Tag: posttraumatic stress disorder

+VAGUS SOCIAL NERVE – INFLUENCED BY CULTURE

alchemynow2 Comments

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I didn’t get very far in my thinking this morning about infant-child abuse, the vagus nerve, and my Borderline mother before I encountered a speed bump with a big sign beside it that read:  CONTEXT.  I was intending to continue studying what Dr. Dacher Keltner writes next in his chapter on compassion (in his book Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life), but I was immediately forced into taking an investigative detour.

Keltner shares with other researchers a “hypothesis that the vagus nerve is a bundle of caretaking nerves.”  (page 232).  As he begins to present some research that his student, Chris Oveis designed and accomplished, he states:

“…suffering Humans are wired to respond to harm from the first moments of life.  One-day-old infants cry in response to another infant’s cries of distress but not their own.  Many two-year-old children, upon seeing another cry, will engage in the purest forms of comfort, offering their toys and gestures of visible concern to the person suffering.  Pictures of sad faces presented so fast participants don’t even know what they’ve seen trigger activation in the amygdala.”  (page 232)

It turns out that what Keltner writes about next is related to ‘prosocial initiation’ that is a human process directly connected to our wandering vagal nerve system in our body.  Oveis’ research shows that both the experience of compassion and the experience of pride are wired into this system and show themselves through directly opposite physiological reactions of the vagus nerve.

Tied to this is the fact that our physiological experience of compassion happens as concern for the individual self is depleted in favor of a concern for others.  Pride, on the other hand, was shown in these studies to operate with an inflation of self interest with a corresponding narrowing and limiting circle of concern for others.

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After reading this information (see starting on page 232 in the chapter on compassion previously posted), I hit the CONTEXT speed bump as my thinking turned in what seemed to be a bizarre direction.  Because I already know that my mother’s insanely abusive treatment of me in my infant-childhood involved a ‘distorted self’ component in that she entirely projected her own ‘badness’ out onto me and then spent 18 years beating me for it, a strange thought came to me today.

While very few Americans might want to admit this (think:  denial = stage of childhood magical thinking), don’t we REALLY worship the SELF in our culture as we practice the religion of INDIVIDUALISM?  In following this train of thought I can easily arrive at a very disturbing conclusion:  My mother was a fanatical devotee to this religion.  Nobody mattered in my mother’s universe except herself.  That her self’s development had been sent spinning off into a distorted course of development through the circumstances of her own infant-childhood doesn’t change the fact that if her self-as-she-experienced-it hadn’t been allowed the freedom to rampage as she saw fit within her home, my life would have been far different.

I think about an example of this worship of SELF and the religion of INDIVIDUALISM in American culture as it is provided in the context of my mother’s infant-childhood.  There was my remote and selfish grandfather, rich and high-powered stock broker that he was (until the crash of ’29 stripped him).  He had five childless years of marriage to my grandmother, herself a mastered degree professional ‘liberated’ woman, before he was forced into the role of fatherhood.

If the course of my grandfather’s intimate life could be used as a measure of the quality of his prosocial commitments, he failed miserably.  If the way my grandmother’s daughter turned out could be used as a measure of the quality of mothering my mother received from her, my grandmother also failed miserably.

So off my investigative mind went today in a search for CONTEXT related to childrearing as it appears in culture.  Because Keltner presents research that clearly shows that humans are capable of prosocial reactions from the first day of life,  because those abilities are wired into our body, when, how, why and through what influences can things go so wrong that someone like my mother can severely abuse her offspring from birth and for the next 18 years – while nobody, including my father, cared?

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Simply put, does typical American-Western culture worship the SELF in a religion of INDIVIDUALISM in direct contrast to Chinese-Eastern Confucian culture where the highest value is placed on a prosocial self in a religion of relationship?

If this is true, and in light of the research on the social operation of our vagus nerve system in our body, then the influences on infant-child development within these two opposing cultures must influence our entire physiological development – of our body-brain – in accordance with how the self is formed in relationship to others.

Please take some time to read and think about the text I present below in terms of how the differences in cultural values provides the CONTEXT for childrearing – even as it also influences both the occurrences of severe maltreatment of infant-children and how that maltreatment influences the developmental changes that happen as a consequence of early relational traumas.

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I am presenting part of a chapter (below) from the 2002 book, Handbook of affective sciences, by Richard J. Davidson, Klaus R. Scherer, H. Hill Goldsmith (Refer to full chapter online HERE — Chapter 20 – Dynamic development of component systems of emotions:  Pride, shame, and guilt in China and the United States, by Michael F. Mascolo, Kurt W. Fischer, and Jin Li).  (Please note:  Refer to the authors’ listing of references in the original article – I have mostly excluded them from the text I include here for educational/study purposes only)

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“American individualism is founded on the primacy of individuals in personal, social, moral, and civic relations.  American individualism values freedom to pursue personal happiness, equality before God and the law, and individual choice in matters of social relations.  In this way, Americans can be said to construct selves that are relatively bounded and separate from others….  At least in the Anglo middle class of American culture, individuals tend to make relatively clear distinctions about what to consider me and mine as opposed to you and yours.  These individualist beliefs are organized around a morality based on principles of individual rights, justice, and equality….  Persons possess universal inalienable rights.  Social relations are based on freely negotiated contracts and agreements.  Although individualist systems demand that individuals refrain from actions that bring harm to others, there are no superogatory moral obligations to sacrifice the self on the behalf of others….  With exceptions (such as relationships to one’s children), individuals are not constrained strongly by a priori obligations of duty, loyalty, or service to others, whether those others include one’s spouse or extended family, employer, or nation.  These beliefs follow from the priority placed on both freedom to pursue individual happiness and freedom from arbitrary constraint….

“Consistent with these beliefs, Americans place considerable value on individuality…, independence…, and personal achievement….  Persons are seen as unique individuals and are encouraged to express their personal feelings and desires and to develop their particular talents.  Children are socialized to depend on themselves rather than on others in performing any given task.  In consonance with these beliefs, Americans place considerable importance on self-esteem…, which is seen as both a determinant and product of personal achievement.  Many Americans believe that in order to succeed, individuals must believe in their abilities (e.g., have self-confidence) and develop positive self-esteem.  Because of the importance placed on self-esteem, Americans praise their children’s successes and protect them from shame.  In this way, personal achievement is outcome, rather than process, oriented.  That is, the main focus of achievement activity is on producing specific outcomes rather than on the process of learning, developing, or achieving per se….  As such, although effort and hard work are valued (e.g., the Protestant work ethic), they are seen as means to reaching desired ends rather than as valuable in themselves.  Perhaps because of value placed on demonstrating one’s uniqueness, individuals often attribute their successes and failures to individual ability rather than to effort or hard work….

“The situation is quite different in many Asian cultures.  For example, Chinese Confucian conceptions of self and social life are organized around the idea of self-perfection as a relational process (Tu, 1985).  This notion is embodied by the dual assumptions that (1) individuals develop through a lifelong process of self-cultivation and (2) the self is a nexus of social relationships (Tu, 1979, 1985).  With regard to the first assumption, Confucianism maintains that individual development consists of a lifelong process of self-cultivation and self-perfection, sometimes called the Way (Tu, 1979).  Through this process, one literally learns to become human.  Confucianism specifies a series of ultimate life goals….  These include ren (benevolence), yi (righteousness), and li (ritual propriety).  Of these, ren is the most important, as it specifies the fundamental quality of being human.  From this view, self-cultivation is a lifelong process of cultivating a moral and spiritual character – to become the most benevolent, sincere, and humane person possible.

There are several important implications of the cultivation of ren.  First, self-cultivation refers to a lifelong process rather than a search for a fixed and attainable outcome.  In this sense, the cultivation of ren is never complete.  Any concrete achievement in life is seen as but a single step or milestone in a long, long process of learning to become ren.  As such, particular developmental outcomes are secondary to the Way.  Second, the search for ren involves a highly disciplined search for the good life, which cannot be reached without sustained effort and lifelong devotion.  The search for ren is similar to the process of becoming a mathematician (or any other type of learned scholar).  Although a rudimentary sense of numeracy may exist from the start, one cannot become a great mathematician without conscious effort and cultivation.  In this way, effort functions as the primary tool in developing ren because it puts desire into action….  Today the notion of continuous self-perfection through hard work continues to be a primary value of Chinese people….

“However, self-cultivation is not an individualist process.  Ren, the fundamental human quality of benevolence, is an inherently social and moral value.  To become sincerely benevolent and humane requires that one put others first.  This is a reflection of the primacy that Chinese Confucianism places on social harmony within hierarchy.  In Confucianism, individuals are not isolated units; they are born into a web of social relationships that are organized in terms of a richly ordered hierarchy.  As such, one is inherently connected to others as part of a hierarchically structured whole.  One cultivates the self through relationships with others.  Development is a lifelong process involving an “ever increasing awareness of the presence of the other in one’s self-cultivation”  (Tu, 1985, p. 232).  As further articulated by Tu, “A Confucian self devoid of human-relatedness has little meaningful content of its own….  A Confucian man’s self-awareness of being a son, a brother, a husband, or a father dominates his awareness of himself as a self-reliant and independent person”  (p. 233).  To become a harmonious being within the social hierarchy, self-cultivation occurs as one willingly learns to suppress one’s own desires and define oneself in terms of the needs and wishes of others within the family and broader society.  To maintain social harmony, it is necessary to praise others and efface the self in social relations….

“The social process of self-cultivation begins in the family.  The indigenous concept of filial piety…is central to Chinese self and socialization.  Yang (1988, 1996) has demonstrated that the traditional value of filial piety continues to be represented in Chinese culture today.  Filial piety refers to the strict moral obligations that exist between children and parents.  Filial piety establishes the absolute authority of parents over children and brings with it reciprocal obligations of parents to children.  It specifies standards for how children relate to their parents and other family members, living or deceased.  It specifies how they are to honor and respect their parents and family name (especially in the traditionally sacrosanct father-son relationship), to provide for them in old age, and to perform ceremonial rituals of worship.  According to the Book of Rites…, a son demonstrates his filial piety in three ways:  by honoring his father, by not disgracing him, and by caring for him in old age.  It is difficult to overestimate the importance and scope of filial piety in shaping Chinese selves.

If a man in his own house and privacy be not grave, he is not filial; if in serving his ruler he be not loyal, he is not filial; if in discharging the duties of office he be not serious, he is not filial; if on the filed of battle he be not brave, he is not filial.  If he fail in these five things, the evil [of the disgrace’ will reflect on his parents.  Dare he but be serious?  (Tu, 1985, pp. 237-238)

“It is important to note that although filial piety is often understood in terms of obligations of children to parents, it is fully mutual and reciprocal.  Parents have a duty to sacrifice for and support their children throughout their lifespan.  It is the parental commitment to children that provides the basis for children’s filial devotion (xiao) in the first place.

“The Classic of Filial Piety is defined as “raising one’s reputation in order to exalt one’s parents” (cited in Yu, 1996), a definition that accentuates the importance of maintaining face and familial honor….  Hu (1944) proposed two basic aspects of face in Chinese society and social relations.  Lian refers to an individual’s moral character in the eyes of others, and it develops as one exhibits faithful compliance to moral, ritual, and social norms.  To say that a person bu yao lian (“doesn’t want face”) indicates that the person is “shameless” or “immoral”;  it is one of the worst insults that can be cast against a person.  In China, the second aspect of face is mianzi, referring to one’s reputation or social prestige.  Mianzi is earned through success in life, attaining a high or respected social position.  To say that a person mei you mianzi means that one is not deserving of honor or respect.  Although still insulting, it is less harsh than being characterized as “shameless” (lacking lian).  According to Hu (1944), although Westerners have a concept of “face” similar to mianzi (i.e. “social prestige”), it does not have the strong moral implications of the concept of lian.  Face is a driving force in social relations among the Chinese, and failures to show lian, or mianzi bring dishonor, disgrace, and shame to one’s family, self, and other significant relationships….

“To promote the cultivation of ren, self-effacement, and self-harmonization with others, Chinese parents adopt relatively strict socialization processes.  Although efforts to socialize children begin soon after they begin to talk and walk, strict discipline increases precipitously at the “age of reason” (dongshi, around 5 years of age).  A central value is affective control:  Children are taught to control their impulses and not to reveal their thoughts and feelings.  Violence is strictly forbidden and is met with severe consequences.  Socialization may involve corporal punishment, which becomes unnecessary as soon as children are able to cease prohibited actions on demand….  To promote filial piety, proper behavior, benevolence, and love of learning, parents draw on a variety of shaming techniques.    If, for example, a child were to show inadequate learning in school, a parent might say, “Shame on you!,”  “You didn’t practice hard enough!,”  “Everyone will laugh at you!,”  “I have no face with your teachers!,” or “You show no filial piety!”  The use of shaming techniques and the creation of strong emotional bonds promote the self-cultivation of relational selves….

Cultural Organization of Self-Evaluative Emotions

“Social, self-evaluative emotions exist across cultures, but their specific forms are strongly shaped by cultures….  Figure 20.4 [see online link page 386] outlines the organization of social self-evaluative emotions within the contexts of American individualism and Chinese Confucianism.  Whereas Americans tend to make sharp distinctions between the moral and the conventional…, under Confucianism all domains of human action are seen as having a strong moral component (Tu, 1979).  For example, under American individualism, achievement is an important social value, but it is not considered a moral imperative or obligation.  In contrast, under Confucianism obligations to family and social groups, to lifelong learning and self-cultivation, and to physical/sexual/civic mores are all connected as part of the larger system of explicitly moral obligations to harmonize oneself with others (Tu, 1979, 1985).

American Individualism:  Separation of Achievement and Morality

“Two separate routes to the experience of self-evaluative emotions within American individuals are social achievement…and moral conduct….  Within achievement domains, if people succeed at an important task, they may become proud of the self’s ability or accomplishment.  Pride is a manifestation of self-esteem and is acceptable as celebration and sharing of one’s worthy self and accomplishments with others.  Pride becomes negative when taken to the extreme, evolving into hubris….  Conversely, upon failing in an achievement domain, people may become ashamed of their lack of ability….  In individualism, shame can arise from an uncontrollable flaw in the self, which is damaging to self-esteem….  As a result, shame engenders hiding, social withdrawal, and self-reproach….

“A second pathway to self-evaluative emotion under individualism is through moral violations.  When people violate a moral norm (e.g., harm another person, violate their rights), they may experience guilt, shame, or both, depending on their appraisal of the situation.  If they focus on their responsibility for an immoral outcome, they experience guilt and attempt to fix the situation, making reparations, or confess….  If instead they view themselves from the eyes of another and see themselves as an immoral, bad, or evil person, they experience shame….  In this way, in individualist systems guilt functions primarily as a moral emotion, whereas shame can function as either a moral emotion or an emotion of social evaluation.

Chinese Confucianism:  Morality and Self-Harmonization

“The situation is quite different under Confucianism.  Instead of making a sharp distinction between the social evaluative and the moral, Confucianism treats social/familial obligations, learning, and physical/sexual mores as all primarily moral concerns….  Because of the value placed on harmony within hierarchy in Chinese society…, not the feeling of and enactment of pride are explicitly discouraged….  If one meets one’s social and familial obligations, one brings honor to the family, not pride to oneself.  Similarly, in light of the Confucian ideal that individuals are not viewed as isolated from their social relations, an individual’s worthy accomplishments are not attributed exclusively to the self.  Instead, they are seen as products of one’s relationships with family and other social groups with whom individuals identify and from whom they gain their support.  (Li, 1997, in press).  As such, a person who has produced a worthy outcome brings honor not primarily on the self but instead to his or her family and other significant social groups.  Thus, when a person performs a worthy action, the appropriate response is not self-celebration but instead modesty, self-effacement, and praise for the other….

“The practice of modesty and self-effacement can be illustrated through an analysis of Chinese politeness strategies.  In an analysis of Chinese and American responses to social compliments, Chen (1993) reported that Americans used for basic politeness strategies:  accepting (39%), returning (19%)m deflecting (30%), and rejecting (13%) compliments.  In contrast, Chinese respondents showed three basic strategies but used primarily one rejecting (96%), in contrast to thanking and denigrating the self (3%) and accepting the compliment (1%)….

“This practice cannot simply be viewed as a kind of “false modesty” or impression management.  Markus and Kitayama (1991) studied the role of culture in the organization of emotional experiences and found that although both Japanese and American participants discriminated between socially engaged versus socially disengaged feelings, the affective valence of their reactions differed greatly (see also Kitayama, Markus, & Matsumoto, 1995).  Socially engaged positive feelings include being together (feelings of closeness, friendliness, respect), whereas socially disengaged positive emotions cast individuals apart from each other (feelings of pride, superiority, being on top of the world).  For Japanese in contrast to Americans, ratings of socially engaged emotions were more strongly correlated with general positive emotions (e.g., feeling happy, relaxed, calm, or elated…).  Conversely, ratings of positive disengaged emotions were more strongly correlated with general positive feelings for Americans than for Japanese.  That is, “feeling good” is strongly related to feelings of social engagement among the Japanese and to feelings of pride and superiority among Americans.  Markus and Kitayama argue that individual attributes are important dimensions of self to Americans, but maintaining harmonious relationships is more central to Japanese sense of self.  They suggest that the motivation for self-effacement among the Japanese is neither false modesty, lack of self-esteem, nor impression management, but self-harmonization – the desire to maintain a conception of self as part of a harmonious relationship with the other.  We suggest that Chinese self-effacement similarly reflects genuine self-harmonization rather than false modesty.”

(from page 384-387 – Chapter 20 – Dynamic development of component systems of emotions:  Pride, shame, and guilt in China and the United States, by Michael F. Mascolo, Kurt W. Fischer, and Jin Li)

from Handbook of affective sciences

By Richard J. Davidson, Klaus R. Scherer, H. Hill Goldsmith

Refer to chapter online HERE

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Note:  I am not advocating either a matriarchal or patriarchal social system here, but reading this chapter today brought to my mind the complete imbalance in my family or origin created in part by disrespect of and disregard for the father.  Once my grandmother divorced her husband when my mother was five, she did everything in her power to disrepute that man.  As a result my mother was disallowed a relationship with her father in her childhood, and did not in her adulthood pursue a relationship with him.  We know next to nothing about our family’s ancestry of my maternal grandfather.

In turn, my mother disreputed my father’s entire family.  My mother effectively influenced my father to disown his family.  After nearly 40 years of marriage to my mother, once my father divorced her he realized what a loss he suffered, but by that time his father, mother and brother were all dead.

And most certainly my mother did not in any way honor or respect her husband, nor did my father demonstrate that he honored or respected himself.

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+MY MOTHER’S VAGUS NERVE: THE MAKING OF HER PERFECT BORDERLINE STORM?

alchemynow13 Comments

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I am thinking this morning about this job I have taken on to try to learn how what happened to my mother when she was a little girl ended up turning her into the monster that tormented and traumatized me from the time I was born.  Today the word ‘investigator’ rings in my thoughts.  I think about accident investigators, criminal investigators, child protection investigators, and I think about myself as an investigator in the case of what happened to my mother.

Can we learn to tell the difference between child abuse that is a crime and child abuse that is an accident?  Is the dividing line between the two really about conscious, willful choice and intention?  Where does ignorance fit into the picture?  Negligence?  Limitations due to very real disabilities?

What role does assigning blame, fault or accountability fit into the investigation of the causes and consequences of infant-child abuse, neglect and maltreatment or of any other accident, crime or trauma?

Obviously nothing can ever be done to change history, including my 18 year history with my mother.  Yet it is one of the qualities of being human that allows us to both learn from history and then take what we learn to try to create a better future.  Hindsight and foresight have been human allies for many, many thousands of years.  While other animals are certainly capable of learning, of applying what they learned in the past to new situations in the future, it seems to be only our human species that can utilize one single, most important gift:  Insight.

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There will come a day in the future when I no longer concern myself with my forensic autobiographical investigative study about what happened to my mother.  When that day comes, it will be because I have had my curiosity sated, because I gave up, or because I am dead.  Today isn’t that day.

Right now I am turning the light of my conscious investigation into the crime or the accident that was my mother’s entire approach to having me as her daughter.  I am moving my search into a new direction.  I want to know what my mother’s vagal nerve system had to do with the disaster that was her life, both as my mother and as a human being.

I posted the scanned images of Dr. Dacher Keltner’s chapter on compassion from his book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, on January 30, 2010.  I am putting his words under my microscope today as I search specifically for what he says in this chapter about the vagal nerve system.

What, most simply, is the vagal nerve system?  The WiseGeek states:

“The vagus nerve is either one of two cranial nerves which are extremely long, extending from the brain stem all the way to the viscera. The vagus nerves carry a wide assortment of signals to and from the brain, and they are responsible for a number of instinctive responses in the body. You may also hear the vagus nerve called Cranial Nerve X, as it is the 10th cranial nerve, or the Wandering Nerve. A great deal of research has been carried out on the vagus nerve, as it is a rather fascinating cranial nerve.

Vagus is Latin for “wandering,” and it is an accurate description of this nerve, which emerges at the back of the skull and meanders in a leisurely way through the abdomen, with a number of branching nerves coming into contact with the heart, lungs, voicebox, stomach, and ears, among other body parts. The vagus nerve carries incoming information from the nervous system to the brain, providing information about what the body is doing, and it also transmits outgoing information which governs a range of reflex responses.

The vagus nerve helps to regulate the heart beat, control muscle movement, keep a person breathing, and to transmit a variety of chemicals through the body. It is also responsible for keeping the digestive tract in working order, contracting the muscles of the stomach and intestines to help process food, and sending back information about what is being digested and what the body is getting out of it.

When the vagus nerve is stimulated, the response is often a reduction in heart-rate or breathing. In some cases, excessive stimulation can cause someone to have what is known as a vaso-vagal response, appearing to fall into a faint or coma because his or her heart rate and blood pressure drop so much. Selective stimulation of this nerve is also used in some medical treatment; vagus stimulation appears to benefit people who suffer from depression, for example, and it is also sometimes used to treat epilepsy.

Most of the time, you don’t notice the actions of the right and left vagus nerves, but you probably would notice if this nerve ceased to function as a result of disease or trauma, because the vagus nerve is one of the many vital nerves which keeps your body in working order. Without the functions of the vagus nerve, you would find it difficult to speak, breathe, or eat, and your heartbeat would become extremely irregular.”

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While this might all sound very technical, medical and boring, I am trying to understand more about this wandering nerve system because there seems to be a major link between the Borderline Personality Disorder condition and changes in how this system works in a Borderline’s body.

I posted the other day from a research study done by Austin, Riniola and Porges about Borderline’s and their vagal nerve system that concluded:

“The BPD group ended in a physiological state that supports the mobilization behaviors of fight and flight, while the control group ended in a physiological state that supports social engagement behaviors.“  (2007, Borderline personality disorder and emotion regulation: Insights from the Polyvagal Theory)

This is NOT a minor or insignificant finding!

There was something terribly wrong with my mother’s STOP and GO physiological process!  As I begin to study about what might have been terribly wrong with her wandering vagal nerve system I begin to move from a consideration of how her brain-mind didn’t work right into the realization that her problem was probably much bigger:  It was in her BODY as well.

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Turning to what Keltner says about compassion I see that he directly places the human ability to experience sympathy and compassion within the responses of this wandering vagal nerve system in our body.  I’m not after hindsight or foresight right now.  I’m after insight.  What is this mysterious “bundle of nerves” and what might it have to do with my mother’s ability to traumatize little me?

Keltner states that this bundle, known as the vagus nerve,

“…resides in the chest and, when activated, produces a feeling of spreading, liquid warmth in the chest and a lump in the throat.  The vagus nerve…originates in the top of the spinal cord and then winds its way through the body…, connecting up to facial muscle tissue, muscles that are involved in vocalization, the heart, the lungs, the kidneys and liver, and the digestive organs.  In a series of controversial papers, physiological psychologist Steve Porges has made the case that the vagus nerve is the nerve of compassion, the body’s caretaking organ.”  (page 228 from Keltner’s book cited above)

I notice that Porges is one of the researchers who accomplished the Borderline vagal nerve study I mentioned above.  It seems that emotional information that would make a normal person’s Autonomic Nervous System’s (ANS) slow-down or STOP branch kick into gear instead had the reverse affect on these Borderlines.  Their ANS-vagal nerve system not only did not slow down, it sped up into a GO state directly connected to fight/flight.  Somehow, it seems, anything like a normal slow-down compassionate response was missing from their body-brain.

While it’s true that “all that glitters is not gold,” these research findings more than make me think about my mother and her treatment of me!  Her capacity to attack me was the opposite of normal!

Think about the actions of any abuser you might know as you read what Keltner next writes about both Porges’ and his own work:

“…Porges notes that the vagus nerve innervates the muscle groups of communicative systems involved in caretaking – the facial musculature and vocal apparatus.  In our research, for example, we have found that people systematically sigh – little quarter-second, breathy expressions of concern and understanding – when listening to another person describe an experience of suffering.  The sigh is a primordial exhalation, calming the sigher’s flight/flight physiology, and a trigger of comfort and trust, our study found, in the speaker.  When we sigh in soothing fashion, or reassure others in distress with our concerned gaze or oblique eyebrows, the vagus nerve is doing its work, stimulating the muscles of the throat, mouth, face, and tongue to emit soothing displays of concern and reassurance.

“Second, the vagus nerve is the primary brake on our heart rate.  Without activation of the vagus nerve, your heart would fire on average at about 115 beats per minute, instead of the more typical 72 beats per minute.  The vagus nerve helps slow the heart rate down.  When we are angry or fearful, our heart races, literally jumping five to ten beats per minute, distributing blood to various muscle groups, preparing the body for fight or flight.  The vagus nerve does the opposite, reducing our heart rate to a more peaceful pace, enhancing the likelihood of gentle contact in close proximity with others.

“Third, the vagus nerve is directly connected to rich networks of oxytocin receptors, those neuropeptides intimately involved in the experience of trust and love.  As the vagus nerve fires, stimulating affiliative vocalizations and calmer cardiovascular physiology, presumably it triggers the release of oxytocin, sending signals of warmth, trust, and devotion throughout the brain and body, and ultimately, to other people.

“Finally, the vagus nerve is unique to mammals.  Reptilian autonomic nervous systems share the oldest portion of the vagus nerve with us, what is known as the dorsal vagal complex, responsible for immobilization behavior:  for example, the shock response when physically traumatized; more speculatively, shame-related behavior when socially humiliated.  Reptile’s autonomic nervous systems also include the sympathetic region of the autonomic nervous system involved in flight/flight behavior.  But as caretaking began to define a new class of species – mammals – a region of the nervous system, the vagus nerve, emerged evolutionarily to help support this new category of behavior.”  (pages 229-230)

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As I read this information I think about Dr. Martin Teicher and his Harvard research group’s suggestion that infant-child abuse alters brain development toward one that is ‘evolutionarily altered’.  As I combine this information with what Keltner just described I begin to think that it might be entirely possible that early infant-child maltreatment can alter the development of the vagal nerve system ‘evolutionarily altered’ ways, as well.

I would doubt that these changes could possibly happen independently of one another.  My bet is that if the brain is forced to change in its development in a malevolent early environment, the vagus nerve system is probably changed at the same time through similar processes of adaptation to trauma.  Hence, if this is the case, the complete meltdown of my mother as a normal, healthy, happy woman!

In fact, my investigative mind suspects that it is the operation of an infant-child’s vagus nerve system that collects the vital information – in its body — about the condition of the world the tiny one was born into that then feeds this information to the developing brain.  As it turns out, the vagus nerve is directly tied to our immune system.  I’ve often said that it seems completely logical to me that infant-child developmental changes in response to early trauma are an immune response to threat and toxic conditions within a malevolent environment that affect how our genes form the body-brain during critical windows of growth and development.

At the same time I realize that I live in a very brain-head-boss oriented culture, rather than in a vagus nerve-body-boss oriented culture.  What if the real truth is that it is the information our vagus nerve collects from our body that signals our immune system to design our brain according to the conditions of our earliest environment from the start of our life?

This makes perfect sense to me.  I am going to digress here for a moment and include some information from a completely different source that I believe fits into this picture I see being painted in front of me about how our vagus nerve might govern our most critical responses to our environment.

I am referring to the writings of Daniel J. Levitin as he presents them in his 2007 book, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.  Levitin is talking about the development of the human brain’s music system in relationship to our brain systems that support our speech:

“The close proximity of music and speech processing in the frontal and temporal lobes, and their partial overlap, suggests that those neural circuits that become recruited for music and language may start out life undifferentiated.  Experience and normal development then differentiate the functions of what began as very similar neuronal populations.  Consider that at a very early age, babies are thought to be synesthetic, to be unable to differentiate the input from the different senses, and to experience life and the world as a sort of psychedelic union of everything sensory.  Babies may see the number five as red, taste cheddar cheeses in D-flat, and smell roses in triangles.

“The process of maturation creates distinctions in the neural pathways as connections are cut or pruned.  What may have started out as a neuron cluster that responded equally to sights, sound, taste, touch and smell becomes a specialized network.  So, too, may music and speech have started in us all with the same neurobiological origins, in the same regions, and using the same specific neural networks.  With increasing experience and exposure, the developing infant eventually creates dedicated pathways and dedicated language pathways.  The pathways may share some common resources….”  (pages 127-128)

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When I apply my investigative thinking about how infant-child abuse, neglect, maltreatment and trauma changes body-brain development to both my mother and to myself, I am looking backwards in time at the impact of these malevolent experiences on the kinds of developmental processes that Levitin is describing here.  These synesthetic experiences happen to us even before we are born, and most certainly happen within our infant body well before our nervous system-brain has finished development.

I see no possible way that the vagus nerve cannot be centrally involved in these earliest stages of our development.  All the information an infant’s body gathers from the conditions of its earliest caregiver interactions, that communicate to the growing body-brain either a safe and secure benevolent world or an unsafe and insecure malevolent world, would occur to a large extent through the vagus nerve system.  I suspect that all this information is communicated to the immune system so that adjustments in development can be made as necessary.

I will pursue these trains of thought in future posts about our wandering vagus nerve system…..

See this post, also: +LINKS – VAGUS NERVE – ABUSE- HEALING

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+NOT HAVING A PARTICULARLY CHIPPER DAY

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I was looking for something a friend had asked me for today and found, in a very unlikely place, an envelope that included my first grade picture, first grade report card, second grade report card and others.  Against my own wishes, I scanned them in and post the links to them here.  I really can’t say at this moment what the point of this even is.

What I did discover, as mentioned in the link for my first grade report card, is that I was absent 23 days in my first grade year of school.  I was not a sickly child, and even if I had missed a few days here and there for normal childhood sicknesses, 23 is a lot of days.

What is confirmed for me here is that my mother kept me out of school throughout my childhood on occasions when she was in a beating, abusive frenzy.  Part of me says today, “Well, I don’t want to even know that little girl.  I don’t want to know anything about her.  She was not me.”

Yes, she was me.  Yes, I am she.  Obviously what she/me experienced is what this blog is about.  But I don’t want to think about any of it today.  Not one single part of it except to scan in this information and post the links.  Not particularly helpful to anyone, I don’t expect, but it will have to do.

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The other thing that’s been on my mind today was a dream I had last night that I actually remembered having this morning when I woke up.  I died in my dream last night.  I don’t remember how I died, or the actual dying itself.  But first in the dream I was alive, and then later in the dream I was dead.

I find it interesting that the whole dream took place at the home of the woman who found my mother dying in her shabby motel room in 2002.  This woman, I call JV, first met and befriended my mother when we moved to Alaska in 1957, and was the only person that maintained a relationship/friendship with my mother over all those years.

JV was strong enough in some unusual way to stay my mother’s friend for 45 years.  In my dream I was with a group of friends and family at JV’s house when I died.  Nobody could see me then but her.  I could see everyone else.  JV didn’t act like anything had changed, even though I knew she knew I was dead.  I’m not going to worry about the ‘meaning’ of the dream — just having it and remembering it is unsettling and strange enough.

So for now, I will go do my 45 minute walk-jog and then do simple things, like eat supper.  I wish everyone well — and I’ll be back here perhaps more chipper tomorrow.  (PS – I hit ‘publish’ for this post and my Firefox crashed.  Glad it saved the post FIRST!)

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*Age 5 – kindergarten 1956-57

*Age 6 – 1st grade report card 1957-58

Just turned 6, too-old eyes, puffy from crying

*Age 7 – 1958-59 2nd grade report card

*Age 9 – 1960-61 4th grade report card

*Age 10 – 5th grade 1961-62

*Age 11 1962-63 6th grade class picture

*Age 11 – 1962-63 6th grade report card

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Well, this does come to mind:

I used to remember my dreams.  Now I remember remembering the dreams.

Years ago I belonged to a circle of women who met with the elder Grandmothers to learn about teachings.  One time I traveled to a Canadian reserve with some of these women to visit our Grandmother elder, Mary.  I brought Mary some tobacco so I could ask her about a dream I had a few days before.

Mary accepted my tobacco.  She sat across the living room from me on her couch, staring down at her shoes while I talked.  I told her my dream about the group of Native American men that stood talking among themselves on the sidewalk across the street from where I stood talking with a group of women.

Suddenly I looked down at my palms and saw each of them had a hole in it I could see through.  Shocked, I turned to my friends and showed the women, “What happened to me?” I asked them.  “What can we do about this?”

None of the women had a clue.  As I looked up I saw the most handsome young man with long black hair glistening down his back crossing the street toward me, looking straight into my eyes.  When he reached me he gently took each of my hands into his, one at a time, raised them to his lips and blew his breath through each hole, never taking his eyes off of mine.

When he released my hands, the holes were gone, and the man turned and sauntered back across the street without saying a word.  Oh, I was in LOVE!  I wanted to follow him more than anything, but the women restrained me.

“Oh, no, Linda, you can’t go where the men are.  The men have men things they have to do.  We women have our women things we have to take care of.  Stay here.  You cannot go to be with that man.  Leave that man alone.”

So, I didn’t follow him.  I dutifully stayed with the women, glancing across the street now and then, until finally I saw him get into his car and leave.

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At no time while I was telling Grandmother Mary about this dream did she move a muscle.  She did not look at me for a few minutes after I had stopped talking, either.  I sat, barely breathing, waiting for her profound interpretation of what this dream might mean.  Finally, Mary shifted her weight, turned toward me and said with the straightest of faces, “Well, honey, all I can tell you is this.  Next time you have that dream about that man, you call me.  I’ll help you get into his trunk.”

The whole room lit up with her laughter.

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+CAN EARLY INFANT-CHILD MALTREATMENT TURN OFF THE COMPASSION SWITCH?

alchemynow4 Comments

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What if a single research key exists that fits into the lock that will open the door for me to find out what was REALLY wrong with my severely abusive Borderline mother?

I used to think that if I could name one single fact about my mother that allowed her to so terribly abuse me from birth and for the next 18 years of my childhood, I would say that my mother lacked a conscience.  Search as I might, I cannot actually find anyone who can begin to say exactly what ‘conscience’ is let alone where it might physically reside in a person’s body-brain.

Today I am beginning to understand that there is another word I can use to think about what my mother did to me.  My mother completely lacked the ability to feel compassion for me.  Compassion, it turns out, IS an aspect of human beings that does seem to be connected biologically, physiologically, neurologically to very real systems in our body-brain.  I like that.  I can learn about this.

The most fundamental human do-good, be-good system in our body is evidently our vagal nerve structures.  Before I present my informational links for today, I want to first present this single piece of research that shines a clear, bright light on what might be the very system within my mother’s body that was – most simply put – unable to help her not to harm me!

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Borderline personality disorder and emotion regulation: Insights from the Polyvagal Theory

By

Marilyn A. Austina, Todd C. Riniolob and Stephen W. Porges (2007)

References and further reading may be available for this article. To view references and further reading you must purchase this article.

Abstract

The current study provides the first published evidence that the parasympathetic component of the autonomic nervous system differentiates the response profiles between individuals diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and controls.

Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), a non-invasive marker of the influence of the myelinated vagal fibers on the heart, and heart period were collected during the presentation of film clips of varying emotional content.

The BPD and control groups had similar initial levels of RSA and heart period. However, during the experiment the groups exhibited contrasting trajectories, with the BPD group decreasing RSA and heart period and the control group increasing RSA and heart period.

By the end of the experiment, the groups differ significantly on both RSA and heart period. The correlation between the changes in RSA and heart period was significant only for the control group, suggesting that vagal mechanisms mediated the heart period responses only in the control group.

The findings were consistent with the Polyvagal Theory [Porges, S. W. (1995). Orienting in a defensive world: Mammalian modifications of our evolutionary heritage: A Polyvagal Theory. Psychophysiology, 32, 301–318; Porges, S. W. (2001). The Polyvagal Theory: Phylogenetic substrates of a social nervous system. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 42, 123–146; Porges, S. W. (2003). Social engagement and attachment: A phylogenetic perspective. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1008, 31–47.], illustrating different adaptive shifts in autonomic state throughout the course of the experiment.

The BPD group ended in a physiological state that supports the mobilization behaviors of fight and flight, while the control group ended in a physiological state that supports social engagement behaviors.

These finding are consistent with other published studies demonstrating atypical vagal regulation of the heart with other psychiatric disorders.

FULL ARTICLE IS PUBLISHED IN:

Brain and Cognition
Volume 65, Issue 1, October 2007, Pages 69-76
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience: Developmental and Clinical Perspectives

Marilyn A. Austina, Todd C. Riniolob and Stephen W. Porgesc, ,

aDepartment of Human Development, University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, MD, USA

bDepartment of Psychology, Medaille College, Buffalo, NY, USA

cDepartment of Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago, Psychiatric Institute, Chicago, IL, USA

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GREAT SHOW!!  GREAT SHOW!!  GREAT SHOW!!  GREAT SHOW!!

THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN GOODNESS

ONLINE – FREE – RADIO PROGRAM

LISTEN HERE (scroll down their web page for title)

Dr. Moira Gunn talks with UC Berkeley Psychology Professor, Dacher Keltner and the editor of Greater Good magazine, Jason Marsh, about how humans are naturally programmed to be good and what separates those who are from those who are not.

Interview with the authors Dacher Keltner and Jason Marsh ABOUT —

The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness by Dacher Keltner, Jason Marsh, and Jeremy Adam Smith (Paperback – Jan 4, 2010)

Book Review

The short, accessible essays…underscore empathy, forgiveness, gratitude, happiness, trust, and apology…. A readable digest of current work in positive psychology for a general audience. (E. James Lieberman – Library Journal )

Book Description

Leading scientists and science writers reflect on the life-changing, perspective-changing, new science of human goodness. In these pages you will hear from Steven Pinker, who asks, “Why is there peace?”; Robert Sapolsky, who examines violence among primates; Paul Ekman, who talks with the Dalai Lama about global compassion; Daniel Goleman, who proposes “constructive anger”; and many others. Led by renowned psychologist Dacher Keltner, the Greater Good Science Center, based at the University of California in Berkeley, has been at the forefront of the positive psychology movement, making discoveries about how and why people do good. Four times a year the center publishes its findings with essays on forgiveness, moral inspiration, and everyday ethics in Greater Good magazine. The best of these writings are collected here for the first time.

A collection of personal stories and empirical research, The Compassionate Instinct will make you think not only about what it means to be happy and fulfilled but also about what it means to lead an ethical and compassionate life. 25 illustrations.

See all Editorial Reviews

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IMPORTANT LINK TO PAGES ON COMPASSION:

Today I scanned the next chapter in Dr. Dacher Keltner’s book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life on Compassion.  I initially purchased this book out of my interest in what Keltner had to say about the human neural circuits that appear to have evolved specifically to help us live a good life in the world having to do with the Polyvagal Theory, or the vagal components of our nervous system.

It is here in his chapter on Compassion that Keltner begins to talk about this vagal nerve system (and about its direct connection to our immune system).  Please take a few moments to read this.  I present this chapter for discussion and educational purposes – please follow the active book title link above to purchase your copy:

CLICK HERE TO READ THE SCANNED PAGES OF KELTNER’S CHAPTER ON COMPASSION

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+KELTNER, ARE YOU LYING? PEOPLE ARE BORN TO CHOOSE, NOT TO BE GOOD

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The sad truth is, I cannot blindly agree with Keltner that humans are “Born to Be Good.”  If we eliminate the bad and try to only keep the good about humans, we are eliminating the whole realm of ambiguity that defines us as a species.  I know that kind of thinking.  It was my mother’s.

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I recognize that I might have troubles with the murky gray regions of ambiguity in human relationships because of being raised by my Borderline mother who allowed no ambiguity whatsoever to exist in her world regarding me.  I was not allowed to be a human child.  I was evil from before I was born (the whole trying to kill her in labor thing, sent by the devil to accomplish this sinister act).

Not having normal experiences or non-threatening experiences within the realm of ambiguity did not allow me to learn (in my growing body-brain) how to negotiate my way around in Grayville, that marginal land where the boundaries and borders between what might be happening are more unclear that what IS definitely happening in real time.  There was no “might be” space in my mother’s universe.  There was only the space of “This is the way things are because I say so.”  My mother lived in a world of absolutes that she defined, irregardless of any other person in her universe.

I bring this up because I am finding it very difficult to understand what Keltner is saying about teasing in the second half of his chapter (in his book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life).  His writing about the ambiguities within the teasing social realm is ambiguous!  Does he mean to be this obtuse?  Or is it that I am so uncomfortable myself with ambiguity that reading what he is saying about the invisible line between legitimate teasing as a GOOD thing and illegitimate teasing that crosses this borderline and becomes bullying as a BAD teasing thing seems impossible for me to find?

Do normal people with normally built prosocial brains simply intuitively and distinctly know the difference automatically?  I am confused.  I must have a need to sort Keltner’s information into black and white categories of “this teasing is good” and “this teasing is bad.”  In fact, I thought I understood Keltner to say earlier that bad teasing is simply not teasing at all, it is bullying.  So, which is it?  Is bullying teasing or is bullying NOT teasing?  Is there both good teasing and bad teasing?  Is their right and wrong teasing?  Or is teasing, by definition, only teasing if it is good and right so that bad and wrong teasing is something else all together?

I hate being in Grayville.  I am tempted to scrap my project, entirely skip the remaining half of Keltner’s teasing chapter.  I am as uncomfortable with reading Keltner’s chapter on teasing as I am with the experience of being teased itself.

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From what I can tell, teasing as a good, right aspect of human behavior is not something normal-prosocial brain people ever have to think about or question.  Bullying, on the other hand, remains a chronic problem within human social interactions of the playground, in the workplace, even in people’s homes.

Do teasing and bullying exist as two separate branches of a single trunk of human relational abilities?  Are they completely separate trunks?  Do they exist as aspects of a single trunk?  Personally, as I read Keltner’s reading, although he might be one of the world’s expert researchers on the subject, I cannot tell the difference.  I wanted him to tell me.  I wanted to know for sure.  Am I missing something here, or is he really as confused about the issue as I am and is just misleading me by telling me that anyone can really tell the difference – and know the truth?

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I returned back to Keltner’s chapter on laughter because he is saying that both genuine laughter and teasing are related to a uniquely human ability to play.  He states:

“The thesis that laughter represents a critical evolutionary shift in hominid evolution is not as far-fetched as one might imagine.  It is a point that evolutionists…have made.  The laugh might rightfully lay claim to the status of tool-making, agriculture, the opposable thumb, self-representation, imitation, the domestication of animals, upright gait, and symbolic language – an evolutionary signature of a great shift in our social organization, accompanied by shifts in our nervous system.  What separates mammals from reptiles are the raw materials of laughter – play, and the ability to communicate with the voice.

“More striking is how human laughter differs from that of our primate relatives…  Human laughter…is stunning in its diversity and complexity:  It is a language unto its own.”  (pages 124-125)

Well, first of all, Keltner’s list of evolutionary landmarks is disturbingly out of order.  Why did he choose to place “the opposable thumb” after “tool-making” and “agriculture?”  Why is “the domestication of animals” listed before “upright gait?”  This unsettling presentation of human evolutionary advances is further confused by the mention of human “symbolic language” abilities in the same paragraph where he is defining what “separates mammals from reptiles.”

His writing is escalating my confusion.  He is not giving me confidence that I will be able to trust him as the expert on such a delicate topic as how teasing is not related to abuse if I have to decipher his mish-mash of historical information about human laughter so that I can translate any of this information into something that makes logical sense to me!  I don’t like to have to work this hard to understand what this man is saying!

How can I trust him to disambiguate the ambiguous topic of the ambiguities of teasing?  How can I hope to repair some of my own problems with both ambiguity and teasing?  Uh-Oh!  Is Keltner in danger of toppling off of his expert-on-the-topic pedestal?

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One of the uncomfortable qualities of ambiguity is doubt.  There is a cost in being able to entertain doubt.  Doubt seems to be one of those run-on experiences that cause many people to desire, “Get to the POINT, already!”  What can we constructively make out of doubt?  In my body, doubt is a state that needs resolution.  It is an open ended invitation to figure something out and get on with life as usual.

My ongoing discomfort with a state of doubt seems to be related to trauma in my experience.  Ongoing trauma does not in itself offer either solution or resolution.  Ongoing trauma leaves people in a state of needing to transition into something better and safer and more known.  The unknown conditions of trauma are connected in my body to the unknown conditions of the 18 years of trauma I experienced with my mother.  I hate doubt!

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I am going to allow myself to go back to the place in Keltner’s writings on laughter where I first encountered my doubt that he was going to answer my personal question about where the line is drawn between true human prosocial interactions and those that are abusive.  This is what I found that led up to my first moment of doubt.  Keltner writes about laughter something that is his lead-in for his discussion about teasing:

“Laughter is not simply a read-out of an internal state in the body or mind, be it the cessation of anxiety and distress or uplifting rises in mirth, levity or exhilaration.  Instead, laughter is also a rich social signal that has evolved with play interactions – tickling, roughhousing, banter – to evoke cooperative response in others.  The laughter as cooperation thesis brings together scattered findings in the empirical literature….”  (page 135)

“Perhaps laughter is the great switch of cooperation.  It is a framing device, shifting social interactions to collaborative exchanges based on trust, cooperation, and goodwill.”

“This theorizing, though, it in need of a bit more precision.  We cooperate in many ways – through gifts, soothing touch, compliments, promises, and acts of generosity.  Laughter must be associated with a more specific brand of cooperation.”  (page 136)

This all sounded fine with me the first time I read Keltner’s words, but the very next paragraph is where doubt began to enter into my consideration of Keltner’s thinking.  What he says in this next paragraph on laughter is dropped like a pile of you-know-what on the sidewalk and then left there.  Nowhere in the remaining pages of his chapter on laughter does Keltner ever go back and talk about the very important idea that he drops into his chapter here.  Nowhere does he actually come back to talking about how BAD laughter relates to GOOD laughter on the human laughter continuum.  He states here:

“Counterexamples to the laughter as cooperation hypothesis readily leap to mind.  Bullies routinely laugh at their aggressive acts of humiliation….  Some torturers at Abu Ghraib were heard to laugh at their victims.  Thomas Hobbes wrote that laughter is the “sudden glory” produced by “the apprehension of some deformed thing in another” that makes people “suddenly applaud themselves” – a view that does not surprise given his portrayal of a dog-eat-dog world.  Clues to a more precise conceptualization of laughter are found in its origins – in how play and laughter emerge in children, and what is being achieved, socially and conceptually, in the process.”  (page 136)

The very title of Keltner’s book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, of course suggest to me that this author might take a very biased look at human behavior.  Knowing this, I ignored and excused this last paragraph the first time I read it.  Yes, Keltner goes on in his writing taking great pains to present this “more precise conceptualization of laughter” as it can be grounded in origins in play.  BUT!!!!  How can he simply turn away from the very BAD aspects of laughter he just presented and pretend that they do not exist?  Never again in his chapter on laughter did he return to talk about what he just said in his words here.

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The first time around I simply ignored this inconsistency and read on.  But I carried my own doubt along with me.  Now I have reached a point in trying to understand what Keltner is saying about teasing where I can no longer allow my thinking to blithely follow along this author’s pathway.  For me, as a severe infant-child abuse survivor, I need to know what Keltner is not saying about the dark side of human nature that seems to be conveniently amputated from this text.

Keltner might as well be saying, “The dark and bad, hurtful, abusive side of humor, laughter and teasing does not exist because I am going to make it go away.  I am going to ignore it.  I am going to drop this turd of truth onto the sidewalk of my writing and then turn away and leave it to feed my readers’ doubts.  But I am not going to give them any useful information about this dark side.  I don’t have to.  I’m the expert and this is, obviously, my book.”

Well, at this point I am going to let my doubt shine.  Keltner’s pattern of separating the dark from the light here — of brandishing the gleaming sword of higher purpose in the good side of human nature while he banishes the bloody sword of how humans can also terribly and darkly wound and hurt one another – is resonating within me with my personal knowledge of how my mother incorporated these same patterns of thinking into her Borderline brain.

If I take the light of my own doubt out and use it to clarify what my experience is with Keltner’s words, I know that I recognize Keltner is splitting an archetype of wholeness into good versus bad so that he can ignore the bad.  The side of human nature that Keltner presented in his paragraph (above) is not minor or insignificant, and it does exist.

My mother’s psychosis split the whole archetype of good and bad in this same way.  I was assigned the not human bad and evil half of the archetype.  I could do no good, no right.  My mother assigned the other half of the archetype to my sister.  She suffered under the punishing weight of not being allowed a childhood, or even to exist in her own right as a human being, because my mother projected out onto her all goodness.  My sister could do not wrong.

So what my doubt is telling me is that I have been down this road before.  There is nothing ambiguous about this fact.  For 18 long and terrible years I lived in this reality.  I was dumped like a turd onto my mother’s sidewalk from the moment I was born.  She then continued on to form a life (distorted as it was) with all my siblings without me in it.  She only turned toward me with her continued rage-filled, violent hatred and let me know she would rather that I didn’t exist at all.

My mother could not tolerate any of her own badness to exist inside of herself.  So she accomplished a similar magical act that Keltner does.  She also banished badness.  She simply projected all of hers out onto me.  I was the demon.  My sister was the angel.  My mother wanted to keep the goodness.  She wanted to destroy the badness.  Keltner seems to be doing the very same thing.  He keeps the goodness and vanquishes the badness by simply ignoring it and pretending it does not exit.

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No wonder my thinking got all tangled up as I tried to decipher the second half of Keltner’s chapter on teasing.  My doubt has been telling me the truth, and just because what I know is not contained in Keltner’s thinking does not mean that he has left this truth out of his book.

Keltner dances around the truth throughout the entire rest of his chapter as if he is trying to make his way around a thousand active vipers.  For every step he takes in his made-up world of all human goodness, he has to step over and around the unspoken truth that within the realm of teasing the bad and hurtful potential of human nature is just as present as the goodness.  If I dare to say it, the problem with ambiguity, with the ambiguous realm of human nature, lies within Keltner’s writings and certainly not solely within me (or within my mother).

I am reminded of the profound and simple Hans Christian Andersen children’s story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”  Go figure!  Reading Keltner’s book while allowing my doubt to remain buried in doubt itself is nothing more than allowing myself as a reader to participate in Keltner’s delusion.  There’s a technical term for this:  Participation Mystique.  I will no longer participate in Keltner’s world of illusion.  Been there, done that with my mother.

Keltner is probably no more aware of his deceptive thinking than my mother was.  M. Scott Peck, in his book People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, offers the most straight forward explanation of the good that doubt does for us that I have ever seen.  Doubt is our internal warning that we are in the presence of the deception of a lie.  Peck does not hesitate to connect the presence of a lie with the presence of evil.  I don’t have to go that far, personally.

What I do know is that without my taking this detour today to let the light of my doubt show me the truth of my own experience while attempting to read and understand the second half of Keltner’s chapter on teasing, I would simply not be able to read another word of his book at all.  I will not follow along with Keltner’s words, dancing over the poisonous vipers of what is ALSO possible for humans just because Keltner seems to be hell bent on ignoring it.  I will not participate with him in his version of dichotomous thinking.

Humans are NOT “born to be good.”  We are born to hopefully be able to make choices between good and bad.  We are supposed to have the full potential to accomplish both.  Because of my 18 years of abuse from my mother I have my own reasons to doubt that all humans end up being equal in the conscious choice department.  But that exploration is ongoing for me.

What is important to me today is that I have MYSELF introduced the Grayville potential of ambiguity into my thinking about Keltner’s thoughts on teasing.  Now that I see he eliminated ambiguity from his own thinking by splitting off the bad, and now that I can include ambiguity in my own thinking as I read his split keep the white, throw out the black-world thoughts, perhaps I can yet learn something else from this book after all – other than the fact that this man seems to follow thought patterns that are very much like my mother’s were.

I don’t have the luxury of being able to lull myself into believing the bad in humans does not exist with equal potential as the good.  I will not dance blind and asleep in the vipers’ den.  I know the truth, and no verbal magical sleight of hand denial of the bad side of human nature, even if done by an ‘expert’, is going to convince me that humans are “Born to Be Good.”

That may be true in the fairy tales, but in real life we have to consider the reality of choice.  If choice is removed from a person such as I believe it was from my mother in her childhood, then we are left with the very worst of what a human being CAN do.  I know vipers.  I was raised by one.  Some people can choose to be vipers.  Some people seem to turn into vipers by accident.  But I will not pretend that these people do not exist, as Keltner seems to want to.

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+CHILD ABUSE: IN THE ABSENCE OF THE PRESENCE OF GOODNESS

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The absence of goodness and of prosocial interactions (like teasing) in my childhood home of origin impacted me equally with the presence of my mother’s abusive badness.  The presence of abuse in infant-childhood tragically turns a little one’s entire universe upside-down, backwards and inside-out from safe, secure and normal.  The more I study about the good side of being human, the more I realize that it isn’t just the presence of abuse that is so damaging.  The absence of goodness astronomically multiplies the impact that the presence of badness has on developing offspring.

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I return again today to the chapter on teasing in Dr. Dacher Keltner’s 2009 book’s (Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life).  Non-child abuse survivors can probably read Keltner’s information on teasing without having to first think about verbal abuse.  Infant-child abuse survivors, however, can easily bring memories of verbal attacks into their thinking about teasing.

Keltner’s writings about smiling and laughter didn’t present me with the same challenge as the one I face when he moved on to teasing.  Smiles and laughter are by nature not verbal, although they very often happen within the varied verbal arenas people participate in with one another.  Teasing, from the human perspective, often involves the use of words.  Infant-childhood verbal abuse survivors can well remember how words can slice, dice and shred the innocent into greatly wounded tiny pieces.

Because verbal abuse is so harmful to the developing infant-child, it can make it even more important for survivors to follow Keltner’s descriptions about what teasing is, and what teasing is not.  He begins his chapter on teasing by presenting us with the image of the famous peacock’s tail.  This tail is often referred to scientifically in terms of how it is a ‘reproductive fitness indicator’ because it is a high cost item for the peacock to present.  The healthier the tail, the more resplendent its appearance, the healthier the peacock is – which simply means that this bird has had enough resources available to it within its environment to produce a tail that is closest to the ‘best possible tail’.

If the peacock’s tail is shabby and forlorn, however, that tail indicates that there were not enough resources in the environment for this peacock to create a ‘best possible tail’.  The shabby-tailed peacock could not afford to make a better one.  Allusions to the quality of the peacock tail’s display are often transferred to considerations of ‘mental illnesses’ as those genes exist toward the gifted end of the human continuum of abilities.  The more creative, say, or talented a person is, the more likely they are to be at higher risk for developing negative complications if their earliest environment was malevolent rather than benign.  The continued presence of human giftedness and ‘mental illness’ is thought to relate to ‘reproductive fitness indicators’ because of the high cost that giftedness carries with it to ‘end up right’.

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Although perhaps they might not seem as dramatic as a peacock’s tail in terms of being obvious and visible reproductive fitness indicators, the presence or absence, as well as the quality of humor and happiness ‘displays’ such as genuine smiles, laughter and teasing do reflect to other people both our individual fitness and the fitness of the early environment that builds the circuits and pathways into the brain that allow humor displays to happen in the first place.

Unlike physical prowess or musical and artistic giftedness, the presence of humor-related abilities is directly tied to our prosocial brain.  Ongoing early unsafe and insecure attachment experiences deplete our human prosocial brain abilities.  The continued absence of humor – call it happiness – directly signals humans that unfortunate early circumstances deprived the brain of its ability to establish all the prosocial (safe and secure attachment) regions and circuits a brain needs to process happiness information on both the personal and the social level.

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Keltner tells his reader at the beginning of his chapter on teasing that no matter how well-built and flourishing a peacock’s tail might be, there is another aspect to the tail that is not so often mentioned.  When a male peacock meets a potential mate, the first thing he does is turn his tail’s display away from the female.  This is the teasing interaction in a most basic and simple form.

The male is testing the female’s interest and intention.  If she turns and walks away, obviously no matter how resplendent the male’s tail is, the female is not impressed.  If, however, the female pursues a ‘relationship’ with the male, she will move around toward the head of the peacock and a ‘relationship’ can continue.  As Keltner notes, if the female shows no further interest once the male has teased her by turning away, “he has acquired critical information about her lack of commitment.  He can factor this information into his decision about whom to mate with and whom not.”  (pages 146-147)

Of course humans are far more complicated than peacocks are, yet we also use a wide array of nonverbal signals as cues in our communications with others.  Most simply put, no matter what our original genetic makeup might have been, the conditions of attachment in our earliest body-brain developmental stages moderate and modulate our abilities to both send and receive our species’ signaling cues.  Teasing is one of these cues.

Prosocial actions happen to signal cooperation in an environment of plenty.  Antisocial actions signal competition in an environment of scarcity.  Unsocial actions communicate an absence of social interactional abilities that are most closely tied to an early environment of nothing at all – or isolation.

Keltner states about teasing:

“The importance of provocation and teasing in our social evolution is suggested by how pervasive teasing is in the animal world….  Sexual insults are as reliable an occurrence in human social life as food sharing, greeting gestures, patterns of comfort, flirtation, and the expression of gratitude.”  (page 147)

“The perils of teasing are patently clear.  “Just teasing” is invoked as a last defense by the grammar-school bully and the incorrigible sexual malfeasant at work.  But what they are referring to with the claim “I was just teasing” upon closer inspection is not teasing at all but aggression and coercion, pure and simple.  Bullies steal, punch, kick, spit on, torment, and humiliate.  They don’t really tease.  Sexual predators grope, leer, and made crude, at times threatening, passes.  They’re pretty ineffectual flirts.  In contrast, teasing is a mode of play, no doubt with a sharp edge, in which we provoke others.  We turn to the playful provocation of teasing to negotiate the ambiguities of social living – establishing hierarchies, testing commitments to social norms, uncovering potential romantic interest, negotiating conflicts over work and resources.”  (page 148)

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As I’ve already described about genuine smiles and laughter, both scarce and nearly missing entirely from my childhood home, so also was teasing missing along with any other safe and secure display of playful behavior.  What was present was my mother’s unremitting bullying actions toward me, and her near complete malevolent control over everyone else in her household.

There was no joking or kidding around in my mother’s monkey house.  We all lived under her malevolent reign of terror.  We were not ‘vaccinated’ as Keltner describes.  We were poisoned.  Our home was not a practice ground for developing prosocial human interactional abilities.  Our home was a practice ground for one thing:  how to survive a childhood with my mother.

Keltner delineates the social nature of teasing:

“The consensus was [in the scientific world] that teasing is “playful aggression.”  Clearly, though, teasing does not equate to all kinds of playful aggression.  Unintended playful aggression – accidentally elbowing a fellow train passenger’s nose while you’re hustling money with your imitation of Harp Marx – is clearly not teasing (at least I hope you don’t think so).  More general references to play are ambiguous.  Many forms of childhood play, such as role playing (children acting as princesses or ninja warriors), roughhousing, highly structured playground games like tag or four square, and the ritualized jokes and conversational games that fill the air of school buses – are not teasing.  The same is true of many forms of adult play:  We tell amusing stories, exchange playful repartee, and josh around in ways that are not teasing.

“…[M]y colleagues…and I defined a tease as an intentional provocation accompanied by playful off-record markers.  We referred to provocation instead of aggression because a tease involves an act that is intended to provoke emotion, to discern another’s commitments.  The provocation is evident in the content of the verbal utterance or some physical act, like a poke in the ribs, the proverbial pinch of the cheek, or a tongue protrusion.  The tease, in a funny way (and I’m not teasing), is like a social vaccine.  Vaccines are weak forms of pathogens (for example, small pox) that, when injected, stimulates the recipient’s immune system – the inflammation response, killer T cells that recognize the dangerous pathogen, bind to it and kill it.  The tease seeks to stimulate the recipient’s emotional system, to reveal the individual’s social commitments.

“The more mysterious element is what is unsaid in the tease.  This family of linguistic acts we called off-record markers.  These are the nonverbal actions that swirl around the hostile provocation and signal that it is not to be taken literally but instead in the spirit of play.”  (pages 150-151)

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I found it fascinating that what Keltner writes about next in his chapter on teasing is directly connected to expert assessments of adult attachment.  Keltner uses the same Grice’s Maxims as rules for sincere communication that adult attachment researchers use to measure safe and secure versus unsafe and insecure attachment patterns.  Keltner presents the four simple rules governing the ability to converse coherently as follows:

“Sincere communication, according to Grice, involves utterances that are to be taken literally.  These statements should adhere as closely as possible to four maxims….  Statements should follow the rule of quantity – avoid the Strunk and White catastrophes of being too wordy or opaquely succinct.  Statements should be relevant and on topic and avoid meandering into digressions, irrelevances, or stream-of-consciousness flights of fancy.  Finally, in honoring the rule of manner, statements should be direct, clear, and to the point….”  (page 151)

Adult attachment researchers have discovered that disintegration in the ability to follow these simple four rules of sincere (coherent) communication is a direct sign of insecure adult attachment.  The more the rules are broken, the more unable an adult is to tell their life story in accordance with these rules, the more certain it is that early relational trauma was present during the adult’s early body-brain developmental stages.  The lack of the ability to tell a coherent life story is the number one signal that an adult insecure attachment ‘disorder’ exists.

Keltner is not making this connection in his writings, but from my point of view, if a person cannot follow these rules in the telling of their life story, and therefore have an insecure attachment pattern built into their body-brain, they will not be able TO BREAK THESE RULES APPROPRIATELY in order to participate in appropriate teasing interactions.  The presence, absence and quality of appropriate teasing abilities might well be a very simple way to assess how pro-socially a person’s body-brain was built from the start of their life.  (I, for example, am extremely unskilled and uncomfortable in the teasing arena!)

How can we intentionally break rules that we do not inherently understand in the first place?  The more I examine what Keltner says about teasing, the more I think about the connection between having a discomfort with teasing that parallels a discomfort with ambiguity in general.  A Borderline Personality Disorder brain does not seem to be able to process ambiguous information in anything like an ordinary way.  It seems very probable to me that insecure attachment, lack of the ability to tell one’s life story according to Grices’ Maxims, the inability to regulate emotion, the inability to tolerate ambiguity and the inability to participate in the teasing arena are ALL related disabilities within the Borderline condition, disabilities that are anchored within the Borderline body-nervous system-brain-mind-self.  I know they were for my mother.

One cannot use what one does not possess.  Nor can one give away what they don’t have in the first place.  My mother’s disabilities created the environment within our childhood home that, in turn, robbed my mother’s children (especially me) of being able to obtain healthy prosocial interaction abilities, either. Thus the consequences of unresolved trauma, including insecure attachments to self and others, are built into the body-brain of offspring and tumble down the generations.

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Keltner continues in his explanation of how genuine insincerity is intentionally communicated through teasing:

“When we intentionally violate Grice’s maxims, we signal that alternative interpretations of the utterance are possible.  We say “this” with our words, and “not this” with violations of Grice’s maxims, pointing to other possible meanings of our utterance.  We signal “not this” by resorting to obvious falsehoods or exaggerations of the truth (which violate the rule of quantity).  We can provide too much information, for example in systematic repetition, or too little information, thus violating the rule of quantity.  We can dwell in the irrelevant to violate the rule of relation.  And we can resort to various linguistic acts – idiomatic expressions, metaphors, oblique references – that violate the rule of manner and its requirements of clarity and directness.

“As important as sincere speech is to our social life, so too is this realm of nonliteral communication.  Our brief utterances can take on the opposite meaning of what the words denote (irony, satire).  We can connect disparate concepts in communicative acts that leap beyond narrow literal denotation (metaphor).  We can endow our utterances with multiple layers of unbounded, aesthetically pleasing meaning (poetry).  (page 152)

Keltner’s words make me think about my suspicions that part of what was wrong with my mother’s brain was related to her not having transitioned successfully out of her childhood stage of magical thinking.  That stage is when a child learns  about what is real and what is not, about multiple and varying ways that other people have of experiencing the world, and about negotiating a developing self comfortably and cooperatively in an ever expanding shared social world.  That is what forming an appropriate Theory of Mind is all about, and my mother didn’t get one.

My mother never learned how to negotiate conflict.

I can easily stretch my thinking about what Keltner is saying about the rules of sincere coherent communication and how we break those rules in certain ways for certain reasons to also include what Keltner says next about polite speech as I think about my mother.  Verbal abuse, any verbal abuse, is NOT teasing and it is NOT polite speech.  Never once in the 18 years of my childhood, did my mother treat me politely!  Child abuse is inconsiderate and rude!

Sure, she knew how to practice polite speech as a part of her public persona, but within the confines of her own domain, politeness was not remotely her concern.  As I already described in my post on Keltner’s description of embarrassment, my mother’s lack of this ability was evidently tied back in its roots into her problems with Grice’s maxims related not only to teasing, but also to polite speech.

Keltner writes.

“The relevance of Grice’s maxims to teasing, ironically enough, is revealed in linguists Brown and Levinson’s 1987 classic, Politeness.  Brown and Levinson carefully document how in the world’s languages speakers add a layer of politeness to their utterances when what they say risks embarrassing the listener or themselves.  Politeness is achieved through systematic violations of Grice’s four maxims.

“Consider the simple act of making a request.  If someone asks you for the time, or directions, or to pass the rutabagas, or not to talk so loudly during the previews, that act is fraught with potential conflict.  The recipient of the request is imposed upon and risks being revealed as incompetent, boorish, or disinterested in social conventions.  The requester risks being perceived as intrusive and impolite.  To soften the impact of requests and other potentially impolite acts such as recommendations, or criticism, people violate Grice’s maxims to communicate in more polite fashion….  We break the rules of sincere communication to be polite.  Equipped with this analysis of nonliteral communication, a careful examination of the tease reveals that teasing and politeness are surprisingly close relatives.”  (pages 152-153)

It is not surprising, then, to find that the lack of teasing and the lack of politeness in my mother are connected.  I suspect these abilities to also be distorted or missing in all severely abusive parents.  (I am not talking about the hundreds of ‘social rules’ my Boston-raised mother enforced such as putting our knife down and switching hands every time we cut a piece of meat on our plate, keeping our elbows off of the dinner table, or brushing our hair before we ever showed up at the table in the first place.)

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I have only made it half way through Keltner’s teasing chapter here today.  There is certainly enough information here to provoke some insightful thought about ourselves, those we know, and about the conditions in our childhood home – especially if abuse was present.

I feel like a social anthropologist, carefully brushing away tidbits of clay to reveal patterns in my mother’s antisocial interactions that I’ve never specifically thought about before now.  A human being might be more than the sum of their parts, but taking this close a look at some of the parts my mother was missing helps me to more clearly see more of the whole picture of who she was – in large measure according to what she was missing – a prosocial brain with its matching abilities.

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MORE ON BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER:

from Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD
If you have BPD, do you find yourself sometimes creating obstacles to your own success? Some people with BPD describe this kind of self-defeating cycle– just as they get close to success, they sabotage it. Maybe you quit therapy just as you are making progress, or a job when it looks like good things are happening. Does this pattern describe you?
In the Spotlight
Don’t Give Up! Reasons to Stay in Therapy
Research shows that about 47% of patients with BPD leave treatment prematurely. Before you make a decision about dropping out of therapy, however, here are some things to consider.
More Topics
BPD and Your Career
Is the self-sabotage factor affecting your career? Do you jump from job to job? Learn more about BPD and career choices.
Maximize Your Time in Therapy
Here are some things you can do to make sure that you are getting the most out of therapy.

+VERBAL ABUSE – CAN I HEAL MY INFANT MUSICAL BRAIN?

alchemynow1 Comment

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I have no doubt that our human species participated in dance and music long, long before we had the ability to use words in speech.  I also know that as a newborn infant I could first experience the terrorizing sounds of my mother’s trauma ‘music’ and feel how she physically treated me through her trauma ‘dance’ long, long before I could begin to comprehend what a word was.  Those earliest experiences with my mother affected how my brain developed.  I want to go back now and specifically try to heal my ‘infant’ musical brain.

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If someone explained to me, for example, that the reason I couldn’t walk as well as others was because my feet had been bound tightly from the time I was very small, and the bindings were not removed until I was a teenager, I would be able to make that connection.  I understand what feet have to do with walking.

I took the ability to send and receive spoken word communication and to think in words for granted all of my life until two years ago.  After the shocking stress of being diagnosed with advanced, aggressive breast cancer, and then after following through with all the radical treatments, including chemotherapy, that have saved my life, I now have a different understanding of my own speech related processes.

I understand now that my brain did not learn to process language normally.  I understand that somehow I was able to continue forward in my infant-child development and all the way into adulthood without anyone, my self included, recognizing that my mother’s severe verbal abuse of me had changed the way my language processing abilities developed, and thus changed the regions of my brain and their operation that language-processing abilities rely on.

What I know about myself now post cancer and its treatment is that what I really did from the time I was very, very small was create the equivalent of a house of cards within my brain that gave me the illusion that I processed spoken language in the same way that other people do.  Chemotherapy’s affect on my infant-child abused brain on many levels was that it erased most of the post-critical windows of early development abilities I had ‘learned’ to use so that I could get along in the world.  In other words, chemotherapy erased my memory of how I pretended to be normal.

My language processing abilities were not spared.  I see the image of a beautiful (and believable) brilliantly colored and intricately designed paper Chinese lantern that represents the ways I managed to incorporate enough of how regular people interact with one another in verbal ways so that even I was fooled into believing I was no different from others.  Yet my experience with cancer and its treatment has been that a soaking rain has disintegrated the fragile paper structure of pretending I was ‘OK’.

I am left with a barely flickering candle of what normal human verbal-social interactions are supposed to be like – and none of the extraneous trappings.  By finding the developmental brain research and by trying to understand it, I am learning that the balance of information processing between the two hemispheres of my brain has been altered.  Not only did my right emotional social limbic brain not develop normally, but neither did my left brain (as a right-handed person).

With the secondary (later learned) structure of my language processing abilities wiped away, I am left with the experience of what my primary language processing abilities are really like.  It is only now that I am beginning to gain willingness to look behind the illusions of normalcy for myself that I am beginning to understand what my mother’s extreme verbal abuse of me from the time I was born did to me.

At the same time I consider myself fortunate to be living in the period of human history when understandings about the intricate workings of the human brain are being discovered.  I am fortunate also to be living at a time when I can find related important information in my own world through the internet.  In some strange way that I cannot pinpoint or name exactly, I also realize that my having cancer, being treated for it, and still being alive – now with this NEW information about the way my brain REALLY processes language combined with access to new brain discovery information – is giving me the fantastic opportunity to combine my personal story of surviving severe infant-child abuse with new-found awareness of how early verbal abuse impacts a young brain during its critical-window periods of rapid growth and development.

I am the living, breathing, walking, talking, hearing, listening result of my mother’s incredible infant-child severe abuse experiment.  I don’t suffer from anything as blatantly obvious as having the consequence of bound feet.  I suffer from the invisible, internal, brain structural changes that her abuse of me created.  At the same time I don’t have any understanding of what brain regions look like.  Words used to describe them are foreign to me, and most of them I cannot form my mental tongue around enough to grasp what these words even sound like!

But understand them I must because I am out of the loop of normal social interactions, home alone with an invisible 100% disability that frankly enrages me and causes me great sadness.  Not only did my right brain not learn how to read ‘social cues’ or facial expressions normally, my left brain did not grow in such a way that verbally expressed words are connected and associated with the underlying expression of emotion and intention of the speaker in normal ways.

If I were to be given the choice between two gifts, one being a platinum jewel studded necklace worth millions and the other being the information that research such as Dr. Martin Teicher’s presents about how early abuse changes the brain, I would not hesitate to accept the latter.  Most unfortunately my body-brain knows within its every fiber what Dr. Teicher is talking about when he writes the following:

“The study on verbal abuse is the first to be published, though the overall hypothesis on distinctive sensory damage has so far panned out when the unpublished work is also considered.  The findings of this study “set the stage for what we’re seeing in the other ongoing studies—that sensory systems are vulnerable,” said Teicher.   “The brain is probably suppressing the development of sensory systems that are providing adverse input.”   That is, children’s brains seem to “turn down the volume” on abusive words, images and even pain.   The result is diminished integrity in these sensory pathways.”

At the same time I know it wasn’t JUST the “deleterious effect of ridicule, humiliation, and disdain on brain connectivity” that changed the way my brain grew its language abilities.  In fact, I suspect I would be far better off today if the development brain changes I suffered from my mother’s verbal abuse of me had at least WAITED to happen once I even understood what ridicule, humiliation and distain even were.  Because my mother’s hatred and abuse of me began at the time of my birth, my body-brain had to change its development from my very beginnings.

My suspicion is that dissociation began to find its way into my body-brain development during the first interactions I had with my mother.  As a result, my body-brain has NEVER stored memory in an ordinary way.  Because of this fact, I have what is probably an unusual ability to both remember things I should not remember and to NOT remember things that I should.  Repeated patterns of abusive interactions, which began at my birth, formed themselves into my body-brain in such a way that dissociation itself became a superhighway of connectivity rather than the desired patterns of association.  I can remember my mother’s interactions with me well before I reached the age of words.

This is true because I was born into an infant world that was about as different from normal as it could possibly be.  I didn’t forget these patterns of interactions with my abusive mother from birth, either.  They built the body-brain I have as they built themselves INTO the body-brain I have.  There’s nothing unusual about this fact, either.  ALL of us have the patterns of our earliest interactions with our infant caregivers built into us – because they BUILT us.

When an ordinarily-built person encounters a group of strangers, how they interact with them on all levels, including verbal exchange, happens through a remembering of their earliest caregiver interactions that built them.

I find that I am surprised by the next thoughts that entered my mind as I wrote this last sentence.  My mind is telling me that I thought I’d made progress as I came to understand that interactions between people, including verbal ones, could be looked at as if they were mostly on one of a continuum or the other.  I thought that continuum was about prosocial interactions or antisocial interactions.  Now I realize that I see another entirely different continuum that exists in its own right as an entirely different way.

People like me, who suffered enough severe abuse from birth, operate in our human interactions on this other continuum.  I suspect that the Austic brain shares the features of this continuum, a continuum that simply shows the degrees of unsocial interactions our brains were built with.  The unsocial brain has a different set of rules than does a brain that includes on the ends of its continuum degrees of prosocial or antisocial abilities.  The unsocialized brain is based in its foundational construction on dissociations rather than associations.  It is a brain built from social isolation and ‘maternal deprivation’.

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As I mentioned above, I had no way to know that I had a dissociational unsocialized brain until my experience with cancer and its treatment erased all the secondary human social interactional abilities that I had somehow learned far later, and far down the road from ‘normal’.  They could be erased and ‘forgotten’ because they were secondary and not primary.  Now I am left with two ongoing parallel experiences.  I experience myself with my unsocial brain at the same time I remember when I could ‘act as if’ I had a socialized brain.  But I do not believe I can ever get back the secondary socialized brain I had before cancer.  That brain, with its complex set of secondary (learned) patterns of ‘normal’ human interactional abilities has vanished as certainly as a paper Chinese lantern in a hard rain.

Because I live with this unsocial brain I can say that two simultaneous experiences I know about first hand are (1) I do not receive or process sensory information normally, and (2) I have a fundamentally altered sense of time – and therefore of timing.  While these two aspects of the way my brain formed affect every experience that I have, they create the most difficulty for me as a human being in my relationships with others.

Words become words in any language we might speak because we can recognize where each one starts and where it ends.  Next, we understand the agreed upon meaning that each word refers to.  If we listen to a language that is not our own, we do not recognize word starts and stops, nor do we understand their meanings.

I now recognize for myself that I don’t actually have a first language at all.  The language that I began to learn from the time I was born was a language purely of emotion.  Not only that, but the first language I learned was about extremely overwhelming SOUND coupled with physical pain caused by brutal and violent motion.  My mother didn’t wait until I had the advanced mental abilities formed into my brain that would have let me begin to comprehend what the words “ridicule, humiliation and disdain” might actually mean.

The associations being made in my infant brain were that the sound, the feel, the look of my mother threatened my existence.  I believe my body knew this fact profoundly.  My mother’s roaring, screaming voice were coupled with (associated with) the look of her distorted, contorted, twisted, wide-eyed, wide-mouthed psychotically violent hate-filled face.  The sound of her, the look of her face, were coupled with (associated with) the rage-dilled steely hard grip of her hands, with her pinches, slaps, thumps, slaps along with the heavy thundering stomp of her feet.

So why would I be surprised now to find that the actual words that fall out of people’s lips are far from being my first concern?  Why would I wonder now why there is often a great distance of time between when those words fall out and when I can actually make any logical sense out of them?  Why would I wonder that my verbal interactional space is slow and loose and broad and wide with ill-defined edges rather than being tight and clear and succinct and efficient and FAST?

Language spoken by other people (all but those I am closest to and most safe and secure with) is about how the sound of that person first affects me.  What they actually say means very little to me at all.  If there is stress for me in the interaction, often I can watch a person’s lips move without hearing the sound of their words at all.

Listening to spoken language happens for me mostly in the realm of courtesy and consideration, not because I am comfortable with it – or even need it myself.  I am always concerned on my most fundamental levels with assessing information for threat and risk of harm and for another person’s TRUE intentions.  That level of meaning is, for me, nearly completely divorced from the actual words a person rattles out of their mouth.

It can, therefore, take me a very long time to understand others’ questions and to respond to them.  There is often a wide blank dissociational pause in the conversation while I work very hard inside of myself to negotiate this human social space.  Even though I try hardest to determine intention and risk of harm, at the same time I did not build within my brain the normal capacity for reading nonverbal social signals.  I now completely understand that social verbal interactions with others are exhausting for me, and that I do not do them well.

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That leads me to the next step in my own thinking.  At 58 years old I am now approaching my own logical conclusion.  I probably had developed within me what might be a supremely musical brain.  This suspicion brings to my mind the writings of Daniel J. Levitin about the human brain and music.  It makes me think about the writings of Arnold H. Modell on the human mirror neuron system as he describes how the essentials of human movement might be best described in terms of dance from before we are born.  It also makes me want to include what Dr. Dacher Keltner says about the brain stem connection between laughter and later-developing human verbal language (Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life).

How strange it might seem to think about my mother’s profound abuse of me from birth in these simple terms:  The terrible and terrifying noise and sound of my mother was her music toward me.  The terrible and terrifying, traumatic movement of her was her dance toward me

If we suspend all the intellectual concepts we are tempted to apply in our thinking about newborns in interaction with their mothers – as they begin to happen to all of us from the moment we are born – and begin to understand that it is the patterns of our mother’s music and of her dance that are impacting our developing body-brain, perhaps we can begin to think in terms of a different kind of medicine that might help in our healing.

About a year before I ever knew I had the cancer, I experienced something that actually scared me.  I had bought myself an electric guitar.  One day I decided to give myself permission to play with it for as long as I wanted.  Four hours went by as if they were four minutes. After I put the guitar backing its case and walked away, I realized that my mind was full of music.  Not words, just patterns of notes and rhythms in ongoing streams without beginning or end.

What scared me was that I could not alter this flow of musical patterns  for nearly 48 hours except when I consciously forced myself to focus momentarily on some other action.  – notice the stop sign ahead of me when I was driving, or going through the actions to make a pot of coffee or a piece of toast.

At that time I was committed to my developmental brain studies and to my writing.  I decided not to let myself return to that level of music involvement because I believed it would interfere with my ‘work’.  Well, many thousands of hours and probably millions of written words later, I am making the decision to pursue an experiment with myself.

I accept that I will not be able to achieve the kind of mastery over guitar technique that I want or need, so I am making the very big decision to pull $519.95 out of my pitiful total savings of $1,800 and buy myself an electric piano.  I am choosing to spend that (to me) very large chunk of money because I am beginning to understand that allowing myself to think in music might be the single best medicine I can provide for my brain.  I am also purchasing and Audiogram so I can record myself thinking and go back and follow my conversations with myself – and between my brain hemispheres.  (The more perfect-pitch and consistent sound quality, the better)

I don’t have a history of musical study.  I cannot (yet?) read music.  But the more I come to understand that this last subject I am considering in my studies, how my mother’s verbal abuse of me FIRST affected my brain-body development as a dancing-musical human being, the more profoundly I am beginning to understand that at no time in my life have I actually been ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’.  I was not built that way.

So if wordless music and dance is the human first language, and if it is the language that continued to build my brain far into the stages when patterns of prosocial verbal speech should have taken over my associational brain patterns, then I think it’s time I gave myself permission to think and speak in my own first language.

Who knows?  Maybe I can go all the way back in the very structure of my brain and rewrite and overwrite what was put in there by the monster from the very beginnings of when I could listen to sound.  Maybe I will find my own first and primary language.  Maybe I will create it.  I will certainly be able to express it.  Of that I have no doubt.

NOTE:  Although this might seem to be an unrelated topic, it is not.  When I was 13 and in 8th grade, I was able to discover in PE class that I was extremely gifted in playing basketball.  If ever I was to know what living in a state of perfect magic is like (other than what I expect to experience now with music), it was the experience of gliding around a basketball court with many other bodies while being oblivious to their existence as real physical objects.  There were only three objects on the full and busy court:  My body, the basketball, and the hoop.  I never took aim.  I never thought.  And I never missed a shot, not even if that shot took place halfway down the court, over everyone else’s head.

As an out-of-shape 58 year old I don’t expect to ever experience the magic of that game as it was for me when I was 13.  I know it was a related ability to autism in some way I don’t quite understand.  Part of how it happened was because I lived in dissociated space where self consciousness did not exist.  I fully expect to be able to recreate that space in the privacy of my own home, hooked to a perfectly tuned electric piano keyboard through head phones.

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I was going to present today a study of these three brain regions that Teicher talked about in his article, Cutting Words May Scar Young Brains, but evidently there were other things I needed to write about.  When I think about his other article, Abuse and Sensitive Periods, from my post +THE ‘TERROR-ABLE’ CONSEQUENCES OF INFANT-CHILDHOOD VERBAL ABUSE, I realize that I already know the truth of what he is saying even if I can’t yet literally understand the specific brain region information he is also writing about.  Right now it is more important to me to get my electric piano keyboard ordered and on its way.  The rest of this study can happen later.

“Among those who [solely] experienced parental verbal abuse, three statistically significant disturbed pathways emerged:

— the arcuate fasciculus, involved in language processing;

—  part of the cingulum bundle, altered in patients with posttraumatic stress disorder and associated with depression and dissociation; and

— part of the fornix, linked to anxiety.  The degree of disruption of the normal flow correlated with the severity of abuse.”

PLEASE READ FULL ARTICLE HERE

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+WHAT IS LONELY? FEELING SO ALONE ALONE

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My topic is loneliness.  It is that life-long recurring state of isolation and aloneness that has never left me for long.  I live with it now nearly constantly.  I want to learn more about my aloneness because I have no more hope that it is ever truly going to leave me in this lifetime.  At times my aloneness attacks me, gripping me in a death lock and does not let go.

I  returned this weekend to an event that happened to me 23 years ago when I was nearly 36 years old that I suspect holds a key to something I need to learn about myself.  At this age I had been gone from home nearly 18 years, the same length of time I had lived in my mother’s abusive home.  Eighteen years seemed like a long, long time.

I read my age 34 journal, and have transcribed much of my age 35 journal.  I was looking for the date that this event I wonder about happened.  I found the date, but I wrote nothing about the event itself, so just now had to recall it from memory.

This event can be singled out as an important one for me that I have never understood, but it belongs to the story of my life.  In the story of my life I found myself for over 30 years being attracted to Native American teachings.  In the journal I transcribed today I pulled out the dates that came to be related to my first introduction into Native American ceremony.  I have not attended any kind of ceremony for the past 15 years, and do not anticipate ever attending one again — but that is a whole different story.

Yet as I read what I wrote at 34 and 35, I was again reminded of those years of being a recently divorced single mother of three children in the far north country of northern Minnesota, on welfare, in poverty, struggling to find a way to find myself in spite of every choice I had ever made that created the situation I was living in.  I obviously knew by then about the seriousness of the infant-child abuse I had experienced — but I had no idea how to connect what had happened to me with who I was, or what any of it really meant.

I could not recognize that so much of what I struggled with was due to very real brain-mind difficulties that were a consequence of an entire infant-childhood of severe abuse.  Those difficulties are still with me, but at least now I recognize them for what they are and realize that most of them have always been permanent.

NOTE:  Of the $336 our family received in AFDC grant per month, the state received $290 per month in child support from my ex-husband for his two daughters.  The state paid the difference of $46.  He paid his support faithfully, and as a result we also received an additional $50 check from the state every month as ‘incentive pay’.  In the nearly 25 years since my son was born his father still owes the bulk of his child support, none of which was paid during the years I raised his son alone.  We also received medical coverage and around $100 per month in food stamps.  In time the county allotted me five hours a week of paid respite day-care for my extremely active baby.  I doubt I could have kept the family together without this help.

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These two links travel to this part of my story.

A slice of my life for the year between my youngest son’s 1st and 2nd birthday:

*Age 34-35 (August 1986 – August 1987) First Sweat Ceremony

The story of one July night:

*Age 35 – Bear Butte and the circle around me (1987)

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+THE ‘TERROR-ABLE’ CONSEQUENCES OF INFANT-CHILDHOOD VERBAL ABUSE

alchemynow1 Comment

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It is becoming clear to me that I will not be able to approach the topic of ‘teasing’ until I so some serious thinking about verbal abuse in general and about my own infant-childhood experiences with my mother’s severe (from birth) verbal abuse of me.  I have been avoiding this subject until now.  It is going to be an extremely painful one for me to approach and consider.

Research on how all forms of abuse infants and children experience can change the way their brain develops is beginning to specify which brain regions are most susceptible to change during particular time-frames of development.  Because my mother began to abuse me from birth, I suspect that everything about how my brain developed was affected, including the regions of my brain that process verbal information.

Some links are presented below to information related to brain changes and infant-child abuse.  I realize that all this information does is to begin to build the frame of the scaffold I need before I can personally think about verbal abuse.

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February 20, 2009

Cutting Words May Scar Young Brains

Parental Verbal Abuse of Child Appears to Damage Cerebral Pathways

“Sticks and stones may break bones, but harsh words may damage a child’s brain. New work from HMS researchers suggests that parental verbal abuse can injure brain pathways, possibly causing depression, anxiety and problems with language processing.”

Word Power
“Principal investigator Martin Teicher, HMS associate professor of psychiatry at McLean Hospital, became interested in the effects of parental verbal abuse 25 years ago.   A patient of his showed all of the signs of being traumatized as a child, but the only form of maltreatment she had been exposed to was parental verbal abuse.

Later, in 2005, Teicher’s research revealed that parental verbal abuse has the same negative psychiatric influence as witnessing domestic violence or experiencing extrafamilial sexual abuse.  His latest study, which shows that verbal abuse damages specific brain connections, is part of a strategy to isolate different types of abuse, including witnessing domestic violence, childhood sexual abuse and harsh corporal punishment, and to examine the specific effects of each on the developing brain.  The researchers designed this strategy around a hypothesis that all of these will act as stressors that produce similar responses in the brain but along different sensory pathways, said Teicher.

The study on verbal abuse is the first to be published, though the overall hypothesis on distinctive sensory damage has so far panned out when the unpublished work is also considered.  The findings of this study “set the stage for what we’re seeing in the other ongoing studies—that sensory systems are vulnerable,” said Teicher.   “The brain is probably suppressing the development of sensory systems that are providing adverse input.”   That is, children’s brains seem to “turn down the volume” on abusive words, images and even pain.   The result is diminished integrity in these sensory pathways.

“This is the first evidence of the potential deleterious effect of ridicule, humiliation, and disdain on brain connectivity,” said Jeewook Choi, first author and visiting assistant professor of psychiatry from South Korea.”

“Among those who [solely] experienced parental verbal abuse, three statistically significant disturbed pathways emerged: the arcuate fasciculus, involved in language processing; part of the cingulum bundle, altered in patients with posttraumatic stress disorder and associated with depression and dissociation; and part of the fornix, linked to anxiety.  The degree of disruption of the normal flow correlated with the severity of abuse.”   PLEASE READ FULL ARTICLE HERE

There’s an incredible photograph at this link showing these three areas of brain changes!

“…two people who show the same symptoms of depression today may be treated the same. Yet one condition may stem mostly from genetic susceptibility and the other mostly from exposure to childhood adversity. Though the two patients may appear to have the same disorder, “different brain regions or structures may be involved,” said Teicher. “Each may need a very different kind of therapy.”

Teicher and his team are now working to identify sensitive periods when specific brain structures are most susceptible and, if possible, to find ways to reverse the damage.

For now, however, the most important message of this work may be the awareness that parental verbal abuse is damaging. “People hear that spanking is bad, so they stop doing that and become more verbally abusive,” said Teicher. “It turns out, that may be worse.””

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WHEN PARENTS VERBALLY ABUSE ONE ANOTHER THEY CAN BE DAMAGING THEIR INFANT-CHILD’S BRAIN DEVELOPMENT:

The Effects of Verbal Abuse on a Fetus

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Parental Verbal Abuse Affects Brain White Matter

By dr teicher

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Abuse and Sensitive Periods

By dr teicher

“Research from my laboratory, and from other labs here and abroad, have shown that exposure to childhood abuse is associated with alterations in brain structure and function.  This research has largely focused on brain regions known to be susceptible to the effects of stress, such as the hippocampus.  We have recently expanded our knowledge regarding the potential adverse effects of abuse by publishing the first preliminary data indicating that the neurobiological consequences of abuse depend on the age of exposure (Andersen et al 2008).”

“Background

The brain is molded by experiences that occur throughout the lifespan. However, there are particular stages of development when experience exerts either a maximal (sensitive period) or essential (critical period) effect. Little direct evidence exists for sensitive or critical periods in human brain development. Based on differential rates of maturation specific brain regions should have their own unique periods of sensitivity to the effects of early experiences such as stress.

Summary

Within the same group of subjects there were marked differences between regions in the stages of greatest vulnerability.  The hippocampus was particularly sensitive to abuse reported to occur at 3-5 and 11-13 years of age.  In contrast, the rostral body of the corpus callosum was affected by abuse reported to have occurred at ages 9-10, and prefrontal cortex by abuse at ages 14-16.

Discussion

Childhood abuse has been associated with vulnerability to a host of psychiatric disorders and behavioral problems. Based on the present findings, there may be different abuse-related syndromes associated with particular stages of abuse and specific regional brain changes.

Identifying sensitive periods may also provide insight into key ages at which stimulation or environmental enrichment may optimally benefit development of specific brain regions.”

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This information comes from the “A Healthy Me” website.

Yelling at Children (Verbal Abuse)

By Benj Vardigan
CONSUMER HEALTH INTERACTIVE

“…current research shows that verbal abuse of children can be just as destructive emotionally as physical and sexual abuse and puts them in as much risk for depression and anxiety.”

What is verbal abuse?

• How common is verbal abuse?
 • What are signs that a child is suffering from verbal abuse?
 • Does verbal abuse do any long-term harm?
 • Why can’t I seem to control my temper?
 • What can I do to avoid verbally abusing my child?
 • What can I do to prevent someone else from verbally abusing my child or another child?
 • What if I see a stranger verbally abusing a child in the supermarket or at the park?

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From the Find Counseling.com website –

“Child Abuse: An Overview” was written by C. J. Newton, MA, Learning Specialist and published in the Find Counseling.com (formerly TherapistFinder.net) Mental Health Journal in April, 2001:
Child Abuse: Just One Story
Child Abuse Introduction |   Signs of Child Abuse
Child Abuse Statistics |   It’s Under Reported
Effects of Child Abuse on Children: Abuse General
Effects of Child Abuse on Children: Child Sexual Abuse
Injuries to Children: Physical and Sexual Abuse
Effects of Child Abuse on Adults: Childhood Abuse
Effects of Child Abuse on Adults: Childhood Sexual Abuse
Definition of Physical Abuse |   Signs of Physical Abuse
Definition of Sexual Abuse |   Signs of Sexual Abuse
Definition of Child Neglect |   Signs of Child Neglect
Definition of Emotional Abuse |   Signs of Emotional Abuse
Abusers |   Pedophiles
Child Physical Abuse and Corporal Punishment
Treatment for Child Abuse
Costs to Society
Conclusions
References
State Child Abuse Laws
Nationwide Crisis Line and Hotline Directory
National Non-Governmental Organizations and Links
U.S. Government Organizations and Links

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Psychiatric News July 7, 2006
Volume 41 Number 13 Page 28
© American Psychiatric Association

  • Clinical & Research News

Parents’ Verbal Abuse Leaves Long-Term Legacy

By Joan Arehart-Treichel

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Here is a website devoted entirely to the subject of VERBAL ABUSE:

ARTICLE:  Verbal Abuse and Children
by Patricia Evans – Provides information particularly to parents

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From The Parent Zone.com website:

What Are The Effects Of Verbal Abuse On Children?

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This article is one of the ground breaking research papers about how child abuse changes the development of an infant-child’s brain.  This paper is excluding research about how abuse changes the development of the right emotional limbic brain.  It is focused on LEFT BRAIN changes, and presents a ‘preliminary’ study about altered patterns of development in right handed children who do not end up with the usual left hemisphere dominance.  (EEGs are not able to detect the kinds of right brain changes child abuse causes).

This 1998 article is presenting the hypothesis that verbal abuse might be one of the powerful influences that changes how the hemispheres develop in relation to one another with the end result being that information is not processed ‘normally’ by either hemisphere and is not transmitted between hemispheres ‘normally’, either.

Preliminary Evidence for Aberrant Cortical Development in Abused Children

A Quantitative EEG Study

http://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/10/3/298

J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci 10:298-307, August 1998
© 1998 American Psychiatric Press, Inc.

Yutaka Ito, M.D., Ph.D., Martin H. Teicher, M.D., Ph.D., Carol A. Glod, R.N., Ph.D. and Erika Ackerman, B.S.

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Here is another excellent presentation about child abuse written by Dr. Bruce Perry (1997), Incubated in terror: Neurodevelopmental factors in the ‘cycle of violence.’

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The development of dissociation in maltreated preschool-aged children

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Johnson et al 2001

Abstract – Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York State Psychiatric Institute, NY 10032, USA.

Childhood verbal abuse and risk for personality disorders during adolescence and early adulthood
Comprehensive Psychiatry, Volume 42, Issue 1, Pages 16-23

ABSTRACT:  Data from a community-based longitudinal study were used to investigate whether childhood verbal abuse increases risk for personality disorders (PDs) during adolescence and early adulthood. Psychiatric and psychosocial interviews were administered to a representative community sample of 793 mothers and their offspring from two New York State counties in 1975, 1983, 1985 to 1986, and 1991 to 1993, when the mean ages of the offspring were 5, 14, 16, and 22 years, respectively. Data regarding childhood abuse and neglect were obtained from the psychosocial interviews and from official New York State records.

Offspring who experienced maternal verbal abuse

during childhood were more than three times as likely

as those who did not experience verbal abuse

to have borderline, narcissistic, obsessive-compulsive, and paranoid PDs during adolescence or early adulthood.

These associations remained significant after offspring temperament, childhood physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, physical punishment during childhood, parental education, parental psychopathology, and co-occurring psychiatric disorders were controlled statistically.

In addition, youths who experienced childhood verbal abuse had elevated borderline, narcissistic, paranoid, schizoid, and schizotypal Personality Disorder symptom levels during adolescence and early adulthood after the covariates were accounted for.

These findings suggest that childhood verbal abuse may contribute to the development of some types of Personality Disorders, independent of offspring temperament, childhood physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, physical punishment during childhood, parental education, parental psychopathology, and co-occurring psychiatric disorders.

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The region in the primate brain that contains mirror neurons corresponds in our human brain to the region, Broca’s area, that processes speech (see page 184 of chapter reference below).  Think about the impact of all forms of adult interactions with infant-children — especially during the rapid-growth brain developmental stages — as you read the following:

“Relational” Mirror Neurons and the Concept of Representation

“Mirror neurons respond only to intentional motor actions. This is the first evidence that there is an area in the motor cortex that can respond specifically and only to goal-directed, relational actions.”  (page 183)

“When mirror neurons are activated, there is a very tight, precise correspondence between a specific motor action and neuron firing. For example, if a neuron responded to an object held between the fingers, it would not respond to the same object held by tweezers. Self-initiated actions and the individual’s perception of the identical action performed by another evoke the same neural response. So it can be said that the monkey’s brain (and ours as well) is intrinsically relational.”” (page 184)

“The discovery of mirror neurons suggests that certain actions may be represented in the mind because they trigger a neural link between self and other. This representation of the other’s action by means of mirror neurons is direct and immediate and does not require any intervening symbolic code or a mental language, as there is an instantaneous mapping from self to other and from other to self. Mirror neurons support ecological theories of perception in that there is an innate coupling between the self and the other: we respond to directly perceived qualities of the other’s intentionality; we do not require coded information.”  (page 185)

READ REST OF CHAPTER HERE

in Imagination and the Meaningful Brain (Philosophical Psychopathology) – By Arnold H. Modell (2006), The MIT Press

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“Scientists who use advanced imaging technology to study brain function report that the human brain is wired to reward caring, cooperation, and service. According to this research, merely thinking about another person experiencing harm triggers the same reaction in our brain as when a mother sees distress in her baby’s face. Conversely, the act of helping another triggers the brain’s pleasure center and benefits our health by boosting our immune system, reducing our heart rate, and preparing us to approach and soothe. Positive emotions like compassion produce similar benefits. By contrast, negative emotions suppress our immune system, increase heart rate, and prepare us to fight or flee.”

READ REST OF ARTICLE HERE:  We Are Hard-Wired to Care and Connect by by David Korten

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READ REST OF CHAPTER HERE

+THE TOPIC OF TEASING: TOO HARD TO CONSIDER?

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When I turned the next page after the chapter on laughter in Keltner’s book my first reaction was aversion.  This isn’t the aversion of disgust I would feel if someone handed me a white china plate with a serving of dog turds in the center of it.  It’s more the aversion I would feel to continuing down a path once I saw a large diamond back rattler stretched across it.  It’s like the aversion I would feel should I be asked to step up on stage to join a chorus line of showgirls scantily dressed and overly plumed in Las Vegas, or should I be asked to sing the national anthem from the center of a pro football stadium in front of thousands.

That’s a strong negative reaction to the single word that appears at the top of Dr. Dacher Keltner’s 2009 book’s (Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life) next page as the heading for his next chapter:  Teasing.

I am experiencing the ‘freeze, hide and flee’ half of the fight/flight stress reaction.  There’s no ‘fight’ for me here except for the fight I am experiencing inside my self about facing my fears by plowing through a topic that obviously makes me feel completely uncomfortable.  I am presented with a challenge here to which I respond with feelings of incompetence and un-confidence.  I KNOW I am an unequipped gladiator in the arena of normal human teasing.

It is only because of my commitment to reading Keltner’s entire book and to learning about my self as the severe infant-child abuse survivor that I am that I marshal my courage and willingness to pay attention both to the information that Keltner presents and to my own difficulties with it.  I know from my experience of aversion to the topic that there is something important here I need to understand.  I know from the start both that I am not going to like what I find here, and that what I find will reflect a truth about how the severe abuse I experienced from birth changed me into someone who is different from the person I could have become had this severe abuse not happened to me.

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Because my experience of severe infant-child abuse contained very specific, unusual, uncommon and unique patterns, I have found myself falling through nearly every single crack in the ‘psychological’ theories about how child abuse can affect adult survivors.  Because my abuse began at birth, I have had to learn that ‘recovery’ of abilities I supposedly ‘used to have’ before severe trauma happened to me is not possible.  My journey of healing is mostly about what I can uncover and discover connected to what was done to me rather than to recover anything.

I have to connect-the-dots of the information I uncover and discover about being myself in the world in far different ways than non-early severe infant-child abuse survivors might get to.  I cannot take for granted even the most basic facts about what it means to be a member of our social human species.  This is mostly true because my mother didn’t just use one massive club of abuse against me from the time I was born.  She had a second massive club that she wielded over me equally:  extreme social isolation.  Being bludgeoned from birth and for the next 18 years by one of these clubs would have all but obliterated me.  Being attacked on all fronts by a combination of the two clubs has made me into a person who very nearly fits the description of a nonsocial species of one.

I am left having to uncover and discover more of what is uniquely different about me from others than what is similar or the same.  Yet I was born a member of a social species.  Everything that is different for me happens according to categories of experience that I share with all others.  It’s just that within each of these categories of possibilities about what it means to be human and what it feels like to be human, I experience patterns of being-in-the-world that are different for me than for nearly all others.

As I encountered my aversion to Keltner’s chapter heading on teasing it didn’t take me very long in scanning the next pages to understand that the topic of teasing is about one of these socially-human categories.  Although Keltner does not make the obvious connection between teasing and attachment patterns, I do.  In fact, the connection is more than glaringly obvious to me.

I suggest that a clear appraisal of our competency of interactions within the arena of teasing activity can show us the kind of social brain we have.. At the same time this appraisal can tell us about the kinds of infant-child interactions we had with our earliest caregivers while the foundation of our emotional-social brain was built from the time of our birth.

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At the same time that I now want to turn to Keltner’s actual presentation of information on teasing, I am experiencing one of my own inner reactions I wrote about earlier in the week.  I hear that warning:  “Do not enter.  Past this point all angels fear to tread.”  I realize that if I cross this line, move past this point, I am at risk for inviting in The Furies.

At the same time I realize there is a second sign posted beside the first.  This one reads, “You cannot get there from here.”  I don’t even have time to consider what this second sign means before I notice a third one that reads, “What is true for most others is absolutely not true for you.”  Oh!  And a fourth sign!  “If you choose to follow down this pathway you must understand that none of what you will find here can be taken personally.  Whatever you are missing in regard to teasing did not come about through any fault of your own.”

If the presence of all those signs aren’t warning enough that I better consider carefully what I am going to choose to do next, I see a flash of yellow through the trees and underbrush just around a curve of the pathway ahead of me.  I walk toward it and see yellow crime scene plastic ribbons strung across the pathway and wound around the bushes on both sides of the pathway into the forest as far as I can see.  At the same time I see a gleaming silver pair of giant scissors lying on the ground in the center of the path right in front of the tape.

I am standing here thinking about this carefully.  What might the repercussions be for me if I pick up these scissors, snap through that yellow tape and continue forward down this pathway?  What might the ramifications be of gaining conscious knowledge about something my body already knows but has no words to describe?  Would I rather be skinned alive than uncover what I am going to discover about myself in this body-brain in this lifetime should I carefully read this chapter?

Believe me, readers.  This is turning into a really long pause here…….  There are more than a few parts of myself I have to consult with before I can make this decision.

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One thing I know today from the information Keltner presents in his book on this topic.  True teasing in the human social arena is NOT about aggression.  If there is aggression present, it is not teasing.  There is not supposed to be anything terrible — ‘terror able’ — about teasing.   Obviously, for me, there was in my “Something Wicked This Way Comes” version of a childhood.

I should not be surprised, given the continual reign of my mother’s verbal abuse of me (included within her unending repertoire of violence), that her so-called teasing was extremely vicious, hurtful and WRONG — from the time I was born.

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