Tag: malevolent world

+DISSOCIATION AND MY VERSION OF THIS UTOPIAN WORLD

alchemynow2 Comments

Every one of us begins life as a unique individual.  Through our early interactions with our caregiving environment we “come down into the world” as James Hillman describes in his book “The Soul’s Code.”

http://www.amazon.com/Souls-Code-Search-Character-Calling/dp/0446673714/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242590259&sr=1-1

I believe that if an infant’s caregiving interactions are of a malevolent kind, an individual’s ability to grown down into the world is interfered with.  This interference will be reflected in the changes the body and brain are forced to make in adjustment to a malevolent world.  Of all the consequences that originate through these adjustments, the one I want to write about today has to do with integration.

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A person learns from infancy how to integrate their self within their environment.  This all happens through the ‘rupture and repair’ patterns that are established within an infant’s body, nervous system and brain through its interactions with its first caregivers.  Because I believe that hope is an innate hard-wired physiological ability available to us from birth, the potential for a lack of hope resulting in hopeless despair and disappointment also exists within us from birth.

If an infant’s early caregiver interactions are adequate and appropriate, hope thus becomes intertwined with this ‘coming down into the world’, or coming to live in a body in this world.  If an infant’s experiences result from inadequate and inappropriate early caregiver experiences, hopeless despair and disappointment will grow into an infant’s body as this body grows into the world.

In cases such as mine, when the pattern of early caregiver interactions occurs within the context of severe mental illness, not only will the inadequate and inappropriate nature of the infant’s experiences change the way it grows on all levels, but there will be introduced an additional, complicating factor — the insanity of the mental illness itself.

Mental illness is a manifestation of brain operations that are occurring outside the range of ‘normal’.  The ability to use the brain as it has evolved to operate in ‘best case’ scenarios has been removed and has been replaced with alternative operational patterns — most usually in response to its early formational environment of deprivation and malevolence.  In these cases REASON no longer operates correctly.  Someone whose brain operates like my mother’s did will not have the ability to think reasonably on any level.  They therefore live in a world of their own creation, a reality that is entirely processed through a brain that has not formed to operate correctly.

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I can only speak for myself about how my reality formed through my interactions with my mother from birth.  There was no possibility of my being able to discern reasonable patterns of cause and effect as my brain developed.  It is only because of the many resiliency factors that also influenced me in childhood (see previous post on resiliency) that I managed to form a brain that has a reasonable sense of cause and effect built into it.  One of the most important resiliency factors that I have to consider is that I evidently did not have the same kind of mental illness genetic combinations available to me to use in order to survive the overwhelming pain of my own childhood that my mother had.

My mother’s irrational control over my developing mind was, however, nearly as pervasive as it was chronic.  She shared in common all of the techniques used by the Chinese in the early 50s to control the minds of prisoners — and she did this to me from birth until I left home at 18.  As a result I will never be able to fully gain control of my own mind away from her brain and mind forming influence.  She made sure that her irrationality became a part of me and she was supremely successful.

But she could never actually control ME, the me that I was from conception, the me that did the interacting with her from the start of my ‘growing down into the world’.  Unfortunately that ME was prevented from integrating properly into a body in this world.  She filled so much of the space and time that should have been MINE that there was precious little left over during that 18 years for me to have experiences that were not in some way influenced by her and her mental illness.

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I write about this today in order to point out a single important aspect of how my early patterns shaped how I am in the world today.  Because my mother constantly pointed out to me through her actions and through her words that I was evil, not human, the devil’s child and BAD, I grew up absolutely believing her.  Through this process the ME that endured these experiences evidently learned that all of the world outside of my influence must be a perfect place.

That fact made logical, reasonable sense in my growing mind.  If Linda was so bad that anyone involved with me had to suffer as from a ‘curse’, then anyone whose life I did not touch must have a perfect life.

I call this today my “Utopian Complex’, and there will evidently never be a logical, rational or reasonable way that I can alter this fundamental belief that I have about myself in relationship to the world outside of my sphere of ‘influence’.  As a result, I still fundamentally believe that the world ‘out there’ is a perfect place and if it isn’t, it sure should be.  In my logically illogical mind, there is absolutely no excuse for the world not to be perfect outside the range of my own personal influence.

This, to me, is an example of how having a brain formed under the conditions presented by my mentally ill mother’s brain-mind gave me a version of what infant brain development specialists call the infant’s ‘unsolvable paradox’.  These researchers know that severely maltreated infants know on a profound level that they have to ‘go on being’ in a world that is so dangerous that possibility is not possible.

This is the consequence of a brain-mind-body that is overwhelmed by traumas outside the possibility of addressing through any known coping ability an infant has.  The paradox is formed deeply within the brain-mind simply by the fact that the infant (myself included) DID survive what was impossible to survive.

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Because I was told from the moment I was born that I caused nothing but trouble and was the cause of all the troubles in my family, and that their world would be perfect if I wasn’t in it, I simply applied logic in an incremental fashion to include my relationship with the entire world outside of myself.  I understand today that my version of building the unsolvable paradox into my being as I grew down into my body and into the world is certainly not the worst that I could have done.

But it only happened THIS way because of the consistent and pervasive psychosis my mother suffered from in relation to me from my first breath.  Infant’s crave consistency and I have to say my mother certainly provided me with that!  My understanding of cause and effect did not grow to apply to me on an ongoing personal level, but was rather accomplished on the level of the grand scheme of ‘Linda versus the world’.

This world was of course represented by my mother as my brain-mind formed, and because she formed her own brain-mind so completely into my developing one, and because I cannot extricate her from my brain-mind, I am simply left with the understanding that the world has no reason to be less than perfect if I haven’t personally done something to harm it.

I doubt that I can communicate to you that this ‘reality’ is not a ‘maybe’ to me.  In the essence of my relationship to being in this world at all, it is fact.

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Of course the other side of this double-edged sword, the other part of this paradox that formed itself into me is that it is a bad thing that I am in the world at all, and especially that it is hopeless for Linda to have a good life because Linda is in it.  Talk about a no-win predicament!  I cannot both live a life and not be in it at the same time!  This is, to me, the end result of being so told I was bad and that chance of becoming good was so hopeless and impossible, that I simply excluded myself from my own life.

This may be a difficult thought to follow because it is NOT based on reasonable logic as a ‘normal’ brain would understand it.  But I suspect that dissociation within my brain is directly connected to having been forced to live a life for 18 years from birth without ME being allowed to be in it.  Each separate experience of my childhood simply happened, but I had no ongoing sense that I was a part of those experiences or any ongoing sense that they happened to me.

It was similar to “If a tree falls in a forest and there’s nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound?”  And if the answer to that question is “No” once, then it is always so.  From the first time I dissociated myself from the ongoing experiences of the traumas that were my childhood I was being forced to live a life without ME in it.  If it happens once or happens a million times, the result are the same:  A disconnection from a meaningful fluid ongoing experience of being alive in a body in the world.

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I know I experience what attachment experts call a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder.  This kind of attachment disorder, I believe, has dissociation so built into it that the person’s ongoing life cannot be separated from it — ever.  It results from ongoing experiences from birth that were not based on logical, rational cause and effect processes and through an absence of adequately resolved patterns of rupture and repair.

In my case true hope  ‘floated’ so far away from my own personal experience of life that it ‘landed’ at the unreachable interface of where I can imagine the ‘world’ as being separate from myself.  Every infant grows into its brain a conception of where its boundaries are, of what lies on its own insides compared to what lies on its outsides.  If the early interactions an infant has as it forms these mental boundaries are based on irrationality, the boundaries themselves will not form normally.

In a normal brain, all ongoing experiences are connected together to form a ‘coherent life story’ with the person being the one living the life.  I can only artificially construct my own life story from the millions of disconnected pieces that lie alone, separated and isolated, somewhere in my memory.  And yet this fact is just one of the small pieces that I believe reflects the kind of damage that results from severe early malevolent abuse.

I will never know if someone’s intervention on my behalf, that could have resulted at least in a different pathway for me through the rest of my childhood, would have left me with less devastating damage.  I believe that it would have.   Removal would have prevented my mother from being able to consistently build her ‘case’ against me (and into my own brain-mind) over the many, many years she had control over me.   I was not given the opportunity to experience myself outside the reach of her terribly distorted mind.

+OUR DISTURBED NATURAL INTERNAL OPIOID (OPIATE) SYSTEM

alchemynow2 Comments

Could it be this simple, that for all the complexities about being human our lives really boil down to this process:  Rupture with repair or rupture without repair, with hope for repair being fulfilled or hope for repair being disappointed?

I believe we are biologically designed even before our birth for the experience of hope.  If we believe that a state of calmness related to having all of our needs met is our most normal state, it becomes true that any disruption of this ‘perfect’ state represents a rupture and indicates a need has arisen and a repair must be made.

This entire system is moderated from before our birth by our own endogenous opioid system.  Yes, opioid as related to our own natural opiate producing system complete with all the receptors that are designed to receive our natural opioids (endogenous opioid peptides, produced naturally in the body, such as endorphins, enkephalins, dynorphins, and endomorphins).

Endogenous opioids are in the placenta and in mother’s milk.  Opioid receptors govern a newborn’s interactions with the world.  If its opioid receptors are all filled up the infant is calm and content.  If a need arises in its body this need is reflected in the emptying of the infant’s opioid receptors and it is then disturbed and not calm.  The infant has experienced a ‘rupture’ in need of ‘repair’, and I believe it is a biological mandate that implicates a physiological response to need in the form of hope for fulfillment.

A mother is physiologically designed to have her opioid receptors filled by bonding to and caring for her newborn.  As she responds to her needy infant’s needs, the infant’s opioid receptors are filled back up and the mother’s are affected positively, also.

Hence in my thinking our own feel good opioid system is at the basis of attachment from start to finish.  Yet because we are a complex species we often deviate from what is best for us and find all kinds of ways to interfere with our natural abilities to feel good simply through safe and secure attachments patterns with one another as members of a social species.

The more disturbed our natural feel good-feel bad processes were in the beginning, the more our development as infants was reflected in the adjustments our bodies and brains had to make in order to survive in a malevolent rather than a benevolent world.  Our hopes of repair after rupture were not met satisfactorily and we are left with an internal opioid system that has been forced to go awry.

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I believe that because we are a social species our first line of repair is naturally meant to happen through attachment to one another.  This fact is reflected in the processes our early brain development goes through as it forms the right limbic emotional brain in interaction with the experiences an infant has with its early caregivers.  All the good natural opioid interactional experiences build a good brain designed for life in a good world where hopes are fulfilled through these caring interactions.  Bad opioid interactions build a different brain designed to operate in a world that is not a friendly one.  A brain built through inadequate and toxic relational interactions will have a different pattern based on the disappointment of hope rather than on its fulfillment.

These early opioid experiences of fulfillment or un-fulfillment directly feed information not only to the developing brain, but also to the entire body as it also designs and builds its nervous system, its immune system, and the operation of its genetic expression machinery to match the world the infant is forming in.  It is on this level that I talk about early attachment experiences and the fostering of either hope based on appropriate and adequate endogenous opioid receptor interactions — forming safe and secure attachments — or about the opposite experiences that form the insecure attachment patterns.

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If you search this blog for ’emotional brain’ and for ‘opioid system’ you will access research about these processes.  You can also search your own body to find your personal pivot point in relationship to hope and disappointment.  Every time we suffer from some version of a rupture in our ongoing state of well being we will automatically have some degree of hope arise in relationship to this disruption.  If the opposite of hope is what built our bodies and brains, we will feel the pain of disappointment more often than will someone who was raised in a secure attachment environment.

Our sense of ourselves in our bodies reflect the point on the hopeful – hopeless continuum our self originated from.  Our interactional experiences with our early caregivers regarding the natural life processes of rupture and repair told us both how to develop and how the world we were developing into would treat us.  It is because all these processes are rooted in our endogenous opioid system that we feel mostly good or mostly bad during our lifespan.

I believe that everything we ever try to do during our lifetimes to make ourselves feel better is a reflection of how our bodies interpreted life in this world from the beginning.  If people did not meet our needs, did not repair the natural ruptures caused by our being alive here in the first place, we were forced to survive on our own.  We did not develop an optimal right limbic emotional SOCIAL brain geared to a safe and secure world with caring people in it.

To the degree that our natural attachment patterns to and within our species were interfered with, we look outside of the human relationship circle to get our needs met.  What we suffer from are degrees of isolation from our species that created and continues to create in us an ‘endogenous opioid hole’ that can never be satisfactorily filled.  Recognizing the reality of our degrees of isolation contributes to our ability to become conscious of what we feel, why we feel it, and what better ways we can try to fill our opioid hole.

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A lack of secure attachment within our species creates an isolation that we experience as an almost overwhelming sadness.  All future adjustments we are forced to make by a disturbed endogenous opioid interaction pattern — including mental illness — is an attempt to survive in spite of our pain.

+SEVERE CHILD ABUSE AND SELF ESTEEM

alchemynow2 Comments

On occasion I have heard people say about other people, “They have no self esteem.”  I don’t believe this is ever an accurate statement.  Everyone has self esteem.  If is part of being human.  What matters to me is how positive or how negative a person’s self esteem is.

A sense of esteem for the self grows right along with a growing self from birth.  Researchers believe that the self of a person is formed by the age of two.  It might be hard for us to believe, but by the time a child is that age it already has a strong sense of its own self worth — either positive or negative — built into the brain by every interaction that little person has already had with its early caregivers within its attachment environment.

Because the sense of self esteem, or self worth, is directly formed through attachment relationships, an unsafe and insecure environment will create an unstable connection to the self.  Development within a safe and secure world provides a young child with a sense of confident connection to important others in its life and a sense of competence within itself.  These conditions are directly connected to either a positive or a negative sense of self esteem and are reflected in the connection each person has to their own inner self in relationship to the world it lives in.

Once the self is formed by the age of two, along with the initial sense of safety, security and positive self esteem, or a sense of un-safety, insecurity and negative self esteem, all other ongoing experiences will be connected to this early formation and will be filtered through it.  Only in cases of serious mental illness can a ‘second self’ be formed that will filter and process ongoing experience.  In usual cases a growing child will attach future experience to the original self it formed and connects to for the rest of its life.

We can think of the experiences a child has during the time of its life from conception to age two as being like the time it takes to tune a piano that child will play its music on for the rest of its life.  We can understand that playing on a well tuned piano will allow that child to create a musically harmonious self prepared to play in an equally harmonious world.  On the other hand, a child who has unsafe and insecure attachment experiences will end up with a mistuned piano that cannot make beautiful music no matter how hard that person tries for the rest of its life.

We can, as adults, assess how well tuned our piano was primarily before the age of two in one of two ways.  If we already know that there were serious problems in our very early brain development years we have our answer instantaneously.  If, however, we have either never thought about ourselves back that far or have no available information at our finger tips that comes from our very early years, we can simply just look back at the patterns of our existence and search for what the overriding emotional tone that our self experiences in the present.

I am certainly not the one to say whether or not ‘bad’ versus ‘good’ people exist in the world.  I believe that kind of thinking originated at a time when mythologies and fairy tales were used to explain events that people had no other way of understanding their lives.  Today we know very clearly what the impact of very early mother-infant experiences are on the forming brain, nervous system, body and self that originates as a hopefully conscious interaction between a growing individual and their environment.  We are not talking about magic.  We are talking about cause and effect.

If we look back even at our adult and teen years and detect patterns of disappointments, wrong choices, hurtful relationships, failure to discover our best place in the work world and also detect that our overriding emotional tone is and has been anything other than balanced, competent calm and well being, we will know that we were most likely sent off in a less than safe and secure world in the first place.  From the time of our unstable and probably malevolent beginnings we have been trying our hardest to correct our own behavior as if we are somehow to blame for being inadequate for the job of being a happy, well adjusted member of our society.

Our foundational sense of self esteem is not some ephemeral or nebulous construction.  It is very real and it actually came from a time of our lives when we had pitifully small powers to control our environments — before we were two years old.  I am not talking about some Freudian fantasy of puppet figures from our past related to our own wishful thinking.  I am talking about the formation of our brains as our self and our sense of worth, value and place in the world was told to us by the people who took care of us before age two — or didn’t.

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Lest we think that we are some kind of exception to a natural rule just because we are of a conscious species, let me assure you we are not.  Research has demonstrated, for example, that if a litter of a calm rat mother’s babies are raised with the calm mother they will end up to be calm rat adults.  If a litter of a nervous ‘neurotic’  mother rat are allowed to grow up under her care, the resulting adults will also be nervous and ‘neurotic’.  No surprise and no magic there.

But here is the surprise though still nothing magical.  If you take the calm mother rat’s babies away from her at birth and put them under the care of the nervous ‘neurotic’ mother rat, those same calm mother babies will grow up to be nervous and ‘neurotic’.  Take the nervous ‘neurotic’ mother rat’s babies away at birth and give them to the calm mother to raise and those babies will grow up to be calm adults.

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So what are we left with about hope of positive changes in our lives if our early beginnings were actually a disaster?  Because the human brain is the most complex structure known to exist, we are all at a point of marveling at its potential for change.

Three  fascinating links related to the Dali Lama and the science of the brain are listed below

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/labnotes/archive/2009/02/24/mom-dad-dna-and-suicide.aspx

http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:RKToUsTHIRMJ:www.dana.org/news/cerebrum/detail.aspx%3Fid%3D7384+dali+lama+nueorscience+neurotic+rats&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

http://www.mindandlife.org/conf04.html

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And take a look at author Alice Miller’s site for prevention of child abuse

http://www.alice-miller.com/index_en.php

More than anything else, I am asking that we consider child abuse backgrounds when facing the difficulties of adult life for anybody who has come from such a past.  While it might be difficult for us to consider our own life or the life of others who might be troubled, with respect, dignity and caring compassion, I believe that it will only be under this light of firm but gentle kindness that we can change the patterns that have been ingrained not only in ourselves, but within our cultures around the globe.

We have to take the consequences of infant and child abuse extremely seriously.  I cannot, unfortunately, locate a source for the following, but I believe it is true.

I heard that the Dali Lama was asked at one of the neuroscience sessions related to the deprivations caused by abusive childhoods whether or not he believed that an adult with a severely abusive early upbringing had the same ability to advance spiritually in this world as do people who did not have very early extreme abuse histories.  It is said that the Dali Lama was quiet in thought for some time before he responded, “No, they do not.”

This means to me that we still do not fully know the adult consequences of early malevolent conditions on all aspects of development.  If nobody really yet knows, then we cannot expect ourselves to know the impact that our own early malevolent experiences had on us, either.  We will not gain either the knowledge or the changes we seek by being harsh on ourselves or on one another.  But in cases where adults are passing on the abuse they experienced to their offspring, we have to be ready to do whatever is necessary to intervene on behalf of their children.

At no point is this a journey for the faint of heart  — not for us individually or for us collectively.  It is not a journey that can be taken in an atmosphere of ambiguity.  We must become clear about what we are facing so that the most helpless and innocent members of our species will not be forced to suffer from what we adults have created to harm them.

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Here are some positive self esteem related books from Gallup Press that I recommend though I have not yet had a chance to read them myself:

In 2004, Gallup Press’ first book, How Full Is Your Bucket?, became an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. This led to the publication of several more strengths books, including StrengthsFinder 2.0 (2007) and Strengths Based Leadership (2009). Fueled by the continued demand for its original strengths-based classic, Gallup Press is releasing two new titles based on How Full Is Your Bucket?.

How Full Is Your Bucket? For Kids (available now)

Because of the overwhelming response from parents and teachers to How Full Is Your Bucket? — many of whom have asked for a “kids’ version” — Gallup Press has created How Full Is Your Bucket? For Kids. Tom Rath coauthored the book with early childhood development expert Mary Reckmeyer, and they partnered with the brilliant children’s book illustrator Maurie Manning.
This new book brings the basic dipper and bucket metaphor to life through the story of a young boy named Felix. In How Full Is Your Bucket? For Kids, Felix begins to see how every interaction he has with others in a day either fills or empties his bucket. Felix then realizes that everything he says or does to other people fills or empties their buckets as well.

Expanded Anniversary Edition of How Full Is Your Bucket?
(available in mid-June)

  This new, expanded hardcover Anniversary Edition of How Full Is Your Bucket? includes updated research and content, with a removable workbook for individual, team, and organizational development.

For more information, or to purchase these new books, visit:

How Full Is Your Bucket? For Kids (available now):

How Full Is Your Bucket? Anniversary Edition (available in mid-June):

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

alchemynowLeave a comment

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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+TRAUMA MATH: THE SORROWS AND HAPPINESS OF “CRAFT SHOW APRIL”

alchemynow2 Comments

I haven’t completely ‘returned’ or recovered from my out-of-town craft show adventure last weekend.  I say returned because my dissociation condition causes me to experience changes as if separate parts of me are ‘out there’ floating around like dandelion fluff in the breeze, drifting around until they eventually land.  I experience a waiting period while this happens, trying to learn every day more of what to do to speed up the process of consolidation of memory as best I can.

Some might call this a grounding process.  I went out and watered all of my plants, most of them looking pretty darn stressed if not dead.  I forgot to have one of the neighbor children come over to water them while I was gone on this 100 degree plus weekend.  Now I’m washing my blankets and clothing.  There’s no place for the washing machine in the house, so it sits out back on the cement rim that lies around the foundation of the house, hooked by an hundred foot extension cord running out my door and to a fifty foot hose.

Taking the small steps of being in my life, in my house, being in my body as I wait for all of the experiences of this past weekend to settle within me in some form of organized fashion.  That’s what the combination of the dissociative disorder and the PTSD do to me now.  They easily give me the feeling of ‘too much to deal with’ and a sense of being easily overwhelmed by any kind of unusual stimulation.

I believe that’s part of the role of the ‘recurring major depression’ that forms the third leg of my emotional and mental ‘disorder’ and ‘disability.’  It gives me the ‘down time’ I need to let things put themselves together after I experience more incoming information than I can handle at one time.

I am so fortunate at this moment in time to have a simple place that is my home.  One has to have the safety and security of some kind of ‘home’ for their body in order that the home of the mind can maintain itself.  I’ve been homeless before, several times, even when I still had young children under my care.  Today more than in several generations having a home or not having a home has come back to the forefront of our concerns — both individually and as a society.

Which leads me to this story I heard from a neighboring vendor, I’ll call her April, at the craft show last weekend.  I always listen with a special interest to stories told by new people I meet.  It’s the only way that I have to test my own theories or ideas, things that I am coming to believe about how our early childhood experiences come to form who we are as adults.

Because April never asked that anything she was telling me be kept confidential, I am not concerned about telling you what she told me.  After all, she had only just met me and spent a few hours in her booth across from mine as she sold kettle corn and ice water as I hoped to sell earrings and mosaics.

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April is one year younger than me, another child of the early fifties, born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona.  She was second born of six children and spent her childhood with both of her parents and with her grandparents nearby.  Her father was an untreated bi-polar severe alcoholic and was extremely violent and abusive to his wife and all of the children.  Her father beat his wife during every one of her pregnancies, and over the years knocked out all of his wife’s teeth, and sent her to the hospital with concussions and broken bones many times.

April told of one severe attack of violence this man had perpetrated against his family, and her mother took herself and all of the children to her mother’s house for some kind of protection.  It wasn’t long before her father showed up at the door with his rifle, accompanied by three uniformed police officers who were there to make sure the wife and children returned home with the man of their family immediately.

We might think this unbelievable and barbaric, but that happened only 45 years ago.  It tells us about the conditions of life and of our culture that took so much hard work and effort to change — even a little bit so that things might be different and better for women and children in America today.

April appears as a very attractive, perky, positive, happy, kind, hard working, healthy woman.  There’s nothing about her that meets the eye of the public that would indicate the kind of terrible traumas that she has experienced in her life.  And yet it didn’t take long as we sat in her RV after Saturday’s craft show had closed for the day, talking over an ice cold beer and a container of grocery store deli chili that April had microwaved and generously shared with me, that I learned how close to the surface all of her difficult history is to her.  In fact I would say none of it has gone anywhere.  But what fascinates me is what April is doing with herself in relationship to it.

April is married to her third husband, a hard working truck driver who just lost one hundred thousand dollars of his 401K that he spent 32 years building for his retirement.  April has worked for the past 21 years as a massage therapist for a major hotel chain in Phoenix.  She still loves her work but in order, now, to hope for a retirement she decided to go into the business of traveling as a kettle corn vendor on weekends.

Certainly she had the resources of owning a RV and a sturdy steel trailer to haul her equipment.  She had the resources to buy everything she needed to set up her booth and cook that candied popcorn, including a portable generator.  But she also had the invisible inner resources to come up with her plan and the stamina and willingness to work extremely hard toward making her business a paying venture.

Just the physical work alone that it took to drive that rig, haul all that heavy equipment off of it, set up the canopy, stand there in 100 plus heat for two days trying to sell to a pitifully thin crowd at that show, and then pack it all up again and return home to get herself ready for a full week of work at her ‘real’ job — and do all this smiling and caring for and about every single person she saw along her way and mean it — provided me with an incredible experience to learn about, watch and benefit from personally.

April made sure that I had ice cold water to drink all weekend, that I had an iced wet cloth to lay on the back of my neck in that scorching heat, that I had chili and beer in the evening and a place to park my little truck next to her RV to sleep for the night, and that I had her friendship and her compassionate and sensitive encouragement every step of the way.  April offered these kindnesses in different ways to everyone around her.  She never complained, and even as she told me about her childhood there was no anger or blame.  She simply described what happened.

As she talked I of course listened to discover how it was possible that April was the person she turned out to be.  At first it was a mystery to me until I heard what might just be the secret of her ‘salvation’, the blessings caught among the curses.

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April described to me how she had attended a cranial massage training institute and had been blindsided by the insensitive and unprofessional experience that she had by being a chosen volunteer for the  technique without being given any warning about what might happen.  While the instructors demonstrated in front of a large crowd of strangers, April experienced what had happened to her in the womb as her father had beaten her mother while she was carrying April.  During this session she remembered what it felt like when she also, as an unborn infant, had been pummeled by her father’s blows.

The conditions of ongoing violence in her home of origin never improved.  April left home very young, married and began having children of her own.  Of her three children, one is schizophrenic and facing a long prison sentence for attempted manslaughter and arson after he tried to burn down his girl friend’s home with her in it.  Among April’s five siblings, one became schizophrenic and two ended up with severe bi-polar conditions.  One of these, her brother, committed suicide.

April’s father died a few months ago and she admits she never loved him and that her father never loved her.  April’s mother suffers from several serious medical conditions in her later years that doctors suspect are directly connected to the many serious injuries that she suffered while being beaten by her husband.  April has struggled with all of these trauma related conditions in her family all of her life, and is left now still trying to find a way to manage continued contact with her mentally ill siblings.

April’s one healthy sister that she is very close to, was a real estate agent in California and her brother-in-law had a successful construction business.  Both sources of income have vanished, her sister’s family has lost both of the homes they owned.  Stress from these challenges caused the brother-in-law to have a serious heart attack and he is facing surgery.  April is not only very worried about her sister and her family, but she also is suffering from what really is the loss of one of the most important support people of her life.

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So here is April woman-handling a physically and financially difficult new business, and optimistically being happy as she continues to face the challenges of her life.  Because of what I understand about how vital it is that an infant’s growing brain receives happiness stimulation in order for the left brain’s happy center to form in the first place — thus allowing it to be accessed later in life — I had to ask April what her perspective is on the differences between herself and her siblings.

She told me that during her recent physical exam her physician had told her that the reason her three siblings ended up with severe mental illness is probably because they had those specific combination of genetic possibilities in them that were triggered as their bodies were stressed during early childhood.  He further stated that evidently April and her other two siblings did not have these genetic sensitivities so they ended up without the mental illness.  (Even then April was a carrier of the genes because she has a schizophrenic alcoholic drug addicted son.  I did not ask her about her own parenting conditions nor did she tell me.)

This still did not explain to me how April manages to be so optimistically positive and so able to find active ways to cope in her life.  It did not explain that while she had for a period of time become what she termed “an active psychologically dependent alcoholic,” how she managed to extricate herself from her addiction so that it didn’t affect her in the present.

This is the point in the conversation where the secret was unveiled to me.  Part of her current difficulties with her bi-polar sister stem from what happened last January at the death of their father.  April was very clear about her lack of feeling for her father and her sister fell to pieces and became enraged at April for her detachment.  It turns out that the only person their father ever paid any affectionate attention to was this bi-polar sister.  She was his favorite and she was his pet.  (I don’t know whether or not there was sexual abuse occurring in this situation, though it sounds to me like a typical setup for such abuse to happen.)

What April told me next is the most important fact of this story.  While her sister was her very sick, abusive, violent ‘dysfunctional’ father’s pet, April was consistently the favored pet of her father’s mother.  And what is most important about THIS fact is that April describes this grandmother as being a very happy person — able to be happy in her own life and able to be extremely happy in her ongoing relationship with April.

THIS is, to me, a magic key to April’s life today.  The happy center in little April’s developing brain was fed, fostered and able to grow because of this happy, safe and secure relationship she had with her happy grandmother.  Because this happy center was so designed and built in April’s early-developing brain, that collection of neurons was already in her brain in spite of all the other nasty traumatic experiences that April still had to endure.

April lost touch with her happy self for many, many years.  But when she was ready to take a good hard look at herself and her life, and wanted to make it so much better, she had this precious resource within her brain of a well-built happy center to fall back on and to rely on as she sought to make happier changes for a happier life.  Still, today, it was and is April’s decision to exercise the heck out of these happy center neurons that is making the difference not only for her in her life, but also for all others that come into contact with her.

April described to me that she works at being happy all of the time.  She WORKS HARD at it.  But she is the one doing the work.  The fact that she was blessed with the conditions in her early brain developmental life, through a safe, secure and happy attachment relationship with at least one other person, her grandmother, does not take away the importance that April is still doing this good work herself.  She made the decision and is applying her own life force to  continue to make these positive changes.  Nobody else could do this for her.  Yet I believe that her early secure attachment with her grandmother helped to give her both the inner resources to do this work and the ability to want to try.

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I could sense the very old competition for affection and resources that still exists between April and her sister regarding their father.  It was like, “She had our father but I had my grandmother.”  The unspoken pain was still there caused by a father who could not love his daughters — in fact could probably not really love anyone including himself.

There’s no way a child cannot crave a father’s affection and not notice when another sibling seems to be receiving it.  Yet in this situation the love from a terrible father could in no way compare to the seemingly healthy love from a happy, adoring grandmother.  April got the better end of the deal, and her sister is a deteriorating bi-polar in large part, I believe, because of these inequities.

(This creates another whole set of questions in my mind.  What happened in April’s father’s early life in relationship with his own mother, this happy grandmother, that set him up for a disastrous life?  It is not at all uncommon for grandmother’s to be able to love and attach securely to grandchildren when they could not do this for their own children.  And why did was this grandmother unable to intervene on behalf of all of her grandchildren?  Why did she single out only one as her ‘pet’?  But all this will be food and fodder for future writings.)

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I understand that everyone who has even only a tiny happy center can still exercise that center through hard work to make it stronger.  But the original nerve cells/neurons that were present at birth — designated for this happy center but NOT used while this center built itself through early attachment relationships and therefore were lost — can NEVER be replaced.

What happy center neurons we DO have can increase their dendrites and the interactions between these dendrites through exercise.  That April is so clearly applying hard work to become more happy, even though she had a better happy center built in the beginning than her sister did, still lets us know that the effects of severe abuse continue for the lifespan.  If they didn’t, April would not have to work so hard to become more happy herself.

People who were raised from birth in safety and security that encompassed and enveloped them as it SHOULD have, have so much more to work with on every level as they face the ongoing challenges of life.  Being happy will always be easier for securely attached from birth people, just as it is for April who only had partial childhood experiences of secure attachment in the midst of trauma compared to her mentally ill siblings.

I describe this today in part as a gesture of support for everyone who has become even more challenged in their lives as a result of the economic difficulties the world is facing.  If you or anyone you know is being additionally challenged right now, please do not judge them harshly if they cannot be as optimistically happy as someone else might be able to be as they struggle to get through their hard times — ANY kind of hard times.

We need to support and encourage ourselves and one another in the work of trying to live a more happy and positive life with kindness to the best of our abilities.  We must be realistic and informed about the context of happiness and active coping just as we need to be about the actual traumas we have experienced.

Those who have suffered early developmental-stage traumas are always the most at risk when new traumas come along.  We can do the math — the aftermath of trauma — to find what is upsetting the balance of well-being in our lives and to find what helps to create a better state of balance every step of the way.

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

+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.