Sunday, June 01, 2008

The Body Bears the Burden:  Trauma, Dissociation, and Disease

By Robert C. Scaer, MD

Second edition

Routledge  2007

Hawthorth Medical Press, imprint of The Hawthorth Press

His chapter 8.  Trauma Reenactment

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These are notes I made while reading this chapter earlier today:

He is making assumptions and taking huge leaps, quantum leaps, in the wrong direction.

Don’t take away from us what is ours – the severity of our damage.  Don’t minimize it – and don’t get this WRONG!

Don’t be lazy in your research, your thinking or your writing.  You’ll do us no favors and you’ll make yourself look like a fool.

We are people between the lines.

For once we want to look in the mirror and see ourselves, not you.  Our mothers couldn’t mirror us, and so, it seems, neither can you.  We expect you, however, to be healthy enough to be honest about this.

If this level of infant abuse is impossible and too difficult to imagine – if we can’t overcome/override taboos about talking about infant abuse – perhaps we can bypass them by using the language of science to inform ourselves, to strengthen our ability and willingness to face infant abuse and its consequences head on.

This we must do if there’s any profession of morality among us.

Docs, toughten up and suck in that stomach full of ego.  It’s time we had our say, every last one of us.  We have been bludgeoned enough in life, we aren’t going to take if from you.  No more, I say, no more.  Please.

This isn’t Elmer Fuddism.  We WILL take you on.  We will have our say because we are finding our voice. Whether you listen or not has always been up to you.

From birth we look into the world to find our selves.  Our self, where we begin and end and where others do, too.  We need to see ourselves in the mirror.  It is our greatest calling.  “Are we our species?”  Like the kid’s book, “Are You My Mother?”  Her reaction to us defines us.

Nobody sees us.  There is no mirror.

Until now.  My greatest hope is that this book will to some new and amazing level, mirror you who have been abused and neglected from birth (or before).

This is no Pollyanna “A Child Called It” version where all is a Disneyland cornucopia of plenty until we were five years old.  We have survived a far harsher reality which has affected every cell in our body and in fact formed us only to continue to survive in a most malevolent world.

We were born on fire and we’ve been on fire ever since.  You know it and so do I.

When kindling makes the fire, creates this fire, feeds this fire.

From birth, we’re still being mis-fed the wrong information.

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Saturday, June 07, 2008

I just received and responded to an email from Scaer.  I found myself using the phrase

More than trauma

What could that mean, really?  That a state exists that we do not even have a word for in our language?

That would be true if as I suggested, trauma exists because there is something else to compare it to.  In the case of peritraumatic conditions for an infant as its brain is forming, there IS no alternative.

So what IS their reality?

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