Tag: learning

+IS THERE A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHILD ABUSE AND OLD STYLE PARENTING TECHNIQUES?

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We live at a time when the world as we know it is changing very fast.  So fast that even what happened 50 years ago can seem ancient history, and certainly what happened 100 years ago is on the other side of the horizon for most of our thoughts.

Prior to the 1960’s few thought about child abuse, let alone about child abuse prevention.  Now we have resources at our finger tips to help us, like the following as it describes the efforts of Child Abuse Prevention America:

http://www.preventchildabuse.org/help/reach_out.shtml

The first federal legislation designed to address the problems of child abuse and prevention wasn’t enacted until 1974:

http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:N33rRidXTnIJ:www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/factsheets/about.cfm+history+child+abuse+prevention&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

The following site describes the history of child abuse prevention in our country:

http://parenthood.library.wisc.edu/Melli/Melli.html

We can go back to the history of the case of the young girl, Mary Ellen Wilson, as her abuser was tried and sentenced in 1874 for an early example of the struggle by the public to protect maltreated children:

http://www.americanhumane.org/about-us/who-we-are/history/mary-ellen.html

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There remains a ripple effect in our country from child abuse that has traveled down the generations and can be traced among people who are alive today.  In our efforts to come to terms with severe abuse that was done to us individually we need to try to understand the history of ‘our people’.

Often time stories remain in families that we have taken for granted.  We need to listen to them in new and different ways.  Even if the people who told us these stories are dead, we can remember what they told us, and then try to add this information to form the context that surrounded our own experiences of child abuse.

I believe that what we will find is that our families’ past histories of abuse contain information about how we are transforming as a society.  Looking backwards prior to the 1960s was a time when the overriding social mind was that children were still seen as having no rights.  These beliefs came from a long human history that believed both women and children were simply objects that could be possessed.

We believed socially that what went on in an individual family’s life was nobody’s business but their own.  Today we still experience those same struggles as we attempt to protect women and children from abuse.  Where do we draw the line between public and private?  More importantly, how do we both define and identify child abuse?

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Any of us who were of the generations that reached adulthood prior to the 1970s are left trying to answer these questions by ourselves.  We are like children of the ‘half light’, raised during a time when society around us was launching their new, enlightened approach to child rearing though it was too soon for these efforts to help us.  We try to take the available new information and attitudes and apply it to our own experiences of severe child abuse.

Meanwhile, because we did survive into our adulthood and are obviously not still children currently experiencing abuse, we find little support for our inner reality of what truly happened to us and how the remaining effects of that severe abuse means that even our brains and our bodies were changed as a consequence — and therefore the quality of our lives — for the rest of our lifespan.

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I want to give you an example from a conversation I had recently with a woman who used to be my work supervisor.  I will call her Joyce, and she is 68 years old.

Joyce’s mother recently died at age 93 after suffering nearly ten years of serious dementia that had been caused by the heavy sedation that was necessary for the major heart surgery she had been given at 83.  The family was never told at the time that the level of anesthesia required for this extensive surgery might mean permanent damage to her brain.

As Joyce’s mother’s mental functioning deteriorated she slipped further and further back into her past until at the end she remained in her childhood, in a continual state of anxiety and concern as she asked over and over again, “Where are the boys?  Where are my brothers?  They need to come right away and get the mules out of the cornfield!  They are ruining the corn!”

Joyce told me what she knows of her mother’s experience growing up with Joyce’s grandmother, Sarah.  Sarah was Cherokee, born in 1867.  She married a German man who owned a small piece of land in Oklahoma and made his living as a blacksmith.  The family raised all their own food.  When her husband died of the flu in 1919 Sarah was pregnant with her twelfth child and left without an income.  She began to farm the land with the team of mules alone, selling produce and eggs to the townspeople for what money the family needed. All of the children grew up working very hard from the earliest possible age they could do so.

She was also a midwife and delivered hundreds of babies during her lifetime, including twins and even triplets, and never lost an infant or a mother.  She not only bore these twelve children, but she kept them healthy and alive.  One time her youngest, a son, suffered a mangled arm in a farm equipment accident.  Sarah successfully amputated her son’s arm.  She used many plants and herbs for remedies, though none of her knowledge of healing was passed down to any of her twelve children.

There were no modern conveniences available to this family.  Sarah and her older children made all of the family’s clothing from flour sacks.  The comforters and mattresses were also made from flour sack remains when the clothing wore out, and were stuffed with goose down from the geese that they raised.  The entire family loaded onto the wagon and went into town for Sunday church and never missed a sermon.

The main thing Joyce remembers about what her mother, her aunts and uncles ever said about their mother other than that she bore and raised them by working extremely hard, was that she was mean, mean, mean, mean.  She yelled at them, she hit them, and she showed them no outward affection.  She did not single out any one of the children for her distemper.  She treated them all the same, and this treatment was mean.

Of the twelve children, six grew up to beat their own children and six did not.  Joyce’s mother showed adequate affection to Joyce and her siblings, though she did force them outside to cut off a thick stick to be switched with on the occasions that they had done something wrong.  Joyce does not, however, feel her mother abused her children.

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In order to understand where child abuse might have occurred as we look  backward at our families’ histories we need to consider the very harsh realities of the contexts those people often lived in.   Where were the luxuries, and what could they have been?  Was having an ‘easy’ life and a relaxed caring mother an exception rather than the rule?  What about how the men treated the mothers?  What can we or do we know about the conditions of their lives?

I believe there is a telling factor that enables those of us today, who are trying to understand the severe abuse of our own childhoods, to know if there was child abuse in our family’s history or not.  The simple fact that we were severely abused by our own parents lets us know that history of abuse is there. Yet hitting and beating children, even severely, was an acceptable child rearing practice in the past.  It is only because we are trying to change these patterns today that these practices concern us.

This means to me that the most important question we can ask in looking back at our own severe childhood abuse histories, and looking back into the past knowing that the abuse flowed forward to us from our ancestors who were also abused, is this:  How receptive would our own parents have been to outside intervention. if it had occurred,  that meant to stop the abuse and to teach our parents new and different parenting skills?  If we ask ourselves this question and answer honestly, we will know whether or not we suffered from intentional abuse or more from old style parenting practices as they operated in our own childhoods.

I believe it is important for us to distinguish this difference because it gives us crucial information about the context of our childhood suffering.  I know from my own experience there would have been absolutely nothing anybody could have done to improve my mother’s parenting skills.  She lived in an altered reality that meant in order for her children, especially me, to have been protected from my mother somebody would have needed to remove us from her care.

True, some of the punishments my mother engaged in toward me had direct ties to the punishments used against her when she was young, particularly the use of isolation, of feeding me soggy crackers in milk for meals when she was enraged, and a tie to her having been held down by her older brother while her mother beat her harshly with a leather razor strap.  But beyond the literal translation of some of her techniques of abuse, her mind was gone.  She was seriously mentally ill.

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This brings me back to a major point of my blog:  Any parent who continues to abuse a child in today’s ‘enlightened’ culture is usually mentally ill.  I understand there is a difference and I distinguish between those parents who lack adequate parenting skills to deal effectively and alternatively with the stresses of raising children who can be identified and taught a better way to parent and those parents whose realities do not include this option.  I automatically include any adult who sexually molests a child in any way under this second category.  I do believe that there are parents who are like zebras and cannot change their stripes.

Knowing which group our own parents fit into allows those of us who experienced severe abuse as children to finally have a rock solid foundation to stand upon as we attempt to define for ourselves exactly what happened to us.  If I came from a family with parents who appeared to be ‘just’ acting out old style parenting patterns that they would have been willing and able to have changed if intervention had occurred, I would not have the additional complication of trying to understand rationally and logically what happened to me.

Because my abuse occurred rather in the context of severe mental illness, and because I now know the difference clearly, I understand how much more difficult it is for me to untangle my own abuse history in any logical or rational way.  There WAS no logic, no reason, no rationality to anything my mother ever did to me.  And because of this fact I lived with chronic anxiety in a constant state of terror where dissociation was my only reprieve.

That fact alone is a huge piece of the puzzle of my childhood, and a critically important one for me to have.  I cannot today go back and try to understand what happened by using any of the ‘known’ information I might have today about how a bad parent could have been a better one.  No kind of intervention could have changed my mother’s psychosis that had ‘destroying the evil that was me’ at its center.  I now also know that there was nothing I could have done as a child to change it either.

My point?  There are parent-child situations without hope of improvement and there are those with hope.  We have to distinguish between them.  While this may not be a distinction that can be easily made, I believe it is critical to a child’s well-being, and is one that becomes of vital importance if we ever hope to effectively prevent abuse to children under the age of two.  It is during these critical brain growth windows of development that severe abuse causes the worst long term damage.

It is during this stage of youngest development that we are going to have the hardest time identifying at risk mothers and infants.  We have to use a laser-like focus of attention to both identify and intervene on behalf of the very young.  That this abuse is most likely to occur behind the ‘sacred closed doors’ behind the walls a family has to keep the public world out that makes our job extremely difficult.

We have to know what we are looking for and looking at.  Who knows this world better than anyone else?  Those of us who have survived severe early abuse and are alive to tell about it.  We need to speak and someone needs to listen to us.  Our adult stories are the voice of the very young severely abused who do not even have the words to speak their stories.

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(Something about writing this post today put me in an heightened anxiety state, perhaps because somehow something was triggered and now I feel like I’m waiting for a bomb to fall out of the sky on my head, destroying me.  What a familiar feeling from my childhood, only the bomb was real, and it was my mother.)

+SEVERE EARLY ABUSE PERMANENTLY CHANGES THE ‘SET POINT’ IN OUR BODIES

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I described in an earlier post how I define conditions that create the worst of developmental conditions for infants and young children in terms of the absence or presence of pervasive terror.  In talking to friends about this idea there needs to be an addition to my thoughts.  The absence or presence of love is directly connected to terror when the terror is caused by an early caregiver.

I also described in an earlier post how I see anger as being an appropriate response to environmental challenge because it involves active and effective coping skills.  If those skills are ineffective in meeting the challenge, the next reaction will be fear.  I am not talking about what might be a sense of fear coupled with an initial startle response to the possibility of threat.  That initial reaction is designed to lead us instantaneously to an assessment of the challenge — is it friend or foe?  Only when the challenge is identified as foe does the cycle of meeting the challenge come into play.

So if anger responses fail, and fear is triggered, it is at that stage that another, new and additional response must be found and applied to the situation in order that competent equilibrium can be restored so that well-being can be reestablished.  If the state of fear moves into sadness and despair, that means that no new adequate coping skill could be found.  In the state of despair there is absolutely no question that all else has failed, including any attempts to learn and apply something new.

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Nature has established an interrelated caregiver-infant response system so that even the big eyes that infants have elicit caregiving from adults.  Infants learn very early that they can interact with their environment to get their needs met, and they will use every single one of their innate abilities to succeed at this mission.  In circumstances where caregivers do not respond appropriately to these infant response elicitation efforts, only time will tell what happens next.

Because of an infant’s physiological limitations they are extremely limited as to what they can do to help their situation when their inborn efforts are not effective.  Along with feeling any physical consequences that may apply, such as feeling too hot or cold, hungry, thirsty or tired, their inborn abilities to respond to these challenges with an immune system response of physical emotion creates an inner experience of the feeling of anger, fear or despair.

The inner pattern of deprivation and/or maltreatment begins to operate at birth (or even before birth).  These rhythms of ‘rupture and repair’ or of ‘rupture without repair’ become directly connected in an infant’s forming brain to the experience of hope.  If an infant experiences a challenge to its well-being state of equilibrium but is repeatedly responded to adequately, hope begins to form as a comforting experience during the time of waiting ‘for help to arrive’.

If there is no adequate response pattern established within the infant’s early environment, another pattern will form that does not include hope as a solacing middle-ground experience in the ‘rupture and repair’ cycle.  If events appear to happen without any cause and effect pattern, if the infant cannot use effectively and then grow to trust and depend upon its own efforts to elicit caregiving responses within its environment, it will not build an adequate pattern of ‘rupture-hope-repair’ into its body and brain.  Instead it will be forced off onto another developmental track based on perceived threat to its own life very early in its development.  This pattern of ‘rupture without hope of repair’ then becomes the foundation upon which all future development will be built.

This, to me, is ultimately what having a secure attachment of safety or an insecure attachment of threat and harm is all about.  We are sent off down one or the other of these two paths from the time of our birth (or before).  What the angle or degree of our resulting deviation becomes, from a state of optimal experience, is determined by our genetic factors as they respond to our early environmental conditions.

The fact remains that attachment is a physiological experience that has biochemical consequences.  It changes, for better or for worse, how every cell in our body interacts on a molecular level.  How much of our experience later becomes conscious is also influenced and impacted by these biological changes.  And in the end, it is our ability to have conscious control over our lives that leads to a better future.

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Because we are a social species we have built into the chemical operation of our bodies an innate desire to be attached.  Our survival from birth depends upon our attachment relationships with our early caregivers.  Our development on all levels is dependent upon others.  Our brain, as a part of our nervous system, will be geared by these early experiences either to a ‘set point’  of balanced equilibrium from secure attachments or a ‘set point’ of unbalanced disequilibrium from insecure attachment conditions.  Our immune systems also develop in accordance with these early experiences in the same way.

We are being told even before birth about the world — is it safe or not and are we wanted or not?  Conditions of early deprivation tell an infant that the world is not safe, that they are not wanted in the world, and that they are hence left on their own to survive or die.  This is, to me, what the purist form of isolation means.  Because we are a social species not being wanted and not being cared for appropriately signal the growing body that they are absolutely alone with nobody attached to them and nobody for them to attach to.  And because our entire body is naturally geared FOR attachment, all resulting development will be forced to follow an alternative pathway.

I believe that a combination of genetic factors, including our sex, will respond in our early interactional environment to determine the emotional tone of our bodies based upon the very early emotional potential we are born with.  A safe, secure, adequate and happy early environment will build a calm set point of balanced equilibrium into a body and brain that allows a child to grow up competent and confident.  A dangerous, malevolent world will create a set point of deprivation and the resulting emotional tone will be some combination of anger, terror and despair with one of these emotions becoming dominant.

Because male bodies are designed differently from female bodies, their hormonal environment will more likely foster an anger-fight emotional tone.  Males have higher testosterone and vasopressin levels than females, and lower oxytocin (I will describe these chemicals in more detail in future posts).  Males are certainly not immune from acquiring either terror or despair as their set point, nor are females immune from acquiring anger as theirs.

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My simple point for today is that if we ask ourselves the simple question, “What is my overriding and foundational emotional tone?” and ask this question without judgment or critique, we can gain a critical piece of useful information about ourselves.  I say overriding and foundational because this emotional tone permeates our entire bodies and is directly connected to the set point of our equilibrium — or disequilibrium.

If a set point of calm balanced equilibrium — built there through safe and secure early caregiver attachment interactions — was never built into our bodies in the first place, calmness will not be our natural state at center for the rest of our lives.  If we want to have calmness at our center, we will have to WORK hard to put it there, and need to realize that we are having to do this work not because there is something ‘wrong’ with us, but that there was something ‘wrong’ in our early formational environment.

There are instances where the ‘something wrong in our early formational environment’ lies entirely within the genetic combinations we were formed with.  If this is true, we know it.  Otherwise, some form of trauma has interrupted our ability to form a ‘set point’ of calm equilibrium at our center, and thus our ability to EVER get there has been changed.

In my opinion anything that prevents us from having an optimal emotional tone based on calm  and balanced equilibrium creates an unfinished trauma cycle that is physiologically happening in our body and brain.  This  ‘unfinished’ trauma cycle built into our bodies means that on some level we will always carry a sense of anxiety no matter what point on the cycle our bodies are stuck at.

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We might assess our center state and determine that our overriding and fundamental center set point is rage.  We might find that our first response is always to fight, is always to take an aggressive position and from there we have to WORK to experience anything else.  This GO state is built into the nervous system-brain and indicates that all reactions to challenges in the environment are first attempted to be met with active coping skill reactions based on what is already known.  It can become extremely hard to realize and accept that these patterns of response are not as useful and effective as one would like to think they are.  In fact, they can get one into a whole lot of trouble.

The chronic anger reaction means that offense is always seen as being the best choice, and that failure is not an option.  We HAVE to at times accept that failure is a fact or we can never learn anything new.  Learning is risky.  Knowing how to react and using this knowledge over and over again only works if the response truly is appropriate.  If one’s internal set point rests on anger and one’s pattern of responses originate in this active survival ‘place’, letting down one’s guard and admitting one doesn’t know how to respond to a challenge can be seen as an action that will lead directly to extinction.

Being ‘stuck’ at a set point of chronic anger and rage means that the feelings of fear and sadness are being left out of the cycle.  Anger is designed to elicit an immediate and effective response to challenge of threat.  It is normally designed to solve a problem so that the center point of calm equilibrium can be returned to.  During damaging early experiences there was no calm set point created in the first place — so what does any response really accomplish for us?  All it does it keep us alive, or so we intend.  But being alive, for us, rarely means that we get to experience well-being.  There is something else always going on for us — the active act of surviving and staying alive.

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We might find that our set point is at fear and terror.  We never came to believe that we had active coping skills that we could use to solve problems stemming from challenges we faced.  We are weak on the competency-confident position on the response cycle, and often fail to realize that we do in fact have the ability to respond actively and adequately.

In addition, if we are stuck in the fear place on the trauma recovery circle we don’t even necessarily feel the despair and sadness that would normally be the result of a complete failure to respond appropriately.  We are literally frozen in a state of fear, anxiety and panic and cannot move.  Our energy, our life force, is frozen within us, also.  Because we cannot move, we cannot learn.  I believe this fear place is connected to the fact that at some point in time we tried to respond to challenge and our efforts failed.  We do not have a clue what else to do.

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If our set point is at despair and sadness we are in the perfect spot to learn something new but we lack the ability to see this.  All escape routes appear to be sealed off from us and our energy is gone — not stored, not held, not frozen — just plain gone.  We lack the energy available to us in the the anger-fight spot or even access to the energy frozen in the fear spot.

Some of us gave up the fight because circumstances overwhelmed our response ability from the time we were born, thus setting our emotional tone and our inner ‘set point’ at despair.  We were forced to lose the race before we ever got started.  Our inner ‘set point’ is at hopelessness.  We feel utterly and fundamentally unable to marshal competent responses to even the simplest of challenges.

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This first step of accurately bringing into our consciousness the state of our emotional tone and our ‘set point’ allows us to form a realistic picture about ourselves in the world.  If we want to change something about ourselves and about our lives we need to know where we are starting from.  That the patterns within us were formed before we were a year old in no way negates the extreme power our ‘set point’ has in determining everything we experience from that early point forward.

Nature has designed us to know about the conditions of the world from before our birth and has designed us to adapt and adjust to these conditions.  If we find ourselves wanting something different from the world we were born into and formed by, we will have to become clear and conscious of the facts as they relate to the changes our bodies were forced to make to keep us alive in malevolent environments.

I do not believe that our bodies will ever, on their own, be able to change their inner, early developed set points.  We HAVE to apply conscious effort, the physics of applied force or WORK, to attempt to change how we ARE in our lives in relationship to these set points.  Comparing ourselves to others and then judging either us or them as a result is not helpful.  This is about becoming absolutely clear about our own emotional tone which will then let us know where we became permanently stuck on the trauma recovery cycle very, very early in our development.

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Some people find that using the image of an ‘inner child’ is helpful when considering the gulf that might separate who we became from who we could have become had our early severe traumas never occurred in the first place.  I have personally never been able to rely upon this image because I know full well that the changes that happened to me were physiologically built into my body and affected every aspect of my biological development so that the body I inhabit today is directly connected to the abused and battered child that I was.

That child has grown up to be me.  Every single experience I had as a child affected how I developed.  Those experiences created within me a ‘set point’ that will never be at calm and balanced equilibrium.  My ‘set point’ is at a state of terror and despair and is directly connected to a sense of anxiety in my body.  There’s no possible way it could have been created otherwise based on my early experiences because the traumas of my early years were so severe and chronic.

The anxiety is built into my body like a background ‘noise’ that never goes away.  I believe this might be worse for me than for many others because I was genetically created to be extremely sensitive no matter what my early life had been like.  This underlying and overriding anxiety colors even my terror and my despair.  Shades of disaster were communicated to my growing body from birth and built these same responses into the operation of my nervous system-brain, my immune system, and into every cell in my body.  It is NOT some inner version of a child that experiences any part of my present day reality.  It is me, in this body, trying to live every moment of this life today and into my future.

I have to work hard to feel any other kind of feeling, and even when I do my body always responds back after a short period of time to what it knows at its center.  Is this bad?  No, it might be unfortunate but it is a natural reaction to severe trauma survival.  At least now I know what is going on in my body, how things got to be this way, and exactly what I am working with as I continually try to make my life better.

I am realistic.  My body’s set point was built in, by and for a malevolent world of disaster and trauma and that can never be changed.  This is the only body I will ever have in this lifetime.  I might as well understand it — how and why it was built the way it was.  Because I know these facts I can try to live in and with this body as I carve out niches and crannies of experiences that are not closely tied to my body’s natural ‘set point’, but are rather built out of the ‘stuff’ that securely-attached-from-birth people can take for granted all of their lives.

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Thank you for reading — your comments are welcome and appreciated — Linda

+IS MENTAL ILLNESS THE COST OF OUR SPECIES’ GREATEST GIFTS?

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Why has our species retained the potential genetic combinations that result in mental illness?

We need to realize that the cost of the development of our greatest gifts as a species are being paid by those who carry the genetic combinations that put them at risk of developing serious ‘mental illness’ conditions.  These people are forced to suffer at the opposite end of the spectrum and continuum of giftedness because many of our greatest human gifts are actually related to signals related to ‘conspicuous consumption’.  We have our gifts because we can afford to pay for them, and the gifts themselves are reproductive fitness indicators that act as signals of our ability to handle the cost of keeping them.

This brings to mind the current financial complications our culture is experiencing related to an imbalance in conspicuous consumption practices.  In order for this process to operate in a good fashion, what is being consumed and displayed has to be paid for.

From a human point of view, the existence of the pyramids, the Vatican, Versailles, the Parthenon, and even the great wall of China are all manifestations of conspicuous consumption indicators.  Someone could afford the cost and paid for them.

On a more mundane level, I can imagine conspicuous consumption being like a peacock’s feathers if I think about someone going to a store, picking an isle and buying everything in that isle whether they needed the goods or not.  If they take them all home and dump them in a pile in their yard so the neighbors would drive by and think, “My oh my that person must be rich!  All those goods in their front yard indicate that they are.”  We do that in our culture with all sorts of items.  We don’t realize that the basis of our actions are still grounded in the ancient evolutionary practice of signaling our reproductive fitness that we can afford all of these things.

During the evolution of our species it was only when we were not under threat of immediate extinction that we could dance out our dramas or learn to chit chat about our trivial experiences.  It was only as we could afford to protect and provide for mothers so that they had the safety and security to spend the time required for long developmental stages leading to advanced mental capacities that we began to develop our FOXP2 gene’s ability for language in the first place (about 140,000 years ago).

In this way all of our advanced gifts were allowed to evolve as indicators of conspicuous consumption because their existence meant that we had access to the resources we needed in order for them to be developed from the start.  The appearance of these gifts within our species today still reflects the fact that we have access to the resources we need to keep them.

In the end, it always comes back to the issues surrounding resources.  If we don’t have the resources, or don’t use them wisely to protect the unborn and the newly born from the consequences of having to adapt to a malevolent environment, ‘mental illness’ will continue to plague our species far more than is required from us to maintain the existence — in our gene pool — of our gifts.

The most important step we can take toward ending unnecessary traumas during infant developmental stages that trigger many ‘mental illness’ genetic combinations would be to destigmatize ‘mental illness’ by appreciating the gifts of our species that are connected genetically to ‘mental illness’ risk factors.  By doing so we would greatly increase our opportunities to intervene constructively with ‘mentally ill’ parents who are most at risk for severely traumatizing their offspring, thus alleviating a major portion of the suffering of future generations.

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Yet when it comes to our species’ more intangible gifts we can easily lose site of the genetic combinations that allow these gifts to exist.  I believe that many families who can point to ‘mental illness’ in their lineage also could point to many great examples of genius and talent.  It is the unfortunate preventable manifestation of the suffering of ‘mental illness’ that concerns me.  In today’s enlightened world we have information that can help us prevent much of its occurrence.  We can effectively lessen the human cost of keeping our greatest gifts through paying close attention to the early infant traumas that often cause ‘mental illness’ genetic combinations to manifest so that we can prevent them.

Because all of life operates in circles and cycles of balance, our species cannot retain the ability to display our great gifts related to our intelligence, our creativity, language, movement and dance without retaining the risk factors that are connected to these gifts.  Our species beat out at least 19 other hominid species because we have the gift of an extremely agile brain.  But the cost of maintaining the gene pool linked to our agility also means that the risk of fragility must also be maintained.

When we think about reproductive fitness indicators even within our advanced species we need to think in three directions at the same time:  male to male reproductive fitness indicators often related to combat competition, female selection indicators related to preferences for selection of mates, and survival fitness indicators among siblings that allow them to compete with each other for resources that the parents provide.

Then we need to realize and remember that for every group of survival reproductive fitness indicators that we have evolved related to these three different survival spectrums our species has a corresponding genetic potential for opposite risk.  In addition, our most valued resources are so expensive to maintain (like the peacock’s feathers) that all they really do is indicate that we can afford to keep them.

In my thinking this means that when the difficulties of ‘mental illness’ manifest themselves in members of our species we need to hold these people carefully in the palm of our species’ hand because without the negative risks that exist related to the genetic combinations of our species’ gifts we would not have their positive expression, either.  The people who end up suffering most are paying the highest price for the cost our species must expend to retain what made us endure, survive and beat out all our competition in the first place.

That the actual expression of many of these ‘mental illnesses’ results from interaction between the sufferer’s genetic potential and harsh, toxic and malevolent environmental conditions from conception to the age (especially) of two means that the rest of us have an obligation to make sure, wherever possible, that early conditions of infants are maintained well enough that these genetic combinations are never forced to appear in their full negative display.  Current scientific research is confirming that this preventive potential DOES exist regarding mental illnesses.  We need to understand what this research is telling us and we need to apply the research findings effectively through the prevention of early maltreatment to infants and young children.

We need to stop condemning the ‘mentally ill’ as if they are substandard, inadequate members of our species.  We need to realize that within their genetic combinations lies links to the greatest giftedness of our species.  If anything, we need to humbly acknowledge the fact that when early abuse and trauma triggers the full spectrum of the opposite end of our giftedness to appear, we are to a large extent responsible as a culture for their suffering.

Certainly there are instances when the genetic combinations of ‘mental illness’ will manifest no matter how well or how adequately these people were cared for from conception.  But research is also demonstrating that a recognizably large percentage related to the appearance of ‘mental illness’ is directly connected to some form of malevolent conditions as they existed in an infant’s early environment, particularly related to early caregiver attachment disorders.

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I understand that only particularly interested readers will spend the time thinking about this topic that following the links below will require.  I know that I am only at the beginning of following the information through myself.  I find it fascinating that we are, as sophisticated users of technology, simply continuing  a process that takes place from the time of our birth when we use information available on the internet to increase our knowledge about this (or any) subject just as we used the information in the brains of our caregivers to form our own brains.

Infants share cognition with their mothers and earliest caregivers as their brains develop.  We are in a very similar way sharing cognition with all the others who have placed their own thoughts and information on the web for us to access.  Through this process of shared cognition we grow our brains today related to any subject we choose to research and to learn about.

Understanding how the risk factors for ‘mental illness’ are directly connected to the greatest gifts of our species will require that we all pursue new directions in our thinking to understand the implications of this information.  By doing so we will discover that the supposed curses related to mental illness and the blessings of our gifts are simply on the two ends of the same reproductive fitness indicator spectrum.

The gifts of our species are expensive and we retain them by paying the cost.  Just because some people are able to enjoy the benefits and others must suffer the cost does not mean that all of us are not equally responsible for trying to lessen the impact related to risk.

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This has been a difficult post for me to attempt to write because I perceive that I come from a family whose lineage has repeatedly included ‘mental illness’.  Because of this fact there has existed a continued pattern of neglect and maltreatment that continues to influence how our family’s at risk genes are expressing themselves.  It becomes hard for me not to wonder if some families are thus having to pay the price for the ‘goods’ that other humans get to enjoy, while the rest of us end up not able to experience the benefits equally because of our suffering.  Writing this post feels like staring down the throat of the beast.

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Why do male peacocks create their brilliant tail displays when they are not connected to mating success which is instead related to their vocalizations?

SEE on peacocks:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peafowl#Plumage

Note the following:

“The plumage of the peacock, and the peahen’s preference for its exorbitance, is a classical example of sexual selection and especially the handicap principle. However, in recent years scientific research has shown that the size and brilliance of a male’s plumage does not meaningfully correlate with his mating success nor his health, and that instead the key factor for attracting females is the vocalizations made prior to mating.”

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Our concern in today’s post about the appearance of mental illness gene combinations within our species relates to sexual selection and handicap principle.

From handicap principle.:

“The central idea is that sexually selected traits function like conspicuous consumption, signalling the ability to afford to squander a resource simply by squandering it. Receivers know that the signal indicates quality because inferior quality signallers cannot afford to produce such wastefully extravagant signals.”

From the section on sexual selection:

see also for an example of the fascinating connection between ‘intelligence’ in humans and our reproductive fitness indicators —

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection#In_humans

“Some hypotheses about the evolution of the human brain argue that it is a sexually selected trait, as it would not confer enough fitness in itself relative to its high maintenance costs (a quarter to a fifth of the energy and oxygen consumed by a human). [9] Related to this is vocabulary, where humans, on average, know far more words than are necessary for communication. Miller (2000) has proposed that this apparent redundancy is due to individuals using vocabulary to demonstrate their intelligence, and consequently their “fitness”, to potential mates. This has been tested experimentally and it appears that males do make greater use of lower frequency (more unusual) words when in a romantic mindset compared to a non-romantic mindset, meaning that vocabulary is likely to be used as a sexual display (Rosenberg & Tunney, 2008).”

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection#History_and_application_of_the_theory

“The theory of sexual selection was first proposed by Charles Darwin in his book The Origin of Species, though it was primarily devoted to natural selection. A later work, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex dealt with the subject of sexual selection exhaustively, in part because Darwin felt that natural selection alone was unable to account for certain types of apparently non-competitive adaptations, such as the tail of a male peacock.”

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Now if we shift over and look for the direct connection between the cost of peacocks’ feathers and the cost of our most extravagant human gifts, we find a direct connection to the existence of mental illness in our species.

See for example

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia#Genetic

“There is little doubt about the existence of a fecundity deficit in schizophrenia. Affected individuals have fewer children than the population as a whole. This reduction is of the order of 70% in males and 30% in females. The central genetic paradox of schizophrenia is why if the disease is associated with a biological disadvantage is this variation not selected out? To balance such a significant disadvantage, a substantial and universal advantage must be exist. Insofar, all theories of a putative advantage were disproved or remain unsubstantiated.”

The references noted for this quote are:

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Now, to consider a link between reproductive fitness indicators within our species and the continued appearance of autism:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/m775188523140523/

The abstract of this article,

Autism as the Low-Fitness Extreme of a Parentally Selected Fitness Indicator

“Abstract  Siblings compete for parental care and feeding, while parents must allocate scarce resources to those offspring most likely to survive and reproduce. This could cause offspring to evolve traits that advertise health, and thereby attract parental resources. For example, experimental evidence suggests that bright orange filaments covering the heads of North American coot chicks may have evolved for this fitness-advertising purpose. Could any human mental disorders be the equivalent of dull filaments in coot chicks—low-fitness extremes of mental abilities that evolved as fitness indicators? One possibility is autism. Suppose that the ability of very young children to charm their parents evolved as a parentally selected fitness indicator. Young children would vary greatly in their ability to charm parents, that variation would correlate with underlying fitness, and autism could be the low-fitness extreme of this variation. This view explains many seemingly disparate facts about autism and leads to some surprising and testable predictions.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Now for the rest of the story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EARLY TRAUMA BUILDS DISSOCIATION INTO THE BRAIN

alchemynow9 Comments

Sometimes thinking with a dissociated mind is like trying to carry too many groceries in your hands at one time.  It takes an incredible amount of focus and concentration to be able to process information that to others would seem obviously connected and therefore would be easily considered in a fluid, flexible and ‘together’ fashion.

Some of my writing might be difficult for readers to follow because of the disconnected way information presents itself to me in the first place — as well as how it presents itself to me as I try to write coherently.  As I mentioned in previous posts, the inability to tell a coherent life story is directly related to how the early developing brain was fed information back in its beginning.  If that information was disconnected at its source — meaning in the brain-mind of an infant’s early caregiver — that pattern of disconnectedness, I believe, is directly communicated not only TO the infant, but more importantly is built into the infant’s growing brain.

Most of us today are at least vaguely familiar with the concept of downloading and uploading information on computers.  Taken in its most specific and literal meaning, early caregivers are downloading information directly into an infant’s growing brain.  The infant’s brain is forming itself according first to how information is being transmitted to it.  It is only after the ‘how’ aspects are transmitted that an infant’s brain can begin to process the specifics of ‘what’ is being transmitted.

Information that is not appropriate in the context of the caregiver-infant interaction and is inconsistently transmitted to an infant will be overwhelming.  It is in effect not an dissimilar to the way that wrong information being processed wrongly within a computer will crash it.  It is not unlike what happens to a car’s transmission if you were driving down the highway at 50 miles per hour and suddenly moved the gear shift to reverse.

A ‘rupture’ without possibility of ‘repair’ is created when any effective ongoing pattern is drastically — and I mean traumatically — interrupted.  We don’t usually think of it this way, but what causes these ‘ruptures without possibility of repair’ in a growing infant and young child’s brain is the presentation of the wrong information in the wrong way at the wrong time, and happens because these young one’s have had no opportunity to build a brain with capacity to process this incoming information effectively.

I believe that if maltreatment exists (as I’ve said before) during critical brain developmental stages during infancy and childhood, these ruptures without repair are themselves built right into the circuitry of the resulting brains.  Because their we are talking about interactions that occur in interaction with the environment, every single time such a lack of repair happens, after an overwhelming traumatic experience,  a ‘dissociation spot’ is created within the brain’s operational patterns that will be carried within such an individual for the rest of their lives.  This is one of the actual, physiological ways that trauma is built into a brain-body.

Knowing exactly which environmental triggers will cause these dissociation spots to become obvious in later years is nearly impossible because most of us with severe abuse histories have literally millions and millions of them built into our brains and into our bodies.   Every single time one of these dissociation spots were put there, or created in the first place, a physiological body-based response happened with it.   This is one of the ways that trauma is physiologically built into a brain-body’s memory.  It is literally formed into the actual cells themselves and affects the way that ongoing genetic processes operate.

If the trauma happens early enough and is severe enough, we DO end up with different brains and bodies as a result, as I mentioned in my previous post.  We are sensitive to stimuli differently and process information differently.  The vital and necessary ability to appraise and sequence information into usable segments that can then later be used in connection to new information is interfered with.

We are different because we are left with a broken string of pearls and a string that cannot be added onto in a normal useful fashion.  We are thus left with an incoherent life story based on a disorganized-disoriented, incoherent brain formed by the same kind of disordered attachment from birth.  Only some of us can go a good long way down the road of our life before we are faced with the reality of what this means to us.  We are left with an armload of groceries dropped on the floor, and we cannot pick them up.  Who is there that can or will help us?

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I believe that life operates through a pattern of circles and cycles.  Because of this, one can follow any given thought around until it connects to the opposite of itself.  I now wish to make the contrasting point to the one I presented in my May 1, 2009 post, “DOES THE GOOD MAKE THE BAD BETTER?” by asking a related question, “How does the bad help us to make our lives better?”

I do not see that there is ever a straight, obvious, easy road that connects the ‘bad’ of our lives to the ‘good’ of our lives.  I want to present you with an example of what I am saying.  From the earliest times of my life I evidently succeeded relatively well at finding ways to continue on living in spite of not only the abuse I experienced but also in spite of the ways I found to work with what happened to me.  Because the traumas were built into my body and my brain on an ongoing basis, I NEVER noticed the adaptations that my brain made to the traumas.

This is a critical point.  I ‘continued on being’ as Dr. Allan Schore says of abused infants.  I survived, and I have done so through a continuing process that was unrecognized and unknown to me.  Things would have remained the same IF I had not had cancer, or more accurately, if the cancer had never been treated and I had not survived it.  Because I had treatment, particularly chemotherapy, and because I came out the other end to be who I am today, I can now look back through the windows of that process and say that I have learned something I never could have possibly known otherwise.

To put it most simply, I have learned how I adapted to the traumas because those adaptations have mostly been taken away from me.

There are some things, even those as seemingly insignificant as the one I presented in my April 21, 2009 post “EARTH DAY: In Honor of the Grieving Chicken, ” that one might never be able to imagine or believe unless they are actually experienced.  If not for my cancer and its treatment I could never have imagined the adaptative abilities I had actually created in order to survive my abuse that made me believe I had done so ‘normally’.

I now know that my definition of ‘normally’ has to be expanded.  My adaptions were normal considering what I experienced, but they were not ‘normal’ in comparison to how other people, whose brains were not formed in, by and for trauma, operate.

I evidently was able to teach myself from birth in some amazing ongoing way how to think and act with a brain that had formed a mind that has millions and millions of dissociation spots built into it.  The chemotherapy regime that I underwent disturbed my brain as it interrupted both my memory and how my brain operates in relationship to memory.

I have know of no scientific support for what I know from inside of myself, but I believe what has happened to me post-chemotherapy happened because the part of the brain that processes incoming experience before it is organized for long term memory storage — the hippocampus — the only part of the brain other than the one that processes new smells that continues to build new nerve cells, called neurons — was directly affected by the working aspect of chemotherapy that stops all new cell formation.  That’s the same process that made all my hair fall out and made my fingernails stop growing and stopped the ability of the cancer cells to multiply.

Because the chemo stopped the rapid cells from growing in my hippocampus, I could no longer remember the steps I normally take to put on my makeup in the morning.  My friend, who also underwent the same chemo treatment, forgot to put her blouse on until she noticed it after she was already in her car to go to work.

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It would take a very caring and astute group of people to realize that an extremely dangerous side affect of chemotherapy — for those of us who formed brains containing dissociation spots from early abuse during brain formation stages — is a deterioration of the brain’s ability to utilize the adaptive processes that it found and learned in order to live relatively well in spite of the affects of the trauma on its development.

The wordless image that came to me in relation to this damage is that of a huge steel post being driven into the gears that run the Big Ben clock in the London Tower.

http://www.parliament.uk/about/history/big_ben.cfm

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While someone could remove the post and repair the clock, the rupture that happened to my ongoing memory processes about how to live an ongoing life in spite of the serious affects that trauma had on my developing brain cannot be repaired.  Yes, this sucks!

Yet as a consequence I now know intimately that I DID manage to create incredible patterns to cope with the dissociation of trauma in my brain.  I know it now because I can no longer DO IT!  I forgot what I learned, what I evidently taught myself from birth, how to do.

So is it a good thing I had cancer and chemotherapy so that I can now understand all of this?  Can what I learned as a result be of some valuable use to someone else?  I can only hope that it can, because I now understand how crippling massive dissociation is to any ongoing ability to manage one’s being in the world.

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There is another critical piece of information I now know about the link between having undergone severely stressful life events and the development of breast cancer.  This research is connected to the ongoing problem of women in Israel developing breast cancer at very high rates.

http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSCOL86917620080828?feedType=RSS&feedName=healthNews

http://www.christiantoday.com/article/stress.may.mean.greater.risk.of.breast.cancer.study.suggests/21418.htm

I have been blessed with excellent physical health and stamina all of my life.  I justified the fact that I didn’t need to get a mammogram because I did not fit any of the risk factor categories that I knew of.  Had anyone ever told me that the stress of severe child abuse increases one’s risk of getting cancer, THAT fact I would have heard and understood.  I understand now that early abuse alters the way the immune system develops as well as alters brain development.

In addition, I now understand that anyone who suffered extreme abuse from birth is at an even higher risk of damage to any ongoing well-being they may have carved out of life for themselves because they no doubt have complicating brain factors due to their brains having adjusted to dissociation.  They are at risk because any chemotherapy that stops rapid cell division will affect their hippocampus.  They are at risk of forgetting everything they ever learned and remembered about how to keep themselves out from under the devastating effects that underlying dissociation  would cause them in their ongoing life processes.

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Now it takes very little demand for information processing to “make me drop all the groceries,” and I am now on full disability because of it.  Imagine running first in an important race.  Suddenly you trip and fall, breaking both your legs.  You are hauled by ambulance to the hospital where the legs are set and put in casts.  Your leg bones take time to heal.  It takes time after this repair for you to get full use of them back again.  How likely are you going to be to get back to that same spot on the race track to resume the race and still even be in the running?

None.  So I can now say that the me that existed prior to chemotherapy is dead.  I cannot go back and get her, either.  I had evidently gone through a continuous process throughout my lifetime to adjust to living with the dissociation that trauma had created in my brain.  I can no longer remember how I did it.

I know that I am not alone.  I am among those on life’s battlefield who have been shot and wounded with thousands of bullets of trauma.  Yet we get up again and again and again and struggle forward toward the end of our lives.  Do we ever need to question why we suffer?

I had laid out the equivalent of a fragile and vulnerable bread crumb trail in the children’s story of Hansel and Gretel that had allowed me to move from my first breath forward in some kind of ‘associated’ way.  By the time I was done with that chemo, that bread crumb trail had vanished and it cannot be replaced.  Until chemotherapy I had never known that trail existed in the first place.  I know it now because it is gone.

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Thank you for reading.  Your comments are welcome and appreciated.

 

PROFOUND PHYSIOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES OF EXTREME EARLY ABUSE

alchemynowLeave a comment

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

Which words might want to appear here?  What story?

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

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

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

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

from – Definitions of oblique on the Web:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+PATTERNS OF RESPONSE TO THREAT

alchemynowLeave a comment

This is how the cycle of life best works from my point of view:

Draw a simple plus sign — ‘+’

Place

— ‘HAPPY’ on the left tip

— ‘ANGER’ at the top tip

— ‘FEAR’ at the right tip

— ‘SAD’ at the bottom tip

Draw a small circle at the center and place ‘COMPETENCE’ there

Draw another circle around the outside of this ‘COMPETENCE’ circle and place ‘PROTECTION’ there

(Please note that I will not be presenting information on the happy state in this post because I consider it a bonus that we can access directly from our safe, secure, calm, optimal state of competence.  This post is about the survival process that results from a threat to our state of competence.  Very few of us experience happy as a result of having our life threatened — though for some the exuberance of challenge is stimulating and a positive experience because they feel absolutely confident that they can meet the challenge successfully.)

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We can complicate things all we want to, but even though this is a two dimensional  simple image , I believe that it  can be used to describe and visualize the operational pattern of life.

One thing missing from this simple image is something we have to visualize in our minds.  Picture this little ‘+’ you have drawn in the center of a bubble, surrounded and encased in the ongoing processes of life itself which I believe  can best be described  with one word — ‘CHANGE’.

What connects the ideal optimal state of perfect competence — or calm equilibrium — to all other life factors represented by the word change, is something that we can recognize in ourselves as the ‘STARTLE RESPONSE’.  This response ALERTS us on some level (I believe through interactions that occur within our immune system) that a challenge to competent equilibrium has occurred (as I described in yesterday’s post).  Startle can vary from low level surprise to extremes of traumatic shock.  However a life form detects this challenge, it matters as a central factor of existence.

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Now because I am writing as a human being to other human beings about our unique experiences of life, I have to add another bubble that contains the patterns I just described — ‘SENTIENT’

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Main Entry:

sen·tient Listen to the pronunciation of sentient

Pronunciation:

\ˈsen(t)-sh(ē-)ənt, ˈsen-tē-ənt\

Function:

adjective

Etymology:

Latin sentient-, sentiens, present participle of sentire to perceive, feel

Date:

1632

1 : responsive to or conscious of sense impressions <sentient beings> 2 : aware 3 : finely sensitive in perception or feeling

– sen·tient·ly adverb

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sentient

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Because I am limited to writing from my own point of view, I will direct you to two pieces of my previous writings so that I can place what I am going to say in context:

ALONE NAKED IN THE WOODS SINGING

This post describes an experience I had when I was 14 that allows me to entertain a certain degree of mystery regarding the possibility that all life has a conscious awareness of its own.  In my ‘vision’ was I sharing with a blade of grass what its own experience of its existence is like, or was I simply experiencing a human version of what a blade of grass experiences?  In other words, which ‘bubble’ was I in?

EARTH DAY: In Honor of the Grieving Chicken

In this post I describe a chicken behavior that defied my explanation of it, and again introduces the possibility that humans have no real idea what other species’ experiences are like to them.

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With those qualifying concepts out of the way, I will write about what I think humans know about how to endure as our experience operates on the sentient level of being as we include both emotions and thoughts into our survival patterns.

Please go back to your ‘+’ image.  I want to describe how I believe this simple pattern operates.

I consider ‘AVOIDANCE’ of harm to be a part of the inner defense and protection circle.  If something happens in the environment that penetrates a life form’s defense circle of protection, it is experienced as a challenge and an adjustment involving resources has to occur to reinstate the equilibrium.

I must now introduce another word — ‘COPING’.  Coping can occur along a continuum from active to passive coping.  What it involves is the resource access and utilization process.  If everything is optimal, the transition process from challenge to adequate adjustment back to a state of harmonious competence happens so fast we hardly need to consider it on any level — except to witness it in our minds with awe and appreciation.

If, however, the transition stage of adaptation requires some more noticeable action for adjustment to occur, we move far enough away from the competent center to notice what might happen next as a life form responds to a challenge.

The startle response always requires an ability to accurately assess threat.  Once that assessment happens, resources have to be accessed in balance with the assessed risk and applied.  Coping skills are resources, and they require available resources.

I believe all of our most effective human coping abilities lie first of all within what we usually might think of as the anger arena and relate to the ‘GO’ (sympathetic) arm of the autonomic nervous system.  A threat to life or well being does not first elicit a lazy response.  A first response will involve the application of enough energy to meet the demands of a challenge.

Our most constructive responses originate, I believe, within this anger arena because it is here that we have stored all of our effective learning about how to actively defend ourselves against harm.  Our species very often experiences this as an instantaneous adrenaline response that we recognize as the ‘FIGHT’ response.

Good!  Recognize the threat, identify it, assess it, and respond appropriately and adequately to get rid of it as quickly, efficiently and effectively as possible using known and proven active coping skills so that calm equilibrium of optimal competence can be restored as quickly as possible.

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OK.  But what if that doesn’t work?  What if the immediate response based on past learning experience (and remember that all genetic survival knowledge is contained in our active coping skill category) still leaves us at risk and under threat?  Now comes the move from the anger place to the fear place on our ‘+’ drawing.

I believe that for humans fear is always about the threat of being overwhelmed so that our life might be extinguished.  Our initial anger response is not related to fear because we first use resources that we are confident will do the job based on our competence abilities.  Only when those coping responses fail and our confidence becomes shaken do we move to the fear place. This movement only takes place if our active coping responses were ineffective and/or overwhelmed.

If we feel anger on any level that means we are in a state of using or hoping to use everything we know with success.  When we feel fear we can know instantaneously that we need to learn something new and find/use additional resources to meet a challenge, but we have to find a way to stay alive long enough to do this.

The fear state also involves active coping responses, most usually what we think of as the flight response.  I consider the freeze response to be a version of flight because it is also designed to remove one at risk from threat.  Both involve trying to be ‘out of sight’ from the threat and invisible (and therefore immune) to it.  They are retreat coping mechanisms designed to escape to a place of safety and security.

If one survives threat by using fear state resources and then is able to return to a state of competent equilibrium, most usually something new was learned in the process.  This ‘something new’ may then be available as a resource during the anger-fight stage next time this or a similar threat occurs.

If we continue to live but the fear state actions do not result in a return to the center state of competence, it is possible that the sad state may be the final resting point.  If we do not acquire knowledge of a new coping skill as a resource, we can end up completely stuck in this sadness state on our ‘+’ drawing until we do learn.  I believe this state is where depression manifests itself.  It is where helplessness, hopelessness, discouragement and demoralization feed into an incompetence cycle and the optimal state of calm and safe competence is never reached.

I believe that the state of sadness is a place of hiding….

Because we do not get to the sad state without first passing through the fear state, fear is literally carried through and combined with sadness.  When sadness from, for example, a ‘legitimate’ grief stemming from any kind of loss, becomes contaminated with fear, all sight of learning a way out can be lost.  This can result in giving up the fight, and only through teasing apart fear from sadness and examining each of them separately can we begin to see how to overcome both.

I believe that some of us are born naturally closer to the sensitive end of the human continuum, and that this puts us at greater risk of experiencing anxiety states that do not result either in effective and appropriate survival responses or in the learning of new adaptive actions.  In addition, what we identify as posttraumatic stress disorder also involves a failure to learn new responses to apply to future threats.

I believe this can happen to anyone if the actual experience of the trauma was more than any single member of our species could ever surmount alone.  Because we are a social species, we have been designed throughout our evolution to advance the survival potential of our species by sharing new learning about how to both avoid harm and to respond to it adequately once it occurs.  This is part of the reason that social support following a traumatic event is such a critical factor in recovery.

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It is crucial to understand that our brain is a part of our nervous system, and that all these described reactions to a challenge from the environment that threatens our optimal state of calm well-being of competence involve reactions that occur in our bodies, including our experience of the emotions themselves.  A central point in my writings is that abuse and trauma during early fetal, infant and toddler stages of development prevent this state of competent well-being at the center from ever developing in the first place.

If the stresses of trauma become built into a body from the start, their corresponding threat reactions will NEVER be the same as they are for a body that developed in an optimal environment.  We need to know this for a fact because every interaction a person has is connected to whatever state lies at the center of their body. If overwhelming threat occurs before a possibility of active, competent response exists, this incompetence will be built into the body from the start.

This fact makes anyone who experienced severe abuse, deprivation and trauma early in their development at the highest risk for inadequate or inappropriate responses to additional traumas and threat for the rest of their lives.  I speak from personal experience on this one.  My trauma reaction bucket was filled to over flowing from the first breath I ever took, and there is no possible way to empty it out because the trauma built itself into my body from the beginning.

Everyone has a threshold of tolerance for traumas.  Compared to my mother, I was not genetically given the option of breaking under the burden of my traumas as she did.  I believe that what we call ‘mental illness’ exists in our genetic heritage to ensure that the human body can survive in the worst possible conditions so that there remains a hope that offspring will find their way to a better world in the future.  The cost of this survival can mean that the distortions required of a developing child in order that it CAN survive result in a broken relationship between the child and the self, and the adult person and the world around them.

What lies at the center of a person severely maltreated from birth is an overwhelming sadness.   (Because males are destined to develop differently from females, their sadness can very easily be replaced with rage.)   When conditions become humanly unbearable, alternatives for survival have to be found or death will be the result.  Suicide is being tied through research very clearly to a genetic base.  If actual death does not become the outcome, then we have to expect a natural reaction that results in dire future consequences for those whose bodies do continue to endure.  Having a balanced calm competent center of equilibrium will be a nearly impossible state to achieve.

Believe me, severe infant and child abuse can cause one to ‘go insane’ and/or die of a broken heart.  The toughest survivors usually have to continue to endure the experience of ongoing, overwhelming,  unbearable sadness for the rest of their lives while all the time being pressured to wonder why they cannot either catch up or keep up will all the others who have built into their bodies competence, calm and balanced well-being from their developmental experiences in an adequate if not optimal world.

For some of us life continues like one of those nightmares where you are falling and falling and never hit bottom.  We just grieve for the love we desperately needed from our birth that would have let our brains and bodies develop based on benevolence rather than malevolence.  Our hearts continue breaking and breaking until we die.  This is OUR natural state.

Because we are members of a social species we know fundamentally that our survival and well-being depends upon our acceptance into our species.  This information is gleaned initially from the mother and all other early caregivers.  Misinformation becomes mis-formation as a body adapts to the crisis of remaining alive while being rejected (ejected) from one’s species.

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Let me take for instance the present threat of a very serious spread from swine flu.  If we as people could have done something to avoid this threat in the first place, obviously the threat would have been prevented.  Once the threat exists, can we contain it?  Can we adequately address the threat through taking steps based on preexisting knowledge we already have so that we can eliminate the threat and restore for ourselves a competent state without threat?  If we don’t already have adequate resources to do these things, then the faster we learn something new to apply to our solution so that containment, elimination and restoration can occur, the better.

Avoid-prevent, contain, eliminate-destroy and restore.  These actions might be motivated by anger and fear, but not by sadness.  Sadness exists in the giving up-overwhelmed state.  Sadness is NEVER a desired stopping place.  If we ever find ourselves stuck in sadness, we need to know that this is both the most vulnerable state we can be in at the same time that it is most valuable because it contains within it the greatest potential for learning something new that is vitally important.

An escape from sadness back to optimal calm competence only happens a most important characteristic is accessed and applied — that of resolve.  Resolve, to me, is a direct reconnection back to the competent experience of the anger state because it involves an awareness that competency is possible.

The problem for many people who are stuck in the sadness state is that they lack the resource of hope that would allow them to experience resolve in the first place.  Hope is something that is built into our being through secure attachment experiences in our environments from the start.  Hope happens because we learn that someone will be there to respond adequately to our needs, and is built into our foundation through these foundational experiences.

Hope is thus intimately and inexorably intertwined with the experience of growing and developing competence literally into our bodies. It stems from connections and linkages that exist (or don’t exist) between ourselves and others.  If we were deprived of the development of hope through early abuse and trauma, it IS something we can learn to acquire later because the potential for experiencing hope appears to be hard wired into our brains before we are born.

In the case of the swine flu, I might feel completely powerless to defend and protect myself and others from its threat (short of disappearing somewhere?), but I have hope that there are people out there with the competence and resources to take adequate care of the threat for us.  These others are thus a part of my immune system resources, and I am dependent upon these others for a solution.

This last statement would lead me in the direction of a discussion of dominance and submission, of ordinate and subordinate conditions — but I will address this in a future post.

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

+FORGETTING TO REMEMBER WHAT TO AVOID

alchemynowLeave a comment

Everything about being alive is about having control over one’s environment.  I believe that it is essentially our immune systems that direct our ability to maintain our lives by using all aspects of our body’s operation to ensure that our lives continue.  If we were a much more primitive species, we would only be able to count on what this immunity provided to protect our cells for us.  Because we are an advanced species, we also can use what resources our advanced brains provide.

We are not taught to consider that our nervous system, including our brain, is directly connected to our immune system.  From my point of view, with emotions being direct indicators to us of how our conscious experiences are affecting us through immune system reactions, we can learn to recognize what these emotions are telling us.  Because we are a complicated species, boiling down what we feel to the core emotions they are connected to, can be hard for us to do.  We more often get stuck cycling the emotions and not accomplishing much of anything related to what they are telling us needs to be done to make our life better — and to give us more control over our environment and our interactions with it.

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I found my way into ‘recovery’ through a 7 week inpatient alcoholism treatment program in 1980, and from there found my way through 12 step programs.  I am aware of the controversy that continues about potential problems related to CONTROL.    OOOHHH!  The big bad “C” word, control.  AND, the big bad “M” word, MANIPULATE.

Well, let me give you some important insider information.  Without the ability to utilize both control and manipulation for our own self preservation we would, quite simply, be dead.  It is not possible for us to delete these two words from our vocabulary and still be able to consider how we not only stay alive, but how we can be alive more efficiently and effectively.  These are not peripheral or abstract concepts.  They are at the core of everything about us.

I see the problems we might have with control and manipulation being related not to these fundamental operations themselves, but with our own degrees of denial of their essential existence and our resulting lack of conscious awareness of their life sustaining (well-being) or life obliterating (ill-being) powers.  Because I am in my thinking always looking for the lowest possible common denominator, I can say that what we are really talking about when we consider both control and manipulation is a simple process of addition or subtraction.

If our bodies detect that we are under some form of threat they are essentially telling us through our immune system reactions that an imbalance is present in the form of a subtraction of resources, and that this depletion needs to be addressed.  Something needs to be added to the equation to balance out the threat so that we can continue living, and to live more abundantly if at all possible.

If we have become so ‘advanced’ that we cannot recognize the signals our immune system gives us, cannot decipher what they mean, cannot take responsible self action to change the triggering situation and make things better, then we are at continual risk of keeping ourselves in environments of escalating threat and danger.  In other words, we are forgetting what being a being in a body is all about.

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We need to stop thinking of our immune system reactions as being handy but nonessential components of our existence.  We cannot continue to separate and divide one part of our being from other parts of our being, and think we are somehow sophisticated because we can conquer our basic nature as living beings.  Our bodies, brains, emotions, needs, wants, desires, illnesses, etc are not all separate parts of who we are.  We are not worms.  These parts we have divided from ourselves cannot go off and live satisfying lives on their own.  Nor can we think we are disconnected from the entirety of the living environment.  Such perspectives are not wise.  Rather, they are destructive fantasies of childish minds.

Infancy and childhood are not states we are designed to remain in.  We are designed to mature into reproductively fit adults so that we can proginate and then take adequate care of our progeny so that our species will endure.  I believe that what is at the center of this wheel-of-life and what is at the hub, is simply — COMPETENCE.  We are either competent members of our species or we are not.  Dead center is dead center.  It is the optimal state for any species, and there are no degrees of gray there.

If we are NOT at the dead center of competence so that we can live the best life possible, then everything we need to do is about making adjustments to get there so that we can become more competent.  Control and manipulation are simply tools we use to get to center and to try to stay there and maintain that state.  Because the living environment is constantly changing and being alive is not a static state, this moving toward (or away from?) dead center of optimal competence is the continual work of every organism.

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The dead center of optimal experience, of being optimally competent, does not exist in a vacuum.  Nor are we supposed to be navigating in pitch darkness, guessing randomly how close or how far we might be from this center.  Reproductive fitness indicators of any species are the clear and definitive signs regarding the relationship an organism has to this center, and these indicators never lie.

If we have, as a supposedly wise species, so confused ourselves about what our reproductive fitness indicators are, what they mean, what they tell us, and what adjustments we are supposed to make regarding the information they tell us and our corresponding relationship to optimal, then we have little choice but to either inform ourselves and make required changes, or suffer — individually and as a species.  Unfortunately, because we have such advanced powers to control and manipulate, we also cause the whole of the world to suffer right along with us.

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Fortunately, we don’t have to twist ourselves into a never ending tangle of knots trying to figure out how to attack any problem that we might identify as keeping us from the optimal state of competence.  We only have to look at the one thing that can tell us about the quality and condition of our reproductive fitness indicators:  ATTACHMENT.  Floundering around lost on any level will affect the quality of the attachments that we have to ourselves, our body, to one another as members of a social species, and to the world we are a part of.  Degrees of incompetence manifest as corresponding impediments in the strength, quality and state of being attached — or not.

I do not make this argument metaphorically.  The fact of the matter is that even before our conception the chemical interactions occurring within our mother’s body affect whether or not a sperm becomes fertile, whether it finds any particular egg and becomes attached with it, whether or not attachment occurs within the uterus, the quality of attachment the fetus experiences to the mother as it grows, and the nature of attachment to ‘what kind of world’ every step of the journey that individual experiences until its death.

The quality of attachment manifests itself in reproductive fitness indicators, which are themselves signs pointing to the quality of competence any organism experiences within the environment of its own body and within the corresponding environment of life itself.

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Life is an interchange of resources occurring as a part of the particular context of the limitations and possibilities that exist in relationship with one another as a part of our planet.  In this way we could say that all life that has been a part of this planet are its reproductive fitness indicators, each particular form sharing in the process of exchanging available resources.

Trauma is a part of life on our planet that occurs when any event causes a disruption in the ‘usual’ pattern of resource exchange among life forms.  Any life form that has living cells will manifest an immune system response to the challenge of trauma.   This response is an indication both that its preexisting competency state has been disturbed within its environment and that a competent adjustment to the challenge is required.

Because life occurs within the context of resources, either a life form has access to resources to adjust to changes within the context of their environment or they suffer — and/or die.  Obviously resources are, well, resources themselves.  Having the right resources to access the right resources is itself a resource.  Having the ability to use the existing resources competently is also a resource.  If the needed resources don’t exit, or if they aren’t available to you, or even if they are there but you don’t have the resources yourself to access and use them, the results are the same — a big “Uh Oh!”

This sounds like a circular process because it is one.  Life forms can advance due to utilization of adequate resources as they have the resource of being able to competently utilize those resources, or they retreat in the opposite direction if the opposite situation exists.  If a retreat is possible until conditions improve, life may continue.  If not?  You know the answer to that question.

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Life is a DOING process.  Life is sustained through what any life form does with resources.  Competency is about controlling and manipulating resources for a life form’s best survival purposes.  This process has been ongoing in balance because life’s corresponding interconnections through a mutual attachment to continued life has not been interrupted on a level that deprives ongoing life of its necessary resources.

Now enters the development of our human species.  It is to the degree that we detach ourselves and unattach ourselves from life promoting processes that we upset ourselves and all of life that our actions thus affect.  Pardon me, but I think we are rapidly approaching a point where our supposed advancement as a species is indicating that our incompetency is showing!

If we pay attention we will notice that all manner of our reproductive fitness indicators are telling us that we are mismanaging resources.  Our incompetent mismanagement of resources is being reflected around us in the deterioration of reproductive fitness indicators within the context of life on this planet on ever increasingly levels and in ever more serious ways.  We can try to remain children engaging in the wistful magical fantasy thinking of ignorance and denial, but that will not change the fact that all of us are being affected personally, as well.

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If we pay attention on the personal level, our immune systems are telling us what this imbalance and mismanagement of available resources feels like.  Yet we seem to be using what has evolved as one of our best resources against ourselves rather than for ourselves.  Every evolving species has stored a capacity to remember how to survive in its genetic code so that ongoing members do not have to relearn the important big things every time a new generation comes along.  As a result each generation can then avoid many sources of trauma and harm by acting according to the learnings remembered in their genes.  The operational term here is AVOID.

Avoiding trauma, harm,  distress and destruction is a very efficient way of manifesting competence.  It seems to work well on every level of life except the highest one.  Humans possess the most advanced brain on the planet.  Yet its evolution has provided us with the most dangerous tool of all.  We now have the ability to FORGET that which we have already learned by using the life sustaining ability to avoid remembering in new and creative ways.

This, to me, means that we have taken ourselves just about as far down the detachment road as we can safely go.  Because we have this ability to ignore and avoid remembering (and competently acting upon) all the information we have gained during our entire evolution about what to avoid so that we can continue living, we are destroying whatever degrees of well being based on wise management of resources to sustain life that we worked so hard to get in the first place.  We are so busy making ourselves stupid with forgetting that we are rapidly diminishing our powers to discover better ways of being in the world.

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I started out writing today thinking that I was going to present the topic of courage, discouragement and encouragement.  As I headed off into my woods of words the writing led me off in another direction.  Yes, I am always surprised when this happens and never sure where exactly I made an alternative turn.  But here I am, and here, too, are you if you have read this far.  Did I forget where I was going?

I intended to say that saddened, despondent and rage filled people are having a difficult time accessing and using resources.  I was going to say that feeling discouraged is meant only to be a short stopping place on our road of life.  I was going to say that from there we can reconsider our goals, desires and intentions and then find new and creative ways to access and use available resources to forge ahead.  I was planning to write about how we can encourage ourselves and one another in this process.

Now I see that I didn’t start out in the first place headed into a simple little wooded glen, nicely packed picnic basket in hand, to enjoy a sunny breezy spring day of meandering.  I found myself on a wide road of stripped forests and polluted waters with garbage thrown, spread and littered all the way into space.  I found death and deprivation and depletion along the sides of the road.  True, there are little places of pretty glens of woods where portions of our world’s populations are able to tarry.

But on the larger scale I see that our species in in danger because we are using the available resources of our highly evolved brains to circumvent our ancient wisdom by forgetting to remember to avoid what will harm us.  By abusing our most precious resource that is meant to sustain us, by incompetently mismanaging ourselves, we are at risk of creating a situation where we will have to learn what we are forgetting all over again.

It is important to remember that the best resource humans have to protect ourselves from the harmful wake of trauma is to avoid it in the first place.  The next most important protective factor is the support of others close to us.  As we alienate ourselves from the first we begin to deprive ourselves of the second.  Unfortunately, we are well on our way to doing both.

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Thank you for reading.  Your comments are welcome and appreciated.

+SOCIAL ISOLATION – Research on the Brain Changes

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

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

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PMID: 18423591 [PubMed – indexed for MEDLINE]

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

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

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

Fone KC, Porkess MV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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