Tag: abuse

+SUGGESTED BOOK ON BRAIN HEALING!

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I am still in the middle of traveling (went 4-wheeling and horse back riding today), and leave northern Minnesota tomorrow morning for a night’s stay at my son’s in Grand Forks, ND and then back down to my daughter’s in Fargo for another ten days before heading ‘home’ to Alaska to see my brothers and the land.

I could write volumes about my experiences thus far, but there’s only one thing I really want to mention right now.  My youngest sister generously sent me a copy of a book she was reading on her Kindle when I visited her in Seattle recently, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Ph.D., Jill Bolte Taylor.  I want to mention it here so that any of you who might find her book of value will have time to get a copy to read before I finally get a chance (after my travels) to write here about my own perception of the value of this book.

Although I highly recommend Jill’s book, because of the specific issues I present on this blog regarding the life long consequences of early severe child abuse as it affects — and alters — the development of the young brain, I suggest that readers might wish to actually begin their reading of “My Stroke of Insight” with Chapter 15 that begins on page 138.  Of course it would be preferrable to begin at the beginning, but the information that the author presents beginning on the page I mention here is most specifically related to “our” topic.

I have never read in any single book so many clear and helpfully identified suggestions about how to manage one’s BRAIN and therefore one’s quality of life!  Jill’s descriptions about how the two hemispheres of the brain operate cannot be matched!  As you read this book you will come to understand how hard-won her suggestions about how to live a ‘better’ life are.  Yet while it is not my intention to in any way demean, belittle or criticize Jill’s perspectives, I do wish to urge this blog’s readers to practice what I call the ‘cautionary’ approach to her statements about her experience with healing her own brain post-stroke. 

Reading the latter chapters in Jill’s book provide an excellent experience in finding the middle road between what people might be able to know and understand about their brains when those brains were formed under benovolent conditions (as Jill’s seems to have been pre-stroke damage), and what those of us whose brains formed under malevolent severe child abuse and neglect conditions need to learn and understand about our altered brain and how to heal it.

Interestingly, Jill’s professional life as a neuroanatomist is intimately connected to Harvard, the same educational and research ‘facility’ that birthed the concept that those of us who were severely abused as children have a changed (‘evolutionarily altered’) brain as a result of our development under extremely adverse conditions.  While there is much in Jill’s writing that I can see as being of value to me (on the middle road) I do not get the sense that she knows about the ‘Martin Teicher’s Group’s’ research about child abuse and how it changes brain development.  Jill’s book does, however, give an impressive jump-start opportunity to learn valuable information about healing a wounded brain – and a wounded self – and that certainly includes me/us.

I won’t go into any more detail at the moment, but I wanted to get this information onto the blog about this book with the hopes that readers will take a little time to pop on over to amazon.com (at least) and explore the value of this book for themselves.  It is a very reasonably priced book and is worth much more for the dime than any book I could possibly recommend!!

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I am far from feeling comfortable using other people’s computers, so will wait for a better  and more appropriate time  to activate those parts of my own brain and being that wait for a future date — when my current play-visit-self-expansion-challenge time has drawn to a close.  I wish you all the very best — and suggest that you read My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Ph.D., Jill Bolte Taylor as soon as you can get your hands on a copy!!  I promise — you will be glad that you did!  Rarely, in my opinion, does a book appear that more than carries its own weight in VALUE such as this one does!! 

Be sure to post your comments here about what you think of Jill’s book once you read it!!

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 Who’s Mother of the Year? 

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Step-up to Prevent Child Abuse!Promising Practices for Preventing Child Abuse and Neglect

 

 

+CHECKING IN FROM FARGO, NORTH DAKOTA

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It is a scary realization to know that, at least in the ‘olden days’ of the 1960s, people as nuts as my mother was could actually run day care centers.  I was too young then to realize what, if any, problems arose regarding the children under her care (I don’t believe she abused any of them) or with the children’s parents.  With so many mothers needing to or choosing to work today, how would anyone know if a daycare provider was ‘off their rocker’, potentially dangerous, or actually dangerous?

It is a known fact that particularly with Borderline Personality Disorder the alterations in perception of reality and resulting actions are extremely difficult to recognize and detect — especially from the outside.  This is part of the purpose and goal of my writings, to help us learn more about what makes these people tick so that we can recognize them better.  I believe our improved understanding of personality disorder, depression, bi-polar and other sometimes-hard-to-detect-in-others brain change-mental illnesses is necessary to keep all children safer!

Free Webinar For Parents: Will You Know High-Quality Child Care When You See It?

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+I AM THRILLED! I WROTE MY 1ST FICTION STORY!

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Directly as a result of my having just processed a ‘quantum healing leap’ experience related to becoming crystal clear about the difference between writing a trauma memory and writing ABOUT a trauma memory, I finally realized that there is absolutely no reason on earth why I can’t write fiction.  I want to thank my dear friend who talked truthfully about how she responded to my writings, as well as also thank those commenters who gave me the gift of their observations and insights as well this morning, because without this amazing inter-personal sharing, I would not have received the incredible gift that has come to me — the gift of being able, for the first time in my life, to safely access and play with my own imagination!

True, it’s almost beyond belief that my childhood was so terrible that I was forbidden to play.  Many abuse incidents happened because my mother caught me playing!  Not any more!  Not any more!

I’m not sure when that realization would have hit me if just after my quantum leap I had talked to my sister who told me she had just discovered the writing links I posted earlier today.  I rushed to the helium.com site and began to poke around through that overly-cluttered frenetic mess of a visual information display (my opinion!).

I found a contest I can enter for a nonautobiographical fiction short story under 1500 words.  “Well, why not?” I asked myself just as a massive thunderhead forced me to turn off my computer.  I grabbed a pen and a stack of paper and wrote

my very first fiction story –

DADDY’S GONE

I don’t think I could be happier if I won the Olympics!

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I hope there are many more stories to come.  What I realized is that I now know how to keep my own many, many abuse memories separate from my imagination.  My imagination is MINE.  It is MY gift, to use and enjoy and bring to full bloom in any way I choose to USE IT!  How cool is THAT?  Today I discovered that I can go anywhere I want to in my imagination, and that does NOT mean I am at risk of ‘bothering’ my trauma memories!  I can imagine safely!

I could NEVER do that as a child.  I could not wonder, I could not imagine, and I could not PLAY.  Today I discovered that allowing myself access to imagination is (drum roll please!) –

PLAY!  By golly, it is FUN!!

It was discovering the doorway into a wide open universe that I didn’t even know I didn’t know existed!

(I guess I chose my blog heading picture for a reason I did not even realize at the time I put it there!)

I have always believed until today that I cannot write fiction.  I mean, I absolutely believed that to be true!  Somehow I believed that the developmental changes that happened to me as a result of 18 long years of that severe child abuse somehow made me into someone that could not imagine.  Imagine that!!  Now that false belief is gone.  It vanished as completely as a light mist would in bright sunshine.  I swear it’s like discovering that I can fly!

I’ll find out over time where the stories take me.  Maybe they’ll be like this one.  Maybe not.  It will take a little time for me to gain confidence that I won’t return to my former state of doubting myself.

I leave this coming Thursday, July 9, 2009 for my seven weeks of traveling and visiting lots of wonderful family.  I am going on a wonderful adventure, even though a part of me remains incredibly sad about the loss of my relationship with my best friend.  But I can do nothing to heal whatever the wounds are that sent down a lightning bolt to cut us off from one another except to work on healing myself.

In the meantime, thanks to the miracle of computers and the internet, I will be able to stay in touch while I’m traveling, so that I can – write –

and write FICTION stories!!

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+HOW DO WE LIVE WELL WHEN WE HAVE TOO MUCH TRAUMA INFORMATION

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Healing is such an amazing process, and yes is one that those of us who were severely abused as children include as an ongoing process every moment of our entire lives.  But being just as equally certain that the healing process is not only as real as was the wounding process in the first place, but is more powerful because it is directly tied into the forces of building life rather than of tearing it down.

As I read and replied to the coolest comments I received on the last post I wrote, I realize that even THAT process – writing the first post, having my dear friend talk to me about her reactions, then my writing of the second post and today receiving the wisdom of commenters and replying to those — is all about what we are talking about!  The more clearly I can understand things, the more power I receive to continue on this healing path, with the knowledge that miracles DO happen and healing can occur as suddenly and ‘out of the blue’ as did many of the terrible abuse events of my childhood.

These ‘healing shifts’ that happen as we apply our best efforts toward the best end possible can happen like the

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I like that NEW IDEA I received today as a result of having accomplished the tasks I didn’t even specifically recognize I was tackling through the process I just described of writing:  Quantum leap learning!  But wait!  There’s MORE!  This leads me to awareness of the fact that what we most want to accomplish is QUANTUM LEAP HEALING!  Now THAT’S MORE LIKE IT!  By following this search on the web I come up with all kinds of links that related to what my BODY knows as it leads me through careful disclosure down the road of removing bit by bit by bit by bit the inner obstacles I carry within me from the abuse I experienced that prevent me from obtaining frequent states of well being.

I refuse to let references to ‘psychic’, etc. stop me from pursuing information related to this new thought I am having today.  As I describe in my piece about doing art therapy, and even about being saved from death in my high school parking lot, I no longer even think about them in terms of ‘psychic’ experiences.  I am beginning to realize as I move forward in my disclosure-healing process that there are probably more things in life we do not know enough about to fully describe them with words than there are ones that we can tidily wrap words around and put a ribbon on top of!

I think about how a parent works with a young child who comes to them saying, “I don’t feel good!”  The parent has to help them examine exactly what it is their body is telling them that led to that statement:  “Where do you hurt?  Does your tummy hurt?  Does your head hurt?”  The parent will feel for a temperature, determine if the child is thirsty, hungry, tired, scared or sad.  Once these details are brought to light, given names and addressed, life can move on as improvement happens.

We live in a materialistic, object obsessed culture that wants to think not only that the brain is an object, but also that it can be separated through some magical process from the body it is a part of.  To make matters work, we are told that our LEFT brain is superior, and that our ‘higher’ cortex is most important of all.  Be logical!  Don’t have feelings, don’t believe in anything intangible that you can’t see, feel or touch.

How ridiculous and destructive is this belief?  How limiting?  How inadequate?

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Those of us who of us who had too much life information forced upon us by traumatic early childhood experiences will not heal if we follow this societal pattern.  It would be like being given a doll’s shoe and told to put our big adult foot into it.  Not possible.  The left hemisphere of our brain has a critical job to do, but it will sit idle or be left to process empty, meaningless information if we don’t give it our truth to work with.

That truth is stored in our body and processed in our right brain hemisphere.  Our left brain is eager to WORK WITH that information, but cannot possibly access it by itself.  That is not its job.

We must also remember than if malevolent conditions surrounded us as our body-brain formed in the first place, neither of our brain hemispheres developed as they are ‘ordinarily’ supposed to.  The part of the brain in the middle that is the bridge between the two hemispheres that is designed to transmit information between these ‘two different brains’ we have was not designed in an ‘ordinary’ fashion, either.  This fact affects what information we receive, the way we receive it, store it, access it, and process it.  This is not a minor alteration of who we were meant to be and who we turned out to be!

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I am not writing ‘clinical’ information here, either.  This information is no different than if someone told us how to avoid electrocuting ourselves or burning down our house!  We aren’t working for our own best interests by refusing to accept these facts, or by feeling inadequate to learn them.  They are important, and influence how successful our efforts to heal from our traumas and live a better life are.

It is the nature of overwhelming trauma to give us too much information that we have no possible way of making good use of.  Our bodies were designed to process not only the information about our traumas themselves, but also designed to protect us from being completely overwhelmed by the ‘too much inappropriate information’.   Our body-brain does this in the safest way it possibly can.

I see a ‘wordless image’ at this moment provided to my left brain from my right brain’s storehouse of information.  If  I was desperately thirsty and wanted a drink of water, and decided that filling an empty paper cup with water from the end of a fire hose turned on full blast was the best way to solve my problem, I would be disappointed with the results!  If I was tired of living in the night darkness and decided to wire house by myself, not knowing how to do the job right, and then hooked up my circuit box to an electric cable carrying the full load of electricity meant to power a town of ten thousand, I would also be disappointed at the outcome of my efforts to solve this problem.

Every person might want to access water and power to maintain their life – or life style.  But just because these systems seem to work without thought or effort for ‘ordinary’ people around us does not mean that things are going to work the same way for those of us who were designed by and build for malevolent worlds of trauma through severe child abuse.  We simply have too much information!

At the same time we are trying to maintain our every day existence, the same way that everyone else does, we are also continually forced to deal with the ongoing effects of what happened to us.  Much of our life force that would be free to become expressed in our life in positive ways is instead tied up in trying to life IN SPITE of our traumatic overload.  A big part of who we are is occupied with maintaining the emergency conditions that exist in our body-brain-minds.

I see the wordless image of a thousand room mansion so full of trauma related information and misinformation that we have no human way to deal with that we must do our best to seal off all the rooms and live on the front porch!  Because this house is really our body we can never just walk away from it.  We have found all kinds of ways to continue on living, but we are always paying a terrible price to do so.

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It takes time, patience, wisdom, care, courage, determination and persistent courage to live this kind of life while we are constantly trying to heal at the same time!  Any ‘quantum leap of healing’ that comes our way would be a most welcome gift!  I believe that through the process of dialoging between our body and both hemispheres of our brain we can experience these kinds of necessary quantum leaps of healing.  These leaps are made both more possible and more probable as we ALSO dialog with one another.

Even if we could use an invisibility to cloak to make our thousand room mansion appear to be nonexistent, or send it into an alternate dimension like they did to things on the Stargate SG-1 episodes, The existence of our trauma too-much-information overload is still always present.  The energy we use to NOT deal with it is vast.  The energy we use TO DEAL with it is vast.  Either way, we need to be realistic and compassionate with ourselves as we learn more daily about how to live a better life.

When our body sends us information through our right brain, we CAN learn to heed this information wisely.  Our body will tell us what our limits are.  It will tell us what we need to do to feel safer and more secure in the world.  We cannot afford to ignore this information or pretend our trauma history doesn’t exist.  Doing so limits us and by excluding much of who we are.  I hear my right brain’s inner voice speaking through my left brain’s voice, “It’s OK now.  It’s all over.  You can come out from hiding.”  At the same time I hear that voice saying, “I am here to help you.  You are never alone.

My job is to be willing to listen to what my body’s voice is saying.  It is never wrong.

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+WRITING ABOUT OUR SEVERE EARLY TRAUMAS FROM THE INSIDE OUT

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Nobody might want to hear this, but I do believe that there can be wounds created within a child by severe abuse that will never heal.  These wounds are too deep and too awful from crimes committed against children during their growth developmental stages that are too much, too deep, and too overwhelming to ‘make go away’.  Knowing this fact is why we accept that there is a category called ‘criminal’ in the first place.

We do not want to be a lawless society.  We want protection.  We want accountability.  We want justice.  We want these things because we do not want to be injured, wounded or killed.  We do not want to be trespassed against.  We do not want our rights to well being to be threatened by torture and terrorism.  We do not want to pay the price that living with the consequences of these lawless, criminal actions requires.

Then why, at the same time, is it so hard for most people to understand that what life is truly like for a severe child abuse survivor, especially for those who were forced to suffer malevolent treatment from birth through the first 5 years of their lives, have lifelong serious damage as a result of powerful people harming them?

I am not saying that we survivors cannot work toward our healing.  We do that with every breath we take.  We always have, and we always will.  But that does not give us the same quality of life, the same ability or chance to experience health and well being, that we would have had if we had been kept safe from criminals when we needed it most.

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We need more fortunate people to truly be able to hear what we are saying.

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I want to note here that I don’t intentionally keep my writing either clinical or sterile.  I have difficulty realizing how people who do not have extremely severe early childhood abuse histories understand what I say and why I say it the way that I do.  I know instinctively that the people I write most for are those with histories similar to mine.  For us, especially if we have built-in serious ‘issues’ with dissociation, our brains do not work the same as more ordinary brains do.

We are therefore always putting ourselves close to internal danger if and when we choose to recall actual memories.  It is not at all a given that feelings the feelings that were present when the abuse occurred is either wise or helpful.  We must be extremely careful of ourselves, and I am, as the writer of these pieces, certainly no exception.

Neither at this point do I choose to put the ‘Disney Special’ twist to my stories, either.  If any of you are interested, try recalling one of your own early childhood trauma events and write it.  We can write from different points of view, differing degrees of closeness or distance from the experience of the abuse.  I can never emphasize enough how important it is to keep ourselves safe while we disclose our abuse and work toward our own healing.

Because so few of us who need it will ever be able to access or afford the kind of quality state-of-the-art therapy we need and deserve in order to safely approach the kind of emotional-memory work that will usual accompany severe early trauma memory retrieval, we are left alone doing the best we can with the resources we have.  That is NOT ENOUGH in my book.  It reflects a serious lack of attention to the needs of adult survivors of horrendous child abuse.

When I speak of the ‘unitiated’ reader I do not intend to offend anyone.  I do, however, mean that word literally.  Those of us with severe child abuse histories know things as a result of having lived through what we did.  Those who have not — most fortunately — been forced to have their childhoods completely stolen from them, cannot, I believe, ever know what those of us who did have ours stolen think like or feel like.  There does exist, in my opinion, a line of differentiation between these two groups of people I am describing.

There is a vast difference between telling ABOUT a memory and telling the memory.  The former is far safer for us to do than the latter.  That is a fact.  I suspect that a reader without a severe abuse history might be ‘dying to know more’ about what the experience of abuse a survivor might be disclosing, and wants the survivor to give them enough detailed information that the reader might think they know what the survivor is talking about.

I am not at all sure that this is possible.  When reading good fiction the writer can give enough vivid description to enable the reader’s mind to actively imagine themselves as being IN the story.  That is not what my kind of writing is about — at least certainly not yet.  I am not writing fiction.  At the same time I don’t see that I am necessarily writing nonfiction, either.  I am writing the truth.

The truth is not clinical, stark, barren, dry or simple.  Reading the truth, when it hurts, requires more than imagination.  It requires a willingness to open oneself up to one’s own pain, to admit that even though there are certainly times when things were rosy and cheerful (not true in my case as a child but true for MOST readers), there were also  times when someone bigger than you hurt you when you were most small and vulnerable, whether they meant to or not.

Those times matter.  I encourage you to write about your stories yourself.  Writing is different than telling someone a story verbally, though this means of disclosure is certainly valid and important.  Writing about it uses another set of functions and abilities in body, brain and mind.  It forces us to ALLOW a linear process or organization to give order to the chaos that our traumas have created within us.  If you had no early traumas, you are most fortunate.  If you did and they are healed, you are also most fortunate.

If you do wish to write and don’t already have a blogspace, I recommend WordPress.com as a wonderful place to start.  I would love you to drop a comment over here about your writing as I would most definitely wish to come by and visit.

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+SIBLING PARTICIPATION IN CHILD ABUSE

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So far none of these stories are getting any easier to write, but fortunately my determination to write them more than matches any reluctance I have to do so.

Each memory that leads to each story seems to be difficult in a unique and unforeseen way.  Some I can write about with more immunity that others.  The one I wrote today has been the most difficult, and having done so I feel a quivering inside my gut because the story STILL scares me.

*Age 14 – Gardening and the Sabotage

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I think again about M. Scott Peck’s book, “People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil” that I referred to in my story about how I abused my little son that was also directly connected to my being able to finally disown my mother.  I wonder about the entire web of my childhood, even as it is presented in the words of my mother’s own writing.  It was all a lie.

Nobody on the outside of our family could have possibly believed the lie– BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T HAVE TO!  This was a fact by default.  Only those of us on the inside of my family had to believe it.  They had no choice.  We were all forced to play our part, one way or the other.

At what point does free will and conscious choice on the part of such a distorted family members enter the picture in any meaningful way?  How can that freedom even be allowed to exist in a family that depends on living the lie for its very existence and survival?  Can we trust that telling the truth always means that we are on the road of healing?

I don’t know that I know the answer, but I wrote this story in spite of that fact.  Did doing so in any way contribute to an increase in my freedom from the hold that my horrendous child abuse history holds over me?  After all, today is the 4th of July, and we are supposed to be celebrating what it means to be free.

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+LINK TO NEW PAGE ON DISSOCIATION

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I’ve heard of a ‘garden variety’ of this or that, but is there a ‘parking lot’ variety of dissociation for those of us who are severe child abuse survivors?  Or was this experience, as recorded on this new page

Age 14 – MIRACLE IN THE PARKING LOT – DISSOCIATION

nothing but a garden variety of nothing special at all?

I don’t know, but something amazing sure kept me alive!

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+TODAY’S LINK TO ANOTHER NEW PAGE

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*Age 13 – DIRTY DIAPER AND PEPPLES IN MY KNEES

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This page describes perhaps not so much my memory of this traumatic abuse experience as it does the experience of having lost this memory and of having it returned to me.  When this memory returned to me — only because I asked my sister for her memories of events I did not remember myself and she told me this one — my experiencing of remembering is itself altered, as I describe while I describe the memory itself.

I can see now that I forgot this memory for a very good reason.  For whatever reasons, it is TOO BIG for me to be able to process.  It is a memory of a traumatic experience that clearly spilled out of the boundary of reasonable ability I had then or have now to handle it.  It is one that clearly involved major dissociation when it happened in the first place, and remains mostly inaccessible to me today in its true form because of dissociation.

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+LINK TO NEW PAGE ADDED TODAY – FIGHTING BACK?

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+Age 14 – SCRUBBED IN THE TUB

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We have to be more careful than words can describe not to either blame others for their victimization or to blame ourselves for the harm that was done to us.  How realistic is it for us to expect that any long term violent, consistent, severe abuse survivor EVER had a chance to fight back?

By suggesting that it is the victim’s fault that abuse ever happened in the first place, let alone continued to happen, creates an unattainable illusion within our social consciousness that we don’t — as outsiders — REALLY need to step in and stop abuse.  We are saying that if only the victim had done THEIR JOB to stop the abuse none of the rest of us would have to be involved at all.

Sound extreme?  Read this page.

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+LINK TO NEWLY ADDED CHILDHOOD STORY

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*Age 10 – NIGHTMARES AND BED WETTING

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This page has just been completed and published under MY CHILDHOOD STORIES.  This page contains a ‘MAY TRIGGER ABUSE MEMORIES’ tag, so please be careful, cautious and considerate of yourself if you have a personal history of sexual abuse.

In this page I also wrote about how factual memory of trauma differs from emotional memory of trauma.  Our emotional memory is processed through the amygdala region of our brain and is ALWAYS stored in our body even though the factual memory might not be.  (When the facts are remembered this is called an ‘explicit‘ memory.  When only the emotions and body memory exist without specific facts, this is called an ‘implicit‘ memory.)

The ‘semantic, autobiographical’ factual part of our memories are processed through a different region of our brain, the hippocampus.  There are times particularly in very early childhood when all memory is preverbal and can only be accessed in our body and not through fact.  These memories will govern our unconscious behavior for the rest of our lives.  There are also times when facts related to memory, particularly of trauma memory, is ‘forgotten’ and invisible to us — sometimes forever, sometimes until it is triggered.

It is also important to realize that the stress hormone cortisol can so heat up our hippocampal memory cells as they try to process trauma-related facts that they are fried to a cinder and the facts of a memory will never be recorded – and therefore will never be available to recall.  When and if this happens — and it can happen both to victims and perpetrators-in-the-act — the emotional memory is ALWAYS stored and retained within the body.

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