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I have the advantage of trying to work my way through trauma related information using my own experience as a basis for what I know, rather than being locked into any established patterns of thinking about either trauma or the so-called ‘mental illnesses’ that are directly connected to Trauma Altered Development (TAD).   I am writing a ‘forensic autobiography’.  That means I write from the perspective of being a ‘confessional’ rather than from being a ‘professional’.  I am free to think any way I want to about the topic of trauma as it concerns me and others like me.

I try to understand what the developmental, attachment, and neuroscience experts say about the topic of TAD, but I am certain that if I line up my conclusions on the topic against these expert findings we will not always match point by point.

I want to talk today – again – about how trauma influences our core development as infant-child abuse survivors.  If our earliest caregiver interactions were not safe and secure, our development was altered from the start.

The experience of shame, as I have written before, is a very real physiological Autonomic Nervous System response to explorations within our early environment that caused us to experience conflict – rupture either with or without repair – with our early caregivers.  If there was no serious rupture (we were in agreement with our caregivers about our self in our environment), or there were ruptures that were met with repair through the appropriate actions of our early caregivers, the “GO” and “STOP” balance within our growing Autonomic Nervous System (sympathetic arm = GO, parasympathetic arm = STOP (pair a brakes)) developed optimally and well in a balanced, ‘ordinary’ way.

These ‘shame’ interactions are always based on the experiences prior to the age of one either in a benevolent or malevolent early caregiver environment that has already by this age built our growing brain, nervous system, body and earliest experience of self in a particular direction.  If these interactions were benevolent, a different body-brain-growing mind and self is forming than would be one that is forming under malevolent conditions.

We have to begin to REALLY understand how profoundly our experiences within our earliest caregiver environment affect us – permanently.  Once we are one year old, our development has already been profoundly directed by the kinds of experiences we have had with our caregivers, primarily with our mother.  It is on this earliest foundation that all other experiences will be processed within our little growing body.

By the time we grow a body-brain that is physically developed enough to be able to experience SHAME at one year of age, the course of our development has already been determined – either within and for a safe, secure, trauma-free benevolent world, or for the opposite.

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I mention this today in following my post of yesterday where I described my opinion of our nation as not being completely pro the human rights of children.  The ability to optimally experience shame in a growing body already by the age of one, I believe, is directly tied to how we experience any later event that involves conflict, consciousness, conscience and choice.

I believe the earliest caregiver interactions we have, mostly benevolent or malevolent, color the development of our personality.  Experts still suspect that personality is primarily influenced by our genetics.  However, developmental, attachment and neuroscientists are rapidly uncovering the facts about how our earliest experiences actually tell our genes what to do.  Given these new and extremely important findings, we can no longer ever assume that anyone’s personality follows the same developmental pathways if everyone is not raised with the same Universal Human Rights guaranteed.  Any violation of basic human needs for development, as conveyed through our understandings about basic human rights, causes Trauma Altered Development (TAD) to occur.

Our national personality is built upon the personalities of all the individuals that are a part of the whole.  Because we are a democracy, the most obvious personality we show to the world becomes the personality of the majority of our members.  Each of our own individual personalities, in turn, were built upon a combination of our personal genetics as they manifested themselves within either a primarily safe and secure early environment or within a traumatic one.

If early attachment is not safe and secure, some degree of trauma is present because fundamental universal human rights were not guaranteed.  We are talking humans here.  Humans have basic PHYSIOLOGICAL needs for our optimal development that create us – in an interaction between our genes and the quality of our early environment – to end up being a certain way in the world.

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America prides itself on being a nation of individualists, choosing to consider that within the perhaps one percent of our genes that make us different from one another there is enough individual potential for differences that it outweighs the 99% of our genes that we share in common as members of our social human species.  I suspect, however, that it is only when early developmental needs are met through the application of human universal rights that the development of the foundational 99% of our shared genetic material can manifest itself optimally that the remaining 1% that provides us the buffet of individual differences can grow, develop and shine among us.

If basic human needs are not met in a safe and secure early environment primarily free of trauma (without ruptures for which there are not adequate and appropriate repair) as described within the recognition of basic human rights, the 99% of us has to take a course through Trauma Altered Development that means we have been forced to adjust to the trauma in a way that limits our ability to be far more of our unique, different self as adults.

Early traumatic, unsafe, insecure and malevolent environments seem to me to narrow the ‘channel’ through which we can pass through our early body-brain-mind-self developmental stages – and still survive.  One by one, I can think about everyone I have ever met who suffered from a malevolent early childhood and begin to see how the patterns among them-us-me become more alike in fundamental ways than they are different.

If I simply look at the so-called ‘personality disorders’ that researchers are now finding are nearly ALWAYS tied in their origins to early infant-child abuse and trauma, the end result makes these people enough alike that they can be grouped into ‘functioning categories’ according to the ‘symptoms’ that they demonstrate in their continued lives.

If I look just at three particular people, I see how Histrionic Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and Borderline Personality Disorder lie on a continuum of personality alteration that created these people to be different than I believe they would have been had their Child Rights been guaranteed so that they would have been able to grow up without Trauma Altered Development.

The very best scenario for human growth and development occurs because of development that happens without the mediating and CHANGING affects of trauma.  Only when Children’s Rights are guaranteed within safe and secure environments can a body-brain-mind-self grow up to be free – and by that I mean, free to be MOST flexible and creative throughout their lives in their actions and responses to every life experience (change) that they encounter.

Trauma Altered Development means that we have been forced to sacrifice aspects of our own autonomous development.  We are forced to be more alike than different because SURVIVAL itself has specific requirements that need to be met.  If we are exposed to overwhelming danger, threat and trauma during our early development, our specie’s resiliency factors from within our bodies will be forced into activation.  If the threat to our infant-child well-being endangers our body-brain-mind-self on the most basic levels, the Trauma Altered Development we experience will simply turn us primarily into SURVIVORS    rather into the most unique, flexible, creative original beings that we had the capacity to become.

To the degree that trauma changes a developing infant-child so that they can survive, to that degree will conscious choice and aware decision making be removed from them – unless and until these survivors can learn what the physiological trauma-changes were, how they affect us, and how we can now FORCE ourselves to become increasingly more conscious in our lives.

Non-trauma-altered people who were not forced to physiologically adapt to early traumas naturally end up with a fuller buffet of consciousness – including the ability to empathize, use a broadly built Theory of Mind to understand themselves in relationship to others in the world, and filter their experience through an aware conscience.  They simply have more choices about how to be in the world.

Of course, these non-trauma developed people can choose to be total jerks if they want to be.  Yet we know that a staggeringly high percentage of our nation’s criminal population suffered from Trauma Altered Development in malevolent childhoods.  Compared to people with Trauma Altered Development, the range of potential choices for non-trauma altered people appears to be almost infinite.

The feedback-feedforward information gathering and response loops within the body-brain-mind-self of a non-traumatized infant-child compared to a traumatized one form differently.  When I think about optimal development using the image of the infinity sign, non-trauma development creates an ever expanding, fully operational flow of life force along that “8” pathway.

The more an individual is forced to apply survival-based physiological changes during their infant-child development in the midst of trauma, the smaller the “8” pathway becomes.  In cases such as my mother’s was, the “8” simply broke so that she was left with the repetitive patterns of “0” only, living her life without the ability to allow incoming information to come in without it having to be processed entirely through the filer of the damage she suffered in her development through trauma.  My mother was not allowed to become the fully unique, thriving, creative, flexible person she COULD have become had she not been forced to physiologically adapt in order to survive during her developmental stages as an infant-child.

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The physiological crisis point within our human body-brain-mind-self as we interact with others of our species is at the SHAME point.  No matter how we choose to recognize this point, no matter what word we choose to apply to this very real physiological point in the operation of our Autonomic Nervous System (ANS), it is at this SHAME point that we are notified that there has been a rupture in need of repair between ourselves and others around us.  The SHAME point is where the “GO” and the “STOP” within our body-brain-mind-self happens.  It is at this point that negotiation can happen successfully – or not.

It seems entirely possible to me that this SHAME point is where the two circles of the “8” infinity sign meet one another.  In cases such as my mother’s, it is at this point that she broke and was left with “0”, unable to negotiate herself as a being in relationship not only to others, but also in relationship to her own self.  She lost the ability to consciously identify herself in a complex world of shifting realities.

My mother operated from the extremely limited survival-based point of automatic pilot only.  She could not flexibly and creatively, openly or consciously consider options to solving conflicts because everything about her centered on NOT feeling shame because she could not tolerate it.  When an infant-child’s environment is so unstable, when their basic human needs-rights are not met, when survival becomes the ONLY option, it means that the patterns of rupture without either repair or HOPE of repair have so signaled the developing little person of danger in a malevolent world that all but the most very basic, primitive options have been allowed.

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The problem with overwhelming trauma is that it disturbs the rupture-repair pattern of checks and balances that allows life to continue going on in anything like a normal or ordinary way.  The problem with overwhelming trauma during our infant-child developmental stages is that we are forced to find a way to survive at the same time we have the most limited resources we will have in our lifetime.  Our only option was, in effect, to steal from our own inner bank of resources in order to survive.  This causes the problem to be built right into our developing body-brain-mind-self because we are then depleted from the inside out.

The point of surviving trauma is to eliminate its effects on us.  If we have no power to eliminate its effects (think here, little tiny person) then the next best thing we can do is eliminate our awareness of the experience of being in a state of ongoing trauma that we cannot escape from.  We have no option except to escape on the inside.

Recovery from trauma post-infant-childhood means that we ‘return’ to a normal or near normal state which happens when the rupture that trauma created becomes repaired.  There must be adequate resources available to allow repair to take place so that life can “GO” on, one way or the other.  In the case of Trauma Altered Development during infant-childhood, the resources had to be found within the child itself because they were not available from the outside.

I do not believe it will be much longer before we understand completely that nearly all of what we call ‘dysfunctional behavior’ including ‘mental illness’ is a result of overwhelming trauma during infant-childhood developmental stages that causes survivors to steal from their own inner storehouse of resources at a time when having to do so – in order to stay alive – robs them of the capacity to later experience a full, healthy, flexibly adaptive, creative best-developed-self.

It is for this reason, if for no other, that a guarantee of Child Rights becomes such a critically important factor.  When a child has its fundamental human rights provided, it will not be forced to use up its own internal resources in order to survive.  Those resources HAVE TO COME from the outside of the child.  That is what human childhood is – a developmental period of growing and expanding ability to sustain oneself in the world.  In order for an infant-child to develop optimally, its needs must be attended to and met during these stages of dependency.  If those needs are not met from the outside, Trauma Altered Development will occur, or the infant-child will die.

It is the responsibility of all adults to ensure that all of a child’s rights are guaranteed and protected.  Nature has designed humans so that appropriate and adequate adult caregiving of infants and children is our specie’s primary, number one resiliency factor.  We must lift the yoke of stigma off of the survivors of infant-child neglect, abuse and trauma and place it instead on all the adults in the society surrounding our little ones that allowed this malevolent treatment and trauma to happen to them in the first place.

It is on this level that I place responsibility and accountability on our nation when I say “SHAME on you!”  Either we intend to STOP neglecting our responsibility to our nation’s children or we don’t.  Either we intend to repair the rupture in the fabric of our society that allows the basic rights of children to be violated, or we do not.

If we choose to GO on letting traumas happen to our little ones that is within our society’s power to STOP, then we must realize that the Trauma Altered Development that will happen to these maltreated and traumatized infant-children will change them on their most primary, physiological level — as they are forced to take from inside of themselves what they need in order to survive — because the adults in their world were not there to help them.  Having to do so will change the degree of well-being for these survivors for the rest of their lives.

When the trigger point of shame is touched, it is time to examine conscience and to choose a course of action.  This is true for individuals and for the societies they are a part of.  In cases such as my mother’s, these abilities were removed from her through trauma that caused her Trauma Altered Development.  Is this same kind of pattern also contained within our nation?

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