The most important work we can do, individually and globally, is the healing and prevention of traumas so that we don't pass them down to future generations. This blog is a working tool to contribute to this good work.
Category: Trauma and Its Consequences
I do not believe that there is any more important action to be taken in this lifetime than the healing of the effects of trauma — both individually and globally.
As I began my re-search over six years ago in my desperate need to find information about how what had happened to me during my abusive childhood was affecting my adult life, I began to find the ‘bits and pieces’ of truth that eventually I was able to fit together into the bigger picture that I live with today.
The more I read about how trauma in infancy-toddlerhood changes development the more hopeless I felt. All I could interpret from the facts I read was DAMAGE! DAMAGE! DAMAGE!
Finally I stumbled over the paper you will find scanned at this link:
The proverbial light went on, and suddenly all thoughts about my being DAMAGED by the severe abuse I experienced from birth turned into thoughts about how I was a CHANGED being!
Yet I still believe that I carry my own internal light into my continued personal study about the topic of abuse-caused early trauma altered development. Although there certainly were years during my own ‘recovery’ attempts that began in 1980 where I bought and swallowed all the various self-help ideas about ‘what was wrong with me’, I now know looking back that while I might have put these thoughts in my mouth and chewed on them — they didn’t taste good and they didn’t taste right.
Something within me knew better — and knew that something very critical was missing from all the ‘recovery’ information I could find. The information I found didn’t feel right deep at my core.
Even though the attachment and developmental neuroscience information that I have most recently studied certainly applies and is a far better fit, I still don’t 100% swallow it?
Why? Because at my core I value myself too much to eat, chew, swallow and digest ANY information that simply tells me I am damaged, changed in such a way that I ended up ‘mentally ill’ or suffering from pathology, or am in any way FLAWED as a being due to the trauma altered development I was FORCED to go through as my body adapted from birth to a malevolent, traumatic and extremely toxic interpersonal world.
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Although my discovery of Dr. Martin Teicher’s writings elevated my re-search to a platform above writings that did nothing but highlight ‘damage’ that happens from infant-child abuse, I still have always known SOMETHING IS STILL MISSING! Even though Teicher seemed to see ‘the bigger picture’, I knew instinctively there is a bigger picture still.
Teicher’s work (and his fellows’) cannot be disputed as it stands, but I don’t believe it goes far enough that it can truly serve those of us who have experienced early trauma altered development through severe abuse so that we ended up with an ‘evolutionarily altered brain’ such as his work describes.
It is NOT ‘just’ our brain that changed. Not in my thinking. It is our ENTIRE BODY. All of it down to our innermost molecule and genetic operation including our entire nervous system and our immune system (I still believe future research will find that it was our immune system that instigated our trauma altered development from the beginning).
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO US AS SURVIVORS TO BE AN ‘EVOLUTIONARILY ALTERED BEING’?
I will NOT buy it that we are ‘mentally ill’ or ‘damaged’ or ‘suffering from pathology’ SIMPLY because we are these beings.
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Most simply put I, as the survivor I am, quite simply NOW live post-childhood in a world that does not belong to me, nor I to it.
Teicher’s paper (as you will find it at the link above) might put in a kingpin for true understanding of who-how we are as survivors, but his information is ONLY the beginning.
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As I write this post following the post immediately preceding this one, I think about the DIFFERENT world I would probably fit into a whole lot better than I do this one.
If I could locate people whose body formed in similar ways that mine did, I could discuss this topic on its most REAL and important level. For starters, my guess is that as a whole we are far less egotistical, self-centered, self-possessed, self-righteous, arrogant, greedy and selfish than are many others who live in ‘that other world’.
We survivors could get together and talk about ‘them’ from our point of view with the information that OUR body tells us and come up with conclusions that very few in ‘that’ world would want to hear — I guarantee it!
If we could escape together from our quarantine in the ‘pathological’ pantry, we could discover our own wisdom — and what I suspect we would find as a group is that we are very closely connected in our experience (and in our body) to our specie’s ancestors — the Most Ancient Ones who lived in a world and during a time when most certainly nobody assumed anyone was ‘safe and secure’ for very long!
THOSE Most Ancient Ones? I feel proud to think that I have developed in such a way that I could share along with them what OUR reality is like.
That we as survivors, and WE as the Most Ancient Ones were NEVER a part of the PAMPERED group does NOT make us damaged, ill or pathological! In fact, people from ‘that’ world might find us downright frightening (Are they envious of us?) in our power, our strength, our resilience, our toughness, our determination, our courage and our endurance. We know things that PAMPERED people are not likely to know in their lifetime — and what WE know is built into our body down to our essential core.
So what if we experience life differently, remember differently, gather different information and process it differently than those who have always lived in ‘that’ world?
Somebody needs to expand their thinking, and I am not at all sure that it is the severe abuse survivors that most need to do this. Every attitude that belittles us, judges us, criticizes us, condemns us and does NOT value, honor and respect not only WHO we are as beings in the world but HOW we are beings in the world is a victim of their own ignorance, bias, stereotyping, prejudice and superstition.
IN FACT, we severe infant-child abuse survivors are probably the closest to being physiological SUPERHEROES as our current generations of humans are ever going to know!
The problem seems to be for me that I can’t find the boat with my own kind on it. I am left feeling pretty darned alone with this information. Those superhero ancestors of ours that were tough enough to endure so that our species is still here are pretty silent these days! But what they knew we know — how to endure the unendurable to the end of our days.
That’s not a trivial project, folks! Infant-child abuse survivors share with our Most Ancient ancestors the most important piece of information any living being can have. In spite of all the distractions one might encounter along life’s way only one single thing matters: Keep moving forward — no matter what!
So, I will no longer take a bite of, put into my mouth (mind), chew on, nor swallow any information about myself (self-help or not) that in any way discounts not only WHO I am, but HOW I am in the world. I will no longer believe that I am flawed, damaged, mentally ill or pathological because I am not like the Pampered People are. I will not try to change myself to be more like them just because they determine that I need to.
I WILL attempt to learn as much as I can about myself so that I can empower myself to be a better me living a better life. The Pampered People can obviously also do what they want to do, but I now understand that what they know, how they know it, what they believe, and how they might judge me has NOTHING to do with me — and it never did.
We survivors are no more pity-able or pathetic than our Most Ancient Ancestors were — and THIS thought does NOT contribute to my sadness — not even one single, tiny bit! Hooray!
I must admit I am starting a post at the same time I have no clear idea what I am going to say. When these writing and thinking moments happen for me I suspect they are in part a result of the damage done to both of my brain hemispheres during early traumatized development, and due also to the changes that happened to the development of the corpus collosum part of my brain that is supposed to transmit information between my left and right brain regions.
I apologize if my writing process creates posts that are difficult to read because they are not thought out clearly before hand, and are therefore not ‘organized and oriented’ in a straight, linear, usual-coherent manner. I am simply documenting who I am and how I am as a survivor of severe infant-child abuse. How I write and what I write is a reflection of what early trauma did to change both of these vital states — WHO I am AND HOW I am in the world.
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On some level I know I want to talk about the ‘choices’ a newborn infant begins to make in relationship to its earliest caregivers. It is a know fact that an infant can form safe and secure attachment with one or more of its earliest caregivers at the same time it is forming unsafe and insecure attachment with one or more other of its earliest caregivers.
I am thinking about that know fact this morning, especially after having wended my way through yesterday’s long posts about avoidant-dismissive attachment — and in light of all the other posts I have written on this blog about infant attachment patterns and how they form the body-nervous system (NS)-brain-mind-self of a developing infant — that last a lifetime.
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So exactly WHAT does happen, and how is it possible, and what are the long-range physiological consequences for an infant who is abused, maltreated and traumatized by one or more of its earliest caregivers — at the same time it is treated perfectly well by someone else? What kind of BODY does that infant form?
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I began my thoughts this morning thinking about my current job of trying to control and manage the hundred year old oleander bushes in my back yard.
I can't even show you the top of this massive mess it has grown so tall over its unkempt years of existenceThick, twisted, unruly and just plain UGLY!Today will be my 3rd day of oleander attack. I have no chain saw, so working on the lower stump area is difficult to do right or the way I want to
There are two oleander plants in this mess. This one on the south side is the pink bloomer. As I eliminate the growth of this one, I can begin to see the separate clump that is the white bloomer to the north of this one.
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What is the connection between my thoughts and images about this oleander, its condition and human infant attachment patterns?
Let me write the words so I can know…..
It took me two days of attack on this plant before I bothered myself to search online for information about the nature of its toxicity.
I read last night that ALL parts of this plant are poisonous to humans and animals. Consumption of three of its leaves will kill a small child. Not only that, but even the dust around the plant is poisonous. Its leaves can be carefully (and separately) composted and used as mulch, but even that is risky business. It cannot be burned.
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This leads me to think about how I react differently to this plant than I do to all others in my yard. The more information I gain about the poisonous nature of oleanders the more I wish it had never been planted in this yard in the first place. Only dynamite or a bulldozer could possibly remove these two plants and their massive roots.
How would I feel and think about trying to manage these plants if I knew absolutely nothing about their toxicity?
Which makes me think about infants from birth: How does an infant KNOW the difference between its nontoxic earliest caregivers (so that it forms safe and secure attachments with them) and its toxic earliest caregivers (which the infant forms insecure attachments with)?
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Then I think about my own life experience from birth. I think about the pictures I found in my baby book. (see
I realize as I am writing that I have far too many disconnected thoughts related to the topic I am addressing. My left brain hemisphere is jumping up and down in its seat yelling at me, “Pick me! Pick me! I know the answer!”
At the same time my right brain hemisphere is quietly beginning to build its momentum in its own way: “If you don’t listen to me I am going to begin to ROAR, and believe me, you don’t want THAT to happen!”
Interesting. The left brain makes one kind of noise within me at the same time the right brain threatens to hijack my BODY and ALL of my attention if I don’t hear what it has to say.
I have to consciously negotiate how I am going to move forward now. I need the left hemisphere’s ability to order, sequence, organize and verbalize. Yet at the same time it is my right brain that is deeply and fundamentally connected to ALL of my experience as my memory of being alive has accumulated that information in my body’s memories.
Hum…….
How to proceed?
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An infant has no choice about who it is born to. It has no choice either about who its first contact with members of our human species are, or about how those beings treat it. So how can it form a wide variety and range of differing attachment patterns appropriate to how each of these beings treat it and interact with it?
This is not a meaningless topic. These earliest beings are responsible for the building of the entire body-being of the infant that it will use to process its self in its world for the rest of its life.
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And then there is the oleander, the toxic, deadly poisonous overgrown hideous out-of-control oleander that is stretching its branches out in every possible direction from its very old roots that are equally entrenched in the earth where somebody planted it/them.
My right hemisphere knows perfectly well what needs to be said about the difference between safe and toxic interactions based on either on the ‘safe-ability’ or the ‘toxic ability’ of who-what anyone interacts with. But my right hemisphere alone does NOT have the power to sort out what it knows and make that information coherent.
So, left brain, what do YOU know?
Quiet……
Listen to my body because my left brain IS a part of my body….
I am waiting……
Here comes words……..
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From the time an infant is born all of the channels of its being are open to experience.
Depending on the nature of these experiences the infant will respond according to its biological underpinnings.
(My right brain is beginning its roar. It wants some pictures because it thrives on images.)
My first and primary attachment beings -- mother, father, 14-month old brotherNote especially top right picture of my father his his first daughter -- me -- Linda. Note the pride and joy on his age 25 face. I could have safely and securely attached to him -- if Mildred had let me.
Great pictures of Mother Mildred playing the role of the proud and loving mother — of the infant sent by the devil to kill her during her breach birthing.
Left brain: “Perhaps everyone could say that the reason why Grandmother Bea, Uncle Charlie and Aunt Carolyn do not appear in one single picture in your baby book is because the pictures had to be cropped so that they could fit within the pages of your baby book.”
Right brain: “We ALL know this isn’t true. Mildred intentionally, though we do not know whether consciously or not, removed all pictures of everyone — her mother and her brother and his wife — from YOUR book (OUR book) because those people were HER attachment beings and there was — as you well learned over the next 18 years of your life — no POSSIBLE way that YOU could force her to share HER beings with you!”
“The only reason pictures of your father and your brother are in your baby book is that Mildred could not ‘politically’ eliminate them and still appear publicly as the perfect mother she was pretending to be.”
“The truth of Mildred’s loathing of YOU lies in a few of its words, in the spaces within those words and lines, and in what is missing in this book including its ripped out and absent pages. As you and all your siblings know eventually the entire book itself ‘went missing’ as your mother denied that ever existed at all, to be discovered only within her storage-locker belongings after her death.”
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“OK,” I ask both of these brain hemispheres. “And what is your point EXACTLY?”
Left brain: “While it is a given biological fact that an infant can from the time of its birth form attachment patterns in resonance with the attachment patterns that exist within its caregivers, your mother all but eliminated all opportunities for you as an infant to experience any possible attachment with anyone else but her.”
“Your mother controlled all access to the baby that was you as much as was humanly — inhumanly — possible. You therefore experience a very particular universe that you must admit was unique. It is NOT normal for any infant to be sequestered away in a ‘chamber’ beyond the reach of only its mother.”
Right brain: “You need to know (I was interrupted by my neighbor’s daughter knocking on my door to borrow shortening to make the Mayan chocolate her teacher gave her a recipe for. I found an unopened block of yellow butter flavored Crisco for her (after making certain that she really didn’t want butter) and showed her how to measure it, and gave her enough to use again later — along with a Ziploc bag to store it in. What was my thought??? It is gone. I have no earthly clue what my right brain was about to say and I doubt that I ever will know now exactly…. I am disorganized and disoriented — again.)
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I want to say something here that I thought while I was outside before I ever started to write this post.
HEALING
What I believe most leads to our healing
Severe infant abuse survivors need to pay very close and detailed attention to figure out not so much WHO we are (against popular opinion) but HOW we are in the world.
Our ability to know WHO we are has been contaminated by the trauma altered changes in our development that radically changed HOW we are. We live in and with a trauma altered body that receives DIFFERENT information than ‘normals’ do — receives this different information DIFFERENTLY — and processes all of this information DIFFERENTLY, as well.
What I just now experienced is the kind of evidence I can now recognize for myself, and until I became able to KNOW what I now know about HOW I am in the world I could not begin to discover WHO I am.
The girl suddenly knocking at my door came through to me as a shock wave that entirely disrupted my being in the world. My ‘systems’ do not tolerate sudden interruptions and change well. I do not (because my trauma altered body CANNOT) smoothly transition between many types of ongoing experience.
I continually am forced to cope with my own experience as it CHANGES ME during change. I — my own ongoing experience of being a self in the world — is NOT the constant I strongly suspect it is for ‘normal’ people. Changes that happen in the world I live in CHANGE ME.
Who I now am post-girl at the door is NOT the same me that I was pre-girl knocking at the door.
Which now means my direction has changed. I, as a being, have been shifted in the current of life-in-the-world and I cannot RETURN to who-how I was before the knock.
Which now means my thoughts have been altered in such a way that I need to make note again of the Bell Curve I mentioned in a recent post.
This is important to me because I continually struggle with knowing that in many, many ways my experience of abuse from birth was SO MUCH ‘definitely more than others’ experience that I fear what I have to say will mean absolutely NOTHING to other people.
As my mother controlled access of other people to me from my birth, as surely as she controlled their appearance in my baby book, she made as absolutely certain as she possibly could that trauma would change the course of development all aspects of my body would take — thus ensuring in the end that I am essentially ALONE in my experience.
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After ‘the knock’ I returned outside to sit in the cool late fall breeze and stare at the mess of the oleander. “That is your mother,” I heard in my thoughts.
As an infant (and throughout most of the next 18 years) I was left to interact as solely as my mother could arrange with ONLY HER and her malevolent psychosis. I ONLY had the toxic, deadly poisonous out-of-control gigantic oleander to experience my own reality with.
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Coming back to far more ordinary and normal infant experience, those infants will form within their own body-brains a variety of attachment patterns that match the ones that exist within their earliest caregivers.
Research is discovering that WHEN and IF a little person is being treated abusively by someone, but at the same time ALSO DOES have someone to form attachments with that are NOT unsafe, insecure and toxic, many genetic combinations that lead to long term detrimental adult health (including mental health) problems DO NOT GET ACTIVATED.
The kind of MAIN attachment system, secure or some version of insecure attachment system, happens NOT because of ANY limitation within an infant itself. What attachment system primarily builds all aspects of our body-brain-mind-self is DUE TO what kind of beings interacted with us during our most critical earliest developmental stages.
This is, to me, a critically important point!
An infant cannot choose to form a safe and secure attachment with an early caregiver who does not have one!
An infant cannot choose to form an unsafe and insecure attachment with an early caregiver who does not have one!
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Left brain back online: “It seems that your mother instinctively knew this fact. The only way that she — and therefore the dictates of biological development could ensure that you received the MOST of what was toxic to you and the LEAST of what was good for you was to eliminate your contact with other people.”
DAMN! My mother, Mildred was SO GOOD at being SO BAD!
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Nobody wants to talk about what it is like to be placed alone in isolation, in solitary confinement as the prisoner of a monster mother from birth and throughout another 18 years.
I was fortunate at least that mother Mildred had enough grasp on ‘the real world’ to know that on certain occasions she was forced to PRETEND around others that an entirely different (wonderful) reality existed that had Linda in it.
I believe that her efforts to form ‘Linda’s baby book’ in a right and publicly acceptable (and applaud-able) fashion happened because she TRIED to pretend ‘at least this much’ about herself and her daughter – me. But in the end she could not even really pull that effort off — hence the baby book was hidden away while she told ALL of her children that it never existed at all.
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Which leads me off on a side-thinking tangent of something else that came into my mind this morning. All the time I was reading and trying to comprehend and learn from the writings particularly of developmental neuroscientist Dr. Allan Schore, such as Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self/Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self, I struggled with his conclusions that being raised by a ‘frightening mother’ has the same severely detrimental effects as being raised by a ‘frightened mother’.
I KNOW what a frightening mother can do! But a frightened mother — just as damaging? How can this possibly be true – even when one of the world’s top developmental neuroscientists says it’s true?
This morning the awareness finally filtered through to me, after six years of processing information about how severe abuse changes an infant-child’s course of development, I FELT the reality that Schore described.
I mention this now because I believe it is connected to why my mother barred all others from having access to me. She was terrified that others would form an attachment to ME that would then threaten those others attachment to HER. I believe this is also why she did not actually destroy my baby book: She was ACTUALLY terrified of me.
But, going deeper than that….. Thanks to my interviews with my mother’s long term ‘friend’ I learned that long after I had left home, and in her older years my mother’s fixation with ‘the devil coming to get me’ still existed. Not only did the ‘devil come to get her’ through MY being born, an experience that put her dangerously close to death’s door (ME TOO!), but she wrote 666 on her hands and face in her OLDER years to keep the devil from coming to get her.
(What a strange twist of thinking it was that the only safety and security she could invent to keep the terrors of ‘the devil’ from consuming her was to PRETEND through this choice of signaling that she was ‘one of his’ anyway!)
Both hemispheres: “Linda, THAT is terror! That is fear beyond what any human should EVER know. THAT terror was built into your mother, no doubt, by someone who terrified, terrorized and abused her when she was very very young.”
That level of terror was FED TO ME even before I was born. It was fed to me while my mother and I were in labor. It was during THAT time that she-we were dying and struggling for our lives. It was during THAT time that her terror fundamentally broke her regarding me in a way that could not be mended. It was during THAT time that she attached her terror of ‘the devil coming to get me’ to little tiny beautiful perfect newly born ME.
Schore is then correct in saying that a mother who is afraid of her infant causes as much damage as does a mother who forces her infant to be afraid of her.
In my case, I received the DOUBLE poison!
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And, again, I am back to the oleander. There are TWO bushes out there. Both are equally toxic. It didn’t matter in the end if my mother was afraid of me ONLY, or if I as an infant was terrified of my mother ONLY.
In the end, although both directions of terror were fully active, toxic is toxic. Poison is poison.
It doesn’t matter if I am outside working with ONLY one oleander or if I am outside working with TWO or a thousand oleanders. Everything about every oleander is toxic, and to be safe anywhere around an oleander the fact of its deathly toxicity must be kept foremost in mind.
As for me in my yard, I cannot eliminate this species from my yard, but I can take precautions and I CAN force limitations to its existence. It is a fact I cannot remove that plant, just as I cannot remove the developmental changes that my mother forced into my body.
I plan to chop those two oleanders to within an inch of their lives. Then I plan to encircle the whole mess with an adobe wall that reaches high enough that new rapid growth from the bottom will be forced to stretch straight up (rather than sideways). I then plan to completely control the shoots that will clamber to take over my yard.
But even then I will be forced to deal with the continual cuttings that will come off of that plant in the future. I am fortunate to have a span of ‘no man’s land’ between my back fence and the Mexican-American border wall. I throw all that is toxic over that wall where it can rot its way into infinity for all I care and not bother me one single bit.
Dare I only wish that someone had done the same with my poisonous mother? If they HAD done so, I would have been spared a whole lot of trouble!
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NOTE: I just discovered something else out about the oleander. I found a branch lying so low that it grew horizontally out of the main root. Its tip ended up on the ground and grew into the soil along my neighbor’s fence line. Where it did this another oleander was formed!
Oh, great! Intergenerational transmission of toxicity!
I have the hose end laid there with water running to saturate the ground where the offspring grows. I WILL dig that one out and eliminate it!
I would rather not write this post. I would rather that abuse never happened to me in the first place — and I mean FIRST place because my mother’s severe abuse of me started when I was born – and lasted the 18 years of my childhood. But after what happened to me yesterday I convinced myself to write this today as a way to document what I know is simply a natural process, no matter how strange or impossible it seems to me if I think only with the mind of acceptable modern-day ‘logic’.
But what, really, is logic? The other day I was sitting outside enjoying the early morning’s first sunshine when I noticed a motley crew of grasshoppers beginning to hop around on a low growing plant six feet away from me. I hate grasshoppers, and this is the second generation to hatch out of their earth nest this year. So I stood up, intent on showing the three closest to me exactly how I feel about them.
At the instant I stood they froze their motion. As I lifted my foot and began to move toward them the three, in concert, each took a flying leap through the air six feet away from where they had been — each in a different direction away from me. How did they know to do that? Grasshopper logic.
Today I scooped a half eaten mouse onto the end of my shovel, not wanting to step on it later as it lay right in the middle of my walking path. Which half was eaten? The head half. What cat logic was this? Cats, who are designed to ONLY eat meat cannot live without the amino acid, taurine, which is found naturally in brains.
And these illustrations have WHAT to do with this post?
Well, I am writing about body logic, but not just about body logic. I am writing about body memory as we begin to accumulate it — yes — from the moment we are conceived (I believe DNA represents the body logic of the memories of our species).
MOST specifically I am talking about infant memory — and infant abuse memory and its retrieval. Possible? Yes.
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Researchers know that the area of our brain, the hippocampus, that is responsible for processing our real-time ongoing memories is one of only two brain regions that grows new brain cells (neurons). (The other one, the olfactory center, builds new neurons so we can remember new smells throughout our lifetime).
Researchers also know that these new neurons can not only be damaged through the presence of stress hormones as memories are being processed, they can also be heated up and be disintegrated and destroyed by them — yup FRIED — before the facts of a memory can be stored.
However, it is also a fact that another totally separate process stores the body-based information of our experience and hence has no chance of being exposed to this stress hormone neuron frying fiasco. So, absolutely, our body remembers everything that ever happens to us. As long as our body lives, those memories exist, and this time line of body memory storage includes our infancy.
I imagine that massage and other healing body workers already know much about body memory and its retrieval. I, however, am learning.
Experiences humans have before the age of one are called IMPLICIT memories, meaning they are stored not only IN the body, but MAKE the body-brain in may significant ways (as this blog describes). Supposedly those very early body-based memories are NOT EVER going to be in a form that we can consciously recall.
Memories that we CAN recall are called EXPLICIT memories, and include both SEMANTIC memories of the facts of our experience and AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL memories that we recall very much with our SELF as the ‘recipient’.
What I am documenting today is an infancy-arena memory that came to me in far more detail yesterday than what my LEFT brain wants to realize or accept. “Tough, left brain! This is very, very real. Deal with it!”
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The long-term experience of living with unresolved trauma includes actions our body-brain is taking that we might think we have no control over. Severe infant-child abuse survivors often experience, as a part of their trauma altered development, changes in how their hippocampus memory processing region gets formed (which is often smaller than normals’).
Another region that is often seriously affected in its development by early abuse is the region of the brain, the corpus collosum, which lies between our left and right brain hemispheres and transmits information between them for processing and integration (something that always occurs to some degree while we are sleeping). The long-term experience of EVER HAVING unresolved trauma within our body happens for us because the processing that needs to happen so that integration between our brain hemispheres of all experience does not fully happen. This leaves parts of our trauma experience inevitably ‘unresolved’.
Our right hemisphere, most active in its growth and formation, takes its biggest giant leap in development birth to age one. Along with forming its networks and circuits to process social attachment information this region is also establishing its connections between our body-based sensory experience and its translation into emotion. Infant early experience of course does not begin with words, but it does begin with feelings which are fed through the right brain from the body as they are stored in memory in both places.
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Enter what I am talking about.
In 1988 I had what was then one of my oddest experiences. For no obvious reason that I have ever figured out something must have triggered my first direct infant memory. I was walking across my wide deck on a warm May afternoon when suddenly as I lifted my right foot off the boards to take my next step this memory appeared — seemingly out of nowhere. I put my foot back down on the deck and froze there.
At the instant the memory came to me it did not come in words. It came as sensory-input information. Of course, immediately following this sensory memory the verbal description of this memory came:
I am a very small infant lying in a very large white crib. My point of vision was in perspective so that the bars of the crib were very wide apart and the top rim of the crib was very far away.
I hear the pounding of her stomping feet coming toward me on a carpeted hallway behind a closed bedroom door. At the same time I hear the terrible rage filled voice of my mother shouting and screaming — I know at me.
I wait for her approach. I watch the door knob I can see a long ways away. I see it turning. The door is slammed open, the Monster rushes in. I see her wide eyes, her open mouth. Most importantly (to me in this memory when it came) I see her arm up to her elbow with her massive hand rapidly descending towards me. The gigantic size of this hand gave me an instantaneous sense of how small I was lying in that crib, both as I watched it coming toward me, and as it clamped itself over my nose and my crying mouth — pushing me down and forcing my head and body hard into the crib mattress — as she hurt and terrified me.
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Although this memory appeared seemingly unbidden, it did appear during the days I was making preparations to move with my children from northern Minnesota to Albuquerque, New Mexico to attend a masters degree program there in art therapy. I have always trusted this memory with only minimal skepticism because I sensed it somehow contained something I needed to know.
In these past six years that I have been studying developmental neuroscience and the long term consequences of severe infant-child abuse the memory I just described has grown in value to me. This memory is strongly tethered to and grounded in all the factual information I have about my mother, her psychosis, and about the perpetual terrible abuse I received.
But I still wasn’t consciously prepared for what I experienced yesterday as it ‘in-formed’ me about my infancy experiences of terror and trauma.
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I have mentioned in previous posts about my ‘anxiety’ difficulties in covering for my sick friend in her little office job. I knew last Saturday that I could only manage to do that work for her through yesterday — or so I thought. As it turned out, I overshot my capacity to deal with that reality by one day. Yesterday I prepared myself, went to work, and lasted exactly one hour before my body reacted with terrible diarrhea and I had to come home.
I spent the rest of the day deescalating, which for me does NOT mean going to bed. I cleared myself of all connections to that experience of trying to be out there ‘in the world’ when I can’t be. As a part of my ‘cleansing’ I donned by scrubby work clothes, took the giant pair of tree trimming loppers I borrowed from my dearly beloved man friend, and began to attack the hundred year old gargantuan mess of an oleander that has taken over an entire corner of my back yard. I wore heavy gloves because this plant is poisonous.
Chop, hack, yank, cut, clip, snip, drag away. Hard at work I gave my body-self permission to ‘do’ whatever it needed to ‘clear the air’ of my living space.
My thoughts wandered in and out between my 14-month-older brother and the man I love and my attachment to him. At the same time I was hyperly aware of my sadness, my deep, pervasive, all encompassing chronic sadness. (As I have recently been blogging about, this sadness is where the central set point of my nervous system was set during my earliest development.)
Such sadness. Such terrible sadness. “What, dear Linda, would help you feel better right this instant?”
“I want to hear his voice. I don’t even need to see him. I need to hear (this man I love’s) voice.”
His voice.
About two years ago during conversations with my sister I clarified that there definitely is a connection between This Man’s voice and the voice that belonged to my father. Yesterday as I worked hard to deplete the gangling mess of the oleander I thought, “Is there a single NOTE on the musical scale that is the ONE NOTE that resonates between the voices of these two important men in my life? Is it a tone? Is it a range of notes?”
My thoughts wandered off into imagining that a test could be devised whereby I could actually pinpoint as I listened to This Man a single note that would signify his voice. Could I find it by holding a cell phone and testing his voice among the notes contained in a dialing sequence?
His voice. My father’s voice. I was questioning, wanting to discover another clue that might help me not only to understand this terrible sadness that I live with but a way to make even a tiny portion of it go away — either permanently or on command.
His voice. My father’s voice. His voice. My father’s voice.
I allowed the words to flow through my thoughts as if they were traveling liquid.
His voice. My father’s voice.
And suddenly I was back in that crib — only this time I knew a little bit more. My body-based memory awareness became more flexible and more inclusive. More of the context appeared.
When, as a tiny infant, I could hear the DRONE of my father’s voice, the HUM of my father’s voice, the rise and the fall of it, the TONE of my father’s voice — obviously from way before I was able to probably know the connection between THAT SOUND, THAT VOICE and the man it came from — there was a pattern that I began to identify.
When I heard THAT SOUND the rest of the horror that was my life with that woman who came to terrify and hurt me DID NOT HAPPEN.
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As I hacked my way into the body of the oleander yesterday my brain-mind-self then brought up the files of information I know about attachment: TO FEEL SAFE AND SECURE.
FEEL! Not know in words, but to FEEL in a very real sensory way IN THE BODY that I was SAFE AND SECURE. This meant in MY infant world that the hurtful terror was NOT THERE. I directly knew from my earliest age, and certainly as soon as my nervous system-brain-body developed enough to make any connections at all — that the ONLY time I felt safe and secure was in the ABSENCE of trauma.
Not the other way around. I wasn’t formed in a world were safe and secure were the norm and trauma was the exception.
When I heard the sound of my father’s voice I was not terrified, terrorized, traumatized — and in pain.
When I heard the distant sound of the hum, the tone, of my father’s voice the storm stopped.
There’s more from yesterday………
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Suddenly thoughts and impressions, feeling and senses about my brother reappeared as I worked away yesterday. My brother. I thought about the piece of my mother’s writing I discovered on a scrap of paper and transcribed onto my blog — SEE: *1951 – October 15 – Linda’s 6-week Checkup (and brother John)
My brother. He would have been just under 16 months old at the time my mother wrote this piece. There he was, on the bed beside his beloved baby sister, me. HIS voice. HIS shining eyes. HIS mirroring expressions. HIS gentle touch. Those are what saved me. (I am very certain that in his very young innocence and love for me — even before he could talk — that my brother intervened and interceded on my behalf as much as he possibly could until both he and I grew older and his interventions were no longer honored, heeded or allowed.)
On the day of this six week checkup, baby doll Linda all dressed up. My mother HAD to act the part of the doting, loving mother in front of her mother, in front of my father who accompanied her carrying her doll baby to the doctor’s office. She had to pretend she loved me to the doctor.
HOW EXHAUSTING!
In this little piece my mother wrote she describes how as soon as she possibly could, once she arrived at her mother’s after this torture of pretense, she laid tiny me down on her mother’s bed and walked away.
She writes about her thrill in arriving at her mother’s and seeing her truly beloved little boy playing with HER collection of toy dishes that she had as a child. (I wondered yesterday, “What happened to that set of dishes?” I have no memory of them every existing in our childhood.)
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Now in this memory retrieval documentary I am writing today I will tell you what happened next. In the midst of my hacking and chopping and sawing and clipping and dragging chunks of that oleander away, I suddenly heard my own voice as if it was in two places at the same time — far, far away in the distance and right inside the center of my body. My own voice said:
“I am having a painful day.”
“I am having a pain filled day.”
“I am having a day full of pain.”
“I am pain full.”
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The next thing I knew I was doubled over from a sharp knife stabbing-like breath-stopping gut-grabbing PAIN in my body centered at my solar plexus.
“What on EARTH?”
(Every time I have thought about this since yesterday’s attack I experience a much smaller version of what I describe here.)
I HAD to start burping out air that seemed to be filling my insides to the point of near explosion! Call it a belch, call it a burb — I was painfully FULL OF AIR!
I had to drop my tools and attend to my burping with a vengeance! I HURT!
It was during the releasing of all this pain-full air that I realized my body was having a POWERFUL memory — at I knew instantly what this memory was.
The same mother who could barely tolerate having to pretend she loved and cherished and cared about six week old me long enough to fool my father, and her mother, and the doctor COULD NOT BEAR TO TOUCH ME!
The REAL mother of infant me HATED me. I was the devil’s spawn to her, not human, a curse upon her life. I was the one the devil sent to kill her while she was in labor with me. (I have written much about this before.)
The REAL mother of infant me propped my bottle whenever she could. She disdained to touch me —
AND
THEREFORE
SHE DID NOT BURP ME!
Oh, so SAD! So painful! So WRONG! SO TRUE!
And yesterday I instantly knew more about the memory that came to me in 1988 about her attack of me in the crib. She had propped the bottle, NOT burped me, I was in PAIN. I was crying. (I know in my body this was not an isolated occurrence.)
And………
Now I know more about THAT story! And today my woundedness is a little more healed. The ruptures trauma created in my body-self is a little more repaired. Cool!
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NOTE: After this whole experience yesterday This Man called, and I also saw him in person, and for the first time I DID NOT hear the overlay that has evidently ALWAYS been in my range of hearing in the ten years I have been hearing my friend’s voice. I DID NOT hear the overlay (or underlay?) of the tone of my father’s voice merged with my friend’s. My friend’s voice sounded different to me, almost like it was ‘hollower’ and shallower — it was not as full, deep, resonating, dimensional and rich as I have always heard it to be before.
For the first time in these ten years I evidently JUST heard the comforting sound of my friend’s voice without hearing the comforting sound of my father’s very similar voice at the same time. Fascinating!
I believe for those of us who were traumatized from the time of our birth (that unfortunate 5% I wrote about this week) that our primary senses of smell and hearing (along with touch) carry much connection to our earliest experiences — as these senses were developed under the duress of trauma.
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Maybe I am preaching to the invisible choir. At age 59, a lot of time has gone by for early infant abuse survivors of the Baby Boom era to die. If you Google Center for Disease Control – ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) longitudinal (long range) studies, you will find those statistics that say the more abuse and adverse experiences a person had who started the CDC studies, the more likely they were not to finish the study. These severe early trauma survivors died on the average 20 years sooner than the less traumatized study participants.
Members of our culture are familiar with information that streams down to the general public from the TOP. Unless our current view of society is suddenly flipped over completely, I certainly hold a position as a human being close to the bottom, not the top.
Whether we are talking in general about the ‘haves’ versus the ‘have nots’, or talking in terms of diagnosed ‘mental illness’, or talking about degrees on a continuum of insecure versus secure human attachment acquired during the first year of life as it designs and builds the human nervous system-brain, etc., we can consider the degrees of human well-being as they can be expressed using a Bell Curve image.
The healthier, happier, and more safely and securely attached an infant’s mother is, the same will correspondingly be true for her offspring — for a lifetime. These are the people who will suffer and struggle less and enjoy more over their life span.
The opposite direction happens when the opposite conditions exist. These are the people who will suffer and struggle more and enjoy less over their life span.
Intervention and education can directly improve the odds that well-being for an infant will improve for its lifetime when the quality of earliest caregiver interactions is improved. The degrees I am describing become physiologically wired and built into an infant’s body. I fully believe that increases to the positive will travel on down the generations just as the negative ones do. Which do we desire as individual parents and as a society?
We are not helpless victims. If we truly desire the best well-being possible for all (and this always starts with the quality of care to our infants), we have the power to accomplish what we want.
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To be very clear, I write as a survivor of the kind of infant-child abuse that probably ONLY exists in the ‘lowest’ (on the left end of this image) severe maltreatment, trauma and abuse. I was a despised and hated baby from my first breath. My advantage now is that I know this at the same time I know a great deal about how this malevolent treatment changed my physiological development.
Having been born to a severely ‘mentally ill’ (no doubt Borderline) mother who, herself, existed on the devastating neglect and abuse end of the infant attachment spectrum, puts me in what I consider either the LOWEST 5% or the HIGHEST 5% depending upon how one looks at the Bell Curve of infant-child treatment.
I ‘definitely’ received a megasized dose of maltreatment at the same time I was mega-deprived of the RIGHT kind of treatment.
So I write from society’s bottom 5% while most so-called ‘experts’ write from the TOP 5%. This means that much of what I say is as equally challenging for the TOP group of humans to comprehend and believe as THEIR information is to those of us in the bottom 5%.
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I am completely comfortable in expanding the size of the group I write to and about from 5% to 15% of our population. While the ‘a little bit higher’ additional 10% above me did not perhaps experience outright hatred from their earliest caregivers, they did NOT receive the quality of tender, loving, adequate care they needed. Their entire physiological development was, I believe, altered in adjustment to their malevolent, insecure and unsafe earliest caregiving (!) environment.
At the same time, even though most attachment experts suggest that fully 50% of our population’s infants DO experience ‘good enough’ early caregiving to end up with a body-nervous system(NS)-brain-mind-self to carry on with the rest of their lives having a primary safe and secure attachment system, I believe that it is ONLY the top 15% who REALLY experience the blessing of ‘optimal’. Those beneficiaries, as a result, can suffer from a kind of blindness that they DO NOT ADMIT. This ignorance stems from their position of privilege.
I believe nearly ALL of our top high-powered ‘professional experts’ came from this top 15%, which means to me that if I am going to wholeheartedly accept as TRUE everything that they tell me, I am accepting their reality as REAL at the same time I discount and deny my own reality.
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While I cannot argue with the generalized view point that approximately 50% of our population had a first year of life that has given them a safe and secure attachment system (matched by a properly operating nervous system/brain-stress response system-vagus nerve system-immune system), I ask myself the question, “Why is such a large percentage of our population reliant upon antidepressants to get through their life?”
Developmental neuroscientists know that mothers as an infant’s earliest primary caregiver — and it remains mothers due to biological heritage of our species that has not changed — quite literally download their brain and nervous system patterning into their offspring’s rapidly growing and developing body-brain at the same time they are passing along their own attachment system patterning. This means that in spite of our best intentions NOT to pass trauma patterns on to our offspring — we do.
Yes, while it can be said that much depression is ‘genetic’, it is also true that many genetic combinations that lead not only to depression to also to a wide array of physiological ‘problems’ are directly triggered into operation during the earliest months and years of our human development because of the influence our earliest caregivers have upon us.
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So what I would hope could be a ‘clarion whisper’ to others in my writings is this: In today’s complex and hectic mothering environment we need to understand and make very clear that what a mother has experienced in HER life directly impacts the body-brain that her baby will grow.
Perhaps the ‘top 50%’ of our society do not need to directly THINK about this fact. They can go on passing down to their offspring the goodness they have received in their benevolent infant-childhoods. The OTHER 50% needs to understand as much as they can — hopefully PRIOR to creating their children — something we do not talk about in our culture: How their body-NS-brain-immune system-mind-self was formed at the beginning of their life.
This is not so much about thinking, “WHO am I in the world?” This is about thinking about, “HOW am I in the world and HOW did I get to be this way?”
It is very common to see an infant growth and development chart or list of what to look for in regard to visible external signs of advancement. I want to see either a separate chart-list that talks about the INNER invisible critical growth and development of an infant’s attachment system as it affects development of its entire nervous system-brain AND body, or see this information included along with the mention of when to expect rolling over, sitting up, the first tooth and crawling.
Only in rare situations does an infant NOT develop its outward signs of health in a normal-ordinary fashion. And yet we accept that at least 50% of these same infants are NOT being given what they need to develop their INNER responses in a normal-ordinary way.
This means to me that we are willing to accept that less-than-best for half our population’s infants, which will directly influence their lifelong well-being on the down turn, is perfectly OK with us.
It is NOT OK! We CAN influence how the Bell Curve of human safe and secure attachment and BEST physiological development ON THE INSIDE turns out. We can ‘raise the bar’ for everyone and we can at the same time ‘raise the bottom’.
My own terrible infant-childhood maltreatment harmed my development greatly. I did not even begin to understand that what happened to me growing up for 18 years under extremely traumatic conditions was not only NOT NORMAL, but was NOT OK and was extremely harmful. It has only been in the last 6-7 years that I have learned what that ‘harmful’ means in terms of my trauma altered development.
It so happens that so much new information has become available about the needs of infants for optimal development due to advances in scientific technologies paralleled my own need and desire to find out the truth about what happened to me where it mattered most. That information is out there for all of us to find, but it needs to be made accessible and understandable to everyone, especially to new parents.
Even though I came a long, long way in not passing the trauma my mother, and through her that I experienced to my own children — I did so anyway on some significant levels. A very sad and traumatized mother who does NOT know this about herself, and who does NOT know how she is going to pass these patterns down to her infant through her innocent (and best) interactions with it during its first year of life — is going to pass those patterns down to her infant. That is nature’s design.
The very best and most accurate measure of the state of a human society’s well-being is to look directly — and with an informed eye — at its infants prior to the age of one.
What we want to see are infants who are well fed and physically cared for — yes. But what we ALSO and at the same time need to see are infants who are being attended to in safe and secure attachment interactions. These interactions are very real actually PHYSIOLOGICAL ways. Yes, they involve caregiver-mother touch, smell, voice, words, tone — but they also happen through face-to-face expressions that are designed to download particularly a mother’s experience of being in the world to her infant so that her infant can, in turn, adjust its physiological development ON ALL LEVELS to the condition of the world it has been born into.
A baby needs to be attended to and comforted in such a way that its entire nervous system will develop with a state of peaceful calm (safety and security) as its middle set point. Some excitement. Not too much. The right kind of stimulation. Modulation of excitement (both positive and negative) ALWAYS BACK TO THIS CENTER POINT OF PEACEFUL CALM.
The baby needs interactions that stimulate its happiness and joy center’s development in its brain. This happens FROM THE CENTER SETPOINT OF PEACE AND CALM. The baby needs to gradually and eventually begin to tolerate the survival experiences of discomfort, anger, fear and sadness — but always within the best possible parameters set by its caregivers so that the infant is NEVER IN ANY WAY OVERWHELMED BY ANYTHING — EVER!
An infant from birth to one is building its brain neuron and nervous system directly based on the kinds of early caregiver interactions it is receiving. The information it gets from these caregiver interactions are telling its genetic material exactly how safe and secure (benevolent) or how unsafe and insecure (malevolent) the entire universe is — and will be — for the rest of its life. The infant’s physiological INNER development will adjust itself accordingly — and in most ways, permanently.
An infant from birth is at the same time building within itself the platform foundation for its thoughts, beginning with the underlying images that are directly connected to its experiences with its earliest caregivers — primarily its mother. “Can I absolutely trust that someone loves me, knows that I AM HERE, and will come to take care of me?”
From this knowledge — either with a “YES” answer or a “NO” answer (or a “MAYBE?” one) comes not only the foundation of trust, but also the foundation of hope. Eventually an infant around the age of one will be able to HOPE for that wonderful caregiver to come take care of it when the infant experiences a need. With this foundation of trust and hope — or its absence — an infant advances into its stages of being able to move out into the world and explore it on its own knowing on its most basic physiological levels that it can count on being safely and securely attached to and in the world — or not.
AND the infant begins to add into its growing body-brain the ability to THINK in more than senses and images. Every single interaction an infant has with a human being before the age of one is directly influencing where its neurons are going to land in the regions of its brains, whether these neurons will live or die, and how these brain regions will process information — including information the infant needs to build its SELF and its relationship with this SELF.
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All of these interactions a billions more directly affect where a maturing human being will end up on this Bell Curve of well-being. Although I was born down there at the lowest 5% point within an extremely malevolent, traumatizing and abusive environment, I can now look upwards and SEE the whole range of possibilities. I can do this because I found a way to learn about how degrees of safe and secure attachment — and its opposite — directly influence the development of ALL OF US.
True, all of us can learn throughout our lifespan, but reality is reality. There are early infant-child critical windows of development during which certain aspects of our physiological development are finalized — and cannot be changed. We need to know as much as we can about what human developmental stages are ON THE INSIDE. We need to know the best we can what happened to us that changed us. Readers of this blog will already know exactly what I am talking about.
As a society we can make up our minds that LESS THAN BEST is not acceptable when it comes to infant care. While we mouth the words ‘everyone is created equal’ we are NOT making sure that everyone is given the same BEST chance to grow and develop the BEST body-brain-mind-self possible. Shame on us.
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Based on what happens in the womb and during the first year of life, additional critical brain development takes place in the second year of life — and onwards. But ALL future development will be directed by and adapted to the information the infant receives from its earliest caregiving environment before the age of one.
Jul 9, 2007 … CDC: Antidepressants most prescribed drugs in U.S.… She added that 25 percent of adults will have a major depressive episode sometime in …
Depression and Bipolar Disorder question: What percentage of the US takes anti-depressants? Answer More people than you think!!! Could not find it but this …
Never do I consider dissociation to be either a primitive ‘defense’ or a passive coping ‘mechanism’. I consider dissociation to be a pattern of interaction between brain regions in concert with the nervous system-stress response system that is very simply ONE THING — its own pattern of processing information.
In light of the mention I made in my previous post concerning the difference between calmness and numbness I want to clarify my thoughts by adding that I can consistently count on one of two inner states within myself that, when I can notice them, alert me to the active operation of dissociation in my information processing and response patterns.
I believe these two inner states are actually one and the same. I notice them as being different only as I experience one AS IT IS HAPPENING and the second IN RETROSPECT after it has happened. It is, therefore, only how I notice dissociation IN REAL TIME that I am describing when I name these two separately.
Neither of these two states feels comfortable to me. Neither of these two states would be ones I would choose to experience — if I had ever been given a choice when dissociation was built into my body by severe infant-child abuse in the first place. Both of these states are equally real.
Because both of these states mean the same thing to me — dissociation is happening/has happened, I will simply pick one by the tail and describe it first. I will start with “dissociation is happening.”
When I experience dissociation as it is happening — and I mean at the millisecond it occurs — there is ALWAYS a ‘shift in the world’.
I experience this shift as a ‘split’, meaning that what was the millisecond earlier an ongoing, coherent, reasonable pattern of interaction suddenly, and I mean SUDDENLY simply ceases to exist. What was — comes to a stop, ceases to exist, breaks, shatters, falls apart — and changes into something else.
I NEVER anticipate such a break in my continuity of interaction with or understanding of my experience in the world. I never did beginning in infancy when these breaks were forced upon me due to my mother’s insanely abusive disruptions of my ongoing experience.
The single word I would use to describe this state of awareness of dissociation as it is happening is this one — BLANK. Yet as I write the word I also understand that it is not enough to document what I want to say. Blank implies that ‘there is nothing there’. In real time, in real life the experience is exactly the opposite. EVERYTHING IS THERE AT THE SAME TIME.
Some describe chaos as being a state where all things are possible. Everything is there at the same time.
I believe that survivors of severe early caregiver terror, trauma, maltreatment and abuse have had the awareness of the state of absolute chaos built into their entire body on all of its levels. Very few such survivors (I would say NONE) made it through their earliest developmental stages of brain-nervous system development without dissociation being built right into the circuitry of their body as a result of their experiences.
When dissociation happens, when the break in the continuity of millisecond-past experience STOPS and the state of BLANK appears, what we actually have happening is the experience of TOO MUCH INFORMATION. In other words, we are experiencing the state of being overwhelmed. That state is a familiar one to us on every level of our being — and it is the same experience as being in chaos.
I INTUITIVELY KNOW THIS IS NOT IN AND OF ITSELF A BAD HAPPENING! It absolutely is NOT a ‘bad thing’. It is not ‘sick’ or ‘wrong’. It is supremely (and I do not use that word lightly) creative. It is a miracle of life, has a purpose, and can come to good end.
So, what is the problem with dissociation? Well, for one thing, it can be dangerous. At the instant that dissociation is happening I am not ACTUALLY in full awareness of any world at all other than the full perception of all that is possible within my mind and being. That awareness does NOT keep me safe in my body in real time in a physical world — and hence, I believe, this instant of dissociation is an ACTIVE coping state and not a passive one.
What I know about this statement is that the exact instant of dissociation happens SO FAST it cannot be measured in any normal way. It happens this fast because the body knows whatever state is being left and whatever state is being created to move into happen in the physical world where body-awareness (certainly not required to be conscious) has to be connected as fast as possible to accomplish ongoing life should a physical danger appear during this time (which an abuse survivor is especially geared to anticipate).
Say you had a working lamp turned on and two extension cords. The lamp is plugged into one cord which is receiving current from being plugged into a wall socket. How fast could you disconnect the lamp from one extension cord, plug it into the other one, and switch the cords plugged into the socket? Could you do this fast enough that the lamp would not visibly flicker?
Believe me, that would not be a passive action. It would be a very very active one just as I believe dissociation is. While no human can physically manipulate cords and plugs at or near the speed of light, I (as a lay person) have the image that these interactions, transactions, manipulations and actions as they happen on the level of electrical pulses and impulses within the brain DO happen that fast.
Pretty sophisticated if you ask me, no ‘primitive defense mechanism’ here, even though this ability has been built into the human brain since we began to advance the development of our brain untold centuries ago. There is nothing shabby or accidental about dissociation. It has a purpose and a natural intention — to allow us to survive under conditions that are ORDINARILY un-survive-able.
Trauma is, by definition, an experience that is outside the range of ordinary experience. Trauma is extraordinary, beyond the ordinary, and so are the people who survive it.
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I am going to carry my lit lamp and cord switching image on with me into my description of what I call the second state of dissociation. If I imagine that the information that has been transpiring just prior to a dissociation being triggered as the body-knows overload has been approached, I imagine that the first cord this lamp has been plugged into has instantaneously become one that is too wimpy, too light to carry the load. A much heavier duty cord is required — and the body-nervous system-brain of trauma survivors just happens to have one handy.
If the heavier cord is suddenly required, and the survivor just happens to have one at hand — why not use it? Believe me, we do.
What’s the problem? The switch to the heavier cord designed to carry the full current of what is happening in the real time present moment — AND the load of past traumatic awareness associated with it that lie outside the range of consciousness — does not happen through conscious free choice.
This results in what I call the second state of dissociation — THE DETOUR.
Experience of the first state, the switch that leads THROUGH the experience of blankness is very seldom consciously identified. Time moves on so fast we cannot actually measure it, and as it does so we are now following a detour. We are NOT on the same path in the same world in the same way that we were before the millisecond split of dissociation occurred.
Being able to recognize that we are on THE DETOUR path varies by individual and by each dissociated experience we have. I believe we can live not only seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months IN THE DETOUR, we can live large portions of our life on these altered pathways. This is a huge topic, and certainly too vast for this post.
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Someone on the outside watching dissociation occur can very possibly SEE the blankness when it happens. Very few people are knowledgeable enough to actually recognize what they are watching, but this does not mean they don’t see it. My hope is that bringing discussions about dissociational experience out into the open will help all of us understand both our own self and also other people better as we all learn more about what dissociation is, what it feels like, why it is possible, how it happens, what creates the ability within humans, how it is helpful and how it is disturbing.
As I work to become increasingly aware of dissociation when I experience it, I find words that help me connect to my self in both my past and in my present. This leaves the playing field of the future wide open. I have two complications currently in two of my main attachment relationships that both involved dissociation when the ‘rupture without repair’ (so far) happened. I am not free to really talk to either of these two people about my experience.
People who are not severe abuse and trauma survivors seem to want to rush right on past any dissociation-related conversation — because the experience of serious dissociation is NOT a part of their reality and is therefore NOT truly important to them. They do not want to truly listen to us — and they don’t. This is NOT OK TO ME.
Yet at the same time when others react this way, and cannot be honest with themselves about the basis of their reactions to a ‘dissociator’ they are in relationship with, they are discounting not only our experience, but OUR SELF at the same time. Dissociation has been built into us. It is a part of our body. It is a part of our patterns of operation and of being alive in the world. Dissociation is a part of US!
And as a consequence dissociation is BOUND to appear in our interactions with others — both those who mean a lot to us as well as with those who are passing folks in our life. There will come a time when the dissociations cannot be ignored. They have to be talked about like any other fact of life. If these open, honest, compassionate, exploratory, learning conversations do NOT take place, there will be ruptures in our lives that cannot possibly be repaired.
Dissociation is something we are supposed to be curious about. Dissociation is ALWAYS connected to something extremely important — something that has to do with life and death, with threat of death, with trauma. As we continue to treat dissociation as something flawed, pathological, wrong, inconvenient, mysterious, troubling, or inconsequential, we are missing out on some of the most important lessons that life has to teach us all: How do you survive the un-survive-able? What gifts and abilities enable that to happen? What are we supposed to learn from trauma?
Perhaps this is really what I believe: I am living a documentary on the physiological changes that severe early and chronic child abuse can cause within a human being and what it is like to live a life with these changes. If this is what I believe, than what I am doing at age 59 is living a documentary and recording what I notice about this experience as a survivor. It just seems that life moves too fast for anything else to be accomplished.
I finished four days of working in my friend’s small office while she recovers from her illness — only she isn’t well enough yet to return so next week I will probably be gone from home and in the office another four days. This SHOULDN’T BE A BIG DEAL for me, but it is. I can feel the powerful impact of stress in my body — and what I have been doing is NOT STRESSFUL in any ‘normal’ person’s way. I know it isn’t. But it nearly more than I can bear. I have the weekend to try to calm myself down — on all my levels.
So from my documentariast point of view I would say that any time I am out in public and interacting in ANY way with other people I am nearly completely overwhelmed by the complexities of human interactions. At the same time I notice this, it’s like I can look backward through a long time tunnel to my infancy and feel the affects of my mother’s maniacal, violent, unpredictable, inappropriate, chaotic interactions with little infant me — and what those interactions did to my body, nervous system and brain as I tried to grow and develop in that insanely abusive and malevolent environment.
I did not have the opportunity for experience I needed in face to face mirroring, reflective, compassionate interactions that would have built into my right brain the ability to ‘read social cues’ or to send back and out to others ‘social cues’ that they could read, either. Every interaction I participate in with others borders on panic. All the information that passes back and forth is moving so fast — just like it is supposed to — but is also well beyond my ability to understand correctly or to process.
As a result, I am easily just plain exhausted in ways that are difficult to describe. It all seems to damn NOISY to me — and it IS noisy. And all the interactions just amp up my stress-distress level, which my continually turned-on stress response/attachment system DOES NOT NEED.
There is no possible way to turn everyday human interactions into slow motion events. If my ‘documentary’ was able to run at the speed that allowed me to work with human social information, nobody except someone like me who had suffered from a truly MAD, insane mother birth to age one would be able to tolerate watching it. The tables would be turned. Instead of ME being the one out of my element and lost in the mad panic of the high speed communication patterns between people, I would be far more comfortable in ‘slow-mo’ while others would amp up their stress levels.
And in the end the result is I am terribly lonely. Normal social interactions do not ‘feed me’. They drain me, and I have to escape them back to the only comfort I now know — my quiet home.
I can’t say to other people, “Slow down! You are so loud, you talk so fast, you move so fast, you send out far too many signals all jumbled up and tumbled over one another.” I am supposed to ‘be normal’ and ‘act normal’ — just like they do with one another.
My mother overwhelmed every sense I had from the time I was born. There was no reciprocal, balanced, compassionate, tender loving interactions between us — ever.
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I was thinking about all of this when I got back from a series of errands I had to do in town today (I didn’t have to go to my friend’s office). I realize that much of my life — all of my 18-year childhood and most of my adulthood — I have survived and endured through using an invisible (to me) ability to dissociate so that masses of information could remain separated from one another so that they did not overwhelm me by being present at the same time.
Thinking about it today I realized that this process allowed me to have large ‘areas’ of quiet within me that were actually empty because information was segmented and presented to me in little pieces not connected to one another — but only present as the information was immediately needed. Other information was somehow put away where I did not have to focus on it, be aware of it, be distracted by it — or have to FEEL it or pay it any attention.
Something about my cancer diagnosis July 2007 and my subsequent experience of treatment and survivorship changed all of these patterns — or ways I had of being in the world that seemed to work for me all those years.
Most simply put in this documentary as I experience it today, I would say that the NUMBNESS disappeared.
Now I would say I have too much information without having any other in-built adequate ability to process or tolerate it.
I still experience dissociation, but not from one numb state to another. Now I can distinctly note that most dissociation happens in response to very clear demands being made on my processing abilities (brain-nervous system-mind-self) that surpass my in-built ability to flow along smoothly and comfortably in response.
This lets me know very clearly that numbness is NOT calmness! I never needed to clarify this or name it for myself before now. Now, not only can I not get to a state of calmness within, I cannot get to a numb state, either.
In other words, I cannot turn down the volume of noise that comes from too much stimulation in too short a period of time, too much information, too many demands on my inadequate abilities to receive, understand, tolerate and appropriately respond to information coming to me continually from the world around me — most especially when I am in contact with other people.
In other words, I am living my life now post-trauma of cancer directly with the body-brain-nervous system my MOTHER built into me before the age of two — and not with the systems that I put together, instinctively and intuitively figured out and Gerry-rigged all on my own throughout my life that allowed me to make-do with how abuse built me in the first place.
Now I live with the whole raw deal. And that is, I will note in my documentary, very often how I feel — very raw. I think about the terrific harm that was done to me while I was a developing little person. I think about the wound that has created in my trauma altered body as a consequence. I think about burned skin, how sensitive beyond belief it is, and I realize that my whole being is wounded, not my skin — at least not the OUTSIDE of my skin.
It might take generations past mine to begin to comprehend what trauma altered infant-child development really is, let alone how to truly begin to live well in spite of these changes. Meanwhile we of the current generations have to make do the best that we can — and document what we have and do experience so that our understandings can help those in the future both STOP infant-child maltreatment at the same time its survivors are respected, honored and assisted to live better with what nature gave us as a result of the terror-able tempest that was our physiological formative beginning — that enabled us to stay alive at all.
I am going to write something here for very selfish reasons. I have been away from the peace and quiet of my home during the day for the better part of two weeks as I take care of my friend’s office while she recuperates from her illness. The more time that passes for me away from the peace and calm of my little universe here at home the less able I am to stop the disturbances of emotion and thought that swirl, tumble and spin around in my body and in my thoughts.
So many thoughts whiz around me during the day. I end up just feeling disorganized and disoriented, true to the insecure attachment disorder that built me through severe infant-child abuse in the first place.
Can I order some of my thoughts here now and feel a little bit better? Let’s see…..
Everyone uses their attachment relationships to help regulate their emotions sometimes. Humans, as members of a social species, are built to have human attachment as the mainstream of their being. As I come to understand how profoundly my terrible infant-childhood insecure and unsafe attachment relationships affected my physiological development, I find overlapping thoughts tumble around my mind because of overlapping words we use to talk about our attachment relationships — the good and the bad.
“Oh, that person is SO insecure.”
“Oh, that person is being so paranoid — again.”
“Oh, that person has trouble with intimacy.”
“Oh, that person has abandonment issues.”
“Oh, that person just uses other people.”
“Oh, that person is SO dependent.”
“Oh, that person is so LOST without so-and-so.”
“Oh, that person is in an addictive relationship.”
What do any of these expressions really mean?
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If we suffered from unsafe and insecure attachment relationships with our primary caregivers from the time we were born and through our earliest years — as I have said so often — our development is changed and instead of having good ‘ole peace and calm at the center of our nervous system as its set point, we end up with a mid set point at anger, fear and/or sadness. Forget the left brain happy center — if we have any neurons left there we have an extremely hard time FEELING them.
My peace and calm comes to me through some kind of manipulation of the OUTSIDE world I live in — if I can manage that. Any sense of safety and security I might experience is dependent on what is happening around me in my world — NOT on my own nervous system’s set point.
This makes me very vulnerable. It makes me dependent on all sorts of ‘things’ in ways that people who did not suffer early trauma and abuse probably cannot imagine.
Today I thought, “It’s like being on a life support system. Because my nervous system-brain-mind-self DID NOT develop outside of a malevolent world, and because it adjusted its development to trauma, my well-being is far more dependent on external sources — just like if I was dependent on a life support system to stay alive.”
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I don’t LIKE IT that my body had to form this way. But it’s a fact. I would rather learn as much as I possibly can about my trauma altered development and what it did to change me than remain ignorant.
For example, two of my very close relationships are currently ‘threatened’ by the primary attachment person’s illness.
Enter guilt. “Here I am, yes concerned about their recovery and sickness for THEIR sake — but the track running parallel to that concern is my own concern for my own self. I NEED these people. I cannot any more afford for anything to really happen to these people than I could afford having someone cut the power to my life support system if I was dependent upon it for my life.”
I am not at all sure that people who talk about abuse survivors being able to form ‘earned secure attachments’ when their primary attachment system is tuned to ‘insecure attachment’. I don’t believe severe infant-child abuse survivors, who did not have at least ONE strong safe and secure attachment bond to some significant person when they were forming their body-nervous system-brain will EVER have anything like a normal attachment.
‘Earned secure attachment’ is NOT normal safe and secure attachment. I believe if we look at the truth we will know that our attachment figures are our life support system in ways that non-early abused people DO NOT NEED.
I thought about this today in terms of the great sadness, fear and/or anger that built itself into child abuse survivors. Those emotions have immense power. They have a force within them, and because one of the consequences of NOT having safe and secure early caregiver attachment relationships is that we did not develop a right social-emotional brain normally so that we can regulate emotions normally or form social attachments normally.
My close attachment relationships contain an element of desperation because that element was built into me right along with my attachment system that can never turn itself off (this is NOT normal) — which is probably directly connected to the fact that my stress response system was set to ON ON ON ON through child abuse and cannot turn itself OFF (again, this is NOT normal — except for severe early abuse survivors).
So even when I am feeling the benefits of close attachment relationships, the undercurrent within my body is always running in the background. I cannot regulate this sad-fearful-angry emotional current for the reasons described above.
So the PEOPLE that I am attached to actually act in my world like massive DIKES to hold back the ocean of my emotion and like massive retaining walls to hold back mountains of emotions, as well.
Knowing this at least alerts me to why my reactions are overly strong (think adult reactive attachment disorder) as I feel, yes, threatened, insecure, unsafe when my ‘earned secure attachment’ to these important people in my life feels shaky to me. It is no different, I don’t believe, than how I would feel if my life was dependent on an external life support system.
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It is vital, I believe, for severe early abuse survivors and the people who love them to understand NONE OF THESE INTENSE REACTIONS ARE PERSONAL. They are PHYSIOLOGICAL. They are connected to a nervous system-brain that did not develop with peaceful calm at its center, that did not develop an adequate happiness center in the left brain, that did not acquire normal ability to read social cues others send out, did not learn how to react to social cues normally (including emotional messages others send in their facial expression, vocal tones, body language, etc.), that did not develop either an attachment system or a stress response system that can be turned off in normal ways, etc. (Our empathic abilities did not develop normally, either — no matter how ‘sensitive to others’ we are.)
I am not BOOM-DOOM-GLOOMING it, either. These trauma related alterations were built into us through early trauma AT THE SAME TIME WE DID NOT HAVE ANYONE TO SAFELY AND SECURELY ATTACH TO. Ours (mine) are very real body-based changes that we can FEEL and that stimulate, modulate, and often control our reactions – including our emotional ones and then the reaction-actions we take in response to our own emotions.
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Perhaps the hardest aspect of being me is that the current popular terms our culture uses ‘against’ severe early abuse survivors (like I listed at the start of this post) do NOT describe what is really going on. They do not address what matters most — not in terms of what caused our difficulties to be built into our body-nervous system in the first place and not in terms of the very real physiological body-felt consequences we live with all of the time.
This dearth of information about the long term consequences of ‘insecure attachment disorders’ that built us in the first place and that we then are forced to carry within us for the rest of our lives IS improving. But for the most part we cannot really talk about what our body tells us about what is REALLY happening within us to anyone.
When our attachment relationships are threatened or end — for ANY reason — our world is rocked to its core. There is nothing minor about what happens within us when our life support relationships radically change or end.
I am not even beginning to describe the fractured, fragile, altered relationship we are forced to have not only with the world around us, but also with our OWN severely traumatized relationship with our ‘self’ – if we are fortunate to have one. The mirroring that we desperately needed from our earliest caregivers DID NOT HAPPEN, which means we are desperately needy for the rest of our lives on the mirroring that any of our present-day attachment people give to us.
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All is simply not what it might appear to be from the outside looking in at we severe early abuse survivors. In some ways I wish I could have remained ignorant of the devastation early abuse caused me. That didn’t happen. Over time, over the length of my life, the reality of my trauma-changed development could no longer be kept behind dikes and retaining walls so that I could pretend to ignore it.
It does help me to know I can name what I experience — both in terms of what I experience and where-how what I experience came from.
Yes, I have great strength in many ways, but I am fragile. I cannot tolerate being gone from the safety and security, the peace, quiet and calm of my home for very long. If my friend is still sick much past the early part of next week someone else will have to be called in to take her place in that little office. When it comes to what ‘ruptures’ my universe and to what I need to make some ‘repairs’, I know that my sensitivity to external stimulation of ANY kind severely limits what I can tolerate in my life.
This is classic Posttraumatic Stress Disorder — call it ‘complex’ or not — and it is directly tied to insecure attachment in our body and to the world we live in. Because our stress response system cannot be turned off, we have to find ways to turn it DOWN so that our inner disorganization-disorientation can diminish.
Do I feel my ability to live a real and full life has been stolen from me as a consequence of trauma-altered development due to severe early abuse (even though it lasted 18 years – it was the early birth to age one abuse that so changed my body)? Yes, I most certainly KNOW THIS NOW. But this is the only body I will ever have to live in during this lifetime, and what was done then, even though in minor and positive ways it can be influenced, cannot be undone.
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The day I wrote one of my latest posts about my happy grandson I had another thought more akin to my own reality when I was his age: “When a baby screams it hears the whole world screaming. When a baby screams it feels the whole world screaming. When a baby screams all that exists in its universe is screaming. Everything everywhere is screaming when a baby screams until someone cares enough about the baby to come to it and help make the screaming stop.”
If nobody is there to consistently do this for an infant, and worse yet, if the primary caregiver hurts the baby and makes it scream, this scream and its physiological reaction in the entire body will build itself into this infant.
That’s what happened to me and to others who resonate with what I am saying here.
I realized very clearly last week that I fundamentally believe that if someone had removed me from my mother from my first breath so that I had been loved and cared for well for the first year of my life, and then had I been returned to my mother for all the exact same abuse I suffered until I left home at 18, my life would not have been stolen from me the way that it has been.
NOTHING anyone could have done to me after the age of one could have created the kind of body-nervous system-brain changes that the trauma of my first year of life built into my body.
It is the birth to age one changes that cursed me, that create nearly all of my difficulties now. It is not that I wouldn’t have had serious ‘issues’ to deal with as a result of severe abuse after age one. It IS that the body-nervous system-brain that I would have had to deal with and to process with and to integrate with and to heal from abuse with (no matter how severe) AFTER the age of one would have been 100% more ABLE and CAPABLE to accomplish exactly these things.
NOTE: I call ‘earned secure attachment’ ‘borrowed attachment’. All I say about trauma altered development includes changes to the immune system and to epigenetic changes and alterations in the expression of many genes and their combinations.
I hope this works – click on link to wonderful little article on how ‘making music’ can turn off the stress response — before it becomes chronic! Well, for those like me who had severe early infant abuse, our stress response was turned on very early and cannot be turned off – but I do believe music still helps us! (I also suspect this is why I prefer listening to music in Spanish, a language I do not know. This way my music appreciation turns OFF my stress response for a few moments, or at least diminishes its feels within my body-self.)
I haven’t been online since last posting. I am struggling with dissociation from my computer. Evidently when I get ‘burned’ I instantly get ‘burned out’.
Have been out in the front yard working hard sunrise to sunset – will post pictures soon — racing against winter.
Began only yesterday (finally) to think about writing ‘my book’. Want to NOT write anywhere around digitalville or my computer. But, I have few words these days – that’s OK, too. Hope all readers are fine and enjoying the wonders of fall! Will be back hopefully in a few days (no sign of virus these past two times I have booted this beast up).
Join Geoff Lawton on a Permaculture adventure as he demonstrates how to grow a food forest from start to finish. Over 90 minutes of quality information to get you on the right track in creating your own garden of Eden.
The movie really comes alive once Geoff leaves the classroom where he spends a few minutes explaining how a forest builds itself before he heads out to the land — where you won’t believe what you see and learn!
Stop the Storm 
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