LINKS TO NEW PAGES ADDED ON ATTACHMENT, PTSD AND EMOTIONS

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

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

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

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

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

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Now for the rest of the story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EARLY TRAUMA BUILDS DISSOCIATION INTO THE BRAIN

May 3, 2009March 31, 2013 alchemynow9 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DOES THE GOOD MAKE THE BAD BETTER?

May 1, 2009November 21, 2010 alchemynow1 Comment

On the whole, one could never have said that our family valued being lazy. I don’t remember exactly what time we woke up in the summer when we had no reason to leave the homestead, no place particular to go. But neither do I remember that we ever ‘slept in.’

But getting up in time to see a sunrise during on any Alaskan July day was nearly impossible. It seemed like a sunset would happen with a sunrise following so close behind it that nobody ever actually saw one happen. But because of this particular experience that happened the summer before I turned 17, when my mother devised one of her more bizarre punishments of me, I was able to see one of the most gorgeous sunrises of my life.

I don’t remember what instigated this event. I have no idea what I had ‘done wrong’. Maybe I had forgotten to remove all the clothespins from the clothes line. Maybe I had forgotten to wipe the stove top clean after I had done the dishes. Maybe I had ‘wiggled my bottom’ when I walked across the room. Maybe I had slipped and used the word “she’ where my mother could hear me.

It never mattered. Most of the time I had no idea why my mother was mad at me. But on this particular night she decided that I wasn’t ‘fit’ to sleep under the same roof as the rest of the family so I was therefore banished to spend the night in the family’s station wagon. But not just anywhere in the car. I was told to sit in the driver’s seat with my head bent down under the steering wheel.

I was skinny at 16, but my full height of five foot eight and a half inches, so bending down that far down in that position was not comfortable by any means. I suspect that my mother kept my father up all night yelling at him because I know she didn’t sleep. About every half hour she returned to the car to check on me to make sure I was still in my assigned position. Which, of course, to avoid any further wrath from her, I still was.

One must realize that we lived miles from the nearest neighbor (and had no electricity until we purchased a generator that we ran sometimes and no running water). We were ‘out there’ and ‘up there’ on the side of a mountain at the end of the road. Nobody ever saw us. Nobody cared that we were there — certainly nobody cared what happened to me.

But on this night I summoned all the rebellion I was capable of and in between the times my mother came out to check on me and the time she returned to the house, I sat up! How daring was that! I didn’t get out of the car, but I was able to watch the sun move over the mountain tops when the sun came up far behind the homestead’s mountain. I had never seen anything so beautiful. All shades of pink, peach, rose and red lit up the high floating clouds and then brushed gradually over the mountain as the sun rose.

Sunrises had never been a part of my summer life until this punishment. I always could time it so that I guessed accurately about what time my mother would pop out of the house and stomp over to the car, could time when her fist would pound on the car’s window and her twisted rage filled face would scream at me. And then she would be gone again and I would sit up to be a part, again, of a wondrous process that held me in awe.

This was not a punishment that my siblings were meant to see, so before they awakened my mother came out, released me from my night’s prison and told me to go in and cook the family breakfast. That’s where I was when the others arose and they never knew where I had been while they had been soundly sleeping.

What a contrast I experienced between the times of my mother’s appearance and her screaming tirades and the sweet stillness of the mountain as it slept through that short night. How could I have survived, relatively intact, the thousands of my mother’s ingenious punishments if I didn’t have that mountain place to feed and sustain me?

I know now that a severely abused child who has no choice but to survive has to have altered and different ways to receive information and to process experiences. When I think back on this experience on some level it makes me literally sick to my stomach — especially knowing my father was in the house and fully aware of what was taking place and did not intervene.

But the punishment also carries within two jewels. One is that I dared to defy my mother by sitting up. The other is that I had implanted in my being a memory that is by itself precious to me — that of being a witness to and a part of an Alaskan summer sunrise as it came over the mountains surrounding me. I could not stop her punishment of me, but I did make use of what options were available to me. I chose to fix beauty and goodness around this abusive incident and I hold the two together inside of me so that one cannot be separated from the other.

And yet this experience is still one that is dissociated from my ongoing life process because there is no way that I could make it ‘fit’ back then when it happened and no way I can make it ‘fit’ now. The only pieces that seem to matter to me are the good parts which I willed myself to keep closer than the experience of the abuse itself. Yes, the experience was traumatic. No, I have never forgotten it, though I do not remember many thousands of other abusive experiences. But I decided even back then that I was going to add my own beauty to the abuse — and that part is MINE.

I need to make it clear here that I do not write about sexual abuse. To my knowledge, that form abuse was not a part of my childhood. I am also NOT saying that anything about the abuse itself was positive. What I am saying is that I find value in being able to own those qualities in me that allowed me to endure all the abusive events and still come out to be a lovely person. I do not have the mental illness that my mother had, and I can never be grateful enough for that fact. ‘Normal’ people never have to think in these terms, but I have to.

One could think that a body (mine) could never have endured even the physical aspects of being beaten from the time I was tiny. Certainly it is critical to understand how a child endures the verbal, psychological and emotional abuse, as well. We did survive because there is something inside of us that allowed that to happen. What THAT was is for me to discover, hold onto and use every day, today included.

At this point, I would not encourage anyone to go ‘back there’ and hunt around for awful childhood abuse memories. Most of us have more than our share to face and deal with on a daily basis as it is. But I will always ask that others think about how the goodness surrounded the abuse in some way or we would never have survived it at all in the first place. There is something good in each survivor, something precious and I say, holy, that we brought with us through the abuse because it is a part of who we are and nobody could or can take that away from us.

After all, I am the one that remembers what it feels like to be included in the rising sun’s caress of an Alaskan mountainside on the morning of a long summer’s day– not my mother nor my father nor my siblings. I am the one that still feels that sun’s kiss, and I always will.

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

+BLACK RABBIT

April 30, 2009November 21, 2010 alchemynow1 Comment

Please see:

http://preventchildabuseny.typepad.com/prevent_child_abuse_new_y/2009/04/response-to-apples-baby-shaker-application.html

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Please follow this link to the story. It has been moved into the section on my childhood stories.

WHY NOT TO REMEMBER MY MOTHER

April 28, 2009November 21, 2010 alchemynow4 Comments

PLEASE NOTE THIS WARNING: This post contains triggering material which may be difficult for anyone with a history of trauma and abuse to read. Please either do not read this alone without a support person at your side, or stop reading immediately if you become uncomfortable with yourself as you read it.

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I received the following comment today related to + About this site

“Linda, I did not pick this up in your writing ( which is amazing ). Is your mother still alive and did you ever have an opportunity to confront her or make peace with her.”

My reply was that I would write about this in today’s post. Not an easy task.

The first image that presents itself in my awareness (from my right brain’s storehouse of wordless images) is one of being in a store shopping for flower and vegetable seeds. I see a well stocked large four-sided display rack that I can turn around in circles so that I can see the entire display.

Suddenly I see that all the packages are ripped open and the seeds are dumped in a pile on the floor. All the seeds are mixed up and it is now my job to sort them all out ‘correctly’ so that they can be resealed in new packages and put back where I found them in the first place.

I know more now about what this image is showing me than I ever could have before. All my memories regarding my mother are sealed into separate ‘packages’ and stored according to my survival brain’s wisdom. They are not linked together in any sort of order based on a timeline according to when these experiences happened in the first place. Never in my childhood was I able to connect them together and it is only with great concentration and effort that I can attempt to do so today.

Every single memory I have of my mother is linked to trauma. To continue with my seed package image, it is like every single package and every single seed is contaminated with poison, and if I touch any of them my brain tells me I could die. In order to “go back there” I have to apply a level of thought that can allow me to do this.

I have to find and put on a ‘safe suit’ of protection that allows me to go back and handle my memories. That safe suit is barely adequate and consists of a mental effort I must make today to understand that there was and is no reason for what happened to me. I use this word, reason, on many levels. My mother’s mind was broken so she had no ability to use reason regarding anything that involved me — ever. She was mentally ill and therefore everything about her was irrational.

Her psychosis regarding me was complete and indissoluble. Because I do not have a mind like hers, even though she influenced nearly every thought that was built into my brain until I was 18, I cannot look into my past from a reasonable or rational place so that I can describe my experience from ‘my side of the fence’. That is probably the final trauma of unresolved trauma. It cannot be translated, on any level, into the realm of reason.

Yet I have to think about reason because it is the only ‘safety suit’ I have. Everything about my relationship with my mother was, from my first breath, about the reason I needed to be hated and continually punished. I was the devil’s child and therefore absolutely evil. My ‘poor’ mother was given the curse of having to be my mother, and therefore she must do the best that she could to ‘deal with me’ and try to accomplish the given, hopeless task of making be ‘better’. She applied herself to her task with vengeance.

In her mind, she had failed miserably in her mission by the time I left home at 18. In her mind that failure was absolute and her belief in that lasted to her final breath.

In order to ‘stack the deck’ in favor of reason I will mention a few concepts used by experts as they work with people who have posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). (This is a diagnosis which I ‘have’, along with dissociative identity disorder — without the identities, which I will discuss later) and major reoccurring depression.) The term ‘flashbacks’ is used in relation to the unresolved traumas in PTSD. Another term used is ‘flashbulb memories’. What this means is that the experiences of trauma have not been integrated into the ongoing experience of the person who endured them.

This lack of integration happens for many reasons, including the fact that nothing has useful, that can lead to an increased ability to survive future related terrors — by the individual or by the species, has yet been learned as a result of these experiences. When abuse begins from birth, before the infant has any possible capacity to ‘process’ its experiences, the very foundation of memory formation is altered within the forming and developing structure of the brain. Having the traumatic memories ‘stuck together’ in any meaningful fashion is therefore the exception, not the rule.

Memories of the individual experiences are therefore like millions of seeds in a pile on the floor. To even have some of them organized and sorted out into a small group of related experiences — so that they can at least be stored in separate packages — requires extremes of applied effort. To assign them meaning is nearly impossible because they happened in and belong to a malevolent world without cause and effect and without reason or rationality.

I believe that it takes an extremely creative and intelligent mind to survive experiences like mine and be able to come out on the other end being able to even remotely ‘act normal’. This intelligent mind has to have had opportunities to form some active coping skills that allow this eventual ‘gluing together of the pieces’ in any meaningful way to happen at all. I describe some of the assets that existed for me in my post THE RESILIENCY MYTH.

While the following might be a controversial statement, it is my current assessment of the relationship of ‘mental illness’ to survival. Had I received the potential genetic combination that could have resulted in a mental illness such as my mother had, and if my body could have taken that detour in order to have survived without the self reflective abilities of a mind that was not given this detour, I would have turned out like my mother did. I do not believe that she had a choice because whatever neglect and maltreatment she received during her brain developmental stages triggered the manifestation of her mental illness and there was nothing she could do about it, either.

Please make no mistake here. I was born in 1951 and raised during an era when child abuse was still not recognized and addressed by our society at large in any meaningful way. In today’s ‘enlightened’ era, there is absolutely NO EXCUSE for outsiders of the family not to know and understand the symptoms a terribly abused child will manifest openly, and no excuse for them not intervening on behalf of the child. Information on this topic will be presented in future posts.

Because my writing is always a process connected to me and to my life as I write the words, and because I am always learning about myself and how I process information related to my personal experiences, I will share with you what is happening in my mind as I attempt to get closer to telling the truth about the question posed in the reader’s comment: “Is your mother still alive and did you ever have an opportunity to confront her or make peace with her.”

In my brain of brains and mind of minds, yes, my mother IS still alive. I do not have a basis for placing anything to do with my mother on a logical timeline and for keeping it there. The reasonable fact is that she ceased to exist in her body in the spring of 2002. I did not shed a single tear. I’m not sure if any of my five siblings shed one, either.

I lack the ability to accomplish the action of finding every single separate ‘seed’ memory that involves her, facing them face to face, and making any of the equally dissociated Linda’s understand unequivocally that THEIR mother is dead. The image that is in my mind now is that each seed has turned into a dandelion seed, that a powerful wind has come up so that each seed with its attached bit of fluff is now dashing away from me into the blue sky — and yes, to a place of safety for themselves — also leaving me in a place of safety as I sit here and write these words.

I will make the effort of trying to grab perhaps one of those seeds or a handful of them before they vanish from me today. (By the way, future posts on attachment disorders, particularly about disorganized-disoriented attachment disorders, will describe how the lack of the ability to tell a coherent life story is one of the clearest marker that indicates these attachment disorders exist for a person.)

Moving on in my writing as I work to answer this commenter’s question, I see that I actually have a fistful of seeds grasped in each of my hands. I guess fortunately for me I only confronted my mother once (seeds in my left hand) and disowned her once years later (seeds in my right hand).

Now I tell myself, “It’s OK Linda.” I slowly open my left hand and protect those seeds from being whisked away before I can write the following:

(“Organize your thoughts, Linda. Let the seeds put themselves in order. Believe that there is a beginning and an end to this group of thoughts. Now begin writing.”)

As I mention elsewhere on this blog, I completed 7 weeks of inpatient alcoholism treatment in 1980 and was then sent to ongoing therapy and given antidepressants. I followed every piece of advice anyone gave me about how to ‘recover’ as avidly as a starving bird would hunt for seeds. About a year after my exit from treatment, following the advice of my therapist, I DID call my mother to confront her.

All I knew at that time was that she had not been nice to me while she raised me, and that there was some discrepancy between her treatment of be back then and her treatment of me as a married adult mother of 2, as she sent me cute little cards with lovey-dovey I love yous enclosed. I can return to that phone call with difficulty. Like two powerfully opposing magnets the me in this chair writing attempts to move closer to the me I see standing in the dining room, sunlight streaming in the windows, cream colored phone in my hand, long twisted coiled cord draped around my feet as I stand there talking to my mother.

What happened? I courageously told her that I was not willing to have a phony (no pun intended) loving relationship with her in the present (“Let me try to think here. I got the first part out… Catch that seed, Linda. Hold onto it, look at it….”) — if — (“Come on, Linda, you can do this. I know there’s all kinds of pain here, but you can find the words and not let the pain appear now. Separate them out. Let the words come but not the pain.”) — (“Is that possible?”) (“Yes, trust me it is possible.”) (Here comes the wind. Stop this argument now.) (“Who are you that I should trust a damn thing you are saying”) (Stop this argument NOW.)

IF. Getting back to the IF. IF we can’t talk about the things you did to me while I was growing up. That’s what I said to her.

She instantly switched to her ugly screaming rage filled voice and attacked me as she launched into the litany she had been building for me from birth. SEE: *Litany from Start to Finish. “You were a horrible, terrible, vile child! You tried to kill me when you were born! You deserved everything I ever gave you and even that was not enough! Even your kindergarten teacher agreed with me. She had been teaching for 35 years before you showed up in her class, and she told me you were more trouble and a worse child than any she had ever had in her class.”

Now, this is the GOOD part. As she streamed and screamed through her litany of abuse I moved the phone receiver away from my ear, lifted up right finger and moved it to the telephone and dropped it with a sense of accomplishment, empowerment, finality and pride onto the disconnect button and I hung the receiver up on her in mid word.

I stood stunned for a split second and then experienced a flood of joy. I started hopping up and down, and then began to skip around the house yelling in song, “I did it! I did it! I hung UP ON HER!”

Now the tears are here pushing against my eyes. No, that wasn’t the end of it. I wasn’t ready. It wasn’t time. Within a matter of days she called back with her sweet voice and I apologized, and the phony loving relationship was reinstated and maintained until the spring of 1989. That is when I had a realization (too much for me to write about right now) that allowed me to write her a simple letter thanking her for being the mother that brought me into the world and telling her directly that because of the abusive things she did to me as a child I could no longer have a relationship with her in my lifetime.

She did not respond though she continued to bemoan the curse of being my mother to my siblings for years after that until they one by one quit listening to her. I only saw her once — out of the corner of my eye as if she were a fleeting mirage of the shadow of a ghost — after that in 1990 as she passed through my desperately ill father’s hospital room. (He had finally divorced her by then).

My father died in 2001. I never confronted him. I ignored and avoided him in my adulthood just like he did me in my childhood. I believe that both of my parents had to make internal adjustments that allowed them to ‘go on being’ while having unbearable, overwhelming pain and sadness at their core. I would also say that both of my parents died of a broken heart.

This is all I can write today. I have to do my ‘Linda in today” things. I cannot describe to you right now how she died, either.

I want to say here that the reason I do this writing is not in hopes of healing myself. I am nearly 58 years old, and things will not get much better for me than they are now. I accept that fact. I write because I now there is value in sharing my experience so that others ‘out there’ with histories related to mine can perhaps see in my words a reflection of their own experience so that they can become empowered to own the fullness of their own traumatic lives. I trust this is possible because I do not write from the top down — not from a place of put-together security based on secure attachment patterns that would create all kinds of benefits those that have them probably don’t recognize.

I write from the bottom up. I write from a place of humiliation, terror, confusion and trauma. I write from an incredible place called ‘the miracle of survival’. I write from what Dr. Teicher of Harvard calls “an evolutionarily altered brain” formed in, by and for existence in a malevolent world.

But for now I am going to watch my blue parakeet bathe itself in its small dish of drinking water as I think about and then DO the act of finding it a better bathtub. I am going to work on the little hand made paper cross earrings I am figuring out how to make so that I can add them to my inventory of crafts to display and sell at this Saturday’s farmers market in town. They will be pure white with silver glitter. I will eat the last of my homemade banana bread muffins, made from my grandmother’s recipe. I added grated apple, dried currants and lots of walnuts. That’s good for me. That’s where I am going next.

But first, I am going to stand in the wind with my fists open and my palms facing the sky and let all the bits of dandelion fluff, memories of myself and my mother, blow away.

As always, thank you for visiting this site and for reading this post. Your comments are welcome and appreciated.

Jerry the Bird’s Shadow

+FORGETTING TO REMEMBER WHAT TO AVOID

April 26, 2009November 21, 2010 alchemynowLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+SOCIAL ISOLATION – Research on the Brain Changes

April 22, 2009November 21, 2010 alchemynowLeave a comment

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

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

PMID: 18423591 [PubMed – indexed for MEDLINE]

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

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

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

Fone KC, Porkess MV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+TRAUMA TRIGGERS and REACTIONS

April 18, 2009November 21, 2010 alchemynow2 Comments

I wanted to write for a moment about trauma triggers from my point of view. Part of what makes unresolved trauma such a problem in our lives is that not only do the triggers seem to have a life of their own, but our internal processing of these trauma triggers also seems to have a life of its own.

During my research I often encountered ‘helpful’ information on PTSD

(SEE: http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=22491)

that suggests one method of resolving the recurring problems of unresolved trauma is to work on the fear conditioning that traumas can create. From my own point of view, this suggestion seemed not only ludicrous but almost humorous. This is an example of how vital it is that we know our own experience and reality and honor this for ourselves.

In my case, my mother’s abuse of me was so chronic and pervasive that it INVADED nearly every corner of my brain and its operation from the time I was born. Nearly every single USUAL ordinary experience was tied to my mother’s psychotic intervention within my reality. The result is that nearly every single aspect of being alive in a body has a pathway and a track in my brain and nervous system back to a traumatic experience. The only way that I can begin to separate the trauma from myself and from my life in the present is to be absolutely as conscious as possible of myself and my responses to these millions (yes millions) of triggers.

Nobody who grew up from birth (and before) in a safe and secure environment can really imagine what life in the world for the rest of us who were born and raised in a DANGEROUS world of constant terrorism was like. Nor can they imagine what it’s like to live within our bodies with these brains. I am hard pressed to think of one object or one daily activity that I participate in that doesn’t have a trauma memory attached to it like a gigantic monster fish at the end of every fishing line I throw out as I live my life. This obviously means I am connected within myself not to a safe and secure platform of being in my body in this world, but rather that the platform of my being rests on terror, threat, and the threat of threat of danger.

I mean what I am saying literally. I can’t touch a hairbrush or put on a belt (sometimes the trigger is noticing somebody else’s belt!), use a coat hangar, wash my hair, do the dishes, eat food, be in a car, put on my clothes, go to bed, wake up from a deep sleep, read a book, watch TV — and on and on and on — without some part of my being having the job of blocking the traumatic reactions so that I can be here in the present having experiences without being caught in some version of a dissociative, trauma reaction experience.

We are meant from birth to connect all of our experiences together both in terms of the feelings these experiences create in us (with their correspondingly crucial information about ourselves in the world – these being our immune system responses), and how we connect all of our experiences together in our memory systems — which are connected to our reactions.

Traumatic reactions to triggers in our environment are memory reactions. My memories did not get linked together in a ‘normal’ way. There was no order in my world from birth, only chaotic, unpredictable violence (with a few moments here and there of my mother being ‘nice’ to me, usually as they happened in some public situation).

When was my world rational and ordered? Never. Therefore most of my memories have a life of their own as if they swim randomly around in a gigantic guppy tank until one of them is caught in the moment by some experience that seems related to the information about life they hold within them.

I imagine it that the people who were raised from birth in predictable, safe and secure environments really had the opportunity to form a brain where all the separate experiences of their early lives became linked together HELPFULLY so that they just grew up with a whale of a body — one connected, competent system that lets them get around in the world pretty much just fine.

For those of us who formed brains while living in hell, we ended up with the guppy tank. It is NOT that our way of being in the world isn’t HELPFUL, but it’s only helpful, really, if we live in a world today that matches the one our brain was built in, by and for in the first place. Perhaps that’s part of the reason we survivors often find ourselves in all kinds of extraordinarily stressful and traumatic situations in our adulthoods. Those really are the only kinds of experiences our brains were prepared to survive in.

But this is another example of how knowing our own pasts is our greatest asset. The understandings of why and how I live in a state of constant foreboding makes perfect sense to me now. My mission now is to make every choice I can to separate my reactions from what has been built into me so that I can try to live a different way today.

But it takes SO MUCH ENERGY, and so much attention. It requires of people like me a constant monitoring of ourselves in the world that ‘normal’ people NEVER have to do. That’s part of why their lives seem to be so much better than ours.

The human brain is an instrument of almost unlimited capacity for growth and change. Knowing that fact allows me to focus my efforts not so I can ‘be like everybody else,’ but so I can use as much of my own potential for positive change as I can discover and use in the span of each day (and night).

Believe me, for all the thousands and thousands and thousands of hours I was made to stand like a statue in some corner — put there by my mother before everyone else got out of bed and made to stay there until everyone but her was sound asleep at night — some few times being allowed to leave it to go to the bathroom or eat or go to school…..

Or being made to lie in bed from the time I was very young as if I was in a coffin (SEE, for example, THE BUBBLE GUM), and when I was in a deep sleep in the middle of the night being yanked out of bed by my hair as I came awake in the middle of some violent beating because I had been sleeping on my back with both arms raised beside my head, which to my mother meant I was pretending to be a baby……..or just experiencing this kind of violent awakening just because she was in a rage and wanted to beat me……. How do I overcome this ‘phobia’ or change lying in my bed so it’s NOT connected to these memories? I tell you, lying in bed during chemo for my cancer had this horrible triggering attached to it!

These experiences and memories do not have any value to me today as some form of ‘sob story’, I assure you. These kind of experiences do not belong in that kind of category for any one who have been in some way where I’ve been. What is crucially important is that we recognize the pervasiveness of trauma triggers and recognize that they will follow us for the rest of our lives. We will do battle with both the reality of what happened to us and the reality of what it did to our brains and our body reactions forever in this lifetime.

We cannot minimize this kind of impact. We can never be ‘deprogrammed’ completely, not even for one single one of these triggers. If abuse happens to children BEGINNING particularly after the age of one, and also importantly after another crucial brain-growing period that happens from age one to two, at least that older child has a platform within their bodies to stand on to fight back. Very early abuse interferes with the development of our very essential self as it exists in our forming brain and body. Do not underestimate the impact of infant and toddler abuse if you suspect you were its victim. Please.

And the younger we are when we understand the platform within us that is the basis of our experience throughout our lifespan, the better chance we have of taking control of our trauma reactions and freeing ourselves to live a more positive life freer from our instinctive trauma reactions.

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Stop the Storm

The most important work we can do, individually and globally, is the healing and prevention of traumas so that we don't pass them down to future generations. This blog is a working tool to contribute to this good work.

Tag: memory

LINKS TO NEW PAGES ADDED ON ATTACHMENT, PTSD AND EMOTIONS

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

EARLY TRAUMA BUILDS DISSOCIATION INTO THE BRAIN

DOES THE GOOD MAKE THE BAD BETTER?

+BLACK RABBIT

WHY NOT TO REMEMBER MY MOTHER

+FORGETTING TO REMEMBER WHAT TO AVOID

+SOCIAL ISOLATION – Research on the Brain Changes

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

+TRAUMA TRIGGERS and REACTIONS

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

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