Tag: malevolent world

+AMAZING DISCOVERY – YET ANOTHER OF MY MOTHER’S CHILDHOOD STORIES

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Found 091109

[enclosed old piece of paper with April 22, 1959 homesteading letter mother had written to her mother, and that grandmother had returned to my mother.  The writing of this story on this paper is in my grandmother’s handwriting.]

Grandmother’s note on the bottom of the page says:

“Dictated by Mildred Cahill Lloyd when about 8 years old”

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The Laughing Brook

Once there was a beautiful, gurgling Brook.  Its name was “Laughing Brook.”  The animals in the nearby woods gave its name to it because the wind came and wrinkled it up and made it murmur, and gurgle, and smile all the way down the hillside.

The animals came to drink at this brook, never knowing it was a fairy brook.  Some animals were good and some were bad.  Those that were bad turned into snakes after drinking the water from the brook, but those that were good stayed as they were, beautiful and kind to each other.

There was one good fairy that lived in the Black Forest where this Laughing Brook flowed by.  That fairy had a firefly that lived with her near a waterfall.  The fireflies lit up her way as they flew about the country.

There was a lovely meadow near the brook where daisies and buttercups and clover grew.  In the meadow there was a big red barn where the farmer kept his cows and hens and pigs and horses.

One night as the fireflies were flying around with the fairies watching over the good people they saw a fire in the hay in the barn.  At once the [written they] fireflies and fairies flew in the window of the farmer’s bedroom and flash their lights so brightly and after that the farmer and his wife woke up, saw the fire from their window, and rushed out in time to save all the animals and most of the barn.

Ever after that the farmer and his wife watched every night to see the fireflies at work and play.

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Although I cannot at present access this article, in light of my mother’s childhood writings I find the following to be a fascinating concept, as reflected in this article:

Rites of Passage and the Borderline Syndrome: Perspectives in Transpersonal Anthropology By LARRY G. PETERS

The following seems to be all that is available as an abstract for this article, found in Questia, Vol. 17, 1994.

How, but in custom and ceremony, are innocence and beauty born?

— W. B. Yeats

The purpose of this study is to compare and contrast certain prevalent contemporary pathological symptoms — parasuicide (especially im­pulsive “self cutting” or wrist cutting and other forms of self-mutilation), anorexia/bulimia, substance abuse, and a predisposition to frequent tran­sient psychotic episodes, all of which, as a constellation, combination, or in some cases individually, are identified by clinicians as presumptive signs of “borderline personality disorder” (BPD) — with those same behaviors in tribal societies. The focus is anthropological and cross-cultural; it is a study of rites of passage, many of which in­volve food deprivations (fasting and purgations), body mutilations (cir­cumcision, scarification), accompan­ied by episodes of altered or nonordi­nary states of consciousness (visions, loss of boundaries). It is argued that there is a relationship between BPD and the failure of Western culture to provide context and myth for mean­ingful rites of passage. The typical symptoms of borderline disorder have neither an appropriate cultural chan­nel nor symbol system to provide di­rection and consequently are not fully appreciated by clinicians. However, these “symptoms” may actually be at­tempts at self-healing gone astray in a culture bereft of an integrative spiritual and ritualistic context, and there­fore without an education for tran­scendent states of consciousness.

Cultural Bound Syndromes (CBSs)

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Peters’ writing seems connected to a field of study called ‘The Anthropology of Consciousness.’  The work of Dr. Larry G. Peters, a Tibetan Shaman, presents the most accurate link I have yet found between my mother’s Alaskan homesteading obsession, her spirituality, and her mental illness.

A child has a different consciousness than an adult does.  I have always been able to sense my mother’s childhood consciousness within her childhood writings:  +MY MOTHER’S CHILDHOOD STORIES.

Having tonight discovered this additional piece of her childhood writing confirms for me that her mind, even by the age of 8, was already grappling on a profound – though unconscious – creative level with archetypal issues related to death and destruction, salvation, punishment and consequence, transformations, relationships with the natural world, and with the fundamental issues related to GOOD and BAD, RIGHT and WRONG that connect to the Borderline Personality Disorder spectrum of symptoms.

I absolutely believe that my mother had child onset pre-borderline conditions that are reflected in her childhood writings – if anybody then could, or even anybody now can make those connections.  I know a lot about my mother.  I was the victim of her insane severe abuse for 18 very long years.

My mother’s inner mental structure was built from very early childhood and probably from her earliest infancy upon a BROKEN understanding of good versus bad.  Whatever psychotic break occurred during her delivery of me was enough to toss her completely over the edge.

I was not saved from the fire as her child.  She used the term ‘snake’ in reference to me.  She believed I was not human, that I was the devil’s child.  I was the outward personification of everything BAD she could not accept about herself.  The OTHER mother, the OTHER Mildred desired to live with the fairies and the fireflies.

I believe the homestead became the outward objectification of the good world her “Laughing Brook” existed in, and the act of homesteading itself became a perpetual rite of passage for my mother as she sought what could not ‘follow her around the bend’.  Homesteading was about her need for healing.  Even her abuse of me was about her need for healing (because if she could ‘deal’ with me her own projected badness would be healed).

The most amazing thing is that Alaska DOES have the power to heal.  It even now remains mostly pure and that natural purity is what raised-up humans throughout our evolution, and it does have the power to heal.  In my mother’s case, however, it was not enough.  (Read PRESENTING THE HOMESTEADING – her letters.)

The rites of passage that Peters makes reference to occur within a healthy brain, mind and psyche.  The sick psyche of my mother’s could not have been saved past the age of 8 no matter what culture she had been a part of.  My mother was born an extremely fragile, at-risk child.  The conditions within her childhood environment from birth might have been adequate to a less sensitive and vulnerable child.  I believe that the conditions of my mother’s childhood conspired to destroy my mother.  She, in turn, very nearly destroyed me.

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This work that I am doing with my mother’s letters does seem to be about retrieving a life of suffering from the ‘lost and found’ — both hers and mine.

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Mother’s letter to Grandmother May 23, 1959 about the homestead:

“I told Bill I hope to live to be 90 and never leave here.  (I want to be buried here!)  I told him I even yearn to be a child again and live here – such a kingdom….”

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+WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT TRAUMA?

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I would think that in their own way everyone in our great nation recognizes today as the 8th anniversary of one of the most terrible crisis that ever occurred within the boundaries of our country.  Our hearts continue to go out to all those who suffered terror and unimaginable trauma as a result of the destruction brought upon them by the acts of terrorists whose own agendas allowed them to kill and destroy wantonly.  At the same time we remember each person and their loved ones whose lives have been touched in the aftermath of war, destruction and bloodshed that has followed 9-11 and the World Trade Center attacks.

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The most devastating consequences of trauma to humans can never be measured in financial terms.  Neither do we yet know the true reality of the way humans respond to extraordinary traumatic stressors.  Continued research into the ongoing, intergenerational consequence of the Holocaust’s traumatic effects shows that trauma can be CLEARLY passed down to offspring.

Researchers will be working to uncover the long range consequences of trauma caused by 9-11 for a long time to come.  They know that babies of women pregnant during the 9-11 terrorist attacks have been found to be born with the ‘markers’ for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a result of their mother’s exposure to the attacks.

We are learning more and more both about how resilient humans are and about our fragility.  Every-day people do not usually pay attention to the results of millions and millions of dollars spent on research about the consequences of trauma to humans, and yet this research can inform our thinking in new and more enlightened ways.

The Atlanta study looked at genetic potential as it interacts with children’s responses to trauma.  It found, among other things, that a child’s safe and secure attachment to ANY adult in its life influences to the positive that child’s ability to overcome traumatic experiences.  In another corner of the world researchers have discovered the same thing.  Although exposed equally to unimaginable terrors and traumas, the children of South Africa end up with severe longterm traumatic responses while the children of Kenya do not.

The more damaged South African children live in a country long torn apart, in fact all but dismantled by generations of influences that have destroyed the secure social attachment fabric of their culture.  Kenya has not suffered this intergenerational destruction of its ongoing cultural strengths so that their children have the benefit – in spite of current terrible traumas and tragedies – of being ‘held’ within a culture that still has its social supports and secure attachment systems somewhat in place.

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We cannot realistically consider the long range consequences of traumatic experience without considering the attachment contexts that form and support (or don’t) the members of any human society.  These attachments begin before birth, as the responses of infants still very much physiologically attached to their mothers during 9-11 demonstrated.

Children are held and supported by the fabric of the attachment support net that their parents either do or do not have in their lives.  Without firmly safe and secure human attachments from the beginning of our lives, we are at astronomically increased risk of suffering long term devastation in our adult lives from any traumatic experience that we might later have.  It is time that all of us realize that attachment is the single most important aspect of our lives because we are a social species.

What this means to me is that all of us, including and perhaps most importantly any mental health expert that works with troubled people of all ages, must begin to include attachment disorder understanding, concepts and vocabulary into our cultural base of knowledge about what makes our lives ‘good’ and what makes them ‘bad’.  I doubt that more than a small handful of mental health experts EVER talk with their adult clients about insecure attachment disorders.

We reserve any discussion or awareness of secure and insecure attachment disorders ONLY as it might relate to ‘troubled’ children.  Where do we think child attachment disorders disappear to once someone magically crosses some invisible line into adulthood?  They go nowhere.  Our attachment orders or disorders are as much ingrained into us as any other physiological response system our brain, body, nervous and immune system has.

We HAVE to begin talking about our attachment system as it operates in our adulthood because it formed who we are and affects how we respond both to the good and to the bad in our lives – at all times!  Those who might be having the most difficult time recovering from the devastating trauma of 9-11 are no exception.  But has ANYONE ever talked to them about their attachment system?

I am willing to bet that any adult who was formed in an extremely malevolent childhood environment and who did not have the benefit of having a safe and secure adult attachment person in their childhood life, is among those who lack the necessary resiliency to recuperate fully from any traumas that they experience.  We are doing nobody any favors by ignoring the absolute, fundamental reality of how our secure or insecure attachment system governs our ability to cope with trauma.

I therefore encourage readers to spend some time investigating some of the information connected to the live-links provided in this post.  You might help yourself beyond belief, or be able to assist someone you know in their efforts to deal with any ongoing traumatic consequences in their lives – including their ability to parent effectively.

Trauma is not bliss, and neither is ignorance.  It is the response-ability of all of us to arm ourselves with any and all information that can help us understand what we can better do to improve secure attachments in the world – no matter who we are, what age we are, or what we have experienced.

Thank you for reading this post.  Comments are welcome and appreciated.

+ATTACHMENT: SMART AND STUPID RESEARCH

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+HUMAN AND HORSE MOTHERING – WHAT’S IN COMMON?

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I wanted to share something from a book I’m reading, The Body Language of Horses by Tom Ledbetter, Bonnie Ainslie.  My brother gave it to me while I was visiting him in Alaska.

I’ve never really had the longed for luxury of being able to spend time with horses.  I’ve always been too poor, too involved in keeping my children clothed and fed with a roof over our heads.

I find as I read this book that I feel like the authors are talking about me.  How can that be?  I am not a horse, yet I am like them.  Because of the extreme abuse I suffered from the time I was little, and because of the overall and overriding insanity present in the home I grew up in, I did not grow up to be an ordinary person.

I have tried to fit in.  I’ve tried to learn the ‘human language’ that others speak not most importantly with their words, but with their body language and the expressions on their faces.  Because my mother was psychotic, because she could not interact with me normally, I simply did not get the same brain circuitry.  Not even the regions of my brain developed according to ‘ordinary’ experiences or patterns, as I have been explaining in my writings.

I can, therefore, more closely relate to what these authors are saying about horses than I can any book I ever read about people.  I might understand a book about all sorts of other kinds of animals if one was written like this one is, but these authors express a rare and comprehensive understanding of how it is to be a horse.  I am amazed and I am feeling calmer as I read it.

Ainslie and Ledbetter explain that every time a human overwhelms a horse with human demands and misconceptions, the horse has no choice but to act like less than what it is – less than a horse.  I understand.  I was not allowed to be a child.  The way my mother treated me did not allow me to be a child just like some humans do not allow horses to be horses.

All the many parallels I find between horses and myself create inside of me a sense that I am so much more correct in my understanding of the changed body and brain of a severely abused child compared to how a child is SUPPOSED to have been allowed to develop that I really do feel like I am a member of nearly a completely different species than are ‘ordinary’ people.

And I know I am not alone.  Therefore, as I share this single paragraph from this book (so far) I wish readers to understand that human mothers create in their offspring the kind of person their infants and children grow into.  I am aware that genetics plays a part in who we become, but researchers are becoming more and more clear that severe abuse alters how genetic potential expresses itself.

Every time an infant and a young child is not given what it needs to develop into its optimal self some life long consequence to the negative is going to appear.  Only in situations where the most important resiliency factor of the AVAILABILITY of some other adequate early caregiver’s interference in the harmful influence of the severely maltreating mother is there, in the end, hope that the effects of the mother’s severe abuse will not permanently and seriously alter the person her offspring turns out to be.

I encourage readers to FEEL the following words.  Enlarge your perspective and imagine what these words are saying if you think about them in terms of the variances in the quality of human mothering and caregiving.  In human terms mothers are not forced, for the most part, to compete with other mothers for what is needed to care for their infants and children.

And yet the end result of a human continuum of living a quality, happy and successful life is still directly connected to what our mothers (or other early caregivers) gave to us.  Harm and hatred to infants DOES NOT allow them to develop into fundamentally happy people – and I don’t care how financially well-off such an offspring turns out to be.  Look at their relationships as well as financial standing.

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From The Body Language of Horses by Tom Ledbetter, Bonnie Ainslie:

“The lead mare wins dominance by physical and psychological means.  She rules as long as she remains vigorous.  Her powers serve twin purposes – first choice of food and space (a) for herself and (b) for her young.  By natural selection, the other mares organize in declining order of priority, with the lowest and most subservient getting the last and least for herself and her foal.  Unless the pasture is inhumanely crowded, everyone subsists.  But the psychological effects on the foals are substantially important.  As Number One in its own age group, the lead mare’s baby becomes habituated to the deference of its peers and their dams.  If well bred, soundly constructed and not too severely disoriented by premature weaning, the Number One foal emerges as Number One weanling, most likely to succeed in what humanity calls the Game of Life.”  (P. 64)

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We are not used to thinking about human success, including psychological success, in these terms.  We do not FIRST and FOREMOST understand that it is the health and well-being of mothers (early caregivers) that MOST affects the lifelong outcome of her offspring.

In American, in particular, we want to believe that everyone is equal, and that all can “make it” if they want to and if they work for it.  We do not want to face the fact that deprivations of a serious enough nature from conception to age 2 (and then through age 7) can so set a person off course that they will never be able to completely make up the difference.

Yes, humans may be far more complicated than horses are.  That means to me that we are at an even higher risk for negative consequences from malevolent mothering – not less.  Once our culture truly understands this fact, they will be able to give us the chances we TRULY need to find a way to live well in spite of our malevolent childhoods.

In my thinking, we have to be very clear and very careful about how we assess who and how we are in the world made mostly by people who had the benevolent childhoods we all deserved – and some received the opposite of.  Most do not become members of the ‘lower hierarchy’ because we choose to be there, any more than a horse chooses to me maltreated by a human being.

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+LINKS FROM THE PAST – MY MOTHER AND HER MOTHER – A LETTER

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All Borderlines, all abusive parents had mothers of one kind or another.  I am always asking the questions in the back of my mind, “What kind of mother was my grandmother to my mother?  What kind of mother was my great grandmother to my grandmother?”

It is of course extremely difficult for me to engage in my forensic autobiographical search to find any answer to my questions.  Yet I do have the written words of both my mother and my grandmother contained in these piles of old letters I am in the process of transcribing.

This is the link to the first of my grandmother’s letters I have transcribed.  Like drawing a single drop from a vast ocean, this single letter remains as only that single drop, yet also contains within it some reflection of the ocean of interactions my mother had over her lifetime with her own mother.

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Follow this link and see what you think!

*Grandmother’s 10-2-1961 Letter to Mother

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I just completed transcription of an earlier letter from my grandmother to my mother.  It contains these words of wisdom:

“Get a hot water bottle and a new diaphragm, Mil.”

*Grandmother’s 3-3-1960 Letter to Mother

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Newest transcriptions:

*Grandmother’s 1-9-1960 Letter to Mother

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*Grandmother’s 3-2-1960 Letter to Mother

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*Grandmother’s 3-19-1960 Letter to Mother

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*Grandmother’s 4-9-1960 Letter to Mother

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*Grandmother’s 4-17-1960 Letter to Mother

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+LINK TO TODAY’S WRITING: MEETING MY BORDERLINE MOTHER’S FRIEND

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J.V. was probably the calm to my mother’s storm.  J.V. was unshakable.  She was invincible.  She was consistent, steady, not emotionally involved, clear, outspoken and wise.  My mother could not throw the lasso of her insanity around J.V. and yank her in.  She could not employ J.V. to join with her in craziness in any way.  My mother could not cajole J.V. into any role in her ongoing destructive drama of her life.  Somehow J.V. had something rarer than any precious gem.  She had the ability to be a severe borderline’s friend for 46 years.

This link below connects to this piece that I wrote today about my visit in Alaska with my mother’s friend:

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*Age 58 – MEETING MY MOTHER’S FRIEND

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+LEFT, RIGHT, CENTER AND HIGHER BRAIN: MY RIGHT TO WRITE!

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While Dr. Martin Teicher and his Harvard Medical School research group have at least – and at last – finally told us the facts about how early brain development can be altered from extreme early child abuse, I can find no one who talks about what this altered brain feels like from the inside.

I am living with such an altered brain.  Every day I discover how that changed brain impacts on my ability to life anything like a quality life.

Since my return from Alaska, and since my decision to actually write a book rather than simply pouring all my words down the hole (whole) in the cup of my blog, I find that I cannot do it.  I think I know part of the reason why.  Perhaps if I articulate what this seems like I can move past what it is that is stopping me?

As Jill Bolte Taylor describes it in her book ‘My Stoke of Insight’, the right brain does not process anything like a sequence of time.  It also cannot write a book by itself.  Taylor describes how her thoughts operated in words even though she lost the ability during her left brain stroke to either verbalize or to comprehend others’ spoken words.  I wonder how a brain allows us to speak to ourselves within our skulls in word-thoughts even at those times that we cannot use language to communicate outside of ourselves?

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When my brother described how writing a book is like forming a shape from carving a block of wood, my right brain understood exactly what he was saying.  Yet I am now stuck with the dilemma of knowing that a book is a tangible, physical THING.  That means to me that my creative right brain efforts must become directed to the formation of an object.  That must require a multiple level of word-thinking, goal direction and focus that I don’t seem able to do – at least not right now until I LEARN how!

My experience with making anything creatively is that I enter what I understand is a right brain creative space that does not require words.  Some might call this FLOW.  In fact, only during brief periods of needing to organize specific actions (like getting materials together, or actually deciding how big to make something, etc.) do words ever enter my ‘making’ process.

How, then, do I creatively write a book?  My brain seems stuck in this dilemma.  Blogging is writing.  It is not about making a tangible, physical object.  I can evidently utilize my familiar brain circuitry and patterns while blogging that do not seem remotely available to me if I try to force my brain to make the switch to ‘writing the book’.

How interesting!  And currently, how impossible!  I suspect that an ‘ordinarily formed’ brain can enter FLOW space and not lose its orientation and organization in the process.  Based on my current experience, I don’t think my ‘evolutionarily altered’ brain can do that!

I understand that it is the higher cortical areas of the brain that are designed to direct the entire show of how we use our brain-minds to BE in the world.  Teicher’s group and other infant brain development specialists talk about how extreme early child abuse alters the development of BOTH brain hemispheres, of the corpus callosum that lies between them and sends information back and forth between them, and also changes how the higher cortices develop (causing early atrophy rather than normal development).  And these are certainly not the only regions, circuits and operations that are affected!

Great!  And we are supposed to live an ordinary, normal life with THAT brain?  Or write a book with it!  I can make jewelry, crochet rugs, make mosaics, draw a picture, make a clay pot, spin wool, weave, make a garden – in short, do all kinds of creative things with this brain because ‘making things’ has always been a part of who I was born to be.  But the process, or the FLOW of making things seems dissociated for me in certain ways from being able to set a concrete goal toward a specific concrete expression of that FLOW.

Throughout my childhood my mother berated and belittled me for being a stupid child because I sat in the middle of the living room floor making and remaking necklaces out of pop beads before I was two years old.  I doubt that as a young child I had any plan as my tiny fingers ‘worked’ with those beads.  I could interact between process and objects in the material world so that some ‘thing’ came out of it.  It was a natural, nonarticulated process that could happen without any higher cortical goal in mind, without self-censorship, and without any ‘attachment’ to outcome.

How do I do that with words?  Taylor has a lot to say in her book about how silent her brain became as her left brain lost its ability to ‘run the show’.  She applauds the benefits of finding ways to access that silence for ourselves as a good thing even when our whole brain is in operation.  (After eight years of focused and dedicated effort Taylor repaired her brain after her stroke at age 37.)

I say that along with thousands of other suggestions given by people who had safe and securely attached childhoods and were thus able to build ‘ordinary’ brains, that those of us with these malevolently-formed changed brains need to be very careful about taking what an ordinary brain person says about how THEIR ‘ordinary’ brain works and applying it across the board to ourselves.

I can assure you that having a silent brain caused by disconnection with the left hemisphere, and having predominantly right brain experiences without correct cooperative processing of information with the left brain, and being denied ordinary-kind supervision and direction from an ordinarily-formed higher cortex is NOT a blissful experience.  It is unsettling, difficult, challenging, disorienting, disorganizing, and SCARY!

Again, I highly recommend reading My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Ph.D., Jill Bolte Taylor.  It at least gives us a clear language and frame of reference to BEGIN to understand – from deep within our own altered experience – how an ‘ordinary’ brain works in contrast to how our ‘evolutionarily altered’ brain does!

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Enough words about this for the time being.  I do not have a co-writer or a publisher or an invested editor to help me write my book – or to act in place of the higher cortex I need to complete this task as I wish to accomplish it.  I have to find a way to argue this out for myself.  If I cannot do this, the blog will remain as my continual FLOW repository for words that seem to stream out easily in this format, but flee into invisibility if I try to direct them toward a final, finished, tangible, physical object – a book!

The silence that Taylor describes as her left brain shut down was in part about the vanishing voice of judgment and criticism that the left brain seems so prone to offer us.  Blogging is not about being right or wrong, not about succeeding or not, not about approval or any of the operations and expectations that the left brain sinks its teeth into.

If my efforts at ‘making a book’ are being sabotaged by my left brain’s critic, does it have to respond by holding its ability to process language at bay where my right brain can’t get to it?  Does it have to seal my words off from my writing, creating right brain that needs them?  “Come on, you two!  Let’s do better than that!  Cooperate, already!”

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Speaking of books, I am in the process of  reading my way through two of them:

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin

The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature by Daniel J. Levitin

I am not reading them for any particular insight into music, per se.  Levitin mentions that the word for song and the word for dance are the same in many world languages because singing involves body movement.  I know that we had both abilities, and their corresponding brain networks firmly implanted within us long before the 140,000-year-ago benchmark when our FOXP2 gene became activated and we evolved to speak.

It seems obvious to me that we evolved ways to express ourselves and to communicate through song, dance, drama, pantomime and all sorts of gestures from our earliest beginnings.  It was only after those brain regions and circuits were very well formed that we were able to use them – MUCH LATER in our development – to talk and think in words!

I am reading this book because I am looking for ways to think about how screaming, shouting, yelling and all forms of verbal violence and auditory assault in the world of the unborn and the very young child affect the development of sound (and language) processing in the developing brain.

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+BEING HUMAN, ANIMAL OR OBJECT?

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This is a complex article (link below) but concerns the important considerations about how does a severely abused young child build into its brain the correct ability to differentiate people from objects and animals if it is NOT treated as human?

Even though experts say, a young child before the age of two just IS and has not yet developed a Theory of Mind, this does not mean that all the underlying brain circuitry necessary for this ability to form after the age of two is not well in place long before that age.  If an infant and child before the age of two has been severely maltreated and does not have the benefit of a safe and secure attachment with an early caregiver, the faulty foundations within the brain will not easily – if ever – allow for an ‘ordinary’ Theory of Mind to form – at any age.

At age 58 I can clearly feel now what I believe is a major difference in the way my brain processes information from contact and experience with people from how I strongly suspect ‘ordinary’ people do.  I can become increasingly aware of HOW I operate in relation to people, but it is far too late for me to change the brain circuitry that formed during malevolent interactions with my mother and is the foundation for who and how I am in the world.

(I talked with a moose while I was visiting my brother last week in Alaska.  It came to graze under his deck and took a nap on my brother’s lawn.  Except for a very few special people in my life, I am far more comfortable conversing with a moose than I will ever be in the presence of humans.)

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Thinking About Actions:

The Neural Substrates of Person Knowledge

ABSTRACT:

“Despite an extensive literature on the neural substrates of semantic knowledge, how person-related information is represented in the brain has yet to be elucidated. Accordingly, in the present study we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of person knowledge.

Focusing on the neural substrates of action knowledge, participants reported whether or not a common set of behaviors could be performed by people or dogs. While dogs and people are capable of performing many of the same actions (e.g. run, sit, bite), we surmised that the representation of this knowledge would be associated with distinct patterns of neural activity.  Specifically, person judgments were expected to activate cortical areas associated with theory of mind (ToM) reasoning. The results supported this prediction. Whereas action-related judgments about dogs were associated with activity in various regions, including the occipital and parahippocampal gyri; identical judgments about people yielded activity in areas of prefrontal cortex, notably the right middle and medial frontal gyri.

These findings suggest that person knowledge may be functionally dissociable from comparable information about other animals, with action-related judgments about people recruiting neural activity that is indicative of ToM reasoning.”

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Two other related article links:

Linking Form and Motion in the Primate Brain

And another related article:

The Representation of Object Concepts in the Brain

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+SUGGESTED BOOK ON BRAIN HEALING!

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I am still in the middle of traveling (went 4-wheeling and horse back riding today), and leave northern Minnesota tomorrow morning for a night’s stay at my son’s in Grand Forks, ND and then back down to my daughter’s in Fargo for another ten days before heading ‘home’ to Alaska to see my brothers and the land.

I could write volumes about my experiences thus far, but there’s only one thing I really want to mention right now.  My youngest sister generously sent me a copy of a book she was reading on her Kindle when I visited her in Seattle recently, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Ph.D., Jill Bolte Taylor.  I want to mention it here so that any of you who might find her book of value will have time to get a copy to read before I finally get a chance (after my travels) to write here about my own perception of the value of this book.

Although I highly recommend Jill’s book, because of the specific issues I present on this blog regarding the life long consequences of early severe child abuse as it affects — and alters — the development of the young brain, I suggest that readers might wish to actually begin their reading of “My Stroke of Insight” with Chapter 15 that begins on page 138.  Of course it would be preferrable to begin at the beginning, but the information that the author presents beginning on the page I mention here is most specifically related to “our” topic.

I have never read in any single book so many clear and helpfully identified suggestions about how to manage one’s BRAIN and therefore one’s quality of life!  Jill’s descriptions about how the two hemispheres of the brain operate cannot be matched!  As you read this book you will come to understand how hard-won her suggestions about how to live a ‘better’ life are.  Yet while it is not my intention to in any way demean, belittle or criticize Jill’s perspectives, I do wish to urge this blog’s readers to practice what I call the ‘cautionary’ approach to her statements about her experience with healing her own brain post-stroke. 

Reading the latter chapters in Jill’s book provide an excellent experience in finding the middle road between what people might be able to know and understand about their brains when those brains were formed under benovolent conditions (as Jill’s seems to have been pre-stroke damage), and what those of us whose brains formed under malevolent severe child abuse and neglect conditions need to learn and understand about our altered brain and how to heal it.

Interestingly, Jill’s professional life as a neuroanatomist is intimately connected to Harvard, the same educational and research ‘facility’ that birthed the concept that those of us who were severely abused as children have a changed (‘evolutionarily altered’) brain as a result of our development under extremely adverse conditions.  While there is much in Jill’s writing that I can see as being of value to me (on the middle road) I do not get the sense that she knows about the ‘Martin Teicher’s Group’s’ research about child abuse and how it changes brain development.  Jill’s book does, however, give an impressive jump-start opportunity to learn valuable information about healing a wounded brain – and a wounded self – and that certainly includes me/us.

I won’t go into any more detail at the moment, but I wanted to get this information onto the blog about this book with the hopes that readers will take a little time to pop on over to amazon.com (at least) and explore the value of this book for themselves.  It is a very reasonably priced book and is worth much more for the dime than any book I could possibly recommend!!

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I am far from feeling comfortable using other people’s computers, so will wait for a better  and more appropriate time  to activate those parts of my own brain and being that wait for a future date — when my current play-visit-self-expansion-challenge time has drawn to a close.  I wish you all the very best — and suggest that you read My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Ph.D., Jill Bolte Taylor as soon as you can get your hands on a copy!!  I promise — you will be glad that you did!  Rarely, in my opinion, does a book appear that more than carries its own weight in VALUE such as this one does!! 

Be sure to post your comments here about what you think of Jill’s book once you read it!!

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 Who’s Mother of the Year? 

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Step-up to Prevent Child Abuse!Promising Practices for Preventing Child Abuse and Neglect

 

 

+SIBLING PARTICIPATION IN CHILD ABUSE

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So far none of these stories are getting any easier to write, but fortunately my determination to write them more than matches any reluctance I have to do so.

Each memory that leads to each story seems to be difficult in a unique and unforeseen way.  Some I can write about with more immunity that others.  The one I wrote today has been the most difficult, and having done so I feel a quivering inside my gut because the story STILL scares me.

*Age 14 – Gardening and the Sabotage

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I think again about M. Scott Peck’s book, “People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil” that I referred to in my story about how I abused my little son that was also directly connected to my being able to finally disown my mother.  I wonder about the entire web of my childhood, even as it is presented in the words of my mother’s own writing.  It was all a lie.

Nobody on the outside of our family could have possibly believed the lie– BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T HAVE TO!  This was a fact by default.  Only those of us on the inside of my family had to believe it.  They had no choice.  We were all forced to play our part, one way or the other.

At what point does free will and conscious choice on the part of such a distorted family members enter the picture in any meaningful way?  How can that freedom even be allowed to exist in a family that depends on living the lie for its very existence and survival?  Can we trust that telling the truth always means that we are on the road of healing?

I don’t know that I know the answer, but I wrote this story in spite of that fact.  Did doing so in any way contribute to an increase in my freedom from the hold that my horrendous child abuse history holds over me?  After all, today is the 4th of July, and we are supposed to be celebrating what it means to be free.

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+WE NEED NEW WORDS TO DIALOG WITH OUR BODY ABOUT TRAUMA

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I am trying to think of another word other than ‘renaissance’, or rebirth, to describe what I wish was happening now among those of us ordinary people who are trying to live the best lives we can without necessarily having the kind of safe and secure attachment background we needed to get along better in life.

I am thinking especially about what little information we really have about our bodies and how they operate.  Sometime in our first year of life people begin to teach infants about their body — and most of us never progress much past that point!  We are taught to point to our eyes, nose, mouth, ears, limbs, etc.

Eventually we learn through our public education and then through osmosis over time about the major organs of our body, and make little progress past that point unless we get sick and then learn the minimum we need to in order to understand what is happening to us.  We seem to prefer to use only one syllable words to think about the only body we will ever have to live in for the rest of our lives.

Yet while we would rather leave anything more complicated than what we consider essential to the ‘experts’, at the same time I do believe our platform of information concerning our bodies is making advancements.  We hear about things through the general media and that information will eventually ‘stick’ if we hear it enough and somehow we begin to understand it is important because it applies to us.

As we are doing this learning, as unintentionally as it might be, we are at the same time expanding our vocabulary.  It’s no different than teaching an infant the word for their nose.  We are learning to name what is going on inside of us.  Yet at the same time we are learning meanings for words like diabetes, hypertension, obesity, allergies, arthritis, osteoporosis, cancer, learning disabilities, addiction, anxiety, depression, serotonin, dopamine, reward system, we less likely to learn how these kinds of ‘events’ are all connected within us to who we are within our own body.

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We all know we are dependent upon and would rather support a medical model that prefers to respond only to symptoms,  prescribe every kind of expensive test to diagnosis illness, dish out every imaginable kind of drug to treat sickness than we are to put forth the effort ourselves to learn any more complicated information about our body than we have to.

Why is that?  When and how did we learn to accept that we don’t need to learn anything more than a 5th grader could learn about how our body operates?  Did someone tell us we are too dumb to learn anything more complicated?  Looking backward, maybe this kind of thinking has worked for all of the generations that have gone before us.

Today there are more of us living longer than ever before in history.  But taking material goods out of the equation, what is our quality of life?  Particularly, what is the quality of our human attachments — our own attachment with our self included?  As a social species, it matters.  We have the desire to live our years better, last longer, and suffer less.  Understanding how our attachment system operates, what has hurt it and what can help it can help us live a better life on every level because it operates on every single level of who we are.

Those of us who suffered from extra-ordinary trauma and abuse during our developmental stages especially need to learn the words that will let us be able to understand how that abuse changed our bodies.  I see it as being no different than any healing process of disclosure. Any improvement we can make to talk about the effects our traumas had on us is empowering.  Trauma changed our bodies, and we don’t even know — on the most vital and profound levels — what that means.

We need the words.  We need them badly.  A  securely-attached-from-birth person has all that good-safe information built right into their body-brain-mind.  They don’t have to think about it.  They don’t even need to talk about it.  They just live it.

Those of us who were so abused that we are the insecurely-attached-from-birth, however, have to learn NOW what these ‘others’ learned when they were supposed to learn it — as infants and young children.  Our communication signals between our body, brain, mind and self are all scrambled up.  We have to learn NOW what those ‘others’ learned from the time they were born.  We cannot efficiently and effectively learn NOW what we have no words to talk about.

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I think at this moment how strange it seems that I, of all people, would be writing about attachment.  Looking back at the strangeness, the unpredictable, escalating, irrational violence and abuse, looking back at the extreme isolation I was forced to endure through my childhood, I can’t help but say that of all the people I can imagine writing about attachment, I can be good at it because I am so bad at it.

Suffering from the long term consequences of an extremely abusive childhood can make us feel so alienated from what ‘ordinary’ people seem to now about living ‘ordinary’ lives that we might be tempted to simply throw in the towel, give up and quit.  Yet as I work my way through the volumes of technical, even molecular research information about our own internal cannabinoid (‘cannabis’)  (and opioid) attachment systems, I realize that by my just being alive I HAVE to know there are things about my attachment system that went right from the beginning or I most simply — would not be here.

I was attached enough to life from the beginning that I was conceived in the first place, implanted onto my mother’s uterine wall, received nourishment from her body, and made it through a difficult birth — just to GET here and to BE here.  Through all the terrible traumas, through all the pain, suffering, sorrows and sadness of my childhood I was still attached enough between my inner, true self and the world to STILL be able to find, recognize, appreciate and value beauty — wherever I found it as a very small child —  even in bubble shadows reflected on the bottom of a toilet bowl, even in the shimmering reflection of water on my bedroom ceiling when I was so punished for doing nothing but being alive.

I am amazed as I work on the endocannabinoid file regarding human reproduction.  Perhaps because I cannot take any kind of safe and secure attachment either lightly or for granted I marvel at the very essence of the miracle of life that was each of our beginnings.  How can such a perfectly ordered system like our attachment system is, be sent off into such difficult directions through insufficient if not outright malevolent circumstances of traumatic early childhood experiences?

I understand that given the requirements of staying alive — if at all possible, in the very worst of situations –that we could not make the adjustments we had to make to survive THEN and necessarily be ‘ordinary’ NOW.  Yet at the same time I also understand that all of it was and is about signals of communication on the molecular and genetic level between the environment we live in and the self we live in it with.

That is the same process that happened when I was conceived, the same process that is happening in each present moment I am alive, the same process that connects every moment of my life together with me in the center of it.

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If I did not have a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder I doubt that I would have ever been motivated to go looking for the big multiple-syllable words that I know I now need to understand the ‘extra-ordinary’ way my body-brain-mind was forced to adapt, develop, and the way it works now.  It is not by looking at all the ways I am dissociated, fragmented and disconnected that will make me feel more safe and secure in my own body in this world.  It is by looking at the ways I am associated, connected and organized that helps me to know that things can never be all that bad!  After all, I am a participant in some kind of miracle here!  We all call that — LIFE!

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So maybe ‘renaissance’, or rebirth, is the word I need.  Maybe as I go back all the way to my very first beginnings I can bring a new kind of understanding about my own place in my own body in my own life into my present.  I find I need to know new things and I need to know new words to know these new things.  I am sitting in the middle of a tragic relationship breakup, not far into a new future of cancer recovery, completely unsure of who I really am, of what I want, or of what is even possible for my future.

But maybe I do not know because I cannot know.  I have to wait for the signals.  The ones I need are not going to come from anywhere else other than from within my own body.  On the most tiny, minute level of who I am — right where my own molecules are constantly interacting with my genetics — something interesting is ALWAYS occurring.  It is that inner world that guides what happens to me as I interact with this great, big wide outer world.

I want to be amazed.  I want to be more attached.  Safely.  Securely.  Peacefully.  Whatever it takes for me to get there I will try to do.  This isn’t about whatever the Buddhist concept of detachment is.  I have been forced to be detached from my own self in my own body all of my life.  Terrible, terrifying, insane abuse put me in THAT place.  I want something new and different, something I think non-abused ‘ordinary’ people can take for granted all of their lives.

I want to know, without a single shadow of any kind of doubt, that I have a right to be here and do so willingly, if not eventually happily.  That was the destiny of the fertilized egg that was me in my beginnings.  How could it be anything but my destiny today?  I did not become lost to the path of that good journey on purpose (I had a great deal of help through a great deal of harm), and while it is taking the better part of my life to find my way back, it is not a journey I am making alone!

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