Tag: maltreatment

+HOW DO WE LIVE WELL WHEN WE HAVE TOO MUCH TRAUMA INFORMATION

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Healing is such an amazing process, and yes is one that those of us who were severely abused as children include as an ongoing process every moment of our entire lives.  But being just as equally certain that the healing process is not only as real as was the wounding process in the first place, but is more powerful because it is directly tied into the forces of building life rather than of tearing it down.

As I read and replied to the coolest comments I received on the last post I wrote, I realize that even THAT process – writing the first post, having my dear friend talk to me about her reactions, then my writing of the second post and today receiving the wisdom of commenters and replying to those — is all about what we are talking about!  The more clearly I can understand things, the more power I receive to continue on this healing path, with the knowledge that miracles DO happen and healing can occur as suddenly and ‘out of the blue’ as did many of the terrible abuse events of my childhood.

These ‘healing shifts’ that happen as we apply our best efforts toward the best end possible can happen like the

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I like that NEW IDEA I received today as a result of having accomplished the tasks I didn’t even specifically recognize I was tackling through the process I just described of writing:  Quantum leap learning!  But wait!  There’s MORE!  This leads me to awareness of the fact that what we most want to accomplish is QUANTUM LEAP HEALING!  Now THAT’S MORE LIKE IT!  By following this search on the web I come up with all kinds of links that related to what my BODY knows as it leads me through careful disclosure down the road of removing bit by bit by bit by bit the inner obstacles I carry within me from the abuse I experienced that prevent me from obtaining frequent states of well being.

I refuse to let references to ‘psychic’, etc. stop me from pursuing information related to this new thought I am having today.  As I describe in my piece about doing art therapy, and even about being saved from death in my high school parking lot, I no longer even think about them in terms of ‘psychic’ experiences.  I am beginning to realize as I move forward in my disclosure-healing process that there are probably more things in life we do not know enough about to fully describe them with words than there are ones that we can tidily wrap words around and put a ribbon on top of!

I think about how a parent works with a young child who comes to them saying, “I don’t feel good!”  The parent has to help them examine exactly what it is their body is telling them that led to that statement:  “Where do you hurt?  Does your tummy hurt?  Does your head hurt?”  The parent will feel for a temperature, determine if the child is thirsty, hungry, tired, scared or sad.  Once these details are brought to light, given names and addressed, life can move on as improvement happens.

We live in a materialistic, object obsessed culture that wants to think not only that the brain is an object, but also that it can be separated through some magical process from the body it is a part of.  To make matters work, we are told that our LEFT brain is superior, and that our ‘higher’ cortex is most important of all.  Be logical!  Don’t have feelings, don’t believe in anything intangible that you can’t see, feel or touch.

How ridiculous and destructive is this belief?  How limiting?  How inadequate?

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Those of us who of us who had too much life information forced upon us by traumatic early childhood experiences will not heal if we follow this societal pattern.  It would be like being given a doll’s shoe and told to put our big adult foot into it.  Not possible.  The left hemisphere of our brain has a critical job to do, but it will sit idle or be left to process empty, meaningless information if we don’t give it our truth to work with.

That truth is stored in our body and processed in our right brain hemisphere.  Our left brain is eager to WORK WITH that information, but cannot possibly access it by itself.  That is not its job.

We must also remember than if malevolent conditions surrounded us as our body-brain formed in the first place, neither of our brain hemispheres developed as they are ‘ordinarily’ supposed to.  The part of the brain in the middle that is the bridge between the two hemispheres that is designed to transmit information between these ‘two different brains’ we have was not designed in an ‘ordinary’ fashion, either.  This fact affects what information we receive, the way we receive it, store it, access it, and process it.  This is not a minor alteration of who we were meant to be and who we turned out to be!

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I am not writing ‘clinical’ information here, either.  This information is no different than if someone told us how to avoid electrocuting ourselves or burning down our house!  We aren’t working for our own best interests by refusing to accept these facts, or by feeling inadequate to learn them.  They are important, and influence how successful our efforts to heal from our traumas and live a better life are.

It is the nature of overwhelming trauma to give us too much information that we have no possible way of making good use of.  Our bodies were designed to process not only the information about our traumas themselves, but also designed to protect us from being completely overwhelmed by the ‘too much inappropriate information’.   Our body-brain does this in the safest way it possibly can.

I see a ‘wordless image’ at this moment provided to my left brain from my right brain’s storehouse of information.  If  I was desperately thirsty and wanted a drink of water, and decided that filling an empty paper cup with water from the end of a fire hose turned on full blast was the best way to solve my problem, I would be disappointed with the results!  If I was tired of living in the night darkness and decided to wire house by myself, not knowing how to do the job right, and then hooked up my circuit box to an electric cable carrying the full load of electricity meant to power a town of ten thousand, I would also be disappointed at the outcome of my efforts to solve this problem.

Every person might want to access water and power to maintain their life – or life style.  But just because these systems seem to work without thought or effort for ‘ordinary’ people around us does not mean that things are going to work the same way for those of us who were designed by and build for malevolent worlds of trauma through severe child abuse.  We simply have too much information!

At the same time we are trying to maintain our every day existence, the same way that everyone else does, we are also continually forced to deal with the ongoing effects of what happened to us.  Much of our life force that would be free to become expressed in our life in positive ways is instead tied up in trying to life IN SPITE of our traumatic overload.  A big part of who we are is occupied with maintaining the emergency conditions that exist in our body-brain-minds.

I see the wordless image of a thousand room mansion so full of trauma related information and misinformation that we have no human way to deal with that we must do our best to seal off all the rooms and live on the front porch!  Because this house is really our body we can never just walk away from it.  We have found all kinds of ways to continue on living, but we are always paying a terrible price to do so.

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It takes time, patience, wisdom, care, courage, determination and persistent courage to live this kind of life while we are constantly trying to heal at the same time!  Any ‘quantum leap of healing’ that comes our way would be a most welcome gift!  I believe that through the process of dialoging between our body and both hemispheres of our brain we can experience these kinds of necessary quantum leaps of healing.  These leaps are made both more possible and more probable as we ALSO dialog with one another.

Even if we could use an invisibility to cloak to make our thousand room mansion appear to be nonexistent, or send it into an alternate dimension like they did to things on the Stargate SG-1 episodes, The existence of our trauma too-much-information overload is still always present.  The energy we use to NOT deal with it is vast.  The energy we use TO DEAL with it is vast.  Either way, we need to be realistic and compassionate with ourselves as we learn more daily about how to live a better life.

When our body sends us information through our right brain, we CAN learn to heed this information wisely.  Our body will tell us what our limits are.  It will tell us what we need to do to feel safer and more secure in the world.  We cannot afford to ignore this information or pretend our trauma history doesn’t exist.  Doing so limits us and by excluding much of who we are.  I hear my right brain’s inner voice speaking through my left brain’s voice, “It’s OK now.  It’s all over.  You can come out from hiding.”  At the same time I hear that voice saying, “I am here to help you.  You are never alone.

My job is to be willing to listen to what my body’s voice is saying.  It is never wrong.

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+WRITING ABOUT OUR SEVERE EARLY TRAUMAS FROM THE INSIDE OUT

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Nobody might want to hear this, but I do believe that there can be wounds created within a child by severe abuse that will never heal.  These wounds are too deep and too awful from crimes committed against children during their growth developmental stages that are too much, too deep, and too overwhelming to ‘make go away’.  Knowing this fact is why we accept that there is a category called ‘criminal’ in the first place.

We do not want to be a lawless society.  We want protection.  We want accountability.  We want justice.  We want these things because we do not want to be injured, wounded or killed.  We do not want to be trespassed against.  We do not want our rights to well being to be threatened by torture and terrorism.  We do not want to pay the price that living with the consequences of these lawless, criminal actions requires.

Then why, at the same time, is it so hard for most people to understand that what life is truly like for a severe child abuse survivor, especially for those who were forced to suffer malevolent treatment from birth through the first 5 years of their lives, have lifelong serious damage as a result of powerful people harming them?

I am not saying that we survivors cannot work toward our healing.  We do that with every breath we take.  We always have, and we always will.  But that does not give us the same quality of life, the same ability or chance to experience health and well being, that we would have had if we had been kept safe from criminals when we needed it most.

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We need more fortunate people to truly be able to hear what we are saying.

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I want to note here that I don’t intentionally keep my writing either clinical or sterile.  I have difficulty realizing how people who do not have extremely severe early childhood abuse histories understand what I say and why I say it the way that I do.  I know instinctively that the people I write most for are those with histories similar to mine.  For us, especially if we have built-in serious ‘issues’ with dissociation, our brains do not work the same as more ordinary brains do.

We are therefore always putting ourselves close to internal danger if and when we choose to recall actual memories.  It is not at all a given that feelings the feelings that were present when the abuse occurred is either wise or helpful.  We must be extremely careful of ourselves, and I am, as the writer of these pieces, certainly no exception.

Neither at this point do I choose to put the ‘Disney Special’ twist to my stories, either.  If any of you are interested, try recalling one of your own early childhood trauma events and write it.  We can write from different points of view, differing degrees of closeness or distance from the experience of the abuse.  I can never emphasize enough how important it is to keep ourselves safe while we disclose our abuse and work toward our own healing.

Because so few of us who need it will ever be able to access or afford the kind of quality state-of-the-art therapy we need and deserve in order to safely approach the kind of emotional-memory work that will usual accompany severe early trauma memory retrieval, we are left alone doing the best we can with the resources we have.  That is NOT ENOUGH in my book.  It reflects a serious lack of attention to the needs of adult survivors of horrendous child abuse.

When I speak of the ‘unitiated’ reader I do not intend to offend anyone.  I do, however, mean that word literally.  Those of us with severe child abuse histories know things as a result of having lived through what we did.  Those who have not — most fortunately — been forced to have their childhoods completely stolen from them, cannot, I believe, ever know what those of us who did have ours stolen think like or feel like.  There does exist, in my opinion, a line of differentiation between these two groups of people I am describing.

There is a vast difference between telling ABOUT a memory and telling the memory.  The former is far safer for us to do than the latter.  That is a fact.  I suspect that a reader without a severe abuse history might be ‘dying to know more’ about what the experience of abuse a survivor might be disclosing, and wants the survivor to give them enough detailed information that the reader might think they know what the survivor is talking about.

I am not at all sure that this is possible.  When reading good fiction the writer can give enough vivid description to enable the reader’s mind to actively imagine themselves as being IN the story.  That is not what my kind of writing is about — at least certainly not yet.  I am not writing fiction.  At the same time I don’t see that I am necessarily writing nonfiction, either.  I am writing the truth.

The truth is not clinical, stark, barren, dry or simple.  Reading the truth, when it hurts, requires more than imagination.  It requires a willingness to open oneself up to one’s own pain, to admit that even though there are certainly times when things were rosy and cheerful (not true in my case as a child but true for MOST readers), there were also  times when someone bigger than you hurt you when you were most small and vulnerable, whether they meant to or not.

Those times matter.  I encourage you to write about your stories yourself.  Writing is different than telling someone a story verbally, though this means of disclosure is certainly valid and important.  Writing about it uses another set of functions and abilities in body, brain and mind.  It forces us to ALLOW a linear process or organization to give order to the chaos that our traumas have created within us.  If you had no early traumas, you are most fortunate.  If you did and they are healed, you are also most fortunate.

If you do wish to write and don’t already have a blogspace, I recommend WordPress.com as a wonderful place to start.  I would love you to drop a comment over here about your writing as I would most definitely wish to come by and visit.

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+LINK TO NEW PAGE ON DISSOCIATION

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I’ve heard of a ‘garden variety’ of this or that, but is there a ‘parking lot’ variety of dissociation for those of us who are severe child abuse survivors?  Or was this experience, as recorded on this new page

Age 14 – MIRACLE IN THE PARKING LOT – DISSOCIATION

nothing but a garden variety of nothing special at all?

I don’t know, but something amazing sure kept me alive!

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+LINK TO NEW PAGE ADDED TODAY – FIGHTING BACK?

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+Age 14 – SCRUBBED IN THE TUB

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We have to be more careful than words can describe not to either blame others for their victimization or to blame ourselves for the harm that was done to us.  How realistic is it for us to expect that any long term violent, consistent, severe abuse survivor EVER had a chance to fight back?

By suggesting that it is the victim’s fault that abuse ever happened in the first place, let alone continued to happen, creates an unattainable illusion within our social consciousness that we don’t — as outsiders — REALLY need to step in and stop abuse.  We are saying that if only the victim had done THEIR JOB to stop the abuse none of the rest of us would have to be involved at all.

Sound extreme?  Read this page.

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+LINK TO NEWLY ADDED CHILDHOOD STORY

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*Age 10 – NIGHTMARES AND BED WETTING

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This page has just been completed and published under MY CHILDHOOD STORIES.  This page contains a ‘MAY TRIGGER ABUSE MEMORIES’ tag, so please be careful, cautious and considerate of yourself if you have a personal history of sexual abuse.

In this page I also wrote about how factual memory of trauma differs from emotional memory of trauma.  Our emotional memory is processed through the amygdala region of our brain and is ALWAYS stored in our body even though the factual memory might not be.  (When the facts are remembered this is called an ‘explicit‘ memory.  When only the emotions and body memory exist without specific facts, this is called an ‘implicit‘ memory.)

The ‘semantic, autobiographical’ factual part of our memories are processed through a different region of our brain, the hippocampus.  There are times particularly in very early childhood when all memory is preverbal and can only be accessed in our body and not through fact.  These memories will govern our unconscious behavior for the rest of our lives.  There are also times when facts related to memory, particularly of trauma memory, is ‘forgotten’ and invisible to us — sometimes forever, sometimes until it is triggered.

It is also important to realize that the stress hormone cortisol can so heat up our hippocampal memory cells as they try to process trauma-related facts that they are fried to a cinder and the facts of a memory will never be recorded – and therefore will never be available to recall.  When and if this happens — and it can happen both to victims and perpetrators-in-the-act — the emotional memory is ALWAYS stored and retained within the body.

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+REWRITING MY STORY OF PETER THE BLACK RABBIT

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I do not know why today I wanted to rewrite

My Story About My Black Rabbit Peter

Perhaps it was because today has been gray and rainy – a very rare occasion for the high desert, and it reminded me of this story.  I think I need another pet rabbit some day – perhaps in my completely unknown future if I can settle somewhere appropriate.  I also don’t know why I needed to write this comment today about the story, but I did.  So I offer both links to you here – for whatever reasons of mystery!

comment on this writing of My Black Rabbit Peter

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+WHAT WE DID NOT LEARN ABOUT TRUST WILL HURT US

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I discovered Brainwave.org this morning, an excellent site devoted to infant brain development through the age of three.  Another excellent site, EQ:  Emotional Intelligence Central, covers a broad range of information on the human social brain that, of course, was formed through the nature and quality of early infant caregiver interactions and affects us for the rest of our lives.

My web search this morning also brought me to a page on brain development of young children written at the university in Fargo, North Dakota where my one of my daughters works!  Another site for The Childhood Affirmations Program covers a wide range of information about “How You Can Shape Your Child’s Brain and Change the World.”

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I have had to narrow my search in my attempt to find the specific information I am looking for today.  I want to know more about when and how the very young infant brain begins to be able to know the difference between who is trustworthy and who is not.  The ability to make this distinction is something that most people can take completely for granted because it is built into an infant’s growing and developing brain so early in life we will never have conscious awareness of how we learned to accomplish this critically important task.

Those of us who were raised in extremely abusive – neglectful, inconsistent, violent, malevolent – early environments could not possibly have developed a ‘trustworthiness meter’ that works in the same way as such a system will for someone who was born into the opposite kind of environment of predictability, benevolence, safety and security.  What our brain never learned as it was built in the first place leaves us with a dis-ability that will make it difficult to recognize critical information from the humans we come into contact with for the rest of our lives.  Who is worthy of our trust and who is not?

Of course humans give and receive signals on many levels that provide us with social-brain information.  If we were formed in, by and for a malevolent world, we will not identify and respond to ANY social signals in the same way as a benevolently-formed person will.  I ask this question today for myself because I know that a person I have trusted for nine years recently ‘flipped sides’ and now appears to be my ‘enemy’.  My mind tells me, “I didn’t see it coming.”

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Whatever the specifics of my history with this man who was so important to me might be, what I think about today are the risk factors that I have carried within my brain from my earliest beginnings.  When I think about all the ‘trauma drama’ that adult child abuse survivors seem doomed to keep repeating, I want to understand more about how my altered social brain knows and does not know about how to recognize in other people what ‘ordinary’ people know so quickly, automatically and unconsciously it would make my conscious mind spin and stagger.

It helps me to realize and begin to know how profoundly my altered brain can affect me at even the most deeply important levels.  I also have to understand that there are degrees of social brain dis-abilities in people that I meet if they come from early abusive environments because their brains did not develop ‘ordinarily’, either!

Unfortunately, the information researchers are providing about how social brain development affects trustworthiness can be complicated and hard to read.  It is important, however, for us to at least know this information is available to us, and that this is a subject that concerns all of us who did not get to develop an ‘ordinary’ social brain in the first place.  Thanks to the internet we can approach the learning of information about our brain’s dis-abilities from either end of the age spectrum.

By looking at information contained in links I provided at the beginning of this post we can learn about how very young infant and child brains learn the important social and emotional information as their brains are forming from the start.  Accessing the information is easier if we look at it from the ‘young’ end.  We can think about our own abuse histories and begin to think about what happened to us, how that affected us, what we might be missing, and how we can begin to change our brains consciously.

We can also look at the information from the adult end.  That information is more complicated.  We CAN understand it with effort, however.  We need to erase that magic, invisible line that we keep in place between what the ‘average’ public can understand and what the ‘brainy experts’ can understand.

We are no longer children.  We have excellent brains, even if their development was altered through our need to adapt to malevolent early experiences.  While we might not consider our need to pay attention to new information about how our social, emotional brain-minds were changed to be of life-saving importance, we can understand that everything about how our brains formed affects the quality of our life and our states of well-being for our entire lifespan!

Even though the study might be difficult, it is worth the effort!  I encourage readers to try it.  Information empowers us on every level.  Even the process of acquiring the information, of learning itself, exercises our brain in positive ways.  Go ahead!  Give it a try!  Follow some of these ‘live links’ I have included in this post.

Even if your studying of this information helps you to better determine safety in ONLY ONE situation, your effort will be worth it!  And have fun with this.  It is not as impossible or difficult as you might think!  Everything and anything that we learn about how our social-emotional brain works will help improve our attachments — to our self, to others, and to the world as a whole.  It will also take the power away from trauma and give it to us.

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+THE QUALITY OF OUR ATTACHMENT SYSTEM DETERMINES HOW WE ARE IN THE WORLD

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My sister recently sent me a link to an article she wanted me to read that was posted on one of the blogs she most frequents.  In two hours of work I have yet to move past the first reference posted within that article because I needed to write my own comment.  In my own mind I cannot separate what I understand about humans as attached social beings from what does or does not adequately attach us to the wider environment of the world we each live in.  I believe it is the same quality of our attachment system that’s been with us from childhood that determines all of the attachments we have in adulthood.

I couldn’t help myself.  I had to write this response to what I have read so far this morning:  *WHEN BEING SELFISH IS TOO SMALL A CONCEPT.

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+DISSOCIATION FROM CHILD ABUSE NEVER LEAVES US

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Written October 16, 2006

I walked into a crowded yet rural gas station-café after spending 3 weeks the summer of 2006 with my friend in her cabin in the northern Minnesota woods.  I experienced instantaneous sensory and perceptual overload.  It was not a logical reaction.  I felt like I shattered, splintered and fragmented.  I was suddenly now in a different world.  I needed a different Linda to cope with it.

It was like the ongoing ME of the past weeks was ‘a state of mind’ that could not transition into this different one, and I suffered disintegration in response to the input of ‘so many possibilities’ that I confronted once I walked in the door of this public establishment.  I could not help but react in almost panic.

It was as if every potential and possible reaction that could possibly happen consumed as much of my attention as what was actually happening at the moment I entered the room, although nothing unusual was happening around me at all.  The unusual was within my own body.  I was just as aware of what could happen as I was of what was happening.  It was as if I could notice at the same time things that might demand my attention in the future even though they didn’t in the present.

It seemed that by my walking into the café I had changed ‘their world’, and I could sense far more of their reactions than these people were probably even aware of themselves.  I do not understand how I could be that aware of what the possibilities of interactions might be, even though I only directly interacted with the cashier near the door.  It was like everything got noisy, very loud, in terms of what I could sense.  I was immediately on overload and left as fast as possible.

THAT was a disorganizing experience, the kind that I believe results from a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder.  Just because we grow into adults does not make our insecure attachments disappear.  I don’t believe it’s ‘just about’ our intimate relationships.  It’s about our whole operation as a self in the world.  I never got to build a solid, safe and secure self that can move around throughout all the transitions of life in a coherent, dependable, ongoing way.

It was as if all these possibilities of complexity triggered a transitional state for me that I could not include within my mind.  I could not narrow what was coming in to me so that I could comfortably focus on the immediate reality of the ‘place’ I was in.  Transitional states of mind are normally brief, just long enough to take in new information, assess it for value and safety, and respond appropriately.  Ordinarily this happens (in innocuous situations) so fast one does not notice that these transitional spaces even exist, let alone know that one has been passed through.

I doubt others without a severe trauma background would be aware of the ‘essence of energy’ present in that small establishment I walked into – and out of.  It was almost like little ghost selves dissolved out of all those bodies and came rushing toward me and hovered around, too close for comfort, when I walked in that door.  I was certainly noticed, stranger I was in their world.

The ghosts felt to me to be curious, pushy, forward, some of them leering.  People do have life forces and energies about them, but in our culture we are not given permission to know this.  We are supposed to ignore all but the socially acceptable versions of exchange between people that we are all supposed to be trained to recognize.

Yet because my childhood was so strange, and so altered from the ‘ordinary’, I did not learn what these appropriate social exchange patterns are really all about.  And even when I try my hardest to figure them out, that never makes me the same as people whose selves formed under far more ordinary circumstances, and this constant trying is a whole lot of work

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Our culture presumes and assumes that people are contained within the boundaries of the skin of their bodies.  Yet we are always ‘sensing’ others’ information they ‘put out’, whether we want to or not.  Most do not have to pay attention to it in their usual, ongoing lives.  I suspect for those of us whose bodies were formed during extremely threatening and dangerous conditions, our sensing abilities operate in different ways and are extremely difficult to shut off.  Just because people do not ‘ordinarily’ admit that parts of others can actually ‘journey’ outside of their bodies, communicate things and be perceived does not mean it does not happen.

It can also be very difficult for early-traumatized people to efficiently sort out the information.  It is hard for us to truly know what is important and what is not.  We were formed to be hypervigilant about ALL information, so we get more of it, have a harder time knowing what it means, and a harder time knowing how to respond to it appropriately.

Because early traumas change the formation of the body, brain and nervous system, and because we later are supposed to slide right into an ordinary life after having experienced anything but an ordinary childhood, we are exposed yet again to forms of incompatibility between ourselves and our environment.  We are as powerless to change the bigger world we live in as adults as we were to change the far narrower one we lived in as growing children.

Some of us will always be outside of the worlds that others live in, left only to imagine what their more ‘ordinary’ perceptions of being in the world is really like.  Some of us will just never know what ‘ordinary’ is.  We can’t help that.  We were formed that way.  I was dissociated from the ordinary throughout the 18 years of my childhood.  I cannot expect those patterns to disappear now.

Some things about the way our brains, bodies and nervous systems we can work to change, but we must be realistic.  I will never be physiologically the same as I would have been if the terrible abuse had not happened to me — especially so early.  My hope is that those of us with these altered bodies will begin to dialog with one another to improve our understandings of what life is like for us — especially on the level of what we cannot change and must find ways to live with.

Just because we developed in an extra-ordinary world of trauma does not make us ‘wrong’.  We had to adapt in order to survive, and we did.  The consequences are very real.  We need to know how the world is to us, and how we are in the world.  From there we can begin to dialog better within ourselves, with one another as severe child abuse survivors, and with those who were built in, by and for a MUCH nicer world than we were.

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+TRAUMA AND THE 30,000 EGGS: HOW MUCH CAN WE TAKE BEFORE WE ARE OVERWHELMED?

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Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) represents an error in the ongoing processes of learning useful things in one’s life.  A traumatic experience can actually contain much more information than a person can actually use as one single individual.  The potential of what a traumatic experience can teach about survival needs to be applied (learned) in order to improve adaptation within the environment just in case a similar event happens again in the future.

Particularly in today’s world where we no longer exist in a tribal culture that would allow a whole group to learn from a dangerous experience, there can be “no room in the inn” on a personal level for the whole amount of new information that might be gained about survival from an event one person has had to experience alone.  Learning is thus interfered with on the individual level, and the wholeness of that person is interfered with, as well.  The result can be that their ongoing experience of being in their life is interrupted, and we then have a post-trauma circumstance.

If the information about what is needed to survive an overwhelming trauma cannot be shared ‘in a group’, the information out-matches the needs of a single person’s waking day and sleeping night.  Unprocessed information about trauma survival just sits in line, in the cue of ongoing information processing, and can ‘jump the line’ at every possible trigger that stimulates it – like it is impatient to be completed and finished.  It WANTS to used, and be useful.  That’s the nature of ongoing life.  Traumas are supposed to teach us something important about how to get along in a world that is not always safe.

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When an infant suffers traumas that create breaks in its ongoing experiencing of life, the interruptions will most often be built into its growing brain as dissociational patterns.  Its learning and adaptation will be interfered with just as it would be for an overwhelmed adult, only much more so.  Once these ‘crisis’ response patterns are built into the brain, they will be lying in wait to be used should any future overwhelming trauma occur.

Survival through evolution has required humans to have the widest possible range of responses to traumas.  If what is known cannot prevent a trauma from occurring, or does not allow for adaptation to a trauma, new responses must be learned.

Within a safe and secure range the best of all possible genetic phenotypes will be able to manifest.  Phenotypes are what we actually SEE on the ‘surface’ of who we are based on our genetic material as our genetic expression machinery has told our genes what to do on an ongoing basis.  If too much trauma exists during the early developmental stages of our lives through abuse, neglect, deprivation, etc., the actual phenotypes we end up with can be far different than they would have been if development had happened in a safe and secure, non traumatic environment.

Most mental illnesses, for example, are ‘visible’ phenotypes that might not have needed to develop if early trauma had not been present.  As soon as an early environment overwhelms an infant or young child with too much trauma, the body will interpret this as a threat-to-life situation, and use the most extreme adaptive phenotypes it can in order to cope with disaster.

The developing brain and body operates on a simple rule basis.  A safe world is run by safe rules and will bring out safe responses.  A dangerous world is run by dangerous rules and will bring out the most extreme adaptations possible – as needed.  Our phenotypes reflect how these rules are applied within our bodies.

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Too much or too little of anything can kill an organism.  Extremes push the body into an emergency, crisis response.  Trauma that reaches PTSD proportions for an individual represents a condition of too much information.  Information is only useful if it can be integrated and applied BY USING IT.  I believe it is because we so often are left without a ‘group’ or ‘tribe’ that would help us learn from the traumas that we are so at risk as individuals for becoming overwhelmed.  This appears obvious when we realize that strong safe and secure attachment relationships mediate the effects of traumas at every single age along the human lifespan continuum.

Making good use of the information that traumas present to us has to be in the direction of promoting and advancing life – for the individual, for the species.  Being a connected part of the ‘social group’ allows for a wider range of possibilities for learning from traumas while being isolated and alone narrows that range.

I think about it in terms of 30,000 eggs.  An ordinary family sized cake might require the input of 3 eggs, not 30,000.  Too many eggs would obviously ruin the cake!  Trauma eliminates the choice of deciding we don’t want so much overwhelming information.  Too bad.  Here it is.   What are we going to learn from it and how are we going to use this information for a better future?   We can’t decide NOT to try to proceed with our cake-bake-of-life with ONLY 3 eggs.  When life hands us 30,000 eggs, we better be ready and able to deal with it.

Trauma is an out-of-the-ordinary experience:  It is extra-ordinary, supra-ordinary.  So if we have to deal with 30,000 eggs, we better be a part of a very large family so that we can effectively bake a super-sized cake large enough to use the 10,000 times more information than what we could ordinarily make good use of by ourselves.  This is what community is truly all about.

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I suspect that in a perfect world no individual (family, group, etc.) would ever be given more traumatic information to deal with than what they could ordinarily use.  The more divided and isolated we are the ‘fewer eggs’ we can handle.  While being connected and safely and securely attached to others is not the only factor that leads to resilience, it is probably the most important one because we are a social species.  We did not evolve as separate beings cut-off from a whole, and our evolutionarily developed abilities to respond to trauma and to process it by learning new things when we need to, is NOT meant to happen separately, either.

Any time we try to go against the patterns that nature has given us, we are far more likely to suffer difficulties.  Healing from trauma is no different.  When the group – our family of origin – hurt us and did not protect us, and was also not there for us when we had our greatest need to depend on safe and secure attachment with dependable, available others,  we are much, much more likely to suffer from ‘too much information’, or information overload that results in a post-traumatic reaction.

Traumas happen.  Not being able to process the information contained in traumatic experience so that future responses will be better adapted responses leaves us baking the 30,000 egg cake when we can only, by ourselves, handle a 3 egg cake.  We need help.  We are made that way.

The more fragmented and insecure our connections are to others, the more at risk we are for being overwhelmed as ‘an army (or victim) of one’.  The more overwhelmed we are, the more likely we are to be fragmented (and dissociated) ourselves.  No single person was ever designed to ‘go it alone’, and certainly not infants and young children.

I say this because we cannot heal alone, either.

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