Tag: abuse

+GUEST POSTS ALWAYS WELCOME! AN INVITATION

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If any reader ever wishes to write a guest post for this blog you are more than welcome to do so!  The best way for you to do this is to add your post as a comment at the last tab that appears with the pages at the top of this blog:

Your Page – Readers’ Responses

We can all describe and document our experiences as infant-child abuse survivors.  The growing body of this information, as it is contained in our stories and experiences, is growing online to become a most valuable resource for everyone — no matter what stage of our journey of life we are writing about.

The ‘professional’ community at the ‘top’ has been missing the truth of what we at the ‘bottom’ truly know about living our lifetime in a trauma-changed body that was altered through our experiences of having to adapt our physiological development to an early environment of trauma.  It is time for us to find our words to describe a reality that those at and near the ‘top’ (the Pampered Ones) cannot — on their own — even begin to imagine.

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+CONVERSATIONS CONTINUED: DIFFERENCE BETWEEN NEED AND GREED

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Following my thinking from my previous post, +PATTERNS OF CONVERSATION – SOOTHING OR NOT? I find myself wondering how, even if we do detect subtle or blatant competitive aggression in conversations, how do we know whether or not a person is ACTUALLY experiencing their unsafe and in-unsecure attachment system as ON — which means they have needs that are present in the conversation but are not being recognized or addressed — versus someone who is being greedy rather than needy?

Greed implies to me that a person has their basic needs met through access and utilization of adequate resources but WANTS and intends to guarantee to themselves that they will have MORE THAN THEY NEED.

I suspect the only way anyone knows (about someone else or about their self) whether greed or need is operating ‘below the surface’ and intertwined in conversations that feel unsettling and stressful rather than sustaining and soothing is that an honest degree of awareness of INFANT-CHILDHOOD has been gained so that this history (as if absolutely affected development of body-brain) is KNOWN.

It is probably not ‘good enough’ to note the ‘symptoms’ of need-greed being present in self and/or others.  If the context, the earliest history is NOT known, a wide open space exists within which determination between actual need related to an insecure attachment system versus outright greed cannot be made.

We can watch someone operate who appears competent and confident — perhaps self-righteous and arrogant and selfish — but still appearing as if they have everything ‘all together’ — and not be able to detect whether their aggression-competition in conversation (and action) is due to their UNDERLYING, unknown, unconscious (even implicit-memory based) woundedness or to outright greed.

Either way, what I most often experience is that it is not considered appropriate to ASK someone for clarity regarding these issues.  Humans operate with supposed conscious choice in our culture at the same time most of the platform for conversation is built on ignorance of important factual information.  Even if we know someone a LONG time, and know a LOT about their background — enough to expect that their NEED is at the bottom of their inability to truly express empathy and compassion — it is STILL not appropriate to bring up the truth.

This awareness leads me to feel dissatisfied, empty, and often drained after engaging in conversation with nearly everyone.  If I had NOT been built in a world of trauma, abuse and isolation I strongly believe that I would be able to abide by the ‘rules of social engagement’ along with nearly everyone else on their terms without question.  Most importantly, I would participate in the ignorance and NOT know what I do detect.  How easy that would that be?

Meanwhile, I believe that greed is one of America’s most powerful mainstream cultural ACCEPTED values.  That not even THIS fact can be ‘politely’ addressed and usefully conversed about just further contributes not only to the drain that our society creates for the planet, but also for the individuals within it that choose to remain blinded to and by this fact.

As long as we continue NOT defining personally and culturally the difference between what we NEED from our expressions in word and action of GREED we will never grow into our mature wisdom.  We will continue to toddle along with hoped for impunity until somewhere down the line the consequences of our ignorance catches up to us — because it will.

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I further think that severe infant-child abuse survivors, once we let the reality of how awful our early years REALLY were, can have a distinct advantage over ordinary people in that we KNOW we didn’t get our basic human rights or needs met.  This means that perhaps we can become more honest, more clear, more conscious — and more responsible for how we interact with others than ordinary people might EVER decide they need to.

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+PATTERNS OF CONVERSATION – SOOTHING OR NOT?

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As so often happens I have no idea what I need to say until I write it.  If I don’t write my thoughts just continue to roll around in a jumble like long scarves swirling around in a tumble drier.    I am thinking about how one’s social-emotional early forming right limbic brain develops must appear in action during conversation.  (I almost said human-to-human conversation, but is there other kinds?  Yes, I do think so.)

If patterns of safe and secure or unsafe and insecure attachment revolve around patterns of rupture and repair, then I suspect these same patterns govern our ‘people’ conversations.  (My thoughts are spinning around very quickly so I will have to hope what I pick out of this swirl applies to what I really want to say!)

Resonance and mirroring, sending and receiving signals — along with activated safety and security attachment needs versus the ability to deactivate one’s own attachment system so that caregiving can happen — are a part of human interactions we have with others from the moment we are born.

What about the patterns of rupture and repair in conversations?

I wonder:  If true empathy and compassion are present in conversation MUTUALLY do the patterns of rupture and repair never have to occur?  Is this kind of conversation, then, the kind that leaves us feeling ‘balmed’ – listened to, hear, appreciated, valued, understood and BETTER for the conversation?

I would contrast these soothing, balming kind of conversations to ones where there is a disturbing competition between the speakers.  Who is right?  Who is wrong?  Who is smartest?  Who knows more than the other?  How does the competition for the ‘goodies’ of conversation play itself out?

In patterns either of rupture with repair or rupture without repair.  And we KNOW the difference.  A competitive conversation leaves us feeling disturbed if not distressed like neither participant was able to truly say from the heart what they would have liked to say — and neither truly listened to or heard the other.

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I believe that some people are by nature, by design, or by trauma-altered early development far more competitive than others.  There is a spectrum of aggression and on this spectrum lies those people who thrive on competition and those who find competition troubling and unnecessary.

I am one of those who see very little need for competition.  When competition appears in conversation it means to me that someone is trying to override (in disrespect) the other.  To me, competition does not happen when there is a mutual acknowledgment of ‘there’s plenty of resources to go around’.

Traumatic backgrounds often leave people feeling desperately unsafe and insecure in the world so that their attachment system never actually turns itself off.  Rupture WITH repair allows for attachment needs to be met so that the system can turn itself OFF.

Rupture WITHOUT repair in relationships and conversations happens, I suspect, when one or both people’s insecure attachment systems remain ON so that one or both peoples CAREGIVING system cannot truly (honestly) be activated.  Our attachment and our caregiving systems are so linked together than diminishing activation of one system allows for increasing activation of the other.  Humans are not designed to operate with these two system dissociated from one another.

I am NOT saying that either attachment or caregiving remain separate from one another.  I AM saying that the way that they are always linked together affects our patterns of human interaction either toward a center point of soothing calm or toward a center point of competition for scarce and needed (depleted) resources.

The fact that we are not educated in any way to usefully recognize these patterns so that we can identify them, name them, own them and then bring under our power of conscious choice our ability to ALTER how these patterns are operating creates (I believe) far more unsatisfying than truly satisfying conversations with others people in our world.

I suspect that the more we are in competition with one another (nearly always on the unconscious level) the LESS able we are to help ourselves and others increase our sense of safety and security in the world.  This means we are then NOT increasing our ability to feel empathy and compassion because degrees of safety and security are what allows true empathy and compassion to operate.

Our body is designed this way.  Our safety and security ‘sense’ system is directly tied to our (anxiety producing) stress versus calm/connection (soothing) response system.  I do not believe that genuine connection between people involves active competition — on any level (I am not talking about ‘friendly games’).  I also suspect that if a person has unacknowledged need competition with others for scarce resources will be present on some level.

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For the first 18 years of my life I was nearly completely barred from social opportunities to participate in banter, gossip, or any other (more?) meaningful human conversation (some experts suspect that humans acquired verbal language due to our motivation to include more members of a social group in gossip).  I DID witness, listen and watch others any time I was around them.  Nearly all of the time to this day some aspect of who I am is involved with this same process — which contributes to my sense of remoteness and disconnection from others.  I believe I was wired this way from birth.

Being involved in this kind of remote watching even when I am involved in conversations with others often feels awkward — if not just plain ‘wrong’ — like part of me is spying upon and critiquing ongoing patterns of conversations, detecting what others were built-from-birth to know instantaneously and automatically and can simply accept as givens and ignore.

Because solitary confinement and social isolation was such a large part of the patterns of abuse I experienced the first 18 years of my life I do not believe that ordinary human conversation (even in my native English tongue) will ever be natural to me.  I am an ‘outsider’ who can somehow ‘cheat’ in conversation like I am watching a movie and can detect in human conversations what others do not(though I was the one initially who was cheated and deprived of what most people take for granted).

Then after conversations I have participated in I have a whole basket full of information I have gleaned by watching the patterns that I have absolutely NOBODY to share the information with.  So today I share this with you.

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+WHO WOULD WANT TO LIVE WITH THIS SADNESS?

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This post is for this girl — I am still the same person and feel the same way.

Me left out -- I have felt that all of my life, just a few times less left out - very much feeling this today (me with my father's back turned on me - in a different universe than my siblings were - and I still pay the price for that)
So sad. Sadness beyond 'in my bones' - in all the cells of my body -- and still there

I know I can’t think my sadness away, but I spent the day garden-building and trying to ask ‘God and the angels’ to show me what I can learn from it.

I miss the man I love (who prefers another’s company) and I miss my children and all my siblings more as the holidays arrive than usual.  I HATE ‘the holidays’.

One of the ‘helpful’ insights today was knowing that I am not alone in how I feel, and ‘things could always be worse’.

Far from happy thoughts — either of THOSE two.

Not that I did actually arrive at any happy thoughts today — but I did end up (perhaps mixing up my holidays) thinking about Jesus on the cross and how alone He was there — but for his Father and the angels.

Then I thought about how easy it might be for humans to forget about God when they are happy with one another — well, I don’t fit THAT picture!

Tomorrow on Thanksgiving I am going to a friend’s house to help her in the kitchen — be with people — eat good food.  My friend feeds anyone in the community who wishes to come every Thanksgiving.

I went last year, and ‘hiding’ in the kitchen suit me.  Serving food to others suit me.  Being quiet suit me.  Watching and listening to others (as if they belonged to a different species than I do) suit me.  I am not sure that I have ever truly felt any more a part of a group than I did in the picture of my father and his three favored children on the big Alaskan rock.

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At 59 knowing that I can’t CHANGE how I feel pisses me off more than anything else.  I no longer have the false desire to try, either.  I am soul tired.

People say, “Everyone feels alone in a crowd sometimes.”  I believe it takes a special kind of severely traumatic and abusive infant-childhood for anyone to REALLY even begin to have a glimmer of a clue what ‘feeling alone’ really feels like.

Then I thought some more about Christ on the cross.  I thought some more about my horrible, horrible childhood and the ‘special hell’ my mother reserved for me (as my oldest brother put it once).  I thought about how NO INFANT or CHILD ever deserves the treatment that some of us had any more than Jesus deserved what happened to Him during His time on this earth.

This thought cheered me up a TINY bit.

Maybe it is because I feel so sad and soul weary that I cannot find any way at all to fight to ‘get better than this’ any more.  I can’t run around and ‘try this’ and ‘try that’ and ‘run here’ and ‘run there’ like I used to.  I can’t distract myself any more.  I can’t fool myself any more.  I can’t pretend any more.

I was, most importantly, able to be different for the 35 years of my life that I had a child under 18 in my care to raise.  My ‘caregiving system’ was able to combine with my attachment to my children to get me down the road without having to have to FEEL the depths of my sadness.

I know now that the sadness has always been at my center since my insanely abusive mother built it into me from the time I was born.  I am so proud of myself that I was able to let my children GO, to let them fly, to let them create for themselves their OWN life.  I certainly wish they didn’t live — all three of them — in Fargo, North Dakota!

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Another train of my thoughts today (again) followed the course of my wandering lost life that seemed to most importantly enable all three of the very special people my children are to be born.  Yet I also NEVER felt that the life I lived along the way was mine, meant for me, belonged to me.  Maybe it is ONLY to the future that the meaning of my own life will come true — in my children, in their lives, the people they encounter and affect — and in the next generations.

If my body processed experience and stored my memories in a safe and securely attached fashion (autobiographical memory) I know I would feel different and be different today.  My dissociational patterns means that all of my memories feel remote to me and NOT a part of ME.  That is so WRONG — and so directly connected as a consequence of my having to build a body-brain in the midst of such terrible and continuing trauma.

I don’t believe my memories comfort me in the way that they do more ‘ordinary’ people — and they never have.

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I think knowing and feeling all of this is directly connected to the most fortunate opportunity I have to work outside with the soil to build a garden.

I laid a big piece of the drip irrigation in the back yard yesterday, and today I planted there.  In went poppy seeds, larkspur seeds, pansy seeds — all waiting now for winter rains to nourish them — and for spring.

I planted a lilac today and I planted an apple tree.  (I moved a rose bush to a happier place for it with morning light so I could better improve the spot for the apple tree.)

I am digging out an area by the back turquoise wood fence as I imagine perhaps — just perhaps — I can tear down the remains of the old shed on my back fence and use that lumber to build a chicken coop.

I use the adobe from that digging to fill in a long planter along the tall yellow metal fence.

I have an adobe bench back there I can sit on in the sun and watch the apple tree grow now.  If I can build a chicken coop I could sit there and watch my chickens.  I would LOVE to be able to do that — though I don’t have transportation to get to a feed store to buy them feed — even if I can afford to buy it — and can find three chickens.

And maybe a little rabbit.  I could sit like I did when I was a child with my warm fuzzy so-gentle rabbit on my lap — pat it and get to know its spirit.

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Someday I hope somebody comes to visit me.  I find down here in southeastern Arizona that people do not go to one another’s house to be with one another like they do up north.  I couldn’t handle the ‘stimulation-noise’ of too many people — or the ‘wrong’ people.  But SOMEONE?

My daughter will bring my grandson down about the 4th to the 8th of this January.  That will be — well — fantastically wonderful!  Then they will go and then I will miss them…….

Meanwhile……….  Perhaps the angels like it if I talk to them.

(Oh — and yesterday I laid the drip over the large compost pile filled with delicious garbage and the thousand worms my sister sent me from Seattle!  I moved the buried tomb that contained all my mother’s writings into the big compost — and guess what?  For the first time in the four years I’ve lived on this property I saw centipedes — nested within my mother’s papers.  HOW GROSS!  I hate centipedes!  Very unsettling, but somehow didn’t surprise me — certainly not after my recent posts about eliminating the hideous oleanders!  The wonderful composting worms can have those papers now — and I KNOW they will make me wonderful garden soil out of them by spring!)

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+TWO DRAWINGS MY MOTHER DID BEFORE 8TH BIRTHDAY (1933)

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Link here to two drawings my mother did right before her 8th birthday.

*1933 Nov 5 Mildred’s 2 Indian Drawings (she was almost 8)

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+SEVERE EARLY ABUSE SURVIVORS AND OUR — SUPER THINKING!

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Do all humans ‘HAVE’ to be parents?  My daughter emailed me the link to this web article Friday at 11 a.m. asking me what I thought of it.

Maslow’s Pyramid Gets a Much Needed Renovation

I answered it with my response 24 hours later.  What I think about the article and the ideas contained within it doesn’t matter to anyone, really.  Simply put, leave Maslow’s Pyramid alone.

What interests me most about this topic is my thought process.  I took a look at the information when my daughter’s email came in, didn’t have an immediate response, and relegated-delegated any further thoughts on the subject to ‘the future’.

This future arrived suddenly as I worked outside in my yard.  I wasn’t remotely aware that I was even ‘thinking’ about this article and my daughter’s request until THERE IT WAS!  My response!

The process I evidently went through in this past 24 hours about this silly little subject fascinates me.  Once THE ANSWER appeared — literally like it came as a boulder falling out of the sky and hitting me on the head in a cartoon — I now understand a little bit more about HOW I think.  (The email I sent to my daughter once I had THE ANSWER appears at the bottom of this post.)

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Because of the information I now understand about how I am different as a result of the Trauma Altered Development I had to go through to survive my extremely abusive infant-childhood I am always interested to learn a little bit more about ‘how I work’.  On this particular point I have no idea what an ‘ordinary or normal’ thought process might be like so have nothing to compare what I just experienced with.

What I DO know is that humans (I would say ESPECIALLY women!) are capable of ‘thinking’ in ways that our culture might not value.  When my daughter presented me with her question I simply tossed the whole dang question ‘into the hopper’ and ‘forgot it’.

Obviously I DID NOT forget it!  On all sorts of levels within my body-brain I have evidently been sorting through LOTS of information so that when THE ANSWER appeared, I KNEW instantly it was MY right one.

The image that came to me about this ‘whole body-brain’ ability to ‘think’ is that I didn’t so much toss the question to ‘a committee’ as I did to some part of my being that knows how to run an elevator!  Over these past 24 hours that elevator operator has been moving up and down all the floors in the skyscraper of my body-brain.  The operator stopped at each floor, opened the door, wandered around the groups of ‘people’ who live and work on each floor, gathering information on the topic from all of them.

Up-down-up-down, returning more than once to some floors to converse again with some members of ‘the group’ until finally a synthesis was made of ALL this information — and (as a commenter said this week) POP!!  There was THE ANSWER!

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For those of us severe infant-childhood abuse and trauma survivors being able to think without attention and without ‘attachment’ or ‘association’ to the thought process that is going on ‘behind the scenes’ — I believe — is something we learned to do in part because trauma was likely to and did appear ‘out of nowhere’ without our being able to predict or control it nearly ALL OF THE TIME.

Being able to form a MIND at all meant that we grew a body-brain that honed to perfection the human ability to apply the greatest flexibility possible to our knowing and thinking processes.  I believe these abilities are connected to ‘dissociation’ — but as my experience of these past 24 hours showed me — our abilities can be amazingly efficient, effective — and impressive!

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My response to:  Maslow’s Pyramid Gets a Much Needed Renovation

OK – I’ve thought about it — this is one of the stupidest things I have ever heard of

Parenting is a choice, like what to have for dinner, what car to drive, what TV show to watch

Confusing ‘being horny’ and heterosexual intercourse with ‘a drive to make babies’ is insane.

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+TODAY’S PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

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Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness —  the fundamental human rights declared in 1776 as The United States of America took its form as an independent nation.  Where do abused infants and children look for their portion of these rights?  To their caregivers.

As I work again today out in the sunshine on this glorious day, and as I pay attention to how I feel in my body, I know I am not happy.  I am aware that what I am accomplishing is to lessen my continual sadness.  “What, then,” I ask myself, “might contribute to something MORE than a lessening of sadness?  What — if you use the powers of your mind to think and dream, might actually give you some measure of happiness?”

Well, at least I am in PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS!  That’s the right direction for me to go as far as I can tell.

Happiness is NOT ‘just’ a lessening of sadness.

I’ve also been thinking about the ‘all right’ feeling as being a measure of a state of well-being.  Oh, how seldom, how very, very seldom have I EVER experienced THAT feeling state:  All is right.  I am all right.

Knowing one is all right in the world is, to me, the rock bottom accomplishment given to an infant-child by its attachment-caregivers from birth so it can build this feeling state into its body-brain from the beginning of its life.  From that time forward this feeling state remains built into the body and is therefore accessible to a person.

Being slapped and hit and yanked and punched and dragged around by hair and limb, having one’s skin punctured by grasping talons of fingernails, being screamed at and……..  Well, as I an other severe abuse survivors well know, these threatening, dangerous, traumatic and terrible-terrorizing conditions of infancy and childhood simply COULD NOT POSSIBLY build into our body a feeling of being ALL RIGHT.

Nope.

Never happened.

So here I am in adulthood sunk in the ‘depression’ of terrible sadness in the Meteor Crater I found myself born and battered in (not perched precariously at the top of a high precipice fighting to the death with her anger and rage against all perceived attacks, as my mother was).

Today I am practicing using my mind, thoughts and dreams to see if I can modulate-moderate the feelings of sadness into something that might resemble what I guess happiness is — or at least make progress toward an inner feeling of ALL RIGHT.

This is what I have come up with so far:  If I could finish this garden, and name it The Secret Garden,  then perhaps I could search out programs in this region of Arizona that work with abused children and invite them to come visit.

When I was five, and before our family moved from Los Angeles to Alaska, we visited an immense garden somewhere on a hill.  I have never forgotten that glorious garden, and every single time in all my 54 years since that day when I think of that garden I feel not only a little-bit-less-sad, but for a brief flash of time I feel almost-happy.

Perhaps if I can create a magical garden here, designed especially for the eye level and imagination of five-year-olds, and then these little people who have been traumatized, battered and abused could come wander around here, MAYBE they too could carry within their body-brain-mind-self a memory that would ALWAYS be happy enough to displace their sadness (or rage) and provide for them a glimmer of true — ALL RIGHT — joy!

Big people could come, too — but it is to the little ones’ joy that I now return to my digging and adobe creation.  May all of us today pursue our happiness!

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+THE ‘DESPERATE FEW’

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I don’t want to write this post at the same time that I know I must write it.  I don’t believe that what I am about to say is going to make any sense at all to very many people.

When I think about the malevolent (not pampered) world that is being described at the end of Dr. Martin and Fellow’s paper here *SYMTPOMS: 120909 Scan of Teicher’s Research – Trauma Altered Development Paper I think about my mother — and about others like her.

If we wrote books so that when we reached the very end of the story we found ourselves exactly right back at the beginning, we might more easily understand that as we look at some things from the inside, we are at the same time looking at them from the outside, as well.  I don’t think we would be comfortable realizing the truth of being alive as members of our species if we were forced to understand that what we value so influences our judgments that we cannot easily find that line — the one that separates beginning from end or inside from outside.

My mother judged the world differently from normal — on every single level.  Who she was made to be at the beginning of her life was exactly the same person that she was at the end of her life.  Looking at my mother this way I understand that there really WAS no middle.  Everything that happened to my mother and everything that she did for her entire life was the same — beginning to end — as she followed a pattern that was built within her body from birth.  That pattern WAS the choice of her life, and I do not believe that my mother could EVER override it.

She never changed because she could not.

And the pattern that was my mother meant that she could never distinguish what was inside of herself from what was outside of herself.

I believe that it is fortunate that very, very, very few people would ever be able to understand who-how my mother was in her life.

I also believe that as we look around at some others within our species whose actions seem to defy all that we judge to ‘be human’ we are at the same kind of loss-to-comprehend that we would be should we try to understand my mother.

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I believe that there are extremes at the very, very, very far ends of the pampered-not pampered, of the benevolent-malevolent continuum of environmental conditions infants are born into and formed by.

I can’t imagine an outcome where too much benevolence (too much pampering as I define it as the absence of abuse and the provision of what we consider normal and necessary) could create truly desperate variations in human development that are as destructive as what too much malevolence (too much being not pampered) can and do create.

I do envision outcomes for infant-child development where the malevolence is mixed with inappropriate and false pampering that pushes development off the charts on the destructive-outcome end.  (This is a combination that I believe destroyed my mother.)

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What I need to say here requires for understanding a perspective that lies beyond how I believe most people think.  I believe there are circumstances that combine malevolent early infant-childhood deprivation and trauma in such a way that the result is on the long, far end of what Teicher describes as the ‘evolutionarily altered’ brain-being.

I see this as happening when enough external and internal pressure is put on a tiny developing person that something inside of them literally SNAPS.  A break occurs that destines the not pampered infant-child down an impossible road of such desperation that no recovery from it will ever be possible.

These little ones grow up to become dangerous people.  Their physiological development (I think) so closely matches the most ancient human patterns that kept our species alive in the most desperate circumstances in the most desperate environments we lived in — that few among us today can even begin to imagine those conditions.  When THESE people change in their development, all hell breaks loose.

Yet we are doing ourselves a disservice to believe that just because we cannot easily ‘begin to imagine’ something that this something isn’t real.

If we continue to believe this way, we will not be able to critically think about the implications and consequences that are as equally real as ‘that which we cannot begin to imagine’.

We have to recognize this challenge to both our belief and to our ability to think about what we do not want to believe.

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Enough of wandering in circles here.  I will go for the big circle — as ‘long ago’ trauma altered developmental response to terrible malevolent conditions meant the exact same response THEN that it still can today.

There are circumstances where the trauma-altered development of infant-children create monsters.

My mother was such a monster.

Yet if my mother had been a bitch wolf who found herself with a litter to raise in the worst environment of scarcity, deprivation and threat — and if THEN she had chosen to parcel out her attention and resources in such a way that perhaps some of her litter would survive and others wouldn’t — we would not raise our eyebrows very high over her actions.

Truly terrible terrifying trauma can, in some infant-children, trigger altered development that creates horrendous results:  “Mothers, limit and/or kill your offspring.”

My mother was astute enough NOT to kill me, but the pattern was there.  But I was tough, and I survived the worst she gave me anyway.

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Picture a primitive, hostile human world of tough times, much threat, dangerously scarce resources:  Sexuality and violence changes.  Males, having their own physiology,  are more likely to end up creating havoc in the wider world (under a biologically-based imperative to ‘find food, create more offspring, expand territory, gather possessions, eliminate competition’), while females create their havoc close to and within their home — which always impacts their children.

We call what these people do in today’s world ‘crimes’ — the most serious, heinous crimes we cannot imagine — until they happen.

My mother was one of these desperate few.  And if I am correct in my thinking there is absolutely no mystery whatsoever on its most basic level about why and how she was able to do what she did to me.

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+ANYONE WANNA EAT BARK AND BUGS?

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When, in my adulthood, I first heard people using versions of a saying, “The table was turned,” I envisioned in my mind someone being angry and turning a table upside down so that its legs stuck up in the air.  It took me a long time before I overcame my embarrassment enough to ask someone what they meant when they said this.

“Oh,” this person said to me.  “It’s like four people are sitting playing cards.  Each of them has their hand laying on the table top and someone turns the table so that everyone has someone else’s hand and THAT hand, rather than their original one, is what each plays the game through with.”

I mention this today because as I described what I have been thinking about pampered versus not pampered people to someone I am very close to yesterday that person responded to me with, “But the word pampered has such negative connotations!”

In other words, they were expressing a sentiment that would probably be common among those people I would say were raised from birth in a ‘benevolent’ world that I am now calling a pampered one.

I can see where this sentiment could come from.  Looking at Webster’s online dictionary for this word I found:

Definition of PAMPER

transitive verb

1 archaic : to cram with rich food : glut

2 a : to treat with extreme or excessive care and attention <pampered their guests> b : gratify, humor <enabled him to pamper his wanderlust — New Yorker>

— pam·per·er\-pər-ər\ noun

Examples of PAMPER

  1. They really pamper their guests at that hotel.
  2. She pampered herself with a day at the spa.
  3. He was pampered all his life and doesn’t know how to function in the real world.

Origin of PAMPER

Middle English, probably of Dutch origin; akin to Dutch dialect pamperen to pamper

First Known Use: 14th century

Related to PAMPER

Synonyms: cocker, coddle, cosset, dandle, indulge, mollycoddle, nurse, baby, spoil, wet-nurse

Antonyms: abuse, ill-treat, ill-use, maltreat, manhandle, mishandle, mistreat, misuse

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Well, how about that?  I have my sense of the contrast between being pampered and NOT being pampered just about right for what I am intending to describe!  Look at the antonyms!

We are not commonly used to using one word to describe in contrast its opposite, but in this case my meaning is extremely clear when I use it to describe how severe infant-abuse survivors experienced their world — yes, when they NEEDED to and SHOULD have been treated exactly the opposite from the way that they actually were.

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How many people among ‘the masses’, however, ever bristle and become concerned and defensive when someone calls someone else ‘mentally ill’, for example?

In contrast, how many of the pampered people are going to bristle and become concerned and defensive when someone calls them pampered?

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We are very comfortable in our society in using definitive explanations for things that rely on a linear black-and-white, either-or pattern of thinking.  It’s EASIER than making sure we understand the full meaning of what we are talking about.

It is EASIER to simply say, “I was abused when I was little,” or “I was not abused when I was little” than it is to say “I was not pampered” versus “I was pampered.”

I could continue to accept this simplistic thinking if there weren’t so many drastic and terrible lifelong consequences for survivors of severe infant-child abuse that society THEN feels completely comfortable in blaming and shaming the survivors for.

It is THEN that I want to ‘turn the tables’ so that the pampered would need to play THEIR entire lifetime out living in the reality that severe abuse survivors know with their every breath.

And the survivors?  What would we survivors know of living the truly, from-birth pampered life even if someone were to suddenly give us one?

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My case in point if ye be of those who can make this gigantic leap!  Nature has mirrored the experience of those whose body was built in ONE kind of world ONE way — and not the other way — permanently.

Pampered-from-birth (‘good enough’) people have a body that knows that reality.  Not pampered-from-birth people have a body that knows that reality.

Nature and its ways cares nothing for the individual personal comfort zone of anyone.  Nature only TRULY cares that a species does what it needs to do to ‘continue on being’.  This entire array of possible body building options that happens in direct response to either the pampered world that raised us or to the not pampered one is — and I am going to the Bigger Picture here — meant to accomplish this ‘continue on being’ by creating bodies that THEMSELVES signal-convey the kind of world that built the person who lives in it.

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So we could turn another table of laid-out card hands here so that Nature received the personalized individual’s perspective on the experience of being alive and the individual people received the hands that clearly expresses what Nature cares about, intends and accomplishes.

How I am  in the world, having been raised in a not pampered infant-childhood directly signals to others (who could detect and understand these signals) exactly what the condition of my early world was like — because those conditions built me to be the way that I am.

Jump to the peacock’s tail.  A brilliant, resplendent, gorgeous and healthy peacock tail is simply a signal and a sign that the experiences of that bird happened in an environment rich in resources.  The tail has nothing PERSONAL to do with the peacock at all!

Another peacock with a pitifully shabby, dull and sickly looking tail is simply signaling to its hoped-for mates that this bird was not pampered in a world of plenty.

Which peacock’s tail is going to attract which kind of mating partner?

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Well, as the ‘superior species’ we don’t like to be pared down to our actual size so that we can not only recognize but also accept that HOW we are in the world (based on the conditions of the world that formed us) does exactly the same thing.  HOW we is a signal that expresses the NOT personal reality of THE CONDITIONS OF THE WORLD and actually, as Nature intends, doesn’t have much to do at all with our personal wishes or concerns as individuals.

So again I will say when you read particularly the last paragraphs of Dr. Martin and Fellow’s paper here *SYMTPOMS: 120909 Scan of Teicher’s Research – Trauma Altered Development Paper you are reading a description of the MISMATCH that happens when not pampered people are born into a not pampered world and at the end of their earliest years are hatched out into a pampered one!

The problem is this mismatch.  The problems we endure as individual severe early abuse survivors IS THIS MISMATCH.

If pampered people were the only ones who lived in a pampered world — OK.  If not pampered people were the only ones who lived in a not pampered world — OK.

How can I say OK to a resource-scarce and traumatizing world?  Think about what our species had to go through so that we could be here asking that question.  Our species was able to experience pampering ONLY under conditions of plentiful resources.  When times were really, really tough, we were able to use an INNER resource that nature has NEVER let us lose:  We contain within our very young body the ability to ADAPTIVELY AND FLEXIBLY adjust to the conditions of the world we are born into.

Then we are able to move forward in time in a not pampered body — surviving — continuing on as individual representatives of our species — into a future where resources were better.  THEN the future generations could adaptively and flexibly adjust to these more pampered conditions — and babies could grow a body that reflected those improved conditions.

In other words, as I write this, I understand that ‘the tables’ are DESIGNED to turn.  Without that ability to adjust and adapt flexibly we would not have had the resilience we needed to survive — not as a species, not as individuals.

We need to understand the bigger picture so that we can depersonalize the facts.  Pampered people do not need to take offense when someone points out the truth of the benefits they received from a resource-rich environment from the time they were born.

AND not pampered people need to be FREE to be people who are not condemned and judged for the fact that our body did EXACTLY THE SAME THING that pampered people’s did:  Adjusted in development to the conditions of OUR environment — which happened to be a resource-scarce one.

If our proverbial turning table were laden on one side with rich and nutritious food an on the other side tree bark and bugs — and THEN this table were to be turned so that pampered and not pampered people had to consume a diet they were not familiar with — my points here in this post might be a little easier — or tougher — to swallow.

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(Of course, I suppose ALL the female peacocks would go for the prettier tale, and in this example of female selection, who wins?  I don’t know……  What I do know is that this version of a mate selection process is about finding who came from the richest world that had the best resources — and who got them.)

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+DID YOU GROW UP IN A METEOR CRATER?

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Did you grow up in a meteor crater?  How safe and secure were you in there??  Were you left alone to try to grow your best body-brain-mind-self while showers of dangerous and life threatening rocks continued to bombard you?

I treated myself to an online search yesterday to try to figure out exactly what the difference is between analogy, metaphor and simile.  Which way does my mind work when I go to write and think in terms of images that do not let go of me?

Metaphor:  My home of origin was a meteor crater.

Analogy:  My home of origin was LIKE a meteor crater?

Simile:  This is how I write!  A simile happens when a writer goes on and on and on — continuing to use an image to interweave it with words in a long drawn-out thought.  That’s me!

Soooooo……

When the infant-child developmental experts write about how a little one’s body-brain changes in response to the stress of trauma, neglect and abuse in a malevolent world — I now translate that fact in my own thinking to this:  These little ones ARE NOT THE PAMPERED ONES.

Their home of origin was a meteor crater.

When the experts write about how in a ‘good enough’ safe and secure environment their best body-brain self is formed in a benevolent world, I translate that now to mean — THEY WERE PAMPERED!

Their home of origin was was NOT a meteor crater.

(Again – please read especially the last paragraphs of this paper:  *SYMTPOMS: 120909 Scan of Teicher’s Research – Trauma Altered Development Paper.)

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At age 59 I am beginning to realize that the ‘conditions’ that trauma built into my body from the start of my life while I tried to exist and grow within a nearly completely non-pampered environment — seem to be getting worse with each passing day.  I feel as though I am engulfed in a downward slide — but from where, to where?

As I asked myself (and my body) this question, the image of myself growing up in not only the bottom of a massive meteor crater but also of being bombarded nearly every moment with torrents of meteors continuing to fall on me, I knew that when I say ‘sliding’ I mean the bottom of the pit is SINKING at the same time the edges of the crater are eroding away and crumbling down on top of me.

“Oh, dreadful!  Oh, great!  After all this time THIS is only as far as I have gotten in this so-called process of recovery?”

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Well, for ME understanding about the meteor crater and how I have always felt in my body, and feel now is a HUGE step of progress!  How strange it seems for me to say this — but discovery of REALITY versus swimming around in ignorant denial IS progress!

THIS matters:  It took me until I was 29 before anyone ever TOLD me I had been “an abused child.”  LORDY!

It has taken me double that number of years (plus) to begin to understand what that REALLY means!

While it certainly is nobody’s contest to stand around and make claims “MY childhood was worse than yours was!” I am now understanding that there are VERY REAL FACTORS that describe what happened to each of us individually during our little years — and these factors group themselves together in such a way that they are actually providing for us descriptive layers of filters.

You know that term — falling through the cracks.  Well, imagine that as you are falling through the cracks — down, down, down — you hit another level with cracks that are closer together.  Do you fall through those narrower cracks as well?

Down, down, down you go as you examine all these layers of filters that descriptions of infant-childhoods actually create.  Down, down, down you fall until — if your mother was truly TRULY unable to provide for you from birth even the most remote aspects of true mother love, you end up falling into a sieve made of the finest mesh — and STILL you continue to fall until you hit — and only THEN discover — what really happened to you.

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I didn’t know this fact.  When I was first told “You were an abused child” I thought, “OK.  All THOSE people have the answers I need to make myself better.”

I have always thought in terms of those where were abused when they were little and those who were not.

It is NOT that simple.  This is NOT a clear black-and-white affair.  Degrees of infant-child trauma MATTER — as do the resiliency factors that were ALSO there in our body and in our earliest lives.

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So today I ask, “How big was that meteor crater you were born into?  How dangerous to you was the continual stream of meteors that fell upon your little head?”

There is NO SHAME in letting ourselves know the truth.  As members of a social species — even though we live in an American culture that pays a whole lot of attention to ‘individuality’ and ‘uniqueness’ of people — being of a social species we ALWAYS feel best when we are more like others than we are different.

Being raised in a meteor hole in a meteor shower that DID NOT mean we were pampered or safe or secure — or even LOVED — means that we grew up (and grew our body-brain-mind-self) in EXCEPTIONAL rather than normal, ordinary or usual conditions.

That what trauma IS — out of the ordinary — extraordinary.

And those conditions CHANGED our development in ways that leave us reeling for the rest of our lives as we TRY to be more and more ‘like everybody else’.

We are NOT like everybody else!

In severely traumatizing childhoods — and I usually count this to be in the 5% category although in my thinking I am coming to realize it well might be 20% of our population who find themselves born into Meteor Craters and ongoing Meteor Showers — we will NEVER be like those others who are in the 80% – 95% of people who received some degree of pampering in their earliest years.

Remember:

Pampering = benevolent world = ‘good enough’ safe and secure

Not pampered = malevolent world = not ‘good enough’ safe and secure

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So when I say I the bottom seems to be falling in the meteor pit I have ALWAYS been in, and the sides are crumbling over my head, I am also saying that for all the ‘self-help’ information that I have found these past 30 years was actually like (analogy!) random, disconnected, irrelevant and misleading bits of ‘facts’ scribbled on tiny pieces of confetti paper, tossed down to me over the edge of my crater into hurricane winds by ‘others’ whose lives exist either on solid ground way above my head or ‘others’ whose lives exist in a little pit MUCH shallower than the one that I know.

Maybe those same ‘others’ who read what I write now will say, “Oh, that is SO NEGATIVE!”

I no longer care a single tiny TWIT what those people think or say.  I can’t see them or hear them from where I am ‘down below’.

None of them ever helped me to understand how the extreme abuse I suffered changed my physiological development.  None of them even MENTIONED that this was possible, let alone that it happens and HAPPENED to me.

None of them ever told me that it was the ABSENCE of having anyone in my life during all of this trauma that actually provided for me a safe and secure attachment opportunity.  THIS MATTERS because in the midst of ANY TRAUMA over a lifetime, it is the presence of safe and secure attachment relationships that HEAL TRAUMA.

In the case of infants and children suffering from horrible traumas, the presence of SOMEONE to safely and securely attach to MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD to that little one’s outcome — PHYSIOLOGICALLY.  These safe and secure attachment relationships are ALWAYS the number ONE most important and powerful resiliency factor that mitigates the impact of trauma.

While it might be an unusual and uncomfortable way to look at infant-childhood to say that treating a little one WITH LOVE and caring kindness means that infant is a PAMPERED one — and therefore of the fortunate group — this is true.

Being treated this way was NOT a given for all of us.

So, who was there to pamper you when it mattered most?

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So when I look at my poverty, at my inability today to tolerate stimulation or ‘excitement’, when I feel what it’s like to be alone, to not have a quality partner relationship, to be at a worse than dead-end ‘career wise’, when I struggle through the moments of my life toward WHAT for a future — I do NOT need to blame or shame myself.  I simply have to look around me at the vastness of this meteor crater that was built into my little body from the start and ask myself, “What CAN you do today to help yourself feel better?”

There IS always something, though that something be as tiny a little thing as are the spaces in the filters that I have fallen all the way through since the time of my birth.  And EVERYTHING that I long for, that I grieve for, EVERYTHING that helps me today — IS A FORM OF SOME KIND OF PAMPERING because PAMPERING is what I completely missed from the start of my life (except for the critical basics of shelter and food, etc.) and for the rest of my life pampering is what I desperately and RIGHTFULLY need.

At the same time I am negotiating within myself HOW it is that nothing I ever experience actually fills up this PIT.  I know today, “How could it?”  If I can stop the bottom from sinking out from under my feet, if I can stop the continual crumbling of that ‘way up there’ crater rim, I am accomplishing something good.

I also know that it will never be possible for severe infant-child abuse survivors — who were left alone without pampering BY ANYONE and terribly hurt by the ones who were SUPPOSED to take care of us — to know WHO we are in the world until we also realize HOW we are in the world.  In order to know for ourselves what we MOST need to know, we have to have the dedication to our own well-being to dare to leave the pack behind us as we search for our OWN truth about what REALLY happened to us — and how that changed us in our body-brain — for our lifetime.

Finally discovering that we were abused infant-children is a critical beginning — but it is ONLY the beginning for some of us.  We have a long, long way to travel toward comprehending our reality because the Meteor Crater we were raised in was really, really deep.

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