The most important work we can do, individually and globally, is the healing and prevention of traumas so that we don't pass them down to future generations. This blog is a working tool to contribute to this good work.
The approximate 5% of the population that I deem to be battered baby crash-dummy survivors of a severely abusive, neglectful, traumatic and inadequate early caregiver-interaction, insecure and unsafe attachment (to others, self and the world) environment truly comprise what our society terms the ‘at risk’ percentage of our population. You name the stressor, the difficulty, the negative consequence and there you will find us standing with our ‘battered baby survivor’ crash dummy flags waving high above the crowd.
Or rather, there you will find us struggling along in the ranks of the homeless, the jobless, the underemployed, the chronically ill, the troubled relationship involved, the poor ones, the sick ones — in other words here we are among the ones MOST in need of understanding, compassion, and assistance.
The older I become the more I realize that I was lucky to get through my mothering years as well as I did (which by most socioeconomic standards was still bopping along the bottom). The older I become the more I suspect that whatever resources I could muster and use to survive my first 18 years of total hell, and then the next 35 years of being a parent and an adult trying to ‘fit in’ and ‘get along’, the more I realize that whatever assets I had in my resource account are pretty well used up.
My cancer came. People who loved me pushed, pulled and dragged me through treatment so that I am still alive. But I feel just about bankrupt.
Financially I am completely dependent ‘on the dole’ – and not living in a nation like, say, Sweden, I punish myself continually for my inability/disability to ‘pay my own way’. That ALSO wears on me heavily.
My expiration date was up — and I pushed it. Here I am. But I am here to say that I think I feel more like a unicorn than I do a ‘fully functional adult human’ (MAN! What we do to one another and our self!)
Here I am, increasingly unable to leave the sanctuary and sanctity of my own Secret Garden because of the cresting effects of the damage that was done to me in my earliest years of development in trauma.
I hate the limitations these consequences of created within me and for me. My world grows smaller and smaller.
I am soon to transfer all my medical records to a woman doctor in this small town, one I hope will listen to me so that she can begin to comprehend what I am saying: I have my bags packed and I am ready to go. I am soul weary and tired of the battle. I see nothing ever getting any better for me. I believe the long term permanent trauma changes that happened to me have caught up with me — for good (or for worse!).
I do not see my point of view as being unnatural given my condition, or as pessimistic. My condition is a fact. If we wish to tackle the problems that someone like me faces, we must accept that some babies are born to be their caregiver’s crash dummies, and there is a price to pay when those conditions are (were for survivors) allowed to exist.
Except for the 5% of the population I write about, to and for, the rest of our culture has a long, long way to go before they will begin to have a single clue about what I am talking about.
Perhaps being raised from birth as a solitary, isolated and battered infant-child prepared me for being a ‘lone voice in the wilderness’. I did a Google search last evening for the terms ‘infant abuse language development’ and was shocked at the pitiful range of information that appeared on my screen. I added the word ‘mother’ to my search terms and still found little that could help me understand what I wanted to study.
As a complete lay person it is NOT a good sign to have my own blog page show up on the first page of such a search. What this tells me is that either what I think is so far outside the realm of ‘correct’ and ‘relevant’ that it bears no further thought — or it tells me that what I know is of critical importance and needs to be researched and studied by the people who receive the BIG BUCKS to study what matters to human beings forever stuck in the trenches of life as survivors of infant-child abuse.
One study I found is so old it represents only the beginning of the research that Dr. Allan Schore and other more ‘modern’ developmental neuroscientists have more currently written about. Although this paper (what I could access of it online — The Rhythmic Structure of Mother-Infant Interaction in Term and Preterm Infants) describes patterns of infant-mother interactions that are critical for infant body-brain development, it was written before the photographic technology even existed that Schore uses to highlight the fact that accurately measuring the infant-caregiver interactions that are forming the infant happen NOT in the range of one-second intervals, but rather occur at rates in the millisecond range.
(Do a Google search for ‘schore mother infant brain development’ and take a look at THIS information.)
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Most simply and effectively put, those of us with severe infant-child abuse and neglect in our developmental early history are MOST likely to experience processes that are lumped together under the descriptive word DISSOCIATION. When I look at the information about the natural patterns of connection and disconnection that take place between infants and their caregivers from birth as they are required for brain-nervous system development (including infant consolidation of information as it builds the body-brain) I understand that when an infant is born into a completely chaotic, traumatic and UNSTABLE environment these patterns DO NOT operate correctly.
Too much information, too much of hurtful information, too much information being bashed at and into the infant, not enough information, chaotic unstable patterns being forced upon the infant by a MOTHER or other early caregiver that have NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with the infant itself, etc.
There is NO POSSIBLE WAY for an infant to develop in a normal or ordinary fashion given the extremely upsetting nature of the interactions and transactions it is exposed to and forced to experience with an abusive, traumatizing, terrorizing early caregiver.
HOW DO WE EXPECT THAT THERE WILL NOT BE SERIOUS AND PERMANENT CONSEQUENCES TO THE INFANT from these kinds of interactions — along with the nearly complete exclusion of CORRECT, sustaining, regulation and HELPFUL interactions that the infant MUST have to build its best body-nervous system-brain?
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Now, getting to my present reality: What I experienced yesterday while trying to obtain fuel assistance money from a county-operated program that is supposed to do its job was so far past unsettling to me that I headed back to my infancy to look for information about how I experienced what happened yesterday — inside of my own body.
I don’t want to go into the details of how inept both this program and its administrators are (in the state of Arizona). Life is life, and it’s a fact that Big People are LIKELY to experience stressful, disturbing and unsettling experiences.
What matters is that when an infant was built from birth in the kind of malevolent (not pampered!) environment I am describing, we do not have built within our own body-nervous system-brain ‘normal or ordinary’ circuits and pathways to DEAL with the stress-distress that life throws our way.
I can find no reference online to this direct connection between infant lack of well-being and the adult consequences of being built in those terrible environments that DIRECTLY affect our inabilities and disabilities to sail through difficulties in our adulthood that normal and ordinary people usually can.
The best that we survivors are likely to hear is, “Oh, there’s something wrong with you. Let’s diagnose you with a ‘mental illness’.
GIVE ME A BREAK, you idiots!
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I will describe here as clearly as I can what happens to me when I am at my wit’s end stress-distress wise and have to deal with people. This happened to me yesterday, and is an experience that I do not remember having consciously between the time I left home at 18 (I had it prior to that) and the time I received my very serious breast cancer diagnosis and began treatment at age 55.
(My daughter tells me she has an idea what I am talking about based on her experience of meeting people in a stress-filled situation, like in an important interview, when she is so involved with dealing with incoming information that is NOT VERBAL — (now experts say that 95% of information transmitted in our conversations IS NONVERBAL) — that she cannot HEAR a single word being spoken. I also believe people under pressure of serious medical treatments experience related difficulties when trying to understand what their medical providers are telling them — like in cancer treatment.)
ANYWAY, the woman behind the fuel assistance program’s desk was trying to explain to me that all the rules for the program had been changed (in stupid ways) that directly and negatively affect ALL people applying for help.
The more desperate I felt inside knowing that my ability to heat my home were being increasingly threatened, the more I could NOT understand what she was telling me. The not understanding was at the level of watching her mouth move its tongue and lips with no sound attached to those actions. At the same time an extremely annoying DISSOCIATED and disconnected SOUND filled my awareness that was extremely noisy and irritating. I could not connect the sound to the lips to the words to any kind of sense at all.
Because what I needed for my own well-being and security (the ability to heat my house) mattered so much, I HAD to understand what this woman was saying to me. How humiliating and extremely AGGRAVATING it was to finally have to say to her, “I need you to tell me what you are saying as if you are talking to a two-year-old — or I will NOT be able to understand you.” (I did not receive the help I needed yesterday and in one month’s time have to jump through all of their hoops again — for the third time in three months.)
I absolutely believe, because I could FEEL it, that my lack of ability to understand a DAMN thing in that conversation happened because the very earliest PREVERBAL, PRE LANGUAGE neuronal wiring in my body — built there during extremely abusive and chaotic nonsensical interactions with my traumatizing mother — was in full action.
I also absolutely believe that I am not ALONE! I am certainly NOT the only adult who survived severe infant abuse.
Does anyone talk about how it IS for us survivors and how it FEELS to us in our BODY to have been so negatively impacted in our development that these alterations affect how we learned and process language — ESPECIALLY WHEN STRESS/DISTRESS IS PRESENT?
No, they do not.
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While I believe the malevolent experiences during my infancy directly formed my body-brain wiring patterns that are the root of how I am forced to operate in the world, I do not believe that ‘dissociation’ is the correct description of the state I am forced into when these earliest wiring patterns overwhelm my ability to make sense of myself in/and the world.
Based on my experience that my cancer treatment interrupted all the later learning I had acquired that allowed me to circumvent the baseline language patterns that I acquired — I believe it is more accurate to say that the earliest beginnings and what THAT felt like is the REAL us in our body. Everything that we managed to piece together to ‘feel more normal’ and to ‘operate more normally’ are themselves the dissociations from what was native to us — that which was built into and built our body-brain in the first place INCLUDING OUR ABILITY TO COMPREHEND AND USE LANGUAGE.
When I experience (and I HATE IT) what I did yesterday, I am very clear that I am ACTUALLY without ‘a first language’. No doubt my brain could be watched during these times and SOMETHING DIFFERENT would be detected about how my brain-mind is processing language.
I suspect that the foundation of language abilities as they happen from birth (actually from before birth) in patterns of connection-disconnection with the mother cannot possibly follow magically along normal pathways if the infant is being treated in traumatizing ways. We infant abuse survivors therefore cannot possibly have learned language in normal and ordinary ways.
This is a BIG PROBLEM, folks, at the same time it COULD be a fascinating journey into understanding the resiliency of infants who can STILL adapt to spoken language. I also believe, however, that the same alterations that occurred due to early abuse and affected how we process spoken words and nonverbal signals with our ‘different balance from ordinary’ in terms of how we receive information, process it and ‘take action’ (listening and speaking) — also affects how we use words in our thinking.
All of this has to do (in my mind) with the different way our right brain, our left brain, and our abilities to transmit, synthesize and understand information between the two were changed through trauma-altered development (and infant abuse) so that our experience of being alive has been fundamentally impacted.
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Doesn’t anybody out there think these facts are worth investigating? We are absolutely WAY IN THE DARK AGES if the best our culture can do is ‘call us mentally ill’. We infant abuse survivors are the most sophisticated examples of the range of environmentally adaptive developmental abilities our species has.
That our language development was changed right along with the rest of our body due to severe early trauma should surprise NO ONE. Why, then, is there not only no USEFUL information available that will explain to us how this process happened and how these changes affect us all of our life — there is NO INFORMATION available at all!
Battered babies don’t simply fall off of the face of the earth. We survived, we are here — and because we were battered and because we survived — we are different beings from ordinary. I for one want to know what that MEANS!
The patterns of interaction an infant has with its mother and other earliest primary caregivers not ONLY build our right limbic emotional brain with its patterns of ability to have either emotional regulation or dysregulation for life, these patterns also build our social brain (same hemisphere) at the same time.
Our resulting ability to ‘read social cues’ normally is directly tied along with the development of our body-nervous system-brain through our earliest interactions to the development of our VERBAL LANGUAGE ABILITIES that are intimately connected to our NONVERBAL LANGUAGE ABILITIES. All of the patterns of communication an infant has with its earliest caregivers ARE a language being spoken.
It is time that all of us understand that being able to communicate efficiently and effectively with others and with our own self are directly formed within us at the same time. We cannot exclude a study of infant abuse and trauma from the consequences to all of our development – including our language abilities.
I do not mean for this post to be a morbid one, only an informative one. In looking at the power than unresolved trauma has to follow in families on down the generations I want to write about two discoveries I have made regarding important MEN in my family tree that have to do with the ‘missing’ children, the dead ones, whose initial ‘being in the world’ no doubt impacted the entire lives of these MEN, albeit perhaps invisibly.
Perhaps it is simply my own limited range of thinking and vision that alerts me to the possibility that it is NOT so much the stories that are told in a family — as few or as many as there may be or have been — that truly matters most. It seems more likely to me that it is the stories that are NOT told that are the ones that contain the storms of intergenerational unresolved trauma that can combine to impact future generations in traumatic ways that TRULY MATTER.
Those of us living today receive the benefit of medical advancements that have lessened or eliminated especially the risk of premature death for infants and children. It was not too many generations past that the continued life of one’s offspring could be counted on.
There are schools of thought that suggest that modern efforts toward the protection of children did not come into play until the survival of children was more likely to happen than it did in the past. Before medical advancements came along to help protect the life of people from diseases we can now prevent and treat, so many parents lost their little ones that a sort of emotional (and affectionate) vacuum existed to lessen the profound grief that losing one’s infants and children had on parents in the past.
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It was not unusual in the past for infants and children to be treated as possession-objects rather than as human beings with needs, feelings and rights of their own. In order to more fully understand how we, as early infant-child abuse survivors experienced the ongoing trauma that DID come down to us from our family’s past history, we need to gather for ourselves as much information as we can about the possible CONTEXT that is NOT told in the stories that belong to and within our family tree.
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I contrast to what I am writing here don’t consider myself especially interested in a genealogical search for my ancestral connections. Yet at the same time I have devoted many, many hundreds of hours to transcribing the writings of my mother, even of her mother, letters of my father as these words filtered down over time into my possession.
I only through accident have come across two streams of information that directly apply to my words here today.
The first piece of information relates to the contextual history of my own father. The stories told within my family of origin always included the fact that my father was an ‘unwanted’ child that arrived late among his siblings. We were told that his sister (unwillingly) was given responsibility for his care when he was young and ‘raised him’.
Much later when I was an adult over 30 my father told me that during his childhood his mother ‘never left the house unless she had to go to the store’ and ‘never had company come to her home’. This information gives me a sense of the context of my grandmother’s depression and/or sadness that I am quite certain PROFOUNDLY affected my father’s infant-child development.
It has only been in the past few months since my daughter began gathering family records to connect herself to my father’s mother who was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution that an important NEW piece of information arrived about the context of my father’s family. Included on my father’s birth certificate is the fact that there were FOUR children born living while only THREE were living as my father was born.
A MISSING CHILD among my father’s siblings.
This fact was NEVER mentioned in spoken words at any time that I know of, and yet is SUCH an important one that it has rearranged and changed everything I know about myself, as the daughter of a man who never stood up to his abusive wife, who never ONCE intervened to protect me or any of my siblings from my mother’s insanity and abuse.
I know enough to understand that the grief of losing a child affected my father’s parents — and siblings — and within the bigger picture, the enlarged context of my family of origin — that missing child affected me.
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This past weekend I had a woman come visit me overnight who has been a friend of mine for 30 years. She lives in Annapolis but was in Arizona visiting her sick brother and popped on down to visit me. My friend has been deeply involved in researching her family tree, and generously spent time online showing me information that can be accessed on my own family history.
I chose to have her look into my mother’s father’s ancestral line. While she couldn’t go back very far, what was found is fascinating.
And NOTHING that we found was EVER mentioned in story by my mother whose parents divorced in 1930 when my mother was five. My mother’s mother remained angry and embittered, full of hatred for her ex husband until her death. She forced her hatred into my mother so that my mother ‘disowned’ her father and never saw him again past about the year 1932.
My mother’s father’s side of the family tree was amputated and erased from the spoken history of our family, but the effects of even this bitterness and the family trauma it was connected to DID affect not only my mother, but also impacted me, and through me, my offspring.
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We could find no information further back than the 1881 Canadian Census, and moving forward to the 1900 United States Census.
Perhaps because my friend is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church she immediately noted that my mother’s father’s father (my great grandfather) had listed himself as a member of the Universalist Church on the 1881 census. His father was listed as born in England, his mother as born in France and French speaking. We could not find the name of either one of these ancestors of mine.
We did find that the first Canadian Universalist (Unitarian) church was started in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canaca in 1937, and that my great grandfather was born there in 1845. (His wife was also born there). These people immigrated to the Boston, MA area in 1882 and by the 1900 census were listing three children: Ada (23) who I know nothing about, her brothers Howard (11) and Charles (9). Charles became my mother’s father.
ALSO included in the census information is the fact that there were FIVE dead children probably between Ada and Howard. No matter what happened to them, that is a LOT OF GRIEF AND TRAUMA that I never heard anyone ever say anything about.
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What this tells me in simple fact is that my mother’s father was the youngest child in his family as was my father in his. I know enough to suspect that the silent, invisible grief in BOTH of these families affected these MEN — right on down the line.
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The other piece of information about my great grandfather’s connection to the Universalist Church in Nova Scotia has provided an avenue for continued ancestral search because according to my friend’s online search that church still has all of its records. I have emailed them asking for help. I would like to know if my unknown great great grandparents were involved in the founding of this first church in Canada.
I am also intrigued with the unique religious affiliation that these ancestors of mine had outside of the ‘mainstream’ of Christian culture. Learning this piece of information rearranged how I think about free-thinking self and my own very free-thinking children. That all of these ancestors, all the way back to the French ones (I hope to find my great grandmother’s maiden name from the marriage records of the church in Halifax), were NEVER mentioned by my mother is a clear sign to me that just as there are road signs to unresolved trauma within families carried in the death of children, there are also road signs to unresolved trauma carried within other family history that is encased within silence.
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I do not believe that severe infant-child abuse EVER EVER simply pops up within a family out of nowhere. If there is abuse, it came from somewhere and is a part of a much bigger picture of trauma and is part of a much larger context that we MUST find as much information about as we possibly can to further our own healing process.
It might seem like nonsense within our culture to put the emphasis that I do personally on the need for severe infant-child abuse survivors to go back through any safe way they can to gather ANY and ALL POSSIBLE INFORMATION about family history so that our understanding about how unresolved trauma FROM THE PAST directly impacted what happened to us can be broadened.
Trauma does NOT easily resolve itself in silence — not when it happened and not as it passes down through the generations.
I also believe that blaming and shaming the perpetrators of abuse is NOT helpful to gathering the kind of contextual information that we need to know. If, as I suspect, trauma does not resolve itself until somebody, somewhere at sometime LEARNS what the trauma has to teach, we need to learn as much as we can about what the signals/signs/symptoms of unresolved trauma are.
Finding that there are amputated branches from the family tree, such as there are in mine, and finding that we had ancestors that died as babies and children so that the unresolved trauma of grief passed down the generations and no doubt affected our parents IS NOT MEANINGLESS TIDBITS OF INFORMATION.
Every bit of unresolved trauma from ‘back there’ found its way, sometimes in trickles, sometimes in roaring rivers, into the ocean of sadness, violence, confusion, loss and rage that fed the traumatic abuse that happened to us. The more we can know about these histories, the more we can find, hear, tell and learn from the stories (especially in the silent ones carried within families), the more coherent our OWN life story and our telling of our own life narrative will become.
Because the inability to tell a coherent life narrative is the number one sign of an adult insecure attachment system-disorder, it is critically important that we find and use anything we can find that helps us make sense out of trauma. We can make progress this way in smoothing out the pathway that leads through us from the past into the future.
Our individual participation in this ‘smoothing out’ process, gained through knowledge that leads to understanding and compassion, will increasing contribute SOOTHING healing and equally soothing calmness for our own self and for all those we are in contact with as we work to put trauma to rest.
If any reader ever wishes to write a guest post for this blog you are more than welcome to do so! The best way for you to do this is to add your post as a comment at the last tab that appears with the pages at the top of this blog:
We can all describe and document our experiences as infant-child abuse survivors. The growing body of this information, as it is contained in our stories and experiences, is growing online to become a most valuable resource for everyone — no matter what stage of our journey of life we are writing about.
The ‘professional’ community at the ‘top’ has been missing the truth of what we at the ‘bottom’ truly know about living our lifetime in a trauma-changed body that was altered through our experiences of having to adapt our physiological development to an early environment of trauma. It is time for us to find our words to describe a reality that those at and near the ‘top’ (the Pampered Ones) cannot — on their own — even begin to imagine.
As so often happens I have no idea what I need to say until I write it. If I don’t write my thoughts just continue to roll around in a jumble like long scarves swirling around in a tumble drier. I am thinking about how one’s social-emotional early forming right limbic brain develops must appear in action during conversation. (I almost said human-to-human conversation, but is there other kinds? Yes, I do think so.)
If patterns of safe and secure or unsafe and insecure attachment revolve around patterns of rupture and repair, then I suspect these same patterns govern our ‘people’ conversations. (My thoughts are spinning around very quickly so I will have to hope what I pick out of this swirl applies to what I really want to say!)
Resonance and mirroring, sending and receiving signals — along with activated safety and security attachment needs versus the ability to deactivate one’s own attachment system so that caregiving can happen — are a part of human interactions we have with others from the moment we are born.
What about the patterns of rupture and repair in conversations?
I wonder: If true empathy and compassion are present in conversation MUTUALLY do the patterns of rupture and repair never have to occur? Is this kind of conversation, then, the kind that leaves us feeling ‘balmed’ – listened to, hear, appreciated, valued, understood and BETTER for the conversation?
I would contrast these soothing, balming kind of conversations to ones where there is a disturbing competition between the speakers. Who is right? Who is wrong? Who is smartest? Who knows more than the other? How does the competition for the ‘goodies’ of conversation play itself out?
In patterns either of rupture with repair or rupture without repair. And we KNOW the difference. A competitive conversation leaves us feeling disturbed if not distressed like neither participant was able to truly say from the heart what they would have liked to say — and neither truly listened to or heard the other.
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I believe that some people are by nature, by design, or by trauma-altered early development far more competitive than others. There is a spectrum of aggression and on this spectrum lies those people who thrive on competition and those who find competition troubling and unnecessary.
I am one of those who see very little need for competition. When competition appears in conversation it means to me that someone is trying to override (in disrespect) the other. To me, competition does not happen when there is a mutual acknowledgment of ‘there’s plenty of resources to go around’.
Traumatic backgrounds often leave people feeling desperately unsafe and insecure in the world so that their attachment system never actually turns itself off. Rupture WITH repair allows for attachment needs to be met so that the system can turn itself OFF.
Rupture WITHOUT repair in relationships and conversations happens, I suspect, when one or both people’s insecure attachment systems remain ON so that one or both peoples CAREGIVING system cannot truly (honestly) be activated. Our attachment and our caregiving systems are so linked together than diminishing activation of one system allows for increasing activation of the other. Humans are not designed to operate with these two system dissociated from one another.
I am NOT saying that either attachment or caregiving remain separate from one another. I AM saying that the way that they are always linked together affects our patterns of human interaction either toward a center point of soothing calm or toward a center point of competition for scarce and needed (depleted) resources.
The fact that we are not educated in any way to usefully recognize these patterns so that we can identify them, name them, own them and then bring under our power of conscious choice our ability to ALTER how these patterns are operating creates (I believe) far more unsatisfying than truly satisfying conversations with others people in our world.
I suspect that the more we are in competition with one another (nearly always on the unconscious level) the LESS able we are to help ourselves and others increase our sense of safety and security in the world. This means we are then NOT increasing our ability to feel empathy and compassion because degrees of safety and security are what allows true empathy and compassion to operate.
Our body is designed this way. Our safety and security ‘sense’ system is directly tied to our (anxiety producing) stress versus calm/connection (soothing) response system. I do not believe that genuine connection between people involves active competition — on any level (I am not talking about ‘friendly games’). I also suspect that if a person has unacknowledged need competition with others for scarce resources will be present on some level.
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For the first 18 years of my life I was nearly completely barred from social opportunities to participate in banter, gossip, or any other (more?) meaningful human conversation (some experts suspect that humans acquired verbal language due to our motivation to include more members of a social group in gossip). I DID witness, listen and watch others any time I was around them. Nearly all of the time to this day some aspect of who I am is involved with this same process — which contributes to my sense of remoteness and disconnection from others. I believe I was wired this way from birth.
Being involved in this kind of remote watching even when I am involved in conversations with others often feels awkward — if not just plain ‘wrong’ — like part of me is spying upon and critiquing ongoing patterns of conversations, detecting what others were built-from-birth to know instantaneously and automatically and can simply accept as givens and ignore.
Because solitary confinement and social isolation was such a large part of the patterns of abuse I experienced the first 18 years of my life I do not believe that ordinary human conversation (even in my native English tongue) will ever be natural to me. I am an ‘outsider’ who can somehow ‘cheat’ in conversation like I am watching a movie and can detect in human conversations what others do not(though I was the one initially who was cheated and deprived of what most people take for granted).
Then after conversations I have participated in I have a whole basket full of information I have gleaned by watching the patterns that I have absolutely NOBODY to share the information with. So today I share this with you.
I was able to sit in my garden this morning to watch the first sun rays touch the delicate leaves of the Ballerina Rose bush I moved yesterday. “Ah-Ha!” I thought to the rose. “I can tell you will be happy there, and I am glad! No longer will you have to wait too long each morning for that light you so desperately need. You will grow into a beautiful plant now. Just wait until next summer. You will see!”
I hope 'my' rose reaches this fullest expression of beauty -- in its own time.
It was cool last night, though still not quite a hard freeze. There is no breath of wind, and I was able to hear each leaf collapsing off the branch of the old Mulberry tree I hard-pruned last summer. Plink! Click! Clatter! Each single leaf marked its falling with a sound hitting the hard adobe walkways.
Does a falling leaf remember its life growing upon the twigs and branches of a tree each year? Does it remember its falling? Can a leaf remember itself once its eaten by a worm and becomes new soil that in turn can feed the growth of something else?
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I thought about how hard my day was for me yesterday. I realized how critically important my garden is to me — for a reason I have not until now clarified in words.
My garden is a collective storehouse of my memories.
This helped me to understand more clearly that just as a leaf is not likely to remember itself in its life, I cannot really remember myself in my life, either. My memories are not ‘attached’ to me as I suspect ‘ordinary’ people’s memories are attached. My memories are attached externally to objects and to people.
Semantic memory is a memory for facts, I think always available in their connection to descriptive words.
Autobiographical memory is SUPPOSED to form so that a self is in the middle of the memory — because they were in the middle of the experience of not ONLY the experience as it happened in time — but most importantly they were in the experience of HAVING the experience as it happened.
This is connected to the critical FEELING FELT process that is supposed to happen for an infant as its body-brain is building through interactions it has with its earliest caregivers. The nature of the infant-caregiver interactions are SUPPOSED to mirror back to the infant, reflect back to the infant, and resonate with the infant in such a way that the infant begins — through the experience of FEELING FELT — to know that it has a SELF inside of it that is having the experience of feeling its own self in its own life.
I MISSED THIS STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT, and once this stage was missed and the ‘feeling felt’ neurons did not develop in an ordinary way, I have lacked the ability to FEEL FELT in my body in my own life — for ALL of my life.
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I thought again this morning about the very first time I encountered a literal awareness of the passage of time. When I was 18, fresh away from home and just out of Naval boot camp, I met a man I fell in love with, had a child by, and eventually married (and soon divorced).
This man had friends with money who lived high on a hill somewhere in the San Francisco Bay area. We went to visit them one day and I saw my first hammock. It was pure white, strong and new looking, hanging in the sun from the branches of two trees that overlooked a vineyard.
Nothing should have been especially noteworthy about my seeing the hammock, and there wasn’t until I returned 2 years later on another visit with my partner and encountered the hammock again.
There is STILL something intangible about my experience of having the experience of encountering this hammock a second time. There it was, the same hammock, but now it was sun rotted, broken and shredded, dirty and in threads half hidden in a growth of weeds.
I remember standing there gazing at the hammock in SHOCK!
It wasn’t the hammock itself that I was responding to so much as it was my very first experience of SEEING the passage of time.
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As I remember this memory this morning — the hammock as I first saw it, the hammock as I saw it next — and as I remember the stunned sensation that filled me at realizing PHYSICALLY in my body that enough time had passed by since I had first walked upon that spot that the hammock and disintegrated into nothing but a tangled web of broken strings — I realize that this is the clearest example I have in my life of how the passage of the time of me in my life is connected NOT to my own internal experience of myself passing through time but is rather connected to how everything I can notice OUTSIDE of myself passes through time.
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My memory returns to the second experience I am clearly aware of that again involves a physical object (as if these things have a life of their own — like a leaf) with its own ‘life in and over time’.
When I was 20 and first moved with my little daughter to Fargo, North Dakota I was blessed with the sweetest landlady anyone could every have — Lily. Over the few months that I lived in Lily’s basement apartment I often sat with her at her kitchen table and shared coffee with her and visited.
After many such encounters one day something came into my awareness — again with a sense of shock. There on the lowest shelf of her narrow shelves built into the wall next to her kitchen table was the exact same sand-filled, metal-topped, plaid cloth-bottomed ashtray — that had ALWAYS been returned to sit in that same exact spot.
Thinking about my own inner reaction to my realization that the ashtray ‘resided’ in that spot over time reminds me of something my son said when we were eating burgers at a restaurant when he was three. Well, actually, he was NOT eating his hamburger — a fact that created this specific memory for me.
We were ready to leave and as I looked at my son’s plate with its burger still intact I said to him, “You haven’t even touched your hamburger!”
He replied from his three-year-old’s perception, “Here, momma, I am touching it now,” as he gingerly placed the tip of his right pointer finger on the bun.
“Oh,” I said next. “I guess we’ll just have take it home.”
My son, in his young thinking-processing stage was NOT being sassy when he responded back. “But Momma! We can’t take the hamburger home! It already is home! This is where it lives!”
At three years of age and beginning at the end of the second year a child “can construct accurate representations of events that endure and are accessible over time.” These are imprinted into the right brain hemisphere as AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY.
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My son was very much involved in related growth and developmental processes that happen as ‘Theory of Mind’ develops — as he went through them HIS WAY. Eventually, of course, he grew to understand that hamburgers don’t ‘live’ anywhere and don’t have a ‘Theory of Mind’. Hamburgers also don’t have memory — at least not as we usually think of memory.
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I have a whole collection of sticky notes attached to this growth chart I am looking at. I have been waiting for years to be ready to address them, in all their simply stated accuracy, in my writing. These statements are about critically important inner growth processes that happen from age one to age four. These stages of development are built upon the first foundation of body-brain development that happens from birth to one through early attachment relationships an infant has with its caregivers.
So far I cannot look directly at these next stages of development because I personally know that NOTHING went as it should have in my development up until age one — and therefore all of my future development was altered, as well. I have not wanted to face what all these changes did to me!
Yet I also know that my ability to have ‘ordinary’ experience of having experience with the FEELING FELT in my own body as the experiences happen — and then storing those memories autobiographically — was stolen from me by severe abuse from birth. I was amputated from my own life, separated from it as surely as each leaf I watch plummet to the earth on a windless morning has been amputated from its tree.
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Identifying specifically HOW I experience my life is hard enough. Finding words to describe it is equally as hard. While I know I am the person who watched those leaves fall this morning, I cannot FEEL it.
As I have worked toward being able to write my own story about my own experience of my severely abusive infant-childhood I have struggled with being able to remember what remembering myself in my first 18 years was REALLY like.
As I do this work I increasingly realize that how I experienced those first 18 years is the same as how I have ALWAYS experienced myself in my life.
Perhaps nature had no better way to assist me in surviving those 18 years of traumatic hell other than to remove from me the ability to truly FEEL myself feeling myself as I went through those experiences.
Instead every experience, as an amputated individual snippet in time, appears to me as if I had remotely WATCHED what happened from a very great distance away (like watching a hammock or an ashtray over time). Today it is becoming even more clear to me that the process I use — have always used — to remember my life is SEMANTIC recall of the facts as they happened and does not involve what ‘ordinary’ people would use as autobiographical memory building and retrieval.
I have always been left outside rather than inside my own life. I believe I lack the neurological underpinnings that would have formed the circuits and pathways inside my body-brain so that I could CONNECT and ASSOCIATE and ATTACH my own self in a ‘feeling felt’ way through time as I live in this body in my lifetime.
On this physiologically-trauma-changed level I ALSO lack those same required neurological pathways and circuits that would enable me to truly feel felt WITH and BY anyone else. I am left wondering what the ‘ordinary’ experience of life is even like for other people — and I truly believe I will never know. Once these emotional-social patterns are built into the body-brain BEFORE THE AGE OF ONE they cannot be changed.
The earliest foundations of body-brain growth and development happened for me in the midst of terrible trauma in such a way that my pathways and circuits were made in a different-than-ordinary way.
As surely as the body of the little girl me in those two pictures I included in my last post look like they were cutout and pasted into a picture of ongoing life of OTHERS that had nothing to do with the reality of my life, I am STILL a cutout-and-pasted-in person in the midst of a stream of life that I experience very, very differently from others.
Yes, I experience feelings. Intensely. But somehow my emotions are disconnected from my memory process in such a way that the literal facts of events are stored (as they are for everyone) separately from the emotions. In my case the emotional of memory (stored by a different process in the body as it is for everyone) is ALWAYS disconnected, unattached and dissociated permanently from my memory recall.
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In rewinding the ‘movie’ of my thinking process this morning I need to add in the part about going to visit yesterday’s post commenter’s blog and reading what he says there about Dissociative Identity Disorder from his experience and perspective. As I read I found myself being envious of people who can experience the experience of having ANY identity — from inside their own self — at all!
I think about looking at my newly moved rose bush shining away in the sunshine this morning. I can only begin to try to imagine what the rose bush’s experience MIGHT be like. As I look at my newly planted apple tree, also shining away and gently swaying in the emerging morning breeze I can wonder what it MIGHT be like to be that apple tree.
As I remember myself yesterday I try to IMAGINE what it was actually like to be me, to have my feelings and thoughts as I did yesterday, because I cannot FEEL myself in my memory from yesterday any more than I can feel what it might have been like to be anyone else — yesterday.
I document all of this simply because I know I was formed in an extreme environment — yes, like in a perfect storm. My mother was so insanely focused on what she did to me from birth that she was able to effectively beat, terrorize and remove from me all of my own ability to know what it was like to actually be me in my own life in any way except in the exact present moment as it was/is happening. Not only did she cut me off from nearly all human contact other than with her, she also cut me off from my ability to be in contact with my own feeling-felt self in my own life.
I therefore have a version of Dissociative Identity Disorder without any real, stuck-together, feeling felt version of any identity at all. I exist from one moment to the next because I semantically (factually) KNOW that I do — and because I exist to other people. No wonder I responded powerfully to the quip about “If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” when I first heard it shortly after I left home at 18.
This post is for this girl — I am still the same person and feel the same way.
Me left out -- I have felt that all of my life, just a few times less left out - very much feeling this today (me with my father's back turned on me - in a different universe than my siblings were - and I still pay the price for that)So sad. Sadness beyond 'in my bones' - in all the cells of my body -- and still there
I know I can’t think my sadness away, but I spent the day garden-building and trying to ask ‘God and the angels’ to show me what I can learn from it.
I miss the man I love (who prefers another’s company) and I miss my children and all my siblings more as the holidays arrive than usual. I HATE ‘the holidays’.
One of the ‘helpful’ insights today was knowing that I am not alone in how I feel, and ‘things could always be worse’.
Far from happy thoughts — either of THOSE two.
Not that I did actually arrive at any happy thoughts today — but I did end up (perhaps mixing up my holidays) thinking about Jesus on the cross and how alone He was there — but for his Father and the angels.
Then I thought about how easy it might be for humans to forget about God when they are happy with one another — well, I don’t fit THAT picture!
Tomorrow on Thanksgiving I am going to a friend’s house to help her in the kitchen — be with people — eat good food. My friend feeds anyone in the community who wishes to come every Thanksgiving.
I went last year, and ‘hiding’ in the kitchen suit me. Serving food to others suit me. Being quiet suit me. Watching and listening to others (as if they belonged to a different species than I do) suit me. I am not sure that I have ever truly felt any more a part of a group than I did in the picture of my father and his three favored children on the big Alaskan rock.
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At 59 knowing that I can’t CHANGE how I feel pisses me off more than anything else. I no longer have the false desire to try, either. I am soul tired.
People say, “Everyone feels alone in a crowd sometimes.” I believe it takes a special kind of severely traumatic and abusive infant-childhood for anyone to REALLY even begin to have a glimmer of a clue what ‘feeling alone’ really feels like.
Then I thought some more about Christ on the cross. I thought some more about my horrible, horrible childhood and the ‘special hell’ my mother reserved for me (as my oldest brother put it once). I thought about how NO INFANT or CHILD ever deserves the treatment that some of us had any more than Jesus deserved what happened to Him during His time on this earth.
This thought cheered me up a TINY bit.
Maybe it is because I feel so sad and soul weary that I cannot find any way at all to fight to ‘get better than this’ any more. I can’t run around and ‘try this’ and ‘try that’ and ‘run here’ and ‘run there’ like I used to. I can’t distract myself any more. I can’t fool myself any more. I can’t pretend any more.
I was, most importantly, able to be different for the 35 years of my life that I had a child under 18 in my care to raise. My ‘caregiving system’ was able to combine with my attachment to my children to get me down the road without having to have to FEEL the depths of my sadness.
I know now that the sadness has always been at my center since my insanely abusive mother built it into me from the time I was born. I am so proud of myself that I was able to let my children GO, to let them fly, to let them create for themselves their OWN life. I certainly wish they didn’t live — all three of them — in Fargo, North Dakota!
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Another train of my thoughts today (again) followed the course of my wandering lost life that seemed to most importantly enable all three of the very special people my children are to be born. Yet I also NEVER felt that the life I lived along the way was mine, meant for me, belonged to me. Maybe it is ONLY to the future that the meaning of my own life will come true — in my children, in their lives, the people they encounter and affect — and in the next generations.
If my body processed experience and stored my memories in a safe and securely attached fashion (autobiographical memory) I know I would feel different and be different today. My dissociational patterns means that all of my memories feel remote to me and NOT a part of ME. That is so WRONG — and so directly connected as a consequence of my having to build a body-brain in the midst of such terrible and continuing trauma.
I don’t believe my memories comfort me in the way that they do more ‘ordinary’ people — and they never have.
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I think knowing and feeling all of this is directly connected to the most fortunate opportunity I have to work outside with the soil to build a garden.
I laid a big piece of the drip irrigation in the back yard yesterday, and today I planted there. In went poppy seeds, larkspur seeds, pansy seeds — all waiting now for winter rains to nourish them — and for spring.
I planted a lilac today and I planted an apple tree. (I moved a rose bush to a happier place for it with morning light so I could better improve the spot for the apple tree.)
I am digging out an area by the back turquoise wood fence as I imagine perhaps — just perhaps — I can tear down the remains of the old shed on my back fence and use that lumber to build a chicken coop.
I use the adobe from that digging to fill in a long planter along the tall yellow metal fence.
I have an adobe bench back there I can sit on in the sun and watch the apple tree grow now. If I can build a chicken coop I could sit there and watch my chickens. I would LOVE to be able to do that — though I don’t have transportation to get to a feed store to buy them feed — even if I can afford to buy it — and can find three chickens.
And maybe a little rabbit. I could sit like I did when I was a child with my warm fuzzy so-gentle rabbit on my lap — pat it and get to know its spirit.
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Someday I hope somebody comes to visit me. I find down here in southeastern Arizona that people do not go to one another’s house to be with one another like they do up north. I couldn’t handle the ‘stimulation-noise’ of too many people — or the ‘wrong’ people. But SOMEONE?
My daughter will bring my grandson down about the 4th to the 8th of this January. That will be — well — fantastically wonderful! Then they will go and then I will miss them…….
Meanwhile………. Perhaps the angels like it if I talk to them.
(Oh — and yesterday I laid the drip over the large compost pile filled with delicious garbage and the thousand worms my sister sent me from Seattle! I moved the buried tomb that contained all my mother’s writings into the big compost — and guess what? For the first time in the four years I’ve lived on this property I saw centipedes — nested within my mother’s papers. HOW GROSS! I hate centipedes! Very unsettling, but somehow didn’t surprise me — certainly not after my recent posts about eliminating the hideous oleanders! The wonderful composting worms can have those papers now — and I KNOW they will make me wonderful garden soil out of them by spring!)
I answered it with my response 24 hours later. What I think about the article and the ideas contained within it doesn’t matter to anyone, really. Simply put, leave Maslow’s Pyramid alone.
What interests me most about this topic is my thought process. I took a look at the information when my daughter’s email came in, didn’t have an immediate response, and relegated-delegated any further thoughts on the subject to ‘the future’.
This future arrived suddenly as I worked outside in my yard. I wasn’t remotely aware that I was even ‘thinking’ about this article and my daughter’s request until THERE IT WAS! My response!
The process I evidently went through in this past 24 hours about this silly little subject fascinates me. Once THE ANSWER appeared — literally like it came as a boulder falling out of the sky and hitting me on the head in a cartoon — I now understand a little bit more about HOW I think. (The email I sent to my daughter once I had THE ANSWER appears at the bottom of this post.)
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Because of the information I now understand about how I am different as a result of the Trauma Altered Development I had to go through to survive my extremely abusive infant-childhood I am always interested to learn a little bit more about ‘how I work’. On this particular point I have no idea what an ‘ordinary or normal’ thought process might be like so have nothing to compare what I just experienced with.
What I DO know is that humans (I would say ESPECIALLY women!) are capable of ‘thinking’ in ways that our culture might not value. When my daughter presented me with her question I simply tossed the whole dang question ‘into the hopper’ and ‘forgot it’.
Obviously I DID NOT forget it! On all sorts of levels within my body-brain I have evidently been sorting through LOTS of information so that when THE ANSWER appeared, I KNEW instantly it was MY right one.
The image that came to me about this ‘whole body-brain’ ability to ‘think’ is that I didn’t so much toss the question to ‘a committee’ as I did to some part of my being that knows how to run an elevator! Over these past 24 hours that elevator operator has been moving up and down all the floors in the skyscraper of my body-brain. The operator stopped at each floor, opened the door, wandered around the groups of ‘people’ who live and work on each floor, gathering information on the topic from all of them.
Up-down-up-down, returning more than once to some floors to converse again with some members of ‘the group’ until finally a synthesis was made of ALL this information — and (as a commenter said this week) POP!! There was THE ANSWER!
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For those of us severe infant-childhood abuse and trauma survivors being able to think without attention and without ‘attachment’ or ‘association’ to the thought process that is going on ‘behind the scenes’ — I believe — is something we learned to do in part because trauma was likely to and did appear ‘out of nowhere’ without our being able to predict or control it nearly ALL OF THE TIME.
Being able to form a MIND at all meant that we grew a body-brain that honed to perfection the human ability to apply the greatest flexibility possible to our knowing and thinking processes. I believe these abilities are connected to ‘dissociation’ — but as my experience of these past 24 hours showed me — our abilities can be amazingly efficient, effective — and impressive!
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — the fundamental human rights declared in 1776 as The United States of America took its form as an independent nation. Where do abused infants and children look for their portion of these rights? To their caregivers.
As I work again today out in the sunshine on this glorious day, and as I pay attention to how I feel in my body, I know I am not happy. I am aware that what I am accomplishing is to lessen my continual sadness. “What, then,” I ask myself, “might contribute to something MORE than a lessening of sadness? What — if you use the powers of your mind to think and dream, might actually give you some measure of happiness?”
Well, at least I am in PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS! That’s the right direction for me to go as far as I can tell.
Happiness is NOT ‘just’ a lessening of sadness.
I’ve also been thinking about the ‘all right’ feeling as being a measure of a state of well-being. Oh, how seldom, how very, very seldom have I EVER experienced THAT feeling state: All is right. I am all right.
Knowing one is all right in the world is, to me, the rock bottom accomplishment given to an infant-child by its attachment-caregivers from birth so it can build this feeling state into its body-brain from the beginning of its life. From that time forward this feeling state remains built into the body and is therefore accessible to a person.
Being slapped and hit and yanked and punched and dragged around by hair and limb, having one’s skin punctured by grasping talons of fingernails, being screamed at and…….. Well, as I an other severe abuse survivors well know, these threatening, dangerous, traumatic and terrible-terrorizing conditions of infancy and childhood simply COULD NOT POSSIBLY build into our body a feeling of being ALL RIGHT.
Nope.
Never happened.
So here I am in adulthood sunk in the ‘depression’ of terrible sadness in the Meteor Crater I found myself born and battered in (not perched precariously at the top of a high precipice fighting to the death with her anger and rage against all perceived attacks, as my mother was).
Today I am practicing using my mind, thoughts and dreams to see if I can modulate-moderate the feelings of sadness into something that might resemble what I guess happiness is — or at least make progress toward an inner feeling of ALL RIGHT.
This is what I have come up with so far: If I could finish this garden, and name it The Secret Garden, then perhaps I could search out programs in this region of Arizona that work with abused children and invite them to come visit.
When I was five, and before our family moved from Los Angeles to Alaska, we visited an immense garden somewhere on a hill. I have never forgotten that glorious garden, and every single time in all my 54 years since that day when I think of that garden I feel not only a little-bit-less-sad, but for a brief flash of time I feel almost-happy.
Perhaps if I can create a magical garden here, designed especially for the eye level and imagination of five-year-olds, and then these little people who have been traumatized, battered and abused could come wander around here, MAYBE they too could carry within their body-brain-mind-self a memory that would ALWAYS be happy enough to displace their sadness (or rage) and provide for them a glimmer of true — ALL RIGHT — joy!
Big people could come, too — but it is to the little ones’ joy that I now return to my digging and adobe creation. May all of us today pursue our happiness!
When, in my adulthood, I first heard people using versions of a saying, “The table was turned,” I envisioned in my mind someone being angry and turning a table upside down so that its legs stuck up in the air. It took me a long time before I overcame my embarrassment enough to ask someone what they meant when they said this.
“Oh,” this person said to me. “It’s like four people are sitting playing cards. Each of them has their hand laying on the table top and someone turns the table so that everyone has someone else’s hand and THAT hand, rather than their original one, is what each plays the game through with.”
I mention this today because as I described what I have been thinking about pampered versus not pampered people to someone I am very close to yesterday that person responded to me with, “But the word pampered has such negative connotations!”
In other words, they were expressing a sentiment that would probably be common among those people I would say were raised from birth in a ‘benevolent’ world that I am now calling a pampered one.
I can see where this sentiment could come from. Looking at Webster’s online dictionary for this word I found:
2 a: to treat with extreme or excessive care and attention <pampered their guests> b:gratify, humor <enabled him to pamper his wanderlust — New Yorker>
Well, how about that? I have my sense of the contrast between being pampered and NOT being pampered just about right for what I am intending to describe! Look at the antonyms!
We are not commonly used to using one word to describe in contrast its opposite, but in this case my meaning is extremely clear when I use it to describe how severe infant-abuse survivors experienced their world — yes, when they NEEDED to and SHOULD have been treated exactly the opposite from the way that they actually were.
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How many people among ‘the masses’, however, ever bristle and become concerned and defensive when someone calls someone else ‘mentally ill’, for example?
In contrast, how many of the pampered people are going to bristle and become concerned and defensive when someone calls them pampered?
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We are very comfortable in our society in using definitive explanations for things that rely on a linear black-and-white, either-or pattern of thinking. It’s EASIER than making sure we understand the full meaning of what we are talking about.
It is EASIER to simply say, “I was abused when I was little,” or “I was not abused when I was little” than it is to say “I was not pampered” versus “I was pampered.”
I could continue to accept this simplistic thinking if there weren’t so many drastic and terrible lifelong consequences for survivors of severe infant-child abuse that society THEN feels completely comfortable in blaming and shaming the survivors for.
It is THEN that I want to ‘turn the tables’ so that the pampered would need to play THEIR entire lifetime out living in the reality that severe abuse survivors know with their every breath.
And the survivors? What would we survivors know of living the truly, from-birth pampered life even if someone were to suddenly give us one?
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My case in point if ye be of those who can make this gigantic leap! Nature has mirrored the experience of those whose body was built in ONE kind of world ONE way — and not the other way — permanently.
Pampered-from-birth (‘good enough’) people have a body that knows that reality. Not pampered-from-birth people have a body that knows that reality.
Nature and its ways cares nothing for the individual personal comfort zone of anyone. Nature only TRULY cares that a species does what it needs to do to ‘continue on being’. This entire array of possible body building options that happens in direct response to either the pampered world that raised us or to the not pampered one is — and I am going to the Bigger Picture here — meant to accomplish this ‘continue on being’ by creating bodies that THEMSELVES signal-convey the kind of world that built the person who lives in it.
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So we could turn another table of laid-out card hands here so that Nature received the personalized individual’s perspective on the experience of being alive and the individual people received the hands that clearly expresses what Nature cares about, intends and accomplishes.
How I am in the world, having been raised in a not pampered infant-childhood directly signals to others (who could detect and understand these signals) exactly what the condition of my early world was like — because those conditions built me to be the way that I am.
Jump to the peacock’s tail. A brilliant, resplendent, gorgeous and healthy peacock tail is simply a signal and a sign that the experiences of that bird happened in an environment rich in resources. The tail has nothing PERSONAL to do with the peacock at all!
Another peacock with a pitifully shabby, dull and sickly looking tail is simply signaling to its hoped-for mates that this bird was not pampered in a world of plenty.
Which peacock’s tail is going to attract which kind of mating partner?
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Well, as the ‘superior species’ we don’t like to be pared down to our actual size so that we can not only recognize but also accept that HOW we are in the world (based on the conditions of the world that formed us) does exactly the same thing. HOW we is a signal that expresses the NOT personal reality of THE CONDITIONS OF THE WORLD and actually, as Nature intends, doesn’t have much to do at all with our personal wishes or concerns as individuals.
So again I will say when you read particularly the last paragraphs of Dr. Martin and Fellow’s paper here *SYMTPOMS: 120909 Scan of Teicher’s Research – Trauma Altered Development Paper you are reading a description of the MISMATCH that happens when not pampered people are born into a not pampered world and at the end of their earliest years are hatched out into a pampered one!
The problem is this mismatch. The problems we endure as individual severe early abuse survivors IS THIS MISMATCH.
If pampered people were the only ones who lived in a pampered world — OK. If not pampered people were the only ones who lived in a not pampered world — OK.
How can I say OK to a resource-scarce and traumatizing world? Think about what our species had to go through so that we could be here asking that question. Our species was able to experience pampering ONLY under conditions of plentiful resources. When times were really, really tough, we were able to use an INNER resource that nature has NEVER let us lose: We contain within our very young body the ability to ADAPTIVELY AND FLEXIBLY adjust to the conditions of the world we are born into.
Then we are able to move forward in time in a not pampered body — surviving — continuing on as individual representatives of our species — into a future where resources were better. THEN the future generations could adaptively and flexibly adjust to these more pampered conditions — and babies could grow a body that reflected those improved conditions.
In other words, as I write this, I understand that ‘the tables’ are DESIGNED to turn. Without that ability to adjust and adapt flexibly we would not have had the resilience we needed to survive — not as a species, not as individuals.
We need to understand the bigger picture so that we can depersonalize the facts. Pampered people do not need to take offense when someone points out the truth of the benefits they received from a resource-rich environment from the time they were born.
AND not pampered people need to be FREE to be people who are not condemned and judged for the fact that our body did EXACTLY THE SAME THING that pampered people’s did: Adjusted in development to the conditions of OUR environment — which happened to be a resource-scarce one.
If our proverbial turning table were laden on one side with rich and nutritious food an on the other side tree bark and bugs — and THEN this table were to be turned so that pampered and not pampered people had to consume a diet they were not familiar with — my points here in this post might be a little easier — or tougher — to swallow.
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(Of course, I suppose ALL the female peacocks would go for the prettier tale, and in this example of female selection, who wins? I don’t know…… What I do know is that this version of a mate selection process is about finding who came from the richest world that had the best resources — and who got them.)
Stop the Storm 
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