The most important work we can do, individually and globally, is the healing and prevention of traumas so that we don't pass them down to future generations. This blog is a working tool to contribute to this good work.
When I turned the next page after the chapter on laughter in Keltner’s book my first reaction was aversion. This isn’t the aversion of disgust I would feel if someone handed me a white china plate with a serving of dog turds in the center of it. It’s more the aversion I would feel to continuing down a path once I saw a large diamond back rattler stretched across it. It’s like the aversion I would feel should I be asked to step up on stage to join a chorus line of showgirls scantily dressed and overly plumed in Las Vegas, or should I be asked to sing the national anthem from the center of a pro football stadium in front of thousands.
That’s a strong negative reaction to the single word that appears at the top of Dr. Dacher Keltner’s 2009 book’s (Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life) next page as the heading for his next chapter: Teasing.
I am experiencing the ‘freeze, hide and flee’ half of the fight/flight stress reaction. There’s no ‘fight’ for me here except for the fight I am experiencing inside my self about facing my fears by plowing through a topic that obviously makes me feel completely uncomfortable. I am presented with a challenge here to which I respond with feelings of incompetence and un-confidence. I KNOW I am an unequipped gladiator in the arena of normal human teasing.
It is only because of my commitment to reading Keltner’s entire book and to learning about my self as the severe infant-child abuse survivor that I am that I marshal my courage and willingness to pay attention both to the information that Keltner presents and to my own difficulties with it. I know from my experience of aversion to the topic that there is something important here I need to understand. I know from the start both that I am not going to like what I find here, and that what I find will reflect a truth about how the severe abuse I experienced from birth changed me into someone who is different from the person I could have become had this severe abuse not happened to me.
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Because my experience of severe infant-child abuse contained very specific, unusual, uncommon and unique patterns, I have found myself falling through nearly every single crack in the ‘psychological’ theories about how child abuse can affect adult survivors. Because my abuse began at birth, I have had to learn that ‘recovery’ of abilities I supposedly ‘used to have’ before severe trauma happened to me is not possible. My journey of healing is mostly about what I can uncover and discover connected to what was done to me rather than to recover anything.
I have to connect-the-dots of the information I uncover and discover about being myself in the world in far different ways than non-early severe infant-child abuse survivors might get to. I cannot take for granted even the most basic facts about what it means to be a member of our social human species. This is mostly true because my mother didn’t just use one massive club of abuse against me from the time I was born. She had a second massive club that she wielded over me equally: extreme social isolation. Being bludgeoned from birth and for the next 18 years by one of these clubs would have all but obliterated me. Being attacked on all fronts by a combination of the two clubs has made me into a person who very nearly fits the description of a nonsocial species of one.
I am left having to uncover and discover more of what is uniquely different about me from others than what is similar or the same. Yet I was born a member of a social species. Everything that is different for me happens according to categories of experience that I share with all others. It’s just that within each of these categories of possibilities about what it means to be human and what it feels like to be human, I experience patterns of being-in-the-world that are different for me than for nearly all others.
As I encountered my aversion to Keltner’s chapter heading on teasing it didn’t take me very long in scanning the next pages to understand that the topic of teasing is about one of these socially-human categories. Although Keltner does not make the obvious connection between teasing and attachment patterns, I do. In fact, the connection is more than glaringly obvious to me.
I suggest that a clear appraisal of our competency of interactions within the arena of teasing activity can show us the kind of social brain we have.. At the same time this appraisal can tell us about the kinds of infant-child interactions we had with our earliest caregivers while the foundation of our emotional-social brain was built from the time of our birth.
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At the same time that I now want to turn to Keltner’s actual presentation of information on teasing, I am experiencing one of my own inner reactions I wrote about earlier in the week. I hear that warning: “Do not enter. Past this point all angels fear to tread.” I realize that if I cross this line, move past this point, I am at risk for inviting in The Furies.
At the same time I realize there is a second sign posted beside the first. This one reads, “You cannot get there from here.” I don’t even have time to consider what this second sign means before I notice a third one that reads, “What is true for most others is absolutely not true for you.” Oh! And a fourth sign! “If you choose to follow down this pathway you must understand that none of what you will find here can be taken personally. Whatever you are missing in regard to teasing did not come about through any fault of your own.”
If the presence of all those signs aren’t warning enough that I better consider carefully what I am going to choose to do next, I see a flash of yellow through the trees and underbrush just around a curve of the pathway ahead of me. I walk toward it and see yellow crime scene plastic ribbons strung across the pathway and wound around the bushes on both sides of the pathway into the forest as far as I can see. At the same time I see a gleaming silver pair of giant scissors lying on the ground in the center of the path right in front of the tape.
I am standing here thinking about this carefully. What might the repercussions be for me if I pick up these scissors, snap through that yellow tape and continue forward down this pathway? What might the ramifications be of gaining conscious knowledge about something my body already knows but has no words to describe? Would I rather be skinned alive than uncover what I am going to discover about myself in this body-brain in this lifetime should I carefully read this chapter?
Believe me, readers. This is turning into a really long pause here……. There are more than a few parts of myself I have to consult with before I can make this decision.
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One thing I know today from the information Keltner presents in his book on this topic. True teasing in the human social arena is NOT about aggression. If there is aggression present, it is not teasing. There is not supposed to be anything terrible — ‘terror able’ — about teasing. Obviously, for me, there was in my “Something Wicked This Way Comes” version of a childhood.
I should not be surprised, given the continual reign of my mother’s verbal abuse of me (included within her unending repertoire of violence), that her so-called teasing was extremely vicious, hurtful and WRONG — from the time I was born.
The wind is back at dawn today, roaring around my house like a drunken clan of Cyclops giants. The tall pine in my neighbor’s yard is dancing a wild, frenzied jig in fast motion. The wind is trying to rip the leaves off the plum tree before they even come out. The giants are bellowing at me down the water heater chimney in the corner of my kitchen.
The sky grows lighter with the sound of birds perched in the twigs of the quince tree above their pan of water outside my kitchen window. The light is all gray today. It seems to be within the clouds across the sky, even in all directions, masking the outlines of the mountains, yet here and there in the west the clouds are outlined with the faintest tints of peach, ecru and tan.
It looks like a day to stay indoors. My cold has thickened and settled, making me feel feverish and queasy. Sneezing, I watch droplets of rain appear on the outside of my window. I am grateful for this roof and these walls of shelter (thinking about my study last weekend about the precuneus part of the brain and its connection to our human sense of shelter and to the self). Protection for the body of the self and for the self of the self.
I am not so tough that I can’t appreciate these advantages I have being only one of billions who have so much less to keep them protected from so much more. Without these protecting walls of shelter around me right now, without this sturdy roof, without some source of heat, I would experience this coming day differently. It strikes me as I read a little more of Dr. Dacher Keltner’s 2009 book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, about laughter that the presence or absence of laughter seems to correspond to the nature of the protection we have inside our self for our self.
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Keltner and his colleague, George Bonanno, designed a long-term study to examine how laughter operated among 45 adults who were grieving for the loss of a much loved spouse who had died within the previous six months. Here again Keltner does not include any assessment of previous traumas, child abuse or maltreatment, or to degrees of secure or insecure attachment. By not collecting this information from his participants, he missed the opportunity to learn about how the presence or absence of laughter during a time of personal storms is directly connected to the nature of the sheltering protection a person has for their self.
Yes, he found that laughter appears as a resiliency factor in human grieving. Yes, laughter appears to be a ‘fitness factor’ that corresponds to the ability to transcend one’s losses so they can flexibly resolve their traumas and move on into the next stages of life. But I resist the intimation his writings leave with is readers, that there is plainly something innately superior about those who can laugh in the midst of their grief compared to those who cannot so easily access laughter’s power to heal.
My bet is that those who entered into the rooms of Keltner’s experimental laboratory to complete his interviews and have their most minute reactions critically examined brought with them the condition of the shelter of their self built within them through critical developmental stages of their infancy and childhood. Those who were early traumatized were most likely to have soggy cardboard boxes to live in, if that. Those who benefited during their development by being given good strong walls and a good strong roof, doors that sealed out the storms and tight, solidly placed windows of course had the corresponding ability to access their laughter within.
What did Keltner and Bonanno find among their 45 participants?
“Measures of laughter (and smiling) predicted reduced grief as assessed at six, fourteen, and twenty-five months postloss. Duchenne laughter while talking about their deceased spouses were less anxious and depressed, and more engaged in their daily living, for the next two years. Just as important, people who showed more anger were observed to be experiencing more anxiety, depression, and disengagement from daily living for the next two years.” (page 142
These researchers continued to study how these grief-triggered reactions appeared in the body of their subjects and observed the following:
“…George and I went on a search for further evidence in support of the benefits of laughter. Why did laughing while talking about the deceased partner relate to increased personal adjustment? What we observed were findings very much in keeping with the laughter as vacation hypothesis. Our first analysis looked at how bereaved individuals’ experience of distress tracked one physiological index of arousal – elevated heart rate. The bereaved individuals who laughed showed similar heart rate arousal as those who did not laugh. But whereas our nonlaughers’ feelings of distress closely tracked increases in their heart rate, our laughers’ feelings of distress were decoupled from this physiological index of stress. Metaphorically, laughers were taking a vacation from the stress of their partners’ deaths, freed from the tension of stress-related physiology.
“We then transcribed their conversations and identified exactly what the bereaved participants were talking about when they laughed. Here again, data suggest that laughter is not a sign of denial of trauma, as widely assumed, but an indicator of a shift toward a new perspective enabled by the imagination. We coded participants’ references to several existential themes related to bereavement – loss, yearning, injustice, uncertainty. We also coded for insight words that reflect a shift in perspective, phrases like “I see” or “from this perspective” or “looking back.” Our participants who laughed were most likely to be talking about the injustice of death – the unfair termination of life, the difficulties of raising a family alone, the loss of intimacy – but they engaged in this discourse with perspective-shifting clauses. Laughter was part of these individuals’ shift in viewing the death of their spouses. It was a portal into a new understanding of their lives. A laugh is a lightning bolt of wisdom, a moment in which the individual steps back and gains a broader perspective upon their lives and the human condition.
“Finally, our data speak to the social benefits of laughter. Our bereaved individuals who laughed reported better relations with a current significant other. They more readily engaged in new intimate relations.” (pages 143-144)
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I believe that Keltner and Bonanno missed the most important fact that it wasn’t the presence or absence of laughter itself that mattered most in their study. It was the presence or absence of a safe and secure attachment system, built into these individuals through the nature of their earliest caregiver interactions during their body-brain developmental stages, that either enabled laughter to exist as the resiliency factor it is, or did not.
Laughter is obviously connected to the benefits this research describes. Yes, it does have the power to modulate the physiological stress response in the body. Yes it indicates “a shift toward a new perspective enabled by the imagination” because it is a signal of fitness that reflects the conditions of the environment an individual was formed in, by and for. Yes, laughter is included in autobiographical narratives when it appears in “perspective-shifting clauses” that are part of the telling of a coherent, continuous life story that is most likely to happen for a safe and securely attached-from-birth person.
Transitioning between contrasting mental states, processing information in insightful ways, being able to obtain shifts in perspective, having a “portal into a new understanding” of one’s life, having the capacity to experience “a lightning bolt of wisdom, a moment in which the individual steps back and gains a broader perspective upon their lives and the human condition” all are possible because of safe and secure attachment patterns built into a person’s body-nervous system-brain-mind-self from the start of one’s life.
And of course having these abilities, which stem from a safe and securely built body-brain, means that such a person will have the capacity also to report “better relations with a current significant other” and will be able to “more readily” engage “in new intimate relations.”
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This research is describing the differences between those who have and those who do not have the insurance-policy benefits of safe and secure attachment built into their early developing body-brain. The presence or absence of laughter is the internal and external signal that clearly indicates the nature of a person’s attachment system. Our attachment system is itself a signifier of the quality of the world that built each of us in our beginnings.
Our attachment system is about the quality of the protective structure within us that contains our self. If I had to try to recover from this cold I have outside in the cold wind and rain of today, rather than trying to recover within the adequate home I have that keeps those stormy elements away from me, I would not be likely to recover as well, as quickly, or maybe even at all. That’s just plain common sense.
So why do we continue to so stubbornly refuse to accept that the conditions of our inward attachment system that directly formed the who and how we are in this world don’t have an equally powerful influence on how we respond to and recover from the trials and tribulations, the storms that happen to us along the pathway of our lives?
If the presence of laughter signifies the existence of a safe and secure inner protective structure for the self, and its absence signifies that this inner protective structure is not safe and secure enough, then I know more about the meaning of laughter in my own life and in the lives of others. Just as I would want to improve the physical structure of my dwelling if the rain was pouring in the roof and my siding was blowing off, I want to improve the structure surrounding my self.
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It is with this new “light of understanding” about the powerful signifier laughter is of the conditions of my inner shelter that I will share with you something that made me laugh so hard yesterday my sides literally hurt. I haven’t laughed like that for a long, long time.
Our rural town weekly newspaper always includes a page called “The Police Beat” where the past week’s 911 calls are presented to the public. I happen to live in this unincorporated outskirt town of 700 people that I found mentioned in the news yesterday. I was trying to read this entire piece from start to finish over the telephone to my daughter last evening without laughing. I couldn’t do it:
Jan. 7 –
“A Naco woman reported a large green half snake half something else was in her bathroom. By the time deputies arrived, the creature was gone.
Of all the descriptions Keltner has presented (above) about laughter, it is his mention of how laughter is “an indicator of a shift toward a new perspective enabled by the imagination” that most caught my attention. I thought to myself, “Hey! I can do THAT!”
Reading this report from the sheriff’s call yesterday captivated my imagination. The words in that report created for me a playground for my imagination – as I suspect it will yours. Now, thanks to reading Keltner’s book combined with my own insights, I understand more than ever before the critical place that laughter has as a signifier of human well-being.
I will pay ever more close attention to finding the large and often very small places that humor, smiles and laughter might be hidden around me in my life – even if they are hidden in the words of a paper about something that first appeared in someone else’s bathroom – and then did not. Now I understand more clearly that my attachment system, my home of my self in the world, will be better off for every instant of genuine laughter I can find.
Human laughter, older than words, might well be the most important language we have. It tells the stories of the better side of life. In laughter we share both the oldest and best of who we are and what we know. In the presence of genuine laughter we are most present in the present because in its embrace we are most completely safe, secure and free.
My guess is that if we could count up all the people in our culture on a given day that mention the interpretation of dreams, we could then divide that number by five and get a good idea about the number of differing theories about dream interpretation. Ten thousand people? Two thousand versions. A hundred thousand people? Twenty thousand interpretations.
I have often wondered if aging changes how people dream. When I reached the age of about 45, my dreaming seemed to stop completely as if I had suddenly become a different person. Gone were the vivid Technicolor scenes of flowing activity. Gone were the presentations of insight in fairy tale formats. Gone were my dreams.
Last night the wind came. It tore around the house, picking up anything not tied or nailed down and throwing them against the walls of the house, battering my mind in sleep with its roaring. Rain pounded on the tin roof above my bed, an ever welcome sound in this high desert, but strange in its silence as both the water pouring out of the sky and its sister wind stopped together as soon as the first faint light of dawn began to creep over our world from the eastern horizon.
It is so silent now it almost feels like the world on the other side of the walls of my house has disappeared. It is this same kind of silence that greets me when I rise from my bed in the morning, leaving behind me the rattling noise of my sleep. I woke many times last night because of the storm, and each time I did a part of me thought, “Oh, darn it! I am not dreaming, I’m thinking!”
There were even times when my eyes opened into the darkness that I found myself in the middle of writing while I was sleeping. Whole paragraphs of words greeted me just at that threshold between sleep and waking. One time I knew the topic of my epistle that had been taking place behind the veil was profoundly sociological. Patterns of human thought, instantly collapsed into a single awareness as I opened my eyes, seemed to contain the wishes for wisdom that follow human generations for thousands and thousands of years.
I gave up on sleeping at 4:30 this morning, and wandered into my kitchen to fix myself some coffee. At that time the storm was still surrounding my house. Now it has gone as if it had never existed, just like the words of my dreams.
What has changed in my brain that now I am forced to sleep with a mind full of words instead of images? Where are the living, breathing connections within me? They have been replaced with this dry, sterile flat landscape of words. I resent this. I miss my dreams.
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As a member of the select group of people who today might wake up wondering about a dream they had last night (even though I doubt I officially even had one), I can join in the medley of dream interpretations by offering what was taught to me about ‘working with dreams’ when I was in art therapy graduate school.
“Dreams are images,” by long white-bearded professor would chant in front of the class. “They are no different than the images painted on canvas or drawn with pencil on pages of white paper. Stick with the image,” he would repeat time after time. “Stick with the image. It will always tell you what it wants you to know if you simply learn how to let it.”
Besides these sparse words there is one other point I can remember now twenty years later. “Look for the places in the image where something is changing. It is in those places that the life force within the image is moving.”
We were taught to find within an image exactly what was there. Nothing more. Nothing less. Within a dream’s verbal telling the change points will always appear in such words as “suddenly” and “but” and “but then” and “if.” At these points a new perspective appears. Something different happens. One thing turns into another. We were taught to understand that no matter how convoluted and complex dreams might appear, they can always be understood in their essence by the movement of their changes.
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The morning’s slow shift from pitch blackness to daylight doesn’t seem to be captured correctly in the word ‘dawn’ to me like the evening shift can be transcribed into ‘twilight’. There is just as much mystery to me in this gradual shift happening outside of my windows right now as I wait for what’s missing – the sound of today’s first bird call. Where are the birds? Are they frightened, soaked and in hiding?
“Call to me, little ones. Let me know you are out there. The sound of your voices will comfort me. You let me know every day I wake up into the same world I was in last night when I tried to sleep, restlessly, dreamlessly and verbal. This silent dray world is eerie and everything seems out of place.”
I wait for this half-light transition to complete itself. Transitions, the stuff all life is made out of.
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I did not intend to write about dreaming this morning. I intended to write about laughter. What has happened is that I am stuck in between these two topics at the point where they are connected. That point is about transitions and insight. (I am glad. I hear a small bird’s first chirping outside my kitchen window. I am home now. I am awake as the world outside wakes along with me.)
I tried earlier to find a book on my shelves I could read this morning to carry me in time across that great divide between darkness and daylight, but several pages of several books left me feeling the same. Too many harsh words with edges that left grit between my teeth. Too few words in each sentence so that as I tried to move my eyes across lines on the page I kept being hit in the face with period after period. “Just let me read,” my word-dream tired brain bellowed at me. “I just want to flow with a thought, not be pulled up short each time I barely get going!”
So I ended up simply back again with Dr. Dacher Keltner’s 2009 book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, picking up where I left off in my reading several days ago, before I got sidetracked by my sadness and minor sickness.
I found this morning that Keltner headed the next section of his chapter on laughter “The Cooperation Switch.” After reading this section, my mind wants to rename it “The Transition-Insight Switch.” He describes how researchers have discovered that every time we laugh our nervous system responds by relaxing itself. Keltner describes how as this pause in our ongoing experience happens, we benefit from an instant of opportunity for discovering something new and different about any situation we might be contending with.
Laugher, as the prosocial specialized sound mix it is, in between the ranges in our vocal chords that we use for talking, connects us not only to others around us, but also to our own self. Laughter represents a loosening of our grip on what we consider to be our usual reality, and makes room for explorations into ‘something different’.
Keltner describes how an infant-child’s capacity for laugher is integrated with the capacity for developing speech and thought. He writes about the stages of young childhood a child passes through as it pretends one thing is something else. A bathtub filled with water IS an ocean. A teaspoon IS a magic wand. A child bobbing up and down wildly on a bed IS flying. Children learn about themselves as they transition into the larger world by using pretense in play.
This critical play stage of infant-child development is supposed to involve laugher. I have written previously about how I don’t believe my mother ever transitioned successfully through this process. The patterns of human development that Keltner describes are supposed to happen in the same way those nighttime transitions turn into day.
Long before the first rays of the sun outlined the high edges of the clouds to differentiate them from the mountaintops I could then see outside my kitchen window, I knew the daylight was coming because of the chirping of the birds. When laugher and happiness are missing for a child during this critical developmental stage of development, it is possible that the borderline between night and day in a child’s developing mind is never crossed completely. The presence of infant-child laugher is as sure a signal of transition as is the chirping of a morning’s first bird.
Laughter does not make a child grow up any more than a chirping bird makes the sun come up. Yet while it would take a drastic force beyond my imagination to change the natural patterns of a daybreak, I can imagine forces that change a young child’s world so much that laughter ceases to be a part of it. Such was the early world of my mother.
Keltner writes about childhood laugher, play and the individual evolution of the human mind as he describes a transitional process across the ‘border land’ of development my mother never completed successfully:
“These forms of pretense emerge in systematic fashion at around eighteen months of age. They are all systematically accompanied by laughter. And they lead the child to develop the ability to use words to refer to multiple objects. As children free themselves from one-to-one relations between words and objects, they learn that words have multiple meanings. They also learn that objects can be many things – a banana can be a banana, a phone, an ogre’s nose, or a boy’s penis (when the parents aren’t’ around).
“In the freedom of pretend play, children learn that there are multiple p0erspectives upon objects, actions, and identities. The child moves out of the egocentrism of his or her own mind and learns that the beliefs and representations of other minds most certainly differ from one’s own. And it is laughter that transports children to this platform of understanding and epistemological insight.
“Laughter is a portal to the world of pretense, play, and the imagination; it is an invitation to a nonliteral world where the truths of identities, objects, and relations are momentarily suspended, and alternatives are willingly entertained. Those hours of pretend play – peek-a-boo games, monsters and princesses, the ogre under the bridge, astronauts – are the gateway to empathy and moral imagination.” (pages 137-138)
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Keltner has developed a theory about laughter:
“In the observation that laugher accompanies the child’s capacity to pretend, to participate in alternatives to the realities referred to in sincere communication, we arrive at a hypothesis about laugher. Let’s call this hypothesis the laughter as vacation hypothesis.
“The word “vacation” traces its linguistic history back to the Latin vacare, which means to be “empty, free, or at leisure” and is defined as a formal suspension of activity or duty. The laugh, then, signals the suspension of formal, sincere meaning. It points to a layer of interaction where alternatives to assumed truths are possible, where identities are lighthearted and nonserious. When people laugh, they are taking a momentary vacation from the more sincere claims and implications of their actions.
“A special realm of sound is reserved for laughs, and it is an ancient one that predates language, represented in old regions of the nervous system – the brain stem – which also regulates breathing. This acoustic space reserved for laughs triggers laughter and pleasure in others [through the actions of our mirror neurons], and designates, like the confines of a circus or theater, a social realm for acts of pretense and imagination. In the pretend play of young children, laugher enables playful routines that allow them to have alternative perspectives on the world they are facing. Laugher is a ticket to the world of pretense, it is a two- to three-second vacation from the encumbrances, burdens, and gravity of the world of literal truths and sincere commitments.” (pages 138-139)
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Steps to the making of a regular day happen without human influence. Not so the making of a human being. The book, Ghosts from the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence by Robin Karr-Morse, Meredith S. Wiley, and Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, applies to my mother. Playing alone and isolated with her delicately painted china dolls, my mother became a ghost of a child. As my sister puts it, our mother became a Toymaster, not a mother, not a whole person. My mother’s mind never transitioned out of the imaginary world of her early childhood.
Everyone in my mother’s world, including her, was a pretend doll playing a pretend part in a pretend drama on a pretend stage. Everything she ever did was a pretense and she never even knew it. She was a ghostly shadow of the woman she could have become because she never completed the transition across that borderline between what is real and what is not.
What was missing at the beginning of my mother’s life – the prosocial genuine experience of laughter – was also absent in the middle and at the end. My mother lived a nightmare she never woke up from until the day she died. It was on the darkest side of her twilight borderline, where she never fully consciously woke up out of her own abused and neglected child mind, that I shared the misery of my childhood with her.
In my mother’s nightmare the darkness could never transform itself into the light of day.
What I did to myself by writing yesterday’s post was not kind, or gentle, or wise. Of course I didn’t know at the time that I was putting myself through the clear paces that the part of May Sarton’s poem I posted the other day describes. Yesterday I innocently invited in The Furies and it has taken 24 hours for the angels, who are also “never far away” to help me reestablish some kind of inner balance.
I am fortunate today that yesterday’s nasty storm seems to have abated. Today I have what May Sarton mentioned in her poem:
“It is the light that matters,
The light of understanding.
Who has ever reached it
Who has not met the furies again and again:
Who has reached it without
Those sudden acts of grace?
-From “The Angels And The Furies”
I have received comments over time about my writing from several people whose opinions I highly value and appreciate. They have told me that most of the time my writing is too intellectual, too detached, distant, remote and objective, too sparse of emotion and personal detail. Well, I can promise you now that “the light that matters, the light of understanding” that I had to suffer through yesterday to GET now clearly tells me that this is just the way I am going to write – because it is all I can afford.
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I might have just as well stood on the thick ice of a raging frozen river yesterday with a lit stick of dynamite in my hands that I used to blow a whole in that ice so that I could crash through it and get swept down that river, under the ice, unable to escape.
I became overwhelmed by sorrow and sadness and spent the rest of my day and night fighting to overcome it. I did that to myself, and it was not pretty. I had dumped myself back into a survival mode where I was fighting, absolutely alone, for my life. My “light of understanding” commitment to myself today is that I don’t care what anyone else says, wants or needs, I will never do that to myself again. I cannot afford to.
Only those who suffered from the worst-case kinds of terrible infant-child abuse, particularly by their mother from birth can ever begin to understand the devastating power such a FURY has to obliterate a tiny developing self. Every single possible avenue we could find to survive – because there was no possible way to escape – became a part of the very body-brain we live with. Yesterday, without realizing it, I violated my own self-protective measures and caused myself the experience of remembering a part of my overwhelming pain. I will not do that again – Duh!
There is no place within myself that I can return safely to any part of my childhood other than to my experiences with the mountain land of Alaska itself. Every single other part of my infant-childhood is connected to absolute, fundamental misery. I learned yesterday that I have needs in the present in order to ever begin to write about the emotions of my experience that I DO NOT HAVE around me in my life today.
First of all, I am sick. I have a nasty cold, the likes of which I have not suffered for well over 20 years. My body is the single continuous fortitude of protection I have counted on to carry me through my life from the moment I was born. I am – quite obviously – at my weakest when my immune system reacts to a physical sickness attack.
Secondly, I am thousands of miles away from my family and my closest friends. I do not have a therapist. I cannot afford one and I couldn’t find one competent or capable enough to help me now, anyway. I choose not to take psychotropic medications, which is usually OK unless I take stupid steps that overwhelm the systems I have in place within myself to keep me in a place of reasonable balance.
I do not have a support system close to me. I do not have a safety net. When I took my own steps yesterday to invite The Furies in I did so with good intentions, but I made a big mistake. By the time I figured this out yesterday, I had crashed through the ice and was gone. The simplest piece of information I now have as a result of my miserable experience yesterday is that next time I am writing and the words “going where Angels fear to tread” I am going to turn around and run as fast as I possibly can in the other direction! I received that warning yesterday, and I kept on going.
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Several hours after I posted yesterday I knew exactly the point in my writing yesterday where my lit stick of dynamite exploded and little dissociated me flew to pieces and disappeared into the ice-covered raging river. I am taking a risk even at this moment by going back and retrieving the phrase that shows where the “perfect storm” was born. I hear the angels’ warning. I tell them, “Only these few words. I hear you. I am being extra careful.” I am determined to prove my own point. Some of readers might have noticed this, anyway.
This was the fulcrum point. It came in my description of how those that love me loved me during my experience with cancer:
“Until I felt what I did last Friday I had no idea how the people who loved me felt as they all traveled thousands of miles, one after the other, to support me and to care for me and to love me as I went through the grueling chemotherapy and eventual surgery that would allow me to remain in their lives.”
I clearly did not think and therefore did not say that these loved ones helped me to REMAIN IN MY OWN LIFE. I said they helped me to remain in theirs.
Enough said. You get my point. I don’t want to invite some giant auger to fall out of the sky on top of my head today to take me down, down, down, down…..
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I am wiser today, even though my cold still has my body in its grip. I am back up here on the surface of the world where I belong. I will do things today like rest when I need to, clean the kitchen table off, maybe wash my kitchen floor until it shines in the infrequent moments the sun breaks through the high clouds.
I have “the light of understanding” that I can fully give myself permission to write what I can write the way I can write it. Yesterday I put myself into the problem of my childhood, not the solution. I most want to work at understanding what happened to my mother that made her into the monster she was. I want to understand how the millions of separate, individual terrorizingly brutal encounters I had with her changed me in my development. I want to make informed connections about the conditions of infant-children that lead to either their increased or decreased well-being throughout their life spans.
If there are in the future people who want to be close with me to support me with their love so that I can enter a space safely and securely in order to ‘go back’ to the emotion and details of my childhood (any more than I already have), it is only THEN that a different level of my writing can appear on this blog.
In the meantime, I am going to let the angels surround me up, down, side to side. I will take precautions to keep myself in the present and not travel into that dangerous fog as I did yesterday. Hell is too short, brief, simple and inadequate of a word to even begin to describe the conditions of a severely abused infant-child’s experience is like. There truly are no words to express or to explain that kind of trauma. Trying to put those experiences into words can be an extremely dangerous occupation, one that I am not willingly going to participate in again.
Please refer to my previous writings about the dangers of DISCLOSURE. I need to heed my own words. Nobody else can do it for me. I am still fragile today, raw and shaky. I will go now and do what needs to be done: BE GOOD TO ME.
As Sarton wrote:
“Able to bless and forgive
Ourselves.
This is what is asked of us.”
What do we know and what are we learning about what might be the ‘seat of the self’ within the neural networks of the brain? Inquiring minds want to know, and mine is certainly one of those inquiring minds.
How could a human being come to hate a newborn infant? What happened in my mother’s early brain-forming stages of infant-child development that so altered the way her brain worked that she could severely abuse me for 18 years from the moment of my birth? What was wrong with her SELF?
An article traveled to me through the circuitous route of a Yahoo.com group I recently joined that has me on a run down Brain Neuroscience Way. What intrigues me most about it is not that neuroscientists discovered brain patterns of activation among people as they read particular concrete nouns that match one another to the point that the researchers could accurately predict how these particular words would show up in action in people’s brains — without watching the actual brains in action.
In other words, this article is about how humans are becoming able to watch other people’s thoughts as they think them — and predict the manner of commonality of similar brain activation patterns in others. See my working note pages on this 2010 research study HERE.
What struck me as I carefully studied this intricate research report is that the region of the brain that responded to the concept of ‘shelter’ as presented in related concrete nouns has also been implicated in other research as being the possible seat of the self — of consciousness, self-reflection, image processing, and autobiographical memory. Is it possible that all of my mother’s brain early brain developmental changes completely interfered with the development and operation of this area of her brain (along with a host of others?)
This next article then came into my view today entitled The Precuneus and Consciousness by Andrea E. Cavanna, MD. (click on this link and scroll down a page to get to the main article — it’s fascinating). This article is a continued presentation of information about this particular brain region I find intriguing, especially the part I put into bold type below. The abstract to this 2007 study states:
“This article reviews the rapidly growing literature on the functional anatomy and behavioral correlates of the precuneus, with special reference to imaging neuroscience studies using hamodynamic techniques. The precuneus, along with adjacent areas within the posteromedial parietal cortex, is among the most active cortical regions according to the “default mode” of brain function during the conscious resting state, whereas it selectively deactivates in a number of pathophysiological conditions (ie, sleep, vegetative state, drug-induced anesthesia), and neuropsychiatric disorders (ie, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease, and schizophrenia) characterized by impaired consciousness. These findings, along with the widespread connectivity pattern, suggest that the precuneus may play a central role in the neural network correlates of consciousness. Specifically, its activity seems to correlate with self-reflection processes, possibly involving mental imagery and episodic/autobiographical-memory retrieval.”
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I strongly suspect that these same altered patterns will be found to occur within a severe Borderline Personality Disorder brain — like my mother’s was. I see all the signs of this being true. I just have to study this further to make my own connections.
The 2010 article I mentioned above suggested to me that in the early evolutionary origins of the human ability to begin to have a self probably used the same brain circuitry that we currently use to process shelter-related information as it relates to containment and ‘boundaries’ having to do with what is either inside or outside of an individual self. That is, if things go right during one’s brain development.
My mother included ME as a part of her own projected self-identification. She could not tell that I was separate from her. It is a known characteristic of the Borderline condition that self-reflection processes do not operate normally. Because of patterns of dissociation built into the early brain when neglect, maltreatment and abuse is present in an infant-child’s environment, I believe the ability to recall one’s own self in episodic, autobiographical memory retrieval is also fundamentally changed.
I am obviously on a mission to understand what happened to my mother to make her into the terrible, terrifying, terrorizing monster that she was. She did not have a stable brain that operated like normal people’s brains do. My search for information about the operation of the precuneous region of the brain involves a search for the seat not only of the self, but of consciousness that makes having a separate, individual, private self possible in the first place.
I will keep you posted on my progress as I make my way next through Cavanna’s 2007 article. In reality, I am searching for my lost true mother. Where was the self of my Borderline mother? What happened to her? When and how did she get lost?
And more importantly, how can learning about the precuneus region of our brain help us to understand how safe and secure early infant-child attachment operates to help a human being develop a clear, healthily boundaried structure of the self within a sanctuary of its own within the brain-mind?
“The precuneus, a long neglected cortical area located in the posteromedial aspect of the parietal lobe, has received particular attention over the last few years, since the functional neuroimaging era has started unravelling unexpected patterns of behavioral correlates. Specifically, the precuneus represents a key region in the interlinked network of the “default mode” brain areas (ie, a midline fronto-parietal core) that shows high metabolic activity during conscious rest and selectively deactivates during non-self-directed cognitive tasks.”
“…it seems reasonable to assume that precuneus activity influences an extensive network of cortical and subcortical structures involved in elaborating highly integrated and associative information, rather than directly processing external stimuli.”
“Furthermore, this model is neuroanatomically acceptable in that the identified regions comprise a network of areas that are relatively distant (as measured by cortico-cortical connections) from primary sensory areas and could thus be expected to participate primarily in conceptual rather than perceptual functions. Overall, during the baseline resting state this neural system is likely to be engaged in higher mental functions involving something similar to contemplative thought against a background of general body awareness, upon which any extended consciousness is constructed.” (Cavanna 2007)
My mother’s version of ‘higher mental’ functioning seemed to be as disintegrated as was her capacity to experience ‘contemplative thought’. I think there was something terribly wrong with my mother’s precuneus. If having a clearly defined conscious self was a late developing advantage that evolution gave to humans, my mother didn’t get one.
CDC Research Finds Problems in Childhood Can Be Lifelong
By JOSEPH BROWNSTEIN
ABC News Medical Unit
Oct. 6, 2009
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I want to pause for a moment from the ongoing themes of my present writing to mention again the important work being done by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in regard to tracking the longterm consequences of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) including child maltreatment, traumas and abuse.
But first I want to let you know about an interesting website I found while pursuing a Google search on the ACE study called The Survivor Archives Project. This is a trauma hope and healing site that invites readers to personally submit to their archives, journal and library.
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The CDC-ACE study is not without limitations. All 17,421 participants were insurance members which means that information from the many other uninsured levels of our society were not included. If they had been (or are in the future) how much more child abuse connected lifelong adult devastation would be seen?
I would like to see the model of this study expanded through the use of the ACE questionnaires in a far wider variety of settings, preferably included in every human well-being study our nation produces. At the moment, I want to simply highlight the important work the CDC has been doing over the past 14 years with its studies of the consequences of child abuse for survivors for your thought and consideration by presenting some information from their website on Adverse Childhood Experiences as follows:
The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study is one of the largest investigations ever conducted on the links between childhood maltreatment and later-life health and well-being. As a collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente’s Health Appraisal Clinic in San Diego, Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) members undergoing a comprehensive physical examination provided detailed information about their childhood experience of abuse, neglect, and family dysfunction. Over 17,000 members chose to participate. To date, over 50 scientific articles have been published and over 100 conference and workshop presentations have been made.
The ACE Study findings suggest that these experiences are major risk factors for the leading causes of illness and death as well as poor quality of life in the United States. Progress in preventing and recovering from the nation’s worst health and social problems is likely to benefit from the understanding that many of these problems arise as a consequence of adverse childhood experiences.
The ACE Study was initiated at Kaiser Permanente from 1995 to 1997, and its participants are over 17,000 members who were undergoing a standardized physical examination. No further participants will be enrolled, but we are tracking the medical status of the baseline participants.
Each study participant completed a confidential survey that contained questions about childhood maltreatment and family dysfunction, as well as items detailing their current health status and behaviors. This information was combined with the results of their physical examination to form the baseline data for the study.
The prospective phase of the ACE Study is currently underway, and will assess the relationship between adverse childhood experiences, health care use, and causes of death.
The ACE Pyramid represents the conceptual framework for the Study. During the time period of the 1980s and early 1990s information about risk factors for disease had been widely researched and merged into public education and prevention programs. However, it was also clear that risk factors, such as smoking, alcohol abuse, and sexual behaviors for many common diseases were not randomly distributed in the population. In fact, it was known that risk factors for many chronic diseases tended to cluster, that is, persons who had one risk factor tended to have one or more others.
Because of this knowledge, the ACE Study was designed to assess what we considered to be “scientific gaps” about the origins of risk factors. These gaps are depicted as the two arrows linking Adverse Childhood Experiences to risk factors that lead to the health and social consequences higher up the pyramid. Specifically, the study was designed to provide data that would help answer the question: “If risk factors for disease, disability, and early mortality are not randomly distributed, what influences precede the adoption or development of them?” By providing information to answer this question, we hoped to provide scientific information that would be useful for the development of new and more effective prevention programs.
The ACE Study takes a whole life perspective, as indicated on the orange arrow leading from conception to death. By working within this framework, the ACE Study began to progressively uncover how childhood stressors (ACE) are strongly related to development and prevalence of risk factors for disease and health and social well-being throughout the lifespan.
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Major Findings
Childhood abuse, neglect, and exposure to other traumatic stressors which we term adverse childhood experiences (ACE) are common. Almost two-thirds of our study participants reported at least one ACE, and more than one in five reported three or more ACE. The short- and long-term outcomes of these childhood exposures include a multitude of health and social problems. The ACE Study uses the ACE Score, which is a count of the total number of ACE respondents reported. The ACE Score is used to assess the total amount of stress during childhood and has demonstrated that as the number of ACE increase, the risk for the following health problems increases in a strong and graded fashion:
alcoholism and alcohol abuse
chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
depression
fetal death
health-related quality of life
illicit drug use
ischemic heart disease (IHD)
liver disease
risk for intimate partner violence
multiple sexual partners
sexually transmitted diseases (STDs)
smoking
suicide attempts
unintended pregnancies
In addition, the ACE Study has also demonstrated that the ACE Score has a strong and graded relationship to health-related behaviors and outcomes during childhood and adolescence including early initiation of smoking, sexual activity, and illicit drug use, adolescent pregnancies, and suicide attempts. Finally, as the number of ACE increases the number of co-occurring or “co-morbid” conditions increases.
Adverse Childhood Experiences Study Questionnaires – AVAILABLE TO EVERYONE
This is the simplest version of the ACE questionnaire I have seen that consists of ten questions: What’s YOUR ACE Score? Help me calculate my ACE Score.
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THE ACE SCORE:
The ACE Study used a simple scoring method to determine the extent of each study participant’s exposure to childhood trauma. Exposure to one category (not incident) of ACE, qualifies as one point. When the points are added up, the ACE Score is achieved. An ACE Score of 0 (zero) would mean that the person reported no exposure to any of the categories of trauma listed as ACEs above. An ACE Score of 10 would mean that the person reported exposure to all of the categories of trauma listed above. The ACE Score is referred to throughout all of the peer-reviewed publications about the ACE Study findings
Below are the links to the actual forms used (and to be used) for research purposes.
The Family Health History and Health Appraisal questionnaires were used to collect information on childhood maltreatment, household dysfunction, and other socio-behavioral factors examined in the ACE Study. The questionnaires are not copyrighted and there are no fees for their use. As a courtesy, a copy of articles on any research conducted using items from the questionnaires is requested.
The ACE study is now in its 10th year and the prospective phase is currently underway. In this ongoing stage of the study, data are being gathered from various sources including outpatient medical records, pharmacy utilization records, and hospital discharge records to track the subsequent health outcomes and health care use of ACE Study participants. In addition, an examination of National Death Index records will be conducted to establish the relationship between ACE and mortality among the ACE Study population.
International interest in replications of the ACE Study is growing. At present there is knowledge of efforts to replicate the ACE Study or use its questionnaire in Canada, China, Jordan, Norway, the Philippines and the United Kingdom. In Puerto Rico, the link between women’s cardiovascular health risks and ACE are under study. In addition, the World Health Organization has included the ACE Study questionnaires as an addendum to the document Preventing Child Maltreatment: A Guide to Taking Action and Generating Evidence. (October 2006*) (PDF)
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Related Links
CDC Resources
CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities
The ACE Pyramid — ACE Study Links Childhood Trauma— These results, appearing in the November 2009 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, are the latest from the ACE Study (Adverse Childhood Experiences). The research project, now in its 14th year, is one of the largest investigations ever conducted on the links between childhood maltreatment and health and well-being later in life. The ongoing study looks at how both positive and negative experiences and childhood stressors are strongly related to development and affect risk factors for disease, health and social well-being throughout the lifespan.
As I move forward in Dr. Dacher Keltner’s 2009 book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life out of his chapter on smiles into his chapter on laughter, I find I am using his information like a powerful laser flashlight, beaming a pinpoint of illumination back through the years of my childhood as I search my memory for genuine smiles, laughter or humor of any kind.
What can I learn about the development of my body-brain-mind-self if I think about myself as having been a monkey in my mother’s monkey house? Certainly my mother’s sovereign nation lacked any equality between members. There was no ‘flattened hierarchy’. My mother had all of the power, and everyone knew it. There was no true cooperation. And certainly in my case there was no affiliation. These conditions did not contribute to any sense of safety or security, and in these conditions true happiness, laughter and humor did not exist. Their absence is incredibly telling.
The research literature is full of information about how the greatest gifts of our species are directly tied to the greatest risks of being distorted through negative influences within a deprived, malevolent, abusive, traumatic early environment.
Reproductive fitness indicators develop in humans through an interactive process of genetics being influenced by conditions within the environment during development. They end up communicating information not only about any single member of a species, but more importantly they communicate information about the condition of the environment that influenced any individual’s development.
The presence or absence of genuine D smiles and laughter is no exception. The lack of safety and security in my childhood was represented by the opposite of joy. My mother’s dysregulated emotions, especially her hatred and rage toward me created suffering, terror, sorrow, despair and alienation within our home. She kept complete power and controlled her family’s environment through terror, threat of violence and violence. Ours was NOT a healthy, happy monkey house.
And of course, because I was my mother’s singled out abuse target, the impact of deprivation and trauma had its most powerful effects on me during my development. My resulting difficulties with happiness are directly tied to having had my mother’s sickness built right into my own body-brain from birth as signals of the lack of well-being and fitness within the environment that formed me. My mother did not give me any “all-purpose signal of cooperative intent.” I received from her the opposite.
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Keltner describes how the smile originated back in the early history of our evolution. A comparison of human patterns with primates’ shows that
“…in more hierarchical macaques, such as the rhesus macaque, there is a narrow use of the silent bared-teeth and relaxed open-mouth display. The silent bared-teeth display – the predecessor to our smile – is used only as an appeasement display. In these status-conscious monkeys, the smile is intertwined with anxiety and defense.
“There are more egalitarian macaque species, however, such as the Tonkean macaque. In these macaques, hierarchies are flatter and power is equally distributed. This social condition more closely resembles the hierarchies observed in our hominid predecessors and contemporary hunter-gathers – power differences are reduced, and equality is more pronounced. In egalitarian primates, food sharing is pervasive, alliances among subordinates are common, and social life consists more of negotiation than assertion of force…. In less stratified macaques, monkeys put the silent bared-teeth display to many new uses: to reassure, to affiliate, and to reconcile, as well as to appease. This is a standard evolutionary principle – that adaptations such as the silent bared-teeth display are put to new uses in a broader array of contexts to respond adaptively to shifting selection pressures. With the rise of primate equality, the silent bared-teeth display became freed from its one-to-one mapping to fear and submissiveness, and extended into new social contexts that promote affectionate cooperation and affiliation. This display became a sign of friendly intent, and the trigger of behavioral processes that allow for close proximity and cooperation – grooming, embraces, hand clasping, and the like. In egalitarian primates, the silent bared-teeth display folded into affiliative, pleasurable exchange.
“The physical signature of human happiness is the D smile. The D smile did not originate in contexts that we today think are fast tracks to happiness…In fact,,.hunter-gatherer hierarchies…systematically downplay any sudden abundance in resources through modesty and generosity.
“In our primate evolution, the D smile was the first vocabulary of friendly intent and affection, in particular between near-equals….the roots of human happiness are found in those moments when individuals moved toward one another toward cooperative and intimate ends. Our ultrascoiality required this, as well as an all-purpose signal of cooperative intent, one that is highly visible and unambiguous, and one that could preempt conflict and spread cooperative relations potently and quickly, faster than a stranger could cock his arm and throw the first punch.” (pages 120-122)
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From here – you guessed it – Keltner continues forward in his next chapter to the topic of laughter. My personal experiences with forbidden laughter were anything but funny.
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I have no memory of my mother ever telling a joke. I have no memory of my father ever telling one, either. I asked my sister and she can’t remember either of our parents ever telling a joke.
I do remember watching the Beverly Hillbillies on TV while we lived in the Government Hill apartments the year I was in 4th grade. I made the mistake of actually considering something on the show funny, and I actually laughed out loud.
My mother jumped all over me verbally, berating me for my gullibility and stupidity in thinking anything about the show was funny. I was stupid, just as the show was stupid. She told me nobody was supposed to think it was funny, or to laugh at it. Was I so stupid that I didn’t know that they used ‘canned laughter’ – totally fake audible laughter – as a part of the show?
She made it sound like my inability to detect the stupidity of the show and the fakeness of the canned laughter meant I had failed some important and significant test that ANYBODY else would have passed. I had to be the dumbest, stupidest person in the whole WORLD!
I’ve have never forgotten this experience. It too was added on a more minor line of my mother’s abuse litany than were my major crimes, as proof of how gullible I was. It was part of the proof that I was a chameleon, had no mind of my own, and would follow anyone to do anything, even over a cliff if they told me to. It proved I could not think on my own for myself (well, that was pretty much true – she never allowed me to think).
How sad it was not to be able to even laugh safely. I never laughed out loud in front of her again. I had to watch myself to be sure I didn’t, monitor my reactions even to humor, make sure no sign of it accidentally slipped out or gave me away. In essence, I knew it was simply bad and unacceptable for me to ever think anything was ever funny.
In fact, by the time I was in 8th grade my mother very creatively forced me to watch black and white film footage on TV of the WWII bombing of Poland as she informed me that I should have been there because that is what I deserved to happen to me – brutal annihilation.
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Keltner describes the evolutionary origins of human laughter as this ability followed a different trajectory from primates’ beginning four million years ago. Smiles and laughter evolved as signals of communication long, long before humans achieved our verbal abilities.
“Most striking is how human laugher differs from that of our primate relatives – gorillas, chimps, and bonobos. In the most rudimentary sense, the laughter of the great apes resembles our own. Their relaxed open-mouth displays and panting vocalizations look and sound quite familiar. They emit these displays in similar contexts as we do – when being tickled and during rough-and-tumble play. As with humans, chimps and apes are most likely to show open-mouthed play faces in developmental periods (adolescence) and times of day (leading up to feeding) where play can defuse conflict. Yet the laughter of chimps and apes is more tightly linked to inhalation and exhalation patterns that that of humans. As a result, it is emitted as short, repetitive, single-breath pants, and has little acoustic variety.
“Human laughter, by contrast, is stunning in its diversity and complexity. It is a language unto its own.” (pages 124-125)
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The presence, absence and quality of laughter both influences the physiological state of the human body and is an expression of the state of the body. Safe and secure early infant attachment to caregivers includes smiles and laughter. Unsafe and insecure early infant attachments do not communicate safety and security through the presence of these signals. These degrees of variation in interaction with the environment are built right into an infant-child’s developing body-brain, including the regulation of the nervous system.
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Keltner states about the physiology of laughter:
“And perhaps most subtly, laughter is intertwined with our breathing…. With the exception of certain pathological laughs…almost all laughter occurs as people exhale. This simple laughter fact may seem incidental to our understanding of laughter, but in fact it is fundamental. Here’s why.
“Respiration and heart rate are two of the body’s most essential rhythms. These two rhythms play off each other like the voices of singers in an a cappella group. When you breath in, your heart rate rises. When you breathe out, your heart rate drops, as does your blood pressure, and you move toward a state of relaxation.
“This lung-heart dynamic has made its way into….the thousand-year-old breathing exercises of yoga practices. Exhalation reduces fight/flight physiology, especially heart rate, calming the body down.” (page 128)
Studies of the acoustical qualities of laughter show that different kinds of laughs correspond to different brain region patterns just as varying smiles do. The sound and pattern of laughter is affected by degrees of intimacy and is different among groups of friends than it is between groups of strangers. Studies have shown that women laugh more than men do, and that men “are much more likely to snort and grunt than women.” (page 130)
Keltner presents more information about laughter:
“…voiced laughs, which have tone to them and involve vibrations of the vocal folds (chords), and unvoiced laughs, which do not. Voiced laughs sound like songs, rising and falling as they move through space. Other people perceive these laughs as invitations to friendship and camaraderie. Unvoiced laughs – hisses, snorts, grunts – are not perceived as such. Much as the language of smiles is divided into Duchene [D] and non-Duchene [non D] smiles, there are voiced laughs of pleasure and unvoiced laughs not involving pleasure…. Both are vital to the social contract.” (pages 130-131)
“Here is a remarkable discovery: Laughs occupy a part of acoustic space that is different from vowel sounds like “ahhh” and “eee.” We may describe laughs in the written word as “ha, ha, ha” or “hee, hee, hee,” but in fact the acoustic structure of laughter is distinct from that of the vowels we use to represent this mysterious category of behavior. Certain regions of the human vocal apparatus produce the vowels and consonants that make up human speech, in which so much of human social life transpires. But there is another register of the human vocal apparatus, another form of output – laughter – with different origins and functions than human speech.” (page 131)
“When people laugh, subcortical, limbic regions of the brain and brain stem – most notably a region known as the pons, which is involved in sleep and breathing – are activated. These regions are much older evolutionarily than the cortical regions involved in language, suggesting that the deeper meaning of laughter is intertwined with breathing.” (page 132.
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From my point of view, learning here that laughter is connected in our body-brain to our most basic fundamental experiences like breathing and sleep is amazing, though not surprising. When I write about how interactive early infant-caregiver interactions influence the growth, development and formation of who we are in the world for the rest of our lives, it is on these fundamental levels that we are helped or harmed in our ability to experience life from a state of either well- or ill-being.
Although infants can obviously cry from the instant they are born just as they can breath, their capacity for smiles and for laughter very soon follows. If an infant is born into an environment of neglect, abuse, maltreatment and trauma, even its first experiences of sending signals out into its caregiving environment and receiving them back will be influenced in development. In cases such as mine was, my environment never improved. The trajectories of all of my abilities were changed during my development, not the least of which is my ability to be happy, to express happiness, and to understand other people’s experience and expression of happiness.
My infant-childhood experiences with ‘joy’ happened in dissociated patterns according to my mother’s orchestration of my life. As a result there is little natural ebb and flow or unconstrained ability to participate with others in states of safe and secure joy. Anxiety was tied in my body to every experience I ever had as an infant-child as I developed, as was dissociation. It is a rare, rare moment when I can even now experience pure joy. My sense of derealization and depersonalization mostly requires that a distance between me and others has to first be bridged.
Because expressions of happiness, including spontaneous laughter, are designed to happen instantaneously and automatically as forms of nonverbal communication, they happen in extremely fast-action displays. I did not get the same circuitry build into my body-nervous system-brain that most other people did so that I operate much more slowly in all social interactions. It helps me to know that there are reasons for how and why I experience social interactions differently than most people do, including the funny, happy ones.
When I talk about the tragedy of life long changes that happen during early developmental stages of abused, traumatized and maltreated infant-children, it is on these profoundly fundamental most basic levels of the human experience that we must accept that these changes take place. These changes often rob a survivor of the experience of being something other than completely alone in an unsafe and insecure world.
Laughter as the form of emotional regulation and social interaction that it is, is missing in most severely abusive families. These deprivation conditions are built into our social-emotional brain, into our entire nervous system and body. At the same time that the signs of happiness, social connectedness and well-being are visible, attempting to access this information with our changed body-brain-self can take an invisible super-Herculean effort.
Those of us who were so seriously deprived and maltreated as infant-children require patience and compassion for ourselves and from others in our efforts to find ways to heal these near mortal wounds that were inflicted on our being and built into our body-brain from the time we were tiny. This isn’t a job for cowards. It is a job for those of us who are willing to fight to our death for what should have been our birthright – the right to experience the fullness of joy within ourselves and with other members of our species.
It helps me to begin to understand how deeply and profoundly the absence of joy influenced my body-brain development right along with the presence of severe violence and abuse. While I can take an umbrella out to keep the rain off of my head I cannot stop it from raining. I will never have the opportunity to return to a happy infant-childhood so I can take a different pathway that would allow joy-filled wiring to be built into me from the start. I have to be realistic as I work with who and how I am as a consequence of what was done to me throughout my formative stages.
It helps me to learn more about why improved well-being, including the experience of happiness, takes effort for me that most non-early abused and traumatized people might never be able to understand. They benefited from advantages in an advantaged early environment that most of these people take for granted because it is all built right into them. It is as if they climbed Mt. Everest by being dropped off near the top. Severe early trauma survivors have to make the struggle from sea level on up.
But facts are facts and we best get on with our climbing, even if that means that the last person to the top had to work hardest to get there.
First of all, I would like to apologize to any readers of yesterday’s post, +HOOKED ON ‘D’ SMILES – THE HAPPINESS CENTER, who may have inexplicably ended up feeling blue after they read it. I understand now that I should have placed a “This Post May Trigger” warning at the top of it. I didn’t because I had no idea that such a reaction to ‘happiness’ might happen. I did not know that post would trigger my loss and grieving that would wash over me for the rest of the day, and that I would have to go to work to understand where it came from.
I ended up understanding what had happened to me yesterday after I wrote that post because I found myself about a half hour later feeling not like a frog who could blithely and easily hop off my lily pad onto a different one and go on my way, but like a frog whose feet were glued to a stone as I sank into the depths of a sadness that seemed to come from nowhere. My insecure attachment system had been triggered in all its complicated glory, and powerful body-memory emotions nearly swallowed me whole. In fact, I don’t feel today quite like the same person I was yesterday when I wrote that post in the first place.
I understand that as we learn, grow and heal change is SUPPOSED to be part of the process. At the same time I know there is risk involved, risk of feeling what our body has to tell us about the reality of our present life as we have been deeply and permanently affected by the severe deprivations, traumas, abuses and maltreatments of our infant-childhood. When these changes happen, our first response is not likely going to be one of those glowing, authentic, genuine ‘D’ smiles tied to our happiness center that I wrote about yesterday.
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As I began today to think about what my next learning-writing step was going to be, I realized that what I encountered yesterday is affecting me today. What I found in the next pages of Dr. Dacher Keltner’s 2009 book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, confirms what I know in my whole body. I see that as an extreme infant-child trauma and abuse survivor that most often what is presented by experts to be accurate and truthful, even ‘proved’ information simply ends up making me feel worse about myself.
In its subtle way, nearly everything I encounter about well-being in the world makes assumptions that are not the truth for everyone, certainly not for us survivors. Something that is presented as truth across all people and ISN’T is, most fundamentally, a lie. Perhaps the most important accomplishment of my work on this blog is to highlight the fact that when we read this kind of information our body will ALWAYS rebel against the lie.
We can train our self to recognize when swallowing the lie creates what is actually a wise immune-system response of rejecting toxic poison. The lie resonates with the contamination our connection with our own self that our early abusers did to us. We will know when this happens because our body-feelings well TELL US. It is time for us to pay attention.
It is for presenting the lie as truth yesterday that all of us are ‘born equal’ in regard to our ability to experience the ‘D’ smile that I apologize for. I mentioned yesterday something of the fact that when happiness was not the fare of our early attachment experiences, our happiness center in our left brain simply lost its neurons as our body-brain developed. But I didn’t say enough. My body told me soon after the post was published that all I did was drop a sprinkle of truth into a sea of suspicious lies. I might as well have dumped a pot of boiling water over my head and then stupidly wondered why I didn’t ‘feel so good’.
Let me try to present an example of the disguised lie being cleverly presented with the so-called truth. I found it nicely presented in the very next section of Keltner’s book that appears after what I wrote about yesterday. After my crashing experience of yesterday, I was hyper-alert today to this kind of information that can hurt severe early abusers because assumptions are made about the ‘truth’ that are not true for us.
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A longitudinal study is one in which the participants are followed over long periods of time. Repeated ‘measures’ are taken over time about certain characteristics, or variables, these longitudinal studies are designed to understand. Keltner presents one of these studies, and states:
“Ravenna Helson is a pioneer in the study of women’s lives. In the early states of her scientific career in the 1950s, she was interested in the intellectual creativity of women – an area almost entirely ignored by psychological science – and interviewed female pioneers in mathematics and the physical sciences. She then turned her scientific imagination to the question of how identity develops…. In 1959…Ravenna initiated what would become the longest longitudinal study of the lives of women ever conducted, the Mills Longitudinal Study. This study has followed the lives of approximately 110 women who graduated from Mills College in 1959 and 1960 for the past fifty years, and continues to this day. It has led to basic discoveries about how identity shifts over the course of life for women, and how it remains the same.” (page 113)
Ravenna contacted Keltner in 1999 to ask him to add a branch to the study. Because he is an expert at understanding human facial expressions, she wanted him to take a look at the high school yearbook photographs of her study’s participants in order to explore
“…whether her Mills participants’ smiles, captured when they were graduating from college, would say anything about the next thirty years of their lives…. Relying upon one yearbook photo as a potential measure of the person’s identity was problematic in this regard, to say the least.” (pages 113-114)
Keltner agreed to accomplish this photographic analysis and
“…took this measure of the warmth of the smile and related it to the treasure trove of measures Ravenna had gathered on these Mills alumnae…when they were twenty-seven, forty-two, and fifty-two. This included measures of their daily stress, their personalities, the health of their marriages, and their sense of meaning and well-being as they moved into middle age.” (pages 114-115)
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Now right here is where my risk-for-contamination from the ‘toxic lie’ meter went off today – loud and clear. Keltner is NOT saying that any measure of early childhood trauma that might have affected these participants’ development from the start of their lives is included in the research analysis. I found online the University of California at Berkeley laboratory that continues to work with this Mills study, and see that over 100 research articles have been published about some combination of findings related to this study.
Finally, it seems, researchers are including measurements of the participants related both to attachment and to emotional regulation in ongoing research. That is progress. But nowhere on their website do I see any direct connection to the kinds of early trauma measurements The Center for Disease Control is using in their Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) studies. The ACE Questionnaires that the CDC uses are perfectly designed to gather information about early childhood trauma that would directly apply to the findings Keltner presents as truth and fact in his words that follow.
Because Keltner makes no reference whatsoever to the possible impact early traumas had on building the happiness centers and the early brain of the women in the Mills study, as a severe infant-child abuse survivor I have to take his findings with such a huge grain of salt that it chokes me. In fact, if these kinds of research findings are presented without including both attachment and early infant-child trauma information, I consider them just plain toxic to my own well-being.
Keltner states:
“What we discovered about the benefits of the warm smile [as assessed from the year book photographs] would fit the analysis of the smile developed here….
“Mills alumnae who showed warmer, stronger D smiles when they were twenty reported less anxiety, fear, sadness, pain, and despair on a daily basis for the next thirty years. The smile mitigates anxiety and pain, most likely through the effects smiling has on stress-related cardiovascular arousal. The strong D smilers also reported feeling more connected to those around them; the smile helps trigger greater trust and intimacy with others.” (page 115)
OK, readers, count the flaws in cause-and-effect logic just presented in Keltner’s last paragraph. I can accept that the D smilers “reported less anxiety, fear, sadness, pain, and despair on a daily basis for the next thirty years,” but there is something wrong with the logic that follows from a severe infant-childhood survivor’s point of view.
We are left swallowing the toxic suggestion that if we were ‘better’ people and we smiled a D smile more often, we would have our ‘anxiety and pain’ mitigated. Well, wouldn’t that just be so nice! How survivors must wish to have the same chances as non-survivors do to react to all the experiences of life in the way that they can and do.
For researchers to suggest that there is something superior about “strong D smilers” compared to others is ludicrous. If early severe infant-childhood abuse survivors had felt “more connected to those around them” – and others had been more connected to them — while their brains were built in the beginning, the traumas and abuse would not have probably happened in the first place.
I find Keltner’s strange mixing of truth with intimations of control of the factors of one’s life by smiling to be toxic to me. One of the lessons I learned from my post-post experience yesterday is that not only was I nearly NEVER encouraged or allowed to be happy as a child from birth, and therefore could not build a big, strong, D smiling happiness center in my brain, but opposite to that immeasurable loss the corresponding fact that unbearable suffering overwhelmed my right brain in its development, as well.
I don’t ‘simply’ suffer from the consequences of not being able to feel happiness from birth, but also suffer from great pain that I doubt someone like Keltner can ever begin to imagine or understand. But for researchers to make the stupid assuming jump between happy D smilers having better lives because they self-empowered themselves in their choices and decisions as opposed to non-D smilers who have less lifelong well-being because they evidently just don’t TRY HARD ENOUGH makes me mad.
That’s right up there with saying, “Of course you didn’t fall off the edge of the world. You simply didn’t walk far enough. That has to be a fact because the world is flat and if you had walked far enough you would have fallen off. That you are here now telling your tale has nothing to do with the world being round. It is simply proof that you didn’t try hard enough to walk far enough.”
Severe infant-child abuse survivors cannot argue with 98%+ of the research findings that ignore the facts of our existence.
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Keltner does not rest with just throwing a poisoned sugar cube at us, either. He pours an ocean of sappy sweet (toxic-shaming) sugar over his following pages without having a clue about how his statements are completely biased against severe infant-child abuse survivors:
“The warmth of a woman’s smile also predicted a rising trajectory in her sense that she was achieving her goals. Women with warmer smiles for the next thirty years became more organized, mentally focused, and achievement-oriented. Forget what people have told you about creativity and achievement emerging out of despair and anxiety. Not so. Dozens of scientific studies have found that people who are led to experience brief positive emotions are more creative, expansive, generative, synthetic, and loosened up in their thought. Our Mills women who showed warmer smiles reflected these benefits of positive emotion across their lives.” (pages 115-116)
Nothing like a blithe inconsideration for what has been stolen from survivors, or for the weight of the burdens we had to bear from the time we were tiny and that still reside within the fiber of our body-brain. Rethinking this paragraph from a survivor’s point of view, and realizing the fact that “despair and anxiety” built our body-brain from the start as they built themselves into us, how hard do we have to work to even begin to achieve what non-abuse survivors can with relative ease? From my point of view, I am not so much interested in how the “good-built” people get better. I want to know how the “trauma-built” people do.
Maybe Keltner could enlighten me (on my father's left) on how this overwhelmed, ostracized, isolated, unloved, battered, hated, hurt, lonely, shunned, rejected, rigid, terrorized, terrified, anxious, dissociated, full of despair, hopeless, helpless and terribly sad so-called 'child of the devil' (from the time of my birth) might be able to build into herself the kind of safe and secure attachment happy left brain and correspondingly a without-traumatized-emotion right brain that would have made me into a D-smiling woman like Keltner's research showcases and promotes. I am not feeling sorry for myself. Infant-child abuse lifelong consequences are real.
Keltner continues with the toxic syrup:
“Our results concerning the relationships of the Mills alumnae were perhaps even more striking. These women were brought to UC Berkeley to spend a day with other individuals, as well as a group of scientists who wrote up personal narratives based on their impressions of the women. Women with warm smiles made much more favorable impressions upon the scientists in this context, suggesting that the smile enables more positive social encounters.” (page 116)
Yes, I suppose a warm smile has this effect on others. But how does this work for survivors whose nervous system was built upon despair and anxiety, who had to develop massive dissociational abilities in order to survive, who have then entirely different body-brains as a result? I want to know how many severe abuse survivors in the 1950s ever made it into a college in the first place so that they could be included in this study?
“Turning to marriage, those women who displayed warmer smiles were more likely to be married by age twenty-seven, less likely to have remained single into middle adulthood, and more likely to have satisfying marriages thirty years later…. Women with warmer smiles had healthier marriages.
“Finally, women with warmer smiles at age twenty reported a more fulfilling life at age fifty-two. Across young and middle adulthood, women prone to expressing positive emotions experience fewer psychological and physical difficulties and greater satisfaction with their lives.” (116)
Keltner has the cart before the horse as far as I can tell. If a person starts off life advantaged, and that means with safe and secure early attachment that build all the self worth and strong, clear sense of self and a great big happiness center at the same time they are not battered, beaten, shamed, shunned, neglected, tortured, etc. so that their left brain ‘negative emotional center’ is not massive and overwhelming, of COURSE they will have a better life!
So, in the end I am at least most impressed with other researchers who have the smarts to understand that without measures of attachment and emotional regulation all the findings of this 50-year+ study show nothing but the benefits of having an advantaged life. I will try to locate the findings of studies that HAVE now included these measures, but I see no indication that any of the 100 papers written from the Mills study include any assessment of the most important factor influencing the well-being of a person throughout their lifetime – presence, absence and/or degree of early developmental deprivation, abuse and trauma.
If researchers are not adding in some measurement of infant-childhood traumas such as the Center for Disease Control’s Adverse Childhood Experience questionnaires, the research findings are still going to be incomplete and relatively useless. By excluding this information from human well-being research, the findings are invalidated. The problem with trying to gather this information from the Mills Study participants at this late stage is that nobody can ever go back and find out these measures from the participants of the Mills study that are already dead. Considering the CDC’s finding that severe early abuse survivors die on the average of 20 years earlier than non-survivors, the most important information that this study could have offered will be forever missing.
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At the same time that I am disappointed with important research that takes place from a position biased in favor of non-child abuse privilege, I can refuse to buy the corresponding bias that suggests that there is something wrong, faulty and inadequate about those of us who never had equal positive advantages in the first place.
I would rather these researchers include a disclaimer with their findings: “We are biased in favor of the privileged people who were not traumatized in their early-infant childhood periods of development. We don’t care about our biases so we present our findings as fact for all and refuse to include measures of infant-childhood trauma into our research design. We have the education, the University and federal backing, and all the power so we can do exactly as we wish. The rest of you be damned.”
Their implied meaning? “The rest of you could change yourself to be like US if you wanted to. You just don’t try hard enough to smile that big genuine happy center D smile. You got what you deserved, and continue to get what you deserve because you just aren’t as good as we are. Accept your lot or change it, but don’t expect us to really give you any useful, truthful information you can use to improve your lives. We only care about ourselves.”
Yes, I am disgusted. Interesting, disgust is a genuine human facial expression connected to an automatic physical response against eating toxic things that will poison us. Research findings that blame, shame and condemn survivors because advantaged biases are not recognized, and because the most important information is ignored, are toxic to early abuse survivors.
I bought the research yesterday and swallowed the poison that presented and highlighted the kinds of opportunities I never had from birth coupled with the horrible suffering I did have and left me feeling somehow accountable for the consequences of how what was done to me affected me. The research findings told me about advantages that happy babies and young children have for the rest of their lives in contrast to the heavy penalty we survivors live with in terms of our lifetime of suffering. Nowhere did I see any compliment given to those of us who endured and survived what many might not have been able to, even though we did not end up able to be like those D smiley people.
I am not so gullible today. It is my firm belief that any research whose funding can be tracked on any level into a federal ‘giving pool’ source, must be required to include consistent and accurate measurements of early trauma and attachment. Otherwise, the research is biased toward the privileged against infant-abuse survivors and is therefore polluted, contaminated, toxic and useless.
The advantage of being in my own think tank of one is that I can be like a frog jumping from lily pad to lily pad, following my own fly, landing when and where I want to, devouring information without having to answer to anyone else. This is why I can follow my last post on pathological liars with this one on smiles!
I am still hopping around in the same pond I was in yesterday as I search for information about how my mother’s abusive Borderline brain gave me a torturous, miserable childhood. I am still trying to understand how what happened to her in her own abusive childhood gave her such an awful brain. Today I just landed on a different lily pad.
It turns out that of the vast number of kinds of smiles humans produce, there really is only one authentic, genuine real one and a whole lot of fakes. In the field of research that Keltner belongs to, scientists have discovered the facial-muscle vocabulary of all human emotion expressed by the face. Smiling has a language.
Keltner describes how the genuine smile originates in the left anterior frontal lobe, a region whose activity is connected to positive emotional experience. All the phony impostor, fake smiles originate in the right anterior frontal lobe. We can tell the difference and respond accordingly from nearly the time we are born. Infants are the first smile detection quality experts.
There are two very specific facial muscles involved in a real, genuine left-brain smile display: the zygomatic major muscle and the orbicularis oculi. The smile these two muscles combine to create by their movement has been named, according to Keltner,
“…in honor of the French neuroanatomist Guilluame Benjamin Amand Duchenne (1806-1875), who first discovered the visible traces of the activity of orbicularis occuli. Smiles that do not involve the activity of the happiness muscle, the orbicularis oculi, are sensibly known as non-Duchenne or non-D smiles.” (page 105)
“When a ten-month-old is approached by his or her mother, the face lights up with the D smile; when a stranger approaches, the same infant greets the approaching adult with a wary non-D smile.” (page 106)
So, we have been able to tell the difference between a real D smile and a fake non-D smile from our first days as breathing creatures. I’ve just never thought about the difference in words before today. The D smile involves
“…the activity of the happiness muscle, the orbicularis oculi. This muscle surrounds the eyes and when contracted leads to the raising of the cheek, the pouching of the lower eyelid, and the appearance of those dreaded crow’s feet – the most visible sign of happiness – which the Botox industry is trying to wipe out of the vocabulary of human expression.” (page 105)
“Duchenne smiles differ morphologically in many ways from the many other smiles that do not involve the action of the orbicularis oculi muscle. They tend to last between one and five seconds, and the lip corners tend to be raised to equal degrees on both sides of the face. Smiles missing the action of the orbicularis oculi and likely masking negative states can be on the face for very brief periods (250 milliseconds [1/4 of a second]) or very long periods (a lifetime of polite smiling…).” (pages 105-106)
“And importantly, several studies have found that Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles, brief two- to three-second displays differing only in the activation of the orbicularis oculi muscle, map onto entirely different emotional experiences.” (pages 106-107)
In other words, these two kinds of smiles are connected to entirely different sides of the brain and their corresponding emotional centers: The D smile to the happiness center on the left side, the fake non-D smiles on the right, negative emotional side of the brain. The D smile “accompanies high spirits and goodwill” while the non-D smile “reflects the attempt to mask some underlying negative state.” (page 108)
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I can easily see how these two kinds of smiles communicate to all of us and especially to tiny infants in their earliest brain formation stages, the state of the environment. A genuine D smile signals through happiness states of safe and secure attachment and at least – at that instant – life in a benign, benevolent world. (It is really an ‘approach’ signal.)
The non-D smile communicates something else entirely. Our sophisticated emotional-social brains are genetically programmed to read these extremely rapid emotional signals from human faces. We KNOW when a non-D smile happens, and that it happens from the negative (unsafe, insecure, “something is not quite right in the world”) place inside another person. (It is really an ‘avoid’ signal.)
The predominant pattern of smiling signals is one of the MAJOR ways our brain is directed in its formation from the time we are born. Unsafe world equals poverty in the genuine happiness D smile. Safe world equals lots of signals about what a wonderful, safe and secure place the world is to be in. The nature of these signals communicate to an infant’s developing body-brain what kind of a world its genetics have to prepare for, and the signals affect the entire body, including the developing nervous and immune system.
The genuine D smile is a flashing green safe-to-GO light. Then fake smile, masking negative emotional states is some degree of a yellow warning light or a down right flashing unsafe-STOP light. Our infant developing body-brain builds itself around this kind of information, and we respond to our environment with this body-brain for the rest of our lives.
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Keltner misses what I consider a most important fact about what he talks about next in his presentation about how depressed mothers responses to and with their infants. It is the nature of these kinds of signaling patterns between a mother and her infant that is building her infant’s body-brain from the beginning of her infant’s life.
(It is also extremely important to note here that a vastly understated problem exists of women who negatively affect their infant’s development because of postpartum anxiety that does not appear as ‘typical’ as postpartum depression. This post also underscores how vitally important it is for any ‘mental health’ treatment a pregnant mother or a mother of a young infant receives to be tied into the needs of her developing infant – such as is now recognized through the field of Infant Mental Health. California, for example, has highly developed services in this regard funded by tobacco taxes.)
Keltner writes:
“In the 1980s developmental psychologists Ed Tronick, Jeff Cohn, and Tiffany Field became interested in what postpartum depression does to mother-child interactions. Their studies, and those of other investigators, revealed that postpartum depression mutes the positive emotionality of the mother – she smiles less, she vocalizes with less warm intonation, and her positive emotional repertoire is less contingent upon the actions of her child. Children of mothers experiencing postpartum depression tend to show complementary behavior – they are more agitated, distressed, and anxious.
“This kind of result is compellingly intuitive. Any parent or friend who has been up close to this phenomenon, who has been in the living room of a depressed mother whose positive emotion is dampened and disengaged from that of her child, readily knows how essential the exchanges of smiles, coos, touch, play faces, and interested and encouraging eyebrow flashes are to the parent-child dynamic. Yet from a scientific standpoint, the finding – the mother’s impoverished positive emotional repertoire brings about anxiety and agitation in the child – is plagued by alternative explanations. Perhaps agitated, fussy infants produce muted positive emotionality and depression in the mother. Perhaps they both share some genetically based tendency that predisposes their parent-child interactions to lack mutual smiles, coos, touches, and play. Perhaps their shared emotional condition is the product of deeper structural causes – underpaid work, poverty, alienated or abusive husbands and the like.
“So to study the role of smiling and muted positive emotionality in parent-child interactions, Tronick, Cohn, and Field developed what has come to be known as the still-face paradigm. This experimental technique is profoundly simple but powerful. The mother is requested to simply be in the presence of her young infant, say nine months old, but to show no facial expressions whatsoever, and none of the most common of facial expressions for young mothers – smiles. As the young child navigates around the laboratory environment, approaching toy robots and stuffed elephants and brightly colored objects that make farm animal noises, the child looks to the mother’s face for signals about the environment. The child seeks information in facial muscle movements about what is safe, fun, and worthy of curious exploration, and what is not, and the mother sits there impassionate, stone-faced, and unresponsive.
“The results are astonishing. In a smile-impoverished environment, the young child no longer explores the environment, no longer approaches novel toys or play structures; her imagination shuts down. The child quickly becomes agitated and distressed, often wildly so, arching his or her back and crying out. The child will often move to the mother and try to provoke her, stir her out of her stupor, with a vocalization or touch or encouraging smile. And as the child begins to resign herself to the unexpressive condition of the mother, she moves away from the mother, refusing eye contact, and eventually falls into listlessness and torpor.” (pages 108-110)
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The first thing I want to say about this information is that what Keltner is describing is the difference between safe and secure and unsafe and insecure attachment in the world for the playing, exploring, and still very dependent infant. The only way this infant can determine the ‘condition of the world’ is through signals sent back and forth between it and its mother.
My strong suspicion is that if an infant has been exposed from birth to a mother who is depressed, anxious, dissociated, frightened or who abuses the infant, the entire scenario Keltner is describing would take a different course. The infant reaction he describes could only happen if an infant had a safe and secure attachment with its mother before they entered the laboratory.
Imagine – taking just these few words and thinking long and deeply about them – how profoundly and negatively a deprived-traumatized infant’s body-brain would have had to develop ALREADY by the age of nine months. Positive and appropriate safe and secure attachment experiences from birth – or their opposite — would have already had powerful impact on and influence over how the infant’s body-brain had formed itself in critical ways.
It would be a most excellent sign in the experiment described above if the infant DID become agitated, distressed, and tried to engage its mother. An abused infant would demonstrate all kinds of alterations in its patterns of interaction with its mother. But see how quickly the infant gives up trying and slumps into helpless, powerless hopelessness even in this brief of an interaction when the mother does not TELL the infant anything it can use to feel safe, secure and attached?
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Keltner continues about the social reinforcement of smiles:
“…they are the first incentives toward which young children move, and that parents hungrily seek. In relevant research, when one-year-old infants sit at the edge of a visual cliff, a glass surface over a precipitous drop, with their mother on the other side, the infant immediately looks to the mother for information about this ambiguous scene, which looks both dangerous and passable. If the mother shows fear, not a single child will crawl across the glass surface. If the mother smiles…approximately 80 percent of the infants will eagerly cross the surface, risking potential harm, to be in the warm, reassuring midst of their mother’s smile.” (page 111)
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Long, long before an infant can move itself around in the world at a distance from its earliest caregivers, its brain has been shaped in its development as circuits, pathways and regions have developed themselves in direct response to the kinds of facial signals it has had with its caregivers – or not had as in the case of deprivation of appropriate interactions.
Keltner describes the physiological benefits of both sending and receiving genuine D smiles:
“Two smiles are exchanged within the span of a second or two… Within the bodies of those individuals…are reciprocally coordinated surges of dopamine and the opiates. Stress-related cardiovascular response reduces. A sense of trust and social well-being rises. The smile….evolved as a neon-light signal of cooperativeness, it became embedded in social exchanges between individuals that give rise to closeness and affiliation.” (pages 112-113)
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A core belief in my thinking is that our entire feel-good biochemical body systems is designed to keep us attached in positive ways to members of our species. To the degrees that we have lost sight of this, we suffer from all the kinds of ‘addictions’ and social ills known within our species, not the least of which is severe infant-child abuse.
I don’t believe my mother’s earliest life was filled with genuine smiles anymore than mine was. If it had been, I can guarantee I wouldn’t be sitting here writing these words today. Had any of my readers own mother been born into a world of genuine smiles they would not be hear reading my words, either.
While the related subjects of humor and laughter await a future post, it is enough today to suggest that by thinking back – mostly within our body – we can track the presence of absence of unresolved trauma in our infant-childhood by the presence or absence of genuine D smiles. It is most helpful to realize that long before our conscious memory abilities were able to operate, the patterns of smiles versus traumas that we experienced built the very foundation of our brain through which we process our emotions for the rest of our lives.
It is never too late to learn more about the power of genuine happiness to expand the activity of and connections between what happy center neurons we have – even if we don’t have very many. That left brain happy center is definitely one that shed unused neurons (those not stimulated by happy caregivers in infancy) as it formed in our early lives. They can never be replaced. Safe and securely attached people HAVE MORE OF THEM present!
Research on brain plasticity clearly shows that exercising areas of our brain can build more and stronger CONNECTIONS BETWEEN NEURONS and thus expand the operation of brain regions – the happy center included.
But I am a realist. Those of us who suffered greatly from infant-child abuse, deprivation and trauma and were NOT born to happy mothers or families, simply did not get to build as big a left brain happy center as did those with opposite experiences. As adults, we actually – in our body – KNOW THIS!
I personally doubt I would be alive if I had not had my brother John, 14 months older than me, who is by character about the dearest person on earth. He got to keep his happy neurons because my mother was able to love him, as was my father. By the time I was born he was fully shining. It is because he lovingly turned the power of his genuine smiling happy neurons upon little tiny (much hated by my turned-psychotic mother) me that any happy neurons were left alive in my brain at all.
Learning how to exercise them so that my happy center neurons can form better connections is one of the most important missions of my life time.
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NOTE: Too much happy stimulation can overstimulate an infant and harm its developing nervous system and brain! A healthy, happy mother knows instinctively how much is enough and when and how to calm her baby down! HINT: When an infant turns its head away and breaks eye contact, LET IT! It is busy with all the information it can handle (like a busy telephone line). Do not get right back into its face or you will overwhelm it. At such times an infant is processing information, building its brain, regulating its own emotional state (self soothing), organizing itself, and calming itself down! The infant will let you know when it is done and ready to reengage with you. Another hint: Men in general are not geared as women are to recognize over stimulating activity with young infants – be careful!
(When such an infant turns its head to the right it is organizing the left side of its brain and vice versa!)
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REMEMBER THIS:
“Any parent or friend who has been up close to this phenomenon, who has been in the living room of a depressed mother whose positive emotion is dampened and disengaged from that of her child, readily knows how essential the exchanges of smiles, coos, touch, play faces, and interested and encouraging eyebrow flashes are to the parent-child dynamic.”
MOST IMPORTANTLY — They are VITAL! Please do not forget this – and please do remember to find a way to help any parent and infant you might encounter who is experiencing anxious or depressed interactions so that infant can have a better chance to build a better brain and have a better life – When you see negative, anxious, depressed kinds of infant-caregiver interaction patterns, know they are hurting an infant’s brain development and changing the degree of well-being it will experience for the rest of its life. FIND A WAY TO EDUCATE – TO POSITIVELY INTERVENE!
PARTS OF THE BRAIN THAT SLOW DOWN OR SPEED UP IN DEPRESSION
“Though depression involves an overall reduction in brain activity, some parts of the brain are more affected than others. In brain-imaging studies using PET scans, depressed people display abnormally low activity in the prefrontal cortex, and more specifically in its lateral, orbitofrontal, and ventromedial regions. And the severity of the depression often correlates with the extent of the decline in activity in the prefrontal cortex.
The prefrontal cortex is known not only to be involved in emotional responses, but also to have numerous connections with other parts of the brain that are responsible for controlling dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin, three neurotransmitters that are important in mood regulation. More specifically, the lateral prefrontal cortex seems to help us choose a course of behaviour by letting us assess the various alternatives mentally. The orbitofrontalcortex seems to let us defer certain immediate gratifications and suppress certain emotions in order to obtain greater long-term benefits. And the ventromedial cortex is thought to be one of the sites in the brain where we experience emotions and the meanings of things.
The two halves of the prefrontal cortex also seem to have specialized functions, with the left half being involved in establishing positive feelings and the right half in establishing negative ones. And indeed, in depressed people, it is the left prefrontal cortex that shows the greatest signs of weakness. In other words, when people are depressed, they find it very hard not only to set goals in order to obtain rewards, but also to believe that such goals can be achieved.
In healthy people, the left prefrontal cortex might also help to inhibit the negative emotions generated by limbic structures such as the amygdalae, which show abnormally high activity in depressed patients. In patients who respond positively to antidepressants, this overactivity is reduced. And when the amygdalae remain highly hyperactive despite antidepressant treatment, the likelihood of a patient’s relapsing into depression is high.
It is also interesting to note that when someone’s left prefrontal cortex is operating at full capacity, the levels of glucocorticoids in their blood are generally very low. This follows logically, considering the harmful effects that high levels of glucocorticoids have on mood.
Brain-imaging studies have also shown that in patients with severe depression, the volume of the two hippocampi is reduced. This atrophy may be due to a loss of neurons that is also induced by the toxic effects of the high levels of glucocorticoids associated with recurrent episodes of depression.The extent of atrophy in the hippocampus even seems to be proportional to the sum of the durations of the episodes of depression, and depressions that are treated rapidly do not seem to lead to this reduction in hippocampal volume.”
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I am over on my Taking Care of Mothers blog working on my ABUSIVE BORDERLINE MOTHER BRAIN book/information. You can check out the progress (long way to go yet) here: +BOOK ON BORDERLINE BRAIN
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Yet another really cool brain site — stuff we should learn in grade school:
Stop the Storm 
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