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The comments to my last post have stimulated and challenged my mind. I know myself well enough to say that I will only ‘make sense’ of my own thoughts if I write them. Putting words down in order satisfies both sides of my brain, and I as the participant in the middle need to know what all of me believes in response to those comments.
First of all some part of me wishes to apologize to my readers that my perceptions are so completely limited to my own experience. In conversation with my friend last weekend the point was made that the reason why I absolutely lack the ability to understand ‘normal/ordinary’ (I note my ‘new’ use of slashes as I find a way to expand and include thoughts that are bound together in meaning to me) people’s strong prejudices, biases, and rigid closed-mindness about so many important aspects of being human.
My friend vehemently insisted that the foundation of beliefs that govern people’s values (and their expression in word and action about them) comes from what people LEARN. My friend then treated learning as if it is fact.
I see nothing whatsoever factual about what people tend to believe about themselves in relationship to so many other people. “How,” I ask myself, “can something LEARNED not be continually and fluidly subject to change through MORE and NEW learning? How is it possible that people get absolutely STUCK with something they learned before regarding beliefs that (to me) have no basis in fact AT ALL?”
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Well, leaving that track of thought I understood that my nearly complete social isolation for the first 18 years of my life (with the exception of pantomiming being a child in school), I MISSED out on the kind of learning that binds and packs people together. And because I missed being socialized on so many levels I did not learn what most people evidently do learn.
Therefore I cannot understand WHAT they learned any more than I can understand HOW they learned it or WHY they can’t learn something new that would be far more conducive to a pleasant world citizenship all the way around!
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THESE thoughts are feeding themselves into the channel of reactions I am having to the comments to my last post. “What it is about making sense of trauma that MATTERS so much to me? What is it about learning as much information as possible about the CONTEXT of infant-child abuse/trauma that FEELS so vitally important to me?”
I look around and look around and look around at the context of ME as a survivor of nearly constant, continual and terrible abuse for the first 18 years of my life and realize that I can no more expand my thinking about what it might be like for others who DID experience terrible early abuse/trauma but ALSO experienced BREAKS IN THE ABUSE/TRAUMA THEY EXPERIENCED.
The particular context of my history is that there were no breaks of note in the 18 year ongoing panorama of abuse toward me.
So why do I write a blog about abuse/trauma if I cannot form a bridge and cross it between what I know and what other people know?
Good question. My writing is completely biased.
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So back to making sense of early abuse/trauma and context. Humans have active sensing abilities before we are born. Then we are born with these abilities to gain information through our senses fully active and growing in their power.
To me, ‘making sense’ of all aspects of our self in the world is just a simple, basic fact. That is what being alive MEANS to me.
When I think about connecting all the information that we are constantly sensing from outside our body and from within and THEN take my thinking to the next level, all I see is more of a natural continuum. As humans we take all we SENSE and use this information to ‘make sense’ that we can detect with the complex abilities of our brain.
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All these words above paved the way for me to think through what I need to say next here: The MOST important tool we have as human beings, no matter WHAT or HOW our life has played itself out since our conception, IS THE POWER TO MAKE SENSE out of ourselves in the world.
When it comes to infant-child abuse and trauma, if we DO NOT gain as much information as possible about the biggest-picture-context of the environment (most importantly about the people in it) we cannot possibly LEARN what we need to know that will assist us to be free of the NEGATIVE impact of what was done to us.
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I am talking about RISK factors as they are intricately interwoven with RESILIENCY factors.
RISK factors lie on the side of what ruptures safety, security and calm peacefulness.
RESILIENCY factors lie on the side of what repairs the ruptures so that safety, security and calm peacefulness return.
Because we are members of a social species, and because all of our experiences including abuse/trauma happen in relationship to another member of our species (one way or the other), the entire STORY of our life is a story about our degrees of safety, security and calm peacefulness IN RELATIONSHIP WITH AND IN CONNECTION TO OTHERS OF OUR SPECIES firstly and most importantly.
THERE IS NO STORY WITHOUT CONTEXT. THERE IS NO COHERENT STORY WITHOUT SENSE.
IF there is abuse/trauma the story will NOT be truly coherent. The sense of the story will be lost.
I believe that looking for the CONTEXT of one’s life is the most certain way of healing our stories — and therefore our LIFE and our SELF.
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These conditions I share with all others. I find this fact very comforting.
Everyone’s life has a context. Some people don’t have to pay this fact much attention. Those of us who suffered severe early infant-child abuse/trauma HAVE to find the biggest context possible because it was the power that this CONTEXT had to traumatize US that matters most in our process of healing from the abuse/trauma’s consequences.
The more the CONTEXT of our early life ran us over as individual little people the more we can benefit now from identifying this CONTEXT so that we can separate our SELF from it.
HOWEVER!!!!!! I must say this: The context of our earliest life DID NOT CONTAIN ALL BAD! If it HAD been all bad, we would be dead.
I believe it is extremely important that we locate within the context of our earliest life, no matter how terrible the abuse/trauma was, what the GOOD aspects of our life were at the SAME TIME.
This is where we will find the RESILIENCY factors that WERE there in the midst of the terrors and horrors of our abusive/traumatizing early years.
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In fact, we cannot find and describe the big picture of the CONTEXT of any part of our life without including these powerfully positive resiliency factors. This is, to me, one of the necessary components of MAKING SENSE of what happened to us — no matter how BAD that part of our experience might have been.
I also believe that we cannot accurately name the risk factors that allowed trauma to topple down the generations and land in/on us without at the same time naming the resiliency factors that ALSO toppled down the generations to land in/on us. CONTEXT allows us to name the BAD of what happened to us at the same time we name the GOOD of what happened to us.
The more information we can INCLUDE in our conscious efforts to heal so we can ‘move on through our life with increased well-being’ means at the same time that there is LESS information being EXCLUDED.
The EXCLUDED information lies in the realm of the ‘secrets’. Unresolved trauma thrives on secrets. Trauma needs to communicate its wisdom toward a better future. When trauma resides in secrets important information it needs to share remains out-of-reach and worse than useless.
Unresolved trauma creates HARM. I believe it does so largely to MAKE US PAY ATTENTION TO IT.
Importantly, when the secrets hidden in unresolved trauma are kept alive, what helps us SURVIVE trauma resiliently remains obscure as well.
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I will say one other thing here: As one commenter pointed out to me, my life story is about what my mother did to survive HER trauma (I think I paraphrased this OK). Nothing about my mother’s infant-childhood abuse/trauma was openly acknowledged and understood — until I investigated the CONTEXT of the abuse that happened to me and came to understand that what happened to me was distinctly a part of the context of how my mother survived what happened to her.
And on down the generations bludgeons unresolved trauma.
As twisted as this may seem at first glance, what happened to me in the context of the bigger picture WAS a good thing. What happened to me was a direct result of how my MOTHER survived what happened to her. If survival is the ONLY real concern, it was all GOOD. If my mother had not found a way to survive the horrors of her own childhood I would never have been born at all.
Looking for and at the resiliency factors that were available to my mother, she used the only ones that were available to her.
Right along with looking at what went so WRONG for my mother in her earliest life (due to risk factors) I ALSO look at the absence of BETTER resiliency factors than the ones she had available — and used.
Moving forward just a little bit along my current thinking here I want to add that it wasn’t JUST the terrible abuse that my mother perpetrated against me that was the RISK factor for me. It was also if not equally a risk factor (and a missing resiliency factor) for me that NOBODY intervened to protect me — just as nobody intervened to protect my mother when she was little, either.
All severe infant-child abuse survivors had heavy-weight risk factors AND heavy-weight resiliency factors. How can we move toward healing if we don’t know the fullest context possible of what happened to us so that we can consider both?
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Stop the Storm 
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