Tag: anxiety disorders

+MY MOTHER AS A ‘BORDERLINE CHILD’ – HER GOOD/BAD STORY

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I believe that within the ending sentence of this story my mother wrote when she was ten years old (1935) lies a powerful clue to the continuing demise of my mother’s mind that led to the terrible abuse she was later to perpetrate against me as ‘the devil’s child who could do no right’ at the same time she relegated to my younger sister the status of being ‘God’s child who could do no bad’.

Both my sister and I became projections from her own disturbed externalized-mind.

From all the stories my mother told us from her own childhood, her mother also created a profound dichotomous split in her feelings toward and treatment of my mother as the ‘bad’ child and her brother as the ‘good’ one

I am presenting this post as my own response to my previous post

+THE TIN WOMAN’S BRAIN: INFANT-CHILD ABUSE AND DISSOCIATING EMOTION FROM FACT

because from my point of view my mother COULD NOT dissociate or differentiate ’emotion from fact’, while I, as the woman created in response-reaction to the profound continual abuse she perpetrated against me for 18 years experience an in-built (in response to developing a body-brain in my mother’s environment of terror and trauma) ability to certainly dissociate emotional information from factual information when my dissociation is triggered in reaction to stress/duress in the environment.

In what might appear to be a bizarre twist of consequence, I would suggest that my mother DID have one of the ‘organized’ insecure attachment patterns (extreme preoccupation) while I, in response to her insane abuse, ended up with primarily a ‘disorganized’ insecure attachment pattern.

My mother’s inability to differentiate or dissociate emotion from fact (although ‘fact’ was tied to her OWN reality) ended up creating within her brain-mind a condition that was designed to enable her to tolerate what would have otherwise completely overwhelmed her.  She was able to contain her own ‘rejected in-tolerate-able badness’ by including me as an externalized projection of her own mind by projecting all of ‘her badness’ onto me.  That entire process was about her EMOTION being absolutely and permanently confused with FACT (so that she could not differentiate between the two) — and I was forced to pay the price.  Her entire being was ‘organized’ around the profound splitting of good from bad that my mother was unable to recognize.

Neither I nor any of my siblings continued this good-bad splitting with our children.

Because my mother perpetrated continual horrendous abuse against me, I was not able to form an ‘organized’ attachment around anyone including my own self.  It’s like my mother was able to create and absolute vacuum that she placed me within that removed from me any ability to develop my own self whatsoever.

As a consequence, my body-brain was designed and built in this environment of trauma ONLY to ‘react’ to the continual threat, violence and danger that was my mother as I knew her.  I could not possibly ‘organize’ my own self within my environment or take anything but the most basic actions during the first 18 years of my life.  Everything else about me was a reaction to her abuse.

Nearly all my efforts to become an ‘organized oriented self’ and to take action on my own behalf as I grew up were thwarted with very few notable exceptions (my feelings about our Alaskan mountain homestead and my childhood-built ability to learn objective facts).  As a result, I have a ‘disorganized-disoriented’ and ‘reactive’ insecure attachment pattern.

I KNOW I suffered abuse ‘profound enough’ to ‘earn’ me my own diagnosis of the attachment patterns I describe here.  In part due to the ‘solitary confinement’ and extreme isolation my mother enforced upon me I suffer from the Reactive Attachment Disorder component of nonattachment.  (See:   Reactive Attachment Disorder in Adults and Child Abuse and Neglect, Reactive Attachment Disorder)  I react profoundly to all stimulation/information I am exposed to in my external environment.  I believe my mother’s reactions were to the universe created in her brain-mind well before she was old enough to write this story.

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Jane and Charles were sitting on the porch wondering what to do outside little snowflakes were playing tag about.

Jane looked up. Their was her mother she said come and get cleaned up. For we are going to call on Uncle Robert. The two children jumped up quickly for they know that he would tell them a story. They jumped into the car and drove up the snowy road the trees wer covered with snowflakes they stopped at a farm rover came to meet them he barked a welcoming. Uncle Robert got up from the chair where he was reading and met them at once.  Jane and Charles [she had Jimmy written in and crossed it out to put in Charles] asked if he would tell them a story he said yes they sat around the fireplace and Uncle Robert began.

Uncle Robert Tells a Story

He started long long ago a bear had three cubs their names were blackie curly and last of all mischievous this he was named because he was always up to some prank this time his mother was going away he told the three little cubs to stay in their cave blackie and curly did but Mischievous did not Blackie and Curly warned him. But this cub was like some children thought he know it all nothing can hurt me he said boldly he trotted down the path not knowing the danger ahead of him.

He looked around not knowing where he was going or thinking about it. He was following a trickling [actually written trickting] brook it was singing him a melody [actually written moldy] of bells.

The cub was so concerned on the music and tree and things around him that he did not [three letter word scratched out here] hear footsteps behind him a hunter was creaping along in the bushes on the other side.

Now let us see what is in the cave of mother bear blackie cub was badly frightened for he knew the dangers ahead of his little brother. Curly meanwhile was having a feast of berrys. Little footsteps entered the cave mother bear was home she looked around yes their was Curly and Blackie but Mischievous [she actually abbreviated this to Mis.] was no where to be seen. Oh mother bear cried where is my mischievous [again abbreviated to mis.] little cub curly cried I told him to stay. Blackie who was [misspelled crying here and scratched it out] crying hard said I told and told him but he said nothing would happen to him no time to cry there’s only time to hunt said mummy bear so out they all went to hunt for Mischievous [again, mis.].

Mischievous [mis.] did not know that they were hunting for him all he thought about was where the little running brook stopped and of how many berries he could [spelled correctly after written wrongly and crossed out] eat the hunter was thinking about how he could catch little Mischievous [Mis.] without harming him, for he wanted [written wan’t] to catch Mischievous [Mis.] and put him in the zoo [spelled zo] for he know he would get a [crossed out and rewritten] lot of money for him.

Oh mother and Blackie and Curly saw the hunter and all three jumped right infront of him for they all three saw Mischievous [Mis.] and that is why they all jumped right infront of the hunter oh he was so startled he jumped higher and quicker than Mother Bear Curly and Blackie had the hunter took head to heals and ran as fast as he had [word correction, crossed out and rewritten] jumped.

Now said Mother Bear, Mischievous [Mis.] come with me and ended Uncle Robert. I don’t think you would like to hear what happened in the cave that night but I will tell you I heard some little bear yells and I know that Mischievous [Mis.] name was changed to sonny bear and don’t you know why? I will tell you because he was always behaving his mother and being sunshiny to people.

[two duplicate sentences are written at the top of this next page that do not seem to be connected to the story:  A little boy came – is underlined, and again:  a little boy came, both sentences are surrounded with a pencil line circle]

Oh tell us another cried Charles and Jane Oh no we will have to go home now and that night Jane and Charles dreamt about bears and cubs Charles dreamt [that is written twice and crossed out before being written a third time] that they were being good and Jane dreamt that they were being bad.

Mildred

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[Charles was both my mother’s father’s name and her only sibling’s name.  Her brother was 2 years older than my mother]

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Links to the rest of my mother’s childhood stories:

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My mother’s full writings:  Hope For A Mountain

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[I hope the following links remain active — if not, search Google for pre-borderline (preborderline) child]

On the Borderline Child

The American Psychiatric Publishing textbook of psychiatry – Google Books Result

Robert E. Hales, Stuart C. Yudofsky, Glen O. Gabbard – 2008 – Medical – 1786 pages
These traumatic experiences appear to occur within a context of sustained neglect from which the pre–borderline child develops enduring rage and self- …

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The borderline psychotic child: a selective integration – Google Books Result

Trevor Lubbe – 2000 – Medical – 218 pages
In defining the defensive set-up of the borderline child from a Contemporary … described how a pre-adolescent borderline boy employed pseudo-congeniality, …

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Parent-child relations: new research – Google Books Result

Dorothy M. Devore – 2006 – Family & Relationships – 219 pages
But now these affective representations are organized (or in the case of a borderline child, can never be organized) and accessible in verbal utterances, …

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Borderline Personality Disorder Online Support Forums: Safe …

Mar 24, 2009 … The relationship between mother and pre–borderline child is often revealed to have been confrontational or even hostile.”

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core wound of abandonment – Borderline Personality Disorder, Self …

Many cases show an ongoing hostile or confictual relationship between mother and pre–borderline child.”In his book, New Hope for Borderline Personality …

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Personality disorders: toward the DSM-V – Google Books Result

William T. O’Donohue, Katherine A. Fowler, Scott O. Lilienfeld – 2007 – Psychology – 398 pages
… insensitivity to the pre–borderline child’s feelings and needs, and serious emotional discord in the family, perhaps leading to separation or divorce. …

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Severe Emotional Disturbance in Children and Adolescents

Part I: The Young Child. Internal Conflict and Growth in a Pre-school Child. Early Identifications in the Borderline Child. Part II: The Child in the Family …

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Coping with the Borderline Behaviour of Our Children – Borderline …

Jul 20, 2008 … How can we as parents cope with our Borderline children or adult-children? … on the infantile emotional nature of an ego-centric pre-teen …

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Borderline pathology in children and adolescents

by C Meekings – 2004 – Cited by 5 – Related articles
trauma in the borderline children suggesting that the experience of multiple traumatic events is more pre– dictive of borderline pathology than any singular …

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Child and adolescent psychiatry – Google Books Result

Michael Rutter, Eric A. Taylor – 2002 – Medical – 1209 pages
Studies of adult populations in relation to borderline personality disorder … study of pre-morbid adjustment, onset pattern and severity of impairment. …

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+DISSOCIATION AS AN ALLERGIC REACTION TO ABUSE

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I believe that the greatest risk factor for triggering dissociation in severe infant-child abuse survivors is for us to be in a parallel state to the one we were in when we were little.  When we are in NEED we are vulnerable.  Because our body-brain was created and built through trauma altered development to process different information in different ways than ordinary, when we are NOT recognized for the trauma altered beings that we are we are in AN ABUSIVE ENVIRONMENT.

In America, if I had gone to that medical clinic yesterday in need (why else would I have gone?) and had been in a wheel chair, and if the clinic had absolutely no access available, they would have been in violation of law.

Would the medical staff have vehemently insisted that I was NO DIFFERENT than they were (as they did to me when I tried to explain in a PROACTIVE way about how I process information under stressful duress)?

Would they have insisted I was exactly the same as they were if I had been blind or deaf?  Would my difference from them be acknowledged at all if I had been?

Access to the building itself is ABOUT being able to meet one’s needs to gain vital information.  Access FOR ME to the same vital information needed to happen through enlightenment of the staff about HOW I AM IN THE WORLD differently from others especially in the ways I process information under stress.  Denial of this fact is ABUSE — and it is that ABUSE in that environment and situation yesterday that tortured me into the dissociated state I described in this post:  +DURESS AND DISSOCIATION

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DID THAT CLINIC HAVE THE RIGHT TO ABUSE ME?

Absolutely.  (The more they abused me the more stress I experienced.)

They evidently had the same perfect right to abuse me that my mother had.

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Am I exercising fantastic thinking when I come to this conclusion about my experience yesterday?

No, I am not.

I am NOT MENTALLY ILL.  I experienced severe enough trauma during my earliest stages of development that I ended up with an INNER body-nervous system-brain-mind that completely adapted itself to that environment of abuse.

I would not have survived otherwise.

When I think about the myriad interactions that happened yesterday at the clinic, I could say that THOSE PEOPLE were mentally ill.  They were not able to stretch their thinking — because of their blatant ignorance of very basic facts about trauma altered development for early abuse survivors — at the same time they stubbornly refused to recognize MY REALITY as I tried to express it to them.

That is exactly what my mother did to me in the beginning:  She disallowed me to have my own reality — in nearly every possible way.  Of course I could NEVER express myself or be heard by my mother any more than I was by the staff at that clinic.  SEE  +THE TIN WOMAN’S BRAIN: INFANT-CHILD ABUSE AND DISSOCIATING EMOTION FROM FACT

Being made to feel by any public service representative I am sick, pathetic, wrong, disabled, ineffective, strange, odd, different, bad, stupid or in any other way being made to feel like an inferior human being who is ‘mentally ill’ is AS ABUSIVE TO SEVERE EARLY ABUSE SURVIVORS AS THE ORIGINAL ABUSE WAS.

Shame on those people!  Shame!

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+THE TIN WOMAN’S BRAIN: INFANT-CHILD ABUSE AND DISSOCIATING EMOTION FROM FACT

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++++++++++++++++++++++++

I have spent a lot of time wondering how I would ever be able to write a book about my abusive childhood if I can’t, won’t or don’t ‘go back there’ to remember how I FELT inside during those 18 years of severe trauma.  After my experience yesterday of trying to manage being in a medically over-stimulating and challenging appointment environment — as I wrote about in my last post — +DURESS AND DISSOCIATION — I am beginning to understand that how I felt yesterday and how I tried to describe my experience in my post is EXACTLY how I felt during most of my childhood.

When the words ‘information machine’ appeared in that post, and as I thought about it since then, what I am beginning to understand is that the regions of my brain that process semantic-factual information never became integrated with the parts of my brain that process emotional, social or autobiographical ‘feeling felt’ information.

The ‘information machine’ child COULD and DID go to school and learned complicated bits of facts about the world I live in.  These facts were connected to facts I began to learn about the factual environment around me from the time I was born.  I was able to become oriented in the world of physical objects and information about them as if I had a separate brain from my OTHER brain — the one that was built in terror and chaos from a time well before I even had words.

As I spoke with my daughter last night about what happened yesterday the word BOMBARDED appeared to me almost as an overarching umbrella description of how my experience of being alive in a body in the world feels to me at those times the ‘information machine’ becomes overwhelmed.  Never until my experience with aggressive cancer and its treatment starting July 2007 did I ever have to experience what it feels like in my adulthood to experience what I evidently nearly ALWAYS felt during my infant-childhood.

The ‘information processing machine’ part of me continued to grow as I grew during my first 18 years because it was invisible and was something my mother could seldom outright attack as she DID attack every other part of me as I grew up.  No other expression of LINDA as an individual being-person-identity was allowed to even appear, let alone grow, develop, express herself, become visible, or flourish.

After the extreme duress that cancer and its treatment caused me it has seemed that some important ‘functional-in-this-world’ part of me was erased.  When I need ‘her’ to be HERE to process the factual nonemotional, nonsocial information that being a human being in a human world involves, she is no longer available.

The ‘information machine’ operated more like the Tin Woman than a human being, and did NOT process emotional information (that is physiologically intertwined with social information in our early forming right limbic brain).  The part of our brain that handles “Just the facts, Ma’am” does NOT need emotional information.

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These brain operations evidently CAN be dissociated from one another.  Not even mentioning what I experienced of my mother’s abuse from birth, even by the age I was in these stories there is no way ‘factual information’ had a place in my experience of trauma and abuse such as these.  My mother’s insane abuse had nothing to do with ME or with reality — I could ‘make sense’ out of nothing she did to me — the FACTS — and MY reality — meant nothing.

+MY 6-WEEK NEWBORN CHECKUP – THE MONSTER WAS BORN WHEN I WAS

see also on my mother and the devil: +WORD WARRIOR NEWS: MY BROKEN, BROKEN, BROKEN MOTHER

*Litany from Start to Finish

*AGE 2 – CINDY BORN – 1953

*Age 3 – THE TOILET BOWL

*Age 4 – THE BEDSPREAD

*Age 5 – THE BUBBLE GUM

*Age 5 – THE FOX

*Age 5 – SHARON AND THE FIRE ANTS

*Age 6 – THE MARBLES

*AGE 6 – FIRST GRADE — NIGHT ON THE STOOL

*AGE 7 – MUD PUDDLE INCIDENT

*AGE 8 – MY BLACK RABBIT, PETER

*Age 9 – BLOODY NOSE

*Age 9 – JOHN and the CHERRY TREE

*Age 10 – THE SHAMPOO LIE AND RUNNING AWAY

*Age 11 – MY EYEBROWS

*Age 13 – DIRTY DIAPER AND PEPPLES IN MY KNEES

+Age 14 – SCRUBBED IN THE TUB

*Age 14 – SILENT TREATMENT

*Age 14 – Gardening and the Sabotage

*Age 15 – FORCED TO WATCH AN ALASKAN SUNRISE

see also for background information:

++SCHORE ON DEVLOPMENT OF RIGHT BRAIN

***Notes on Siegel’s writings

++++++++++++++++++++++++

+DURESS AND DISSOCIATION

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+++++++++++++++++

At the doctor’s today — too much, too much, too much, too much information streaming from strange faces, strange mouths, strange eyes — too much information

overload

overload

Where is that safe place?  When facing what needs to be faced is the only right option because I need something I can’t run or hide from.

Noise, too much noise, too much information.  Words dissolve, faces dissolve, my thoughts dissolve.  I can hear nothing, focus on nothing, understand nothing — without tremendous will power concentration.

I can’t explain that although I LOOK like an adult, a person — I can vanish inside, vanish, vanish, vanish.  Empty inside.  Nobody there.  Nobody for you to talk to because there’s nobody in here listening, nobody to hear you.

Too many words, like icicles stabbing stabbing stabbing stabbing.  I can’t tell them, QUIET PLEASE.  I can’t read your lips, your words don’t match the movement of your mouth.

What has happened to me that it’s come to this?  Everything they tell me is complicated complicated complicated.  I cannot understand a word that you are saying.

I have gone backwards in time, all the way back.  Does anyone understand what it’s like to be a nobody?  Body here, nobody else.  Nothing else.  You on the outside moving around, doing people things, I can’t tell you what it’s like inside for me.  There are no words on the inside to meet and match your words on the outside.

All gone.  It’s all gone.”Be here, Linda.  Be here.  Focus.  Pay attention.  This is important, you cannot go away.  There is nobody here with you to help you.  You are alone in this.  You have to do this.”

Appointment after appointment, things I need taken care of.  How can I do it?

The terror I cannot name overtakes me and I can barely bash it back.  It comes like a cloud of locusts, out of the void, out of the unknown world I do not feel a part of

unless

unless

all is calm.  All is slowly given, carefully spoken, like drops of nectar, drops of dew, one at a time slowly sinking in below the surface, into my awareness.

I wish I knew what happened to one of my competent selves, a confident one, one who could fool herself as she fooled everyone else — an information machine.  Very efficient.  Ticking words, in and out like gushes of breath, all held in check, in their places, in their order

But not now.  The words don’t work that way any more.  Not when there are things at stake and I am a stranger in a strange place and there’s too much to take in — and I go away, fighting not to, like the dark spook shadows in the movie “Ghost,” dragged away I go into the darkness while they all stay where they are in the light.

And the tears come rushing out of my eyes and I can’t outrun them, sidestep them, just they gush

What I can manage to grasp in my attention is like a thousand diamond’s thousand facets — spinning spinning spinning

How to make sense of THAT?

There is no dissociational OTHER to take over when things inside fall to pieces.  Nobody there.  Nobody there.  I am barely here and then gone again

gone again

gone again

It is frightening.  Walls and floors and doors and ceilings disappear along with meaning behind the sounds.

“Stay here, Linda.  Pay attention Linda.”

In the two hours I spent in that clinic today I vanished a million times.  All that remains behind is this body with a gossamer thread of me attached somehow — I am NOT dead yet, not dead yet, not dead yet.  I am this body, I am supposed to be in this body.

But we part ways, go in different directions, and nobody here can pay any attention to anything except how the storm feels inside feels inside feels inside.

+++++++++++++++++

+WHEN THE GOING ISN’T TOUGH: CYCLING THROUGH THE TRAUMA STATES

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+++++++++++++++++++++

There.  It took an hour to get set up and to put a coat of my super-mixed paint on my new aluminum fence.  I am happy to report that the color is perfect!  I couldn’t have picked one out of a paint card lineup and done any better.  The color blends well with the dirt (a big coordination plus in the desert) and contrasts beautifully with the blue sky above the fence as it sets off anything that still happens to be growing green.

I had the opportunity to notice very specifically how fast a person can cycle through the five states I mentioned in today’s earlier posts.  There I was, carefully adjusting my upside-down plastic five gallon ex-pickle pails, making sure they were as firmly planted in the uneven dirt as I could manage so I could perch on tiptoe to reach the top fence line and not fall over.  Down the corrugation I flicked my sloppy 1/3 water logged paint, getting my rhythm as I watched for the inevitable paint drips leaking down from the screws I so carefully put into the fence yesterday.

But that’s the problem with getting your rhythm, finding your beat.  You can lose it.  But I guess if you never find your beat in the first place you don’t even notice!

Fortunately I was near the end of the fence when I went to readjust my pail-stands a little bit further to my right, holding the greasy wet paint bucket by its side.  OOPS!  Wet bucket, slippery wet fake latex gloves (I guess Latex is a new endangered species) — and the bucket went flying — down, of course.

Enter my emotional reaction.  No more “Gee I am content spending an hour doing this job.  I sure am glad the sun finally came up so I could get at it.”

No more “Gee I sure am happy with this color!”

Just as the bucket left my hands and even before it hit the ground (and spilled all over my overturned pail-stools):

ANGER – “Linda!  Now look at what you’ve done!  Obviously you should have been holding onto the paint bucket handle not its sides!”  Too late at the moment for that admonishment based on wisdom.

FEAR:  “Oh, Gosh!  There goes the paint all over the ground” as I reached as fast as possible to pick up the bucket and right it.  “Is there any paint left?”

SADNESS:  “What a loss and what a waste of paint!”  That was true.

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Then, as I flicked paint off of the overturned pickle pail to swipe it onto the fence as fast as I could before it all ran off into the dirt, “Gee, I could stand on that now burnt-orange pail again, get paint all over the bottom of my shoes, and walk around my yard leaving fancy footprints!  How cool would that be?”  Made me smile, though I denied myself that footprinting treat.

Silly is good.  Humorous is good…..

At the same time I sure was glad, though, that I only lost half of what I had started with instead of all the paint because I was so far down the fence line when my ‘accident’ happened.  Had ALL the remaining paint spilled, and had I no more to finish my job, my resiliency would not have been so resplendent.  Of that fact I am quite certain.

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+AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS: OUR BASIC STATES OF BEING

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+++++++++++++++++++++++++

How our primary physiological states FEEL is directly related to how things in our life (including our self) SEEM.  I actually SEE it this way (though the balance and operation is altered for early severe infant-abuse survivors):

+ PEACEFUL CALM CONNECTION WELL-BEING at the center of our nervous system-brain-being:  Our cup is full

+  JOYFUL HAPPINESS (built into the left brain birth to age one):  Our cup runneth over

+ ANGER as a survival emotion to resolve problems using what we know:  Our cup is half full with high positive hopes of filling it up again SOON

+ FEAR as a survival emotion means we have to try HARDER:  Our cup is empty

+ SADNESS as a survival emotion means we better learn something COMPLETELY NEW:  Our cup doesn’t seem to have any bottom to it at all — or perhaps we don’t even seem to have a cup (can’t find it?)

The bottom three emotions involve an activated stress response/attachment system — designed by nature in safe and secure early attachment relationships to never be ON for very long.

The top one is supposed to be our NORMAL state (through ‘good enough’ early environmental design).

The second one, JOYFUL HAPPINESS is the creme de la creme!

Most simply put, discovering how these states of being were built to operate as our body developed is ALL we need to know about our infant-childhood.  We cannot work to change what we do not know.

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See today’s previous posts:

+DAYS WITHOUT WORDS – FOCUSED SURVIVAL AND DISSOCIATION

+’FIGHTING ANGER’ IS GOOD FOR US

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+DAYS WITHOUT WORDS – FOCUSED SURVIVAL AND DISSOCIATION

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+++++++++++++++++++++++++

Awake most of the night – up for good well before the sunrise.  Waiting for the sun, I have work to do.  I have cleared out whatever money I have accumulated these past months and invested all of it in yet another fence.  How antisocial of me, erasing what I can now of my neighbor on the west side of my yard whose trailer sits not 6 feet away from that fence line.

Up went the posts, painted the cross boards, up with the corrugated aluminum panels.  I blocked the sight of their falling apart lattice sided screened porch.  I blocked their never ending porch light from penetrating the still darkness of my yard’s night sky.  Or did I?

I had to laugh when I went outside last night to sit, finally, in the privacy of my yard.  Nope, no more of THEIR light in my yard, but wait?  The siding, like tin foil, now reflects every tall street light behind my house on the Mexican side of the border wall!

I dug around on my pantry shelves last night for a look at all the cans of strange colored paint I have accumulated from here and there over the years.  Is there something I can use to cover that corrugated reflective shine, something to flatten the surface, to darken my yard?  Oh, yes, here it is.  I am waiting for the sun to rise so I can take these two mixed gallons of interior paint, one orange, the other dark terra cotta, so I can work some more on my task.

(The trick I discovered ‘accidentally’ to using interior paint on exterior metal surfaces is to thin it with water.  Somehow the paint seems to then forget it’s supposed to pucker and buckle and flake and peel!)

++

I am reminded of a time about 20 years ago when I worked as an art therapist on a northern Reservation.  I had a caseload of 40 sexually abused and traumatized children under the age of 10 (over half of them boys).  The Indian Health Service had given me some ‘spare’ money they had for these children’s therapy, and I stretched that money out for a year and a half.  When the money finally ran out and was not replaced, I had to leave, and as I ‘checked out’ another Reservation therapist made this parting comment to me:  “You have been so focused all the time you’ve been up here.”

Even back then I knew his comment reflected something about me that ‘wasn’t quite right’ but I had no idea what I had ‘done wrong’.  To me, whatever I could offer to those children meant more to me than sitting around, wasting time and socializing with other workers possibly could have.

And yet doing EXACTLY that would not only have been ‘normal’, but was expected.  I had failed to shmooze!

++

I thought this morning as I waited with pinpoint bright star lights above me for the sun to rise so I could go back to work (before my 2 pm doctor’s appointment this afternoon) on my Secret Garden about my ability to focus.  Being focused these past few days has NOT been about words.  It has NOT been about writing.  It has not even been about thinking, or about feeling.

My focus, whenever it comes upon me, is simply about being alive — in the moment — as I find things to do that involve work — and work I WANT to do, for whatever reasons.

As I think about my powerful ability to focus, I also realize that this ability is not within the ‘normal or ordinary’ range of what MOST people do or HOW they do what they do.  My focus is about being ‘in a space’ where NOTHING else can reach me.

And I know this ability is something that was built into me through the 18 years of terror, trauma and abuse of my infant-childhood, and it has served me well all of my life.

My states of focus have their own patterns of the passage of time.  Stimulation is so moderated that a bomb could probably go off within my sphere and I would hardly notice.

What this topic has also brought to mind today is how I now see my continually operating stress response system that so rarely ever turns itself off that I barely know what CALM peacefulness is or what it feels like.

I think about the three main emotions that get themselves built into the nervous system-brain of severely traumatized little people while they are growing and developing their body at the start of their life in adaptation to the terrible duress, distress and stress they are under:  ANGER, FEAR and/or SADNESS.

I think about what I believe about anger, that it is stimulated by changes and pressures within the environment that could not be solved by immediately known means.  “Find another way — NOW” the body-brain says.  “Learn something new — NOW — and use it to solve this immediate problem.”  Anger includes this important fact:  “YOU CAN DO IT!”

I have been increasingly angry about the noise and lights that stream from my neighbor’s close-to-me yard.  I can do nothing about noise, but I can visually do something about my privacy.  I had to have the RESOURCES to purchase the material I needed to build this fence-wall.  But equally as importantly, I had to have the CONFIDENCE and COMPETENCE to do this work myself.

The interplay-balance between stressors from the environment implicate anger as a reaction that reflects the need to SOLVE the problem, the resources needed to accomplish a solution, AND confidence and competence needed to personally DO SOMETHING useful to make things better to increase well-being.  Anger is NOT so much about learning something completely new as it is about using what one knows in a new and different creative way.

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There was NOTHING I could do about the terrible abuse I suffered for the first one-third of my life.  NOTHING except to survive it.  I survived that abuse without any anger at all — and that could still amaze me if I didn’t now understand that in order to feel ANGER one must have access to some degree and version of what I wrote in my previous paragraph.

I am old enough NOW to understand that my anger at my neighbor’s ‘intrusion’ into my space is my problem, not theirs.  I didn’t tell them I was going to build a fence ASAP.  I did try to choose a color for the cross boards (very light blue) that would hopefully be pleasing or at least not too offensive to them.  That’s the best I could do about taking care of what I need while trying to be kindly considerate of them.

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Everything I have been doing these past five days has been about that fence:  planning, preparing, purchasing, leveling the 40′ of ground along my west line, and doing the work.  I am very, very, very much a project oriented person.  Focus provides a safe inner place/space for me.  While in my focus mode, most everything and everyone else is EXCLUDED from my realm of awareness.

Focus is an emotional-regulation tool I HAVE to use because my right brain did NOT experience ‘normal or ordinary’ early safe and secure attachment experiences with my caregivers that would have built ‘normal and ordinary’ emotional regulation abilities into my body-brain in the first place.

Early trauma during especially an infant’s earliest developmental stages prior to one year of age creates emotional DYSREGULATION patterns rather than ‘ordinary’ regulation patterns.  Survivors of early trauma and abuse live with these changes for the rest of their lives.

My focusing abilities are very much about so-called dissociation.  I know that now.  It is something that was built into me from birth in response to the trauma of the environment that I grew and developed within.  Focused survival — that’s what I spent the first 18 years of my life doing.  It can be an extremely ISOLATED process — as I become my own ‘Army of One’.

But that’s a whole OTHER part of my story……..

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+HAD THERAPY? DID ANYONE TALK ABOUT WHAT MATTERS MOST?

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For all the variety of difficulties adult survivors of early severe infant-child abuse might have that land them into one kind of therapy or another, how many opportunities are we given to understand the bare-bone underpinnings of how our body-brain gets made in the first place so that we can better understand how what happened THEN directly affects how our body-brain operates now?

For those of us who either STRONGLY suspect or know as clear fact that we were born into madness, chaos, trauma, neglect and abuse, here is a website that describes infant development in simple words and can be read from the beginning to help us to better understand how things are designed to move along in safe and secure early attachment environments where babies are loved, attentively and appropriately cared for, and get their needs met..

Check out BABYZONE – Their section on ‘Baby Week by Week’ provides a wonderful description of an infant’s physical-social-emotional developmental ability stages during the first 52 weeks of life as they are designed to be met, matched, and resonated with by its earliest caregivers.

Their ‘Toddler Week by Week’ pages describe the critical stages of development and an older infant’s needs through week 104 of life.

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It is nearly always ASSUMED that every single person goes through these same stages equally and comes out at the other end, say entering week 105 of life, having achieved, accomplished and acquired whatever happens ‘naturally’ and is therefore equally prepared for ‘what happens next’.

Not true.

In cases where the range of early trauma means that safe and secure attachment patterns do not exist, development – which means the growth and formation of the body-brain-nervous system can very easily be trauma-altered.  Through the process of reading the 104 week descriptions BABYZONE provides, and by using even just a little bit of imagination about what YOUR earliest days of life (the most critical ones for all development because they establish the physiological foundation of the body a person lives in for the rest of their life) I believe we can begin to untangle the knotted twisted thread of our lives in a ‘reason-able’ fashion.

What the information on this site provides is a straightforward account of how the interactions an infant has with its earliest caregivers, who establish the quality of the environment an infant is building itself within, need to feed an infant the RIGHT information in the RIGHT way at the RIGHT time.

Read these descriptions and then imagine what happens to an infant that is being influenced by terror, physical harm, deprivation/neglect, trauma and malevolent treatment.  While we might, as a culture, wish to ALSO imagine that these conditions NEVER surround infants that fantasy does not bear itself out in everyone’s reality.

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Sometimes I wonder what the course of my own ‘recovery’ journey would have been like if 30+ years ago when I first received ‘help’ someone had been educated enough, informed enough, and patient enough to go back to the roots of who I am in this body in this lifetime and assess what the conditions of my earliest life (during critical developmental stages) were like so that I (and ‘them’) could have determined how trauma had changed me way back there at the start of my life so that I ended up with a different trauma-changed body that was forced to find ways to continue down the road of life no matter how traumatic the world I was in actually was.

I encourage anyone who already knows that something was very, very wrong with their childhood to stretch their thinking back as far as they can in an effort to understand that severe child abuse does not necessarily begin at some magical ‘later age’.  Truly mad, abusive and neglectful parents were just as likely to maltreat an infant as they were a child of 2, 3, 4 plus.  Just because nobody wants to think or talk about these realities does not magically mean they don’t and didn’t happen.

Remember, also, that INCONSISTENT treatment of infants is damaging to their patterns of development.  The inability of caregivers to respond appropriately to ‘the person inside’ the baby body is also extremely detrimental to development.  Nature has provided a range of ACCEPTABLE flaws in early infant-toddler caregiving patterns – but beyond that (and in interaction with the susceptibilities of the infant), patterns of trauma change patterns of development.

This website gives us an idea – for our own selves regarding our own possible early environmental conditions – exactly what we needed to build the best body-brain possible.  Those of us who end up with troubled adult lives very probably did not get these most important early needs met RIGHT and in some cases got exactly the opposite — what we LEAST needed.

Bear in mind that our body KNOWS what happened THEN.  If we consider this whole arena of information about trauma in our earliest critical stages of development WITHOUT allowing the internal adult censor to shout and scream distractions at us, our body will simply tell us, “This is what happened to me, and it still matters.”

The clearest way I know of to listen to our body tell us what we most need to know about our earliest developmental trajectory is to imagine our severe abuser from childhood, and then imagine THAT person having little bitty baby us in THEIR hands!  How well did THAT go for you — THEN?

AND please remember:  Going back to our body for this information is HARD tough work.  Be gentle and careful of yourself.  Journaling/blogging along the way is highly recommended as is art work of any kind (and movement/music).  The information our body often holds was given to it before we had words though certainly NOT before we could — did — and tried to — communicate with those who mattered most to us — our earliest caregivers.

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+MORE THINKING ON CRASH-DUMMY BABIES – THE SOUND/PITCH OF THE DISTRESSED INFANT CRY

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I found an interesting article online that describes the pitch range of ordinary infant versus distressed ‘sick’ infant crying:

Impact of the Cry of the Infant at Risk on Psychosocial Development

PHILIP SANFORD ZESKIND, PhD

Carolinas Medical Center, USA

(Published online April 4, 2005)

Recent Research Results

“Whereas research originally sought to find whether cries elicited by discrete eliciting conditions could be perceptually differentiated, (4,25) more recent research has centered on cries as representing a continuum of sounds. (26,17)  A model emphasizing a “synchrony of arousal” between infants and caregivers describes how increases or decreases in infant arousal produce corresponding changes in the temporal and acoustic characteristics of infant crying that then typically produce corresponding increases or decreases in the perceived arousal and motivation of the caregiver. (27)  For example, as the infant becomes increasingly hungry and aroused, cries become increasingly higher-pitched, resulting in increasingly higher-perceived arousal in the caregiver. In this way, the cry sound mediates a symbiosis between the conditions that result in infant crying and the caregiver’s responses to the infant.”  [please see the references noted by numbers embedded within this text by clicking on the title of the article above]

“Whereas typical cries may range in fundamental frequency (basic pitch) from 400 to 650 Hz, hyperphonated cries are defined by a qualitative break in the cry sound to a fundamental frequency above 1,000 Hz that may range to 2,000 Hz and more.”

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I wanted to get an idea about what this range of crying pitch might sound like, so I found a list of the hertz range for notes on a piano keyboard.

PIANO KEY FREQUENCIES

The sound range of the crying of a ‘sick’ baby is way up there on the piano keyboard, at and above ‘soprano C’.

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“Reflecting a special condition of infant arousal, the high-pitched hyperphonated cry of the infant at risk elicits significantly stronger perceptual and physiological reactions than typical infant cries. Across cultures, (14,28) hyperphonated cries are perceived to be more irritating, aversive, arousing and “sick” sounding than typical cries and to elicit more immediate responses that include holding and cuddling. (29) Several studies indicate that there are at least two distinct dimensions underlying the perceptions of hyperphonated cries ― one in which the infant sounds “sick” and requires ameliorative care and one in which the cry is perceived as unusually aversive. (14,30) A higher cry pitch has been directly related to these particular perceptions. (30)”

“The presence of at least two dimensions underlying the perceptions of infant cry sounds underscores the importance of considering how the same cry sound may have different meanings to caregivers, depending on the listener’s emotional set.”

“In contrast to the typical response of increased arousal to higher-pitched cry sounds, adolescent mothers, (34) women suffering from depression35 and women who use cocaine during pregnancy (36) perceive cries of increasing pitch as being less arousing and less worthy of immediate care.”

“These differences in caregiver responsivity to infants with higher-pitched and hyperphonated cry sounds have been shown to be related to the infant’s subsequent psychosocial development.”

Conclusion

“The psychosocial development pathway of the infant at risk will reflect the combined effects of the infant’s altered neurobehavioural organization, the resulting behavioural repertoire of the infant, and how individual caregivers respond to the infant. As part of this behavioural repertoire, the hyperphonated cry of the infant at risk is a two-edged sword. So aversive are the physical properties of high-pitched infant crying that caregivers will often try to do whatever is necessary to try to stop the noxious sound. In most cases, these attempts will provide the kinds of auditory, visual, vestibular and tactile-kinesthetic forms of stimulation that promote infant development. This process may be accentuated when caregivers respond with attentive, more immediate ameliorative care to an infant they think sounds “sick.”

“In some cases, however, caregivers may respond to the aversive quality of the cry with unusually heightened arousal that provides that basis for “defensive” reactions, actions that are physically detrimental to the infant’s well-being and/or emotional and physical withdrawal of the mother from the infant over time. When a mother suffers from depression, for example, her emotional condition may make her even less able to respond to the crying infant as the needs of that infant increase. In extreme cases, her response patterns may include an increased risk for physical child abuse and/or neglect. These divergent response patterns and [have] effects on several aspects of the infant’s psychosocial development have been supported in longitudinal studies.”

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What happens to an infant’s development when the mother/caregiver, who is supposed to be the infant’s comforter is, instead the SOURCE of an infant’s distress and hence of its higher pitched cry of distress?

Reading this information makes me wonder about my own stress response and aversion to high pitched sounds.  I have almost NO tolerance for them at all!!  They are a trigger for my trauma that is often hard to understand — but maybe the facts that this article points out are part of the much bigger SOUND picture — including verbal abuse — that set our nervous system off down the trauma-changed road from the beginning of my life.

This — a “synchrony of arousal” between infants and caregiver — does not happen for battered babies and hence our development is trauma-changed.

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+BEING AN ADULT BATTERED BABY SURVIVOR – A UNICORN IN MY OWN SECRET GARDEN?

alchemynow2 Comments

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The approximate 5% of the population that I deem to be battered baby crash-dummy survivors of a severely abusive, neglectful, traumatic and inadequate early caregiver-interaction, insecure and unsafe attachment (to others, self and the world) environment truly comprise what our society terms the ‘at risk’ percentage of our population.  You name the stressor, the difficulty, the negative consequence and there you will find us standing with our ‘battered baby survivor’ crash dummy flags waving high above the crowd.

Or rather, there you will find us struggling along in the ranks of the homeless, the jobless, the underemployed, the chronically ill, the troubled relationship involved, the poor ones, the sick ones — in other words here we are among the ones MOST in need of understanding, compassion, and assistance.

The older I become the more I realize that I was lucky to get through my mothering years as well as I did (which by most socioeconomic standards was still bopping along the bottom).  The older I become the more I suspect that whatever resources I could muster and use to survive my first 18 years of total hell, and then the next 35 years of being a parent and an adult trying to ‘fit in’ and ‘get along’, the more I realize that whatever assets I had in my resource account are pretty well used up.

My cancer came.  People who loved me pushed, pulled and dragged me through treatment so that I am still alive.  But I feel just about bankrupt.

Financially I am completely dependent ‘on the dole’ – and not living in a nation like, say, Sweden, I punish myself continually for my inability/disability to ‘pay my own way’.  That ALSO wears on me heavily.

My expiration date was up — and I pushed it.  Here I am.  But I am here to say that I think I feel more like a unicorn than I do a ‘fully functional adult human’ (MAN!  What we do to one another and our self!)

Here I am, increasingly unable to leave the sanctuary and sanctity of my own Secret Garden because of the cresting effects of the damage that was done to me in my earliest years of development in trauma.

I hate the limitations these consequences of created within me and for me.  My world grows smaller and smaller.

I am soon to transfer all my medical records to a woman doctor in this small town, one I hope will listen to me so that she can begin to comprehend what I am saying:  I have my bags packed and I am ready to go.  I am soul weary and tired of the battle.  I see nothing ever getting any better for me.  I believe the long term permanent trauma changes that happened to me have caught up with me — for good (or for worse!).

I do not see my point of view as being unnatural given my condition, or as pessimistic.  My condition is a fact.  If we wish to tackle the problems that someone like me faces, we must accept that some babies are born to be their caregiver’s crash dummies, and there is a price to pay when those conditions are (were for survivors) allowed to exist.

Except for the 5% of the population I write about, to and for, the rest of our culture has a long, long way to go before they will begin to have a single clue about what I am talking about.

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