Tag: dissociation

+MAYBE WE CAN’T BE FOOLED – THIS IS NOT A BENIGN WORLD!

alchemynow2 Comments

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I have a lot of thoughts this morning as I wait out the dawn for the sun to rise.  I am thinking about the book that was recommended to me by a therapist nearly 30 years ago – the one I read that led to my finally being able to disown my mother.  In People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil by M. Scott Peck I found something I needed:  How to tell truth from untruth by listening to what my body tells me in my gut.

This morning I put this thought together with the concluding paragraphs Dr. Martin Teicher includes in one of his important articles about how the stress caused by infant-child abuse, neglect and trauma changes the development of the brain:

“In our hypothesis, postnatal neglect or other maltreatment serves to elicit a cascade of stress responses that organizes the brain to develop along a specific pathway selected to facilitate reproductive success and survival in a world of deprivation and strife.  This pathway, however, is costly as it is associated with an increased risk of developing serious medical and psychiatric disorders and is unnecessary and maladaptive in a more benign environment.”

I am questioning my own conclusion that I reached after discovering Teicher’s work.  “Who says that severe early abuse survivors hatch out from their first malevolent environment when they leave home into a “more benign environment?”  Does an environment that lacks direct assault constitute a benign environment?”

No.

I woke up this morning thinking about the interactions I had with my neighbor children yesterday (ages 6 and 12).  The 6 year old is still young enough to be oblivious to many of the stresses present in the world she is growing up in and for.  The child who just turned 12 two days ago is increasingly showing great signs of inner conflict and distress.  She is vastly overweight, receives blatant derogatory comments at school about her weight, and openly admitted to me yesterday that the teasing she receives at school makes her feel ‘mean’.  And mean she can be!  She is not a happy child.

I also think about a friend of mine (alcoholic/addict) who has the sweetest heart and who is running his body directly into the ground.  I hadn’t seen him for many months.  He stopped by this week for a visit and brought a friend of his who must have repeated to me six times that his ex-wife ‘ripped him off’ after 34 years of marriage, etc.

I found myself after he told the story once wondering why he repeated it again – and again – and again…..  Then I found myself completely without compassion realizing that I don’t give a hoot about what happened to him.  He is a complete stranger to me.  In my world if something that happens in your life continues to trouble you, deal with it!  Grapple with it!  Wrestle with it!  Examine the conditions surrounding the events that cling on and on and on – and get over it!

UNLESS!!!  I reserve for the category of ‘there’s no way this one will ever leave me’ for victims of early infant-childhood trauma and abuse the reality that because that trauma changed the course of our physiological development permanently so that we ended up with a different body-brain our trauma built us and built itself INTO us.  As long as we live in our body the consequences of our earliest traumas reside within us.  We cannot leave those traumas behind.

SO…..

I did ask both my addicted friend and the friend he brought with him what their childhoods were like.  The addict insists that his earliest years were ideal.  OK.  Addictions can hit without early trauma.  The other man admitted that his early years were awful.

OK

“So go back to the beginning,” I wanted to tell him.  “Go back there and find the beginning of your own path through life and follow it.  Untangle it where you can.  Expose your early sufferings where you can.  But what good will it do you — or others who are weighted down by repeated exposure to a boring story of ‘gee my ex was so mean’ – to hear about something that has nothing to do with us?”

Am I getting harsh in my aging years?  Probably so…..

But

These thoughts are connected for me today as I received a lightening bolt realization:  None of us – no matter what nation we live in – are living in a perfect ‘BENIGN’ world.  As long as anyone is suffering, the world is not benign.

But

We have to look at the biggest picture possible.  This world and the civilizations upon it are supposed to be maturing and advancing, evolving, growing up.  Once this process is complete, only THEN will this world be benign.

Even within the boundaries of our great (rich) nation nearly a quarter of our children go to bed hungry because they don’t have enough food to eat.  Forty percent of our nation’s children are living in unstable housing.  Never mind the numbers of our children that are obese, that don’t make it through high school, or the numbers who cannot read well or think for themselves even if they do graduate.

This is NOT a benign environment, Dr. Martin Teicher.

I have, on some profound levels, bought (as Mr. Peck would say) that lie!

This is not a world where every human being is cherished.  This is not a world that does everything possible to make sure everyone has what they need from conception onward to thrive as the best person they can be as they live a life of well-being.

This COULD be a different, benign benevolent world – but it ISN’T one yet.

Just because those of us who suffered terrible things during our earliest years might have escaped one level of trauma as we stepped away from our home of origin and escaped our childhoods does NOT mean that we entered a wonderful world!

If we are going to define what is good for us and what isn’t, we have to think about what the world COULD be like and not pretend that the world is REALLY that world we imagine.

And perhaps those of us who survived our terrifying and terrible earliest years happen to have a body that is not, as Teicher states, designed ONLY for living in a malevolent world.  Perhaps we have a body that craves that better world that isn’t here yet at the same time that we ALWAYS know that this world we are in is NOT the benign world that most people seem intent on believing it is.

Perhaps we WANT more, NEED more in more intense and direct ways because we have suffered so much already.  Perhaps we crave a truly peaceful, safe-and-secure, fair, just, compassionate and caring world because we know so well how bad things can be – and that stepping out of our home of origin was REALLY only one small step in perhaps a better direction – but NONE of us are ‘there’ yet!!  Making the world a better place is a mutual job that everyone has to work on together.

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” -Jiddu Krishnamurti

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+THE LIVING AND THE DYING IN MY GARDEN – SEEING MYSELF IN THE LIFE OF MY PLANTS

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I am up and wide awake (Such an odd expression – what exactly is the alternative to being ‘wide awake’?) at 4 a.m. this morning.  It is a perfect temperature outside.  I hear the first single rooster crowing up the sun across the border in Mexico.  A part of me is eager for the morning light to flood my yard so I can go rescue one of the native southwestern plants I bought that I know – of all of them – is NOT thriving where I planted it.  In fact, it is dying.

I don’t know what is troubling my Henry Eiler’s Quilled Black Eyed Susan, but it was supposed to be the showcase plant in the back yard!  It was supposed to grow into a thriving and glorious giant!  Nope.  Not doing that!  It is shriveling and losing all of its baby leaves as if it is sinking into the earth rather than growing in the opposite direction!

All I can think of is to carefully dig it out and put it back into a pot.  I need to move it where I can watch it carefully, like my precious grandson was watched in his intensive care neonatal environment after he was born six weeks prematurely.

Will it survive?  Can I provide for this little plant what it needs so it can grow past this life-or-death stage?  What am I doing WRONG for it?  Can I figure that out so I can do it RIGHT?

I am a complete newbie when it comes to drip irrigation.  I don’t understand the living complexity of this (for me) massive system I am still in the process of installing in my growing garden.  Only the RIGHT amount of water, at the RIGHT amount of pressure, streaming CORRECTLY through the RIGHT amount of line is needed.  If the ‘zone’ length is too long water comes out at the front end too MUCH and doesn’t make it to the back end of the line.  How do I adjust all of this so that I can guarantee every single plant, each with its own particular and special growth needs just the RIGHT amount of water at the RIGHT periods of time?

I don’t know.  And I hate to sacrifice the life of any individual plant as I work as hard as I can to figure all of this out!

We are evidently in a period of drought down here in southeastern Arizona.  I don’t actually understand what it is about ME that is stimulating me to work so hard to have a yard filled with living, thriving and blooming plants that will bring beauty to this piece of earth IN SPITE of the harsh conditions present here.

I am challenging myself.  I have a WANT and a DESIRE and the INTENTION of trying to cooperate within the limitations of this climate and of this soil and of these growing conditions on this little patch of ground I am living on to MAKE LIFE HAPPEN and to MAKE THAT LIFE BEAUTIFUL.  Of course that suggests (truly) that bare dusty reddish-brown soil on its own is not beautiful to me.  I am suggesting that THINGS CAN BE BETTER if I try hard enough, work hard enough, am determined enough, sacrifice enough.

I want to do something DIFFERENT and SPECIAL here in my little life, my little yard.  I want to figure all of this out!  At the same time, except for needing the vital resource of WATER to move around on this soil to bring life to these plants, I want the garden to be sustainable.  I desire that this garden find its own thriving balance point, its own ‘tipping point’ and stay there provided I can do my part to take care of it correctly.

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On the other hand as I look at my own situation as a human being I know that nothing was done for me during the first 18 years of life (other than being given the physical necessities of shelter, water, food, etc.) correctly.  Me, like the tiny Brown Eyed Susan in my yard spent my entire infant-childhood on the verge of dying.  Not only did nobody NOTICE, nobody CARE, but my parents continually cooperated with each other to make things WORSE for me, never BETTER.

So in a way I guess my gardening here in this arid high desert land is a sort of trauma drama reenactment for me, an effort to ACT out a way to create a beautiful, thriving garden IN SPITE of similar (parallel-symbolic) conditions to my own infant-childhood as they attack these plants.  Can I protect them?  Can I take adequate care of them?  Can I give them what they need?  Can I help them to thrive IN SPITE of all the detriments within this environment that are working against them?

And in the case of this single plant that seems to be losing its battle/struggle to remain alive let alone to GROW, can I-we win this battle?  Can I figure out what is WRONG and make it BETTER?  Can I ‘repair’ the ‘rupture’ in the patterns of this plant’s existence so that it can actually continue to BE on this earth?

Today I will try.  I will do everything in my power to help this plant.

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RECENT POSTS:

+ADOBE MOMMA NEWS: COOP WINDOWS (AND A FEW FLOWERS)

+’BAD MEDICINE’: PRETENDING EARLY ABUSE SURVIVORS HAVE AN ‘ORDINARY’ BODY

+AS DR. MARTIN TEICHER STATES — EARLY ABUSE, ALTERED BRAIN DEVELOPMENT AND THE SCARS THAT WON’T HEAL

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+AS DR. MARTIN TEICHER STATES — EARLY ABUSE, ALTERED BRAIN DEVELOPMENT AND THE SCARS THAT WON’T HEAL

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Sometimes I try to figure out how the kinds of altered brain development that happened to me through severe abuse and trauma especially during the early years of my growth actually FEEL like from the inside of me.  Today, as this poor parched and unusually dry earth sends back to me a dull hollow thumping sound when I send a stream of water from the hose upon it, I think about what it feels like to be that kind of thirsty.

I contrast that thought with the knowledge that too much water upon the earth is equally as harmful as too little is.  Then I find myself wondering, “Are the left brain hemisphere developmental changes abuse survivors experience a consequence of too much harmful experience or are they a consequence of too little positive experience?  Are the changes created by a combination of both, or are they created by something else entirely?”

Does anyone know?

While it might not be possible for the very earth that provides all life to experience both severe drought and severe flooding in the same place at the same time, as I read SCARS THAT WON’T HEAL: THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF CHILD ABUSE —By Martin H. Teicher I am beginning to understand that what he describes of the changes that happen to the developing brain of a traumatized infant-child in fact creates a similar – and therefore very possible – reality as the combined flooding and drought at the same time would be like.

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I encourage readers to please take a look at this entire article by clicking HERE.  (It includes a mention toward the end about Borderline Personality Disorder, as well.)  I am going to skip down to the end of the article to post today what Teicher says in conclusion [I added underlining for emphasis]:

Adaptive Detriment

“Our team initiated this research with the hypothesis that early stress was a toxic agent that interfered with the normal, smoothly orchestrated progression of brain development, leading to enduring psychiatric problems. Frank W. Putnam of Children’s Hospital MedicalCenter of Cincinnati and Bruce D. Perry of the Alberta Mental Health Board in Canada have now articulated the same hypothesis.  I have come to question and reevaluate our starting premise, however.  Human brains evolved to be molded by experience, and early difficulties were routine during our ancestral development.  Is it plausible that the developing brain never evolved to cope with exposure to maltreatment and so is damaged in a nonadaptive manner? This seems most unlikely. The logical alternative is that exposure to early stress generates molecular and neurobiological effects that alter neural development in an adaptive way that prepares the adult brain to survive and reproduce in a dangerous world.

“What traits or capacities might be beneficial for survival in the harsh conditions of earlier times? Some of the more obvious are the potential to mobilize an intense fight-or-flight response, to react aggressively to challenge without undue hesitation, to be at heightened alert for danger and to produce robust stress responses that facilitate recovery from injury.  In this sense, we can reframe the brain changes we observed as adaptations to an adverse environment.

“Although this adaptive state helps to take the affected individual safely through the reproductive years (and is even likely to enhance sexual promiscuity), which are critical for evolutionary success, it comes at a high price. McEwen has recently theorized that overactivation of stress response systems, a reaction that may be necessary for short-term survival, increases the risk for obesity, type II diabetes and hypertension; leads to a host of psychiatric problems, including a heightened risk of suicide; and accelerates the aging and degeneration of brain structures, including the hippocampus.

“We hypothesize that adequate nurturing and the absence of intense early stress permits our brains to develop in a manner that is less aggressive and more emotionally stable, social, empathic and hemispherically integrated.  We believe that this process enhances the ability of social animals to build more complex interpersonal structures and enables humans to better realize their creative potential.

“Society reaps what it sows in the way it nurtures its children. Stress sculpts the brain to exhibit various antisocial, though adaptive, behaviors.  Whether it comes in the form of physical, emotional or sexual trauma or through exposure to warfare, famine or pestilence, stress can set off a ripple of hormonal changes that permanently wire a child’s brain to cope with a malevolent world.  Through this chain of events, violence and abuse pass from generation to generation as well as from one society to the next.  Our stark conclusion is that we see the need to do much more to ensure that child abuse does not happen in the first place, because once these key brain alterations occur, there may be no going back.”

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+’BAD MEDICINE’: PRETENDING EARLY ABUSE SURVIVORS HAVE AN ‘ORDINARY’ BODY

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As my daughter and I prepare to write our book, it is so important to me that SHE understands what I mean when I tell her, “It’s NOT the individual specific details of what my mother did to me as contained in any story I could tell about my severely abusive infant-childhood that truly matter.  What matters MOST is what the trauma my mother caused me DID to change my physiological development.”  The article contained in my last post, +WHAT EARLY ABUSE/NEGLECT SURVIVORS MOST NEED TO KNOW (AND ARE LEAST LIKELY TO BE TOLD) is EXACTLY what I mean.  Yet the changes highlighted in that article are only the tip of the ‘trauma changed physiological development’ iceberg.

It is critical to me that what my daughter and I write will communicate that it isn’t the actual specific details of ANYTHING that happened to ANY of us as survivors that TRULY changed us — or our entire lives.  As a result of the physiological impact of the stress hormones our body was forced to create in us in response to trauma, abuse and neglect we ended up with a DIFFERENT body-brain with which we process every experience of our lives — then and now.

I personally believe it is criminal that early severe maltreatment survivors are NOT GIVEN THIS INFORMATION.  Everything any of us hope to achieve in the way of healing hinges upon how we learn about the trauma-changed body we live in/with so that we can identify how we are different from OTHERS who are not early severe maltreatment survivors.  We do NOT have the same body that they do — and EVERYONE needs to understand this fact — and what it means.

It is so easy for ‘professionals’ to ‘diagnose’ my ‘condition’ with labels and categories at the same time the important information about my trauma-changed physiological development is left completely out of the picture.  I am sorry, but the truth is that I have done amazingly well considering the changes my body-brain was forced to make!!  But simply suggesting something like “You have an anxiety disorder” does nothing to reflect my true reality.

Tell me, rather, what ‘limbic kindling’ really is, what it feels like, what it means to me from the INSIDE of my body.  Tell me what ’emotional dysregulation’ really is, what ‘the inability to self-sooth’ really is, what is really happening when my right brain, my left brain, and the region that processes information between them was built differently from ordinary under terribly traumatic and stressful conditions.

If there are practicing professionals out there that do not KNOW about the information such as Teicher’s article presents — and at this point this includes nearly ALL OF THEM —  then in my mind they are unethically applying inappropriate techniques AND MEDICATIONS to their clients.  These professionals — all of them including doctors — need to obtain the education about these facts before they EVER begin to treat early abuse survivors for ANYTHING!

Excuse me, but not only our lives but the quality of our lives depends on our being told when we ask for help what trauma altered development is, how and why it happens, what it means, and how we can live a better life with the trauma altered developmental changes that happened to us.

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+WHAT EARLY ABUSE/NEGLECT SURVIVORS MOST NEED TO KNOW (AND ARE LEAST LIKELY TO BE TOLD)

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This research article is over a decade old, but it contains the kind of information severe early abuse and neglect survivors MOST NEED TO KNOW and are LEAST LIKELY TO BE TOLD!  Please take a look:

McLean Researchers Document Brain Damage Linked to Child Abuse and Neglect

December 14, 2000 — Belmont, MA — McLean Hospital researchers have identified four types of brain abnormalities linked to child abuse and neglect, providing the first comprehensive review about the multiple ways in which abuse can damage the developing brain.  In the Fall 2000 issue of Cerebrum, the researchers also review evidence that suggests this early damage to the developing brain may subsequently cause disorders like anxiety and depression in adulthood.

“The science shows that childhood maltreatment may produce changes in both brain function and structure,” says Martin Teicher, MD, PhD, director of the Developmental Biopsychiatry Research Program at McLean, and author of the paper.  Although a baby is born with almost all the brain cells (neurons) he will ever have, the brain continues to develop actively throughout childhood and adolescence. ”  A child’s interactions with the outside environment causes connections to form between brain cells,” Teicher explains.”  Then these connections are pruned during puberty and adulthood.  So whatever a child experiences, for good or bad, helps determine how his brain is wired.”

The McLean team identifies four types of abnormalities caused by abuse and neglect. “These changes are permanent,” says Teicher. “This is not something people can just get over and get on with their lives.”

Limbic irritability:

The limbic system is a network of brain cells sometimes called the “emotional brain.”  It controls many of the most fundamental emotions and drives important for survival.  The McLean researchers found evidence that abuse may cause disturbances in electrical impulses as limbic nerve cells communicate, resulting in seizures or significant abnormalities on an EEG, a diagnostic test that measures brain waves.  The researchers studied 253 adults who came to an outpatient mental health clinic for psychiatric assessment.  A little more than half reported being physically and/or sexually abused as children.  The researchers developed a checklist (the Limbic System Checklist-33 or LSCL-33) to determine how often the patients experienced symptoms similar to those that occur in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy.  They found that patients who experienced abuse scored much higher suggesting an underlying disturbance in the limbic system.  Follow-up studies of 115 children admitted to McLean were conducted to measure EEG disturbances.  Patients with a history of abuse were twice as likely as non-abused patients to have an abnormal EEG.  Interestingly, all of the extra EEG abnormalities affected the left hemisphere of the brain.  EEG abnormalities were associated with more self-destructive behavior and more aggression.

Arrested development of the left hemisphere:

The brain is divided into two hemispheres, with the left controlling language and the right responsible for visual-spatial ability, perception and expression of negative affect.  In six separate studies and analyses, the smallest involving 20 people and the largest involving 115, the researchers reviewed medical records, conducted neuropsychological tests to measure left- and right-brain abilities, examined the results of MRI scans to provide pictures of the brain at work, and studied the results of sophisticated EEG coherence tests, which provided information on brain structure as well as function.  These studies provide evidence of deficient development of the left brain hemisphere in abused patients, so that the right hemisphere may be more active than in healthy individuals. The researchers speculate that the left hemisphere deficits seen in abused patients may contribute to the development of depression and increase the risk of memory impairments.

Deficient integration between the left and right hemispheres:

The corpus callosum is a major information pathway connecting the two hemispheres of the brain.  The researchers reviewed MRI brain scans from 51 patients admitted to McLean’s Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Program, and compared them to 97 MRIs of healthy children obtained from the National Institute of Mental Health.  In abused children, the corpus callosum was smaller than in healthy children.  After reviewing the medical records, the researchers found that neglect was associated with a 24 percent to 42 percent reduction in the size of various regions of the corpus callosum in boys, but sexual abuse had no effect.  In girls, sexual abuse was associated with an 18 percent to 30 percent smaller size in the corpus callosum, but neglect had no effect.  They also found that abused patients shifted degree of activity between their two hemispheres to a much greater extent than normal.  They theorize that a smaller corpus callosum leads to less integration of the hemispheres.  This in turn can result in dramatic shifts in mood or personality.

Increased vermal activity:

The cerebellar vermis is a part of the brain that is involved in emotion, attention and the regulation of the limbic system.  The McLean researchers used a new functional MRI technique known as T2 relaxometry, which provides information about blood flow to the brain during a resting state, to measure vermal activity in both abused and healthy individuals.  Thirty-two adults participated, including 15 with a history of sexual or intense verbal childhood trauma but no physical trauma.  The higher a participant’s LSCL-33 score, the greater the degree of vermal activity or blood flow.  The researchers theorize that the abused patients had higher vermal activity in order to quell electrical irritability within the limbic system.  They hypothesize that the cerebellar vermis helps to maintain emotional balance, but that trauma may impair this ability.

After documenting these four types of brain abnormalities, the McLean researchers examined animal studies to determine how such damage might occur.  Such studies show that neglect and trauma increase production of cortisol and decrease production of the thyroid hormone, which affect development of neurochemical and neurotransmitter receptors in the hippocampus, amygdala and locus coeruleus, parts of the brain that regulate fear and anxiety.  Based on these studies, the McLean team theorizes that the stress caused by child abuse and neglect may also trigger the release of some hormones and neurotransmitters while inhibiting others, in effect remolding the brain so that the individual is “wired” to respond to a hostile environment.

“We know that an animal exposed to stress and neglect early in life develops a brain that is wired to experience fear, anxiety and stress,” says Teicher.  “We think the same is true of people.”

[All bold type and underlining is mine for emphasis!]

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+FIGHTING BACK AGAINST THE ABUSE SURVIVOR’S ALTERED PERITRAUMATIC SENSE OF TIME

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Although I feel it’s progress for me to have identified this feeling I live with most of the time, ‘prescience’ as described in this post

+IN MY RESPONSE TO MY MOTHER’S ABUSE: A GIFT

I also wish I could have one day, even part of one day, when I didn’t have to feel it.  It creates something almost like a loud, continual noise and therefore is always competing with my current reality for attention.  I guess that’s what it’s designed and built into me for.  Never as a child did I have a moment to simply feel happy, joyful, relaxed, safe, secure or free — and rarely do I have a chance to feel that way now.

As I pay attention to this ‘prescience’ feeling I am aware that it seems to be tied into the altered sense of the passage of time that I grew up with in the midst of trauma from the time I was born.  Peritrauma is the state in the middle of a traumatic experience, and it is known for creating this same sense of an altered sense of time passing.

I also believe that this peritraumatic sense of the passing of time collapses past and future into the present — not by leaving the past where it belongs ‘back there’ or by keeping a perspective on the future as ‘out there’ — but by bringing the full weight of ALL THREE awarenesses into each single passing instant of time in my present moment.

The state of peritrauma, existing as it does in the midst of an acute trauma experience, demands that we have at our immediate disposal EVERYTHING we might possibly know that is connected to our experience and that might (if even in the smallest way) help us survive the trauma we are in the middle of.

This acute peritraumatic condition most often happens in FAST time even though time can seem to slow down or stop completely.  This FAST condition most often relies most heavily on what our BODY remembers because that information bypasses the higher cortical regions of our more developed and ‘advanced’ brain that operate far more slowly.  (Maybe it is the competition between these two ways of operating in our body-brain that give us the mixed message at times of FAST and SLOW time happening AT THE SAME TIME!)

All of this action seems to combine for me into a state of overwhelming all-pervasive hyperawareness that I am not safe in the world at any given instant in time.  Especially when severe trauma and abuse build our body-brain in the first place from the time we are very tiny, ALL OF THAT TRAUMA was overwhelming to us.  We had no resources available to us that could help us survive and endure except for the automatic ones that are responses of the BODY and not of the consciously THINKING brain.

I find in my daily life that it is only by consciously recognizing the prescience state my body knows all of the time and by bringing verbal awareness (in thoughts) into this PTSD mix that I can back away from the noise I experience in my body-brain nearly all of the time.  This takes attention and energy and sometimes I resent that I have to constantly wage this battle for a sense of safety and security in this world.

This is directly tied into my knowledge that there was NOTHING FAIR about what happened to me in the first 18 years of my life, and there’s NOTHING FAIR about the aftermath that I live with.  And interestingly enough it is this very feeling state of resentment that gives me a handle in the present moment that I can grab onto in my efforts to turn down the volume of this noise.

Resentment IS an angry energy, a fight back energy, an active coping skills energy.  This energy is something I can WORK with, even if all I do when I feel it is STOMP MY FEET.  The Earth doesn’t mind!  I can then do something creative in THIS moment of my life with that energy — to help myself carve out a ledge to stand on in the PRESENT moment.

The more of the PRESENT moment I can wrestle out of my prescience-peritraumatic sense of a collapsed past-future into the present the more I can push back both the past and the future.  I can make space for myself to LIVE today.  I can talk to my body to let it know that ‘the sky is not likely to fall on my head today’, that I am OK!!!

At the same time this effort helps me to combat ‘derealization’ and ‘depersonalization’ one moment at a time.  It helps me to be a REAL PERSON as I let my body know I respect its efforts to protect me — but for this moment I need to make some room for ME to BE in the present moment today.

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+AS HARD AS OUR ABUSER(S) TRIED, THEY DID NOT HAVE THE POWER TO TOUCH US!

alchemynow2 Comments

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It is another gloriously beautiful sunny day down here in Arizona where I live on the Mexican-American border line.  I am hard at work building my adobe chicken coop and its surrounding chicken run.  I am loving this work.  I make creative decisions every step of the way, and I find delight in carrying them out and making this one-of-a-kind safe home for my hoped for little birds!

But I want to pause before I go out there and play in the mud.  (Obviously I missed out as a child on something I would have absolutely LOVED to do then – and still love to do today!)  I would like to post here a comment to this blog that just came through along with my reply.  If there is a ‘nutshell’ synopsis of what the essence of my ‘work-mission’ truly is, I believe it lies in these words.

Comment was to this post:  +FORCED THROUGH ABUSE IN INFANT-CHILDHOOD TO GROW A DISSOCIATING SELF

All my life I have believed that I am not part of the human race. I spend much of my waking hours feeling that I don’t have the right to breathe, that I am a waste of good air. My mother was sadistic and manipulative. She constantly assaulted me and then used the fear of god, to control my every being, my every thought, my every action. She threatened my being so often from the beginning that I only have glimpses of being scared to death, chased and running in fear, her hand and voice reaching for me, terrifying me, ripping hair from my head, being whipped with belts, fly swatters, and coat hangers, ragging that she would beat the hell out of me, being bandaged up and warned not to tell anyone or not to air a family’s dirty laundry in public, and the family filing into the second row church pew every Sunday morning. She made fun of my adolescent body and also encouraged my brothers to laugh and do the same. She said if my brothers had a girlfriend like me, she wouldn’t let her in the house. She said if dad and her got divorced it would be my fault. I came to realize just over the last two years that she would have killed me if it hadn’t been a sin. I have learned the reason why I have no friends, why I’ve divorced several times and why I keep losing jobs, it’s because she broke me. I am 53. On the internet, I have found your blog, as well as a few others, and resources. I have hope now. I am not dead yet, I am not giving up. I have mental health insurance and I am going to use it. I like to read your writings that include anger, it helps me to place mine in perspective. Thank-you.

My reply:

I hear my own mother in your words – truly, truly, truly mentally ill and devastatingly destructive to you! I am so sorry! Please ‘shop’ for a therapist that understands how early trauma ESPECIALLY during the first two years of life changes physiological development in traumatized infant-toddlers. Because we were not protected and kept safe at ANY time, the changes our very body had to make to survive that level of stress and distress just continued right on down the road. This therapist would understand how our earliest infant-caregiver interactions form corresponding attachment patterns (‘disorders’) in our body-brain that last the rest of our life.

When you are ready (and you can Google search stopthestorm PLUS….) read anything you can find especially by Dr. Martin Teicher and Dr. Allan Schore.

You will find a link to a scan of Teicher’s important article here:

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/a-book-being-born/dr-teichers-article-on-trauma-altered-development/

I KNOW it is technical, but read it for the ‘meat’ of it, especially for what he says on the last page.

Here is a post on verbal abuse. Researchers are finding that verbal abuse (even for children who are exposed to parental verbal abuse of each other) is as harmful as ANY other kind of abuse:

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/the-terror-able-consequences-of-infant-childhood-verbal-abuse/

Here is another important one by Teicher:

http://drteicher.wordpress.com/2008/12/14/hello-world/

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Here are some by Dr. Schore:

On shame:

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/emotions/dr-allan-schore-on-emotional-regulation-notes/dr-schore-on-shame/

On emotional regulation:

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/emotions/dr-allan-schore-on-emotional-regulation-notes/

On emotional dysregulation:

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/emotions/dr-allan-schore-on-emotional-regulation-notes/schore-notes-on-developmental-emotional-dysregulation/

On brain and nervous system development:

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/attachment/notes-on-schore/schore-on-brain-and-nervous-system-development/

On early relational trauma:

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/attachment/notes-on-schore/notes-on-schore-relational-trauma/

On the mother-infant relationship:

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/what-matters-most-the-mother-infant-relationship/

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These articles can just be scanned to start off with. You can also Google search “stopthestorm trauma altered development” and find posts such as this one:

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/2009/11/29/trauma-altered-development-tad-a-new-descriptive-concept/

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I am 59. Looking back on the first 18 terrible years of my life I now believe that it wasn’t any single one (of many thousands) of actual, specific abuse actions that my mother took against me (and that my father allowed) that TRULY hurt me. It was my mother’s insane, abusive hatred of me (based on her mental illness/psychosis) as my earliest physiological development of my body-brain was CHANGED in its course and trajectory that has caused me the very specific kinds of difficulties I have had over my lifespan.

No, you are ‘not dead yet’ nor are you going to give up! We are strong and we are GOOD people, and every moment can bring us a new healing for our body-self. I believe in SELF, and in SOUL, and my mother COULD NEVER TOUCH ME – no matter what she did to me. Discovering that ME, integrating that ME joyfully into the world and into my life is what parents are SUPPOSED to do. Ours failed worse than miserably, but WE are HERE!

Thank you so much for stopping by, and for your comment. I believe in what’s called ‘quantum healing’. I believe part of how that happens results from us empowering ourselves with information about the facts of what the abuse did to your physiological development. Please stop by again — and I hope your radiance can shine EVERY moment no matter what healing work you are doing that the moment. That radiance is OURS – and our abusers did NOT HAVE THE POWER to touch our inner core self. I really believe that! Please post comments again for updates, and take care of yourself! All the best, and I see your powerful courage and determination shining through here! Linda – alchemynow

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For some reason immediately after I posted my response I thought of this Bible quotation about the work of Jesus:

Matthew 22:20-22 (King James Version)

20And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription?

21They say unto him, Caesar’s. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.

22When they had heard these words, they marvelled, and left him, and went their way.

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While I believe that all of live is sacred, and that our body is integral to who we are, it struck me today that all of the changes that early infant-child severe abuse and trauma caused to our developing body-brain DID NOT HAPPEN TO OUR SELF.  Our ability to live in our body in this world was changed, but NOT WHO WE ARE.  Our abuser(s) were not given the power to even BEGIN TO TOUCH WHO WE ARE, because – I believe – who we were made to be belongs to GOD and NOBODY can change that fact.

While our body came into this world and will stay here once we leave it, and thus perhaps can be said to ‘belong to Caesar’ (to this world), we as individual soul-selves belong to God!

Trauma changed how our body receives and processes the physical information we receive in this physical world.  Trauma has changed how much of what information we receive, but it did not have the power to change who we ARE as soul-selves.

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As I think about this today I see images in my mind of our healing work being like uncovering, discovering and rescuing our SELF out of the rubble that the terrors and pain of our earliest years created for us.  We are looking for a lifeline that is directly connected between WHO WE ARE NOW and WHO WE WERE THEN as we were made and created to be.

It doesn’t begin to matter to me what individual specific ‘religion’ a person finds comforting or that they adhere to.  I believe that all the miracles of all religions were sent throughout time to humankind from the One Creator.  To recognize that there is a SPIRITUAL component to all of life and to our self allows for us to begin to separate out what all of the specific, individual and actual separate traumatic experiences we suffered during our earliest development did to change our physiological development AT THE SAME TIME we can identify our OWN SELF as the most precious gem that has always radiated our ‘piece of life’ within us.

WHO did the suffering – in my case that was ME – is not the same as the situations, circumstances, experiences that surrounded me.  I was never allowed to develop ‘boundaries’ separate from my mother while I was little.  But I was never then nor am I now the horrible ‘things’ that my mother did to me.  As I work now to define my own self, to reclaim my own self from the war-torn rubble that my mother did her best to heap upon me to obliterate me, I can see how powerless she was to accomplish her aim.

Yes, she was able to torment, torture and traumatize me as I lived in my body and tried to grow up.  But she never touched ME!!

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+MY FIRST WORLD, MY FIRST SELF – MY SECOND WORLD, MY SECOND SELF

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As I wrote to my daughter following the publication of my last post (+IN MY RESPONSE TO MY MOTHER’S ABUSE: A GIFT), if she and I are going to write a book together she will need to understand her role as the translator of my words.  I am very aware after writing this last post that when I write ‘my truth’ I am doing so according to this image I can see inside of myself at this moment as if it physically exists and I can see and touch it:

I am standing alone in a world that is divided from the world that other people live in by a clear surface — like glass but more like a very slightly flexible, unbreakable membrane.  I cannot get through it, over it, around it, under it or past it in any way in my lifetime.

When I write ‘my truth’ I do so as if I am writing with a magic marker using an area of this membrane as a slate.  My words, however, appear on the other side of the surface as backward letters.  My daughter will need to be able to understand this reality, carefully consider how my words ‘get through’ to readers on the ‘other side’, and adjust them in whatever way she feels is needed so that they can be tolerated – and somewhat understood – by readers.

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As I just emailed her about what I know about this barrier, I also understand that I have a FIRST (or primary) self, and a SECOND self.

My FIRST self knows things that I hope can be recorded in a book.  My first self is the only self I had until, at age 18, I stepped onto a jet plane and headed away from home to Naval boot camp.  The world that I was leaving did not match the world I was entering, and my first self has ALWAYS known that.

Nothing except surface and only marginal bits of information about my life during my first 18 years had any relevance to the second world I moved into.

My second self figured out a way from the moment I put my foot onto the jet plane how to get along in the world where other people reside.  My second self moves around in this second world I found myself in in effect ‘acting as if’ or ‘pretending’ that I have been in this ‘normal’ world from the get-go.  Yet this second world is NOT my home.  I am an implant, an immigrant, a transposed ‘alien’ (like they call the Mexicans that enter the country down here in Arizona ‘illegal aliens’).

I act as if I am a ‘naturalized citizen’ of this second world, but I am not.  I only get along because I COULD create this second self that moves around more like a ghost than an embodied human being.

If I am going to, with my daughter’s help, write a book that actually could MATTER I will have to make an agreement with myself to let my FIRST primary self appear.  That part of me is often present when I write.  I am aware of ‘her’ presence because I can sense my inability with language — verbal and written – that I experience because my language development was so impacted and altered within the environment of early severe abuse I suffered.

I cannot go back and edit what I write from the ‘ordinary’ side of the clear membrane that encases the world that I ACTUALLY live in.  The ‘mostly normal’ suit I try to wear so that other people are perhaps somewhat comfortable in my presence only goes ‘so deep’.  I cannot truly BE what I pretend to me:  an ordinary person.

I am a severe-trauma-abuse-created person who comes from a malevolent world – who is trying to fit in the best I can in a different world.  Dr. Martin Teicher calls this world a ‘benevolent world’ and describes how it is the mismatch between the two worlds that creates most of the problems severe abuse survivors face in adulthood.  In my case, the use of verbal language is a foreign experience to me in ways that only my first self could explain.  Yet there are very few on the ‘ordinary’ side of the membrane that would even be able to begin to understand me if I tried to tell them what this is all about.

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Actually, in thinking about this, my second self is like attired with somebody else’s clothes.  I think of how I’ve seen around me – teens borrowing clothing and putting together outfits to wear from someone else’s closet.  When I left home I had nothing appropriate ‘to wear’ in the new world I stepped into.  I borrowed an ‘outfit’ =  this second self.

I had had practice being a second self when I went to school, I suppose.  But even my experience as THAT version of a second self was completely connected to the first self I always was during my first 18 years of life.

It took a severing – like cutting an umbilical cord – between my first world and the second world I stepped into for my second self to truly take her form.

I realize today, then, that when I write about ‘borrowed secure attachment’ rather than ‘earned secure attachment’ that these two concepts must be connected in my reality somehow.  But what matters to me is that even though I suspect my secure attachment to my children as their mother was a ‘borrowed secure attachment’ — it primarily worked.  I did not abuse them, I loved them, and they are fine.

I am also still alive in this second world – and that in itself has never been for me a simple or meaningless feat.

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+IN MY RESPONSE TO MY MOTHER’S ABUSE: A GIFT

alchemynow2 Comments

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Some days I wake up with a feeling I cannot name that seems to consume my body – nay, more like possess it.  At those times I have to work hard, and consciously as if to wrest my own body away from this feeling.  If I give a pause to this conscious work the feeling is back again and it seems that I all but disappear in its wake.

What is this feeling?  What is it that is so important my own body would rather experience just that single very limited and limiting feeling rather than open itself up to the ACTUAL conditions of my personal environment?  I can only imagine that my body, left to its own devices, has a set point within it that it returns to like the proverbial apple falling from a tree branch to the ground below.

When this feeling is here, as it consumes my body, when I as a separate person (is that even possible, to be separate from what ones body knows?) have to carve out a ‘second life’ for the day, one in which I attempt to control what I feel with my mind, I realize this feeling is one that I have run from all of my life as I try to stay just ahead of it, just ahead of the roaring monster who is chasing me, who hides around every corner, who pounces on me when I least expect it, who wishes more than anything in its existence to hurt me as if it wishes to devour me.  But I always knew from the time I was born until I left home at 18 that this monster did NOT actually want to eat me alive.  It wanted to make me suffer.  A dead child does not suffer, and to my mother, of what use would I be to her then?

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I looked inside of myself this morning for some new word I have never used before – in my thoughts or in my writing – to use as I might try to tame this beast, this devouring monster that grew itself into my body from the time I was born.  What word?  Yes, I could say this is all tied to a sense of foreboding.  But that is a worn word.  I began using that word for this feeling about four years ago.  It is obvious to me this morning that this word has no power to banish my body’s memories of the attacks of the monster-beast.

A new word.  I ask my brain-mind for a new word.  It gave me this one:

Prescience

: foreknowledge of events: a : divine omniscience b : human anticipation of the course of events : foresight

Origin of PRESCIENCE

Middle English, from Late Latin praescientia, from Latin praescient-, praesciens, present participle of praescire to know beforehand, from prae- + scire to know — more at science

First Known Use: 14th century

For pronunciation of ‘prescience’ click HERE

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“Well,” I say to myself, followed by “Thank you.”

I realize as I study this word that it has more power to help me heal myself than my old word, foreboding, could ever contain.

THIS word, Prescience, has within itself a connection to ME – to my powers, to my abilities, to my SMARTS!

I have said over the span of many years that as I went along in my infant-childhood life I was NEVER prepared for my mother’s attacks upon me.  Always they seem in my memory to have happened ‘out of the blue’, without my having seen any single one of them coming beforehand.

BUT!  Maybe (as this new word suggests) I ALWAYS saw them coming, I was ALWAYS preparing myself for the last attack at the same time I was trying to recover from the most previous one, along with those connected in the entire line of attacks upon me my mother had accomplished over the span of my entire existence up until each new attack began.

What did that mean?  What does it mean to me today?

“foreknowledge of events: a : divine omniscience b : human anticipation of the course of events : foresight”

Of course my body had this foreknowledge.  It had it from the time of my birthing, from the time I was born.  Never had there been a time my mother did not believe I was the devil’s child, not human, sent to kill her during childbirth.  Never had there been a time from that moment when her psychosis came awake and completely colored her relationship with me, her firstborn and perfectly beautiful daughter, that I was her enemy that she had to destroy.

Having ALWAYS had this information in my body – having it build itself into my body at the same time my mother’s traumas built my body in response to her – means that there was NEVER a time I didn’t know how in danger both of her impending attacks and of the very real possibility of my imminent destruction.  Never did I experience either a safe PRESENT moment or memory of a safe past moment so that I, in my growing body-brain could experience with anticipation a FUTURE moment in which I would be safe.

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So perhaps today as I head out to cut my 5-gallon white plastic ex-pickle buckets in half to make them each into two short buckets – so that I can stack them pyramid fashion as I create a tower to plant my new tiny strawberry plants in – I can think inside of myself, “Good for you, Linda!  Good for you that you were able to transform the certain knowledge that you lived always in such an unsafe world into the ability to move forward in time carrying your OWN self right along with you!  It is your OWN self that can see the possibility of growing luscious red happy strawberries in those (what’s the word the kids use today?  Oh, “repurposed”) buckets.”

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I don’t seem to have a way to make this feeling of ‘prescience’ go away, any more than I can continue living if I made my body go away.  This feeling is part of this body I live in.  This feeling is part of who I AM.

This feeling is different than what I have always considered it to be.  It is NOT just fear.  It is NOT just heightened awareness that any danger can lurk anywhere in this lifetime.  It is NOT just paranoia, not ‘anxiety’ and not just foreboding – although it can seem to feel just like all of these survival-based states of being combined into one.

This feeling is a special gift I have been given from the time I was born – although I had little choice other than to nourish this feeling once my monster-beast very ill abusive mother herself nourished the seed of my prescience ability in my newborn infant body.  She – and I – in interaction together formed patterns of survival within my body that will NEVER leave me until I breath my last breath.

She hurt me terribly in every way she could think of (and get away with).  I responded by enduring so that I survived her.

PRESCIENCE.  Yes, it all began before I had the ability to develop even the tiniest thought within my body-brain consciously.  Preverbally I became an expert at ‘pre-science’ – that science of being able to combine all the genetic abilities I had been born with into a professional-level science of being able to not only STAY ALIVE, but to also stay alive ON MY INSIDES where my truest soul-spirit-self lives.

I used everything my mother ever did to me to become such a PRESCIENCE professional that my prescience abilities will NEVER leave me!  “This, my dear Linda, is a GIFT!  Do not fear this fear of fear itself!  This is NOT fear.  This is NOT anxiety.  This is NOT foreboding in any ordinary sense of the word.  You, dearest charmed one, are an expert, professional PRESCIENTIST!”

And not many alive today, really only those who have had to develop this gift within their body so that they could endure the unendurable from the time they were born – those whose main enemy was the same mother who brought them into the world in the first place – have this amazing ability to NEVER lose sight of how the body and the self are so intimately connected that one knows what the other knows NO MATTER WHAT – so that BOTH can respond appropriately should any danger appear within the immediate world at any given split second in time.

ON THE OTHER HAND – knowing at the same time that the PRESCIENTIST retains its gifts that planting strawberries CAN HAPPEN ANYWAY IN A SAFE AND REASON-ABLE FASHION lets me get on with my day.  I know I want not only to endure today, endure into the future moments of my life – I ALSO know that in my future I want STRAWBERRIES!

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+MEASURE OF AMERICAN WELL-BEING: 2010-2011 RISK AND RESILIENCE REPORT

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“The American HD [Human Development] Index is an alternative measure of well-being and opportunity, calculated from official government data; it measures the three basic building blocks of a good life— health, education, and income. Index scores enable a ranking of the 50 U.S. states, 435 congressional districts (CDs), major racial and ethnic groups, and men and women and allow for the tracking of progress over time. The American HD Index answers the question: how are ordinary Americans doing? The American Human Development Project calculates life expectancy by state and for the five major racial and ethnic groups in each state—the only life expectancy calculations at this level available today.”

– Created by the American Human Development Project

The Measure of America: “How is opportunity distributed in America? Are we falling behind other affluent democracies? Which groups are surging ahead and which face the greatest risks? Which congressional districts enjoy the highest—and lowest—levels of well-being?”

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The report presents strong evidence that the capabilities a person has going into a crisis— ranging from a financial downturn to a man-made or natural disaster—strongly determine how fast he or she can bounce back. It concludes with a set of recommendations to boost the American HD Index scores of all Americans and to enable those left behind to realize their full potential.

“As poverty is rising and high unemployment is causing searing pain across society, we need an accurate understanding of America’s diverse and complex conditions,” said Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “No other publication comes close to this one in documenting and explaining America’s disparate socioeconomic realities, especially the vast differences across regions and social groups and the alarming shortfall of America’s performance compared with other high-income countries.”

Click on the title of the report for more information:  American Human Development Report 2010-2011 such as:

The wealthiest 20% of U.S. households have slightly more than half of the nation’s total income. The poorest 20% have 3.4% of total income.

The wealth of the top 1% of households rose, on average, 103% from 1983 to 2007. Wealth in the poorest 40% of households dropped 63% during the same period.

For every $1 of net worth whites have, Latinos have 12 cents, and African Americans have 10 cents.

Fact Sheets – from

The Measure of America 2010-2011: Mapping Risks and Resilience

report:

AHDP Health Fact Sheet (PDF)
AHDP Education Fact Sheet (PDF)
AHDP Income Fact Sheet (PDF)

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