Tag: play

+PLAY AS AN INDICATOR OF SAFETY AND SECURITY IN A BENEVOLENT WORLD

alchemynowLeave a comment

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Mothers have evolved throughout the millennia to play with their infants.

Having the ability to engage in healthy play has evolved through the millennia to build healthy body-nervous system-brain-mind selves in our species.  Play happens when the world is a friendly place to be.  Play TELLS us that the world is a friendly place to be.

When the environment surrounding mother and infant-child is benevolent, healthy play is most usually present.  This benevolence in the environment is then built into the growing-developing offspring.

When the environment surrounding mother and infant-child is hostile, toxic, lacking in essential survival qualities and therefore is malevolent, a mother’s ability to engage in healthy play with her offspring is interfered with.

Thus, the absence of healthy playfulness between mother and offspring signal the developing infant-child on every physiological level that trauma exists in its world.  The offspring will then be forced to change and adapt to the best of its physiological abilities to prepare itself for a lifetime within a malevolent world.

++++

Healthy playfulness between a mother and her offspring only happens to the degree that the environment is safe and secure enough to allow this play to happen.

If a mother grew and developed in her own early childhood in a world that signaled her body-nervous system-brain-mind self that the world was malevolent, she is most likely carrying unresolved trauma within herself that then signals to her offspring that the world is malevolent.  Her offspring will then have to change according to the trauma-present-in-the-world message just as its mother did.

Both mother and infant-child will then suffer from a lack of safety and security perceived as permanent and real by their physiological development.  When trauma is present, healthy play is interfered with because our evolution has designed our species so that degree, quality, kinds of, presence of healthy play and playful attitudes directly indicate the degree of either benevolence or malevolence in the world.

++++

I am not talking about play as we might think about it in today’s world.  This kind of play has nothing to do with toys or ‘stuff’.  Healthy play that signals to offspring the condition of the world is about direct face-to-face interaction between mother and infant-child.  The presence of a world safe and secure enough to allow for this kind of play between early caregivers and offspring has operated throughout our evolution.

It was only when the world because safe and secure enough, adequate and benevolent enough for this level of play to grow and thrive that humans ever achieved powers of speech at all (only about 140,000 years ago).  The physiological systems within our body and brain had to have already evolved sophisticated organizational and orientational abilities to have ever allowed our powers of speech to manifest in the first place because speech uses all those preexisting abilities.

Any time trauma happens it always disrupts ongoing coherent life.  If trauma cannot be resolved, consequences happen.  Dissociation represents one of the fundamental consequences of a being’s inability to resolve trauma.  Dissociation continues to affect a mother because its very existence means that something malevolent occurred that was not able to be resolved.

A dissociating mother thus communicates her state of unresolved trauma to her offspring primarily through an interruption in her ability to engage in healthy play and playful attitudes with her offspring.  The key to healthy playfulness between a mother and her offspring is that it is APPROPRIATE.

Appropriate, and therefore healthy play and playfulness between a mother and her offspring, the kind of play that then signals the offspring to grow an entire body geared for life in a benevolent world, happens when the mother’s entire focus is on fostering the well-being of her infant-child.

Mother’s have evolutionarily evolved to respond appropriately to their offspring so that their play-filled responses do not overwhelm, over stimulate or under stimulate them.  When a mother has experienced enough trauma during her own development that incoherency in the form of dissociation has been built into her entire body, she is not likely to be able to operate from this optimal, benign, benevolent-world-condition state within herself.  She will then communicate her own preexisting, unresolved trauma states directly to her offspring.

++++

Terror, pain and trauma interrupt play and the ability to play.  This lack of play and the ability to play then acts as a direct signal that communicates malevolence in the world.  When healthy play and playfulness exist, they happen in a safe and secure world, not in the midst of trauma.

A mother who does not carry unresolved trauma into her interactions with her offspring will be able to focus on the well-being of her offspring and demonstrate the benevolence of the world to her developing infant-child through her healthy, appropriate play and playfulness with it.

These interactions operate from birth to form first the right, limbic, emotional, social brain.  As the infant-child continues to grow, the foundation of play or its absence, built within its body-nervous system-brain-mind-self will further influence the development of its later-forming left brain, the connection between the two hemispheres of its brain, and the development of its higher-processing cortical abilities.

A non-dissociating mother is able to have appropriate hopes, dreams, wishes and desires for the well-being of her offspring.  She will automatically be able to orient herself and organize her interactions with her offspring.  Her goal, destination, direction and purpose regarding her offspring will be benevolent.  This benevolence will be communicated through safety and security that manifests itself in healthy play and playfulness toward her offspring.

A dissociating mother will experience breaks in her ongoing interactions with her offspring that will vary in degree according to the changes that had to happen to her during her own development in a malevolent early environment.

In my case, my mother’s dissociation toward me was extreme, fundamental and complete.  In her psychosis she believed that I was evil, that I tried to kill her while I was being born, that I was not human, and that I was sent to be a curse on her life.  Her psychotic dissociation in-formed every interaction she ever had with me from the time I was born.

My mother’s unresolved trauma, manifesting itself in her dissociation, prevented her from ever being able to respond to me with anything like appropriate, healthy play or playfulness.  She was not able to consider my well-being because she could never understand that I was a separate entity from her.  I was merely and continually the recipient of her slit-off projection of her intolerable perception of her own badness.

She not only could not have playful interactions with me that I needed to build a non-trauma centered body-nervous system-brain-mind-self, but her psychosis was so severe that she prevented ME from ever being able to play at all.

++++

The absolute disturbance in the necessary operation of play in my childhood directly ties into my own dissociation.  The trauma I experienced in the malevolent environment of my childhood could not possibly be integrated into a coherent self.  However, as a mother to my own children I was able to know they were separate beings from me, and I was able to focus as much as I possibly could on them and on the development of their well-being.

In other words, I was able to organize and orient a ‘mothering self’ within me that existed to foster the development of my children.  Because I could do this, I could offer to them enough play and playfulness that it communicated to them a relative lack of trauma in the world and enough of a sense of safety and security in the world that I did not pass my unresolved trauma onto them.

They did not have perfect childhoods because the unresolved trauma and the changes that had to happen to me so that I could survive my childhood affected every other aspect of my being-in-the-world, and therefore DID affect them.  But these problems were MINE and I was able to keep them myself.  I did not force them INTO my children the way my mother forced her unresolved trauma INTO growing and developing me.

++++

As we return in our thoughts to consider our infancy and childhood through the lens of playfulness and play or its absence, we can become much more clear about how our caregivers’ unresolved trauma — or the absence of it — operated to directly communicate to our growing and developing body on all its levels what the condition of the world was like.

If appropriate and healthy play and playfulness was there for us, it is during those experiences that we were developing in an ‘ordinary’ way.  If it was absent, some degree of trauma was present, and we were forced at those times in our development to try to adapt to that malevolency.

Who we are today and how we are in our bodies in the world is directly connected to play and playfulness because it is only in times of safety and security that play exists at all.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

POWER OF PLAY AND THE MEMORIES OF PLAY

alchemynow1 Comment

My older brother sent me the link to this site about hope and humanity

http://www.humanmedia.org/catalog/home.php

Full Length Audio Programs as Heard on Public Radio
Satellite Radio • CDs • Online MP3 Audio Downloads

++

He had just listened to a program featuring Nancy Carlsson-Paige and told me, “There are some interesting articles there to read.  The interview mentioned that Nancy is the mother of actor Matt Damon.”

http://nancycarlsson-paige.org/

“Childhood is dramatically different today than it was just a generation ago, but children still need an environment that encourages healthy play, a sense of security, and strong, loving relationships. Whether you are a parent or teacher, my goal is to help you prepare and succeed in supporting children’s optimal growth in these challenging times.”
– Nancy Carlsson-Paige

++

Refer also to this interesting news article on pills and memories.  If those of us with horrific childhoods had a choice, would we choose to erase our ‘bad’ memories?  Part of what is so significant to me about what I have learned about early abuse and brain formation is that even if specific memories could be erased, the changes that the brain and body had to make to adjust to the conditions of the toxic and threatening, dangerous environment have already been made, and these changes are permanent.

But would elimination of specific toxic memories give us a different degree of peace within ourselves, and hence of a sense of well being?

http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/neuro/memory_drugs_sd.html

My father had brain surgery for a pituitary tumor in 1990 but ‘forgot’ to tell the brain surgeon he had a bleeding disorder.  As a result, he suffered massive brain hemorrhaging but survived it.  Along with an assortment of substantial deterioration, he lost all his long term memory.  He did not remember he had a wife and could not remember why he had divorced her.  He could not remember his childhood or his children.  He could not remember homesteading or the life time of work he had done as a civil engineer.  But he DID know that he couldn’t remember himself in his past and that he had forgotten everything good and bad, and he suffered greatly with this knowledge until his death 10 years later.

++

Animals enact genetic memories about how to get along in the world and reinforce behaviors for their offspring through play.  Humans have an additional critical brain development layer.  As we get older our brains sort out complicated information that we receive from our daily experiences in our dreams during our sleep time.  Part of the disruption that occurs for PTSD sufferers happens because the traumatic experiences are so overwhelming that the brain cannot find a use for the experiences and they are not integrated.  They often continue to trouble our sleep and our dreams as a result.

I found it fascinating to learn that migrating geese, for example, can go lengthy periods without sleep because they are engaging only in repetitive motor actions and do not have anything new or different happening while they are flying.  They therefore don’t need to sleep.  Sharks also don’t need to sleep because their repetitive motor actions consume most of their lives, and without new and unusual experiences, their brains have nothing new to process during dreaming states.

++

So what does childhood play have in common with dreaming?  Children process incoming information during their play in the same way that we process incoming information in our dreams.  Because the foundation of our brain’s processing of information that we can later access consciously through thought and with words is first formed in our right brain as wordless images, our species has developed ways of working with these images in ways that do not involve words — including dreaming and playing.

All our processing ‘techniques’ below consciousness still involve efficient transmission of information back and forth across our corpus collosum — the two hemispheres communicate via dense bundles of nerve fibers called the corpus callosum.  Early childhood trauma is known to alter the development of both hemispheres, and of the corpus callosum.  These alterations interfere with processing of memory and learning, and this interruption shows itself both as problems with dreaming and especially with small children, as problems that appear in play.

++

One of the ways that intergenerational unresolved traumas are communicated to future generations is through alterations in play behavior between mother and infant.  Dr. Allan Schore’s writings on early brain development so clearly describe the importance of mother-infant play that he makes me think that just watching a mother’s play interactions with her infant would provide enough information alone to be able to detect potential danger — or not — in how that mother handles raising the infant in every way.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=allan+schore&x=0&y=0

When I return to the work of ‘translating’ such research findings into common word usage, I will write posts with more specifics about what the experts are finding about mothers, infants, play and early brain development.

++

For now I will just say that once I discovered this research and then looked back over my childhood, I realized that the deprivation I experienced by having play interfered with and removed from my early life had profound consequences both on my brain’s development and on my ability to process the traumas themselves.

I have written about one memory regarding the removal of play from my school experience in first grade: FIRST GRADE — NIGHT ON THE STOOL and of another about playing alone when I was the same age:   THE MARBLES

Part of how my mother controlled me from birth was by controlling my ability to play, and as the above memories indicate, she found ways to even control my interaction with peers when I was away from her just as she controlled my interactions with my siblings when I was at home.  Childhood play has evolved as a way our species engages in social interactions as members of a social species.  Play affects our development from the time we are born, and without play we lose an important aspect of becoming our best selves possible, both in our relationships with ourselves and with one another.

++

In addition, we need to realize that the same region of the brain that is exercised during physical play and activity, the cerebellum

(SEE:   http://www.google.com/search?q=brain+coordination&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3RNFA_enUS270US307

and  http://www.waiting.com/brainanatomy.html) is the same region of the brain we use to coordinate thoughts when we cognate.  Our body’s movement in interaction with our mother’s movements when are within her womb are thus building our capacities to coordinate our thoughts well before the time we are born.  Our body’s movements continue to participate in this process during our entire lives.

Interestingly, this word cognate is directly connected to the female – or mother:  http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1B3RNFA_enUS270US307&defl=en&q=define:cognate&ei=w2cASvP1MJ7etAOM_o3uBQ&sa=X&oi=glossary_definition&ct=title).  Mothering is critical to the development of humans inside and out!

A connection between movement and well being in newborns can also be seen in the fact that rocking a premature infant vastly improves their growth

http://www.google.com/search?q=rocking+premature+infants&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3RNFA_enUS270US307

including even their breathing.  Is being held and rocked play to a newborn?  What happened to us if our mothers couldn’t even do this?  What potential monster did we create when we invented bottles for feeding babies?  (I believe that this was the monster that began to harm my mother from the moment of her birth, as well as the monster that began harming me.  Even monkeys won’t become attached to a propped bottle!)

http://jap.physiology.org/cgi/content/abstract/77/3/1548

++

As Nancy Carlsson-Paige proposes (in the link at the start of this post) our culture’s children today are at risk of developing long term socialization disabilities related to their lack of active physical play, and of positive socially interactive play experiences.  An area of basic human needs that developed throughout our evolution is being tampered with and neglected, and there will be negative consequences for future generations.  Play is a part of the development of well being on crucially important levels.

Realizing this fact has opened a whole new level for me to understand how my mother’s abuse of me affected my development.  I believe that as ‘recovering’ survivors taking a thorough inventory of everything we know about our childhood play becomes an important tool to claiming our lives.  Play is a dramatic expression of inner experience (and continues to express itself through the ‘trauma dramas’ we enact in adulthood), just as dreams are, during our entire life.

What DO we remember about our childhood play?  Play occurs in an arena of safety and security.  Therefore our play activities from birth are like litmus paper indicators of the degree of benevolence present in our environment, surrounding not only our caregivers but ourselves as well.  In this way knowing our play history can provide us with extremely useful information about our attachment patterns to and within the world at large.  Quality play does not indicate a malevolent environment.  Lack of it does.

++

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