Tag: dissociation

+OUR BODY-BRAIN BALANCE BETWEEN ‘PEACE’ AND ‘ALARM’

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While I certainly can’t say that I understand either the information presented in this selection I am posting today from the book I am reading, Ghosts from the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence – (1998) by Robin Karr-Morse, Meredith S. Wiley, I can say that I find this passage intriguing.  I am not familiar with “the role of the neurotransmitter serotonin in aggressive behavior” as I usually come across it in reference to the ‘montage’ of pharmaceutical concoctions that are prescribed to treat ‘depression’ by increasing/enhancing available serotonin in a ‘depressed’ person’s body.

I am reading this book thinking about my mother.  Nobody will ever know the exact combinations of early infant and childhood distress, neglect, trauma and otherwise malevolent treatment she received that turned her into such a violent, vicious, and chronic infant-child abuser (with me being her target).  I do suspect, however, that much of the information the authors present in this book do apply to her.

Even though I am not a violent person, the trauma my mother inflicted upon me from birth through age 18 affected the development of all the systems in my body, as well.

The following comes from a subsection titled PEASE PORRIDGE HOT, PEASE PORRIDGE COLD that is contained in chapter two from Ghosts from the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence (I added bold type within text below for emphasis):

“It was only a game.  Even though it was for science – it was only a game.  The first person who hit the button after the lights flashed got to zap his partner with an electric current.  The winner could pick a charge ranging from one, a light twinge, to eight, a jolt of pain.  These were college students at McGill University in Montreal.  They usually picked low dosages of electricity, giving what they got, exchanging only level of pain they received.  That was before the drink.  Scientists deliberately raised the aggression level of participants by giving them a dose of amino acids that lowered their levels of the brain chemical serotonin.  Soon the game changed.  Volunteers began zapping their partners with higher and higher numbers in spite of receiving lower charges themselves.  Next, the students were given another snack, this time a dose of tryptophan, an essential ingredient for the brain to produce serotonin.  As the serotonin levels rose, the choice of painful jolts diminished.  An Orwellian experiment, perhaps, but proof positive that the manipulation of neurochemicals can alter levels of aggression. [see work of Ron Kotulak)

“Serotonin reducing chemicals such as certain amino acids lower the threshold [meaning ‘they let more aggression in’] for aggressive tendencies.  In rodents, serotonin-reducing drugs were first viewed as aphrodisiacs because the rats became very sexually active under their influence.  But aggression soon followed.  Handlers were bitten and other rats were attacked just for coming close – behaviors previously unseen in the animals.

“The role of the neurotransmitter serotonin in aggressive behavior has been under study since the mid 1970s when Marie Asberg, at the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, observed the linkage between low serotonin and violent suicides, suicides involving guns, knives, ropes, or jumping from high places.  Soon criminals with a history of violence were discovered to also have low levels of serotonin.  But the effect of serotonin can only be understood in relation to a counter-balancing neurotransmitter, noradrenaline [norepinephrine].

“While serotonin is known to be key to modulating impulsive behaviors at the neocortical level of the brain, noradrenaline is the alarm hormone designed to alert the system to respond to danger.  Together they have a teeter-totter type of relationship:  in normal people, serotonin is higher during sleep and decreases during wakefulness, while noradrenaline is higher during wakefulness and lower during sleep.  The balance between the two is the key to normal function.  For most of us, there is a balance, enabling us to react in reasonable ways.  But, as with the McGill students, our functional levels can be altered, at least temporarily.  Alcohol and extremely stressful environments can have similar effects to the students’ initial drink of amino acids.  When these exposures occur to a developing fetus or infant, the levels of serotonin and noradrenaline are just being built, shaping lifetime patterns.

“Violent behavior is roughly of two types:  impulsive and premeditated.  Most acts of violence are impulsive.  “Cold-blooded” pr premeditated acts are far less common and are typically enacted by a very different personality than the “hot-blooded” crime.  When environmental experiences early in life cause noradrenaline levels to be too high and serotonin levels too low, the result, in the presence of later emotional triggers, may be impulsive violence.  Conversely, very low levels of noradrenaline together with low levels of serotonin result in underarousal, which may generate an appetite for high-risk behaviors to achieve arousal, setting the stage for predatory violence or premeditated crimes.  Interestingly, very high levels of serotonin are not a means of counteracting this effect.  Excessively high serotonin levels result not in well-being, but in rigidity or obsessive-compulsive behavior, like Lady MacBeth’s repetitive hand washing.  The balance of neurochemicals in either scenario is thought to be set primarily by early experience [Google search:  ‘Perry incubated in terror’ for the author’s reference here – first link on Google is the document].  When babies develop in an atmosphere of terror or trauma, these neurochemicals can be called upon to enable them to survive.  But that which enables survival may also create permanent and lethal imbalances.

“Low levels of serotonin may be the result of a genetic error.  A single gene inherited by some people from their fathers results in an inability to adequately convert tryptophan from common foods into serotonin.  The individual inheriting this gene may have no problem unless there is an additional stressor, primarily alcohol.  In affected individuals, alcohol briefly raises, then drastically lowers, serotonin levels.  At the latter point, the individual is prone to acting out aggressively.  This gene is common – affecting 40 percent of the Swedish population tested at random [see same Perry reference above].  With 48 percent of the homicides in the United States committed under the influence of alcohol, the role of this interaction is clearly of concern.

“Normal serotonin and noradrenaline levels are extremely important to balanced functioning.  Without realizing it, our culture is creating more and more individuals with an imbalance in this delicate equation in the brain.  Alcohol, drugs, and other toxic exposures such as lead are being implicated in damage to the genes responsible for these neurochemicals.  So are conditions after birth such as abusive, terrifying, or war-torn environments, in which impulsive or reactive behaviors are essential to survival.  Researchers suspect that conditions of child neglect, child abuse, gang warfare, and domestic violence are – without our awareness – biologically, as well as socially, feeding the cycle of violent crime.  As Ron Kotulak stated in his series on the brain:

“Underlying the scientific quest, which has revealed genetic and environmental links to abnormal brain chemistry, is the growing suspicion that society may unwittingly be feeding the nation’s epidemic of murder, rape and other criminal acts by making childhood more dangerous than ever.”

“Abuse and neglect in the first years of life have a particularly pervasive impact.  Prenatal development and the first two years are the time when the genetic, organic, and neurochemical foundations for impulse control are being created [the first 33 months of life].  It is also the time when the capacities for rational thinking and sensitivity to other people are being rooted – or not – in the child’s personality.”  (pages 42-45, Ghosts from the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence)

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OTHER RELATED TOPIC LINKS:

How Trauma Affects the Brain

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See study here:  Difference in serotonergic and noradrenergic regulation of human social behaviours

“Noradrenaline was related to increased social engagement and cooperation and a reduction in self-focus….serotonin may be associated with protection of the self from the negative consequences of social interaction.”

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Functional coupling of serotonin and noradrenaline transporters.

On serotonin and noradrenaline:  “Re-uptake of the neurotransmitters serotonin and noradrenaline out of the synaptic cleft is mediated by selective transporter proteins, the serotonin transporter and the noradrenaline transporter respectively. Both are integral membrane proteins that are have a high degree of homology and represent members of a larger neurotransmitter transporter superfamily.”

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BOOK:  Balancing Serotonin and Norepinephrine Levels

By John Allocca

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Mechanisms underlying the long-term behavioral effects of traumatic experience in rats: the role of serotonin/noradrenaline balance and NMDA receptors. (2007)

“Traumatic stressors induce long-lasting changes in behavior. It is believed that all three glutamatergic, serotonergic and noradrenergic neurotransmission play a role in the development of such behavioral changes, but their relative importance and relationship is poorly understood. We have shown previously that a single exposure of rats to electric shocks induces social avoidance for about 10 days….  Noteworthy, the brain noradrenaline/serotonin ratio correlated negatively with shock-induced social avoidance, suggesting that the ratio rather than absolute levels are important in this respect.”

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Why Some Kids Turn Violent

“For millions of American children, the world they encounter is relentlessly menacing and hostile. So, with astounding speed and efficiency, their brains adapt and prepare for battle. Cells form trillions of new connections that create the chemical pathways of aggression; some chemicals are produced in overabundance, some are repressed.

In studies with children and adolescents with disruptive behavior disorders, low serotonin levels was the single most accurate predictor of which youngsters would go on to commit more violent crimes or suicide. Conversely, high levels of noradrenaline were the chemical signature of post-traumatic stress disorder.

The rising tide of abuse and neglect of children occurs during the critical period when children are developing what is called “moral emotions.” These are emotions that are rooted in brain chemistry and are established in the first three years of life. The development of impulse control occurs at a time when sensitivity toward others is also being rooted in a child’s personality.

The brain’s alarm network, called the locus coeruleus, sits at the base of the brain and sends out noradrenaline pathways to other brain centers that control heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, emotions, and motivation.

When the locus coeruleus finds itself in an uncontrollable, threatening environment, it sets its noradrenaline gauge on high. Over the pathways come surges of the stress hormone that keep the body in a constant state of readiness—heart racing, blood pressure high, easy to startle, quick to blow up. These are the PTSD children.”

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HOW STRESS AND POOR NUTRITION CAN CAUSE POSTPARTUM DEPRESSION by Dean Raffelock

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From the International Guide to the World of Alternative Mental Health

Guidebook for Preventing Migraine Headaches, Depression, Insomnia, and Bipolar Syndrome by Dr. John A. Allocca

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GUT HEALTH – Our Second Brain

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Seratonin: The chemistry of Well-Being

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Neurological Control — Neurotransmitters

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Pediatric Bipolar Disorder: A Brain Illness

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DEVELOPING A SOCIAL NEUROSCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDING OF YOUTH by E. Koller

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SEE ALSO:

+LOOKING AT THE NURSERY AS THE SEAT OF VIOLENT CRIME

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+LOOKING AT THE NURSERY AS THE SEAT OF VIOLENT CRIME

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

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

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

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

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

The authors state on page 9:

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

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

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

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

alchemynow2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

alchemynowLeave a comment

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

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

“The Trauma Myth”: The child betrayed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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GO HERE TO GET STARTED!

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

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

alchemynow5 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I knew the difference between right and wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+”THE SOUL’S POWER”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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From:  Solace for Mothers – Healing after traumatic childbirth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I also found this information online:

When a bad birth haunts you

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

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

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

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

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Post Natal Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

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Birth Trauma: In the Eye of the Beholder

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

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

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

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

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

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Post Traumatic Stress Disorder After Childbirth

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

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+ANTIDOTE TO DISSOCIATION: THE TRANSITION TO WHOLENESS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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+UNITED NATIONS CIVIL SOCIETY NETWORK LINKS

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+LEARNING HOW TO CHANGE PEACEFULLY (leaving the trauma-drama OUT!)

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Those of us who are committed to our own lifelong growth and development no doubt will experience periods of rest followed by periods of angst followed by periods of searching followed by periods of learning and then by periods of trying to find ways to expand our life to include changes that happen to us as a consequence of this entire process.

Sometimes the changes we see in our self and in our life are very DRAMATIC.  Many severe infant-child abuse survivors know DRAMA best because the entire universe that formed us was without healthy patterns of movement in any direction other than the directions fostered by despair and accomplished by violence (of all possible kinds).  Thus, for we survivors, learning to find a healthy, balanced pace for ourselves as we go through our life changes often doesn’t feel ‘normal’ to us.  We are used to the kinds of dramatic-traumatic UPHEAVALS our body-brain was formed by.

THOSE changes are to me kind of like PRIMORDIAL ones, and I think about volcanoes and earthquakes, tidal waves and forceful winds.  Nope!  I don’t want my own changes to follow THOSE kinds of courses anymore.  I want gentle change, change that I would recommend to happen as if they were happening in the presence of a little tiny infant.

Can there be such a thing as ‘peaceful change’?  Isn’t that an oxymoron-contradiction in words?  Is ‘peaceful’ something that happens when everything is staying EXACTLY the same (status quo), while ‘change’ is something that must ALWAYS mean trauma lurks somewhere?

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Being alive is always about change – or so I have heard.  I have also read over and over again in the writings of neuroscientific developmental experts that the best possible safe and secure infant-mother (caregiver) attachment relationships build a little one’s body-brain to be MOST flexible and LEAST rigid in its abilities to adapt to an ever-changing world over the course of a lifetime.

Severe abuse survivors adapted a body-brain in their earliest developmental growth periods in the midst of trauma that most usually remains most centrally in a ‘stress response-anxiety state’ nearly all of the time.  That kind of a body (and I sure have one) must learn over a long, long haul what the feeling of being peaceful even is.  At the same time, what we really ONLY know is continual change.

Infant-child abuse (to me) means that something bad and harmful is ALWAYS coming at the little one’s developing body, and this ‘always coming at’ creates continual threat to continued life and to continued survival.  All these ‘coming ats’ happen to the little one when it is most defenseless to prevent, predict, fight back or escape the really awful things that happens to it.  In other words, the ‘center of control’ is NOT within the power of the infant except as it can possibly find ways to adapt within its growing physiology.

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Finding ways to move past THIS kind of change reaction is probably actually what all survivor healing is truly about.  Our empowerment comes as we learn to recognize both internal needs for change and external demands for change while we remain at as close to a ‘peaceful-center’ as we can find within our self.  Not an easy task for survivors, but POSSIBLE as we make progress in our healing and growth.

This process for me seems to be like widening and improving the roadway I move down in my life.  My pathway in life began (and stayed for my first 18 years) nearly impassably treacherous.  I want to widen it now, level it, smooth it, make it so I can see behind me and in front of me so I can anticipate where I am going as I view where I have been more clearly.

Maybe my own ‘artistic and creative’ way of working on all of this is part of the motivation for all the adobe pathway-walkway work I do in my ever expanding own yard!  Who knows?

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+INFANT-CHILD ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP: GETTING ENOUGH TO ‘GO WITH’

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Well, time to see if I can write anything like a coherent post out of some of the thousands of thoughts that have been flying through my mind in the past week.  Most certainly this post is again about the visual contained in this link  (Sorry – WordPress is eliminating spacing between paragraphs today!):


The baby in this video returns, as I mentioned before, to its mother during a point in its exploration of its own self in the mirror when a sense of LACK of safety and security overwhelms it.  It returns to her for PROTECTION.  It returns to her because the baby is FEELING a sense of RUPTURE within itself that requires REPAIR.  Appropriately, its repair is tied to its reliance upon its mother.  If the baby DID NOT have — already PRIOR to this experience — a safe and secure attachment experience-relationship with its mother, where could it have possibly have turned for the REPAIR (protection, safety, security) that it so fundamentally needed at that moment?
Then I think about my own self as an infant-child.  I had NOBODY to turn to, and I never did from the moment I was born.  Then I think again about the furry baby in the video (above).  I think again about all I have learned about how the LACK of safe and secure attachment (protection) changes an infant’s total physiological development — so that the ‘stress response’ end of the continuum that is supposed to be counter-weighted and counteracted by the ‘calm connection’ end of the response system is never activated.
So development is guided by the stress hormone cortisol rather than by the optimal physiological ‘guidance system’ of safe and secure attachment.  Where do we find our CALM?  Where would the furry baby have been able to find its calm at the point it needed to down-regulate its anxiety-stress-not-feeling-safe-in-the-world response?
Being able to yet AGAIN turn its its external source of regulation for repair means that yet AGAIN those patterns of rupture WITH the experience of repair were building themselves into the little ones growing body-brain.
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The baby’s growing and developing body-brain was malleable.  It was going to adapt one way or the other to either NO REPAIR (no safety, security, protection, attachment) or to the opposite.  The resiliency factor was its MOTHER and HER ability to form and foster that attachment relationship.
This all led me to realize that just as I have said before that my mother’s orchestrated CONSTANT moving around was GOOD FOR ME.  The moving meant we went to different schools, often changing schools in the middle of the year after we had started the school year late.  I HAD to build ACTIVE COPING skills into my own self in response to those challenges.  I had NO way, on the other hand, to use active coping skills at home in response to my mother’s constant abuse of me.
My body-brain grew and developed, however, with active coping skill abilities built into it to a large extent because of the continual moving.
I also realized today that this moving, as it included moving on and off of our mountain homestead was good for me, also.  My ONLY safe and secure attachment was to the glorious wilderness that mountain provided me.  When we left it — as in the book Heidi by Johanna Spyri which was my absolute favorite story when I was growing up — I experience terrible grief when we left the mountain (RUPTURE) as I also experienced calm-connection-joy (REPAIR) when we returned to it.
Instead of having any human being (including a mother) to experience the patterns of rupture and repair with, I had the Alaskan wilderness mountain homestead.  Well, that was evidently GOOD ENOUGH!  As a result I do have rupture-repair patterns built into me.  They happened beginning when I was 7 (when we found the mountain), not before that except with my 14-month-older brother.  But evidently that was ENOUGH to get me by.
It wasn’t enough to let my body-brain avoid growing itself with a massive ‘stress-anxiety’ ON GO system being overdeveloped within me — along with the host of problems this reality creates for me.  But at least I have enough to WORK WITH as I use what I do have to learn, grow, heal and change NOW in spite of the terrible difficulties I suffered during those first 18 years of my critical growth and development.

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+ADOBE MOMMA NEWS: NOTICING THE GIFT

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This week has been fraught with near zero night temperatures – record lows for us, complete with frozen water lines, frozen sewer lines.  All my water pipes are STILL frozen.  But outside in the glorious sunshine this morning I happened to notice THIS:

This is the latest sunken adobe walkway I poured and patted into place a week ago before the COLD hit us.
I just happened to notice this GIFT today - as the mud was both freezing and drying the patterns of ice crystals embedded themselves into the mud
With the first footsteps across this amazing beauty, with the first rain, they will disappear - but not from my memory

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