Tag: anxiety disorders

+MOTHERING: WHEN IT’S RIGHT, WHEN IT’S WRONG

alchemynowLeave a comment

I feel at this instant like a dancer might who is poised behind a curtain of a stage, breathing those last breaths before the music starts, before the curtain rises, about to dance a dance before an unseen but present audience.  This dancer would have performed the dance before, would have practiced it step by step, part by part, before this evening’s performance.  Not I.  I have no idea what I am going to write here before you.  I know not one word before I begin.  All I can do is take that last breath and step on out, hoping.

Hoping that I know what I want to say, what needs to be said.  Hoping that I can say it right, leaving nothing out but adding nothing in that does not belong within this dance of words.  What is it that I will say first?

++

Do we, as a species, want to replace the kind of mothering that built our species from the beginning with medications that alter our brain chemicals and that might mimic what we used to be able to accomplish within our own brains without any other assistance? After all, we used to be prepared for the task of living as members of a social species in such an exact way that all the programming needed to accomplish this mothering was biologically given to mothers, and given to infants, so that in the end infants grew up to be balanced children and adults who knew the possibility of well being.

What happens to infants when the ability to mother adequately is removed from the people-growing equation?  What happens to the adults that these infants grow up to be?  How far back in my own family can I look in order to discover where the diversion of mothering abilities began and where mothering began to be altered and removed from the ongoing patterns particularly of how mothers raised their daughters?  I can’t see back there very far, but far enough to know something passed down to me was very, very harmful.

++

I must tread carefully here, if treading across a public stage can be considered dancing at all?  I wish I could say what needs to be said exactly, specifically so, as if the dance has already been danced before and I can follow in some earlier, preexisting invisible footsteps.  If I knew ahead of time what the dance was and how to perform it, this writing would be so much easier to do.

++

I do not wish to alienate mothers.  I do not wish to harshly condemn any mother’s efforts to raise her own children.  Those of you who have been reading my posts already know that something was so wrong with the way my mother raised me that it could hardly be called mothering at all.

But she was my mother and she did mother me.  Inadequately, but she did mother me.  Taken from that far extreme of mothering like my mother gave me, across an entire range of possibilities of mothering, all the way over to the most perfect mother we could even collectively imagine — somewhere along this line every mother could place her own.

It is not that I am deliberately eliminating men from my writing here due to some inner bias of my own.  I very specifically consider that mothering is something only women can do.  Men father.  They cannot mother, no matter how nurturing they may be toward their infants and children.  Everything we know and can imagine about the biological, physiological differences between women and men apply here.  How men father is not the topic of this post.  How women mother is.

++

With that clarifying step taken, I will turn in another direction and take yet another step.  What we might consciously know about mothering will always be only a tiny part of the story unless we today begin to think very clearly and carefully about ourselves as a species, and particularly about being American members of our species at this point in time.  We cannot leave the context of culture and society out of our discussion about mothering.

I can report facts to you about my own experiences of mothering as I consciously understand them, but I also must state I know really nothing of substance about the generations of women in my family that preceded me as mothers.  I make guesses based on guesses.  My guess is that my mother’s grandmother — who came into my mother’s home when her own husband died, and very closely in time to when my mother’s mother divorced her own husband — was as important to my mother as she grew up after the age of 5 or 6 as her actual mother was.  I do not believe that my mother was healthily mothered by either one of these women.

It is here that my dance must take another step, a sort of flying leap into the air with a shift of the body above the stage floor, so that some distance is covered and the dancer lands in a surprising spot — of sorts.  This step includes what any of us women might know or imagine about all the grand mothering in our families.  What is grand mothering compared and/or contrasted to mothering?  We cannot leave the grandmothers out of our mothering equation.

How my mother’s grandmother mothered my mother’s mother had to have had — my definite guess here — a major influence upon how my mother developed not only as a person, not only as a mother, but specifically as my mother.  How my mother mothered me had a powerful impact on my ability to mother my own children, and backward and forward throughout the generations we see that mothers never do their own mothering in a vacuum.

++

Now I, as the dancer within my own mind, must take yet another step.  This time the step moves into a spin, both feet close together twirling above the floor, ending with me landing into a forward fold, down on one knee, both arms stretched in front of me, palms together toward the sky.  It is here I must talk about our evolution, how if we move far enough away from the kind of mothering that nature intended us to practice within our species we are running the risk of endangering ourselves — and I use this word ‘ourselves’ in both the most singular and most collective way.

I, singularly, suffered the consequences of my mother’s psychosis that was focused specifically on me.  I know that all of my siblings suffered from growing up with my mother as their mother.  Yet we all know that I was forced from birth to be the one chosen to grow up in the center of her storm.

I have said and I will continue to say it again, that my mother’s psychotic break and her overriding mental illness was influenced by conditions of her childhood that damaged her developing brain-mind.  This next step I am taking is more like a jumping up and down firmly in one place.  It is not a step of grace, it is a step of emphasis.  No matter what the men may be doing in the early lives of children, it is ALWAYS to the mothers that I will look for ultimate accountability.

I take another step here away from center and follow with another and another and another until I have traveled in a wide full circle.  At the center of this circle I place the young children.  For every step from that center in any direction I would want another woman to be standing there.  This wide movement I am taking in my dance is meant to point out that for the millions of years our species spent evolving itself, never until recent times and under the guise and the burden of so-called ‘civilization’ did we women EVER mother alone.

We can all talk until we run out of breath about the rights of women.  I am not opposed to women pursuing what they may think is best for them in their lives.  But I am NOT talking about women here.  I am talking about mothers.  I am talking about women’s fitness to mother in the first place.  And ultimately, I am talking about the children we bear and bring into this world.  These children not only need mothers (and fathers, not the topic of this post), they need adequate MOTHERING.

I have to let other dancers onto the stage now.  This is no longer a dance I choose to dance alone.  With the flurry of movement of multiple dancers I see in the patterns they create in their dancing that when women who are mothering are cut off from one another all manor of ill being replaces the well being that we always knew before.

++

The color I remember from stories my mother told of both her grandmother and her mother were that they were brilliant women.  Each in their own way were educated career women.  I hold no false belief that either of these two women were adequate as mothers.  My mother paid a price for this.  I and my siblings paid a price for this.  My own children paid a price for this, even though I was a stay-at-home mother.

Just in looking at the influences in five generations, from my great grandmother to my own children, I see that it wasn’t the mothers themselves that were missing.  No, not us.  It was the necessary QUALITY of mothering that was missing, and that lack and loss is what has created the ongoing pattern of disaster.

If you read my June 1972 writing in +LEAVING NO CHAOS BEHIND – PART ONE, you will be able to instantly know what I am talking about.  That writing reflected the state of dysregulation within my brain-mind that was a direct result of the trauma and terror that formed by brain from the beginning of my life.  How could I, or anyone else, ever expect me to be able to adequately mother children with that brain?

True, except for the incident I described in THE DAY I ABUSED MY OWN LITTLE SON, I did not blatantly or overtly abuse my own children.  But I did harm them.  There was no possible way that I could not have done so, no matter how much I tried not to.  That is the nature of trauma when it is not resolved.  One way or the other, it passes itself on down the generations.  We can whine and moan, curse and spit, but there is little we can do about it — unless and until we find the right information and the resources we need AT THE RIGHT TIME.

Dance over.  I’m deadly serious now.  I do not have any grandchildren.  This may change in the future.  What matters to me most is that my children have broken the pattern to the best of their ability.

If I could magically go back and offer to my own self when I was 18 what I know now, I have no doubt my children would be the beneficiary of radical positive changes that I would have been able to make in myself as a result of the knowledge I now have.  True, there is a probable chance that they would never have been born in the first place.  I cannot find it in myself to wish for that.

All I can do is what we all can do — move forward.  We can learn.  We can change.  We can heal, each according to our abilities.

Before our species so changed our world, back before the coming of ‘civilization’ began to disconnect mothers from mothers, we did not mother alone.  Grandmothers were also part of the cycle of mothering.  Not isolated grandmothers, but connected grandmothers.  Women breast fed one another’s children.  They held them and cared for them as if they were their own.

The birth mother was not left with the full burden of caring for her child alone.  She was always accessible in times when her infant could not be solaced by other women.  The infant could always be returned to its birth mother (if she were alive) when necessary.  But in between these times the birth mother had the ability to ‘get away’ and to work at her other tasks, but the infants never suffered for lack of mothering.

++

I take the stand that in today’s world of American culture we are hurting our mothers by isolating them from other mothers and we are hurting our offspring.  We have gone so far away from what nature gave us in the beginning I am not at all convinced that we can ever find our way back.  But I also know that if we never identify problems that exist we have absolutely NO HOPE of repairing the rupture we have created within our culture — and in increasingly wider circles within other ‘advancing’ cultures — as we interfere with mothers’ ability to adequately mother their young.

I will describe in future posts that the damage we are causing directly affects our brain’s ability to regulate itself.  Adequate mothering is designed to build a regulated human brain that can experience well being as its center point of balanced equilibrium.  The more mothers don’t and can’t mother their young the way nature intended us to, the more dysregulated our brains become.

Is it a good thing that we now have, as the end result of very expensive and extensive research, all kinds of prescription drugs to regulate more and more and more brain and nervous system dysregulations than ever before?  Or do we look at the bigger picture and accept as fact that inadequate mothering of infants and young children is creating these dysregulations in the first place?  Are we more afraid to ask the questions or to find out the true answers?

We are becoming dependent as a society on the powerful drugs we take — as adults and feed to our children — to regulate brain chemistry because we are creating the problems by building these brains that cannot regulate themselves in the first place.

++

I could ask, “What are we willing to know about this problem?”  Or I could ask the much harder and more helpful question, “What are we NOT willing to know about this problem?”  Maybe we are so acceptant of the fact that ‘everyone’ takes brain-regulating medications that we don’t even think it’s a problem in the first place.

Are we so absolutely stupid and foolish that we ‘thank our lucky stars’ that we have all these wonder drugs available to us in our super advanced civilization to fix us?  Does it ever occur to us that we are creating these same problems that need these medications and that the conditions are PREVENTABLE?

Do we refuse to see harm in anything we are doing or have done to our own children that meant they had no choice but to develop brains that could not adequately regulate themselves for the task of being humans who are healthy and have well being — naturally?  Just as women birth the children, they are designed to be the builders of infant brains.  That job is not done at birth.  If mothers cannot adequately build brains within their infants that can healthily regulate themselves, the job will not get done.

++

I do not ask any question that I am not willing to ask myself, no matter how difficult it might be to look at the truth.  We might not need to use the word abuse in reference to how we parent our own children.  But if we have our own histories of trauma we cannot help but pass this trauma down to our children, no matter how much we try not to.

There is a wealth of new information available to us about the brain development of infants and young children.  Until we access this information at the ground level where we all live and struggle, we cannot make the kinds of changes within ourselves that will truly allow our children to escape what we never meant to do to them in the first place.  There is no bliss in ignorance.

We HAVE to know what happened to us.  We have to become crystal clear about the changes in HOW mothers mother because we are damaging our children and the future of our society.  This isn’t about feeling badly.  I give the example as clearly as I can that how my mother mothered me does NOT need to be an emotional issue on any level other than in my memories of the actual abuse experiences themselves.

What we need MOST are the facts.  The simple clear facts.  We can change nothing for the better without them.  I do not believe that we can continue to bear and raise children in our present and advancing technological world without knowing the facts we need to know about how to build a healthy human brain from birth.

Interactions within inadequate daycare environments, infant isolation from lengthy quality time with healthy mothers, ongoing lengths of time interacting with electronic media, lack of exercise, lack of time outdoors, lack of quality play, are all contributing to a demise of the human brain resulting in an increased need to consume medications to regulate the brain — whether we want to admit it or not.  We are social beings designed to build a social brain through powerful positive human attachments that begin most importantly with our mothers.

If we continue to choose not to pay attention to the reality of our human condition within our ‘new world’, our proverbial dance will be done.  We are a specific species with specific needs during our infant brain developmental stages.  How well we are mothered determines how well our brains work for the rest of our lives.  There are no exceptions.

+DEPERSONALIZATION LINKS

alchemynow1 Comment

My previous two posts were difficult to write and ‘took a lot out of me’.  They reminded me of myself.

I am only going to give a little information on depersonalization today, which is one aspect of dissociation, in case some readers are not familiar with it.

++

Depersonalization (or depersonalisation) can be referred as a malfunction or anomaly of the mechanism in which an individual has awareness or perception of his or her own self. It is a feeling of watching oneself act, while having no control over a situation.[1] It can be considered desirable, such as in the use of recreational drugs, but it usually refers to the severe form found in anxiety and, in the most intense cases, panic attacks. A sufferer feels that he or she has changed and the world has become less real, vague, dreamlike, or lacking in significance. It can sometimes be a rather disturbing experience, since many feel that, indeed, they are living in a “dream”.

More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depersonalization

DEPERSONALIZATION SUPPORT COMMUNITY

http://www.dpselfhelp.com/forum/

“STRANGER TO OURSELVES”

http://www.depersonalization.info/overview.html

++++

See also link below on veterans and suicide

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/13/cbsnews_investigates/main3496471.shtml

+LEAVING NO CHAOS BEHIND – PART TWO

alchemynow7 Comments

++++

This post follows —

+LEAVING NO CHAOS BEHIND – PART ONE

I could say that from the instant I left home I followed an invisible bread crumb trail into the future, but I would be wrong.  I began to follow that invisible pathway from the moment I was born.  Because there was never any reason, no cause and effect, no reason, no logic to consequences there was never a discernible pattern to anything that ever happened to me.

All I knew was what was told to me, as I came into a body and into this world, through actions and later by words as I came to recognize and understand them.  I was told I was so bad that I tried to kill my mother when I was born.  I was told that I was not human, that I was the devil’s child, and that I was evil.  Everything that I knew always went back to these facts.

At the same time that I was forced just by the fact that I was alive to follow this invisible bread crumb pathway into my future, I was trying at the same time to follow the faintest dim light of hope that was held repeatedly in front of me throughout my childhood by my mother.   I did not know that I was living an unsolvable paradox.

At the same time she told me that I had been created and born evil, I was also told I remained evil because I chose to do so, and that I deliberately continued to remain evil because I was so evil that was the ongoing evil decision that I chose to make — moment after moment, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, incident after incident.  I never knew that I was doomed not to ever get near to or reach the hope that was held out in front of me.

Because I was innately and essentially evil it was impossible for me to ever make the good or right decision or choice how to act BECAUSE of that fact.  Yet I was also told that the fact of my evil remained a fact because I willed it that way each time I continued to make the choice to stay evil no matter how many chances my ‘loving, caring, patient, adoring, long suffering’ mother gave me to choose otherwise.

How could I as an infant begin to learn about the exercise of free will, decision and choice when I was continually punished for a choice I had been proven to have made before I was born by my actions in trying to murder my own mother?  I was born evil.  I was evil because I chose to be evil.  I continued to choose to remain evil because I chose to be evil because I was evil.

The yet even darker blanket that grew over this entire pyschosis that my mother had was that I was born evil because of the evil I had done in some other lifetime that had condemned me to hell.  This had nothing to do with any other manifestation of a thought my mother might have had regarding something that could have been construed as a belief in reincarnation.  Her thinking along these lines ONLY related specifically to me.

Her belief in my evilness grew so that as I grew older it was not about me being born as an evil infant human.  It came to be about my having done something so evil in my earlier lifetime that I had been judged as being so evil by God that I had been condemned to everlasting damnation in hell.  I had been given up on by God and He had given me to the devil.  The devil owned me.  I was his possession, his puppet, his tool, his worker.  I was his proxy sent first to kill her, and because that didn’t work, I continued to live on as the devil’s curse upon my mother’s life.

I suspect as I write this that this dark blanket that smothered out any hope of the light coming through to me was the inevitable result of the progression of her psychosis as I continued to live as her daughter in a body that also continued to grow.  The only possible avenue of escape that could have been possible for me growing up was never provided.  It would have had to have come as a result of my being able to, in any way, understand that the further development of my mother’s psychosis, which had me at its center, was a logical consequence of her mental illness, that her mental illness was the cause of her psychosis, and her actions toward me were the effect of it.

Did anyone ever tell me that?  No.  Was I ever able to step out from under her insanity so that I could figure it out by myself?  No.  Was there any possible avenue of escape open to me from birth to age 18?  No.

My entire being from birth had to attempt to grow along with and in spite of my mother’s madness about me that she continually forced me to encounter in my ongoing experiences throughout my entire childhood.  It makes me think about how cancers devour a body’s resources until the person is killed.  I had to grow an entire being that was contaminated with the cancer of my mother’s beliefs about who I was from the time of my birth.

I was not given the choice NOT to build the cancer of my mother’s mental illness into my being.  Her cancer had taken over the ‘cell’ that was her and spilled over and grew into me.  I had to eat and swallow her poison.  I had no way to prevent this from happening.  Yet through this analogy I see that while her cancer cells were taking over space inside of who I should have been able to become as my own self, they could never invade the ‘cells’ that WERE individually my own.

I had some impermeable ‘Linda cell’ boundary abilities that prevented my mother from taking over all of me.  Somehow there were pockets of my own experience of being alive that she and her psychosis could not completely take over, contaminate or consume.  But neither was there the opportunity for these individual ‘Linda cells’ or pockets of Linda reality to form themselves into a whole entire separate person, or even into clear definable identities.  That is where the dissociation originated from.

++

When I go back and read my June 1972 writing I can see how able these individual Linda cells and pockets were to co-inhabit my own being and mind.  It strikes me that perhaps how I came to develop that far was due to the fact that I am innately a peaceful person.  Had my separate experiences of experience ever had the need to compete with one another I would not have been able to follow my invisible bread crumb pathway into the future in one body at all successfully.

I suspect that the lack of any inner need to compete for supremacy of one single perspective — or even of one tiny part of one — also stems from the bizarre yet helpful fact that nothing I EVER did as a child successfully allowed me ANY illusion of control — related to cause and effect — over my mother’s reactions to me.

I was as a child cut off at EVERY possible turn from being able to assert myself in any effective way to change what happened to me within my environment.  And no matter how strange it might be to understand this, it was because nothing worked that I never began to compete within myself so that a working model of a part of Linda ended up taking control of any part of who I was.  Hence, I basically have ended up with a dissociative identity disorder without the identities.

++

It is hard to know about the development of a human brain-mind because we need to use the brain that has already formed in order to go back and try to understand the earlier form as it formed itself.  I do believe that I have a unique situation here and something unique to offer to anyone that might wonder about the possibilities that exist within a developing brain-mind.

Brain-mind development is a process that usually proceeds through identifiable stages.  Once one or several of these developmental stages has completed itself, its patterns are locked into place and used, then, for the further developments as they come along in their own sequences and patterns.  Because of the very special circumstances I developed in, my brain did not ‘lock into place’ these individual growth and developmental stages as they normally occur.

My brain-mind was forced to go on and on and on and on as it attempted to find a place for its ongoing experiences in the world.  I received piece after piece after never-ending piece of information through my interactions with my mother without ever being given the opportunity to hook them together in any meaningful way.  I believe that some part of me knew that this was happening as it happened.

This is what makes my June 1972 writing significant.  It was a message in a bottle, written down by some part of myself and sent into the future as an intact representation of the best operation my brain-mind could accomplish right before my 21st birthday.  The writing itself was like taking a living slice of brain-mind tissue, cut out at that point of time, frozen within those words, and passed to me in the future so that I could accurately re-member who I was when I left the home of my origin.

++

Time passed.  I went on in my life.  I continued to follow that same invisible bread crumb path to get to where I am as I sit here today with my fingers upon this keyboard.    Yet even as all this time has gone by, my inner experiences of myself in my life are not much more connected to one another than they were as represented in those June 1972 words.

My brain was never allowed to develop through its stages with a single Linda at its center.   What ‘holds me together’ is more like what holds all the individual notes and patterns of silence within a song together.  The individual notes, patterns of sound and silence, tones, pitches, rhythms, movements within songs do not compete with one another any more than do my experiences or my experiences of my own experiences compete with one another.

Yet holding oneself together as the ongoing pattern of one’s life song is continually being written is an exhausting and disheartening process. I cannot, as I believe that others can, just let go and let the ‘main Linda’ go on about the business of life as if such an entity exists.  Because I have little sense that such a single Linda exists, I also cannot trust that she knows what she is up against or doing in this lifetime.  The ongoing process of living my life is therefore continually ‘up for grabs’ between all the various aspects of myself that process both my life and my experience of it.

I believe that I continue to be able and willing to ‘do life’ only because I am able to identify some very  incredible and undeniable gifts that I was born with.  Among these are my innate intelligence, creativity, indomitable will to stay alive with its accompanying determination, stubbornness and courage, my ability to have consideration for the feelings of others in my life who love me, my ability to focus intensely, my ability to tolerate changes, my ability to hope, my curiosity, my willingness and intense desire to learn, my ability to be surprised, my love for beauty including my innate desire to find something beautiful in ugliness, my loyalty to others as well as to myself, my compassion, my incredible stamina and ability to withstand pain, and the never ending peaceableness of my nature.

All of these gifts and abilities help me as I try to orient myself and organize my experience through a brain-mind that was not created in anything like a normal, benevolent world.  I imagine this to perhaps be like being deep under water all of the time, and having to follow the upward movements of the bubbles my gifts provide me with as I try to orient myself and my movements toward the water’s surface.

++

So when it comes to the question of why I never left home before I was 18 to escape the abuse, I have to say that I didn’t even know that either the abuse existed or that escape existed.  One has to know one is captured and a captive before there is anything to contrast the state of captivity to.  Otherwise, how can a person even conceive of escape in the first place?

There was also no unified Linda in existence, and therefore there was no one to make such a choice or decision ‘with’, ‘within’, ‘from’ or ‘for’.  I had all the facets of a diamond, but no diamond.  All I had was the capacity to survive in and endure being alive in a world of chaos and destruction.

When I finally did leave home, I took all the chaos as well as my ability to live with it out the door with me.  Chaos by definition means that all possibilities are contained within it.  Building patterns out of chaos is what a brain does from its beginnings.  Neither mine nor my mother’s brains were an exception to this rule.  That hers was built around a psychosis and mine was not is the difference between us.  While both options are contained within the possibilities of being human, mine allows for some access to consciousness where my mother’s did not.

Both of our child brain-minds had to develop in the midst of an unsolvable paradox — how to remain alive in a malevolent world that did not give us the resources to do so.  We each, however, had available to us different inner avenues to pursue that allowed each of us to accomplish this impossible task in a different way.  I cannot find it within myself to fault either one of us for taking the only possible route we had available to us in childhood that ensured our continued survival.

Once our individual routes to survival were taken, in our early environments that we were equally powerless to change, those routes became permanent pathways into and through our futures.  They allowed us some chance to organize and orient our inner reality within a disorganized and disoriented world.  Neither one of us could ever go back to the beginning and get to develop a different ‘better’ brain in different better circumstances.  We each were forced to live with the consequences of the ‘developmental brain damage’ that we suffered, and that could have been prevented.

That fact is what this blog is all about.

+EARLY ORIGIN OF OUR ONGOING EXPERIENCE OF SHAME AND FORGIVENESS

alchemynowLeave a comment

I can in  no way see that forgiveness is not about the patterns of rupture and repair.  Lack of the ability  or willingness to forgive must relate to there being a rupture for which there is no repair.

Every issue involving rupture and repair patterns occur in attachment relationship contexts of our self in relationship to our self, to others and to our world at large.  All of our attachment relationships are processed through our right brain’s emotional center.  This means that all our ongoing attachment relationship processes are processed through the same neuronal pathways that were built within our brains through our experiences with our early caregivers from birth to one year old.

These experiences built our social emotional brain well before we even had potential for consciousness.  They will continue to operate in exactly the way they were formed unless we later can apply conscious thought and effort to change them.

When we choose to apply ‘new and more advanced’ terminology to the basic operations of our brains, minds, nervous systems and bodies, we are taking a step toward the risk of losing touch and sight of what we are actually talking about.  It is no different to me than using any word in our language without knowing what the imaginal root of the word is as it came into our language from its beginnings.  Words get born.  They originate somewhere.  They come from somewhere.  They have a beginning.

++

++

If one pays particular attention to how an infant is attached within its world at about one year old as it moves from the world of its caregiver into the wider world of its own discovery, I suspect that we can tell about the origin of the operation of what we call ‘forgiveness’ as it operates in tandem with the origin of what we call ‘the shame reaction’ that occurs at this time.  This ‘shame’ reaction as it is described by Dr. Allan Schore happens when an infant’s nervous system, or more specifically the ‘go’ or sympathetic arm of its autonomic nervous system responds with excitement and outgoing energy as an infant moves into its wider world of discovery.

At the same time, the potential has correspondingly increased for the infant to experience a ‘crash’ or ‘stop’ as the other arm of the automic nervous system, the parasympathetic (I think of this as the pair of breaks) will kick in if the infant returns from its excited explorations to find that its caregiver does not respond back to the infant with the same level of ‘go’ excitement.  The infant will experience this clash, or rupture as a depletion of its positive state.  This ‘stop’ after ‘go’ is neurologically what we come to call the shame reaction.

There has to be the basis of a safe and secure attachment relationship between an infant and the caregiver it is returning to in order for this rupture to be repaired.  These rupture and repair processes are simply further continuations of the development and growth of already existing rupture and repair patterns that have been built through caregiver-infant interactions from birth and correspond to the infant’s right brain emotional center’s development.

If that area of the brain has already suffered from enough malevolent interactions to have been ‘mis-informed’ and thus ‘misformed’ by the time an infant is one year old, all ongoing patterns related to movements within the bigger world as they relate to patterns of ‘coming back together in safety and security’ with the primary caregivers surrounding the infant will also be affected.  This go and stop, rupture and repair patterning seems to me to directly connect our more advanced (and thus somewhat more obscure0 words of shame to forgiveness.  Even on the most profound and basic physiological level, shame reflects rupture and forgiveness reflects repair.

Because these go and stop patterns are directly related to the right brain’s emotional social center, they are both about emotions in terms of their experience through either regulation or dysregulation.  These two patterns are built into the brain from birth, as I’ve mentioned.  This means to me that what we call forgiveness directly ties into the right brain’s ability to regulate emotions.  Even though we think of forgiveness as being a conscious activity, it still has its roots in the original patterns of our right emotional brain.

++

Infant brains formed through safe and secure early attachment relationships have the advantage regarding emotional regulation in every possible way over infant brains formed in unsafe and insecure early environmental interactions with early caregivers.  The advantages of one and the disadvantages of the other are in the circuitry of the brain itself.

Caregivers need have no negative intent to cause an infant this ‘stop’ shame reaction.  It is a natural reaction an infant actually needs to experience on occasion as it learns about safety and danger in the wider world, and about how to negotiate the space of the world with other people and their needs.  But the resolution of shame through a repair of the shame reaction is essential if all is going to go well in an infant’s development.  Looking at this repair process as a reinstatement of a secure attachment relationship in the world lets us know absolutely that ‘forgiveness’ is the counterpart of ‘shame’ and lies at the basis of our attachment interrelationships.

++

I remember specifically with my middle child that once she learned to talk well, she needed to talk about things that happened in her life and in her mind long before I would have thought she had the capacity for forming memories from those experiences.  It was if she knew somehow that once she had the ability to verbalize about these early experiences that process was also necessary.  She had in fact waited for her own developmental abilities to catch up with her needs.

I wonder if it isn’t the same with shame in cases where very eary experiences are harmful and detrimental to an infant.  Their phsyiological development might not have developed to the point that they can actually experience the physical process of the stop and go within their nervous system.  Yet if those older experiences were damaging enough to a child, I suspect that they can be there waiting for the time that infant’s body is old enough to experience that shame reaction.

I say this because the process of rupture and repair, as it builds the early infant social emotional right limbic brain, has already deeply formed itself into the brain itself well before a child reaches the age of one, the age when the infant can physically move itself around in the larger world.  I believe that it is possible that if ruptures have not already been adequately met with repair early on, that even the beginnings of the physical shame and forgiveness patterns will be interfered with.

This is true because expectation, anticipation, hope  and hopelessness have already begun the foundational development of the right brain from very early on.  For example, when a tiny infant is hungry and someone responds adequately to feed it, that infant’s brain is already building hope into it as it learns within itself that in this safe and secure world it can trust that its needs will be met.  These experiences form the basis of the first thought processes as they involve the early formation of mental representations.

If harmful and inadequate experiences are the ones that operate at these crucial early stages, hopelessness, despair and even rage can fill in the cracks where these misshapen mental representations are forming.  They will already be firmly in place well before the age of one, and will influence what an infant anticipates and expects upon its return to its caregiver once it enters into the world.

This puts hope — its fulfillment or disappointment — at the pivotal point where shame and forgiveness operate from the start.  These inner relationships are physiologically formed into the body and brain of an infant, and will obviously form the foundation for all our hope, shame and forgiveness experiences we have for the rest of our lives.

++

There is no mystery here.  If we want to change the patterns that were built into our brains and bodies from the beginning we have to become conscious of how these patterns are operating within us, even though we will probably never retrieve the actual facts of the experiences we had as infants that built our inner operating systems in the first place.  First we have to recognize that these patterns exist, and directly realize that they involve our right emotional brain.

Shame normally happens for an infant when it anticipates a emotional state reaction from an attachment figure that matches the infant’s own state.  When that state is not matched the infant experiences this as a rupture that we come to know as shame.  It is an interactional experience.

Forgiveness normally happens for an infant when the mismatch between what it anticipated from the caregiver and did not get is repaired.  When a caregiver reestablishes rapport with the infant it is acting our forgiveness.  The infant actually accepts the forgiveness willingly because an infant’s natural state is to be united with or reunited with its attachment figures.

++

In looking at both shame and forgiveness in the dictionary, both have origins in the English language before the 12th century.  It is rare to find a word in what we would call modern English that came into the language earlier than that.  This means to me that both these words refer to states that have been consciously known for a long, long time.

Both words, however, reflect at their basis, at least in modern English, that they relate to conditions of the mind and states of being — as they are rooted in our human physiological body and experience of being alive in that body.  They are therefore related to mentalizing abilities and to Theory of Mind.  Both of these two operations are interfered with in cases of mental illness like my mother had, and both are also interfered with through early trauma as they become reflected in insecure attachment disorders.

This is because the true issue at stake in both the shame rupture and the forgiveness repair require the context of an attachment relationship in order to operate in the first place.  They are both physiologically rooted in our body, brain, nervous system and mind because we are members of a social species and we must form this way.  Shame reflects a breech in ongoing attachment and forgiveness repairs and heals this breech.

Early developmental experiences in a malevolent world change how these two corresponding parts of who we are form and operate.  If we suffered early abuse and trauma, without having access to adequate secure and safe attachment figures we could always depend on to mediate the damage-forming process as we formed our shame-forgiveness response system, we will experience complications throughout our lives related to these changes.

If we hope to affect healing for ourselves related to shame and forgiveness, I believe we need to understand and accept how and why we got these problems in the first place.  To do so we must consider the quality of our attachment relationships from birth so that we can begin to understand how they were already operating in our brains, nervous system and body by the time we were old enough to begin to enter the bigger, wider world on our own at about one year old.

++

Main Entry:

1shame

Pronunciation:

\ˈshām\

Function:

noun

Etymology:

Middle English, from Old English scamu; akin to Old High German scama shame

Date:

before 12th century

1 a: a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety b: the susceptibility to such emotion <have you no shame?>2: a condition of humiliating disgrace or disrepute : ignominy <the shame of being arrested>3 a: something that brings censure or reproach ; also : something to be regretted : pity <it’s a shame you can’t go> b: a cause of feeling shame

rom http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shame

++

Main Entry:

for·give

Pronunciation:

\fər-ˈgiv, fȯr-\

Function:

verb

Inflected Form(s):

for·gave \-ˈgāv\ ; for·giv·en \-ˈgi-vən\ ; for·giv·ing

Etymology:

Middle English, from Old English forgifan, from for- + gifan to give

Date:

before 12th century

transitive verb1 a: to give up resentment of or claim to requital for <forgive an insult> b: to grant relief from payment of <forgive a debt>2: to cease to feel resentment against (an offender) : pardon <forgive one’s enemies>intransitive verb: to grant forgiveness

synonyms see excuse

— for·giv·able \-ˈgi-və-bəl\ adjective

— for·giv·ably \-blē\ adverb

— for·giv·er noun

from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/forgive

++

+MAGICAL WISHFUL THINKING DOES NOT HEAL ABUSE

alchemynow2 Comments

If I try to look at myself objectively I would wonder that I refer to my mother as having been mentally ill but I do not consider myself mentally ill.  I would ask myself what criteria do I use and apply to myself that is different from the criteria I use in my thinking about my mother?

There seems to be a level of desription regarding the operation of a person’s brain-mind and nervous system that means to outsiders that mental illness is present.  With today’s advances in brain imaging techniques I believe that if our culture wanted to, we could actually see in actual brain operating pictures the distinction that I evidently make about mental illnesses within my own mind.

I can visualize my thinking about mental health and mental illness in terms of a growing tree with branches that relate to my descriptive categories.  Once a person is set off onto one of the branches related to these categories, they can never ‘jump branches’ by changing the basic origination point that leads into development along one of these branches.  What is done or happens to a person before the age of two is the determining factor and cannot be changed.

It is important to realize that there is a fifth branch that I can visualize on this tree.  It is actually the one that grows straight up to the sky without deviation or interruption.  It relates to people who are optimally designed and who were raised from conception in a ‘good enough’ optimal caregiving environment.  These people’s bodies and brains were not forced to change their development in adaptation to malevolency within the world.  I only talk about these securely attached individuals in this writing as comparison points for how the rest of us ended up having to develop in one of these other four directions.

In the process of my own writing I have determined that there are four main levels leading to four different branches of this imaginary tree.   They result from brain-mind-body changes that lead, in my thinking, off in one of these differing directions.  Each of these categories, or types of mental illness that I recognize stem from altered brain development.   I can understand that some mental illness occurs strictly through extreme genetic combinations that existed from conception and would have manifested as mental illness no matter how well a person had been cared from during their early lives.  I include within this category serious changes that occur prior to birth or at birth through severe traumas to the fetus or infant that can also completely change the way a person develops.  Obviously and fortunately I don’t fit this category and did not have to develop along the lines of this branch.

Now I will describe other three categories that do apply to my life personally.  I also believe that in the future medical experts, including those working in the mental health fields, will recognize the accuracy of what I understand about these categories.  At this point in time I believe that an understanding of which branch we grew into, which one our parents grew into, which ones our siblings grew into, etc. will help us determine what realistic changes for the better we can expect in our lives.

My personal understanding is that for any one of us that grew and developed in some form of a malevolent world during our early years were forced to adapt in some way that has placed us on one of these four ‘deviating’ limbs.  We therefore experience some form of very real disability in comparison to the securely attached who grew up without severe harmful influence and who were not forced to adapt to a harmful environment.

The other three branches I am going to describe all entail the presence of some form of insecure attachment disorder.  I agree with Dr. Allan Schore that every insecure attachment pattern results in some form of an empathy disorder.  The toxic, malevolent, unsafe and insecure experiences we had as we developed created the breach in our ability to form secure attachments in the first place.  Changes an individual was forced to make physiologically in our bodies and brains as we adapted in our development is what sends us off into one of these other three branch directions.

If we are of the luckier ones, we ONLY had to develop an insecure attachment.  These manifest as what experts call dismissive-avoidant or ambivalent-preoccupied insecure attachment patterns.  The FACT is that these patterns are built into the operation of the body, brain, mind and nervous system of the individual who has them.

These people have been forced to develop along an alternative branch of the tree, but do not usually end up with what we, as a society, would term a mental illness.  They will, however, experience life differently than a securely attached person will, and are at risk for all kinds of ‘social’ disabilities due to the fact that their early forming social emotional brain development has been effected.  They are ‘wired’ for insecure attachments.

It is here in my description of the next two branches of the tree that I deviate from the commonly accepted ideas about mental illness.  Early development within an environment of severe trauma so often leads in the direction of the development of some form of ‘mental illness’ that it would be the rare, rare event to find an exception where this does not happen.  Current thinking on ‘mental illness’ would therefore demand that we accept what I describe as two separate branches as being only one single large branch.  Along this single branch are placed all currently used mental illness diagnostic categories.

As we become very clear regarding the facts, we will know that what creates this branch in the first place is exposure to severe traumas during early development in an environment that does not contain enough available resources to prevent serious adjustments within the infant and young child from having to be made.  Once we leave our magical wishful thinking behind about the causes of so-called mental illnesses, we will see that disorganized and disoriented insecure attachment from birth (or before) create the deviation point from which what see as two separate branches originate.

I am forced to use currently accepted thinking and terminology to describe what happens from that origination point on our visualized tree. But I believe that the two branches result from very different and distinct adaptations to trauma and into some version of what we currently consider to be mental illness.   While we might magically wish that these two branches are the same, I do not believe that they are.

In my own world of ‘fact’, I know these branches are different from my own experience.  My mother was forced to grow along one of these two branches while I was forced to grow along the other one.  While personal knowledge is not the stuff science is based on, it can still inform our individual and collective thinking.  Larger changes may well come from the bottom-up, grass root, experience based real world knowledge that those of us who have experienced and survived severe abuse from birth have within us.  It is from this base that I describe the differences that exist between these last two branches as they originated from adaptations within early malevolent environments.

++

Do not get me wrong here.  Any consideration of mental illness, either as it might currently be accepted as occurring on one single branch, or as might exist in two separate categories on two separate branches, still means that a person’s brain, mind and body has been devastatingly altered during early development.  The distinction matters to me because it influences the ability to live with the resulting dis-order and helps our efforts to heal be more effective.

Of all the varying cultural and religious belief structures that exist on our planet, I am going to pick only one to illustrate my point here.  In fact, I am only going to pick one sentence from one of these belief structures.  I encourage anyone who cannot relate to this one sentence because of its origins to please find a related, similar thought within your own belief structure that will allow you to understand what I am trying to say here.

This one sentence is, I believe, a statement about our species’ condition that can be understood through any spiritual belief system, certainly not only from a Christian point of view.  It belongs to the final “Last Seven Words” that Jesus Christ uttered from the cross of crucifixion.

Father forgive them, for they know not what they do (Luke 23:34).

SEE:

http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:c93sR4hE5jMJ:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayings_of_Jesus_on_the_cross+forgive+them+father+for+they+know&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

http://bibref.hebtools.com/?book=%20Luke&verse=23:34&src=!

I cannot personally find it within myself to argue with these few simple words.  Nor can I really understand what they mean.  All I know is that situations exist between people on this planet that often come back to this fundamental concept of forgiveness.

I will never argue about religion, nor will I ever defend my own beliefs whatever they might be (and many might say they are eclectic).  But I will say that every time the topic of forgiveness arises in relation to my experience of 18 years of nearly constant, terrible insane abuse heaped upon me by my mother, my thoughts always return to the above 10 words.  By doing I pass the issue of forgiveness on up the ladder in an understanding that it originates from and in my case belongs to Powers much greater than me.

++

I introduce the concept of forgiveness here before I describe the two branches of mental illness because believe forgiveness is ultimately about accountability and responsibility.  One of the two branches I do hold both accountable and responsible for their actions and the other I do not.  I belong to the first branch while I believe my mother belongs to the second.

As I have already mentioned in other posts I am ‘diagnosed’, through the current existing mental health system’s structure, as ‘having’ posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety disorder including severe recurring depression, and dissociative disorder.  Within a more enlightened system I would also be described as ‘having’ a severe disoriented-disorganized insecure attachment disorder, if not an adult version of the childhood version of Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD).  In the MOST enlightened system I would be considered to have logical physiological changes caused by adaptations that had to be made in order for me to survive in a devastatingly hostile world.

My mother was never formally recognized by anyone as having severe mental illness, so any attempt to ‘diagnose’ her happens in retrospect as a ‘best guess’.  She appears obviously to have suffered from a psychotic break,  from serious Borderline Personality Disorder, and probably had some Bi-Polar characteristics, as well.

What do I see as the main difference between the two of us, and why would I describe myself as being on one branch of mental illness and place her on an entirely different one?  What do I use as the final determining factor for the difference between us?

Returning to the originating point of both of these two branches in their common source of developmental adaptation to a malevolent early environment, and to my description of disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder, I can say that both of us have the same roots to our mental illnesses in the same kind of brain operation:  DISSOCIATION.

The distinction I make between the two branches and the mental illnesses that are found on each one, is that in some forms of mental illness such a dissociative break occurred during their development that the survivor has had the ability to connect to their self removed.

Continued survival necessitated that this break occur to prevent the overwhelming nature of their exposure to trauma, as experienced by a self in connection to a mind overcome by that trauma, to continue their lives hopefully without destroying their bodies.  As we know, this break is not a guarantee to continued life in a physical body because some still succumb to self destruction.

This fundamental dissociative break between the experience of ongoing life and the self results in brain and body changes that protect life itself at the same time the more advanced and developed abilities to experience consciousness are interfered with.  As a consequence these people lack real self reflective abilities, do not appear with what all the rest of us would consider a conscience, and have had the exercise of free will and choice based on self consciousness removed from them.  Theirs is a different, and often dangerous, version of reality.

++

Those of us that do not have the genetic potential to take this detour during our developments that results in a single, profound and fundamental dissociative break in our connection to self — the operation of self and a connection to self being the result a very real (and visible through advanced brain imaging techniques) physiological brain operation — develop along what I see as the other branch.

Both branches, again, involve dissociational patterns as they occur in the brain’s function.  Those of us that I would place on this branch I see myself on as different from the one I see my mother as being on, have NOT suffered a fundamental break that prevents us from having access to our self.  Having some access to our self is still in the operational loops within our brains (most of the time) while theirs is not ALL of the time.

What do I mean by ‘most of the time’?  It is the nature of dissociation when and as it occurs to create some kind of breach between the ongoing experience of being alive in a body and the self.  For some, I believe, the dissociative breach happened once and for all and can only be said to be ‘a pattern of one’.

For the rest of us, dissociation can happen thousands and thousands of times throughout our life time, caused by exposure to a million trauma triggers.  In between these triggered reactions those of us on this different branch can access some version of a connection to some version of our self while the others cannot.

A very graphic, though not disgustingly bloody, image just popped into my awareness as I finished writing my last sentence.  I see those on the one branch where I would place my mother as having a head completely severed from their body.  This head hovers closely above the body and follows where it goes but there is no connection between the two.  Those of us on the other branch have a head that is partially severed by that is connected through the equivalent of vital main arteries and nerves.  Strange image, I know…..

If I go outside to start my car and find the battery is dead, it does me no good at all to forgive my car’s battery for failing me and for making my life more difficult.  I think about my own abuse history and my mother in the same kind of factual way I would think about a dead battery.  No amount of magical wishful thinking involving denial or forgiveness is going to get my car started.  Neither do I see that it applies to my thinking about my mother.  If an individual is forced through conditions of early trauma to severe their connection to self they are just as cut off from their power source of consciousness as my car would be from the power of a working battery.

++++++++++

By thinking in terms of this tree, and by identifying how a person ends up on one branch or another, we can begin to separate out what really is the magical wishful thinking process of denial from the more helpful process of learning new facts about how our brains develop.  Brains CAN and DO develop in such a way that the more advanced abilities related to having a self and an operational connection to this self are left out of the picture.

It might seem like an odd assessment to make, but I consider that the term and topic of ‘forgiveness’ is often tangled up with magical wishful thinking that is actually a denial of the facts regarding the risks and consequences of severe maltreatment as it affects human development.

I have no desire to protect my mother, excuse or justify her horribly abusive behavior toward me.  I equally have no desire to forgive her.  I see both my mother and her behavior in the light of fact, not magical wishful thinking that leads to denial.  I think we have to be very careful in our thinking about forgiveness because of the risk we take in involving forgiveness with our denial of the very real physiological causes and consequences of severe maltreatment during early brain formation stages.

As long as we keep forgiveness tangled up with our denial of the facts, we will never truly find ways to heal the very real damage done to our perpetrators, to ourselves and being done to others on an ongoing basis.  If we continue to apply magical wishful thinking to the real conditions of our existence, we will be at the same time also denying that we have a very REAL problem that has very REAL solutions — a problem caused by factual conditions that we can factually address, heal and resolve.

++

This is, to me, simply a helpful clarification process.  It is a form of inventory taking that can help us identify both our possession of specific resources and our lack of resources.

I aim for realistic rather than wishful thinking.  As children, we all moved through a Theory of Mind developmental stage during which we processed, incorporated, and integrated outsiders’ thinking into our own brain-mind.  It can feel uncomfortable to have our final thinking structure ‘threatened’ by the introduction of thoughts that do not seem to match the Theory of Mind that we came up with.

Our individual and collective cultural Theory of Mind is always open to learning, growth and change if we are flexible and wise enough to let this happen.  This growth requires of all of us that we allow new information to enter our thinking process, and as we do so we change who and how we are in the world. I see this as nothing more than a ‘reality checking’ process that allows us to continue to move past the childhood stage of ‘magical wishful thinking’ in some new way every day of our lives.

I believe that as we do this ‘work’ we can — individually and collectively –push ourselves further and further away from the EVENT HORIZON of trauma and the effects traumas have upon us throughout our adult lives.  The literal meaning of an event horizon has to do with what happens near a Black Hole in space.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_horizon

we read:  “In general relativity, an event horizon is a boundary in spacetime, most often an area surrounding a black hole, beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer. Light emitted from beyond the horizon can never reach the observer, and anything that passes through the horizon from the observer’s side appears to freeze in place, with its image becoming more redshifted as time proceeds.”

I believe that this image applies to our work related to healing trauma.  I believe that degrees of childhood magical wishful thinking that remain within our individual and collective Theory of Mind constructions put us at increasing risk for being sucked into the hole trauma can create in the fabric of a good life filled with well being.  The good news is that we can always learn more about what is real in the world, and each time we do learning, we are replacing an immature magical wishful thought with some new fact.  Facts are based in the real world as best we can understand it.  Continuing to grow our Theory of Mind as it informs our actions is what I think healing is all about.

++

How do we know what magical wishful thinking is?  I see the image of my son when he was three to four years old as he ‘plays’ with my well used tall metal kitchen stool laid down on the floor.  His favorite ‘game’ for many moths was to sit on the floor inside it with his legs straight out in front of him between the stool’s supporting cross pieces.  His hands were constantly moving around the top round seat piece ‘as if’ it were a space ship’s steering mechanism he had to use to maneuver himself through all of his ‘imaginary’ spaceship adventures.

When adults see young children engaged in this kind of ‘play’ we know that what is happening within the child’s mind is very different than what is happening inside our own as we watch.  If we try to tell the child that their world is ‘not real’ they will look at us blankly, walk away and do something else because we have ruined their experience, or simply ignore us and go on with their game.  We cannot, at this stage of their development, actually change the way their mind is perceiving their world, though how we interact with them does influence the growth process they are involved in.

The fact that the old metal kitchen stool was not a spaceship meant absolutely nothing to my son.  In fact, my true concern eventually had nothing to do with his mental state.  I became, as the months went by and his body continued to grow larger, became worried about his body.  And I was right to worry.  There DID come a day when he wedged himself so tightly into position within the legs and cross pieces of that stool that he couldn’t get out.  I couldn’t get him out, either.

He started screaming in panic and terror.  It would not have been helpful for me to become involved in my son’s magical thinking world, even if I could have.  I needed to be in the real world of fact so I could effect a solution to this very real problem.  I left his older sister beside him on the floor while I ran for the apartment manager to help us.  It was only through a process of him using a crow bar and force to bend the legs of the stool that we were able to extricate my son from in between the steel pieces.  Obviously, that ‘game’ was over.

It had not mattered before that time what I said to my son regarding my concerns.  He had to really learn the facts by getting himself so stuck within the stool that he needed serious help to get out that he was forced to finally leave behind his much loved child’s game.  Before that time arrived he was not only perfectly capable of retaining his state of magical wishful thinking, but self determined to do so.

++

How, when, where and to what degree were we able to pass through our own Theory of Mind developmental stages so that we left some part of our magical wishful thinking behind us?  How willing are we to continue in our adulthood to exercise our brain’s infinite abilities to learn, grow and change?

Nobody is going to magically appear and sweep us away from the dangers of the event horizon of ongoing effects from trauma, no matter how much we might wish that they would do so.  This is something that we all must do together.  Learning the actual facts about how trauma changed our bodies and our brain-minds during development in malevolent conditions can lead us to new facts, and is it not the truth what will actually set us free?

As long as we continue to keep magical wishful thinking a part of our Theory of Mind related to the causes and consequences of severe early abuse during developmental stages, we are NOT going to find the very real facts we need in order to prevent this disaster from occurring in the first place, or to find realistic hopes for healing once it has occurred.

+TRAUMA DRAMAS ARE A BRAIN’S REPEATED ATTEMPTS TO COMMUNCIATE

alchemynowLeave a comment

In my reply to the comment on yesterday’s post I described why I do not believe that my mother had the ability to distinguish right from wrong.

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/2009/05/17/dissociation-and-my-version-of-an-utopian-world/#comments

In my reply I referred to my mother’s childhood stories because I believe they include her own description of the break that happened within her own mind and the point where she became not only lost to herself but also lost her ability to connect with the ‘reality’ that most others remain in contact with throughout their lives.

My Mother’s Childhood Stories
++

I believe that one of the clearest indicators that unresolved trauma from childhood continues to exist in a person can be found by looking at the ‘trauma dramas’ that  repeat themselves in adulthood.  This happens because the nature of unresolved trauma is that it cannot be integrated into the body-brain of a person who has been overwhelmed by it.

John J. Ratey, who authored the book “A User’s Guide To the Brain:  Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain”

(Vintage Books, 2002 —

http://www.amazon.com/Users-Guide-Brain-Perception-Attention/dp/0375701079/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242667313&sr=1-1)

wrote the following:

“The confusing terminology that neuroscience applies to the brain and its functions will itself eventually need to change – and it will as our understanding of the brain deepens.  Scientists looking at pathology are still caught up in the unitary hunt for the broken neural component they imagine to be at fault, and are doing their best to match up specific brain functions with specific neurogeographical locations.  The sooner we replace our mechanistic model of the brain with an ecologically centered, systems-based view, the better off we will be, for such a model better accounts for much of human experience.  (Ratey, p.4)”

“…the brain is largely composed of maps, arrays of neurons that apparently represent entire objects of perception or cognition, or at least entire sensory or cognitive qualities of those objects, such as color, texture, credibility, or speed.  Most cognitive functions involve the interaction of maps from many different part [sic] of the brain at once…  The brain assembles perceptions by the simultaneous interaction of whole concepts, whole images….the brain is an analog processor, meaning, essentially, that it works by analogy and metaphor.  It relates whole concepts to one another and looks for similarities, differences, or relationships between them [bolding is mine].  It does not assemble thoughts and feelings from bits of data.  (Ratey, p.5)”

“Although metaphor and analogy are unconventional in scientific circles, I am firmly convinced that a more nonlinear kind of thought will eventually supplant much of the logical reasoning we use today [bolding is mine].  Chris Langton, one of the primary researchers in the field of complexity theory, has speculated that in the future science will become more poetic…..real trust, when emotions are running high, is based on analogy, not calculation.  (Ratey, p.5)”

++

I firmly believe in the truth of what Ratey is saying, and I also believe that as we move further ahead in the development of our understanding about how the brain actually works — in contrast to how we assume it works — we will know more about what the experience of mental illness actually is for people who have it.  We will also know more about what creates the experience of severe child abuse for the offspring of people with mental illness such as my mother had.

As I prepare myself to write +What I Suspect of My Mother’s Early Childhood (Please read this page, it is important!), I also think about another very important piece necessary to the understanding of my mother’s abuse of me.  Please follow this link to one of the important writings of Dr. Stephen B. Karpman titled, “Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis.”

http://www.itaa-net.org/tajnet/articles/karpman01.html

++

Having the ability to use language means that we can assign words to bits and pieces of our experiences.  It is a commonly recognized fact that one of the symptoms of PTSD and unresolved trauma is that the language centers of the brain cannot actively participate in the integration process through verbal articulation of the traumatic experience.  I believe that leaves the right brain’s ability to process information in wordless images responsible for attempting to heal the traumas.  It does so most actively through reenactment.

Communication through bodily movements is a far, far older means of expression than words or even hand signals are, and directly links to the emotional brain through activation of the amygdala brain region.  SEE:

Bonda et al, 1996

Montreal, Canada) eva bonda, Michael petrides, david ostry and alan evans  “Specific involvement of human parietal systems and the amygdala in the perception of biological motion”  in The Journal of Neuroscience, june 1, 1996, 16(11), 3737-3744 http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/reprint/16/11/3737

++

I believe that the ‘cognitive map’ interactions that Ratey talks about become disturbed as a result of overwhelming trauma.  This matters MOST when we are talking about severe early chronic child abuse and maltreatment because the child is building its brain during these experiences that will establish what these maps are and how the brain will process information contained in the maps for the rest of their lives.  As my mother’s childhood stories indicate, she wrote these stories as her brain was actively trying to form a working Theory of Mind, SEE Google search:

http://www.google.com/search?q=theory+of+mind+development&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3RNFA_enUS270US307

Because the traumas of her early life had overwhelmed her abilities to resolve them, she was forever left in this unresolved state with her right brain’s dramatic, metaphoric processes trying to resolve these traumas by itself without the assistance of the left brain or higher cortical thinking.  This, to me, reflects the overriding purpose of repeated trauma dramas in adulthood.  The person is acting out and communicating with the BODY what the mind does not have the ability to process within itself.

This is why I believe Karpman’s writings are so critically important in our attempts to understand what our abusive childhood experiences were linked to.  While we might rather believe that some cut-and-dried scientific explanation will eventually appear that will allow us to place our experiences of trauma and abuse in some clinically sterile container, all sealed off and logically explained away, I do not believe such a solution will ever be possible to attain.

Life can be extremely messy, especially when unresolved traumas have to repeat themselves through trauma dramas that nobody, either inside the situation or outside of it, seem to be able to understand.  This is why I do not believe that forgiveness has anything to do with healing from the 18 years of severe abuse I suffered from under my mother.  She was simply a very big, very mean, dangerous psychotic body trying to actively resolve her experiences of early trauma through the communicative actions of the trauma drama that was her life.

We expect play among children to be their age appropriate means of coming to terms with their lives.  Yet we do not realize that when a brain-mind is forced in childhood through malevolent interactions with early environments to take a detour in its development, as adults we still continue to play in a similar way.  Where is that magic line where acting something out in childhood becomes dangerous in adulthood?  I don’t think we know exactly where that line really is, do we?  When does this tendency of the human being to act out dramas become a deadly serious game, where playing for keeps means disaster and the cost is the lack of well being for human lives?

That is why a childhood such as mine was seems like a nightmare and is as illogical and unreasonable as dreams can be.  In either case the brain is trying to process information through a left brain-right brain integration effort.  In situations where a child’s ability to process trauma is overwhelmed, there is nothing they can do the rest of their lives to resolve it.  THAT is only one part of the tragedy.

Other parts of the tragedy include the facts that we do not necessarily recognize when such traumas are overwhelming a young child, we do not actively intervene or prevent these traumas from occurring, and we sure do not make adequate and appropriate therapy available universally to those who suffered from these overwhelming traumas in the first place.

++

Any time I see repeating patterns indicating a lack of well being in an adult’s life, my own included, I can now easily see the trauma drama actions of the right brain trying to resolve traumas through action of the body.  Those of us caught in these repeating trauma reenactment cycles never learned that life could be about anything other than suffering in an unsafe and insecure world.  We were never told that we would act out in our lifetime the traumas that were impossible for our brains to process and integrate in any other way, including through the natural process of sleep and dreaming.  It doesn’t take long for the very real consequences of our actual choices and actions in the real world to so encapsulate us in our lives that we have little or no hope of escape.

This is so far past judgment that I cannot even see that it applies.  If we ever encounter someone with a severed artery we don’t stop and first ponder how this accident happened before we offer life saving assistance.  Yet when it comes to recognizing repeated trauma dramas in our own and in one another’s lives we are rapidly coming to a point when these dramas are occurring so often among us that we think they are normal. This, to me, is creating a nearly overwhelming burden for those who were and are safely and securely attached in the world.  Who else is there to show us there is a different and a better way to live other than bleeding to death?

The further we wander away from our meaningful and adequate social attachment relationships with one another as members of a social species, the more at risk we become for suffering from isolation loneliness, depression, addictions, harmful conspicuous consumption, obesity and all manner of neglect of our offspring, ourselves and our environment.  We are more and more often spending our lives in a state of lack of well being trying desperately to repair what was never built right in the first place.

People such as my mother was are like the warning canaries the miners used to assess the safety of their working environments.  The demise of my mother’s mind happened because nobody was paying attention.  My own suffering in my childhood happened for the same reason.  The environment of trauma that both of us grew up in happened because we were cut off from life saving assistance from others of our species.  Isolation breeds dis-ease in a social species.

And because we are members of a social species we are innately destined to attempt to communicate within ourselves and to others the state of our reality.  Trauma drama reenactments, as unconscious attempts to communicate the reality of malevolent experience both within our own brain and to others of our species, are seldom heard and seldom understood.  The nature of the traumas simply keep passing themselves down the generations until someone at some time listens to these communications, GETS IT and offers the life saving means to resolving the traumas so that they can finally STOP repeating themselves.

++

Repeated trauma dramas always indicate not only that a lack of safety and security existed in the first place, but that this same condition continues to exist in the present.  They tell us about our insecure attachments within the world we live in.

+DISSOCIATION AND MY VERSION OF THIS UTOPIAN WORLD

alchemynow2 Comments

Every one of us begins life as a unique individual.  Through our early interactions with our caregiving environment we “come down into the world” as James Hillman describes in his book “The Soul’s Code.”

http://www.amazon.com/Souls-Code-Search-Character-Calling/dp/0446673714/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242590259&sr=1-1

I believe that if an infant’s caregiving interactions are of a malevolent kind, an individual’s ability to grown down into the world is interfered with.  This interference will be reflected in the changes the body and brain are forced to make in adjustment to a malevolent world.  Of all the consequences that originate through these adjustments, the one I want to write about today has to do with integration.

++

A person learns from infancy how to integrate their self within their environment.  This all happens through the ‘rupture and repair’ patterns that are established within an infant’s body, nervous system and brain through its interactions with its first caregivers.  Because I believe that hope is an innate hard-wired physiological ability available to us from birth, the potential for a lack of hope resulting in hopeless despair and disappointment also exists within us from birth.

If an infant’s early caregiver interactions are adequate and appropriate, hope thus becomes intertwined with this ‘coming down into the world’, or coming to live in a body in this world.  If an infant’s experiences result from inadequate and inappropriate early caregiver experiences, hopeless despair and disappointment will grow into an infant’s body as this body grows into the world.

In cases such as mine, when the pattern of early caregiver interactions occurs within the context of severe mental illness, not only will the inadequate and inappropriate nature of the infant’s experiences change the way it grows on all levels, but there will be introduced an additional, complicating factor — the insanity of the mental illness itself.

Mental illness is a manifestation of brain operations that are occurring outside the range of ‘normal’.  The ability to use the brain as it has evolved to operate in ‘best case’ scenarios has been removed and has been replaced with alternative operational patterns — most usually in response to its early formational environment of deprivation and malevolence.  In these cases REASON no longer operates correctly.  Someone whose brain operates like my mother’s did will not have the ability to think reasonably on any level.  They therefore live in a world of their own creation, a reality that is entirely processed through a brain that has not formed to operate correctly.

++

I can only speak for myself about how my reality formed through my interactions with my mother from birth.  There was no possibility of my being able to discern reasonable patterns of cause and effect as my brain developed.  It is only because of the many resiliency factors that also influenced me in childhood (see previous post on resiliency) that I managed to form a brain that has a reasonable sense of cause and effect built into it.  One of the most important resiliency factors that I have to consider is that I evidently did not have the same kind of mental illness genetic combinations available to me to use in order to survive the overwhelming pain of my own childhood that my mother had.

My mother’s irrational control over my developing mind was, however, nearly as pervasive as it was chronic.  She shared in common all of the techniques used by the Chinese in the early 50s to control the minds of prisoners — and she did this to me from birth until I left home at 18.  As a result I will never be able to fully gain control of my own mind away from her brain and mind forming influence.  She made sure that her irrationality became a part of me and she was supremely successful.

But she could never actually control ME, the me that I was from conception, the me that did the interacting with her from the start of my ‘growing down into the world’.  Unfortunately that ME was prevented from integrating properly into a body in this world.  She filled so much of the space and time that should have been MINE that there was precious little left over during that 18 years for me to have experiences that were not in some way influenced by her and her mental illness.

++

I write about this today in order to point out a single important aspect of how my early patterns shaped how I am in the world today.  Because my mother constantly pointed out to me through her actions and through her words that I was evil, not human, the devil’s child and BAD, I grew up absolutely believing her.  Through this process the ME that endured these experiences evidently learned that all of the world outside of my influence must be a perfect place.

That fact made logical, reasonable sense in my growing mind.  If Linda was so bad that anyone involved with me had to suffer as from a ‘curse’, then anyone whose life I did not touch must have a perfect life.

I call this today my “Utopian Complex’, and there will evidently never be a logical, rational or reasonable way that I can alter this fundamental belief that I have about myself in relationship to the world outside of my sphere of ‘influence’.  As a result, I still fundamentally believe that the world ‘out there’ is a perfect place and if it isn’t, it sure should be.  In my logically illogical mind, there is absolutely no excuse for the world not to be perfect outside the range of my own personal influence.

This, to me, is an example of how having a brain formed under the conditions presented by my mentally ill mother’s brain-mind gave me a version of what infant brain development specialists call the infant’s ‘unsolvable paradox’.  These researchers know that severely maltreated infants know on a profound level that they have to ‘go on being’ in a world that is so dangerous that possibility is not possible.

This is the consequence of a brain-mind-body that is overwhelmed by traumas outside the possibility of addressing through any known coping ability an infant has.  The paradox is formed deeply within the brain-mind simply by the fact that the infant (myself included) DID survive what was impossible to survive.

++

Because I was told from the moment I was born that I caused nothing but trouble and was the cause of all the troubles in my family, and that their world would be perfect if I wasn’t in it, I simply applied logic in an incremental fashion to include my relationship with the entire world outside of myself.  I understand today that my version of building the unsolvable paradox into my being as I grew down into my body and into the world is certainly not the worst that I could have done.

But it only happened THIS way because of the consistent and pervasive psychosis my mother suffered from in relation to me from my first breath.  Infant’s crave consistency and I have to say my mother certainly provided me with that!  My understanding of cause and effect did not grow to apply to me on an ongoing personal level, but was rather accomplished on the level of the grand scheme of ‘Linda versus the world’.

This world was of course represented by my mother as my brain-mind formed, and because she formed her own brain-mind so completely into my developing one, and because I cannot extricate her from my brain-mind, I am simply left with the understanding that the world has no reason to be less than perfect if I haven’t personally done something to harm it.

I doubt that I can communicate to you that this ‘reality’ is not a ‘maybe’ to me.  In the essence of my relationship to being in this world at all, it is fact.

++

Of course the other side of this double-edged sword, the other part of this paradox that formed itself into me is that it is a bad thing that I am in the world at all, and especially that it is hopeless for Linda to have a good life because Linda is in it.  Talk about a no-win predicament!  I cannot both live a life and not be in it at the same time!  This is, to me, the end result of being so told I was bad and that chance of becoming good was so hopeless and impossible, that I simply excluded myself from my own life.

This may be a difficult thought to follow because it is NOT based on reasonable logic as a ‘normal’ brain would understand it.  But I suspect that dissociation within my brain is directly connected to having been forced to live a life for 18 years from birth without ME being allowed to be in it.  Each separate experience of my childhood simply happened, but I had no ongoing sense that I was a part of those experiences or any ongoing sense that they happened to me.

It was similar to “If a tree falls in a forest and there’s nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound?”  And if the answer to that question is “No” once, then it is always so.  From the first time I dissociated myself from the ongoing experiences of the traumas that were my childhood I was being forced to live a life without ME in it.  If it happens once or happens a million times, the result are the same:  A disconnection from a meaningful fluid ongoing experience of being alive in a body in the world.

++

I know I experience what attachment experts call a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder.  This kind of attachment disorder, I believe, has dissociation so built into it that the person’s ongoing life cannot be separated from it — ever.  It results from ongoing experiences from birth that were not based on logical, rational cause and effect processes and through an absence of adequately resolved patterns of rupture and repair.

In my case true hope  ‘floated’ so far away from my own personal experience of life that it ‘landed’ at the unreachable interface of where I can imagine the ‘world’ as being separate from myself.  Every infant grows into its brain a conception of where its boundaries are, of what lies on its own insides compared to what lies on its outsides.  If the early interactions an infant has as it forms these mental boundaries are based on irrationality, the boundaries themselves will not form normally.

In a normal brain, all ongoing experiences are connected together to form a ‘coherent life story’ with the person being the one living the life.  I can only artificially construct my own life story from the millions of disconnected pieces that lie alone, separated and isolated, somewhere in my memory.  And yet this fact is just one of the small pieces that I believe reflects the kind of damage that results from severe early malevolent abuse.

I will never know if someone’s intervention on my behalf, that could have resulted at least in a different pathway for me through the rest of my childhood, would have left me with less devastating damage.  I believe that it would have.   Removal would have prevented my mother from being able to consistently build her ‘case’ against me (and into my own brain-mind) over the many, many years she had control over me.   I was not given the opportunity to experience myself outside the reach of her terribly distorted mind.

+OUR DISTURBED NATURAL INTERNAL OPIOID (OPIATE) SYSTEM

alchemynow2 Comments

Could it be this simple, that for all the complexities about being human our lives really boil down to this process:  Rupture with repair or rupture without repair, with hope for repair being fulfilled or hope for repair being disappointed?

I believe we are biologically designed even before our birth for the experience of hope.  If we believe that a state of calmness related to having all of our needs met is our most normal state, it becomes true that any disruption of this ‘perfect’ state represents a rupture and indicates a need has arisen and a repair must be made.

This entire system is moderated from before our birth by our own endogenous opioid system.  Yes, opioid as related to our own natural opiate producing system complete with all the receptors that are designed to receive our natural opioids (endogenous opioid peptides, produced naturally in the body, such as endorphins, enkephalins, dynorphins, and endomorphins).

Endogenous opioids are in the placenta and in mother’s milk.  Opioid receptors govern a newborn’s interactions with the world.  If its opioid receptors are all filled up the infant is calm and content.  If a need arises in its body this need is reflected in the emptying of the infant’s opioid receptors and it is then disturbed and not calm.  The infant has experienced a ‘rupture’ in need of ‘repair’, and I believe it is a biological mandate that implicates a physiological response to need in the form of hope for fulfillment.

A mother is physiologically designed to have her opioid receptors filled by bonding to and caring for her newborn.  As she responds to her needy infant’s needs, the infant’s opioid receptors are filled back up and the mother’s are affected positively, also.

Hence in my thinking our own feel good opioid system is at the basis of attachment from start to finish.  Yet because we are a complex species we often deviate from what is best for us and find all kinds of ways to interfere with our natural abilities to feel good simply through safe and secure attachments patterns with one another as members of a social species.

The more disturbed our natural feel good-feel bad processes were in the beginning, the more our development as infants was reflected in the adjustments our bodies and brains had to make in order to survive in a malevolent rather than a benevolent world.  Our hopes of repair after rupture were not met satisfactorily and we are left with an internal opioid system that has been forced to go awry.

++

I believe that because we are a social species our first line of repair is naturally meant to happen through attachment to one another.  This fact is reflected in the processes our early brain development goes through as it forms the right limbic emotional brain in interaction with the experiences an infant has with its early caregivers.  All the good natural opioid interactional experiences build a good brain designed for life in a good world where hopes are fulfilled through these caring interactions.  Bad opioid interactions build a different brain designed to operate in a world that is not a friendly one.  A brain built through inadequate and toxic relational interactions will have a different pattern based on the disappointment of hope rather than on its fulfillment.

These early opioid experiences of fulfillment or un-fulfillment directly feed information not only to the developing brain, but also to the entire body as it also designs and builds its nervous system, its immune system, and the operation of its genetic expression machinery to match the world the infant is forming in.  It is on this level that I talk about early attachment experiences and the fostering of either hope based on appropriate and adequate endogenous opioid receptor interactions — forming safe and secure attachments — or about the opposite experiences that form the insecure attachment patterns.

++

If you search this blog for ’emotional brain’ and for ‘opioid system’ you will access research about these processes.  You can also search your own body to find your personal pivot point in relationship to hope and disappointment.  Every time we suffer from some version of a rupture in our ongoing state of well being we will automatically have some degree of hope arise in relationship to this disruption.  If the opposite of hope is what built our bodies and brains, we will feel the pain of disappointment more often than will someone who was raised in a secure attachment environment.

Our sense of ourselves in our bodies reflect the point on the hopeful – hopeless continuum our self originated from.  Our interactional experiences with our early caregivers regarding the natural life processes of rupture and repair told us both how to develop and how the world we were developing into would treat us.  It is because all these processes are rooted in our endogenous opioid system that we feel mostly good or mostly bad during our lifespan.

I believe that everything we ever try to do during our lifetimes to make ourselves feel better is a reflection of how our bodies interpreted life in this world from the beginning.  If people did not meet our needs, did not repair the natural ruptures caused by our being alive here in the first place, we were forced to survive on our own.  We did not develop an optimal right limbic emotional SOCIAL brain geared to a safe and secure world with caring people in it.

To the degree that our natural attachment patterns to and within our species were interfered with, we look outside of the human relationship circle to get our needs met.  What we suffer from are degrees of isolation from our species that created and continues to create in us an ‘endogenous opioid hole’ that can never be satisfactorily filled.  Recognizing the reality of our degrees of isolation contributes to our ability to become conscious of what we feel, why we feel it, and what better ways we can try to fill our opioid hole.

++

A lack of secure attachment within our species creates an isolation that we experience as an almost overwhelming sadness.  All future adjustments we are forced to make by a disturbed endogenous opioid interaction pattern — including mental illness — is an attempt to survive in spite of our pain.

+IS MENTAL ILLNESS THE COST OF OUR SPECIES’ GREATEST GIFTS?

alchemynowLeave a comment

Why has our species retained the potential genetic combinations that result in mental illness?

We need to realize that the cost of the development of our greatest gifts as a species are being paid by those who carry the genetic combinations that put them at risk of developing serious ‘mental illness’ conditions.  These people are forced to suffer at the opposite end of the spectrum and continuum of giftedness because many of our greatest human gifts are actually related to signals related to ‘conspicuous consumption’.  We have our gifts because we can afford to pay for them, and the gifts themselves are reproductive fitness indicators that act as signals of our ability to handle the cost of keeping them.

This brings to mind the current financial complications our culture is experiencing related to an imbalance in conspicuous consumption practices.  In order for this process to operate in a good fashion, what is being consumed and displayed has to be paid for.

From a human point of view, the existence of the pyramids, the Vatican, Versailles, the Parthenon, and even the great wall of China are all manifestations of conspicuous consumption indicators.  Someone could afford the cost and paid for them.

On a more mundane level, I can imagine conspicuous consumption being like a peacock’s feathers if I think about someone going to a store, picking an isle and buying everything in that isle whether they needed the goods or not.  If they take them all home and dump them in a pile in their yard so the neighbors would drive by and think, “My oh my that person must be rich!  All those goods in their front yard indicate that they are.”  We do that in our culture with all sorts of items.  We don’t realize that the basis of our actions are still grounded in the ancient evolutionary practice of signaling our reproductive fitness that we can afford all of these things.

During the evolution of our species it was only when we were not under threat of immediate extinction that we could dance out our dramas or learn to chit chat about our trivial experiences.  It was only as we could afford to protect and provide for mothers so that they had the safety and security to spend the time required for long developmental stages leading to advanced mental capacities that we began to develop our FOXP2 gene’s ability for language in the first place (about 140,000 years ago).

In this way all of our advanced gifts were allowed to evolve as indicators of conspicuous consumption because their existence meant that we had access to the resources we needed in order for them to be developed from the start.  The appearance of these gifts within our species today still reflects the fact that we have access to the resources we need to keep them.

In the end, it always comes back to the issues surrounding resources.  If we don’t have the resources, or don’t use them wisely to protect the unborn and the newly born from the consequences of having to adapt to a malevolent environment, ‘mental illness’ will continue to plague our species far more than is required from us to maintain the existence — in our gene pool — of our gifts.

The most important step we can take toward ending unnecessary traumas during infant developmental stages that trigger many ‘mental illness’ genetic combinations would be to destigmatize ‘mental illness’ by appreciating the gifts of our species that are connected genetically to ‘mental illness’ risk factors.  By doing so we would greatly increase our opportunities to intervene constructively with ‘mentally ill’ parents who are most at risk for severely traumatizing their offspring, thus alleviating a major portion of the suffering of future generations.

++

Yet when it comes to our species’ more intangible gifts we can easily lose site of the genetic combinations that allow these gifts to exist.  I believe that many families who can point to ‘mental illness’ in their lineage also could point to many great examples of genius and talent.  It is the unfortunate preventable manifestation of the suffering of ‘mental illness’ that concerns me.  In today’s enlightened world we have information that can help us prevent much of its occurrence.  We can effectively lessen the human cost of keeping our greatest gifts through paying close attention to the early infant traumas that often cause ‘mental illness’ genetic combinations to manifest so that we can prevent them.

Because all of life operates in circles and cycles of balance, our species cannot retain the ability to display our great gifts related to our intelligence, our creativity, language, movement and dance without retaining the risk factors that are connected to these gifts.  Our species beat out at least 19 other hominid species because we have the gift of an extremely agile brain.  But the cost of maintaining the gene pool linked to our agility also means that the risk of fragility must also be maintained.

When we think about reproductive fitness indicators even within our advanced species we need to think in three directions at the same time:  male to male reproductive fitness indicators often related to combat competition, female selection indicators related to preferences for selection of mates, and survival fitness indicators among siblings that allow them to compete with each other for resources that the parents provide.

Then we need to realize and remember that for every group of survival reproductive fitness indicators that we have evolved related to these three different survival spectrums our species has a corresponding genetic potential for opposite risk.  In addition, our most valued resources are so expensive to maintain (like the peacock’s feathers) that all they really do is indicate that we can afford to keep them.

In my thinking this means that when the difficulties of ‘mental illness’ manifest themselves in members of our species we need to hold these people carefully in the palm of our species’ hand because without the negative risks that exist related to the genetic combinations of our species’ gifts we would not have their positive expression, either.  The people who end up suffering most are paying the highest price for the cost our species must expend to retain what made us endure, survive and beat out all our competition in the first place.

That the actual expression of many of these ‘mental illnesses’ results from interaction between the sufferer’s genetic potential and harsh, toxic and malevolent environmental conditions from conception to the age (especially) of two means that the rest of us have an obligation to make sure, wherever possible, that early conditions of infants are maintained well enough that these genetic combinations are never forced to appear in their full negative display.  Current scientific research is confirming that this preventive potential DOES exist regarding mental illnesses.  We need to understand what this research is telling us and we need to apply the research findings effectively through the prevention of early maltreatment to infants and young children.

We need to stop condemning the ‘mentally ill’ as if they are substandard, inadequate members of our species.  We need to realize that within their genetic combinations lies links to the greatest giftedness of our species.  If anything, we need to humbly acknowledge the fact that when early abuse and trauma triggers the full spectrum of the opposite end of our giftedness to appear, we are to a large extent responsible as a culture for their suffering.

Certainly there are instances when the genetic combinations of ‘mental illness’ will manifest no matter how well or how adequately these people were cared for from conception.  But research is also demonstrating that a recognizably large percentage related to the appearance of ‘mental illness’ is directly connected to some form of malevolent conditions as they existed in an infant’s early environment, particularly related to early caregiver attachment disorders.

++

I understand that only particularly interested readers will spend the time thinking about this topic that following the links below will require.  I know that I am only at the beginning of following the information through myself.  I find it fascinating that we are, as sophisticated users of technology, simply continuing  a process that takes place from the time of our birth when we use information available on the internet to increase our knowledge about this (or any) subject just as we used the information in the brains of our caregivers to form our own brains.

Infants share cognition with their mothers and earliest caregivers as their brains develop.  We are in a very similar way sharing cognition with all the others who have placed their own thoughts and information on the web for us to access.  Through this process of shared cognition we grow our brains today related to any subject we choose to research and to learn about.

Understanding how the risk factors for ‘mental illness’ are directly connected to the greatest gifts of our species will require that we all pursue new directions in our thinking to understand the implications of this information.  By doing so we will discover that the supposed curses related to mental illness and the blessings of our gifts are simply on the two ends of the same reproductive fitness indicator spectrum.

The gifts of our species are expensive and we retain them by paying the cost.  Just because some people are able to enjoy the benefits and others must suffer the cost does not mean that all of us are not equally responsible for trying to lessen the impact related to risk.

++

This has been a difficult post for me to attempt to write because I perceive that I come from a family whose lineage has repeatedly included ‘mental illness’.  Because of this fact there has existed a continued pattern of neglect and maltreatment that continues to influence how our family’s at risk genes are expressing themselves.  It becomes hard for me not to wonder if some families are thus having to pay the price for the ‘goods’ that other humans get to enjoy, while the rest of us end up not able to experience the benefits equally because of our suffering.  Writing this post feels like staring down the throat of the beast.

++

Why do male peacocks create their brilliant tail displays when they are not connected to mating success which is instead related to their vocalizations?

SEE on peacocks:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peafowl#Plumage

Note the following:

“The plumage of the peacock, and the peahen’s preference for its exorbitance, is a classical example of sexual selection and especially the handicap principle. However, in recent years scientific research has shown that the size and brilliance of a male’s plumage does not meaningfully correlate with his mating success nor his health, and that instead the key factor for attracting females is the vocalizations made prior to mating.”

++

Our concern in today’s post about the appearance of mental illness gene combinations within our species relates to sexual selection and handicap principle.

From handicap principle.:

“The central idea is that sexually selected traits function like conspicuous consumption, signalling the ability to afford to squander a resource simply by squandering it. Receivers know that the signal indicates quality because inferior quality signallers cannot afford to produce such wastefully extravagant signals.”

From the section on sexual selection:

see also for an example of the fascinating connection between ‘intelligence’ in humans and our reproductive fitness indicators —

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection#In_humans

“Some hypotheses about the evolution of the human brain argue that it is a sexually selected trait, as it would not confer enough fitness in itself relative to its high maintenance costs (a quarter to a fifth of the energy and oxygen consumed by a human). [9] Related to this is vocabulary, where humans, on average, know far more words than are necessary for communication. Miller (2000) has proposed that this apparent redundancy is due to individuals using vocabulary to demonstrate their intelligence, and consequently their “fitness”, to potential mates. This has been tested experimentally and it appears that males do make greater use of lower frequency (more unusual) words when in a romantic mindset compared to a non-romantic mindset, meaning that vocabulary is likely to be used as a sexual display (Rosenberg & Tunney, 2008).”

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection#History_and_application_of_the_theory

“The theory of sexual selection was first proposed by Charles Darwin in his book The Origin of Species, though it was primarily devoted to natural selection. A later work, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex dealt with the subject of sexual selection exhaustively, in part because Darwin felt that natural selection alone was unable to account for certain types of apparently non-competitive adaptations, such as the tail of a male peacock.”

++

Now if we shift over and look for the direct connection between the cost of peacocks’ feathers and the cost of our most extravagant human gifts, we find a direct connection to the existence of mental illness in our species.

See for example

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia#Genetic

“There is little doubt about the existence of a fecundity deficit in schizophrenia. Affected individuals have fewer children than the population as a whole. This reduction is of the order of 70% in males and 30% in females. The central genetic paradox of schizophrenia is why if the disease is associated with a biological disadvantage is this variation not selected out? To balance such a significant disadvantage, a substantial and universal advantage must be exist. Insofar, all theories of a putative advantage were disproved or remain unsubstantiated.”

The references noted for this quote are:

++

Now, to consider a link between reproductive fitness indicators within our species and the continued appearance of autism:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/m775188523140523/

The abstract of this article,

Autism as the Low-Fitness Extreme of a Parentally Selected Fitness Indicator

“Abstract  Siblings compete for parental care and feeding, while parents must allocate scarce resources to those offspring most likely to survive and reproduce. This could cause offspring to evolve traits that advertise health, and thereby attract parental resources. For example, experimental evidence suggests that bright orange filaments covering the heads of North American coot chicks may have evolved for this fitness-advertising purpose. Could any human mental disorders be the equivalent of dull filaments in coot chicks—low-fitness extremes of mental abilities that evolved as fitness indicators? One possibility is autism. Suppose that the ability of very young children to charm their parents evolved as a parentally selected fitness indicator. Young children would vary greatly in their ability to charm parents, that variation would correlate with underlying fitness, and autism could be the low-fitness extreme of this variation. This view explains many seemingly disparate facts about autism and leads to some surprising and testable predictions.”

++

LINKS TO NEW PAGES ADDED ON ATTACHMENT, PTSD AND EMOTIONS

alchemynowLeave a comment

I will be writing another post for today, but for those readers who might find this information useful, the following pages were added this morning:

++++

under the category of Emotion, in pages on the ANXIETY SPECTRUM

**ARTICLE: Predictors of PTSD

**ARTICLE: Meta-Analysis of PTSD Risk Factors

** Notes on Research About PTSD Core Symptoms

**BIOMARKERS FOR PTSD

++++

On the brain development of emotional regulation:

**Dr. Allan Schore on Emotional Regulation – Notes

**Schore on Emotion: Orbitofrontal Notes

** Schore – Notes on Developmental Emotional Dysregulation

**Notes on Schore – Development of Attachment

++++

On disorganized-disoriented attachment:

DISSOCIATION AND DISORGANIZED ATTACHMENT – from Liotti

++++

On origins of Borderline Personality Disorder:

**Notes on Origin of BPD from Bateman and Fonagy

++++