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Before I head off to take one of my ‘power naps’ I want to drop some information over here on the blog from the book writing.  I have my body well trained now to turn its current off as I turn myself off and instantly go to sleep.  I have to do this when my thinking becomes too intense, when I need to deescalate the intensity of this work.  I am, thankfully, very very good at flipping my ‘off’ switch now and disappearing into sleep.  I don’t sleep long, usually about 20 minutes, but in that time I can refresh myself and wake up ready to take a different orientation to my work.

Why I never thought about what I just thought about before now is another one of those book-writing mysteries to me.  All these various pieces have been floating around peripherally in my range of thinking for a long time.  But there is something unique about this book writing that is allowing pieces of information to fit themselves together in patterns that are different than any I have recognized before.

(Dissociative Identity Disorder = DID)

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Along the thoughts about what my mother did in relation to me being her all evil child and my next younger sister being her all good child it just hit me that ALL of my mother’s children were, in fact, her separate identities.  The term ‘multiple personalities’ is no longer used, so I will have to think in terms of ‘multiple identities’.

True for a long time I have used the terms ‘projection’ and ‘splitting’ in my thoughts about the patterns in my mother’s so-disturbed mind.  I have thought in terms of ‘gee she had no boundaries between herself and her children’ and in terms of ‘how amorphous her ever-shifting Borderlines were between herself and her children’.

What I am beginning to see today as I write is that none of these terms are specific enough or accurate enough to describe what my mother did in relation to her offspring.  True, we were personification of her childhood baby dolls.  True, her motives were assigned to us.  True, we were included in a distorted ‘we’ and ‘us’ of my mother’s mind.  But this is more than that.

We WERE SHE in her mind.  She lacked the brain ability to differentiate between herself and her children.  Yet we were more than the external mirrors of her Borderline mirroring mind upon which she ‘sent out’ onto us whatever she thought and felt.  No, we in fact DID NOT EXIST as separate human beings from her, and because all six of us siblings were born into this madness, none of us from birth grew up knowing we were fully human.

This DID NOT just happen to me, though the effects of her focus on me of ALL she despised in herself and could not tolerate kept me as her devil’s child in a very ‘special’ place — equaled only by the ‘special’ place she put my sister in as God’s child.

So we were my mother’s altered personalities.   We were her alters.  We were she.  Oh, ICK!  ‘Projection’, ‘splitting’ and a ‘lack of boundaries’ does not begin to describe what THIS reality was like.  I am not at all sure that ‘dissociation’ even begins to address what this reality was like.  Well, no more thinking about this just now.  Time to turn myself OFF and take a nap!

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Instead of getting an Easter basket full of candy in 1957 when I was 5 1/2, I was getting yet another toxic dose of this:

“Recent research suggests that early chronic trauma negatively affects brain development and body stress response systems (DeBellis et al., 1999a, 1999b).  In this formulation it is important to emphasize that early neglect and early trauma have similar effects.  Recent neurobiological research suggests that neglect and absence of care in infancy are traumatic because they create ongoing feelings of intense anxiety and helplessness.  Children with a history of severe early neglect show many PTSD symptoms, especially dissociation and hyperarousal (DeBellis, 2005).  Chronic trauma causes the HPA system to become overactive and more sensitive to future stress.  Children with histories of chronic abuse and trauma have greater concentrations of stress hormones than non traumatized children.  The longer the exposure to trauma, the higher were the abnormal concentrations of stress hormones and neurotransmitters (DeBellis et al., 1999a).  These biochemical changes mean that the stress response systems of traumatized children are activated much of the time, even when no stressors are present, and also that they become more active when stress is mild.  Essentially, the nervous system responds inappropriately, as if severe stressors were present.  Behaviorally, this biochemical overactivity translates into symptoms of PTSD:  hyperarousal, hypervigilance, high anxiety, and difficulty in sleeping.  In a highly reactive child these symptoms may surface so often that he appears to have ADHD; Perry, 1997 [sic]).  In severe cases of persistent abuse and neglect, pervasive developmental disorders may result (Nelson & Carver, 1998).

“The necessity of being constantly on alert has the potential to interfere with development in many ways, especially in young children whose self-regulatory and cognitive skills are not yet well developed.  Maladapted stress response systems have especially negative impacts on the regulation of arousal and emotion:  “Chronic stress increases the ability of the amygdala to learn and express fear associations, while at the same time reducing the ability of the prefrontal cortex to control fear…a vicious cycle in which increased fear and anxiety lead to more stress [and] further dysregulation” (Quirk, 2007, p. 39).   The individual’s ability to appraise environmental cues and respond in a modulated way is impaired by the automatic and overreactive quality of the stress response (Schore, 2001).  A traumatized child who has witnessed violence or been abused spends a great deal of energy scanning the behavior of others for signs of threat.  She becomes attuned to nonverbal cues that signal the potential for violence.  High arousal overshadows and interferes with other brain activities such as curiosity, concentration, and motivation to learn.

“Finally, studies using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have shown that children traumatized in the first few years have smaller brain volumes overall, in addition to other brain abnormalities, including delays in myelination, negative effects of stress hormones on the prefrontal cortex, and decreased density of corpus callosum, the network of nerve fibers that links and carries messages between the two hemispheres of the brain (DeBellis, 2005; DeBellis et al., 1999B; Teicher et al., 2004).”  (Child Development, Third Edition: A Practitioner’s Guide (Social Work Practice with Children and Families) by Douglas Davies (Hardcover – Jul 23, 2010) The Guilford Press; Third Edition (July 23, 2010) pages 51-52

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+YET ANOTHER ARTICLE ABOUT ‘ALL THAT REALLY MATTERS ABOUT INFANT-CHILD ABUSE’

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I thank blog reader, Monica, for providing me the link to this important article from MSNBC:

Effects of sexual abuse last for decades

Study finds levels of so-called stress hormone are altered for years, sometimes causing physical and mental problems, researchers find — By Joan Raymond

The findings of this 23-year-long study following the lives of women who were sexually abused “by a male living in the home” parallels the important findings the Center for Disease Control (CDC) is documenting in their research on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) studies.

Many sexual abuse consequences are the same as ones suffered by child abuse that does not include sexual abuse.  EXTREME STRESS DURING IMPORTANT EARLY GROWTH STAGES changes the direction physiological development takes.

Resiliency factors available to traumatized children need to be studied equally with the traumas that create such damaging stress.  Without this information nothing useful can be said about what contributes to some people having much more ‘damage’ than others seem to.

Information in studies needs to also be gathered about the overall environment the abused child is living in.  Most importantly, was the abused child’s mother abused herself as a child?  What kinds of attachment patterns were present in the home?  It is very hard for me to imagine sexual abuse happening in a home where safe and secure healthy parents are present.  That means the child did not have safe and secure attachments in the first place.

All research on healing from any kind of trauma concludes that safe and secure attachments to other people who help the sufferer process the trauma – as well as STAY SAFE – make the biggest possible difference in the quality of long term recovery from trauma.  This fact is a MILLION TIMES more important for young children!!!

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Further information about the work of the authors of the sexual abuse research study, Dr. Penelope Trickett and Dr. Frank Putnam can be found by Google searching these terms:  ‘trickett putman sexual abuse’

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Another important article to take a look at:

The Impact of Maltreatment on the Developing Child

By Dr. Dana M. Hagel

“Recent neuroimaging studies demonstrate that neuroanatomy is significantly altered among individuals who have experienced childhood maltreatment and abuse-related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.”

“The psychological trauma of maltreatment triggers the complex neurochemical and hormonal systems involved in the stress response and in emotional regulation.  When child experiences an abusive insult, in their glucocorticoid [our body’s own steroid system], noradrenergic, and vasopressin-oxytocin systems are activated; this highly adaptive response allows for survival in a dangerous environment.  Chronic activation, however, may result in permanent changes in brain chemistry, structure, and function.  [I believe it is also vitally important that we realize these changes happen in our entire body, not just in our brain — including our nervous system and our immune system!] Over time, maltreated children are at risk for the development of an exaggerated response to relatively minor stress.  Compounding this insult, maltreated children are forced to respond to environmental threats (family violence), rather than engaging in activities necessary for the development of complex emotional, behavioral, and cognitive functioning.”  [bold type is mine]

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This is exactly what I have been thinking about as I begin now to write my response to the 6^th question my daughter has given me for our book.  It wasn’t ONLY that my mother terrified and assaulted me for 18 years that hurt me.  It wasn’t ONLY the additional isolating confinements of long duration she forced me to bear.  All of these things were combined with the fact that I could not interact with the world in anything like a normal way – so that I was at the SAME TIME deprived of all the OTHER developmentally-necessary activities that SHOULD have been happening for me.

Abuse in dangerous early environments creates a DOUBLE WHAMMY this way!!  I do not believe the harm to we early abuse survivors can ever be adequately measured!  But these kinds of research efforts mentioned in this post HELP because they let survivors and ‘the public’ know that what early abuse is and what it does MATTERS!!!  OH, do we survivors KNOW THIS!!!!!!

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Infant and child abuse survivors very often suffer from alterations in their physiological development because of the extreme stress caused them by the people who were supposed to take care of them.  Trauma and abuse change brain development — a fact that makes it all the more important for survivors to begin to understand ways that we can assist our brain to work better in spite of the changes that may have happened to us.

I stumbled upon this website on the brain today – LOTS of great and easy to understand information, fun exercises and thought provoking insights about the 3-pound miracle inside our skull.  Check this out!!

For example:

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 This picture from a slide I just discovered last Thursday is connected to the two abuse memories from my childhood (age 5 1/2) written about in the posts with links below this picture.  Now that I can see the picture bigger than its original one inch size, I can see two Easter baskets against the wall.  I believe one of them was mine.  I have no idea who the second one could have been for – there were only four children in the family at this time.

I can also see that my siblings don’t look particularly sad in this picture.  Nor should they have.  We were all pure, beautiful and innocent children being mothered by an insane Borderline sadistic terrorist.  How they felt having witnessed the hours of terrible abuse of me from the night before — that I was shocked to realize was still going on even the next morning, Easter Sunday while my siblings were posing in this picture — I cannot ever know.

I can never speak for how my siblings experienced the nearly continual rages my mother had toward me — and her abuse of me.  I am in the process of writing my own story — and that story is NOT my siblings’ story any more than it is my mother’s or my father’s.  It seems very strange to me that I should encounter this picture just after writing the two abuse memories that are sandwiched around the time this picture was taken — within hours.

My daughter has just forwarded to me Question #6 of the eventual 19 questions that I am answering as I tell my story.  I am now in my four day ‘waiting’ period of preparing myself to respond in writing to Question #6.  Therefore I will offer nothing more about this picture now.  I will need to decide if I am going to back up and write about this picture within the body of Question #5 which I have already finished, or if I am going to start my response to #6 with this picture.

All I can say right now is that this depicted ‘situation’ was so common during my childhood that it WAS my and my siblings’ reality.  Linda was simply missing from most of the ongoing life of my family as I was being ‘punished’ in bed, in a corner — having been beaten — with all the other etc.  that accompanied my mother’s madness about me.

(The Fox memory) – +WRITING A BOOK? MY STORIES? WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?

(This picture belongs between these two memories – related to last night’s post) – +ME: THE INVISIBLE CHILD MISSING

(The Bubble Gum memory) – +AN EXAMPLE: ABUSE MEMORY AND FINDING OUR OWN GOODNESS

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