Tag: empathy disorder

+FROM FAILED TO FANTASTIC FAMILIES – JUDGMENT WON’T GET US THERE!

alchemynowLeave a comment

Welcome to today’s post that describes what I think hampers many well intentioned efforts to help ‘troubled families’ improve their quality of life.

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First let me offer to you a link that provides access to vital and marvelous resources for improving parenting abilities no matter what our childhood backgrounds were like.  Once we know these resources exist, we can begin to find ways to access them within our communities because I realize the videos are expensive.

I can personally recommend the S.T.E.P. program as one that was amazingly helpful to me in raising my children.  This site presents other programs, as well, including several designed for parents of infants and very young children.

I believe that everyone can benefit from learning more about becoming a better parent.  I also believe that as a society we could improve our entire overall quality of life as a culture by making this kind of information easily accessible to everyone — even before they become parents.

Take a look at this site, The Center for the Improvement of Child Caring.  I believe you will be happy that you did!

http://www.ciccparenting.org/catalogitem.asp?ci=39&cid=&c=3

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Now for the rest of the story:

Information is a resource.  Having access to resources and being able to use them makes people healthier and happier, and increases their well-being in the world.

Resources exist both inside and outside of our individual bodies.  What happens to us from birth determines what resources are available to us within our own brains, and these brain resources determine how we interact with all other available resources surrounding us for the rest of our lives.

As today’s researchers learn more and more about how early infant and child maltreatment and deprivation changes the way the brain develops, they are also learning about how brains develop and operate under the best of conditions.  Each of these different brains (and bodies) end up developing according to the resources available to the very young child at the start of its life.

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We cannot expect that a severely maltreated infant’s brain will develop to be the same as a well treated infant’s brain because they are each being built in differing circumstances and being ‘fed’ different information about the world.  Both types of brains are alike, however, in that they are designed to keep a person alive in the world they live in.

We have to remember that a developing infant and young child brain only knows the information it is receiving as it builds itself and cannot anticipate a future that is different from its early one.  Of course these adaptations occur in interaction between the environment and the particular genetic potential an infant has within itself.

Yet there is no doubt that early severe abuse and maltreatment will cause any developing brain to adjust itself to a malevolent world if it is forced to, no matter what.  Nobody would be immune to this adaptive process because it is the only way severe challenges to an infant can be survived.  True recognition of this fact humbles us.  Once we have this level of humility we can begin to truly help others to live a better life without heaping shame on them in the process.

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The image comes into my mind of a bulldozer and a space shuttle.  We could imagine that any given infant has the potential from birth to develop (a brain suited) for the future tasks of either one depending upon the information it receives from its early environment.   This information about the conditions of the future,  directly communicated to it by the conditions of its early caregiving environment, determines the infant and young child’s final outcome.

Let’s say that harsh, toxic and traumatic environments create in the young one the need to become a bulldozer in order to deal with these malevolent deprivations.  At the same time we could say that a benevolent environment of safety, security and plenty allows an infant to prepare itself for a better future and in the end it can become a space shuttle.  In both cases mobility would be possible.  In both cases the job of remaining alive would have been accomplished.

Yet from this simple image we can tell that beyond the basic similarities between these two, there are vast differences that resulted as consequences of the information about the possibilities of the future that either ‘type’ of infant received and adapted to.  In both cases the infants made the best use of information and resources possible.  Yet what happens to an infant that was forced through early malevolent conditions to become a bulldozer when it graduates out of childhood into a world built for and by those who had enough resources in their benevolent early environments to become space shuttles?

We are left with a serious, yet I believe unrecognized gap here between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’.

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I mention this now as I introduce some information about improving parenting skills because I believe many attempts to improve the quality of parenting are being made by people who are like our imaginary space shuttles as they try to ‘help’ people who are like our imaginary bulldozers.  Too often well intentioned efforts of the ‘haves’ to ‘help’ the ‘have nots’ become ‘better’ fail because the fundamental differences between these two groups are not currently being recognized or acknowledged.

These differences come from the fact that a brain built in a safe and secure early attachment environment is not the same kind of brain that is built in an unsafe and insecure early attachment environment.  These two kinds of brains operate in the adult (and childhood) world differently.  They process information differently and they respond differently.

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For those readers who might be wondering how to tell which kind of brain they developed and which kind of future their brains were preparing them to live in, I will use one word that, to me, becomes the pivot point (imagine the old fashioned playground teeter tooter here).  Movement toward the benevolent end or movement toward the malevolent end can be determined from this pivot point.  That one word is TERROR.  To the degree that any infant or developing young child experiences terror — a repeated state of complete lack of safety and security — will its brain develop differently from a child’s brain who does not have to experience this state.

From that pivot point, moving toward one end or the other, changes will occur in the individual that is being prepared for a future world that corresponds to similar hostile, dangerous, threatening, traumatic and toxic conditions.  Once we realize that these changes are fundamental we can begin to find ways to talk between worlds.  In order for this communication to be meaningful the basic facts underlying the differences between the ‘secures’ and the ‘insecures’ have to be recognized, described, understood, respected and honored.

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What possible scenarios can I imagine about what kinds of possibly effective interventions that could have happened to protect me from my mother’s abuse of me?  This field of imagination is wide open to me because it NEVER happened.  When considering intervention in relationship to my own experience, I think about when I was in eighth grade and had to wear one of those very short, one piece blue gym suits, and had to take group showers every day after class.  I remember backing myself into the shower corner, always facing away from the wall feeling so ashamed, humiliated and embarrassed because the entire back of my body from the base of my skull to my heels, including my arms, was covered in every imaginable color of bruises — black, blue, purple, green, yellow.

I realize how silly that was on one level because certainly those bruises would have been visible simply as I wore that stupid suit throughout the entire class period.  Yet it was standing naked and visible in the showers themselves that made me feel this humiliation.  Yet nobody — EVER — paid any attention.  Not one single time did someone ask me, either classmate or teacher, how I had gotten even one of those bruises.  They were visible, ugly, horrible, and obvious indicators of the fact that someone was hurting me terribly.  I suspect it was because my mother’s abuse of me had started from my first breath it never entered my thoughts that I could tell anyone or ever expect anyone to either care or to help me.

While we live in a world today that is legally mandated to report physical signs of abuse, those signs are merely the tip of the iceberg.  Those of you who know the reality of all the different levels and kinds of abuse, neglect and maltreatment that children can be exposed to know what I am talking about.

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We are still, today, left with the proverbial vicious cycle with continued questions about how we recognize extreme traumatic stress going on in families, how to intervene, and how to improve conditions on all levels for everyone being affected.  Yet what I can now say is that even if someone had intervened because of my eighth grade bruises, they would still have missed the most important damage of all — the changes that my brain had already made that allowed me to survive in a malevolent world even before I was two years old.

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What I am going to say next is not meant to offend anyone.  I say it because I care that all efforts being made to Stop the Storm of unresolved traumas be as effective as they possibly can be.  I offer my own ‘expert’ opinion based on conclusions I have made as a survivor of terrible infant and child abuse myself.  I believe a dangerous weapon is often being unconsciously wielded against the very people the ‘haves’ are trying to ‘help’.

That weapon is any degree of an attitude of self righteous superiority and judgment of or against those who were forced through their very early malevolent experiences to become bulldozers rather than space shuttles.  Because those of us who formed a body and brain in a worst-case world had to build defense into ourselves from our earliest beginnings, we have an uncanny ability to recognize and to respond defensively against ANY PERCEIVED FORM OF ATTACK.

We detect challenges to the integrity of our being and respond at the speed of light.  I don’t mean this metaphorically.  The electrical impulses that govern communication within and between the cells of our body and brain move that fast.  Once a challenge or a threat is detected, we will protect ourselves at all costs.  We do this unconsciously because our bodies learned from the time of our beginnings that consciousness is far too slow to keep us alive.

And we certainly include an ability to detect anyone’s negative judgment of us as being a threat because we were built that way.  When we consider the fact that information transmitted brain to brain through facial expressions ALONE moves at the speed of a signal every 1/200th of a second, we can begin to understand that people who are assessing and judging us from any position of supposed self righteous superiority may not even realize that they are doing it.

That does not, to me, make their even unconscious transmission of judgment toward us in any way acceptable.  It therefore becomes the job of anyone who thinks they sincerely care about the ‘have nots’ and wish to ‘help’ them to become completely aware and conscious of their own biases and resulting judgments — both of perpetrators and of victims — because nearly 100% of perpetrators were victimized themselves.

This also means that those of us who are survivors of traumatic childhoods need to look within ourselves and detect how we have ‘bought’ or ‘eaten’ the judgments that others may have passed down to us — both in our childhood and our adulthood.  We cannot afford to ignore these seeds of doubt because they directly attach themselves anywhere inside of us where the potential for shame exists.

Because our physiological ability to feel shame originates in our body by the time we are one year old, it is guaranteed that anything that has been passed to us by others and has triggered our shame contributes to its further ‘growth and development’.  Shame usually operates far below our level of conscious awareness.   It is an automatic response that occurs within our nervous system (including our brain) and body.

I understand that humans physically develop the ability to experience shame as our bodies develop from conception.  It is not until we are a year old that our bodies have grown enough for this reaction to occur.  But once we have passed that developmental stage, all of our social attachment interactions are processed through this filter.  It is not helpful for well meaning ‘educators’ to be handing out shame along with whatever new information they are trying to transmit to those that ‘need’ it.

“A spoonful of poison does not make the medicine go down.”  Self righteous judgment based on an attitude of superiority causes an unconscious shame defense reaction within the recipient that distorts all the information that might be offered to a threatened individual at the same time.

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Because of the traumatic experiences that formed my brain, I have an almost excruciatingly sensitive ‘input detection system’ that is geared to exquisitely detect danger and threat surrounding me at all times.  I have built a corresponding protection and defense system within me.  Because I am a member of a social species, any input that I process related to social interactions has to be processed by my ‘shame detection system’.

I now understand that most of my aversion to any supposedly ‘helpful self help’ book I’ve ever read stems from the fact that my advanced ability to detect unbelievably delicate attacks on my level of shame senses judgment in these writings.  I can and do read volumes of information ‘between the lines’.  I have always known on some level that I have to translate and interpret information contained in these books because I have never found a single one of them that addresses the fundamental fact that I have a very different brain and body as a result of the abuse I experienced from birth.

This process of translation and interpretation is exhausting in itself.   It takes an incredible level of focus and energy to do it.  In addition we are forced at the same time to defend ourselves from the underlying projections of shame that affect us at very deep levels as we read these books.  I suspect that everyone with one of these altered brains experiences the same thing that I do even if they don’t recognize it.  Because those like me are already forced to expend so much more energy just getting along in a world we weren’t prepared for and don’t really understand, many of us just can’t make use of the well intentioned information that these books are meant to provide us with.

This makes all the well intended efforts we apply to ourselves or that others might apply to us to inform, transform, reform, conform us to fit a world we were not built in, by or for in the first place remarkably inefficient and ineffective.  In some cases, such as would have been true for my mother, the hoped for results are impossible to obtain due to the vast distortions that took place in a vastly altered brain — made so because drastic measures had to be taken early in life in order to adjust and adapt to and survive drastic conditions.

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I am not saying that it is a waste of time to try to provide information that helps those that could use it to live better lives.  What I am saying is that we often do not consider the full context of the problems themselves and are thus hindering our efforts to address them.  What do we really know about the full context of all the things we are trying to prevent, either?  I don’t care if we look at preventing or addressing child abuse, domestic abuse, war, poverty, crime, sexual predation, ignorance or terrorism.  Humans are contextual beings.  We develop in context.  We live in context.  Everything we do and everything done to us happens in a context.

The contexts that cause some to mature into the equivalent of bulldozers or into space shuttles were very different in the first place.  If we refuse to realize the ramifications of these differences and continue to unconsciously judge people for having them, we might as well be taking our hardest efforts to make the world a better place and throw them like tiny pieces of confetti into a strong wind.

If we continue to self righteously judge one another from our supposed positions of superiority we will continue to offend others in the depths of their being, and they will continue to defend themselves against us.  Not helpful.  They will not be able to hear or apply a single useful thing we are telling them.  Is changing this pattern of judgment between all of us truly what loving ourselves and one another — no matter what — is all about?

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Thank you for reading this long post.  Your comments are welcome and appreciated.

+FINDING THE CRACK IN MY BORDERLINE MOTHER’S REALITY

alchemynow3 Comments

At 5:35 pm on Good Friday, March 27, 1964 I was 12 years old and not yet a woman.

Then the great Alaskan earthquake happened on this day at 5:36 pm — the second strongest earthquake on record anywhere on our planet.

http://images.google.com/images?q=1964+alaska+earthquake&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3RNFA_enUS270US307&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=Eyz-SfPnA5ectAOtoaDWAQ&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&resnum=4&ct=title

http://wcatwc.arh.noaa.gov/64quake.htm

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I could tell you my personal story of the earthquake that day when my menarche happened, but all I want to mention now is that by the end of that three minutes of terrible shaking, I was a woman.

What matters most to me right now is that because of the earthquake, because of my mother’s writing about her personal experience during it, because those pieces of paper she wrote her story on survived for over 40 years and then found their way into my hands after her death in 2002, I now have proof of a critical point regarding Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) — most importantly of my mother’s version of this mental adaptation to early traumas and my assessment of her condition.

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I believe that an abusive borderline parent will do everything in their power to keep the ‘outside world’ from seeing or being able to detect both their broken mental condition and the abuse that is a result of it.  This is what makes BPD parents so extremely dangerous to their offspring.  Nobody outside of the family is likely to EVER suspect the existence of either the mental illness or the abuse.  (Knowing the signs to look for in order to notice in the first place and then to be able to see through the crack in the reality of BPDs will be covered in future posts).

I am not saying that my mother’s mental illness or her abuse of me was invisible to the outside.  I am saying that a combination of the fact that nobody cared with the fact that these same people did not know what they were seeing even if they were looking, resulted in a complete absence of intervention for the entire 18 years of my childhood I spent being severely abused by my mother.

It is likely that my father also succumbed to these same factors, although the additional fact of him being my father SHOULD have allowed him the ability to intervene on my behalf in some way.  This is a good part of why I am pursuing my writing based on my personal experience.  I believe that personality disorders are so pervasive, consistent and insidious that until our present ‘enlightened era’ it has been nearly impossible for those who are on the inside to recognize what is going on, either.

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This is why what I found in my mother’s writings about her earthquake experience is so empowering to me because it confirmed what I intuitively know about her condition and affirmed my assessment on many levels both of the cause of BPD and of the consequences of involvement on any level with a person — especially a mother — who has it.

You can read her story as she wrote it at My Mother’s Alaskan Earthquake Journal Entry.

In the months just prior to receiving my cancer diagnosis I was hard at work sorting and copying into my computer all my mother’s letters, notes and journal entries concerning her homesteading experiences.  I will post what I have completed for you to reference, but there remains hundreds of disorganized pages and letters that still need to be included to make the entries complete.

These papers my mother wrote traveled thousands of miles, some of them being stored for up to 30 years in her various storage lockers she kept, and finally found their way to me nearly 50 years after she wrote them.  It was in this collection of her papers that I found the stories that she wrote the winter of her 11th birthday.  (SEE also:   My Mother’s Childhood Stories)

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All the time I was transcribing her writings I was searching for a clue that would show me the truth in her writings that would confirm what I know in my own heart about my mother’s mental illness.  Because my mother’s stated intention in writing any of these letters and journals was to eventually write what she referred to as her “Alaskan book,” they were written from the public side of the border wall that allowed her to write under the ‘spell’ of that BPD persona.  Because this borderline split between public and private is so fundamentally and profoundly crafted into the altered brain of a borderline it is usually impossible to detect it through their own description of their version of reality.

That is why what I found in her earthquake writing created in me a state of elation!  I FOUND it!!  I found the hole in her border wall, the crack in her reality.  I found the chink in the armor that she had developed as her brain grew in childhood to protect herself from unbearable pain.  I found the equivalent of my own Silver Chalice.  If I never read another word she wrote I have still successfully completed my mission and my quest.

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I need to take a related diversion, or detour at this moment to make a connection that I believe is vitally crucial to putting severely abusive mothers’ behavior in the social context of the human mythological imagination.

I encountered this ‘myth’ several years ago at the start of my research, Euripides’ Medea, and would like you to find a way to read it if you can.  It is contained in this book

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1417908971

though I read it in an earlier printing of this one

http://www.amazon.com/Greek-Drama-Bantam-Classics-Moses/dp/0553212214/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1241397818&sr=1-1

Refer to this for historical context surrounding the Trojan War and Jason and Medea:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medea

Euripides’ famous retelling of this part of Greek myth in his play about Medea was first performed in 431 B.C., hence this story is a retelling of mythology that is older than 2500 years.  My point is that I believe this story is about a particular form of madness and can be seen as very closely related to aspects of what we now know of as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).  For whatever reasons the authors of the myth ascribe to her, in the end Medea murders her own children.

Had my mother been able to escape any consequence for her actions, I know she would have murdered me. In fact, this is a point of argument that I hold with the experts’ version of what dissociation is and what it does.  I DID NOT dissociate during my mother’s beatings of me.  I felt every single one of them because I had to remain absolutely aware and present during all of them as soon as I was old enough to control my body.  Her rage usually and quickly escalated to the point that she lost control of herself while she was beating me — in rhythm to her recitation of the litany she had created for me — SEE:  Litany from Start to Finish — to avoid the most dangerous falls her beatings caused me or I would have been killed — if possible, killed many times over.

It is evident in Euripides’ play that all the public present knew of Medea’s intent to kill her children because she stated it publicly and yet nobody intervened — not even when they heard the children screaming as she hacked them to death in their home with a massive knife.  Yet while many consider that this play refers to abandonment, one of the key symptoms of BPD, it is the ‘lower layer’ related to a mother’s ‘passion’ to kill her child or children that most fascinates me personally.

Because I understand that extreme childhood trauma can cause an evolutionarily altered brain to form, and because I believe that BPD appears as one of the manifestations possible from these changed brains, I also believe that it is the very, very ancient genetic information about surviving in the worst of all possible worlds that triggers this mother-passion to harm her offspring.  It is no different an instinctual reaction as one pursued by animals when they kill offspring, abandon entire litters, or choose the most ‘fit’ of the offspring to save while abandoning the others.

This is, I believe, the human basis of the killing Medea did of her children and the attempted killing my mother did to me.

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Now back to the earthquake writings:  My proof is contained therein.  If you read her writings at My Mother’s Alaskan Earthquake Journal Entry you will find in her story the following — (Words written in the brackets are mine as is the type bolding.  Eklunds were neighboring homesteaders on the valley floor whose house my sisters, younger brother and I had been staying at while my parents were in Anchorage during the earthquake):

“Finally Eklund’s house was in sight – from outward appearances all seemed fine.  She came running out as we approached.  I could see our children were fine.  I was so thankful!  I hugged and killed [meant kissed no doubt but she wrote killed], each child in turn.  We were all together again.  I can’t emphasize strongly enough – that this was all that was important.  We could always start over again – even though for us, who like so many Alaskans have struggled so long and hard for everything and still have so far to go.  We could and would, if necessary, do it again.  I’m sure there was absolutely no questioning our minds to that.”

BINGO!

Even if we call this a ” Freudian slip, or parapraxis,  an error in speech, memory, or physical action that is believed to be caused by the unconscious mind,” the unmistakable evidence is here in her writings that what I suspect of her mental reality was real.

When I am ready to dig through boxes again, and ready to set up my scanner and do this, I will scan in the actual words as she wrote them with her own hand.  I transcribed them into my computer exactly.  There is no way, once a person sees her writing, that the two middle letters in ‘killed’ could possibly be construed as being the two middle letters in ‘kissed’.

Finding this hole through which I could see her reality may well be the only tangible vindication I can ever discover that proves my mother was who she did not say she was, particularly as she terrorized me from the moment of my birth as a result of her psychosis.

The only other related confirmations that I have found in her writings appears in the last of her childhood stories (mentioned above) and in her writing of the dream about the dark rainbow and the storm which can be seen at

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/about-stop-the-stor/

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Drawing the line between the real world and the reality of the world of a borderline becomes nearly impossible particularly for those of us who were abused by one from birth.   Not only the trauma is built into the body-brain, but as a result, the version of the borderline mother’s reality is built into the survivor, as well.  I know my mother’s is built into me.

These three ‘holes’ that appear in my mother’s writings are thus critically important for me to both possess and to consider as I attempt to face the reality of what happened to me on all the levels that my mother damaged me.  I’m not sure that anybody who was not severely abused by a borderline parent can even begin to imagine how important these tangible expressions that illustrate clearly the break in the nearly perfect facade a borderline shows to the public world is — or imagine the terrible confusion such a parent creates in the minds of those she abuses.

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My mother never knew that she meant to write that word KILL, yet there it was where I was able to find it.  What a gift this discovery is to me, and perhaps to someone else who reads this post.  That word is a direct connection to the ancient genetic potential for survival in a traumatic world that mothers who have been abused themselves CAN form even in this very real current day world.  Because the evolutionary throw-back potential can exist in a brain that was traumatized during its development, it is folly for us to remain puzzled on any level when we hear of a mother abusing her children, not even her infants.

We can no longer afford to be puzzled when mothers actually kill their offspring, either.  All the evidence that trauma can turn a mother into a killer is in the 2500 year old play about Medea which I am sure only reflects a reality that has been with our species from the time of our beginnings.  It was present in my mother’s writings and in her abuse of me.

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I also want to note here that the infliction of self harm and self injury that is common to borderlines did not have to be a part of my mother’s spectrum of behaviors because she made no distinction between herself and me.  I was a projection of all that she had been taught to abhor within herself.  I was thus an externalized aspect of her mind — a mind that was, in effect, turned inside out because the burden of containing her own reality within herself was potentially too much to bear.  She could then heap all kinds of punishments and injuries on me and did not have to self-harm her own body.

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As always, thank you for reading — Your comments are welcome and appreciated.  Linda

PROFOUND PHYSIOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES OF EXTREME EARLY ABUSE

alchemynowLeave a comment

I stop and look inside of myself as I begin to write this post.  Do I want to write about the present?  Do I want to write about the past?  Chasing fireflies in the darkness, so beautiful, becoming rare.  I miss them.  They do not live in the desert.

Which words might want to appear here?  What story?

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I know that I mentioned this once before in an earlier post, that the inability to tell a coherent life story is one of the key and central indicators that a person has an insecure attachment from early childhood.  I think we are often tempted to focus on what we know of our adult relationships.  Task masters that we are, we count them like keeping score.  Which ones were ‘good’?  Which ones failed?  Were we hurt?  Are we bitter?  Could we have ‘done better’?

But what do we really know about those early relationships, the ones that set the stage and formed the patterns that lie in the very fiber of our brain and body?  Those, the implicit memories, that guide us obliquely?

Now there’s a word I didn’t expect to pop out of my keyboard when I started writing this post.

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http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1B3RNFA_enUS270US307&defl=en&q=define:oblique&ei=UtT7Se3dC56utAOH-MDzAQ&sa=X&oi=glossary_definition&ct=title

from – Definitions of oblique on the Web:

  • any grammatical case other than the nominative
  • slanting or inclined in direction or course or position–neither parallel nor perpendicular nor right-angled; “the oblique rays of the winter sun …
  • external oblique muscle: a diagonally arranged abdominal muscle on either side of the torso
  • devious: indirect in departing from the accepted or proper way; misleading; “used devious means to achieve success”; “gave oblique answers to direct questions”; “oblique political maneuvers”
    wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webw

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“slanting or inclined in direction or course or position–neither parallel nor perpendicular nor right-angled”

All our experiences, even those that we participate in before we are born, even all those that happen to us before we can hold our head up, roll over or sit by ourselves, dig their way into our growing bodies and form us.  If they were formed by experiences that were hazardous to our well-being, these never-to-be-consciously accessed memories can lie there in wait like predators that later steal our lives away from us without us even knowing it.

They ‘slant’ our lives and incline us ‘in direction or course or position’ so that we end up out of kilter and off on a life direction that can often be far different from the one that COULD have been ours if those very early experiences (certainly up to age 2) had been harmonious and balanced.  There are consequences if we survived, and our entire life course ends up ‘neither parallel nor perpendicular nor right-angled’.

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Does that make us, the survivors of severe abuse as infants and young children the ‘oblique people?’  When I pay attention, more so now than ever before in my life I would have to say, “Yes, that is very probably so.”  I say this at 57 because the trajectory I was sent out upon from the time of my birth has now landed me at this age in a place that I would never have been any more able to anticipate than I was able to anticipate the word ‘oblique’ appearing on this page.

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An image has appeared in my mind, of myself being hungry for a fresh peach.  In this image I know they are in season, but I have no peach tree.  No one in my town has a peach tree either, so if I want a peach badly enough I will have to go to the market to buy one.

How do I know where the market is if I’ve never been there?  Do I simply head off in any old random direction, suggesting to myself that if I travel far enough I will eventually find the market and buy my peach?  Probably not.  I will probably find someone who knows and ask them for directions.  They would probably guide me to a well used road and suggest that I follow it to my ultimate destination — in this case, the peach store.

Troubled brains grow in troubled infancies.  My analogy might be trivial but my point is far from trite.  If chaos reigned in our early lives while our brains were finishing their human growth and development stages, our adult brains are not likely to be able to effectively participate in reasoned life planning.   “What goes in comes out.”  We end up being the ones that would have a hard time finding a peach store even if we lived in one.

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We can easily see here how troubled families create troubled offspring ad infinitum, and on down the generations the troubledness goes.  I will introduce the information here that our higher thought processes are centered in our cortex which is not completely developed until the age to 25 – 30.  Brain development continues through our life span, but no matter what, it is the development of the brain during those first 2 years that ALWAYS matter the most, followed in importance by the mental maturation that builds upon this early development through the age of 6 or 7.

By the age of 7 we have ‘decided’ how we fit into the world around us, and our resulting Theory of Mind that we have created will both lead us and follow us for the rest of our lives.  All sorts of changes in the brain happen if those first few years are toxic and harmful.  Our brains adjust to this life in a malevolent world, and all our higher level thinking processes will be affected as will our ‘under cover’ operations that unconsciously control our ability to bond to other people, affect what motivates us toward reward, what we avoid, what we are afraid of, what confuses and confounds us.

These altered brains formed through early abuse, I believe, are not designed to participate in a long term future.  Our bodies knew if the world was already this terribly bad from the start, it was not likely to change and we cannot truly hope — on a biological or physiological basis — for things to get better.  There is no time for wishful thinking in a malevolent world.  Survival is not the name of the game, it is the ONLY game in town.

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In some ways this programmed troubled pathway to survival in a terrible world is incredibly efficient.  All possible short cuts are designed within the body and the brain to insure that in every future situation the fastest response based on survival learning will be the one chosen by the survivor.  On the other hand, because most of us do not move into an adulthood that could ever match the horrors we went through as we developed our brains in the first place, we simply DO NOT MATCH.  We are a very bad fit with the rest of the world ‘out there’.  (And then we wonder why ALL our relationships are troubled, even the one we try to have with our self?)

This ‘out there’ world did not exist for us as we were harmed, abused, neglected, maltreated in the first place, so we could not build bodies designed to live in this better ‘out there’ world.  We were not loved and we were not protected.  We have no innate idea what safety and security mean — and for some of us, we never will  — because our brains and bodies will not let us.

Although our altered brains and bodies (along with their implicit memories) allowed us to survive our horrors, they do not participate well in a benevolent world.  And herein lies a whole new, MAJOR set of troubles.

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To follow my peach craving image, my brain is unable to find its way to the store, no matter how helpful others might be in giving their directions, and no matter how hungry I am for a peach.  What if someone offered to put me in their car so they drive me to the store?  OK.  Maybe that might work — or probably, that is the ONLY alternative that would work.  But as adults we are mostly on our own.  Nobody is going to drive us through life in their car.

People who had adequate experiences with early caregivers during their brain formation stages do not understand how or why the rest of us, who did not have these benevolent experiences, get so lost in our lives.  We don’t understand it, either.  We often end up feeling as if there is something terribly wrong with us.

No, on the most practical level, there is nothing ‘wrong’ with us.  Just something very, very different.

How could we NOT be different, considering how we started out in this life?  The miracle to me is that our human genetic material and all the operations that tell our genes what to do have such a vast array of possible choices that can be made so that a human can continue to survive in a world that does little except threaten immediate extinction — to the body and to the ‘soul’ of the suffering one.

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Everything about how our brain develops takes place flexibly in a situational context.  We are influenced by what goes on both on our insides and outside of ourselves.  This is the same adjustable, flexible, adaptive process that led our species down four and a half million years of evolution.  There is nowhere on the timeline that it stops.  I am a result of this process.  You are a result of this process.  And, again, “What goes in comes out.”  We can’t have it any other way.  This is the process of survival as a species and as individuals.

Eventually I hope to finish the work of translating into the simplest terms possible some of the information available to us from development neuroscience that shows what I would easily say is 20 different changes a body-brain will make as a result of developing in an environment of severe deprivation and trauma.  The one I want to mention now is in relationship to future planning abilities, and only enough to say that the early traumatized brain is not physiologically designed for one of our species’ highest aims — to be able to access what is called ‘future memory.’  (Yes, we have a ‘memory dis-ability.)

The brain and body are designed, through development under certain conditions (malevolent or benevolent), to continually process information through both feed forward and feed backward loops.  As we prepared ourselves — biologically — through terrible childhoods to survive in a world in the future, our brains made adaptations that benevolent brains NEVER have to make.  Nor can they later make the same kinds of adjustments that our brains and bodies had to make from our start.

We were assured of being at the cutting edge if the world we moved into as  adults matched the terror and trauma of the worlds that formed us.  We are designed and built to be survival machines.  Our cortex forms differently (along with all kinds of other changes), and if abuse is bad enough, actually atrophies long before the usual and optimal timeline for completion of development for the cortex is reached.

As a result, one of the most important luxuries of the benevolently formed brain is stolen from us for the rest of our lives:  We cannot participate in the feed forward loop that leads to future memory — future thought and planning.  Our brains do not believe the future exists, and if it does, well……  nobody would want to live in the kind of future our brains know from past experience.

Human brains are the most complex forms in our universe, but they are not magical.  Even though research shows that our brains are actually formed — under optimal conditions — to process infinity, if our brains were told through early experiences that the world was certain to cause our destruction at any moment, they adjust themselves as efficiently as possible in preparation for this event.   All possible roads to survival needed to be maximized and available.  There is no future in a doomsday world.  Our infanthoods and early childhoods without hope insured that we knew this then and that we would know it for the rest of our lives.

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Early abuse survivors cannot take the obvious road to a better future.  That road was never built into our brains at our beginning.  While human brains seem to have the ability to process infinity, we have to understand that HOW they do this is different for people who suffered extreme hardship, trauma and deprivation while their brains were forming.

We cannot afford to ignore this fact.  We have to begin to understand on a profound level how different a malevolently formed brain is from a benevolently formed brain.  While a peach and an orange are both fruits, they differ from one another in substantial ways, just as the brains I am attempting to describe do.

I think we live in a culture that is so used to thinking in terms of mass production.  We believe it is somehow wrong to focus on how people are different rather focusing on how we are the same.  We find ourselves in a both/and culture that contains a paradox.  We value individuality while insisting that everyone has the same opportunities and is equal.  Where in our thinking do we have room for consequences and cause and effect?

Just because an abused infant survives to its toddlerhood, and then makes it to its teen years and beyond, does not mean that it has within itself a whole person that somehow miraculously survived to be the same person it would have become if the abuse had never happened.  I am not talking about HEALING here.  I am talking about very real changes that happened during the development of that person physiologically — on the genetic level, the level of the brain, nervous system and immune system.  That means that we do not even end up in the same body when we are adults as a result of having survived extreme early abuse that we would have had if our circumstances had been good ones.

This means that we live in different bodies and we live in a different world — because our perception and the way we process information is different.  We were built differently almost as if we came from a different planet.  For those of you — and I don’t say this with humor — that have felt yourself to be an alien on this planet — I say take a long honest look at the conditions surrounding your early development.  If they were harsh, you are an alien.  Being a survivor makes us a different KIND of person in a different kind of body with a different kind of brain.

We are the ones that will never easily find our way down the wide common road to any peach market.  Ours is a relentless struggle, often complicated by benevolent-world ideas about how we SHOULD be better at getting along in life.  It is time for those of us who KNOW a different world to begin speaking our truth.

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A very clear expose of these kinds of scenarios I am describing  is presented by Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz in their book,

The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook–What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=boy+raised+dog&x=0&y=0

I highly recommend this book as a thought expanding opportunity to discover what Dr. Perry knows about this topic of alterations in development for maltreated children.

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Thank you very much for reading this post — your comments are welcome and appreciated.  Linda

+BLACK RABBIT

alchemynow1 Comment

Please see:

http://preventchildabuseny.typepad.com/prevent_child_abuse_new_y/2009/04/response-to-apples-baby-shaker-application.html

++++++++++++++

Please follow this link to the story. It has been moved into the section on my childhood stories.

WIDENING OUR PERCEPTION OF IMMUNITY TO INCLUDE ABUSE

alchemynowLeave a comment

My call to others is that we need to expand and widen our considerations of what immunity is, what it does, who it includes, and how it operates.

The abuse that happened to me happened because my mother was not protected against the deprivations caused within her environment.  Her body, which in her case refers to her brain-mind, had to make its own adjustments to survive what threatened her because there was nobody around her when she was small that paid adequate attention to her needs.  As a result, her malaise was passed onto me through abuse.

It is NOT a stretch of the imagination and therefore a waste of time for us to begin to think about how critical every form of immunity is to our continued survival and well being.  Because we now live in an increasingly more complex world it is easy for us to lose track of and sight of what matters the most.

We are a social species.  That means that our survival did and does depend on connections between one another.  The smallest circle of protection might happen in regards to what threatens us inside our own skin.  But our need for immunity, protection and defense does not stop there.  We are vulnerable both individually and collectively to all kinds of threats that exist within our environment.  For an infant and a young child, if that threat is happening to it as a result of inadequate and harmful care of lack of it, from its immediate caregivers, its immune response team must come from outside of the immediate family.

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When we consider, for example, the current conditions in our global environment that are putting us at risk from swine flu, we can easily see how this expanded immune system from our connected relationship to ever expanding circles of other people affect us.  We, of course, try to avoid and prevent contamination using whatever means at our disposal.  I don’t personally make surgical masks.  I would have to depend on someone else to manufacture, distribute, etc. a mask I might choose to wear.  But once I might have that mask attached to my face, do I ever think of all the people that were involved in the chain of protection that made it possible for me to have the mask in the first place?

How about government involvement?  That’s a part of a larger circle of protection.  But actions taken by that larger circle affect me, too.

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http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-national/20090426/US.Swine.Flu.States/?cid=rssfeed&attr=article_news_national_US.Swine.Flu.States

Government attention to threat

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090429/hl_afp/healthfluworld_20090429151820

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?rn=3906861&cl=13217634&ch=4226716&src=news

Use of surgical masks

http://www.newsday.com/news/health/la-sciw-swine-masks28-2009apr28,0,1240748.story

Arizonians worried

http://www.azcentral.com/business/articles/2009/04/29/20090429biz-masks0429.html

Flu spreading, kills US toddler

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090429/ap_on_he_me/med_swine_flu

Knowing the symptoms

http://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/flu-guide/20061101/swine-flu-faq

Officials saying swine flu cannot be contained

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599189431400

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Protection of other members of our species is our responsibility, and one we will not take seriously until we realize and accept the fact that we are all connected and must participate in an immune system process that is much larger than the one we are taught to believe is ONLY important — our own personal one that exists within our own bodies.

This link provides us with an example of how interconnected actions on behalf of at risk children can impact these same children’s immunity — meaning their well being.

http://www.preventchildabuseny.org/promisesforparents.shtml

Protection of little ones always circles back to the well being of the caregivers who take care of them.  If a child is being neglected, abused, molested, it is because an opening exists for toxic challenges to REACH that child in the first place.  The only protection a child can offer to itself is contained in a very small developing body that is, rather than being able to protect itself, actually developing a body that includes both the trauma experiences themselves and their body’s trauma reactions and responses that are being built into their bodies from the start.

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Isolation from one another puts as all at risk of ‘infection’ from toxic interactions with our environments — wherever those toxins come from.  If the circle of protection and immunity is broken, a whole new level of emergency is created.  Our efforts always need to aim toward avoiding and preventing traumas from happening in the first place.  I do not see a difference between the threat of swine flu infection or threat of ‘infection’ from maltreatment, violence, deprivation or abuse.  It takes a healthy, whole, fully connected and operational immune system to address any threat of harm — to us individually and to us collectively.

Attachment on all levels is a protective factor.  Risk of harm and extinction for any species corresponds to the degree that healthy attachments within that species are damaged or obliterated.  I believe that for our advanced human species it is not only what we might DO that matters, it is also about our awareness and what and who we include or exclude in our thinking.

As we separate ourselves from one another we are creating gaps in our ‘atmosphere’ of protective immunity from all threats of harm.  We are ALL a part of one another’s immune system because we are members of a social species.  Every living organism defines itself according to its boundaries.  Degrees of health and well being operate  according to how competently — and that means adequately and successfully — any organism can protect those boundaries.

Because it all boils down to resources, it is the availability of, access to, and utilization of resources that determines the quality of competence any organism has to stay alive.  As members of a social species we are each a part of that resource system.  We also have to remember that social species has a main continuum of behavior that lets us interact with one another.  This is a continuum that contains cooperation at one extreme end and competition on the other.

This is all about the most important operation a living system participates in — control over its environment through manipulation of resources.  This is nothing but basic resource management through some form of manipulation.  For a social species this operation usually appears in some form of dominance and submission.  Who is the most vulnerable to any kind of threat and who is not?  Who has access to vital resources and who does not?

At this point in human evolution I suggest that competition will soon become a cancer that will eat up our species from the inside.  Cooperation, on the other hand, has the capacity to balance out all the ills our species currently suffers from, and is the immune system reaction that has the ability to heal us.  Competition creates a state of war.  Cooperation is the state of peace.  Where do we see ourselves on this continuum?  At what point does our ambivalence become cruelty to somebody else?

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Human boundaries are formed through attachment.  The more strong, safe and secure our sense of attachment is — I would add as adults, the wider that circle is — the better our resource of having empathy for one another is.  Empathy is what connects us together.  What we choose to do in participation with others is another matter.

If our interactions between our genetics and our early caregivers forced us to avoid the experience of emotion, we will correspondingly be unable as adults to access them adequately, understand them, or to take action according to the information they provide to us.  We will also not be able to detect the full range of expressions other people use to communicate with us.

And again, experts suggest that all versions of attachment disorders result in a corresponding empathy pathology.  I believe this is about the formation of healthy boundaries and all ongoing operations that protect and defend these boundaries.  It is possible that humans can form a brain that prevents access even to their own self, and from there, access is denied as a fully functioning member of the species as a whole.

We will always choose what we think is best for ourselves.  It will only be to the degree that we expand our perceptions of ourselves that we will realize that we are all in this business of life together.  It is therefore our part as members of a species that relies on one another for all levels of immunity that we can offer our individual efforts to the betterment of both our individual selves and our collective community.

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When it comes to something as obvious as threat from what might be a rampant virus, we can all see what that threat IS.  Yet it becomes a matter not only of our body’s individual immune response to protect us.  It also becomes a matter that involves a wide circle of our connected community.  Our protection and defense on all levels always depends on one another.

Protecting infants and children is no different.  As one who was NOT well protected from harm from birth, I can say, “Wish you were there!”  Assuming, of course, that if you HAD been there you would have acted as a part of a fully functional immune system component and would have made sure, in some way, that the abuse had stopped.

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As always, thank you for reading — your comments are welcome and appreciated.

+SUFFER IN SILENCE

alchemynow2 Comments

Why did I sleep so poorly and wake before dawn today?  What do I do with the millions of thoughts, swarming around like gnats, each untouchable?  I try to swat them away.  I do not want to hear them.  I don’t want them to be a part of me.

I used to have an inner directive about my research and writing that I could in the end say things about the consequences of severe abuse from birth that I knew no therapist would ever tell a client — because they didn’t know them.  Now I laugh a macabre laugh.  Nobody can afford any therapy any more.  There is no access.  How do those of us who had such a terrible mess made of the first 18 years of our life get help for anything that happened to us, let alone for the difficulties those experiences back then cause for us now?

Or is none of it supposed to matter?  Do we just need to do what my sister calls it, “Put on your big girl panties,” and get on with our lives, moment by moment, the best that we can?

I get the feeling that I have so much information buried, hidden just below the surface — but I am supposed to leave it there?  Leave it untouched, waiting for future generations to discover in their own time, because we have too much on our plates in the world right now and it is all too much for anyone to hear?

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I have a very clear idea at this moment about how this all can work.  I walked away from my research and my computer and my writing and remembering 5 months ago.  I simply pushed back my chair, got up, walked away and didn’t turn back — until now.  It happened the instant I knew I had found what I was looking for:  ‘substance p’.

SEE search:

http://www.google.com/search?q=substance+p&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3RNFA_enUS270US307

Substance P is a neurotransmitter related to the sensation of pain.  It works the same way if we are feeling something as physically wrong for us as it does if we feel something as emotionally wrong with us.  That means to me that our sadness is not something to spurn and discard.  It is a part of us we need to cherish and learn from.

 

++

 

Partly my mission up until that point was to show that our nation’s reliance on pharmaceuticals to treat ‘depression’ and ‘anxiety’ was no different than a reliance on anything that we use to take away our perception of pain.  I knew there really was no difference between psychological pain and physical pain because both are indications to the body that there is something hazardous affecting an individual within their environment, and both elicit an immune system response.

 

I knew that we run the risk of basically saying to one another and to ourselves, “That’s OK.  Go ahead and keep your hand in the flame.  Take these pills.  You will not feel it.  But by all means don’t take the pain seriously as a signal to you that there’s something wrong with your life.  Don’t try to find out what it is, what caused it, how it affects you.  Don’t change anything.  Just ‘remain productive,’ get on with your life, quit whining and complaining.  Nobody cares and neither should you.”

 

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So in my own life I turned away from my studies and from my writing, and tried to create a sanctuary for myself, tried to forget everything I am and everything I’ve become as a result of early, chronic, consistent, terrible abuse.  After all, our society tells us, “That’s all in the past now.”  That’s a lie.  It is NOT in the past.  Everything that has happened to us remains right here in the present instant, accumulated in our body, in our body’s memory, and affects every interaction that occurs all the way down to the molecules in our body and how our genetic code is continually manifesting in our bodies.

 

So what?

 

We are not supposed to ask the questions.  We are not supposed to know the answers.  Thinking is supposed to be carefully modulated so that we avoid knowing the truth.  Be a nation of smiley faces, plugging along, separating the good from the bad, letting people ‘get what they deserve’.  Don’t pity ourselves?  Don’t ever think you had it worse than anyone else because we all know how much worse other people have it?

 

The more we don’t know our own reality the more we separate ourselves from ourselves, and hence from one another.  Are we simply a glamor culture founded upon the powers of distraction and the pursuit of not knowing the truth?  Every time an important question bubbles to the surface of our awareness we are supposed to turn away and forget it.  If we can’t do this by ourselves, then we better go get some kind of pill to help us.

 

Where’s the salvation in that?  Where’s the learning?  Where’s the connection to reality and to what is really going on?  Where is the taking of new information and using it to create a better world?  Are questions and wondering forbidden?

 

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For example, what if I were to ask important questions like, “What is the difference between the experience of abuse for the child that is singled out in a family as the chronically abused one, and the siblings who are the witness abuse survivors? What is the difference between them in regards to the long term brain and body changes they each receive as a result?  Is there a possibility and risk that by our unwillingness to ask these questions and to look for the answers on the bigger level that we are saying there is no difference between them, and that a witness and a victim are in effect ‘the same thing’?  Where, in this picture, do the perpetrators fit in?”

By being willing to pay close attention  to the lessons of trauma we can become  crystal clear about cause and effect, culpability and accountability.  Both witnesses to abuse and victims of abuse have their shared portion of experiences related to peril.  In addition, they each also have their own experiences that are distinctly different.

 

Is there in effect a forbidden zone, a boundary in our thinking and learning that says, “STOP here, beyond this point there is no passing?”  Is that part of what continually keeps the after effects of trauma alive and well, running just under the surface of our culture like a poisoned and toxic ground water that remains so close to the surface that the well being of at least half or our citizens is being jeopardized on some level daily — and nobody is really supposed to care?  Does the adage, ‘pay lip service’ apply here as we all like to decry violence and abuse but will not do anything individually to stop either the actions or the effects — not even within ourselves?

 

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“Chin up.  Suffer in silence.  Don’t admit the truth.  What you don’t know can’t hurt you.  Don’t make such a big deal of it.”

 

Is this really all about not wanting to separate the victims from the not victims because somehow the not victims carry some sense of guilt, shame and responsibility for what victimized the ‘others’ in the first place?  Or is it that we live embedded within a culture that insists it is right in saying that “People get what they deserve?”

 

That leaves the not victims exonerated from whatever guilt they might be carrying so that they never have to dig down and take the guilt out and look at it.  It leaves the victims holding the bad bag feeling as if somehow they deserved what happened to them and they have no right to complain.  Not ever.  “Don’t rock the sinking boat?”

 

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That leaves us with a vast gray area where people who really do suffer somehow just have ‘bad genes.”  When all else fails and there is no other logical explanation, blame genetics.  Who cares that research is showing how nasty early experiences trigger most of these genes to misbehave as they had to and continue to adjust for a person’s survival in a hostile, toxic and malevolent world?

 

We make choices as a society just like we make them individually.  If nobody calls anybody on their behavior, where is the balance, reason and health in that?  Pharmaceutical companies who make billions off of the results are the monster engines powering health research — physical and mental-emotional health.  We don’t question this.  We literally BUY their results as if they came straight from the God of the universe.  The power is in the pills?

 

The word ‘pharmaceutical” stems from the Greek word ‘pharamkos’, which was the chosen sacrifice that was killed after all the ills of a people were projected onto it.  Kill the pharmakos, all troubles of the people are vanquished.  Blame the victim, ‘de-capacitate’ the victim, shut them up, make them go away and all will be well for everyone else.

 

What if the sacrifice doesn’t want to BE the sacrifice?  What power do they have to resist?  True mental health and well being is being treated like an obsolete technology itself.  Who cares if vinyl records disappear off the market as they are being continually replaced by newer and better recording technologies?  All that matters is that we have access to the music itself.  Well being for the masses?  Who cares if it has been replaced with tiny pills in throw away (well, maybe in some places recyclable) bottles?

 

Shouldn’t we all just be so grateful?  We don’t have to suffer.  We don’t have to work at well being.  We don’t have to ask the tough questions and find the tougher answers.  Access to well being has been equalized and guaranteed to all?  And if we refuse to take the pills?  If we dare to question Big Brother’s machine?  Well, who first asked “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody there to hear it does it make a sound?”

 

I have always thought that question was ludicrous.  A tree falling and hitting the ground makes vibrations, dislodges and upsets all manner of life that exists within its branches, etc.  Only egocentric humans would assume that the world revolves around us.  I can personally say anything I want to about how the abuse I suffered was preventable, that I would rather it had never happened in the first place, that it changed the development of my brain and body into being one geared for the most efficient survival in a life-and-death threat world, and that this childhood created a lack of well being in me that operates on my molecular level.  Who wants to hear this noise?

 

Better that I either suffer in silence — which is what I am doing if nobody hears a sound I am making — or shut up, pop my pills, and get to work fitting in here.  I mean, how productive is the truth?

 

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+SOCIAL ISOLATION – Research on the Brain Changes

alchemynowLeave a comment

I imagine that researchers can write about topics such as this one without being ’emotionally involved’ with their topic.  If so, then this is what makes my writing different from theirs.  The condition they write about is one I have intimate experience with — only my isolation began at birth, not at post-weaning.

What follows here are my ‘pre-notes’ for the following article that I will be considering in depth in following posts:

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PMID: 18423591 [PubMed – indexed for MEDLINE]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez

Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2008 Aug;32(6):1087-102. Epub 2008 Mar 18.Click here to read

Behavioural and neurochemical effects of post-weaning social isolation in rodents-relevance to developmental neuropsychiatric disorders.

Fone KC, Porkess MV.

Institute of Neuroscience, School of Biomedical Sciences, Medical School, Queen’s Medical Centre, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2UH, UK. kevin.fone@nottingham.ac.uk

ABSTRACT:  Exposing mammals to early-life adverse events, including maternal separation or social isolation, profoundly affects brain development and adult behaviour and may contribute to the occurrence of psychiatric disorders, such as depression and schizophrenia in genetically predisposed humans. The molecular mechanisms underlying these environmentally induced developmental adaptations are unclear and best evaluated in animal paradigms with translational salience. Rearing rat pups from weaning in isolation, to prevent social contact with conspecifics, produces reproducible, long-term changes including; neophobia, impaired sensorimotor gating, aggression, cognitive rigidity, reduced prefrontal cortical volume and decreased cortical and hippocampal synaptic plasticity. These alterations are associated with hyperfunction of mesolimbic dopaminergic systems, enhanced presynaptic dopamine (DA) and serotonergic (5-HT) function in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), hypofunction of mesocortical DA and attenuated 5-HT function in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. These behavioural, morphological and neurochemical abnormalities, as reviewed herein, strongly resemble core features of schizophrenia. Therefore unravelling the mechanisms that trigger these sequelae will improve our knowledge of the aetiology of neurodevelopmental psychiatric disorders, enable identification of longitudinal biomarkers of dysfunction and permit predictive screening for novel compounds with potential antipsychotic efficacy.

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First of all I will say that from my perspective as a survivor of severe abuse from birth, the consequences documented in this article go far beyond what the authors are describing.  While I cannot change the official diagnostic criteria for depression or schizophrenia, I can suggest that all these changes exist on a continuum rather than belonging simply to such ‘gigantic’ main categories.

I suspect that in 45 – 50% of cases infants and young children receive less than the optimal quality of caregiver interaction which leads to some form of ‘attachment disorder.’  Not only are these disorders empathy disorders, but they are  correspondingly reflected in alterations in the way young brains and nervous systems develop within these less-than-optimal environments.  Consequently these degrees of alteration will manifest themselves along the continuum of difficulties these authors are describing.

The process through which these alterations occur should be no mystery to us.  It simply reflects a flexible adjustment ability that allows an individual’s body to prepare itself for living in a less-than-optimal world as it develops in a less-than-optimal environment from its start.  We don’t get to have it both ways in life.  Tell a growing body that the world is hazardous and filled not with plenty but with deprivation, this body will change its developmental course to the best of its ability so it can survive in this same kind of world ‘later on.’

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My friends and loved ones tell me that I am happier when I am not working on my research or writing.  They are right because I can live in a different ‘space’ that I can create that is separate from the truth.  But my being happier does nothing to help anyone else.  It takes willingness, fortitude and courage — as well as an abiding faith that my interpretation of current research can help someone else with a background similar to mine at least understand why they’ve never seemed to reach ‘the top of their game’.

As it is this ‘work’ wakens the darkness inside of me, wakens my woundedness, hurts me.  I cannot be detached, objective, scientific or write from some remote place where this subject matter cannot reach or touch me.  I have to write from a place of reality within myself, a place where I know — personally — what these authors are talking about.

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Practically speaking, I don’t believe that nature ever means for those of us who suffered in a malevolent environment from birth to do much more than survive until we can reproduce offspring.  In the time of our harshest ancient history this is all that a member of our species could hope to accomplish.  How can we wonder or be surprised when these abused infants grow up and recreate the same kind of environment for their offspring?  They never knew any other kind of world, and even if they have experienced ‘better’ in their older years, ‘better’ is not what built their brains or their bodies in the first place.

I suspect that the DNA memories and their expression machinery that built us is far more ancient than the ‘happy, safe and secure memories’ that we expect in our supposed modern life. Those of us who were battered, beaten, neglected from birth had a very ancient set of DNA mechanisms activated because the very ancient memory of our species about how to endure and survive in a malevolent, hostile world is what we desperately needed in order to survive and endure ourselves.

So ours is not some long ago forgotten memory about being here on earth when hardship and trauma is all that there is.  Ours is not only recent memory, but constant memory as this ancient survival genetic code is activated continually throughout our lifespan.

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But sometimes this ancient survival memory does not manifest in a smooth useful transition into the relatively benign world most others live in.  As a species we survived the hardest times of our history by taking the most extreme measures possible to do so.  If rape, pillage, murder and mayhem was what was needed to guarantee our survival, then that’s exactly what we did.  If times were truly harsh and there were not enough resources for a mother to ensure survival for herself and all of her offspring, very tough choices have always needed to be made.  When we see those same ancient genetically-linked behavior choices being made by over-traumatized women today we are puzzled if not appalled.

And, yes, I am including my own mother — ALL abusive mothers — in this descriptional category — though the choice is not usually conscious and is based on information their own bodies received in their early lives about the condition of the world and how best to survive in a dangerous one.  Certainly my mother was beautiful, if that’s what we choose to measure reproductive fitness by.  She was voted the most beautiful girl in her high school graduating class.  She had, when young, an hour glass figure, thick wavy auburn hair, emerald bedroom eyes, a perfect complexion, full lips and a ‘vivacious’ personality.

But if someone had paid attention and known what to look for, the indicators were there of terrible trouble in the long term in her own stories written when she was 10 and 11 years old.  SEE:  My Mother’s Childhood Stories.  It is obvious in these stories that she was creatively gifted, that her mind at that time was processing complex interactions as she tried to build a working ‘theory of mind.’  But, then, read her last story and tell me what you think!

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The younger we are when traumas occur the wider the range of possible choices a developing organism has at its disposal.  As ‘windows of developmental opportunity’ close with age, the range of possible choices is equally diminished.  A physiological response to trauma at a very early age (which begins to happen at conception if needed), I believe, activates the ‘worst of the worst’ case scenario genetic interrelationships that an organism has in its arsenal/at its disposal.  Once these physiological choices have been made, a trajectory is established that is destined toward an ‘awful’ future.  To the extent that these choices are force-made early in development, human higher level choice options will be replaced by faster, more automatic survival-based patterns that have been recorded in our genetic memory from our ancient experiences in a very dangerous world environment.

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Windows of developmental growth opportunity are times of maximum flexibility and more open ended possibility.  As time goes on and these windows narrow and/or close, flexibility is exchanged for ‘what works’ based on the nature and quality of early experiences.

Because all growth and development occurs in an interactional way, it is not possible to protect a developing infant from the consequences of extreme stress and trauma during the period of these growth windows EXCEPT to not allow the infant to be exposed to these experiences in the first place.

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For those of you who detest the idea of playing a ‘blame game’, let me assure you that the consequences of keeping our heads buried in the ground of ignorance means that someone — meaning the victims of early neglect and maltreatment — will be paying the price of having an altered body and an altered life due to naturally occurring early developmental adjustments to exposure to a malevolent, hazardous and toxic world.  I believe that as time goes on and as we begin to  not only chew on but to digest the impact of trauma on developing people, we will find that about 85% of serious lifelong negative experiences in adulthood can be traced to adjustments bodies and brains were forced to make under stress of traumas experienced particularly up to the age of 2.  That fact would lead us to the startling realization that much of adulthood negative experience could be entirely prevented with completely adequate early caregiving of infants and young toddlers.

The problem is complicated by the fact that approximately 45% of our current adult population was forced to make adaptations within their own inadequate or partially (and yet significantly) inadequate years of development themselves.  That means these people often have no clue about what they missed because they don’t even know what they needed ‘back then’, and therefore cannot possibly know how to make it better for their own offspring.

It also means that trying to convince this 45% that there was and is a better way to build a human brain and body becomes an almost insurmountable task.  Adequate parenting has far less to do with what we might intend than it does with what we actually do.  Infants do not magically grow up and then receive the best human brain that our species’ advanced evolution might have to offer them.  These advanced brains are consequences of the best early infant interactions caregivers can provide.  And because we are a social species, the end product of our adult brain is formulated by our early social interactions.

To the extent and degree that ‘something is missing’ during these early growth windows of development, we are consequently ‘socially deprived.’  Believe me, when researchers translate their findings of any kind of animal research to the human realm, they are describing for us the possible (and probable) result of a range of isolation-based experiences and their resulting consequences.  For the fullest possible range of advanced human brain potentials to be realized, early infant and toddler experiences must be of the highest quality, taking place in a dependably safe and secure setting.  Anything less than this ideal will result in some form of genetic-memory alterations that are a depletion of the highest potential toward adaptation to life — in infancy and in the future — in a hostile world.

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We can boil all of this down to the simplest of statements:  Less-than-optimal infancy = less-than-optimal brain development in, by and for a less-than-optimal world = less-than-optimal adulthood.

Should all adults be equally free to tamper with the nitroglycerin-like explosive potential of genetic adaptations possible in our human gene pool?  Right now, our society answers that question, “Yes.”  At the same time we also say that we have no, or very little control over the societal ills of child abuse, domestic violence, rape, crime, addictions and the origination of a wide range of so-called mental illnesses.

Reproductive fitness indicators are NOT negative.  They exist on continuums related to every single vital aspect of our species including such things as creative expression in dance, art, music, humor, verbal ability, memory, perseverance, focus, stamina, exploration —  among all the others.

In my boiled down version of what ails adults I will simply state that all of the above merely represent degrees of well-being versus ill-being.  All of the above are simply manifestations of how fit the world is and how fit we are to reproduce in it because all of the above are specifically linked to our species’ ‘reproductive fitness indicators’.

Early interactions with the environment from conception particularly to the age of 2, signal our entire genetic makeup to pick a direction of development based on incoming information.  I see it no differently than if we were putting together a team to play a sport.  Finding the best talent for one sport is different than finding the best talent for a completely different sport, but the choices still have to be made from a pool of available talent.

Each of us has a unique array of  ‘reproductive fitness indicators”, but they are still linked to what is possible within our human gene pool.  The problem comes when enough traumatic stress is applied during the developmental growth window for any one of our indicators so that indicator becomes a signal not of health and vital well-being for the member of the species in interaction with its environment, but becomes rather an indicator of reproductive unfitness in a less-than-optimal world.

All of our so-called ‘mental illness’ genetic and gene expression combinations seem to be directly linked in their origin to reproductive fitness indicators.  Remember above when I mentioned that I believe 85% of our adult problems could be prevented if early experiences were optimal for optimal development of the individual before the age (at a minimum) of two?  That would leave what I would guess is a 15% group that would end up with some kind of reproductive fitness indicator deficit no matter what the quality of early care would be.  That is because we carry within our human genome a collection of fitness indicator genes that can appear and combine in such a way that results will never be optimal.  That still seems to be a fact of life, though genetic research may well be able to mitigate those factors in the future.

We can celebrate the amazing potential adaptive abilities that exist for us as a species.  At the same time we must realize that how we raise our offspring — in every way — affects how these abilities manifest and express themselves.  We cannot bear and raise our offspring with impunity.  The ability to flexibly adapt to our environment has always been our greatest asset.  We need to understand what reproductive fitness indicators are and how they were influenced during the crucial stages of our development so that they reflect not only our individual fitness for reproduction, but also directly reflect the fitness of the environment we are bearing our young in.

We can ‘zoom in, zoom out’ all we want to as we consider these factors, but we cannot escape the fact that how a fetus, an infant, and a toddler is treated on all levels will affect the trajectory of their development with the end result that a deficit of care will reflect a deficit in development.  The only way we can change our perspective is to admit to ourselves and accept the fact that if we allow deficits to occur in early development, we are perfectly willing to accept the lifelong negative consequences that originate as a result.  We can never completely isolate ourselves from our species or from the total environment we all life in.

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Your comments are welcome and appreciated.  Post to be continued….

+FACING OUR OWN IDEAS ABOUT MONSTERS

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There’s a woman who comes to the small free art class I voluntarily teach on Saturday afternoons whose entire being lights up when she talks about gardens.  Not any old kind of garden, but rather truly beautiful ones, hidden ones, secret ones, places where people could come to find peace and beauty and untroubled sanctuary.

This same woman always thinks about gates and doorways at the same time.  The images are connected.  These gates are not ordinary, either.  Down here in the southwest we perhaps have more images in our minds about walled courtyards and gates that are sealed off from public view by all manner of creative and appealing gates.  Some have small windows in them up high where adults can peer through to see into the secret places.

This woman has never read the children’s story or seen the movie of ‘The Secret Garden,’ though I am recommending it to her as a homework assignment to discover this story.  While in art therapy graduate school we learned much about how the psyche of humanity communicates to us in and through image.  Neuroscientists are now beginning to suspect that our brains process all incoming information into memory storage in a poetic, metaphoric fashion.  All this information is stored in our limbic, emotion, right brain and is only available to our left ‘logical’ brain when we talk about something very specific that is in some way connected to our metaphoric memories.

In the case of secret gardens and private sealed off worlds, I think about the ‘bigger picture’ of the history of two things in our collective minds:  mazes and labyrinths.  Mazes are often about what amazes us.  This might be something that we have puzzled about and are at the edge of understanding but not quite there yet.  What kinds of things amaze us?  What things capture our imaginations and captivate our thoughts?  Things that we wonder about in the world.  Wonder is an amazing mental operation of its own, and something that I as a child abused from birth could not do.  I had no points of comparison so there was no wonder in my young life.

I think about Pelzer’s book, “A Child called It,” and about how he fought back against his abuse even in his mind.  One has to have some means to compare one’s own experience in their private world with what one knows others experience in the public world.  If a child is abused from birth and there is no reprieve, no opportunity to spend lengths of time in interaction with a sane caregiver, then that infant’s brain will simply accept as reality all that it has experienced and had built into its brain about what the world is like.  We never question a certain reality unless our minds have the freedom to reach toward and devour the possibility that there are worlds ‘out there’ that are different.

Along with this student’s delight in imagining secret gardens comes the collective imaginal idea of labyrinths.  If you do a Google search for “labyrinth minotaur” you will bring yourself face to face with a world of not only delightful possibilities, but also bring yourself to a place that presents a collective image of the monster within us.  At the center of the labyrinth our imagination holds there an image of the minotaur, a horrible creature that both scares us nearly to death and one that is also our strongest ally and protector.

Someone mentioned to me the other day that as I clarify and focus my blog and my thoughts about who I am really writing for, I will find that my section, + Art and Creativity, is out of place and does not belong on my site.  The brain of our species is the most complex and creative ‘object’ in existence on our planet.  I believe that to live our lives to the fullest we need to exercise our connection between the two hemispheres of our brain so that we know more and more about who we are and how we are in the world.

Through artistic exploration we allow the more hidden (in our American culture) aspects of ourselves access into our lives.  Most of us keep our own poetry, our own metaphor perspectives on our lives, sealed and walled off from the world in our internal secret gardens and labyrinths.  When we allow our images to come forth, even through the spoken word, we can honor ourselves by encouraging not only further and continued access, but also exploration of meaning for ourselves.

If a person has these particular hidden, secret garden and maze-labyrinth images popping around where they can actually recognize them consciously, then a further pursuit into the images can connect to all sorts of fascinating wisdom.

As the world acclaimed astrologer, Zane,’ (SEE: http://www.zanestein.com/CentaureanAstrology.htm) describes in relation to the asteroid Nessus, we all have a monster inside of ourselves that we usually cannot face.  In Carl Jung’s thinking, this monster lies sealed off in our personal shadow, a place that he says we put all that we are afraid of about ourselves — both the best of us and the worst of us.  If a student begins to allude through their art exploration to something like mazes and labyrinths, it becomes a fascinating study to encourage that student to pursue the images until they can present into consciousness the reality of whatever ‘mythological’ base they are connecting to.

Through the infant brain development and growth years a person learns what to do with the ‘devil and the angel’ within themselves.  Normally we make adjustments so that our mind knows (coming from the operation of our brain) how to live in a world of extremes.  An infant’s brain knows at a very early age, usually beginning clearly by the third month of life, who is safe to trust and who is not.  If an infant is growing in a malevolent world this distinction obviously becomes impossible to make in a useful and healthy way.

A growing child’s brain has to learn how to sequence and prioritize information — both what is coming in from the outside and what is accumulating in ever increasingly complex formats on their inside.  If an infant and then later a young child is being raised in an environment of conflict, torture, and terrorism, it is obvious that these processes are either aborted or completed in unhealthy and inadequate ways.

But we need to know that ALL of us have a Jungian shadow, and all of us have a secret garden and a secret labyrinth whose center contains a monster that we believe is us.  This monster has power — power to destroy and power to protect.  If our brains were allowed to at least develop a minimal pathway through our cortex that allows us to use our higher cortical thinking abilities, we do not allow the monster to wreck havoc in our own or anybody else’s life.  But because our relationship to these ‘states’ was set in motion from birth, we must work as adults to access all the information that we know about these things and bring them into consciousness as we learn who, in fact, we are, who we fear we are, who we fear we could become, who we hope we could become.

I don’t know what my student holds behind the secret door in her being.  If she chooses to explore through the images in art work what she knows ‘in there’ we will all be able to share in her process.  If a young child is being raised by monsters, the boundaries between one’s own monster/protector and the monster/protector of its caregivers will be all mixed together in some kind of very nasty and unpalatable soup.  But we can never just throw the whole pot out and start over.  We have to work with what we were given beginning at the time of our birth.

We have not only the ability to safely and wisely do this work, but we have the obligation and right to do it.  Safely is the key word here.  It is because we were not SAFE from birth that we have the nasty soup in the first place.  But even if we were safe, as social beings in a social world we all made distinctions between what was acceptable about us and what wasn’t.  Most of us never go back as adults and take a good, creative look behind the secret doorways.  We need to, because what motivates us and creates our highest priorities lies in there — whether we know it or not, or even WANT to know it or not.

Child abuse and the lifelong plague

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Child abuse is most often linked to a cycle, but when considering a cycle where do we break into the loop to start our investigation?

I want to make the point that what comes around goes around – but it all starts somewhere so can also end somewhere.

Before someone figured out that rats carried the plague nobody could attack the terrible problem at its roots. I believe that we have to, as parents and adults, recognize the true reality of our own childhood traumas so that we can understand how they have impacted us. Child abuse does not just hurt little people. When those little people grow up they carry those wounds with them for the rest of their lives. So far, I don’t see that we understand exactly how these consequences are all linked together. Advances in developmental neuroscience tell us that child abuse, especially to infants and the very young during brain developmental changes, in fact gives the survivor a brain built for a malevolent rather than a benevolent world.

Until we educate ourselves about this fact we are in effect killing the horses and sparing the rats that are the cause of the plague among us in the first place. A malevolently-formed brain is designed for a different world. If we don’t understand this we are screaming our loudest across a chasm trying to change those who hurt the little ones without realizing they truly aren’t able to hear what we are saying to them. Their brains hear and understand information differently. It’s our job to face this truth so that we can find a way to reach the abusers who were themselves abused. Otherwise – and obviously – the cycle is not only continuing but is growing in force and magnitude.

Most of the time we are ‘preaching to the choir’ about child abuse.  Those 50% at the top of the heirarchy who came from safe and secure childhoods are screaming to those down below about what to do and what not to do.  Those at the very bottom can never hear those words.  It’s time we empower those at the bottom, those who had truly horrific childhoods from birth, to know their own reality and do their own screaming from the bottom up.  Will those at the top hear us?