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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.

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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.

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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

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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!

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

+PAPER TIGERS – A FILM ABOUT HEALING THAT MATTERS

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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.

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Leave a Comment »

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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

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Wednesday, October 7, 2015.  THIS came along in my email box this morning from the Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog.  And this email may change the course of my life.

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People living in New York can get to this – not me, way over here in North Dakota.

Paper Tigers Film Screening

Posted: 06 Oct 2015 07:50 AM PDT

“The impact of unloved and traumatized children on society is profound and widespread. 85% of inmates were traumatized as youth. 27% of hospital visits can be traced to causes linked to childhood trauma. Hurt kids grow up to hurt people. The generational cycles of trauma and abuse are as stubborn as they are tragic.

“There is hope. That’s the message of Paper Tigers, a documentary that takes an intimate look at a year in the life of the students of Lincoln High School, an alternative school that specializes in educating traumatized youth. Set in the rural town of Walla Walla, WA, the film examines the concept of Trauma Informed Communities—a movement that shows great promise in healing youth struggling with the dark legacy of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES).

“Prevent Child Abuse New York and the School of Social Welfare at the University at Albany will present a special screening of Paper Tigers. A panel discussion will follow the film. Event details are below.”

When: Wednesday, November 4, 2015, 4:30 PM
Where: University at Albany Downtown Campus, Milne Hall Room 200, 135 Western Ave., Albany, NY 12203
Register: Please register here to ensure your space at the event

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Click HERE to see if there is a screening of this film near you!

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I sent this information to my daughter who is employed in the Masters of Public Health department at a university here.  Perhaps she can pass this information to someone who will work to get a screening of this film in Fargo.

Take a look:

“Paper Tigers captures the pain, the danger, the beauty, and the hopes of struggling teens—and the teachers armed with new science and fresh approaches that are changing their lives for the better.”

And from this film’s website –

ABOUT THE FILM

“Paper Tigers is an intimate look into the lives of selected students at Lincoln High School, an alternative school that specializes in educating traumatized youth. Set amidst the rural community of Walla Walla, WA, the film intimately examines the inspiring promise of Trauma Informed Communities – a movement that is showing great promise in healing youth struggling with the dark legacy of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES).

“Exposure to chronic and adverse stress (and the altered brain function that results) leaves a child in a fruitless search for comfort and escape from a brain and body that is permanently stuck in flight or fight. That comfort comes in the form of drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, sex, food and more.

“Every year, millions of unloved and traumatized youth enter adulthood with damaged brains and hearts. They are highly predisposed to die from self-destructive behaviors, and highly likely to continue the cycle of abuse. Even those who do not engage in self destructive behaviors are highly predisposed to get cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, and immune disorders.

“The impact of unloved and traumatized children on society is profound and widespread. 85% of inmates were traumatized as youth. 27% of hospital visits can be traced to causes linked to childhood trauma. Hurt kids grow up to hurt people. The generational cycles of trauma and abuse are as stubborn as they are tragic.

“But there is hope.

“There are doctors, researchers, teachers, nurses, social workers and law enforcement officers that are turning the tide against the cycle of trauma and abuse. A movement is rising, one that sees aberrant behavior in children as a symptom rather than a moral failing. This movement asks not what is wrong with our youth, but rather what has happened to them. The paradigm is shifting from punishment and blame to a deeper commitment to understanding and healing the underlying causes of aberrant behavior. With this shifting paradigm comes the promise of great improvements in many of the society’s costly ills: less crime, less illness, less teen pregnancy, abuse, rape, divorce.

“Simply put, it is cheaper to heal than to punish. Paper Tigers takes a look at what is possible.”

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I can always feel a twist of the knife of disappointment when I read of work about early trauma that ends up mentioning – MONEY – in terms of “the cost to society.”

What about OUR suffering?  The suffering of high ACE score survivors?

Well, I can read between the lines of the effort this website and this film represent to understand that bridges must be built between the HAVES (those who were raised with safe and secure attachment and low ACE scores) and the HAVE-NOTS who suffered the opposite.  Without those bridges such survivors, along with little ones suffering in real time present moments, will continue to be ignored by those with the means to make the biggest positive difference.  (It is also not true that violence always travels down traumatized generations – as some of the information at this website might seem to suggest.)

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I had thought I would end my tenure in Fargo, North Dakota right about now by heading south again.  Didn’t happen because I could not move myself off of what felt like dead center.  It did not feel right for me to leave now.  A matter of timing and/or a matter of destination place?

I am beginning a serious search for information about Walla Walla, WA to find out of the excitement that I felt at this healing work being done in this place connects me remotely – or perhaps will connect me much more closely with that work.  Perhaps by this time next year I will be relocated there.

Time will tell….

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Meanwhile, perhaps some of this blog’s readers can attend one of the many screenings of Paper Tigers – or perhaps organize a screening of this important documentary in their hometown – INFORMATION ON HOSTING A SCREENING HERE.

And, please get this information to anyone you can think of who CARES!

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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 »

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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

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Monday, September 21, 2015.  If we have a history of early traumatic relationships that built our developing nervous system, brain and self within unsafe and insecure attachment conditions rather than within safe and secure attachment conditions those patterns of insecurity within us can very easily become activated in every relationship we have – especially our most meaningful ones – for the duration of our life.

While I am certainly not saying that safe and securely attached people do not have relationship difficulties, I am saying that because we severe early trauma survivors were built in, by and for a primarily malevolent world we have never been designed for default patterns of safety and security in this world – certainly not within the human-to-human world.

While it is often very helpful to us in our efforts to build healthy safe and secure attachment relationships to have identified the specific details and nature of our early traumas, I do not believe this information gives us – by itself – the most important avenues we need in order to create and sustain the kinds and quality of relationships with people we most want to have in our current and future life.

We need to learn to identify the PATTERNS within the range of how human attachment systems operate.  These patterns exist as very early-forming neurobiological expressions that appear in our body/brain and then in how we feel, how we think and how we act/react.

I continue to most highly recommend Dr. Daniel J.Siegel and Mary Hartzell’s book

Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive

for its practical explanation of what attachment is, how to identify patterns of attachment, how these patterns originate, how we experience them in relationships and how we can change them.

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Trauma survivors are not alone in having human needs.  Everyone has them.  When anyone has an attachment need that is creating an “insecurity” within them this means, most simply, that their attachment system is turned ON (it is activated).

If person A is called in some way to “caregive” to another person B –whose attachment need system is also turned ON — person A will not be able to fully caregive to B unless A can either turn OFF (deactivate) their attachment need system or at least relegate their need to an inconspicuous level at this time.

I have found this toggle-switch-like ON/OFF (attachment need/caregive in response to need) connection between activated need (insecurity) and caregiver response is most clearly conceptualized and explained in the writings presented here:

All the links are contained together here:  +CAREGIVING IN ADULT ATTACHMENT RELATIONSHIPS

Links in the series separately:

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part One

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Two

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Three

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Four

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Five

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Six

**Attachment Styles and Caregiving from Collins Article

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Ahh!  But there is so much more to our story!

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The end goal of early safe and secure attachment is to create a fully autonomous adult who can flexibly and appropriately choose from the widest array possible of health-and-happiness producing options in response to self, others and one’s environment.

High Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) score people and/or people with severe early attachment trauma histories of abuse and neglect usually suffer from what I call a PRIMARY insecure attachment disorder.  Our attachment need system rarely if ever turns itself OFF or can be turned OFF.

We were formed in an environment that did not meet our basic human needs and that by its severely traumatic nature also created additional extraordinary needs within us.

As adults we work to become conscious of our own needs as we take responsibility for them.  It is nobody else’s job to take care of us.  (We are grownups, no longer kids.)  When we lost sight of what our own needs are we can also become very foggy about our “demands” for someone else to respond to us in ways we WANT them to.  (For a connection to “codependency” CLICK HERE.)

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Having lived many years in a high desert region where much research goes into learning about the lifespan of trees has given me a useful image in my thinking about the differences between those with “primary” insecure attachments and those without them.

Evidently a tree left to grow through too many of its early developmental years in a pot will never grow a true taproot once it has been transplanted into the earth.  As I see it people raised in a safe and secure (benevolent) attachment world are enabled to grow their taproot from the start of their life within the enriching soil of healthy human interactions.  Those of us raised in the horrors of a drastically unsafe and insecure (malevolent) attachment world are like trees whose potential for life is constricted within a pot of impossibility.

When developmental expert Dr. Martin Teicher speaks of the kinds of physiological changes that happen during the developmental stages of maltreated infants and children he also notes that it is most often the total MISMATCH between growing up in a malevolent world and then being transplanted later into a mostly benevolent world that creates so many additional problems for severe early trauma survivors.

Our body/brain/self was designed to keep us alive in a world that WAS impossible to survive within.

In the words of Dr. Donald Woods Winnicott (some of whose writings are presented here: The Language of Winnicott) — “going on being” is an essential component of the development of an authentic “self” – which, from a severe trauma survivor’s point of view, is only possible if LIFE ITSELF is allowed to “go on being” at all.

It is the unsolvable paradox of surviving what cannot be survived, of “going on being” when “going on being” is not possible for a tiny infant/child, that forms the basis of the “primary” insecure attachment disorder patterns some of us are left to negotiate relationships with throughout our lifespan.

Yet, we are NOT trees!  We do continue to stretch and grow our attachment relationship taproot into the soil of health, happiness, safety and security – in the best way we know how to — no matter what our early trauma experiences have been.

But we are not indigenous inhabitants of a safe and secure attachment relationship (benevolent) world.  We are transplants.  We live in the complicated aftermath of severe early trauma.

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How DID we remain alive when doing so was impossible?

How DO we give so much to others when so many of our essential early needs were never met?

We replaced “No, you CANNOT” with “Yes, I CAN!”

We replaced “No, you WILL NOT” with “Yes, I WILL!”

“If there is a good way forward, I will find it.  If there is no good way forward, I will create one.”

But I think the hardest part has to do with having been SO ALONE, having to essentially survive as a self – alone.

How do we even learn what safe and secure attachment IS?  How do we learn to be TOGETHER with other people?  How do we learn to help others learn how to be TOGETHER with us?

How do we learn to be alone without – well – FEELING SO ALL ALONE?  How do we — come to think about it — even learn how to be around other people without STILL FEELING SO ALL ALONE?

No other person is ever going to be able to take our pain away from us.  No one else is going to remove from us the essences of all that we have been through.  These elements are a part of us.

But the risk is that we might WANT someone to take care of us, to heal us, to remove our essential aloneness – WHATEVER it is that should NEVER have been a part of our life in the first place.

THAT PART?

HA!  Not gonna happen!  And that is perfectly OK!

Boundaries lie where you remain you while I remain me.

This is the integrity of life.

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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 »

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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

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Friday, September 11, 2015.  I am asking myself, “Do I really know what respect is?”  It is not a tangible object.  That much I know.  Yet I turn the word around in my mind as if it IS some kind of internal object that some people must actually “have a handle on.”

Handle.  I would say that in my “world order of things” respect seems to be connected to the way I handle my own self in the world.

“In respect to….”

“In retrospect….”

As I try to inspect what I might inwardly know or at least believe about respect I cannot avoid opening some inner doors of revelation into my childhood.  As this happens I cannot avoid cringing.

It is easy for me to simply say, “Nobody ever respected me.”  So how DID I learn a single thing as a kid about respect?

I couldn’t demand or command respect from anyone as an infant or as a child or even as a teenager.  What I do know, for example, is that in our family it was perfectly fine for my mentally ill mother to beat me often, whenever she wanted to for as long as she wanted to for no reason that any sane person could have determined.

Yet at the same time all her children were trained to climb the steep hillside above our Alaskan homestead shack ALWAYS on a specified single narrow pathway out of respect for NOT harming, not hurting, not damaging, not trampling any tiny tendril of any plant that grew there.

So I DID learn certain things about respect from my parents?

Yes.

But I learned NOTHING about what it would be like to be respected myself – except perhaps by default from teachers at school – in some sort of remote and depersonalized way.

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(Interesting)  Origin of RESPECT

Middle English, from Latin respectus, literally, act of looking back, from respicere to look back, regard, from re- + specere to look — more at spy

First Known Use: 14th century
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Taking a massive leap forward, today I look back at my parenting of my three very-grown children.  By miracles I will probably never specifically be able to identify I was able to completely respect my children and to teach them to respect their self.  I can’t see, however, that I kept our relationships in healthy balance, however.  I could not do a good job at teaching my children to respect me.

I still have aspects of a huge-hole-within struggle when it comes to understanding what it feels like to be respected – wholly respected – for who I am.  I attach “completely valued” now to any concept of respect I come up with.  (I am very blessed to have a few fantastic friendships with people who offer me the best kind of respect that I can imagine.)

I think there is a kind of warm and tender caring involved for me to FEEL fully respected.  It involves on the part of another person (and what I know I do not always give to other people myself) careful listening with an open mind and heart so that I feel listened to and HEARD with high positive regard and empathy for me to FEEL respected.

I don’t think I built that kind of an infrastructure from early on into my children’s relationship with me.  (Oops!)

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I can learn to more clearly identify that when my reactions to others are filled with feelings of disappointment, fear, sadness, frustration, loneliness, shame and even of anger it may well be my “respect-hole” that is being activated and needs to be honored, examined and healed (some more).

I don’t want to keep falling blindly into that hole created, in part, by my tendency to attribute worth and value to others without keeping my half of all interactions firmly anchored in what now needs to be my OWN respect for myself.

I need to strengthen my own self-respect foundations.  This is part of building more resiliencies into me as I decrease my reactivity to how I perceive other people as acting toward me.

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In the massive tumult and jumble of unresolved traumas passed down over generations in families (and in cultures) it can be hard and can take a very long time before complicating factors can be disentangled so that they can begin to be identified and examined.  Both of my parents always had terrible relationships with their parents.

Yes, respect is a part of love.  But it is its OWN part.  To use attachment-related terminology from developmental neuroscientist Dr. Allan N. Schore, problems with respect are about “ruptures without repair” in traumatized family and the people who grew up in them.  Healing can at times seem overwhelming.

Hopefully having the processes of “respect” jump into my current life’s limelight will help me even at age 64 to examine some specific related patterns that have always been troubling to me, usually without my knowledge.  Intergenerational trauma is often entrenched in patterns of “shame and blame” (the antithesis of respect) so that any attempts to heal these traumas and their consequences MUST take place entirely free of those deadly cycles.

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Essentially these processes are about healing our attachment trauma wound at its core that left us perpetually asking, “Will you love me if I am completely myself?”  (“Will you respect me if I am completely myself?”)

We are learning, bit by bit, to replace the unequivocal “NO!” we were so traumatized by with a permanent (we can TRUST it) unconditional “YES!”

This healing, as it takes place, happens in all of our relationships ESPECIALLY in our relationship with our self.

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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.

++++

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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

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Tuesday, September 1, 2015.  There are times in our life when the last thing people around us want from us is that we BE REAL.  If there are important choices being made, significant choices and especially ones that gravely affect very young innocent children — that appear to be being made by others who are operating from an unconscious inner “data base” — EVERY PERSON involved better remain unconscious as well and if this is not possible – then they better be SILENT.

Or what?

Confrontations in these kinds of patterns within relationships do not work.  There is a kind of inner status quo in people who seem to need to remain in an “unconscious” state about matters of import that seems necessary to them being able to sustain their life.  The power held by the unconsciousness itself can never be underestimated.

It is serving a purpose.  A very big purpose.  The good or bad of such purpose is open to question.

Or is it?

What might the critical difference be between that which seems to sustain life and that which seems to sustain a LIFESTYLE?  In American mainstream materialistic, consumer society do we differentiate between the two?

Are we clear about the difference between a want and a need?  How much do we understand about the essential attachment NEEDS of infants and very young children (I would say especially under the age of five)?  In these little people what they NEED and what they WANT is exactly the same thing IF they are being parented correctly with at least GOOD ENOUGH safe and secure attachment permeating the little one’s every early life moment.

A parent’s – especially a mother’s – lack of specific clarity about the difference between their own wants and needs is very likely going to damage their children’s essential development because there IS some suffering-through-personal-sacrifice of WANTS in caregiving attachment adults – and often even some sacrifice of NEEDS required to maintain a stable and fulfilling safe and secure environment for very young humans to grow their self, their connection to and their personal relationship with this self.

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In a materialistic society where WANT is the fuel and GET IT is the fire it is incredibly easy to drop one’s very young children along the roadside in the mad rush to acquire WHATEVER.

Or, just an easy process to drop one’s very young children in some large daycare center and forget about them during the most important formative moments, hours, days, weeks, months and years of those little ones’ lives.  Easy to do so unconsciously.  Easy to do so unchallenged.  Easy for everyone except for those little people who will grow up, and I mean WILL grow up, wounded and lost-within.

Parents who do not want to know what the critically important attachment needs of their children are – won’t know.  Nor will they let anyone else tell them either about these needs or about how not meeting these needs harms their so-young and vulnerable children.

It’s an emotional death trap.  I suspect that this mass abandonment of little ones by mothers into daycare centers from birth is the number one way that trauma is being passed down through the generations to the largest number of people in America today.

It seems not to matter one bit whether or not these kinds of parents were “traumatized” in their childhood or not.  This society condones, enables and encourages such kinds of abandonment of the young – at very young ages and for very VERY long hours per day — and it seems that fewer and fewer parents are willing to question how destructive to the development of a whole and healthy self in young children these patterns of neglect actually are.

It works fine for the creation of a consumer society which best operates by luring its citizens to attempt to fulfill their vast hole-within-self (replete with the kinds of gaping internal wounds that early abandonment creates) by BUYING THINGS.  Buying more and more and more and MORE – things.  Consume.  Consume.  CONSUME.

These children grieve for their mothers all through their waking days.  Who cares?  Who, really, cares?

And when mothers become “super affectionate” love machines to their abandoned young for perhaps an hour in the mornings and perhaps two hours in the evenings – with some kind of super smooching also on the very short weekends filled with GO!  GO!  GO! — these young ones do NOT understand that such love is not a life sustaining, long-term kind of moment-to-moment intimate sharing of continual life experiences kind of love that actually builds happy, healthy self-sustaining whole human beings.

It takes TIME to raise a child, to create a human being.  That is what our evolution has determined best suits our development and frees our fullest potential.  TIME with loving attachment people whose very life is itself devoted primarily to meeting the needs of the little ones being brought into the world.

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Daycare centers are herding pens for lost children, no matter how much they cost, no matter how great their hard-sell for customers is.  Daycares are about BUSINESS.  About making money.

They are not about solacing the breaking hearts of the abandoned young who fill up their toy-packed rooms.  They are not about looking within a child with love to draw out the best possible self of a child into a world where love is dependably there to welcome them every moment of their young life.

Daycare centers overwhelm and overstimulate young children in ways that are not remotely related to the actual needs for intimate development that each child has.  Perhaps by age three “play date” experiences with other children maybe twice a week in two hour segments can be helpful to them.  But this is NOT what is happening to larger and larger segments of our child population.

Not by a long shot.

How long will it take before our society’s great experiment garners attention as the ACE score long-range traumatic event that it is in young children’s lives?  It will take generations because nobody wants to think about or talk about or do anything to stop these patterns.

There may be some cases where daycares can offer to some children more than the parents have to offer them.  But little people do NOT need daycare in most cases to gain some kind of imagined competitive academic edge over their peers.  They do not need daycare “prep schools.”

Neither do they need “friends” to become whole little people at these so-young ages.  They do not need to be overly structured, overly stimulated, overly lost with such long times away (usually 10-11 hours per weekday) away from their primary attachment people.

What are the solutions to these great problems we are creating for our new generations?  How, when and where will our society identify the problems over a person’s lifespan that began with these kinds of patterns of early abandonment?

Who cares?

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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.

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NOTE:  I am still stuck with this new version of the blog’s posting page that I do not like and cannot get out of.  It has refused to post or include my chosen 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

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Sunday, August 9, 2015.  It is hard to say this the kind of information at this link below is “good news.”  It IS NOT good news for those of us who suffer all of our lives from the consequences of severe early trauma (high Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) scores).  I do see it as good news, however, that Psychology Today is presenting this information in such a professional and clearly understandable way.

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7 Ways Childhood Adversity Changes the Brain

How Early Emotional Trauma Changes Who We Are — and What We Can Do About It

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I also see it as good news that one of my own brothers alerted me to this article today.

There are also some links on this page to very good, helpful information.

I will turn 64 at the end of this month.  I hold no illusions whatsoever that the condition-my-condition-is-in will ever in my lifetime remarkably improve.  If, however, I had known the kind of information at the above link when I was 18 – I think I could have turned my life in a better direction so that I could have made far better decisions, far better choices than the ones I did make when I first escaped from my insanely abusive childhood at this age.

I did the best I could do with very little of anything in my experience except horrific trauma.  The kind of information on ACEs coming out today and entering the mainstream awareness has only recently been “discovered” in ways that are helpful to our understanding today.  Certainly it wasn’t possible from my 30s onward when I began healing from my childhood that ANYONE could have clued me into the fact that my physiological development itself had been profoundly altered from birth because of the traumatic abuse I suffered.

Please find some way if you can to use this information for your recovery and pass it along in any way that you can to help someone else!

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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.

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Leave a Comment »

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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

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Saturday, July 25, 2015.  Perhaps it was inevitable, even predictable, that for all the years of intense, focused, concentrated work I put into my studies of research and personal family history that a time would come when who I am would find a way to be tested through love with sacrifice.

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I am watching sweeping bands of wispy clouds glow golden from the setting sun.  Their beauty is amplified because they stretch low across the deepening blue of a far-reaching sky high above them.

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Understandings about the lifelong effects of severely traumatic childhoods are likely not to rest in some sanctified remote place in our lives where no emotion can reach them.

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Those golden clouds that blessed my heart only moments ago are all dark now as I write these words outdoors while the blazing heat of the day empties from the air around me.

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Our life here on earth is made up of contrasts.  What we reach for.  What we hope and work for.  And what we get.  Split-second intervals become hours, days, weeks and years.

What do we carry along with us?  What is left behind?  What catches up to us – out of nowhere (such a small, big word)?

But most importantly what keeps us going?  Like fisher-people we have those nets cast all around us.  Hidden under the surface of the sea of our life that surrounds us.  We have our personal values, what is true for us, what we care most about.  Who keeps us feeling connected and that we matter?

Who are we safe enough with to feel in their presence our genuine joy?

Who and what keeps us hopeful – and for what?

When the sun sets and all fills with darkness we are always on our way to a better tomorrow.  Sometimes I need to notice what this feels like.

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I went searching online to find an article about something of meaning to me right now in my life.  I found this article:

Empath Traits: 22 Signs You Are A Highly Sensitive Person

By Barrie Davenport

Yeah.  That’s me.  That has always been me.  It will always be me.  And for people this sensitive I am wondering if horrifically abusive and neglectful early years wound us in ways that perhaps they would not if we had not been – who and HOW we are in the world.

I don’t know.  I do not know.

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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 »

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NOTE:  I am still stuck with this new version of the blog’s posting page that I do not like and cannot get out of.  It has refused to post or include my chosen 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