Tag: dissociative identity disorder

+BORROWED SECURE ATTACHMENT: WHEN CHILD ABUSE IS NOT PASSED ON

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As I look back from my current age of 59 not at WHO I was immediately after I physically left the severely abusive home I grew up in for my first 18 years, I realize that there WAS no conscious me.  I have to look back at HOW I was at this time of my life.

HOW I was meant that I was unconscious of having a self or of being a self at all.  I have no memory of my ever self-reflecting or of my ever reflecting backwards on my first 18 years of terrible abuse and traumatic experiences.

WHAT I was also comes to mind:  I was a BODY moving through space.  That’s it.  I moved, like an empty puppet responding to this ‘freedom’ I found outside of my insanely abusive mother’s reach.  In fact, that’s all I really had ever been – A WHAT.

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I left home as I entered Navy boot camp and at the same time entered a universe that knew nothing about me but what they witnessed of what my empty-puppet body did.

A strange image comes to mind as I write this.  I was and had always been from the moment of my birth a FIRST RESPONDER.  That’s what I had always done because that was all that I was ever allowed to do – to RESPOND immediately to stimulation that came AT me, most of it in extremely traumatic, abusive and violent form, from the outside world my body just happened to have been born into.

Nobody responded FIRST to me, a pattern that is ‘natural’ and required for a human infant to begin to form its body-brain-mind-self in the world.  I was born into a chaotic, traumatic and extremely REACTIVE environment that was controlled by my abusive mother.

There had never been a place, space, time or opportunity for Linda to be Linda except for moments I stole from the spaces in between my mother’s attacks of me.  Linda grew, developed and evolved as a LEFTOVER – formed within whatever little spaces there were for me to stretch out into – in those cracks between my mother’s attacks.

The only reason there ever were actual spaces between my mother’s attacks is that she had other responsibilities to take care of her home and her other children.  Besides, sometimes she just got tired, physically tired from her rage at me and had to take a rest.  During these times she most often secluded me in my bed or in a corner until she could ‘get back’ to actively abusing me again.

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So because I had to FIRSTLY respond to my mother, I didn’t get to put myself first in my own life.  As a result, I left home having no single clue that I was a person at all.  This fact, probably more than any other single consequence of my abusive childhood impacted my parenting history with my firstborn as it had the most amazing effect on how I treated her (and my next two children).

I didn’t have a self in the beginning at age 19 when my oldest was born.  Without a self, there was ‘nobody here’ to interfere with the self expression and development of my baby.  My instinctive first response to being a mother always was – and I mean instinctive because I was completely unconscious of this fact – was to do nothing as a mother that could possibly interfere with the self-development of my children.

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Perhaps because I had been built entirely, body-brain-mind, as a FIRST RESPONDER to my reactive delusional abusive mother I was able to make very good use of my abilities as a first responder to respond FIRST to the unique individual people my children were each born as.

It just so happens that THIS pattern, responding FIRST to the infant-child as its own person, is exactly what an infant needs to develop its own self fully on all levels as it grows its own body-brain-mind-self.

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Perhaps this is the actual root of what I term for myself as Borrowed Secure Attachment.  (I cannot personally relate to what attachment experts refer to as ‘Earned Secure Attachment’.)   As an untampered-with individual new being, all infants are born with the ability to form safe and secure attachments with their caregivers.  Left ‘hands-off’ except to be a First Responder to the INFANT itself, the infant’s natural abilities to attach will guide the relationship its earliest caregiver has with it.

Infants give the signals, all the signals needed to let its caregiver know not only WHAT it needs when there is a need, but also at the same time the infant is signaling its caregiver, “Hey, here I am!  This self-being-grown in here needs this, is sending you this signal – and by-the-way, thank you for responding to ME first!”

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Putting the infant-as-an-individual-self FIRST just happens to be what correct caregiving is all about.  Correct infant-child caregiving is NOT about the little one meeting the attachment needs of its caregivers – although doing so is often a natural SECONDARY benefit of being a parent.

Who the infant is and what the infant needs is a great parent’s FIRST concern.

And by hook and by crook – the patterns my mother created inside of me by her never responding to ME FIRST and always by responding to HER FIRST just happened to leave me with a completely wide open road inside of myself to do things pretty much RIGHT with my own children.

As Dr. Peter Fonagy suggests, there are transgenerational patterns of attachment.  I was a LUCKY one!  Because my mother’s insane abuse was so persistent and pervasive my own attachment brain-body wiring was basically left untouched!!

(Experts report that the ability to attach securely lies in the INFANT-CHILD as it reacts differently to different attachment patterns of different caregivers.)

True, I ended up with completely messed up insecure attachment patterns myself – but I was at the same time – and strangely for the same reasons – able to allow my own children to utilize the attachment-wiring-operation potential for secure attachment that they were BORN WITH.

My mother OVERWHELMED me so completely that there was nothing BUILT into me for human attachment wiring that could have (or did) enable me to overwhelm my own children.

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I call what I was able to allow to happen with my own children BORROWED secure attachment because the entire amazing, marvelous, naturally-determine ability to attach came from THEM, not from me.  I had not been built from birth with anything within myself that could have interfered with what my children were born to do naturally – and perfectly.

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I believe that our culture has a very important task of trying to elucidate what factors contribute to the average statistic that ONLY 35% of parents who were abused as children go on to abuse their own children while 65% DO NOT go on to abuse their own children.  True, the offspring of the 35% suffer terribly.  But what happens – and I mean really happens – in the cases of the 65%?

I am, most blessedly, among the 35% of nonabusing parents.  Considering the fact that my entire childhood was about NOTHING but abuse and trauma, and considering the fact that I was not allowed to form ONE SINGLE safe and secure attachment with anyone, HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?

I don’t believe in magic.  There is a very real physiological pattern within my own body that was built into me in the midst of severe abusive trauma for the first 18 years of my life that worked extremely well FOR MY OWN CHILDREN.

Even though I have a reactive disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment pattern MYSELF I did not pass it on to my children because I operated as a parent in an appropriate caregiving mode.

Attachment experts suggest that someone who has an insecure attachment pattern does not have what it takes in their own ‘wiring’ to have it easily – or naturally – turned ‘off’ so that their caregiving system can operate correctly.  I suggest that in cases such as mine where there never was an opportunity to EVER feel safe and securely attached to humans I simply had a blank slate in the ‘take care of me’ department.

I had never been able to DO ANYTHING to get my own attachment needs met.  I did not have a ‘take care of me’ repertoire on any level.  My mother, on the other hand, was the extreme opposite as she consumed EVERYTHING from me.  I was born to TAKE CARE OF HER with everything I had.

It was my job as my mother’s child from my birth to do one thing and one thing only – to BE the complete object of her displaced-projected personal BADNESS.  My mother’s NEED to make me this object of her projection CONSUMED everything about me to the point that when I left home at age 18 to enter ‘the real world’ no Linda existed other than as a First Responder (‘reactive’) – in totality – to the needs of someone outside else.

My children (as strange as this is as I write it) simply replaced my MOTHER as I FIRST RESPONDED no longer to her, but in replacement, to my own children.  Because I had never done anything but take care of my abusive mother’s needs, I must have been exquisitely prepared to take care of my own children’s needs – as those needs existed NOT IN ME – but as with my mother – as those needs existed outside of me and within my children.

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Once born a caregiver (as an infant-child recipient of complete insane abuse), always a caregiver?

NOTE:  One HUGE miracle to me is that I never once became involved with any abusive ADULT!  Because I didn’t, I haven’t spent any time wondering why not.

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+WORDPRESS SHARED THIS TODAY: 2010 in review

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The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 37,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 5 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 400 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 719 posts. There were 506 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 283mb. That’s about 1 picture per day.

The busiest day of the year was July 1st with 260 views. The most popular post that day was ++MY CHILDHOOD STORIES.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were en.wordpress.com, mail.yahoo.com, google.com, search.aol.com, and en.search.wordpress.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for sunflower, avoidant attachment, earned secure attachment, borderline mother, and stop the storm.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

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++MY CHILDHOOD STORIES April 2009

2

*Attachment Simplified – Organized Insecure Attachment – Avoidant-Dismissive October 2009

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*Attachment Simplified – Disorganized Insecure Attachment – Disorganized-Disoriented October 2009
2 comments

4

+MY MOTHER’S VAGUS NERVE: THE MAKING OF HER PERFECT BORDERLINE STORM? February 2010
7 comments

5

MY BORDERLINE MOM June 2009
6 comments

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My most sincere gratitude and appreciation goes to WordPress for all the amazing free services they provide — thank you!

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+WHEN IS A STORY A STORY?

alchemynow1 Comment

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Perhaps if I lived in a different time or a different place everyone around me would understand if I told them, “All I have left in me is one good story.”  That I cannot tell that story to the empty air would also be understood.  I can write and write and write and write, but for me writing is not the same thing as telling.

Where is a story when it’s not being told?  Is it, like our memories themselves lying around in shards and shreds, in pieces and parts within our minds — somewhere?  Or is a story a living thing that has no slumbering existence at all, existing only when it is falling from somebody’s activated lips?

Perhaps it is because so much of the body of my story as I imagine telling it, probably to my daughter, is so much about being alone in solitary confinement, in isolation and in silence (in between the terrors of traumatic abuse over those first 18 years of my life) that my story is frozen there, askew akimbo, in limbo, and cannot take on a life of its own if there is no caring listener to help it be born.

Perhaps my story– spoken (or written) into silence — would be worse than no story at all.  Perhaps, formed THAT way my story would be no story, just an ongoing pause, more of the same, a restless opera hanging around getting parts of itself stuck in cobwebs while the rest of it fades and fades and fades into silence like notes at the end of an echo.

Is a museum a museum if it’s empty?  Is an art gallery a gallery if it doesn’t contain a single piece of art?  Is a story a story if there’s nobody there to hear it but the teller?  I think not.  In all these cases I think not.

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+BLOGGING HISTORY – NEW WAYS FOR OUR SPECIES TO REMEMBER ITSELF

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+BLOGGING HISTORY – NEW WAYS FOR OUR SPECIES TO REMEMBER ITSELF

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Blogging our way through time — recording our histories — recording our histories in the making — reading histories in the moment — What I found at the end of one of Dr. Bruce Perry’s articles (link below) makes me think about how new and different our perspectives on the passage of time and our places in it are today as we participate with advances in technology to record ourselves as a species in a new way.

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“Learning the language of trauma and translating the verbal and non-verbal elements of this language will require many more years of investigation. Yet, as this investigation is underway, it is the task of all of us working with maltreated children [ME:  and adult survivors] to educate our peers and the rest of society that this language exists…. To educate our society that traumatic events, like other experience, change the brain. Further, that the brain stores elements of the traumatic events as cognitive memory, motor memory, emotional memory and state memory, altering the functional capacity of the traumatized individual. And, in the end, by robbing the individual potential of millions of children each year, childhood trauma and neglect robs the potential of our families, our communities and our societies. (page 16)”

Info above and below is from this article:  Memories of Fear: How the Brain Stores and Retrieves Physiologic States, Feelings, Behaviors and Thoughts from Traumatic Events by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD

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Beginning at the end of page 16 Perry talks about trauma and history – and what is human history but what we remember of what happened?  I am copying this portion of the text found at this link into this post – in part because it reminds me so much of what all bloggers are doing today – recording our history and our perspectives on history-in-the-making in the ongoing moments of the present.

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“The memory of trauma is carried not only through the life of the individual by their neurobiology but it is carried in the life of a family through family myths, childrearing practices and belief systems. Major traumatic events in the history of a people or culture become memorialized, as well, and carried forward across generations in our literature, our laws and our very social structures.

“It is the unique property of living systems to carry forward elements of past experience – indeed, for all living systems, the present is contingent upon and a reflection of that past experience. In a very true sense, a body collective – a group – is a living, dynamic system. And, as the individual carries its own history forward using the apparatus of neurobiological mechanisms related to memory, each living group carries its memories forward in time. Yet living groups – families, clans, societies – carry this information forward using different mechanisms of recording and storage.

“Over the history of humankind, the methods for recording and storing the experiences of the group have evolved. In our distant past, humans living [in] groups passed experience from generation to generation using oral tradition – and sociocultural practices – language, arts, belief systems, rules, law – all were reflections of the past – and with each generation, modification, amendment, and alteration of the past ‘memory’ was modified by present experience. With the development of written language, information could be passed across generations more efficiently. Sociocultural advance occurred at an increased rate, made possible by more efficient ‘remembering’ of the lessons (good and bad) from the past. The ‘brain’ of humankind – the libraries of the world — kept ‘civilization’ alive through its darkest moments – and even if generation after generation during a given period in history did not take advantage of this ‘memory’ – the information was not lost to humankind.

“Later in history, again, with the introduction of the printing press, the past was more efficiently stored and passed on. Books became available for everyone. More people became literate. Information of all sorts – arts, science, social studies– was stored in books. Again, a tremendous advancement in human sociocultural evolution can be traced to this process – to literacy and widespread education. Information from the past – primarily cognitive information – enriched the present. The rate of creativity was accelerated; invention and innovation – new ideas, machines, products, processes – were facilitated by the more efficient sociocultural ‘memory’ allowed by books and literacy. Now, in the span of a lifetime, the accumulated and distilled experience of thousands of generations could be absorbed – and acted upon to create sociocultural advances.

And now, we are in the first generations of a new era of recording, storing and transmitting information – electronic media – tapes, photographs, videos, films – all immortalize the experiences of humankind. The electronic media allow a unique and

different form for the memory of an individual, family, community and society to pass from generation to generation.

“There is great hope for humankind in these advances. In the past, the inefficient methods of recording, storing and passing on the horror of war, rape, neglect, abuse, starvation, misogyny, slavery – allowed these lessons of living to be edited, modified, distorted and, with tragic consequences, forgotten. Only elements of the experience of war were passed across generations – the heroism of an individual, the success of the nation — and the emotional ‘memory’ of war – the hate, rage, death, loss – has been transformed, altered and, all too often, forgotten.

“Creative artists have always played the role of ‘emotional’ memory for a culture. In ways that standard recording of simple facts and figures cannot convey, a painting, poem, novel, or film can capture the emotional ‘memory’ of an experience. But in a society where access to and ‘artistic’ literacy is low, the emotional lessons of the past are easily lost. And when the last veteran of each distant war died, an element of the emotional ‘memory’ of that horror died as well. Unable to carry the emotional memory of war to the next generation – history could much more easily repeat itself – or more honestly, we could much more easily repeat history. But with documentary and creative film and video, which can convey both the fact and the emotion, maybe it will be harder for us to forget the past – and we, therefore, will be not so doomed to repeat it.

“Yet the ever present danger of recording, storing and passing on false images, false stories, false history can be equally destructive. The responsible use of film, video, electronic storage may allow us to use these advances to promote and pass on those qualities which create, sustain and grow our humanity and, over many generations, to leave behind those qualities which rob our humanity (racism, misogyny, factionalism).

Can we change our world to create fewer traumatic memories to carry into the next generations – fewer traumatic events to shape our children who will create our future social structures?

“How can we heal the scars of individual and group trauma that haunt us today? Can we ever make racism, misogyny, maltreatment of children – distant memories? There are solutions. These conditions are not the inevitable legacy of our past. When an individual becomes self-aware, there is the potential for insight. With insight comes the potential for altered behavior. With altered behavior comes the potential to diminish the transgenerational passage of dysfunctional or destructive ideas and practices.

“And so it must be for groups. As a society, we cannot develop true insight without self-awareness. Enduring socio-cultural changes in racism, misogyny and maltreatment of children cannot occur without institutional and cultural insight and the resulting altered institutional and cultural behavior. The challenge for our generation is to understand the dynamics and realities of our human living groups in a way that can result in group insight – which, inevitably, will lead to the understanding that we must change our institutionalized ignorance and maltreatment of children. (pages 16 – 18)”

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+THE MISSING MONTHS OF THE ‘ANTWONE FISHER’ MOVIE-STORY: WHAT WE MOST NEED TO KNOW

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I rewatched the movie “Antwone Fisher” yesterday.  This movie is about an adult working to heal from terrible child abuse inspired by a true story and marks Denzel Washington’s directorial debut.

From my point of view, what the movie never describes is what probably makes the biggest difference in the outcome of this story.  What were Antwone’s first foster parents like?  Did they love that parentless infant RIGHT?  Did they form a safe and secure attachment with the baby?

According to the story Antwone was removed at age two from his first foster home he had been placed in when he was two months old.  For all concerns about interfering with early bonding-attachment relationships, I do not believe that age two is a permanently damaging age to change primary early attachments.  In this case the child was moved to a horribly abusive home, but nothing in the story addresses the nature and the quality of the earliest, most critically important caregiver attachment patterns BEFORE the age of two that impact the direction that all fundamental physiological development follows.  (See update in comment section to this post.)

I would say by looking at the story as it is presented in this movie that Antwone’s first two years HAD to have taken place within an adequately non-malevolent caregiver-attachment environment.  The remarkable recovery that occurs post-terrible LATER abuse would NOT have followed the same course it did if Antwone’s physiological body-brain development had been changed by severe trauma during his infancy.

When looking at our own recovery from our own severe child abuse it remains MOST IMPORTANT that we understand how profoundly our physiological development is impacted by our earliest experiences in our environment.  If we continually struggle to overcome the horrors of severe abuse experiences that we KNOW about, and can never manage to ‘get our wings’ and soar out of the ugly mire of abuse we know we experienced, I would ALWAYS say that it’s most likely that our body-brain development was changed by trauma in profound ways during the earliest months of our life.

I personally know that if the first two years of my life had been perfectly FINE I would not be in the same body NOW that I am in – no matter how severely I had been abused post-two-years-old.  It is the Trauma Altered Development that happened to me before that age because I was BORN into a malevolent, abusive and traumatic malevolent environment that has created these lifelong difficulties that I (along with all infant-toddler severe trauma-abuse survivors) continue to struggle with.

Because the presentation of Antwone’s story in this film completely ignores those first two MOST CRITICAL years of the child’s life we are left guessing that all infant-child abuse survivors could recover by following a pathway such as this survivor did.  Not so.  Not so.  Not so!

It is not ‘getting lucky enough’ to benefit from high quality therapy that makes the biggest difference.  It is not ‘being willing enough’ to face our traumatic childhood memories of experience that makes the biggest difference, either.  It is not ‘being genetically superior’ or even ‘being resilient enough’ that matters most.

As Dr. Bruce Perry clearly states, children are not born resilient.  They are born MALLEABLE.  When the earliest environment deprives a rapidly growing and developing infant-toddler of what it needs for its body-brain to follow an optimal pathway, Trauma Altered Development will occur – BECAUSE of this malleability.  The resilience a little person needs in order to develop a body most able to ‘deal with’ severe traumas anytime after the age of two comes in ONE WAY and ONE WAY only – FROM THE PEOPLE WHO CARE FOR THAT BABY from the time it is conceived UNTIL it has ESPECIALLY reached the developmental milestones a body has built into it by two years of age.

As far as I can tell a description of these first critical months of experience are complete missing from the Antwone Fisher story.

Is this same time-frame description missing from your child abuse story?  If you continue a struggle to heal from early traumas you DO know about in a body that does not seem to be operating ‘quite right’, my guess is that whatever description of your first months of life that you GUESS happened to you needs to be closely examined in the bright light of reality.

None of us just happened to end up in a Trauma Altered Development body through bad luck.  We were built this way because we grew from (conception) birth in a caregiving environment that did NOT do exactly that:  Give us the care we needed prior to age two so that we could have a body healthy and resilient enough to fully process and recover from our later abuse.

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+BOYCOTTING FACEBOOK – A COMMUNITY OF NON-CARERS ABOUT INFANT-CHILD ABUSE?

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For any human being to care about infant-child abuse SHOULD be, in my thinking, a part of BEING HUMAN — a part of one’s life, and NOT merely a ’cause’ that some people choose to be concerned about while everyone else ignores it.

Today for some reason this topic flashed into a raging inferno for me, and in response to my Facebook friend community’s complete non-reponse to even ONE of my occasional postings about the topic of infant-child abuse, I have canceled my membership in that community.

The suffering of any infant-child under the terrible burden of maltreatment HAS to be the concern of EVERY MEMBER of a healthy human community.  Those of us who are survivors of the kinds of trauma I write about on this blog know absolutely that what happened to all of us happened because NOBODY cared enough to notice, to prevent it, to intervene, to protect us, or to STOP IT.

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I am not talking about a trivial matter.  I am talking about CRIMES against helpless, powerless infants and children.  From what I see around me — on Facebook included — “If it didn’t happen to me and it isn’t happening to my children, WHO CARES?”

A HORRIBLE attitude in my thinking that makes those who refuse to place the well-being of ALL infants and children at the top of our personal and societal pile of concerns as guilty as the perpetrators!

The body-brain that severely abused, neglected, traumatized and maltreated infant-children develop is NOT maladaptive in the bigger picture because it suited a specific environment surrounding the infant-child that REQUIRED that these adaptations happen so that the victim could survive – PERIOD.  Most often perpetrators of the abuse I write about are among trauma-altered survivors themselves — and the abuse they cause is merely a symptom of that fact.

+’SUPER INFANT-CHILD ABUSE’, WORSE THAN WAR CRIMES, IN THE REALM OF GENOCIDE-INFANTICIDE

EVERY responsible and humane adult in our society needs to take infant-child abuse most seriously.  EVERYONE needs to educate themselves about what it IS, what it does to its survivors for a lifetime, how to notice, how to intervene, how to help prevent — and evidently HOW AND WHY TO CARE.

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The neurobiological consequences of early stress and childhood maltreatment.

Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 27 (2003) 33-44

Martin H. Teicher, Susan L. Andersen, Ann Polcari, Carl M. Anderson, Carryl P. Navalta, Dennis M. Kim

“In our hypothesis, postnatal neglect or other maltreatment serves to elicit a cascade of stress responses that organizes the brain to develop along a specific pathway selected to facilitate reproductive success and survival in a world of deprivation and strife.  This pathway, however, is costly as it is associated with an increased risk of developing serious medical and psychiatric disorders and is unnecessary and maladaptive in a more benign environment.  [page 39 – found by clicking on article title above]

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The same super-materialistic, spiritually deprived, selfish, object-oriented society that allows infant-child abuse to exist at all is the same one that DOESN’T care.  Facebook appears to me simply a mirror of that society and I want no part of it.

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+REPAIRED YESTERDAY’S LINKS – CRITICAL INFO FOR EARLY ABUSE-TRAUMA SURVIVORS

+EARLY ABUSE AND TRAUMA SURVIVORS NEVER GET A HOLIDAY

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+REPAIRED YESTERDAY’S LINKS – CRITICAL INFO FOR EARLY ABUSE-TRAUMA SURVIVORS

alchemynow2 Comments

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My apologies for the trouble with the links in yesterday’s important post

+EARLY ABUSE AND TRAUMA SURVIVORS NEVER GET A HOLIDAY

I think I have them all straightened out now.  As I Googled myself around regarding the titles and topics represented by those links I found myself being awed for those of us severe infant-child abuse and trauma survivors who actually MOSTLY are able to function!

What a menu of terrible difficulties this area of study contains!  I don’t believe there is ANYTHING more important for us as survivors to understand than the information is you will find at the end of these links.

That no  professional EVER even MENTIONED how early severe trauma and neglect can change an infant-child’s physiological development is, to me, CRIMINAL!!!

There is NO, and I MEAN NO psychological or psychiatric ‘theory’ that can begin to remotely help us if it does not address the neurobiological CHANGES that happened to our growing and developing BODY on all of our levels as we survived our traumas!

The kinds of changes that are described in these articles presented in yesterday’s post are what happened to my mother, to my father — and most definitely happened to ME!

We CANNOT consider our healing as severe early abuse and trauma survivors without understanding the FACTS as these articles present them.  THEORIES are of no use to us WHATSOEVER!

We have to educate ourselves with this critically important information.  Any survivor who is seeing a therapist must determine if that person KNOWS this information.  If they don’t, give them this actual link to my post of yesterday,

+EARLY ABUSE AND TRAUMA SURVIVORS NEVER GET A HOLIDAY

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/2010/12/25/early-trauma-survivors-never-get-a-holiday/

If your therapist will not listen to you about this critically important information, I would suggest that you find one that WILL!  So-called ‘mental health treatment’ that does not operate for survivors from this informed foundation of information is no better than BLOODLETTING treatments for disease.

The Trauma Altered Development we endured changed our PHYSICAL body — the same one we have to live within for the rest of our life.  Any treatment for a ‘physical problem’ that is not based on facts is useless!!

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+EARLY ABUSE AND TRAUMA SURVIVORS NEVER GET A HOLIDAY

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I know that I am not alone on this 2010 Christmas Day in my awareness that nothing special about this cultural holiday is going to alter who I am or how I am in the world as a severe infant-child abuse and trauma survivor.  Forty three people have come to my Stop the Storm blog already this morning – and it for them that I offer this post because considering the lifelong forced physiological adaptations an abused-traumatized little body makes leaves us on EVERY day of our life to face its consequences.

For all of us who on this Christmas Day find ourselves having to think about this topic, I say that what follows is the tip of the iceberg of what truly happened to us as a consequence of the early infant-child severe abuse and trauma that we have survived — and that changed our physiological development.

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Although this article isn’t the newest one on the block (1995), I absolutely trust its foremost author, Dr. Bruce Perry, and therefore know that it is an important one for what I am thinking about today.  This entire article can be read online by clicking on the following link:

Childhood Trauma, the Neurobiology of Adaptation, and “Use-Dependent” Development of the Brain:  How “States” Become “Traits”

Abstract

“Childhood trauma has profound impact on the emotional, Behavioral, cognitive, social, and physical functioning of children.  Developmental experiences determine the organization and functional status of the mature brain.  The impact of traumatic experiences on the development and function of the brain are discussed in context of the basic principles of neurodevelopment.  There are various adaptive mental and physical responses to trauma, including physiological hyperarousal and dissociation.  Because the developing brain organizes and internalizes new information in a use-dependent fashion, the more a child is in a state of hyperarousal or dissociation, the more likely they are to have neuropsychiatric symptoms following trauma.  The acute adaptive states, when they persist, can become maladaptive traits.”

Conclusions

“Children and infants use a variety of adaptive response patterns in the face of threat, and, in a use-dependent fashion, internalize aspects of these responses, organizing the developing brain.  There are a variety of neuropsychiatric symptoms that result when these patterns of neural activation persist.  This has implications for research, clinical assessment, intervention, and prevention.

“More important, however, is that understanding the impact of experience on the developing child by using a neurodevelopmental conceptualization offers certain directions for our culture….  Profound sociocultural and public policy implications arise from understanding the critical role of early experience in determining the functional capacity of the mature adult – and therefore our society.  Persistence of the destructive myth that “children are resilient” will prevent millions of children, and our society, from meeting their true potential.  Persistence of the pervasive maltreatment of children in the face of decreasing global and national resources will lead, inevitably, to sociocultural devolution.

“It need not be so.”

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In other words, these patterns not only BUILD the brain, they are BUILT INTO the brain (and nervous system, stress-calm response system, immune system).  This is the same process that Dr. Perry is describing is the one Dr. Martin Teicher concludes leads to “an evolutionarily altered brain.”

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Maltreatment and Its Effects on Early Brain Development

Language Development and Reactive Attachment Disorder in Children

Attachment Disorders

The post-traumatic response in children and adolescents

Aggression and Violence: The Neurobiology of Experience Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD

Altered brain development following global neglect in early childhood by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD and Ronnie Pollard, MD

Biological Relativity: Time and the Developing Child by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD

Brain Structure and Function I: Basics of Organization by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD

Brain Structure and Function II: Special Topics Informing Work with Maltreated Children by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD

Child Development And Post-traumatic Stress Disorder After Hurricane Exposure by Alan M. Delamater, PhD, and E. Brooks Applegate, PhD

Childhood Experience and the Expression of Genetic Potential: What Childhood Neglect Tells Us About Nature and Nurture by BRUCE D. PERRY, MD, PhD

Childhood Trauma, the Neurobiology of Adaptation and Use-dependent Development of the Brain: How States become Traits by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, Ronnie A. Pollard, MD, Toi L. Blakley, MD, William L. Baker, MS, Domenico Vigilante

Curiosity, Pleasure and Play: A Neurodevelopmental Perspective by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, Lea Hogan, MEd, and Sarah J. Marlin

Curiosity: The Fuel of Development by Bruce Duncan Perry, MD, PhD

Decoding Traumatic Memory Patterns at the Cellular Level by Thomas R. McClaskey, DC, CHT, BCETS

Dysregulation of the Right Brain: A Fundamental Mechanism of Traumatic Attachment and the Psychopathogenesis of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder by Allan N. Schore

Emotion: An Evolutionary By-Product of the Neural Regulation of the Autonomic Nervous System by Stephen W. Porges

Homeostasis, Stress, Trauma and Adaptation: A Neurodevelopmental View of Childhood Trauma by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD and Ronnie Pollard, MD

Incubated in Terror: Neurodevelopmental Factors in the ‘Cycle of Violence’ by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD

Memories of Fear: How the Brain Stores and Retrieves Physiologic States, Feelings, Behaviors and Thoughts from Traumatic Events by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD

NEUROBIOLOGICAL SEQUELAE OF CHILDHOOD TRAUMA: Post-traumatic Stress Disorders in Children by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD

Neurodevelopmental Adaptations to Violence: How Children Survive the Intragenerational Vortex of Violence by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD

Neurodevelopment and the Psychobiological Roots of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Texas Youth Commission Prevention Summary

NEURODEVELOPMENT AND THE PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY OF TRAUMA I: Conceptual Considerations for Clinical Work with Maltreated Children by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD

NEURODEVELOPMENT AND THE PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY OF TRAUMA II: Clinical Work Along the Alarm-Fear-Terror Continuum by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD

Neurodevelopmental aspects of childhood anxiety disorders: Neurobiological responses to threat by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD

The post–traumatic response in children and adolescents by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD

Neuroscience Tutorial The Washington University School of Medicine

Neurodevelopmental Impact of Childhood Trauma: Adaptive Responses to Childhood Trauma: Focus on Dissociation (A ChildTrauma Academy Presentation) by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD

Neurodevelopmental Impact of Child Maltreatment: Implications for Practice, Programs and Policy (A ChildTrauma Academy Presentation) by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD

The Meaning in Words by Dr. Bruce Perry

Noradrenergic and Serotonergic Function in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder by Steven M. Southwick, MD, John H. Krystal, MD, J. Douglas Bremner, MD, C. A. Morgan III, MD, Andreas L. Nicolaou, PhD, Linda M. Nagy, MD, David R. Johnson, PhD, George R. Heninger, MD, and Dennis S. Charney, MD

Persisting Psychophysiological Effects of Traumatic Stress: The Memory of ‘States’ — [DOC] Download by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, Leslie Conroy, MD, & Al Ravitz, MD

Phenomenology and Psychobiology of the Intergenerational Response to Trauma by Rachel Yehuda, PhD, Jim Schmeidler, PhD, Abbie Elkin, BA, Elizabeth Houshmand, BA, Larry Siever, MD, Karen Binder-Brynes, PhD, Milton Wainberg, MD, Dan Aferiot, MSW, Alan Lehman, MSW, Ling Song Guo, MD, Ren Kwei Yang, MD (1997)

The Effects of a Secure Attachment Relationship on Right Brain Development, Affect Regulation, and Infant Mental Health by Allan N. Schore

Smaller Hippocampal Volume Predicts Pathologic Vulnerability to Psychological Trauma by Mark W. Gilbertson, Martha E. Shenton, Aleksandra Ciszewski, Kiyoto Kasai, Natasha B. Lasko, Scott P. Orr, and Roger K. Pitman

The Effects of Early Relational Trauma on Right Brain Development, Affect Regulation, and Infant Mental Health by Allan N. Schore

The Impact of Abuse and Neglect on the Developing Brain by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD and John Marcellus, MD

The Neurophysiology of Dissociation and Chronic Disease by Robert C. Scaer

The Neuropsychological Basis of Potential Co-occurrence of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury With Posttraumatic Stress Disorder by Robert B. Sica, PhD, BCETS

The Contribution of Early Traumatic Events to Schizophrenia in Some Patients: A Traumagenic Neurodevelopmental Model by JOHN READ, BRUCE D. PERRY, ANDREW MOSKOWITZ, AND JAN CONNOLLY

Effects of Traumatic Events in Childhood by Bruce Perry

Surviving Childhood by Bruce Perry

Traumatized Children: How Childhood Trauma Influences Brain Development by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD

Violence and Childhood: How Persisting Fear Can Alter the Developing Child’s Brain Special ChildTrauma Academy Web Site version of: The Neurodevelopmental Impact of Violence in Childhood  Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD

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May we find increasing peace and calm -- photograph "Quinault Waterfall" by Robert Kraft from publicdomainpictures.net

+ALL MY MOTHER’S ABUSE? IT WAS THE FORCED ISOLATION THAT HURT/CHANGED ME THE MOST

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I feel today like a survivor of an evil experiment designed to determine exactly  how much a human infant-child could be deprived of and still go on living.  I feel like an inhabitant of a freaks-only sideshow as I realize gradually over the span of my lifetime how completely, thoroughly and vilely abusive the first 18 years of my life truly were.

In some ways the absence of overt sexual abuse just makes my own personal experience all the stranger because that’s about all that was missing short of broken bones and actual death to make the first 18 years of my life so unique that I doubt I will ever encounter anyone who will ever be able to share with me what their own experience of a similar infant-childhood was like — or what it did to them.

My mother’s sense of her own needs for self preservation was enough to keep me from ending up at a doctor’s office or a hospital as a result of her violence toward me.  That and the fact that as soon as I was old enough I participated actively with her violent beatings to prevent my body from being broken to bits as I avoided calamitous crashes into solid objects.

Yet after all the years I have spent trying to ‘get real’ about the reality of my infant-childhood, it is only now at age 59 that I am finally finding myself face-to-face with one of the most critical factors of my mother’s unique abuse of me — the solitary confinement and isolation she encapsulated me within.

As a survivor of the 18-year abuse experiment I endured, right now I would say that for all the thousands of physical beatings, for all the nearly constant verbal abuse I endured, for all the terror and sadness I felt, my reality today was probably most powerfully and negatively influenced by extreme isolation.

And again, the same as with all the other abuse my mother did to me, she isolated and confined me as early as she could after my birth — because she COULD.

My mother was perfect at what she did.  She was perfect at making sure nobody interfered, nobody questioned, nobody noticed.  She created the perfect prison for me, the perfect trap, the perfect living tomb that I had no hope of escaping from.  She spun me into the center of her madly abusive psychosis and kept me there for 18 years.

Yet today I would say that for all the voracious physical and verbal attacks against me it was the fact that she completely disallowed me from having any meaningful human contact that was the aspect of her abuse that has most contributed to my lack of well-being.  All the damage my mother did to me impacted the way my body-brain physiologically developed, but with the theft of my opportunity to engage in positive meaningful human contact nearly all of my permanent internal ‘wiring’ was created to operate within a human vacuum.

Understatement:  NOT GOOD for me as a member of a social species.

Does it give me any consolation and comfort to know that, given parallel deprivation and abuse from birth, there isn’t a member of any mammal species on earth whose physiological development wouldn’t have been as equally and negatively interfered with as mine was?

No.

My only ray of hope is that there is something about my extreme and bizarre story of infant-child abuse that can offer something of vital importance to somebody about what humans truly NEED from birth to live a life of well-being.

What I would say today is that for all the different kinds of abuse, neglect, trauma and malevolent treatment little ones might be forced to endure and survive it is the deprivation of caring, positive meaningful human contact that damages us the MOST.  The absence of this contact, call it safe and secure human attachment for ease of translation across the various fields of human developmental study, most detrimentally alters the physiological developing wiring in the body-nervous system-brain of an infant-child.

Given the most extreme and severe cases these changes are permanent and irreversible, and in members of our human species they are accompanied by corresponding FEELINGS of suffering and awareness of loss.

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I don’t write to gain sympathy or pity.  I write to document as accurately as I can what the long-term permanent consequences of severe abuse and deprivation from birth can and will most likely do to its survivors.

Through my own process I am clarifying what I see as priorities — no matter how severely abused an infant-child abuse survivor was.  Digging around for the actual specifics of this event or that one — no matter how fundamentally overwhelmed with sorrows someone’s formative years actually were — pales in importance when compared with what we need to understand about the entire array of human contact experiences we had.

Social species’ members are NOT designed to be raised in solitary confinement or isolation.  Without positive and caring human contact within our immediate circle of infant-childhood life — no matter what other abuses are going on — we cannot escape the consequences of physiological developmental changes that happen to us and leave us as outsiders in the great circle of humanity.

As I become increasingly clear about the worst damage I suffered during the 18 years of abuse I suffered from my mother, and as I reconsider some of the stories I have written of my experiences, I am realizing that it was the power my mother had to remove me from human contact that has made me continue to suffer in my life.

It was the isolation my mother enforced to keep my father, my grandmother and my siblings away from me that removed the most important resiliency factor I needed to have come out of those terribly abusive years better than I did.

It was the thousands and thousands of hours of being made to lie in my bed as a child and the thousands of hours of being stood in corners all alone while everyone else went on with their lives as if I did not exist, as if I were dead that created the internal isolation burden that I suffer most from today.  It wasn’t the beatings or the terrible screaming and verbal abuse or being dragged around by my hair, not the bruises and cuts and abrasions to my flesh that damaged me most.

It was the being forced to be absolutely alone.

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*Age 5 – THE BUBBLE GUM

*AGE 6 – FIRST GRADE — NIGHT ON THE STOOL

*Age 7 – Sad me, homestead birthday BBQ

*AGE 7 – MUD PUDDLE INCIDENT

*Age 9 – BLOODY NOSE

*Age 10 – 1960-61 fantasy locked in the semi trailer

*Age 14 – SILENT TREATMENT

*Age 14 – Gardening and the Sabotage

*Age 15 – FORCED TO WATCH AN ALASKAN SUNRISE

*Age 15 – MY ‘VISION’ – ALONE NAKED IN THE WOODS SINGING

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+MY HOLIDAY BLUES — ANY WORSE THAN USUAL?

alchemynowLeave a comment

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Well, if this is the jolly time of year I sure don’t feel one bit jolly.  Family is too far away.  Trying to go ‘out in public’ to make some kind of human connection is, well, just about hopeless.  So here I am home alone again, as usual.

by Petr Kratochvil -- on publicdomainpictures.net

I wouldn’t MIND that so much if the ratio weren’t so completely lopsided.  Maybe one percent of the time when I am ‘out there’ where the ‘other people’ are I MIGHT feel a little bit connected to someone.  But like a groove worn all the way through one of those old fashioned LP vinyl records, my being alone just seems to be a fundamental fact of my existence – no matter how much I wish it (I) were otherwise.

I will go out on Christmas day to a local community dinner and that will help — in part because I know the people who have no other place to go that gather there are more like me than most people are in the world.  That still won’t guarantee that I will feel CONNECTED, though, because of my lack of ability to feel connected to other people is a consequence of the serious insecure attachment pattern built into my body-brain from the time I was born (thanks to my insanely abusive mother who was able to pull off her horrific abuse of me without anyone’s intervention).

So while I would much rather be able to write of a different tale, I am left with the one that is the true one for me.  It is NOT that I ‘don’t need people like other people do’ as someone told me once.  It’s that I desperately need people and always have — but I honestly don’t believe I have the internal wiring necessary to ever feel true connection with others even when I am around them (with the exception of a very very very few people who are closest to me).

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Even though I am living in the same body that trauma built during my first 18 years of life, I didn’t know THEN that I would eventually, as an adult, have to try to consciously PRETEND that my being around others is the same for me as it looks like as I watch most everyone else.  In fact, I didn’t even know as an adult that I pretended to be a socially-engage-able person.

Now I know that I didn’t have a safe and secure attachment with ANYONE during my childhood — not ANYONE — and therefore all of the incredibly complex wiring didn’t get put into place for me.  I can no longer genuinely pretend that being with others is remotely satisfying or soothing to me.

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There is always The Watcher.  The Watcher is not alone, of course.  There are a multitude of Others who watch the Watcher.  The Watcher is never truly engaged with other people.  The Watcher ‘goes away’ if I am EVER truly and wholly engaged.  But that is so seldom that it rarely happens.

There are The Coaches, too.  There is the one that tries to help me keep up with others during social engagement, trying to give me cues to help me read other people’s social cues.  I can’t keep up.  I can’t trust or know or believe or act like I know what all the social cues people learned through human interactions from the time they were born even ARE — let alone how they operate and how I am supposed to respond to them.

There is a Verbal Coach who tries to help me stay in synch in conversation, tries to keep me in beat with the rhythm of the verbal exchange.  The Watcher is always there watching me AND the coaches — because The Watcher has no emotion (more like a Razor’s Edge).

Mostly when I am attempting to engage with other people I am extremely aware of being The Outsider.  I was an outsider in the life of my family for the first 18 years of my life.  Being The Outsider is probably as natural a state for me as being an adequately engaged human social being is for most other people.

I say ‘most other people’ because the ONLY people who are not naturals in their essence at social engagement are those who were either born with rare shyness genes, autism spectrum genes (etc.), or are those of us who suffered from extreme trauma, abuse and unsafe and insecure attachment relationships — alone — birth to age one and most usually AT LEAST birth to age two while the social-emotional-preverbal language brain-nervous system was forming itself.

ALL of these people who are not ‘naturals” (with the exception of the shyness gene people as long as they were not an abused/neglected infant) are NOT native language speakers and are missing most of the most primary and fundamental human social connection body-brain wiring/circuitry necessary to truly be able to connect — and to FEEL connection to and with other people.

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So here come the holidays.  At least I am fortunate that I do not have to deal with any negative family charades which must be very difficult for severe infant-child abuse survivors that DO.

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I used to pretend to be a socially OK person because I used to be able to BORROW the attachment patterns of other people.  I was very very good at being an attachment-chameleon — which by itself was NOT a ‘bad’ thing.  Being able to borrow the attachment patterns of other people enabled me NOT to abuse my own children because I could borrow the attachment abilities they were born with at the same time I was able to respond appropriately to them so that their attachments could grow and develop in safe and secure ways.  Borrowing attachments also allowed me NOT to be as socially isolated all of my adult life as I am now.

I know this now, looking back from my age-59 vantage point at all the different kinds of relationships I used to be able to maintain at different stages of my adult life.

Borrowed Attachment is directly connected to having a Disorganized-Disoriented (Reactive) Insecure attachment pattern.  I simply was able to organize and orient myself around other people’s attachment patterns.  (And yes, as I have said before on this blog, being this dependent upon others was like being on life support.  I was borrowing from them what I did not and could not have myself — like being dependent on a life support system.)

At least in my life my own insecure attachment patterns have not caused undo hardships on others.  While these others might WISH that I was able to form strong, clear and sustained attachment connections with them, I simply can’t, and these others are not harmed.  They are simply unable to form the kinds of connections with me that they might rather have because I cannot form attachments of my own with them.

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Rather than go into any more detail here about any of this, I just want to present a stark contrast to how I am feeling and to how I am as an isolated being unable to form attachments in the world (except with the ‘chosen few’ who love me enough in spite of all my difficulties).

My daughter told me of how my 9-month-old grandson attended a meeting with his mother and father today at a bank.  One of the women there wanted to take the baby off so that his parents could concentrate on paper signing.  Back came the woman in only a few moments with baby and his tear streaked cheeks and hearty bawling.

Back to his parents he quickly quieted back to contentment.

“Most excellent!”  I assured my daughter.  “That’s EXACTLY what you want the little one to be doing at this age.  He is wonderfully demonstrating his secure attachment.”

I also told my daughter that a baby that will, at this age and up to around the age of one, happily go off with strangers is NOT likely to have a happy life.  A healthy infant HAS to have powerfully strong safe and secure — loving and happy — attachments with its earliest caregivers FIRST AND FOREMOST because EVERYTHING else in its growth and development has already depended on this and will for the rest of its life depend on this firm, good and RIGHT foundation.

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Given my mother’s severe Borderline (abusive) condition I never stood a chance and I will the price for what she did to my attachment system as it built itself into my growing body-brain for the rest of my life — holidays or not.

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