The most important work we can do, individually and globally, is the healing and prevention of traumas so that we don't pass them down to future generations. This blog is a working tool to contribute to this good work.
I answered it with my response 24 hours later. What I think about the article and the ideas contained within it doesn’t matter to anyone, really. Simply put, leave Maslow’s Pyramid alone.
What interests me most about this topic is my thought process. I took a look at the information when my daughter’s email came in, didn’t have an immediate response, and relegated-delegated any further thoughts on the subject to ‘the future’.
This future arrived suddenly as I worked outside in my yard. I wasn’t remotely aware that I was even ‘thinking’ about this article and my daughter’s request until THERE IT WAS! My response!
The process I evidently went through in this past 24 hours about this silly little subject fascinates me. Once THE ANSWER appeared — literally like it came as a boulder falling out of the sky and hitting me on the head in a cartoon — I now understand a little bit more about HOW I think. (The email I sent to my daughter once I had THE ANSWER appears at the bottom of this post.)
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Because of the information I now understand about how I am different as a result of the Trauma Altered Development I had to go through to survive my extremely abusive infant-childhood I am always interested to learn a little bit more about ‘how I work’. On this particular point I have no idea what an ‘ordinary or normal’ thought process might be like so have nothing to compare what I just experienced with.
What I DO know is that humans (I would say ESPECIALLY women!) are capable of ‘thinking’ in ways that our culture might not value. When my daughter presented me with her question I simply tossed the whole dang question ‘into the hopper’ and ‘forgot it’.
Obviously I DID NOT forget it! On all sorts of levels within my body-brain I have evidently been sorting through LOTS of information so that when THE ANSWER appeared, I KNEW instantly it was MY right one.
The image that came to me about this ‘whole body-brain’ ability to ‘think’ is that I didn’t so much toss the question to ‘a committee’ as I did to some part of my being that knows how to run an elevator! Over these past 24 hours that elevator operator has been moving up and down all the floors in the skyscraper of my body-brain. The operator stopped at each floor, opened the door, wandered around the groups of ‘people’ who live and work on each floor, gathering information on the topic from all of them.
Up-down-up-down, returning more than once to some floors to converse again with some members of ‘the group’ until finally a synthesis was made of ALL this information — and (as a commenter said this week) POP!! There was THE ANSWER!
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For those of us severe infant-childhood abuse and trauma survivors being able to think without attention and without ‘attachment’ or ‘association’ to the thought process that is going on ‘behind the scenes’ — I believe — is something we learned to do in part because trauma was likely to and did appear ‘out of nowhere’ without our being able to predict or control it nearly ALL OF THE TIME.
Being able to form a MIND at all meant that we grew a body-brain that honed to perfection the human ability to apply the greatest flexibility possible to our knowing and thinking processes. I believe these abilities are connected to ‘dissociation’ — but as my experience of these past 24 hours showed me — our abilities can be amazingly efficient, effective — and impressive!
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — the fundamental human rights declared in 1776 as The United States of America took its form as an independent nation. Where do abused infants and children look for their portion of these rights? To their caregivers.
As I work again today out in the sunshine on this glorious day, and as I pay attention to how I feel in my body, I know I am not happy. I am aware that what I am accomplishing is to lessen my continual sadness. “What, then,” I ask myself, “might contribute to something MORE than a lessening of sadness? What — if you use the powers of your mind to think and dream, might actually give you some measure of happiness?”
Well, at least I am in PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS! That’s the right direction for me to go as far as I can tell.
Happiness is NOT ‘just’ a lessening of sadness.
I’ve also been thinking about the ‘all right’ feeling as being a measure of a state of well-being. Oh, how seldom, how very, very seldom have I EVER experienced THAT feeling state: All is right. I am all right.
Knowing one is all right in the world is, to me, the rock bottom accomplishment given to an infant-child by its attachment-caregivers from birth so it can build this feeling state into its body-brain from the beginning of its life. From that time forward this feeling state remains built into the body and is therefore accessible to a person.
Being slapped and hit and yanked and punched and dragged around by hair and limb, having one’s skin punctured by grasping talons of fingernails, being screamed at and…….. Well, as I an other severe abuse survivors well know, these threatening, dangerous, traumatic and terrible-terrorizing conditions of infancy and childhood simply COULD NOT POSSIBLY build into our body a feeling of being ALL RIGHT.
Nope.
Never happened.
So here I am in adulthood sunk in the ‘depression’ of terrible sadness in the Meteor Crater I found myself born and battered in (not perched precariously at the top of a high precipice fighting to the death with her anger and rage against all perceived attacks, as my mother was).
Today I am practicing using my mind, thoughts and dreams to see if I can modulate-moderate the feelings of sadness into something that might resemble what I guess happiness is — or at least make progress toward an inner feeling of ALL RIGHT.
This is what I have come up with so far: If I could finish this garden, and name it The Secret Garden, then perhaps I could search out programs in this region of Arizona that work with abused children and invite them to come visit.
When I was five, and before our family moved from Los Angeles to Alaska, we visited an immense garden somewhere on a hill. I have never forgotten that glorious garden, and every single time in all my 54 years since that day when I think of that garden I feel not only a little-bit-less-sad, but for a brief flash of time I feel almost-happy.
Perhaps if I can create a magical garden here, designed especially for the eye level and imagination of five-year-olds, and then these little people who have been traumatized, battered and abused could come wander around here, MAYBE they too could carry within their body-brain-mind-self a memory that would ALWAYS be happy enough to displace their sadness (or rage) and provide for them a glimmer of true — ALL RIGHT — joy!
Big people could come, too — but it is to the little ones’ joy that I now return to my digging and adobe creation. May all of us today pursue our happiness!
When, in my adulthood, I first heard people using versions of a saying, “The table was turned,” I envisioned in my mind someone being angry and turning a table upside down so that its legs stuck up in the air. It took me a long time before I overcame my embarrassment enough to ask someone what they meant when they said this.
“Oh,” this person said to me. “It’s like four people are sitting playing cards. Each of them has their hand laying on the table top and someone turns the table so that everyone has someone else’s hand and THAT hand, rather than their original one, is what each plays the game through with.”
I mention this today because as I described what I have been thinking about pampered versus not pampered people to someone I am very close to yesterday that person responded to me with, “But the word pampered has such negative connotations!”
In other words, they were expressing a sentiment that would probably be common among those people I would say were raised from birth in a ‘benevolent’ world that I am now calling a pampered one.
I can see where this sentiment could come from. Looking at Webster’s online dictionary for this word I found:
2 a: to treat with extreme or excessive care and attention <pampered their guests> b:gratify, humor <enabled him to pamper his wanderlust — New Yorker>
Well, how about that? I have my sense of the contrast between being pampered and NOT being pampered just about right for what I am intending to describe! Look at the antonyms!
We are not commonly used to using one word to describe in contrast its opposite, but in this case my meaning is extremely clear when I use it to describe how severe infant-abuse survivors experienced their world — yes, when they NEEDED to and SHOULD have been treated exactly the opposite from the way that they actually were.
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How many people among ‘the masses’, however, ever bristle and become concerned and defensive when someone calls someone else ‘mentally ill’, for example?
In contrast, how many of the pampered people are going to bristle and become concerned and defensive when someone calls them pampered?
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We are very comfortable in our society in using definitive explanations for things that rely on a linear black-and-white, either-or pattern of thinking. It’s EASIER than making sure we understand the full meaning of what we are talking about.
It is EASIER to simply say, “I was abused when I was little,” or “I was not abused when I was little” than it is to say “I was not pampered” versus “I was pampered.”
I could continue to accept this simplistic thinking if there weren’t so many drastic and terrible lifelong consequences for survivors of severe infant-child abuse that society THEN feels completely comfortable in blaming and shaming the survivors for.
It is THEN that I want to ‘turn the tables’ so that the pampered would need to play THEIR entire lifetime out living in the reality that severe abuse survivors know with their every breath.
And the survivors? What would we survivors know of living the truly, from-birth pampered life even if someone were to suddenly give us one?
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My case in point if ye be of those who can make this gigantic leap! Nature has mirrored the experience of those whose body was built in ONE kind of world ONE way — and not the other way — permanently.
Pampered-from-birth (‘good enough’) people have a body that knows that reality. Not pampered-from-birth people have a body that knows that reality.
Nature and its ways cares nothing for the individual personal comfort zone of anyone. Nature only TRULY cares that a species does what it needs to do to ‘continue on being’. This entire array of possible body building options that happens in direct response to either the pampered world that raised us or to the not pampered one is — and I am going to the Bigger Picture here — meant to accomplish this ‘continue on being’ by creating bodies that THEMSELVES signal-convey the kind of world that built the person who lives in it.
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So we could turn another table of laid-out card hands here so that Nature received the personalized individual’s perspective on the experience of being alive and the individual people received the hands that clearly expresses what Nature cares about, intends and accomplishes.
How I am in the world, having been raised in a not pampered infant-childhood directly signals to others (who could detect and understand these signals) exactly what the condition of my early world was like — because those conditions built me to be the way that I am.
Jump to the peacock’s tail. A brilliant, resplendent, gorgeous and healthy peacock tail is simply a signal and a sign that the experiences of that bird happened in an environment rich in resources. The tail has nothing PERSONAL to do with the peacock at all!
Another peacock with a pitifully shabby, dull and sickly looking tail is simply signaling to its hoped-for mates that this bird was not pampered in a world of plenty.
Which peacock’s tail is going to attract which kind of mating partner?
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Well, as the ‘superior species’ we don’t like to be pared down to our actual size so that we can not only recognize but also accept that HOW we are in the world (based on the conditions of the world that formed us) does exactly the same thing. HOW we is a signal that expresses the NOT personal reality of THE CONDITIONS OF THE WORLD and actually, as Nature intends, doesn’t have much to do at all with our personal wishes or concerns as individuals.
So again I will say when you read particularly the last paragraphs of Dr. Martin and Fellow’s paper here *SYMTPOMS: 120909 Scan of Teicher’s Research – Trauma Altered Development Paper you are reading a description of the MISMATCH that happens when not pampered people are born into a not pampered world and at the end of their earliest years are hatched out into a pampered one!
The problem is this mismatch. The problems we endure as individual severe early abuse survivors IS THIS MISMATCH.
If pampered people were the only ones who lived in a pampered world — OK. If not pampered people were the only ones who lived in a not pampered world — OK.
How can I say OK to a resource-scarce and traumatizing world? Think about what our species had to go through so that we could be here asking that question. Our species was able to experience pampering ONLY under conditions of plentiful resources. When times were really, really tough, we were able to use an INNER resource that nature has NEVER let us lose: We contain within our very young body the ability to ADAPTIVELY AND FLEXIBLY adjust to the conditions of the world we are born into.
Then we are able to move forward in time in a not pampered body — surviving — continuing on as individual representatives of our species — into a future where resources were better. THEN the future generations could adaptively and flexibly adjust to these more pampered conditions — and babies could grow a body that reflected those improved conditions.
In other words, as I write this, I understand that ‘the tables’ are DESIGNED to turn. Without that ability to adjust and adapt flexibly we would not have had the resilience we needed to survive — not as a species, not as individuals.
We need to understand the bigger picture so that we can depersonalize the facts. Pampered people do not need to take offense when someone points out the truth of the benefits they received from a resource-rich environment from the time they were born.
AND not pampered people need to be FREE to be people who are not condemned and judged for the fact that our body did EXACTLY THE SAME THING that pampered people’s did: Adjusted in development to the conditions of OUR environment — which happened to be a resource-scarce one.
If our proverbial turning table were laden on one side with rich and nutritious food an on the other side tree bark and bugs — and THEN this table were to be turned so that pampered and not pampered people had to consume a diet they were not familiar with — my points here in this post might be a little easier — or tougher — to swallow.
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(Of course, I suppose ALL the female peacocks would go for the prettier tale, and in this example of female selection, who wins? I don’t know…… What I do know is that this version of a mate selection process is about finding who came from the richest world that had the best resources — and who got them.)
As I began my re-search over six years ago in my desperate need to find information about how what had happened to me during my abusive childhood was affecting my adult life, I began to find the ‘bits and pieces’ of truth that eventually I was able to fit together into the bigger picture that I live with today.
The more I read about how trauma in infancy-toddlerhood changes development the more hopeless I felt. All I could interpret from the facts I read was DAMAGE! DAMAGE! DAMAGE!
Finally I stumbled over the paper you will find scanned at this link:
The proverbial light went on, and suddenly all thoughts about my being DAMAGED by the severe abuse I experienced from birth turned into thoughts about how I was a CHANGED being!
Yet I still believe that I carry my own internal light into my continued personal study about the topic of abuse-caused early trauma altered development. Although there certainly were years during my own ‘recovery’ attempts that began in 1980 where I bought and swallowed all the various self-help ideas about ‘what was wrong with me’, I now know looking back that while I might have put these thoughts in my mouth and chewed on them — they didn’t taste good and they didn’t taste right.
Something within me knew better — and knew that something very critical was missing from all the ‘recovery’ information I could find. The information I found didn’t feel right deep at my core.
Even though the attachment and developmental neuroscience information that I have most recently studied certainly applies and is a far better fit, I still don’t 100% swallow it?
Why? Because at my core I value myself too much to eat, chew, swallow and digest ANY information that simply tells me I am damaged, changed in such a way that I ended up ‘mentally ill’ or suffering from pathology, or am in any way FLAWED as a being due to the trauma altered development I was FORCED to go through as my body adapted from birth to a malevolent, traumatic and extremely toxic interpersonal world.
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Although my discovery of Dr. Martin Teicher’s writings elevated my re-search to a platform above writings that did nothing but highlight ‘damage’ that happens from infant-child abuse, I still have always known SOMETHING IS STILL MISSING! Even though Teicher seemed to see ‘the bigger picture’, I knew instinctively there is a bigger picture still.
Teicher’s work (and his fellows’) cannot be disputed as it stands, but I don’t believe it goes far enough that it can truly serve those of us who have experienced early trauma altered development through severe abuse so that we ended up with an ‘evolutionarily altered brain’ such as his work describes.
It is NOT ‘just’ our brain that changed. Not in my thinking. It is our ENTIRE BODY. All of it down to our innermost molecule and genetic operation including our entire nervous system and our immune system (I still believe future research will find that it was our immune system that instigated our trauma altered development from the beginning).
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO US AS SURVIVORS TO BE AN ‘EVOLUTIONARILY ALTERED BEING’?
I will NOT buy it that we are ‘mentally ill’ or ‘damaged’ or ‘suffering from pathology’ SIMPLY because we are these beings.
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Most simply put I, as the survivor I am, quite simply NOW live post-childhood in a world that does not belong to me, nor I to it.
Teicher’s paper (as you will find it at the link above) might put in a kingpin for true understanding of who-how we are as survivors, but his information is ONLY the beginning.
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As I write this post following the post immediately preceding this one, I think about the DIFFERENT world I would probably fit into a whole lot better than I do this one.
If I could locate people whose body formed in similar ways that mine did, I could discuss this topic on its most REAL and important level. For starters, my guess is that as a whole we are far less egotistical, self-centered, self-possessed, self-righteous, arrogant, greedy and selfish than are many others who live in ‘that other world’.
We survivors could get together and talk about ‘them’ from our point of view with the information that OUR body tells us and come up with conclusions that very few in ‘that’ world would want to hear — I guarantee it!
If we could escape together from our quarantine in the ‘pathological’ pantry, we could discover our own wisdom — and what I suspect we would find as a group is that we are very closely connected in our experience (and in our body) to our specie’s ancestors — the Most Ancient Ones who lived in a world and during a time when most certainly nobody assumed anyone was ‘safe and secure’ for very long!
THOSE Most Ancient Ones? I feel proud to think that I have developed in such a way that I could share along with them what OUR reality is like.
That we as survivors, and WE as the Most Ancient Ones were NEVER a part of the PAMPERED group does NOT make us damaged, ill or pathological! In fact, people from ‘that’ world might find us downright frightening (Are they envious of us?) in our power, our strength, our resilience, our toughness, our determination, our courage and our endurance. We know things that PAMPERED people are not likely to know in their lifetime — and what WE know is built into our body down to our essential core.
So what if we experience life differently, remember differently, gather different information and process it differently than those who have always lived in ‘that’ world?
Somebody needs to expand their thinking, and I am not at all sure that it is the severe abuse survivors that most need to do this. Every attitude that belittles us, judges us, criticizes us, condemns us and does NOT value, honor and respect not only WHO we are as beings in the world but HOW we are beings in the world is a victim of their own ignorance, bias, stereotyping, prejudice and superstition.
IN FACT, we severe infant-child abuse survivors are probably the closest to being physiological SUPERHEROES as our current generations of humans are ever going to know!
The problem seems to be for me that I can’t find the boat with my own kind on it. I am left feeling pretty darned alone with this information. Those superhero ancestors of ours that were tough enough to endure so that our species is still here are pretty silent these days! But what they knew we know — how to endure the unendurable to the end of our days.
That’s not a trivial project, folks! Infant-child abuse survivors share with our Most Ancient ancestors the most important piece of information any living being can have. In spite of all the distractions one might encounter along life’s way only one single thing matters: Keep moving forward — no matter what!
So, I will no longer take a bite of, put into my mouth (mind), chew on, nor swallow any information about myself (self-help or not) that in any way discounts not only WHO I am, but HOW I am in the world. I will no longer believe that I am flawed, damaged, mentally ill or pathological because I am not like the Pampered People are. I will not try to change myself to be more like them just because they determine that I need to.
I WILL attempt to learn as much as I can about myself so that I can empower myself to be a better me living a better life. The Pampered People can obviously also do what they want to do, but I now understand that what they know, how they know it, what they believe, and how they might judge me has NOTHING to do with me — and it never did.
We survivors are no more pity-able or pathetic than our Most Ancient Ancestors were — and THIS thought does NOT contribute to my sadness — not even one single, tiny bit! Hooray!
As I sit outside in this morning’s sunshine and look at the huge lump of still-drying adobe that marks where the oleanders are entombed, encased and enshrined (and hopefully approaching their death) I have the strangest sense: “Who put that thing there? Were there ever giant oleanders stretched out over this piece of ground, or were they there only in my imagination?”
If I didn’t know what I now know about myself perhaps I wouldn’t even notice how I FEEL today — along with my thoughts in my mind that accompany how I feel. And I sure wouldn’t have any idea in my mind what these thoughts mean and where they come from.
When I write about what the self-help books never told me, when I write about what I was never told about how and why being in a body in this lifetime has always been difficult for me, I am talking about ‘these kinds of things’.
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I woke this morning with a determination that I am NOT going to remain at the dead end ‘nose against the wall’ hope-less state that I found myself in yesterday. I want to move forward. At least during the terror, trauma and deprivation of my 18 year childhood I WAS able to access at least that one idea (although never consciously): “Being alive means that I am moving forward in time, always forward.”
So what does forward mean to me on this glorious, still sunny morning? What thoughts can I access today that might help me keep my terrible underlying-overlying, overwhelming perpetual sadness at bay? What can I tell myself today in my mind that represents something I learned and am able to learn today that did not come from any therapist or self-help book?
Two words appeared in my mind: TRANSITIONAL OBJECTS
So I did a quick Google search, adding ‘child abuse’ along the way. Here are three links I came up with but there are plenty there online for exploration:
“I believe that transitional objects are indeed very important to a child’s emotional development. These objects help the child deal with transitions such as the transition from wakefulness to sleep and transition from being with parents to being with a baby-sitter. Security objects are usually very soft and warm. They can be items such as a blanket, cloth diaper, stuffed animal, or even a favorite pillowcase. Children’s transitional objects are usually something that reminds them of their parents.”
“Children’s attachment to transitional objects is based on unique identity and not the properties or kind of the object. This reasoning is an early and spontaneous example of the same value that adults place of sentimental possessions.”
As you might take a look for yourself in an online search about this topic, notice words like ‘self soothing’, transition between states and experiences, ‘sentimental’ and of course ATTACHMENT.
Who in God’s Green Acres was there for me to BE ATTACHED TO? Certainly NOT my mother — who was the last person on this green and blue earth that ever did anything but traumatize me.
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Looking at Websters online database I see that SENSE and SENTIMENT share the same roots. As I think about how my body formed from birth in a malevolent environment, I know that way before I had the ability to think in literal thoughts my body-self knew without a doubt THROUGH THE SENSES OF MY BODY that I was NOT safe and secure in the world.
So to whom was I EVER going to form a safe and secure attachment to so that any possible physical ‘transitional object’ was going to help me sooth myself?
Nobody.
The conditions of malevolence that my body formed in — as I repeat again — built into the circuitry-wiring-patterns of my brain’s neuronal structures and in my body the ABSENCE of the ability to not only FEEL safe and secure in the world, but also the absence of a PERSON (other than my 14-month-older baby brother) to be safely and securely attached to.
THIS FACT MATTERS!
This fact changes how I am in the world.
When I wake this morning and see that giant lump of drying adobe where the old sprawling oleanders stood a week ago, it is ONLY within my conscious MIND that I can connect not only the fact that the oleanders once existed, that days of work were required to transition those plants into a lump of adobe, but most importantly THAT I, LINDA, MADE THIS CHANGE UPON THE PLANET.
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What is this all about? I lack the ability to FEEL in the circuitry of my body-brain that I had a damn thing to do with the changes that happened in my yard — any of them.
This means to me that my entire home and yard are my CURRENT TRANSITIONAL OBJECTS. I walk around outside and as I physically SEE (with my senses) the changes that have happened there and try to physically form a ‘feeling felt’ connection within my own self NOT ONLY that I am in this body, but AM this body doing the walking — and that I have been ‘here’ all along making these changes.
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When I write about the consequences especially of infant-toddler abuse as they impact development, I am talking about all of these kinds of experiences of having one’s own life experiences.
I encourage readers of this blog to spend some time with a Google search investigating what I am describing using terms such as ‘attachment feeling felt’, and ‘attachment child abuse feeling felt’.
During early infant developmental stages use of transitional objects is connected to not only the ‘feeling felt’ of SELF to others, but also the ‘feeling felt’ the SELF has TO OTHERS. If an infant never is given what it needs to FEEL FELT in the world so that in response it can ALSO feel other people in the world, an entirely different FEELING pattern is built into the infant’s body-brain.
This does NOT mean such survivors are ‘mentally ill’ because we cannot access this very real kind of FEELING information. We never got it built into us in the first place which gave us a CHANGED and DIFFERENT body.
If we are going to search realistically for the structural underpinnings of dissociation, depersonalization and derealization — along with an over or under active stress response system that feeds into depression and posttraumatic stress disorder, we need to be REALISTIC in our thinking — yes, within our mind.
“The mind emerges from the activity of the brain, whose structure and function are directly shaped by interpersonal experience.”
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How our brain is built, along with the body that feeds information to the brain, are directly guided in their fundamental development by the kinds of early caregiver interactions an infant has.
SO, as I try to understand my ACTUAL experience of being a self with a mind in a body in my lifetime in this world, I MUST go back and learn as much as I can about how what happened to me from birth changed how I am in the world.
Yes, I HATE how I am now. There is NOTHING redeeming whatsoever about what was stolen from me! How can I celebrate that I cannot remember in any ‘feeling felt’ way that I was the person who made ALL the changes not only in my yard, but over the course of my entire adult life?
I can’t FEEL myself transitioning along through moments of time unless I TRY to — which is NOT the same thing as actually being able to FEEL something.
My inability to feel connected to my own self in a body in my life of course impacts all of my human relationships, as well. NO PERSON EVER ACTUALLY FEELS REAL TO ME. How could they? The only version of a human being that I can FEEL FELT with is within the range of early development similar to what my baby brother was when I was born. He was the only human being who consistently looked into my eyes, talked with me directly (when he was old enough to have words), touched me gently with love, and recognized my ACTUAL existence.
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Adult Reactive Attachment Disorder. What that means to me is that because the feeling of ‘feeling felt’ and of ‘feeling myself in my own life’ was NOT built into my body-brain, ALL I can do is react to what happens in my life AS THINGS HAPPEN. I can factually remember things (as I could during my childhood) but I could not feel myself as a self having experiences then, and I cannot actually do it now.
Therefore there is no possible way for me to FEEL connected on the most fundamental physiologically-wired way. I have to consciously work toward how I think I imagine experiences MIGHT BE LIKE for nearly all other human beings (the ‘upper 95%) who did not receive the horrendous malevolent treatment I did from birth.
No wonder I fight this sadness! No wonder I have great difficulties when people who are important to me are not within my immediate physical range of experience. I missed the opportunity to experience nearly every single positive early attachment building (body-nervous system-brain-mind-self) experience that would have led to my having an entirely different experience of myself in my life — NOW!
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Because I know every day more clearly how right I am about how trauma changes early development, hence changes the body we live in for the rest of our life — I KNOW there is no self-help book out there that tells us what these changes are, how they affect everything we experience in our life, and what it all means to us.
‘They’ can tell us until we are all blue in the face about this self-help clue/tip or another one, but nobody EVER told me I receive different information in the world, in a different way and process it differently — and because my experience was so ‘unique’ in its severity I might be one of the very, very few ‘lay people’ who could POSSIBLY have come to figure this out!
Yet I don’t believe that even all the attachment experts and developmental neuroscientists have figured out either because they are all divisional in what they know according to which separate Ivory Tower they operate from within.
In my particular case I can fit together what these experts have found out together into a single picture because I LIVE what they describe. I do NOT agree with ANY OF THEM that who and how I am in the world is one single bit PATHOLOGICAL.
I (and other survivors like me) am simply a living example of what a trauma altered development changed being is like and how WE experience life!
How many people can erase the awareness of pain from a bone break with their mind? How many people can make a toothache disappear with their mind? Does our society call these people ‘mentally ill’ because their pain is real and their mind is not doing the trick of changing their condition — for the better?
I almost feel like the fog is clearing that I have lived in blind all of my life. I keep thinking today, “How would my life as an adult turned out differently if anyone had EVER told me along my life’s pathway what I know now more clearly every passing day to be true?
I can feel my terrible, terrible sadness today. I feel weighted by it physically. Moving is difficult as if my being is so heavy. It’s a beautiful clear, sunny, warm, breezy day. I am working outside. I sit in the sun when I want to and gaze south over the Mexican wall at the tall trees over there swaying, at the tall mountain behind them — gorgeous!
I have absolutely NO reason to feel sad in my body today. Yet I am.
This is NOT depression! This is Substance P I bet, telling my body that pain is present — and has been since I was born.
I wish there was some kind of surgery that could be done to remove this sadness. I pay close attention to my body — and to my mind — as this sadness permeates my life. How would I feel if THIS feeling were GONE? Can I make it disappear and vanish WITH MY MIND? Nope.
I live with this sadness, in spite of this sadness — which I believe is at the set point of my nervous system. If someone had told me as a young adult that I would be sad all of my life — and to be aware (beware!) that every single choice and decision I was going to make in my life would be a REACTION to the pain of this sadness — could I have learned a long time ago how to consciously construct my choices and decisions to better insure a LESSENING of this chronic sadness?
I don’t know. I do know the body-brain built during the first year of life forms permanent connections that cannot be changed. It is also true that the cortical ‘higher thinking’ region of our brain is still maturing until age 25-30. Yet it is ALSO true that severe child abuse can make this brain region atrophy early (see Dr. Martin Teicher’s work) so that it never develops ‘on schedule’ or ‘correctly’ at all!
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I would NOT call what I live with a mental illness anymore than I would call a broken bone or a toothache a mental illness. What I feel is equally physiologically present IN MY BODY!
What I am beginning to think, though, is that IF everything I ever do is really in reaction to the pain of sadness — then I have an adult version of a Reactive Attachment Disorder (do a Google search on adult reactive attachment disorder – fascinating reading).
This is, in my thinking, a very real physiological-biological REALITY that has very, very little to do with the MIND. When I read blog comments by readers that use the worn-out terminology all the self-help books preach, I want to SHOUT “IT IS IN OUR BODY!!!” All of the difficulties we experience are NOT IN OUR MIND. Our MIND IS NOT SICK. We live in a trauma changed body from the infant-child abuse we experienced — and how we feel in our body IS THE CONSEQUENCE.
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In my thinking quieting my life and myself as much as possible — a form of eliminating the variables as a scientist would do in an experiment — and then paying the closest attention possible to how my body FEELS and what it tells me I will learn more than any self-help book will ever be able to tell me about ME and my experience.
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I think about a television set that was built in its factory-of-origin so that it over-shows one of the three primary colors ALL of the time unless the watcher manually adjusts the color ranges every time the television is turned on.
Too much red, or yellow, or blue — similar to infant-child abuse survivors whose nervous system was formed under the stress of trauma so that peace and calm is not their set point at center. Instead they have too much anger, too much fear, or too much sadness at center.
I don’t have to question where my center set point lies. I feel it, and it’s my guess that all survivors can detect their set point in one of these three powerful survival-based emotional arenas.
Because our body reacts to what we do (the people we are around for example) we can ‘lift ourselves’ away from our center set point on occasion. But in my thinking we have a body built under so much stress, with so little safety, security, peace, calm and happiness when we were little that we ARE IN THE HOLE.
Just to escape the chronic nature of the emotion that is our center set point requires huge input. We might just escape our central feeling — but to get to PEACE and CALM — and from there to HAPPY? HUGE input is needed!
And we do NOT stay in the peaceful or happy place once we are not in contact with whatever/whomever HELPED us out of our hole temporarily because we are REACTING to external rather than internal conditions.
Again, this is not a ‘mentally ill’ condition. It is body-based in our physiology. Although I am nothing like an expert, I FEEL the truth of what I say.
Adequate early caregiver interactions in a safe and secure environment transmit to the infant’s growing body-nervous system-brain the ability to grow into itself a drastically reduced tendency to REACT to external stimulation and conditions. THAT state, as different as it is from that of severe infant-child abuse survivors, IS IN THEIR BODY-physiology, too!
All the self-help razmahtaz in the world can be confusing jibberish to early abuse survivors, more like dandelion fluff blowing in the wind than it is useful. What happened to us was not in our mind. It affected how our body developed. These trauma changes affected how our body FEELS every moment of our life except when we are reacting to the world around us — which creates temporary feeling changes that do not last.
I don’t HAVE any answers today other than STOP INFANT-CHILD ABUSE because it hurts for a lifetime! And don’t call us ‘mentally ill’ because we FEEL the consequences of this hurt for a lifetime. What we endured built itself into us from the beginning of our lives and guess what? We cannot simply ‘get over it and move on’, ‘put our abusive childhoods in the past’, ‘forget our past’, or magically ‘forgive our abusers’ so that we will be ‘better’ and more like ‘normal people’.
It became very clear to me as I replied to the comments that what I do with my work out in my yard is not only ‘gardening therapy’ for me, it is an expression of myself in an art form: Adobe.
Today completes the basic work on destroying these two oleanders in my yard (see: +MY TOXIC MOTHER AND THE OLEANDER). What interests me about my thinking in response to today’s comments is the similarity I see between this oleander project and my severe infant-child abuse survivorship: While I do not believe in ‘getting over it and moving on’, ‘putting our abusive childhoods in the past’, ‘forgetting our past’, ‘leaving our abusive childhoods behind’, etc., I do believe in positive change.
I am reminded of the posts I wrote some time ago in which I described my realization that my mother as the abuser and my father as her enabler would have deserved a minimum jail sentence each of 14,500 years for what they did to me — and that was figured using the tip of the iceberg and vastly minimizing my mother’s attacks on me over the 18 years of my childhood.
Crimes against a child that could have/should have resulted in 14,500 years of incarceration is NOT something I can even conceive of resolving for myself with ‘forgiveness’.
This does not mean that I simply accept what happened and how I am today as a result of it mildly! Nope! Not this woman!
So, my latest project has been teaching me how I understand that a severe infant-child abuse survivor can emerge from their earliest years being an extremely TOXIC person — or NOT! Nobody is perfect, but my mother didn’t earn her 14,500 year jail term assessment from me by simply being a little bit flawed. Nope!
So — my mother and the metaphor of the deadly poisonous oleander.
I would — and I am serious! Need a bulldozer in this yard to remove the roots of these two hundred year old oleanders — or dynamite. I have no access to either — and I have no possible way to remove those roots.
Parallel: I have no way to remove the damage my mother did to me through her mentally ill devastating abuse of me. The ‘damage’ was built right into my developing body-brain from birth, as I describe so many times on this blog.
But, I can do the best I can to pare all of it down — put boundaries around what was ‘her’ and what was ‘me’ — and most importantly I can CONTAIN and QUARANTINE the toxic poison to minimize what is affecting me ever day — to the best of my ability.
This is, to me most certainly NOT about forgiveness. This is about continuing to survive the best way that I can.
SOOOOOO…… Here are the latest pictures, including one from the previous post showing the start of this project:
Starting to hack down the two oleandersDown to the stumps. All surrounding ground that these plants have polluted is toxic -- I will never be able to grow anything edible in this groundWithout a chainsaw this is as low as I could cut the stumpsOver the fence into 'no man's land' (Mexican American wall/fences behind the pile) - no way does this picture show the extent of the PILE of scrap I threw into QUARANTINE!The most toxic thing I had around to use as a weapon against these plants was LIME -- 50 pounds dumped into the ball of stumps (each), whole mess contained within dried adobe blocks -- and salt thrown on tho I wish I had MOREI felt badly for all the bugs that crawled up out of the soil once the lime was on, so I put these sticks up as bug escape routes -- only the 'smartest' survived, which included spiders but only a few beetlesHere I started covering up stumps with a heavy cement mix of wet adobe mud -- notice the delightfully sickly green the stumps turned with the lime -- YAY!Layers of cement-adobe, sandwiched with slabs of broken cement from the back of the yard over the stumpsEach wet adobe block weighs 50 pounds (35 pounds dry), each block contains nearly 5 gallons of soilEnd of the day today, sunset -- filled UP!I will need to put another layer down the center over the stumps --
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I WILL make something beautiful out of the mess! I hope the height of this will be right for bench around the outside — place to put flower pots down the center — I can plant flowers in this toxic soil — I hope to find the money over time to put up a TALL privacy fence along my neighbor’s chain link — the oleander did give some privacy, but at way too high a price!
And every moment I have worked on this project I have thought about my mother and her toxic abuse. I can’t change what she did to me, but I sure can work to chop it all down to size (perspective-gaining), contain it, quarantine as much toxic parts as possible, and BURY THE HELL out of the mother I have NEVER yet been able to feel ANGER toward. I hope I am moving in that direction – so I can learn what anger has to teach me and move on from THAT — which is possible — and mine to do!
I must admit I am starting a post at the same time I have no clear idea what I am going to say. When these writing and thinking moments happen for me I suspect they are in part a result of the damage done to both of my brain hemispheres during early traumatized development, and due also to the changes that happened to the development of the corpus collosum part of my brain that is supposed to transmit information between my left and right brain regions.
I apologize if my writing process creates posts that are difficult to read because they are not thought out clearly before hand, and are therefore not ‘organized and oriented’ in a straight, linear, usual-coherent manner. I am simply documenting who I am and how I am as a survivor of severe infant-child abuse. How I write and what I write is a reflection of what early trauma did to change both of these vital states — WHO I am AND HOW I am in the world.
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On some level I know I want to talk about the ‘choices’ a newborn infant begins to make in relationship to its earliest caregivers. It is a know fact that an infant can form safe and secure attachment with one or more of its earliest caregivers at the same time it is forming unsafe and insecure attachment with one or more other of its earliest caregivers.
I am thinking about that know fact this morning, especially after having wended my way through yesterday’s long posts about avoidant-dismissive attachment — and in light of all the other posts I have written on this blog about infant attachment patterns and how they form the body-nervous system (NS)-brain-mind-self of a developing infant — that last a lifetime.
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So exactly WHAT does happen, and how is it possible, and what are the long-range physiological consequences for an infant who is abused, maltreated and traumatized by one or more of its earliest caregivers — at the same time it is treated perfectly well by someone else? What kind of BODY does that infant form?
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I began my thoughts this morning thinking about my current job of trying to control and manage the hundred year old oleander bushes in my back yard.
I can't even show you the top of this massive mess it has grown so tall over its unkempt years of existenceThick, twisted, unruly and just plain UGLY!Today will be my 3rd day of oleander attack. I have no chain saw, so working on the lower stump area is difficult to do right or the way I want to
There are two oleander plants in this mess. This one on the south side is the pink bloomer. As I eliminate the growth of this one, I can begin to see the separate clump that is the white bloomer to the north of this one.
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What is the connection between my thoughts and images about this oleander, its condition and human infant attachment patterns?
Let me write the words so I can know…..
It took me two days of attack on this plant before I bothered myself to search online for information about the nature of its toxicity.
I read last night that ALL parts of this plant are poisonous to humans and animals. Consumption of three of its leaves will kill a small child. Not only that, but even the dust around the plant is poisonous. Its leaves can be carefully (and separately) composted and used as mulch, but even that is risky business. It cannot be burned.
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This leads me to think about how I react differently to this plant than I do to all others in my yard. The more information I gain about the poisonous nature of oleanders the more I wish it had never been planted in this yard in the first place. Only dynamite or a bulldozer could possibly remove these two plants and their massive roots.
How would I feel and think about trying to manage these plants if I knew absolutely nothing about their toxicity?
Which makes me think about infants from birth: How does an infant KNOW the difference between its nontoxic earliest caregivers (so that it forms safe and secure attachments with them) and its toxic earliest caregivers (which the infant forms insecure attachments with)?
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Then I think about my own life experience from birth. I think about the pictures I found in my baby book. (see
I realize as I am writing that I have far too many disconnected thoughts related to the topic I am addressing. My left brain hemisphere is jumping up and down in its seat yelling at me, “Pick me! Pick me! I know the answer!”
At the same time my right brain hemisphere is quietly beginning to build its momentum in its own way: “If you don’t listen to me I am going to begin to ROAR, and believe me, you don’t want THAT to happen!”
Interesting. The left brain makes one kind of noise within me at the same time the right brain threatens to hijack my BODY and ALL of my attention if I don’t hear what it has to say.
I have to consciously negotiate how I am going to move forward now. I need the left hemisphere’s ability to order, sequence, organize and verbalize. Yet at the same time it is my right brain that is deeply and fundamentally connected to ALL of my experience as my memory of being alive has accumulated that information in my body’s memories.
Hum…….
How to proceed?
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An infant has no choice about who it is born to. It has no choice either about who its first contact with members of our human species are, or about how those beings treat it. So how can it form a wide variety and range of differing attachment patterns appropriate to how each of these beings treat it and interact with it?
This is not a meaningless topic. These earliest beings are responsible for the building of the entire body-being of the infant that it will use to process its self in its world for the rest of its life.
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And then there is the oleander, the toxic, deadly poisonous overgrown hideous out-of-control oleander that is stretching its branches out in every possible direction from its very old roots that are equally entrenched in the earth where somebody planted it/them.
My right hemisphere knows perfectly well what needs to be said about the difference between safe and toxic interactions based on either on the ‘safe-ability’ or the ‘toxic ability’ of who-what anyone interacts with. But my right hemisphere alone does NOT have the power to sort out what it knows and make that information coherent.
So, left brain, what do YOU know?
Quiet……
Listen to my body because my left brain IS a part of my body….
I am waiting……
Here comes words……..
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From the time an infant is born all of the channels of its being are open to experience.
Depending on the nature of these experiences the infant will respond according to its biological underpinnings.
(My right brain is beginning its roar. It wants some pictures because it thrives on images.)
My first and primary attachment beings -- mother, father, 14-month old brotherNote especially top right picture of my father his his first daughter -- me -- Linda. Note the pride and joy on his age 25 face. I could have safely and securely attached to him -- if Mildred had let me.
Great pictures of Mother Mildred playing the role of the proud and loving mother — of the infant sent by the devil to kill her during her breach birthing.
Left brain: “Perhaps everyone could say that the reason why Grandmother Bea, Uncle Charlie and Aunt Carolyn do not appear in one single picture in your baby book is because the pictures had to be cropped so that they could fit within the pages of your baby book.”
Right brain: “We ALL know this isn’t true. Mildred intentionally, though we do not know whether consciously or not, removed all pictures of everyone — her mother and her brother and his wife — from YOUR book (OUR book) because those people were HER attachment beings and there was — as you well learned over the next 18 years of your life — no POSSIBLE way that YOU could force her to share HER beings with you!”
“The only reason pictures of your father and your brother are in your baby book is that Mildred could not ‘politically’ eliminate them and still appear publicly as the perfect mother she was pretending to be.”
“The truth of Mildred’s loathing of YOU lies in a few of its words, in the spaces within those words and lines, and in what is missing in this book including its ripped out and absent pages. As you and all your siblings know eventually the entire book itself ‘went missing’ as your mother denied that ever existed at all, to be discovered only within her storage-locker belongings after her death.”
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“OK,” I ask both of these brain hemispheres. “And what is your point EXACTLY?”
Left brain: “While it is a given biological fact that an infant can from the time of its birth form attachment patterns in resonance with the attachment patterns that exist within its caregivers, your mother all but eliminated all opportunities for you as an infant to experience any possible attachment with anyone else but her.”
“Your mother controlled all access to the baby that was you as much as was humanly — inhumanly — possible. You therefore experience a very particular universe that you must admit was unique. It is NOT normal for any infant to be sequestered away in a ‘chamber’ beyond the reach of only its mother.”
Right brain: “You need to know (I was interrupted by my neighbor’s daughter knocking on my door to borrow shortening to make the Mayan chocolate her teacher gave her a recipe for. I found an unopened block of yellow butter flavored Crisco for her (after making certain that she really didn’t want butter) and showed her how to measure it, and gave her enough to use again later — along with a Ziploc bag to store it in. What was my thought??? It is gone. I have no earthly clue what my right brain was about to say and I doubt that I ever will know now exactly…. I am disorganized and disoriented — again.)
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I want to say something here that I thought while I was outside before I ever started to write this post.
HEALING
What I believe most leads to our healing
Severe infant abuse survivors need to pay very close and detailed attention to figure out not so much WHO we are (against popular opinion) but HOW we are in the world.
Our ability to know WHO we are has been contaminated by the trauma altered changes in our development that radically changed HOW we are. We live in and with a trauma altered body that receives DIFFERENT information than ‘normals’ do — receives this different information DIFFERENTLY — and processes all of this information DIFFERENTLY, as well.
What I just now experienced is the kind of evidence I can now recognize for myself, and until I became able to KNOW what I now know about HOW I am in the world I could not begin to discover WHO I am.
The girl suddenly knocking at my door came through to me as a shock wave that entirely disrupted my being in the world. My ‘systems’ do not tolerate sudden interruptions and change well. I do not (because my trauma altered body CANNOT) smoothly transition between many types of ongoing experience.
I continually am forced to cope with my own experience as it CHANGES ME during change. I — my own ongoing experience of being a self in the world — is NOT the constant I strongly suspect it is for ‘normal’ people. Changes that happen in the world I live in CHANGE ME.
Who I now am post-girl at the door is NOT the same me that I was pre-girl knocking at the door.
Which now means my direction has changed. I, as a being, have been shifted in the current of life-in-the-world and I cannot RETURN to who-how I was before the knock.
Which now means my thoughts have been altered in such a way that I need to make note again of the Bell Curve I mentioned in a recent post.
This is important to me because I continually struggle with knowing that in many, many ways my experience of abuse from birth was SO MUCH ‘definitely more than others’ experience that I fear what I have to say will mean absolutely NOTHING to other people.
As my mother controlled access of other people to me from my birth, as surely as she controlled their appearance in my baby book, she made as absolutely certain as she possibly could that trauma would change the course of development all aspects of my body would take — thus ensuring in the end that I am essentially ALONE in my experience.
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After ‘the knock’ I returned outside to sit in the cool late fall breeze and stare at the mess of the oleander. “That is your mother,” I heard in my thoughts.
As an infant (and throughout most of the next 18 years) I was left to interact as solely as my mother could arrange with ONLY HER and her malevolent psychosis. I ONLY had the toxic, deadly poisonous out-of-control gigantic oleander to experience my own reality with.
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Coming back to far more ordinary and normal infant experience, those infants will form within their own body-brains a variety of attachment patterns that match the ones that exist within their earliest caregivers.
Research is discovering that WHEN and IF a little person is being treated abusively by someone, but at the same time ALSO DOES have someone to form attachments with that are NOT unsafe, insecure and toxic, many genetic combinations that lead to long term detrimental adult health (including mental health) problems DO NOT GET ACTIVATED.
The kind of MAIN attachment system, secure or some version of insecure attachment system, happens NOT because of ANY limitation within an infant itself. What attachment system primarily builds all aspects of our body-brain-mind-self is DUE TO what kind of beings interacted with us during our most critical earliest developmental stages.
This is, to me, a critically important point!
An infant cannot choose to form a safe and secure attachment with an early caregiver who does not have one!
An infant cannot choose to form an unsafe and insecure attachment with an early caregiver who does not have one!
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Left brain back online: “It seems that your mother instinctively knew this fact. The only way that she — and therefore the dictates of biological development could ensure that you received the MOST of what was toxic to you and the LEAST of what was good for you was to eliminate your contact with other people.”
DAMN! My mother, Mildred was SO GOOD at being SO BAD!
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Nobody wants to talk about what it is like to be placed alone in isolation, in solitary confinement as the prisoner of a monster mother from birth and throughout another 18 years.
I was fortunate at least that mother Mildred had enough grasp on ‘the real world’ to know that on certain occasions she was forced to PRETEND around others that an entirely different (wonderful) reality existed that had Linda in it.
I believe that her efforts to form ‘Linda’s baby book’ in a right and publicly acceptable (and applaud-able) fashion happened because she TRIED to pretend ‘at least this much’ about herself and her daughter – me. But in the end she could not even really pull that effort off — hence the baby book was hidden away while she told ALL of her children that it never existed at all.
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Which leads me off on a side-thinking tangent of something else that came into my mind this morning. All the time I was reading and trying to comprehend and learn from the writings particularly of developmental neuroscientist Dr. Allan Schore, such as Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self/Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self, I struggled with his conclusions that being raised by a ‘frightening mother’ has the same severely detrimental effects as being raised by a ‘frightened mother’.
I KNOW what a frightening mother can do! But a frightened mother — just as damaging? How can this possibly be true – even when one of the world’s top developmental neuroscientists says it’s true?
This morning the awareness finally filtered through to me, after six years of processing information about how severe abuse changes an infant-child’s course of development, I FELT the reality that Schore described.
I mention this now because I believe it is connected to why my mother barred all others from having access to me. She was terrified that others would form an attachment to ME that would then threaten those others attachment to HER. I believe this is also why she did not actually destroy my baby book: She was ACTUALLY terrified of me.
But, going deeper than that….. Thanks to my interviews with my mother’s long term ‘friend’ I learned that long after I had left home, and in her older years my mother’s fixation with ‘the devil coming to get me’ still existed. Not only did the ‘devil come to get her’ through MY being born, an experience that put her dangerously close to death’s door (ME TOO!), but she wrote 666 on her hands and face in her OLDER years to keep the devil from coming to get her.
(What a strange twist of thinking it was that the only safety and security she could invent to keep the terrors of ‘the devil’ from consuming her was to PRETEND through this choice of signaling that she was ‘one of his’ anyway!)
Both hemispheres: “Linda, THAT is terror! That is fear beyond what any human should EVER know. THAT terror was built into your mother, no doubt, by someone who terrified, terrorized and abused her when she was very very young.”
That level of terror was FED TO ME even before I was born. It was fed to me while my mother and I were in labor. It was during THAT time that she-we were dying and struggling for our lives. It was during THAT time that her terror fundamentally broke her regarding me in a way that could not be mended. It was during THAT time that she attached her terror of ‘the devil coming to get me’ to little tiny beautiful perfect newly born ME.
Schore is then correct in saying that a mother who is afraid of her infant causes as much damage as does a mother who forces her infant to be afraid of her.
In my case, I received the DOUBLE poison!
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And, again, I am back to the oleander. There are TWO bushes out there. Both are equally toxic. It didn’t matter in the end if my mother was afraid of me ONLY, or if I as an infant was terrified of my mother ONLY.
In the end, although both directions of terror were fully active, toxic is toxic. Poison is poison.
It doesn’t matter if I am outside working with ONLY one oleander or if I am outside working with TWO or a thousand oleanders. Everything about every oleander is toxic, and to be safe anywhere around an oleander the fact of its deathly toxicity must be kept foremost in mind.
As for me in my yard, I cannot eliminate this species from my yard, but I can take precautions and I CAN force limitations to its existence. It is a fact I cannot remove that plant, just as I cannot remove the developmental changes that my mother forced into my body.
I plan to chop those two oleanders to within an inch of their lives. Then I plan to encircle the whole mess with an adobe wall that reaches high enough that new rapid growth from the bottom will be forced to stretch straight up (rather than sideways). I then plan to completely control the shoots that will clamber to take over my yard.
But even then I will be forced to deal with the continual cuttings that will come off of that plant in the future. I am fortunate to have a span of ‘no man’s land’ between my back fence and the Mexican-American border wall. I throw all that is toxic over that wall where it can rot its way into infinity for all I care and not bother me one single bit.
Dare I only wish that someone had done the same with my poisonous mother? If they HAD done so, I would have been spared a whole lot of trouble!
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NOTE: I just discovered something else out about the oleander. I found a branch lying so low that it grew horizontally out of the main root. Its tip ended up on the ground and grew into the soil along my neighbor’s fence line. Where it did this another oleander was formed!
Oh, great! Intergenerational transmission of toxicity!
I have the hose end laid there with water running to saturate the ground where the offspring grows. I WILL dig that one out and eliminate it!
I would rather not write this post. I would rather that abuse never happened to me in the first place — and I mean FIRST place because my mother’s severe abuse of me started when I was born – and lasted the 18 years of my childhood. But after what happened to me yesterday I convinced myself to write this today as a way to document what I know is simply a natural process, no matter how strange or impossible it seems to me if I think only with the mind of acceptable modern-day ‘logic’.
But what, really, is logic? The other day I was sitting outside enjoying the early morning’s first sunshine when I noticed a motley crew of grasshoppers beginning to hop around on a low growing plant six feet away from me. I hate grasshoppers, and this is the second generation to hatch out of their earth nest this year. So I stood up, intent on showing the three closest to me exactly how I feel about them.
At the instant I stood they froze their motion. As I lifted my foot and began to move toward them the three, in concert, each took a flying leap through the air six feet away from where they had been — each in a different direction away from me. How did they know to do that? Grasshopper logic.
Today I scooped a half eaten mouse onto the end of my shovel, not wanting to step on it later as it lay right in the middle of my walking path. Which half was eaten? The head half. What cat logic was this? Cats, who are designed to ONLY eat meat cannot live without the amino acid, taurine, which is found naturally in brains.
And these illustrations have WHAT to do with this post?
Well, I am writing about body logic, but not just about body logic. I am writing about body memory as we begin to accumulate it — yes — from the moment we are conceived (I believe DNA represents the body logic of the memories of our species).
MOST specifically I am talking about infant memory — and infant abuse memory and its retrieval. Possible? Yes.
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Researchers know that the area of our brain, the hippocampus, that is responsible for processing our real-time ongoing memories is one of only two brain regions that grows new brain cells (neurons). (The other one, the olfactory center, builds new neurons so we can remember new smells throughout our lifetime).
Researchers also know that these new neurons can not only be damaged through the presence of stress hormones as memories are being processed, they can also be heated up and be disintegrated and destroyed by them — yup FRIED — before the facts of a memory can be stored.
However, it is also a fact that another totally separate process stores the body-based information of our experience and hence has no chance of being exposed to this stress hormone neuron frying fiasco. So, absolutely, our body remembers everything that ever happens to us. As long as our body lives, those memories exist, and this time line of body memory storage includes our infancy.
I imagine that massage and other healing body workers already know much about body memory and its retrieval. I, however, am learning.
Experiences humans have before the age of one are called IMPLICIT memories, meaning they are stored not only IN the body, but MAKE the body-brain in may significant ways (as this blog describes). Supposedly those very early body-based memories are NOT EVER going to be in a form that we can consciously recall.
Memories that we CAN recall are called EXPLICIT memories, and include both SEMANTIC memories of the facts of our experience and AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL memories that we recall very much with our SELF as the ‘recipient’.
What I am documenting today is an infancy-arena memory that came to me in far more detail yesterday than what my LEFT brain wants to realize or accept. “Tough, left brain! This is very, very real. Deal with it!”
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The long-term experience of living with unresolved trauma includes actions our body-brain is taking that we might think we have no control over. Severe infant-child abuse survivors often experience, as a part of their trauma altered development, changes in how their hippocampus memory processing region gets formed (which is often smaller than normals’).
Another region that is often seriously affected in its development by early abuse is the region of the brain, the corpus collosum, which lies between our left and right brain hemispheres and transmits information between them for processing and integration (something that always occurs to some degree while we are sleeping). The long-term experience of EVER HAVING unresolved trauma within our body happens for us because the processing that needs to happen so that integration between our brain hemispheres of all experience does not fully happen. This leaves parts of our trauma experience inevitably ‘unresolved’.
Our right hemisphere, most active in its growth and formation, takes its biggest giant leap in development birth to age one. Along with forming its networks and circuits to process social attachment information this region is also establishing its connections between our body-based sensory experience and its translation into emotion. Infant early experience of course does not begin with words, but it does begin with feelings which are fed through the right brain from the body as they are stored in memory in both places.
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Enter what I am talking about.
In 1988 I had what was then one of my oddest experiences. For no obvious reason that I have ever figured out something must have triggered my first direct infant memory. I was walking across my wide deck on a warm May afternoon when suddenly as I lifted my right foot off the boards to take my next step this memory appeared — seemingly out of nowhere. I put my foot back down on the deck and froze there.
At the instant the memory came to me it did not come in words. It came as sensory-input information. Of course, immediately following this sensory memory the verbal description of this memory came:
I am a very small infant lying in a very large white crib. My point of vision was in perspective so that the bars of the crib were very wide apart and the top rim of the crib was very far away.
I hear the pounding of her stomping feet coming toward me on a carpeted hallway behind a closed bedroom door. At the same time I hear the terrible rage filled voice of my mother shouting and screaming — I know at me.
I wait for her approach. I watch the door knob I can see a long ways away. I see it turning. The door is slammed open, the Monster rushes in. I see her wide eyes, her open mouth. Most importantly (to me in this memory when it came) I see her arm up to her elbow with her massive hand rapidly descending towards me. The gigantic size of this hand gave me an instantaneous sense of how small I was lying in that crib, both as I watched it coming toward me, and as it clamped itself over my nose and my crying mouth — pushing me down and forcing my head and body hard into the crib mattress — as she hurt and terrified me.
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Although this memory appeared seemingly unbidden, it did appear during the days I was making preparations to move with my children from northern Minnesota to Albuquerque, New Mexico to attend a masters degree program there in art therapy. I have always trusted this memory with only minimal skepticism because I sensed it somehow contained something I needed to know.
In these past six years that I have been studying developmental neuroscience and the long term consequences of severe infant-child abuse the memory I just described has grown in value to me. This memory is strongly tethered to and grounded in all the factual information I have about my mother, her psychosis, and about the perpetual terrible abuse I received.
But I still wasn’t consciously prepared for what I experienced yesterday as it ‘in-formed’ me about my infancy experiences of terror and trauma.
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I have mentioned in previous posts about my ‘anxiety’ difficulties in covering for my sick friend in her little office job. I knew last Saturday that I could only manage to do that work for her through yesterday — or so I thought. As it turned out, I overshot my capacity to deal with that reality by one day. Yesterday I prepared myself, went to work, and lasted exactly one hour before my body reacted with terrible diarrhea and I had to come home.
I spent the rest of the day deescalating, which for me does NOT mean going to bed. I cleared myself of all connections to that experience of trying to be out there ‘in the world’ when I can’t be. As a part of my ‘cleansing’ I donned by scrubby work clothes, took the giant pair of tree trimming loppers I borrowed from my dearly beloved man friend, and began to attack the hundred year old gargantuan mess of an oleander that has taken over an entire corner of my back yard. I wore heavy gloves because this plant is poisonous.
Chop, hack, yank, cut, clip, snip, drag away. Hard at work I gave my body-self permission to ‘do’ whatever it needed to ‘clear the air’ of my living space.
My thoughts wandered in and out between my 14-month-older brother and the man I love and my attachment to him. At the same time I was hyperly aware of my sadness, my deep, pervasive, all encompassing chronic sadness. (As I have recently been blogging about, this sadness is where the central set point of my nervous system was set during my earliest development.)
Such sadness. Such terrible sadness. “What, dear Linda, would help you feel better right this instant?”
“I want to hear his voice. I don’t even need to see him. I need to hear (this man I love’s) voice.”
His voice.
About two years ago during conversations with my sister I clarified that there definitely is a connection between This Man’s voice and the voice that belonged to my father. Yesterday as I worked hard to deplete the gangling mess of the oleander I thought, “Is there a single NOTE on the musical scale that is the ONE NOTE that resonates between the voices of these two important men in my life? Is it a tone? Is it a range of notes?”
My thoughts wandered off into imagining that a test could be devised whereby I could actually pinpoint as I listened to This Man a single note that would signify his voice. Could I find it by holding a cell phone and testing his voice among the notes contained in a dialing sequence?
His voice. My father’s voice. I was questioning, wanting to discover another clue that might help me not only to understand this terrible sadness that I live with but a way to make even a tiny portion of it go away — either permanently or on command.
His voice. My father’s voice. His voice. My father’s voice.
I allowed the words to flow through my thoughts as if they were traveling liquid.
His voice. My father’s voice.
And suddenly I was back in that crib — only this time I knew a little bit more. My body-based memory awareness became more flexible and more inclusive. More of the context appeared.
When, as a tiny infant, I could hear the DRONE of my father’s voice, the HUM of my father’s voice, the rise and the fall of it, the TONE of my father’s voice — obviously from way before I was able to probably know the connection between THAT SOUND, THAT VOICE and the man it came from — there was a pattern that I began to identify.
When I heard THAT SOUND the rest of the horror that was my life with that woman who came to terrify and hurt me DID NOT HAPPEN.
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As I hacked my way into the body of the oleander yesterday my brain-mind-self then brought up the files of information I know about attachment: TO FEEL SAFE AND SECURE.
FEEL! Not know in words, but to FEEL in a very real sensory way IN THE BODY that I was SAFE AND SECURE. This meant in MY infant world that the hurtful terror was NOT THERE. I directly knew from my earliest age, and certainly as soon as my nervous system-brain-body developed enough to make any connections at all — that the ONLY time I felt safe and secure was in the ABSENCE of trauma.
Not the other way around. I wasn’t formed in a world were safe and secure were the norm and trauma was the exception.
When I heard the sound of my father’s voice I was not terrified, terrorized, traumatized — and in pain.
When I heard the distant sound of the hum, the tone, of my father’s voice the storm stopped.
There’s more from yesterday………
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Suddenly thoughts and impressions, feeling and senses about my brother reappeared as I worked away yesterday. My brother. I thought about the piece of my mother’s writing I discovered on a scrap of paper and transcribed onto my blog — SEE: *1951 – October 15 – Linda’s 6-week Checkup (and brother John)
My brother. He would have been just under 16 months old at the time my mother wrote this piece. There he was, on the bed beside his beloved baby sister, me. HIS voice. HIS shining eyes. HIS mirroring expressions. HIS gentle touch. Those are what saved me. (I am very certain that in his very young innocence and love for me — even before he could talk — that my brother intervened and interceded on my behalf as much as he possibly could until both he and I grew older and his interventions were no longer honored, heeded or allowed.)
On the day of this six week checkup, baby doll Linda all dressed up. My mother HAD to act the part of the doting, loving mother in front of her mother, in front of my father who accompanied her carrying her doll baby to the doctor’s office. She had to pretend she loved me to the doctor.
HOW EXHAUSTING!
In this little piece my mother wrote she describes how as soon as she possibly could, once she arrived at her mother’s after this torture of pretense, she laid tiny me down on her mother’s bed and walked away.
She writes about her thrill in arriving at her mother’s and seeing her truly beloved little boy playing with HER collection of toy dishes that she had as a child. (I wondered yesterday, “What happened to that set of dishes?” I have no memory of them every existing in our childhood.)
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Now in this memory retrieval documentary I am writing today I will tell you what happened next. In the midst of my hacking and chopping and sawing and clipping and dragging chunks of that oleander away, I suddenly heard my own voice as if it was in two places at the same time — far, far away in the distance and right inside the center of my body. My own voice said:
“I am having a painful day.”
“I am having a pain filled day.”
“I am having a day full of pain.”
“I am pain full.”
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The next thing I knew I was doubled over from a sharp knife stabbing-like breath-stopping gut-grabbing PAIN in my body centered at my solar plexus.
“What on EARTH?”
(Every time I have thought about this since yesterday’s attack I experience a much smaller version of what I describe here.)
I HAD to start burping out air that seemed to be filling my insides to the point of near explosion! Call it a belch, call it a burb — I was painfully FULL OF AIR!
I had to drop my tools and attend to my burping with a vengeance! I HURT!
It was during the releasing of all this pain-full air that I realized my body was having a POWERFUL memory — at I knew instantly what this memory was.
The same mother who could barely tolerate having to pretend she loved and cherished and cared about six week old me long enough to fool my father, and her mother, and the doctor COULD NOT BEAR TO TOUCH ME!
The REAL mother of infant me HATED me. I was the devil’s spawn to her, not human, a curse upon her life. I was the one the devil sent to kill her while she was in labor with me. (I have written much about this before.)
The REAL mother of infant me propped my bottle whenever she could. She disdained to touch me —
AND
THEREFORE
SHE DID NOT BURP ME!
Oh, so SAD! So painful! So WRONG! SO TRUE!
And yesterday I instantly knew more about the memory that came to me in 1988 about her attack of me in the crib. She had propped the bottle, NOT burped me, I was in PAIN. I was crying. (I know in my body this was not an isolated occurrence.)
And………
Now I know more about THAT story! And today my woundedness is a little more healed. The ruptures trauma created in my body-self is a little more repaired. Cool!
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NOTE: After this whole experience yesterday This Man called, and I also saw him in person, and for the first time I DID NOT hear the overlay that has evidently ALWAYS been in my range of hearing in the ten years I have been hearing my friend’s voice. I DID NOT hear the overlay (or underlay?) of the tone of my father’s voice merged with my friend’s. My friend’s voice sounded different to me, almost like it was ‘hollower’ and shallower — it was not as full, deep, resonating, dimensional and rich as I have always heard it to be before.
For the first time in these ten years I evidently JUST heard the comforting sound of my friend’s voice without hearing the comforting sound of my father’s very similar voice at the same time. Fascinating!
I believe for those of us who were traumatized from the time of our birth (that unfortunate 5% I wrote about this week) that our primary senses of smell and hearing (along with touch) carry much connection to our earliest experiences — as these senses were developed under the duress of trauma.
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Maybe I am preaching to the invisible choir. At age 59, a lot of time has gone by for early infant abuse survivors of the Baby Boom era to die. If you Google Center for Disease Control – ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) longitudinal (long range) studies, you will find those statistics that say the more abuse and adverse experiences a person had who started the CDC studies, the more likely they were not to finish the study. These severe early trauma survivors died on the average 20 years sooner than the less traumatized study participants.
I see that there are a lot of people who find their way over to this blog in a search to understand avoidant-dismissive insecure attachment. One of the search combinations that came through on my admin page yesterday was asking the question, “Who are avoidant-dismissive people likely to be attracted to?” Many people are landing through their Google searches on this post:
I have not followed off on any detour to examine the nitty-gritty of the ‘upper level’ insecure attachment disorders. I believe a lot of information has already been accumulated by others regarding them, while very little has been written about the ‘lower level’ insecure attachment disorder of ‘disorganized-disoriented’. This ‘lower level’ (versus the ‘upper level’ one) is often presented in the neuroscientific and infant developmental research simply as a being a severely ‘disabling’ consequence of infant maltreatment and neglect that results in the most severe ‘pathological’ outcomes in body-brain and mind.
Because my writing is primarily about what my life has been like as a survivor of severe abuse, maltreatment and trauma from birth until I ‘escaped’ home at age 18, I make no claims about being an expert at anything else. I can, however, write somewhat competently about the dismissive-avoidant insecure attachment disorder from my own experience because I believe that is what my father has, and I believe that is what the man I am not with, but have been in love with these past ten years has.
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If you do an Amazon.com book search for Daniel J. Siegel, and a Google search for Mindsight, you will find yourself standing at a gateway through which you can enter and learn more about how early caregiver attachment patterns transmit to an infant through direct face-to-face interactions than I can ever describe.
His book, Parenting From the Inside Out is probably the simplest place to start your way into this informative world of human infant development.
The simplest way to think about ALL of the insecure attachment patterns-disorders is to realize that a human being has been biologically programmed to require very specific interactions with its earliest caregivers so that it can form the best body-nervous system-brain possible. The exact patterns that are ‘down loaded’ into an infant’s developing body-brain through its earliest human interactions will be, in turn, built into the very fabric and fiber of an infant.
When a parent, particularly the mother, did not receive what she (they) needed to form the best body-brain possible, that lack-of-best information will simply be communicated to the infant — and that information comes tumbling down the generations through infant-caregiver interactions — UNLESS something interferes.
That SOMETHING is actually some person, somewhere, who DOES interact with an infant in a safe and secure attachment way so that those neuro-biological of ‘goodness’ can build themselves into the infant — usually right along with the ‘badness’ patterns.
I do not believe that avoidant-dismissive attachment comes DIRECTLY from abuse itself, even though if we are fine tuning how we look at what all humans NEED to build the best body-brain possible and DO NOT get in one degree or another, we ARE talking about abuse.
In the case of dismissive-avoidant insecure attachment the actions/nonactions that create these patterns in infants comes most often from a hypo or less-than-responsive early caregiver — which is in my thinking a form of neglect of primary infant attachment needs (depressed mothers are often in this category). D-A attachment is then most closely related to a non-response pattern rather than to a hyper overly response pattern which seems more typical of the ‘lower order’ insecure attachment systems of preoccupied and disorganized-disoriented.
In all insecure attachment relationships there is something within the caregiver that is interfering with the ability to recognize an infant IN THE PRESENT MOMENT — something all infants desperately need from their caregivers.
An infant, in the critical time periods of its body-nervous system-brain does not have the ability to put itself on PAUSE so it can wait for those moments when its caregiver is PRESENT TO IT AND APPROPRIATE in its responses to the infant.
Of course, readers of this blog already know that anything written by the developmental neuroscientist Dr. Allan Schore, such as Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self/Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self (two-volume set), contain vital specifics about the processes that build a human being BEST versus those that do not. Hard reading, I assure you. (You can search this blog for Schore and come up with a lot of info, as well.)
SOOOO — about avoidant-dismissive or dismissive-avoidant insecure attachment. The basis of this pattern is that body-based emotion-driven information that an infant has no choice but to communicate to its earliest caregivers ALL OF THE TIME is only selectively paid attention to by the caregiver.
Add to this that the caregiver response is not consistent. Sometimes the caregiver might notice the infant expressing a need through an emotion, yet later the caregiver doesn’t respond to the same infant emotion in any predictable way. On and Off. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. The caregiver (as with all insecurely attached adults) is (often unconsciously with this insecure attachment pattern) simple not paying attention to the infant in real time because the caregiver has interference within their own insecurely built body-nervous system-brain.
(Pass it on, folks! Do a Google search for ‘mother attachment predict’ — fascinating reading!) Researchers can assess a mother’s attachment before the birth of her offspring and often exactly predict the attachment patterns of her children — throughout a lifetime!
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Our family only very recently stumbled upon an extremely important piece of information about my father. My daughters are accumulating intergenerational documents to ‘prove’ their relationship to my father’s mother so that they can join the Daughters of the American Revolution as my father’s mother did.
In scouring the family paperwork collections for these documents, my daughters received my father’s birth certificate from their uncle. It states on there that my father had a dead sibling (born alive four, living three at the time of my father’s birth in 1926).
Nobody in my family EVER mentioned that my grandparents lost a baby. What we did hear repeatedly during our childhoods is that my father was not a wanted child, that his mother wanted nothing to do with him, that his older sister was assigned his care, that she begrudged this burden and let my father know this.
Years later my father told me his mother was depressed and very seldom responded to anyone. She seldom left her home, had no friends, and was sad sad sad. What happened during the life of my paternal grandmother? I don’t know, but I DO not know that she was 32 when my father was born and his father was 37, and that somewhere there was a dead child. This grief factor is one of the very first places I would look to discover what prior circumstance contributed to a lack of care and love for a later baby. BINGO!
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All attachment patterns have roots in the same human processes. They determine how we respond to two things: One – our own emotions in our body and Two – our connection patterns with our self and others. Both of these functions are built into the right brain hemisphere during the first year of life.
Human development is designed to be RESPONSIVE to signals received by the infant AND the infant adapts its development according to the signals it receives. True, genetic material in the infant is involved. In my father’s case, he was no doubt born with the potential to develop his (later forming) left brain in amazing ways. He became a civil engineer, read nonfiction voraciously his entire life, had a ‘photographic memory’ and never forgot while he was well anything he ever learned.
Yet my father was also built through his earliest caregiver interactions to be the perfect match to my insanely abusive mother.
My father was on the COOL end of the emotional spectrum. My mother was on the HOT volcanic end. I believe dismissive-avoidant insecure attachment patterns can VERY EASILY gravitate to HOT emotionally dysregulated people, and the severely troubled (most often disorganized-disoriented and the preoccupied insecurely attached) people because of the emotional vacuum that exists within their own body.
The reverse makes these attraction patterns likely, as well. The dismissive-avoidant pattern is a HYPO emotional regulatory pattern. When the brain of a true dismissive-avoidant is watched in action during studies about emotion, these people are not remotely aware they experience many emotions AT ALL. Yet at the same time researchers can watch their brain receive emotional information at the same time their brain consumes vast amounts of energy screening the emotional information from conscious awareness.
In other words, just as happened to them from birth, the emotion is THERE but not responded to — this time, as older humans, not even responded to by the person who is having them.
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The dismissive-avoidant attachment system-disorder is, I believe, the most common one. It is also one that in our culture is least likely to be recognized because these people ‘get along’ better than do ‘owners’ of the more severe insecure patterns.
Experts suggest that the ‘other’ more severe insecurely attached adults are attracted to the dismissive-avoidant ones because they instinctively recognize that these people WILL NEVER OVERWHELM THEM EMOTIONALLY. My mother knew that about my father the instant she met him, I have no doubt.
My father responded to my mother’s ‘warmth’ and vivacious charm. (Very unfortunately.)
Experts also suggest that the flaws in these insecurely attached relationships often come to light when and if the more severely insecurely attached person, who is far more likely to experience serious enough life consequences that force them to seek help, do so and begin to heal and change. At this point the rigidity of the dismissive-avoidant partner can drive their partner even more ‘crazy’!
It is important to understand that the dismissive-avoidant person is NOT AWARE of emotions that they are, in fact, experiencing. Their brain-nervous system was designed by their nonresponsive earliest caregivers to screen out — not pay attention to — and to eventually deny the existence of body-based emotions. These people simply do not access information based on their emotions — and in turn, do not access information about anyone else’s emotions EITHER.
Their early caregivers left emotional response out of the baby-building equation, and now so do their offspring.
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I will also add that I believe the commonly recognized insecure attachment patterns, as they go ‘down’ in terms of the safety and security they represent, add into one another. My extremely emotionally dysregulated mother ALSO dismissed other people’s emotions. She COULD not see them because her entire universe was built on her projections from inside herself out onto others.
I also believe that nearly ALL of the time insecurely attached people seek one another out. IF my father had ‘moved up the ladder’ of attachment instead of down, and IF he had bound himself to someone of the ‘upper’ 50% of our population that DID have a safe and secure attachment system-pattern built into them, he COULD most likely have healed enough to change his primary responses to others.
In other words, he could have LEARNED and been TAUGHT how to better recognize situations that contained emotions — both for himself and for others. My father was a naive 23 when he met my overwhelming mother. True, while nobody had ever helped him to recognize emotions, he was still young enough that I believe some changes for the better COULD have happened if he had done ‘upwardly mobile’ instead of the reverse.
Partners from birth on, as members of a social species, are always involved in regulating emotion and physiological states through human interactions. We can learn enough about the basic attachment patterns so that we can recognize (1) what they are, (2) where they most likely came from and how, and (3) how to gently change their expression (the basic hardwiring inside an infant’s body-brain prior to the age of one will NEVER change in some basic physiological ways).
We do not, in my opinion, live in a culture that values the body-based TRUTH of reality that emotions contain. Our body and its emotional signals are first filtered through the right social-emotional (earliest forming) brain hemisphere. Depending on the kind of benevolent or malevolent experiences an infant has with its earliest caregivers, a human being is supposed to develop a brain that can quickly and smoothly pass right brain information over to the left brain for processing and integration.
When this happens BEST, language can be assigned to experience. What happens in a dismissive-avoidant CULTURE is that talking about emotions, and the very real and true experience of people who DO live in a body is NOT encouraged. We can end up with a literal language such as my father was a master of at the same time we ignore and dismiss the vast truth of our lives. My father’s condition enabled him to enable my mother in such a way that he NEVER protected his children, especially me from my mother’s insanity and abuse — if he ever really SAW it at all.
He was also set up to endure his wife’s abuse of him. I don’t believe he had either a platform or the language to even THINK about the emotional hell he, his wife and all of his children were in. If one has never felt heat, cannot physiologically become aware of its presence, burning to death in a house fire is far more likely than it would be for someone who had built a body that could receive and process ALL information the body accumulated.
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I believe that in ALL cases how an infant is responded to birth to age one by its earliest caregivers matters THE MOST. The trajectory for all an infant’s future development on all levels is set by the age of one. The foundation is built.
In our current culture I expect that the ranks of the truly securely attached is dropping from 50%, and as this happens the ranks of ALL the insecurely attached is swelling. Because MOST caregivers certainly do not directly abuse infants, it will be the ranks of the dismissive-avoidant insecurely attached that is going to swell the most — and the fastest.
I say this because there is NO JOB a human will ever do that is more demanding that taking care of an infant prior to the age of one CORRECTLY. Busy, stressed, working parents who rely on day care providers to meet the most vital needs of their babies are often selling their infant’s short without ever thinking about it.
IGNORANCE IS NOT BLISS!
Taking care of the basic physiological needs for warmth, changing, feeding of infants is NOT ENOUGH to guarantee that an infant will remain in the top 50% of the safely and securely attached emotional regulation category. Infants are HIGH NEED beings who REQUIRE appropriate touch, face-to-face responses, who require human vocal interactions, who require that their caregivers pay the RIGHT KIND OF ATTENTION to their responses instant-to-instant.
All early caregiver interactions are designing and putting into place the patterns within the brain’s circuitry that the infant will rely on for the rest of its life to process information about its SELF and the condition of the world it has been born into.
I want to add here something I consider extremely relevant and important. Infants are physiologically designed to respond FIRST to their mother, SECOND to the next most caring human in their universe which certainly CAN be their father, next, to ALL most caring humans (relatives and day care providers who respond with absolute love and focused appropriate attention to the infant), AT THE SAME TIME infants are also biologically programmed to respond to happy, loving CHILDREN.
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I believe ALL insecure attachment systems-patterns happen because earliest caregivers MISSED THE INFANT’S CUES.
Infants are ALWAYS sending out perfect cues. Their outgoing signals are NEVER off target. It is the responses that an infant receives to its cues that determine the degree of safe and secure attachment in the world the infant is building into its body-nervous system-brain-mind-self.
Nature intends that modulation of an infant’s needs begins in earnest at the same time the infant can extend its range of activity into the physical world at an increasing distance from its caregiver. Before the age of one what an infant is asking for — it ACTUALLY needs.
Just because what an infant younger than age one’s needs are more than its caregivers WANT to respond to does not in any way indicate that there is something ‘spoiled’ or ‘wrong’ with the infant. That kind of thinking, in my opinion, is some of the downright STUPIDEST human thought ever invented!
Most unfortunately I suspect that in today’s world we are losing sight of this fact at the same time we are both dismissing the vital importance of caring for infants AS THEY NEED TO BE CARED FOR and avoiding the WORK ourselves that bringing humans into the world ACTUALLY requires.
Every single signal, every single cue an infant prior to the age of one sends out needs to be responded to consciously by its caregivers. Every act of NOT responding to an infant has to be a conscious choice. All actions toward an infant affect its rapid growth and development. No action toward an infant is without consequence.
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When his parents choose to let my grandson cry without taking any other action they are choosing at those times to consciously moderate the intensity and duration of the emotions he is experiencing. They are ‘building’ strength into his emotional and nervous system response-abilities according to what they KNOW he can safely and securely tolerate (he is 8 months old). Challenges from the environment by themselves do not harm infants. Dismissing and avoiding the reality of the infant’s needs and its responses to those challenges, however, can certainly cause harm to the infant’s development.
Reality today dictates that many mothers and parents cannot financially afford NOT to utilize day care. If we really knew what we were doing as a nation we would create day care situations for infants that guaranteed that the needs of those infants were met. We are living at a time and in a world today that often detours early caregivers away from the innate biological programming that is very real, and has naturally made sure that mothers both knew how to take the best care of their babies and DID it.
Babies like my father and mother were fell through the cracks. Their needs were not met — and either nobody noticed or nobody cared. Both inevitably ended up with serious insecure attachments within their body-brain to their own self, to the world, and to other people. Babies that are not cared for the BEST way possible experience trauma — and insecure attachment systems-patterns built into infants is how intergenerational trauma gets passed down through the ages.
Stop the Storm 
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