I am very glad that I believe in the spiritual power of prayer to help all of us, even though most of what happens in this lifetime remains a Great Mystery to me.

As I work hard and humbly with my hands in the dirt I know there is a God that cares about everyone and about everything.  I ask that God to help all of us this whole world over.

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Why is there no looting in Japan?

Discipline in the face of disaster: no looting in Japan

“Three days after a magnitude-9 killer quake devastated Japan, triggering Pacific-wide tsunamis and a likely nuclear plant meltdown and then consigning millions of Japanese to darkness, thirst and hunger in the wintry cold, I still have yet to read reports of widespread looting,” wrote Frederico D. Pascual Jr. of The Philippine Star. “This Filipino watching 3,200 kilometers from Ground Zero finds this disciplined behavior of a huge population in distress awe-inspiring. Let us pray that they stay that way — and that we learn from them.“

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My company-related thoughts concerning my experiences of this past week have come to include what I am trying to learn and understand about the interplay between our human attachment and our caregiving systems.  It is most common for those of us who are survivors of severe infant-child abuse to have a body-brain that was changed in its physiological development in such a way that our stress-distress (insecure attachment) system works differently from ‘normal’.

Our ‘warning’ system shows its nearly continual activation through our patterns of attachment to self, others and to our world around us as it manifests in our insecure attachment patterns that are very difficult to ‘turn off’.  This means that when we ‘caregive’ we are accomplishing this feat in different ways from ‘normal’.  A body-brain built in a safe and secure earliest attachment-relationship environment will activate when ACTUAL threat exists in the environment.  At other times it will turn itself off and caregiving smoothly happens within these times.

These two systems — our attachment system and our caregiving system — are not ordinarily designed to operate at the same time.  Once our attachment needs are met the system turns off (and body-felt anxiety all but disappears).  I believe many people, especially parents, can react appropriately in caregiving their offspring because they can accomplish BOTH system activations at the same time.  Experts refer to Earned Secure attachment when this happens.  Based on my own experience I call this Borrowed Secure attachment.

When it comes to adult-to-adult interactions it can be harder to gain clarity about how these two systems are operating within relationships.  Needing ‘more than normal’ is an understandable and very normal consequence stemming from abuse, trauma, neglect and maltreatment of infants and children.  Gaining clarity about WHAT we need, WHEN we need, HOW we need, and WHO we feel we need what from are part of our never-ending healing process.

Give and receive is what our rupture-repair patterns are about.  I am very clear about how these patterns work when I am in interaction with children, but am having to learn as much as I can about adult interactions that seem foggy to me in these areas.  In the meantime as I continue to learn, I try to achieve a gentle forgiving stance that is most clearly connected to this thought as I struggle in adult relationships:  “Linda, this isn’t the end of the world!”

From the time I was born everything in my universe felt like ‘the end of the world’ or ‘the world is ending NOW (or very soon)’.  Just taking a breath, backing up from the specific details of a troublesome experience and giving myself time to process accomplishes a lot for me!  The experience of the passage of TIME itself becomes altered in the midst of trauma.  I try today to literally manage time so that it slows down.  In that slowing down I can allow more and more information into the picture that can help me gain a better, clearer perspective about what matters most — and what doesn’t.

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