Tag: mental illness

+THOUGHTS ON THE TRIGGER POINT OF SHAME

alchemynowLeave a comment

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I have the advantage of trying to work my way through trauma related information using my own experience as a basis for what I know, rather than being locked into any established patterns of thinking about either trauma or the so-called ‘mental illnesses’ that are directly connected to Trauma Altered Development (TAD).   I am writing a ‘forensic autobiography’.  That means I write from the perspective of being a ‘confessional’ rather than from being a ‘professional’.  I am free to think any way I want to about the topic of trauma as it concerns me and others like me.

I try to understand what the developmental, attachment, and neuroscience experts say about the topic of TAD, but I am certain that if I line up my conclusions on the topic against these expert findings we will not always match point by point.

I want to talk today – again – about how trauma influences our core development as infant-child abuse survivors.  If our earliest caregiver interactions were not safe and secure, our development was altered from the start.

The experience of shame, as I have written before, is a very real physiological Autonomic Nervous System response to explorations within our early environment that caused us to experience conflict – rupture either with or without repair – with our early caregivers.  If there was no serious rupture (we were in agreement with our caregivers about our self in our environment), or there were ruptures that were met with repair through the appropriate actions of our early caregivers, the “GO” and “STOP” balance within our growing Autonomic Nervous System (sympathetic arm = GO, parasympathetic arm = STOP (pair a brakes)) developed optimally and well in a balanced, ‘ordinary’ way.

These ‘shame’ interactions are always based on the experiences prior to the age of one either in a benevolent or malevolent early caregiver environment that has already by this age built our growing brain, nervous system, body and earliest experience of self in a particular direction.  If these interactions were benevolent, a different body-brain-growing mind and self is forming than would be one that is forming under malevolent conditions.

We have to begin to REALLY understand how profoundly our experiences within our earliest caregiver environment affect us – permanently.  Once we are one year old, our development has already been profoundly directed by the kinds of experiences we have had with our caregivers, primarily with our mother.  It is on this earliest foundation that all other experiences will be processed within our little growing body.

By the time we grow a body-brain that is physically developed enough to be able to experience SHAME at one year of age, the course of our development has already been determined – either within and for a safe, secure, trauma-free benevolent world, or for the opposite.

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I mention this today in following my post of yesterday where I described my opinion of our nation as not being completely pro the human rights of children.  The ability to optimally experience shame in a growing body already by the age of one, I believe, is directly tied to how we experience any later event that involves conflict, consciousness, conscience and choice.

I believe the earliest caregiver interactions we have, mostly benevolent or malevolent, color the development of our personality.  Experts still suspect that personality is primarily influenced by our genetics.  However, developmental, attachment and neuroscientists are rapidly uncovering the facts about how our earliest experiences actually tell our genes what to do.  Given these new and extremely important findings, we can no longer ever assume that anyone’s personality follows the same developmental pathways if everyone is not raised with the same Universal Human Rights guaranteed.  Any violation of basic human needs for development, as conveyed through our understandings about basic human rights, causes Trauma Altered Development (TAD) to occur.

Our national personality is built upon the personalities of all the individuals that are a part of the whole.  Because we are a democracy, the most obvious personality we show to the world becomes the personality of the majority of our members.  Each of our own individual personalities, in turn, were built upon a combination of our personal genetics as they manifested themselves within either a primarily safe and secure early environment or within a traumatic one.

If early attachment is not safe and secure, some degree of trauma is present because fundamental universal human rights were not guaranteed.  We are talking humans here.  Humans have basic PHYSIOLOGICAL needs for our optimal development that create us – in an interaction between our genes and the quality of our early environment – to end up being a certain way in the world.

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America prides itself on being a nation of individualists, choosing to consider that within the perhaps one percent of our genes that make us different from one another there is enough individual potential for differences that it outweighs the 99% of our genes that we share in common as members of our social human species.  I suspect, however, that it is only when early developmental needs are met through the application of human universal rights that the development of the foundational 99% of our shared genetic material can manifest itself optimally that the remaining 1% that provides us the buffet of individual differences can grow, develop and shine among us.

If basic human needs are not met in a safe and secure early environment primarily free of trauma (without ruptures for which there are not adequate and appropriate repair) as described within the recognition of basic human rights, the 99% of us has to take a course through Trauma Altered Development that means we have been forced to adjust to the trauma in a way that limits our ability to be far more of our unique, different self as adults.

Early traumatic, unsafe, insecure and malevolent environments seem to me to narrow the ‘channel’ through which we can pass through our early body-brain-mind-self developmental stages – and still survive.  One by one, I can think about everyone I have ever met who suffered from a malevolent early childhood and begin to see how the patterns among them-us-me become more alike in fundamental ways than they are different.

If I simply look at the so-called ‘personality disorders’ that researchers are now finding are nearly ALWAYS tied in their origins to early infant-child abuse and trauma, the end result makes these people enough alike that they can be grouped into ‘functioning categories’ according to the ‘symptoms’ that they demonstrate in their continued lives.

If I look just at three particular people, I see how Histrionic Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and Borderline Personality Disorder lie on a continuum of personality alteration that created these people to be different than I believe they would have been had their Child Rights been guaranteed so that they would have been able to grow up without Trauma Altered Development.

The very best scenario for human growth and development occurs because of development that happens without the mediating and CHANGING affects of trauma.  Only when Children’s Rights are guaranteed within safe and secure environments can a body-brain-mind-self grow up to be free – and by that I mean, free to be MOST flexible and creative throughout their lives in their actions and responses to every life experience (change) that they encounter.

Trauma Altered Development means that we have been forced to sacrifice aspects of our own autonomous development.  We are forced to be more alike than different because SURVIVAL itself has specific requirements that need to be met.  If we are exposed to overwhelming danger, threat and trauma during our early development, our specie’s resiliency factors from within our bodies will be forced into activation.  If the threat to our infant-child well-being endangers our body-brain-mind-self on the most basic levels, the Trauma Altered Development we experience will simply turn us primarily into SURVIVORS    rather into the most unique, flexible, creative original beings that we had the capacity to become.

To the degree that trauma changes a developing infant-child so that they can survive, to that degree will conscious choice and aware decision making be removed from them – unless and until these survivors can learn what the physiological trauma-changes were, how they affect us, and how we can now FORCE ourselves to become increasingly more conscious in our lives.

Non-trauma-altered people who were not forced to physiologically adapt to early traumas naturally end up with a fuller buffet of consciousness – including the ability to empathize, use a broadly built Theory of Mind to understand themselves in relationship to others in the world, and filter their experience through an aware conscience.  They simply have more choices about how to be in the world.

Of course, these non-trauma developed people can choose to be total jerks if they want to be.  Yet we know that a staggeringly high percentage of our nation’s criminal population suffered from Trauma Altered Development in malevolent childhoods.  Compared to people with Trauma Altered Development, the range of potential choices for non-trauma altered people appears to be almost infinite.

The feedback-feedforward information gathering and response loops within the body-brain-mind-self of a non-traumatized infant-child compared to a traumatized one form differently.  When I think about optimal development using the image of the infinity sign, non-trauma development creates an ever expanding, fully operational flow of life force along that “8” pathway.

The more an individual is forced to apply survival-based physiological changes during their infant-child development in the midst of trauma, the smaller the “8” pathway becomes.  In cases such as my mother’s was, the “8” simply broke so that she was left with the repetitive patterns of “0” only, living her life without the ability to allow incoming information to come in without it having to be processed entirely through the filer of the damage she suffered in her development through trauma.  My mother was not allowed to become the fully unique, thriving, creative, flexible person she COULD have become had she not been forced to physiologically adapt in order to survive during her developmental stages as an infant-child.

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The physiological crisis point within our human body-brain-mind-self as we interact with others of our species is at the SHAME point.  No matter how we choose to recognize this point, no matter what word we choose to apply to this very real physiological point in the operation of our Autonomic Nervous System (ANS), it is at this SHAME point that we are notified that there has been a rupture in need of repair between ourselves and others around us.  The SHAME point is where the “GO” and the “STOP” within our body-brain-mind-self happens.  It is at this point that negotiation can happen successfully – or not.

It seems entirely possible to me that this SHAME point is where the two circles of the “8” infinity sign meet one another.  In cases such as my mother’s, it is at this point that she broke and was left with “0”, unable to negotiate herself as a being in relationship not only to others, but also in relationship to her own self.  She lost the ability to consciously identify herself in a complex world of shifting realities.

My mother operated from the extremely limited survival-based point of automatic pilot only.  She could not flexibly and creatively, openly or consciously consider options to solving conflicts because everything about her centered on NOT feeling shame because she could not tolerate it.  When an infant-child’s environment is so unstable, when their basic human needs-rights are not met, when survival becomes the ONLY option, it means that the patterns of rupture without either repair or HOPE of repair have so signaled the developing little person of danger in a malevolent world that all but the most very basic, primitive options have been allowed.

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The problem with overwhelming trauma is that it disturbs the rupture-repair pattern of checks and balances that allows life to continue going on in anything like a normal or ordinary way.  The problem with overwhelming trauma during our infant-child developmental stages is that we are forced to find a way to survive at the same time we have the most limited resources we will have in our lifetime.  Our only option was, in effect, to steal from our own inner bank of resources in order to survive.  This causes the problem to be built right into our developing body-brain-mind-self because we are then depleted from the inside out.

The point of surviving trauma is to eliminate its effects on us.  If we have no power to eliminate its effects (think here, little tiny person) then the next best thing we can do is eliminate our awareness of the experience of being in a state of ongoing trauma that we cannot escape from.  We have no option except to escape on the inside.

Recovery from trauma post-infant-childhood means that we ‘return’ to a normal or near normal state which happens when the rupture that trauma created becomes repaired.  There must be adequate resources available to allow repair to take place so that life can “GO” on, one way or the other.  In the case of Trauma Altered Development during infant-childhood, the resources had to be found within the child itself because they were not available from the outside.

I do not believe it will be much longer before we understand completely that nearly all of what we call ‘dysfunctional behavior’ including ‘mental illness’ is a result of overwhelming trauma during infant-childhood developmental stages that causes survivors to steal from their own inner storehouse of resources at a time when having to do so – in order to stay alive – robs them of the capacity to later experience a full, healthy, flexibly adaptive, creative best-developed-self.

It is for this reason, if for no other, that a guarantee of Child Rights becomes such a critically important factor.  When a child has its fundamental human rights provided, it will not be forced to use up its own internal resources in order to survive.  Those resources HAVE TO COME from the outside of the child.  That is what human childhood is – a developmental period of growing and expanding ability to sustain oneself in the world.  In order for an infant-child to develop optimally, its needs must be attended to and met during these stages of dependency.  If those needs are not met from the outside, Trauma Altered Development will occur, or the infant-child will die.

It is the responsibility of all adults to ensure that all of a child’s rights are guaranteed and protected.  Nature has designed humans so that appropriate and adequate adult caregiving of infants and children is our specie’s primary, number one resiliency factor.  We must lift the yoke of stigma off of the survivors of infant-child neglect, abuse and trauma and place it instead on all the adults in the society surrounding our little ones that allowed this malevolent treatment and trauma to happen to them in the first place.

It is on this level that I place responsibility and accountability on our nation when I say “SHAME on you!”  Either we intend to STOP neglecting our responsibility to our nation’s children or we don’t.  Either we intend to repair the rupture in the fabric of our society that allows the basic rights of children to be violated, or we do not.

If we choose to GO on letting traumas happen to our little ones that is within our society’s power to STOP, then we must realize that the Trauma Altered Development that will happen to these maltreated and traumatized infant-children will change them on their most primary, physiological level — as they are forced to take from inside of themselves what they need in order to survive — because the adults in their world were not there to help them.  Having to do so will change the degree of well-being for these survivors for the rest of their lives.

When the trigger point of shame is touched, it is time to examine conscience and to choose a course of action.  This is true for individuals and for the societies they are a part of.  In cases such as my mother’s, these abilities were removed from her through trauma that caused her Trauma Altered Development.  Is this same kind of pattern also contained within our nation?

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

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Your Page – Readers’ Responses

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+AMERICANS MUST NOT BELIEVE THAT CHILDREN ARE HUMAN BEINGS — THUS, NO HUMAN RIGHTS

alchemynow2 Comments

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Any violation of an infant-child’s rights constitutes abuse in my book.  Our nation can march itself, fly itself, bomb itself, invade itself all around this globe proclaiming to be the great protector of human rights, while within the boundaries of our own nation we refuse to even accept that children are human beings.  If we DID accept this fact, that children are not possessions and are, indeed human, then we would have to recognize EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEIR UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS.  SHAME ON US!  SHAME!  SHAME!  SHAME!

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First, let me say this:  It is an honor to have Pat reading and posting on my blog.  I was concerned that her post today would be lost in the comment tailing pile from the mine of information accumulating on Stop the Storm.  So I copied it over here!!

COMMENT MADE TO +ALIGNING OUR NATION WITH UNITED NATIONS CHILD RIGHTS IS AGAINST OUR OWN LAWS

BY:  Pat Gordon-Smith
on December 6, 2009 at 6:11 AM

There’s an excellent accessible version of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child at http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/en/docs/Know_Your_Rights_poster.pdf

It’s a poster intended to inform children of their rights and, as such, is great for anyone. The language it uses is important, too. It shows the extent to which the world of children’s rights has moved on since the Universal Declaration on Children’s Rights. Then, the version written for children has them as passive dependants. In this version children are active agents, following the spirit of the CRC itself.

Here is the text from the poster. The numbered points correspond to the articles in the convention:

1)  Everyone under the age of 18 has ALL of these rights. You have the right to…
2)  Be treated fairly no matter who you are, where you are from, what language you speak, what you believe or where you live.
3)  Have adults always do what is best for you.
4)  Have all of these rights protected by your government.
5)  Be given support and advice from your parents and family.
6)  Life.
7)  Have a name and a nationality.
8 )  An official identity.
9)  Not be separated from your parent(s), unless it is for your own good.
10)  Be reunited with your parent(s) if they have to move to another country.
11) Not be taken out of your country illegally.
12)  Have your own opinion, which is listened to and taken seriously.
13)  Find out information and express what you think through speaking, writing and art, unless this denies other people their rights.
14)  Think and believe whatever you want to and practice any religion, with guidance from your parent(s).
15)  Be with friends and join or set up clubs, unless this denies other people their rights.
16)  Have your privacy and family respected.
17)  Get reliable information from newspapers, books, radio, television and the Internet, as long as it is not harmful to you.
18)  Be brought up by your parents, if possible.
19)  Be protected from being hurt or badly treated in any way.
20)  Special protection and help if you can’t live with your parents.
21)  The best care possible if you are adopted or in foster care.
22)  Special protection and help if you are a refugee.
23)  Access to education and any support you may need if you have a disability.
24)  The best health and medical care possible, and information to help you stay healthy.
25)  Have your living situation checked regularly if you are looked after away from your family.
26)  Help from the government if you are poor or in need.
27)  A basic standard of living: food, clothing and a safe place to live.
28)  An education.
29)  An education that develops your personality and abilities, and encourages you to respect other people, cultures and the environment.
30)  Enjoy your own culture, religion and language, even if these are not the same as most people in your country.
31)  Rest, play and relax.
32)  Be protected from work that harms your health or education.
33)  Be protected from dangerous drugs and their trade.
34)  Be protected from sexual abuse.
35)  Not be kidnapped or sold.
36)  Be protected from being taken advantage of or exploited in any way.
37)  Not to be punished in a cruel or hurtful way.
38)  Protection and care in times of war. If you are under 15 you should never be forced to join an army.
39)  Special help if you have been hurt, neglected or badly treated.
40)  Be helped and treated fairly if you are accused of breaking the law.
41)  Be protected by national or international laws which provide better rights than the ones in this list.
42) ALL children and adults should know and learn about these rights.

I’ve just written a blog entry about this on my blog, ‘Children’s rights and other things’ (http://patsky.blogspot.com) that includes some further explanation of certain articles.

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Please refer to the December 12, 1989 United Nations General Assembly document from the Convention on the Rights of the Child from which this above 42-Article List of the Rights of the Child have been condensed for ease of understanding and clarity for our globe’s children and youth.

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I remember years ago when I saw a plaque hanging on the wall of someone’s home I was visiting that simply read, “Clarity Begins At Home.”  Today I found this same phrase incorporated into the thinking represented on the website for ERIC – Education Resources Information Center:  ED201555 – Clarity Begins at Home:  An Analysis of Key Ideas of Invitational Education.

ERIC is America’s Education Resources Information Center – an online digital library of education research and information. ERIC is sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education. ERIC provides ready access to education literature to support the use of educational research and information to improve practice in learning, teaching, educational decision-making, and research.

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My search today for ‘United Nations Child Rights’ yielded 257 documents in the ERIC database that represent global action and thought on the topic.

When I added United States of America into the search, 3 documents appeared.  Only one 1991 document “is a curriculum that serves as an introduction to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Designed for the upper elementary and middle grades 5-10.”

I took out ‘America’ and received information on 32 documents, all of which are not specifically about our nation.

Our nation will never begin to bring a discussion of child rights into mainstream educational classrooms as long as we continue to allow corporeal punishment to exist within our schools.  Physical assault, violence and ‘hitting’ by public school staff is still legal in 22 of our 50 states:

Where the states stand on corporal punishment:

Alabama–Legal
Alaska–Illegal
Arizona–Legal
Arkansas–Legal
California–Illegal
Colorado–Legal
Connecticut–Illegal
Delaware–Illegal
District of Columbia–Illegal
Florida–Legal
Georgia–Legal
Hawaii–Illegal
Idaho–Legal
Illinois–Illegal
Indiana–Legal
Iowa–Illegal
Kansas–Legal
Kentucky–Legal
Louisiana–Legal
Maine–Illegal
Maryland–Illegal
Massachusetts–Illegal
Michigan–Illegal
Minnesota–Illegal
Mississippi–Legal
Missouri–Legal		 Montana–Illegal
Nebraska–Illegal
Nevada–Illegal
New Hampshire–Illegal
New Jersey–Illegal
New Mexico–Legal
New York–Illegal
North Carolina–Legal
North Dakota–Illegal
Ohio–Legal
Oklahoma–Legal
Oregon–Illegal
Pennsylvania–Illegal
Rhode Island–Illegal
South Carolina–Legal
South Dakota–Illegal
Tennessee–Legal
Texas–Legal
Utah–Illegal
Vermont–Illegal
Virginia–Illegal
Washington–Illegal
West Virginia–Illegal
Wisconsin–Illegal
Wyoming–Legal

We Must Stop Corporal Punishment Now!

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The focus of my blog is on the intergenerational transmission of unresolved trauma that happens because the Rights of Children are not protected.  Our problem is much larger than corporeal punishment in our schools.  I understand that the sinking Titanic of Dark Age thinking within the current medical model field of mental health services and research remains connected to our public consideration of Child Rights on all levels within our nation, including in our laws, in our homes, and in our public educational system.

The following is included in the Preamble to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child:

“Recalling that, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations has proclaimed that childhood is entitled to special care and assistance,

Convinced that the family, as the fundamental group of society and the natural environment for the growth and well-being of all its members and particularly children, should be afforded the necessary protection and assistance so that it can fully assume its responsibilities within the community,

Recognizing that the child, for the full and harmonious development of his or her personality, should grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding,

Considering that the child should be fully prepared to live an individual life in society, and brought up in the spirit of the ideals proclaimed in the Charter of the United Nations, and in particular in the spirit of peace, dignity, tolerance, freedom, equality and solidarity…”

In the spirit of the aims of this blog, I am particularly concerned that children within our nation experience every possible assistance toward “the full and harmonious development of his or her personality” which can only happen through safe and secure attachment experiences that an infant-child has provided for it “in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding” that happens ONLY when Child Rights are recognized, allowed and protected.

We are not clear as a nation or as individuals about what Child Rights are.  CRIN’s Factsheet on Children’s Rights clearly describes the ONLY way to look at the Universal Rights of Children.  The USA is a nation of materialists.  We must still believe that children are possessions, and therefore believe that children are not HUMAN, they are OBJECTS to be arbitrarily treated in any way we want to – within the boundaries of our laws, which are obviously themselves seriously lacking in regard to the Universal HUMAN Rights of Children.

Is our nation acceptably divided about whether or not children are human beings or not?  I think that is the issue here.  If we believe in the Dark Age thinking that children are possessions and are therefore objects rather than human beings, anything we might assign to them in terms of a ‘right’ or not can remain arbitrary.  I have no illusions about this point, personally.

When my mother and my grandmother engaged in a rage-filled argument over little not quite two-year-old me, it was because they believed I was an object possession, not that I was a human child.

When my mother violently shoved my three-year-old head repeatedly into the toilet bowl and beat me mercilessly, I was not being treated as a human being with rights.  I was being treated more aggressively than if I was a baby’s dirty diaper.

When I was battered and terrorized and forced to spend the night sitting perched on a stool alone in the dark because I got the white cuffs of my parka dirty, I was treated as having LESS VALUE and less rights than the coat did!

When I was made to ride long hours in the car curled in a fetal position on the floor of the back seat ‘like a dog’ when I was seven, I was treated as having less value and rights than a badly abused dog!

When I was 13 and knocked down by my mother over and over again into a giant mud puddle until I crawled around and said over and over again, “I am a pig, I am a pig,” which I refused to do, I was being treated with less value and as having no more rights than would a badly abused livestock animal.

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I realize that I am taking a controversial stand, but believe me, the suffering of the 18 years of my infant-childhood — and the resulting suffering during my entire adult life as a consequence of the violation of my Rights as a Child – backs me up when I say to everyone in our nation:  You either stand on the side of knowing absolutely that children are human beings with Universal Human Rights that must be guaranteed and protected, or you do not and believe instead that children are not human and are objects that are possessions with no HUMAN rights at all.

It is this latter position held by the majority of our citizens that prevents every one of our 50 states, and therefore prevents our entire nation, the United States of America, from ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and from guaranteeing these rights be protected for every American child.

I am sorry, but I cannot find any ‘gray area of the Law’ here.  “Clarity Begins At Home.”  Our ignorance belongs to us.  As long as we deny our beliefs that children are objects, possessions and livestock, we will remain a nation of child abusers on our most fundamental level, because we do not REALLY believe that children are human beings at all, and therefore have no Universal Human Rights to be either guaranteed or protected.

How else can I understand how I could go to public 8th grade PE class wearing one of those little blue gym suits with the entire back of my body covered solid with bruises of every imaginable color and shape all the way down to my heels — black, blue, green, purple, yellow, brown — from the base of my neck, across both of my shoulders and arms, down my back, over my buttocks, down my thighs, my calves — all perfectly visible to those around me on the gymnasium floor and/or in the community girls’ showers?  Nobody blinked an eye or EVER said a WORD!

That was in 1964.  How much progress have we REALLY made since then in recognizing and protecting the Universal Human Rights of our nation’s children?  Where are our laws that tell our children and the world we mean exactly what we say?

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

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Your Page – Readers’ Responses

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

alchemynowLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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+ALIGNING OUR NATION WITH UNITED NATIONS CHILD RIGHTS IS AGAINST OUR OWN LAWS

alchemynow7 Comments

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The following comment has brought something to my attention that extremely troubles me.  Perhaps I am experiencing some of the reactions and feelings that others might experience when faced with the reality that child abuse really does occur after they have spent their lives in oblivious ignorance of this fact.

Those of us who have suffered from infant-child abuse and neglect already know, of course, that extreme maltreatment of infants and children happens in our nation.  Yet here I am today, evidently having spent my life time somehow believing that the United States of America exists at some high level of the social food chain and would, given our advantages in the world, OF COURSE lead the world on all fronts that have to do with caring for and protecting our children.

NOT TRUE I find today, thanks to the following comment:

posted comment by Pat Gordon-Smith
patsky.blogspot.com

90.211.0.50

Submitted on 2009/12/03 at 8:47am

The Universal Declaration of Children’s Rights was superseded in 1989 by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child — CRC – http://www.cirp.org/library/ethics/UN-convention/

It is a detailed interpretation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the special case of children whose journey between wholly dependent infancy and legally independent adulthood means that, for a greater or lesser period between birth and age 18, they must rely on others for their physical, financial and emotional security.

Every country in the world has ratified the CRC apart from two – Somalia and the USA, although last week Somalia indicated its intention to sign. This was reported on the Jobsanger blog, where I posted a response (http://jobsanger.blogspot.com/2009/11/statement-on-childrens-rights.html).

Your conclusions seem bang on to me. I agree that, in the US, recognition of children’s rights should be a matter for the federal government. Perhaps you and blogger Ted McLaughlin might join forces in putting pressure on the president for just that.

Good luck.

IN RESPONSE TO:

+VIOLATING THE UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS OF CHILDREN

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I just printed and read the December 12, 1989 United Nations General Assembly document from the Convention on the Rights of the Child.  I highly encourage my blog’s readers to do the same.  President Clinton did sign this, but it has never been presented to our Senate.

I did a Google search for the United Nations 10- member elected Committee on the Rights of the Child, which was established as a result of the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child to help nations improve the conditions of their children.

Article 44 of the Convention’s 54 Article Annex report on the Rights of the Child says,

1.  States Parties undertake to submit to the Committee, through the Secretary-General of the United Nations, reports on the measures they have adopted which give effect to the rights recognized herein and on the progress made on the enjoyment of those rights.”

This is emblazoned at the top of the Google search page:

United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child Adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 20 November 1989, and ratified by all nations except the United States and Somalia. www.unicef.org/crc

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Any great, grand illusion I may have had about our nation’s commitment to the well-being of children – no matter what – has evaporated.  I feel chilled, sickened, saddened and scared.  I want to know on what grounds, and using what reasoning, what licensure, was our nation the ONLY one other than completely unstable Somalia to refuse involvement with this global effort to identify, recognize, clarify and describe the Human Rights of Children, or to participate with an enforced accountability for the treatment and protection of our nation’s children.

This 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was held during the same time period (1985-1990) that the 75% of our young adults who are now unfit for military duty to our nation were born.

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This United Nations Background Note on Children’s Rights outlines global issues and progress made on behalf of earth’s children up until 1995 and includes the following:

A Global Pact on Children’s Rights

“After a lengthy period of careful negotiations, the Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted in November 1989 by a vote of the General Assembly. By September of the following year, the Convention had obtained the 20 ratifications required for its entry into force as international law. Its importance as a foundation of modern human rights law was later underscored at the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna….”

America evidently wants no part of ‘international law’?  Ask the Indigenous People of our nation how well the USA honors its treaties.

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“The failure to ratify the treaty so far is in part due to potential conflicts with the constitution and because of opposition by some political and religious conservatives to the treaty.”

This scares me – why 75% of our youth ended up being misfits today?  How far are we willing to let the condition of our children deteriorate before we recognize that the states are not up to the job of ensuring a standard of Child Rights that even matches the United Nations suggestions?

Evidently we cannot participate in a global Child Right action because it is against our own law:

“American laws for the protection of children are at the state, rather than the federal level, and the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution restricts the authority of the federal government to pass legislation in this area.”

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“International human rights instruments such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its Optional Protocols are negotiated among United Nations Member States and are legally binding on the individual States that become parties to the instrument. There are two ways for a State to become a party: by signature and ratification or by accession.

In ratifying the Convention or an Optional Protocol, a State accepts an obligation to respect, protect, promote and fulfill the enumerated rights—including by adopting or changing laws and policies that implement the provisions of the Convention or Protocol.”

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This appears to be the kind of American reaction to these United Nations global efforts to provide for and protect the Rights of Children that leaves our nation hanging out in nowhere-ville in the company of Somalia, a nation without any government at all:

Updated February 25, 2009

Boxer Seeks to Ratify U.N. Treaty That May Erode U.S. Rights

By Joseph Abrams

– FOXNews.com

Sen. Barbara Boxer is pushing the Obama administration to move forward with ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, a controversial treaty that has never gained much support in the U.S.

“Sen. Barbara Boxer is urging the U.S. to ratify a United Nations measure meant to expand the rights of children, a move critics are calling a gross assault on parental rights that could rob the U.S. of sovereignty.

The California Democrat is pushing the Obama administration to review the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, a nearly 20-year-old international agreement that has been foundering on American shores since it was signed by the Clinton administration in 1995 but never ratified.

Critics say the treaty, which creates “the right of the child to freedom of thought, conscience and religion” and outlaws the “arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy,” intrudes on the family and strips parents of the power to raise their children without government interference.

Nearly every country in the world is party to it — only the U.S. and Somalia are not — but the convention has gained little support in the U.S. and never been sent to the Senate for ratification……” [READ FULL ARTICLE HERE – I find the ‘opposition’ sickening]

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Of course, there’s this, found at the Smart Girl Politics blog:

“Home Schooling families stepped up to represent not only their rights, but the rights of all Americans. The grassroots movement that took place yesterday must continue on a larger scale by educating all Americans about the danger of this U.N. treaty and placing calls to their elected officials.

Once again, our liberal friends in Washington, who claim to love America, are covertly hoping to ratify CRC making it the law of the land here in the United States helping to strip away the rights of parents in America and allow the U.N. to dictate what proper parenting looks like at a global level.

Both Drudge http://www.drudge.com/news/122366/us-may-join-un-childrens-treaty and Free Republic http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2278566/posts reported on this development on June 24, 2009, but this has been on the back burner for Barbara Boxer as reported earlier this year by FoxNews.com. “Sen. Barbara Boxer is urging the U.S. to ratify a United Nations measure meant to expand the rights of children, a move critics are calling a gross assault on parental rights that could rob the U.S. of sovereignty.” http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/02/25/boxer-seeks-ratify-treaty-erode-rights/

According to J. Michael Smith, HSLDA President, in Washington Times Op-ed—U.N. Treaty Might Weaken Families “

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June 23, 2009 post comment on Drudge Report:

“The US was a major player in getting the Convention on the Rights of the Child up and running. In fact, the US signed on to the convention 14 years ago, but has not ratified it. (Just like Somalia.) However, the US has signed and ratified a pair of optional protocols: “Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict” and “Optional Protocoal on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography.” President Obama has described this country’s failure to ratify the convention as “embarrassing.” The text is located here: www.crin.org ”

As mentioned above, these are the

Optional Protocols

Two Optional Protocols to the Convention on the Rights of the Child exist:

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Fortunately I have found some hope in this impressive website concerned with the Rights of the Child:

CRIN – Child Rights Information Network found at http://www.crin.org/

THEIR MISSION:

“CRIN’s mission is to equip the global child rights community with the information it needs to ensure the implementation of children’s rights.

CRIN presses for rights, not charity and is passionate about putting children’s rights at the top of the global agenda by addressing root causes and promoting systematic change. Its guiding framework is the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

Our activities are based on the belief that information is a powerful tool for realising children’s rights – and such information should be made as widely available and accessible as possible. As such, CRIN aims to bridge the gap between the information-rich and the information-poor by maximising the potential of new information technologies, and ensuring that those unable to use them are not excluded.

As a network of, at the last count, over 2,000 members in 150 countries, we aim to capture the expertise and the knowledge of our members, making this available to all actors involved in the implementation of the CRC.”

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Please take a moment to follow this link and read CRIN’s Factsheet on Children’s Rights.  Print it, display it, believe it, share it.

For every single one of us who has suffered the trauma of infant-child maltreatment and abuse, we know the truth of these words within every cell of our body.  These facts give us the common ground we need in order to understand the essence of what was done to us, what happened to us as a result, and why.

Our basic human Child Rights were violated.  We were not protected.  We were harmed, hurt – and changed.

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+PTSD AND SEVERE ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – PART THREE

alchemynowLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Van der Kolk continues by saying:

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

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

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

Van der Kolk continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This post follows:

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

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

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

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+VIOLATING THE UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS OF CHILDREN

alchemynow3 Comments

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When any of the Universal Human Rights of Children are violated, those who violate and those who allow the violation to occur are equally accountable for the criminality of their actions.

Today I am reminded of the biggest picture not only about the condition of the youth, children, infants and their parents within our nation.  This picture is about Human Rights – not only as they apply to adults, but also as they apply to the offspring we are raising among us.

What do these words mean?

Equal Justice, Equal Opportunity, Equal Dignity

I found a wonderful video about Human Rights presented at this above link presented by our friends on their website, Treasures of Wonderment.

I then went to the United Nations website where I found the full text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

“On December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights….Following this historic act the Assembly called upon all Member countries to publicize the text of the Declaration and “to cause it to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other educational institutions, without distinction based on the political status of countries or territories.””

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Considering my concerns about the current poor condition of the youth of our nation, and thinking about how every passing present moment of our lives are passing continually into the past as we step into the future, I wonder about the decline in well-being that our nation is obviously experiencing as demonstrated not only by this lack of well-being of our youth but also of the parents who raise them.

Do we in America today deny that we have these Universal Human Rights and that our children also have Universal Human Rights?  What are we lacking as a nation that is creating these conditions of distress within our population?  What elements are missing that the required environment of safe and secure attachment to ourselves, to our children, to one another and to the world we live in seems to be increasingly missing within our own nation?

What standards can we use in order to take a clearer look at ourselves?  Why NOT consider the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the most complete set of guidelines existing on our planet about our concerns?

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Every one of the 30 Articles contained within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are vital to ensure human well-being.  All these Rights fit together into a whole.  It is my particular concern today about the well-being of our nation’s infants, children, youth and their parents that most concerns me, so I paid particular attention to Articles 25 and 26 as I read this Declaration:

Article 25.

  • (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
  • (2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Article 26.

  • (1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
  • (2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
  • (3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

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Do the rights of children solely lie with their parents?  What happens if parents do not and cannot ensure the rights of their children?  What happens if and when parents directly violate ANY of the United Nations Human Rights as they apply to children?  What ARE the Universal Human Rights of children?  Do they have any?

On November 20, 1959 the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Children’s Rights.  I found a United Nations page with links on the rights of children, and also found the official version of the Universal Declaration of Children’s Rights.

I also found the following on the United Nations website.  It is in these few words that the picture becomes clear not only about what children need, but what their Universal Human Rights are in plain and simple language:

Declaration of the Rights of the Child – Plain Language Version

1.  All children have the right to what follows, no matter what their race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, or where they were born or who they were born to.

2.  You have the special right to grow up and to develop physically and spiritually in a healthy and normal way, free and with dignity.

3.  You have a right to a name and to be a member of a country.

4.  You have a right to special care and protection and to good food, housing and medical services.

5.  You have the right to special care if handicapped in any way.

6.  You have the right to love and understanding, preferably from parents and family, but from the government where these cannot help.

7.  You have the right to go to school for free, to play, and to have an equal chance to develop yourself and to learn to be responsible and useful.

Your parents have special responsibilities for your education and guidance.

8.  You have the right always to be among the first to get help.

9.  You have the right to be protected against cruel acts or exploitation, e.g. you shall not be obliged to do work which hinders your development both physically and mentally.

You should not work before a minimum age and never when that would hinder your health, and your moral and physical development.

10.  You should be taught peace, understanding, tolerance and friendship among all people.

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Those who are survivors of any degree of deprivation of any of these rights anywhere on our planet – including within our own nation — are caused suffering through criminal actions.  When any of these Universal Human Rights of children are violated, it is to this that we must pay the closest attention:

6.  You have the right to love and understanding, preferably from parents and family, but from the government where these cannot help.

I do not believe that in our nation the Universal Human Rights of Children should be left to the care of the governments of our separate states.  I believe that the guarantee of these Rights needs to be protected by our federal government.  I believe we need to develop a federal standardization in regards to children’s Rights that is applied equally across all 50 states on every level that impacts the well-being of our nation’s children – from conception forward.

This would include all child protection services, including all services designed to identify maltreatment, all services designed to remedy critical issues within a child’s home of origin in a speedy and competent manner, and all services that are designed to place children in living environments where ALL their Universal Human Rights will be guaranteed.

I also believe that our children’s public education needs to be standardized on a national level and should NO LONGER be left, in any way or on any level, up to the incompetent design and administration of individual states.

It seems obvious to me that considering the findings that 75% of our youth are suffering from serious lack of well-being that even finding ways to shore up inadequate parenting will not resolve the profound problems our nation is facing in regard to Universal Human Rights of our children.  We need an across-the-board revision of our educational system by the federal government, and this need has reached critical proportions.

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Either we are a nation that is willing to stand behind these Rights as defined by the United Nations or we are not.  It seems obvious to me where the great grey area of “maybe yes, maybe no” has gotten us.  We have approached a ‘crisis management needed’ stage within our nation.  We need to move up the hierarchy of who is going to take care of our nation’s children – and how.

If parents are not equipped to guarantee the Universal Human Rights of their children, and if our individual states are not equipped to do it, then it is our federal government’s responsibility to step up to its job of guaranteeing these rights through every possible means at its disposal.

Violating the Universal Human Rights of Children is a criminal act.  Allowing anyone to violate these rights is a criminal act.  These Rights are not arbitrary.  They are absolute, fundamental and necessary.  There is no room for grey.  Either we are a nation of criminals or we are not.

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PBS Documentary – The Mind’s Big Bang – evolution of our mind – There’s a free toolbar you can download that open’s up a universe!!

+HARSH REALITY, NOT EVEN A QUESTION – WE HAVE BECOME A NATION OF FOOLS

alchemynowLeave a comment

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What is wrong with our nation that over 75% of our nation’s young adults born between 1985 and 1990 appear to be sloppy, incompetent fools?  Talk about NEGLECT and bad parenting!!!  How and why did we let things get THIS BAD?

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“Thursday, Nov. 5, 2009 the generals and admirals of Mission: Readiness, along with US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, released a new report that details the fact that 75% of young Americans are unable to serve their country because they have either failed to graduate high school, engaged in criminal activity, or are physically or mentally unfit.”

For state-by-state data, the press release and report, go to the press conference page.  You will find here that even this 75% statistic is considered to be too LOW!

This link goes to the excellent full report, well worth the reading.  Be sure to look for more details about the data collection for this study in this complete report HERE, which includes a full presentation about the need for early childhood development education and parent coaching, as well as the following statement:

“….state and federal governments together are paying over $20 billion a year to identify and care for the victims of abuse or neglect in America….Individual children who grow up to drop out of school, abuse drugs and become career criminals cost society, on average, over 2.5 million dollars each.”

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It is too bad that this study did not collect child abuse information, similar to that collected by the Center for Disease Control in their recent studies, along with the other statistics so that we could clearly determine patterns of Trauma Altered Development in correlation with the problems over 75% of our nation’s young adults are now demonstrating.

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I must be living in a bubble.  I am stunned and shocked by the findings of this report that a minimum of “75% of young Americans are unable to serve their country.”  Is our great nation already experiencing this drastic of a decline in our standards and quality of life that this 75% figure measuring a disaster of fitness among the masses of our nation’s youth seems to bother so few?  Yes.  It seems obvious that this is true.

What is wrong with the parents of these children?  What are they doing?  It seems obvious to me what they are NOT doing – paying attention and providing anything like a high quality of life for their children that prepares them for a high quality life in adulthood.

These statistics reflect serious neglect and negligence, at a minimum.  I do not believe the ‘problem’ lies within the schools.  The responsibility of raising healthy and competent children lies with the parents that bring them into the world.  Is this the best that our nation’s parents can do?  Do we have nearly an entire nation of unfit parents?  We must, because evidently we have nearly an entire nation of completely unfit young adults.

If 75% of our nations young adults are this unhealthy and unprepared for competent adulthood, how in the universe are they prepared to provide healthy parenting to any children they may bring into the world?

Something is WRONG here – and I mean right HERE – in this once-was-a-proud-strong nation called America!  Are we destroying our own nation from the inside?

Have we willingly and knowingly turned ourselves into an uneducated, ignorant, lazy, unhealthy, sloppy, placid, valueless drug using nation of misfits, criminals and fools?

I need to revise my entire mental concept of ORDINARY!!  If being useless to oneself, one’s offspring, one’s nation and one’s global civilization is the accepted standard of ordinary in our nation, I want no part of ordinary!!  Or is it the other way around so that most parents have suffered enough traumas that they had no chance at ordinary in the first place?

The inequity in the distribution of fitness versus lack of fitness among our youth is staggering!  This massive group of pathetic youth is entering the age when they will be running our country and making decisions that will impact the future of our globe.  Or, are we content to let the less than 25% of our population run our entire nation while the rest of our population further deteriorate into nothing more than complete social parasites?

Are the non-traumatized, securely attached, advantaged people having fewer (if any) children while the traumatized, insecurely attached and disadvantaged are having more?  Are we seeing the consequences of a generation of daycare and latchkey children whose mother’s abandoned the home for the public work place?

There is no amount of money on this globe that our government could possibly throw into our ‘educational system’ to resolve this massive of a problem.  The government is not any more responsible for raising our nation’s children than our school systems are.

Parents HAVE to more positively participate in the PARENTING of their children.

We have obviously reached this dismal and appalling point in our national decline because far more than the majority of the parents of our nations either do not give a damn or are completely unfit themselves!

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

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Your Page – Readers’ Responses

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+PTSD AND SEVERE ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – PART TWO

alchemynowLeave a comment

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This second post about Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) refers again to a book called Healing Trauma: Attachment, Mind, Body, and Brain – Hardcover (Jan 2003, W.W. Norton and Co.) by Daniel J. Siegel, Marion F. Solomon, and Marion Solomon, chapter 4 (pages 168-195) written by Bessel A. van der Kolk:  “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and The Nature of Trauma.”

Today’s post follows the November 28, 2009 post

+PTSD AND SEVERE CHILD ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – PART ONE

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

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The following is taken from pages 172 of the above text.  I will consider this information in my writing below:

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It is now easier for me to work with this information because I have described my own version of an alternative way of thinking about the ongoing complications severe infant-child abuse and malevolent treatment survivors face as a direct result not only of the specifics of the actual horrific traumas they lived through, but also because of the very real physiological changes that surviving these traumas created in their infant-child growing and developing body.

(see yesterday’s November 29, 2009 post

+TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT (TAD) – A NEW DESCRIPTIVE CONCEPT)

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An accurate primary and initial assessment of TAD for those of us who are Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors would allow us to know immediately how the changes our body-brain had to make created us to be different from ‘ordinary’ people who do not have the history of trauma that we do.

In this TAD assessment two critical resiliency factors would also need to be assessed because these two resiliency factors (one primary, the other secondary) are known to have the ability to nearly completely modify and modulate the power that early trauma has to change our developing body-brain.

The presence of safe and secure attachment to some early primary caregiver is the most basic and important resource an Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivor had.  The current assessment tools available to assess adult secure and insecure attachment need to be simplified, refined and made accessible to the public.

Stemming from the degree of safety and security available through early caregiver attachment, the ability to play is a secondary but critical resiliency factor that impacts an Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivor’s body-brain development.  I believe that assessment criteria and tools to measure this critical factor consistently and accurately can be developed and also made available to the public.

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NOTE:  In our new age of technology, the public has the right to be able to access critically important information about themselves and how their early infant and childhood experiences impacted their development.  At present this information remains ONLY available within ‘clinical’ settings, if even there.

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As far as I am concerned, anything and everything that is currently lumped under so-called ‘psychological’ categories belongs to the sinking Titanic of dark age medical model thinking that I referred to in yesterday’s post.

Until Trauma Altered Development (TAD) is assessed at the bedrock level of how Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors changed at their own bedrock (molecular) level, any attempt to moderate so-called ‘symptoms’ remains a crap shoot in the dark.

TAD assessment can connect the consequences of early trauma to altered physiological changes that an Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivor’s body was forced to make to best ensure continued survival in early malevolent environments,

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Early caregiver attachment experiences from birth build the body-brain we will live with for the rest of our lives.

Van der Kolk (scanned text above) writes that it is not usually the symptoms of PTSD itself that brings those seeking help to a clinical setting.  Rather, he says that it is “depression, outbursts of anger, self-destructive behaviors, and feelings of shame, self-blame and distrust that distinguished a treatment-seeking sample from a nontreatment-seeking community sample with PTSD.”

Through an accurate TAD assessment, any ongoing difficulty an Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivor has with emotions and social interactions can be traced to inadequate early caregiver interactions in a malevolent environment that built for the survivor an entirely different early-forming right-limbic-emotional-social brain.

When the foundation of the early forming right brain is altered because of maltreatment, the Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivor’s later developmental stages involving shame, guilt and embarrassment will also be off course from ‘ordinary and optimal’ and will cause altered patterns of development in the body-brain.

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Van der Kolk states:

“The majority of people who seek treatment for trauma-related problems have histories of multiple traumas.”

OK, I can certainly understand this, but here again, as I mentioned above, I do not agree with applying so-called ‘psychological’ and ‘symptom based’ medical model diagnostic thinking used in the author’s next statements.  I absolutely disagree with ever using terms such as ‘character pathology’ in reference to Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors!

“One recent treatment-seeking sample…suffered from a variety of other psychological problems which in most cases were the chief presenting complaints, in addition to their PTSD symptoms:  77% suffered from behavioral impulsivity, affect lability, and aggression against self and others; 84% suffered from depersonalization and other dissociative symptoms; 75% were plagued by chronic feelings of shame, self-blame and being permanently damaged and 93% complained of being unable to negotiate satisfactory relationships with others.  These problems contribute significantly to impairment and disability above and beyond the PTSD symptoms….Focusing exclusively either on PTSD or on the depression, dissociation and character pathology prevents adequate assessment and treatment of traumatized populations.”

TAD assessments will clearly show that ‘impulsivity’, ‘affect liability’, most aggression, and dissociation are directly connected to changes in how an Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivor’s nervous system, including their brain – and here, particularly their right brain – formed differently from ‘ordinary’ due to growth and development in trauma.

“Chronic feelings of shame, self-blame and being permanently damaged” are also directly connected to trauma through developmental changes an Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivor’s nervous system, including their brain – and here, particularly their later forming (after age one) left brain – had to make while developing in an early malevolent, trauma-filled environment.

Rather than referring to these changes as ‘character pathologies’, which in my thinking is the maltreatment, abusive stance taken by the medical model toward Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors, a TAD assessment can accurately and specifically pinpoint the origin of these changes in the body-brain and describe the consequences of them.

Receiving an accurate TAD assessment will show us exactly how our body was forced to adapt during our development through trauma so that we could survive it.   Yes, I do believe we KNOW we are different from ‘ordinary,’ but we are not ‘permanently damaged’.   We ARE permanently changed.

The changes Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors experience are fundamental and profound!  Everything about us was subject to adjustment for our trauma survival – our body, our nervous system and brain, our immune system, our mind, and our connection between our self and our self and between our self and the entire world around us.  NOT facing the truth and discovering the facts through TAD assessment will NOT resolve the difficulties we face with our continued survival into adulthood.

The only long term solution societies have is to STOP Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment!!!  Part of that solution is to provide the kind of TAD assessment Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors need, and to make available to us the resources necessary for us to live the best life we can in spite of the changes we had to make in order to stay alive because nobody STOPPED the Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment that happened to us.

It is the pathological character of the society we were born into that allowed what happened to us to happen at all, let alone allowed it to continue to the degree that trauma changed our physiological development.  If there is any self blame to be had, it is on the level far beyond OURS as the Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors.

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That the grand sinking Titanic of the archaic dark age’s medical model about Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors has at least THOUGHT about throwing us a life boat becomes apparent in van der Kolk’s next words:

“As part of the DSM IV field trial, members of the PTSD taskforce delineated a syndrome of psychological problems which have been shown to be frequently associated with histories of prolonged and severe personal abuse.  They call this Complex PTSD, or Disorders of Extreme Stress Not Otherwise Specified (DESNOS).”

Great!  A life boat full of holes!  Gee, why are we NOT thankful for that?

“A syndrome of psychological problems” be damned!  Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors do not suffer from a ‘syndrome’, and ours are not ‘psychological problems’!  For all the reasons I have repeatedly described, we simply need a TAD assessment that will tell us HOW our little body adapted down to our molecular level during our development in the midst of, and in spite of, toxic malevolent trauma.  Then we need resources that inform us how to live NOW with these profound trauma-caused changes that happened to us THEN.

The author continues:

“DESNOS delineated a complex of symptoms associated with early interpersonal trauma.”

Again, we don’t have ‘symptoms’.  We have a different body-brain-mind-self that adapted to survival in a malevolent world and caused us to have Trauma Altered Development (TAD).

We don’t have symptoms, we have consequences.  Every single item in the list of so-called ‘complex symptoms’ (see them in the page scan below) that van der Kolk describes are directly connected to our TAD.  EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE ITEMS exist within us because of changes our body-brain was forced to make.  They are consequences of the changes our body had to make through our TAD.

The only real progress in the right direction I can see – given to us like faulty patches to a sinking life boat thrown to us from a sinking ship – is that at least an association ‘with early interpersonal trauma’ is finally being considered in the current medical model thinking.

But this tiny droplet of hoped for healing balm offered by the creation of a construct named “Complex PTSD, or Disorders of Extreme Stress Not Otherwise Specified (DESNOS)” is not what we Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors need in my book.

We need our entire society to understand and accept the truth that the Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment that happened to me and others – and continues to happen to children around us today – is nothing short of a form of parental-selected genocide that did not fulfill its intent to completely destroy us.  We are Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors because we are still alive, and we ONLY SURVIVED because we were able to adapt our body throughout our Trauma Altered Development to and within the malevolent environments that formed us.

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The rest of van der Kolk’s words (below) simply bring into my mind the image of the author being like a modern day Paul Revere, whose horse’s hooves pound along the streets of our nation as he screams a warning.  I am certainly not convinced, however, that even this author knows which message it is that most needs to be delivered.

The Trauma Altered Development that Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors experienced had no choice but to build itself into every part of who we are BECAUSE we live in a body, and our body had no choice but to change so that we could stay alive.

To describe any aspect of what happened to us in terms of a ‘diagnosis’ or a ‘symptom’, ‘complex’ or not, to call us ‘maladjusted’ or to tell us we suffer from any form of a ‘character pathology’ or ‘psychological problem’ is to continue to condemn us with stigmas and stereotyped prejudice which makes as much sense as applying all of the above labels to someone who is tall versus short, or who has red hair rather than blond.

If we wish as a society to remain in the dark ages about the consequences of Trauma Altered Development for Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors then at least we should have enough honor and common sense to admit it.  If we are appalled by the ignorance that is still applied to our circumstances, today is the day we can enlighten ourselves and get on with the legitimate task of figuring out how to accurately assess Trauma Altered Development so that we can begin to live well as the changed, extraordinary Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors that we are.

Our Trauma Altered Development did not affect WHO we are in the world, but it absolutely changed HOW we are in the world.  It is up to all of us to learn what that means.

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The following is taken from pages 173 of the above text:

Again, it is not a picture of ‘long-term psychiatric impact’ nor a ‘diagnosis’ that Trauma Altered Development affected Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors need.  We need to understand the changes our body had to make to guarantee our survival and specifically how those changes affect us, and specifically how to improve our quality of life and well-being in the world in spite of our TAD.

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Your Page – Readers’ Responses

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+RETHINKING THE CONSEQUENCES OF EARLY (DEVELOPMENTAL) TRAUMA

alchemynow4 Comments

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Most of us are familiar with the sideways “8” symbol for infinity.   It’s a simple image, but is designed to represent a continuation of something that flows smoothly without having an end in itself.

I was thinking about the symbol this morning in terms of how we use resources in our life from the time we are conceived.  When we came into this world as a fertilized egg we could live off of our own inner resources just long enough to receive signals from our mother’s body that told us it was ‘safe’ to attach to her uterine wall.  Signals from her body told us where to attach, and the ability to receive those signals and act on them allowed us to accomplish this required attachment.

During the length of time we remained attached to the world through our attachment inside our mother we grew an increasingly more complex body by using resources we received from our mother.  From the time we were born as a breathing being into this world outside our mother’s body we were still completely dependent on outside others to provide all our resources for us.  We needed our early caregivers to allow us to breath, to keep us warm, to feed us, to protect us from harm.

During our most dependent stages of growth and development outside our mother’s body we were using the resources given to us by our early caregivers to continue our growth and development which included our nervous system-brain, immune system, and our entire body.  Nature has designed this process to work very well!

If safe and secure attachments continue to exist as they operate through our early caregivers’ attention to us, we continue to grow along an ‘ordinary’ and optimal pathway.  If trauma is introduced into our growing environment, and if it is allowed to overwhelm what is needed for our ‘ordinary’ and optimal growth, changes in our development HAVE to happen so that we can continue to remain alive.

I was thinking about our early growth and development in terms of the infinity sign because in a benevolent world our increasing ability to find and use resources can be represented by an expanding infinity sign.  In a safe and secure attachment environment we have a need, resources are provided to us, we take those resources into our bodies, can use them to our best advantage and we continue to grow.

If trauma in an unsafe and insecure early attachment world that threatens our ‘ordinary’, optimal development by directly interrupting our ability to access and use the resources we need to grow up in a benevolent world, what is changing in our developing body-brains as a consequence is our ability to get the resources we need in order to continue to grow to fulfill our potential for living in a safe and secure world.

As I have said many times in the past, the changes our body has to make due to interruptions through trauma during our early development are not maladaptive or ‘pathological’.  They are necessary and required for continuation of our life.

When we grow up and find ourselves living in a far more benevolent world than the one was that we formed in, we simply (!!) do not have a body-brain-mind-self that is prepared to access and use resources in the same way that an ‘ordinary’ non-traumatized (in early childhood) person can.  Something about our infinity sign has been changed.  Something about how we detect, access and use resources changed as a result of growing a body-brain in an early environment filled not with safety and security but rather with a lack of safety and security = trauma.

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When I think about this sideways “8” sign as it passes resources back and forth between the world outside of the body and the world inside a person, I have to think about boundaries.  Where do I stop and where does the outside world begin?

As I continue to explore the existing information about posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), I will have to consider one of the fundamental and primary concerns that this diagnostic category of ‘mental illness’ is attempting to address – how we detect, access and use the resource of information from our environment.  This information comes to us in the form of stimuli – both from within our own body and from the world outside of us.  Severe early trauma has changed us in ways that make our stimuli information resource systems work differently from ‘ordinary’.

If there is some degree of lack of well-being exiting within either a fertilized egg or in its mother, the step of attaching safely and securely to the uterine wall is interfered with, the infinity sign of resource transactions required for continued life ceases, and that is the end of life for the new little person.  This kind of risk continues for us every step of our life.  Given enough trauma and given enough inability to overcome the trauma, life stops.

The resource transaction process continues because information passes freely between the world and a life form.  We might think of air and water and food and heat ranges as resources, but do we think of their presence, availability and quality as providing basic information about the condition of the world we live in?  Do we think of early caregiver interactions with offspring as directly providing information (a vital resource about vital resources) concerning the quality of the environment the little one is growing up in – and for?

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If a person was built from conception in a safe and secure world, they will have a resource management system designed in, by and for a benevolent world.  If that person later experiences severe trauma, they will process it according to the resource management system they received very early in their lives – because that system has built itself into their body.  This ‘ordinary’ person will still have to access and use plenty of resources to overcome the experience of later traumas – but they will do so differently than someone will who has resource management systems (i.e. body-brain) designed in, by and for a malevolent, traumatic world.

Most plainly put, the following stems from my on-paper doodling as it relates to this critical topic or resource management and the changes our developing body-brain had to make in an unsafe, insecure and traumatic early environment:

S – surviving

T – trauma

O – orients

P – personality

The

S – surviving

T – trauma

O – orients

R – resource

M – management

If a newborn finds itself in a malevolent environment all its ongoing experiences will send it signals about the trauma-filled world it lives in so that it can alter its ongoing resource management systems as they develop to maximize its ability to survive in this malevolent world.

If a newborn finds itself in a benevolent environment all its ongoing experiences will send it signals about a safe and secure world so that it can continue our species’ best-case development pathway using information it has received about adequate resources in the world.

Our particular personality is one of our primary resource management assets – but its development is influenced by the information an infant-child receives from its environment.  (More on this later regarding how early trauma creates ‘personality disorder’ developmental conditions.)

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Information communicated through the ability to send and receive signals on the molecular level continues throughout our entire life span.  Not only is the information itself a vital resource, but so also is the ability to send and receive these signals.  Beginning from conception information is transmitted between the environment and the organism living in the environment.

As a result of the information we receive and through our potential to adjust to the world we live in, we end up with an orientation either to a safe and secure or a trauma filled world.  Child abuse during critical developmental stages communicates on the molecular level what the conditions of our early world are like.  Our body has the miraculous ability to receive these signals of information and to adjust our development accordingly.

On the most basic level, when we are considering the effects that severe and early trauma has on a developing infant-child, this is what we are talking about – orientation in the world that determines how our resource management systems develop and operate to maximize our chances of survival.

Those of us who had to develop in a malevolent world have a body that is designed through flexible adaptive abilities during early development to be oriented to survival in a malevolent world.  Everything our body-brain knows about being in the world was set by this initial orientation-in-the-world process.

Current clinical thinking about trauma uses a model that looks like this:

Pre-trauma > trauma > post-trauma

That model DOES NOT apply to me.

Because I was born into a world filled with trauma, and because my tiny body-brain had to adapt its development in response to surviving that trauma, trauma built itself into me.  My most fundamental physiological orientation is based on surviving trauma.  I never had a ‘pre-trauma’ state.  Without having one, I cannot have a ‘post-trauma’ state, either.

So what might a severe infant-child abuse survivor’s trauma model look like?

Trauma < > trauma < > trauma

This model represents to me the development of a body-brain on all levels that has trauma at its origins because trauma was present at ground zero when development occurred.  (I am saying ground zero, but in my case that point happened at the moment I was born.  Variations of trauma can exist in utero.  In my case it did not.)

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What do we do with such a infant-child abuse trauma model?  My suggestion:  Go back to the drawing board.  The existing model about trauma and PTSD simply do not make sense as it is currently being used to describe what happened to and continues to happen for early severe infant-child abuse survivors.

The operation of our infinity sign resource management system simply developed differently from ‘ordinary’.  We are optimally designed to survive in a malevolent world.  No amount of magical, wishful childhood thinking (termed denial) is going to make us into ‘ordinary’ people.  We were not built in an ordinary world nor designed for living in a benevolent one.

By rethinking what is known about the affects of severe early abuse during infant-child development I have no doubt that we can and will become clear about what our changed body-brain resource management systems are designed to do for us and how they operate.  Once we have this information, we can THEN realistically and most effectively begin to find ways to alter our present experience of being alive in a more benevolent world while having to do so in/with a body physiologically designed in, by and for a malevolent world.

To continue to ignore and deny that we do not fit existing clinical models of ‘mental health’ and that we need to come up with new and appropriate ones, means that the storm of trauma that created us differently in the first place has no real possibility of ending.  The consequences to all of us for not being willing to consider the truth about how a trauma-changed body affects our ability to live well in a more benevolent world means that the wake trauma creates in our beginnings will follow us on through the rest of our lives.

We can do better than this!

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

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Your Page – Readers’ Responses

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+PTSD AND SEVERE CHILD ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – PART ONE

alchemynow4 Comments

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I am certainly not a big fan of the concept of ‘complex trauma’ or of ‘complex PTSD’.  I believe that the entire field of so-called ‘mental health’ has to rethink every concept they have ever used ‘against us’ in the light of the new scientific evidence that clearly shows that severe early child abuse as it happens to a little one during its growth and developmental stages CHANGES the entire physiology of the survivor.

We are not ‘ordinary’ people with some sort of maladaptive, pathological ‘post trauma’ or ‘complex trauma’ ‘mentally ill’ ‘condition’!  We are extra-ordinary individuals whose bodies adapted in what are no doubt definable, physiologically sound, logical, adaptive, practical and understandable ways — to be known, understood and appreciated as the most state-of-the-art scientific research will demonstrate — as a direct consequence of having to develop a changed body-immune system-nervous system-brain-mind-self in order to survive in an extremely challenging, dangerous, traumatic and malevolent world.

Worn out, misinformed, misused, inaccurate and archaic terms, concepts, descriptions and thoughts about us based on ignorance of the true facts about adapting to early trauma and abuse, need to be put exactly where they belong — down the toilet — and not be applied to/against us.

Trying to squeeze early trauma survivors into ANY of the preexisting boxes created by ‘ordinary’ people to describe ‘ordinary’ people belong — exactly and specifically — TO THEM only, not to US!

What follows is an example of how difficult it is to translate ‘helpful’ and ‘factual’ information about the very subject we are interested in — the consequences of surviving trauma — into anything that either makes sense to or helps me as a survivor of extreme severe early and ongoing trauma of malevolent abuse from birth until age 18.

And I am FAR from alone!

Researchers and clinicians need to apply their newest research discoveries in an ongoing effort to help us all understand that every single change we were forced to make during our infant-child SURVIVORHOOD is, in fact, a super resiliency factor that kept us alive in the midst of — and in spite of — ongoing overwhelming traumas.

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Every single piece of so-called mental health information available on the wide array of difficulties humans can face in their efforts to achieve well-being and get along in the world need to be considered differently by survivors of severe maltreatment that happened to them during the early years of their childhood.

Early and severe maltreatment in a malevolent early caregiving environment changes the way our body-immune system-nervous system-brain-mind-self develops to allow us to adapt so we can survive in a traumatic, toxic and dangerous world.

I want to talk about Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) today.  I am referring to a book called Healing Trauma: Attachment, Mind, Body, and Brain – Hardcover (Jan 2003, W.W. Norton and Co.) by Daniel J. Siegel, Marion F. Solomon, and Marion Solomon, chapter 4 (pages 168-195) written by Bessel A. van der Kolk:  “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and The Nature of Trauma.”

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from page 171:

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(I am breaking up the following text from a single paragraph found in this book into segments so that I can comment on the author’s words.  What follows is taken from the above book, pages 171-172.)

The author is describing the ‘secondary effects of developing PTSD’:

“Once people develop PTSD, the recurrent, unbidden reliving of the trauma in visual images, emotional states, or in nightmares produces a constant re-exposure to the terror of the trauma.  In contrast to the actual trauma, which had a beginning a middle [sic], and an end, the symptoms of PTSD take on a timeless character.”

It is important for us to understand that when a tiny infant-child’s entire body-being has to form in a malevolent environment of trauma as it is fed ongoing information by its early caregivers about a dangerous world, all the factors having to do with surviving the trauma by adjusting growth and development to it, become built right into the growing body-brain.  Being alive in an early malevolent environment is itself, “a constant re-exposure to the terror of the trauma.”

I do not believe that survivors of severe early trauma ever have a chance to build an ‘ordinary’ ongoing experience of time into their body-brain-mind-self in the first place.  An infant has only the most basic, rudimentary, simple ability to identify a ‘beginning, middle, to any ‘actual trauma’.  Any processing of the experience of time within a tiny infant-child has to be built into the body-brain over TIME from the start.  Therefore these ‘symptoms of PTSD’ that ‘take on a timeless character’ become incorporated into the body-brain of the little one from the start.

From the time I was born, I did not have the luxury of having a ‘beginning, middle or end’ to the trauma I experienced through my mother’s abuse of me.  The best I had were temporary pauses in the abuse while my mother was either exhausted from her attacks or occupied (temporarily) elsewhere.  I could never predict when the monster would return.  My trauma-stress-response system, as it was being built into my body-brain, was ON all of the time within a pattern made up of these unpredictable pauses and attacks.

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Author:

“The traumatic intrusions are horrifying, they interfere with dealing with the past, while distracting from being able to attend to the present.  This unpredictable exposure to unbidden memories of the trauma usually leads to a variety of (usually maladaptive) avoidance maneuvers, ranging from avoidance of people or actions that remind them of the trauma, to drug and alcohol abuse, to emotional withdrawal from friends or activities that used to provide potential sources of solace.”

‘Used to provide potential sources of solace’?  Few of us had anyone THERE to care for us properly, to keep us safe and secure, to love and protect us from the start – or the abuse would not have happened in the first place.

The above statement alone gives we survivors very clear idea about how careful we have to be when trying to make our OWN use out of the professional information being provided AS IF it applies equally to people whose body-brain did NOT grow and develop within an early (unsafe and insecure attachment) malevolent world, and to survivors who DID grow and develop within a malevolent environment.

We have to be extremely care-full about applying any ‘professional’ concepts to ourselves.  We have to think through every word they say!!  We have to include our own reality of early experience into the ‘solution’ equations.  We have to know the truth about how our early trauma FORCED our body-brain-mind-self into adapting, adjusting and changing so that we could survive our child abuse traumas AT ALL!

We ARE NOT THE SAME.  Our body-brain is not the same.  True, our ‘traumatic intrusions’ were horrifying, but we were far too little to even have a PAST to be interfered with.  We had no ongoing experience of ourselves in the world that did not include horrifying trauma and threat of trauma.

Yes, we were prevented from ‘being able to attend to the present’ – any ordinary ‘present’ in any ‘ordinary’ way.  We certainly were forced to attend in the present to surviving the horrifying traumas being heaped upon tiny little us while at the same time our growing and developing tiny selves were trying to accomplish all the required NORMAL developmental milestones everyone has to pass through as they mature from infancy to adulthood.  ALL of our growth and developmental stages and processes were thus interfered with because of the trauma we experienced in our infant-childhoods.

And of course, I take major issue with the use of the term ‘maladaptive’ in reference to any consequence that happened to us because of our severe early abuse. I believe this kind of ‘professional’ thinking and the attitudes that go with it is used against early severe child abuse survivors as a bludgeoning weapon that further pounds the consequences of our abuse and trauma into our being!!

Applying the concept of ‘maladaptive’ to us is just plain GOOFY!  We are the most ADAPTIVE people alive!  We survived what was impossible to survive from the time we were born, from the time we were little tiny people!  And, while our entire beings were busy adapting, we still went right on through every required human growth and developmental stage — in spite of the horror and terrible trauma we experienced in our childhoods!!

This “…variety of (usually maladaptive) avoidance maneuvers, ranging from avoidance of people or actions that remind them of the trauma, to drug and alcohol abuse, to emotional withdrawal from friends or activities that used to provide potential sources of solace” becomes extremely difficult to accurately assess among populations of severe early child abuse survivors.   I believe this kind of ‘profession thinking’ becomes like a net of ignorance conveniently thrown over the large group of ‘maladapted’ people because the effort it would take to truly think about the truth of our development as survivors takes just too much effort on the part of those ‘ordinary’ others who seek to provide us ‘help’.

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Author’s paragraph continues:

“Problems with attention and concentration keep them from being engaged with their surroundings with zest and energy.  Uncomplicated activities like reading, conversing with others, and watching television require extra effort.  This loss of ability to focus, in turn, often leads to problems with taking one thing at a time and gets in the way of reorganizing one’s life to et it back on track.”

OK, readers!! Have at it!!

Understanding how to translate ‘professional’ lingo, theory, concept, and attempts to ‘repair’ us to make us into more ‘ordinary’ functioning people will nearly 100% of the time come from the above stated point of view.  THAT’S NOT US!  Not in the way ‘others’ think it is!

How many of us early severe abuse survivors can understand on ONE LEVEL exactly what the author is saying above?  Then, how many of us can NOW begin to understand that these ‘difficulties’ that we experience were directly built right into our growing and developing body-nervous system-brain-mind self in direct relationship to the degree and nature of the traumas present in the environment that FORMED US from the start?

Trauma changed how we developed!  We only continue to suffer from being told there is something ‘maladaptive’ or ‘pathological’ about us – BECAUSE WE SURVIVED?  That IS what we are being told.  There was no possible way we could have survived without the trauma changing us!  It’s a tough bottom line, but the way I see it, if there is any negative assessment given at all to anything about the way we ARE in the world because of how we had to change to survive our child abuse traumas, then we are yet again simply being re-victimized by others.

It does us no GOOD on any level to suck in anything negative NOW about who we had to become THEN in order to survive.

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Well, I barely got started on this chapter, but I will continue in another post because this information is so important for us to understand without having to think about ourselves through the filter of ignorance that we usually find as we try to achieve a greater well-being in the world having endured ‘horrifying traumas’ that we were strong enough, determined enough, and resilient enough to survive!!

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