Tag: mothering

+ASKING THE QUESTION, “WHAT IS FORGIVENESS?”

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I just wrote the following in an email and sent it off to my family and friends.  I will also post it here, seriously asking any of my readers to please respond if they care to share with me their own answer to this question:

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If I were a young child and I came to you with this question, how would you answer me?

“What is forgiveness?”

I ask because I realize I absolutely don’t know the answer to the question myself.  I can’t, for example, even imagine any situation that could happen where I would even think about forgiving my children.  There’s nothing they could do that I can imagine that would even make my needing them enter the picture.

Maybe because I grew up always being in trouble and never being forgiven that I did not grow up with any concept of what forgiveness might be.  I just don’t know.  So I ask this as a serious question and hope you can give me your perspective.  I feel like I’m missing something that seems so important to other people.

+MAGICAL WISHFUL THINKING DOES NOT HEAL ABUSE

alchemynow2 Comments

If I try to look at myself objectively I would wonder that I refer to my mother as having been mentally ill but I do not consider myself mentally ill.  I would ask myself what criteria do I use and apply to myself that is different from the criteria I use in my thinking about my mother?

There seems to be a level of desription regarding the operation of a person’s brain-mind and nervous system that means to outsiders that mental illness is present.  With today’s advances in brain imaging techniques I believe that if our culture wanted to, we could actually see in actual brain operating pictures the distinction that I evidently make about mental illnesses within my own mind.

I can visualize my thinking about mental health and mental illness in terms of a growing tree with branches that relate to my descriptive categories.  Once a person is set off onto one of the branches related to these categories, they can never ‘jump branches’ by changing the basic origination point that leads into development along one of these branches.  What is done or happens to a person before the age of two is the determining factor and cannot be changed.

It is important to realize that there is a fifth branch that I can visualize on this tree.  It is actually the one that grows straight up to the sky without deviation or interruption.  It relates to people who are optimally designed and who were raised from conception in a ‘good enough’ optimal caregiving environment.  These people’s bodies and brains were not forced to change their development in adaptation to malevolency within the world.  I only talk about these securely attached individuals in this writing as comparison points for how the rest of us ended up having to develop in one of these other four directions.

In the process of my own writing I have determined that there are four main levels leading to four different branches of this imaginary tree.   They result from brain-mind-body changes that lead, in my thinking, off in one of these differing directions.  Each of these categories, or types of mental illness that I recognize stem from altered brain development.   I can understand that some mental illness occurs strictly through extreme genetic combinations that existed from conception and would have manifested as mental illness no matter how well a person had been cared from during their early lives.  I include within this category serious changes that occur prior to birth or at birth through severe traumas to the fetus or infant that can also completely change the way a person develops.  Obviously and fortunately I don’t fit this category and did not have to develop along the lines of this branch.

Now I will describe other three categories that do apply to my life personally.  I also believe that in the future medical experts, including those working in the mental health fields, will recognize the accuracy of what I understand about these categories.  At this point in time I believe that an understanding of which branch we grew into, which one our parents grew into, which ones our siblings grew into, etc. will help us determine what realistic changes for the better we can expect in our lives.

My personal understanding is that for any one of us that grew and developed in some form of a malevolent world during our early years were forced to adapt in some way that has placed us on one of these four ‘deviating’ limbs.  We therefore experience some form of very real disability in comparison to the securely attached who grew up without severe harmful influence and who were not forced to adapt to a harmful environment.

The other three branches I am going to describe all entail the presence of some form of insecure attachment disorder.  I agree with Dr. Allan Schore that every insecure attachment pattern results in some form of an empathy disorder.  The toxic, malevolent, unsafe and insecure experiences we had as we developed created the breach in our ability to form secure attachments in the first place.  Changes an individual was forced to make physiologically in our bodies and brains as we adapted in our development is what sends us off into one of these other three branch directions.

If we are of the luckier ones, we ONLY had to develop an insecure attachment.  These manifest as what experts call dismissive-avoidant or ambivalent-preoccupied insecure attachment patterns.  The FACT is that these patterns are built into the operation of the body, brain, mind and nervous system of the individual who has them.

These people have been forced to develop along an alternative branch of the tree, but do not usually end up with what we, as a society, would term a mental illness.  They will, however, experience life differently than a securely attached person will, and are at risk for all kinds of ‘social’ disabilities due to the fact that their early forming social emotional brain development has been effected.  They are ‘wired’ for insecure attachments.

It is here in my description of the next two branches of the tree that I deviate from the commonly accepted ideas about mental illness.  Early development within an environment of severe trauma so often leads in the direction of the development of some form of ‘mental illness’ that it would be the rare, rare event to find an exception where this does not happen.  Current thinking on ‘mental illness’ would therefore demand that we accept what I describe as two separate branches as being only one single large branch.  Along this single branch are placed all currently used mental illness diagnostic categories.

As we become very clear regarding the facts, we will know that what creates this branch in the first place is exposure to severe traumas during early development in an environment that does not contain enough available resources to prevent serious adjustments within the infant and young child from having to be made.  Once we leave our magical wishful thinking behind about the causes of so-called mental illnesses, we will see that disorganized and disoriented insecure attachment from birth (or before) create the deviation point from which what see as two separate branches originate.

I am forced to use currently accepted thinking and terminology to describe what happens from that origination point on our visualized tree. But I believe that the two branches result from very different and distinct adaptations to trauma and into some version of what we currently consider to be mental illness.   While we might magically wish that these two branches are the same, I do not believe that they are.

In my own world of ‘fact’, I know these branches are different from my own experience.  My mother was forced to grow along one of these two branches while I was forced to grow along the other one.  While personal knowledge is not the stuff science is based on, it can still inform our individual and collective thinking.  Larger changes may well come from the bottom-up, grass root, experience based real world knowledge that those of us who have experienced and survived severe abuse from birth have within us.  It is from this base that I describe the differences that exist between these last two branches as they originated from adaptations within early malevolent environments.

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Do not get me wrong here.  Any consideration of mental illness, either as it might currently be accepted as occurring on one single branch, or as might exist in two separate categories on two separate branches, still means that a person’s brain, mind and body has been devastatingly altered during early development.  The distinction matters to me because it influences the ability to live with the resulting dis-order and helps our efforts to heal be more effective.

Of all the varying cultural and religious belief structures that exist on our planet, I am going to pick only one to illustrate my point here.  In fact, I am only going to pick one sentence from one of these belief structures.  I encourage anyone who cannot relate to this one sentence because of its origins to please find a related, similar thought within your own belief structure that will allow you to understand what I am trying to say here.

This one sentence is, I believe, a statement about our species’ condition that can be understood through any spiritual belief system, certainly not only from a Christian point of view.  It belongs to the final “Last Seven Words” that Jesus Christ uttered from the cross of crucifixion.

Father forgive them, for they know not what they do (Luke 23:34).

SEE:

http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:c93sR4hE5jMJ:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayings_of_Jesus_on_the_cross+forgive+them+father+for+they+know&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

http://bibref.hebtools.com/?book=%20Luke&verse=23:34&src=!

I cannot personally find it within myself to argue with these few simple words.  Nor can I really understand what they mean.  All I know is that situations exist between people on this planet that often come back to this fundamental concept of forgiveness.

I will never argue about religion, nor will I ever defend my own beliefs whatever they might be (and many might say they are eclectic).  But I will say that every time the topic of forgiveness arises in relation to my experience of 18 years of nearly constant, terrible insane abuse heaped upon me by my mother, my thoughts always return to the above 10 words.  By doing I pass the issue of forgiveness on up the ladder in an understanding that it originates from and in my case belongs to Powers much greater than me.

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I introduce the concept of forgiveness here before I describe the two branches of mental illness because believe forgiveness is ultimately about accountability and responsibility.  One of the two branches I do hold both accountable and responsible for their actions and the other I do not.  I belong to the first branch while I believe my mother belongs to the second.

As I have already mentioned in other posts I am ‘diagnosed’, through the current existing mental health system’s structure, as ‘having’ posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety disorder including severe recurring depression, and dissociative disorder.  Within a more enlightened system I would also be described as ‘having’ a severe disoriented-disorganized insecure attachment disorder, if not an adult version of the childhood version of Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD).  In the MOST enlightened system I would be considered to have logical physiological changes caused by adaptations that had to be made in order for me to survive in a devastatingly hostile world.

My mother was never formally recognized by anyone as having severe mental illness, so any attempt to ‘diagnose’ her happens in retrospect as a ‘best guess’.  She appears obviously to have suffered from a psychotic break,  from serious Borderline Personality Disorder, and probably had some Bi-Polar characteristics, as well.

What do I see as the main difference between the two of us, and why would I describe myself as being on one branch of mental illness and place her on an entirely different one?  What do I use as the final determining factor for the difference between us?

Returning to the originating point of both of these two branches in their common source of developmental adaptation to a malevolent early environment, and to my description of disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder, I can say that both of us have the same roots to our mental illnesses in the same kind of brain operation:  DISSOCIATION.

The distinction I make between the two branches and the mental illnesses that are found on each one, is that in some forms of mental illness such a dissociative break occurred during their development that the survivor has had the ability to connect to their self removed.

Continued survival necessitated that this break occur to prevent the overwhelming nature of their exposure to trauma, as experienced by a self in connection to a mind overcome by that trauma, to continue their lives hopefully without destroying their bodies.  As we know, this break is not a guarantee to continued life in a physical body because some still succumb to self destruction.

This fundamental dissociative break between the experience of ongoing life and the self results in brain and body changes that protect life itself at the same time the more advanced and developed abilities to experience consciousness are interfered with.  As a consequence these people lack real self reflective abilities, do not appear with what all the rest of us would consider a conscience, and have had the exercise of free will and choice based on self consciousness removed from them.  Theirs is a different, and often dangerous, version of reality.

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Those of us that do not have the genetic potential to take this detour during our developments that results in a single, profound and fundamental dissociative break in our connection to self — the operation of self and a connection to self being the result a very real (and visible through advanced brain imaging techniques) physiological brain operation — develop along what I see as the other branch.

Both branches, again, involve dissociational patterns as they occur in the brain’s function.  Those of us that I would place on this branch I see myself on as different from the one I see my mother as being on, have NOT suffered a fundamental break that prevents us from having access to our self.  Having some access to our self is still in the operational loops within our brains (most of the time) while theirs is not ALL of the time.

What do I mean by ‘most of the time’?  It is the nature of dissociation when and as it occurs to create some kind of breach between the ongoing experience of being alive in a body and the self.  For some, I believe, the dissociative breach happened once and for all and can only be said to be ‘a pattern of one’.

For the rest of us, dissociation can happen thousands and thousands of times throughout our life time, caused by exposure to a million trauma triggers.  In between these triggered reactions those of us on this different branch can access some version of a connection to some version of our self while the others cannot.

A very graphic, though not disgustingly bloody, image just popped into my awareness as I finished writing my last sentence.  I see those on the one branch where I would place my mother as having a head completely severed from their body.  This head hovers closely above the body and follows where it goes but there is no connection between the two.  Those of us on the other branch have a head that is partially severed by that is connected through the equivalent of vital main arteries and nerves.  Strange image, I know…..

If I go outside to start my car and find the battery is dead, it does me no good at all to forgive my car’s battery for failing me and for making my life more difficult.  I think about my own abuse history and my mother in the same kind of factual way I would think about a dead battery.  No amount of magical wishful thinking involving denial or forgiveness is going to get my car started.  Neither do I see that it applies to my thinking about my mother.  If an individual is forced through conditions of early trauma to severe their connection to self they are just as cut off from their power source of consciousness as my car would be from the power of a working battery.

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By thinking in terms of this tree, and by identifying how a person ends up on one branch or another, we can begin to separate out what really is the magical wishful thinking process of denial from the more helpful process of learning new facts about how our brains develop.  Brains CAN and DO develop in such a way that the more advanced abilities related to having a self and an operational connection to this self are left out of the picture.

It might seem like an odd assessment to make, but I consider that the term and topic of ‘forgiveness’ is often tangled up with magical wishful thinking that is actually a denial of the facts regarding the risks and consequences of severe maltreatment as it affects human development.

I have no desire to protect my mother, excuse or justify her horribly abusive behavior toward me.  I equally have no desire to forgive her.  I see both my mother and her behavior in the light of fact, not magical wishful thinking that leads to denial.  I think we have to be very careful in our thinking about forgiveness because of the risk we take in involving forgiveness with our denial of the very real physiological causes and consequences of severe maltreatment during early brain formation stages.

As long as we keep forgiveness tangled up with our denial of the facts, we will never truly find ways to heal the very real damage done to our perpetrators, to ourselves and being done to others on an ongoing basis.  If we continue to apply magical wishful thinking to the real conditions of our existence, we will be at the same time also denying that we have a very REAL problem that has very REAL solutions — a problem caused by factual conditions that we can factually address, heal and resolve.

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This is, to me, simply a helpful clarification process.  It is a form of inventory taking that can help us identify both our possession of specific resources and our lack of resources.

I aim for realistic rather than wishful thinking.  As children, we all moved through a Theory of Mind developmental stage during which we processed, incorporated, and integrated outsiders’ thinking into our own brain-mind.  It can feel uncomfortable to have our final thinking structure ‘threatened’ by the introduction of thoughts that do not seem to match the Theory of Mind that we came up with.

Our individual and collective cultural Theory of Mind is always open to learning, growth and change if we are flexible and wise enough to let this happen.  This growth requires of all of us that we allow new information to enter our thinking process, and as we do so we change who and how we are in the world. I see this as nothing more than a ‘reality checking’ process that allows us to continue to move past the childhood stage of ‘magical wishful thinking’ in some new way every day of our lives.

I believe that as we do this ‘work’ we can — individually and collectively –push ourselves further and further away from the EVENT HORIZON of trauma and the effects traumas have upon us throughout our adult lives.  The literal meaning of an event horizon has to do with what happens near a Black Hole in space.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_horizon

we read:  “In general relativity, an event horizon is a boundary in spacetime, most often an area surrounding a black hole, beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer. Light emitted from beyond the horizon can never reach the observer, and anything that passes through the horizon from the observer’s side appears to freeze in place, with its image becoming more redshifted as time proceeds.”

I believe that this image applies to our work related to healing trauma.  I believe that degrees of childhood magical wishful thinking that remain within our individual and collective Theory of Mind constructions put us at increasing risk for being sucked into the hole trauma can create in the fabric of a good life filled with well being.  The good news is that we can always learn more about what is real in the world, and each time we do learning, we are replacing an immature magical wishful thought with some new fact.  Facts are based in the real world as best we can understand it.  Continuing to grow our Theory of Mind as it informs our actions is what I think healing is all about.

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How do we know what magical wishful thinking is?  I see the image of my son when he was three to four years old as he ‘plays’ with my well used tall metal kitchen stool laid down on the floor.  His favorite ‘game’ for many moths was to sit on the floor inside it with his legs straight out in front of him between the stool’s supporting cross pieces.  His hands were constantly moving around the top round seat piece ‘as if’ it were a space ship’s steering mechanism he had to use to maneuver himself through all of his ‘imaginary’ spaceship adventures.

When adults see young children engaged in this kind of ‘play’ we know that what is happening within the child’s mind is very different than what is happening inside our own as we watch.  If we try to tell the child that their world is ‘not real’ they will look at us blankly, walk away and do something else because we have ruined their experience, or simply ignore us and go on with their game.  We cannot, at this stage of their development, actually change the way their mind is perceiving their world, though how we interact with them does influence the growth process they are involved in.

The fact that the old metal kitchen stool was not a spaceship meant absolutely nothing to my son.  In fact, my true concern eventually had nothing to do with his mental state.  I became, as the months went by and his body continued to grow larger, became worried about his body.  And I was right to worry.  There DID come a day when he wedged himself so tightly into position within the legs and cross pieces of that stool that he couldn’t get out.  I couldn’t get him out, either.

He started screaming in panic and terror.  It would not have been helpful for me to become involved in my son’s magical thinking world, even if I could have.  I needed to be in the real world of fact so I could effect a solution to this very real problem.  I left his older sister beside him on the floor while I ran for the apartment manager to help us.  It was only through a process of him using a crow bar and force to bend the legs of the stool that we were able to extricate my son from in between the steel pieces.  Obviously, that ‘game’ was over.

It had not mattered before that time what I said to my son regarding my concerns.  He had to really learn the facts by getting himself so stuck within the stool that he needed serious help to get out that he was forced to finally leave behind his much loved child’s game.  Before that time arrived he was not only perfectly capable of retaining his state of magical wishful thinking, but self determined to do so.

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How, when, where and to what degree were we able to pass through our own Theory of Mind developmental stages so that we left some part of our magical wishful thinking behind us?  How willing are we to continue in our adulthood to exercise our brain’s infinite abilities to learn, grow and change?

Nobody is going to magically appear and sweep us away from the dangers of the event horizon of ongoing effects from trauma, no matter how much we might wish that they would do so.  This is something that we all must do together.  Learning the actual facts about how trauma changed our bodies and our brain-minds during development in malevolent conditions can lead us to new facts, and is it not the truth what will actually set us free?

As long as we continue to keep magical wishful thinking a part of our Theory of Mind related to the causes and consequences of severe early abuse during developmental stages, we are NOT going to find the very real facts we need in order to prevent this disaster from occurring in the first place, or to find realistic hopes for healing once it has occurred.

+THREE PART ANALYSIS OF MY MOTHER’S STORIES

alchemynow2 Comments

After much work I present this information in response to this comment a reader made in reference to my mother’s stories:

“Linda,  I have read your mother’s childhood stories, particularly the one where you say she has a “break” deep inside her childhood mind.  I don’t see it from a readers point of view.  Can you explain why you feel this is an important story?”

I know that my own sisters had the same response when they read ,y mother’s stories.  Perhaps nobody but me will ever see what I see in them.  I don’t know that I can adequately describe what I know about my mother through her childhood writings, but I tried…..

+MY ANALYSIS OF MY MOTHER’S STORIES – PART 1

+MY ANALYSIS OF MY MOTHER’S STORIES – PART 2

+MY ANALYSIS OF MY MOTHER’S STORIES – PART 3

+CATCHING UP ON MY MOTHER

alchemynow2 Comments

I didn’t finish writing this section until many of you had probably already read yesterday’s post so I am including the link here because it is contains important information to my story.  Please be patient with how slow the page might load on your computer.  There’s lots of informtion on this blog and wordpress.com loads more slowly as a result.

+What I Suspect of My Mother’s Early Childhood

I also encourage readers who haven’t yet done so to read

My Mother’s Childhood Stories

I’ll write more later today……

Thank you for visiting.  Linda

+TRAUMA DRAMAS ARE A BRAIN’S REPEATED ATTEMPTS TO COMMUNCIATE

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In my reply to the comment on yesterday’s post I described why I do not believe that my mother had the ability to distinguish right from wrong.

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/2009/05/17/dissociation-and-my-version-of-an-utopian-world/#comments

In my reply I referred to my mother’s childhood stories because I believe they include her own description of the break that happened within her own mind and the point where she became not only lost to herself but also lost her ability to connect with the ‘reality’ that most others remain in contact with throughout their lives.

My Mother’s Childhood Stories
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I believe that one of the clearest indicators that unresolved trauma from childhood continues to exist in a person can be found by looking at the ‘trauma dramas’ that  repeat themselves in adulthood.  This happens because the nature of unresolved trauma is that it cannot be integrated into the body-brain of a person who has been overwhelmed by it.

John J. Ratey, who authored the book “A User’s Guide To the Brain:  Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain”

(Vintage Books, 2002 —

http://www.amazon.com/Users-Guide-Brain-Perception-Attention/dp/0375701079/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242667313&sr=1-1)

wrote the following:

“The confusing terminology that neuroscience applies to the brain and its functions will itself eventually need to change – and it will as our understanding of the brain deepens.  Scientists looking at pathology are still caught up in the unitary hunt for the broken neural component they imagine to be at fault, and are doing their best to match up specific brain functions with specific neurogeographical locations.  The sooner we replace our mechanistic model of the brain with an ecologically centered, systems-based view, the better off we will be, for such a model better accounts for much of human experience.  (Ratey, p.4)”

“…the brain is largely composed of maps, arrays of neurons that apparently represent entire objects of perception or cognition, or at least entire sensory or cognitive qualities of those objects, such as color, texture, credibility, or speed.  Most cognitive functions involve the interaction of maps from many different part [sic] of the brain at once…  The brain assembles perceptions by the simultaneous interaction of whole concepts, whole images….the brain is an analog processor, meaning, essentially, that it works by analogy and metaphor.  It relates whole concepts to one another and looks for similarities, differences, or relationships between them [bolding is mine].  It does not assemble thoughts and feelings from bits of data.  (Ratey, p.5)”

“Although metaphor and analogy are unconventional in scientific circles, I am firmly convinced that a more nonlinear kind of thought will eventually supplant much of the logical reasoning we use today [bolding is mine].  Chris Langton, one of the primary researchers in the field of complexity theory, has speculated that in the future science will become more poetic…..real trust, when emotions are running high, is based on analogy, not calculation.  (Ratey, p.5)”

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I firmly believe in the truth of what Ratey is saying, and I also believe that as we move further ahead in the development of our understanding about how the brain actually works — in contrast to how we assume it works — we will know more about what the experience of mental illness actually is for people who have it.  We will also know more about what creates the experience of severe child abuse for the offspring of people with mental illness such as my mother had.

As I prepare myself to write +What I Suspect of My Mother’s Early Childhood (Please read this page, it is important!), I also think about another very important piece necessary to the understanding of my mother’s abuse of me.  Please follow this link to one of the important writings of Dr. Stephen B. Karpman titled, “Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis.”

http://www.itaa-net.org/tajnet/articles/karpman01.html

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Having the ability to use language means that we can assign words to bits and pieces of our experiences.  It is a commonly recognized fact that one of the symptoms of PTSD and unresolved trauma is that the language centers of the brain cannot actively participate in the integration process through verbal articulation of the traumatic experience.  I believe that leaves the right brain’s ability to process information in wordless images responsible for attempting to heal the traumas.  It does so most actively through reenactment.

Communication through bodily movements is a far, far older means of expression than words or even hand signals are, and directly links to the emotional brain through activation of the amygdala brain region.  SEE:

Bonda et al, 1996

Montreal, Canada) eva bonda, Michael petrides, david ostry and alan evans  “Specific involvement of human parietal systems and the amygdala in the perception of biological motion”  in The Journal of Neuroscience, june 1, 1996, 16(11), 3737-3744 http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/reprint/16/11/3737

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I believe that the ‘cognitive map’ interactions that Ratey talks about become disturbed as a result of overwhelming trauma.  This matters MOST when we are talking about severe early chronic child abuse and maltreatment because the child is building its brain during these experiences that will establish what these maps are and how the brain will process information contained in the maps for the rest of their lives.  As my mother’s childhood stories indicate, she wrote these stories as her brain was actively trying to form a working Theory of Mind, SEE Google search:

http://www.google.com/search?q=theory+of+mind+development&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3RNFA_enUS270US307

Because the traumas of her early life had overwhelmed her abilities to resolve them, she was forever left in this unresolved state with her right brain’s dramatic, metaphoric processes trying to resolve these traumas by itself without the assistance of the left brain or higher cortical thinking.  This, to me, reflects the overriding purpose of repeated trauma dramas in adulthood.  The person is acting out and communicating with the BODY what the mind does not have the ability to process within itself.

This is why I believe Karpman’s writings are so critically important in our attempts to understand what our abusive childhood experiences were linked to.  While we might rather believe that some cut-and-dried scientific explanation will eventually appear that will allow us to place our experiences of trauma and abuse in some clinically sterile container, all sealed off and logically explained away, I do not believe such a solution will ever be possible to attain.

Life can be extremely messy, especially when unresolved traumas have to repeat themselves through trauma dramas that nobody, either inside the situation or outside of it, seem to be able to understand.  This is why I do not believe that forgiveness has anything to do with healing from the 18 years of severe abuse I suffered from under my mother.  She was simply a very big, very mean, dangerous psychotic body trying to actively resolve her experiences of early trauma through the communicative actions of the trauma drama that was her life.

We expect play among children to be their age appropriate means of coming to terms with their lives.  Yet we do not realize that when a brain-mind is forced in childhood through malevolent interactions with early environments to take a detour in its development, as adults we still continue to play in a similar way.  Where is that magic line where acting something out in childhood becomes dangerous in adulthood?  I don’t think we know exactly where that line really is, do we?  When does this tendency of the human being to act out dramas become a deadly serious game, where playing for keeps means disaster and the cost is the lack of well being for human lives?

That is why a childhood such as mine was seems like a nightmare and is as illogical and unreasonable as dreams can be.  In either case the brain is trying to process information through a left brain-right brain integration effort.  In situations where a child’s ability to process trauma is overwhelmed, there is nothing they can do the rest of their lives to resolve it.  THAT is only one part of the tragedy.

Other parts of the tragedy include the facts that we do not necessarily recognize when such traumas are overwhelming a young child, we do not actively intervene or prevent these traumas from occurring, and we sure do not make adequate and appropriate therapy available universally to those who suffered from these overwhelming traumas in the first place.

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Any time I see repeating patterns indicating a lack of well being in an adult’s life, my own included, I can now easily see the trauma drama actions of the right brain trying to resolve traumas through action of the body.  Those of us caught in these repeating trauma reenactment cycles never learned that life could be about anything other than suffering in an unsafe and insecure world.  We were never told that we would act out in our lifetime the traumas that were impossible for our brains to process and integrate in any other way, including through the natural process of sleep and dreaming.  It doesn’t take long for the very real consequences of our actual choices and actions in the real world to so encapsulate us in our lives that we have little or no hope of escape.

This is so far past judgment that I cannot even see that it applies.  If we ever encounter someone with a severed artery we don’t stop and first ponder how this accident happened before we offer life saving assistance.  Yet when it comes to recognizing repeated trauma dramas in our own and in one another’s lives we are rapidly coming to a point when these dramas are occurring so often among us that we think they are normal. This, to me, is creating a nearly overwhelming burden for those who were and are safely and securely attached in the world.  Who else is there to show us there is a different and a better way to live other than bleeding to death?

The further we wander away from our meaningful and adequate social attachment relationships with one another as members of a social species, the more at risk we become for suffering from isolation loneliness, depression, addictions, harmful conspicuous consumption, obesity and all manner of neglect of our offspring, ourselves and our environment.  We are more and more often spending our lives in a state of lack of well being trying desperately to repair what was never built right in the first place.

People such as my mother was are like the warning canaries the miners used to assess the safety of their working environments.  The demise of my mother’s mind happened because nobody was paying attention.  My own suffering in my childhood happened for the same reason.  The environment of trauma that both of us grew up in happened because we were cut off from life saving assistance from others of our species.  Isolation breeds dis-ease in a social species.

And because we are members of a social species we are innately destined to attempt to communicate within ourselves and to others the state of our reality.  Trauma drama reenactments, as unconscious attempts to communicate the reality of malevolent experience both within our own brain and to others of our species, are seldom heard and seldom understood.  The nature of the traumas simply keep passing themselves down the generations until someone at some time listens to these communications, GETS IT and offers the life saving means to resolving the traumas so that they can finally STOP repeating themselves.

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Repeated trauma dramas always indicate not only that a lack of safety and security existed in the first place, but that this same condition continues to exist in the present.  They tell us about our insecure attachments within the world we live in.

+DISSOCIATION AND MY VERSION OF THIS UTOPIAN WORLD

alchemynow2 Comments

Every one of us begins life as a unique individual.  Through our early interactions with our caregiving environment we “come down into the world” as James Hillman describes in his book “The Soul’s Code.”

http://www.amazon.com/Souls-Code-Search-Character-Calling/dp/0446673714/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242590259&sr=1-1

I believe that if an infant’s caregiving interactions are of a malevolent kind, an individual’s ability to grown down into the world is interfered with.  This interference will be reflected in the changes the body and brain are forced to make in adjustment to a malevolent world.  Of all the consequences that originate through these adjustments, the one I want to write about today has to do with integration.

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A person learns from infancy how to integrate their self within their environment.  This all happens through the ‘rupture and repair’ patterns that are established within an infant’s body, nervous system and brain through its interactions with its first caregivers.  Because I believe that hope is an innate hard-wired physiological ability available to us from birth, the potential for a lack of hope resulting in hopeless despair and disappointment also exists within us from birth.

If an infant’s early caregiver interactions are adequate and appropriate, hope thus becomes intertwined with this ‘coming down into the world’, or coming to live in a body in this world.  If an infant’s experiences result from inadequate and inappropriate early caregiver experiences, hopeless despair and disappointment will grow into an infant’s body as this body grows into the world.

In cases such as mine, when the pattern of early caregiver interactions occurs within the context of severe mental illness, not only will the inadequate and inappropriate nature of the infant’s experiences change the way it grows on all levels, but there will be introduced an additional, complicating factor — the insanity of the mental illness itself.

Mental illness is a manifestation of brain operations that are occurring outside the range of ‘normal’.  The ability to use the brain as it has evolved to operate in ‘best case’ scenarios has been removed and has been replaced with alternative operational patterns — most usually in response to its early formational environment of deprivation and malevolence.  In these cases REASON no longer operates correctly.  Someone whose brain operates like my mother’s did will not have the ability to think reasonably on any level.  They therefore live in a world of their own creation, a reality that is entirely processed through a brain that has not formed to operate correctly.

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I can only speak for myself about how my reality formed through my interactions with my mother from birth.  There was no possibility of my being able to discern reasonable patterns of cause and effect as my brain developed.  It is only because of the many resiliency factors that also influenced me in childhood (see previous post on resiliency) that I managed to form a brain that has a reasonable sense of cause and effect built into it.  One of the most important resiliency factors that I have to consider is that I evidently did not have the same kind of mental illness genetic combinations available to me to use in order to survive the overwhelming pain of my own childhood that my mother had.

My mother’s irrational control over my developing mind was, however, nearly as pervasive as it was chronic.  She shared in common all of the techniques used by the Chinese in the early 50s to control the minds of prisoners — and she did this to me from birth until I left home at 18.  As a result I will never be able to fully gain control of my own mind away from her brain and mind forming influence.  She made sure that her irrationality became a part of me and she was supremely successful.

But she could never actually control ME, the me that I was from conception, the me that did the interacting with her from the start of my ‘growing down into the world’.  Unfortunately that ME was prevented from integrating properly into a body in this world.  She filled so much of the space and time that should have been MINE that there was precious little left over during that 18 years for me to have experiences that were not in some way influenced by her and her mental illness.

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I write about this today in order to point out a single important aspect of how my early patterns shaped how I am in the world today.  Because my mother constantly pointed out to me through her actions and through her words that I was evil, not human, the devil’s child and BAD, I grew up absolutely believing her.  Through this process the ME that endured these experiences evidently learned that all of the world outside of my influence must be a perfect place.

That fact made logical, reasonable sense in my growing mind.  If Linda was so bad that anyone involved with me had to suffer as from a ‘curse’, then anyone whose life I did not touch must have a perfect life.

I call this today my “Utopian Complex’, and there will evidently never be a logical, rational or reasonable way that I can alter this fundamental belief that I have about myself in relationship to the world outside of my sphere of ‘influence’.  As a result, I still fundamentally believe that the world ‘out there’ is a perfect place and if it isn’t, it sure should be.  In my logically illogical mind, there is absolutely no excuse for the world not to be perfect outside the range of my own personal influence.

This, to me, is an example of how having a brain formed under the conditions presented by my mentally ill mother’s brain-mind gave me a version of what infant brain development specialists call the infant’s ‘unsolvable paradox’.  These researchers know that severely maltreated infants know on a profound level that they have to ‘go on being’ in a world that is so dangerous that possibility is not possible.

This is the consequence of a brain-mind-body that is overwhelmed by traumas outside the possibility of addressing through any known coping ability an infant has.  The paradox is formed deeply within the brain-mind simply by the fact that the infant (myself included) DID survive what was impossible to survive.

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Because I was told from the moment I was born that I caused nothing but trouble and was the cause of all the troubles in my family, and that their world would be perfect if I wasn’t in it, I simply applied logic in an incremental fashion to include my relationship with the entire world outside of myself.  I understand today that my version of building the unsolvable paradox into my being as I grew down into my body and into the world is certainly not the worst that I could have done.

But it only happened THIS way because of the consistent and pervasive psychosis my mother suffered from in relation to me from my first breath.  Infant’s crave consistency and I have to say my mother certainly provided me with that!  My understanding of cause and effect did not grow to apply to me on an ongoing personal level, but was rather accomplished on the level of the grand scheme of ‘Linda versus the world’.

This world was of course represented by my mother as my brain-mind formed, and because she formed her own brain-mind so completely into my developing one, and because I cannot extricate her from my brain-mind, I am simply left with the understanding that the world has no reason to be less than perfect if I haven’t personally done something to harm it.

I doubt that I can communicate to you that this ‘reality’ is not a ‘maybe’ to me.  In the essence of my relationship to being in this world at all, it is fact.

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Of course the other side of this double-edged sword, the other part of this paradox that formed itself into me is that it is a bad thing that I am in the world at all, and especially that it is hopeless for Linda to have a good life because Linda is in it.  Talk about a no-win predicament!  I cannot both live a life and not be in it at the same time!  This is, to me, the end result of being so told I was bad and that chance of becoming good was so hopeless and impossible, that I simply excluded myself from my own life.

This may be a difficult thought to follow because it is NOT based on reasonable logic as a ‘normal’ brain would understand it.  But I suspect that dissociation within my brain is directly connected to having been forced to live a life for 18 years from birth without ME being allowed to be in it.  Each separate experience of my childhood simply happened, but I had no ongoing sense that I was a part of those experiences or any ongoing sense that they happened to me.

It was similar to “If a tree falls in a forest and there’s nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound?”  And if the answer to that question is “No” once, then it is always so.  From the first time I dissociated myself from the ongoing experiences of the traumas that were my childhood I was being forced to live a life without ME in it.  If it happens once or happens a million times, the result are the same:  A disconnection from a meaningful fluid ongoing experience of being alive in a body in the world.

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I know I experience what attachment experts call a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder.  This kind of attachment disorder, I believe, has dissociation so built into it that the person’s ongoing life cannot be separated from it — ever.  It results from ongoing experiences from birth that were not based on logical, rational cause and effect processes and through an absence of adequately resolved patterns of rupture and repair.

In my case true hope  ‘floated’ so far away from my own personal experience of life that it ‘landed’ at the unreachable interface of where I can imagine the ‘world’ as being separate from myself.  Every infant grows into its brain a conception of where its boundaries are, of what lies on its own insides compared to what lies on its outsides.  If the early interactions an infant has as it forms these mental boundaries are based on irrationality, the boundaries themselves will not form normally.

In a normal brain, all ongoing experiences are connected together to form a ‘coherent life story’ with the person being the one living the life.  I can only artificially construct my own life story from the millions of disconnected pieces that lie alone, separated and isolated, somewhere in my memory.  And yet this fact is just one of the small pieces that I believe reflects the kind of damage that results from severe early malevolent abuse.

I will never know if someone’s intervention on my behalf, that could have resulted at least in a different pathway for me through the rest of my childhood, would have left me with less devastating damage.  I believe that it would have.   Removal would have prevented my mother from being able to consistently build her ‘case’ against me (and into my own brain-mind) over the many, many years she had control over me.   I was not given the opportunity to experience myself outside the reach of her terribly distorted mind.

+OUR DISTURBED NATURAL INTERNAL OPIOID (OPIATE) SYSTEM

alchemynow2 Comments

Could it be this simple, that for all the complexities about being human our lives really boil down to this process:  Rupture with repair or rupture without repair, with hope for repair being fulfilled or hope for repair being disappointed?

I believe we are biologically designed even before our birth for the experience of hope.  If we believe that a state of calmness related to having all of our needs met is our most normal state, it becomes true that any disruption of this ‘perfect’ state represents a rupture and indicates a need has arisen and a repair must be made.

This entire system is moderated from before our birth by our own endogenous opioid system.  Yes, opioid as related to our own natural opiate producing system complete with all the receptors that are designed to receive our natural opioids (endogenous opioid peptides, produced naturally in the body, such as endorphins, enkephalins, dynorphins, and endomorphins).

Endogenous opioids are in the placenta and in mother’s milk.  Opioid receptors govern a newborn’s interactions with the world.  If its opioid receptors are all filled up the infant is calm and content.  If a need arises in its body this need is reflected in the emptying of the infant’s opioid receptors and it is then disturbed and not calm.  The infant has experienced a ‘rupture’ in need of ‘repair’, and I believe it is a biological mandate that implicates a physiological response to need in the form of hope for fulfillment.

A mother is physiologically designed to have her opioid receptors filled by bonding to and caring for her newborn.  As she responds to her needy infant’s needs, the infant’s opioid receptors are filled back up and the mother’s are affected positively, also.

Hence in my thinking our own feel good opioid system is at the basis of attachment from start to finish.  Yet because we are a complex species we often deviate from what is best for us and find all kinds of ways to interfere with our natural abilities to feel good simply through safe and secure attachments patterns with one another as members of a social species.

The more disturbed our natural feel good-feel bad processes were in the beginning, the more our development as infants was reflected in the adjustments our bodies and brains had to make in order to survive in a malevolent rather than a benevolent world.  Our hopes of repair after rupture were not met satisfactorily and we are left with an internal opioid system that has been forced to go awry.

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I believe that because we are a social species our first line of repair is naturally meant to happen through attachment to one another.  This fact is reflected in the processes our early brain development goes through as it forms the right limbic emotional brain in interaction with the experiences an infant has with its early caregivers.  All the good natural opioid interactional experiences build a good brain designed for life in a good world where hopes are fulfilled through these caring interactions.  Bad opioid interactions build a different brain designed to operate in a world that is not a friendly one.  A brain built through inadequate and toxic relational interactions will have a different pattern based on the disappointment of hope rather than on its fulfillment.

These early opioid experiences of fulfillment or un-fulfillment directly feed information not only to the developing brain, but also to the entire body as it also designs and builds its nervous system, its immune system, and the operation of its genetic expression machinery to match the world the infant is forming in.  It is on this level that I talk about early attachment experiences and the fostering of either hope based on appropriate and adequate endogenous opioid receptor interactions — forming safe and secure attachments — or about the opposite experiences that form the insecure attachment patterns.

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If you search this blog for ’emotional brain’ and for ‘opioid system’ you will access research about these processes.  You can also search your own body to find your personal pivot point in relationship to hope and disappointment.  Every time we suffer from some version of a rupture in our ongoing state of well being we will automatically have some degree of hope arise in relationship to this disruption.  If the opposite of hope is what built our bodies and brains, we will feel the pain of disappointment more often than will someone who was raised in a secure attachment environment.

Our sense of ourselves in our bodies reflect the point on the hopeful – hopeless continuum our self originated from.  Our interactional experiences with our early caregivers regarding the natural life processes of rupture and repair told us both how to develop and how the world we were developing into would treat us.  It is because all these processes are rooted in our endogenous opioid system that we feel mostly good or mostly bad during our lifespan.

I believe that everything we ever try to do during our lifetimes to make ourselves feel better is a reflection of how our bodies interpreted life in this world from the beginning.  If people did not meet our needs, did not repair the natural ruptures caused by our being alive here in the first place, we were forced to survive on our own.  We did not develop an optimal right limbic emotional SOCIAL brain geared to a safe and secure world with caring people in it.

To the degree that our natural attachment patterns to and within our species were interfered with, we look outside of the human relationship circle to get our needs met.  What we suffer from are degrees of isolation from our species that created and continues to create in us an ‘endogenous opioid hole’ that can never be satisfactorily filled.  Recognizing the reality of our degrees of isolation contributes to our ability to become conscious of what we feel, why we feel it, and what better ways we can try to fill our opioid hole.

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A lack of secure attachment within our species creates an isolation that we experience as an almost overwhelming sadness.  All future adjustments we are forced to make by a disturbed endogenous opioid interaction pattern — including mental illness — is an attempt to survive in spite of our pain.

+SEVERE CHILD ABUSE AND SELF ESTEEM

alchemynow2 Comments

On occasion I have heard people say about other people, “They have no self esteem.”  I don’t believe this is ever an accurate statement.  Everyone has self esteem.  If is part of being human.  What matters to me is how positive or how negative a person’s self esteem is.

A sense of esteem for the self grows right along with a growing self from birth.  Researchers believe that the self of a person is formed by the age of two.  It might be hard for us to believe, but by the time a child is that age it already has a strong sense of its own self worth — either positive or negative — built into the brain by every interaction that little person has already had with its early caregivers within its attachment environment.

Because the sense of self esteem, or self worth, is directly formed through attachment relationships, an unsafe and insecure environment will create an unstable connection to the self.  Development within a safe and secure world provides a young child with a sense of confident connection to important others in its life and a sense of competence within itself.  These conditions are directly connected to either a positive or a negative sense of self esteem and are reflected in the connection each person has to their own inner self in relationship to the world it lives in.

Once the self is formed by the age of two, along with the initial sense of safety, security and positive self esteem, or a sense of un-safety, insecurity and negative self esteem, all other ongoing experiences will be connected to this early formation and will be filtered through it.  Only in cases of serious mental illness can a ‘second self’ be formed that will filter and process ongoing experience.  In usual cases a growing child will attach future experience to the original self it formed and connects to for the rest of its life.

We can think of the experiences a child has during the time of its life from conception to age two as being like the time it takes to tune a piano that child will play its music on for the rest of its life.  We can understand that playing on a well tuned piano will allow that child to create a musically harmonious self prepared to play in an equally harmonious world.  On the other hand, a child who has unsafe and insecure attachment experiences will end up with a mistuned piano that cannot make beautiful music no matter how hard that person tries for the rest of its life.

We can, as adults, assess how well tuned our piano was primarily before the age of two in one of two ways.  If we already know that there were serious problems in our very early brain development years we have our answer instantaneously.  If, however, we have either never thought about ourselves back that far or have no available information at our finger tips that comes from our very early years, we can simply just look back at the patterns of our existence and search for what the overriding emotional tone that our self experiences in the present.

I am certainly not the one to say whether or not ‘bad’ versus ‘good’ people exist in the world.  I believe that kind of thinking originated at a time when mythologies and fairy tales were used to explain events that people had no other way of understanding their lives.  Today we know very clearly what the impact of very early mother-infant experiences are on the forming brain, nervous system, body and self that originates as a hopefully conscious interaction between a growing individual and their environment.  We are not talking about magic.  We are talking about cause and effect.

If we look back even at our adult and teen years and detect patterns of disappointments, wrong choices, hurtful relationships, failure to discover our best place in the work world and also detect that our overriding emotional tone is and has been anything other than balanced, competent calm and well being, we will know that we were most likely sent off in a less than safe and secure world in the first place.  From the time of our unstable and probably malevolent beginnings we have been trying our hardest to correct our own behavior as if we are somehow to blame for being inadequate for the job of being a happy, well adjusted member of our society.

Our foundational sense of self esteem is not some ephemeral or nebulous construction.  It is very real and it actually came from a time of our lives when we had pitifully small powers to control our environments — before we were two years old.  I am not talking about some Freudian fantasy of puppet figures from our past related to our own wishful thinking.  I am talking about the formation of our brains as our self and our sense of worth, value and place in the world was told to us by the people who took care of us before age two — or didn’t.

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Lest we think that we are some kind of exception to a natural rule just because we are of a conscious species, let me assure you we are not.  Research has demonstrated, for example, that if a litter of a calm rat mother’s babies are raised with the calm mother they will end up to be calm rat adults.  If a litter of a nervous ‘neurotic’  mother rat are allowed to grow up under her care, the resulting adults will also be nervous and ‘neurotic’.  No surprise and no magic there.

But here is the surprise though still nothing magical.  If you take the calm mother rat’s babies away from her at birth and put them under the care of the nervous ‘neurotic’ mother rat, those same calm mother babies will grow up to be nervous and ‘neurotic’.  Take the nervous ‘neurotic’ mother rat’s babies away at birth and give them to the calm mother to raise and those babies will grow up to be calm adults.

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So what are we left with about hope of positive changes in our lives if our early beginnings were actually a disaster?  Because the human brain is the most complex structure known to exist, we are all at a point of marveling at its potential for change.

Three  fascinating links related to the Dali Lama and the science of the brain are listed below

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/labnotes/archive/2009/02/24/mom-dad-dna-and-suicide.aspx

http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:RKToUsTHIRMJ:www.dana.org/news/cerebrum/detail.aspx%3Fid%3D7384+dali+lama+nueorscience+neurotic+rats&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

http://www.mindandlife.org/conf04.html

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And take a look at author Alice Miller’s site for prevention of child abuse

http://www.alice-miller.com/index_en.php

More than anything else, I am asking that we consider child abuse backgrounds when facing the difficulties of adult life for anybody who has come from such a past.  While it might be difficult for us to consider our own life or the life of others who might be troubled, with respect, dignity and caring compassion, I believe that it will only be under this light of firm but gentle kindness that we can change the patterns that have been ingrained not only in ourselves, but within our cultures around the globe.

We have to take the consequences of infant and child abuse extremely seriously.  I cannot, unfortunately, locate a source for the following, but I believe it is true.

I heard that the Dali Lama was asked at one of the neuroscience sessions related to the deprivations caused by abusive childhoods whether or not he believed that an adult with a severely abusive early upbringing had the same ability to advance spiritually in this world as do people who did not have very early extreme abuse histories.  It is said that the Dali Lama was quiet in thought for some time before he responded, “No, they do not.”

This means to me that we still do not fully know the adult consequences of early malevolent conditions on all aspects of development.  If nobody really yet knows, then we cannot expect ourselves to know the impact that our own early malevolent experiences had on us, either.  We will not gain either the knowledge or the changes we seek by being harsh on ourselves or on one another.  But in cases where adults are passing on the abuse they experienced to their offspring, we have to be ready to do whatever is necessary to intervene on behalf of their children.

At no point is this a journey for the faint of heart  — not for us individually or for us collectively.  It is not a journey that can be taken in an atmosphere of ambiguity.  We must become clear about what we are facing so that the most helpless and innocent members of our species will not be forced to suffer from what we adults have created to harm them.

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Here are some positive self esteem related books from Gallup Press that I recommend though I have not yet had a chance to read them myself:

In 2004, Gallup Press’ first book, How Full Is Your Bucket?, became an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. This led to the publication of several more strengths books, including StrengthsFinder 2.0 (2007) and Strengths Based Leadership (2009). Fueled by the continued demand for its original strengths-based classic, Gallup Press is releasing two new titles based on How Full Is Your Bucket?.

How Full Is Your Bucket? For Kids (available now)

Because of the overwhelming response from parents and teachers to How Full Is Your Bucket? — many of whom have asked for a “kids’ version” — Gallup Press has created How Full Is Your Bucket? For Kids. Tom Rath coauthored the book with early childhood development expert Mary Reckmeyer, and they partnered with the brilliant children’s book illustrator Maurie Manning.
This new book brings the basic dipper and bucket metaphor to life through the story of a young boy named Felix. In How Full Is Your Bucket? For Kids, Felix begins to see how every interaction he has with others in a day either fills or empties his bucket. Felix then realizes that everything he says or does to other people fills or empties their buckets as well.

Expanded Anniversary Edition of How Full Is Your Bucket?
(available in mid-June)

  This new, expanded hardcover Anniversary Edition of How Full Is Your Bucket? includes updated research and content, with a removable workbook for individual, team, and organizational development.

For more information, or to purchase these new books, visit:

How Full Is Your Bucket? For Kids (available now):

How Full Is Your Bucket? Anniversary Edition (available in mid-June):

+IS THERE A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHILD ABUSE AND OLD STYLE PARENTING TECHNIQUES?

alchemynowLeave a comment

We live at a time when the world as we know it is changing very fast.  So fast that even what happened 50 years ago can seem ancient history, and certainly what happened 100 years ago is on the other side of the horizon for most of our thoughts.

Prior to the 1960’s few thought about child abuse, let alone about child abuse prevention.  Now we have resources at our finger tips to help us, like the following as it describes the efforts of Child Abuse Prevention America:

http://www.preventchildabuse.org/help/reach_out.shtml

The first federal legislation designed to address the problems of child abuse and prevention wasn’t enacted until 1974:

http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:N33rRidXTnIJ:www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/factsheets/about.cfm+history+child+abuse+prevention&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

The following site describes the history of child abuse prevention in our country:

http://parenthood.library.wisc.edu/Melli/Melli.html

We can go back to the history of the case of the young girl, Mary Ellen Wilson, as her abuser was tried and sentenced in 1874 for an early example of the struggle by the public to protect maltreated children:

http://www.americanhumane.org/about-us/who-we-are/history/mary-ellen.html

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There remains a ripple effect in our country from child abuse that has traveled down the generations and can be traced among people who are alive today.  In our efforts to come to terms with severe abuse that was done to us individually we need to try to understand the history of ‘our people’.

Often time stories remain in families that we have taken for granted.  We need to listen to them in new and different ways.  Even if the people who told us these stories are dead, we can remember what they told us, and then try to add this information to form the context that surrounded our own experiences of child abuse.

I believe that what we will find is that our families’ past histories of abuse contain information about how we are transforming as a society.  Looking backwards prior to the 1960s was a time when the overriding social mind was that children were still seen as having no rights.  These beliefs came from a long human history that believed both women and children were simply objects that could be possessed.

We believed socially that what went on in an individual family’s life was nobody’s business but their own.  Today we still experience those same struggles as we attempt to protect women and children from abuse.  Where do we draw the line between public and private?  More importantly, how do we both define and identify child abuse?

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Any of us who were of the generations that reached adulthood prior to the 1970s are left trying to answer these questions by ourselves.  We are like children of the ‘half light’, raised during a time when society around us was launching their new, enlightened approach to child rearing though it was too soon for these efforts to help us.  We try to take the available new information and attitudes and apply it to our own experiences of severe child abuse.

Meanwhile, because we did survive into our adulthood and are obviously not still children currently experiencing abuse, we find little support for our inner reality of what truly happened to us and how the remaining effects of that severe abuse means that even our brains and our bodies were changed as a consequence — and therefore the quality of our lives — for the rest of our lifespan.

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I want to give you an example from a conversation I had recently with a woman who used to be my work supervisor.  I will call her Joyce, and she is 68 years old.

Joyce’s mother recently died at age 93 after suffering nearly ten years of serious dementia that had been caused by the heavy sedation that was necessary for the major heart surgery she had been given at 83.  The family was never told at the time that the level of anesthesia required for this extensive surgery might mean permanent damage to her brain.

As Joyce’s mother’s mental functioning deteriorated she slipped further and further back into her past until at the end she remained in her childhood, in a continual state of anxiety and concern as she asked over and over again, “Where are the boys?  Where are my brothers?  They need to come right away and get the mules out of the cornfield!  They are ruining the corn!”

Joyce told me what she knows of her mother’s experience growing up with Joyce’s grandmother, Sarah.  Sarah was Cherokee, born in 1867.  She married a German man who owned a small piece of land in Oklahoma and made his living as a blacksmith.  The family raised all their own food.  When her husband died of the flu in 1919 Sarah was pregnant with her twelfth child and left without an income.  She began to farm the land with the team of mules alone, selling produce and eggs to the townspeople for what money the family needed. All of the children grew up working very hard from the earliest possible age they could do so.

She was also a midwife and delivered hundreds of babies during her lifetime, including twins and even triplets, and never lost an infant or a mother.  She not only bore these twelve children, but she kept them healthy and alive.  One time her youngest, a son, suffered a mangled arm in a farm equipment accident.  Sarah successfully amputated her son’s arm.  She used many plants and herbs for remedies, though none of her knowledge of healing was passed down to any of her twelve children.

There were no modern conveniences available to this family.  Sarah and her older children made all of the family’s clothing from flour sacks.  The comforters and mattresses were also made from flour sack remains when the clothing wore out, and were stuffed with goose down from the geese that they raised.  The entire family loaded onto the wagon and went into town for Sunday church and never missed a sermon.

The main thing Joyce remembers about what her mother, her aunts and uncles ever said about their mother other than that she bore and raised them by working extremely hard, was that she was mean, mean, mean, mean.  She yelled at them, she hit them, and she showed them no outward affection.  She did not single out any one of the children for her distemper.  She treated them all the same, and this treatment was mean.

Of the twelve children, six grew up to beat their own children and six did not.  Joyce’s mother showed adequate affection to Joyce and her siblings, though she did force them outside to cut off a thick stick to be switched with on the occasions that they had done something wrong.  Joyce does not, however, feel her mother abused her children.

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In order to understand where child abuse might have occurred as we look  backward at our families’ histories we need to consider the very harsh realities of the contexts those people often lived in.   Where were the luxuries, and what could they have been?  Was having an ‘easy’ life and a relaxed caring mother an exception rather than the rule?  What about how the men treated the mothers?  What can we or do we know about the conditions of their lives?

I believe there is a telling factor that enables those of us today, who are trying to understand the severe abuse of our own childhoods, to know if there was child abuse in our family’s history or not.  The simple fact that we were severely abused by our own parents lets us know that history of abuse is there. Yet hitting and beating children, even severely, was an acceptable child rearing practice in the past.  It is only because we are trying to change these patterns today that these practices concern us.

This means to me that the most important question we can ask in looking back at our own severe childhood abuse histories, and looking back into the past knowing that the abuse flowed forward to us from our ancestors who were also abused, is this:  How receptive would our own parents have been to outside intervention. if it had occurred,  that meant to stop the abuse and to teach our parents new and different parenting skills?  If we ask ourselves this question and answer honestly, we will know whether or not we suffered from intentional abuse or more from old style parenting practices as they operated in our own childhoods.

I believe it is important for us to distinguish this difference because it gives us crucial information about the context of our childhood suffering.  I know from my own experience there would have been absolutely nothing anybody could have done to improve my mother’s parenting skills.  She lived in an altered reality that meant in order for her children, especially me, to have been protected from my mother somebody would have needed to remove us from her care.

True, some of the punishments my mother engaged in toward me had direct ties to the punishments used against her when she was young, particularly the use of isolation, of feeding me soggy crackers in milk for meals when she was enraged, and a tie to her having been held down by her older brother while her mother beat her harshly with a leather razor strap.  But beyond the literal translation of some of her techniques of abuse, her mind was gone.  She was seriously mentally ill.

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This brings me back to a major point of my blog:  Any parent who continues to abuse a child in today’s ‘enlightened’ culture is usually mentally ill.  I understand there is a difference and I distinguish between those parents who lack adequate parenting skills to deal effectively and alternatively with the stresses of raising children who can be identified and taught a better way to parent and those parents whose realities do not include this option.  I automatically include any adult who sexually molests a child in any way under this second category.  I do believe that there are parents who are like zebras and cannot change their stripes.

Knowing which group our own parents fit into allows those of us who experienced severe abuse as children to finally have a rock solid foundation to stand upon as we attempt to define for ourselves exactly what happened to us.  If I came from a family with parents who appeared to be ‘just’ acting out old style parenting patterns that they would have been willing and able to have changed if intervention had occurred, I would not have the additional complication of trying to understand rationally and logically what happened to me.

Because my abuse occurred rather in the context of severe mental illness, and because I now know the difference clearly, I understand how much more difficult it is for me to untangle my own abuse history in any logical or rational way.  There WAS no logic, no reason, no rationality to anything my mother ever did to me.  And because of this fact I lived with chronic anxiety in a constant state of terror where dissociation was my only reprieve.

That fact alone is a huge piece of the puzzle of my childhood, and a critically important one for me to have.  I cannot today go back and try to understand what happened by using any of the ‘known’ information I might have today about how a bad parent could have been a better one.  No kind of intervention could have changed my mother’s psychosis that had ‘destroying the evil that was me’ at its center.  I now also know that there was nothing I could have done as a child to change it either.

My point?  There are parent-child situations without hope of improvement and there are those with hope.  We have to distinguish between them.  While this may not be a distinction that can be easily made, I believe it is critical to a child’s well-being, and is one that becomes of vital importance if we ever hope to effectively prevent abuse to children under the age of two.  It is during these critical brain growth windows of development that severe abuse causes the worst long term damage.

It is during this stage of youngest development that we are going to have the hardest time identifying at risk mothers and infants.  We have to use a laser-like focus of attention to both identify and intervene on behalf of the very young.  That this abuse is most likely to occur behind the ‘sacred closed doors’ behind the walls a family has to keep the public world out that makes our job extremely difficult.

We have to know what we are looking for and looking at.  Who knows this world better than anyone else?  Those of us who have survived severe early abuse and are alive to tell about it.  We need to speak and someone needs to listen to us.  Our adult stories are the voice of the very young severely abused who do not even have the words to speak their stories.

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(Something about writing this post today put me in an heightened anxiety state, perhaps because somehow something was triggered and now I feel like I’m waiting for a bomb to fall out of the sky on my head, destroying me.  What a familiar feeling from my childhood, only the bomb was real, and it was my mother.)

+TRAUMA MATH: THE SORROWS AND HAPPINESS OF “CRAFT SHOW APRIL”

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I haven’t completely ‘returned’ or recovered from my out-of-town craft show adventure last weekend.  I say returned because my dissociation condition causes me to experience changes as if separate parts of me are ‘out there’ floating around like dandelion fluff in the breeze, drifting around until they eventually land.  I experience a waiting period while this happens, trying to learn every day more of what to do to speed up the process of consolidation of memory as best I can.

Some might call this a grounding process.  I went out and watered all of my plants, most of them looking pretty darn stressed if not dead.  I forgot to have one of the neighbor children come over to water them while I was gone on this 100 degree plus weekend.  Now I’m washing my blankets and clothing.  There’s no place for the washing machine in the house, so it sits out back on the cement rim that lies around the foundation of the house, hooked by an hundred foot extension cord running out my door and to a fifty foot hose.

Taking the small steps of being in my life, in my house, being in my body as I wait for all of the experiences of this past weekend to settle within me in some form of organized fashion.  That’s what the combination of the dissociative disorder and the PTSD do to me now.  They easily give me the feeling of ‘too much to deal with’ and a sense of being easily overwhelmed by any kind of unusual stimulation.

I believe that’s part of the role of the ‘recurring major depression’ that forms the third leg of my emotional and mental ‘disorder’ and ‘disability.’  It gives me the ‘down time’ I need to let things put themselves together after I experience more incoming information than I can handle at one time.

I am so fortunate at this moment in time to have a simple place that is my home.  One has to have the safety and security of some kind of ‘home’ for their body in order that the home of the mind can maintain itself.  I’ve been homeless before, several times, even when I still had young children under my care.  Today more than in several generations having a home or not having a home has come back to the forefront of our concerns — both individually and as a society.

Which leads me to this story I heard from a neighboring vendor, I’ll call her April, at the craft show last weekend.  I always listen with a special interest to stories told by new people I meet.  It’s the only way that I have to test my own theories or ideas, things that I am coming to believe about how our early childhood experiences come to form who we are as adults.

Because April never asked that anything she was telling me be kept confidential, I am not concerned about telling you what she told me.  After all, she had only just met me and spent a few hours in her booth across from mine as she sold kettle corn and ice water as I hoped to sell earrings and mosaics.

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April is one year younger than me, another child of the early fifties, born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona.  She was second born of six children and spent her childhood with both of her parents and with her grandparents nearby.  Her father was an untreated bi-polar severe alcoholic and was extremely violent and abusive to his wife and all of the children.  Her father beat his wife during every one of her pregnancies, and over the years knocked out all of his wife’s teeth, and sent her to the hospital with concussions and broken bones many times.

April told of one severe attack of violence this man had perpetrated against his family, and her mother took herself and all of the children to her mother’s house for some kind of protection.  It wasn’t long before her father showed up at the door with his rifle, accompanied by three uniformed police officers who were there to make sure the wife and children returned home with the man of their family immediately.

We might think this unbelievable and barbaric, but that happened only 45 years ago.  It tells us about the conditions of life and of our culture that took so much hard work and effort to change — even a little bit so that things might be different and better for women and children in America today.

April appears as a very attractive, perky, positive, happy, kind, hard working, healthy woman.  There’s nothing about her that meets the eye of the public that would indicate the kind of terrible traumas that she has experienced in her life.  And yet it didn’t take long as we sat in her RV after Saturday’s craft show had closed for the day, talking over an ice cold beer and a container of grocery store deli chili that April had microwaved and generously shared with me, that I learned how close to the surface all of her difficult history is to her.  In fact I would say none of it has gone anywhere.  But what fascinates me is what April is doing with herself in relationship to it.

April is married to her third husband, a hard working truck driver who just lost one hundred thousand dollars of his 401K that he spent 32 years building for his retirement.  April has worked for the past 21 years as a massage therapist for a major hotel chain in Phoenix.  She still loves her work but in order, now, to hope for a retirement she decided to go into the business of traveling as a kettle corn vendor on weekends.

Certainly she had the resources of owning a RV and a sturdy steel trailer to haul her equipment.  She had the resources to buy everything she needed to set up her booth and cook that candied popcorn, including a portable generator.  But she also had the invisible inner resources to come up with her plan and the stamina and willingness to work extremely hard toward making her business a paying venture.

Just the physical work alone that it took to drive that rig, haul all that heavy equipment off of it, set up the canopy, stand there in 100 plus heat for two days trying to sell to a pitifully thin crowd at that show, and then pack it all up again and return home to get herself ready for a full week of work at her ‘real’ job — and do all this smiling and caring for and about every single person she saw along her way and mean it — provided me with an incredible experience to learn about, watch and benefit from personally.

April made sure that I had ice cold water to drink all weekend, that I had an iced wet cloth to lay on the back of my neck in that scorching heat, that I had chili and beer in the evening and a place to park my little truck next to her RV to sleep for the night, and that I had her friendship and her compassionate and sensitive encouragement every step of the way.  April offered these kindnesses in different ways to everyone around her.  She never complained, and even as she told me about her childhood there was no anger or blame.  She simply described what happened.

As she talked I of course listened to discover how it was possible that April was the person she turned out to be.  At first it was a mystery to me until I heard what might just be the secret of her ‘salvation’, the blessings caught among the curses.

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April described to me how she had attended a cranial massage training institute and had been blindsided by the insensitive and unprofessional experience that she had by being a chosen volunteer for the  technique without being given any warning about what might happen.  While the instructors demonstrated in front of a large crowd of strangers, April experienced what had happened to her in the womb as her father had beaten her mother while she was carrying April.  During this session she remembered what it felt like when she also, as an unborn infant, had been pummeled by her father’s blows.

The conditions of ongoing violence in her home of origin never improved.  April left home very young, married and began having children of her own.  Of her three children, one is schizophrenic and facing a long prison sentence for attempted manslaughter and arson after he tried to burn down his girl friend’s home with her in it.  Among April’s five siblings, one became schizophrenic and two ended up with severe bi-polar conditions.  One of these, her brother, committed suicide.

April’s father died a few months ago and she admits she never loved him and that her father never loved her.  April’s mother suffers from several serious medical conditions in her later years that doctors suspect are directly connected to the many serious injuries that she suffered while being beaten by her husband.  April has struggled with all of these trauma related conditions in her family all of her life, and is left now still trying to find a way to manage continued contact with her mentally ill siblings.

April’s one healthy sister that she is very close to, was a real estate agent in California and her brother-in-law had a successful construction business.  Both sources of income have vanished, her sister’s family has lost both of the homes they owned.  Stress from these challenges caused the brother-in-law to have a serious heart attack and he is facing surgery.  April is not only very worried about her sister and her family, but she also is suffering from what really is the loss of one of the most important support people of her life.

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So here is April woman-handling a physically and financially difficult new business, and optimistically being happy as she continues to face the challenges of her life.  Because of what I understand about how vital it is that an infant’s growing brain receives happiness stimulation in order for the left brain’s happy center to form in the first place — thus allowing it to be accessed later in life — I had to ask April what her perspective is on the differences between herself and her siblings.

She told me that during her recent physical exam her physician had told her that the reason her three siblings ended up with severe mental illness is probably because they had those specific combination of genetic possibilities in them that were triggered as their bodies were stressed during early childhood.  He further stated that evidently April and her other two siblings did not have these genetic sensitivities so they ended up without the mental illness.  (Even then April was a carrier of the genes because she has a schizophrenic alcoholic drug addicted son.  I did not ask her about her own parenting conditions nor did she tell me.)

This still did not explain to me how April manages to be so optimistically positive and so able to find active ways to cope in her life.  It did not explain that while she had for a period of time become what she termed “an active psychologically dependent alcoholic,” how she managed to extricate herself from her addiction so that it didn’t affect her in the present.

This is the point in the conversation where the secret was unveiled to me.  Part of her current difficulties with her bi-polar sister stem from what happened last January at the death of their father.  April was very clear about her lack of feeling for her father and her sister fell to pieces and became enraged at April for her detachment.  It turns out that the only person their father ever paid any affectionate attention to was this bi-polar sister.  She was his favorite and she was his pet.  (I don’t know whether or not there was sexual abuse occurring in this situation, though it sounds to me like a typical setup for such abuse to happen.)

What April told me next is the most important fact of this story.  While her sister was her very sick, abusive, violent ‘dysfunctional’ father’s pet, April was consistently the favored pet of her father’s mother.  And what is most important about THIS fact is that April describes this grandmother as being a very happy person — able to be happy in her own life and able to be extremely happy in her ongoing relationship with April.

THIS is, to me, a magic key to April’s life today.  The happy center in little April’s developing brain was fed, fostered and able to grow because of this happy, safe and secure relationship she had with her happy grandmother.  Because this happy center was so designed and built in April’s early-developing brain, that collection of neurons was already in her brain in spite of all the other nasty traumatic experiences that April still had to endure.

April lost touch with her happy self for many, many years.  But when she was ready to take a good hard look at herself and her life, and wanted to make it so much better, she had this precious resource within her brain of a well-built happy center to fall back on and to rely on as she sought to make happier changes for a happier life.  Still, today, it was and is April’s decision to exercise the heck out of these happy center neurons that is making the difference not only for her in her life, but also for all others that come into contact with her.

April described to me that she works at being happy all of the time.  She WORKS HARD at it.  But she is the one doing the work.  The fact that she was blessed with the conditions in her early brain developmental life, through a safe, secure and happy attachment relationship with at least one other person, her grandmother, does not take away the importance that April is still doing this good work herself.  She made the decision and is applying her own life force to  continue to make these positive changes.  Nobody else could do this for her.  Yet I believe that her early secure attachment with her grandmother helped to give her both the inner resources to do this work and the ability to want to try.

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I could sense the very old competition for affection and resources that still exists between April and her sister regarding their father.  It was like, “She had our father but I had my grandmother.”  The unspoken pain was still there caused by a father who could not love his daughters — in fact could probably not really love anyone including himself.

There’s no way a child cannot crave a father’s affection and not notice when another sibling seems to be receiving it.  Yet in this situation the love from a terrible father could in no way compare to the seemingly healthy love from a happy, adoring grandmother.  April got the better end of the deal, and her sister is a deteriorating bi-polar in large part, I believe, because of these inequities.

(This creates another whole set of questions in my mind.  What happened in April’s father’s early life in relationship with his own mother, this happy grandmother, that set him up for a disastrous life?  It is not at all uncommon for grandmother’s to be able to love and attach securely to grandchildren when they could not do this for their own children.  And why did was this grandmother unable to intervene on behalf of all of her grandchildren?  Why did she single out only one as her ‘pet’?  But all this will be food and fodder for future writings.)

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I understand that everyone who has even only a tiny happy center can still exercise that center through hard work to make it stronger.  But the original nerve cells/neurons that were present at birth — designated for this happy center but NOT used while this center built itself through early attachment relationships and therefore were lost — can NEVER be replaced.

What happy center neurons we DO have can increase their dendrites and the interactions between these dendrites through exercise.  That April is so clearly applying hard work to become more happy, even though she had a better happy center built in the beginning than her sister did, still lets us know that the effects of severe abuse continue for the lifespan.  If they didn’t, April would not have to work so hard to become more happy herself.

People who were raised from birth in safety and security that encompassed and enveloped them as it SHOULD have, have so much more to work with on every level as they face the ongoing challenges of life.  Being happy will always be easier for securely attached from birth people, just as it is for April who only had partial childhood experiences of secure attachment in the midst of trauma compared to her mentally ill siblings.

I describe this today in part as a gesture of support for everyone who has become even more challenged in their lives as a result of the economic difficulties the world is facing.  If you or anyone you know is being additionally challenged right now, please do not judge them harshly if they cannot be as optimistically happy as someone else might be able to be as they struggle to get through their hard times — ANY kind of hard times.

We need to support and encourage ourselves and one another in the work of trying to live a more happy and positive life with kindness to the best of our abilities.  We must be realistic and informed about the context of happiness and active coping just as we need to be about the actual traumas we have experienced.

Those who have suffered early developmental-stage traumas are always the most at risk when new traumas come along.  We can do the math — the aftermath of trauma — to find what is upsetting the balance of well-being in our lives and to find what helps to create a better state of balance every step of the way.

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Thank you for reading this post — your comments are welcome and appreciated.  Linda