Tag: child rights

+KIDS NEED TLC — NOT TRAUMA!

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I took the day off from writing a post yesterday and spent the afternoon hanging out in the local laundromat cafe visiting friends.   Even so, I sure didn’t take the day off from thinking about child abuse.  I find that I am asking questions about severe infant-child abuse survivors that there are no answers for — at least not yet.

I’m not even sure these questions could be asked until NOW — at this point in time — when the research is in full support not only of the questions themselves, but of what we will find in answer to them.  We can now see what happens to infant-children when they are given traumas instead of TLC.

I can find the new neuroscientific research about the links between infant maltreatment and life long adult ‘maladaptive’ conditions, but this research cannot possibly begin to tell me what the very real experience of living with the Trauma Altered Development survivors is like from the inside!

I have to ask questions for which there are no answers — yet — because so many people (including probably all the neuroscience researchers) just GOT their social emotional brain in the first place through their safe and secure early caregiver attachments, and therefore already have the answers built right into their body-brain from the start.  To them, there ARE no such questions as I have to ask – therefore, no answers.

Are we survivors supposed to continue to pretend that we don’t know the difference between ourselves and ‘them’?  Are we supposed to be content to have ‘them’ tell us we have a ‘psychopathology’, a disease, a dysfunction, a disorder, take our diagnosis and shut up about it all?  I don’t THINK SO!

I am working my way in my thinking through the most important mother-infant brain building article by Dr. Allan Schore that I introduced two days ago in my post.   In the meantime I am busy making Holiday cut out cookies, a task I haven’t done for 20 years, with the hopes of delivering them to people who have no home.

As I prepare to decorate these cookies, I think about the profound links between severe infant-child abuse and maltreatment and the long term health consequences to survivors – including homelessness.

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Maybe in part because I didn’t write a post yesterday, I dreamed on last night.  I was disappointed this morning when I woke up, opened my eyes, and realized the post I wrote while I was sleeping wasn’t available to ‘cut, copy or paste’ into my blog!

I do remember the very clear visual image that was contained in that dream post, though.  I was thinking about carnations, my grandmother’s favorite flower.  I saw this flower as a white one in a glass of pure water.  In a ‘good enough’ benevolent safe and securely attached infant-childhood body-brain-mind-self development naturally follows a ‘best’ pathway so the little one (in the image of a white carnation) is in no way changed in its development by trauma it suffered in its  malevolent early experiences.

Then I saw an image of a carnation (little person) who did have to go through Trauma Altered Development — and in the image there was the white flower in a glass of water that looked purple in my dream.  The stem of the white flower had to suck up all that purple up its stem — through wounds it received through its development in a malevolent hurtful environment.  In the dream I watched the injured flower turn from white into increasingly darker shades of purple.

First the outside ruffled edges of these traumatized flowers began to change.  According to how long the white flower was left in the wounding environment, the color of the flower was forced to deepen until all of the flower’s ‘development’ changed.

I might have lost all the words to the dream post I wrote, but I did not lose the image of the flowers which followed me into my waking day.

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I also thank ‘totanaca‘ for the comment posted today to CONTACT INFO in regard to work being done toward creating and implementing a national ban on corporeal punishment — of legalized physical assault — against children in our public schools.  Please visit this site dedicated to the banning efforts and make your voice heard:

Ways to ban Corporal Punishment of Children

If you haven’t already found them, please read related posts on this blog.

Corporeal punishment in the public schools creates an atmosphere of terror for our children.  Children form bonds with their teachers and school officials, and violence against children then forms a trauma bond where there should be safe and secure attachment.  Witness abuse is also fostered among all children in a corporeal punishment environment who are helpless to protect not only themselves from physical assault, but also cannot protect their peers.  These are human rights violation concerns.

Children have human rights.

CHILDREN ARE TO BE TREASURED AND PROTECTED!  THEY NEED TLC — NOT TRAUMA!

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Cookie baking note: I just ignored the timer that went off to remind me and warn me that the sheet I was baking of tiny little purple cookie people needed to be attended to.  I got preoccupied and busy doing other things until I smelled the burning cookies!

Sure enough, they are all burned to a crisp and I had to throw them out.  Children are not cookies!  When their needs are not met, when their human rights are violated, when they are maltreated in a malevolent environment so that they suffer Trauma Altered Development — and then have to suffer without a best-built social-emotional brain (and changed body, including nervous and immune system changes) for the rest of their lives — what do we do with them?  Throw them out?

Adult survivors of severe trauma in childhood are dying on the average 20 years earlier than non traumatized children (adults), fill our hospitals and clinics with severe adult onset disease, fill our prisons, our battered shelters, our ‘mental’ and ‘behavioral’ health centers and our streets.  We allow them to be traumatized when they are children and throw them out when they are ‘damaged’ as adults.

Our nation’s statistics are matching this dismal state of our national affairs.  We are ignoring all the warnings — are we going to let this continue?  Believe me, it was not my tiny purple cookie people’s fault they got burned!  The job of baking them right was MINE.

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+PTSD AND SEVERE ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – CONCLUSION

alchemynow4 Comments

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This is the concluding post (PART 4 – see links below to 1st 3 posts) about how Trauma Altered Development (TAD) changes an infant-child abuse survivor’s reaction to ALL trauma.   Van der Kolk writes about posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the book, Healing Trauma: Attachment, Mind, Body, and Brain – Hardcover (Jan 2003, W.W. Norton and Co.) by Daniel J. Siegel, Marion F. Solomon, and Marion Solomon, chapter 4 (pages 168-195) written by Bessel A. van der Kolk:  “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and The Nature of Trauma.”

In his concluding statement of his chapter, van der Kolk writes:

“The rediscovery of trauma as an etiological [causing] factor in mental disorders is only about 20 years old.  During this time there has been an explosion of knowledge about how experience shapes the CNS [Central Nervous System, including the brain] and the formation of the self.  Developments in the neurosciences have started to make significant contributions to our understanding of how the brain is shaped by experience, and how life itself continues to transform the ways biology is organized.”

Again, in talking about infant-child abuse survivors, I would throw the term ‘mental disorders’ out the window.  (Yet how did my mother’s TAD lead her to be HOW she was in the world?]  Trauma Altered Development (TAD) happens at birth (and before) as these trauma experiences shape the CNS and brain’s formation and ‘the formation of the self’.

We cannot minimize, ignore, deny or under estimate the power early trauma has to affect an infant-child’s development.  Van der Kolk is writing in 2003.  Many advances in research and discovery about the impact early experience has on forming an individual have been made in these intervening seven years.  Evidence of early trauma’s power to change people is piling up around us.

“How life itself continues to transform the ways biology is organized” has to be considered in the light that certain of our developmental stages, once passed through in our early life, cannot later be redone under better conditions.  Science has to sort out which is which – which changes are permanent and which changes can be altered at a later age.

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Van der Kolk continues:

“The study of trauma has probably been the single most fertile area within the disciplines of psychiatry and psychology in helping to develop a deeper understanding of the interrelationships among emotional, cognitive, social and biological forces that shape human development.  Starting with PTSD in adults, but expanding into early attachment and coping with overwhelming experiences in childhood, our field has discovered how certain experiences can “set” psychological expectations and biological selectivity.  Research in these areas has opened up entirely new insights into how extreme experiences throughout the lifecycle can have profound effects on memory, affect regulation, biological stress modulation, and interpersonal relatedions [sic].  These findings, in the context of the development of a range of new therapy approaches, are beginning to open up entirely new perspectives on how traumatized individuals can be helped to overcome their past.”

OK, I will first take issue with the last statement van der Kolk makes in his conclusion.  We have to sort out those with Trauma Altered Development (TAD) due to adaptation to extreme traumatic stress during the critical windows of their development from those who did not suffer from trauma that changed them in their development.  I belong to the first group.  Now that I know that fact, I can understand that I will NEVER be able to “overcome” my “past” in any fashion such as this author is suggesting here.

This is a critically important point for TAD survivors to understand.  Our traumatic infant-child experiences changed how we formed so that both the trauma experiences and our physiological responses to them are built into our body!  We cannot, obviously, leave our trauma changed body in our ‘past’, and any suggestion that we should or can do is worse than ludicrous.

I do not believe that any ‘help’ for me can start with PTSD in my adulthood.  For reasons pointed out in my previous posts on this topic (see below) I am no longer convinced that I even have PTSD.  I never had a pretrauma state from which to measure a posttraumatic state against – nor do I have a pretrauma state (or condition of my body) to return to.

Maybe it would help me understand myself better if I rework van der Kolk’s words so they make more sense to me as a TAD survivor:

“The study of trauma …[can help us] to develop a deeper understanding of the interrelationships among emotional, cognitive, social and biological forces that shape human development.  Starting with … early attachment and coping with overwhelming [malevolent, traumatic] experiences in childhood, our field has discovered how certain experiences …[form a developing infant-child body so that] psychological expectations and biological selectivity [are profoundly affected and permanently altered as a result].  Research in these areas has opened up entirely new insights into how extreme [traumatic] experiences throughout the lifecycle can have profound effects on memory, affect regulation, biological stress modulation, and interpersonal …[relations – but most definitely and profoundly when these experiences happen during development and change it so that all life experiences, including any later trauma experience, is processed in a different way]  These findings… are beginning to open up entirely new perspectives on how traumatized individuals [changed from birth cannot] …be helped to overcome their past.”

We cannot overcome our past.  We can begin to learn about the changes that happened to us so that we can begin to learn how to live well in spite of them.

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Interesting website my sister sent me the link to – am exploring it – has really COOL TRAUMA CHARTS!  Take a look at them, especially the third one which about describes how I feel all the time — and the way I felt for the entire first 18 years of my life — minus the hostility and rage because I did not have the luxury of that experience.  It is important to remember that depression is considered ‘an anxiety disorder’.

The experience of all these experiences related to trauma built themselves into our body through early infant-child maltreatment from our beginning.  The top right cluster of experiences on that bottom chart are ‘hyper’  or ‘GO’ sympathetic arm responses of our Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) and the lower left ones are the ‘hypo’ or ‘STOP’ parasympathetic ones (remember, like a ‘pair a brakes’).  Fundamental changes in how our ANS formed happened to us through our Trauma Altered Development (TAD).

Again, I have to consider this information through my Trauma Altered Development (TAD) severe infant-child abuse survivorhood filter – I do not have an ‘ordinary’ non-trauma built body – my nervous system does not have a safe, secure calm set point……I am different…..so how does this information apply to me/us?  We have to figure this out…..
Somatic Experiencing Foundation for Human Enrichment — Mission Statement

The Foundation for Human Enrichment – FHE is a non-profit, educational and research organization dedicated to the worldwide healing and prevention of trauma. We provide professional training in Somatic Experiencing and outreach to under served populations and victims of violence, war and natural disasters.

What is Somatic Experiencing® (SE)?

”Somatic Experiencing® is a body-awareness approach to trauma being taught throughout the world. It is the result of over forty years of observation, research, and hands-on development by Dr. Levine. Based upon the realization that human beings have an innate ability to overcome the effects of trauma, Somatic Experiencing has touched the lives of many thousands. SE® restores self-regulation, and returns a sense of aliveness, relaxation and wholeness to traumatized individuals who have had these precious gifts taken away. Peter has applied his work to combat veterans, rape survivors, Holocaust survivors, auto accident and post surgical trauma, chronic pain sufferers, and even to infants after suffering traumatic births.

This is the primary website for the SE training, support of health professionals in Somatic Experiencing® and connecting trauma victims to the approximately 5,000 SE® Practitioners across the globe.”

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FROM MY POINT OF VIEW — considered from the above:

“SE® restores self-regulation, and returns a sense of aliveness, relaxation and wholeness to traumatized individuals who have had these precious gifts taken away”

TAD survivors cannot be restored or returned to anything like what these presenters are describing.  “These precious gifts” were taken away from us from the time of our birth — or even before!!  We have to understand what this means to us — nobody is going to do it for us!!  I never had a ‘sense of aliveness, relaxation or wholeness’ ever formed into my body in the first place — or any ‘ordinary’ ability to self-regulate (formed into our body-nervous system-brain fundamentally through our caregiver attachment experiences before the age of one).  Nobody can give me back what I never had.

So, how do I FIND these ‘precious gifts’ for myself NOW?  My Trauma Altered Development is a consequence I have suffered from my entire life as a result of having had my Human Rights as a Child stripped from me and violated through 18 years of abuse, torment and trauma.

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This post follows:

From December 2, 2009 +PTSD AND SEVERE ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – PART THREE

from November 30, 2009 +PTSD AND SEVERE ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – PART TWO

from November 28, 2009 +PTSD AND SEVERE CHILD ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – PART ONE

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PLEASE NOTE:  Do not take anything I say as a reason to alter any ongoing treatment, therapy or medication you are receiving.  Consult with your provider if you find something in my writing that brings questions to your mind regarding your health and well-being.

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OK, and this for FUN?

President Obama and ET?  “The Vatican Astrobiology conference from November 6-8 , for the first time legitimized discussion of extraterrestrial life and its implications for the Catholic Church.”

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+ALIGNING OUR NATION WITH UNITED NATIONS CHILD RIGHTS IS AGAINST OUR OWN LAWS

alchemynow7 Comments

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The following comment has brought something to my attention that extremely troubles me.  Perhaps I am experiencing some of the reactions and feelings that others might experience when faced with the reality that child abuse really does occur after they have spent their lives in oblivious ignorance of this fact.

Those of us who have suffered from infant-child abuse and neglect already know, of course, that extreme maltreatment of infants and children happens in our nation.  Yet here I am today, evidently having spent my life time somehow believing that the United States of America exists at some high level of the social food chain and would, given our advantages in the world, OF COURSE lead the world on all fronts that have to do with caring for and protecting our children.

NOT TRUE I find today, thanks to the following comment:

posted comment by Pat Gordon-Smith
patsky.blogspot.com

90.211.0.50

Submitted on 2009/12/03 at 8:47am

The Universal Declaration of Children’s Rights was superseded in 1989 by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child — CRC – http://www.cirp.org/library/ethics/UN-convention/

It is a detailed interpretation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the special case of children whose journey between wholly dependent infancy and legally independent adulthood means that, for a greater or lesser period between birth and age 18, they must rely on others for their physical, financial and emotional security.

Every country in the world has ratified the CRC apart from two – Somalia and the USA, although last week Somalia indicated its intention to sign. This was reported on the Jobsanger blog, where I posted a response (http://jobsanger.blogspot.com/2009/11/statement-on-childrens-rights.html).

Your conclusions seem bang on to me. I agree that, in the US, recognition of children’s rights should be a matter for the federal government. Perhaps you and blogger Ted McLaughlin might join forces in putting pressure on the president for just that.

Good luck.

IN RESPONSE TO:

+VIOLATING THE UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS OF CHILDREN

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I just printed and read the December 12, 1989 United Nations General Assembly document from the Convention on the Rights of the Child.  I highly encourage my blog’s readers to do the same.  President Clinton did sign this, but it has never been presented to our Senate.

I did a Google search for the United Nations 10- member elected Committee on the Rights of the Child, which was established as a result of the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child to help nations improve the conditions of their children.

Article 44 of the Convention’s 54 Article Annex report on the Rights of the Child says,

1.  States Parties undertake to submit to the Committee, through the Secretary-General of the United Nations, reports on the measures they have adopted which give effect to the rights recognized herein and on the progress made on the enjoyment of those rights.”

This is emblazoned at the top of the Google search page:

United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child Adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 20 November 1989, and ratified by all nations except the United States and Somalia. www.unicef.org/crc

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Any great, grand illusion I may have had about our nation’s commitment to the well-being of children – no matter what – has evaporated.  I feel chilled, sickened, saddened and scared.  I want to know on what grounds, and using what reasoning, what licensure, was our nation the ONLY one other than completely unstable Somalia to refuse involvement with this global effort to identify, recognize, clarify and describe the Human Rights of Children, or to participate with an enforced accountability for the treatment and protection of our nation’s children.

This 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was held during the same time period (1985-1990) that the 75% of our young adults who are now unfit for military duty to our nation were born.

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This United Nations Background Note on Children’s Rights outlines global issues and progress made on behalf of earth’s children up until 1995 and includes the following:

A Global Pact on Children’s Rights

“After a lengthy period of careful negotiations, the Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted in November 1989 by a vote of the General Assembly. By September of the following year, the Convention had obtained the 20 ratifications required for its entry into force as international law. Its importance as a foundation of modern human rights law was later underscored at the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna….”

America evidently wants no part of ‘international law’?  Ask the Indigenous People of our nation how well the USA honors its treaties.

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“The failure to ratify the treaty so far is in part due to potential conflicts with the constitution and because of opposition by some political and religious conservatives to the treaty.”

This scares me – why 75% of our youth ended up being misfits today?  How far are we willing to let the condition of our children deteriorate before we recognize that the states are not up to the job of ensuring a standard of Child Rights that even matches the United Nations suggestions?

Evidently we cannot participate in a global Child Right action because it is against our own law:

“American laws for the protection of children are at the state, rather than the federal level, and the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution restricts the authority of the federal government to pass legislation in this area.”

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“International human rights instruments such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its Optional Protocols are negotiated among United Nations Member States and are legally binding on the individual States that become parties to the instrument. There are two ways for a State to become a party: by signature and ratification or by accession.

In ratifying the Convention or an Optional Protocol, a State accepts an obligation to respect, protect, promote and fulfill the enumerated rights—including by adopting or changing laws and policies that implement the provisions of the Convention or Protocol.”

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This appears to be the kind of American reaction to these United Nations global efforts to provide for and protect the Rights of Children that leaves our nation hanging out in nowhere-ville in the company of Somalia, a nation without any government at all:

Updated February 25, 2009

Boxer Seeks to Ratify U.N. Treaty That May Erode U.S. Rights

By Joseph Abrams

– FOXNews.com

Sen. Barbara Boxer is pushing the Obama administration to move forward with ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, a controversial treaty that has never gained much support in the U.S.

“Sen. Barbara Boxer is urging the U.S. to ratify a United Nations measure meant to expand the rights of children, a move critics are calling a gross assault on parental rights that could rob the U.S. of sovereignty.

The California Democrat is pushing the Obama administration to review the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, a nearly 20-year-old international agreement that has been foundering on American shores since it was signed by the Clinton administration in 1995 but never ratified.

Critics say the treaty, which creates “the right of the child to freedom of thought, conscience and religion” and outlaws the “arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy,” intrudes on the family and strips parents of the power to raise their children without government interference.

Nearly every country in the world is party to it — only the U.S. and Somalia are not — but the convention has gained little support in the U.S. and never been sent to the Senate for ratification……” [READ FULL ARTICLE HERE – I find the ‘opposition’ sickening]

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Of course, there’s this, found at the Smart Girl Politics blog:

“Home Schooling families stepped up to represent not only their rights, but the rights of all Americans. The grassroots movement that took place yesterday must continue on a larger scale by educating all Americans about the danger of this U.N. treaty and placing calls to their elected officials.

Once again, our liberal friends in Washington, who claim to love America, are covertly hoping to ratify CRC making it the law of the land here in the United States helping to strip away the rights of parents in America and allow the U.N. to dictate what proper parenting looks like at a global level.

Both Drudge http://www.drudge.com/news/122366/us-may-join-un-childrens-treaty and Free Republic http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2278566/posts reported on this development on June 24, 2009, but this has been on the back burner for Barbara Boxer as reported earlier this year by FoxNews.com. “Sen. Barbara Boxer is urging the U.S. to ratify a United Nations measure meant to expand the rights of children, a move critics are calling a gross assault on parental rights that could rob the U.S. of sovereignty.” http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/02/25/boxer-seeks-ratify-treaty-erode-rights/

According to J. Michael Smith, HSLDA President, in Washington Times Op-ed—U.N. Treaty Might Weaken Families “

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June 23, 2009 post comment on Drudge Report:

“The US was a major player in getting the Convention on the Rights of the Child up and running. In fact, the US signed on to the convention 14 years ago, but has not ratified it. (Just like Somalia.) However, the US has signed and ratified a pair of optional protocols: “Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict” and “Optional Protocoal on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography.” President Obama has described this country’s failure to ratify the convention as “embarrassing.” The text is located here: www.crin.org ”

As mentioned above, these are the

Optional Protocols

Two Optional Protocols to the Convention on the Rights of the Child exist:

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Fortunately I have found some hope in this impressive website concerned with the Rights of the Child:

CRIN – Child Rights Information Network found at http://www.crin.org/

THEIR MISSION:

“CRIN’s mission is to equip the global child rights community with the information it needs to ensure the implementation of children’s rights.

CRIN presses for rights, not charity and is passionate about putting children’s rights at the top of the global agenda by addressing root causes and promoting systematic change. Its guiding framework is the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

Our activities are based on the belief that information is a powerful tool for realising children’s rights – and such information should be made as widely available and accessible as possible. As such, CRIN aims to bridge the gap between the information-rich and the information-poor by maximising the potential of new information technologies, and ensuring that those unable to use them are not excluded.

As a network of, at the last count, over 2,000 members in 150 countries, we aim to capture the expertise and the knowledge of our members, making this available to all actors involved in the implementation of the CRC.”

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Please take a moment to follow this link and read CRIN’s Factsheet on Children’s Rights.  Print it, display it, believe it, share it.

For every single one of us who has suffered the trauma of infant-child maltreatment and abuse, we know the truth of these words within every cell of our body.  These facts give us the common ground we need in order to understand the essence of what was done to us, what happened to us as a result, and why.

Our basic human Child Rights were violated.  We were not protected.  We were harmed, hurt – and changed.

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