Tag: dissociation

+DID YOU GROW UP IN A METEOR CRATER?

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Did you grow up in a meteor crater?  How safe and secure were you in there??  Were you left alone to try to grow your best body-brain-mind-self while showers of dangerous and life threatening rocks continued to bombard you?

I treated myself to an online search yesterday to try to figure out exactly what the difference is between analogy, metaphor and simile.  Which way does my mind work when I go to write and think in terms of images that do not let go of me?

Metaphor:  My home of origin was a meteor crater.

Analogy:  My home of origin was LIKE a meteor crater?

Simile:  This is how I write!  A simile happens when a writer goes on and on and on — continuing to use an image to interweave it with words in a long drawn-out thought.  That’s me!

Soooooo……

When the infant-child developmental experts write about how a little one’s body-brain changes in response to the stress of trauma, neglect and abuse in a malevolent world — I now translate that fact in my own thinking to this:  These little ones ARE NOT THE PAMPERED ONES.

Their home of origin was a meteor crater.

When the experts write about how in a ‘good enough’ safe and secure environment their best body-brain self is formed in a benevolent world, I translate that now to mean — THEY WERE PAMPERED!

Their home of origin was was NOT a meteor crater.

(Again – please read especially the last paragraphs of this paper:  *SYMTPOMS: 120909 Scan of Teicher’s Research – Trauma Altered Development Paper.)

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At age 59 I am beginning to realize that the ‘conditions’ that trauma built into my body from the start of my life while I tried to exist and grow within a nearly completely non-pampered environment — seem to be getting worse with each passing day.  I feel as though I am engulfed in a downward slide — but from where, to where?

As I asked myself (and my body) this question, the image of myself growing up in not only the bottom of a massive meteor crater but also of being bombarded nearly every moment with torrents of meteors continuing to fall on me, I knew that when I say ‘sliding’ I mean the bottom of the pit is SINKING at the same time the edges of the crater are eroding away and crumbling down on top of me.

“Oh, dreadful!  Oh, great!  After all this time THIS is only as far as I have gotten in this so-called process of recovery?”

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Well, for ME understanding about the meteor crater and how I have always felt in my body, and feel now is a HUGE step of progress!  How strange it seems for me to say this — but discovery of REALITY versus swimming around in ignorant denial IS progress!

THIS matters:  It took me until I was 29 before anyone ever TOLD me I had been “an abused child.”  LORDY!

It has taken me double that number of years (plus) to begin to understand what that REALLY means!

While it certainly is nobody’s contest to stand around and make claims “MY childhood was worse than yours was!” I am now understanding that there are VERY REAL FACTORS that describe what happened to each of us individually during our little years — and these factors group themselves together in such a way that they are actually providing for us descriptive layers of filters.

You know that term — falling through the cracks.  Well, imagine that as you are falling through the cracks — down, down, down — you hit another level with cracks that are closer together.  Do you fall through those narrower cracks as well?

Down, down, down you go as you examine all these layers of filters that descriptions of infant-childhoods actually create.  Down, down, down you fall until — if your mother was truly TRULY unable to provide for you from birth even the most remote aspects of true mother love, you end up falling into a sieve made of the finest mesh — and STILL you continue to fall until you hit — and only THEN discover — what really happened to you.

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I didn’t know this fact.  When I was first told “You were an abused child” I thought, “OK.  All THOSE people have the answers I need to make myself better.”

I have always thought in terms of those where were abused when they were little and those who were not.

It is NOT that simple.  This is NOT a clear black-and-white affair.  Degrees of infant-child trauma MATTER — as do the resiliency factors that were ALSO there in our body and in our earliest lives.

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So today I ask, “How big was that meteor crater you were born into?  How dangerous to you was the continual stream of meteors that fell upon your little head?”

There is NO SHAME in letting ourselves know the truth.  As members of a social species — even though we live in an American culture that pays a whole lot of attention to ‘individuality’ and ‘uniqueness’ of people — being of a social species we ALWAYS feel best when we are more like others than we are different.

Being raised in a meteor hole in a meteor shower that DID NOT mean we were pampered or safe or secure — or even LOVED — means that we grew up (and grew our body-brain-mind-self) in EXCEPTIONAL rather than normal, ordinary or usual conditions.

That what trauma IS — out of the ordinary — extraordinary.

And those conditions CHANGED our development in ways that leave us reeling for the rest of our lives as we TRY to be more and more ‘like everybody else’.

We are NOT like everybody else!

In severely traumatizing childhoods — and I usually count this to be in the 5% category although in my thinking I am coming to realize it well might be 20% of our population who find themselves born into Meteor Craters and ongoing Meteor Showers — we will NEVER be like those others who are in the 80% – 95% of people who received some degree of pampering in their earliest years.

Remember:

Pampering = benevolent world = ‘good enough’ safe and secure

Not pampered = malevolent world = not ‘good enough’ safe and secure

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So when I say I the bottom seems to be falling in the meteor pit I have ALWAYS been in, and the sides are crumbling over my head, I am also saying that for all the ‘self-help’ information that I have found these past 30 years was actually like (analogy!) random, disconnected, irrelevant and misleading bits of ‘facts’ scribbled on tiny pieces of confetti paper, tossed down to me over the edge of my crater into hurricane winds by ‘others’ whose lives exist either on solid ground way above my head or ‘others’ whose lives exist in a little pit MUCH shallower than the one that I know.

Maybe those same ‘others’ who read what I write now will say, “Oh, that is SO NEGATIVE!”

I no longer care a single tiny TWIT what those people think or say.  I can’t see them or hear them from where I am ‘down below’.

None of them ever helped me to understand how the extreme abuse I suffered changed my physiological development.  None of them even MENTIONED that this was possible, let alone that it happens and HAPPENED to me.

None of them ever told me that it was the ABSENCE of having anyone in my life during all of this trauma that actually provided for me a safe and secure attachment opportunity.  THIS MATTERS because in the midst of ANY TRAUMA over a lifetime, it is the presence of safe and secure attachment relationships that HEAL TRAUMA.

In the case of infants and children suffering from horrible traumas, the presence of SOMEONE to safely and securely attach to MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD to that little one’s outcome — PHYSIOLOGICALLY.  These safe and secure attachment relationships are ALWAYS the number ONE most important and powerful resiliency factor that mitigates the impact of trauma.

While it might be an unusual and uncomfortable way to look at infant-childhood to say that treating a little one WITH LOVE and caring kindness means that infant is a PAMPERED one — and therefore of the fortunate group — this is true.

Being treated this way was NOT a given for all of us.

So, who was there to pamper you when it mattered most?

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So when I look at my poverty, at my inability today to tolerate stimulation or ‘excitement’, when I feel what it’s like to be alone, to not have a quality partner relationship, to be at a worse than dead-end ‘career wise’, when I struggle through the moments of my life toward WHAT for a future — I do NOT need to blame or shame myself.  I simply have to look around me at the vastness of this meteor crater that was built into my little body from the start and ask myself, “What CAN you do today to help yourself feel better?”

There IS always something, though that something be as tiny a little thing as are the spaces in the filters that I have fallen all the way through since the time of my birth.  And EVERYTHING that I long for, that I grieve for, EVERYTHING that helps me today — IS A FORM OF SOME KIND OF PAMPERING because PAMPERING is what I completely missed from the start of my life (except for the critical basics of shelter and food, etc.) and for the rest of my life pampering is what I desperately and RIGHTFULLY need.

At the same time I am negotiating within myself HOW it is that nothing I ever experience actually fills up this PIT.  I know today, “How could it?”  If I can stop the bottom from sinking out from under my feet, if I can stop the continual crumbling of that ‘way up there’ crater rim, I am accomplishing something good.

I also know that it will never be possible for severe infant-child abuse survivors — who were left alone without pampering BY ANYONE and terribly hurt by the ones who were SUPPOSED to take care of us — to know WHO we are in the world until we also realize HOW we are in the world.  In order to know for ourselves what we MOST need to know, we have to have the dedication to our own well-being to dare to leave the pack behind us as we search for our OWN truth about what REALLY happened to us — and how that changed us in our body-brain — for our lifetime.

Finally discovering that we were abused infant-children is a critical beginning — but it is ONLY the beginning for some of us.  We have a long, long way to travel toward comprehending our reality because the Meteor Crater we were raised in was really, really deep.

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+ABUSE SURVIVAL: NOT A TRIVIAL PROJECT

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As I began my re-search over six years ago in my desperate need to find information about how what had happened to me during my abusive childhood was affecting my adult life, I began to find the ‘bits and pieces’ of truth that eventually I was able to fit together into the bigger picture that I live with today.

The more I read about how trauma in infancy-toddlerhood changes development the more hopeless I felt.  All I could interpret from the facts I read was DAMAGE!  DAMAGE!  DAMAGE!

Finally I stumbled over the paper you will find scanned at this link:

*SYMTPOMS: 120909 Scan of Teicher’s Research – Trauma Altered Development Paper

The proverbial light went on, and suddenly all thoughts about my being DAMAGED by the severe abuse I experienced from birth turned into thoughts about how I was a CHANGED being!

Yet I still believe that I carry my own internal light into my continued personal study about the topic of abuse-caused early trauma altered development.  Although there certainly were years during my own ‘recovery’ attempts that began in 1980 where I bought and swallowed all the various self-help ideas about ‘what was wrong with me’, I now know looking back that while I might have put these thoughts in my mouth and chewed on them — they didn’t taste good and they didn’t taste right.

Something within me knew better — and knew that something very critical was missing from all the ‘recovery’ information I could find.  The information I found didn’t feel right deep at my core.

Even though the attachment and developmental neuroscience information that I have most recently studied certainly applies and is a far better fit, I still don’t 100% swallow it?

Why?  Because at my core I value myself too much to eat, chew, swallow and digest ANY information that simply tells me I am damaged, changed in such a way that I ended up ‘mentally ill’ or suffering from pathology, or am in any way FLAWED as a being due to the trauma altered development I was FORCED to go through as my body adapted from birth to a malevolent, traumatic and extremely toxic interpersonal world.

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Although my discovery of Dr. Martin Teicher’s writings elevated my re-search to a platform above writings that did nothing but highlight ‘damage’ that happens from infant-child abuse, I still have always known SOMETHING IS STILL MISSING!  Even though Teicher seemed to see ‘the bigger picture’, I knew instinctively there is a bigger picture still.

Teicher’s work (and his fellows’) cannot be disputed as it stands, but I don’t believe it goes far enough that it can truly serve those of us who have experienced early trauma altered development through severe abuse so that we ended up with an ‘evolutionarily altered brain’ such as his work describes.

It is NOT ‘just’ our brain that changed.  Not in my thinking.  It is our ENTIRE BODY.  All of it down to our innermost molecule and genetic operation including our entire nervous system and our immune system (I still believe future research will find that it was our immune system that instigated our trauma altered development from the beginning).

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO US AS SURVIVORS TO BE AN ‘EVOLUTIONARILY ALTERED BEING’?

I will NOT buy it that we are ‘mentally ill’ or ‘damaged’ or ‘suffering from pathology’ SIMPLY because we are these beings.

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Most simply put I, as the survivor I am, quite simply NOW live post-childhood in a world that does not belong to me, nor I to it.

Teicher’s paper (as you will find it at the link above) might put in a kingpin for true understanding of who-how we are as survivors, but his information is ONLY the beginning.

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As I write this post following the post immediately preceding this one, I think about the DIFFERENT world I would probably fit into a whole lot better than I do this one.

If I could locate people whose body formed in similar ways that mine did, I could discuss this topic on its most REAL and important level.  For starters, my guess is that as a whole we are far less egotistical, self-centered, self-possessed, self-righteous, arrogant, greedy and selfish than are many others who live in ‘that other world’.

We survivors could get together and talk about ‘them’ from our point of view with the information that OUR body tells us and come up with conclusions that very few in ‘that’ world would want to hear — I guarantee it!

If we could escape together from our quarantine in the ‘pathological’ pantry, we could discover our own wisdom — and what I suspect we would find as a group is that we are very closely connected in our experience (and in our body) to our specie’s ancestors — the Most Ancient Ones who lived in a world and during a time when most certainly nobody assumed anyone was ‘safe and secure’ for very long!

THOSE Most Ancient Ones?  I feel proud to think that I have developed in such a way that I could share along with them what OUR reality is like.

That we as survivors, and WE as the Most Ancient Ones were NEVER a part of the PAMPERED group does NOT make us damaged, ill or pathological!  In fact, people from ‘that’ world might find us downright frightening (Are they envious of us?) in our power, our strength, our resilience, our toughness, our determination, our courage and our endurance.  We know things that PAMPERED people are not likely to know in their lifetime — and what WE know is built into our body down to our essential core.

So what if we experience life differently, remember differently, gather different information and process it differently than those who have always lived in ‘that’ world?

Somebody needs to expand their thinking, and I am not at all sure that it is the severe abuse survivors that most need to do this.  Every attitude that belittles us, judges us, criticizes us, condemns us and does NOT value, honor and respect not only WHO we are as beings in the world but HOW we are beings in the world is a victim of their own ignorance, bias, stereotyping, prejudice and superstition.

IN FACT, we severe infant-child abuse survivors are probably the closest to being physiological SUPERHEROES as our current generations of humans are ever going to know!

The problem seems to be for me that I can’t find the boat with my own kind on it.  I am left feeling pretty darned alone with this information.  Those superhero ancestors of ours that were tough enough to endure so that our species is still here are pretty silent these days!  But what they knew we know — how to endure the unendurable to the end of our days.

That’s not a trivial project, folks!  Infant-child abuse survivors share with our Most Ancient ancestors the most important piece of information any living being can have.  In spite of all the distractions one might encounter along life’s way only one single thing matters:  Keep moving forward — no matter what!

So, I will no longer take a bite of, put into my mouth (mind), chew on, nor swallow any information about myself (self-help or not) that in any way discounts not only WHO I am, but HOW I am in the world.  I will no longer believe that I am flawed, damaged, mentally ill or pathological because I am not like the Pampered People are.  I will not try to change myself to be more like them just because they determine that I need to.

I WILL attempt to learn as much as I can about myself so that I can empower myself to be a better me living a better life.  The Pampered People can obviously also do what they want to do, but I now understand that what they know, how they know it, what they believe, and how they might judge me has NOTHING to do with me — and it never did.

We survivors are no more pity-able or pathetic than our Most Ancient Ancestors were — and THIS thought does NOT contribute to my sadness — not even one single, tiny bit!  Hooray!

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+NOT MENTALLY ILL – BUT TODAY? WITHOUT ANSWERS.

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How many people can erase the awareness of pain from a bone break with their mind?  How many people can make a toothache disappear with their mind?  Does our society call these people ‘mentally ill’ because their pain is real and their mind is not doing the trick of changing their condition — for the better?

I almost feel like the fog is clearing that I have lived in blind all of my life.  I keep thinking today, “How would my life as an adult turned out differently if anyone had EVER told me along my life’s pathway what I know now more clearly every passing day to be true?

I can feel my terrible, terrible sadness today.  I feel weighted by it physically.  Moving is difficult as if my being is so heavy.  It’s a beautiful clear, sunny, warm, breezy day.  I am working outside.  I sit in the sun when I want to and gaze south over the Mexican wall at the tall trees over there swaying, at the tall mountain behind them — gorgeous!

I have absolutely NO reason to feel sad in my body today.  Yet I am.

This is NOT depression!  This is Substance P I bet, telling my body that pain is present — and has been since I was born.

I wish there was some kind of surgery that could be done to remove this sadness.  I pay close attention to my body — and to my mind — as this sadness permeates my life.  How would I feel if THIS feeling were GONE?  Can I make it disappear and vanish WITH MY MIND?  Nope.

I live with this sadness, in spite of this sadness — which I believe is at the set point of my nervous system.  If someone had told me as a young adult that I would be sad all of my life — and to be aware (beware!) that every single choice and decision I was going to make in my life would be a REACTION to the pain of this sadness — could I have learned a long time ago how to consciously construct my choices and decisions to better insure a LESSENING of this chronic sadness?

I don’t know.  I do know the body-brain built during the first year of life forms permanent connections that cannot be changed.  It is also true that the cortical ‘higher thinking’ region of our brain is still maturing until age 25-30.  Yet it is ALSO true that severe child abuse can make this brain region atrophy early (see Dr. Martin Teicher’s work) so that it never develops ‘on schedule’ or ‘correctly’ at all!

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I would NOT call what I live with a mental illness anymore than I would call a broken bone or a toothache a mental illness.  What I feel is equally physiologically present IN MY BODY!

What I am beginning to think, though, is that IF everything I ever do is really in reaction to the pain of sadness — then I have an adult version of a Reactive Attachment Disorder (do a Google search on adult reactive attachment disorder – fascinating reading).

This is, in my thinking, a very real physiological-biological REALITY that has very, very little to do with the MIND.  When I read blog comments by readers that use the worn-out terminology all the self-help books preach, I want to SHOUT “IT IS IN OUR BODY!!!”  All of the difficulties we experience are NOT IN OUR MIND.  Our MIND IS NOT SICK.  We live in a trauma changed body from the infant-child abuse we experienced — and how we feel in our body IS THE CONSEQUENCE.

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In my thinking quieting my life and myself as much as possible — a form of eliminating the variables as a scientist would do in an experiment — and then paying the closest attention possible to how my body FEELS and what it tells me I will learn more than any self-help book will ever be able to tell me about ME and my experience.

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I think about a television set that was built in its factory-of-origin so that it over-shows one of the three primary colors ALL of the time unless the watcher manually adjusts the color ranges every time the television is turned on.

Too much red, or yellow, or blue — similar to infant-child abuse survivors whose nervous system was formed under the stress of trauma so that peace and calm is not their set point at center.  Instead they have too much anger, too much fear, or too much sadness at center.

I don’t have to question where my center set point lies.  I feel it, and it’s my guess that all survivors can detect their set point in one of these three powerful survival-based emotional arenas.

Because our body reacts to what we do (the people we are around for example) we can ‘lift ourselves’ away from our center set point on occasion.  But in my thinking we have a body built under so much stress, with so little safety, security, peace, calm and happiness when we were little that we ARE IN THE HOLE.

Just to escape the chronic nature of the emotion that is our center set point requires huge input.  We might just escape our central feeling — but to get to PEACE and CALM — and from there to HAPPY?  HUGE input is needed!

And we do NOT stay in the peaceful or happy place once we are not in contact with whatever/whomever HELPED us out of our hole temporarily because we are REACTING to external rather than internal conditions.

Again, this is not a ‘mentally ill’ condition.  It is body-based in our physiology.  Although I am nothing like an expert, I FEEL the truth of what I say.

Adequate early caregiver interactions in a safe and secure environment transmit to the infant’s growing body-nervous system-brain the ability to grow into itself a drastically reduced tendency to REACT to external stimulation and conditions.  THAT state, as different as it is from that of severe infant-child abuse survivors, IS IN THEIR BODY-physiology, too!

All the self-help razmahtaz in the world can be confusing jibberish to early abuse survivors, more like dandelion fluff blowing in the wind than it is useful.  What happened to us was not in our mind.  It affected how our body developed.  These trauma changes affected how our body FEELS every moment of our life except when we are reacting to the world around us — which creates temporary feeling changes that do not last.

I don’t HAVE any answers today other than STOP INFANT-CHILD ABUSE because it hurts for a lifetime!  And don’t call us ‘mentally ill’ because we FEEL the consequences of this hurt for a lifetime.  What we endured built itself into us from the beginning of our lives and guess what?  We cannot simply ‘get over it and move on’, ‘put our abusive childhoods in the past’, ‘forget our past’, or magically ‘forgive our abusers’ so that we will be ‘better’ and more like ‘normal people’.

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+THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ‘TOXIC’ AND ‘TRAUMATIZED’ – THE OLEANDER CONTINUED

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The words that go along with these pictures of my oleander killing project have been affected by the poignant comments I received today to this post:

*BEING WITNESS TO MY OWN ABUSE

It became very clear to me as I replied to the comments that what I do with my work out in my yard is not only ‘gardening therapy’ for me, it is an expression of myself in an art form:  Adobe.

Today completes the basic work on destroying these two oleanders in my yard (see: +MY TOXIC MOTHER AND THE OLEANDER).  What interests me about my thinking in response to today’s comments is the similarity I see between this oleander project and my severe infant-child abuse survivorship:  While I do not believe in ‘getting over it and moving on’, ‘putting our abusive childhoods in the past’, ‘forgetting our past’, ‘leaving our abusive childhoods behind’, etc., I do believe in positive change.

I am reminded of the posts I wrote some time ago in which I described my realization that my mother as the abuser and my father as her enabler would have deserved a minimum jail sentence each of 14,500 years for what they did to me — and that was figured using the tip of the iceberg and vastly minimizing my mother’s attacks on me over the 18 years of my childhood.

Crimes against a child that could have/should have resulted in 14,500 years of incarceration is NOT something I can even conceive of resolving for myself with ‘forgiveness’.

This does not mean that I simply accept what happened and how I am today as a result of it mildly!  Nope!  Not this woman!

So, my latest project has been teaching me how I understand that a severe infant-child abuse survivor can emerge from their earliest years being an extremely TOXIC person — or NOT!  Nobody is perfect, but my mother didn’t earn her 14,500 year jail term assessment from me by simply being a little bit flawed.  Nope!

So — my mother and the metaphor of the deadly poisonous oleander.

I would — and I am serious!  Need a bulldozer in this yard to remove the roots of these two hundred year old oleanders — or dynamite.  I have no access to either — and I have no possible way to remove those roots.

Parallel:  I have no way to remove the damage my mother did to me through her mentally ill devastating abuse of me.  The ‘damage’ was built right into my developing body-brain from birth, as I describe so many times on this blog.

But, I can do the best I can to pare all of it down — put boundaries around what was ‘her’ and what was ‘me’ — and most importantly I can CONTAIN and QUARANTINE the toxic poison to minimize what is affecting me ever day — to the best of my ability.

This is, to me most certainly NOT about forgiveness.  This is about continuing to survive the best way that I can.

SOOOOOO……  Here are the latest pictures, including one from the previous post showing the start of this project:

 

Starting to hack down the two oleanders
Down to the stumps. All surrounding ground that these plants have polluted is toxic -- I will never be able to grow anything edible in this ground
Without a chainsaw this is as low as I could cut the stumps
Over the fence into 'no man's land' (Mexican American wall/fences behind the pile) - no way does this picture show the extent of the PILE of scrap I threw into QUARANTINE!
The most toxic thing I had around to use as a weapon against these plants was LIME -- 50 pounds dumped into the ball of stumps (each), whole mess contained within dried adobe blocks -- and salt thrown on tho I wish I had MORE
I felt badly for all the bugs that crawled up out of the soil once the lime was on, so I put these sticks up as bug escape routes -- only the 'smartest' survived, which included spiders but only a few beetles
Here I started covering up stumps with a heavy cement mix of wet adobe mud -- notice the delightfully sickly green the stumps turned with the lime -- YAY!
Layers of cement-adobe, sandwiched with slabs of broken cement from the back of the yard over the stumps
Each wet adobe block weighs 50 pounds (35 pounds dry), each block contains nearly 5 gallons of soil
End of the day today, sunset -- filled UP!
I will need to put another layer down the center over the stumps --

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I WILL make something beautiful out of the mess!  I hope the height of this will be right for bench around the outside — place to put flower pots down the center — I can plant flowers in this toxic soil — I hope to find the money over time to put up a TALL privacy fence along my neighbor’s chain link — the oleander did give some privacy, but at way too high a price!

And every moment I have worked on this project I have thought about my mother and her toxic abuse.  I can’t change what she did to me, but I sure can work to chop it all down to size (perspective-gaining), contain it, quarantine as much toxic parts as possible, and BURY THE HELL out of the mother I have NEVER yet been able to feel ANGER toward.  I hope I am moving in that direction – so I can learn what anger has to teach me and move on from THAT — which is possible — and mine to do!

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+IN PURSUIT OF USEFUL INFORMATION: INFANT ABUSE MEMORY RETRIEVAL

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I would rather not write this post.  I would rather that abuse never happened to me in the first place — and I mean FIRST place because my mother’s severe abuse of me started when I was born – and lasted the 18 years of my childhood.  But after what happened to me yesterday I convinced myself to write this today as a way to document what I know is simply a natural process, no matter how strange or impossible it seems to me if I think only with the mind of acceptable modern-day ‘logic’.

But what, really, is logic?  The other day I was sitting outside enjoying the early morning’s first sunshine when I noticed a motley crew of grasshoppers beginning to hop around on a low growing plant six feet away from me.  I hate grasshoppers, and this is the second generation to hatch out of their earth nest this year.  So I stood up, intent on showing the three closest to me exactly how I feel about them.

At the instant I stood they froze their motion.  As I lifted my foot and began to move toward them the three, in concert, each took a flying leap through the air six feet away from where they had been — each in a different direction away from me.  How did they know to do that?  Grasshopper logic.

Today I scooped a half eaten mouse onto the end of my shovel, not wanting to step on it later as it lay right in the middle of my walking path.  Which half was eaten?  The head half.  What cat logic was this?  Cats, who are designed to ONLY eat meat cannot live without the amino acid, taurine, which is found naturally in brains.

And these illustrations have WHAT to do with this post?

Well, I am writing about body logic, but not just about body logic.  I am writing about body memory as we begin to accumulate it — yes — from the moment we are conceived (I believe DNA represents the body logic of the memories of our species).

MOST specifically I am talking about infant memory — and infant abuse memory and its retrieval.  Possible?  Yes.

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Researchers know that the area of our brain, the hippocampus, that is responsible for processing our real-time ongoing memories is one of only two brain regions that grows new brain cells (neurons).  (The other one, the olfactory center, builds new neurons so we can remember new smells throughout our lifetime).

Researchers also know that these new neurons can not only be damaged through the presence of stress hormones as memories are being processed, they can also be heated up and be disintegrated and destroyed by them — yup FRIED — before the facts of a memory can be stored.

However, it is also a fact that another totally separate process stores the body-based information of our experience and hence has no chance of being exposed to this stress hormone neuron frying fiasco.  So, absolutely, our body remembers everything that ever happens to us.  As long as our body lives, those memories exist, and this time line of body memory storage includes our infancy.

I imagine that massage and other healing body workers already know much about body memory and its retrieval.  I, however, am learning.

Experiences humans have before the age of one are called IMPLICIT memories, meaning they are stored not only IN the body, but MAKE the body-brain in may significant ways (as this blog describes).  Supposedly those very early body-based memories are NOT EVER going to be in a form that we can consciously recall.

Memories that we CAN recall are called EXPLICIT memories, and include both SEMANTIC memories of the facts of our experience and AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL memories that we recall very much with our SELF as the ‘recipient’.

What I am documenting today is an infancy-arena memory that came to me in far more detail yesterday than what my LEFT brain wants to realize or accept.  “Tough, left brain!  This is very, very real.  Deal with it!”

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The long-term experience of living with unresolved trauma includes actions our body-brain is taking that we might think we have no control over.  Severe infant-child abuse survivors often experience, as a part of their trauma altered development, changes in how their hippocampus memory processing region gets formed (which is often smaller than normals’).

Another region that is often seriously affected in its development by early abuse is the region of the brain, the corpus collosum, which lies between our left and right brain hemispheres and transmits information between them for processing and integration (something that always occurs to some degree while we are sleeping).  The long-term experience of EVER HAVING unresolved trauma within our body happens for us because the processing that needs to happen so that integration between our brain hemispheres of all experience does not fully happen.  This leaves parts of our trauma experience inevitably ‘unresolved’.

Our right hemisphere, most active in its growth and formation, takes its biggest giant leap in development birth to age one.  Along with forming its networks and circuits to process social attachment information this region is also establishing its connections between our body-based sensory experience and its translation into emotion.  Infant early experience of course does not begin with words, but it does begin with feelings which are fed through the right brain from the body as they are stored in memory in both places.

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Enter what I am talking about.

In 1988 I had what was then one of my oddest experiences.  For no obvious reason that I have ever figured out something must have triggered my first direct infant memory.  I was walking across my wide deck on a warm May afternoon when suddenly as I lifted my right foot off the boards to take my next step this memory appeared — seemingly out of nowhere.  I put my foot back down on the deck and froze there.

At the instant the memory came to me it did not come in words.  It came as sensory-input information.  Of course, immediately following this sensory memory the verbal description of this memory came:

I am a very small infant lying in a very large white crib.  My point of vision was in perspective so that the bars of the crib were very wide apart and the top rim of the crib was very far away.

I hear the pounding of her stomping feet coming toward me on a carpeted hallway behind a closed bedroom door.  At the same time I hear the terrible rage filled voice of my mother shouting and screaming — I know at me.

I wait for her approach.  I watch the door knob I can see a long ways away.  I see it turning.  The door is slammed open, the Monster rushes in.  I see her wide eyes, her open mouth.  Most importantly (to me in this memory when it came) I see her arm up to her elbow with her massive hand rapidly descending towards me.  The gigantic size of this hand gave me an instantaneous sense of how small I was lying in that crib, both as I watched it coming toward me, and as it clamped itself over my nose and my crying mouth — pushing me down and forcing my head and body hard into the crib mattress — as she hurt and terrified me.

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Although this memory appeared seemingly unbidden, it did appear during the days I was making preparations to move with my children from northern Minnesota to Albuquerque, New Mexico to attend a masters degree program there in art therapy.  I have always trusted this memory with only minimal skepticism because I sensed it somehow contained something I needed to know.

In these past six years that I have been studying developmental neuroscience and the long term consequences of severe infant-child abuse the memory I just described has grown in value to me.  This memory is strongly tethered to and grounded in all the factual information I have about my mother, her psychosis, and about the perpetual terrible abuse I received.

But I still wasn’t consciously prepared for what I experienced yesterday as it ‘in-formed’ me about my infancy experiences of terror and trauma.

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I have mentioned in previous posts about my ‘anxiety’ difficulties in covering for my sick friend in her little office job.  I knew last Saturday that I could only manage to do that work for her through yesterday — or so I thought.  As it turned out, I overshot my capacity to deal with that reality by one day.  Yesterday I prepared myself, went to work, and lasted exactly one hour before my body reacted with  terrible diarrhea and I had to come home.

I spent the rest of the day deescalating, which for me does NOT mean going to bed.  I cleared myself of all connections to that experience of trying to be out there ‘in the world’ when I can’t be.  As a part of my ‘cleansing’ I donned by scrubby work clothes, took the giant pair of tree trimming loppers I borrowed from my dearly beloved man friend, and began to attack the hundred year old gargantuan mess of an oleander that has taken over an entire corner of my back yard.  I wore heavy gloves because this plant is poisonous.

Chop, hack, yank, cut, clip, snip, drag away.  Hard at work I gave my body-self permission to ‘do’ whatever it needed to ‘clear the air’ of my living space.

My thoughts wandered in and out between my 14-month-older brother and the man I love and my attachment to him.  At the same time I was hyperly aware of my sadness, my deep, pervasive, all encompassing chronic sadness.  (As I have recently been blogging about, this sadness is where the central set point of my nervous system was set during my earliest development.)

Such sadness.  Such terrible sadness.  “What, dear Linda, would help you feel better right this instant?”

“I want to hear his voice.  I don’t even need to see him.  I need to hear (this man I love’s) voice.”

His voice.

About two years ago during conversations with my sister I clarified that there definitely is a connection between This Man’s voice and the voice that belonged to my father.  Yesterday as I worked hard to deplete the gangling mess of the oleander I thought, “Is there a single NOTE on the musical scale that is the ONE NOTE that resonates between the voices of these two important men in my life?  Is it a tone?  Is it a range of notes?”

My thoughts wandered off into imagining that a test could be devised whereby I could actually pinpoint as I listened to This Man a single note that would signify his voice.  Could I find it by holding a cell phone and testing his voice among the notes contained in a dialing sequence?

His voice.  My father’s voice.  I was questioning, wanting to discover another clue that might help me not only to understand this terrible sadness that I live with but a way to make even a tiny portion of it go away — either permanently or on command.

His voice.  My father’s voice.  His voice.  My father’s voice.

I allowed the words to flow through my thoughts as if they were traveling liquid.

His voice.  My father’s voice.

And suddenly I was back in that crib — only this time I knew a little bit more.  My body-based memory awareness became more flexible and more inclusive.  More of the context appeared.

When, as a tiny infant, I could hear the DRONE of my father’s voice, the HUM of my father’s voice, the rise and the fall of it, the TONE of my father’s voice — obviously from way before I was able to probably know the connection between THAT SOUND, THAT VOICE and the man it came from — there was a pattern that I began to identify.

When I heard THAT SOUND the rest of the horror that was my life with that woman who came to terrify and hurt me DID NOT HAPPEN.

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As I hacked my way into the body of the oleander yesterday my brain-mind-self then brought up the files of information I know about attachment:  TO FEEL SAFE AND SECURE.

FEEL!  Not know in words, but to FEEL in a very real sensory way IN THE BODY that I was SAFE AND SECURE.  This meant in MY infant world that the hurtful terror was NOT THERE.  I directly knew from my earliest age, and certainly as soon as my nervous system-brain-body developed enough to make any connections at all — that the ONLY time I felt safe and secure was in the ABSENCE of trauma.

Not the other way around.  I wasn’t formed in a world were safe and secure were the norm and trauma was the exception.

When I heard the sound of my father’s voice I was not terrified, terrorized, traumatized — and in pain.

When I heard the distant sound of the hum, the tone, of my father’s voice the storm stopped.

There’s more from yesterday………

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Suddenly thoughts and impressions, feeling and senses about my brother reappeared as I worked away yesterday.  My brother.  I thought about the piece of my mother’s writing I discovered on a scrap of paper and transcribed onto my blog — SEE:  *1951 – October 15 – Linda’s 6-week Checkup (and brother John)

My brother.  He would have been just under 16 months old at the time my mother wrote this piece.  There he was, on the bed beside his beloved baby sister, me.  HIS voice.  HIS shining eyes.  HIS mirroring expressions.  HIS gentle touch.  Those are what saved me.  (I am very certain that in his very young innocence and love for me — even before he could talk — that my brother intervened and interceded on my behalf as much as he possibly could until both he and I grew older and his interventions were no longer honored, heeded or allowed.)

On the day of this six week checkup, baby doll Linda all dressed up.  My mother HAD to act the part of the doting, loving mother in front of her mother, in front of my father who accompanied her carrying her doll baby to the doctor’s office.  She had to pretend she loved me to the doctor.

HOW EXHAUSTING!

In this little piece my mother wrote she describes how as soon as she possibly could, once she arrived at her mother’s after this torture of pretense, she laid tiny me down on her mother’s bed and walked away.

She writes about her thrill in arriving at her mother’s and seeing her truly beloved little boy playing with HER collection of toy dishes that she had as a child.  (I wondered yesterday, “What happened to that set of dishes?”  I have no memory of them every existing in our childhood.)

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Now in this memory retrieval documentary I am writing today I will tell you what happened next.  In the midst of my hacking and chopping and sawing and clipping and dragging chunks of that oleander away, I suddenly heard my own voice as if it was in two places at the same time — far, far away in the distance and right inside the center of my body.  My own voice said:

“I am having a painful day.”

“I am having a pain filled day.”

“I am having a day full of pain.”

“I am pain full.”

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The next thing I knew I was doubled over from a sharp knife stabbing-like breath-stopping gut-grabbing PAIN in my body centered at my solar plexus.

“What on EARTH?”

(Every time I have thought about this since yesterday’s attack I experience a much smaller version of what I describe here.)

I HAD to start burping out air that seemed to be filling my insides to the point of near explosion!  Call it a belch, call it a burb — I was painfully FULL OF AIR!

I had to drop my tools and attend to my burping with a vengeance!  I HURT!

It was during the releasing of all this pain-full air that I realized my body was having a POWERFUL memory — at I knew instantly what this memory was.

The same mother who could barely tolerate having to pretend she loved and cherished and cared about six week old me long enough to fool my father, and her mother, and the doctor COULD NOT BEAR TO TOUCH ME!

The REAL mother of infant me HATED me.  I was the devil’s spawn to her, not human, a curse upon her life.  I was the one the devil sent to kill her while she was in labor with me.  (I have written much about this before.)

The REAL mother of infant me propped my bottle whenever she could.  She disdained to touch me —

AND

THEREFORE

SHE DID NOT BURP ME!

Oh, so SAD!  So painful!  So WRONG!  SO TRUE!

And yesterday I instantly knew more about the memory that came to me in 1988 about her attack of me in the crib.  She had propped the bottle, NOT burped me, I was in PAIN.  I was crying.   (I know in my body this was not an isolated occurrence.)

And………

Now I know more about THAT story!  And today my woundedness is a little more healed.  The ruptures trauma created in my body-self is a little more repaired.  Cool!

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NOTE:  After this whole experience yesterday This Man called, and I also saw him in person, and for the first time I DID NOT hear the overlay that has evidently ALWAYS been in my range of hearing in the ten years I have been hearing my friend’s voice.  I DID NOT hear the overlay (or underlay?) of the tone of my father’s voice merged with my friend’s.  My friend’s voice sounded different to me, almost like it was ‘hollower’ and shallower — it was not as full, deep, resonating, dimensional and rich as I have always heard it to be before.

For the first time in these ten years I evidently JUST heard the comforting sound of my friend’s voice without hearing the comforting sound of my father’s very similar voice at the same time.  Fascinating!

I believe for those of us who were traumatized from the time of our birth (that unfortunate 5% I wrote about this week) that our primary senses of smell and hearing (along with touch) carry much connection to our earliest experiences — as these senses were developed under the duress of trauma.

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Maybe I am preaching to the invisible choir.  At age 59, a lot of time has gone by for early infant abuse survivors of the Baby Boom era to die.  If you Google Center for Disease Control – ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) longitudinal (long range) studies, you will find those statistics that say the more abuse and adverse experiences a person had who started the CDC studies, the more likely they were not to finish the study.  These severe early trauma survivors died on the average 20 years sooner than the less traumatized study participants.

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+SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS ABOUT DISMISSIVE-AVOIDANT INSECURE ATTACHMENT DISORDER

alchemynow7 Comments

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I see that there are a lot of people who find their way over to this blog in a search to understand avoidant-dismissive insecure attachment.  One of the search combinations that came through on my admin page yesterday was asking the question, “Who are avoidant-dismissive people likely to be attracted to?”  Many people are landing through their Google searches on this post:

*Attachment Simplified – Organized Insecure Attachment – Avoidant-Dismissive

I have not followed off on any detour to examine the nitty-gritty of the ‘upper level’ insecure attachment disorders.  I believe a lot of information has already been accumulated by others regarding them, while very little has been written about the ‘lower level’ insecure attachment disorder of ‘disorganized-disoriented’.  This ‘lower level’ (versus the ‘upper level’ one) is often presented in the neuroscientific and infant developmental research simply as a being a severely ‘disabling’ consequence of infant maltreatment and neglect that results in the most severe ‘pathological’ outcomes in body-brain and mind.

Because my writing is primarily about what my life has been like as a survivor of severe abuse, maltreatment and trauma from birth until I ‘escaped’ home at age 18, I make no claims about being an expert at anything else.  I can, however, write somewhat competently about the dismissive-avoidant insecure attachment disorder from my own experience because I believe that is what my father has, and I believe that is what the man I am not with, but have been in love with these past ten years has.

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If you do an Amazon.com book search for Daniel J. Siegel, and a Google search for Mindsight, you will find yourself standing at a gateway through which you can enter and learn more about how early caregiver attachment patterns transmit to an infant through direct face-to-face interactions than I can ever describe.

His book, Parenting From the Inside Out is probably the simplest place to start your way into this informative world of human infant development.

The simplest way to think about ALL of the insecure attachment patterns-disorders is to realize that a human being has been biologically programmed to require very specific interactions with its earliest caregivers so that it can form the best body-nervous system-brain possible.  The exact patterns that are ‘down loaded’ into an infant’s developing body-brain through its earliest human interactions will be, in turn, built into the very fabric and fiber of an infant.

When a parent, particularly the mother, did not receive what she (they) needed to form the best body-brain possible, that lack-of-best information will simply be communicated to the infant — and that information comes tumbling down the generations through infant-caregiver interactions — UNLESS something interferes.

That SOMETHING is actually some person, somewhere, who DOES interact with an infant in a safe and secure attachment way so that those neuro-biological of ‘goodness’ can build themselves into the infant — usually right along with the ‘badness’ patterns.

I do not believe that avoidant-dismissive attachment comes DIRECTLY from abuse itself, even though if we are fine tuning how we look at what all humans NEED to build the best body-brain possible and DO NOT get in one degree or another, we ARE talking about abuse.

In the case of dismissive-avoidant insecure attachment the actions/nonactions that create these patterns in infants comes most often from a hypo or less-than-responsive early caregiver — which is in my thinking a form of neglect of primary infant attachment needs (depressed mothers are often in this category).  D-A attachment is then most closely related to a non-response pattern rather than to a hyper overly response pattern which seems more typical of the ‘lower order’ insecure attachment systems of preoccupied and disorganized-disoriented.

In all insecure attachment relationships there is something within the caregiver that is interfering with the ability to recognize an infant IN THE PRESENT MOMENT — something all infants desperately need from their caregivers.

An infant, in the critical time periods of its body-nervous system-brain does not have the ability to put itself on PAUSE so it can wait for those moments when its caregiver is PRESENT TO IT AND APPROPRIATE in its responses to the infant.

Of course, readers of this blog already know that anything written by the developmental neuroscientist Dr. Allan Schore, such as Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self/Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self (two-volume set), contain vital specifics about the processes that build a human being BEST versus those that do not.  Hard reading, I assure you.  (You can search this blog for Schore and come up with a lot of info, as well.)

SOOOO — about avoidant-dismissive or dismissive-avoidant insecure attachment.  The basis of this pattern is that body-based emotion-driven information that an infant has no choice but to communicate to its earliest caregivers ALL OF THE TIME is only selectively paid attention to by the caregiver.

Add to this that the caregiver response is not consistent.  Sometimes the caregiver might notice the infant expressing a need through an emotion, yet later the caregiver doesn’t respond to the same infant emotion in any predictable way.  On and Off.  Sometimes yes, sometimes no.  The caregiver (as with all insecurely attached adults) is (often unconsciously with this insecure attachment pattern) simple not paying attention to the infant in real time because the caregiver has interference within their own insecurely built body-nervous system-brain.

(Pass it on, folks!  Do a Google search for ‘mother attachment predict’ — fascinating reading!)  Researchers can assess a mother’s attachment before the birth of her offspring and often exactly predict the attachment patterns of her children — throughout a lifetime!

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Our family only very recently stumbled upon an extremely important piece of information about my father.  My daughters are accumulating intergenerational documents to ‘prove’ their relationship to my father’s mother so that they can join the Daughters of the American Revolution as my father’s mother did.

In scouring the family paperwork collections for these documents, my daughters received my father’s birth certificate from their uncle.  It states on there that my father had a dead sibling (born alive four, living three at the time of my father’s birth in 1926).

Nobody in my family EVER mentioned that my grandparents lost a baby.  What we did hear repeatedly during our childhoods is that my father was not a wanted child, that his mother wanted nothing to do with him, that his older sister was assigned his care, that she begrudged this burden and let my father know this.

Years later my father told me his mother was depressed and very seldom responded to anyone.  She seldom left her home, had no friends, and was sad sad sad.  What happened during the life of my paternal grandmother?  I don’t know, but I DO not know that she was 32 when my father was born and his father was 37, and that somewhere there was a dead child.  This grief factor is one of the very first places I would look to discover what prior circumstance contributed to a lack of care and love for a later baby.  BINGO!

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All attachment patterns have roots in the same human processes.  They determine how we respond to two things:  One – our own emotions in our body and Two – our connection patterns with our self and others.  Both of these functions are built into the right brain hemisphere during the first year of life.

Human development is designed to be RESPONSIVE to signals received by the infant AND the infant adapts its development according to the signals it receives.  True, genetic material in the infant is involved.  In my father’s case, he was no doubt born with the potential to develop his (later forming) left brain in amazing ways.  He became a civil engineer, read nonfiction voraciously his entire life, had a ‘photographic memory’ and never forgot while he was well anything he ever learned.

Yet my father was also built through his earliest caregiver interactions to be the perfect match to my insanely abusive mother.

My father was on the COOL end of the emotional spectrum.  My mother was on the HOT volcanic end.  I believe dismissive-avoidant insecure attachment patterns can VERY EASILY gravitate to HOT emotionally dysregulated people, and the severely troubled (most often disorganized-disoriented and the preoccupied insecurely attached) people because of the emotional vacuum that exists within their own body.

The reverse makes these attraction patterns likely, as well.  The dismissive-avoidant pattern is a HYPO emotional regulatory pattern.  When the brain of a true dismissive-avoidant is watched in action during studies about emotion, these people are not remotely aware they experience many emotions AT ALL.  Yet at the same time researchers can watch their brain receive emotional information at the same time their brain consumes vast amounts of energy screening the emotional information from conscious awareness.

In other words, just as happened to them from birth, the emotion is THERE but not responded to — this time, as older humans, not even responded to by the person who is having them.

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The dismissive-avoidant attachment system-disorder is, I believe, the most common one.  It is also one that in our culture is least likely to be recognized because these people ‘get along’ better than do ‘owners’ of the more severe insecure patterns.

Experts suggest that the ‘other’ more severe insecurely attached adults are attracted to the dismissive-avoidant ones because they instinctively recognize that these people WILL NEVER OVERWHELM THEM EMOTIONALLY.  My mother knew that about my father the instant she met him, I have no doubt.

My father responded to my mother’s ‘warmth’ and vivacious charm.  (Very unfortunately.)

Experts also suggest that the flaws in these insecurely attached relationships often come to light when and if the more severely insecurely attached person, who is far more likely to experience serious enough life consequences that force them to seek help, do so and begin to heal and change.  At this point the rigidity of the dismissive-avoidant partner can drive their partner even more ‘crazy’!

It is important to understand that the dismissive-avoidant person is NOT AWARE of emotions that they are, in fact, experiencing.  Their brain-nervous system was designed by their nonresponsive earliest caregivers to screen out — not pay attention to — and to eventually deny the existence of body-based emotions.  These people simply do not access information based on their emotions — and in turn, do not access information about anyone else’s emotions EITHER.

Their early caregivers left emotional response out of the baby-building equation, and now so do their offspring.

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I will also add that I believe the commonly recognized insecure attachment patterns, as they go ‘down’ in terms of the safety and security they represent, add into one another.  My extremely emotionally dysregulated mother ALSO dismissed other people’s emotions.  She COULD not see them because her entire universe was built on her projections from inside herself out onto others.

I also believe that nearly ALL of the time insecurely attached people seek one another out.  IF my father had ‘moved up the ladder’ of attachment instead of down, and IF he had bound himself to someone of the ‘upper’ 50% of our population that DID have a safe and secure attachment system-pattern built into them, he COULD most likely have healed enough to change his primary responses to others.

In other words, he could have LEARNED and been TAUGHT how to better recognize situations that contained emotions — both for himself and for others.  My father was a naive 23 when he met my overwhelming mother.  True, while nobody had ever helped him to recognize emotions, he was still young enough that I believe some changes for the better COULD have happened if he had done ‘upwardly mobile’ instead of the reverse.

Partners from birth on, as members of a social species, are always involved in regulating emotion and physiological states through human interactions.  We can learn enough about the basic attachment patterns so that we can recognize (1) what they are, (2) where they most likely came from and how, and (3) how to gently change their expression (the basic hardwiring inside an infant’s body-brain prior to the age of one will NEVER change in some basic physiological ways).

We do not, in my opinion, live in a culture that values the body-based TRUTH of reality that emotions  contain.  Our body and its emotional signals are first filtered through the right social-emotional (earliest forming) brain hemisphere.  Depending on the kind of benevolent or malevolent experiences an infant has with its earliest caregivers, a human being is supposed to develop a brain that can quickly and smoothly pass right brain information over to the left brain for processing and integration.

When this happens BEST, language can be assigned to experience.  What happens in a dismissive-avoidant CULTURE is that talking about emotions, and the very real and true experience of people who DO live in a body is NOT encouraged.  We can end up with a literal language such as my father was a master of at the same time we ignore and dismiss the vast truth of our lives.  My father’s condition enabled him to enable my mother in such a way that he NEVER protected his children, especially me from my mother’s insanity and abuse — if he ever really SAW it at all.

He was also set up to endure his wife’s abuse of him.  I don’t believe he had either a platform or the language to even THINK about the emotional hell he, his wife and all of his children were in.  If one has never felt heat, cannot physiologically become aware of its presence, burning to death in a house fire is far more likely than it would be for someone who had built a body that could receive and process ALL information the body accumulated.

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I believe that in ALL cases how an infant is responded to birth to age one by its earliest caregivers matters THE MOST.  The trajectory for all an infant’s future development on all levels is set by the age of one.  The foundation is built.

In our current culture I expect that the ranks of the truly securely attached is dropping from 50%, and as this happens the ranks of ALL the insecurely attached is swelling.  Because MOST caregivers certainly do not directly abuse infants, it will be the ranks of the dismissive-avoidant insecurely attached that is going to swell the most — and the fastest.

I say this because there is NO JOB a human will ever do that is more demanding that taking care of an infant prior to the age of one CORRECTLY.  Busy, stressed, working parents who rely on day care providers to meet the most vital needs of their babies are often selling their infant’s short without ever thinking about it.

IGNORANCE IS NOT BLISS!

Taking care of the basic physiological needs for warmth, changing, feeding of infants is NOT ENOUGH to guarantee that an infant will remain in the top 50% of the safely and securely attached emotional regulation category.  Infants are HIGH NEED beings who REQUIRE appropriate touch, face-to-face responses, who require human vocal interactions, who require that their caregivers pay the RIGHT KIND OF ATTENTION to their responses instant-to-instant.

All early caregiver interactions are designing and putting into place the patterns within the brain’s circuitry that the infant will rely on for the rest of its life to process information about its SELF and the condition of the world it has been born into.

I want to add here something I consider extremely relevant and important.  Infants are physiologically designed to respond FIRST to their mother, SECOND to the next most caring human in their universe which certainly CAN be their father, next, to ALL most caring humans (relatives and day care providers who respond with absolute love and focused appropriate attention to the infant), AT THE SAME TIME infants are also biologically programmed to respond to happy, loving CHILDREN.

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I believe ALL insecure attachment systems-patterns happen because earliest caregivers MISSED THE INFANT’S CUES.

Infants are ALWAYS sending out perfect cues.  Their outgoing signals are NEVER off target.  It is the responses that an infant receives to its cues that determine the degree of safe and secure attachment in the world the infant is building into its body-nervous system-brain-mind-self.

Nature intends that modulation of an infant’s needs begins in earnest at the same time the infant can extend its range of activity into the physical world at an increasing distance from its caregiver.  Before the age of one what an infant is asking for — it ACTUALLY needs.

Just because what an infant younger than age one’s needs are more than its caregivers WANT to respond to does not in any way indicate that there is something ‘spoiled’ or ‘wrong’ with the infant.  That kind of thinking, in my opinion, is some of the downright STUPIDEST human thought ever invented!

Most unfortunately I suspect that in today’s world we are losing sight of this fact at the same time we are both dismissing the vital importance of caring for infants AS THEY NEED TO BE CARED FOR and avoiding the WORK ourselves that bringing humans into the world ACTUALLY requires.

Every single signal, every single cue an infant prior to the age of one sends out needs to be responded to consciously by its caregivers.  Every act of NOT responding to an infant has to be a conscious choice.  All actions toward an infant affect its rapid growth and development.  No action toward an infant is without consequence.

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When his parents choose to let my grandson cry without taking any other action they are choosing at those times to consciously moderate the intensity and duration of the emotions he is experiencing.  They are ‘building’ strength into his emotional and nervous system response-abilities according to what they KNOW he can safely and securely tolerate (he is 8 months old).  Challenges from the environment by themselves do not harm infants.  Dismissing and avoiding the reality of the infant’s needs and its responses to those challenges, however, can certainly cause harm to the infant’s development.

Reality today dictates that many mothers and parents cannot financially afford NOT to utilize day care.  If we really knew what we were doing as a nation we would create day care situations for infants that guaranteed that the needs of those infants were met.  We are living at a time and in a world today that often detours early caregivers away from the innate biological programming that is very real, and has naturally made sure that mothers both knew how to take the best care of their babies and DID it.

Babies like my father and mother were fell through the cracks.  Their needs were not met — and either nobody noticed or nobody cared.  Both inevitably ended up with serious insecure attachments within their body-brain to their own self, to the world, and to other people.  Babies that are not cared for the BEST way possible experience trauma — and insecure attachment systems-patterns built into infants is how intergenerational trauma gets passed down through the ages.

Plain and simple.

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+SURVIVORS’ WORK IS ABOUT NAMING WHAT HAPPENED, NOT ABOUT BLAMING

alchemynowLeave a comment

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I received a great comment on one of my other related blogs to this post that was such a welcome affirmation of the work I try to do in my writing.

POST:

+What I Suspect of My Mother’s Early Childhood

COMMENT:

Thank you for having written this blog. I haven’t finished reading all of it, adding bits and pieces every week… I really don’t know how to thank you properly.
I come from a dysfunctional family, my grandmother came from a loveless abusive childhood herself (great-grandma pushed into insanity by a criminal great-grandfather; grandmother an evil lost soul, my own mother only partially “saved” by her father who was such a good man he remained loyal to my grandmother even to his dying day while she robbed and condescended him daily.)

In your writings I find explanations to so many things that are going on in my head. Chemicals gone wrong, neural pathways built wrong…
I’m stubborn enough to cling to the hope that with enough good examples I still have time to “rewrite” my brain, you know scientists have recently determined there is SOME amount of neuronal regeneration going on after infancy? Won’t be looking too deeply into that in case I debunk it by accident, it keeps my hopes up, “I may find a way to change my brain makeup” after all…

Your writing somehow shows me the way.
Thank you ever so much.

MY REPLY:

Thank you for your wonderful comment! Have you been over to my main blog?

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/

I also have the entire collection of my mother’s writings that I transcribed at

http://hopeforamountain.wordpress.com/

These writings have not been totally proofed for punctuation, etc. but they are complete. The link at the top there for “Mildred’s Mountain” leads to a selection only of the basic Homesteading tale.

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Two regions of the brain actually grow new neurons. One is the hippocampus so that we can process memories of ongoing experience. The other is the olfactory region that lets us gain information about new smells we encounter in our life.

Otherwise, the neurons we are left with past the age of two are all we get. What neuroscientists mean when they talk about our brain’s incredible abilities to ‘rewire’ itself, and its resiliency is that the ‘little arms and fingers’ — the axons and dendrites that neurons have can form and reform their connections extensively — and there IS much hope for improving our abilities!!

What you are reading about, and what my writings on the Stop the Storm blog are mostly about is our need to understand how profoundly the experiences we have MOST PARTICULARLY birth to one affect our entire physiological development. Nothing I ever read in self-help books adequately told me what I most needed to know about the trauma altered development I experienced.

My search began 6 years ago at a time when internet access to the most current developmental neuroscience findings that new technology has enabled became available. This is a thrilling time!

Knowing that our body adapted itself to the trauma that our caregivers fed us — and that trauma in turn fed them when they were little — lets us know at the same time that we are not ‘sick’ or ‘wrong’ in any way — simply different.

Your comment gives me great comfort, encouragement and hope for the work I do. I am not a professional, but I sure am an expert about what happened to me. Neither my father or my mother were wanted or loved babies!! Who they became, HOW they became, and the horror they were both able to accomplish in raising their own children (and indeed, in living their own very sad and tragic lives), I believe was a direct consequence of deprivation, neglect, lack of love and maltreatment not only birth to one, but for their entire childhoods.

Thank you for visiting! Never give up hope. The more we learn about the truth about our trauma altered the development the more empowered we become to live a better life moment to moment — no matter how trauma-changed our body is! All the very best to you, and I hope to hear from you again!!

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+CLARIFYING MY PERSPECTIVE: INFANT ABUSE IN THE 5%

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Members of our culture are familiar with information that streams down to the general public from the TOP.  Unless our current view of society is suddenly flipped over completely, I certainly hold a position as a human being close to the bottom, not the top.

Here is an image for something known as The Bell Curve.

Whether we are talking in general about the ‘haves’ versus the ‘have nots’, or talking in terms of diagnosed ‘mental illness’, or talking about degrees on a continuum of insecure versus secure human attachment acquired during the first year of life as it designs and builds the human nervous system-brain, etc., we can consider the degrees of human well-being as they can be expressed using a Bell Curve image.

The healthier, happier, and more safely and securely attached an infant’s mother is, the same will correspondingly be true for her offspring — for a lifetime.  These are the people who will suffer and struggle less and enjoy more over their life span.

The opposite direction happens when the opposite conditions exist.  These are the people who will suffer and struggle more and enjoy less over their life span.

Intervention and education can directly improve the odds that well-being for an infant will improve for its lifetime when the quality of earliest caregiver interactions is improved.  The degrees I am describing become physiologically wired and built into an infant’s body.  I fully believe that increases to the positive will travel on down the generations just as the negative ones do.  Which do we desire as individual parents and as a society?

We are not helpless victims.  If we truly desire the best well-being possible for all (and this always starts with the quality of care to our infants), we have the power to accomplish what we want.

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To be very clear, I write as a survivor of the kind of infant-child abuse that probably ONLY exists in the ‘lowest’ (on the left end of this image) severe maltreatment, trauma and abuse.  I was a despised and hated baby from my first breath.  My advantage now is that I know this at the same time I know a great deal about how this malevolent treatment changed my physiological development.

Having been born to a severely ‘mentally ill’ (no doubt Borderline) mother who, herself, existed on the devastating neglect and abuse end of the infant attachment spectrum, puts me in what I consider either the LOWEST 5% or the HIGHEST 5% depending upon how one looks at the Bell Curve of infant-child treatment.

I ‘definitely’ received a megasized dose of maltreatment at the same time I was mega-deprived of the RIGHT kind of treatment.

So I write from society’s bottom 5% while most so-called ‘experts’ write from the TOP 5%.  This means that much of what I say is as equally challenging for the TOP group of humans to comprehend and believe as THEIR information is to those of us in the bottom 5%.

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I am completely comfortable in expanding the size of the group I write to and about from 5% to 15% of our population.  While the ‘a little bit higher’ additional 10% above me did not perhaps experience outright hatred from their earliest caregivers, they did NOT receive the quality of tender, loving, adequate care they needed.  Their entire physiological development was, I believe, altered in adjustment to their malevolent, insecure and unsafe earliest caregiving (!) environment.

At the same time, even though most attachment experts suggest that fully 50% of our population’s infants DO experience ‘good enough’ early caregiving to end up with a body-nervous system(NS)-brain-mind-self to carry on with the rest of their lives having a primary safe and secure attachment system, I believe that it is ONLY the top 15% who REALLY experience the blessing of ‘optimal’.  Those beneficiaries, as a result, can suffer from a kind of blindness that they DO NOT ADMIT.  This ignorance stems from their position of privilege.

I believe nearly ALL of our top high-powered ‘professional experts’ came from this top 15%, which means to me that if I am going to wholeheartedly accept as TRUE everything that they tell me, I am accepting their reality as REAL at the same time I discount and deny my own reality.

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While I cannot argue with the generalized view point that approximately 50% of our population had a first year of life that has given them a safe and secure attachment system (matched by a properly operating nervous system/brain-stress response system-vagus nerve system-immune system), I ask myself the question, “Why is such a large percentage of our population reliant upon antidepressants to get through their life?”

Developmental neuroscientists know that mothers as an infant’s earliest primary caregiver — and it remains mothers due to biological heritage of our species that has not changed — quite literally download their brain and nervous system patterning into their offspring’s rapidly growing and developing body-brain at the same time they are passing along their own attachment system patterning.  This means that in spite of our best intentions NOT to pass trauma patterns on to our offspring — we do.

Yes, while it can be said that much depression is ‘genetic’, it is also true that many genetic combinations that lead not only to depression to also to a wide array of physiological ‘problems’ are directly triggered into operation during the earliest months and years of our human development because of the influence our earliest caregivers have upon us.

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So what I would hope could be a ‘clarion whisper’ to others in my writings is this:  In today’s complex and hectic mothering environment we need to understand and make very clear that what a mother has experienced in HER life directly impacts the body-brain that her baby will grow.

Perhaps the ‘top 50%’ of our society do not need to directly THINK about this fact.  They can go on passing down to their offspring the goodness they have received in their benevolent infant-childhoods.  The OTHER 50% needs to understand as much as they can — hopefully PRIOR to creating their children — something we do not talk about in our culture:  How their body-NS-brain-immune system-mind-self was formed at the beginning of their life.

This is not so much about thinking, “WHO am I in the world?”  This is about thinking about, “HOW am I in the world and HOW did I get to be this way?”

It is very common to see an infant growth and development chart or list of what to look for in regard to visible external signs of advancement.  I want to see either a separate chart-list that talks about the INNER invisible critical growth and development of an infant’s attachment system as it affects development of its entire nervous system-brain AND body, or see this information included along with the mention of when to expect rolling over, sitting up, the first tooth and crawling.

Only in rare situations does an infant NOT develop its outward signs of health in a normal-ordinary fashion.  And yet we accept that at least 50% of these same infants are NOT being given what they need to develop their INNER responses in a normal-ordinary way.

This means to me that we are willing to accept that less-than-best for half our population’s infants, which will directly influence their lifelong well-being on the down turn, is perfectly OK with us.

It is NOT OK!  We CAN influence how the Bell Curve of human safe and secure attachment and BEST physiological development ON THE INSIDE turns out.  We can ‘raise the bar’ for everyone and we can at the same time ‘raise the bottom’.

My own terrible infant-childhood maltreatment harmed my development greatly.  I did not even begin to understand that what happened to me growing up for 18 years under extremely traumatic conditions was not only NOT NORMAL, but was NOT OK and was extremely harmful.  It has only been in the last 6-7 years that I have learned what that ‘harmful’ means in terms of my trauma altered development.

It so happens that so much new information has become available about the needs of infants for optimal development due to advances in scientific technologies paralleled my own need and desire to find out the truth about what happened to me where it mattered most.  That information is out there for all of us to find, but it needs to be made accessible and understandable to everyone, especially to new parents.

Even though I came a long, long way in not passing the trauma my mother, and through her that I experienced to my own children — I did so anyway on some significant levels.  A very sad and traumatized mother who does NOT know this about herself, and who does NOT know how she is going to pass these patterns down to her infant through her innocent (and best) interactions with it during its first year of life — is going to pass those patterns down to her infant.  That is nature’s design.

The very best and most accurate measure of the state of a human society’s well-being is to look directly — and with an informed eye — at its infants prior to the age of one.

What we want to see are infants who are well fed and physically cared for — yes.  But what we ALSO and at the same time need to see are infants who are being attended to in safe and secure attachment interactions.  These interactions are very real actually PHYSIOLOGICAL ways.  Yes, they involve caregiver-mother touch, smell, voice, words, tone — but they also happen through face-to-face expressions that are designed to download particularly a mother’s experience of being in the world to her infant so that her infant can, in turn, adjust its physiological development ON ALL LEVELS to the condition of the world it has been born into.

A baby needs to be attended to and comforted in such a way that its entire nervous system will develop with a state of peaceful calm (safety and security) as its middle set point.  Some excitement.  Not too much.  The right kind of stimulation.  Modulation of excitement (both positive and negative) ALWAYS BACK TO THIS CENTER POINT OF PEACEFUL CALM.

The baby needs interactions that stimulate its happiness and joy center’s development in its brain.  This happens FROM THE CENTER SETPOINT OF PEACE AND CALM.  The baby needs to gradually and eventually begin to tolerate the survival experiences of discomfort, anger, fear and sadness — but always within the best possible parameters set by its caregivers so that the infant is NEVER IN ANY WAY OVERWHELMED BY ANYTHING — EVER!

An infant from birth to one is building its brain neuron and nervous system directly based on the kinds of early caregiver interactions it is receiving.  The information it gets from these caregiver interactions are telling its genetic material exactly how safe and secure (benevolent) or how unsafe and insecure (malevolent) the entire universe is — and will be — for the rest of its life.  The infant’s physiological INNER development will adjust itself accordingly — and in most ways, permanently.

An infant from birth is at the same time building within itself the platform foundation for its thoughts, beginning with the underlying images that are directly connected to its experiences with its earliest caregivers — primarily its mother.  “Can I absolutely trust that someone loves me, knows that I AM HERE, and will come to take care of me?”

From this knowledge — either with a “YES” answer or a “NO” answer (or a “MAYBE?” one) comes not only the foundation of trust, but also the foundation of hope.  Eventually an infant around the age of one will be able to HOPE for that wonderful caregiver to come take care of it when the infant experiences a need.  With this foundation of trust and hope — or its absence — an infant advances into its stages of being able to move out into the world and explore it on its own knowing on its most basic physiological levels that it can count on being safely and securely attached to and in the world — or not.

AND the infant begins to add into its growing body-brain the ability to THINK in more than senses and images. Every single interaction an infant has with a human being before the age of one is directly influencing where its neurons are going to land in the regions of its brains, whether these neurons will live or die, and how these brain regions will process information — including information the infant needs to build its SELF and its relationship with this SELF.

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All of these interactions a billions more directly affect where a maturing human being will end up on this Bell Curve of well-being.  Although I was born down there at the lowest 5% point within an extremely malevolent, traumatizing and abusive environment, I can now look upwards and SEE the whole range of possibilities.  I can do this because I found a way to learn about how degrees of safe and secure attachment — and its opposite — directly influence the development of ALL OF US.

True, all of us can learn throughout our lifespan, but reality is reality.  There are early infant-child critical windows of development during which certain aspects of our physiological development are finalized — and cannot be changed.  We need to know as much as we can about what human developmental stages are ON THE INSIDE.  We need to know the best we can what happened to us that changed us.  Readers of this blog will already know exactly what I am talking about.

As a society we can make up our minds that LESS THAN BEST is not acceptable when it comes to infant care.  While we mouth the words ‘everyone is created equal’ we are NOT making sure that everyone is given the same BEST chance to grow and develop the BEST body-brain-mind-self possible.  Shame on us.

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Based on what happens in the womb and during the first year of life, additional critical brain development takes place in the second year of life — and onwards.  But ALL future development will be directed by and adapted to the information the infant receives from its earliest caregiving environment before the age of one.

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Number of Americans taking antidepressants doubles – USATODAY.com

Aug 3, 2009 … The number of Americans using antidepressants doubled in only a decade, while the number seeing psychiatrists continued to fall, …

CDC: Antidepressants most prescribed drugs in U.S. – CNN.com

Jul 9, 2007 … CDC: Antidepressants most prescribed drugs in U.S. … She added that 25 percent of adults will have a major depressive episode sometime in …

Answers.com – What percentage of the US takes anti-depressants

Depression and Bipolar Disorder question: What percentage of the US takes anti-depressants? Answer More people than you think!!! Could not find it but this …

10 Percent of Americans Use Antidepressants, Study Finds

Aug 4, 2009 … New research finds that 27 million Americans — more than 10 percent of the population — took antidepressant medications in 2005, …

Antidepressants in America – TIME

Aug 5, 2009 … Antidepressants in America. By Alex Altman Wednesday, Aug. … which data were available — the percentage of Americans using antidepressants …
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1914604,00.html …

Antidepressant Use in U.S. Has Almost Doubled – US News and World …

Aug 3, 2009 … Antidepressant Use in U.S. Has Almost Doubled … The study found that 5.84 percent of U.S. residents aged 6 and over were using …

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+DISSOCIATION: THE SURVIVOR’S CURSE?

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Those of us who suffered severe trauma and abuse particularly during our earliest infancy — so that our physiological development was forced to change in adaptation to the trauma — need to speak out and begin to think about our resulting difficulties in getting along during our lifetime in a world that really (fortunately in many ways) does not have a clue what living in a trauma-altered body is like.

We need to realize that dissociation is NOT a clearly understood phenomena.  There is no clear trail of understanding about dissociation laid out for us to follow by the experts in any field of research or practice.  I believe dissociational experiences need to be documented in any way that we can manage because it will only be in the future that survivor’s who were forced to build a body-brain that contains dissociational patterns will receive the help needed to understand how we are in the world — along with HOW we are in our body in the world affects WHO we are.

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If you have just landed at this post, please first read the post that immediately precedes this one.

Living requires that everyone continually process incoming information so that it can be responded to.  Through safe and secure earliest caregiver relationships we are supposed to build a body-nervous system-brain that can smoothly take in new information, match it up with related and relevant information we have gained during our past, and then be able to respond in the present (responding to the future is a different topic) in appropriate ways.

This process is supposed to be both ongoing and coherent.  That means it is supposed to make sense.  We are supposed to be able to make sense out of what happens to us.  We are supposed to come up with responses, reactions, and actions continually that make sense — make sense to US and make sense to those around us.

Early maltreatment of infants during their first year of life, during the period in which the body-nervous system-brain is undergoing its incredibly fast and complex building process, interferes with this process.  When primary caregivers confuse, hurt, terrify and terrorize, neglect and in other ways mistreat an infant, the information the infant receives cannot possibly be received by the infant in positive ways.

The only alternative a maltreated infant has is to physiologically adapt its development in response to horrific conditions that signify to its growing and rapidly developing body that the world is not safe, that the infant is vastly insecure, and that the infant is ALONE in the midst of all of this.  Dissociation is one of the natural consequences of being overwhelmed, traumatized, and of being fed not only too much information to handle (process, make sense of and respond to), but too much of the WRONG information about the self and the world the self has been born into.

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Now, to simply get to a nitty-gritty description so that I can document a dissociational episode I experienced yesterday.

The first phase of trying to document dissociation involves the reaction (I believe) of shame and embarrassment.  “What’s wrong with me?”  This stage also includes the sense that what happened made no sense at all and that there was no ‘reason’ for it.

We must be careful here.  I am NOT saying that shame and embarrassment TRIGGER the dissociational episode.  I am saying that these feelings are a very seductive temptation to fall into when we go back and try to document such an episode.

Humans are supposed to gradually build into their body-NS-brain from birth the ability to smoothly transition between experiences.  Traumatized infants cannot build this ability into their body because nothing about what they experience allows them too.  Being traumatized and frequently overwhelmed creates a different body-NS-brain because it has been fed, as I said above, too much of the wrong kind of information.

I see an image:  Picture someone saying to an infant, “Eventually in your life, when you are bigger and ready to handle it, life is going to give you a LOT to deal with.  Right now our job is to build you a body-NS-brain that will have good, healthy strong channels in it so that when this time comes, everything you need to get along in the world well is prepared and ready.  This way you will nearly always (overwhelming trauma can hit anyone down the road) be able to take in stride all that you encounter in your life.  You will be able to transition, or change smoothly with the changes as you move along through the rest of your life.”

Dissociation is a DIFFERENT way to handle transitions and changes.  As we document dissociation we do not need to judge it.  We need to pay attention the best that we can and describe it.

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So there I was yesterday, already hyper aware of my well overamped stress response system that had been overtaxed during the week by my efforts to take care of my friend’s job so that she would not worry as she heals from her illness.  Of course all kinds of other stressors went on all week, and the end result is that my entire self, living as it does in a trauma altered body, was on overload.

Standing in line at our small town’s local hardware store — did I notice the BLANK instant that would have let me know dissociation was going to take over the job of handling me in relation to the changes of the world?

Nope.  I did not.

But as always happens sooner or later, once dissociation has occurred and a DETOUR is in progress, something happens to make sure we know we are on a different track in our life from the one we were following prior to the dissociational experience.

What I find fascinating as I make the effort to document yesterday’s experience is that somehow I switched the identity of the person I was speaking to.

Within my own self I simply reorganized certain information within me and reoriented the entire scenario so that as the DETOUR was in progress everything made sense to me.

Did it make sense to the woman I was speaking to?  Of course not!  Did it make sense to me once she put the roadblock in the middle of my DETOUR route?  Not at the time, not even yet — but I respect who I am and how I am in the world as a severe early trauma survivor to try to look at this without criticism and judgment.

I don’t believe dissociation happens without the presence of both stress and a stressor.  Because at the same time I had a permanently turned on/activated stress response system (that I am coming to believe is the exact same thing as the insecure attachment disorder-system I also have that also cannot be turned off), I am ALWAYS experiencing stress (call it anxiety — but it is a very particular kind of anxiety).

It could take a book to adequately document just this one episode of dissociation that happened to me yesterday standing in line at the hardware store.  I believe, when I talk about honoring and respecting the dissociation severe early trauma survivors experience, that this fact is true for every single dissociational experience any survivor has.

Present with any single instance of dissociation is an entire lifetime of accumulated knowledge about what trauma is, what it feels like to endure it, what it takes to survive it, and about what the risks continue to be as we stay alive in a vulnerable body in what our body knows to be a dangerous, threatening and hostile world.

THAT IS A LOT OF INFORMATION!  All of that information is both vital and very near to us (because it is IN us) all of the time.  So-called ordinary-normal people do NOT carry this vast storehouse of trauma-related information.  Therefore, they are NOT at risk for becoming overwhelmed at any given time with a wealth of survival based information — which means they are not at risk for a dissociational episode that seems to come from ‘out of the blue’.

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If I were writing this in a book format I would start another chapter here.  Because I am writing this in a blog format, this post is simply going to get longer!

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I feel like I am inching my way out on a precarious branch that few before me have traveled so far out on.  As I described in my previous post, dissociation is always connected to our physiological adaptation in our body-NS-brain to terrible trauma that overwhelmed, and therefore confused, disorganized and disoriented us.  Those earliest traumatic experiences that built us always happened at the same time that chaos was present.  Within chaos — all possibilities exist simultaneously.

Our tiny growing body-self had to find a way to continue-on-being in the midst of these experiences.  At the same time we brought right along with us into our future life, one instant at a time, all of this UNRESOLVED trauma experience information.

Trauma remains alive in the body of all survivors until somebody somewhere somehow pays the right kind of attention to its message.

Why?

Just as trauma involves the experience of chaos where ‘all is possible’, at the same time it carries the parallel message that if the human race is going to survive and endure the information contained in the trauma has to be understood so that in the future the same kind of trauma can be first of all AVOIDED and if that doesn’t happen, then the same kind of trauma can be responded to when it happens in a new and better way.

Just as trauma=chaos=all is possible, any individual member of our species who experiences trauma is connected to the ALL — we each contain within us the genetic information that made us members of our great species in the first place.  And along with being a member of our species we are given an inescapable mandate:  What each of us experiences in our lives as individual representatives of our species belongs to the WHOLE.

If any single one of us continues to carry information within us about a trauma that was NOT resolved, that information is designed by nature and by evolution to be of critical importance to every single member of our entire species.

Problem?  We do not think this way.  But not thinking about something accurately does NOT make the faulty way of thinking accurate.

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So, again, there I am standing at the counter in the hardware store having a verbal exchange with the cashier.  I am interacting with a woman I will call Anna, though I do not actually remember her name.  I know her through associated experiences I have had in the past.

This woman’s brother is married to my neighbor in this trailer court where the house I live in is located.  I will call my neighbor Ruth.

Over 95% of the population of the border town I live in is of Mexican heritage.  (The town 8 miles away where the hardware store is located is probably 50%.)

Now, looking closely as I try to describe and document what happened to trigger what happened next I verify my own statement above.  All the trauma related information of my entire lifetime was present in that instant I stood in line — and dissociated.

How is that possible?  Again as I stated above, all of this information is present with EVERY early trauma survivor because our bodies changed in their development to make sure we remember.

Dissociation is a part of this trauma-related altered remembering ability that we survivors are blessed-cursed with.

Entering into the context of the hardware store exchange came all the information that I have about my being unable to attach to others in the world.  My insecure attachment disorder exists in nearly absolute contrast to what I see happening between family members, neighbors and friends in this area I live in.

These people are above all else supremely social from the time they are born.  They love one another and they show it — all of the time.  They are designed from birth to value one another in social interactions — Anna and Ruth being no exception.

I lost track of certain facts yesterday, things I consciously KNOW about the relationship of these two women.  I know about the connection by marriage that socially makes these two women very real sisters.  I know Ruth lives two trailers to the west of my house, just over the chain link fence of the neighbor that lives between us.

I know Ruth drives a little silver car.  I know Anna lives in another town 13 miles away and drives a large four wheel drive.  Both women work at this hardware store but seldom on the same shift, and on this day only Anna was working.

Enter my dissociation.

Enter my attempt to document what happened.

Anna cheerfully made a light comment that she loves this time of year, that the night previous she enjoyed lighting her wood stove.

Enter my dissociation.

Enter my WAY TOO MUCH RELATED INFORMATION.

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I must take a moment here to mention something that has happened to me in recent weeks — at least that I have certainly become aware of in recent weeks.

Never before in my life have I consciously noticed that I occasionally think in smells.  Over the past two months I have noticed that sometimes if I think ‘lilac’ I simultaneously literally SMELL lilac.  If I think vinegar, I smell it.  If I think sour milk, I smell it, etc.

How and why this is happening to me (and not all of the time – randomly — and I can not predict it and do not expect it when it DOES happen) I do not know.

But it happened yesterday.

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As soon as Anna mentioned her wood stove three things happened simultaneously.  (1) I remembered that I sometimes think in smells, (2) I remembered actually smelling very real woodsmoke wafting through my back yard this week, and (3) I was overwhelmed with the connection made inside of me to everything I have EVER known about wood smoke and wood stoves.  With an Alaskan homesteading childhood and a long time spent living in the cold winters of northern Minnesota my memories of these experiences are vast.  Because I was built the way that I was, trauma is connected to many of these wood smoke memories.

Strange trigger.

I am not sure that I would have reacted the way that I did yesterday if I had not already been near my complete stress overload point from all the other things that are happening to me (none of which would overstress a ‘normal-ordinary’ person).

So, yesterday suddenly out of nowhere I dissociated in such a way that I lost track of the real time information about who Anna and Ruth are, where they live, etc.  Suddenly I was talking to Anna AS IF SHE WAS RUTH.  In my trauma-stressed-altered reality suddenly Anna lived in the trailer as my neighbor and Ruth disappeared as a person from my reality.

The conversation included me telling Anna that I have tree branches in my yard from the trees I have trimmed, and that she could have them for her stove.  At the same time I could ‘see’ Anna coming down the driveway to get them.  Discussion turned to stray dogs because I was purchasing T-posts so that I can try to build a fence along the east side of my yard that the stray dogs cannot penetrate.  Anna told me about her fence that keeps her dog in her yard.  I responded, “I didn’t know you have a dog over there!”

Abrupt crash – detour ended.  Anna:  “I don’t live there in the trailer, Ruth does!”

Me?  Embarrassed and shaken, confused at my own self, “What HAPPENED, Linda?”

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Even though we are most certainly operating within the cultural norms of our society to take dissociational experiences personally — after all, word of my ‘faux pas’ is no doubt going to spread like wildfire around this small, closely knit neighborhood I live in — my documentary’s point is that dissociation happens to us as individual people because trauma has ALWAYS been bigger than we are as separate people.

We did not survive, evolve and endure as a social species by being alone as separate individuals.  We endured as a group.  When trauma-related memory information overwhelms us — FOR WHATEVER SEEMINGLY INSIGNIFICANT REASON IN THE PRESENT MOMENT — at the instant that it does, at the instant we become overwhelmed and dissociate as a consequence, we are being humbled as an individual self.

At the instant something around us connects with something within us that triggers dissociation, NATURE itself — along with the human specie’s mandate to carry trauma information until someone somewhere at some time can solve the riddle so THAT won’t happen within our species again — takes over and overrides in real time our ability to be a cognizant person with free will and free choice.

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So, yes, patterns of dissociation can wreck absolute havoc with a survivor’s ongoing experience of being an individual person ‘equal to all others’.

Severe infant-child abuse survivors ARE DIFFERENT.  We carry information about terrible things that CAN and DO happen within the reality of our species.

Nobody listens.  Nobody learns a damn thing.  Nobody cares.  The trauma information gets carried forward because NATURE is NOT going to let a species member forget what ALL species members need to know.

A traumatized, maltreated, abused, neglected infant is not given any other choice but to endure the best that it can.  This endurance includes trauma altered changes to its physiological development.  From that time forward ALL early trauma survivors are not given a choice about whether or not to carry the torch that blazes with signals that this kind of trauma DOES exist in the world.

When we experience dissociation we are experiencing what it is like to carry this torch.  What was it yesterday in that conversation that caught my trauma survivor attention?  The detailed specifics no longer mattered about who the actual individual was who lit a wood fire to stay warm.  What mattered was the ability to stay warm to survive in the cold.

The detailed specifics no longer mattered about whose dog lived where.  What mattered is that dogs that are not cared for adequately by owners cause all kinds of problems and are threatening.

The detailed specifics of who these women were as individuals ceased to matter, as well.  What mattered is that they are connected and closely attached to one another and share each others lives.  Their reality is fundamentally in contrast to my own where I live alone, am alone — because I pay this price for being formed as an isolated and severely abused and traumatized tiny human being.

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Severe early trauma survivors are at risk of dissociating ALL OF THE TIME.  It is nearly a superhuman task for us to anticipate what is going to trigger the overwhelming reactions to trauma that were built into our body.

What really matters to me is that I am prevented in real time within my society from approaching my neighbor and her ‘sister’ to tell her what happened to me yesterday, and what has happened to me all of my life as a direct physiological consequence of having been born as a beautiful, whole tiny baby to a vicious psychotic mean, dangerous mad woman who was supposed to be my mother.

I cannot tell them that even my mother was a torch carrier for trauma-related information.  I cannot tell them that really awful things happened to my mother when she was tiny and that she passed trauma on down to me.

So I say all of this here and now, knowing that whatever backlash that is likely to surround me — silently and invisibly — as a result of yesterday’s social fiasco will be detectable to me.  I still have the same basic choice I have always had as a trauma survivor:  survive or don’t.

That my species does not care about the information about trauma that my body has stored and carries is NOT my problem — really.  My job is to carry this torch — and carry it I do, no matter what awkward and puzzling ways this torch sheds its information.  What matters to me is that I figure this all out the best that I can.

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+DISSOCIATION: THE SURVIVOR’S GIFT?

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Never do I consider dissociation to be either a primitive ‘defense’ or a passive coping ‘mechanism’.  I consider dissociation to be a pattern of interaction between brain regions in concert with the nervous system-stress response system that is very simply ONE THING — its own pattern of processing information.

In light of the mention I made in my previous post concerning the difference between calmness and numbness I want to clarify my thoughts by adding that I can consistently count on one of two inner states within myself that, when I can notice them, alert me to the active operation of dissociation in my information processing and response patterns.

I believe these two inner states are actually one and the same.  I notice them as being different only as I experience one AS IT IS HAPPENING and the second IN RETROSPECT after it has happened.  It is, therefore, only how I notice dissociation IN REAL TIME that I am describing when I name these two separately.

Neither of these two states feels comfortable to me.  Neither of these two states would be ones I would choose to experience — if I had ever been given a choice when dissociation was built into my body by severe infant-child abuse in the first place.  Both of these states are equally real.

Because both of these states mean the same thing to me — dissociation is happening/has happened, I will simply pick one by the tail and describe it first.  I will start with “dissociation is happening.”

When I experience dissociation as it is happening — and I mean at the millisecond it occurs — there is ALWAYS a ‘shift in the world’.

I experience this shift as a ‘split’, meaning that what was the millisecond earlier an ongoing, coherent, reasonable pattern of interaction suddenly, and I mean SUDDENLY simply ceases to exist.  What was — comes to a stop, ceases to exist, breaks, shatters, falls apart — and changes into something else.

I NEVER anticipate such a break in my continuity of interaction with or understanding of my experience in the world.  I never did beginning in infancy when these breaks were forced upon me due to my mother’s insanely abusive disruptions of my ongoing experience.

The single word I would use to describe this state of awareness of dissociation as it is happening is this one  — BLANK.  Yet as I write the word I also understand that it is not enough to document what I want to say.  Blank implies that ‘there is nothing there’.  In real time, in real life the experience is exactly the opposite.  EVERYTHING IS THERE AT THE SAME TIME.

Some describe chaos as being a state where all things are possible.  Everything is there at the same time.

I believe that survivors of severe early caregiver terror, trauma, maltreatment and abuse have had the awareness of the state of absolute chaos built into their entire body on all of its levels.  Very few such survivors (I would say NONE) made it through their earliest developmental stages of brain-nervous system development without dissociation being built right into the circuitry of their body as a result of their experiences.

When dissociation happens, when the break in the continuity of millisecond-past experience STOPS and the state of BLANK appears, what we actually have happening is the experience of TOO MUCH INFORMATION.  In other words, we are experiencing the state of being overwhelmed.  That state is a familiar one to us on every level of our being — and it is the same experience as being in chaos.

I INTUITIVELY KNOW THIS IS NOT IN AND OF ITSELF A BAD HAPPENING!  It absolutely is NOT a ‘bad thing’.  It is not ‘sick’ or ‘wrong’.  It is supremely (and I do not use that word lightly) creative.  It is a miracle of life, has a purpose, and can come to good end.

So, what is the problem with dissociation?  Well, for one thing, it can be dangerous.  At the instant that dissociation is happening I am  not ACTUALLY in full awareness of any world at all other than the full perception of all that is possible within my mind and being.  That awareness does NOT keep me safe in my body in real time in a physical world — and hence, I believe, this instant of dissociation is an ACTIVE coping state and not a passive one.

What I know about this statement is that the exact instant of dissociation happens SO FAST it cannot be measured in any normal way.  It happens this fast because the body knows whatever state is being left and whatever state is being created to move into happen in the physical world where body-awareness (certainly not required to be conscious) has to be connected as fast as possible to accomplish ongoing life should a physical danger appear during this time (which an abuse survivor is especially geared to anticipate).

Say you had a working lamp turned on and two extension cords.  The lamp is plugged into one cord which is receiving current from being plugged into a wall socket.  How fast could you disconnect the lamp from one extension cord, plug it into the other one, and switch the cords plugged into the socket?  Could you do this fast enough that the lamp would not visibly flicker?

Believe me, that would not be a passive action.  It would be a very very active one just as I believe dissociation is.  While no human can physically manipulate cords and plugs at or near the speed of light, I (as a lay person) have the image that these interactions, transactions, manipulations and actions as they happen on the level of electrical pulses and impulses within the brain DO happen that fast.

Pretty sophisticated if you ask me, no ‘primitive defense mechanism’ here, even though this ability has been built into the human brain since we began to advance the development of our brain untold centuries ago.  There is nothing shabby or accidental about dissociation.  It has a purpose and a natural intention — to allow us to survive under conditions that are ORDINARILY un-survive-able.

Trauma is, by definition, an experience that is outside the range of ordinary experience.  Trauma is extraordinary, beyond the ordinary, and so are the people who survive it.

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I am going to carry my lit lamp and cord switching image on with me into my description of what I call the second state of dissociation.  If I imagine that the information that has been transpiring just prior to a dissociation being triggered as the body-knows overload has been approached, I imagine that the first cord this lamp has been plugged into has instantaneously become one that is too wimpy, too light to carry the load.  A much heavier duty cord is required — and the body-nervous system-brain of trauma survivors just happens to have one handy.

If the heavier cord is suddenly required, and the survivor just happens to have one at hand — why not use it?  Believe me, we do.

What’s the problem?  The switch to the heavier cord designed to carry the full current of what is happening in the real time present moment — AND the load of past traumatic awareness associated with it that lie outside the range of consciousness — does not happen through conscious free choice.

This results in what I call the second state of dissociation — THE DETOUR.

Experience of the first state, the switch that leads THROUGH the experience of blankness is very seldom consciously identified.  Time moves on so fast we cannot actually measure it, and as it does so we are now following a detour.  We are NOT on the same path in the same world in the same way that we were before the millisecond split of dissociation occurred.

Being able to recognize that we are on THE DETOUR path varies by individual and by each dissociated experience we have.  I believe we can live not only seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months IN THE DETOUR, we can live large portions of our life on these altered pathways.  This is a huge topic, and certainly too vast for this post.

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Someone on the outside watching dissociation occur can very possibly SEE the blankness when it happens.  Very few people are knowledgeable enough to actually recognize what they are watching, but this does not mean they don’t see it.  My hope is that bringing discussions about dissociational experience out into the open will help all of us understand both our own self and also other people better as we all learn more about what dissociation is, what it feels like, why it is possible, how it happens, what creates the ability within humans, how it is helpful and how it is disturbing.

As I work to become increasingly aware of dissociation when I experience it, I find words that help me connect to my self in both my past and in my present.  This leaves the playing field of the future wide open.  I have two complications currently in two of my main attachment relationships that both involved dissociation when the ‘rupture without repair’ (so far) happened.  I am not free to really talk to either of these two people about my experience.

People who are not severe abuse and trauma survivors seem to want to rush right on past any dissociation-related conversation — because the experience of serious dissociation is NOT a part of their reality and is therefore NOT truly important to them.  They do not want to truly listen to us — and they don’t.  This is NOT OK TO ME.

Yet at the same time when others react this way, and cannot be honest with themselves about the basis of their reactions to a ‘dissociator’ they are in relationship with, they are discounting not only our experience, but OUR SELF at the same time.  Dissociation has been built into us.  It is a part of our body.  It is a part of our patterns of operation and of being alive in the world.  Dissociation is a part of US!

And as a consequence dissociation is BOUND to appear in our interactions with others — both those who mean a lot to us as well as with those who are passing folks in our life.  There will come a time when the dissociations cannot be ignored.  They have to be talked about like any other fact of life.  If these open, honest, compassionate, exploratory, learning conversations do NOT take place, there will be ruptures in our lives that cannot possibly be repaired.

Dissociation is something we are supposed to be curious about.  Dissociation is ALWAYS connected to something extremely important — something that has to do with life and death, with threat of death, with trauma.  As we continue to treat dissociation as something flawed, pathological, wrong, inconvenient, mysterious, troubling, or inconsequential, we are missing out on some of the most important lessons that life has to teach us all:  How do you survive the un-survive-able?  What gifts and abilities enable that to happen?  What are we supposed to learn from trauma?

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