Tag: mean mother

+HAVE FUN WITH THIS SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL BRAIN BUILDING EXERCISE!

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Let me introduce something fun now!  This exercise is about how we order, organize, regulate our nervous system-brain, our body, our emotions, our SELF in direct face-to-face communication with others of our social species.

Here is some basic (useful) information from Dr. Daniel J. Siegel’s book about brain-mind building as he talks about the growth of our early right and left brain connections.  As you read the paragraph below, and connect it to the information in Dr. Allan N. Schore’s mother-infant brain building of the earliest foundation of our social human brain, realize that the exercise of our brain regions, circuits, pathways and neurons in our social-emotional right limbic brain never ceases throughout our lifespan.

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Siegel writes:

“From the beginning of life, the brain has an asymmetry in its circuitry, which leads to the specialization of functions on each side of the brain.  The ways in which the mind creates representations of experience is shaped by this lateralization of function.  The capacities to sense another person’s emotions, to understand others’ minds, and even to express one’s own emotions via facial expressions and tone of voice are all mediated predominately by the right side of the brain.  In certain insecure attachment patterns, communication between parent and child may lack these aspects of emotions and mental experience.  In contrast, secure attachments seem to involve the sharing of a wide range of representational processes from both sides of the brain.  In essence, such balanced interpersonal communication allows the activity of mind to sense and respond to the activity of another.  Such sharing of activity can be seen as the sharing of states of mind….” (Page 7) from Dr. Daniel J. Siegel’s book, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (The Guilford Press, 1999))

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The more we were deprived in our own infant-childhood of deprivation-trauma, the less we experienced the kinds of safe and secure social-human attachment experiences that allowed these brain patterns to grow and develop in our brain – during the formative stages when they were most needed and necessary.

Except in very rare situations of complete infant-child isolation (and my experience did contain 95% isolation except within the school environment), most people (which DOES include me or I would not be able to talk!) have at least a rudimentary social-brain in existence.

We are long past the earliest stages where our neurons where assigned their place in our brain regions and given their job to do.  We are long past the earliest stages where the superhighways of connection between our social-emotional brain and the regions it is intimately connected to were carved into place through our earliest mother-caregiver interactions.  BUT, we continue as human beings to exercise these brain functions as long as we breath.

For those of us who suffered Trauma Altered Development through severe malevolent treatment, we especially need to understand – intellectually and consciously – the vital information contained within Shore’s article because we need to do TODAY as much as we possibly can in our interactions with people what Schore is describing in order to strengthen and improve the functioning of our emotional-social brain.

Remember, what I am suggesting here is meant to be enjoyable.  We can best benefit from these kinds of exercises if we approach them from a playful stance within ourselves.  This process, even from the beginning when our brain was built, always best happens in safe, secure and play-filled mother-infant activities.  That is no less true – ever.

Social-brain, emotional, right brain exercise happens in close communication through signals exchanged through ALL OF OUR SENSES directly with another person.  It can be really hard to find an adult who will do this with us, yet it is MOSTLY this kind of interaction with a trained, skilled and caring therapist that is effecting the most beneficial healing for us.  Because most of us don’t have access to a therapist who can help us with this, we need to learn how to do it ourselves.

Most importantly, do not feel any pressure to do this RIGHT.  Certainly no brain-building infant ever has that thought!  It is even best to simply watch other people from a distance in the beginning as they interact in signaling communication with one another.  Of course, as Schore points out, the facial signals are being transmitted – received – and responded to so FAST that we cannot consciously detect them.  But we can try to!

I cannot read other people’s ‘social’ or ‘emotional cues’ correctly.  This contributes to my sense of depersonalization and derealization (not to mention dissociations).  I am always an outsider – really – when it comes to human interactions because of the Trauma Altered Development I experienced from birth.  This does not ever mean that I can’t continue to learn more about what being a member of a social species is all about!  Every single positive human interaction we have improves the social-emotional regulatory region of our right brain.

So – – – –

Try this once you have completed some serious, focused outside watching of other people as they communicate with one another (and if you have family or ‘party’ holiday gatherings you have a perfect crowd for the watching!).  Having paid attention of the nature and quality of their interactive signaling, through body movement, facial expression, gestures, tone of voice, pitch, patterns of pauses, etc. you will already have an idea about how what I am going to suggest next might feel TO YOU.

I call this ‘in situ‘, or ‘in place’ communication.  You can do this with anyone you feel safe and secure with, even a child who is old enough to engage in conversation.

Sit comfortably FACING ONE ANOTHER with your knees about a foot apart.  Relax.  Feel yourself inside your own body.  Breath.  Notice the physical sensations of your feet on the floor (don’t cross your legs or ankles), your bottom on the chair, your back, etc.  These are feelings (tied to emotions) recognizable by your right brain.

Concentrate on letting anxiety leave this PLACE.  I know this is hard for some of us to ever accomplish, but the point of this exercise is to connect the sensation of NO ANXIETY with feeling calm in social interaction that is safe and secure.  ‘Ordinary’ safe and securely attached (from birth) people get to NOT feel anxiety nearly all of the time!  Survivors don’t really even know what this feels like.

So here you are with your chosen partner.  Look at one another’s faces and begin to speak.  You can talk about ANYTHING!  Remember, at least two-thirds of all human speech is about other people – or gossip.  So, gossip if you like.

Tell a story about something that happened during your day – and your partner’s day.  Nothing deep or heavy here.  Just communicate, and as you do begin to THINK ABOUT how you two are transmitting, receiving and sending back communication signals.  Because we are working to exercise the earliest forming regions of the social-emotional brain, it is important to particularly notice the face – expression conveyed through muscles, eyes, and position of the head.

Notice PARTICULARLY how both of you both make eye contact and break it!  The actions that accomplish this are social-emotional regulatory actions.  The fun thing to begin to see is that we all do this!  We have always done it!

If a person moves their eyes away from another person’s eyes, either also turning the head or not, you can tell which region of their brain they are INWARDLY sending their energy to.  When a person looks to the left and/or turns their head to the left they are ORGANIZING and ordering the information into their RIGHT BRAIN.

If we move our eyes to the right and/or the head, we are ORGANIZING and ordering information into the left region of our brain.  This information we are dealing with is very complicated and involves both the external information we are receiving from the other person and our own INTERNAL information that we get at the same time.

Even without consciously noticing that it is happening, a person in face-to-face direct dyadic (two person) communication might eventually shift their ENTIRE BODY in one direction or the other.  If they do this, pay attention to the direction they are shifting toward and realize it is the OPPOSITE side of their brain that is being organized and ordered.  (These patterns might be a bit different depending on which hand, right or left, a person is dominant with – though the basic underlying structures are the same, the information itself can be processed differently depending on which is our dominant side.)

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Once this exercise feels comfortable, and as you have noticed how you feel during the entire process, you can experiment with more emotionally laden conversation and watch what happens next!  Because part of our intention is to strengthen particularly the right social-emotional regions of the brain, every time you notice a shift toward the RIGHT in eyes, head or body, intentionally compensate with a shift in the OPPOSITE direction toward the LEFT so that you reinforce, through this action, activity that is ordering and organizing the right brain regions.

Every time one or both of the people engaged in this kind of direct fact-to-face conversation make this kind of BREAK away from one another, this is a rupture that will be or not be repaired by a return to facing one another and continuing to communicate – after each takes the time that they need to process the information inside of their own brain.  These interactions continually build themselves within the pathways of our brain into patterns of pauses that help regulate us back to CALM so that we can return for more stimulation – again!

These rupture and repair pauses and returns to activity happen all the way down to our Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) level where our – you got it!!  Where our parasympathetic STOP (‘pair a brakes’) arm of our ANS balances itself with our sympathetic GO ANS arm!

There you have it – neuroscience exercise to help build better and better internal emotional regulation into your body-brain through safe and secure social interactions!!

Have fun!  And please continue to read and study Dr. Allan N. Schore’s baby social-emotional brain building article!

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+WHAT WE MOST NEED TO KNOW: HOW MOTHERING BUILDS THE INFANT BRAIN

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There is a link here to the most important article you will ever read — complicated at the same time it describes what matters most to us as human beings.

When you click on the title of the article I am presenting here today, which is an active link that will lead you first through a series of language translations of the abstract, simply scroll down to the full article which is written in English.

It is my opinion that the information contained in this article, written by Dr. Allan N. Schore, is the most valuable we will ever read in our lifetime.  Or, I can say, the most important we will TRY to read.

Every single word I have written on my blog up until this moment is really ONLY in introduction to the information contained in this 60-page article.  I will work with this information later to try to present it in a more digestible, understandable format, but this is the ORIGIN of all of my thinking.

I discovered Shore’s neuroscientific description of the building of an infant’s brain through emotional interactions it has with its mothering earliest caregiver well before I discovered the work of Dr. Martin Teicher and his Harvard research group.  I carefully picked my way through the dense, complicated and vital information contained in Schore’s books.  The essence of all Schore’s discoveries about this critical period of infant brain development is condensed into this article I am presenting the link to today.

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Whether we have EVER thought about it up until this moment or not, when any of us ever interact with a newborn and very young infant, or as we watch a mother interacting with her newborn and very young infant, we are watching GENESIS IN ACTION.  We are watching neuroscience building a human brain – in real time, in the moment, during every single flash of a tiny millisecond interaction after another – human interactional experiences with the infant is actively BUILDING its brain.

I could say the following with every breath I ever take for the rest of my life and it would not be enough:  When an infant has a safe and secure attachment to its earliest mothering caregiver ALL these brain building interactions happen completely naturally – and adequately.  There is then no particular reason to  have to think in terms of neuroscience except that it is fascinating to understand mothers and infants together through this critically important lens of information.

HOWEVER!!!  If an infant was born to a mother whose own earliest mothering caregiver interactions were NOT safe and secure, she did not receive the kind of face-to-face brain building experiences that would have allowed her to build a BEST emotionally regulated social brain herself.  Her interactions with her infant will not follow the BEST patterns needed for her infant to build its own best brain — except under special conditions (read on).

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My daughter asked me the other day after reading my Sunday post why she doesn’t have a dysregulated brain if I have one as her mother because my own mother had one and therefore built a dysregulated brain into little infant me.

We are getting down to the most important nitty-gritty information about the truth regarding intergenerational transmission of parental unresolved trauma – through abuse, neglect and maltreatment of offspring — with her question.  She did NOT ask me why I did not abuse her the way my mother abused me.  She knows enough now to understand that the most important intergenerational issue is WHAT KIND OF BRAIN PATTERNING DOES A MOTHER TRANSMIT TO HER INFANT.

The simplest way I can answer her question is that (1) I have a different genetic composition than my mother did; (2) I suffered different patterns of deprivations-traumas than my mother did; (3) the timing during our later infant-child developmental stages that our deprivations-traumas happened to us were different; (4) these deprivations-traumas affected the genetic-change mechanisms within my mother and myself differently.

At the same time I know that both my mother and I had DISSOCIATION built into our earliest forming trauma-changed infant brain.  HOW the dissociational patterns operated were different because of the four points I just made.   What is critically important to understand is that I was able to form an entire oriented and organized dissociated ME, as a mother, that did not stand in the way of or change in any way the inborn ability my own children had to build safe and secure attachments.

My mother’s brain had formed an entirely different set of patterns related to her ‘self’ than mine did.  I could organize and orient ‘a mothering self’ that put my children at the center of my life.  My mother could not do this.

I was able, within my dissociated safe and secure mothering dissociated universe to let my children form a safe and secure attachment to me – which meant most importantly not that I literally never abused my own children – but that I was able to interact with them from birth in safe and secure attachment interactions that let THEM build a BEST brain from the start.

Of course it matters that I did not abuse them.  But what my 33-year-old daughter who is now carrying her firstborn child is, herself in her own life, MOST benefiting from is that she has a SAFELY AND SECURELY built excellent brain – that was formed from its very foundation on the BEST kinds of face-to-face mothering caregiver interactions Schore is describing in this article.

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The foundational experiences that humans have as members of a social species happen through the way their earliest mothering caregiver experiences shaped their brain’s development.  Our ability to experience and regulate our emotions, our ability to read and appropriately respond to social cues, what motivates and rewards us, what gives us meaning in our lives, what tells our body how to respond and what to respond to, what coordinates all our memory storage, processing and recall for the rest of our lives happens according to HOW our earliest mothering caregiver experiences formed our brains.

If our mother was able to ALLOW a safe and secure attachment with us, even if she herself did not get a BEST brain in her own early unsafe and insecure attachment environment, our mother was probably able to avoid building into us a replica of her own dysregulated brain.  This alternative to the feared inevitable passing on of intergenerational unresolved trauma happens through what the experts call an ‘earned secure attachment’ and what I call a ‘borrowed secure attachment’.

If development from conception to birth has not been interfered with, and certainly even at times when some prior-to-birth disruptions did occur, humans are born with the ability to form safe and secure attachments, and are designed to build the best brain possible.  That best brain, however, cannot be built without signals of communication between the mother and her infant that the world is a safe and secure place to be in.  It is the nature and quality of these earliest mother-infant signals that determine what kind of a foundational brain we build — either trauma-based or not.

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I have not in my own lifetime of 58 years ever been able to change the core foundation of the trauma-built brain I received because of my mother’s far less than best treatment of me from birth.  Every experience I have had (as happens for all of us) is directed by and processed through this earliest brain we built.  As I return to my work with my mother’s 50+ year old letters, I can see the thread of her distorted relationship with herself in the world in her writing.

I now understand that her earliest brain was formed through deprivations-traumas, and that her experiences along her continued development certainly through age five sent her course of development down a road different than mine went as a young child.  A consideration of these differences is not my concern today, because the most important place we can focus our attention is on what goes right or goes so very wrong at the very beginning of our earliest brain stage development as a brain’s foundation is built.

It is at these most important earliest brain developmental stages that the following information Schore presents matters the most.  PLEASE try to read this article.  Skip what doesn’t make sense if you must, but you WILL have some (what I call) BINGO! experiences as you read.  This information can change  how you think about yourself in the world, whether you experienced Trauma Altered Development or not.  It can change how you understand every other person you know in your life, including your infant-childhood caregivers.

Skip down immediately by scrolling to his page 22 and you will get the picture, literally, as Schore presents his visual about the nature of mother-infant emotional communication signaling.  Now you can go back and begin to read the text!  Genesis of the human brain.  Neuroscience in action.  Once we truly GET this information, especially those of us who were abused, maltreated, traumatized and CHANGED through early maltreatment, light will begin to shine on the most important facts about our being in the world.  GOOD LUCK in your reading!!

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CLICK ON THIS TITLE TO REACH THIS FULL ARTICLE:

EFFECTS OF A SECURE ATTACHMENT

RELATIONSHIP ON RIGHT BRAIN DEVELOPMENT,

AFFECT REGULATION, AND

INFANT MENTAL HEALTH

ALLAN N. SCHORE

Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences

University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine

INFANT MENTAL HEALTH JOURNAL, Vol. 22(1–2), 7–66 (2001)

2001 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health

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+PRIMARY A-B-Cs — ATTACHMENT-BRAIN-CAREGIVER

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To begin to understand my mother, how she treated me, and how her treatment of me changed me, I need to understand the most primary A-B-Cs – The patterns of Attachment our forming Brain had with our earliest Caregiver formed the foundation of our brain from which our self-in-the-world originates.

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Babies are born with the basic ‘floor plan’ of their brain already laid out.  All the regions of every human’s brain are in the same place, just as our other organs and limbs are.  A baby is also born with billions more neurons, or brain nerve cells, than will actually be needed in the brain building stages that follow birth.

Genetics in interaction with the uterine experience have already influenced early brain development before birth.  If the infant has not suffered damage-changes within its mother, at birth it has more than enough neurons for what comes next.  I think about my son, who is soon to be 25.  He was a Lego maniac from the first time he picked up one of those bright plastic little pieces at the age of three.  He eventually ended up with a foot locker packed with thousands and thousands of individual pieces (which his mother is requiring him to keep forever).

If he was even now in a Lego playing mood, he would find enough variety and type of piece to create just about anything his imagination could design.  Tear them apart, make something entirely different.  Whatever pieces he might not use in one design can be kept in reserve, recombined, used later, or never used at all.  But he has the choice of keeping them all, and keep them he does.

An infant’s brain growth and development does not work in quite this same way.  Humans are born with far more than enough neurons, and most of them are not specified in the beginning as to what region of the brain they will go to or what kind of neuron they will turn into according to what job they will eventually perform.  This is because brain building is a flexible process.  While it is intended that some of the overly abundant neurons will die, the plan is that as many of them as possible find their way into use as a best possible brain is built.

The kind of interactions and the nature of experiences an infant has within the world it was born into direct the process of body-brain building so that the resulting brain will be adapted in the best way possible for the conditions of the world the infant was born into.  This adaptive brain building process is in full motion as soon as an infant is born.

As I have said, humans are designed to receive, understand and respond to signals from within the environment in the form of communications.  A growing human brain detects signals and builds itself in partnership with the environment itself, an environment that is presented to the infant through the kinds of interactions it has with its earliest mothering caregiver.

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Most of us probably think of a brain as a wrinkled, soft, squishy organ that we would not want to hold in our hands.  Because it is probably the most important organ we have, Siegel’s following description of it might give us a better idea about what we are talking about:

“The brain has an estimated one hundred billion neurons, which are collectively over two million miles long.  Each neuron has an average of then thousand connections that directly link itself to other neurons.  Thus there are thought to be about one million billion of these connections, making it “the most complex structure, natural or artificial, on earth.” [he gives a reference here to Green et al, 1998, page 427]  A neuron sends an electrical impulse down its long axons; this releases a neurotransmitter at the space at the end, called a “synapse,” which then excites or inhibits the downstream neuron.  A synapse is the connection that functionally links neurons to one another.  Because of the spider-web-like interconnections, activation of one neuron can influence an average of ten thousand neurons at the receiving ends!  The number of possible “on-off” patterns of neuronal firing is immense, estimated as a staggering ten times ten one million times (ten to the millionth power).”  (page 13 in the writings of Dr. Daniel J. Siegel in his book The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (The Guilford Press, 1999))

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The firing patterns in a mother’s brain specifically activate similar firing patterns in her infant’s brain as all the adaptive neurons within it are ‘learning’ what to do in relationship to being alive in a body in the world.  As an infant grows, and its newly forming brain gets up and running, the infant will be able to both receive the signals its caregiver is sending accurately, but will also get better and better at sending its own signals back to her.

A safe and securely attached infant will have its own signals received accurately by its mother and as she sends them back to the infant through am accurate mirroring process, the infant begins to clarify and BECOME ITS OWN SELF in the world.  This signaling happens with patterns and rhythms that are instructing the infant’s neurons where to go, what job to do, how to link them together into circuits and networks during this process that is designed to create brain.

An infant is born with a brain blueprint, but it is the experiences it has with its early mothering caregiver that make brain building happen according to emotional information the mother gives to her infant during the critical development stages her infant’s brain goes through.  Brain building happens in predictable stages.  Just as a Jacuzzi cannot be placed in a sky scraper’s pent house before all the steel structural components have been put into place, a baby’s brain cannot ‘think’ in the way we think about thinking from the start of its life.  A brain has to be built that an infant-child can do its thinking with.

The way an infant receives signals from its mother happen through its basic senses in the same way we receive signals from our environment during our entire lifetime.  It might be hard to believe, but at birth an infant already knows its mother.  It knows the feel of her, the rhythms of her, the sound of her and is tuned to her smell and her touch from the moment it is born.  If a newborn is removed at birth from its mother it will experience grief detectable in the physiological responses its body will demonstrate.  Foster and adoptive parents can be trained to recognize the ‘symptoms’ of a newborn’s grieving stages as it passes through and completes them.

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Beginning even before birth communication signaling between and infant and its mother is already taking place.  It is through the increasingly more complex abilities an infant comes to have, through the brain development it experiences in interaction with the mother, that the brain takes its genetic potential complete with the mechanisms that tell the genes what to do, combines it with information coming into the infant from its environment, and grows all the basic brain regions and the operational connections through them.

This early brain growth happens as mother-infant communication signaling involves emotion.  It is through emotional interactions in this dyad, this connection between the two – mother and infant – through smell, touch, rhythm (prosody or the music of speech complete with pitch, loudness and tone), and most importantly through facial expressions that human brains are extremely well prepared to receive, recognize and respond back to.  Nature has specifically designed women-mothers to participate appropriately in these early required emotional interactions with infants.

Siegel writes (in the above mentioned book):

“The primary ingredient of secure attachment experiences is the pattern of emotional communication between child and caregiver….The way the mind establishes meaning – the way it places value or significance on experience – is closely linked to social interactions.  This connection between meaning and interpersonal experience occurs because these two processes appear to be mediated via the same neural circuits responsible for initiating emotional processes.”  (page 6)

The foundation of an infant’s initial brain region growth and development happens through emotional communication with its mothering caregiver.  Done ‘best’ in secure attachment environments, a ‘best world possible’ emotionally regulated brain is built in, by and for a benevolent world.  In turn, a dysregulated, jumbled, mis-qued disorganized, disoriented pattern of instability, lack of predictability, without safe and secure emotional attachment experiences builds a very different infant brain that is adapted to a malevolent world.

All the early infant brain building that goes on is directed by the nature of its early emotional caregiver experiences.  The adaptive, growing brain slides its neurons around, tells them where to go, what to do, how to connect to one anther, where to build pathways, roads and superhighways in response to these early emotional interactions.  It is the critically important emotional-social area of the brain that grows first through these caregiver experiences.  It is this area of the brain, once built, that will primarily orchestrate how a person is in the world for their lifetime.  Remembering the importance of Siegel’s words from yesterday’s post about this area of the brain, I repeat them here:

“The centrally located “limbic system” … plays a central role in coordinating the activity of higher and lower brain structures.  The limbic regions are thought to mediate emotion, motivation, and goal-directed behavior.  Limbic structures permit the integration of a wide range of basic mental processes, such as the appraisal of meaning, the processing of social experience (called “social cognition”), and the regulation of emotion.  This region also houses the medial temporal lobe (toward the middle, just to the sides of the temples), including the hippocampus, which is thought to play a central role in consciously accessible forms of memory.

The brain as a whole functions as an interconnected and integrating system of subsystems.  Although each element contributes to the functioning of the whole, regions such as the limbic system, with extensive input and output pathways linking widely distributed areas in the brain, may be primarily responsible for integrating brain activity.

When we look to understand how the mind develops, we need to examine how the brain comes to regulate its own processes.  Such self-regulation appears to be carried out in large part by these limbic regions.”  (pages 10-11 – bolding is mine)

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If an infant’s earliest mothering-caregiver interactions happen through safe and secure attachment experiences, this area of the brain will organize, integrate and regulate emotion, social interaction, meaning and activity for a ‘best’ world.  In unsafe and insecure environments, this area of the brain will grow itself a different way.

The nature of these early experiences create patterns in the brain that appear as representations of experience, and these ‘mental models’ expand through associations and connections – or through patterns of dissociations and disconnections — to affect how a person is in the world.  Our emotional regulatory abilities, our mental processes, our states of mind, our ability to transition between states of mind, the way we remember ourselves in the world, are all connected in their roots to how our infant emotional brain was formed at the time of our beginning.

Sigel:

“…different mental processes are organized within a state of mind.  These states allow disparate [fundamentally different] activities of the brain to become cohesive at a given moment in time.”  (page 7)

Through our earliest mothering-caregiver emotional experiences, as this area of our infant brain is forming, the trajectory our self-in-the-world will take is determined and set into motion.  Understanding how early infant attachment experiences build our brain gives us an accurate way to look at our self and others in the world as we come to understand the fundamental and profound affect these early experiences have on forming the regions, patterns, circuits and operation of our core brain areas.

In cases such as my mother’s, I can begin to understand that who she was on the adult end of her development cannot be disconnected from how she was formed to operate in the world from her beginnings.  Her brain, as does all of ours, formed itself in response to the kinds of mothering-caregiver interactions she had and did not have.  Obviously, her brain did not form in the ‘best way possible’ for the ‘best world possible’.  Her brain formed in adjustment to deprivation-trauma.

My mother’s case is an extreme one.  Yet, again, we are talking about degrees of deprivation-trauma and degrees of ability to adapt to it.  Once we begin to understand the power safe and secure early attachment has to form a ‘best brain’ we can also begin to understand how degrees of insecure, unsafe attachment experiences change the growing infant brain’s foundation into ‘something else’.

My mother’s brain was not built by safe and secure attachment in a benevolent world.  My mother became a ‘something else’.  No doubt about it.  I know this because I am her daughter.

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+THIS HONEST TRUTH: ME, MY 6-YEAR-OLD SELF AND MY MOTHER’S 1958 LETTERS

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It takes courage for me to publish here this link (below) because I do not have any answers when it comes to my own ongoing, internal, personal experience with my childhood traumas with my mother.  I have returned to the task of transcribing my mother’s 1958 letters, a job that I left behind several months back.

My efforts TODAY to deal with further discovery in my mother’s letters of her beliefs about me as a six-year-old disintegrated me even further than they did last night when I first re-encountered her writing.  The internal process going on for me as contained here and in this link make me feel like I am dying, my guts torn out and strewn on the ground as Hitchcock’s birds fly at me to peck my eyes out.

I guess I could say, “This post may trigger” — it certainly triggered me:

*Age 6 – Jan. 1958 First Grade in Mother’s Letters

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background information:

Diagnosis of Trauma and Abuse-Related Dissociative Symptom Disorders in Children and Adolescents

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This is what I wrote when I found that the first words of the first 1958 letter of my mother’s that I picked up to work on transcribing last night was about me:

I feel icky and contaminated as I start back to work on my mother’s letters, a job I abandoned awhile back because I was SICK of the memory of my mother.  These are the 1958 letters from the year I was 6, in first grade, the first year we were in Alaska.  By August 31, 1958 I turned seven and started second grade that fall.

My mother – with her twisted, tweaked, twilight borderline distorted view of the world – the one I grew up thinking was normal because I had no frame of reference to the contrary.

As soon as I begin work again with my mother’s letters I can feel conflict between knowing the truth NOW that I didn’t know for the first 30 years of my life, and my feelings of what, fear?  That I ‘should’ respect my mother, and “Who am I to make up all these bad things about her and slander her good name?”  Bad Linda.  Bad, Bad Linda.

Horse pucky.

These feelings are difficult to identify and to face head on because I have spent most of my life avoiding them.  It’s like getting caught in a time warp, reading that my father in January of 1958 just went out the door to start the car to warm it up and is coming back into the house in a minute to get the note my mother is writing so it can be mailed to my grandmother.  All dead, all of them dead now.  How, really, can a person criticize a dead person’s life?

What values of my own do I confront here?  They certainly aren’t around to care what I say about anything.  Is all that I have here before me in these tattered and tanning envelopes really nothing but the passing of time – soon to be 52 years of it with this particular batch of mother’s letters.

Yet it does matter.  These people’s lives formed mine, and I in turn formed my children’s lives.  We all just march on down the road of our lives leaving one little tiny, miniature less than an ant sized footprint along the pathway after the other.

Yet I know I am not far away from my own deep sadness as I transcribe my mother’s letters:  I wanted my parents to love me and they did not.  I want to reach my hands back through the passage of all this time gone by, grab them each by the shoulders as the big person I am now.  I want to shake them, looking them each straight in the eye.  My face would follow theirs closely if they tried to look away from me when I ask them, “Why?  Why could you not love me?  I am your CHILD!  Why did you HURT me?”

I never really was my parents’ child.  I was their hated stranger.

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+TO BE OR NOT TO BE A TRAUMA-CHANGED HUMAN — THE QUALITY OF MOTHERING HOLDS THE ABSOLUTE KEY

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Early mothering-infant caregiver interactions build a human body-brain-mind-self from the foundation on up.  We cannot change the way Nature remembers to make a human being.  If Nature’s laws are broken, a surviving infant-child-adult will suffer the consequences from having to change its early physiological development in adjustment to deprivation-trauma for the rest of its life.

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I am again returning to the writings of Dr. Daniel J. Siegel in his book The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (The Guilford Press, 1999).

Siegel writes:

“What are the mechanisms by which human relationships shape brain structure and function?  How is it possible for interpersonal experience – the interactions between two people – to affect something so inherently different as the activity of neurons?”  (page 9)

I have already laid out in my thinking that human infant-children have basic needs that are met through having their Universal Human Rights met as described in the December 12, 1989 United Nations General Assembly document from the Convention on the Rights of the Child.  Yesterday’s post describes my belief that mothers are ultimately responsible for the well-being of the children they bring into the world.  Just as mothers are biologically designed to carry and birth offspring, they are also biologically designed to provide all that is necessary for an infant to continue to develop in the best way possible most critically through the first year of an infant’s life.

If a mother cannot or chooses not to provide for the necessary memory-making processes her infant requires for its best development, another WOMAN can certainly provide these experiences to an infant under the age of one.  What an infant needs, as I will begin to clarify today, is MOTHERING.  I am not using the word ‘mothering’ interchangeably with ‘nurturing’, which is certainly something anyone can provide.  Mothering is based on the biological memory contained within our specie’s DNA that forms the structure of human-being-making.

An infant’s body, including its nervous system-brain, grows best under adequate care provided by its mother.  Next in line for an infant’s best care are other women who also have the ability to adequately meet the developmental needs of the infant.  As I will describe here, those needs are very specific.  The wonder of making a human from ‘scratch’ is that under ordinary circumstances, women have always known from the origins of our species how to meet the needs of infants.  It does not take a rocket scientist to tell us how to mother.  I believe if we have not experienced infant-child deprivation and trauma-related changes in our own development ourselves as women that we are automatically born with everything we need to raise our offspring right – and by right I mean in the best way possible.

Siblings and other children have, I believe, always been important in the early care of infant-children.  They can certainly be adequate for the job on some levels if they have also been built from conception in the best way possible.  But children cannot take over the job because it is an appropriately regulated brain within the mother than interacts with the developing brain of her infant that paves the way for all future development of her offspring.  It is the ‘interpersonal experiences’ an infant has with its mother (or other mothering female) that shape its early forming (foundational) body-brain.

Love between an infant and its father is no less important than mother-infant love.  Fathers are also important to the well-being of an infant’s development, but nature has designed their contribution (other than the obvious first one) to be in the role of provider and protector of the mother and the infant so that the earliest needs of growing humans can be met by women.  Men tend to excite and overstimulate infants.  They are not biologically designed for the early job of establishing all the nerve-growth factors that create a balanced, healthy brain and nervous system in a tiny person.

Fathers are naturally meant to participate actively with their offspring AFTER the first year of life at the time that an infant has grown a body-nervous system-brain (at about a year of age) that allows it to venture away from its mother further and further into the exciting, stimulating bigger world.  Before that time it is the primary safe and secure attachment an infant has with its mothering caregiver that builds the foundation for all growth and development that will follow.

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Over the millennia of human evolution mothering has always been a basic, critically important process that happened naturally.  Mothers were adequately mothered in their own development so that nothing interfered with their memory of how to mother, and they were naturally able to go on to have offspring of their own that they, in turn, adequately mothered.

I do not believe that women evolved to share the earliest infant interactional experiences with men.  Women evolved to share these experiences with other women.  Living in cultures that today isolate women from one another is contributing to the difficulties women are facing in being the best mothers they were naturally designed to be.  In today’s world it has become too easy for women to forget what mothering young infant-children is supposed to be like.  I think it is a pitiful symptom of the decline in the value our species has always placed on the mother-infant-child relationship that makes us now have to turn to neuroscience to tell us about the specifics of building a human being that we have always naturally known how to do.

Even though women are biologically prepared to mother, even those fundamental memories can be tampered with, changed and removed through interactions a human mother has with all those around her as her own DNA memories are telling her how to prepare herself for life in the world she is born into.  The more disconnected mothering becomes from its biological roots, the more complicated our return to mothering naturally becomes.

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It does no good whatsoever to sit around, whine and wring our hands when any problem appears that needs to be resolved.  If it takes an understanding of brain development to convince women that the mothering of their infant-child is the most important job they will ever do, then so be it.  If it takes an education in the importance of safe and secure attachment experiences before an infant is one year old to build a ‘best’ human body-brain, we better get to work.

If we were not adequately mothered ourselves, these regions that Siegel is describing (below) have already been altered during their early growth periods of our own infant-childhood in direct response to the deprivations-traumas we experienced during our own development.  Pay particular attention to the information Siegel is presenting on the limbic system.  This system is the main area of the brain being built by mother-infant interactional experiences from birth until age one – and is directed in its development by the degree of safe and secure attachment an infant has with its earliest, primary caregiver.

Siegel writes:

“The brain is a complex system of interconnected parts.  The “lower structures” include those circuits of brainstem deep within the skull that mediate basic elements of energy flow, such as states of arousal and alertness and the physiological state of the body (temperature, respiration, heart rate).  At the top of the brainstem is the thalamus, an area that serves as a gateway for incoming sensory information and has extensive connections to other regions of the brain, including the neocortex, just above it.” (page 10)

Pausing for a moment, I will note here that human infants are not developed enough when they are born to be able to regulate or modulate much about themselves at all.  Their body can regulate respiration and heart rate, but they are not yet developed enough to even control their bodily temperature.  An infant is born with more fat cells on its back side to keep it warm, which works fine because adults naturally remember that holding a baby close to one’s body keeps its front side warmest!  Adult caregivers, especially the mothering ones, provide all the interactional experiences necessary to ‘train’ a baby during its development so that it can increasingly regulate everything about itself in the world.  This happens through natural processes – we hope.

Siegel continues, and we have to remember that he is describing brain areas and functions that develop within an infant-child during a succession of growth and developmental windows over time (note:  He wrote the following as one paragraph that I am breaking apart for ease of reading):

“The “higher structures,” such as the neocortex at the top of the brain, mediate “more complex” information-processing functions such as perception, thinking, and reasoning.  These areas are considered to be the most evolutionarily “advanced” in humans and mediate the complex perceptual and abstract representations that constitute our associational thought processes.”

[My note:  These regions are formed later in an infant-child’s developmental journey.  The neocortex is not fully developed in humans until between the ages of 25-30.  However, as Dr. Martin Teicher notes, traumatized and abused children’s neocortex actually “atrophies early” and never finishes its course of development properly.  For these survivors, the best growth and development of their neocortex has been robbed from them during their Trauma Altered Development that also affected the development of all the other regions – and the nervous system and immune system – of the survivor during all their preceding critical developmental stages.]

The centrally located “limbic system” – including the regions called the orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, and amygdala – plays a central role in coordinating the activity of higher and lower brain structures.  The limbic regions are thought to mediate emotion, motivation, and goal-directed behavior.  Limbic structures permit the integration of a wide range of basic mental processes, such as the appraisal of meaning, the processing of social experience (called “social cognition”), and the regulation of emotion.  This region also houses the medial temporal lobe (toward the middle, just to the sides of the temples), including the hippocampus, which is thought to play a central role in consciously accessible forms of memory.

The brain as a whole functions as an interconnected and integrating system of subsystems.  Although each element contributes to the functioning of the whole, regions such as the limbic system, with extensive input and output pathways linking widely distributed areas in the brain, may be primarily responsible for integrating brain activity.

When we look to understand how the mind develops, we need to examine how the brain comes to regulate its own processes.  Such self-regulation appears to be carried out in large part by these limbic regions.”  (pages 10-11 – bolding is mine)

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If I cut the fluff, I can simply say that a screwed up, dysregulated mother will ‘download’ her screwed up, dysregulated limbic brain directly into her infant’s growing brain – especially the earliest forming limbic structures —  from birth to age one.  It is within the attachment, caregiving interactions a mother has with her infant that the infant’s brain is formed.  These interactions FORM the infant brain through the ongoing interactional experiences that an infant has with its mother.

Evolution has determined that this is the way growing a body-brain happens.  No infant is ever given the choice to say, “Gee whiz!  There’s something wrong with my mother!  She has an awfully dysregulated brain and she is forcing me to grow one, too!  Help!  Somebody get me a different mother NOW!”

Nope.  Doesn’t happen this way unless someone external to the mother-infant relationship is smart enough to helpfully intervene (and this usually means consciously informed in today’s world) because they know that a dysregulated-brained mother is creating a replica of her own brain as she builds the brain of her infant.

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Siegel continues, and this information is critically important.  Any of us who have ‘anxiety’ related disturbances in our body suffered changes in our Hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis (HPA axis responsible for regulating the stress response), as it was formed in us through combinations of early deprivation-trauma to these developing regions:

“The limbic and lower regions of the brain also house the hypothalamus and the pituitary, which are responsible for physiological homeostasis [Linda note:  or feedback control.  Our earliest attachment experiences build into our body a memory of how to BE in relationship to our center point of balanced equilibrium.  This point is set at CALM in the best safe and secure attachment environment, and is set somewhere else if we experience deprivation-trauma during this early developmental stage.], or bodily equilibrium, established by way of neuroendocrine activity (neuronal firing and hormonal release).  Stress is often responded to by the “hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis, and this system can be adversely affected by trauma.  This neuroendocrine axis, along with the autonomic nervous system (regulating such things as heart rate and respiration) and the neuroimmune system (regulating the body’s immunological defense system) are ways in which the function of the brain and body are intricately intertwined.”  (page 11)

[My note:  Autonomic Nervous System – ANS: Remember sympathetic GO arm and parasympathetic STOP arm “pair a brakes” as I have written about it earlier in relation to the age one onset of the physiological experience of shame.  I also believe, and I have tracked my thoughts through research, that it is the developing immune system itself that orchestrates through signals to the growing infant whether or not the world is a safe, secure benevolent place to be living in or not.  If the immune system, whose job it is to protect and defend us down to our most basic molecular level,  identifies deprivation-trauma, it signals the entire cascade of Trauma Altered Development to occur.]

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I will close today’s post by adding the following description Siegel presents about brain development as it applies most importantly to an infant’s early body-brain development before the age of one:

“The activation of neural pathways directly influences the way connections are made within the brain.  Though experience shapes the activity of the brain and the strength of neuronal connections throughout life, experience early in life may be especially crucial in organizing the way the basic structures of the brain develop.  For example, traumatic experiences at the beginning of life may have more profound effects on the “deeper” structures of the brain, which are responsible for basic regulatory capacities and enable the mind to respond later to stress.  Thus we see that abused children have elevated baseline and reactive stress hormone levels.”  (page 13 – bolding is mine)

Researchers seem forced to use the term “may be” in their writings to avoid some kind of potential peer sanction against their own thinking.  There is nothing “may be” about how early experience IS “especially crucial in organizing the way the basic structures of the brain develop.”  What I hope to convey today is how profound and permanent adaptations to deprivation-trauma are in terms of infant body-brain-nervous system-immune system development.

Early attachment interactional experiences that an infant has with its primary mothering caregiver tells all the mechanisms that govern its early development HOW to build themselves in preparation for either a benevolent, safe and secure world or for an unsafe, insecure and malevolent one.  Once all these critical regulatory structural systems have been built – with or without the need for changes – they will operate on an implicit memory unconscious level, guiding a person’s future interactions from within the core of their body, for the rest of their lives.

If infant mothering is inadequate so that deprivations and trauma are allowed to occur during first-year critical growth stages, Trauma Altered Development is GOING to occur.  There is no possible way it can’t.  And there is no possible way to consider Trauma Altered Development without considering the quality of mothering an infant receives because it is those interactions an infant has with its mothering caregiver that either tell an infant’s DNA to respond to trauma or not to.

If deprivation-trauma does exist in an infant-child’s interactions with its mothering caregiver, this ONLY happens because the same kind of deprivation-trauma was built into the infant’s mother at the start of her life.  This is the way dysregulated trauma-based patterns of ‘being in the world’ topple on down through the generations.  It is in this way, and through these processes that the malevolent conditions of the world are signaled through direct mother-infant communications so that Trauma Altered Development –built right into the forming infant body-brain — can change a growing human into one that can survive in a malevolent world both in the present as well as in the future.

Trauma and the memory of the experience of trauma causes physiological developmental changes because they both build the traumatized infant’s body at the same time they build themselves into it.  This is not like knitting a sweater where an identified mistake can be fixed by unraveling the sweater back to the mistake and correcting it, so a person can start over again and do things right.

Trauma-related adaptive physiological changes that happen within a developing human infant cannot be corrected later.  Any future efforts made to give such a survivor a ‘better life’ have to happen WITH and WITHIN the body-brain that was altered in the first place.  Humans do not REALLY get a second chance to mother an infant right, and we need to drop the illusion that we do.

We have no power to change the way Nature remembers how to make a human being.  The way we form, through mothering-infant social-attachment interactions happens according to Nature’s laws.  If those laws are broken through unsafe, insecure, malevolent early experiences, the developing body-brain of the infant will build all that information into its most basic, fundamental trauma-changed structures.  Survivors of infant-child abuse and maltreatment are left to live with and within a trauma-altered body-brain for the rest of their lives.  I kid you not.

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PLEASE NOTE:  Do not take anything I say as a reason to alter any ongoing treatment, therapy or medication you are receiving.  Consult with your provider if you find something in my writing that brings questions to your mind regarding your health and well-being.

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+”MOTHER! WHERE ART THOU?” — RESPONDING TO AN INFANT-CHILD’S CRY OF NEED

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I did not intend to write about what found its way out the ends of my finger tips on this keyboard today.  Degrees of deprivation of a young human’s developmental needs cause degrees of deprivation adaptations to happen – translated by the tiny growing body as degrees of trauma – as they build the body from its start. When mothers cannot, or will not provide the necessary care to their infant-children during their critical early developmental stages some degree of Trauma Altered Development will occur.

‘Response-ability’ – are mother’s losing their ability to adequately respond to the needs of their offspring?  Is our society losing its ability to respond to the needs of mothers so that they can no longer adequately respond to the needs of their young?  My mother was simply on the far end of the infant-child deprivation of need spectrum.  How many other mothers share this offspring-deprivation spectrum with her?

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Humans are presented at conception with a package of material that is our portion of our species’ memory contained within our genetic material.  Within our DNA is the information needed to send and receive signals of communication within our growing self in relationship to the environment outside of us.  Within this DNA package we were also given abilities to accomplish an impressive range of flexible adaptation to and within our first environment.

By the time we are born our genetic memory as contained within our DNA, including the memory of what to DO with this DNA, has already accomplished an impressive amount of remembering work.  If we are fortunate, all has gone well and we appear into our next arena of development healthy.  Whatever adjustments we needed to make in order to survive and grow within our first environment were made efficiently and well.

We carry all our communication and flexible adaptive abilities right out of the womb with us, along with the rest of the package of our DNA material.  But being born has nothing to do with us having completed all of the most critical stages of our early development.  Nature was faced with two interconnected problems:  How to make an increasingly complex human being even though if left in the womb too long it would be too big to get out without killing its mother, and how to provide continued required nurturing for the infant while it completed the rest of its critical early development.

Nature solved these two problems through a sophisticated maternal preparation process that genetically and hormonally gives mothers what they need to not only carry the unborn but also to be prepared to care for the newborn as it passes through the rest of its early body-brain critical-windows of developmental stages.

All this probably sounds common knowledge to the point of, “Ho!  Hum!” until we begin to understand that HOW the mother cares for her offspring continues to determine the course of its development post-birth just as profoundly as it did pre-birth.  The mother IS an infant’s universe, and it is to THIS universe that an infant’s DNA-communication-adaptation package is going to continue to respond to in its development.

Certainly there are usually other caregivers present surrounding a newborn.  All the interactions an infant has with these significant others are important, but it is to women, the females of our species, that Nature gave the specific biological, physiological nurturing abilities an infant requires to continue its postnatal development in the best way possible.  Any deviation from what is best for an infant will result to it having to make some form of alteration as it adapts to a less-than-best environment.

Deprivations signal to the infant’s growing body that stress exists in the world it is being made for.  Changes that happen in an infant’s course of development depend on the degree of deprivation it is exposed to during the critical windows of its early growth stages.  These changes can and will be made because the original DNA package the infant received at conception contains information that not only tells the infant what conditions of its world ARE less-than-best, how to detect them, but also HOW to adjust to them in order to survive.

Depending on temperament and personality of an infant as contained within its DNA, there are allowable degrees of deprivation to which infant-children can adapt without noticeably altering the direction their overall development has to take.  Results from many years of twin study research has shown that while 50% of temperament and personality stem directly from DNA the other 50% comes directly through the experiences a developing infant-child has within its environment.

In the sophisticated juggling act that an infant-child engages with in interaction with its early primary caregiver, the margin for allowable deprivation-before-adaptation is much smaller than we might think.  I believe that we have reached a point in civilization where the given boundaries of what an infant can flexibly adapt to without having to fundamentally CHANGE itself for survival in a malevolent world can be usefully identified.

In line with the adage that “When a disease appears so will its cure,” it is now, at this point in our evolution, as women make major changes in their lives that affect the quality of care they provide to their young offspring that we must understand how these changes are impacting infant-child development.  Just because cultures allow women increasing opportunity to change their lives during their childbearing years does not in any way mean that the critical needs of developing infant-children can or will change in equal measure.  If these needs are not met, trauma-based changes will occur within the developing body-brain that will last a life time.

Advancing attachment research and increasingly sophisticated findings from the field of development neuroscience are beginning to show us in detail exactly what the best early caregiving environments are that meet the needs of young infants in the best way possible.  If mothers are no longer prepared to take care of offspring the way nature designed them to within a benevolent world in the first place, their little ones are going to suffer changes in their own development as they adapt to the deprivations present within their early environment.

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I am obviously not simply writing today about the long term and permanent adaptive adjustments an infant-child body-brain has to make to survive a severely abusive malevolent early environment as it prepares for a lifetime of living in the same.  I am talking about the universal human needs of children.  Any deprivation of basic need an infant-child suffers exists on a continuum of severity, as do the developmental changes these deprived little ones will experience and suffer from for the rest of their lives.

We have to ask ourselves, “How much deprivation of an infant-child’s fundamental human needs is OK?  How much deprivation is allowable?”  Given the 18 years of severe maltreatment I suffered from birth and throughout my childhood, I am sensitized to concern about the developmental needs of human infant-children from the far end of the maltreatment continuum.  At the same time, it is because I have been forced to learn about the permanent adaptive changes a developing little one will have to make to deprivations that I can stand on the line of this continuum and see how these degrees of deprivation cause changes all the way along its length.

I have thought long, hard and deeply about the topic of human infant-children’s fundamental needs during their early developmental stages.  I have honed my thinking to the point where what I know about the topic appears to be fact.  Best-possible human development requires that certain fundamental human needs be met adequately or some degree of deprivation-trauma will cause adaptive changes to occur during these developmental stages that create corresponding degrees of deprivation of best well-being for a lifetime.

When a society loses sight of the critical role mother’s play in the quality of their offspring’s development that society is in a state of decline.  This slide will take such a society past ‘shabby’ right into ‘a shambles’.  With 75% of our nation’s 17-24 year old young adults being currently unfit for military service I would say our national slide is moving quickly into the ‘shambles’ state.  I will also say that I strongly suspect this rapid decline of quality of life among our nation’s youth can be directly correlated with mothers’ increasing exit from their job of providing for the fundamental human developmental needs of their young infant-children.  (Keep in mind, my maniac abusive mother was a stay-at-home mom!)

I absolutely believe that when a mother brings offspring into the world it is her naturally given responsibility to meet the best-possible developmental needs of that infant-child.  If she chooses to pursue her own life away from her offspring, it is her responsibility to know exactly what the needs of her infant-child are, and to make absolutely certain those needs are being met elsewhere.  If mothers cannot or will not take care of their offspring, even with encouragement and assistance, those little ones need to be removed and be cared for appropriately – elsewhere.

In cases such as my mother’s was, it was (or should have been) obvious that something went terribly wrong during her own young development that caused her to adjust in ways that prevented her from being a mother to me at all.  But it is easy to point a finger at such a complete disaster of a mother while at the same time not paying attention to the kinds of deprivations that cause deprivation/trauma-related changes to happen in the body-brain development of little ones in much less obvious ways.

Any deprivation of ‘best’ will create a deprivation-based memory to be built into a human being’s developing body because memory builds our body in the first place.  Every single adjustment away from ‘best’ treatment in a ‘best’ environment is translated by the body into a need to prepare for a ‘less than best’ future.  When these changes happen particularly during the first year of life, they affect all of development from those foundational changes onward in ways that are permanent and can never be reversed.

It is the degree of quality in mothering during the first developmental years of life that causes these changes to happen.

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+EARLY TRAUMA MEMORY CHANGES ‘THE BODY’ WE DO ALL OUR REMEMBERING WITH

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It is not possible to talk about how we developed into the people we are today without talking about memory.  It is not possible to talk about our Trauma Altered Development without first considering how all our experiences were processed by and stored within our body as memory that built us from our beginning.

Experience forms us.  If this were not true, early infant-childhood trauma would not have the absolute power to change our development that it does.  We cannot talk about how a human being develops or how it remembers itself in the world without thinking in terms of early attachment experiences.  Memory is not only built into the body-brain, it builds the body-brain that does the remembering.

I am including information in today’s post written by Dr. Daniel J. Siegel in his book The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (The Guilford Press, 1999).  Please see the scanned image below of his chart about the types and characteristics of memory.

It is much easier to think about ‘memory’ in terms of this single, simple word.  But there is nothing simple about memory.  Memory is what our DNA is made of.  We carry genetic memory within us from the instant we are conceived.  From that instant our experiences within the environment begin to tell our DNA about the conditions of the world we find ourselves within so that we can adjust ourselves in every way possible to survive within the conditions of the world we are being made in and for.

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All of the terms that Siegel uses in his chart (below) describe different kinds of memory processes.  Siegel says:

“From the first days of life, infants perceive the environment around them.” (page 28)

More accurately, humans “perceive the environment around them” — and within them — from the instant of their conception.  Their DNA has already begun the process of adapting within the conditions of a person’s earliest world.  What Siegel is saying here is that the postnatal infant, once it has been born and now lives independently in a body outside of its mother, continues to process experience in the form of memory.  Memory happens at the point an individual encounters the world outside of its own skin, takes information about the world and uses it to create an increasingly advanced ‘self in the world’ (which of course includes the body).

Experience and early growth and development of an infant-child’s entire body, INCLUDING the brain, are intimately, fundamentally and absolutely intertwined and interconnected.  Siegel writes:

“At birth, the infant’s brain is the most undifferentiated organ in the body.  Genes and early experience shape the way neurons connect to one another and thus form the specialized circuits that give rise to mental processes.  In this way, experiences early in life have a tremendously important impact on the developing mind.  The differentiation of circuits within the brain involves a number of processes including (1) the growth of axons into local and widely distributed regions; (2) the establishment of new and more extensive synaptic connections between neurons; (3) the growth of myelin along the lengths of neurons, which increases the speed of nerve conduction and thus…enhances the linkage among synaptically connected nerve cells; (4) the modification of receptor density and sensitivity at the postsynaptic “receiving” cell making connections more efficient; and (5) the balance of all of these factors with the dying away or pruning of neurons and synapses resulting from disuse or toxic conditions such as chronic stress….Experiences lead to an increased activity of neurons, which enhances the creation of new synaptic connections.  This experience-dependent brain growth and differentiation is thus referred to as an “activity-dependent” process.”  (page 14)

The entire process described in the above paragraph is how memories make us.  This is not an arbitrary choice.  Memory makes everyone through this same interactive experience-memory-body making process.  Looked at in this way, who and what we are on every level of our existence is a result of how we interact in our biological-physiological very real body with the experiences of our life within the environments we pass through — from conception to death.

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MIND is not a tangible ‘thing.’  Brain is not MIND.  MIND cannot operate separately from the physiological body that gives rise to it and informs it for a person’s lifetime.  The entire foundation for our growth and development from birth happens through our earliest interactions with our attachment caregivers.  If our earliest experiences are unstable, toxic, traumatic and malevolent, the direction of our growth and development will be changed.

Siegel writes:

“Interpersonal experiences continue to influence how our minds function throughout life, but the major structures – especially those that are responsible for self-regulation – appear to be formed in the early years.  It is for this reason that we will look closely at the early years of life to understand the ways in which the mind develops and comes to regulate its own processes.”  (pages 14-15)

Siegel proposes “…that the mind develops at the interface of neurophysiological processes and interpersonal relationships.  Relationship experiences have a dominant influence on the brain because the circuits responsible for social perception are the same as or tightly linked to those that integrate the important functions controlling the creation of meaning, the regulation of bodily states, the modulation of emotion, the organization of memory, and the capacity for interpersonal communication.  Interpersonal experience thus plays a special organizing role in determining the development of brain structure early in life and the ongoing emergence of brain function throughout the lifespan.”  (page 21)

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It is not possible to consider human growth and development without considering the kinds of early attachment experiences an infant has with its caregivers.  In my thinking, the kind of interpersonal signaling that Siegel describes here even governs our conception and all our interactive experiences from the time that conception happens.

It is here that I have to say that because I am a survivor of early and long term severe abuse trauma that caused me to change in my development, I begin to take issue with Siegel’s thinking.   I do not have the luxury of taking the kinds of liberties in my thinking that nearly all non-traumatized people can afford to take.

I have found that research-writers frequently make a giant leap between ‘infant’ and ‘child’ in their thinking and this bothers me.  That is why I use the term ‘infant-child’ most often in my own writing.  An ‘infant’ is not the same as a ‘child’.  There is a universe of critical developmental impact and room for Trauma Altered Development to occur between these two stages of being.  Siegel makes that giant leap here as he continues:

“One fundamental finding relevant for developing this “interpersonal neurobiology” of the mind comes from numerous studies across a wide variety of cultures:  Attachment is based on collaborative communication.  Secure attachment involves contingent communication, in which the signals of one person are directly responded to by the other.  Sounds simple.  But why is this type of reciprocal communication so important?  Why doesn’t it happen in all families?  During early development, a parent and child “tune in” to each other’s feelings and intentions in a dance of connection that establishes the earliest form of communication.  Mary Ainsworth’s early studies suggest that healthy, secure attachment requires that the caregiver have the capacity to perceive and respond to the child’s mental state.” (page 21)

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“Collaborative communication” even happens inside our own bodies as our cells signal one another.  It happens on our molecular levels as our DNA interacts with the environment we live in.  Without collaborative communication life cannot continue.  Life happens on its fundamental levels through this “dance of connection” that Siegel is describing.  These signaling patterns and the information that they transmit form our entire body on all levels, not ‘just’ the brain.  Our brain, as a part of our Central Nervous System (CNS) processes all the signaling information going on within our entire body.

Siegel states that neuroscience can now describe

“…the mechanisms underlying how these early reciprocal communication experiences are remembered and how they allow a child’s brain to develop a balanced capacity to regulate emotions, to feel connected to other people, to establish an autobiographical story, and to move out into the world with a sense of vitality.  The capacity to reflect on mental states, both of the self and of others, emerges from within attachment relationships that foster such processes.  These patterns of communication literally shape the structure of the child’s developing brain.  These important early interpersonal experiences are encoded within various forms of memory.”  (pages 21-22, bolding is mine)

These earliest attachment experiences do not ‘just’ form the child’s developing brain.  They contribute to the formation of the entire body including the nervous system and the immune system because they are communicating to the growing body information in the form of memories about either the benevolent or malevolent environment the infant-child is preparing to live in for the rest of its life.

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My thinking continues to deviate from Siegel’s as he begins in his writing to specifically discuss the impact of memory on an infant-child’s development.  I have to read between his lines and begin to translate what he is saying through the filter of my own experiences from birth.  Siegel states:

“Memory is more than what we can consciously recall about events from the past.  A broader definition is that memory is the way past events affect future function.  Memory is thus the way the brain is affected by experience and then subsequently alters its future responses.  In this view, the brain experiences the world and encodes this interaction in a manner that alters future ways of responding.  What we shall soon see is that this definition of memory allows us to understand how past events can directly shape how and what we learn, even though we may have no conscious recollections of those events.  Our earliest experiences shape our ways of behaving, including patterns of relating to others, without our ability to recall consciously when these first learning experiences occurred.”  (page 24 – I added underlining to what Siegel had italicized)

I do not disagree with Siegel’s words, but from my point of view, his thinking is too limited to apply to what I, as a Trauma Altered Development survivor, most need to understand.  DNA is memory.  DNA has recorded within it all the information needed to remember how to make a body from a single cell.  DNA contains the record of what we need to know to be built from conception into a human being rather than into a leaf, a turnip or a toad.

It is not ‘just’ the brain that “experiences the world and encodes this interaction in a manner that alters future ways of responding.”  Our brain does not pursue a course of development that is in any way separate from the ongoing development of our entire body down to its basic molecular operations.  Experience is translated by the mechanisms that tell our DNA what to do every step of the way.  I now have to consider the research discovering and describing epigenetic changes has happened since the 1999 publication of this book.

While Siegel says “this definition of memory allows us to understand how past events can directly shape how and what we learn, even though we may have no conscious recollections of those events” I must expand my thinking to include how “past events” in the form of memories build the entire body.  I have to expand my concept of “learning” to include the learning that is contained within our DNA itself, within the mechanisms that tell our DNA what to do, within the cells of our body that signal one another and receive signals from the larger environment, and within our entire body that contains a brain that eventually grows and develops an ability to inform our mind.

Because I grew and developed from birth in a malevolent environment that influenced my development on all my levels except the fundamental DNA I was conceived with, I cannot take for granted that any of my ensuing development post-birth was not affected by the influence of trauma, and therefore altered.

The only way I can begin to truly understand myself in the world is to begin to understand that trauma and the memory of trauma built my entire body in the first place, and this trauma-formed (trauma in-formed) ‘remembering body built from trauma memory’ is itself the one that I remember every memory with.  Every memory I have, conscious or not, happens within this trauma changed body.

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Siegel:

“In a direct way, experience shapes the structure of the brain.”  (page 24)

Add to this, in a direct way experience shapes the structure of the body itself.

Siegel:

“The infant brain has an overabundance of neurons with relatively few synaptic connections at birth, compared to the highly differentiated and interconnected set of connections that will be established in the first few years of life.  Experience and genetic information will determine to a large extent how those connections are established.  Memory utilizes the processes by which chemical alterations strengthen associations among neurons for short-term encoding and actually activate the genetic machinery required for the establishment of new synaptic connections for longterm memory storage.”  (page 25 – bolding is mine:  I suspect trauma interruptions in the process lead to dissociation)

Experience interacts with our genetic information.  They do not operate separately or independently.  Human beings are created to be adaptable creatures within the realm of what is possible for each of us as individual members of our species.  At its most fundamental levels, all these interactions are stored within our body as memory, and from our beginning these memories are stored as implicit memory that, according to Siegel,

“…involves parts of the brain that do not require conscious processing during encoding or retrieval.  When implicit memory is retrieved, the neural net profiles that are reactivated involve circuits in the brain that are a fundamental part of our everyday experience of life:  behaviors, emotions, and images.  These implicit elements form part of the foundation for our subjective sense of ourselves:  We act, feel, and imagine without recognition of the influence of past experience on our present reality.”  (page 29 – bolding is mine)

People who do not have a body that developed, grew and formed in a malevolent environment of trauma have a different body than does an early traumatized survivor.  The differences in the kinds of early experiences between these two groups formed different memories into the body that will then be the body that remembers everything else in their life time.  That “we act, feel, and imagine without recognition of the influence of past experience on our present reality” includes everything about our self in the world as determined through our earliest caregiving experiences in the world that built us.

People who did not experience Trauma Altered Development do not have to concern themselves with how their past experiences influenced their present reality.  They can roll on down the road of their lives having been built in a ‘good enough’ benevolent world.  Those of us who suffered severe maltreatment during our formative stages will experience the impact of those traumas within the very fiber of our body in which we live our lives.

Nearly all people who experienced Trauma Altered Development have experienced adulthoods that are less than optimal – and most of us eventually are told that we have ‘symptoms’ that place us in some ‘dysfunctional’ category or another.  NONE of us have been told the facts that I just outlined above.  NONE of us have been told that it is not only the terribly harmful things that were done to us that are our problem, not the memory of these experiences that we might or might not consciously remember that is our problem, but that it is the body we live in that was itself built BY THE EXPERIENCES OF TRAUMA we endured and changed as a consequence – through which we live our life and remember everything else with for the rest of our life – that has made us into a different kind of person than non-early-traumatized people are.

This is what Siegel is not telling me.  Severe trauma so changes us in our development that we become what Teicher’s group calls ‘evolutionarily altered’ beings.  I want to know what that means, because I know that without having had these human resiliency factors that allowed me to transform trauma memory from birth into a body that could survive, I would not be here at all.

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from page 33, "The Developing Mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are," by Daniel J. Siegel

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PLEASE NOTE:  Do not take anything I say as a reason to alter any ongoing treatment, therapy or medication you are receiving.  Consult with your provider if you find something in my writing that brings questions to your mind regarding your health and well-being.

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+WHEN OUR TEARS TAKE AWAY OUR WORDS – WHAT IS THE TRUTH ABOUT OUR TRAUMAS?

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By the end of this post I cannot write my way through my tears…..

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I decided to take a look today at this book, hoping to find within it some new information that will give me some new insights about how to ‘recover’ from the effects of the 18 years of chronic trauma I experienced from birth and throughout the survivorhood that was supposed to be my childhood.

The Trauma Spectrum: Hidden Wounds and Human Resiliency by Robert C. Scaer (Hardcover – Jul 17, 2005)

Yet, here again, in spite of Scaer’s many years of experience in treating trauma survivors, in spite of his careful writing based on meticulous research, this book does not truly address my condition.  He misses the fundamental fact that those of us who suffered overwhelming trauma while our body-brain-mind-self was passing through our early critical-window growth and developmental stages have been deprived of the most basic human right possible – the right to live our lives in a body that has not been permanently changed by having trauma built right in to it.

Because I live in a trauma formed body, I have NEVER had a body that did not include these trauma adaptation responses in it.  I do not have the luxury, therefore, to return to any pretrauma state.  Well, I do have to make an important distinction here.  Because the full development of my mother’s mental psychosis did not originate until the time she was actually birthing me, the conditions my body formed in while she was pregnant with me were benign and adequate.  Without at least having had those nine months of untraumatized development, I most certainly would not be alive today.

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Except for the critical 9-month reprieve from developmental trauma that I had the luxury of experiencing within my mother’s womb, all the rest of my development occurred in a malevolent environment of trauma.  I now know enough about myself and those like me to understand that everything in Scaer’s book is missing the mark about how trauma ‘facts’ apply to me.

Very few researchers are ready yet to look our situation square in the face.  They treat our reality as if they were trying to consider what a full eclipse of the sun looks like.  We cannot look unaided at an eclipse without suffering permanent visual damage.  Researchers are evidently unprepared to look at our situation without suffering damage to their own vision of what life is SUPPOSED to be like in regard to the impact that trauma truly has on the most powerless and helpless humans on earth – infants and very young children.

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I am sorry, but I just cannot find it within me to get too excited about or to feel too hopeful because Scaer starts his book by paying passing lip service to the reality of Trauma Altered Development (TSD) when he writes on page 12:

“The nature versus nurture, genes versus experience dilemma is especially important in the field of development of the brain and behavior.  Many mental illnesses and behavioral and personality traits are considered to be primarily genetic in nature.  In fact, genes are routinely activated or “switched on” by experience, often only during a window of opportunity in early infancy.  The long-term effects of early life experience on behavior throughout the lifespan must be considered when diagnosing and treating behavioral disorders, especially when considering the perplexing tendency for victims of trauma to repeat behavior closely associated with prior life trauma.”

HOGWASH!   This is just another example of ‘sinking Titanic’ Dark Age thinking.  Yes, “genes are routinely activated or “switched on” by experience” but there’s nothing ‘often’ about this process.  It occurs on the most fundamental level in a continual process during our early infant-child growth and development – it is HOW we get made!  The experiences we have with our early caregivers, either in a safe and secure attachment relationship or not, set in motion all the physiological, biological adaptations to our benevolent or malevolent environment that determine the creation of the body we will live in and with for the rest of our lives.

Those of us forced to endure overwhelming trauma during these ‘windows of opportunity’ in early infancy (and early childhood) that Scaer mentions in passing so change us that we do not belong to the ‘ordinary’ group the rest of his book is designed to help.  I am left, again, with a mind full of ‘yes, but…..’ – WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF US?

If overwhelming traumatic experiences build us in the first place, we absolutely have no chance to EVER ‘return’ to a pretrauma state.  Very few researchers and clinicians seem to get this critical point.

(see an example of an exception: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook–What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing by Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz (Paperback – Dec 24, 2007) )

How do I begin to pick my way through the rubble of thinking that is contained in books like Scaer’s so that I can learn SOMETHING useful about the impact of trauma and hoped-for so-called ‘recovery’ from its effects when I know from the start that this author has no clue about how Trauma Altered Development has changed me?  Filtering what Scaer is saying about trauma through my own body-brain-mind-self that was built through my own experiences of overwhelming trauma from the moment I was born and for the next 18 years of my life is a daunting task.  I have to translate and transform his thinking one word, one concept, one ‘lesson’ at a time.

Scaer’s book would be dense and difficult to read even if I knew ahead of time that he knew what he was talking about as his information applies to me.  Knowing ahead of time that he doesn’t have the remotest clue about who and how I am in the world leaves me ONLY with my own desire to better understand the fundamental nature of trauma as it impacts human beings.  I cannot hope or trust that this author has prepared a pathway for me to travel through this information he considers himself enough of an expert to present.

I have to rely upon my own desire for knowledge and understanding about how the trauma that happened to me changed me from the first breath I took on this earth if I am ever going to be able to achieve any healing.  I refuse to accept my assigned status of being a casualty of a war I was born into as I was forced to fight to stay alive and continue my development with every possible human resiliency factor I had in my little, tiny body.

I find myself at this moment up against my own tears that spring from the deepest levels of who I am as I seek to help all of us who were forced to change on our cellular levels in order to remain alive against all odds.  We were terribly, terribly hurt and we remained alive.  Where are the words that we can use to begin to understand what these hurts did to us?  If the trauma experts cannot even find and use these words accurately, how can I?  How can we begin to articulate what our body knows on its most profound levels about the reality of the power trauma has to impact human beings and to forever change us?

How do we begin to translate our experience and transform our tears directly into words?  I have to get back to you on that.  Right now my tears are taking my words away.  I doubt that’s a problem trauma experts like Scaer ever have to face.

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+PTSD AND SEVERE ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – PART THREE

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I find that the only standard I can consistently depend upon in my considerations about what constitutes malevolent treatment versus adequate, benevolent treatment lies within the context of the United Nations Universal Declaration of the Human Rights of Children.  Safe, secure, appropriate and adequate early care that leads to an infant-child’s optimal development lies on a continuum at the opposite end from early malevolent conditions that present nearly a constant challenge and threat to survival itself.

The basic needs of children are defined in this Declaration.  In looking at my own history of survivorhood (I was never allowed to be a child, and therefore I no longer consider that I had a childhood at all) it is clear to me that every one of my rights as an infant-child were violated.  It was in that malevolent environment of deprivation that I was exposed to the degrees of trauma that were severe enough to create within the physiology of my body Trauma Altered Development (TAD).

From my earliest beginnings as a being physically separate from my mother was suffered from a lack of safe and secure attachment.  Deprived of that most fundamental resiliency factor, my body-brain-mind-self had to do the best that I could do to continue to grow and develop within that terrible environment that threatened my very existence.

This third post on the topic again continues an exploration of how TAD changes an infant-child abuse survivor’s reaction to ALL trauma.   Van der Kolk writes about posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the book, Healing Trauma: Attachment, Mind, Body, and Brain – Hardcover (Jan 2003, W.W. Norton and Co.) by Daniel J. Siegel, Marion F. Solomon, and Marion Solomon, chapter 4 (pages 168-195) written by Bessel A. van der Kolk:  “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and The Nature of Trauma.”

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I begin writing today by considering the last sentence of the scanned book pages that were posted on November 30, 2009:

“….progress in understanding the function of attachment in shaping the individual and rapid developments in the neurosciences gave a new shape to these old insights [about the importance of trauma].”  (page 177)

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Van der Kolk next considers “The Psychobiology of Trauma” in his writing:

“Modern research has come to elucidate the degree to which PTSD is, indeed, a “physioneurosis,” a mental disorder based on the persistence of biological emergency responses.”  (page 177)

In my thinking, naming PTSD ‘a mental disorder’ ignores the overwhelming evidence that the entire human body is included in the ‘persistence of biological emergency responses’ that the author is talking about.  From my point of view, it is the consideration of how severe infant-child maltreatment and abuse changes the development of the ENTIRE BODY of the little one that matters to those of us who survived this degree of early trauma.

‘Biological emergency responses’ BUILT our bodies.  These responses signaled our DNA how to express itself.  These responses signaled our developing nervous system and brain on all levels about how to adapt to trauma.  Our developing nervous system was also intimately involved in these responses as it formed, also.  It is at this most basic, profound level of our physiological development from our beginnings that we have to understand how our development changed in ways that a non-TAD ‘ordinary’ body did not.

The adaptive changes that happened to us took place on far, far deeper levels than just the level of mind.  Mind is simply the topmost layer of our existence that I see as being related to our body as smoke is to fire.  I do not have a ‘mental disorder’.  My entire being is ordered in a very particular way in accordance with what surviving my infant-child trauma required.

It is this Trauma Altered Development that created my survival based, trauma centered ordering of my entire being that I seek to understand.  I am not convinced that van der Kolk has anything more than a passing surface notion of what these TAD changes actually ARE, how they affect us, or even if they legitimately belong to anything like a PTSD diagnostic category.

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Van der Kolk continues by saying:

“To understand how trauma affects psychobiological activity, it is useful to briefly revisit some basic tenets of neurobiology.”

I do not like the term ‘psychobiological activity’ because it implies that anyone on the outside can ever have any accurate information about what another person’s ‘psyche’ is like.  That is why researchers try to more completely understand the human ability to form a Theory of Mind.  MIND belongs to each of us as individuals, and everyone has their own.  Nobody can ever come to understand what the subjective experience of MIND is like for another person.

‘Neurobiology’ is a different thing.  This is a realistic descriptive word that refers to a part of a person that can, within the current limitations of science, be understood and described because it is physically real on the molecular level.  But neurobiology is not the same thing as MIND.

Van der Kolk continues:

“McLean (1990) defined the brain [my note:  The brain is a biological reality as part of our nervous system, from which an individual’s MIND originates.  Brain and MIND are not the same thing.] as a detecting, amplifying, and analyzing device for maintaining us in our internal and external environment.  These functions range from the visceral regulation of oxygen intake and temperature balance to the categorization of incoming information necessary for making complex, long-term decisions affecting both individual and social systems.  In the course of evolution, the human brain has developed three interdependent subanalyzers, each with different anatomical and neurochemical substrates:

(1)  the brain stem and hypothalamus, which are primarily associated with the regulation of internal homeostasis,

(2) the limbic system, which is charged with maintaining the balance between the internal world and external reality, and

(3) the neocortex, which is responsible for analyzing and interacting with the external world.

”It is generally thought that the circuitry of the brain stem and hypothalamus is most innate and stable, that the limbic system contains both innate circuitry and circuitry modifiable by experience [my note:  This emotional area of the brain forms through early caregiver attachment interactions birth to age one, forming MUCH earlier than the neocortex], and that the structure of the neocortex is most affected by environmental input (Damasio, 1995).  If that is true, trauma would be expected to leave its most profound changes on neocortical functions, and least affect basic regulatory functions.  However, while this may be true for the ordinary stress response, trauma – stress that overwhelms the organism – seems to affect people over a wide range of biological functioning, involving a large variety of brain structures and neurotransmitter systems.”  (pages 177-178)

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I am going to scan in the book pages that follow in van der Kolk’s description of how trauma affects people.  I believe his statement on the bottom half of page 190 is extremely important:

“…the development of a chronic trauma-based disorder is qualitatively different from a simple exaggeration of the normal stress response….”

We need to stretch that concept as far as we possibly can if we are going to understand how severe trauma from malevolent infant-child abuse and neglect changes our entire development – nothing about us is excluded.  Any possible aspect of our development that can adapt its development in order to help us endure and survive early trauma – does so.

Our problem comes when the reality of our early trauma is denied along with the depth, breadth and width of its impact on our development.  What may be true for a non trauma altered development person cannot be assumed to be true for us.  Yes, we know what the following descriptions of consequences FEELS like – but we also know that we never knew any other, different way of being in the world.

Due to the changed development we experienced as we survived our early severe traumas, anything that we might begin to understand now as being more like  ‘ordinary’ in our physical – and correspondingly in our mental — ability to experience our self in our body in our lifetime, will happen as we begin to understand how deeply trauma formed us in the first place so that we will NEVER experience trauma (or life) in the same way as will a person who did not experience Trauma Altered Development when they were little.

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The scanned pages below (from the book mentioned above!) is complicated information, but it is a place for us to truly begin to understand ourselves – the way were MADE in the severely abusive and trauma-filled environments we were formed in.

On page 184 van der Kolk notes that “PTSD patients” have problems

“…with “taking in” and processing arousing information, and to learn from such experiences.”

Sorry, but I am not a ‘PTSD patient’.  I am a 58-year-old woman who has suffered from an extra-ordinary body, altered in all its developmental stages in adaptation to trauma, that has never been able to ‘take in’ even ordinary information, let alone ‘arousing information’, or to ‘learn from’ the experiences of my life in an ordinary way.

What on earth do we expect to happen to little people who must continue to develop and survive even while they have little or no access to even their most basic Universal Human Rights?  Infant-child development IS ALTERED under these conditions.  It is time that we realize this is the most truly horrific consequence of early abuse and trauma.  We don’t get to experience ANYTHING the same way as non-early-traumatized people do – not even later traumas.

(note:  I believe in ‘degrees of damage’ – the 75% of our sub-par young adults in this country have suffered some degree of damage that has changed the course of their development away from optimal and BEST!  We cannot afford to ignore that fact – deprivation and violation of the Universal Human Rights of Children causes changes in the way their body and brain develop.  There is a very real, physiological process through which trauma and deprivation get passed on down the generations.  We know it is happening when we see the consequences in degrees of lack of well-being –- which are detectable no matter what our age.)

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(The following is from page 186 on left or right handedness and trauma)

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This post follows:

from November 30, 2009 +PTSD AND SEVERE ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – PART TWO

from November 28, 2009 +PTSD AND SEVERE CHILD ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – PART ONE

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PLEASE NOTE:  Do not take anything I say as a reason to alter any ongoing treatment, therapy or medication you are receiving.  Consult with your provider if you find something in my writing that brings questions to your mind regarding your health and well-being.

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+THREE TOPIC INFORMATION POST

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FROM THE:

Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog

Early Learning:   Key to National Defense

Posted: 30 Nov 2009 09:36 AM PST

A new press release, published by Mission Readiness says that according to Pentagon data, that 75% of our nation’s 17 to 24-year-olds are unfit for service due to failure to complete high school, past criminal record or are physically unfit. Military leaders are calling on Congress to pass the Early Learning Challenge Grant legislation.

The Obama Administration’s Early Learning Challenge Grant proposal would challenge states to develop effective, innovative models that promote high standards of quality and a focus on outcomes across early learning settings, and dedicate $10 billion over ten years toward this effort.  The goal is to reform and improve early learning programs to deliver a complete and competitive education to every child in America.

Congress is now considering the proposal, which would help states provide more at-risk kids with access to quality early learning programs.  It would provide grants to the states of $1 billion a year for up to ten years to improve the quality of early childhood development programs and expand access to more at-risk kids.

Some of the goals of the fund are to:

  • Drive results-oriented, standards reform across programs, setting a high standard of quality for programs to strive toward, in order to better promote early learning, child development, and school readiness.
  • Fund and implement pathways to improve existing early learning programs, with the goal of increasing the number of low-income young children who participate in higher-quality settings.
  • Ensure that more children enter kindergarten ready, with the healthy cognitive, social, emotional, and physical skills and ability necessary for success.

The military is currently meeting recruitment goals, due in part to the severe economic recession, but the retired leaders said the challenge of finding quality recruits will return when the economy recovers. Rear Admiral Barnett said, “Our national security in the year 2030 is absolutely dependent on what’s going on in pre-kindergarten today. We urge Congress to take action on this issue this year.”

Major General Comstock adds: “I’m a lifelong political conservative, and I believe that government should intervene on a limited and targeted basis.   Early education is not conservative common sense or liberal common sense, it’s just plain common sense. Reaching the most at-risk kids helps increase graduation rates and cut crime, so early education is a matter of national security.”

To view the full press release please visit : http://www.missionreadiness.org/press110509.html

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THE FOLLOWING IS PRESENTED IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER:

FROM About.com — Borderline Personality Disorder

In the Spotlight | More Topics |
from Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD
Lots of people with BPD worry about the whether their marriage can weather the storms that can come with the disorder. And many people who are married to those with BPD wonder whether therapy can improve the quality of the relationship.

Can a BPD Marriage Survive?
Couples counseling may be one helpful avenue of treatment, but there are no systematic studies of these types of therapies in BPD couples.

More Topics

Can I Get Better on My Own?
If you or your spouse has BPD, you may be wondering whether treatment is really necessary. Unfortunately, BPD isn’t the kind of disorder that is easily treated through self-help.

Should I Divorce My BPD Spouse?
Of course there is no blanket answer for this one. Some people make their BPD marriage work, and others can’t. But here are some things to consider…

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I am scanning in the following four pages about the history of the treatment of trauma for your consideration.  It is the last sentence on page 177 that interests me most as I will consider in a future post, but in all fairness to the author and to my readers, the rest of this information needs to be presented here for educational purposes.

These pages are taken from the book, Healing Trauma: Attachment, Mind, Body, and Brain – Hardcover (Jan 2003, W.W. Norton and Co.) edited by Daniel J. Siegel, Marion F. Solomon, and Marion Solomon, chapter 4 (pages 168-195) written by Bessel A. van der Kolk:  “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and The Nature of Trauma.

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Please feel free to comment directly at the end of this post or on

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Your Page – Readers’ Responses

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PLEASE NOTE:  Do not take anything I say as a reason to alter any ongoing treatment, therapy or medication you are receiving.  Consult with your provider if you find something in my writing that brings questions to your mind regarding your health and well-being.

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