Tag: depression

+MAGICAL WISHFUL THINKING DOES NOT HEAL ABUSE

alchemynow2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

++

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

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

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

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

SEE:

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

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

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

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

++

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

++

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

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

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

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

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

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

++++++++++

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

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

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

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

++

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

++

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

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

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

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

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

++

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

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

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

+THREE PART ANALYSIS OF MY MOTHER’S STORIES

alchemynow2 Comments

After much work I present this information in response to this comment a reader made in reference to my mother’s stories:

“Linda,  I have read your mother’s childhood stories, particularly the one where you say she has a “break” deep inside her childhood mind.  I don’t see it from a readers point of view.  Can you explain why you feel this is an important story?”

I know that my own sisters had the same response when they read ,y mother’s stories.  Perhaps nobody but me will ever see what I see in them.  I don’t know that I can adequately describe what I know about my mother through her childhood writings, but I tried…..

+MY ANALYSIS OF MY MOTHER’S STORIES – PART 1

+MY ANALYSIS OF MY MOTHER’S STORIES – PART 2

+MY ANALYSIS OF MY MOTHER’S STORIES – PART 3

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

alchemynowLeave a comment

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

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

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

My Mother’s Childhood Stories
++

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

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

(Vintage Books, 2002 —

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

wrote the following:

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

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

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

++

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

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

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

++

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

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

Bonda et al, 1996

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

++

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

++

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

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

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

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

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

++

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

+DISSOCIATION AND MY VERSION OF THIS UTOPIAN WORLD

alchemynow2 Comments

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

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

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

++

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

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

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

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

++

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

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

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

++

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

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

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

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

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

++

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

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

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

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

++

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

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

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

++

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

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

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

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

+OUR DISTURBED NATURAL INTERNAL OPIOID (OPIATE) SYSTEM

alchemynow2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

++

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

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

++

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

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

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

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

++

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

+SEVERE EARLY ABUSE PERMANENTLY CHANGES THE ‘SET POINT’ IN OUR BODIES

alchemynowLeave a comment

I described in an earlier post how I define conditions that create the worst of developmental conditions for infants and young children in terms of the absence or presence of pervasive terror.  In talking to friends about this idea there needs to be an addition to my thoughts.  The absence or presence of love is directly connected to terror when the terror is caused by an early caregiver.

I also described in an earlier post how I see anger as being an appropriate response to environmental challenge because it involves active and effective coping skills.  If those skills are ineffective in meeting the challenge, the next reaction will be fear.  I am not talking about what might be a sense of fear coupled with an initial startle response to the possibility of threat.  That initial reaction is designed to lead us instantaneously to an assessment of the challenge — is it friend or foe?  Only when the challenge is identified as foe does the cycle of meeting the challenge come into play.

So if anger responses fail, and fear is triggered, it is at that stage that another, new and additional response must be found and applied to the situation in order that competent equilibrium can be restored so that well-being can be reestablished.  If the state of fear moves into sadness and despair, that means that no new adequate coping skill could be found.  In the state of despair there is absolutely no question that all else has failed, including any attempts to learn and apply something new.

++

Nature has established an interrelated caregiver-infant response system so that even the big eyes that infants have elicit caregiving from adults.  Infants learn very early that they can interact with their environment to get their needs met, and they will use every single one of their innate abilities to succeed at this mission.  In circumstances where caregivers do not respond appropriately to these infant response elicitation efforts, only time will tell what happens next.

Because of an infant’s physiological limitations they are extremely limited as to what they can do to help their situation when their inborn efforts are not effective.  Along with feeling any physical consequences that may apply, such as feeling too hot or cold, hungry, thirsty or tired, their inborn abilities to respond to these challenges with an immune system response of physical emotion creates an inner experience of the feeling of anger, fear or despair.

The inner pattern of deprivation and/or maltreatment begins to operate at birth (or even before birth).  These rhythms of ‘rupture and repair’ or of ‘rupture without repair’ become directly connected in an infant’s forming brain to the experience of hope.  If an infant experiences a challenge to its well-being state of equilibrium but is repeatedly responded to adequately, hope begins to form as a comforting experience during the time of waiting ‘for help to arrive’.

If there is no adequate response pattern established within the infant’s early environment, another pattern will form that does not include hope as a solacing middle-ground experience in the ‘rupture and repair’ cycle.  If events appear to happen without any cause and effect pattern, if the infant cannot use effectively and then grow to trust and depend upon its own efforts to elicit caregiving responses within its environment, it will not build an adequate pattern of ‘rupture-hope-repair’ into its body and brain.  Instead it will be forced off onto another developmental track based on perceived threat to its own life very early in its development.  This pattern of ‘rupture without hope of repair’ then becomes the foundation upon which all future development will be built.

This, to me, is ultimately what having a secure attachment of safety or an insecure attachment of threat and harm is all about.  We are sent off down one or the other of these two paths from the time of our birth (or before).  What the angle or degree of our resulting deviation becomes, from a state of optimal experience, is determined by our genetic factors as they respond to our early environmental conditions.

The fact remains that attachment is a physiological experience that has biochemical consequences.  It changes, for better or for worse, how every cell in our body interacts on a molecular level.  How much of our experience later becomes conscious is also influenced and impacted by these biological changes.  And in the end, it is our ability to have conscious control over our lives that leads to a better future.

++

Because we are a social species we have built into the chemical operation of our bodies an innate desire to be attached.  Our survival from birth depends upon our attachment relationships with our early caregivers.  Our development on all levels is dependent upon others.  Our brain, as a part of our nervous system, will be geared by these early experiences either to a ‘set point’  of balanced equilibrium from secure attachments or a ‘set point’ of unbalanced disequilibrium from insecure attachment conditions.  Our immune systems also develop in accordance with these early experiences in the same way.

We are being told even before birth about the world — is it safe or not and are we wanted or not?  Conditions of early deprivation tell an infant that the world is not safe, that they are not wanted in the world, and that they are hence left on their own to survive or die.  This is, to me, what the purist form of isolation means.  Because we are a social species not being wanted and not being cared for appropriately signal the growing body that they are absolutely alone with nobody attached to them and nobody for them to attach to.  And because our entire body is naturally geared FOR attachment, all resulting development will be forced to follow an alternative pathway.

I believe that a combination of genetic factors, including our sex, will respond in our early interactional environment to determine the emotional tone of our bodies based upon the very early emotional potential we are born with.  A safe, secure, adequate and happy early environment will build a calm set point of balanced equilibrium into a body and brain that allows a child to grow up competent and confident.  A dangerous, malevolent world will create a set point of deprivation and the resulting emotional tone will be some combination of anger, terror and despair with one of these emotions becoming dominant.

Because male bodies are designed differently from female bodies, their hormonal environment will more likely foster an anger-fight emotional tone.  Males have higher testosterone and vasopressin levels than females, and lower oxytocin (I will describe these chemicals in more detail in future posts).  Males are certainly not immune from acquiring either terror or despair as their set point, nor are females immune from acquiring anger as theirs.

++

My simple point for today is that if we ask ourselves the simple question, “What is my overriding and foundational emotional tone?” and ask this question without judgment or critique, we can gain a critical piece of useful information about ourselves.  I say overriding and foundational because this emotional tone permeates our entire bodies and is directly connected to the set point of our equilibrium — or disequilibrium.

If a set point of calm balanced equilibrium — built there through safe and secure early caregiver attachment interactions — was never built into our bodies in the first place, calmness will not be our natural state at center for the rest of our lives.  If we want to have calmness at our center, we will have to WORK hard to put it there, and need to realize that we are having to do this work not because there is something ‘wrong’ with us, but that there was something ‘wrong’ in our early formational environment.

There are instances where the ‘something wrong in our early formational environment’ lies entirely within the genetic combinations we were formed with.  If this is true, we know it.  Otherwise, some form of trauma has interrupted our ability to form a ‘set point’ of calm equilibrium at our center, and thus our ability to EVER get there has been changed.

In my opinion anything that prevents us from having an optimal emotional tone based on calm  and balanced equilibrium creates an unfinished trauma cycle that is physiologically happening in our body and brain.  This  ‘unfinished’ trauma cycle built into our bodies means that on some level we will always carry a sense of anxiety no matter what point on the cycle our bodies are stuck at.

++

We might assess our center state and determine that our overriding and fundamental center set point is rage.  We might find that our first response is always to fight, is always to take an aggressive position and from there we have to WORK to experience anything else.  This GO state is built into the nervous system-brain and indicates that all reactions to challenges in the environment are first attempted to be met with active coping skill reactions based on what is already known.  It can become extremely hard to realize and accept that these patterns of response are not as useful and effective as one would like to think they are.  In fact, they can get one into a whole lot of trouble.

The chronic anger reaction means that offense is always seen as being the best choice, and that failure is not an option.  We HAVE to at times accept that failure is a fact or we can never learn anything new.  Learning is risky.  Knowing how to react and using this knowledge over and over again only works if the response truly is appropriate.  If one’s internal set point rests on anger and one’s pattern of responses originate in this active survival ‘place’, letting down one’s guard and admitting one doesn’t know how to respond to a challenge can be seen as an action that will lead directly to extinction.

Being ‘stuck’ at a set point of chronic anger and rage means that the feelings of fear and sadness are being left out of the cycle.  Anger is designed to elicit an immediate and effective response to challenge of threat.  It is normally designed to solve a problem so that the center point of calm equilibrium can be returned to.  During damaging early experiences there was no calm set point created in the first place — so what does any response really accomplish for us?  All it does it keep us alive, or so we intend.  But being alive, for us, rarely means that we get to experience well-being.  There is something else always going on for us — the active act of surviving and staying alive.

++

We might find that our set point is at fear and terror.  We never came to believe that we had active coping skills that we could use to solve problems stemming from challenges we faced.  We are weak on the competency-confident position on the response cycle, and often fail to realize that we do in fact have the ability to respond actively and adequately.

In addition, if we are stuck in the fear place on the trauma recovery circle we don’t even necessarily feel the despair and sadness that would normally be the result of a complete failure to respond appropriately.  We are literally frozen in a state of fear, anxiety and panic and cannot move.  Our energy, our life force, is frozen within us, also.  Because we cannot move, we cannot learn.  I believe this fear place is connected to the fact that at some point in time we tried to respond to challenge and our efforts failed.  We do not have a clue what else to do.

++

If our set point is at despair and sadness we are in the perfect spot to learn something new but we lack the ability to see this.  All escape routes appear to be sealed off from us and our energy is gone — not stored, not held, not frozen — just plain gone.  We lack the energy available to us in the the anger-fight spot or even access to the energy frozen in the fear spot.

Some of us gave up the fight because circumstances overwhelmed our response ability from the time we were born, thus setting our emotional tone and our inner ‘set point’ at despair.  We were forced to lose the race before we ever got started.  Our inner ‘set point’ is at hopelessness.  We feel utterly and fundamentally unable to marshal competent responses to even the simplest of challenges.

++

This first step of accurately bringing into our consciousness the state of our emotional tone and our ‘set point’ allows us to form a realistic picture about ourselves in the world.  If we want to change something about ourselves and about our lives we need to know where we are starting from.  That the patterns within us were formed before we were a year old in no way negates the extreme power our ‘set point’ has in determining everything we experience from that early point forward.

Nature has designed us to know about the conditions of the world from before our birth and has designed us to adapt and adjust to these conditions.  If we find ourselves wanting something different from the world we were born into and formed by, we will have to become clear and conscious of the facts as they relate to the changes our bodies were forced to make to keep us alive in malevolent environments.

I do not believe that our bodies will ever, on their own, be able to change their inner, early developed set points.  We HAVE to apply conscious effort, the physics of applied force or WORK, to attempt to change how we ARE in our lives in relationship to these set points.  Comparing ourselves to others and then judging either us or them as a result is not helpful.  This is about becoming absolutely clear about our own emotional tone which will then let us know where we became permanently stuck on the trauma recovery cycle very, very early in our development.

++

Some people find that using the image of an ‘inner child’ is helpful when considering the gulf that might separate who we became from who we could have become had our early severe traumas never occurred in the first place.  I have personally never been able to rely upon this image because I know full well that the changes that happened to me were physiologically built into my body and affected every aspect of my biological development so that the body I inhabit today is directly connected to the abused and battered child that I was.

That child has grown up to be me.  Every single experience I had as a child affected how I developed.  Those experiences created within me a ‘set point’ that will never be at calm and balanced equilibrium.  My ‘set point’ is at a state of terror and despair and is directly connected to a sense of anxiety in my body.  There’s no possible way it could have been created otherwise based on my early experiences because the traumas of my early years were so severe and chronic.

The anxiety is built into my body like a background ‘noise’ that never goes away.  I believe this might be worse for me than for many others because I was genetically created to be extremely sensitive no matter what my early life had been like.  This underlying and overriding anxiety colors even my terror and my despair.  Shades of disaster were communicated to my growing body from birth and built these same responses into the operation of my nervous system-brain, my immune system, and into every cell in my body.  It is NOT some inner version of a child that experiences any part of my present day reality.  It is me, in this body, trying to live every moment of this life today and into my future.

I have to work hard to feel any other kind of feeling, and even when I do my body always responds back after a short period of time to what it knows at its center.  Is this bad?  No, it might be unfortunate but it is a natural reaction to severe trauma survival.  At least now I know what is going on in my body, how things got to be this way, and exactly what I am working with as I continually try to make my life better.

I am realistic.  My body’s set point was built in, by and for a malevolent world of disaster and trauma and that can never be changed.  This is the only body I will ever have in this lifetime.  I might as well understand it — how and why it was built the way it was.  Because I know these facts I can try to live in and with this body as I carve out niches and crannies of experiences that are not closely tied to my body’s natural ‘set point’, but are rather built out of the ‘stuff’ that securely-attached-from-birth people can take for granted all of their lives.

++

Thank you for reading — your comments are welcome and appreciated — Linda

+TRAUMA MATH: THE SORROWS AND HAPPINESS OF “CRAFT SHOW APRIL”

alchemynow2 Comments

I haven’t completely ‘returned’ or recovered from my out-of-town craft show adventure last weekend.  I say returned because my dissociation condition causes me to experience changes as if separate parts of me are ‘out there’ floating around like dandelion fluff in the breeze, drifting around until they eventually land.  I experience a waiting period while this happens, trying to learn every day more of what to do to speed up the process of consolidation of memory as best I can.

Some might call this a grounding process.  I went out and watered all of my plants, most of them looking pretty darn stressed if not dead.  I forgot to have one of the neighbor children come over to water them while I was gone on this 100 degree plus weekend.  Now I’m washing my blankets and clothing.  There’s no place for the washing machine in the house, so it sits out back on the cement rim that lies around the foundation of the house, hooked by an hundred foot extension cord running out my door and to a fifty foot hose.

Taking the small steps of being in my life, in my house, being in my body as I wait for all of the experiences of this past weekend to settle within me in some form of organized fashion.  That’s what the combination of the dissociative disorder and the PTSD do to me now.  They easily give me the feeling of ‘too much to deal with’ and a sense of being easily overwhelmed by any kind of unusual stimulation.

I believe that’s part of the role of the ‘recurring major depression’ that forms the third leg of my emotional and mental ‘disorder’ and ‘disability.’  It gives me the ‘down time’ I need to let things put themselves together after I experience more incoming information than I can handle at one time.

I am so fortunate at this moment in time to have a simple place that is my home.  One has to have the safety and security of some kind of ‘home’ for their body in order that the home of the mind can maintain itself.  I’ve been homeless before, several times, even when I still had young children under my care.  Today more than in several generations having a home or not having a home has come back to the forefront of our concerns — both individually and as a society.

Which leads me to this story I heard from a neighboring vendor, I’ll call her April, at the craft show last weekend.  I always listen with a special interest to stories told by new people I meet.  It’s the only way that I have to test my own theories or ideas, things that I am coming to believe about how our early childhood experiences come to form who we are as adults.

Because April never asked that anything she was telling me be kept confidential, I am not concerned about telling you what she told me.  After all, she had only just met me and spent a few hours in her booth across from mine as she sold kettle corn and ice water as I hoped to sell earrings and mosaics.

++

April is one year younger than me, another child of the early fifties, born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona.  She was second born of six children and spent her childhood with both of her parents and with her grandparents nearby.  Her father was an untreated bi-polar severe alcoholic and was extremely violent and abusive to his wife and all of the children.  Her father beat his wife during every one of her pregnancies, and over the years knocked out all of his wife’s teeth, and sent her to the hospital with concussions and broken bones many times.

April told of one severe attack of violence this man had perpetrated against his family, and her mother took herself and all of the children to her mother’s house for some kind of protection.  It wasn’t long before her father showed up at the door with his rifle, accompanied by three uniformed police officers who were there to make sure the wife and children returned home with the man of their family immediately.

We might think this unbelievable and barbaric, but that happened only 45 years ago.  It tells us about the conditions of life and of our culture that took so much hard work and effort to change — even a little bit so that things might be different and better for women and children in America today.

April appears as a very attractive, perky, positive, happy, kind, hard working, healthy woman.  There’s nothing about her that meets the eye of the public that would indicate the kind of terrible traumas that she has experienced in her life.  And yet it didn’t take long as we sat in her RV after Saturday’s craft show had closed for the day, talking over an ice cold beer and a container of grocery store deli chili that April had microwaved and generously shared with me, that I learned how close to the surface all of her difficult history is to her.  In fact I would say none of it has gone anywhere.  But what fascinates me is what April is doing with herself in relationship to it.

April is married to her third husband, a hard working truck driver who just lost one hundred thousand dollars of his 401K that he spent 32 years building for his retirement.  April has worked for the past 21 years as a massage therapist for a major hotel chain in Phoenix.  She still loves her work but in order, now, to hope for a retirement she decided to go into the business of traveling as a kettle corn vendor on weekends.

Certainly she had the resources of owning a RV and a sturdy steel trailer to haul her equipment.  She had the resources to buy everything she needed to set up her booth and cook that candied popcorn, including a portable generator.  But she also had the invisible inner resources to come up with her plan and the stamina and willingness to work extremely hard toward making her business a paying venture.

Just the physical work alone that it took to drive that rig, haul all that heavy equipment off of it, set up the canopy, stand there in 100 plus heat for two days trying to sell to a pitifully thin crowd at that show, and then pack it all up again and return home to get herself ready for a full week of work at her ‘real’ job — and do all this smiling and caring for and about every single person she saw along her way and mean it — provided me with an incredible experience to learn about, watch and benefit from personally.

April made sure that I had ice cold water to drink all weekend, that I had an iced wet cloth to lay on the back of my neck in that scorching heat, that I had chili and beer in the evening and a place to park my little truck next to her RV to sleep for the night, and that I had her friendship and her compassionate and sensitive encouragement every step of the way.  April offered these kindnesses in different ways to everyone around her.  She never complained, and even as she told me about her childhood there was no anger or blame.  She simply described what happened.

As she talked I of course listened to discover how it was possible that April was the person she turned out to be.  At first it was a mystery to me until I heard what might just be the secret of her ‘salvation’, the blessings caught among the curses.

++

April described to me how she had attended a cranial massage training institute and had been blindsided by the insensitive and unprofessional experience that she had by being a chosen volunteer for the  technique without being given any warning about what might happen.  While the instructors demonstrated in front of a large crowd of strangers, April experienced what had happened to her in the womb as her father had beaten her mother while she was carrying April.  During this session she remembered what it felt like when she also, as an unborn infant, had been pummeled by her father’s blows.

The conditions of ongoing violence in her home of origin never improved.  April left home very young, married and began having children of her own.  Of her three children, one is schizophrenic and facing a long prison sentence for attempted manslaughter and arson after he tried to burn down his girl friend’s home with her in it.  Among April’s five siblings, one became schizophrenic and two ended up with severe bi-polar conditions.  One of these, her brother, committed suicide.

April’s father died a few months ago and she admits she never loved him and that her father never loved her.  April’s mother suffers from several serious medical conditions in her later years that doctors suspect are directly connected to the many serious injuries that she suffered while being beaten by her husband.  April has struggled with all of these trauma related conditions in her family all of her life, and is left now still trying to find a way to manage continued contact with her mentally ill siblings.

April’s one healthy sister that she is very close to, was a real estate agent in California and her brother-in-law had a successful construction business.  Both sources of income have vanished, her sister’s family has lost both of the homes they owned.  Stress from these challenges caused the brother-in-law to have a serious heart attack and he is facing surgery.  April is not only very worried about her sister and her family, but she also is suffering from what really is the loss of one of the most important support people of her life.

++

So here is April woman-handling a physically and financially difficult new business, and optimistically being happy as she continues to face the challenges of her life.  Because of what I understand about how vital it is that an infant’s growing brain receives happiness stimulation in order for the left brain’s happy center to form in the first place — thus allowing it to be accessed later in life — I had to ask April what her perspective is on the differences between herself and her siblings.

She told me that during her recent physical exam her physician had told her that the reason her three siblings ended up with severe mental illness is probably because they had those specific combination of genetic possibilities in them that were triggered as their bodies were stressed during early childhood.  He further stated that evidently April and her other two siblings did not have these genetic sensitivities so they ended up without the mental illness.  (Even then April was a carrier of the genes because she has a schizophrenic alcoholic drug addicted son.  I did not ask her about her own parenting conditions nor did she tell me.)

This still did not explain to me how April manages to be so optimistically positive and so able to find active ways to cope in her life.  It did not explain that while she had for a period of time become what she termed “an active psychologically dependent alcoholic,” how she managed to extricate herself from her addiction so that it didn’t affect her in the present.

This is the point in the conversation where the secret was unveiled to me.  Part of her current difficulties with her bi-polar sister stem from what happened last January at the death of their father.  April was very clear about her lack of feeling for her father and her sister fell to pieces and became enraged at April for her detachment.  It turns out that the only person their father ever paid any affectionate attention to was this bi-polar sister.  She was his favorite and she was his pet.  (I don’t know whether or not there was sexual abuse occurring in this situation, though it sounds to me like a typical setup for such abuse to happen.)

What April told me next is the most important fact of this story.  While her sister was her very sick, abusive, violent ‘dysfunctional’ father’s pet, April was consistently the favored pet of her father’s mother.  And what is most important about THIS fact is that April describes this grandmother as being a very happy person — able to be happy in her own life and able to be extremely happy in her ongoing relationship with April.

THIS is, to me, a magic key to April’s life today.  The happy center in little April’s developing brain was fed, fostered and able to grow because of this happy, safe and secure relationship she had with her happy grandmother.  Because this happy center was so designed and built in April’s early-developing brain, that collection of neurons was already in her brain in spite of all the other nasty traumatic experiences that April still had to endure.

April lost touch with her happy self for many, many years.  But when she was ready to take a good hard look at herself and her life, and wanted to make it so much better, she had this precious resource within her brain of a well-built happy center to fall back on and to rely on as she sought to make happier changes for a happier life.  Still, today, it was and is April’s decision to exercise the heck out of these happy center neurons that is making the difference not only for her in her life, but also for all others that come into contact with her.

April described to me that she works at being happy all of the time.  She WORKS HARD at it.  But she is the one doing the work.  The fact that she was blessed with the conditions in her early brain developmental life, through a safe, secure and happy attachment relationship with at least one other person, her grandmother, does not take away the importance that April is still doing this good work herself.  She made the decision and is applying her own life force to  continue to make these positive changes.  Nobody else could do this for her.  Yet I believe that her early secure attachment with her grandmother helped to give her both the inner resources to do this work and the ability to want to try.

++

I could sense the very old competition for affection and resources that still exists between April and her sister regarding their father.  It was like, “She had our father but I had my grandmother.”  The unspoken pain was still there caused by a father who could not love his daughters — in fact could probably not really love anyone including himself.

There’s no way a child cannot crave a father’s affection and not notice when another sibling seems to be receiving it.  Yet in this situation the love from a terrible father could in no way compare to the seemingly healthy love from a happy, adoring grandmother.  April got the better end of the deal, and her sister is a deteriorating bi-polar in large part, I believe, because of these inequities.

(This creates another whole set of questions in my mind.  What happened in April’s father’s early life in relationship with his own mother, this happy grandmother, that set him up for a disastrous life?  It is not at all uncommon for grandmother’s to be able to love and attach securely to grandchildren when they could not do this for their own children.  And why did was this grandmother unable to intervene on behalf of all of her grandchildren?  Why did she single out only one as her ‘pet’?  But all this will be food and fodder for future writings.)

++

I understand that everyone who has even only a tiny happy center can still exercise that center through hard work to make it stronger.  But the original nerve cells/neurons that were present at birth — designated for this happy center but NOT used while this center built itself through early attachment relationships and therefore were lost — can NEVER be replaced.

What happy center neurons we DO have can increase their dendrites and the interactions between these dendrites through exercise.  That April is so clearly applying hard work to become more happy, even though she had a better happy center built in the beginning than her sister did, still lets us know that the effects of severe abuse continue for the lifespan.  If they didn’t, April would not have to work so hard to become more happy herself.

People who were raised from birth in safety and security that encompassed and enveloped them as it SHOULD have, have so much more to work with on every level as they face the ongoing challenges of life.  Being happy will always be easier for securely attached from birth people, just as it is for April who only had partial childhood experiences of secure attachment in the midst of trauma compared to her mentally ill siblings.

I describe this today in part as a gesture of support for everyone who has become even more challenged in their lives as a result of the economic difficulties the world is facing.  If you or anyone you know is being additionally challenged right now, please do not judge them harshly if they cannot be as optimistically happy as someone else might be able to be as they struggle to get through their hard times — ANY kind of hard times.

We need to support and encourage ourselves and one another in the work of trying to live a more happy and positive life with kindness to the best of our abilities.  We must be realistic and informed about the context of happiness and active coping just as we need to be about the actual traumas we have experienced.

Those who have suffered early developmental-stage traumas are always the most at risk when new traumas come along.  We can do the math — the aftermath of trauma — to find what is upsetting the balance of well-being in our lives and to find what helps to create a better state of balance every step of the way.

++

Thank you for reading this post — your comments are welcome and appreciated.  Linda

WHY NOT TO REMEMBER MY MOTHER

alchemynow4 Comments

PLEASE NOTE THIS WARNING:  This post contains triggering material which may be difficult for anyone with a history of trauma and abuse to read.  Please either do not read this alone without a support person at your side, or stop reading  immediately if you become uncomfortable with yourself as you read it.

++++

I received the following comment today related to + About this site

“Linda, I did not pick this up in your writing ( which is amazing ). Is your mother still alive and did you ever have an opportunity to confront her or make peace with her.”

My reply was that I would write about this in today’s post.  Not an easy task.

++

The first image that presents itself in my awareness (from my right brain’s storehouse of wordless images) is one of being in a store shopping for flower and vegetable seeds.  I see a well stocked large four-sided display rack that I can turn around in circles so that I can see the entire display.

Suddenly I see that all the packages are ripped open and the seeds are dumped in a pile on the floor.  All the seeds are mixed up and it is now my job to sort them all out ‘correctly’ so that they can be resealed in new packages and put back where I found them in the first place.

I know more now about what this image is showing me than I ever could have before.  All my memories regarding my mother are sealed into separate ‘packages’ and stored according to my survival brain’s wisdom.  They are not linked together in any sort of order based on a timeline according to when these experiences happened in the first place.  Never in my childhood was I able to connect them together and it is only with great concentration and effort that I can attempt to do so today.

Every single memory I have of my mother is linked to trauma.  To  continue with my seed package image, it is like every single package and every single seed is contaminated with poison, and if I touch any of them my brain tells me I could die.   In order to “go back there” I have to apply a level of thought that can allow me to do this.

I have to find and put on a ‘safe suit’ of protection that allows me to go back and handle my memories.  That safe suit is barely adequate and consists of a mental effort I must make today to understand that there was and is no reason for what happened to me.  I use this word, reason, on many levels.  My mother’s mind was broken so she had no ability to use reason regarding anything that involved me — ever.  She was mentally ill and therefore everything about her was irrational.

Her psychosis regarding me was complete and indissoluble.  Because I do not have a mind like hers, even though she influenced nearly every thought that was built into my brain until I was 18, I cannot look into my past from a reasonable or rational place so that I can describe my experience from ‘my side of the fence’.  That is probably the final trauma of unresolved trauma.  It cannot be translated, on any level, into the realm of reason.

Yet I have to think about reason because it is the only ‘safety suit’ I have.  Everything about my relationship with my mother was, from my first breath, about the reason I needed to be hated and continually punished.  I was the devil’s child and therefore absolutely evil.  My ‘poor’ mother was given the curse of having to be my mother, and therefore she must do the best that she could to ‘deal with me’ and try to accomplish the given, hopeless task of making be ‘better’.  She applied herself to her task with vengeance.

In her mind, she had failed miserably in her mission by the time I left home at 18.  In her mind that failure was absolute and her belief in that lasted to her final breath.

++

In order to ‘stack the deck’ in favor of reason I will mention a few concepts used by experts as they work with people who have posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  (This is a diagnosis which I ‘have’, along with dissociative identity disorder — without the identities, which I will discuss later) and major reoccurring depression.)  The term ‘flashbacks’ is used in relation to the unresolved traumas in PTSD.  Another term used is ‘flashbulb memories’.  What this means is that the experiences of trauma have not been integrated into the ongoing experience of the person who endured them.

This lack of integration happens for many reasons, including the fact that nothing has useful, that can lead to an increased ability to survive future related terrors — by the individual or by the species, has yet been learned as a result of these experiences.  When abuse begins from birth, before the infant has any possible capacity to ‘process’ its experiences, the very foundation of memory formation is altered within the forming and developing structure of the brain.  Having the traumatic memories ‘stuck together’ in any meaningful fashion is therefore the exception, not the rule.

Memories of the individual experiences are therefore like millions of seeds in a pile on the floor.  To even have some of them organized and sorted out into a small group of related experiences — so that they can at least be stored in separate packages — requires extremes of applied effort.  To assign them meaning is nearly impossible because they happened in and belong to a malevolent world without cause and effect and without reason or rationality.

++

I believe that it takes an extremely creative and intelligent mind to survive experiences like mine and be able to come out on the other end being able to even remotely ‘act normal’.  This intelligent mind has to have had opportunities to form some active coping skills that allow this eventual ‘gluing together of the pieces’ in any meaningful way to happen at all.  I describe some of the assets that existed for me in my post THE RESILIENCY MYTH.

While the following might be a controversial statement, it is my current assessment of the relationship of ‘mental illness’ to survival.  Had I received the potential genetic combination that could have resulted in a mental illness such as my mother had, and if my body could have taken that detour in order to have survived without the self reflective abilities of a mind that was not given this detour, I would have turned out like my mother did.  I do not believe that she had a choice because whatever neglect and maltreatment she received during her brain developmental stages triggered the manifestation of her mental illness and there was nothing she could do about it, either.

++

Please make no mistake here.  I was born in 1951 and raised during an era when child abuse was still not recognized and addressed by our society at large in any meaningful way.  In today’s ‘enlightened’ era, there is absolutely NO EXCUSE for outsiders of the family not to know and understand the symptoms a terribly abused child will manifest openly, and no excuse for them not intervening on behalf of the child.  Information on this topic will be presented in future posts.

++

Because my writing is always a process connected to me and to my life as I write the words, and because I am always learning about myself and how I process information related to my personal experiences, I will share with you what is happening in my mind as I attempt to get closer to telling the truth about the question posed in the reader’s comment:  “Is your mother still alive and did you ever have an opportunity to confront her or make peace with her.”

In my brain of brains and mind of minds, yes, my mother IS still alive.  I do not have a basis for placing anything to do with my mother on a logical timeline and for keeping it there.  The reasonable fact is that she ceased to exist in her body in the spring of 2002.  I did not shed a single tear.  I’m not sure if any of my five siblings shed one, either.

I lack the ability to accomplish the action of finding every single separate ‘seed’ memory that involves her, facing them face to face, and making any of the equally dissociated Linda’s understand unequivocally that THEIR mother is dead.  The image that is in my mind now is that each seed has turned into a dandelion seed, that a powerful wind has come up so that each seed with its attached bit of fluff is now dashing away from me into the blue sky — and yes, to a place of safety for themselves — also leaving me in a place of safety as I sit here and write these words.

++

I will make the effort of trying to grab perhaps one of those seeds or a handful of them before they vanish from me today. (By the way, future posts on attachment disorders, particularly about disorganized-disoriented attachment disorders, will describe how the lack of the ability to tell a coherent life story is one of the clearest marker that indicates these attachment disorders exist for a person.)

Moving on in my writing as I work to answer this commenter’s question, I see that I actually have a fistful of seeds grasped in each of my hands.  I guess fortunately for me I only confronted my mother once (seeds in my left hand) and disowned her once years later (seeds in my right hand).

Now I tell myself, “It’s OK Linda.”  I slowly open my left hand and protect those seeds from being whisked away before I can write the following:

(“Organize your thoughts, Linda.  Let the seeds put themselves in order.  Believe that there is a beginning and an end to this group of thoughts.  Now begin writing.”)

As I mention elsewhere on this blog, I completed 7 weeks of inpatient alcoholism treatment in 1980 and was then sent to ongoing therapy and given antidepressants.  I followed every piece of advice anyone gave me about how to ‘recover’ as avidly as a starving bird would hunt for seeds.  About a year after my exit from treatment, following the advice of my therapist, I DID call my mother to confront her.

All I knew at that time was that she had not been nice to me while she raised me, and that there was some discrepancy between her treatment of be back then and her treatment of me as a married adult mother of 2, as she sent me cute little cards with lovey-dovey I love yous enclosed.  I can return to that phone call with difficulty.  Like two powerfully opposing magnets the me in this chair writing attempts to move closer to the me I see standing in the dining room, sunlight streaming in the windows, cream colored phone in my hand, long twisted coiled cord draped around my feet as I stand there talking to my mother.

What happened?  I courageously told her that I was not willing to have a phony (no pun intended) loving relationship with her in the present (“Let me try to think here.  I got the first part out…  Catch that seed, Linda.  Hold onto it, look at it….”) — if — (“Come on, Linda, you can do this.  I know there’s all kinds of pain here, but you can find the words and not let the pain appear now.  Separate them out.  Let the words come but not the pain.”) — (“Is that possible?”)  (“Yes, trust me it is possible.”)  (Here comes the wind.  Stop this argument now.)  (“Who are you that I should trust a damn thing you are saying”)  (Stop this argument NOW.)

IF.  Getting back to the IF.  IF we can’t talk about the things you did to me while I was growing up.  That’s what I said to her.

She instantly switched to her ugly screaming rage filled voice and attacked me as she launched into the litany she had been building for me from birth.  SEE: *Litany from Start to Finish.  “You were a horrible, terrible, vile child!  You tried to kill me when you were born!  You deserved everything I ever gave you and even that was not enough!  Even your kindergarten teacher agreed with me.  She had been teaching for 35 years before you showed up in her class, and she told me you were more trouble and a worse child than any she had ever had in her class.”

Now, this is the GOOD part.  As she streamed and screamed through her litany of abuse I moved the phone receiver away from my ear, lifted up right finger and moved it to the telephone and dropped it with a sense of accomplishment, empowerment, finality and pride onto the disconnect button and I hung the receiver up on her in mid word.

I stood stunned for a split second and then experienced a flood of joy.  I started hopping up and down, and then began to skip around the house yelling in song, “I did it!  I did it!  I hung UP ON HER!”

Now the tears are here pushing against my eyes.  No, that wasn’t the end of it.  I wasn’t ready.  It wasn’t time.  Within a matter of days she called back with her sweet voice and I apologized, and the phony loving relationship was reinstated and maintained until the spring of 1989.  That is when I had a realization (too much for me to write about right now) that allowed me to write her a simple letter thanking her for being the mother that brought me into the world and telling her directly that because of the abusive things she did to me as a child I could no longer have a relationship with her in my lifetime.

She did not respond though she continued to bemoan the curse of being my mother to my siblings for years after that until they one by one quit listening to her.  I only saw her once — out of the corner of my eye as if she were a fleeting mirage of the shadow of a ghost — after that in 1990 as she passed through my desperately ill father’s hospital room.  (He had finally divorced her by then).

My father died in 2001.  I never confronted him.  I ignored and avoided him in my adulthood just like he did me in my childhood.  I believe that both of my parents had to make internal adjustments that allowed them to ‘go on being’ while having unbearable, overwhelming pain and sadness at their core.  I would also say that both of my parents died of a broken heart.

This is all I can write today.  I have to do my ‘Linda in today” things.  I cannot describe to you right now how she died, either.

++

I want to say here that the reason I do this writing is not in hopes of healing myself.  I am nearly 58 years old, and things will not get much better for me than they are now.  I accept that fact.  I write because I now there is value in sharing my experience so that others ‘out there’ with histories related to mine can perhaps see in my words a reflection of their own experience so that they can become empowered to own the fullness of their own traumatic lives.  I trust this is possible because I do not write from the top down — not from a place of put-together security based on secure attachment patterns that would create all kinds of benefits those that have them probably don’t recognize.

I write from the bottom up.  I write from a place of humiliation, terror, confusion and trauma.  I write from an incredible place called ‘the miracle of survival’.  I write from what Dr. Teicher of Harvard calls “an evolutionarily altered brain” formed in, by and for existence in a malevolent world.

++

But for now I am going to watch my blue parakeet bathe itself in its small dish of drinking water as I think about and then DO the act of finding it a better bathtub.  I am going to work on the little hand made paper cross earrings I am figuring out how to make so that I can add them to my inventory of crafts to display and sell at this Saturday’s farmers market in town.  They will be pure white with silver glitter.  I will eat the last of my homemade banana bread muffins, made from my grandmother’s recipe.  I added grated apple, dried currants and lots of walnuts.  That’s good for me.  That’s where I am going next.

But first, I am going to stand in the wind with my fists open and my palms facing the sky and let all the bits of dandelion fluff, memories of myself and my mother, blow away.

++

As always, thank you for visiting this site and for reading this post.  Your comments are welcome and appreciated.

+PATTERNS OF RESPONSE TO THREAT

alchemynowLeave a comment

This is how the cycle of life best works from my point of view:

Draw a simple plus sign — ‘+’

Place

— ‘HAPPY’ on the left tip

— ‘ANGER’ at the top tip

— ‘FEAR’ at the right tip

— ‘SAD’ at the bottom tip

Draw a small circle at the center and place ‘COMPETENCE’ there

Draw another circle around the outside of this ‘COMPETENCE’ circle and place ‘PROTECTION’ there

(Please note that I will not be presenting information on the happy state in this post because I consider it a bonus that we can access directly from our safe, secure, calm, optimal state of competence.  This post is about the survival process that results from a threat to our state of competence.  Very few of us experience happy as a result of having our life threatened — though for some the exuberance of challenge is stimulating and a positive experience because they feel absolutely confident that they can meet the challenge successfully.)

++++

We can complicate things all we want to, but even though this is a two dimensional  simple image , I believe that it  can be used to describe and visualize the operational pattern of life.

One thing missing from this simple image is something we have to visualize in our minds.  Picture this little ‘+’ you have drawn in the center of a bubble, surrounded and encased in the ongoing processes of life itself which I believe  can best be described  with one word — ‘CHANGE’.

What connects the ideal optimal state of perfect competence — or calm equilibrium — to all other life factors represented by the word change, is something that we can recognize in ourselves as the ‘STARTLE RESPONSE’.  This response ALERTS us on some level (I believe through interactions that occur within our immune system) that a challenge to competent equilibrium has occurred (as I described in yesterday’s post).  Startle can vary from low level surprise to extremes of traumatic shock.  However a life form detects this challenge, it matters as a central factor of existence.

++++

Now because I am writing as a human being to other human beings about our unique experiences of life, I have to add another bubble that contains the patterns I just described — ‘SENTIENT’

……………..

Main Entry:

sen·tient Listen to the pronunciation of sentient

Pronunciation:

\ˈsen(t)-sh(ē-)ənt, ˈsen-tē-ənt\

Function:

adjective

Etymology:

Latin sentient-, sentiens, present participle of sentire to perceive, feel

Date:

1632

1 : responsive to or conscious of sense impressions <sentient beings> 2 : aware 3 : finely sensitive in perception or feeling

– sen·tient·ly adverb

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sentient

…………………………

Because I am limited to writing from my own point of view, I will direct you to two pieces of my previous writings so that I can place what I am going to say in context:

ALONE NAKED IN THE WOODS SINGING

This post describes an experience I had when I was 14 that allows me to entertain a certain degree of mystery regarding the possibility that all life has a conscious awareness of its own.  In my ‘vision’ was I sharing with a blade of grass what its own experience of its existence is like, or was I simply experiencing a human version of what a blade of grass experiences?  In other words, which ‘bubble’ was I in?

EARTH DAY: In Honor of the Grieving Chicken

In this post I describe a chicken behavior that defied my explanation of it, and again introduces the possibility that humans have no real idea what other species’ experiences are like to them.

++

With those qualifying concepts out of the way, I will write about what I think humans know about how to endure as our experience operates on the sentient level of being as we include both emotions and thoughts into our survival patterns.

Please go back to your ‘+’ image.  I want to describe how I believe this simple pattern operates.

I consider ‘AVOIDANCE’ of harm to be a part of the inner defense and protection circle.  If something happens in the environment that penetrates a life form’s defense circle of protection, it is experienced as a challenge and an adjustment involving resources has to occur to reinstate the equilibrium.

I must now introduce another word — ‘COPING’.  Coping can occur along a continuum from active to passive coping.  What it involves is the resource access and utilization process.  If everything is optimal, the transition process from challenge to adequate adjustment back to a state of harmonious competence happens so fast we hardly need to consider it on any level — except to witness it in our minds with awe and appreciation.

If, however, the transition stage of adaptation requires some more noticeable action for adjustment to occur, we move far enough away from the competent center to notice what might happen next as a life form responds to a challenge.

The startle response always requires an ability to accurately assess threat.  Once that assessment happens, resources have to be accessed in balance with the assessed risk and applied.  Coping skills are resources, and they require available resources.

I believe all of our most effective human coping abilities lie first of all within what we usually might think of as the anger arena and relate to the ‘GO’ (sympathetic) arm of the autonomic nervous system.  A threat to life or well being does not first elicit a lazy response.  A first response will involve the application of enough energy to meet the demands of a challenge.

Our most constructive responses originate, I believe, within this anger arena because it is here that we have stored all of our effective learning about how to actively defend ourselves against harm.  Our species very often experiences this as an instantaneous adrenaline response that we recognize as the ‘FIGHT’ response.

Good!  Recognize the threat, identify it, assess it, and respond appropriately and adequately to get rid of it as quickly, efficiently and effectively as possible using known and proven active coping skills so that calm equilibrium of optimal competence can be restored as quickly as possible.

++

OK.  But what if that doesn’t work?  What if the immediate response based on past learning experience (and remember that all genetic survival knowledge is contained in our active coping skill category) still leaves us at risk and under threat?  Now comes the move from the anger place to the fear place on our ‘+’ drawing.

I believe that for humans fear is always about the threat of being overwhelmed so that our life might be extinguished.  Our initial anger response is not related to fear because we first use resources that we are confident will do the job based on our competence abilities.  Only when those coping responses fail and our confidence becomes shaken do we move to the fear place. This movement only takes place if our active coping responses were ineffective and/or overwhelmed.

If we feel anger on any level that means we are in a state of using or hoping to use everything we know with success.  When we feel fear we can know instantaneously that we need to learn something new and find/use additional resources to meet a challenge, but we have to find a way to stay alive long enough to do this.

The fear state also involves active coping responses, most usually what we think of as the flight response.  I consider the freeze response to be a version of flight because it is also designed to remove one at risk from threat.  Both involve trying to be ‘out of sight’ from the threat and invisible (and therefore immune) to it.  They are retreat coping mechanisms designed to escape to a place of safety and security.

If one survives threat by using fear state resources and then is able to return to a state of competent equilibrium, most usually something new was learned in the process.  This ‘something new’ may then be available as a resource during the anger-fight stage next time this or a similar threat occurs.

If we continue to live but the fear state actions do not result in a return to the center state of competence, it is possible that the sad state may be the final resting point.  If we do not acquire knowledge of a new coping skill as a resource, we can end up completely stuck in this sadness state on our ‘+’ drawing until we do learn.  I believe this state is where depression manifests itself.  It is where helplessness, hopelessness, discouragement and demoralization feed into an incompetence cycle and the optimal state of calm and safe competence is never reached.

I believe that the state of sadness is a place of hiding….

Because we do not get to the sad state without first passing through the fear state, fear is literally carried through and combined with sadness.  When sadness from, for example, a ‘legitimate’ grief stemming from any kind of loss, becomes contaminated with fear, all sight of learning a way out can be lost.  This can result in giving up the fight, and only through teasing apart fear from sadness and examining each of them separately can we begin to see how to overcome both.

I believe that some of us are born naturally closer to the sensitive end of the human continuum, and that this puts us at greater risk of experiencing anxiety states that do not result either in effective and appropriate survival responses or in the learning of new adaptive actions.  In addition, what we identify as posttraumatic stress disorder also involves a failure to learn new responses to apply to future threats.

I believe this can happen to anyone if the actual experience of the trauma was more than any single member of our species could ever surmount alone.  Because we are a social species, we have been designed throughout our evolution to advance the survival potential of our species by sharing new learning about how to both avoid harm and to respond to it adequately once it occurs.  This is part of the reason that social support following a traumatic event is such a critical factor in recovery.

++

It is crucial to understand that our brain is a part of our nervous system, and that all these described reactions to a challenge from the environment that threatens our optimal state of calm well-being of competence involve reactions that occur in our bodies, including our experience of the emotions themselves.  A central point in my writings is that abuse and trauma during early fetal, infant and toddler stages of development prevent this state of competent well-being at the center from ever developing in the first place.

If the stresses of trauma become built into a body from the start, their corresponding threat reactions will NEVER be the same as they are for a body that developed in an optimal environment.  We need to know this for a fact because every interaction a person has is connected to whatever state lies at the center of their body. If overwhelming threat occurs before a possibility of active, competent response exists, this incompetence will be built into the body from the start.

This fact makes anyone who experienced severe abuse, deprivation and trauma early in their development at the highest risk for inadequate or inappropriate responses to additional traumas and threat for the rest of their lives.  I speak from personal experience on this one.  My trauma reaction bucket was filled to over flowing from the first breath I ever took, and there is no possible way to empty it out because the trauma built itself into my body from the beginning.

Everyone has a threshold of tolerance for traumas.  Compared to my mother, I was not genetically given the option of breaking under the burden of my traumas as she did.  I believe that what we call ‘mental illness’ exists in our genetic heritage to ensure that the human body can survive in the worst possible conditions so that there remains a hope that offspring will find their way to a better world in the future.  The cost of this survival can mean that the distortions required of a developing child in order that it CAN survive result in a broken relationship between the child and the self, and the adult person and the world around them.

What lies at the center of a person severely maltreated from birth is an overwhelming sadness.   (Because males are destined to develop differently from females, their sadness can very easily be replaced with rage.)   When conditions become humanly unbearable, alternatives for survival have to be found or death will be the result.  Suicide is being tied through research very clearly to a genetic base.  If actual death does not become the outcome, then we have to expect a natural reaction that results in dire future consequences for those whose bodies do continue to endure.  Having a balanced calm competent center of equilibrium will be a nearly impossible state to achieve.

Believe me, severe infant and child abuse can cause one to ‘go insane’ and/or die of a broken heart.  The toughest survivors usually have to continue to endure the experience of ongoing, overwhelming,  unbearable sadness for the rest of their lives while all the time being pressured to wonder why they cannot either catch up or keep up will all the others who have built into their bodies competence, calm and balanced well-being from their developmental experiences in an adequate if not optimal world.

For some of us life continues like one of those nightmares where you are falling and falling and never hit bottom.  We just grieve for the love we desperately needed from our birth that would have let our brains and bodies develop based on benevolence rather than malevolence.  Our hearts continue breaking and breaking until we die.  This is OUR natural state.

Because we are members of a social species we know fundamentally that our survival and well-being depends upon our acceptance into our species.  This information is gleaned initially from the mother and all other early caregivers.  Misinformation becomes mis-formation as a body adapts to the crisis of remaining alive while being rejected (ejected) from one’s species.

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

Let me take for instance the present threat of a very serious spread from swine flu.  If we as people could have done something to avoid this threat in the first place, obviously the threat would have been prevented.  Once the threat exists, can we contain it?  Can we adequately address the threat through taking steps based on preexisting knowledge we already have so that we can eliminate the threat and restore for ourselves a competent state without threat?  If we don’t already have adequate resources to do these things, then the faster we learn something new to apply to our solution so that containment, elimination and restoration can occur, the better.

Avoid-prevent, contain, eliminate-destroy and restore.  These actions might be motivated by anger and fear, but not by sadness.  Sadness exists in the giving up-overwhelmed state.  Sadness is NEVER a desired stopping place.  If we ever find ourselves stuck in sadness, we need to know that this is both the most vulnerable state we can be in at the same time that it is most valuable because it contains within it the greatest potential for learning something new that is vitally important.

An escape from sadness back to optimal calm competence only happens a most important characteristic is accessed and applied — that of resolve.  Resolve, to me, is a direct reconnection back to the competent experience of the anger state because it involves an awareness that competency is possible.

The problem for many people who are stuck in the sadness state is that they lack the resource of hope that would allow them to experience resolve in the first place.  Hope is something that is built into our being through secure attachment experiences in our environments from the start.  Hope happens because we learn that someone will be there to respond adequately to our needs, and is built into our foundation through these foundational experiences.

Hope is thus intimately and inexorably intertwined with the experience of growing and developing competence literally into our bodies. It stems from connections and linkages that exist (or don’t exist) between ourselves and others.  If we were deprived of the development of hope through early abuse and trauma, it IS something we can learn to acquire later because the potential for experiencing hope appears to be hard wired into our brains before we are born.

In the case of the swine flu, I might feel completely powerless to defend and protect myself and others from its threat (short of disappearing somewhere?), but I have hope that there are people out there with the competence and resources to take adequate care of the threat for us.  These others are thus a part of my immune system resources, and I am dependent upon these others for a solution.

This last statement would lead me in the direction of a discussion of dominance and submission, of ordinate and subordinate conditions — but I will address this in a future post.

++

As always, thank you for reading — your comments are welcome and appreciated.

+SUFFER IN SILENCE

alchemynow2 Comments

Why did I sleep so poorly and wake before dawn today?  What do I do with the millions of thoughts, swarming around like gnats, each untouchable?  I try to swat them away.  I do not want to hear them.  I don’t want them to be a part of me.

I used to have an inner directive about my research and writing that I could in the end say things about the consequences of severe abuse from birth that I knew no therapist would ever tell a client — because they didn’t know them.  Now I laugh a macabre laugh.  Nobody can afford any therapy any more.  There is no access.  How do those of us who had such a terrible mess made of the first 18 years of our life get help for anything that happened to us, let alone for the difficulties those experiences back then cause for us now?

Or is none of it supposed to matter?  Do we just need to do what my sister calls it, “Put on your big girl panties,” and get on with our lives, moment by moment, the best that we can?

I get the feeling that I have so much information buried, hidden just below the surface — but I am supposed to leave it there?  Leave it untouched, waiting for future generations to discover in their own time, because we have too much on our plates in the world right now and it is all too much for anyone to hear?

++

I have a very clear idea at this moment about how this all can work.  I walked away from my research and my computer and my writing and remembering 5 months ago.  I simply pushed back my chair, got up, walked away and didn’t turn back — until now.  It happened the instant I knew I had found what I was looking for:  ‘substance p’.

SEE search:

http://www.google.com/search?q=substance+p&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3RNFA_enUS270US307

Substance P is a neurotransmitter related to the sensation of pain.  It works the same way if we are feeling something as physically wrong for us as it does if we feel something as emotionally wrong with us.  That means to me that our sadness is not something to spurn and discard.  It is a part of us we need to cherish and learn from.

 

++

 

Partly my mission up until that point was to show that our nation’s reliance on pharmaceuticals to treat ‘depression’ and ‘anxiety’ was no different than a reliance on anything that we use to take away our perception of pain.  I knew there really was no difference between psychological pain and physical pain because both are indications to the body that there is something hazardous affecting an individual within their environment, and both elicit an immune system response.

 

I knew that we run the risk of basically saying to one another and to ourselves, “That’s OK.  Go ahead and keep your hand in the flame.  Take these pills.  You will not feel it.  But by all means don’t take the pain seriously as a signal to you that there’s something wrong with your life.  Don’t try to find out what it is, what caused it, how it affects you.  Don’t change anything.  Just ‘remain productive,’ get on with your life, quit whining and complaining.  Nobody cares and neither should you.”

 

++

 

So in my own life I turned away from my studies and from my writing, and tried to create a sanctuary for myself, tried to forget everything I am and everything I’ve become as a result of early, chronic, consistent, terrible abuse.  After all, our society tells us, “That’s all in the past now.”  That’s a lie.  It is NOT in the past.  Everything that has happened to us remains right here in the present instant, accumulated in our body, in our body’s memory, and affects every interaction that occurs all the way down to the molecules in our body and how our genetic code is continually manifesting in our bodies.

 

So what?

 

We are not supposed to ask the questions.  We are not supposed to know the answers.  Thinking is supposed to be carefully modulated so that we avoid knowing the truth.  Be a nation of smiley faces, plugging along, separating the good from the bad, letting people ‘get what they deserve’.  Don’t pity ourselves?  Don’t ever think you had it worse than anyone else because we all know how much worse other people have it?

 

The more we don’t know our own reality the more we separate ourselves from ourselves, and hence from one another.  Are we simply a glamor culture founded upon the powers of distraction and the pursuit of not knowing the truth?  Every time an important question bubbles to the surface of our awareness we are supposed to turn away and forget it.  If we can’t do this by ourselves, then we better go get some kind of pill to help us.

 

Where’s the salvation in that?  Where’s the learning?  Where’s the connection to reality and to what is really going on?  Where is the taking of new information and using it to create a better world?  Are questions and wondering forbidden?

 

++

 

For example, what if I were to ask important questions like, “What is the difference between the experience of abuse for the child that is singled out in a family as the chronically abused one, and the siblings who are the witness abuse survivors? What is the difference between them in regards to the long term brain and body changes they each receive as a result?  Is there a possibility and risk that by our unwillingness to ask these questions and to look for the answers on the bigger level that we are saying there is no difference between them, and that a witness and a victim are in effect ‘the same thing’?  Where, in this picture, do the perpetrators fit in?”

By being willing to pay close attention  to the lessons of trauma we can become  crystal clear about cause and effect, culpability and accountability.  Both witnesses to abuse and victims of abuse have their shared portion of experiences related to peril.  In addition, they each also have their own experiences that are distinctly different.

 

Is there in effect a forbidden zone, a boundary in our thinking and learning that says, “STOP here, beyond this point there is no passing?”  Is that part of what continually keeps the after effects of trauma alive and well, running just under the surface of our culture like a poisoned and toxic ground water that remains so close to the surface that the well being of at least half or our citizens is being jeopardized on some level daily — and nobody is really supposed to care?  Does the adage, ‘pay lip service’ apply here as we all like to decry violence and abuse but will not do anything individually to stop either the actions or the effects — not even within ourselves?

 

++

 

“Chin up.  Suffer in silence.  Don’t admit the truth.  What you don’t know can’t hurt you.  Don’t make such a big deal of it.”

 

Is this really all about not wanting to separate the victims from the not victims because somehow the not victims carry some sense of guilt, shame and responsibility for what victimized the ‘others’ in the first place?  Or is it that we live embedded within a culture that insists it is right in saying that “People get what they deserve?”

 

That leaves the not victims exonerated from whatever guilt they might be carrying so that they never have to dig down and take the guilt out and look at it.  It leaves the victims holding the bad bag feeling as if somehow they deserved what happened to them and they have no right to complain.  Not ever.  “Don’t rock the sinking boat?”

 

++

 

That leaves us with a vast gray area where people who really do suffer somehow just have ‘bad genes.”  When all else fails and there is no other logical explanation, blame genetics.  Who cares that research is showing how nasty early experiences trigger most of these genes to misbehave as they had to and continue to adjust for a person’s survival in a hostile, toxic and malevolent world?

 

We make choices as a society just like we make them individually.  If nobody calls anybody on their behavior, where is the balance, reason and health in that?  Pharmaceutical companies who make billions off of the results are the monster engines powering health research — physical and mental-emotional health.  We don’t question this.  We literally BUY their results as if they came straight from the God of the universe.  The power is in the pills?

 

The word ‘pharmaceutical” stems from the Greek word ‘pharamkos’, which was the chosen sacrifice that was killed after all the ills of a people were projected onto it.  Kill the pharmakos, all troubles of the people are vanquished.  Blame the victim, ‘de-capacitate’ the victim, shut them up, make them go away and all will be well for everyone else.

 

What if the sacrifice doesn’t want to BE the sacrifice?  What power do they have to resist?  True mental health and well being is being treated like an obsolete technology itself.  Who cares if vinyl records disappear off the market as they are being continually replaced by newer and better recording technologies?  All that matters is that we have access to the music itself.  Well being for the masses?  Who cares if it has been replaced with tiny pills in throw away (well, maybe in some places recyclable) bottles?

 

Shouldn’t we all just be so grateful?  We don’t have to suffer.  We don’t have to work at well being.  We don’t have to ask the tough questions and find the tougher answers.  Access to well being has been equalized and guaranteed to all?  And if we refuse to take the pills?  If we dare to question Big Brother’s machine?  Well, who first asked “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody there to hear it does it make a sound?”

 

I have always thought that question was ludicrous.  A tree falling and hitting the ground makes vibrations, dislodges and upsets all manner of life that exists within its branches, etc.  Only egocentric humans would assume that the world revolves around us.  I can personally say anything I want to about how the abuse I suffered was preventable, that I would rather it had never happened in the first place, that it changed the development of my brain and body into being one geared for the most efficient survival in a life-and-death threat world, and that this childhood created a lack of well being in me that operates on my molecular level.  Who wants to hear this noise?

 

Better that I either suffer in silence — which is what I am doing if nobody hears a sound I am making — or shut up, pop my pills, and get to work fitting in here.  I mean, how productive is the truth?

 

++