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Drained.  Nearly completely drained.  That’s how I feel right now.  While there was nothing traumatic about my outing this morning to pick up the baby chicks at the feed store 15 miles away, how my body (and I, right along with it) reacted to this excursion could seem beyond belief to me if I didn’t know myself as well as I do now.

There’s a feeling the body has after an encounter with an acute traumatic stressful-distressful experience.  After all the emergency reactions have taken place, and after the threat has passed, the body goes into a ‘relief’ stage that almost feels like the stellar opposite of the acute trauma state.  I am in that state now — even though nothing happened TODAY to trigger it!

I know it does me no good to judge the state I (and my body) are in right now.  I simply document it.  I feel like the only thing I want right now — no crave right now — is nearly absolute stillness.

This need for stillness is past ‘quiet’.  It is passed ‘tired’.  This state seems related to one where even the action of breathing demands more than I (and my body) wish to expend.

Spent.  I feel spent.

I am not going to try to ‘figure this out’.  There is no figuring, I figure!  Somehow (at age 59) my body seems to have spent so much energy just to survive the first 18 terrible and traumatic years of my life, followed by what it took of me to make it through the next 40 years of being ‘relatively OK’, there is just very little left in my ‘get on with living’ category of expenditures.

This is a need for, a desire for, a craving for a state of nearly absolute quiet and peacefulness.  It is a state where there is no ‘rise to the fight’ left in me.

As I write this I find myself remembering a state that I imagine was very close to the one I am in right now that I have called in my adulthood ‘The Watching State’.  During those first 18 years when I was so viciously and brutally abused, it seems that all that I could really manage to do in between my mother’s attacks on me was to simply WATCH.

I was never allowed to PARTICIPATE in the life of my family in anything more than a very marginal way.  Much of what my mother did to me in between her direct physical attacks of me was to confine and isolate me — alone.  THAT state I found myself in wasn’t even a Watcher state.  Those times I was in a Listener state.  And that Listener state began when I was born as my mother isolated me alone in my crib away from all things human.

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So, thinking about it as I pay attention to how I feel at this moment, I realize that how I feel even lacks the energy required of me to be either a Watcher or a Listener.  Both of those states required that I be attuned to the activities of a world outside of my own body.

I don’t even have the energy, or the motivation, or the passion at this moment to do anything more than breath.

That’s OK.  It has to be.  This is the way I get to be on occasion at this point in my life.  This state will pass.  In the meantime I need to be very care-full and respect-full of myself.  Patient.  Kind.  Accepting.  Compassionate and understanding.  Encouraging.  Positive.

The image I see/feel from my right brain-body is of a lake with a dam whose water has been let out to replenish life elsewhere.  The dam is back in place, but it will take time for the lake-of-myself to fill back up again.

Time is hence my ally — as is waiting.  As is not demanding or expecting or punishing or shaming myself right now.  The last thing I need is to pressure myself right now.  I had enough pressure during the first 18 years of my lifetime to last a hundred lifetimes.  So I am gentle with myself — the tide that has washed out will wash itself back in again.

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Looking back at what I just wrote I find it interesting how many times I said ‘right now‘.  There would be a clue in this fact — if I had the energy to even think about it!

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As I walk around my growing garden before sunrise, noticing how each new plant is faring I dig out the tiny weeds before they become troublesome.  I tie at an angle each main shoot growing from the base of the climbing roses.  I look for signs of stress for each plant and then find a way to alleviate it so the plant can thrive in the place I planted it.

I think about the word ‘tend’.  I am tending this garden to the best of my ability.  Yet I also think about the fact that as I grew up nobody tended me.

Infant-child abusers are consumed with their own existence.  I can’t even say that they are truly consumed with their own self because much of the time their connection to their self is NOT what is operating in their life.  Their Trauma Altered Development that most of them experienced in their own earliest stages of life interfered with the development both of their self – and with the development of their healthy connection to this self.

What we who were abused in the early times of our life had done to us was anything but a reflection of being ‘tended’.  I took a glance at this word ‘tend’ and immediately found that it is connected to ‘attend’ and to ‘attention’.  What most strikes me is that all of these words are related to the action of COMPANIONSHIP.

And here immediately with the word COMPANION is the connection to FOOD – to sustenance – to the mutual sharing of nurturing.

Infant-child abusers are NOT the companions of their offspring.  As I wander around the many adobe pathways I have created as I built my garden, as I tend to the plants that are growing along the way, I am actually in companionship with each one.  We are sharing this life.  They, each according to their nature, are sharing their life with me and are helping to sustain me just as I am doing my best to help each one grow into the best plant possible.

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As we survivors participate in our own healing from abuse and trauma we are always mutually sharing a life journey with all life around us.  We can make choices and decisions now about how we wish to be in the world that we could not make when we were little.  Certainly any physiological trauma-related changes that we experienced have altered the body-brain we live with in this world, but those changes DO NOT exclude options for healing every step of the way along the garden path of our lifetime.

A plant cannot usually eliminate the weeds beside it that are competing for its nourishment.  It cannot get up and walk away from the base of a tree that is blocking its sunlight.  We can pay attention to what we need, take a look at what is blocking our best growth and development in the present, and make positive changes to the best of our ability.

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There are both passive and active ways to make changes in life.  A cactus by nature preserves moisture within its structure.  A snapdragon cannot.  Some plants in my garden amazingly survived our 2 below zero deep freezes of last winter.  Others did not and vanished.  All abuse survivors are strong and resilient, capable and clever at surviving.  The question I ask myself right now is, “What are you going to do today to TEND to yourself in the best way you can today, Linda?”

I am going to pick up my seven newly hatched soon-to-be hens this morning!  I can hardly wait to see their fuzzy tiny bodies hunting and pecking around like they know exactly what they are doing – even without having a mother around to show them!

There are many, many things I know that I certainly DID NOT learn from my mother.  Any attention she ever paid to me was of the harmful and abusive variety.  But that never stopped ME from growing into an amazing and wonderful person.  I just need to remember this and get on with tending – something I am pretty good at!!

Soon I will have seven more little ones to attend to!  Off I go into the sunshine to get them!

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There is something somewhere in my thoughts after writing my last post (+CREATING A TIMELINE OF OUR EARLIEST LIFE – PUTTING ORDER/ORGANIZATION TO TRAUMA/CHAOS) that is connecting that topic to a consideration of the difference between ‘compassion’ and ‘pity’.  It does not serve ours or anyone else’s desires toward healing to apply an ointment of ‘pity’.  Compassion, on the other hand, I see as a most healing balm.

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PITY

I can see how my inner sense of conflict and irritation at the word is connected to my preference for the word ‘compassion’ just by looking at this in relation to PITY:

Synonyms: disgrace, crime, shame, sin

COMPASSION

This word has one single definition:

: sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it

Synonyms: commiseration, sympathy, feeling

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Compassion operates ONLY when it is actually built right into our body-brain.  It is connected physiologically to our Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) and our vagus nerve system.  Compassion is a physiological reaction that can perhaps be pantomimed or mimicked but is only genuine when it is directly connected to ‘correct’ wiring within our body-brain.

Trauma Altered Development that happens in infant-childhood earliest growth stages due to stress from trauma, maltreatment and abuse can prevent the wiring of compassion.  This happened to my mother.  Compassion, which by definition is genuine or it doesn’t exist at all, was missing within her.

Pity is what I call a ‘secondary’ reaction that is NOT based on or connected to physiology within our ANS or our vagus nerve system.  It is nothing more than an intellectual construct that does not (in my opinion) help anyone or carry any power to help or to heal.

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I mention this today because I suspect it can be very hard for those of us who survived terrible infant-childhoods to be able to FEEL in our BODY the difference between these two conditions.  Compassion is a feeling body-based state.  We can FEEL this one.  Pity offers us nothing in the way of genuine feeling.  It is a relative of the abuse we suffered and does nothing but auger (dig) us deeper into despair rather than lift us up into increasing joy and well-being.

Compassion is connected to ‘company’ and is meant to operate within us to help draw us to others of our social species.

Pity separates people from one another and does the opposite from what compassion is designed to do.

These patterns also exist within our self toward our self.  Compassion draws us closer to our genuine self.  Pity alienates us from our self.

Compassion offers us ways to reach out to our self and to others and helps us delineate (clarify) our true priorities.  Pity puts up walls and barriers, keeps us from knowing the truth about reality and perpetuates (continues) our inner confusions.  Compassion carries within it the light of attachment.  Pity carries the darkness of being – and remaining – broken.

I believe we can know the difference between compassion and pity most simply by paying attention to where in our body we feel the feeling connected to each word.  Compassion heals.  Pity hurts.  Compassion is connected to hope and trust.  Pity is connected to fear, anger and shame.

While there is no shame to ‘thinking’ pity, I believe it is a waste of time to remain stuck within this intellectually-based condition.  Finding the TRUE feelings that pity hides and helps us avoid takes us to the truth of our body, and in that process we are practicing compassion.

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There is absolutely no one who can do for us what we need to do for ourselves to accomplish our degrees of healing as survivors of extremely traumatic infant-childhoods.  While I occasionally receive comments on this blog written by survivors who do not want their comments published, I encourage everyone to consider what reasons they have not to speak their own truth where others who have suffered similar early fates can read it.  Although nobody else can heal us, we all have something to say that can assist someone else who is making a healing journey that is similar to ours.

This morning I have been thinking that just as I say that it isn’t the specific details of our actual terrible and traumatic infant-childhoods that truly matters — because in the end what damaged us MOST is the altered physiological development that changed the very body-brain we grew in the middle of the hells we lived in — it must also be equally true that it doesn’t actually matter so much what actual ‘diagnosis’ could be given to those who harmed us, either.

Most often, if not always, our perpetrators suffered Trauma Altered Development in the midst of the hell that was their infant-childhood, too.  What I say we are looking for are the PATTERNS that remain in our altered-development body-brain.  Those patterns ARE physiological.  That does not mean that we can’t work to change how those patterns are affecting us in our adulthood.  It does mean that we need to learn as much as we can about how the terrible stress on our developing little body RESULTED in us having a different body-brain than we would have had if we had been born into a safe and secure early attachment home.

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When people ask me for a book to read that might help them all I can say is that there are books you can find by Google searching, but I don’t believe the information about Trauma Altered Development yet exists for the lay public.  That information does exist en masse on this blog and can be found by Google searching combinations of “stopthestorm” AND whatever words you might think of related to what you most need to know.

It is important to realize that all severely traumatized infant-children suffer altered physiological development IN COMBINATION with ‘saving factors’ or ‘resiliency factors’ that existed in their early lives.  These factors consist of PRIMARILY safe and secure relationships with someone in our earliest years that was able to love us appropriately.

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While I do not advocate a specific ‘return’ to an abusive early life to search out traumatic memories, I do recommend that survivors work to create what I call a TIMELINE of their early years (and on into adulthood when helpful).  The Disorganized-Disoriented insecure attachment pattern that many survivors end up with is CONTRASTED with the organized insecure attachment patterns.

There is a BIG difference between these two ‘versions’ of insecure attachment.  What is commonly called ‘Dismissive-Avoidant insecure attachment’ is an organized insecure attachment pattern.  The insecure attachment ‘disorder’ commonly called ‘Preoccupied’ is also an organized insecure attachment pattern.

While I see that all the insecure attachment patterns usually include degrees of dissociation, it is the Disorganized-Disoriented insecure attachment pattern that I believe is most closely tied with BODY-BASED feelings of panic, anxiety,and a reoccurring sense of overwhelming confusion and loss.

I also believe that all of the insecure attachment patterns-disorders (all being a direct result of unsafe and insecure early infant-caregiver attachment relationships, primarily with the mother) exist in combination with physiological changes that happened in development in response to trauma.  And I believe that all insecure attachment patterns also involve SOME degree of interference with the development of the SELF.

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Creating a TIMELINE of our early life (the best we can) begins to create a bridge over which we can walk back and forth so that we can make better sense of how we are and how we feel in our adult life.  Just as a smooth, happy, clear and positive connection with our SELF was tampered with during our earliest years, so also was our ability to tell a coherent life story/narrative of our self in our own life.

I think we end up being trapped in our adult life with an overlap of powerful, if not overwhelming feelings from our earliest life that continually contaminate our present experience of being alive in our body.  Part of how this continues to happen is that our body-brain did not grow itself with an ordinary sense of TIME built into it.  Trauma does that to us.  (Google search “stopthestorm peritrauma” to find related posts here.)

If we can begin to consciously create a sense of ‘ordinary time’ for ourselves we can begin to teach and instruct our body-brain that there is such a thing as a PAST-PRESENT-FUTURE time reality that nonsurvivors automatically know about — and our body-brain DOES NOT.  Creating a TIMELINE of our earliest life helps bring this more ‘ordinary’ sense of time into focus for us.

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I had the advantage of my mother’s letters that, as I transcribed them, at least gave me some points in time that could be matched with factual experiences.  A severe early trauma survivor’s life happens in the midst of trauma — which is the same thing as saying it happens in the midst of chaos.  CHAOS does not contain an ordinary pattern of the passage of time.

Dissociation is, I believe, directly connected to a sense of time-passing that is in shambles.  Nothing but overlap and contamination of present and past can happen if we cannot somehow manage to NAME the past as the past and the present as the present — because our body-brain was not built in/by/for trauma with this information included.  WE HAVE TO DO THIS CONSCIOUSLY.

This is all a very gradual process.  Somewhere in our time-confusion body-brain we have to make room for our SELF as it exists NOW with every breath we take and with our every heartbeat NOW to experience the good things of life!!  Our earliest years all but buried this SELF alive!  We are the only ones who can find ways to let our SELF live NOW.

And we can share with one another and with other people who care what this entire experience is like for us.  While we cannot walk another’s path or follow another’s journey exactly, there are far more experiences that we share that not as survivors.  This is because there are patterns of trauma-altered body-brain development changes that we share in common (to one degree or another).  Sharing our journey helps ALL of us gain more confidence that we are MAKING A POSITIVE DIFFERENCE both to our own self and to somebody else.

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NEXT POST:  +PITY HURTS, COMPASSION HEALS: KNOWING THE DIFFERENCE

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A HEALING PRAYER FOR WOMEN

Glory be to Thee, O Lord my God! I beg of Thee by Thy Name through which He Who is Thy Beauty hath been stablished upon the throne of Thy Cause, and by Thy Name through which Thou changest all things, and gatherest together all things, and callest to account all things, and rewardest all things, and preservest all things, and sustainest all things—I beg of Thee to guard this handmaiden who hath fled for refuge to Thee, and hath sought the shelter of Him in Whom Thou Thyself art manifest, and hath put her whole trust and confidence in Thee.

She is sick, O my God, and hath entered beneath the shadow of the Tree of Thy healing; afflicted, and hath fled to the City of Thy protection; diseased, and hath sought the Fountainhead of Thy favors; sorely vexed, and hath hasted to attain the Wellspring of Thy tranquillity; burdened with sin, and hath set her face toward the court of Thy forgiveness.

Attire her, by Thy sovereignty and Thy loving-kindness, O my God and my Beloved, with the raiment of Thy balm and Thy healing, and make her quaff of the cup of Thy mercy and Thy favors. Protect her, moreover, from every affliction and ailment, from all pain and sickness, and from whatsoever may be abhorrent unto Thee.

Thou, in truth, art immensely exalted above all else except Thyself. Thou art, verily, the Healer, the All-Sufficing, the Preserver, the Ever-Forgiving, the Most Merciful.

—Bahá’u’lláh in Bahá’í Prayers: A Selection of Prayers Revealed by Bahá’u’lláh, the Báb, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá pages 90-91

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I want to highlight today an important concept called ‘good enough parenting’.  This kind of parenting – human parenting which is never perfect because people aren’t perfect – does guarantee to an infant-child that its most basic rights and needs will be met in a ‘good enough’ way.

‘Good enough’ parenting communicates to a little one’s developing body-brain that the world is safe and secure enough that drastic adjustments to its physiology DO NOT have to be made.  This ‘good enough’ parenting lies along the spectrum of safe and secure attachment from conception as it signals to a little one’s genetic potential that all is well-enough with the world and Trauma Altered Development does not happen.

What is this ‘good enough parenting’ like?  I am presenting links to some information that can provide food for thought both for those of us who received ANYTHING BUT ‘good enough’ parenting and thus experienced Trauma Altered Development (along with receiving an insecure attachment disorder-pattern) and for those who DID receive ‘good enough’ parenting and/or provided it for their own offspring.

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If you might find yourself only following one of the links presented here today – this one is worth the journey!!

From Newharbinger Publications:  An interview with Ruth P. Newton, Ph.D.

— author of The Attachment Connection: Parenting a Secure & Confident Child Using the Science of Attachment Theory

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Here is a book on the concept of ‘good enough parenting’ described originally by the British doctor Donald Woods Winnicott:

A Good Enough Parent : A Book on Child-Rearing – Paperback (Mar. 12, 1988) by Bruno Bettelheim

Product Description

“In this book, the preeminent child psychologist of our time gives us the results of his lifelong effort to determine what is most crucial in successful child-rearing. His purpose is not to give parents preset rules for raising their children, but rather to show them how to develop their own insights so that they will understand their own and their children’s behavior in different situations and how to cope with it. Above all, he warns, parents must not indulge their impulse to try to create the child they would like to have, but should instead help each child fully develop into the person he or she would like to be.”

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What is “good enough” parenting?

This website page describes how ‘attunement’ is critical to the healthy growth and development of an infant-child and that it can mean different things at different stages of a little one’s development.

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Article on ‘good enough’ parenting and Reactive Attachment Disorder:  Good Enough Parenting

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WHAT IS GOOD ENOUGH PARENTING? Attunement And Self-Esteem In Child Rearing

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Valuing Parent Education: a Cornerstone of Child Abuse Prevention

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Effective Parenting Capacity Assessment:  Key Issues

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A very interesting site:  GoodEnoughCaring.com website

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Good Enough Moms & Dads:  Separating Fact from Fiction about Parent-Child Attachment

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A New Guide to Attachment Parenting Questions The Medical Establishment

February 11, 2011 by Mary Jessica Hammes

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How Much Attachment Parenting is Necessary?  The real key to parent-child bonding

By Heather Turgeon  February 10, 2011

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The Good Enough Parent

by Nadia on Thu, 2010-12-02

“A recent debate on the mommy blogs and in the NY Times got Nadia thinking about the idea of the “good enough parent.”

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In our so-called Western Worldview model of the universe (and of ourselves) with its reliance upon Newtonian-Cartesian thinking, we are most susceptible to perpetuating illusions (delusions) about how we grow a self IN A BODY that can be (is) influenced by the signals received from the earliest environment we are born into.  As long as we are considered to be nothing more than a collection of ‘parts’ in a universe that we do not conceive of as a living WHOLE we cannot possibly know the truth about the wide range of possibilities that in fact DO exist in interaction BETWEEN an infant and its caregiving-attachment environment.

We do not simply hatch into adulthood.  Our body-brain has been specifically created in response to the environment that made us.  This is an interactional process.  There are profound consequences within the body-brain of people whose earliest environments did little to HELP them toward well-being.

None of us live separately from our body.  There is no split between our body and our brain, either.  Nor do we have the power to escape how our environment influences how our genetic potential manifests itself.

We are not robots, nor are we a race of super-beings that are immune to the same natural patterns and processes that affect all life.  There is nothing magical about us.  Any one of us, challenged by a harsh and malevolent early environment, will come out at the end of our infant-childhood in a very different body (and with a very different brain) than we would have if we had been formed under the influence of a far better world.

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All this being said, what I want to mention is that I believe that the so-called ‘personality disorder’ spectrum includes people whose particular genetic potential was forced to respond in a survival-at-all-costs early environment in a particular way that changed their phenotype (what we ‘see’ of genetic combinations).  Very simply put an adequate early environment would NOT have triggered these ‘personality disorder’ patterns.

These patterns, I believe, lie squarely within the range of survival-based tools that our species’ genetic potential has retained for use under conditions of severe devastation.

If we have doubts about the power of our physiological make-up to adapt to a malevolent world in permanent ways, we need to take note of such sobering words as these:

Transgenerational Effects of Maternal Care

“The epigenetic modifications associated with maternal care illustrate the long-term effects of mother-infant interactions within one generation.  However, there is increasing evidence that maternal care can also shape the phenotype of future generations.  The transgenerational continuity of child abuse in humans is striking.  It is currently estimated that up to 70% of abusive parents were themselves abused, whereas 20% – 30% of abused infants are likely to become abusers…”  Oxford Handbook of Developmental Behavioral Neuroscience (Oxford Library of Neuroscience) by Mark Blumberg, John Freeman and Scott Robinson (Nov 10, 2009), page 332)

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NOTE:  As I understand things, nearly every single one of the so-called ‘mental illnesses’ is a phenotype that resulted from undue stress during earliest development that triggered the particular genetic combinations (like a combination lock) so that these phenotypes manifested.  They were in most cases (my belief) NOT preordained in any way (unlike, say, our eye color), but are rather adaptive survival-under-desperate-conditions reactions to malevolent/toxic conditions during development.

The phenotypes then are actually reproductive fitness-unfitness indicators that signal the conditions within the earliest developmental phases of life.  SEE:  REPRODUCTIVE FITNESS INDICATORS.  That our species is losing the ability to ‘read’ the fitness indicators and to understand what they signal about the conditions of the environment-at-large puts us at great risk for continuing to suffer with a lack of well-being (as individuals and as civilizations).

That research is showing that epigenetic factors may pass on these adaptive conditions through the generations is frightening to me!  Nature does not take chances with our survival.  When future generations carry the epigentic information that guarantees manifestation of the trauma-reaction changes (in altered phenotypes) — so that the changes manifest in the future even if the individual DID NOT suffer trauma in their earliest development — we will have to look BACKWARDS to see where/when the trauma occurred in ancestral lines.

Researchers HOPE that epigenetic changes will dissolve over the generations if conditions within the environment that triggered them improve.  It is unknown at present if epigenetic changes can eventually alter DNA if environmental conditions remain troublesome to survival.

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+EARLY ABUSE SURVIVORS SUCH AS MY MOTHER WAS – PROGRAMMED TO SURVIVE AT ALL COSTS

+EARLY ABUSE SURVIVORS SUCH AS MY MOTHER WAS – PROGRAMMED TO SURVIVE AT ALL COSTS

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When the physiological development of a human being is forced to change during the first 33 months of its life (conception to age two) in response to the stresses present in a malevolent early world what are MEANT to be the range of options for choice, reason and action for that individual can be permanently changed.

In a worst-case world immediate death is all but guaranteed.  In such a world biology dictates to animals that survival of the species requires that those old enough to reproduce continue to live at all costs because there is not enough time before ‘the end of the world’ for the youngest members of the species to survive long enough to reproduce.

As harsh as this reality might be, the offspring are at greatest risk of being left behind, cast out and/or destroyed in the interest of ‘the greatest good’ for the species.  An entirely different ‘reasoning’ take over, one that is a species’ biological heritage.  That we might not like this reality does not matter.  That life is so harsh that all but the ones who can accomplish what most needs to be done for survival of the species requires the sacrifice of the offspring IS NOT biologically based on conscious (evolved ability) thought.

This is, I believe, a level of biological programming in which genetic potential for survival of the body of the self — geared toward survival of the species — kicks in.  This is what happened to my mother, and is what I believe happens to all parents who do great harm to their offspring.

If we wish to ‘reason’ severe infant-child abuse out, this is the level we must think about it on.  This is the level where conjecture, blame and criticism ends and the truth begins.  This is the level where the facts lie buried in human DNA potential as it becomes triggered during earliest development of a body-brain in an environment of absolute challenge to survival so that life for the species itself can be continued.

That these facts may appear to be buried beneath the preferred rhetoric of so-called advanced society does not make them any less true.  The fact that we might not want to KNOW the truth or believe it does not change it.  What does have the power to change the scenarios that result from physiological developmental changes in response to early stress and trauma is to guarantee to every human being the best infant-childhood possible so that these trauma alterations would not have to occur.

+EARLY ABUSE SURVIVORS SUCH AS MY MOTHER WAS – PROGRAMMED TO SURVIVE AT ALL COSTS

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