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I cannot pull any punches.  Surviving child abuse is a serious matter that needs to concern both those who endured it and those who were fortunate enough not to.

Child abuse should happen to no one.  Yet it does.  Those of us who survived it are doing the best that we can to understand the changes this abuse did to us during our development, to learn, to grow and heal.  We need to be vigilant about our well-being, proactive regarding the state of our health, and informed.

We suffer from continued difficult lives for as long as we live.  At the same time, our risk for developing serious adult ailments and perhaps to die young is connected to the extremely high price we had to pay to endure and remain alive.  Sticking our heads in the sand will not help us.  We are incredibly STRONG people or we would not be here!  We have the strength to face the facts and to find ways to continue to improve ourselves, our lives, and our chances for continued survival.

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It is easy to lose track of important information as time goes on that is posted in comments to writings on this blog.  One such piece of information came through today, and I think it warrants a repeat here:

Comment and reply posted to *THE ADVANTAGES OF DISCLOSURE

Comment submitted on 2009/10/30 at 1:54am

I never knew what I was experiencing was a disassociation from myself but now that I read what you wrote I go through exactly what you do. I like how you put this.
“While I have the benefit now of reorganizing and reorienting myself in relation to my brother based on our new level of connection, I have to experience aspects of this readjustment consciously in order for it to become a living useful integrated part of who I am.”

I always get in this stuck phase. Words for describing what Im going through just aren’t there. I feel like it’s because I learned from a very early age to program myself to shut off to the describing, and trying to put it into words because when I did I got hurt one way or another. So now that I am an adult I flounder. I have to work twice as hard and I fumble with thing actions, reactions that most normal adults are able to have within seconds without much thought and commit it to memory. Where as I have to actively think and then do and the evaluate and then try to commit it to memory.

Thank you for your blog

Reply submitted on 2009/10/30 at 9:58am

Hi there, and it makes me so happy to hear from you! After I had done my post yesterday about my journal, down at the bottom I went back and added something that was a (welcomed) revelation for me. For all the years of my recovery work I’ve heard people talk about how we have to learn how to feel — value of feelings, what they tell us, how to tolerate them, how to regulate them, how to learn from them. It’s true.

But yesterday was the first time it clicked with me that I never learned how to think!! My mother’s abuse interrupted me and my development every possible step of the way she could do it. Even though she could not say to me directly, “LINDA! STOP THINKING!” She really accomplished this.

This is a new realization or a new level of recovery for me to begin to understand this. Many times in my early recovery both therapists and AA people told me, “Linda, you use rationalization as a defense all of the time.” Nobody ever detected the underlying crisis of self that is connected to being smart and thinking. Nobody said to me, “By the way, Linda. Let’s look at the way you think. Let’s see where those thought patterns are connected in how your poor little growing baby brain learned to BE in a malevolent world of chaos and violence.”

We can always trust that our body, “itself” (it really IS US) remembers all our experiences and feelings because those memories are stored separately from the facts of our experience. How our left and right brain hemispheres develop and how they communicate with one another is MAJORLY affected in our early development from severe early child abuse. That means we are NOT the same as other ‘ordinary’ people are. Once we understand this, it’s a whole new world to explore, examine and learn about as we come to NAME HOW we are in the world which affects WHO we are in the world.

We cannot take for granted what ‘ordinary’ safe and secure, or even organized insecurely attached people can. We have to become far more conscious and aware. I take for granted that I have arms and hands, for example, and that I can use them and control what they do in ‘ordinary’ ways. I don’t have to consciously think about this. I just DO ordinary things with them.

Not so with the way my brain developed through abuse. So many things that psychology has simply stuck in the ‘defense’ category do not belong there. Thinking involves words, but how to connect our thinking both to our body-feelings and to our words becomes a task we can learn to practice with discipline as we try to train or retrain our brain-body-mind-self connections!

How can a growing little child ever find words when what they experience is beyond reason?

It is helping me to affirm who I am by realizing that what happened to me is shared by most people who were severely abused and neglected as children, especially to those whose mothers were ‘damaged’. It helps me to know the changes that happened to us as we grew and developed were not willy-nilly. The adaptations and adjustments our body-brain-mind-self had to make so we could survive DO follow patterns. It’s just that only now with new brain imaging techniques and new infant-child development research we are beginning to realize that we are evolutionarily altered beings. On a most profound level that is something for us to celebrate! That is a testimony to the miracle of resiliency that our species has ALWAYS had so that we could outlive at least 19 other hominid species throughout all the millions of years we have been developing — and surviving — as a species.

Having an identifiable ’self’, I believe, was a later evolutionary gift to our species that came after our life on this planet was no longer as terribly malevolent and dangerous as it was in our beginnings. We had grown enough to find ways to survive under threat, and the actual conditions of our environment eventually improved. But a tiny fetus and newborn, a little child, born into a world that is toxic and threatening still has the ancient genetic memory of how to grow a body and brain that allows it to continue to survive intolerable conditions. That those of us who were born into a bad-mothering world (especially and primarily) really are a testament to the amazing survival abilities of our species.

But the world we grow up into is filled with other people whose early lives were not all that bad, and they were able to grow and develop ‘ordinarily’ in contrast to us. It becomes, pardon the expression, like the Clash of the Titans. Only it is not supposed to be a conflict between survivors and those whose survival early on was not challenged. We just have to LEARN, and humans are very good at that. That’s why the name of our species is The Wise Ones! By golly, we are on the way.

Exactly what you are describing in your comment is how this process works for us. Think about how humans only ‘got’ verbal language ONLY 140,000 years ago. When we realize how LATE that was in our development, we realize we have vast storehouses of abilities to survive and to live BESIDES words. THOSE abilities are what kept us alive. Those abilities kept our species alive. There’s incredible powers in those non-verbal abilities. We can learn about the word part! In a way, words are frosting on the cake of life — yes, essential to who we are now in our more ‘ordinary’ world. But as I write this I realize they are not as essential to our survival as all our other abilities are (that we used or we wouldn’t be here).

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I hate to have to say this, but reality IS reality.  I was thrilled – even though it is a strange thing to say, and I WISH (a part of denial, magical childhood thinking reality state) it were not so – to see yesterday’s news about research that is confirming the long term, life span consequences for an individual who has survived intolerable severe child abuse.  The research is catching up with reality.

Our survival comes with an extremely high price tag.  Survival to the child bearing years is what nature has allowed us to do.  That we survive PAST that age, as I have said before, is due to the more benevolent conditions of the world we grow up and survive into.  The cost of the adaptations and adjustments our body-brain-mind-self had to make to keep us alive DOES show up in the costly consequences of serious illnesses and premature death.

Nature does not see our early death as being unusual.  It is simply the cost of surviving in a dangerous and malevolent world.  We have to realize the facts so that we can acknowledge risk and take precautions wherever possible to alter the natural course of our continued survival in our altered and adjusted bodies.  For example, if anyone had ever told me that surviving the distress and trauma of a severely abusive childhood put me at extremely high risk for cancer, I would have made certain I had mammograms early – or at all.

That I ended up with advanced, aggressive breast cancer (in fact, two different cancers in the same breast) does not surprise me now that I understand the risks and the price my body paid for surviving my incredibly terrible childhood with my parents.  This is why I continue to work as hard as I can on this blog.  I suffer under no delusions that I have now been granted anything more than a temporary reprieve from the cancers I have been treated for and that now seem to be ‘not present’ in my body at this time.  Whatever it is that I may have learned from surviving 18 years of terrible child abuse — and what might be of use to someone else —  I better say while I am still here to say it.

Whatever happens to me down the road of my life, and whenever it happens to me, this blog will remain as my legacy in the hopes that what I have learned from my suffering will be able to help those who also suffer to live a better life.

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I did not fit the ‘ordinary’ breast cancer risk factor profile.  Add in the severe child abuse history, and I was on the top of the list.  Should this make us terribly sad that we continue to pay the price for the abuse we suffered for the rest of our – perhaps very short – lives!  YES!  Sad and enraged, not only as the victim-survivors, but as members of a civilization that continues to allow severe child abuse and neglect to occur.

I posted this yesterday, but as this is a repeat-of-information post, I’ll post it again (comes to us from the Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog:

Traumatic Childhood Can Reduce Life Expectancy

A difficult childhood reduces life expectancy by up to 20 years according to a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The study found that participants who were exposed to more then five different types of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) were over 50 percent more likely to die during the 10-year period of the study. On the other hand, people who reported fewer than six ACEs did not have a statistically increased risk of death compared with the control group.

Listen to a podcast Adversce Childhood Experiences and the Risk of Premature Mortality.

To explore the effect that childhood trauma could have on life span, Kaiser Permanente mailed questionnaires to adults who were 18 years and older, and who had visited the Kaiser clinic in San Diego from 1995 to 1997. Overall, the study subjects were middle-class and had good health coverage. Of those surveyed, 75 percent were white, 11 percent Latino, 7 percent Asian, and 5 percent African-American. They’re educated: 75 percent attended college and 40 percent have a basic or higher college education. When they filled out the questionnaire, their average age was 57. Most of them had jobs. Half were women, half were men.

The participants were asked about their exposure to eight categories of abuse or dysfunction based on previous Kaiser studies. One third of the 17,337 participants who replied to the questionnaires had an ACE score of zero, meaning they had not been exposed to any of the eight types of abuse or household dysfunction. The majority of the remaining responders registered a score of between one and four, whereas about 8 percent of the scoring participants were rated five, and roughly three percent, six to eight.

During the next decade, the study authors, kept records of which of the 17,337 participants passed away by matching identifying information such as Social Security numbers from the questionnaire with data from the National Death Index. In total 1,539 of the participants died during the follow-up period. When the increased number of deaths in those subjects with an ACE score of six or greater was compared with the control group, their mortality risk was 1.5 times higher than for people whose childhoods had been free of all eight types of abuse. They lost about 20 years from their lives, living to 60.6 years on average, whereas the average age of death for the control group was 79.1.

It is unclear why the authors saw more death ages during the 10-year period only for the group with an ACE score of six or greater. Previous studies by these authors found that the risk of chronic illnesses, such as heart disease, lung disease and cancer, was greater only for people with these high ACE scores. In contrast, the risk of substance abuse and suicide increased stepwise from low to high scores. The authors found that ACE-related health risks, namely mental illness, social problems and prescription medication use, accounted for about 30 percent of the 50 percent greater risk of death seen in this population. “As would be expected, the documented ACE-related conditions among participants appear to account for some, although not all, of the increased risk of premature death observed in the current study,” wrote David Brown, an epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and lead author of the study.

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