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I try to be as positive as I can about the work I am doing with my writing about the permanent and lifelong trauma-centered changes that plague survivors of severe abuse and trauma that happened during their early infant-child developmental changes.

Today’s transcription of my quarter of a century old letters my friend just returned back to me has left me feeling anything but positive.  The reality of the kinds of childhoods like mine, and like the kind I am talking about and describing, is horrible.  There is no way to pretty up the picture about what was done to us and what happened to us as a result.

I am faced with the tragedy of what my mother’s abuse did to me — not just during my childhood, but throughout my entire life up until this very instant in time.  Primarily I balance my mother’s abuse by the other side of my child abuse history.  No one was there for me to form a safe and secure attachment with.  THIS LACK, I believe, had as much to do with how my body-brain-mind-self had to change in order to survive as did the abuse itself.

I believe that having a safe and secure attachment to at least one other person from birth particularly through age 5 is a critical resiliency factor to balance out the terrible harm of abuse in infancy and childhood.  When I consider the terrible abuse of my childhood, it is ALSO the absence of having any other person I could form at attachment to and with that profoundly harmed me.

It is not JUST the presence of abuse that truly creates a malevolent childhood.  It is also the complete absence of safe and secure attachment to ANYONE else.  That absence, I believe, amplifies the impact of the trauma of abuse nearly beyond belief.  That absence, in particular, coupled with the abuse, so changes a person’s development that trauma becomes the underlying pivotal factor of their ongoing existence.

No matter how benign our adult life may appear from the outside, the reality of this kind of childhood trauma within us manifests itself in every feeling, thought, action, decision and experience that we have.   How to live well in spite of the trauma-centered developmental changes that happened to us is so far past my ability to understand today that I can’t imagine it.

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I am having a transparent moment, as if all the illusions I have ever had about myself being an ‘ordinary’ person in an ‘ordinary’ world have now completely evaporated.  Is this a feeling of complete hopelessness that I am experiencing?  It can’t be.  I won’t let it be.

Having illusions about who and how I am in this body in this lifetime is not the same thing as having hope.  Just because today, finally, all my illusions have vanished because I have challenged them and found that they do not fit me, does not mean that I have no right to find a way to a better life in this world.

At this moment I feel as if I have one foot poised in the air over a threshold I am crossing into a new vision of myself in my life.  I can, for the first time ever, looking backward through the time of my life and see myself being born a pure and innocent child, full of potential, full of life, full of the ability to respond to the world I was born into.

That this world welcomed me with trauma and abuse, which held me firmly within its grasp for the first, formative, 18 years of my life does not mean that I, as a human being, have changed in my essence.  But I do have to work with this body, nervous system, and brain that changed itself to survive the horrors of that ongoing trauma.  It is my mind I am working to change, to the best of my ability, not because it is in any way ill, but because it is mine.

My mind can no longer afford to feed itself on a diet of illusion and false belief that what happened to me did not affect me in ways that I now KNOW it did.  And with this knowledge I now have the most profound hope I have ever had.  It is time for me to learn how to experience life MY way, my CHANGED way, without ever again expecting anything about myself to be — ordinary.

There is an invisible line that is crossed during a severely abused infant-child’s life where the option to develop in an ‘ordinary’ way is removed.  To deny this fact is to suffer from delusion.

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*Ages 29-33 – Eight Letters to a Friend

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*Commentary on the eight letters to a friend – ages 29-33

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SOME OF THE KEY TYPICAL TROUBLESOME WORDS, CONCEPTS AND EXPERIENCES THAT ARE DIFFERENT FOR SEVERE CHILD ABUSE SURVIVORS – SEEN FROM MY NEWLY INFORMED PERSPECTIVE.

These things connect to what continues to ‘trouble’ us because they are all connected to the changes that our body-brain-mind had to make in order to survive early severe abuse during our infant-child developmental stages:

Choice

Feeling guilty – the whole concept of guilty

Concept of procrastination as being a source of our problems

‘shirking’ responsibility – the whole concept of ‘response-ability’ as it applies to us

dealing with things on a self-honesty level

concept of ‘changing’

the concept of feelings, feeling feelings, experiencing feelings

emotional brain not form ‘ordinarily’; emotional dysregulation = chronic problem

feeling lonely, depressed, crying – all different for us than for ‘ordinary’ people

experience of ‘feeling low’ and low on energy is different

‘anger’ has a different meaning to us – both our own and other people’s

being with other people

feeling trapped

our experience of the experience of ‘being sick’ and recuperating is altered

our experience of being kind to ourselves

our experience of giving ourselves ‘permission’

how we experience anticipation of enjoyable experiences

experience of worry different

experience of ‘wishful thinking’ is different

experience of disappointment different

Experience of trust is different

Our experience of the passage of time is VERY different!

Our experience of friendships is different

Being willing to reach for and experience ANY kind of self-help we can find

Finding that it does not REALLY help us at all

blaming-shaming ourselves that it doesn’t

not being able to immediately and completely trust our impressions of people

my ‘who-to-trust/not-trust’ center in my infant brain could not form correctly

making a mess of our own thinking trying to change these first impressions!

Our sense of safety with others is THE number ONE issue – we have to trust it

Intense feelings of isolated-alone, trust them, they are REAL beyond belief

Realize that ‘ordinary’ people do not experience them with the pain we do

Yes, we will do everything possible to ‘protect our feelings’ – naturally

Have to be hyper aware of what feels threatening and scary to us – it’s real

There are memories and feelings we can’t touch because it isn’t good for us to

Repression of trauma is not the same thing as dissociation

we can’t ‘work through issues’ like others if we dissociate

not helpful to feel guilty-shame for what we cannot possible accomplish!

Terrible ambiguity can exist about our abuser(s) – ordinary people can’t imagine

Confused-meshed identity and relationship with abuser

Commonly called ‘defense mechanisms’ don’t begin to describe true insanity

Have to be realistic about ‘recovery’ goals – ours will be different than ‘ordinary’

Be careful of what we believe of what therapists who do truly not know us, tell us

We don’t really know what love is or what it feels like – we weren’t built that way

I strongly suspect that ‘love’ is different from ordinary for us

We will never stop learning about what ‘ordinary’ people automatically know

We did not grow into our thinking abilities like ‘ordinary’ people do

Not helpful to be told by others we are ‘rationalizing’ as a defense when we think

We need help learning about our thinking process because abuse changed it

Our disorganized insecure attachment means that we do not grieve the same

Extremely helpful to understand insecure attachment and love relationships

Our own pain-loneliness puts us at risk for attaching harmfully in relationships

Our sense of ‘time passing’ is different; things do not ‘end’ in time like ordinary

Difficulties with accountability if we don’t know source of our difficulties

Terrible troubles with goals-future plans, our higher cortex formed differently

We have a different version of a selfhood – not the ordinary one formed by age 2

When we feel alone in the world, a lot of it is because we are lonely for our self

(a self-centered-self is cultural and evolutionarily a recent luxury we didn’t get)

We had no say in the matter – we developed a trauma-centered self from birth

12-step program talk about ‘unmanageability’ = not from our ‘planet of origin’

12-step program talk about ‘acceptance’ = not from our ‘planet of origin’

12-step program talk about ‘powerlessness’ = not from our ‘planet of origin’

12-step program talk about ‘resentments’ = not from our ‘planet of origin’

the set-point for our nervous system is not at ‘calm’ like ‘ordinary’ is

(these points are included at the end of the link presented above)

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