Tag: disorganized disoriented insecure attachment

+DISSOCIATION AS AN ALLERGIC REACTION TO ABUSE

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

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

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

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

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

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DID THAT CLINIC HAVE THE RIGHT TO ABUSE ME?

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

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

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

No, I am not.

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

I would not have survived otherwise.

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

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

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

Shame on those people!  Shame!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Litany from Start to Finish

*AGE 2 – CINDY BORN – 1953

*Age 3 – THE TOILET BOWL

*Age 4 – THE BEDSPREAD

*Age 5 – THE BUBBLE GUM

*Age 5 – THE FOX

*Age 5 – SHARON AND THE FIRE ANTS

*Age 6 – THE MARBLES

*AGE 6 – FIRST GRADE — NIGHT ON THE STOOL

*AGE 7 – MUD PUDDLE INCIDENT

*AGE 8 – MY BLACK RABBIT, PETER

*Age 9 – BLOODY NOSE

*Age 9 – JOHN and the CHERRY TREE

*Age 10 – THE SHAMPOO LIE AND RUNNING AWAY

*Age 11 – MY EYEBROWS

*Age 13 – DIRTY DIAPER AND PEPPLES IN MY KNEES

+Age 14 – SCRUBBED IN THE TUB

*Age 14 – SILENT TREATMENT

*Age 14 – Gardening and the Sabotage

*Age 15 – FORCED TO WATCH AN ALASKAN SUNRISE

see also for background information:

++SCHORE ON DEVLOPMENT OF RIGHT BRAIN

***Notes on Siegel’s writings

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+DURESS AND DISSOCIATION

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

overload

overload

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

unless

unless

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

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

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

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

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

How to make sense of THAT?

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

gone again

gone again

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

“Stay here, Linda.  Pay attention Linda.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silly is good.  Humorous is good…..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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See today’s previous posts:

+DAYS WITHOUT WORDS – FOCUSED SURVIVAL AND DISSOCIATION

+’FIGHTING ANGER’ IS GOOD FOR US

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+DAYS WITHOUT WORDS – FOCUSED SURVIVAL AND DISSOCIATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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+BATTERED CRASH-DUMMY BABIES — AND OUR LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

alchemynow2 Comments

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Perhaps being raised from birth as a solitary, isolated and battered infant-child prepared me for being a ‘lone voice in the wilderness’.  I did a Google search last evening for the terms ‘infant abuse language development’ and was shocked at the pitiful range of information that appeared on my screen.  I added the word ‘mother’ to my search terms and still found little that could help me understand what I wanted to study.

As a complete lay person it is NOT a good sign to have my own blog page show up on the first page of such a search.  What this tells me is that either what I think is so far outside the realm of ‘correct’ and ‘relevant’ that it bears no further thought — or it tells me that what I know is of critical importance and needs to be researched and studied by the people who receive the BIG BUCKS to study what matters to human beings forever stuck in the trenches of life as survivors of infant-child abuse.

One study I found is so old it represents only the beginning of the research that Dr. Allan Schore and other more ‘modern’ developmental neuroscientists have more currently written about.  Although this paper (what I could access of it online — The Rhythmic Structure of Mother-Infant Interaction in Term and Preterm Infants) describes patterns of infant-mother interactions that are critical for infant body-brain development, it was written before the photographic technology even existed that Schore uses to highlight the fact that accurately measuring the infant-caregiver interactions that are forming the infant happen NOT in the range of one-second intervals, but rather occur at rates in the millisecond range.

(Do a Google search for ‘schore mother infant brain development’ and take a look at THIS information.)

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Most simply and effectively put, those of us with severe infant-child abuse and neglect in our developmental early history are MOST likely to experience processes that are lumped together under the descriptive word DISSOCIATION.  When I look at the information about the natural patterns of connection and disconnection that take place between infants and their caregivers from birth as they are required for brain-nervous system development (including infant consolidation of information as it builds the body-brain) I understand that when an infant is born into a completely chaotic, traumatic and UNSTABLE environment these patterns DO NOT operate correctly.

Too much information, too much of hurtful information, too much information being bashed at and into the infant, not enough information, chaotic unstable patterns being forced upon the infant by a MOTHER or other early caregiver that have NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with the infant itself, etc.

There is NO POSSIBLE WAY for an infant to develop in a normal or ordinary fashion given the extremely upsetting nature of the interactions and transactions it is exposed to and forced to experience with an abusive, traumatizing, terrorizing early caregiver.

HOW DO WE EXPECT THAT THERE WILL NOT BE SERIOUS AND PERMANENT CONSEQUENCES TO THE INFANT from these kinds of interactions — along with the nearly complete exclusion of CORRECT, sustaining, regulation and HELPFUL interactions that the infant MUST have to build its best body-nervous system-brain?

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Now, getting to my present reality:  What I experienced yesterday while trying to obtain fuel assistance money from a county-operated program that is supposed to do its job was so far past unsettling to me that I headed back to my infancy to look for information about how I experienced what happened yesterday — inside of my own body.

I don’t want to go into the details of how inept both this program and its administrators are (in the state of Arizona).  Life is life, and it’s a fact that Big People are LIKELY to experience stressful, disturbing and unsettling experiences.

What matters is that when an infant was built from birth in the kind of malevolent (not pampered!) environment I am describing, we do not have built within our own body-nervous system-brain ‘normal or ordinary’ circuits and pathways to DEAL with the stress-distress that life throws our way.

I can find no reference online to this direct connection between infant lack of well-being and the adult consequences of being built in those terrible environments that DIRECTLY affect our inabilities and disabilities to sail through difficulties in our adulthood that normal and ordinary people usually can.

The best that we survivors are likely to hear is, “Oh, there’s something wrong with you.  Let’s diagnose you with a ‘mental illness’.

GIVE ME A BREAK, you idiots!

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I will describe here as clearly as I can what happens to me when I am at my wit’s end stress-distress wise and have to deal with people.  This happened to me yesterday, and is an experience that I do not remember having consciously between the time I left home at 18 (I had it prior to that) and the time I received my very serious breast cancer diagnosis and began treatment at age 55.

(My daughter tells me she has an idea what I am talking about based on her experience of meeting people in a stress-filled situation, like in an important interview, when she is so involved with dealing with incoming information that is NOT VERBAL — (now experts say that 95% of information transmitted in our conversations IS NONVERBAL) —  that she cannot HEAR a single word being spoken.  I also believe people under pressure of serious medical treatments experience related difficulties when trying to understand what their medical providers are telling them — like in cancer treatment.)

ANYWAY, the woman behind the fuel assistance program’s desk was trying to explain to me that all the rules for the program had been changed (in stupid ways) that directly and negatively affect ALL people applying for help.

The more desperate I felt inside knowing that my ability to heat my home were being increasingly threatened, the more I could NOT understand what she was telling me.  The not understanding was at the level of watching her mouth move its tongue and lips with no sound attached to those actions.  At the same time an extremely annoying DISSOCIATED and disconnected SOUND filled my awareness that was extremely noisy and irritating.  I could not connect the sound to the lips to the words to any kind of sense at all.

Because what I needed for my own well-being and security (the ability to heat my house) mattered so much, I HAD to understand what this woman was saying to me.  How humiliating and extremely AGGRAVATING it was to finally have to say to her, “I need you to tell me what you are saying as if you are talking to a two-year-old — or I will NOT be able to understand you.”  (I did not receive the help I needed yesterday and in one month’s time have to jump through all of their hoops again — for the third time in three months.)

I absolutely believe, because I could FEEL it, that my lack of ability to understand a DAMN thing in that conversation happened because the very earliest PREVERBAL, PRE LANGUAGE neuronal wiring in my body — built there during extremely abusive and chaotic nonsensical interactions with my traumatizing mother — was in full action.

I also absolutely believe that I am not ALONE!  I am certainly NOT the only adult who survived severe infant abuse.

Does anyone talk about how it IS for us survivors and how it FEELS to us in our BODY to have been so negatively impacted in our development that these alterations affect how we learned and process language — ESPECIALLY WHEN STRESS/DISTRESS IS PRESENT?

No, they do not.

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While I believe the malevolent experiences during my infancy directly formed my body-brain wiring patterns that are the root of how I am forced to operate in the world, I do not believe that ‘dissociation’ is the correct description of the state I am forced into when these earliest wiring patterns overwhelm my ability to make sense of myself in/and the world.

Based on my experience that my cancer treatment interrupted all the later learning I had acquired that allowed me to circumvent the baseline language patterns that I acquired — I believe it is more accurate to say that the earliest beginnings and what THAT felt like is the REAL us in our body.  Everything that we managed to piece together to ‘feel more normal’ and to ‘operate more normally’ are themselves the dissociations from what was native to us — that which was built into and built our body-brain in the first place INCLUDING OUR ABILITY TO COMPREHEND AND USE LANGUAGE.

When I experience (and I HATE IT) what I did yesterday, I am very clear that I am ACTUALLY without ‘a first language’.  No doubt my brain could be watched during these times and SOMETHING DIFFERENT would be detected about how my brain-mind is processing language.

I suspect that the foundation of language abilities as they happen from birth (actually from before birth) in patterns of connection-disconnection with the mother cannot possibly follow magically along normal pathways if the infant is being treated in traumatizing ways.  We infant abuse survivors therefore cannot possibly have learned language in normal and ordinary ways.

This is a BIG PROBLEM, folks, at the same time it COULD be a fascinating journey into understanding the resiliency of infants who can STILL adapt to spoken language.  I also believe, however, that the same alterations that occurred due to early abuse and affected how we process spoken words and nonverbal signals with our ‘different balance from ordinary’ in terms of how we receive information, process it and ‘take action’ (listening and speaking) — also affects how we use words in our thinking.

All of this has to do (in my mind) with the different way our right brain, our left brain, and our abilities to transmit, synthesize and understand information between the two were changed through trauma-altered development (and infant abuse) so that our experience of being alive has been fundamentally impacted.

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Doesn’t anybody out there think these facts are worth investigating?  We are absolutely WAY IN THE DARK AGES if the best our culture can do is ‘call us mentally ill’.  We infant abuse survivors are the most sophisticated examples of the range of environmentally adaptive developmental abilities our species has.

That our language development was changed right along with the rest of our body due to severe early trauma should surprise NO ONE.  Why, then, is there not only no USEFUL information available that will explain to us how this process happened and how these changes affect us all of our life — there is NO INFORMATION available at all!

Battered babies don’t simply fall off of the face of the earth.  We survived, we are here — and because we were battered and because we survived — we are different beings from ordinary.  I for one want to know what that MEANS!

The patterns of interaction an infant has with its mother and other earliest primary caregivers not ONLY build our right limbic emotional brain with its patterns of ability to have either emotional regulation or dysregulation for life, these patterns also build our social brain (same hemisphere) at the same time.

Our resulting ability to ‘read social cues’ normally is directly tied along with the development of our body-nervous system-brain through our earliest interactions to the development of our VERBAL LANGUAGE ABILITIES that are intimately connected to our NONVERBAL LANGUAGE ABILITIES.  All of the patterns of communication an infant has with its earliest caregivers ARE a language being spoken.

It is time that all of us understand that being able to communicate efficiently and effectively with others and with our own self are directly formed within us at the same time.  We cannot exclude a study of infant abuse and trauma from the consequences to all of our development – including our language abilities.

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+RESLIENCY FACTORS AND THE ‘AT LEAST….’ GAME

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When it comes to being outside the circle of ordinary/normal infant/child socialization, I might just about be an expert.  SO ‘at least’ my unusual perceptions as an ‘outsider’ allows me to think/perceive/suspect/wonder about things that ordinary/normal people (NOT severely abused and traumatized from birth people) might never consider.

Before I even write another word about resiliency factors I want to introduce the importance of HUMOR (dark, light, gray) when it comes to considering the context of your abusive/traumatic early life.  I’m not sure there even IS any other way to think about the unthinkable — what went so RIGHT in an infant/childhood where so much obviously went so WRONG!

Yes, humor can put a different twist on things, shed a different light, allowing us to notice what tends to be invisible and overwhelmed by the darkness of terrifying and terrible infant/child abuse and trauma.

So — with a very important twist of enlightening humor –the following comes to mind…..

So — my mother forced me to spend weeks on end lying in my bed alone as a component of some bizarre punishment scheme of hers or another — at least I had a bed!

So — my mother forced me to stand in corners for days and days from sunup to after sundown — at least we had a shelter to live in — and at least the sun went DOWN though, “SHUCKS, too bad it came back up!”

So — my mother forced 99.5% of her insane abuse on me while my siblings (though witness abuse and trauma bonding must have been their fare) went out to play, ate dinner as a family, dragged in a Christmas tree, WHATEVER they were doing — at least I had siblings and was NOT absolutely alone with my mother as an only child and I had hearing so that I could listen to everyone else having a life…..

So — never once did my father intervene to stop my mother’s abuse, to acknowledge me as a loved daughter (etc….) — at least I knew who my father was, at least he never abandoned his family, at least he had a job and provided for us……

So — I was terrified at school of doing something ‘wrong’ so that my mother would get a ‘report’ from the teacher — at least I got an education and stayed smart and still love learning….

So — my mother belittled and shamed me that I wrote ‘stupid stories’ and drew ‘the ugliest pictures’ — at least our family valued ‘art’ and provided me access to the basics of paper, scissors, pencils and crayons.

So — my mother kept me most of my childhood from going outside to play — at least on our Alaskan homestead I always knew that the perfect beauty of the wilderness was just on the outside of the walls….

So — my mother violently bashed my head and face into the toilet bowl when I was four because she believed I was trying to murder my 2 year old sister when I was just showing her the beautiful bubbles the sunlight made on the pattern of the shadow of the hair ball floating in the water — at least my mother NEVER removed from me my powerful love of beauty…..

So — my mother viciously verbally abused me when my pet rabbit died — at least I had been allowed to HAVE a pet to love….

So — my mother abused me at times with too little or too much food to eat — at least there was always something in the house to eat…..

So — my mother took the family to Alaska when I was five, to a large extent to remove my grandmother from my life — at least I had SOME attention from my grandmother before then and I knew she was alive in Los Angeles….

So — my mother liked to place me in the center of the car’s back seat so she could train the rear-view mirror directly on me so she could stare at me and give me the perpetual evil eye — at least our family had transportation…..

So — we moved a bizillion times in my childhood — at least when my mother was en-captured in her move-a-thons she had less time to traumatize me and at least some of those moves took us up to the homestead I loved….

So — my mother beat me many times ‘to within an inch of my life’ — at least there was always that inch….

So — holidays were among the very, very few times my mother’s direct abuse of me abated — at least there were holidays…

So — ‘being in public’ meant that my mother bit her tongue and restrained her fists — at least there WAS public (sometimes)….

So — my mother let me clearly know she hated it that “Linda is never sick” and let me know she wished I was and that none of her other (precious) children had to suffer (as if it was my fault that I refused to take on THEIR sickness) — at least I had a healthy strong body with incredible stamina that allowed me to endure and endure and endure her…..

So — my mother screeched at me when I was 17, “You are no better than a snake!  You would be a terrible mother!  I hope God never sees fit to give you children.” — at least I proved her DEAD WRONG!

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