Tag: bonding

+LOOKING AT THE NURSERY AS THE SEAT OF VIOLENT CRIME

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I suffer no delusions about the source of my mother’s ability to commit her 18 years’ worth of violent crime against me.  All survivors of infant-child abuse, neglect and maltreatment were victims of violent crime that happened to them in particular ways, at particular times that impacted their physiological development before the age of TWO YEARS OLD.   For some survivors the maltreatment they received during these earliest months of life created the patterns within their little growing body-brains that led down a very straight road to an end result of becoming capable of perpetrating violent crime.

I have written on this blog in the past that the minimum prison term my mother as the abuser and my father as her enabler SHOULD have received would have been no less than 14,500 years.  I arrived at this figure simply my generalizing at a minimum how many times I was forced to endure a violent attack.  This figure does not begin to match a justified consequence for the related verbal violence that happened or take into account the 18 years of continual terror and trauma that the environment of my home of origin actually contained.

The source of all the violence I (and other survivors) experienced started somewhere, and that somewhere was the nursery.

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“Though we have been greatly concerned about government spending on the U.S. health care system, which many deem to be in crisis, we have not noticed that the cost of the criminal justice system is three times the cost of the nation’s entire health care budget.”

I am beginning my study of the book, Ghosts from the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence (1998) by Robin Karr-Morse, Meredith S. Wiley.  I hope I have the commitment and strength to read this book cover to cover.  It will not be an easy read – but will be an important one.  As an 18 year infant-child-teen victim of severe and consistent violent abuse and battering by my mother, I am reading this book not only to gain a more clear understanding of violence that happens to others, but also as a survivor looking backwards into the nursery in which my mother was so pathetically, invisibly and malevolently raised to learn more about what happened to her.

The authors state on page 9:

“Media coverage of violence – murder and rape, gang violence, serial killings, the murder of parents, children, and coworkers – treats violent behavior as if it suddenly emerges from a developmental void.  It is a rare story that looks for the sources of this behavior even in preadolescence or grade school.  And this is far from the real root in most cases.  In order to understand the tide of violent behavior in which America is now submerged, we must look before preadolescence, before grade school, before preschool to the cradle of human formation in the first thirty-three months of life.  Those months, including nine months of prenatal development and the first two years after birth (33 months), harbor the seeds of violence for a growing percentage of American children.  In the violence equation…this is chapter one, the missing chapter.

“The ghosts of children lost to rage and despair, overlooked or abused by a community unaware of their existence, do retaliate.  These children – like all children – “do unto others.”  It may be easy and politically expedient to ignore them or to close eyes to the appalling circumstances of their lives while they are voiceless and powerless – little bodies tucked away where no one is looking.  But these children – grown larger and angrier – are swelling the rising tide of violent young offenders in our communities.  Range-filled adolescents only seem to come out of nowhere.  They come, too often, from the nursery.”

“As we begin to discover the previously unimaginable impact of the smallest insult to the brain at crucial times in development [and the stress hormones released during maltreatment of infants creates brain insult], we are beginning to see that much of what we have formerly written off as unknowable in origin and therefore unchangeable, can and must be prevented.  The current upswing in violent behavior is a clear sign of systemic distress.  If human life is to continue, our entire species needs to attend differently to our young.”  [addition of bold type is mine]

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+PLANNED SUFFERING FOR CHILDREN IN OUR UNBALANCED NATION

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The sentiments reflected in the words below follow exactly along the lines the United Nations identified within the large and growing gap in America between the quality of life for America’s most ‘pampered’ children and those that live a far less ‘pampered’ life.

The New York Times Editorial by columnist Paul Krugman (published online February 27, 2011)

Leaving Children Behind

“Will 2011 be the year of fiscal austerity?”

“And who will bear the brunt of these cuts? America’s children.”

“The really striking thing about all this isn’t the cruelty – at this point you expect that – but the shortsightedness.  What’s supposed to happen when today’s neglected children become tomorrow’s work force?

“Anyway, the next time some self-proclaimed deficit hawk tells you how much he worries about the debt we’re leaving our children, remember what’s happening in Texas, a state whose slogan right now might as well be “Lose the future.””  READ FULL ARTICLE HERE

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ALL THE SIGNS ARE HERE

(click – you might have to wait a few seconds – the article will appear at this link)

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+SMOKING – AND NOT BEING ABLE TO FEEL WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE LOVED

alchemynow2 Comments

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I am thinking about jumping into an alligator full of swamps.  No, I guess that’s supposed to read the other way around.  I am getting past the ‘thinking about quitting cigarettes’ stage to the ‘preparing to quit smoking’ stage.  At 59, it’s not that I WANT to quit.  I’ve loved smoking since the first Kool I smoked out of a pack I bought from a vending machine when I was 16.  But as I don’t seem to be ready to die from the two breast cancers I fought and beat, it’s what seems to be coming next that will drive me to quitting.

The recent CT scan I had that showed no cancer did show early stage emphysema — and I am beginning to feel it.  In addition I have advancing osteoporosis like my mother’s mother had (badly though never a smoker), and even with treatment both of my hips and my lower back are being affected.  Cigarette smoking pulls calcium out of the bones.

I am obviously among the 20% of the population that still smokes just as I am also among the 20% of the population that suffers from depression.  But now, after all my studying about the long-term consequences due to trauma-altered physiological body-brain development during my earliest years due to severe infant-child abuse, I know very well that quitting smoking will be tied directly to my worst nightmare, my worst alligator full of internal swamps.

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Without having an safe and secure human attachments during my childhood – with the exception of the love I received from my birth from my brother who was 14 months old when I was born — I never formed body-brain pathways and circuits that would have allowed me to FEEL what it feels like to be loved.

Only those other severe infant-child abuse survivors who like me had NOBODY to turn to, NOBODY that truly loved them, will know what I am talking about.  Feeling what if feels like to be loved does NOT come automatically.  I never knew that until I began my own studies in infant-child neurological development.

Even though I have never read a developmental neuroscientist who said that the inability to feel the feeling of being loved is the MAJOR negative consequence of the kind of abuse I suffered at the hands of a man-woman-monster I had instead of a mother (an ‘anti-mother’), I KNOW I am right.

Again, at age 59 if I was going to be able to feel what it feels like to be loved by my children, siblings, friends, partners — or even to be loved by my own self — I would have felt it by now.  I search and search and search and search inside myself for that feeling — both in my memories of the past and within myself regarding my current relationships.  The feeling of feeling loved is MISSING.

I believe that this feeling of being loved is specifically one that is SUPPOSED to be built into an infant’s rapidly developing body-brain during the first year of life while the right limbic social-emotional brain is going through its foundational and extremely rapid foundational formation.

Nobody (other than my baby brother) gave me experiences of being loved that would have built those pathways, circuits and patterns into my body-brain — so, they aren’t there.  Can they be built post-infant-childhood?  Not that I know of.

I logically and ‘semantically’ know (left brain) that I am loved, but this is NOT the same thing as being able to FEEL the feeling of being loved.  Yes, this is a ‘dis-ability’ — like being deaf or blind or paralyzed — and I believe it is entirely based on trauma-altered physiological development due to the severe trauma and abuse I experienced during my critical windows of growth that, once passed, cannot be returned to at a later date and be ‘done over’.

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It is the PAIN that my inability to feel the feeling of being loved that I believe is at the root of my cigarette smoking patterns.  I am not at all sure I can find a way to live — to stay alive — with that pain unmasked by my smoking.  I believe being now absolutely aware of my missing ability means that I have to face that feeling within myself that the ABSENCE of being able to feel what it feels like to be loved has created in its place.

I call that feeling overwhelming sadness.  It is a grief that humans are not meant to ever experience, and it comes from ONE thing:  Being born to a mother so absolutely and completely unable to love her infant-child that she hates and hurts it instead.

There is no amount of ‘intellectual power’ that I know of capable of erasing the great pain that NOT being able to feel the feeling of being loved creates physiologically in my body.  Yet I am rapidly approaching a crossroads.  I can’t say that I am even capable of feeling the feeling of being loved by my own self if I am not physiologically capable of feeling anyone else’s love for me, either.  But if I want to continue living past my current age with any quality of life, I am not going to have a choice not to quit smoking.

My most important ‘coping skills’ to get through my life are very active ones.  Not to be able to accomplish physical feats that require stamina and endurance will NOT suit me at all.  I have never been a ‘sitter’.  That is not how I cope.

It also seems to me that to return to a nonsmoking state of existence is to return directly to the state of ‘being a child’.  Only as a child did I not live with cigarettes, and during THAT time I lived with horror and abuse.  This future trek will be interesting — at least I can say that much!  I have self-medicated with tobacco for a long, long time.  I cannot imagine living without it.

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+AVOID THE PRYING EYES OF CREEPY FAMILY: WRITE YOURSELF A PRIVACY-PROTECTED BLOG!!!

alchemynowLeave a comment

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I can’t stop thinking this morning about a commenter’s words written to my post of yesterday morning.  I also can’t stop thinking about an interview I read several days ago and dismissed.  This ‘can’t stop thinking about…..’ process is what I need to write about now.

The interview written January 18, 2010 was written on The Salon website by Thomas Rogers about the work of a controversial woman:

“The Trauma Myth”: The child betrayed

Susan Clancy discusses her controversial theory, and how an industry designed to help children may hurt them

As I read this interview I found myself struggling not only with the ideas Clancy has presented in both of her books AND with her use of degrading (swearing) language she evidently felt compelled to use in this interview.  I found that her overall concerns lost credibility to me because of her use of this (to me) inappropriate language.

Yet I haven’t been able to entirely dismiss what Clancy mentions (at the above link).  I know on some level there is truth in her words, but I also trust this ‘squirmy feeling’ in my gut that tells me, “BEWARE – be wary – all is not safe in her thinking.”

I do agree with two things Clancy is saying that match my inner understandings.  As an infant-child, and even as a teen, I had no perspective that would have let me even begin to know that all the torture, trauma, battering, abuse, and chronic misery I suffered during my life with my mother was not normal, was ‘wrong’, was not deserved, or even that it was possible that I could have my own reflective thoughts about ANY of my own experience.

While Clancy is talking specifically about sexual abuse of children happening in environments and within contexts that prevent the child from always being able to tell that ‘abuse’ is going on, I would NEVER say the child being sexually abused is not ‘being hurt’.  Clancy is not adequately describing what ‘being hurt’ is.

When researchers tell us that nearly 100% of people with Borderline Personality Disorder were sexually abused as children, that fact alone lets us know even within this limited population that the HARM to children from being sexually abused – and yes, betrayed – is currently beyond our abilities to measure.

When it comes to my own severe infant-child abuse history, even though I have no memory of overt sexual abuse, it wasn’t until the researchers began to discuss the permanent physiological changes that happen in a traumatized little one’s developing body-brain that I began to FINALLY begin to understand how HURT I actually had been by my mother’s torture of me.  In fact, I can hardly imagine a greater hurt to an infant-child than to create such terrible trauma in its life – during the most critical stages of its physiological development – that its entire growing body-brain has to change in its development to survive the abuse and trauma.

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However, it is Clancy’s OTHER topic that I am stuck ‘thinking about’ this morning.  Clancy does not believe in ‘repressed memory’, and I have to say on this subject that I agree with her.  Whether Clancy speaks of dissociation in either of her books I do not know – nor will I ever know because I already feel far too uncomfortable with her language and her ideas to ever read her books.

Researchers clearly know that severe abuse at ANY age can change the region of our brain that processes incoming memory:  the hippocampus.  (Google search ‘hippocampus child abuse’, for examples of the research)

Trauma and memory combine with one another in ways I don’t believe ANYONE yet fully understands.  When researchers such as Dr. Allan Schore describe how the stress hormone, cortisol can so ‘heat up’ the brain’s neurons in the hippocampus as trauma memories are being processed so that these neurons get so hot they FRY before the facts of memory are retained (emotional memory is stored in the body differently) – and that this ‘fried memory cell’ process can happen to BOTH a victim AND a perpetrator of abuse – lets me know that we have to be very careful about what we believe to be true about memory.

I have written many times on my blog that I don’t advocate ‘going after trauma memories’ for any general reason.  I believe extreme caution must be used any time we choose to deal with trauma memory.  On those occasions that ‘trauma triggers’ in our environment stimulate a memory that then appears where it seems we had no memory of this experience before the trigger happened, these memories (to me, in agreement with Clancy) are now NOT FORGOTTEN – in other words are now remembered.  This experience has nothing to do with them being so-called ‘repressed’ before we ‘un-forgot’ them.

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Now, in regard to the commenter’s words yesterday:  We have not only the right to tell our stories but also the right to write them.  In addition, I believe that WRITING our stories of abuse and trauma is VERY HEALING, just so long as we are wise and careful with our self as we go through this disclosure process.

Part of why I believe that wise disclosure is healing especially for those of us who are survivors of early infant-child abuse, trauma and malevolent treatment is that the treatment we received most likely changed our physiological development.  When this happens, we do not ‘get to’ process information in ‘normal ways’.

When researchers tell us that the development of our right and our left brain hemisphere can be altered due to adaptations to early trauma, and that the region of the brain between these two hemispheres, the corpus callosum, also changes due to trauma during development, it then becomes one of the primary needs of our healing to find out what this means to us in our everyday lives.

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Now comes the next part of my morning’s thinking.  I want all of this blog’s readers to know that WordPress hosts blogs for FREE, and their blog interface is nearly perfect!  Part of the perfection that WordPress has created within their blogging systems is a complete, thorough and very understandable HELP section.  There is also a way to contact tech support workers directly – and they are incredibly prompt and helpful in their replies.

MOST importantly, every single word a person writes on their WordPress blog can be published PRIVATELY and not publicly.  These private publications are password protected so that NOBODY without your permission can read a single thing you right.

As early trauma and abuse targets our boundaries to our body and to our self were breached, broken, invaded, violated, smashed-to-smithereens before they were ever formed.

I did respond to yesterday’s commenter that I didn’t begin to write my stories until both of my parents were dead dead dead.  BUT knowing what I know today about the power for healing that writing my stories has provided me, and knowing what I know today about the complete and total privacy that WordPress provides for its blog writers, I ALSO know that there is absolutely NO REASON WHATSOEVER for ANYONE not to take advantage of the healing powers of writing ANYTHING and EVERYTHING they want to on their private blog.

Now, my experience continues to me that the more I write the more I fine-tune my recognition of how my body-brain processes my LIFE in and out of the word-world.

Turning traumas into words is one of the most empowering things a survivor can do.  And, one of the most healing.

Writing builds connections between our changed-brain hemispheres in increasingly new and complex ways – something all early trauma survivors not only desperately NEED, but fundamentally DESERVE in our healing.

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Finding out HOW the ocean of trauma we were swallowed up in as little tiny people HURT us is OUR right of discovery.  Not Clancy, not anyone else can tell us what did or did not hurt us – or HOW.

Writing allows us to discover our self in ways that can cement the knowledge we gain into WORDS – even if what we write is never read by another soul.  We decide that.  Our privacy happens as we explore and define our own boundaries, as does our new levels of healing.

So even if your ‘messed up’ family would turn all shades of bruise-color should they discover YOUR truth about what YOU know about your family-of-origin experience, there’s no reason to let a single thought of THEM change how you process YOUR REALITY on your free (and completely private if you wish) WordPress blog!

And please also know that you can always use this blog’s ‘contact us’ button at the top of the site to leave me a comment with questions about your new process.  Ask in the comment that it not be published and it won’t be.  I will try to answer any questions if I can, and will certainly lend support and encouragement – ‘in-courage-ment’ – to any new blog writer survivor!  Good luck, have fun, and happier healing!

Go write your memories — good and bad — in any words you want to, as many times as you want to.  My experience has been that I am more free now from the power of my trauma because my memories are all clarified and locked-down in place so that they are OUTSIDE of me nearly more than INSIDE of me now.  I like that!

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GO HERE TO GET STARTED!

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/

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+TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT AND THE POWER OF THE SOUL TO KNOW RIGHT FROM WRONG

alchemynow5 Comments

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The mind of a child – not just any child, but the mind of ME as a child:  My mother did not change it where my mind matters most.  Sure, all the trauma I was exposed to through her abuse of me had its affect.  Sure, my little growing body-brain had to change in its physiological development as a consequence of stress, distress and more and more of the same.  But as I look back at myself growing up I can tell that there was something happening during every one of the abusive incidents I remember that tells me that for all the twisted, insistent, psychotic, horrible projections of her own that my mother tried to transplant INTO me — it never worked.  I kept my own reality as I knew it.  I did not accept her version of reality as she worked so hard to apply it to me.

I can think all the way back to when I was two and my mother accused me of manipulating my grandmother to place me back into diapers, to spoil me, to pamper me, to turn my grandmother against my mother.  I didn’t do those things, and somehow at that very young age I KNEW IT.

It’s not that I ever thought, “She’s wrong.”  I just never believed her.  How do I know that?

I can think all the way back to when I was three and my mother accused me of trying to murder my little sister by drowning her in the toilet bowl.  I always knew I didn’t do that, either. Did I think consciously about this fact?  No, I did not.  Did I think, “What’s wrong with my mother that she could think such a thing?”  No, I did not.  Did I think, “I’m right and she’s wrong?”  Yes, on some profoundly deep, primary and soul level, I did think that – but not in words.  There is a ‘knowing’ that is far beyond words, that is original in the body (primarily in the right brain hemisphere’s connection to the body) that I believe exists in a way that makes this knowledge immutable, ‘not subject to change’, a factor of reality – plain and simple.

At age four when I was violently and severely beaten not only because in my mother’s twisted world I had picked the rows of chenille off of the bedspread during naptime, but ALSO that I was intentionally lying AND trying to get my little sister into trouble because I hated her, I KNEW I had not done any of these things.

This same pattern exists in every abuse memory I currently remember.  I ALWAYS simply KNEW my own reality, what had actually happened – and most importantly I knew that my mother’s version of reality was NOT mine.  But I did NOT know these things in words.  I knew I did not steal the bubble gum and lie about it when I was five.  I knew I was NOT sleeping but was playing a game with the fox running beside the car; that I was not hiding my marbles so my brother and sisters could not find them because I was ‘so selfish’ I did not want to share; and that I had not ‘pulled my pants down for that neighbor boy’ as my mother insisted I had.

These same patterns went on all the way through my childhood, all the way into my teens.  In fact, these patterns within my mother’s distorted mind that so controlled the external world I was left to live in had started while I was being born.  Was I sent by the devil to kill my mother while I was being born?  Now THAT distorted projection I could not combat with any knowledge of my own experience as it contrasted to my mother’s – and THAT one I DID believe.  I was given no choice except on the most profound and most important level of who I am – and it has taken me nearly 60 years to get to that level with clarity.

This single most important delusional projection of my mother’s provided the driving force behind her madness regarding me – and was responsible for all the terrible abuse she did to me.  But as I wrote in my last post NONE of this had anything to do with ME, and on some deep, primary and profound level I KNEW it.  The problem was I didn’t know I always knew it.

Probably because there never was a time in my first 18 years that I could articulate my own reality in words to somebody else, there correspondingly never a time when I could articulate my own reality to my own self.  Everything I knew down deep inside where I WAS existed as fragmented, dissociated bits and pieces of a reality of life that was MINE on the deepest of levels, but that remained somewhere so far away from me that I had no access to it except as those bits and pieces existed AT THE TIME they were formed.

As I was being viciously attacked, screamed at, physically slapped, beaten, punched, dragged and thrown around like a rag doll in the center of the thousands of my mother’s rages I had nothing inside of myself to hold onto except what I knew of my own reality at any given moment.  The facts as I knew them never matched what my mother said was true.

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It is extremely difficult for me to write a post such as this one where I make any effort to approach ‘en masse’ the experience of my own reality of my own infant-childhood.  There is very, very little in the entire first 18 years of my life that wasn’t painful and terrifying.  As I write this morning I remember myself around age 12 or 13 lying for the zillionth time alone in my bed, ostracized, isolated, condemned and suffering after a horrendous beating – crying, hopeless, helpless, and lost in the darkness.  It was during this one single incident, however, that I actually ‘heard words’ that said, “Linda, it isn’t humanly possible for anyone to be as bad as your mother says you are.”

That was it.  Those words came as the only, single few instants of hope or of reprieve that I ever experienced during those long, long years of torture, trauma and abuse.  So I can never say that as my mother attacked me yet again for something I knew I had not done – and as I knew inside myself the facts of my own reality that did not match hers – that I ever received any comfort whatsoever from my knowledge.  I did not.

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“So why,” I ask myself on this sunny and glorious morning, “are you opening that door even a tiny bit to glimpse yourself suffering in and enduring 18 years within the raging inferno of the fires of hell, Linda?”

I know as I ask myself that question that what I want to say next required of me that I ‘go back there’ to look for something.  I didn’t know what I was even looking for exactly until this moment – because NOW I have found it.

What I always knew, I believe, was something that I possessed directly as a manifestation of my soul and of the spirit within it.  What I always knew – what I can look back and see NOW that I ALWAYS KNEW – was in direct contrast to what my mother DID NOT KNOW.

I knew the difference between right and wrong.

I didn’t, of course, ever know during my first 18 years that this is what I knew and is what my mother didn’t know.  I ONLY see this fact this clearly right now at this instant as I write this.

I am tempted next to ask a question that I don’t know the answer to.  “Is every human being born into their lifetime with an intact power to know right from wrong?”  I would follow this question with another one:  “Was my mother born with this knowledge and through the circumstances of her own abusive earliest years so trauma-changed in her physiological development that the ability to know right from wrong was removed from her?”

Right here I allow the ‘sea to part’.  It is enough to know that at the same time there was something within my mother so terribly, terribly, nearly beyond human imagining WRONG with my mother there was something equally RIGHT with me.

I (most fortunately) never lost my ability to know what was right and what was wrong.  I never lost my ability to tell the difference between the two.  And there was nothing my mother ever did to me, or evidently anything she could EVER possibly do to me that could have removed that power I was born with away from me.

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I believe absolutely in God, and I believe that only God knows the condition of any human being.  I believe that extreme stress in the physiological developmental period of infant-child growth change the BODY, and in my mother’s case those changes directly affected the way her brain-mind worked, as well.

I needed to personally write this post as a precursor to the following.

When I think about the innate powers of the soul, I think about the words contained in the quotation at this link:

+”THE SOUL’S POWER”

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+WHY MY MOTHER ABUSED ME: POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER AFTER CHILDBIRTH

alchemynow2 Comments

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I absolutely believe with every fiber of my being that the horror, suffering, trauma, violence and terror that happened to me because my mother hated me would NOT have happened if my birth had not been a difficult one – that IN ITSELF traumatized my mother.  I believe that every horrible thing my mother did to me could be traced back to that ONE event:  My breach birth and the abusive medical treatment my mother received during it.  THIS event is what left me the target of my mother’s resulting madness.  Her abuse of me never had ANYTHING to do with me as an individual infant-child-person.

When I look back at my very long 18 year infant-childhood so full of my mother’s severe abuse of me that there wasn’t much time or room left for me to do anything else but survive it, today I have my inner spotlight focused on just THIS one thing:  The circumstances surrounding my birthing as they impacted my mother.  (See also:  *Litany from Start to Finish)

Out of all the children in my family (there were six of us) I was undeniably the sole and main focus of my mother’s terrible abuse.  At the same time it is obvious to all of my siblings now that my mother’s mind had not been ‘right’ well before I was born, it was the trauma of her birthing of me that created within her the severe psychotic break that created the inner conditions in her mind that found their way into the reality of my every breathing moment of the 18 years I spent enduring her violent and vicious wrath.

Today is the first day I have ever specifically NAMED what happened to her:  Birth trauma.  In my online searching I found some excellent websites that are designed to convey information, hope and help for mothers who experience birth trauma.  I have a very special point of view when I consider these sites because the birth trauma that my mother experienced LED DIRECTLY to the overwhelming and nearly unimaginable 18 years of torture I suffered from my mother as a direct result of this birthing trauma.

True, my mother no doubt suffered sexual abuse, neglect, infant maltreatment along with a whole array of difficulties in her earliest years that acted like a burning fuse to the bomb that FINALLY went off at the time of my birth.  But there is a chance – perhaps a very good chance – that if anyone had recognized how disturbed and traumatized my mother actually was as a result of her (and my) near death as she tried to deliver breach-me and had intervened to help her with her trauma IMMEDIATELY – perhaps none of what I suffered would have come to be.

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From:  Solace for Mothers – Healing after traumatic childbirth

Solace for Mothers is an organization designed for the sole purpose of providing and creating support for women who have experienced childbirth as traumatic. Birth trauma is real and can result from an even seemingly “normal” birth experience.

“ A traumatic event is defined as “The person has experienced, witnessed or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others and the person’s response involved fear, helplessness or horror” (DSM-IV). This certainly can happen during the birth of a child and can have long lasting effects on mother, baby and witnesses present at the birth.

The effects of trauma after childbirth include flashbacks of the birth, nightmares, avoiding and feeling stressed by reminders of the birth, feeling edgy, and experiencing panic attacks. Often these symptoms are confused with postpartum depression by mothers, doctors and mental health providers. To learn more about PTSD and trauma after childbirth, click here.

The resources available through this site offer immediate, personal support to mothers and others who are struggling with birth trauma, PTSD after childbirth and anxiety caused by their birthing experiences.

If you believe that you have been traumatized by your experiences of giving birth to your child, or by witnessing a birth of someone else’s child, Solace for Mothers has resources and supportive communities available for you.

Please browse our web site to learn more about Solace for Mothers. If you work with birthing women, please offer us as a resource. We are pleased to host two online communities where women and those who support them can connect around birth trauma concerns.”

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As my mother’s daughter, I was the living reminder of ‘the traumatic birth experience’.  Even though all the past negative experiences of my mother’s life contributed to the psychotic break she suffered during her birthing of me, the fact remains that it was the circumstance of MY BIRTH that led to the torture my mother did to me.

I also found this information online:

When a bad birth haunts you

The information provided at this link (above) is worth a read.  I was never ‘the baby’ to my mother after I was born.  I was the devil’s child who was sent to kill her while I was being born.  I do suspect that the anesthesia ‘Twilight Sleep’ (see also:  Twilight Sleep here) was given to my mother during labor, but even without the addition of that horrible drug my mother’s pre-Borderline Personality Disorder condition prior to my birth left her completely open and vulnerable to severe disturbance due to a difficult birthing experience.

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Healing the Trauma: Entering Motherhood with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) by Jennifer Jamison Griebenow

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Birth Trauma:  Stress Disorder Afflicts Moms – Study suggests that PTSD may be more common than previously believed

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Birth Trauma Can Cause Women to Develope PPD & PTSD:  A Discussion About Birth Rape and Its Results

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Post Natal Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

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Birth Trauma: In the Eye of the Beholder

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The Birth Trauma Association (BTA) was established in 2004 to support women suffering from Post Natal Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or birth trauma. We are not trained counsellors or therapists or medical professionals. We are mothers who wish to support other women who have suffered difficult births and we aim to offer advice and support to all women who are finding it hard to cope with their childbirth experience.

The BTA is the only organisation in the UK which deals solely and specifically with this issue. We aim to tackle the problem with work which is focused on three main areas:

(1) Raising awareness of birth trauma
(2) Working to prevent it
(3) Supporting families in need

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“What do mothers, who perceive they have had traumatic childbirths, experience each year as the anniversary of their birth trauma occurs?  No research to date has focused on this phenomenon.  The purpose of this study was to describe the essence of women’s experiences regarding the anniversary of their birth trauma.”  Read article HERE

(In all my childhood my mother never joyfully celebrated my birthday – today I realize the birth trauma experienced was a DIRECT contributing factor to this part of my childhood reality, as well as to ALL of the abuse she did to me.)

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Post Traumatic Stress Disorder After Childbirth

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I am not saying in this post that my childhood and that of my siblings would not have been a living hell due to my mother’s mental illness.  What I am saying is that I – ME! – would not have been the target or the recipient of the kind of abuse that I was.  I also do suspect, however, that the progression of my mother’s Borderline Personality Disorder mental illness would have taken a different course had this birthing trauma not occurred, and whatever that course would have been  — had my mother not suffered the trauma of my breach birth in that particular hospital or had she received immediate and appropriate help even if trauma had occurred — nobody will ever know.

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+ANTIDOTE TO DISSOCIATION: THE TRANSITION TO WHOLENESS

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Even when I stumble upon a website such as this one, Women of Green, containing a post entitled, “Can Western Women Save the World? The Dalai Lama Thinks So” I feel lost and overwhelmed in response.  In my reality, there are just too many pieces, too many parts.

Perhaps it might be especially because of my severe disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment ‘disorder-pattern’ that I am left so unmistakably influenced more by what feels ‘broken into pieces’ than many other people are.  When I follow anything that might concern me about the state of our world I end up at the same point in my thinking and in my emotions.  I am left as if I am standing over a pile of tiny shards that are all that’s left of something precious that was once whole and is now smashed to smithereens.

(See this excellent article that I believe applies to what happened to my mother in her infant-childhood to make turn her into the raging super-abusive ‘anti-mother’ whose trajectory of disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment was so different than mine:

Forecasting Aggression:  Toward a New Interdisciplinary Understanding of What Makes Some Troubled Youth Turn Violent By Daniel S. Schechter, M.D.)

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Having been the recipient of my (Borderline) mother’s insane, intensive, brutalizing and violent abuse of me from birth and for the following 18 years of my childhood I was forced to grow, develop and build a body-brain-mind-self without having any safe and secure human attachment relationship that could have allowed me to put the pieces together of my own shattered early life.  Every single time (except for my relationship with nature) that I EVER tried to pursue anything that could have brought me happiness, my mother was ALWAYS there to smash me again.  Smash, bash, crash!  My mother was an absolute expert on applying any force of any kind possible (and from her point of view, necessary) to BREAK LINDA.

After writing my recent post, +LEARNING HOW TO CHANGE PEACEFULLY (leaving the trauma-drama OUT!), I have spent most of my waking moments outside working on and in my garden.  The amount of time I have spent out there specifically thinking about anything has been minimal.  The ‘me’ that’s now doing that work is in the process of BECOMING – different.

Because of my dissociation disorder, I have to be very aware and very vigilant (as best as I can be) of my own process of change.  In this past week I have been LIVING through something I have not put specific words to:  I am coming to understand more clearly that for me there is a difference between how I see change, transformation and transitioning.  My innate body-brain circuitry and pathways of dissociation happened inside of my growing and developing body-brain-mind-self BECAUSE of the horrendous abuse I was chronically forced to experience.  As a result my universe has ALWAYS been about the parts and not about the whole.

I am transitioning.  I have always been transitioning.  At this moment of my life at age 59 my own process of transitioning has moved itself into the forefront of my focus.  It is my own transitioning that I am investigating now – by living it at the same time I am becoming consciously aware of what I am experiencing.

This entire post is actually about one unifying topic:  God.  I never set out to write a blog about God.  Yet in my own search for LIFE, which I see as a search for HEALING (because I was so totally wounded and carry those wounds within this body that trauma built), I don’t believe I will be able to move forward without a thorough investigation about what all things ‘God-invested’ means to me.

God.  I believe the entire accumulation of physiological (on every level) consequence that my first 18 years of severe trauma and abuse did to me has greatly complicated my ability to ‘have a meaningful relationship’ with God.  In order to ‘make my own peace’ with my own essential self I believe I have to face my own brokenness from a spiritual point of view.

This is a time of great transition for me.  I have not decided how I am going to process this time of transition on my blog.  I don’t care how anyone approaches their own belief in God.  I see God as the Unknowable Essence, the Omnipotent Being, the Greatest Mystery and the Creator of All Things.  Being able to break through my own dissociation to heal IN SPITE of that brokenness (that lack of continuity of self-in-the-world) is not a minor step for me.

In my personal investigation about what’s wrong in our nation and in our world that so many little and big people are being allowed to suffer so greatly I simply hit an immovable wall that showed me there is no answer on this globe to solve the brokenness in this whole world unless and until a spiritual solution is found – both personally and combined in love and compassion with masses of others within our species.

That we will have to leave behind what is divisive in our thinking and in our actions in favor of keeping what we share in common about our belief in our Higher Power means to me that we can choose to look inside for what sustains all the goodness of life rather than continue to fight internally and with one another over what is wrong.  Our species is as broken and ‘dissociated’ as a unit as I often feel inside of my own self.  But staying in a place of wounded brokenness will NEVER allow us to find solutions.

However we mutually come to share in bigger and bigger and bigger healing circles that will bring about bigger and bigger and bigger ripples of healing around our globe will not happen through clashes of disagreements.  Healing happens when ‘forces are joined’ on the PLUS rather than on the MINUS side of life.  It seems obvious to me that all abuse is about the minus.  I will always need my transitions to be about the plus.

Wholeness, call it ‘holistic’ if that’s the best word we can find in our language, seems to me to be the exact opposite of what I experienced in my unbelievably sick home of origin.  Whether we are considering our own needs for positive transitioning or the needs of others (including the ‘environment’), we are considering a whole that I believe the Creator made as a WHOLE UNIT that functions in wholeness the same way our own body does.  I am exploring that wholeness.

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+UNITED NATIONS CIVIL SOCIETY NETWORK LINKS

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+CRITICISM NOT ALLOWED IN A BLACK-AND-WHITE WORLD

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I never once had the thought during my 18-year abusive infant-childhood that there was any other kind of parent different than mine were.  I was sequestered within a total environment of trauma that had never allowed me to learn to think either subjectively or objectively about my own experience in relation to anybody else’s different kind of experience.  There was only ONE WAY to see the world, and that was my abusive mother’s way.  She held control over every inlet and outlet of my life, and her control of me was absolute and unswerving.

In my mother’s black-and-white world I was the all-black-one and everyone else was all-white.  Because there was never any break in the trauma I experienced, and because no deviation from my mother’s dictates was ever allowed, I never knew anything like GREY actually existed.  And perhaps because I know so intimately what it feels like (and IS like) to be completely ‘demonized’, I tend to make every possible allowance I can find not to ‘criticize’ anyone else.

There was no balance of any kind in the environment that built me.  Conceiving of a world where very real malevolence exists AT THE SAME TIME that true benevolence ALSO exists at the same time, in the same place is very hard for me to do.  I believe that being raised in a completely abusive Borderline universe makes the Borderline’s inability to tolerate either ambiguity or paradox seem like a fact of reality that everyone accepts.

Trying to live in a different kind of world that accepts the reality that good and bad exist together along with a zillion degrees of mixtures of the two in between often makes me feel as if I am walking completely blind through human-influenced experiences of all kinds that I do not understand.

DARING to criticize my own nation makes me feel like a traitor who will be exposed at any moment – and punished for both my daring and for my criticism.  My severe trauma-built body-brain makes sure that I remember one thing – and it tells me this is the truth whether I ever would have dared to criticize my mother or if I dare to criticize America:  “The bigger they are they harder the hit!”

I was completely setup to shutup.  There never was a middle ground, not even enough for me to be able to identify my own feelings or to have my own thoughts about my experience growing up.  Being entombed absolutely alone in a living tomb of silence is VERY SCARY.  Daring to criticize ‘my nation’ now is stimulating everything I know about threat-to-life if I challenge the status quo.

It was obvious to me that the entire world was on the side of my mother, including my father, my siblings, my teachers, any neighbors we ever had, even my grandmother who was ‘forced’ to give up trying to intercede against my mother on my behalf.  Because my mother was always RIGHT, and because I have accepted the cultural dictate in this nation that America is also always RIGHT – who do I think I am to dare to question otherwise?

And yet it seems to be my concern for the millions of infants, children and their families that are suffering in very real ways within our nation today that is giving me the permission I need to ask in my compassion for THEM, “What is WRONG here?”  Along with the ideas I presented in my earlier post today about ‘betrayal trauma’ comes my own conflicts about daring to notice something is wrong, daring to ask the question, and about daring to look at the ugly side of the history and ongoing practice our nation displays in allowing some people to thrive while others needlessly suffer and perish – both within our own boundaries and around the globe.

Am I betraying my own nation by entertaining the idea that America is far from perfect?

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Previous posts in the last 24 hours:

+HERE’S A TAKE ON THE RICH RICH RICH RICH AND THE POOR POOR POOR POOR

+FINDING MY COURAGE TO TAKE A LOOK AT ‘WHAT’S WRONG WITH AMERICA’

+ONGOING TRAUMAS: AMERICA’S BIG MONEY PERPETRATORS

+WHERE THE BAD PEOPLE HIDE: ‘AMERICA FAR WORSE THAN A BULLY’

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+FINDING MY COURAGE TO TAKE A LOOK AT ‘WHAT’S WRONG WITH AMERICA’

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For all the severe trauma, neglect, abuse and malevolent treatment I endured during the first 18 years of my life, I have yet to thoroughly explore the topic of the book I am highlighting here today as it applies to my own life.  I have known for many years that I had no relationship with my mother or father that was outside the range of what is described as a ‘trauma bond’ or as a ‘betrayal bond’.  I had no safe and secure attachment relationship with ANYONE during those 18 years.  I have evidently taken that fact so fore granted that it is only now as I continue to explore the CONTEXT of the Bigger Picture in which the trauma that happened to me within that I am NOW directly faced with either paying some attention to what these kinds of bonds actually are – or not.

From a rather detached point of view I find it intriguing to learn this about myself:  I did not move to the point where I could directly consider these damaged-damaging kinds of bonds UNTIL I reached a point where my interest and concern became focused not on my own story, but rather on the suffering of OTHER infants and children CURRENTLY trying to grow up in our nation as they suffer from all kinds of deprivations and traumas within malevolent environments.

As I noted in some of my recent posts, it is within the CONTEXT and within the Bigger Picture that I share the overwhelming suffering of my abusive-traumatic infant-childhood with LOTS of other people.  These ‘other people’ are NOT only grownups.  They are ALSO infants, toddlers, childrens and teens who are suffering NOW – in real-time.  As I have pursued my own understandings about what happened to me from the PAST on into the present real-time moment, all boundaries and distinctions I might have had about ‘my suffering’ and the suffering of others have vanished.

In this dissolution of distinctions about suffering I am left taking a closer look at the conditions within our American nation that are not only allowing growing numbers of our offspring to suffer, but that are contributing to this suffering.  I realized a long time ago that especially in regard to infant abuse our culture has built into itself such a taboo against harming little ones that we don’t even want to THINK about let alone TALK about the fact that infant abuse does happen!

Now I feel like I am broaching yet another taboo subject – what is wrong with America.  As I take a look at this subject I feel I am wandering around alone in a very dark bramble thicket – but I will not change my direction.  Forward I go, no matter how uncomfortable this stage of my journey is.

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I will be continuing to post further excerpts from the book I introduced in last evening’s post, America’s Sacred Calling: Building a New Spiritual Reality (2010) by John Fitzgerald Medina.   At the same time I admit to myself I am reaching WAY OUT OF MY COMFORT ZONE as I tackle the information Medina presents.  My realization is that I am unable to make any further progress toward understanding suffering in the context of the nation I am a part of if I don’t at the same time understand that I have a BETRAYAL BOND with America.

As members of a social species we are programmed in our DNA to seek protection by being with others of our kind.  We are most comfortable being a part of the larger group at the same time that our innate physiological attachment ‘wiring’ makes certain that if we move too far out of our ‘group comfort zone’ – we will FEEL IT as discomforting, threatening and downright scary!  We will feel this threat in terms of lack of safety and security at the same time our attachment systems go into full play.

I suspect that most people instinctively align themselves with their own nation in the same way that infants and children align themselves with the caregivers they are dependent on for protection-need fulfillment.  Dependency based on NEED can be a powerful force that keeps us even as adults from asking questions and surveying factual information that MIGHT BURST OUR BUBBLE about anyone we are reliant on for protection-need fulfillment – including facts about our own nation.

In this context of examining context I present the following information on ‘betrayal bonds’.  This information comes from this book:

The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitive Relationships (1997) by Patrick J. Carnes

Product Description

Patrick Carnes presents an in-depth study of exploitive relationships: why they form, who is most susceptible, and how they become so powerful. He explains to readers how to recognize when traumatic bonding has occurred and provides a checklist so they can examine their own relationships. Included are steps readers can take to safely extricate themselves or their loved ones from these situations.

In Carnes’ introduction to his book he states:

“Betrayal.  A breach of trust.  Fear.  What you thought was true – counted on to be true – was not.  It was just smoke and mirrors, outright deceit and lies.  Sometimes it was hard to tell because there was just enough truth to make everything seem right.  Even a little truth with just the right spin can cover the outrageous.  Worse, there are the sincerity and care that obscure what you have lost.  You can see the outlines of it now.  It was exploitation.  You were used.  Everything in you wants to believe you weren’t. Please make it not so, you pray.  Yet enough has emerged.  Facts.  Undeniable.  You sizzle with anger.

Betrayal.  You can’t explain it away anymore.  A pattern exists.  You know that now.  You can no longer return to the way it was (which was never really as it seemed).  That would be unbearable.  But to move forward means certain pain.  No escape.  No in-between.  Choices have to be made today, not tomorrow.  The usual ways you numb yourself will not work.  The reality is too great, too relentless.

Betrayal.  A form of abandonment.  Often the abandonment is difficult to see because the betrayer can be still close, even intimate, or may be intruding in your life.  Yet your interests, your well-being is continually sacrificed.

Abandonment is at the core of addictions.  Abandonment causes deep shame.  Abandonment by betrayal is worse than mindless neglect.  Betrayal is purposeful and self-serving.  If severe enough, it is traumatic.  What moves betrayal into the real of trauma is fear and terror. [my note:  I would add here that trauma is ALSO about overwhelming helplessness, hopelessness and great pain and suffering!] If the wound is deep enough, and the terror big enough [and great pain and suffering], your bodily systems shift to an alarm state.  You never feel safe.  You’re always on full-alert, just waiting for the hurt to begin again.  In that state of readiness, you’re unaware that part of you has died.  You are grieving.  Like everyone who has loss, you have shock and disbelief, fear, loneliness and sadness.  Yet you are unaware of these feelings because your guard is up.  In your readiness, you abandon yourself. Yes, another abandonment.

But that is not the worst.  The worst is a mind-numbing, highly addictive attachment to the people who have hurt you. [my note:  Addictive physiological patterns use the same chemicals and body-brain routes that human attachment does.  When our earliest caregiver attachments hurt us, our body-brain had no choice in the beginning of our life to alter the way our attachment patterns built us and built themselves into us in our early unsafe and insecure human environment.] You may even try to explain and help them understand what they are doing – convert them into non-abusers.  You may even blame yourself, your defects, your failed efforts.  You strive to do better as your life slips away in the swirl of the intensity.  These attachments cause you to distrust your own judgment, distort your own realities and place yourself at even greater risk.  The great irony?  You are bracing yourself against further hurt.  The result?  A guarantee of more pain.  These attachments have a name.  They are called betrayal bonds.

Exploitive relationships create betrayal bonds.  These occur when a victim bonds with someone who is destructive to him or her.  Thus the hostage becomes the champion of the hostage taker, the incest victim covers for the parent and the exploited employee fails to expose the wrongdoing of the boss. {my note:  I am also becoming very clear that, against all our nation’s social taboos about ‘thinking this way’, that our nation itself is allowing an abusive exploitive relationship to continue to grow between ‘the rich and the poor’.  I have a betrayal bond-attachment (as I suspect most of us do) to my own nation!] Sexual exploitation by professionals – such as in the Father Porter case, the Pied Piper phenomenon at Jonestown, and the kidnapping of the children from the school bus at Chowchilla – grab national attention.  Yet the bonds formed in those situations have much in common with the experiences most of us have.

We typically think of bonding as something good.  We use phrases like male bonding and marital bonds, referring to something positive. [my note:  and ‘the mother-infant bond’ – the following bold type is mine] Yet bonds are neutral.  They can be good or bad.  Consider destructive marriages as in War of the Roses in which the attachment results in a mutually destructive bond that cannot be broken.  Partners cannot leave each other the bond is so strong, even when they clearly know the risks.  Similarly, adult survivors of abusive and dysfunctional families struggle with bonds that are rooted in their own betrayal experiences.  Loyalty to that which does not work, or worse, to a person who is toxic, exploitive or destructive to you, is a form of insanity.

A number of signs indicate the presence of a betrayal bond:

1.  When everyone around you has strong negative reactions, yet you continue covering up, defending or explaining a relationship.

2.  When there is a constant pattern of nonperformance and yet you continue to believe false promises.

3.  When there are repetitive, destructive fights that nobody wins.

4.  When others are horrified by something that has happened to you and you are not.

5.  When you obsess over showing someone that he or she is wrong about you, your relationship or the person’s treatment of you.

6.  When you feel stuck because you know what the other person is doing is destructive but believe you cannot do anything about it.

7.  When you feel loyal to someone even though you harbor secrets that are damaging to others.

8.  When you move closer to someone you know is destructive to you with the desire of converting them to a non-abuser.

9.  When someone’s talents, charisma or contributions cause you to overlook destructive, exploitive or degrading acts. [my note:  Alas, I am also ‘reading’ patterns here that describe the nation I am a part of]

10.  When you cannot detach from someone even though you do not trust, like or care for the person.

11.  When you find yourself missing a relationship, even to the point of nostalgia and longing, that was so awful it almost destroyed you.

12.  When extraordinary demands are placed upon you to measure up as a way to cover up that you’ve been exploited.

13.  When you keep secret someone’s destructive behavior toward you [my note:  and I would add in the case of our nation ‘against others’] because of all the good they have done or the importance of their position or career.

14.  When the history of your relationship is about contracts or promises that have been broken and that you are asked to overlook.

Divorce, employee relations, litigation of any type, incest, child abuse, family and marital systems, domestic violence, hostage negotiation, kidnapping, professional exploitation and religious abuse all are areas that reference and describe the pattern of betrayal bonding.  They have in common situations of incredible intensity, or importance, or both. [my note:  I place our ‘national allegiance’ in this same category when the wealth and interests of the few causes great harm to the desperate many] They all can result in a bond with a person who is dangerous and exploitive.  Signs of betrayal bonding include misplaced loyalty, inability to detach and self-destructive denial. [bold type is mine]

If you are reading this book, a clear betrayal has probably happened in your life.  Chances are that you have also bonded with the person or persons who have let you down.  Now here is the important part:  you will never mend the would without dealing with the betrayal bond.  Like gravity, you may defy it for a while, but ultimately it will pull you back.  You cannot walk away from it.  Time will not heal it.  Burying yourself in compulsive and addictive behaviors will bring no relief, just more pain….

You can click on this title and go to Amazon.com to explore the Table of Contents and other pages, as well.  I haven’t read the book yet as I just discovered it in my searching today.  I will either locate a copy through my local library or buy one for myself.  The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitive Relationships (1997) by Patrick J. Carnes

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+FOUND A GREAT USER-FRIENDLY ABUSE-TRAUMA RECOVERY WEBSITE!

alchemynowLeave a comment

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I found this excellent website this morning that has lots of clear accurate information-packed pages related to abuse and trauma — HELPGUIDE.org

Healing Emotional and Psychological Trauma — Symptoms, Treatment, and Recovery

What is emotional and psychological trauma?

Emotional and psychological trauma is the result of extraordinarily stressful events that shatter your sense of security, making you feel helpless and vulnerable in a dangerous world.

Traumatic experiences often involve a threat to life or safety, but any situation that leaves you feeling overwhelmed and alone can be traumatic, even if it doesn’t involve physical harm. It’s not the objective facts that determine whether an event is traumatic, but your subjective emotional experience of the event. The more frightened and helpless you feel, the more likely you are to be traumatized.

A stressful event is most likely to be traumatic if:

  • It happened unexpectedly.
  • You were unprepared for it.
  • You felt powerless to prevent it.
  • It happened repeatedly.
  • Someone was intentionally cruel.
  • It happened in childhood.

Emotional and psychological trauma can be caused by single-blow, one-time events, such as a horrible accident, a natural disaster, or a violent attack. Trauma can also stem from ongoing, relentless stress, such as living in a crime-ridden neighborhood or struggling with cancer.

Risk factors that increase your vulnerability to trauma

People are also more likely to be traumatized by a new situation if they’ve been traumatized before – especially if the earlier trauma occurred in childhood.

Childhood trauma increases the risk of future trauma

Traumatic experiences in childhood can have a severe and long-lasting effect. Children who have been traumatized see the world as a frightening and dangerous place. When childhood trauma is not resolved, this fundamental sense of fear and helplessness carries over into adulthood, setting the stage for further trauma.

Childhood trauma results from anything that disrupts a child’s sense of safety and security, including:

* An unstable or unsafe environment

* Separation from a parent

* Serious illness

* Intrusive medical procedures

* Sexual, physical, or verbal abuse

* Domestic violence

* Neglect

* Bullying

Symptoms of emotional and psychological trauma

Following a traumatic event, most people experience a wide range of physical and emotional reactions. These are NORMAL reactions to ABNORMAL events. The symptoms may last for days, weeks, or even months after the trauma ended.

Emotional symptoms of trauma:

* Shock, denial, or disbelief

* Anger, irritability, mood swings

* Guilt, shame, self-blame

* Feeling sad or hopeless

* Confusion, difficulty concentrating

* Anxiety and fear

* Withdrawing from others

* Feeling disconnected or numb

Physical symptoms of trauma:

* Insomnia or nightmares

* Being startled easily

* Racing heartbeat

* Aches and pains

* Fatigue

* Difficulty concentrating

* Edginess and agitation

* Muscle tension

These symptoms and feelings typically last from a few days to a few months, gradually fading as you process the trauma. But even when you’re feeling better, you may be troubled from time to time by painful memories or emotions—especially in response to triggers such as an anniversary of the event or an image, sound, or situation that reminds you of the traumatic experience.

This appears to be a very user-friendly site.  I found a host of informative articles HERE.  Great site!

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