Tag: mental illness

+IT WASN’T FUNNY: THE BUZZARD THAT ATE MY MOTHER

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Shared laughter might just be the ultimate in human-to-human cooperative communication.  It has long been my suspicion that when researchers say that severe infant-child deprivation and trauma can create an ‘evolutionarily altered brain’ that is designed for life in a malevolent rather than a benevolent world that they are actually describing two different kinds of brain-body-mind self development.

Either we grow into our early body-brain information about plenty of available, necessary resources that allows cooperation to be fruitful or we grow into our early body-brain information that there are so few vital resources that cooperation is not going to really solve anything.  In this latter malevolent world environment ‘survival of the fittest’ and ‘kill or be killed’ can rule supreme.  This connection to human past evolutionary conditions means that at such times in our evolutionary past existence, when the world was an impossible place for very many to survive in, individual development may well have been pushed into the direction of non-cooperation at the same time it was pushed toward competition.

When I look at all the aspects I know about my mother, it is now easy for me to say she was formed in an unfit early environment that changed her in through her earliest development to be an unfit mother.  The unfitness of her early world was retained within her body-brain and communicated to me, and to her entire family by her actions.  These actions included what she DID do as well as what she DID NOT do in regard to her children.

She did try to annihilate me.  She did not express genuine smiles or laughter.  The absence of these high profile prosocial signals communicated ‘reproductive unfitness’ in a malevolent world as powerfully as did her complete dysregulated emotional states, her impulsive actions including rage and violence, her twisted view of reality, her overall dissatisfaction with her life and her total unhappiness.

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The more I learn about how early caregiver interactions between an infant-child and its earliest caregivers directly communicate either safety and security of the world or its opposite to a little one’s developing body-brain, the less puzzling and mysterious my mother’s insanely abusive treatment of me becomes.  Early human development is designed to prepare an individual for life in a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ world, and the resulting person they become simply reflects the degrees of plenty or of deprivation that their earliest world contained.

Input early on becomes output later on.  Early infant-child input from safe and secure attachment with caregivers gives the developing body-brain information about a good enough world.  The little one knows they are not alone, that they are connected within a species-wide social fabric that tells their body-brain that cooperation can exist because it does exist.  The infant does not receive signals that it is not only completely alone, but that the environment is dangerous, toxic, deprived, malevolent, overwhelming and without adequate resources.  A safely and securely attached infant-child receives information about the opposite kind of this kind of world and its entire development happens along the cooperative end of the prosocial human continuum.

In order for an infant to grow and develop a prosocial body-brain, it has particular needs throughout the critical-window stages of its growth.  A prosocial human must first have its attachment needs met so that it can move forward in its development successfully.  Safe and secure attachment interactions include the presence of adequate and appropriate caregiving.  Building a prosocial human requires that more than an infant-child’s basic physical needs must be met.

A prosocially-built human has to experience repeated, consistent patterns of appropriate prosocial interactions with its caregivers from birth as its body-brain grows.  Secure attachment builds a prosocial, regulated emotional-social brain so that the infant is prepared to enter its next exploratory stage of development.  After that stage has been successfully completed, the infant-child continues to grow its own prosocial connection to its self along with its prosocial connection to others.  It moves into the caregiving stages that allow the infant to use empathy skills and to consider the existence of others as it builds its Theory of Mind.

From its earliest experiences an infant has received patterns of cooperative and/or competitive signals based on the quality and nature of its early caregiver interactions that have – I say again – both built the young body-brain and built themselves into it.  There is no magic here, no errors, no mistakes.  Nature has determined that the ability to flexibly adapt one’s earliest development to the conditions of the external environment is the most pro-life thing to do.

If one’s early world was both pro-life and prosocial, BINGO.  A balanced, positively cooperative-competitive person will come out the other end of childhood.  If one’s early world was in actuality malevolent and anti-life, well, we can all imagine the end result of this.  It is easy to see that the opposite end of prosocial is antisocial – and here we have a description of what happened to my mother.

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An young infant-child is a ‘show me’ kind of critter.  Human interactions directly communicate conditions of a safe and secure prosocial benevolent cooperative world to a tiny one as these patterns build its body-brain.  Its basic physical needs must be met along with its basic social ones.  Most importantly, safety and security happen are communicated socially by direct mirroring interactions between an infant-child and its caregivers.

For a prosocial person to grow out of early experiences, these interactions have to happen in a safe and secure early environment that allows for and includes smiles and laughter through playful interactions from birth.  Degrees of deprivation and trauma will be directly communicated to a developing little one by the absence of these interactions just as they equally would be communicated by the actual direct presence of violence and abuse.

It seems logical to conclude that in an abusive home the presence of trauma is coupled equally with the absence of smiling, laughter and play (those prosocial interactions that communicate safe and secure attachment in a safe and secure world).  I accept this to be a true fact, BUT in cases such as my mother’s was, I suspect a third extremely important influence.

If the one wing of a devouring buzzard is trauma, and the other wing of this devouring buzzard is the absence of happiness, the third negative influence for my mother was the deprivation caused by outright neglect.  Here we have the tail of the buzzard that devoured my mother’s chances for having a good life of well-being.  While my mother came out of her childhood grown into an adult body, the truth of the matter was that she was actually road kill.  Nothing was left for her but to wait for the buzzard of a malevolent infant-childhood to gradually devour her carcass.

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Yes, that assessment of my mother’s state and condition is extremely dark and grim, but believe me, there was nothing prosocial about my mother.  While obviously her most basic physical needs were met from birth that allowed her shell of a body to keep on living, what she needed to be given to grow into a cooperative prosocial human being was not.  I can see that gigantic buzzard that overshadowed her life.  It had one wing of trauma, one wing of anti-happiness, and long destabilizing tail feathers of the early neglect of nothing-at-all.

Even if an infant-child’s earliest world cooperates enough with the little one to provide for its basic physical needs, if it does not cooperate enough to provide for its basic emotional and social needs, such an infant will not grow a prosocial cooperation-built body or brain.  I have spent a lot of time thinking about factors that influenced my development versus those that might have influenced my mother that made me into a different kind of person than my mother was.

While I know some things as fact about my mother’s early life, there is much I will never know.  But if I look at how she turned out – full of unresolved trauma and without prosocial abilities – I can make some pretty educated (and I believe correct) important guesses.

My mother’s family had money.  They lived in what I would consider to be a pretty affluent gargantuan house.  I have it in my grandmother’s own written word that after five years of marriage without the arrival of desired children, by the time my grandmother became pregnant her husband had decided he did not want to be bothered.  My mother’s brother was born first.  I suspect that any possible joy at the prospect of parenting that the combined force of my grandfather and grandmother could muster was used up giving minimal attention to their son.

Two years later when my mother was born in 1925, I seriously doubt there was much left of parental affection left in my grandparents’ home.  I absolutely intuitively know that my mother was placed in some remote area of this huge house and tended by a maid-nanny.  I knew about my mother being cared for by a nanny before the facts recently came to light from my nephew’s search of the Mormon genealogical database that included from the 1929 census not only that the nanny-maid was in the house, but also what her name was.

Because my mother could be bottle fed, leaving her alone for extended periods of time in her little crib was not much of a problem.  I have no doubt that the outright neglect of her fundamental emotional and social developmental needs led to a large degree to her disabled prosocial body-brain.  Coupled with whatever other erroneous and cruelly stupid remnants of Victorian-age parenting practices that tormented and terrorized my mother, her earliest history of being left absolutely alone harmed her beyond repair.

My mother was left to build a body-brain-mind-self that included not the knowledge of resource plenty within a prosocial cooperative environment, but rather knowledge of how to endure and survive within a competitive environment that did not include adequate resources.  There was no ‘sharing’ in my mother’s world.  Prosocial neurological circuits and pathways did not build themselves into her body-brain.  Antisocial ones did.

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I consider the continual presence of my loving 14-month-old brother during the earliest months of my life to be the single most important influence on the direction my development took differently than my mother’s.  I do not believe that my mother’s two-year-old brother offered to her the saving interactions that my brother offered to me.  My brother’s loving, positive contact with me allowed those prosocial interactions to find their way into my physiological development.  I do not believe my mother had such a most important ally.

I had the chance to mutually smile, to mutually laugh and to mutually play with my little brother.  Because my mother’s psychosis of competitive hatred of me did not happen with her (and my father’s) most cherished first born son, my brother had been given what he needed from the time of his birth to safely and securely attach to baby me.  My mother thought my brother’s love for me was cute.  She considered it acceptable and entertaining not because it benefited me, but because it was related to her positive feelings for him.  (My intuitions about this pattern were clearly confirmed when I found my mother’s written description of my brother as she ‘pretended’ to write about my six-week infant checkup.)

As I grew into my older toddler months, my mother did intervene and increasingly isolated me from interacting with my brother.  But the good had been done and nothing my mother could ever do to me afterwards could alter those prosocial patterns my brother’s interaction with me had built into me.  I had cooperated with my brother in a mutually shared environment of positive interaction and those interactions broke the back of the buzzard that would have followed me all the days of my life as surely as it followed my mother.

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All these words that I have just written came to me today because I wanted to talk about what comes next in Dr. Dacher Keltner’s 2009 book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life about laughter as a prosocial exchange of cooperative intent between humans.  I had one of those light-bulb moments of “Ah Ha!” illumination today when I read Keltner’s words that follow.  The words literally jumped off of the page and emblazoned themselves within my body-brain-mind-self the way truth can do when you find it.  I will share these words with you.  Be prepared.  They have the power to change everything you know about yourself in the world.  I know that, because they changed me.

Keltner wrote:

“Recent neuroscience evidence suggests that when we hear others laugh, mirror neurons represent that expressive behavior and quickly activate action tendencies and experiences that simulate the original laugh in the listener’s brain.  Specifically, laughter triggers activation in a region of the motor cortex in the listener, the supplementary motor area (SMA).  Bundles of neurons leaving the SMA go to the insula and the amygdala, thus triggering the experience of mirth and amusement in the perceiver of the laugh.  When we hear others laugh, this system of mirror neurons acts as if the listener is laughing.”  (page 134)

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There is a universe of information in this paragraph.  I already know that patterns of infant-caregiver mirroring interactions (or their absence) create the foundation of our brain from the time we are born.  The light went on for me when I read these words particularly in regard to my mother’s complete inability to participate in exchanges of genuine laughter.  Her body-brain-mind-self could never magically recreate what was never built into her in the first place.  At the same time I instantly KNEW this I saw the buzzard I described above.

I leave you with a few Google search results that you can explore in order to begin to understand how profoundly the absence of a safe and secure early environment of mirroring prosocial interactions involving smiles, laughter and play changed your own abusive early caregiver into a ‘monster’.  Believe me, the information on the other end of these links is only the beginning tip of a very big iceberg that tells me more about the terrible abuse my mother did to me than will any self-help book I can ever find to read

Empower yourself – take a look at these:

— child abuse brain development mirror neurons

— child abuse brain development laughter

— child neglect brain development smiles

— child abuse brain development amygdala

— child abuse brain development insula

— child abuse brain development borderline

— child neglect brain development borderline

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+CHILD ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – info and links

alchemynowLeave a comment

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CHILD ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP IN THE NEWS:

Childhood Trauma May Shorten Life By 20 Years

CDC Research Finds Problems in Childhood Can Be Lifelong

By JOSEPH BROWNSTEIN
ABC News Medical Unit
Oct. 6, 2009

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I want to pause for a moment from the ongoing themes of my present writing to mention again the important work being done by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in regard to tracking the longterm consequences of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) including child maltreatment, traumas and abuse.

But first I want to let you know about an interesting website I found while pursuing a Google search on the ACE study called The Survivor Archives Project.  This is a trauma hope and healing site that invites readers to personally submit to their archives, journal and library.

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The CDC-ACE study is not without limitations.  All 17,421 participants were insurance members which means that information from the many other uninsured levels of our society were not included.   If they had been (or are in the future) how much more child abuse connected lifelong adult devastation would be seen?

I would like to see the model of this study expanded through the use of the ACE questionnaires in a far wider variety of settings, preferably included in every human well-being study our nation produces.  At the moment, I want to simply highlight the important work the CDC has been doing over the past 14 years with its studies of the consequences of child abuse for survivors for your thought and consideration by presenting some information from their website on Adverse Childhood Experiences as follows:

The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study is one of the largest investigations ever conducted on the links between childhood maltreatment and later-life health and well-being. As a collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente’s Health Appraisal Clinic in San Diego, Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) members undergoing a comprehensive physical examination provided detailed information about their childhood experience of abuse, neglect, and family dysfunction. Over 17,000 members chose to participate. To date, over 50 scientific articles have been published and over 100 conference and workshop presentations have been made.

The ACE Study findings suggest that these experiences are major risk factors for the leading causes of illness and death as well as poor quality of life in the United States. Progress in preventing and recovering from the nation’s worst health and social problems is likely to benefit from the understanding that many of these problems arise as a consequence of adverse childhood experiences.

Here is one website about the study:

The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study:  Bridging the gap between childhood trauma and negative consequences later in life.

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About the study:

The ACE Study was initiated at Kaiser Permanente from 1995 to 1997, and its participants are over 17,000 members who were undergoing a standardized physical examination. No further participants will be enrolled, but we are tracking the medical status of the baseline participants.

Each study participant completed a confidential survey that contained questions about childhood maltreatment and family dysfunction, as well as items detailing their current health status and behaviors. This information was combined with the results of their physical examination to form the baseline data for the study.

The prospective phase of the ACE Study is currently underway, and will assess the relationship between adverse childhood experiences, health care use, and causes of death.

More detailed scientific information about the study design can be found in “The relationship of adult health status to childhood abuse and household dysfunction,”* published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in 1998, Volume 14, pages 245-258.

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The ACE Pyramid represents the conceptual framework for the Study. During the time period of the 1980s and early 1990s information about risk factors for disease had been widely researched and merged into public education and prevention programs. However, it was also clear that risk factors, such as smoking, alcohol abuse, and sexual behaviors for many common diseases were not randomly distributed in the population. In fact, it was known that risk factors for many chronic diseases tended to cluster, that is, persons who had one risk factor tended to have one or more others.

Because of this knowledge, the ACE Study was designed to assess what we considered to be “scientific gaps” about the origins of risk factors. These gaps are depicted as the two arrows linking Adverse Childhood Experiences to risk factors that lead to the health and social consequences higher up the pyramid. Specifically, the study was designed to provide data that would help answer the question: “If risk factors for disease, disability, and early mortality are not randomly distributed, what influences precede the adoption or development of them?” By providing information to answer this question, we hoped to provide scientific information that would be useful for the development of new and more effective prevention programs.

The ACE Study takes a whole life perspective, as indicated on the orange arrow leading from conception to death. By working within this framework, the ACE Study began to progressively uncover how childhood stressors (ACE) are strongly related to development and prevalence of risk factors for disease and health and social well-being throughout the lifespan.

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Major Findings

Childhood abuse, neglect, and exposure to other traumatic stressors which we term adverse childhood experiences (ACE) are common. Almost two-thirds of our study participants reported at least one ACE, and more than one in five reported three or more ACE. The short- and long-term outcomes of these childhood exposures include a multitude of health and social problems. The ACE Study uses the ACE Score, which is a count of the total number of ACE respondents reported. The ACE Score is used to assess the total amount of stress during childhood and has demonstrated that as the number of ACE increase, the risk for the following health problems increases in a strong and graded fashion:

  • alcoholism and alcohol abuse
  • chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
  • depression
  • fetal death
  • health-related quality of life
  • illicit drug use
  • ischemic heart disease (IHD)
  • liver disease
  • risk for intimate partner violence
  • multiple sexual partners
  • sexually transmitted diseases (STDs)
  • smoking
  • suicide attempts
  • unintended pregnancies

In addition, the ACE Study has also demonstrated that the ACE Score has a strong and graded relationship to health-related behaviors and outcomes during childhood and adolescence including early initiation of smoking, sexual activity, and illicit drug use, adolescent pregnancies, and suicide attempts. Finally, as the number of ACE increases the number of co-occurring or “co-morbid” conditions increases.

Content source: Division of Adult and Community Health, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion

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Adverse Childhood Experiences Study Questionnaires – AVAILABLE TO EVERYONE

This is the simplest version of the ACE questionnaire I have seen that consists of ten questions:  What’s YOUR ACE Score?  Help me calculate my ACE Score.

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THE ACE SCORE:

The ACE Study used a simple scoring method to determine the extent of each study participant’s exposure to childhood trauma.  Exposure to one category (not incident) of ACE, qualifies as one point.  When the points are added up, the ACE Score is achieved.  An ACE Score of 0 (zero) would mean that the person reported no exposure to any of the categories of trauma listed as ACEs above.  An ACE Score of 10 would mean that the person reported exposure to all of the categories of trauma listed above.  The ACE Score is referred to throughout all of the peer-reviewed publications about the ACE Study findings

Below are the links to the actual forms used (and to be used) for research purposes.

The Family Health History and Health Appraisal questionnaires were used to collect information on childhood maltreatment, household dysfunction, and other socio-behavioral factors examined in the ACE Study. The questionnaires are not copyrighted and there are no fees for their use. As a courtesy, a copy of articles on any research conducted using items from the questionnaires is requested.

Family Health History Questionnaire

Male Version (PDF–190K)

Female Version (PDF–180K)

Health Appraisal Questionnaire

Male Version (PDF–85K)

Female Version (PDF–89K)

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Adverse Childhood Experiences Definitions

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Future Directions

The ACE study is now in its 10th year and the prospective phase is currently underway. In this ongoing stage of the study, data are being gathered from various sources including outpatient medical records, pharmacy utilization records, and hospital discharge records to track the subsequent health outcomes and health care use of ACE Study participants. In addition, an examination of National Death Index records will be conducted to establish the relationship between ACE and mortality among the ACE Study population.

International interest in replications of the ACE Study is growing. At present there is knowledge of efforts to replicate the ACE Study or use its questionnaire in Canada, China, Jordan, Norway, the Philippines and the United Kingdom. In Puerto Rico, the link between women’s cardiovascular health risks and ACE are under study. In addition, the World Health Organization has included the ACE Study questionnaires as an addendum to the document Preventing Child Maltreatment: A Guide to Taking Action and Generating Evidence. (October 2006*) (PDF)

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Related Links

CDC Resources

CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities

CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control

Other Government Resources

The Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families

Research Institutes

American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children*

International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect*

Family Research Laboratory*

Voluntary Organizations

Prevent Child Abuse America*

Childhelp USA*

Victim Assistance

National Children’s Advocacy Center*

Chadwick Center*

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Overview Article:

Felitti VJ, Anda RF, Nordenberg D, Williamson DF, Spitz AM, Edwards V, Koss MP, Marks JS. Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults: The adverse childhood experiences (ACE) study.
American Journal of Preventive Medicine. 1998;14:245-258.

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New Publication: Childhood Stress and Autoimmune Disease in Adults

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PUBLICATIONS ON MAJOR FINDINGS BY:

Health Outcomes

Publication Year

A Video Series on:  THE ACE STUDY

The ACE Pyramid — ACE Study Links Childhood Trauma—  These results, appearing in the November 2009 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, are the latest from the ACE Study (Adverse Childhood Experiences). The research project, now in its 14th year,  is one of the largest investigations ever conducted on the links between childhood maltreatment and health and well-being later in life. The ongoing study looks at how both positive and negative experiences and childhood stressors are strongly related to development and affect risk factors for disease, health and social well-being throughout the lifespan.

The ACE Study — The Good Works in Trauma — From the Institute for Educational Research and Service and the National Native Children’s Trauma Center

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+MISSING LAUGHTER IN MY MOTHER’S MONKEY HOUSE

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As I move forward in Dr. Dacher Keltner’s 2009 book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life out of his chapter on smiles into his chapter on laughter, I find I am using his information like a powerful laser flashlight, beaming a pinpoint of illumination back through the years of my childhood as I search my memory for genuine smiles, laughter or humor of any kind.

I find myself thinking about the important book, Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder by Paul T. Mason and Randi Kreger as I realize that the absence of happiness in our abusive infant-childhoods paralleled the presence of unsafely, insecurity, unpredictability and violence.  Genuine smiles and riotous laughter do not occur in the middle of trauma.

What can I learn about the development of my body-brain-mind-self if I think about myself as having been a monkey in my mother’s monkey house?  Certainly my mother’s sovereign nation lacked any equality between members.  There was no ‘flattened hierarchy’.  My mother had all of the power, and everyone knew it.  There was no true cooperation.  And certainly in my case there was no affiliation.  These conditions did not contribute to any sense of safety or security, and in these conditions true happiness, laughter and humor did not exist.  Their absence is incredibly telling.

From my previous studies I already know that good humor is one of the powerful ‘reproductive fitness indicators’ of our species, right up there with good physical health and beauty, intelligence, good memory, and creative thought.  Any species fitness indicators provide direct evidence of the state of ill- or well-being of specie’s members – like does the fitness indicator of a peacock’s tail display.

The research literature is full of information about how the greatest gifts of our species are directly tied to the greatest risks of being distorted through negative influences within a deprived, malevolent, abusive, traumatic early environment.

Reproductive fitness indicators develop in humans through an interactive process of genetics being influenced by conditions within the environment during development.  They end up communicating information not only about any single member of a species, but more importantly they communicate information about the condition of the environment that influenced any individual’s development.

The presence or absence of genuine D smiles and laughter is no exception.  The lack of safety and security in my childhood was represented by the opposite of joy.  My mother’s dysregulated emotions, especially her hatred and rage toward me created suffering, terror, sorrow, despair and alienation within our home.  She kept complete power and controlled her family’s environment through terror, threat of violence and violence.  Ours was NOT a healthy, happy monkey house.

And of course, because I was my mother’s singled out abuse target, the impact of deprivation and trauma had its most powerful effects on me during my development.  My resulting difficulties with happiness are directly tied to having had my mother’s sickness built right into my own body-brain from birth as signals of the lack of well-being and fitness within the environment that formed me.  My mother did not give me any “all-purpose signal of cooperative intent.”  I received from her the opposite.

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Keltner describes how the smile originated back in the early history of our evolution.  A comparison of human patterns with primates’ shows that

“…in more hierarchical macaques, such as the rhesus macaque, there is a narrow use of the silent bared-teeth and relaxed open-mouth display.  The silent bared-teeth display – the predecessor to our smile – is used only as an appeasement display.  In these status-conscious monkeys, the smile is intertwined with anxiety and defense.

“There are more egalitarian macaque species, however, such as the Tonkean macaque.  In these macaques, hierarchies are flatter and power is equally distributed.  This social condition more closely resembles the hierarchies observed in our hominid predecessors and contemporary hunter-gathers – power differences are reduced, and equality is more pronounced.  In egalitarian primates, food sharing is pervasive, alliances among subordinates are common, and social life consists more of negotiation than assertion of force….  In less stratified macaques, monkeys put the silent bared-teeth display to many new uses:  to reassure, to affiliate, and to reconcile, as well as to appease.  This is a standard evolutionary principle – that adaptations such as the silent bared-teeth display are put to new uses in a broader array of contexts to respond adaptively to shifting selection pressures.  With the rise of primate equality, the silent bared-teeth display became freed from its one-to-one mapping to fear and submissiveness, and extended into new social contexts that promote affectionate cooperation and affiliation.  This display became a sign of friendly intent, and the trigger of behavioral processes that allow for close proximity and cooperation – grooming, embraces, hand clasping, and the like.  In egalitarian primates, the silent bared-teeth display folded into affiliative, pleasurable exchange.

“The physical signature of human happiness is the D smile.  The D smile did not originate in contexts that we today think are fast tracks to happiness…In fact,,.hunter-gatherer hierarchies…systematically downplay any sudden abundance in resources through modesty and generosity.

“In our primate evolution, the D smile was the first vocabulary of friendly intent and affection, in particular between near-equals….the roots of human happiness are found in those moments when individuals moved toward one another toward cooperative and intimate ends.  Our ultrascoiality required this, as well as an all-purpose signal of cooperative intent, one that is highly visible and unambiguous, and one that could preempt conflict and spread cooperative relations potently and quickly, faster than a stranger could cock his arm and throw the first punch.”  (pages 120-122)

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From here – you guessed it – Keltner continues forward in his next chapter to the topic of laughter.  My personal experiences with forbidden laughter were anything but funny.

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I have no memory of my mother ever telling a joke.  I have no memory of my father ever telling one, either.  I asked my sister and she can’t remember either of our parents ever telling a joke.

I do remember watching the Beverly Hillbillies on TV while we lived in the Government Hill apartments the year I was in 4th grade.  I made the mistake of actually considering something on the show funny, and I actually laughed out loud.

My mother jumped all over me verbally, berating me for my gullibility and stupidity in thinking anything about the show was funny.  I was stupid, just as the show was stupid.  She told me nobody was supposed to think it was funny, or to laugh at it.  Was I so stupid that I didn’t know that they used ‘canned laughter’ – totally fake audible laughter – as a part of the show?

She made it sound like my inability to detect the stupidity of the show and the fakeness of the canned laughter meant I had failed some important and significant test that ANYBODY else would have passed.  I had to be the dumbest, stupidest person in the whole WORLD!

I’ve have never forgotten this experience.  It too was added on a more minor line of my mother’s abuse litany than were my major crimes, as proof of how gullible I was.  It was part of the proof that I was a chameleon, had no mind of my own, and would follow anyone to do anything, even over a cliff if they told me to.  It proved I could not think on my own for myself (well, that was pretty much true – she never allowed me to think).

How sad it was not to be able to even laugh safely.  I never laughed out loud in front of her again.  I had to watch myself to be sure I didn’t, monitor my reactions even to humor, make sure no sign of it accidentally slipped out or gave me away.  In essence, I knew it was simply bad and unacceptable for me to ever think anything was ever funny.

In fact, by the time I was in 8th grade my mother very creatively forced me to watch black and white film footage on TV of the WWII bombing of Poland as she informed me that I should have been there because that is what I deserved to happen to me – brutal annihilation.

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Keltner describes the evolutionary origins of human laughter as this ability followed a different trajectory from primates’ beginning four million years ago.  Smiles and laughter evolved as signals of communication long, long before humans achieved our verbal abilities.

“Most striking is how human laugher differs from that of our primate relatives – gorillas, chimps, and bonobos.  In the most rudimentary sense, the laughter of the great apes resembles our own.  Their relaxed open-mouth displays and panting vocalizations look and sound quite familiar.  They emit these displays in similar contexts as we do – when being tickled and during rough-and-tumble play.  As with humans, chimps and apes are most likely to show open-mouthed play faces in developmental periods (adolescence) and times of day (leading up to feeding) where play can defuse conflict.  Yet the laughter of chimps and apes is more tightly linked to inhalation and exhalation patterns that that of humans.  As a result, it is emitted as short, repetitive, single-breath pants, and has little acoustic variety.

“Human laughter, by contrast, is stunning in its diversity and complexity.  It is a language unto its own.”  (pages 124-125)

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The presence, absence and quality of laughter both influences the physiological state of the human body and is an expression of the state of the body.  Safe and secure early infant attachment to caregivers includes smiles and laughter.  Unsafe and insecure early infant attachments do not communicate safety and security through the presence of these signals.  These degrees of variation in interaction with the environment are built right into an infant-child’s developing body-brain, including the regulation of the nervous system.

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Keltner states about the physiology of laughter:

“And perhaps most subtly, laughter is intertwined with our breathing….  With the exception of certain pathological laughs…almost all laughter occurs as people exhale.  This simple laughter fact may seem incidental to our understanding of laughter, but in fact it is fundamental.  Here’s why.

“Respiration and heart rate are two of the body’s most essential rhythms.  These two rhythms play off each other like the voices of singers in an a cappella group.  When you breath in, your heart rate rises.  When you breathe out, your heart rate drops, as does your blood pressure, and you move toward a state of relaxation.

“This lung-heart dynamic has made its way into….the thousand-year-old breathing exercises of yoga practices.  Exhalation reduces fight/flight physiology, especially heart rate, calming the body down.”  (page 128)

Studies of the acoustical qualities of laughter show that different kinds of laughs correspond to different brain region patterns just as varying smiles do.  The sound and pattern of laughter is affected by degrees of intimacy and is different among groups of friends than it is between groups of strangers.  Studies have shown that women laugh more than men do, and that men “are much more likely to snort and grunt than women.”  (page 130)

Keltner presents more information about laughter:

“…voiced laughs, which have tone to them and involve vibrations of the vocal folds (chords), and unvoiced laughs, which do not.  Voiced laughs sound like songs, rising and falling as they move through space.  Other people perceive these laughs as invitations to friendship and camaraderie.  Unvoiced laughs – hisses, snorts, grunts – are not perceived as such.  Much as the language of smiles is divided into Duchene [D] and non-Duchene [non D] smiles, there are voiced laughs of pleasure and unvoiced laughs not involving pleasure….  Both are vital to the social contract.”  (pages 130-131)

“Here is a remarkable discovery:  Laughs occupy a part of acoustic space that is different from vowel sounds like “ahhh” and “eee.”  We may describe laughs in the written word as “ha, ha, ha” or “hee, hee, hee,” but in fact the acoustic structure of laughter is distinct from that of the vowels we use to represent this mysterious category of behavior.  Certain regions of the human vocal apparatus produce the vowels and consonants that make up human speech, in which so much of human social life transpires.  But there is another register of the human vocal apparatus, another form of output – laughter – with different origins and functions than human speech.”  (page 131)

“When people laugh, subcortical, limbic regions of the brain and brain stem – most notably a region known as the pons, which is involved in sleep and breathing – are activated.  These regions are much older evolutionarily than the cortical regions involved in language, suggesting that the deeper meaning of laughter is intertwined with breathing.”  (page 132.

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From my point of view, learning here that laughter is connected in our body-brain to our most basic fundamental experiences like breathing and sleep is amazing, though not surprising.  When I write about how interactive early infant-caregiver interactions influence the growth, development and formation of who we are in the world for the rest of our lives, it is on these fundamental levels that we are helped or harmed in our ability to experience life from a state of either well- or ill-being.

Although infants can obviously cry from the instant they are born just as they can breath, their capacity for smiles and for laughter very soon follows.  If an infant is born into an environment of neglect, abuse, maltreatment and trauma, even its first experiences of sending signals out into its caregiving environment and receiving them back will be influenced in development.  In cases such as mine was, my environment never improved.  The trajectories of all of my abilities were changed during my development, not the least of which is my ability to be happy, to express happiness, and to understand other people’s experience and expression of happiness.

My infant-childhood experiences with ‘joy’ happened in dissociated patterns according to my mother’s orchestration of my life.  As a result there is little natural ebb and flow or unconstrained ability to participate with others in states of safe and secure joy.  Anxiety was tied in my body to every experience I ever had as an infant-child as I developed, as was dissociation.  It is a rare, rare moment when I can even now experience pure joy.  My sense of derealization and depersonalization mostly requires that a distance between me and others has to first be bridged.

Because expressions of happiness, including spontaneous laughter, are designed to happen instantaneously and automatically as forms of nonverbal communication, they happen in extremely fast-action displays.  I did not get the same circuitry build into my body-nervous system-brain that most other people did so that I operate much more slowly in all social interactions.  It helps me to know that there are reasons for how and why I experience social interactions differently than most people do, including the funny, happy ones.

When I talk about the tragedy of life long changes that happen during early developmental stages of abused, traumatized and maltreated infant-children, it is on these profoundly fundamental most basic levels of the human experience that we must accept that these changes take place.  These changes often rob a survivor of the experience of being something other than completely alone in an unsafe and insecure world.

Laughter as the form of emotional regulation and social interaction that it is, is missing in most severely abusive families.  These deprivation conditions are built into our social-emotional brain, into our entire nervous system and body.  At the same time that the signs of happiness, social connectedness and well-being are visible, attempting to access this information with our changed body-brain-self can take an invisible super-Herculean effort.

Those of us who were so seriously deprived and maltreated as infant-children require patience and compassion for ourselves and from others in our efforts to find ways to heal these near mortal wounds that were inflicted on our being and built into our body-brain from the time we were tiny.  This isn’t a job for cowards.  It is a job for those of us who are willing to fight to our death for what should have been our birthright – the right to experience the fullness of joy within ourselves and with other members of our species.

It helps me to begin to understand how deeply and profoundly the absence of joy influenced my body-brain development right along with the presence of severe violence and abuse.  While I can take an umbrella out to keep the rain off of my head I cannot stop it from raining.  I will never have the opportunity to return to a happy infant-childhood so I can take a different pathway that would allow joy-filled wiring to be built into me from the start.  I have to be realistic as I work with who and how I am as a consequence of what was done to me throughout my formative stages.

It helps me to learn more about why improved well-being, including the experience of happiness, takes effort for me that most non-early abused and traumatized people might never be able to understand.  They benefited from advantages in an advantaged early environment that most of these people take for granted because it is all built right into them.  It is as if they climbed Mt. Everest by being dropped off near the top.  Severe early trauma survivors have to make the struggle from sea level on up.

But facts are facts and we best get on with our climbing, even if that means that the last person to the top had to work hardest to get there.

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+HOOKED ON ‘D’ SMILES – THE HAPPINESS CENTER

alchemynow7 Comments

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The advantage of being in my own think tank of one is that I can be like a frog jumping from lily pad to lily pad, following my own fly, landing when and where I want to, devouring information without having to answer to anyone else.  This is why I can follow my last post on pathological liars with this one on smiles!

I am still hopping around in the same pond I was in yesterday as I search for information about how my mother’s abusive Borderline brain gave me a torturous, miserable childhood.  I am still trying to understand how what happened to her in her own abusive childhood gave her such an awful brain.  Today I just landed on a different lily pad.

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I am back for the moment with Dr. Dacher Keltner’s 2009 book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, having landed on his chapter on smiles.

It turns out that of the vast number of kinds of smiles humans produce, there really is only one authentic, genuine real one and a whole lot of fakes.  In the field of research that Keltner belongs to, scientists have discovered the facial-muscle vocabulary of all human emotion expressed by the face.  Smiling has a language.

Keltner describes how the genuine smile originates in the left anterior frontal lobe, a region whose activity is connected to positive emotional experience.  All the phony impostor, fake smiles originate in the right anterior frontal lobe.  We can tell the difference and respond accordingly from nearly the time we are born.  Infants are the first smile detection quality experts.

There are two very specific facial muscles involved in a real, genuine left-brain smile display:  the zygomatic major muscle and the orbicularis oculi.  The smile these two muscles combine to create by their movement has been named, according to Keltner,

“…in honor of the French neuroanatomist Guilluame Benjamin Amand Duchenne (1806-1875), who first discovered the visible traces of the activity of orbicularis occuli.  Smiles that do not involve the activity of the happiness muscle, the orbicularis oculi, are sensibly known as non-Duchenne or non-D smiles.”  (page 105)

“When a ten-month-old is approached by his or her mother, the face lights up with the D smile; when a stranger approaches, the same infant greets the approaching adult with a wary non-D smile.”  (page 106)

So, we have been able to tell the difference between a real D smile and a fake non-D smile from our first days as breathing creatures.  I’ve just never thought about the difference in words before today.  The D smile involves

“…the activity of the happiness muscle, the orbicularis oculi.  This muscle surrounds the eyes and when contracted leads to the raising of the cheek, the pouching of the lower eyelid, and the appearance of those dreaded crow’s feet – the most visible sign of happiness – which the Botox industry is trying to wipe out of the vocabulary of human expression.”  (page 105)

“Duchenne smiles differ morphologically in many ways from the many other smiles that do not involve the action of the orbicularis oculi muscle.  They tend to last between one and five seconds, and the lip corners tend to be raised to equal degrees on both sides of the face.  Smiles missing the action of the orbicularis oculi and likely masking negative states can be on the face for very brief periods (250 milliseconds [1/4 of a second]) or very long periods (a lifetime of polite smiling…).”  (pages 105-106)

“And importantly, several studies have found that Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles, brief two- to three-second displays differing only in the activation of the orbicularis oculi muscle, map onto entirely different emotional experiences.”  (pages 106-107)

In other words, these two kinds of smiles are connected to entirely different sides of the brain and their corresponding emotional centers:  The D smile to the happiness center on the left side, the fake non-D smiles on the right, negative emotional side of the brain.  The D smile “accompanies high spirits and goodwill” while the non-D smile “reflects the attempt to mask some underlying negative state.”  (page 108)

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I can easily see how these two kinds of smiles communicate to all of us and especially to tiny infants in their earliest brain formation stages, the state of the environment.  A genuine D smile signals through happiness states of safe and secure attachment and at least – at that instant – life in a benign, benevolent world.  (It is really an ‘approach’ signal.)

The non-D smile communicates something else entirely.  Our sophisticated emotional-social brains are genetically programmed to read these extremely rapid emotional signals from human faces.  We KNOW when a non-D smile happens, and that it happens from the negative (unsafe, insecure, “something is not quite right in the world”) place inside another person.  (It is really an ‘avoid’ signal.)

The predominant pattern of smiling signals is one of the MAJOR ways our brain is directed in its formation from the time we are born.  Unsafe world equals poverty in the genuine happiness D smile.  Safe world equals lots of signals about what a wonderful, safe and secure place the world is to be in.  The nature of these signals communicate to an infant’s developing body-brain what kind of a world its genetics have to prepare for, and the signals affect the entire body, including the developing nervous and immune system.

The genuine D smile is a flashing green safe-to-GO light.  Then fake smile, masking negative emotional states is some degree of a yellow warning light or a down right flashing unsafe-STOP light.  Our infant developing body-brain builds itself around this kind of information, and we respond to our environment with this body-brain for the rest of our lives.

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Keltner misses what I consider a most important fact about what he talks about next in his presentation about how depressed mothers responses to and with their infants.  It is the nature of these kinds of signaling patterns between a mother and her infant that is building her infant’s body-brain from the beginning of her infant’s life.

(It is also extremely important to note here that a vastly understated problem exists of women who negatively affect their infant’s development because of postpartum anxiety that does not appear as ‘typical’ as postpartum depression.  This post also underscores how vitally important it is for any ‘mental health’ treatment a pregnant mother or a mother of a young infant receives to be tied into the needs of her developing infant – such as is now recognized through the field of Infant Mental Health.  California, for example, has highly developed services in this regard funded by tobacco taxes.)

Keltner writes:

“In the 1980s developmental psychologists Ed Tronick, Jeff Cohn, and Tiffany Field became interested in what postpartum depression does to mother-child interactions.  Their studies, and those of other investigators, revealed that postpartum depression mutes the positive emotionality of the mother – she smiles less, she vocalizes with less warm intonation, and her positive emotional repertoire is less contingent upon the actions of her child.  Children of mothers experiencing postpartum depression tend to show complementary behavior – they are more agitated, distressed, and anxious.

“This kind of result is compellingly intuitive.  Any parent or friend who has been up close to this phenomenon, who has been in the living room of a depressed mother whose positive emotion is dampened and disengaged from that of her child, readily knows how essential the exchanges of smiles, coos, touch, play faces, and interested and encouraging eyebrow flashes are to the parent-child dynamic.  Yet from a scientific standpoint, the finding – the mother’s impoverished positive emotional repertoire brings about anxiety and agitation in the child – is plagued by alternative explanations.  Perhaps agitated, fussy infants produce muted positive emotionality and depression in the mother.  Perhaps they both share some genetically based tendency that predisposes their parent-child interactions to lack mutual smiles, coos, touches, and play.  Perhaps their shared emotional condition is the product of deeper structural causes – underpaid work, poverty, alienated or abusive husbands and the like.

“So to study the role of smiling and muted positive emotionality in parent-child interactions, Tronick, Cohn, and Field developed what has come to be known as the still-face paradigm.  This experimental technique is profoundly simple but powerful.  The mother is requested to simply be in the presence of her young infant, say nine months old, but to show no facial expressions whatsoever, and none of the most common of facial expressions for young mothers – smiles.  As the young child navigates around the laboratory environment, approaching toy robots and stuffed elephants and brightly colored objects that make farm animal noises, the child looks to the mother’s face for signals about the environment.  The child seeks information in facial muscle movements about what is safe, fun, and worthy of curious exploration, and what is not, and the mother sits there impassionate, stone-faced, and unresponsive.

“The results are astonishing.  In a smile-impoverished environment, the young child no longer explores the environment, no longer approaches novel toys or play structures; her imagination shuts down.  The child quickly becomes agitated and distressed, often wildly so, arching his or her back and crying out.  The child will often move to the mother and try to provoke her, stir her out of her stupor, with a vocalization or touch or encouraging smile.  And as the child begins to resign herself to the unexpressive condition of the mother, she moves away from the mother, refusing eye contact, and eventually falls into listlessness and torpor.”  (pages 108-110)

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The first thing I want to say about this information is that what Keltner is describing is the difference between safe and secure and unsafe and insecure attachment in the world for the playing, exploring, and still very dependent infant.  The only way this infant can determine the ‘condition of the world’ is through signals sent back and forth between it and its mother.

My strong suspicion is that if an infant has been exposed from birth to a mother who is depressed, anxious, dissociated, frightened or who abuses the infant, the entire scenario Keltner is describing would take a different course.  The infant reaction he describes could only happen if an infant had a safe and secure attachment with its mother before they entered the laboratory.

Imagine – taking just these few words and thinking long and deeply about them – how profoundly and negatively a deprived-traumatized infant’s body-brain would have had to develop ALREADY by the age of nine months.  Positive and appropriate safe and secure attachment experiences from birth – or their opposite — would have already had powerful impact on and influence over how the infant’s body-brain had formed itself in critical ways.

It would be a most excellent sign in the experiment described above if the infant DID become agitated, distressed, and tried to engage its mother.  An abused infant would demonstrate all kinds of alterations in its patterns of interaction with its mother.  But see how quickly the infant gives up trying and slumps into helpless, powerless hopelessness even in this brief of an interaction when the mother does not TELL the infant anything it can use to feel safe, secure and attached?

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Keltner continues about the social reinforcement of smiles:

“…they are the first incentives toward which young children move, and that parents hungrily seek.  In relevant research, when one-year-old infants sit at the edge of a visual cliff, a glass surface over a precipitous drop, with their mother on the other side, the infant immediately looks to the mother for information about this ambiguous scene, which looks both dangerous and passable.  If the mother shows fear, not a single child will crawl across the glass surface.  If the mother smiles…approximately 80 percent of the infants will eagerly cross the surface, risking potential harm, to be in the warm, reassuring midst of their mother’s smile.”  (page 111)

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Long, long before an infant can move itself around in the world at a distance from its earliest caregivers, its brain has been shaped in its development as circuits, pathways and regions have developed themselves in direct response to the kinds of facial signals it has had with its caregivers – or not had as in the case of deprivation of appropriate interactions.

Keltner describes the physiological benefits of both sending and receiving genuine D smiles:

“Two smiles are exchanged within the span of a second or two…  Within the bodies of those individuals…are reciprocally coordinated surges of dopamine and the opiates.  Stress-related cardiovascular response reduces.  A sense of trust and social well-being rises.  The smile….evolved as a neon-light signal of cooperativeness, it became embedded in social exchanges between individuals that give rise to closeness and affiliation.”  (pages 112-113)

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A core belief in my thinking is that our entire feel-good biochemical body systems is designed to keep us attached in positive ways to members of our species.  To the degrees that we have lost sight of this, we suffer from all the kinds of ‘addictions’ and social ills known within our species, not the least of which is severe infant-child abuse.

I don’t believe my mother’s earliest life was filled with genuine smiles anymore than mine was.  If it had been, I can guarantee I wouldn’t be sitting here writing these words today.  Had any of my readers own mother been born into a world of genuine smiles they would not be hear reading my words, either.

While the related subjects of humor and laughter await a future post, it is enough today to suggest that by thinking back – mostly within our body – we can track the presence of absence of unresolved trauma in our infant-childhood by the presence or absence of genuine D smiles.  It is most helpful to realize that long before our conscious memory abilities were able to operate, the patterns of smiles versus traumas that we experienced built the very foundation of our brain through which we process our emotions for the rest of our lives.

It is never too late to learn more about the power of genuine happiness to expand the activity of and connections between what happy center neurons we have – even if we don’t have very many.  That left brain happy center is definitely one that shed unused neurons (those not stimulated by happy caregivers in infancy) as it formed in our early lives.  They can never be replaced.  Safe and securely attached people HAVE MORE OF THEM present!

Research on brain plasticity clearly shows that exercising areas of our brain can build more and stronger CONNECTIONS BETWEEN NEURONS and thus expand the operation of brain regions – the happy center included.

But I am a realist.  Those of us who suffered greatly from infant-child abuse, deprivation and trauma and were NOT born to happy mothers or families, simply did not get to build as big a left brain happy center as did those with opposite experiences.  As adults, we actually – in our body – KNOW THIS!

I personally doubt I would be alive if I had not had my brother John, 14 months older than me, who is by character about the dearest person on earth.  He got to keep his happy neurons because my mother was able to love him, as was my father.  By the time I was born he was fully shining.  It is because he lovingly turned the power of his genuine smiling happy neurons upon little tiny (much hated by my turned-psychotic mother) me that any happy neurons were left alive in my brain at all.

Learning how to exercise them so that my happy center neurons can form better connections is one of the most important missions of my life time.

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NOTE:  Too much happy stimulation can overstimulate an infant and harm its developing nervous system and brain!  A healthy, happy mother knows instinctively how much is enough and when and how to calm her baby down!  HINT:  When an infant turns its head away and breaks eye contact, LET IT!  It is busy with all the information it can handle (like a busy telephone line).  Do not get right back into its face or you will overwhelm it.  At such times an infant is processing information, building its brain, regulating its own emotional state (self soothing), organizing itself, and calming itself down!  The infant will let you know when it is done and ready to reengage with you.  Another hint:  Men in general are not geared as women are to recognize over stimulating activity with young infants – be careful!

(When such an infant turns its head to the right it is organizing the left side of its brain and vice versa!)

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REMEMBER THIS:

“Any parent or friend who has been up close to this phenomenon, who has been in the living room of a depressed mother whose positive emotion is dampened and disengaged from that of her child, readily knows how essential the exchanges of smiles, coos, touch, play faces, and interested and encouraging eyebrow flashes are to the parent-child dynamic.”

MOST IMPORTANTLY — They are VITAL!  Please do not forget this – and please do remember to find a way to help any parent and infant you might encounter who is experiencing anxious or depressed interactions so that infant can have a better chance to build a better brain and have a better life – When you see negative, anxious, depressed kinds of infant-caregiver interaction patterns, know they are hurting an infant’s brain development and changing the degree of well-being it will experience for the rest of its life.  FIND A WAY TO EDUCATE – TO POSITIVELY INTERVENE!

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+REALLY COOL WEBSITE ON THE BRAIN

alchemynow4 Comments

FROM – THE BRAIN FROM TOP TO BOTTOM WEBSITE

You can navigate the site from HERE, beginner, intermediate or advanced

PARTS OF THE BRAIN THAT SLOW DOWN OR SPEED UP IN DEPRESSION

“Though depression involves an overall reduction in brain activity, some parts of the brain are more affected than others. In brain-imaging studies using PET scans, depressed people display abnormally low activity in the prefrontal cortex, and more specifically in its lateral, orbitofrontal, and ventromedial regions. And the severity of the depression often correlates with the extent of the decline in activity in the prefrontal cortex.

The prefrontal cortex is known not only to be involved in emotional responses, but also to have numerous connections with other parts of the brain that are responsible for controlling dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin, three neurotransmitters that are important in mood regulation. More specifically, the lateral prefrontal cortex seems to help us choose a course of behaviour by letting us assess the various alternatives mentally. The orbitofrontal cortex seems to let us defer certain immediate gratifications and suppress certain emotions in order to obtain greater long-term benefits. And the ventromedial cortex is thought to be one of the sites in the brain where we experience emotions and the meanings of things.

The two halves of the prefrontal cortex also seem to have specialized functions, with the left half being involved in establishing positive feelings and the right half in establishing negative ones. And indeed, in depressed people, it is the left prefrontal cortex that shows the greatest signs of weakness. In other words, when people are depressed, they find it very hard not only to set goals in order to obtain rewards, but also to believe that such goals can be achieved.

In healthy people, the left prefrontal cortex might also help to inhibit the negative emotions generated by limbic structures such as the amygdalae, which show abnormally high activity in depressed patients. In patients who respond positively to antidepressants, this overactivity is reduced. And when the amygdalae remain highly hyperactive despite antidepressant treatment, the likelihood of a patient’s relapsing into depression is high.

It is also interesting to note that when someone’s left prefrontal cortex is operating at full capacity, the levels of glucocorticoids in their blood are generally very low. This follows logically, considering the harmful effects that high levels of glucocorticoids have on mood.

Brain-imaging studies have also shown that in patients with severe depression, the volume of the two hippocampi is reduced. This atrophy may be due to a loss of neurons that is also induced by the toxic effects of the high levels of glucocorticoids associated with recurrent episodes of depression.The extent of atrophy in the hippocampus even seems to be proportional to the sum of the durations of the episodes of depression, and depressions that are treated rapidly do not seem to lead to this reduction in hippocampal volume.”

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I am over on my Taking Care of Mothers blog working on my ABUSIVE BORDERLINE MOTHER BRAIN book/information.  You can check out the progress (long way to go yet) here:  +BOOK ON BORDERLINE BRAIN

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Yet another really cool brain site — stuff we should learn in grade school:

Brain structures glossary

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http://www.memory-key.com/neurology/glossary_brain.htm

+GREAT BOOK ABOUT THE BEST IN HUMANS

alchemynowLeave a comment

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My book Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life – Paperback (Oct 5, 2009) by Dacher Keltner has arrived.  I am eagerly embarking on its study about what’s best about humans.  My insanely abusive Borderline mother sure didn’t teach me anything about THAT!

Keltner resides in the camp of study about positive human emotions.  Interestingly, researchers could not really study what has always been termed ‘happiness’ equally with the survival emotions such as fear and rage until technology invented photographic equipment that operates as fast as our face moves when we express emotion.

The more survival-based emergency related emotions happen in bigger ways so that we can watch them happen more easily than we can (could) watch expressions related to happiness and well-being.  Just as we needed really FAST photography to accurately be able to watch the visual information transmitted and received between infants and mothers (that build our earliest fundamental brain regions), we also needed it to see what happens when we treat one another well and with kindness.

(For an example of how the extremely rapid fraction-of-a-millisecond mother-infant communication takes place please scroll down to page 22 in Dr. Allan N. Schore’s paper, EFFECTS OF A SECURE ATTACHMENT RELATIONSHIP ON RIGHT BRAIN DEVELOPMENT, AFFECT REGULATION, AND INFANT MENTAL HEALTH)

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Humans are born with the capacity to experience emotion.  We simply live them without thinking about what they are, what they mean, or what they are named.  In safe and secure infant-childhood environments we are helped by our caregivers to gradually learn about our emotions as we learn about our self and others in the world.  Eventually we learn what emotions are named and about how to ever more effectively regulate them.

Because this ability to regulate and differentiate emotions happens within our earliest infant-child attachment relationship environment, the process is either assisted or interfered with by our caregivers.  In my own case, as I study Keltner’s book, I doubt I will be able to think about very many instances from my infant-childhood at all where I would have even been allowed to experience the positive emotional states.

I find it interesting that even in the field of vastly expensive scientific research that the differentiation of ‘happiness’ and the study of this state had to wait until technology caught up with our desire and need to better understand the happiness aspect of who we are.

Dr. Keltner is at the cutting-edge of this research.  His study happens because he can use the new lens of sophisticated super-stop action photography to see our human finely tuned happiness communications in the same way that evolution of the lens allowed us to see new aspects of our world through microscopes and telescopes.

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Keltner states about the study of happiness in the first chapter of his book:

“The canonical [orthodox] studies of human emotion, studies of the universality of facial expression, of how emotion is registered in the nervous system, how emotion shapes judgment and decision making, had never looked into these states.  The groundbreaking studies of emotion had only examined one state covered by the term “happiness.”  But research is often misled by “ordinary” language, the language we speak rather than the language of scientific theory.  Happiness is a diffuse term.  It masks important distinctions between emotions such as gratitude, awe, contentment, pride, love, compassion and desire – the focus of this book – as well as expressive behaviors such as teasing, touch, and laughter.  This narrow concentration on “happiness” has stunted our scientific understanding of the emotions that move people toward higher jen ratios.  By solely asking, “Am I happy?” we miss out on the many nuances of the meaningful life.

My hope is to shift what goes into the numerator of you jen ration, to bring into sharper focus the millisecond manifestations of human goodness.  I hope that you will see human behavior in a new light, the subtle cues of embarrassment, playful vocalizations, the visceral feelings of compassion, the sense of gratitude in another’s touch to your shoulder, that have been shaped by the seven million years of hominid evolution and that bring the good in others to completion.  In our pursuit of happiness we have lost sight of these essential emotions.  Our everyday conversations about happiness are filled withy references to sensory pleasure – delicious Australian wines, comfortable hotel beds, body tone produced by our exercise regimens.  What is missing is the language and practice of emotions like compassion, gratitude, amusement, and wonder.  My hope is to tilt your jen ratio to what the poet Percy Shelley describes as the great secret of morals:  “the identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.”  The key to this quest resides in the study of emotions long ignored by affective science.”  (pages 14-15)

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My mother was extremely short on jen, as are all people who outright neglect, abuse and maltreat people – infants and children most included.  My mother’s experiences in her own abusive childhood seemed to completely obliterate any ability she was born with to understand what ‘being good’ was all about.  Certainly it was my experience with her that she was never able to ‘be good’ to me and in fact she did not believe I even had the capacity to ‘be good’ myself.

In fact, my mother projected her own ‘badness’ that she found intolerable inside herself out onto me and proceeded to spend the 18 years of my childhood ‘punishing’ me for being ‘that bad’.  This process was, I believe, entirely connected to abuse in her own childhood as she had been told her ‘badness’ made her unlovable, but if she could only be ‘good enough’ she would be lovable and loved again.  Something became permanently broken in my mother’s early ‘good-bad’ early forming brain, and it made her into a monster.

Knowing this about my Borderline mother makes me very curious about Keltner’s book whose very title —  BORN TO BE GOOD — addresses the underlying conflicts my entire childhood was consumed with:  Evil versus Good versus Evil versus Good……..  Every interaction I had with my mother from the time I was born was in reality a communication from her to me about how essentially and fundamentally un-good and totally evil I was.

The extremes of my mother’s psychosis were so severe that she literally believed I was satan’s child and was not even born as a human being.  I was condemned beyond salvation, though my mother believed through every word and deed she abused me with that she was doing her very super-human best to save me as she battled to accomplish the impossible task of turning me into ‘something good’.

Keltner’s book is about the best in human social interactions.  I want to know more about this because I certainly have vast personal experience about what the worst in human social interactions can be like.  I want to improve my own ‘jen ratio’.  What might this mean?

By first translating the broad term ‘happiness’ into the broader term ‘goodness’, Keltner then describes the kinds of minute human interactions that both communicate goodness and build it into self and others.  The term “jen ratio” is the kingpin of his writing    About jen itself Keltner states:

“…Confucius taught a new way of finding the meaningful life through the cultivation of jen.  A person of jen, Confucius observes, “wishing to establish his own character, also establishes the character of others.”  A person of jen “brings the good things of others to completion and does not bring the bad things of others to completion.”  Jen is felt in that deeply satisfying moment when you bring out the goodness in others.

“Jen science is based on its own microscopic observations of things not closely examined before.  Most centrally, it is founded on the study of emotions such as compassion, gratitude, awe, embarrassment, and amusement, emotions that transpire between people, bringing the good in each other to completion.  Jen science has examined new human languages [My note:  New to scientific study, ancient to humans] under its microscope – movements of muscles in the face that signal devotion, patterns of touch that signal appreciation, playful tones of the voice that transforms conflicts.  It brings into focus new substances that we are made of, neurotransmitters as well as regions of our nervous system that promote trust, caring, devotion, forgiveness, and play.  It reveals a new way of thinking about the evolution of human goodness, which requires revision of longstanding assumptions that we are solely wired to maximize desire, to compete, and to be vigilant to what is bad.

“The jen ratio is a lens onto the balance of good and bad in your life.  In the denominator of the jen ratio place recent actions in which someone has brought the bad in others to completion….  Above this, in the numerator of the ratio, tally up the actions that bring the good in others to completion….  As the value of your jen ratio rises, so too does the humanity of your world.

“Think of the jen ratio as a lens through which you might take stock of your attempt at living a meaningful life.”  (pages 3-5)

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I haven’t seen these two words in Keltner’s book yet, hope and enthusiasm, but this is how I feel as I enter into this new journey.  For all my awarenesses about the differences between how my body-brain-mind-self was formed in comparison to others who benefited from having a safe and secure attachment foundation rather than one formed in, by and for trauma, I enthusiastically hope that by understanding how we ALL have a jen ration operating in our lives I can begin to make my own ration better.

I will keep you posted (literally!) about my experiences with the information contained within the pages of Keltner’s BORN TO BE GOOD book I was fortunate to discover!

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+MAYBE TRAUMA IS THE RULE AND ‘SAFE AND SECURE’ IS THE EXCEPTION

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Given that the United States and the United Kingdom sit at the bottom of the measurement continuum regarding the well-being of their children among the 21 richest nations on earth, I am beginning to seriously rethink my own thinking about the impact of deprivation and trauma on early infant-child development.  Maybe a safe and secure attachment to caregivers and to the world is NOT the norm, as Dr. Daniel Siegel and others suggest at the same time they note that safe and secure attachment seems to exist in roughly half of our nation’s population.

What is life like for the other half who are not safely and securely attached?

Maybe the best possible infant-child interactions with a best possible mother in a best possible benign and benevolent world is a goal the human race is striving toward and is not something we have yet to obtain.  As excited as I have been at discovering Dr. Martin Teicher’s work about how infant-child abuse, deprivation and trauma can create an ‘evolutionarily altered’ brain designed by, for and in a malevolent world, maybe I have to admit that he and his researchers are just plain WRONG.

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What I read in the 2009 Child and Youth Well-Being Index (CWI) projections for 2010 for American children contributes to my revised thinking about the impact of deprivation and trauma on infant-child development.  These findings (below) clearly show us that what is acceptable and ‘normal’ and what is not is entirely subject to the perspective of experience.

This Special Report shows that the impact of the current recession on children in America will be dramatic.

• The percentage of children in poverty is expected to peak at 21 percent in 2010, comparable to that of previous economic recessions.

• More than a quarter (27 percent) or 8 million children will have at least one parent not working full-time year-round in 2010.

• For all families, median annual family income (in constant 2007 dollars) is expected to decline from $59,200 in 2007, to about $55,700 in 2010. For single female-headed households, median annual family income is expected to decline from $24,950 in 2007, to $23,000 in 2010. The steepest drop, however, will be among single male-headed households where median annual family income is expected to decline from $38,100 in 2007 to $33,300 in 2010.

The significant decrease in the family economic well-being domain is projected to cause negative ripple effects across the other domains which the CWI measures.

The Impact on Other CWI Domains

The significant decrease in the family economic well-being domain is projected to cause negative ripple effects across the other domains which the CWI measures.

While the overall impact of the recession on children’s well-being is expected to resemble similar impacts from recessions past, a few trends make this economic downturn unique.  Among them:

• Social relationships domain: The rate of residential mobility for children normally decreases during a recession. Due to the greater severity of the housing crisis accompanying the current economic recession, however, this decline in residential mobility will be counterbalanced by the increased mobility of low-income families that lose their housing and either move or become homeless. For those children, there will be substantial negative impacts on peer and other neighborhood social relationships.

• Health domain: Children’s overall health is expected to decline due to obesity. Though obesity has been on the rise for several years [already the highest of 21 rich nations], it is now likely to spike as the recession drives parents to rely more on low-cost fast food.

While this obesity increase is expected to bring down the health domain, however, there is some positive news. The total number of children with health insurance is expected to remain at just under 90 percent in 2010, due to the fact that government health insurance policies will provide a public safety net for children who are likely to lose private coverage.

Other projected impacts across the domains include:

• Community connectedness domain: The connection that children have to their surrounding communities is likely to be negatively impacted by declines in Pre-Kindergarten participation.

• Safety/behavioral domain: Children’s safety and behavior is expected to fare worse due to higher rates of violent crime where youth are both victims and perpetrators. This is based on historic recessionary trends of budget cuts for policing and juvenile crime prevention.

Finally, the focus of the CWI and its Key Indicators is on national averages across the U.S. and across the population of all children and youths. However, it must be emphasized that there will be a diversity of impacts of the current economic downturn geographically across the nation and across racial/ethnic subpopulations and socioeconomic groups. Low-income African American and Latino children are generally more susceptible to the consequences of economic fluctuations.  When the economy is doing well, their well-being gains are more dramatic; when the economy slumps, they are harder hit than their white counterparts because more children of color live in poverty to begin with.

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It is only in very recent history that life for members of our species on this planet could be said to be easy enough that our numbers are moving ever nearer to the double digit billions.  Yet while the shear masses of our numbers might indicate that we have, as a species, at last reached some suggested height of well-being as a whole, the lack of personal well-being for billions among us on this globe indicate otherwise – our nation’s children included.

Any question of optimism versus pessimism becomes mute in the light of reality.  As a survivor of severe abuse from birth that lasted for the following 18 years of my childhood, it is probably truer that I share more in common with the majority of people on this planet than I do with the privileged, advantaged minority of people who were born into a safe and secure benevolent world.

Taken from this global perspective, Dr. Teicher and others like him who suggest that adjustments in infant-childhood to deprivation and trauma make us into evolutionarily altered people are wrong.  Evolution moves forward.  Anyone who does NOT experience deprivation and trauma in their early life and is formed for a benign world rather than for a harsh and malevolent one might well be considered to be the evolutionary exception rather than the rule.

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+EARLY TRAUMA CHANGES HOW WE THINK AND TALK

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When infant-children do not receive what they need NOT TO CHANGE their development in response to early trauma, well, their body-brain-mind-self has no choice but to change!  These changes then have no choice but to appear as altered patterns of being in the world, including patterns of verbal exchange.

This post concerns a posted comment and my reply to it.

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COMMENT FROM:  Randy Webb, aztraumatherapy.com —  2010/01/08 at 6:58am

TO:  *Chapter 3a Symptoms

“I’ve noticed anecdotally that my clients who have reported experiences of trauma seem more likely than others who have not reported trauma to indicate “black and white” and relatively more “rigid” views of religion, definitions of happiness or success and other people’s behavior. Could these be indications of relatively less CNS plasticity and an indication of something getting “frozen” instead of “completing” some cycle of recovery in response to trauma?”

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REPLY:

Your comment and question relate in my mind to my December 28, 2009 post:

+ATTACHMENT – HOW WE ARE WHO WE ARE

While the kinds of thinking you are describing can be reflected in cultural attitudes in the form of biases, prejudices and their resulting stereotypical thinking, because you are specifically noticing them in relation to traumatized people I will suggest that the nature and quality of early attachment experiences might lie at the root of what you are describing.

We are not used to thinking about what people say as being representations of the patterns of communication that exist on the molecular, physiological level of the body, they are.  Our earliest infant-child interactions with our mothering caregivers create us at these fundamental levels, and determine how our genetic potential manifests itself.

These interactions, which signal to our growing and developing body-brain-mind-self the condition of the world as being mostly either safe, secure and benevolent, or as being mostly unsafe, insecure and malevolent, will determine how we receive and process all information from the world around us.  The patterns of signaling communication in our body will eventually show itself both in the quality and nature of the ‘trauma dramas’ we experience for the rest of our lives, and in the patterns of spoken and unspoken communications – including our thoughts – that we use to describe ourselves in relation to the world we live in for the rest of our lives.

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The connection you are making in your own thoughts that led to your question are fascinating:   “Could these be indications of relatively less CNS plasticity and an indication of something getting “frozen” instead of “completing” some cycle of recovery in response to trauma?”

If we think about communication patterns in terms of how they were influenced and formed during our earliest developmental stages, CNS plasticity as it connects to how our immune system interpreted the quality of our experience and then signaled all our developmental pathways, yes, you are completely correct.

It becomes essential that we think about people’s traumas in terms of ‘age at first onset’ (see link to 12-28-09 post above).  People, who were formed without severe relational traumas in infancy, have a completely different CNS (including the brain and Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) homeostatic set point.  They formed a ‘trauma centered’ body-brain-mind-self from the beginning which limited and changed the range of possible ‘free choice’ options for response they will have in and to the world.  Their body has taken over for them far more aspects of ‘being alive’ that non-early traumatized people’s body do.

When people seem to be struggling with recovery from adult trauma, the most important first step we need to take in order to most help them is to determine the quality and nature of their earliest attachments during their early growth and development stages.  While birth to age one is the most critical stage, these critical windows of development continue certainly through age 4-6 while a person’s Theory of Mind is forming.

We can listen to adults talk about their lives and begin to hear disturbances in their ability to tell a ‘coherent life story’.  Unresolved trauma will show itself in disturbances in our patterns of processing information on all levels within the body.  The earlier the traumas happened, most certainly before the age of 2, the more an appropriate, flexible, and coherent ability to converse verbally about one’s experiences in their life will be absent.

If early trauma did not build a person’s body-brain-mind-self, the ‘frozen’ interruptions in signaling communication – as they appear as you say in decreased CNS (body) plasticity – can hopefully be overcome.  The more usual approaches to resolving these traumas will allow the ‘lessons’ from the trauma to begin to unfold and take hold – as the hold the unresolved trauma has on a person will lessen its hold over them.

HOWEVER, if trauma built a person’s body-brain-mind-self from the beginning there is no ‘recovery’ to be made in anything like the normal sense of this process.  Because our earliest experiences of attachment form us, these patterns (such as you are describing) are hard wired into us on all levels, including our CNS-brain.

People who suffered what I refer to as Trauma Altered Development are evolutionarily altered people, built in, by and for a malevolent world of deprivation and trauma.  All their communication signals have been adjusted on their most fundamental levels in response to this kind of a world.  All later traumas they may experience will be processed by their trauma altered body-brain.  These people are most likely not to be able to respond with the ‘plasticity’ or resiliency that non-early traumatized people can.

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If infant development has been sent of course through early relational deprivation and trauma, the later stages leading to a plastic, flexible, adaptive, resilient and accurate Theory of Mind will not occur correctly.  Early trauma will show itself in patterns of behavior for these survivors, including thought and verbal communication, for the rest of their lives.

Treating trauma effectively in these survivors requires a detailed understanding about how trauma altered all aspects of their development from their beginning.  They have altered patterns of attachment to the world, to their own self, and to everyone else.  These physiological alterations have been permanently set into place.  They receive different information from the world in different ways and process this information differently.

I would say that while healing trauma in these survivors IS POSSIBLE, ‘recovery’ in the usual sense is not.  The trauma-changed body has no pre-trauma state to return to.  Their healing can utilize all the resilient powers of plasticity contained in the trauma changed body-brain, but these powers have to operate according to how a survivor was formed from their start.  Recognizing early trauma changes through the attachment signaling patterns they create is the first step.

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+21 RICH NATIONS COMPARED ON CHILD WELL-BEING – U.S. AND U.K. AT THE BOTTOM

alchemynow2 Comments

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Please spend some time reading the UNICEF 2007 Report Card on six measurements of the well-being of children.  The United States and the United Kingdom have total scores at the bottom of the 21 OECD [Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development] industrialized nations included in this study (page 2).

While every measurement is extremely important, the one that is of greatest concern to me in regard to the well-being particularly of infants and very young children is the finding that the United States rates highest in the percentage of births per 1,000 women

ages 15-19.  See Report Card page 31, Figure 5.2f.

This report states this about teenage births:

“For most girls growing up in an OECD country, the norm today is an extended education, a career, a two income household, delayed childbearing and a small family.   And it is in this context that teenage pregnancy has become a significant problem: giving birth at too young an age is now associated with wide ranging disadvantage for both mother and child – including a greater likelihood of dropping out of school, of having no or low qualifications, of being unemployed or low-paid, and of living in poor housing conditions.   But as always, association is not the same as cause.   Many girls who give birth in their teens have themselves grown up with the kind of poverty and disadvantage that would be likely to have negative consequences whether or not they wait until they are in their twenties before having children.  Becoming pregnant while still a teenager may make these problems worse, but not becoming pregnant will not make them go away.

Beyond the immediate problem, teenage fertility levels may also serve as an indicator of an aspect of young people’s lives that is otherwise hard to capture.  To a young person with little sense of current well-being – unhappy and perhaps mistreated at home, miserable and under-achieving at school, and with only an unskilled and low-paid job to look forward to – having a baby to love and be loved by, with a small income from benefits and a home of her own, may seem a more attractive option than the alternatives.   A teenager doing well at school and looking forward to an interesting and well-paid career, and who is surrounded by family and friends who have similarly high expectations, is likely to feel that giving birth would de-rail both present well-being and future hopes.

It is as an approximate measure of what proportion of teenagers fall on which side of this divide that the teenage fertility rates shown in Figure 5.2f may be an especially significant indicator of young people’s well-being.”

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I consider these findings also especially significant in light of this blog’s strong emphasis on the critical importance of safe and secure attachments as a foundation of body-brain-mind-self development of people.  Take a look at these findings.  The United States and the United Kingdom appear to be failing miserably on these measures of child well-being and are at the bottom of this combined initial attempt to measure attachment on the national level.

On page 22, Figure 4.0 shows young people’s family and peer relationships – and an OECD overview is presented in graphic form.  The Report states:  “The quality of children’s relationships is as difficult to measure as it is critical to well-being.  Nonetheless it was considered too important a factor to be omitted altogether and an attempt has therefore been made to measure the quality of ‘family and peer relationships’ using data on family structures, plus children’s own answers to survey questions.”

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Among the measurements on behaviors and risk-taking of young people presented beginning on page 26, Figure 5.0, the Report states:   “Any overview of children’s well-being must attempt to incorporate aspects of behaviour which are of concern to both young people themselves and to the society in which they live.   This section therefore brings together the available OECD data on such topics as obesity, substance abuse, violence, and sexual risk-taking.”

Again, the United States and the United Kingdom are at the very bottom in their total scores on these measurements.  Page 27, Figure 5.1 Overview — Children’s health behavior the United States is at the bottom.  Page 28, Figure 5.1d, the United States has the highest percentage of young people age 13 and 15 who report being overweight.    “…the EU [European Union] Health Commissioner has said:   “Today’s overweight teenagers are tomorrow’s heart attack victims”.”

“…in most countries young people’s health behaviours do not deviate very far from the average for the OECD as a whole.  The exceptions are Poland, where children’s health behaviours are considerably better than average, and the United States whose overall ranking suffers because of high levels of obesity.”

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“The great majority of young people growing up in all OECD countries score themselves above the midpoint on the ‘life satisfaction ladder’.”  Fortunately, United States’ young people are among this majority (page 37).

An interesting observation in this section of the Report about student agreement with negative statements about personal well-being in regard to feeling ‘out of place’ comes from Japan (page 38):

“The most striking individual result is the 30% of young people in Japan who agreed with the statement ‘I feel lonely’ – almost three times higher than the next highest-scoring country. Either this reflects a difficulty of translating the question into a different language and culture, or a problem meriting further investigation, or both.”

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From the Report Card:

“The true measure of a nation’s standing is how well it attends to its children – their health and safety, their material security, their education and socialization, and their sense of being loved, valued, and included in the families and societies into which they are born.”

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“When we attempt to measure children’s well-being what we really seek to know is whether children are adequately clothed and housed and fed and protected, whether their circumstances are such that they are likely to become all that they are capable of becoming, or whether they are disadvantaged in ways that make it difficult or impossible for them to participate fully in the life and opportunities of the world around them.   Above all we seek to know whether children feel loved, cherished, special and supported, within the family and community, and whether the family and community are being supported in this task by public policy and resources.

All families in OECD countries today are aware that childhood is being reshaped by forces whose mainspring is not necessarily the best interests of the child.   At the same time, a wide public in the OECD countries is becoming ever more aware that many of the corrosive social problems affecting the quality of life have their genesis in the changing ecology of childhood.   Many therefore feel that it is time to attempt to re-gain a degree of understanding, control and direction over what is happening to our children in their most vital, vulnerable years.

That process begins with measurement and monitoring. And it is as a contribution to that process that the Innocenti Research Centre has published this initial attempt at a multi-dimensional overview of child well-being in the countries of the OECD.”  (page 38)

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Any part of the Innocenti Report Card may be freely reproduced using the following reference:

UNICEF, Child poverty in perspective: An overview of child well-being in rich countries, Innocenti Report Card 7

2007 UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, Florence. © The United Nations Children’s Fund, 2007

Full text and supporting documentation can be downloaded from the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre website.

“This Report Card provides a comprehensive assessment of the lives and well-being of children and young people in 21 nations of the industrialized world.   Its purpose is to encourage monitoring, to permit comparison, and to stimulate the discussion and development of policies to improve children’s lives.

The report represents a significant advance on previous titles in this series which have used income poverty as a proxy measure for overall child well-being in the OECD countries.   Specifically, it attempts to measure and compare child well-being under six different headings or dimensions: material well-being, health and safety, education, peer and family relationships, behaviours and risks, and young people’s own subjective sense of well-being.   In all, it draws upon 40 separate indicators relevant to children’s lives and children’s rights (see pages 42 to 45).

Although heavily dependent on the available data, this assessment is also guided by a concept of child well-being that is in turn guided by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child…. The implied definition of child well-being that permeates the report is one that will also correspond to the views and the experience of a wide public.”

* The United Kingdom and the United States find themselves in the bottom third of the rankings for five of the six dimensions reviewed  [material well-being, health and safety, education, peer and family relationships, behaviors and risks, and young people’s subjective sense of their circumstances]

* There is no obvious relationship between levels of child well-being and GDP per capita.  The Czech Republic, for example, achieves a higher overall rank for child well-being than several much wealthier countries including France, Austria, the United States and the United Kingdom

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SEE ALSO – The United States has been taking internal measurements on our nation’s children’s well-being for over 30 years.

CHILD WELL-BEING STATISTICAL REPORT, SPECIFIC TO THE UNITED STATES:

The 2009 Foundation for Child Development — Child and Youth Well-being Index (CWI) Report

Children and youth live unique lives and as such, at some point, each experiences a range of social conditions.   The Index is comprised of Key Indicators associated with different stages of the life course in the first two decades of life.

The CWI includes the following 28 Key Indicators organized into seven domains of child well-being in the United States that have been found in numerous social science studies to be related to an overall sense of subjective well-being or satisfaction with life.

Family Economic Well-Being Domain

1. Poverty Rate (All Families with Children)

2. Secure Parental Employment Rate

3. Median Annual Income (All Families with Children)

4. Rate of Children with Health Insurance

Health Domain

1. Infant Mortality Rate

2. Low Birth Weight Rate

3. Mortality Rate (Ages 1-19)

4. Rate of Children with Very Good or Excellent Health (as reported by parents)

5. Rate of Children with Activity Limitations (as reported by parents)

6. Rate of Overweight Children and Adolescents (Ages 6-19)

Safety/Behavioral Domain

1. Teenage Birth Rate (Ages 10-17)

2. Rate of Violent Crime Victimization (Ages 12-19)

3. Rate of Violent Crime Offenders (Ages 12-17)

4. Rate of Cigarette Smoking (Grade 12)

5. Rate of Binge Alcohol Drinking (Grade 12)

6. Rate of Illicit Drug Use (Grade 12)

Educational Attainment Domain

1. Reading Test Scores (Ages 9, 13, and 17)

2. Mathematics Test Scores (Ages 9, 13, and 17)

Community Connectedness

1. Rate of Persons who have Received a High School Diploma (Ages 18-24)

2. Rate of Youths Not Working and Not in School (Ages 16-19)

3. Rate of Pre-Kindergarten Enrollment (Ages 3-4)

4. Rate of Persons who have Received a Bachelor’s Degree (Ages 25-29)

5. Rate of Voting in Presidential Elections (Ages 18-20)

Social Relationships Domain

1. Rate of Children in Families Headed by a Single Parent

2. Rate of Children who have Moved within the Last Year (Ages 1-18)

Emotional/Spiritual Well-Being Domain

1. Suicide Rate (Ages 10-19)

2. Rate of Weekly Religious Attendance (Grade 12)

3. Percent who report Religion as Being Very Important (Grade 12)

Taken together, changes in the performance of these 28 Key Indicators and the seven domains into which they are grouped provide a view of the changes in the overall well-being of children and youth in American society.   Each domain represents an important area that affects well-being/quality of life: economic well-being, health, safety/behavior, educational attainment, community connectedness (participation in major social institutions), social relationships, and emotional/spiritual well-being.   The performance of the nation on each indicator also reflects the strength of America’s social institutions: its families, schools, and communities.   All of these Key Indicators either are well-being indicators that measure outcomes for children and youths or surrogate indicators of the same.

SEE ALSO:

THE CHILD AND YOUTH WELL-BEING INDEX (CWI)

Foundation for Child Development and the CWI

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Check out this article:

“How Is the Economic Recession Affecting U.S. Children?

The 2009 Child Well-being Index”

by Eric Zuehlke

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+TAKING THE PAUSE FROM CHILD ABUSE “TALK”

alchemynowLeave a comment

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There are many serious things I could think about today but again it is a gorgeous day, over seventy degrees, and I am choosing to do other things.  Out of respect for all who are suffering from subzero temperatures and battling snow, I must go outside and continue the work of expanding my garden.

Groups of neighborhood children thrilled at helping me yesterday.  Today they are going south of the line to attend their 35-year-old uncles funeral in Mexico today.  He died in a terrible car wreck after being chased at high speeds the night before last in what was probably a drug deal gone bad.  Out of respect I will go out along the roadsides today and fill the back of my trusty 1978 El Camino with rocks I can haul back here.

When the children are free again tomorrow, they will thrive on helping me sculpt the soil they have already learned to love the smell off as we plan for new life that will come from the seeds we will plant when we know the nights will again be consistently warm enough.

All that I can write about suffering and child abuse can wait for another day.  My sister came for her visit and left yesterday.  I miss her.  We talked nearly constantly for the three days and four evenings she was here, much about our abusive childhood.  But, more on that later…….

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