Tag: language development

+WORDS DO NOT MEAN SOCIAL CONNECTION TO ME – THEY ARE OBJECT-TOOLS-WEAPONS

alchemynow3 Comments

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I know I better write a post right now before I head out to do some serious adobe work in my garden today because if I don’t track the process of my thinking at this moment I know I will soon make such a quantum leap in what I know about myself, my trauma altered development that happened because of the severe infant-child abuse I experienced, dissociation and my language development that I will never be able to go back and track how my conclusions about the connections between all these vitally important topics actually arrived.

As I ‘play around with’ the experiences I had last week with the medical clinic, and as I anticipate the medically-related appointments that I am going to have to go through in the near future, and as I sift through the facts of MY experience to gain information about what happened last week I am finding myself headed straight for some amazing discoveries.

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Much of what I experience as dissociation when I am engaged in a stressful situation with people who actually escalate my stress response rather than sooth it — dissociation that includes an inability to hear spoken language, to process verbal information or to even THINK in words (the blank state) — is directly related to the way my physiological development was affected by severe trauma from birth.

The trauma that matters most to me as I consider the consequences of it that I live with DAILY at age 59 happened from birth to age two.  I have focused much of my writing so far on this blog on the critically important right-limbic-social-emotional brain development that happens directly through early attachment relationships with caregivers.

I have to move forward now in my thinking to age two.

While there are specific developmental stages and milestones that happen during this second year of life, the one I want to look at right now has to do with the continuation of the development of LANGUAGE.

An infant begins its breathing life with the ability to send and receive signals in the form of PREVERBAL communication.  All ‘attachment’ interactions with early caregivers happen on the level (from the infant’s point of view) of this PREVERBAL communication.

An infant’s caregiver is also using NONVERBAL and VERBAL communication signals with the infant.  As the infant’s body-nervous system-brain grows and develops, its physiology has been built by the PATTERNS of the earliest (attachment) interactions.  These patterns literally tell the DNA and the cells of the infant’s body WHAT TO DO.

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As an infant moves toward the acquisition of WORDS and the ability to understand and use them, it uses ALL the patterns that have been built into it as ‘traffic flow channels’ for its growing abilities to communicate.

If everything the infant has experienced has happened in an extremely traumatic, abusive, neglectful environment of malevolence, chaos, unpredictability and NONEXISTENT contact between the infant’s SELF and its caregiver, the infant’s ENTIRE REPERTOIRE INVOLVING VERBAL LANGUAGE HAS ALREADY BEEN SENT DOWN A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PATHWAY than the kind a safely and securely attached infant’s has.

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‘Ordinary people’ are familiar with part of what I wish to describe if they think about trying to communicate with a police official after a serious car accident, or if they think about how words failed them in an important interview, or failed them at the moment they received a cancer diagnosis.

This tells me that the ‘dissociatable’ regions of the human brain that can separate emotional experience from verbal articulation (both spoken and in thinking abilities) is perfectly POSSIBLE for everyone.

What happens to me is that I experience these changes in how words include themselves in my ongoing experience at times that ‘ordinary people’ would NEVER experience.  That is the difference between how I operate and how they do — not that ‘I dissociate words from my experience’ and they do not.

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Researchers know that a ‘bad mother rat’ is a nervous, over amped-stress response rat who will NOT LICK HER OFFSPRING like a safely and securely NON stressed mother rat will.

Researchers also know that if they switch offspring between a high licking rat mother and a low licking mother (meaning highly stressed and nonstressed), the offspring RAISED by either of these types of mothers will build into their developing physiology the corresponding high or low stress level responses.

Researchers now know that the degree of stressed-out response in the offspring is NOT due to genetics.  It is due to the ability an offspring’s body has to alter its physiological development in direct response to the nature of the environment is is formed by and in.

In human terms we can translate this very basic fact into what happens to infants raised in secure, safe, loving, appropriate, adequate MOTHER-early caregiving environments versus those who are raised in opposite conditions.

Severe infant abuse and neglect constitutes a LOW LICKING environment — which is the same as a HIGH STRESS environment.

Most simply put, there is NO POSSIBLE WAY THAT THESE CONTRASTS IN ENVIRONMENTS COULD NOT AFFECT AN INFANT’S LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT.

The stages of preverbal to nonverbal to verbal development are directly affected by the level of stress and trauma present or absent from an infant’s universe during its most critical windows of early physiological development.

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Now, to switch thinking tracks:  There are language development experts who look back over the word-utilizing history of the human species who see in our verbal-language development a pattern that suggests the following.

Many other living creatures (bats and primates included) have the same gene that humans eventually made use of to develop our ability to TALK.

This is the FOXP2 gene.

Researchers believe that it was ONLY about 140,000 years ago that this gene was activated in humans so that it could directly alter the development of our brain AND OUR LARYNX so that we could begin to talk.

All the interactions that mother’s have with their offspring are part of how this ability evolves in all of us now as they are directly tied to the development of our infant body-brain in our earliest attachment caregiving universe.

Some researchers also believe that once the world became benign enough that more early humans had safety and security to spend more time sitting around socializing with one another — which amounts to GROOMING BEHAVIOR in both primates and rats.

The quality of grooming behavior in both primates and rats is used as a measurement of HIGH and LOW stress.

It is evidently very possible that humans began to utilize their FOXP2 gene simply to expand their ability to sooth, bond and communicate with one another — researchers refer to this in humans as GOSSIP — with spoken language as an advancement over gesture that could then include more people within the circle of communicative signaling — or GOSSIP.

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Human infants, as they interact with their earliest caregivers, are engaged in a mutual dance of signaling communication — sending and receiving — with their caregivers.  In abusive, neglectful, traumatic and malevolent early infant environments, the signaling DOES NOT GO ACCORDING TO OPTIMAL PLAN.

The infant’s language-communication-signaling patterns are therefore correspondingly altered within its physiological body-brain development.

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Use of signaling in patterns of listening and responding (rupture and repair) in ‘healthy’ early attachment environments are tied to the development of emotional regulation abilities in an infant’s growing right-emotional-limbic brain AT THE SAME TIME that this same brain region is also developing its SOCIAL-emotional patterns.

Because I was abused and traumatized from birth I did not participate in ‘normal or ordinary’ preverbal or nonverbal communication patterns with my caregivers.  There was no possible way that my physiology could pattern itself AS IF I had magically grown them in a safe, secure, optimal or even adequate environment.

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I therefore suggest that for every single person who has been given the so-called ‘mentally ill diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder’ and that KNOWS that something was NOT OK in their early infant-caregiver interactions that DISSOCIATION as it includes the component of verbal communication with others and within our self in our thoughts HAS BEEN CHANGED right along with all our other Trauma Altered Development.

What happened to me the other day at the medical clinic has also highlighted a critically important point to me:  When I was born nobody gave a single solitary HOOT about what I needed.  They didn’t respond to me as if I existed as a human being at all.  Because all my patterns of communication included patterns of abuse and trauma, I DID NOT DEVELOP A RIGHT BRAIN THAT INCLUDES ‘NORMAL OR ORDINARY’ use of preverbal and nonverbal social-emotional cuing.

What this means to me when push comes to shove NOW is that — as a component of my nonattachment reality tied to the so-called insecure Reactive Attachment Disorder or Disorganized-Disoriented attachment disorder — is that not only can I NOT include ‘normal’ nonverbal social communication cues in MY communication to others, I cannot read the ones they send to me, either.

In the end — I DO NOT CARE ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE.  That level of signaling caring was NOT built into my infant (birth to 2) physiology during my precursory stages of verbal language ability.

Nobody cared about ME so very realistically, how could CARING possibly have been included in my language acquisition physiological patterning?  (This is part of the ’empathy disorder’ Dr. Allan Schore describes as a component of all insecure attachment disorders within the 45% of our population that has some version of one.)

Because the ability to include EMOTIONALLY relevant information and to read its signals and clues was not a part of my preverbal-nonverbal-verbal physiological development, the bottom line TO ME is that I am excluded from the highly developed human social specie’s GROOMING and GOSSIPING behavior.  I was not born into an environment that included me as a PART OF THE GROUP to be safely and securely attached to and within.

The solitary confinement and isolation I experienced due to my mother’s abuse continued to one degree or another to profoundly affect me through my entire 18 year childhood.  (No play included.)

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Language – spoken and nonverbal — not only does not work the same in my body-brain, it does not mean the same to me as it no doubt does to ‘ordinary people’, either.

Although I obviously am able to understand words themselves, I do not believe that my language abilities are wired into me in anything like a normal way when it comes to interactions with members of my species.  And who the hell else would CARE if I could talk or not?

I am an excluded-from-ordinary person, and my latest clarity of discovery is that THIS is perhaps one of the MOST IMPORTANT consequences of being raised from birth so that my development was physiologically patterned in and by trauma.

I am excluded from being truly attached in my lifetime to members of my species who developed normal and ordinary language abilities.

This does leave me to wonder if I could learn more about how I am in the world by coming to understand how language develops in people who are blind and/or deaf from birth (and Autism-spectrum brain holders).  These people also would have to move through the preverbal-nonverbal-verbal developmental stages differently.

But even here, it would only be those who were NOT LOVED or treated kindly in safe and secure attachment earliest caregiving infant environments that would have experienced the kind of base-line, bottom-up truly altered right-limbic-emotional-social-preverbal brain development that I did.

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So when my stress response is activated like it was at the clinic last week, other people can feel extremely threatened and defensive around me and interaction with me because we are from completely different worlds when it comes to the use of words.

Words are simply a tool to me — to be used as a tool to accomplish an end.  I was not built with words included in my development to be primarily about exchanges involving emotion between people that belong to and in a human group (involving degrees of social bonding).

I believe the more I clarity I can gain about this topic the more I might be able (if I am willing) to NOT move very quickly between using words as TOOLS and using these TOOLS as weapons.  This means to me that words are OBJECTS to me — and I suspect this happens for me on very deep, profound, fundamental levels of my Trauma Altered physiology.

I tried to explain to the doctor at the clinic that all stress has to be deescalated in that environment for me to begin to understand verbal exchange.  I also know that written words are ACTUALLY my primary language.

Social-emotional spoken language exchange, with its normal roots in preverbal and nonverbal language development, IS NOT MY FIRST OR MY PRIMARY LANGUAGE.

If this fact is true for many people with the a so-called ‘anxiety-dissociation diagnosis of mental illness’ — what I am saying is IN HIGH NEED OF SCIENTIFIC VALIDATION.

If what I am discovering about myself as a survivor of extreme early and long-term infant-child abuse is correct, much of the ‘mystery’ and therefore of the social stigma based on misunderstanding about DISSOCIATION can be traced back to Trauma Altered Development as it affected our ability to communicate with others of our species AND MOST IMPORTANTLY in verbal cognition-verbal thought WITHIN OUR OWN SELF.

When I ‘go blank’ during ‘dissociation’ I have followed back a track of development in my physiology that moves far more quickly to a place where words do not exist in information gathering and processing interactions or transactions (either with others or within my own thoughts).

The ONLY hope-for-balm to heal this in the moment it happens would be for all around me to recognize INSTANTLY the need to erase all threat of harm and stress from the encounter.  More importantly, once the ‘dissociation’ involving my altered language processing happens, it is too late to fix it at that moment.

AWARENESS that allows for proactive prevention of the conditions that lead to this dissociation of word meaning from language transaction would be most helpful, along with the very real understanding that I, and others who were abused as infants like I was, do not have the ‘ordinary’ connection between emotional information and ‘verbal fact’.

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It struck me after I published this post that one powerful effect of my mother’s horrific verbal abuse of me all of my life is that I KNOW what the end product of words as object-tools-weapons REALLY can mean.  All verbal abuse survivors know this.  But when it comes to the ADDITION of terrible verbal abuse as it bombards an infant that is ALSO being neglected, physically abuse and traumatized, there is no possible way that profound physiological development of language abilities can be avoided.

We survivors of trauma on these most profound language-development levels are therefore language exiles from our species and are probably ONLY able to truly communicate with survivors whose brain-language abilities were built with these same altered preverbal-nonverbal-verbal physiological Trauma Altered patterns.

This all must tie in on the deepest human physiological levels with the reasons why it is the ability or disability to tell one’s life narrative ‘coherently’ according to compliance with or ‘incoherently’ in deviation from Grice’s conversational maxims that is the foundation of the assessment tool used to determine a secure versus insecure attachment pattern-system-disorder in adults.  (Adult Attachment Assessment Interview)

Those of us raised in extremely malevolent early attachment environments did not have the same communication ‘rules’ built into our body-brain.  We do NOT, therefore, speak the same language as do those who were not equally as exposed to severe trauma during critical early physiological developmental stages.

(To know a LANGUAGE is a far more complex and expansive operation than simply knowing a collection of WORDS.  There are, for example, nearly 3000 words in this post, but I believe it is only those who have some ‘cultural immersion’ experience in the universe of severe infant-child abuse trauma that will know exactly what I am actually talking about here!)

The Meaning in Words by Dr. Bruce Perry

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+BATTERED CRASH-DUMMY BABIES — AND OUR LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

alchemynow2 Comments

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Perhaps being raised from birth as a solitary, isolated and battered infant-child prepared me for being a ‘lone voice in the wilderness’.  I did a Google search last evening for the terms ‘infant abuse language development’ and was shocked at the pitiful range of information that appeared on my screen.  I added the word ‘mother’ to my search terms and still found little that could help me understand what I wanted to study.

As a complete lay person it is NOT a good sign to have my own blog page show up on the first page of such a search.  What this tells me is that either what I think is so far outside the realm of ‘correct’ and ‘relevant’ that it bears no further thought — or it tells me that what I know is of critical importance and needs to be researched and studied by the people who receive the BIG BUCKS to study what matters to human beings forever stuck in the trenches of life as survivors of infant-child abuse.

One study I found is so old it represents only the beginning of the research that Dr. Allan Schore and other more ‘modern’ developmental neuroscientists have more currently written about.  Although this paper (what I could access of it online — The Rhythmic Structure of Mother-Infant Interaction in Term and Preterm Infants) describes patterns of infant-mother interactions that are critical for infant body-brain development, it was written before the photographic technology even existed that Schore uses to highlight the fact that accurately measuring the infant-caregiver interactions that are forming the infant happen NOT in the range of one-second intervals, but rather occur at rates in the millisecond range.

(Do a Google search for ‘schore mother infant brain development’ and take a look at THIS information.)

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Most simply and effectively put, those of us with severe infant-child abuse and neglect in our developmental early history are MOST likely to experience processes that are lumped together under the descriptive word DISSOCIATION.  When I look at the information about the natural patterns of connection and disconnection that take place between infants and their caregivers from birth as they are required for brain-nervous system development (including infant consolidation of information as it builds the body-brain) I understand that when an infant is born into a completely chaotic, traumatic and UNSTABLE environment these patterns DO NOT operate correctly.

Too much information, too much of hurtful information, too much information being bashed at and into the infant, not enough information, chaotic unstable patterns being forced upon the infant by a MOTHER or other early caregiver that have NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with the infant itself, etc.

There is NO POSSIBLE WAY for an infant to develop in a normal or ordinary fashion given the extremely upsetting nature of the interactions and transactions it is exposed to and forced to experience with an abusive, traumatizing, terrorizing early caregiver.

HOW DO WE EXPECT THAT THERE WILL NOT BE SERIOUS AND PERMANENT CONSEQUENCES TO THE INFANT from these kinds of interactions — along with the nearly complete exclusion of CORRECT, sustaining, regulation and HELPFUL interactions that the infant MUST have to build its best body-nervous system-brain?

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Now, getting to my present reality:  What I experienced yesterday while trying to obtain fuel assistance money from a county-operated program that is supposed to do its job was so far past unsettling to me that I headed back to my infancy to look for information about how I experienced what happened yesterday — inside of my own body.

I don’t want to go into the details of how inept both this program and its administrators are (in the state of Arizona).  Life is life, and it’s a fact that Big People are LIKELY to experience stressful, disturbing and unsettling experiences.

What matters is that when an infant was built from birth in the kind of malevolent (not pampered!) environment I am describing, we do not have built within our own body-nervous system-brain ‘normal or ordinary’ circuits and pathways to DEAL with the stress-distress that life throws our way.

I can find no reference online to this direct connection between infant lack of well-being and the adult consequences of being built in those terrible environments that DIRECTLY affect our inabilities and disabilities to sail through difficulties in our adulthood that normal and ordinary people usually can.

The best that we survivors are likely to hear is, “Oh, there’s something wrong with you.  Let’s diagnose you with a ‘mental illness’.

GIVE ME A BREAK, you idiots!

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I will describe here as clearly as I can what happens to me when I am at my wit’s end stress-distress wise and have to deal with people.  This happened to me yesterday, and is an experience that I do not remember having consciously between the time I left home at 18 (I had it prior to that) and the time I received my very serious breast cancer diagnosis and began treatment at age 55.

(My daughter tells me she has an idea what I am talking about based on her experience of meeting people in a stress-filled situation, like in an important interview, when she is so involved with dealing with incoming information that is NOT VERBAL — (now experts say that 95% of information transmitted in our conversations IS NONVERBAL) —  that she cannot HEAR a single word being spoken.  I also believe people under pressure of serious medical treatments experience related difficulties when trying to understand what their medical providers are telling them — like in cancer treatment.)

ANYWAY, the woman behind the fuel assistance program’s desk was trying to explain to me that all the rules for the program had been changed (in stupid ways) that directly and negatively affect ALL people applying for help.

The more desperate I felt inside knowing that my ability to heat my home were being increasingly threatened, the more I could NOT understand what she was telling me.  The not understanding was at the level of watching her mouth move its tongue and lips with no sound attached to those actions.  At the same time an extremely annoying DISSOCIATED and disconnected SOUND filled my awareness that was extremely noisy and irritating.  I could not connect the sound to the lips to the words to any kind of sense at all.

Because what I needed for my own well-being and security (the ability to heat my house) mattered so much, I HAD to understand what this woman was saying to me.  How humiliating and extremely AGGRAVATING it was to finally have to say to her, “I need you to tell me what you are saying as if you are talking to a two-year-old — or I will NOT be able to understand you.”  (I did not receive the help I needed yesterday and in one month’s time have to jump through all of their hoops again — for the third time in three months.)

I absolutely believe, because I could FEEL it, that my lack of ability to understand a DAMN thing in that conversation happened because the very earliest PREVERBAL, PRE LANGUAGE neuronal wiring in my body — built there during extremely abusive and chaotic nonsensical interactions with my traumatizing mother — was in full action.

I also absolutely believe that I am not ALONE!  I am certainly NOT the only adult who survived severe infant abuse.

Does anyone talk about how it IS for us survivors and how it FEELS to us in our BODY to have been so negatively impacted in our development that these alterations affect how we learned and process language — ESPECIALLY WHEN STRESS/DISTRESS IS PRESENT?

No, they do not.

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While I believe the malevolent experiences during my infancy directly formed my body-brain wiring patterns that are the root of how I am forced to operate in the world, I do not believe that ‘dissociation’ is the correct description of the state I am forced into when these earliest wiring patterns overwhelm my ability to make sense of myself in/and the world.

Based on my experience that my cancer treatment interrupted all the later learning I had acquired that allowed me to circumvent the baseline language patterns that I acquired — I believe it is more accurate to say that the earliest beginnings and what THAT felt like is the REAL us in our body.  Everything that we managed to piece together to ‘feel more normal’ and to ‘operate more normally’ are themselves the dissociations from what was native to us — that which was built into and built our body-brain in the first place INCLUDING OUR ABILITY TO COMPREHEND AND USE LANGUAGE.

When I experience (and I HATE IT) what I did yesterday, I am very clear that I am ACTUALLY without ‘a first language’.  No doubt my brain could be watched during these times and SOMETHING DIFFERENT would be detected about how my brain-mind is processing language.

I suspect that the foundation of language abilities as they happen from birth (actually from before birth) in patterns of connection-disconnection with the mother cannot possibly follow magically along normal pathways if the infant is being treated in traumatizing ways.  We infant abuse survivors therefore cannot possibly have learned language in normal and ordinary ways.

This is a BIG PROBLEM, folks, at the same time it COULD be a fascinating journey into understanding the resiliency of infants who can STILL adapt to spoken language.  I also believe, however, that the same alterations that occurred due to early abuse and affected how we process spoken words and nonverbal signals with our ‘different balance from ordinary’ in terms of how we receive information, process it and ‘take action’ (listening and speaking) — also affects how we use words in our thinking.

All of this has to do (in my mind) with the different way our right brain, our left brain, and our abilities to transmit, synthesize and understand information between the two were changed through trauma-altered development (and infant abuse) so that our experience of being alive has been fundamentally impacted.

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Doesn’t anybody out there think these facts are worth investigating?  We are absolutely WAY IN THE DARK AGES if the best our culture can do is ‘call us mentally ill’.  We infant abuse survivors are the most sophisticated examples of the range of environmentally adaptive developmental abilities our species has.

That our language development was changed right along with the rest of our body due to severe early trauma should surprise NO ONE.  Why, then, is there not only no USEFUL information available that will explain to us how this process happened and how these changes affect us all of our life — there is NO INFORMATION available at all!

Battered babies don’t simply fall off of the face of the earth.  We survived, we are here — and because we were battered and because we survived — we are different beings from ordinary.  I for one want to know what that MEANS!

The patterns of interaction an infant has with its mother and other earliest primary caregivers not ONLY build our right limbic emotional brain with its patterns of ability to have either emotional regulation or dysregulation for life, these patterns also build our social brain (same hemisphere) at the same time.

Our resulting ability to ‘read social cues’ normally is directly tied along with the development of our body-nervous system-brain through our earliest interactions to the development of our VERBAL LANGUAGE ABILITIES that are intimately connected to our NONVERBAL LANGUAGE ABILITIES.  All of the patterns of communication an infant has with its earliest caregivers ARE a language being spoken.

It is time that all of us understand that being able to communicate efficiently and effectively with others and with our own self are directly formed within us at the same time.  We cannot exclude a study of infant abuse and trauma from the consequences to all of our development – including our language abilities.

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+VERBAL ABUSE – CAN I HEAL MY INFANT MUSICAL BRAIN?

alchemynow1 Comment

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I have no doubt that our human species participated in dance and music long, long before we had the ability to use words in speech.  I also know that as a newborn infant I could first experience the terrorizing sounds of my mother’s trauma ‘music’ and feel how she physically treated me through her trauma ‘dance’ long, long before I could begin to comprehend what a word was.  Those earliest experiences with my mother affected how my brain developed.  I want to go back now and specifically try to heal my ‘infant’ musical brain.

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If someone explained to me, for example, that the reason I couldn’t walk as well as others was because my feet had been bound tightly from the time I was very small, and the bindings were not removed until I was a teenager, I would be able to make that connection.  I understand what feet have to do with walking.

I took the ability to send and receive spoken word communication and to think in words for granted all of my life until two years ago.  After the shocking stress of being diagnosed with advanced, aggressive breast cancer, and then after following through with all the radical treatments, including chemotherapy, that have saved my life, I now have a different understanding of my own speech related processes.

I understand now that my brain did not learn to process language normally.  I understand that somehow I was able to continue forward in my infant-child development and all the way into adulthood without anyone, my self included, recognizing that my mother’s severe verbal abuse of me had changed the way my language processing abilities developed, and thus changed the regions of my brain and their operation that language-processing abilities rely on.

What I know about myself now post cancer and its treatment is that what I really did from the time I was very, very small was create the equivalent of a house of cards within my brain that gave me the illusion that I processed spoken language in the same way that other people do.  Chemotherapy’s affect on my infant-child abused brain on many levels was that it erased most of the post-critical windows of early development abilities I had ‘learned’ to use so that I could get along in the world.  In other words, chemotherapy erased my memory of how I pretended to be normal.

My language processing abilities were not spared.  I see the image of a beautiful (and believable) brilliantly colored and intricately designed paper Chinese lantern that represents the ways I managed to incorporate enough of how regular people interact with one another in verbal ways so that even I was fooled into believing I was no different from others.  Yet my experience with cancer and its treatment has been that a soaking rain has disintegrated the fragile paper structure of pretending I was ‘OK’.

I am left with a barely flickering candle of what normal human verbal-social interactions are supposed to be like – and none of the extraneous trappings.  By finding the developmental brain research and by trying to understand it, I am learning that the balance of information processing between the two hemispheres of my brain has been altered.  Not only did my right emotional social limbic brain not develop normally, but neither did my left brain (as a right-handed person).

With the secondary (later learned) structure of my language processing abilities wiped away, I am left with the experience of what my primary language processing abilities are really like.  It is only now that I am beginning to gain willingness to look behind the illusions of normalcy for myself that I am beginning to understand what my mother’s extreme verbal abuse of me from the time I was born did to me.

At the same time I consider myself fortunate to be living in the period of human history when understandings about the intricate workings of the human brain are being discovered.  I am fortunate also to be living at a time when I can find related important information in my own world through the internet.  In some strange way that I cannot pinpoint or name exactly, I also realize that my having cancer, being treated for it, and still being alive – now with this NEW information about the way my brain REALLY processes language combined with access to new brain discovery information – is giving me the fantastic opportunity to combine my personal story of surviving severe infant-child abuse with new-found awareness of how early verbal abuse impacts a young brain during its critical-window periods of rapid growth and development.

I am the living, breathing, walking, talking, hearing, listening result of my mother’s incredible infant-child severe abuse experiment.  I don’t suffer from anything as blatantly obvious as having the consequence of bound feet.  I suffer from the invisible, internal, brain structural changes that her abuse of me created.  At the same time I don’t have any understanding of what brain regions look like.  Words used to describe them are foreign to me, and most of them I cannot form my mental tongue around enough to grasp what these words even sound like!

But understand them I must because I am out of the loop of normal social interactions, home alone with an invisible 100% disability that frankly enrages me and causes me great sadness.  Not only did my right brain not learn how to read ‘social cues’ or facial expressions normally, my left brain did not grow in such a way that verbally expressed words are connected and associated with the underlying expression of emotion and intention of the speaker in normal ways.

If I were to be given the choice between two gifts, one being a platinum jewel studded necklace worth millions and the other being the information that research such as Dr. Martin Teicher’s presents about how early abuse changes the brain, I would not hesitate to accept the latter.  Most unfortunately my body-brain knows within its every fiber what Dr. Teicher is talking about when he writes the following:

“The study on verbal abuse is the first to be published, though the overall hypothesis on distinctive sensory damage has so far panned out when the unpublished work is also considered.  The findings of this study “set the stage for what we’re seeing in the other ongoing studies—that sensory systems are vulnerable,” said Teicher.   “The brain is probably suppressing the development of sensory systems that are providing adverse input.”   That is, children’s brains seem to “turn down the volume” on abusive words, images and even pain.   The result is diminished integrity in these sensory pathways.”

At the same time I know it wasn’t JUST the “deleterious effect of ridicule, humiliation, and disdain on brain connectivity” that changed the way my brain grew its language abilities.  In fact, I suspect I would be far better off today if the development brain changes I suffered from my mother’s verbal abuse of me had at least WAITED to happen once I even understood what ridicule, humiliation and distain even were.  Because my mother’s hatred and abuse of me began at the time of my birth, my body-brain had to change its development from my very beginnings.

My suspicion is that dissociation began to find its way into my body-brain development during the first interactions I had with my mother.  As a result, my body-brain has NEVER stored memory in an ordinary way.  Because of this fact, I have what is probably an unusual ability to both remember things I should not remember and to NOT remember things that I should.  Repeated patterns of abusive interactions, which began at my birth, formed themselves into my body-brain in such a way that dissociation itself became a superhighway of connectivity rather than the desired patterns of association.  I can remember my mother’s interactions with me well before I reached the age of words.

This is true because I was born into an infant world that was about as different from normal as it could possibly be.  I didn’t forget these patterns of interactions with my abusive mother from birth, either.  They built the body-brain I have as they built themselves INTO the body-brain I have.  There’s nothing unusual about this fact, either.  ALL of us have the patterns of our earliest interactions with our infant caregivers built into us – because they BUILT us.

When an ordinarily-built person encounters a group of strangers, how they interact with them on all levels, including verbal exchange, happens through a remembering of their earliest caregiver interactions that built them.

I find that I am surprised by the next thoughts that entered my mind as I wrote this last sentence.  My mind is telling me that I thought I’d made progress as I came to understand that interactions between people, including verbal ones, could be looked at as if they were mostly on one of a continuum or the other.  I thought that continuum was about prosocial interactions or antisocial interactions.  Now I realize that I see another entirely different continuum that exists in its own right as an entirely different way.

People like me, who suffered enough severe abuse from birth, operate in our human interactions on this other continuum.  I suspect that the Austic brain shares the features of this continuum, a continuum that simply shows the degrees of unsocial interactions our brains were built with.  The unsocial brain has a different set of rules than does a brain that includes on the ends of its continuum degrees of prosocial or antisocial abilities.  The unsocialized brain is based in its foundational construction on dissociations rather than associations.  It is a brain built from social isolation and ‘maternal deprivation’.

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As I mentioned above, I had no way to know that I had a dissociational unsocialized brain until my experience with cancer and its treatment erased all the secondary human social interactional abilities that I had somehow learned far later, and far down the road from ‘normal’.  They could be erased and ‘forgotten’ because they were secondary and not primary.  Now I am left with two ongoing parallel experiences.  I experience myself with my unsocial brain at the same time I remember when I could ‘act as if’ I had a socialized brain.  But I do not believe I can ever get back the secondary socialized brain I had before cancer.  That brain, with its complex set of secondary (learned) patterns of ‘normal’ human interactional abilities has vanished as certainly as a paper Chinese lantern in a hard rain.

Because I live with this unsocial brain I can say that two simultaneous experiences I know about first hand are (1) I do not receive or process sensory information normally, and (2) I have a fundamentally altered sense of time – and therefore of timing.  While these two aspects of the way my brain formed affect every experience that I have, they create the most difficulty for me as a human being in my relationships with others.

Words become words in any language we might speak because we can recognize where each one starts and where it ends.  Next, we understand the agreed upon meaning that each word refers to.  If we listen to a language that is not our own, we do not recognize word starts and stops, nor do we understand their meanings.

I now recognize for myself that I don’t actually have a first language at all.  The language that I began to learn from the time I was born was a language purely of emotion.  Not only that, but the first language I learned was about extremely overwhelming SOUND coupled with physical pain caused by brutal and violent motion.  My mother didn’t wait until I had the advanced mental abilities formed into my brain that would have let me begin to comprehend what the words “ridicule, humiliation and disdain” might actually mean.

The associations being made in my infant brain were that the sound, the feel, the look of my mother threatened my existence.  I believe my body knew this fact profoundly.  My mother’s roaring, screaming voice were coupled with (associated with) the look of her distorted, contorted, twisted, wide-eyed, wide-mouthed psychotically violent hate-filled face.  The sound of her, the look of her face, were coupled with (associated with) the rage-dilled steely hard grip of her hands, with her pinches, slaps, thumps, slaps along with the heavy thundering stomp of her feet.

So why would I be surprised now to find that the actual words that fall out of people’s lips are far from being my first concern?  Why would I wonder now why there is often a great distance of time between when those words fall out and when I can actually make any logical sense out of them?  Why would I wonder that my verbal interactional space is slow and loose and broad and wide with ill-defined edges rather than being tight and clear and succinct and efficient and FAST?

Language spoken by other people (all but those I am closest to and most safe and secure with) is about how the sound of that person first affects me.  What they actually say means very little to me at all.  If there is stress for me in the interaction, often I can watch a person’s lips move without hearing the sound of their words at all.

Listening to spoken language happens for me mostly in the realm of courtesy and consideration, not because I am comfortable with it – or even need it myself.  I am always concerned on my most fundamental levels with assessing information for threat and risk of harm and for another person’s TRUE intentions.  That level of meaning is, for me, nearly completely divorced from the actual words a person rattles out of their mouth.

It can, therefore, take me a very long time to understand others’ questions and to respond to them.  There is often a wide blank dissociational pause in the conversation while I work very hard inside of myself to negotiate this human social space.  Even though I try hardest to determine intention and risk of harm, at the same time I did not build within my brain the normal capacity for reading nonverbal social signals.  I now completely understand that social verbal interactions with others are exhausting for me, and that I do not do them well.

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That leads me to the next step in my own thinking.  At 58 years old I am now approaching my own logical conclusion.  I probably had developed within me what might be a supremely musical brain.  This suspicion brings to my mind the writings of Daniel J. Levitin about the human brain and music.  It makes me think about the writings of Arnold H. Modell on the human mirror neuron system as he describes how the essentials of human movement might be best described in terms of dance from before we are born.  It also makes me want to include what Dr. Dacher Keltner says about the brain stem connection between laughter and later-developing human verbal language (Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life).

How strange it might seem to think about my mother’s profound abuse of me from birth in these simple terms:  The terrible and terrifying noise and sound of my mother was her music toward me.  The terrible and terrifying, traumatic movement of her was her dance toward me

If we suspend all the intellectual concepts we are tempted to apply in our thinking about newborns in interaction with their mothers – as they begin to happen to all of us from the moment we are born – and begin to understand that it is the patterns of our mother’s music and of her dance that are impacting our developing body-brain, perhaps we can begin to think in terms of a different kind of medicine that might help in our healing.

About a year before I ever knew I had the cancer, I experienced something that actually scared me.  I had bought myself an electric guitar.  One day I decided to give myself permission to play with it for as long as I wanted.  Four hours went by as if they were four minutes. After I put the guitar backing its case and walked away, I realized that my mind was full of music.  Not words, just patterns of notes and rhythms in ongoing streams without beginning or end.

What scared me was that I could not alter this flow of musical patterns  for nearly 48 hours except when I consciously forced myself to focus momentarily on some other action.  – notice the stop sign ahead of me when I was driving, or going through the actions to make a pot of coffee or a piece of toast.

At that time I was committed to my developmental brain studies and to my writing.  I decided not to let myself return to that level of music involvement because I believed it would interfere with my ‘work’.  Well, many thousands of hours and probably millions of written words later, I am making the decision to pursue an experiment with myself.

I accept that I will not be able to achieve the kind of mastery over guitar technique that I want or need, so I am making the very big decision to pull $519.95 out of my pitiful total savings of $1,800 and buy myself an electric piano.  I am choosing to spend that (to me) very large chunk of money because I am beginning to understand that allowing myself to think in music might be the single best medicine I can provide for my brain.  I am also purchasing and Audiogram so I can record myself thinking and go back and follow my conversations with myself – and between my brain hemispheres.  (The more perfect-pitch and consistent sound quality, the better)

I don’t have a history of musical study.  I cannot (yet?) read music.  But the more I come to understand that this last subject I am considering in my studies, how my mother’s verbal abuse of me FIRST affected my brain-body development as a dancing-musical human being, the more profoundly I am beginning to understand that at no time in my life have I actually been ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’.  I was not built that way.

So if wordless music and dance is the human first language, and if it is the language that continued to build my brain far into the stages when patterns of prosocial verbal speech should have taken over my associational brain patterns, then I think it’s time I gave myself permission to think and speak in my own first language.

Who knows?  Maybe I can go all the way back in the very structure of my brain and rewrite and overwrite what was put in there by the monster from the very beginnings of when I could listen to sound.  Maybe I will find my own first and primary language.  Maybe I will create it.  I will certainly be able to express it.  Of that I have no doubt.

NOTE:  Although this might seem to be an unrelated topic, it is not.  When I was 13 and in 8th grade, I was able to discover in PE class that I was extremely gifted in playing basketball.  If ever I was to know what living in a state of perfect magic is like (other than what I expect to experience now with music), it was the experience of gliding around a basketball court with many other bodies while being oblivious to their existence as real physical objects.  There were only three objects on the full and busy court:  My body, the basketball, and the hoop.  I never took aim.  I never thought.  And I never missed a shot, not even if that shot took place halfway down the court, over everyone else’s head.

As an out-of-shape 58 year old I don’t expect to ever experience the magic of that game as it was for me when I was 13.  I know it was a related ability to autism in some way I don’t quite understand.  Part of how it happened was because I lived in dissociated space where self consciousness did not exist.  I fully expect to be able to recreate that space in the privacy of my own home, hooked to a perfectly tuned electric piano keyboard through head phones.

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I was going to present today a study of these three brain regions that Teicher talked about in his article, Cutting Words May Scar Young Brains, but evidently there were other things I needed to write about.  When I think about his other article, Abuse and Sensitive Periods, from my post +THE ‘TERROR-ABLE’ CONSEQUENCES OF INFANT-CHILDHOOD VERBAL ABUSE, I realize that I already know the truth of what he is saying even if I can’t yet literally understand the specific brain region information he is also writing about.  Right now it is more important to me to get my electric piano keyboard ordered and on its way.  The rest of this study can happen later.

“Among those who [solely] experienced parental verbal abuse, three statistically significant disturbed pathways emerged:

— the arcuate fasciculus, involved in language processing;

—  part of the cingulum bundle, altered in patients with posttraumatic stress disorder and associated with depression and dissociation; and

— part of the fornix, linked to anxiety.  The degree of disruption of the normal flow correlated with the severity of abuse.”

PLEASE READ FULL ARTICLE HERE

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