Welcome to today’s post that describes what I think hampers many well intentioned efforts to help ‘troubled families’ improve their quality of life.

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First let me offer to you a link that provides access to vital and marvelous resources for improving parenting abilities no matter what our childhood backgrounds were like.  Once we know these resources exist, we can begin to find ways to access them within our communities because I realize the videos are expensive.

I can personally recommend the S.T.E.P. program as one that was amazingly helpful to me in raising my children.  This site presents other programs, as well, including several designed for parents of infants and very young children.

I believe that everyone can benefit from learning more about becoming a better parent.  I also believe that as a society we could improve our entire overall quality of life as a culture by making this kind of information easily accessible to everyone — even before they become parents.

Take a look at this site, The Center for the Improvement of Child Caring.  I believe you will be happy that you did!

http://www.ciccparenting.org/catalogitem.asp?ci=39&cid=&c=3

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Now for the rest of the story:

Information is a resource.  Having access to resources and being able to use them makes people healthier and happier, and increases their well-being in the world.

Resources exist both inside and outside of our individual bodies.  What happens to us from birth determines what resources are available to us within our own brains, and these brain resources determine how we interact with all other available resources surrounding us for the rest of our lives.

As today’s researchers learn more and more about how early infant and child maltreatment and deprivation changes the way the brain develops, they are also learning about how brains develop and operate under the best of conditions.  Each of these different brains (and bodies) end up developing according to the resources available to the very young child at the start of its life.

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We cannot expect that a severely maltreated infant’s brain will develop to be the same as a well treated infant’s brain because they are each being built in differing circumstances and being ‘fed’ different information about the world.  Both types of brains are alike, however, in that they are designed to keep a person alive in the world they live in.

We have to remember that a developing infant and young child brain only knows the information it is receiving as it builds itself and cannot anticipate a future that is different from its early one.  Of course these adaptations occur in interaction between the environment and the particular genetic potential an infant has within itself.

Yet there is no doubt that early severe abuse and maltreatment will cause any developing brain to adjust itself to a malevolent world if it is forced to, no matter what.  Nobody would be immune to this adaptive process because it is the only way severe challenges to an infant can be survived.  True recognition of this fact humbles us.  Once we have this level of humility we can begin to truly help others to live a better life without heaping shame on them in the process.

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The image comes into my mind of a bulldozer and a space shuttle.  We could imagine that any given infant has the potential from birth to develop (a brain suited) for the future tasks of either one depending upon the information it receives from its early environment.   This information about the conditions of the future,  directly communicated to it by the conditions of its early caregiving environment, determines the infant and young child’s final outcome.

Let’s say that harsh, toxic and traumatic environments create in the young one the need to become a bulldozer in order to deal with these malevolent deprivations.  At the same time we could say that a benevolent environment of safety, security and plenty allows an infant to prepare itself for a better future and in the end it can become a space shuttle.  In both cases mobility would be possible.  In both cases the job of remaining alive would have been accomplished.

Yet from this simple image we can tell that beyond the basic similarities between these two, there are vast differences that resulted as consequences of the information about the possibilities of the future that either ‘type’ of infant received and adapted to.  In both cases the infants made the best use of information and resources possible.  Yet what happens to an infant that was forced through early malevolent conditions to become a bulldozer when it graduates out of childhood into a world built for and by those who had enough resources in their benevolent early environments to become space shuttles?

We are left with a serious, yet I believe unrecognized gap here between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’.

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I mention this now as I introduce some information about improving parenting skills because I believe many attempts to improve the quality of parenting are being made by people who are like our imaginary space shuttles as they try to ‘help’ people who are like our imaginary bulldozers.  Too often well intentioned efforts of the ‘haves’ to ‘help’ the ‘have nots’ become ‘better’ fail because the fundamental differences between these two groups are not currently being recognized or acknowledged.

These differences come from the fact that a brain built in a safe and secure early attachment environment is not the same kind of brain that is built in an unsafe and insecure early attachment environment.  These two kinds of brains operate in the adult (and childhood) world differently.  They process information differently and they respond differently.

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For those readers who might be wondering how to tell which kind of brain they developed and which kind of future their brains were preparing them to live in, I will use one word that, to me, becomes the pivot point (imagine the old fashioned playground teeter tooter here).  Movement toward the benevolent end or movement toward the malevolent end can be determined from this pivot point.  That one word is TERROR.  To the degree that any infant or developing young child experiences terror — a repeated state of complete lack of safety and security — will its brain develop differently from a child’s brain who does not have to experience this state.

From that pivot point, moving toward one end or the other, changes will occur in the individual that is being prepared for a future world that corresponds to similar hostile, dangerous, threatening, traumatic and toxic conditions.  Once we realize that these changes are fundamental we can begin to find ways to talk between worlds.  In order for this communication to be meaningful the basic facts underlying the differences between the ‘secures’ and the ‘insecures’ have to be recognized, described, understood, respected and honored.

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What possible scenarios can I imagine about what kinds of possibly effective interventions that could have happened to protect me from my mother’s abuse of me?  This field of imagination is wide open to me because it NEVER happened.  When considering intervention in relationship to my own experience, I think about when I was in eighth grade and had to wear one of those very short, one piece blue gym suits, and had to take group showers every day after class.  I remember backing myself into the shower corner, always facing away from the wall feeling so ashamed, humiliated and embarrassed because the entire back of my body from the base of my skull to my heels, including my arms, was covered in every imaginable color of bruises — black, blue, purple, green, yellow.

I realize how silly that was on one level because certainly those bruises would have been visible simply as I wore that stupid suit throughout the entire class period.  Yet it was standing naked and visible in the showers themselves that made me feel this humiliation.  Yet nobody — EVER — paid any attention.  Not one single time did someone ask me, either classmate or teacher, how I had gotten even one of those bruises.  They were visible, ugly, horrible, and obvious indicators of the fact that someone was hurting me terribly.  I suspect it was because my mother’s abuse of me had started from my first breath it never entered my thoughts that I could tell anyone or ever expect anyone to either care or to help me.

While we live in a world today that is legally mandated to report physical signs of abuse, those signs are merely the tip of the iceberg.  Those of you who know the reality of all the different levels and kinds of abuse, neglect and maltreatment that children can be exposed to know what I am talking about.

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We are still, today, left with the proverbial vicious cycle with continued questions about how we recognize extreme traumatic stress going on in families, how to intervene, and how to improve conditions on all levels for everyone being affected.  Yet what I can now say is that even if someone had intervened because of my eighth grade bruises, they would still have missed the most important damage of all — the changes that my brain had already made that allowed me to survive in a malevolent world even before I was two years old.

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What I am going to say next is not meant to offend anyone.  I say it because I care that all efforts being made to Stop the Storm of unresolved traumas be as effective as they possibly can be.  I offer my own ‘expert’ opinion based on conclusions I have made as a survivor of terrible infant and child abuse myself.  I believe a dangerous weapon is often being unconsciously wielded against the very people the ‘haves’ are trying to ‘help’.

That weapon is any degree of an attitude of self righteous superiority and judgment of or against those who were forced through their very early malevolent experiences to become bulldozers rather than space shuttles.  Because those of us who formed a body and brain in a worst-case world had to build defense into ourselves from our earliest beginnings, we have an uncanny ability to recognize and to respond defensively against ANY PERCEIVED FORM OF ATTACK.

We detect challenges to the integrity of our being and respond at the speed of light.  I don’t mean this metaphorically.  The electrical impulses that govern communication within and between the cells of our body and brain move that fast.  Once a challenge or a threat is detected, we will protect ourselves at all costs.  We do this unconsciously because our bodies learned from the time of our beginnings that consciousness is far too slow to keep us alive.

And we certainly include an ability to detect anyone’s negative judgment of us as being a threat because we were built that way.  When we consider the fact that information transmitted brain to brain through facial expressions ALONE moves at the speed of a signal every 1/200th of a second, we can begin to understand that people who are assessing and judging us from any position of supposed self righteous superiority may not even realize that they are doing it.

That does not, to me, make their even unconscious transmission of judgment toward us in any way acceptable.  It therefore becomes the job of anyone who thinks they sincerely care about the ‘have nots’ and wish to ‘help’ them to become completely aware and conscious of their own biases and resulting judgments — both of perpetrators and of victims — because nearly 100% of perpetrators were victimized themselves.

This also means that those of us who are survivors of traumatic childhoods need to look within ourselves and detect how we have ‘bought’ or ‘eaten’ the judgments that others may have passed down to us — both in our childhood and our adulthood.  We cannot afford to ignore these seeds of doubt because they directly attach themselves anywhere inside of us where the potential for shame exists.

Because our physiological ability to feel shame originates in our body by the time we are one year old, it is guaranteed that anything that has been passed to us by others and has triggered our shame contributes to its further ‘growth and development’.  Shame usually operates far below our level of conscious awareness.   It is an automatic response that occurs within our nervous system (including our brain) and body.

I understand that humans physically develop the ability to experience shame as our bodies develop from conception.  It is not until we are a year old that our bodies have grown enough for this reaction to occur.  But once we have passed that developmental stage, all of our social attachment interactions are processed through this filter.  It is not helpful for well meaning ‘educators’ to be handing out shame along with whatever new information they are trying to transmit to those that ‘need’ it.

“A spoonful of poison does not make the medicine go down.”  Self righteous judgment based on an attitude of superiority causes an unconscious shame defense reaction within the recipient that distorts all the information that might be offered to a threatened individual at the same time.

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Because of the traumatic experiences that formed my brain, I have an almost excruciatingly sensitive ‘input detection system’ that is geared to exquisitely detect danger and threat surrounding me at all times.  I have built a corresponding protection and defense system within me.  Because I am a member of a social species, any input that I process related to social interactions has to be processed by my ‘shame detection system’.

I now understand that most of my aversion to any supposedly ‘helpful self help’ book I’ve ever read stems from the fact that my advanced ability to detect unbelievably delicate attacks on my level of shame senses judgment in these writings.  I can and do read volumes of information ‘between the lines’.  I have always known on some level that I have to translate and interpret information contained in these books because I have never found a single one of them that addresses the fundamental fact that I have a very different brain and body as a result of the abuse I experienced from birth.

This process of translation and interpretation is exhausting in itself.   It takes an incredible level of focus and energy to do it.  In addition we are forced at the same time to defend ourselves from the underlying projections of shame that affect us at very deep levels as we read these books.  I suspect that everyone with one of these altered brains experiences the same thing that I do even if they don’t recognize it.  Because those like me are already forced to expend so much more energy just getting along in a world we weren’t prepared for and don’t really understand, many of us just can’t make use of the well intentioned information that these books are meant to provide us with.

This makes all the well intended efforts we apply to ourselves or that others might apply to us to inform, transform, reform, conform us to fit a world we were not built in, by or for in the first place remarkably inefficient and ineffective.  In some cases, such as would have been true for my mother, the hoped for results are impossible to obtain due to the vast distortions that took place in a vastly altered brain — made so because drastic measures had to be taken early in life in order to adjust and adapt to and survive drastic conditions.

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I am not saying that it is a waste of time to try to provide information that helps those that could use it to live better lives.  What I am saying is that we often do not consider the full context of the problems themselves and are thus hindering our efforts to address them.  What do we really know about the full context of all the things we are trying to prevent, either?  I don’t care if we look at preventing or addressing child abuse, domestic abuse, war, poverty, crime, sexual predation, ignorance or terrorism.  Humans are contextual beings.  We develop in context.  We live in context.  Everything we do and everything done to us happens in a context.

The contexts that cause some to mature into the equivalent of bulldozers or into space shuttles were very different in the first place.  If we refuse to realize the ramifications of these differences and continue to unconsciously judge people for having them, we might as well be taking our hardest efforts to make the world a better place and throw them like tiny pieces of confetti into a strong wind.

If we continue to self righteously judge one another from our supposed positions of superiority we will continue to offend others in the depths of their being, and they will continue to defend themselves against us.  Not helpful.  They will not be able to hear or apply a single useful thing we are telling them.  Is changing this pattern of judgment between all of us truly what loving ourselves and one another — no matter what — is all about?

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Thank you for reading this long post.  Your comments are welcome and appreciated.