Tag: posttraumatic stress disorder
+Links to new pages on attachment patterns
The only way not to have an operating attachment system is to be dead. Our attachment system is supposed to be able to be deactivated appropriately so that our other systems of exploration and caregiving can be activated in their own turn. When we have an insecure attachment rather than secure attachment system, this ‘shut off’ ability may be lost to us. As a result, all of our behavioral systems are negatively affected.
Our attachment patterns are formed into our brains during our experiences with our mother and other important early care givers mostly before we are a year old. They operate behind the scenes of our life much as a computer’s operating system is hidden from our view.
Whether we look at an infant’s developing attachment system, or look at an adult attachment system as it operates in romantic and other relationships including parenthood, the more we understand these systems the more conscious power we can have over our own lives.
*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part One
**Attachment Styles from Collin’s Article
*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Two
*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Three
*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Four
*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Five
*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Six
**Attachment Styles and Caregiving from Collins Article
+LINK to New Page: +Boot Camp to Motherhood
+LINK to *THE DANGERS OF MEMORY RETRIEVAL
The following link will take you to the page I wrote today about my experiences related to re-membering traumas within my own life:
*THE DANGERS OF MEMORY RETRIEVAL
+MOTHERING: WHEN IT’S RIGHT, WHEN IT’S WRONG
I feel at this instant like a dancer might who is poised behind a curtain of a stage, breathing those last breaths before the music starts, before the curtain rises, about to dance a dance before an unseen but present audience. This dancer would have performed the dance before, would have practiced it step by step, part by part, before this evening’s performance. Not I. I have no idea what I am going to write here before you. I know not one word before I begin. All I can do is take that last breath and step on out, hoping.
Hoping that I know what I want to say, what needs to be said. Hoping that I can say it right, leaving nothing out but adding nothing in that does not belong within this dance of words. What is it that I will say first?
++
Do we, as a species, want to replace the kind of mothering that built our species from the beginning with medications that alter our brain chemicals and that might mimic what we used to be able to accomplish within our own brains without any other assistance? After all, we used to be prepared for the task of living as members of a social species in such an exact way that all the programming needed to accomplish this mothering was biologically given to mothers, and given to infants, so that in the end infants grew up to be balanced children and adults who knew the possibility of well being.
What happens to infants when the ability to mother adequately is removed from the people-growing equation? What happens to the adults that these infants grow up to be? How far back in my own family can I look in order to discover where the diversion of mothering abilities began and where mothering began to be altered and removed from the ongoing patterns particularly of how mothers raised their daughters? I can’t see back there very far, but far enough to know something passed down to me was very, very harmful.
++
I must tread carefully here, if treading across a public stage can be considered dancing at all? I wish I could say what needs to be said exactly, specifically so, as if the dance has already been danced before and I can follow in some earlier, preexisting invisible footsteps. If I knew ahead of time what the dance was and how to perform it, this writing would be so much easier to do.
++
I do not wish to alienate mothers. I do not wish to harshly condemn any mother’s efforts to raise her own children. Those of you who have been reading my posts already know that something was so wrong with the way my mother raised me that it could hardly be called mothering at all.
But she was my mother and she did mother me. Inadequately, but she did mother me. Taken from that far extreme of mothering like my mother gave me, across an entire range of possibilities of mothering, all the way over to the most perfect mother we could even collectively imagine — somewhere along this line every mother could place her own.
It is not that I am deliberately eliminating men from my writing here due to some inner bias of my own. I very specifically consider that mothering is something only women can do. Men father. They cannot mother, no matter how nurturing they may be toward their infants and children. Everything we know and can imagine about the biological, physiological differences between women and men apply here. How men father is not the topic of this post. How women mother is.
++
With that clarifying step taken, I will turn in another direction and take yet another step. What we might consciously know about mothering will always be only a tiny part of the story unless we today begin to think very clearly and carefully about ourselves as a species, and particularly about being American members of our species at this point in time. We cannot leave the context of culture and society out of our discussion about mothering.
I can report facts to you about my own experiences of mothering as I consciously understand them, but I also must state I know really nothing of substance about the generations of women in my family that preceded me as mothers. I make guesses based on guesses. My guess is that my mother’s grandmother — who came into my mother’s home when her own husband died, and very closely in time to when my mother’s mother divorced her own husband — was as important to my mother as she grew up after the age of 5 or 6 as her actual mother was. I do not believe that my mother was healthily mothered by either one of these women.
It is here that my dance must take another step, a sort of flying leap into the air with a shift of the body above the stage floor, so that some distance is covered and the dancer lands in a surprising spot — of sorts. This step includes what any of us women might know or imagine about all the grand mothering in our families. What is grand mothering compared and/or contrasted to mothering? We cannot leave the grandmothers out of our mothering equation.
How my mother’s grandmother mothered my mother’s mother had to have had — my definite guess here — a major influence upon how my mother developed not only as a person, not only as a mother, but specifically as my mother. How my mother mothered me had a powerful impact on my ability to mother my own children, and backward and forward throughout the generations we see that mothers never do their own mothering in a vacuum.
++
Now I, as the dancer within my own mind, must take yet another step. This time the step moves into a spin, both feet close together twirling above the floor, ending with me landing into a forward fold, down on one knee, both arms stretched in front of me, palms together toward the sky. It is here I must talk about our evolution, how if we move far enough away from the kind of mothering that nature intended us to practice within our species we are running the risk of endangering ourselves — and I use this word ‘ourselves’ in both the most singular and most collective way.
I, singularly, suffered the consequences of my mother’s psychosis that was focused specifically on me. I know that all of my siblings suffered from growing up with my mother as their mother. Yet we all know that I was forced from birth to be the one chosen to grow up in the center of her storm.
I have said and I will continue to say it again, that my mother’s psychotic break and her overriding mental illness was influenced by conditions of her childhood that damaged her developing brain-mind. This next step I am taking is more like a jumping up and down firmly in one place. It is not a step of grace, it is a step of emphasis. No matter what the men may be doing in the early lives of children, it is ALWAYS to the mothers that I will look for ultimate accountability.
I take another step here away from center and follow with another and another and another until I have traveled in a wide full circle. At the center of this circle I place the young children. For every step from that center in any direction I would want another woman to be standing there. This wide movement I am taking in my dance is meant to point out that for the millions of years our species spent evolving itself, never until recent times and under the guise and the burden of so-called ‘civilization’ did we women EVER mother alone.
We can all talk until we run out of breath about the rights of women. I am not opposed to women pursuing what they may think is best for them in their lives. But I am NOT talking about women here. I am talking about mothers. I am talking about women’s fitness to mother in the first place. And ultimately, I am talking about the children we bear and bring into this world. These children not only need mothers (and fathers, not the topic of this post), they need adequate MOTHERING.
I have to let other dancers onto the stage now. This is no longer a dance I choose to dance alone. With the flurry of movement of multiple dancers I see in the patterns they create in their dancing that when women who are mothering are cut off from one another all manor of ill being replaces the well being that we always knew before.
++
The color I remember from stories my mother told of both her grandmother and her mother were that they were brilliant women. Each in their own way were educated career women. I hold no false belief that either of these two women were adequate as mothers. My mother paid a price for this. I and my siblings paid a price for this. My own children paid a price for this, even though I was a stay-at-home mother.
Just in looking at the influences in five generations, from my great grandmother to my own children, I see that it wasn’t the mothers themselves that were missing. No, not us. It was the necessary QUALITY of mothering that was missing, and that lack and loss is what has created the ongoing pattern of disaster.
If you read my June 1972 writing in +LEAVING NO CHAOS BEHIND – PART ONE, you will be able to instantly know what I am talking about. That writing reflected the state of dysregulation within my brain-mind that was a direct result of the trauma and terror that formed by brain from the beginning of my life. How could I, or anyone else, ever expect me to be able to adequately mother children with that brain?
True, except for the incident I described in THE DAY I ABUSED MY OWN LITTLE SON, I did not blatantly or overtly abuse my own children. But I did harm them. There was no possible way that I could not have done so, no matter how much I tried not to. That is the nature of trauma when it is not resolved. One way or the other, it passes itself on down the generations. We can whine and moan, curse and spit, but there is little we can do about it — unless and until we find the right information and the resources we need AT THE RIGHT TIME.
Dance over. I’m deadly serious now. I do not have any grandchildren. This may change in the future. What matters to me most is that my children have broken the pattern to the best of their ability.
If I could magically go back and offer to my own self when I was 18 what I know now, I have no doubt my children would be the beneficiary of radical positive changes that I would have been able to make in myself as a result of the knowledge I now have. True, there is a probable chance that they would never have been born in the first place. I cannot find it in myself to wish for that.
All I can do is what we all can do — move forward. We can learn. We can change. We can heal, each according to our abilities.
Before our species so changed our world, back before the coming of ‘civilization’ began to disconnect mothers from mothers, we did not mother alone. Grandmothers were also part of the cycle of mothering. Not isolated grandmothers, but connected grandmothers. Women breast fed one another’s children. They held them and cared for them as if they were their own.
The birth mother was not left with the full burden of caring for her child alone. She was always accessible in times when her infant could not be solaced by other women. The infant could always be returned to its birth mother (if she were alive) when necessary. But in between these times the birth mother had the ability to ‘get away’ and to work at her other tasks, but the infants never suffered for lack of mothering.
++
I take the stand that in today’s world of American culture we are hurting our mothers by isolating them from other mothers and we are hurting our offspring. We have gone so far away from what nature gave us in the beginning I am not at all convinced that we can ever find our way back. But I also know that if we never identify problems that exist we have absolutely NO HOPE of repairing the rupture we have created within our culture — and in increasingly wider circles within other ‘advancing’ cultures — as we interfere with mothers’ ability to adequately mother their young.
I will describe in future posts that the damage we are causing directly affects our brain’s ability to regulate itself. Adequate mothering is designed to build a regulated human brain that can experience well being as its center point of balanced equilibrium. The more mothers don’t and can’t mother their young the way nature intended us to, the more dysregulated our brains become.
Is it a good thing that we now have, as the end result of very expensive and extensive research, all kinds of prescription drugs to regulate more and more and more brain and nervous system dysregulations than ever before? Or do we look at the bigger picture and accept as fact that inadequate mothering of infants and young children is creating these dysregulations in the first place? Are we more afraid to ask the questions or to find out the true answers?
We are becoming dependent as a society on the powerful drugs we take — as adults and feed to our children — to regulate brain chemistry because we are creating the problems by building these brains that cannot regulate themselves in the first place.
++
I could ask, “What are we willing to know about this problem?” Or I could ask the much harder and more helpful question, “What are we NOT willing to know about this problem?” Maybe we are so acceptant of the fact that ‘everyone’ takes brain-regulating medications that we don’t even think it’s a problem in the first place.
Are we so absolutely stupid and foolish that we ‘thank our lucky stars’ that we have all these wonder drugs available to us in our super advanced civilization to fix us? Does it ever occur to us that we are creating these same problems that need these medications and that the conditions are PREVENTABLE?
Do we refuse to see harm in anything we are doing or have done to our own children that meant they had no choice but to develop brains that could not adequately regulate themselves for the task of being humans who are healthy and have well being — naturally? Just as women birth the children, they are designed to be the builders of infant brains. That job is not done at birth. If mothers cannot adequately build brains within their infants that can healthily regulate themselves, the job will not get done.
++
I do not ask any question that I am not willing to ask myself, no matter how difficult it might be to look at the truth. We might not need to use the word abuse in reference to how we parent our own children. But if we have our own histories of trauma we cannot help but pass this trauma down to our children, no matter how much we try not to.
There is a wealth of new information available to us about the brain development of infants and young children. Until we access this information at the ground level where we all live and struggle, we cannot make the kinds of changes within ourselves that will truly allow our children to escape what we never meant to do to them in the first place. There is no bliss in ignorance.
We HAVE to know what happened to us. We have to become crystal clear about the changes in HOW mothers mother because we are damaging our children and the future of our society. This isn’t about feeling badly. I give the example as clearly as I can that how my mother mothered me does NOT need to be an emotional issue on any level other than in my memories of the actual abuse experiences themselves.
What we need MOST are the facts. The simple clear facts. We can change nothing for the better without them. I do not believe that we can continue to bear and raise children in our present and advancing technological world without knowing the facts we need to know about how to build a healthy human brain from birth.
Interactions within inadequate daycare environments, infant isolation from lengthy quality time with healthy mothers, ongoing lengths of time interacting with electronic media, lack of exercise, lack of time outdoors, lack of quality play, are all contributing to a demise of the human brain resulting in an increased need to consume medications to regulate the brain — whether we want to admit it or not. We are social beings designed to build a social brain through powerful positive human attachments that begin most importantly with our mothers.
If we continue to choose not to pay attention to the reality of our human condition within our ‘new world’, our proverbial dance will be done. We are a specific species with specific needs during our infant brain developmental stages. How well we are mothered determines how well our brains work for the rest of our lives. There are no exceptions.
+IS THIS NORMAL?
I have to ask the question, “Do we any longer even know what normal is for our species?” I have the advantage when looking backward over my life in knowing that there obviously was nothing normal about the way I was raised, nothing normal about the formation of my brain except as its growth and development reflected the human ability to adapt to dire conditions.
In the three generations that have come into being upon this planet since the time of my birth so many changes have happened in our culture and upon our planet that I am not sure we even know who we are as a species any more.
The simplest way to look at this is to consider that over 90% of veterans returning home from our current wars are consuming some version of a psychotrophic medication (prescription medications that alter brain chemistry). At the same time a huge percentage of our at home population is doing the same thing. These medications, to me, represent a need within us to supplement our own body and brain operations through the addition of powerful brain modulating chemicals that we are not evidently able to produce within our own bodies.
In the bigger picture I see that we are not only consuming our own technologies, but they are now consuming us and we don’t even see this happening. If we do, do we consider this to be normal?
++
I don’t have the time to write anything else at the moment, but I do believe we need to explore our own thinking about how technologies are not only changing the way humans are living on this planet, but are also changing our bodies at the same time. What do we really understand about these changes?
+DEPERSONALIZATION LINKS
My previous two posts were difficult to write and ‘took a lot out of me’. They reminded me of myself.
I am only going to give a little information on depersonalization today, which is one aspect of dissociation, in case some readers are not familiar with it.
++
Depersonalization (or depersonalisation) can be referred as a malfunction or anomaly of the mechanism in which an individual has awareness or perception of his or her own self. It is a feeling of watching oneself act, while having no control over a situation.[1] It can be considered desirable, such as in the use of recreational drugs, but it usually refers to the severe form found in anxiety and, in the most intense cases, panic attacks. A sufferer feels that he or she has changed and the world has become less real, vague, dreamlike, or lacking in significance. It can sometimes be a rather disturbing experience, since many feel that, indeed, they are living in a “dream”.
More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depersonalization
DEPERSONALIZATION SUPPORT COMMUNITY
http://www.dpselfhelp.com/forum/
“STRANGER TO OURSELVES”
http://www.depersonalization.info/overview.html
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See also link below on veterans and suicide
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/13/cbsnews_investigates/main3496471.shtml
+LEAVING NO CHAOS BEHIND – PART ONE
I will be writing a response to the following comment:
“Why did you stay with your parents until you were 18 years old? Many kids from abusive homes will leave early and actually prefer living on the streets rather than return to the home. I am not suggesting that you should have left–just wondering if you ever thought about leaving as a way to escape the constant abuse.”
++
Before I begin to address the above important question, I want to give you a very brief synopsis of what happened once I DID leave home.
My parents put me into the Navy and I left Alaska October 3, 1969. It had not been my decision. I was incapable, even a month after my 18th birthday, of making a decision.
I completed boot camp in Bainbridge, Maryland and was placed in data processing (computer) school in San Diego. I tried, but could not ‘get’ computers, so was put through a brief secretarial training program and then stationed in Newport, Rhode Island.
I was pregnant four months out of boot camp, but hid it from the military for as long as I possibly could. At that time women were still being instantly discharged from the service if they were pregnant, no exceptions.
I was discharged from the Navy in September 1970 and knew of nowhere to go but back to San Diego where I’d met some young people prior to my transfer. I was unmarried when I gave birth to my daughter in January 1971 and had no means to make the decision to keep her or not. I placed in her a foster home where she remained for the first month of her life. During that time I traveled with another group of young people to Brandywine, West Virginia where I made the decision to keep my daughter.
I traveled back to San Diego, brought my daughter home, and in June of 1971 moved to Alameda to be with the father of my child who was in the Navy also. I’ve written the whole story about this time in my life but of course can’t locate it in my computer files. Enough to say I traveled to Hawaii to marry the father once he was sent out to sea on an aircraft carrier, and returned back to California alone to try to figure out what to do next.
The chaos continued as the father was discharged for drug charges, together we managed to get ourselves out to Ohio by fall 1972 where we had other young friends. The marriage failed nearly immediately, the father went to Fargo, North Dakota the winter my daughter turned one and I followed him there, arriving in Fargo in early June of 1972.
It was at that time that I wrote this piece I am going to share with you here. All the above experiences in chaos had occurred prior to my 21st birthday the end of August 1972, and in less than three years after I had walked out of my parents’ door. How this piece of writing has survived for 37 years and is still with me, I do not know.
But it did, and here it is followed by the poems that I wrote at the same time. I remember sitting at the typewriter in the tiny basement apartment I found in Fargo for myself and my daughter. I remember these words pouring out of my finger tips as I wrote them, and I see there are no corrections on these two pieces of white paper, folded in fourths. Today I might call this piece “A Dissociator’s Dream.”
++
written early June 1972
Don’t blow your cover. No matter what, don’t blow your cover. Cover? What cover? Naked legs? Flowing hair. Double-talk, triple-talk, round-the-circle talk. Don’t look in my eyes, they’re real. Yes, perhaps in time you’ll see the fears and the years and the tears. Perhaps in time.
But right now. What about right NOW? Wait, what game are we playing. Come back, wait here, where are you, hurry, they’re leaving…don’t run quite so fast, my legs are shorter than yours used to be.
Your time’s up. Ha! You didn’t think I was around these parts. Didn’t know I was right behind you, did ya? Well, what did you think? I’d change the rules and let you know? Come now, what fun would that have been? We can’t all win. Not all the time, now that you mention it, not any of the time.
Look around you. Where am I? No, no, no, not there. I tired of that place long ago. No, not there either. Don’t you remember? We decided back there we should find a place, a safer place, where you could find me any time you cared to look. You’ve come calling on me again…well think about it for awhile. Who let who down?
When the bills were posted the word was clear enough. The old fellow who did the touch up job passed through some time ago. Faded now, can’t for the life of me figure out what it used to say. Oh, well, there must be one sheltered from that last storm. It’ll all come clear when I come across that one.
Did you call my name? Please, did you call me? It couldn’t have been your mistake. It’s been so long since you’ve used it, denying doesn’t change what I have heard. Don’t leave…wait! I’ll take care of you, you’ll remember.
Believe me when I say your pain doesn’t matter. Once you feel it as pain your battle’s half won! Just hand it here, I’ll take it over there and put it down, and I really wouldn’t worry about coming back to check on it.
Don’t worry, it’ll pass. I’ve merely forgotten my name. No, you can’t tell me. Remember, we’ve just met? Maybe you could take a moment and give me a reminder. A clue, just a clue. Not that I need it, sometimes warm words fill cold spaces.
Laugh a little, cry a little, work a little, worry a little. The tune’s the same, we make up our own words.
Did I tell you the sun came up last night? It was really neat. I made the date with the sun a few years back, surprised I remembered when the time came around. Let me know when you set yours, I’d love to be with you. Now that I’ve seen it, I find the night a little empty.
It’s been a little over an hour now. My perception has been warped by too much exposure. Hopefully when developed, the images will clear. Proper timing. Important, you know. Where is the clarity without the darkness and the light?
My body will never be as perfect as yours. I don’t think about it that way. My balance is in my fingers, where yours is in your toes. Don’t laugh, I’m humming now, and I can’t hear you, so just hum along…you know the tune.
I waited too long, words have a way of getting bored and running out on you. Well, I’ll be patient with you, they’ll be back.
++
(the following words were indented in patterns that do not translate into this blog’s format)
There is so much
within you
for you
to be
Everything
that is
happening
now
is
to be
Everything
…………………………………….
When you see beauty
you see me
When you hear music
you are in tune
with me
When you remember
anything
you are remembering me
In your head
and
When you believe
you have found
peace
happiness
fulfillment
you believe
in me
As I have been
in your past
For now we
Exist
As when
………………………………………
return to
your mother
without demanding
to know
where
she
has been for
the ages
that
have passed
between you and
her
have been only
necessary
for
you
……………………………..
my Voice is one with all voices
all voices are my Voice
my Voice
speaks
of thunder and whispers
to your ears
every sound you detect
is my Voice
every
sound that is
in existence is
a tune
my Voice
Is
………………………………….
Let my child be my beacon, and I her song…..
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Looking back, I see that I might as well have fallen out of the sky and hit the ground running when I left home. I’d never been away from home a night in my life except for one week at my grandmother’s house when I was two and my sister was born, and for the week I spent at bible camp the summer before I turned 12. I had never spent the night at a friend’s house. I had never been on a date.
My mother did not come out from behind her closed bedroom door to say goodbye to me the night I left home. My father had driven me to the airport in Anchorage, a drive that took over an hour that night and never said a word.
I stepped through the door into that jet plane, headed 3362 miles off to boot camp as the crow flies, never looking back until I was 30 years old and went into treatment. Even then, I had no way to understand what had happened to me. My experience matched nothing anyone seemed to know, and of course I had no idea what other people’s experiences had been or were like, either. It’s taken another almost 30 years for me to begin to figure that out.
+EARLY ORIGIN OF OUR ONGOING EXPERIENCE OF SHAME AND FORGIVENESS
I can in no way see that forgiveness is not about the patterns of rupture and repair. Lack of the ability or willingness to forgive must relate to there being a rupture for which there is no repair.
Every issue involving rupture and repair patterns occur in attachment relationship contexts of our self in relationship to our self, to others and to our world at large. All of our attachment relationships are processed through our right brain’s emotional center. This means that all our ongoing attachment relationship processes are processed through the same neuronal pathways that were built within our brains through our experiences with our early caregivers from birth to one year old.
These experiences built our social emotional brain well before we even had potential for consciousness. They will continue to operate in exactly the way they were formed unless we later can apply conscious thought and effort to change them.
When we choose to apply ‘new and more advanced’ terminology to the basic operations of our brains, minds, nervous systems and bodies, we are taking a step toward the risk of losing touch and sight of what we are actually talking about. It is no different to me than using any word in our language without knowing what the imaginal root of the word is as it came into our language from its beginnings. Words get born. They originate somewhere. They come from somewhere. They have a beginning.
++
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If one pays particular attention to how an infant is attached within its world at about one year old as it moves from the world of its caregiver into the wider world of its own discovery, I suspect that we can tell about the origin of the operation of what we call ‘forgiveness’ as it operates in tandem with the origin of what we call ‘the shame reaction’ that occurs at this time. This ‘shame’ reaction as it is described by Dr. Allan Schore happens when an infant’s nervous system, or more specifically the ‘go’ or sympathetic arm of its autonomic nervous system responds with excitement and outgoing energy as an infant moves into its wider world of discovery.
At the same time, the potential has correspondingly increased for the infant to experience a ‘crash’ or ‘stop’ as the other arm of the automic nervous system, the parasympathetic (I think of this as the pair of breaks) will kick in if the infant returns from its excited explorations to find that its caregiver does not respond back to the infant with the same level of ‘go’ excitement. The infant will experience this clash, or rupture as a depletion of its positive state. This ‘stop’ after ‘go’ is neurologically what we come to call the shame reaction.
There has to be the basis of a safe and secure attachment relationship between an infant and the caregiver it is returning to in order for this rupture to be repaired. These rupture and repair processes are simply further continuations of the development and growth of already existing rupture and repair patterns that have been built through caregiver-infant interactions from birth and correspond to the infant’s right brain emotional center’s development.
If that area of the brain has already suffered from enough malevolent interactions to have been ‘mis-informed’ and thus ‘misformed’ by the time an infant is one year old, all ongoing patterns related to movements within the bigger world as they relate to patterns of ‘coming back together in safety and security’ with the primary caregivers surrounding the infant will also be affected. This go and stop, rupture and repair patterning seems to me to directly connect our more advanced (and thus somewhat more obscure0 words of shame to forgiveness. Even on the most profound and basic physiological level, shame reflects rupture and forgiveness reflects repair.
Because these go and stop patterns are directly related to the right brain’s emotional social center, they are both about emotions in terms of their experience through either regulation or dysregulation. These two patterns are built into the brain from birth, as I’ve mentioned. This means to me that what we call forgiveness directly ties into the right brain’s ability to regulate emotions. Even though we think of forgiveness as being a conscious activity, it still has its roots in the original patterns of our right emotional brain.
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Infant brains formed through safe and secure early attachment relationships have the advantage regarding emotional regulation in every possible way over infant brains formed in unsafe and insecure early environmental interactions with early caregivers. The advantages of one and the disadvantages of the other are in the circuitry of the brain itself.
Caregivers need have no negative intent to cause an infant this ‘stop’ shame reaction. It is a natural reaction an infant actually needs to experience on occasion as it learns about safety and danger in the wider world, and about how to negotiate the space of the world with other people and their needs. But the resolution of shame through a repair of the shame reaction is essential if all is going to go well in an infant’s development. Looking at this repair process as a reinstatement of a secure attachment relationship in the world lets us know absolutely that ‘forgiveness’ is the counterpart of ‘shame’ and lies at the basis of our attachment interrelationships.
++
I remember specifically with my middle child that once she learned to talk well, she needed to talk about things that happened in her life and in her mind long before I would have thought she had the capacity for forming memories from those experiences. It was if she knew somehow that once she had the ability to verbalize about these early experiences that process was also necessary. She had in fact waited for her own developmental abilities to catch up with her needs.
I wonder if it isn’t the same with shame in cases where very eary experiences are harmful and detrimental to an infant. Their phsyiological development might not have developed to the point that they can actually experience the physical process of the stop and go within their nervous system. Yet if those older experiences were damaging enough to a child, I suspect that they can be there waiting for the time that infant’s body is old enough to experience that shame reaction.
I say this because the process of rupture and repair, as it builds the early infant social emotional right limbic brain, has already deeply formed itself into the brain itself well before a child reaches the age of one, the age when the infant can physically move itself around in the larger world. I believe that it is possible that if ruptures have not already been adequately met with repair early on, that even the beginnings of the physical shame and forgiveness patterns will be interfered with.
This is true because expectation, anticipation, hope and hopelessness have already begun the foundational development of the right brain from very early on. For example, when a tiny infant is hungry and someone responds adequately to feed it, that infant’s brain is already building hope into it as it learns within itself that in this safe and secure world it can trust that its needs will be met. These experiences form the basis of the first thought processes as they involve the early formation of mental representations.
If harmful and inadequate experiences are the ones that operate at these crucial early stages, hopelessness, despair and even rage can fill in the cracks where these misshapen mental representations are forming. They will already be firmly in place well before the age of one, and will influence what an infant anticipates and expects upon its return to its caregiver once it enters into the world.
This puts hope — its fulfillment or disappointment — at the pivotal point where shame and forgiveness operate from the start. These inner relationships are physiologically formed into the body and brain of an infant, and will obviously form the foundation for all our hope, shame and forgiveness experiences we have for the rest of our lives.
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There is no mystery here. If we want to change the patterns that were built into our brains and bodies from the beginning we have to become conscious of how these patterns are operating within us, even though we will probably never retrieve the actual facts of the experiences we had as infants that built our inner operating systems in the first place. First we have to recognize that these patterns exist, and directly realize that they involve our right emotional brain.
Shame normally happens for an infant when it anticipates a emotional state reaction from an attachment figure that matches the infant’s own state. When that state is not matched the infant experiences this as a rupture that we come to know as shame. It is an interactional experience.
Forgiveness normally happens for an infant when the mismatch between what it anticipated from the caregiver and did not get is repaired. When a caregiver reestablishes rapport with the infant it is acting our forgiveness. The infant actually accepts the forgiveness willingly because an infant’s natural state is to be united with or reunited with its attachment figures.
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In looking at both shame and forgiveness in the dictionary, both have origins in the English language before the 12th century. It is rare to find a word in what we would call modern English that came into the language earlier than that. This means to me that both these words refer to states that have been consciously known for a long, long time.
Both words, however, reflect at their basis, at least in modern English, that they relate to conditions of the mind and states of being — as they are rooted in our human physiological body and experience of being alive in that body. They are therefore related to mentalizing abilities and to Theory of Mind. Both of these two operations are interfered with in cases of mental illness like my mother had, and both are also interfered with through early trauma as they become reflected in insecure attachment disorders.
This is because the true issue at stake in both the shame rupture and the forgiveness repair require the context of an attachment relationship in order to operate in the first place. They are both physiologically rooted in our body, brain, nervous system and mind because we are members of a social species and we must form this way. Shame reflects a breech in ongoing attachment and forgiveness repairs and heals this breech.
Early developmental experiences in a malevolent world change how these two corresponding parts of who we are form and operate. If we suffered early abuse and trauma, without having access to adequate secure and safe attachment figures we could always depend on to mediate the damage-forming process as we formed our shame-forgiveness response system, we will experience complications throughout our lives related to these changes.
If we hope to affect healing for ourselves related to shame and forgiveness, I believe we need to understand and accept how and why we got these problems in the first place. To do so we must consider the quality of our attachment relationships from birth so that we can begin to understand how they were already operating in our brains, nervous system and body by the time we were old enough to begin to enter the bigger, wider world on our own at about one year old.
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Main Entry:
Pronunciation:
\ˈshām\
Function:
noun
Etymology:
Middle English, from Old English scamu; akin to Old High German scama shame
Date:
before 12th century
1 a: a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety b: the susceptibility to such emotion <have you no shame?>2: a condition of humiliating disgrace or disrepute : ignominy <the shame of being arrested>3 a: something that brings censure or reproach ; also : something to be regretted : pity <it’s a shame you can’t go> b: a cause of feeling shame
rom http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shame
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Main Entry:
Pronunciation:
\fər-ˈgiv, fȯr-\
Function:
verb
Inflected Form(s):
for·gave \-ˈgāv\ ; for·giv·en \-ˈgi-vən\ ; for·giv·ing
Etymology:
Middle English, from Old English forgifan, from for- + gifan to give
Date:
before 12th century
transitive verb1 a: to give up resentment of or claim to requital for <forgive an insult> b: to grant relief from payment of <forgive a debt>2: to cease to feel resentment against (an offender) : pardon <forgive one’s enemies>intransitive verb: to grant forgiveness
synonyms see excuse
— for·giv·able \-ˈgi-və-bəl\ adjective
— for·giv·er noun
from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/forgive
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+FORGIVENESS AND EARLY BETRAYAL
WARNING – POST MAY TRIGGER TRAUMA MEMORIES FOR THOSE WITH ABUSE HISTORIES
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Because of the way dissociation was built into my brain from birth, I can never address a topic that involves an emotional image head on. For those of you who have ever played with building blocks with a toddler, we generally place all the blocks close to the child and begin playing from there. What would happen if we hid all the blocks individually in different places and then told the child to build something out of one particular color, say blue. Or red. The child would have to search in every imaginable place it could think of to find any of the blocks, let alone just those of a single particular color. How well would the game progress for the child?
I have to follow a similar process as I try to know what I might know of forgiveness, or of any other emotional topic. Children are meant to build one safe, secure, logical experience on top of previous ones as they learn about themselves, about the world, and about themselves in the world. When other people talk about ‘recovering’ or ‘rebuilding’ themselves through healing they need to realize that there might be nothing straight forward about the process.
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I have an 18 year childhood of bits and pieces of experiences that did not form themselves together in any kind of logical or reasonable way. That is because there was no logic or reason in the environment I was in as my life happened to me. The only organizing principle available to me, other than the one my body could orchestrate on the most basic, physiological level, was my mother. The basis of her organization toward me was her psychosis about me.
I cannot, therefore, travel backward by following an organized, connected, coherent pathway in order to find out anything about myself as I grew and developed into a body and into my life. It becomes an intricate matching game with the pieces in complete disarrangement and mostly lost. My strongest memories are, as I’ve mentioned before, those that my mother included in the abuse litany she recited over and over and over again each time that she beat me throughout these 18 years. One of those very early abuse litany crimes that I had evidently committed happened when I was two years old.
Do I remember this memory because it is mine or because it was placed in my mother’s abuse litany so that over the years the memory was literally pounded into me? I was two years old, my grandmother had just come to visit us and mother sent me to my bedroom because I had done something ‘bad’. After this my mother added it to the litany because it proved to her I was willful, obstinate and disobedient — because I pounded my fists on the wall all the down the hallway to my bedroom.
Whether the memory is mine or mine only because of my mother’s repeated resurrections over the years of this event, I do believe that it happened. I believe at this age of two I was able, still, to feel anger. I have no memory of the feeling of anger in my childhood except as connected to this memory, or pseudo memory. Obviously it was thoroughly communicated to me at this time that my feeling angry was not acceptable or allowed.
As I try to face the topic of forgiveness head on I am automatically lost to myself as I try to know what I might know about it. I cannot track the growth and development of any anger toward my mother past this two year old event, one that I was beaten for many times over in the years that followed. The dissociational patterns within my mind only allow me to try to snatch what might be related events of my life, an act no easier than it would be to try to snatch bits of dandelion fluff out of a strong wind, hoping I can catch them in the order that they were attached to their flower of origin in the first place.
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The concept that I could think about individual emotions and my experience of them as actual factors of my being alive was not introduced to me until I entered the seven week in-patient treatment program for alcoholism when I was 30 years old. This is a process that a normal child is exposed to from birth through the mirroring process a mother and other early caregivers surround an infant with. These early mirroring experiences actually show the infant what it is feeling, and begin to form the early foundation of a connection to being an individual self.
If you imagine conditions that prevent this mirroring process from EVER happening for an infant, and then imagine that this non-mirroring state is maintained consistently throughout an entire childhood, you can perhaps realize how difficult it might be for such a person to ever go back and make things right within themselves. Early infant reciprocal interactions form the right emotional limbic brain itself, and they establish all the emotional regulatory patterns that will then exist in that brain for the duration of a lifetime.
This is where the insecure attachment disorders first take their root — in the patterns of neuronal firings that are built into an infant and young child’s growing brain. If a growing individual is exposed only to interactions with adults around them that are completely disorganized and disoriented, that overwhelm the child, that are not one bit reasonable or logical, that are not patterned on ANY information that is actually connected to the inner experience particularly of an infant under one year old, we cannot expect that the resulting operations of such a little one’s brain will ever be either optimal or ‘normal’.
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Because of my mother’s mental illness and psychosis it was impossible for her to ever respond to me as being anything other than a distorted projection of evil coming out of her own damaged mind. I have pondered and wondered how it was possible, from these very disturbed beginnings (as they continued unabated for 18 years), that I was able to come out on the other end to be as able to negotiate myself around in the world as I did.
Even for all the resiliency factors that I have identified and described in my earlier posts, I still find myself trying to find the answer to this question. On the one hand, if I remain in the wishful magical thinking state I suspect the magic of some kind of ‘miracle’ that occurred that allowed me to survive as a relatively adequate person. I still know I am faced with a mystery here, but without resorting to magical wishful thinking I also know that I am missing some kind of important factual information in my considerations.
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During the nearly 30 years that have passed since I was first told that I had feelings, I have passed many times through a state where I think I was far better off before I had that knowledge. I have come to understand that for some people not ‘being in touch’ with their feelings might be the wisest course a body, brain and mind can ever take.
I say this because I have also come to understand that for those of us with terrible early trauma during our brain formative stages of development, at the same time we experienced these traumas we also experienced the lack of being given adequate abilities and faculties to ever be able to regulate our emotions like ‘normal’ people can. Building an early forming right brain emotional center is about either having emotional regulation abilities built into this center or not. We must understand that emotional regulation occurs through very real physiological, neurological operations that ARE the patterns that were built into our brains in the first place.
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I bring this all up as I write today because of those that I asked about their understanding of forgiveness, all of them seem to relate forgiveness in some way to the experience of anger. In fact, one respondent to my question believes that forgiveness itself is a FEELING. Nowhere can I see in people’s response to my question do I see that forgiveness is NOT about feelings. Oh, boy! I am in trouble now! I can either give up and turn away from trying to learn something new about forgiveness, or I can apply a whole lot of willpower, courage and focused effort in an attempt to heal something here — in order to learn something new and different about myself and others in relation to being human in this world.
Because of my childhood I can never assume that I have the same background information about anything that other people who are not early abuse survivors have at their disposal. My building blocks are either missing or so disconnected, dispersed and hidden in unrelated places within me that it takes a whole lot of work to connect them together into a useful construction.
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I do know when I think about it that every single time I was beaten my mother was at the same time screaming at me to say I was ‘sorry’. Sorry for what? There was so seldom any rational connection between her beatings and the real world that I did not even know what I had done ‘wrong’ in the first place. Fortunately or unfortunately there was a part of ME that endured these beatings that evidently was extremely stubborn as I held to some version of an inner integrity that I don’t even now understand. I refused her request.
In fact, as my siblings used to point out to me in their pleadings to me on my and their behalf, if I would have cried and if I would have said I was sorry her beatings of me might have been less severe. What was it about ME, as I look back at this today, that prevented me from participating with my mother during these beatings by giving in to her demands? Why did I not shed the requisite tears and beg desperately for her forgiveness?
Those of you who have experience with severe child abuse through beatings will understand me when I say that there were two kinds of beatings. During one kind my mother lost control and entered her violent rage state so quickly that she didn’t even take pause long enough to demand that I pull my pants down. If the origination point of the beating included a ‘slower burn’ that was in fact as cold as ice, the ritualized demand to pull my pants down happened before the physical impact began.
The difference between these two kinds of beatings only had to do with the speed of the actual eruption of her physical blows upon my body. The force of the beatings and the length of them did not vary. Once my mother had entered her insane physical violence against me stage, the beatings themselves could literally go on for a long, long time until she had exhausted not only her rage attack but also her physical stamina. She had a vast reservoir of both.
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It is also important that I point out to you that my choice and decision not to beg her forgiveness, not to say I was sorry, and not to cry was never, to my knowledge, a conscious choice. It had to therefore originate from some core of will within myself that I was not able to consciously access in my thoughts — not before the beatings, not during, after or between them. I am left to conclude, therefore, that this ‘battle of wills’ between my mother and my self originated very, very early in my development. In fact, this ability that I had to defy her in taking over ME is what saved me.
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Looking backward as I write today I see that I am approaching something that is powerful, forceful, amazing, yet at the same time very delicate. In my attempts to discern what I know about forgiveness I am having to travel back to an age well before two. For those of you who know what anthropomorphizing in relation to animals means, you will understand me better when I say it is not helpful to go back into early childhood and use any adult idea of what was actually happening on the insides of an infant or a very young child.
The reasons should be obvious to us. An infant is very much like a young animal at the beginning in that its brain is very primitive simply because not enough time has gone by yet for the advanced human brain to grow and develop. A fully developed brain would mean that a head would be too big to be born from the mother in the first place. In addition, nature has designed the rest of a brain’s formation to occur in interaction with its environment, not exclusively without those interactions. Experience in the world has to be built into our early brains so that the brain is actually effective in surviving within the same world that built it.
So a very key important point is trying to come clear to me as I write at this moment. Because my mother’s hatred for me was present before I was born as a result of her psychotic break while delivering me that meant she understood I was the devil’s child sent to kill her, there was something within me FROM THE MOMENT OF MY BIRTH, or even before because her break happened while I was still inside of her, that meant the ME that I was and am — KNEW BETTER.
It was therefore never, from that point forward, possible for me to comprehend what she was talking about or beating me for. That is the closest I can describe to what I experienced during the thousands of beatings — this state of non comprehension. My refusal to participate in her psychosis the way she probably wanted me to resulted not from my conscious choice not to, but rather was connected to my innate inner point of logic, reason and the most profound knowing that I’d never left from the time of my birth.
I DID NOT know what she was talking about or really why she hated me or what the beatings and abuse were all about. It was therefore not possible for me to comprehend anything about the abuse. My mother’s actions toward me were outside of my realm of understanding from the first breath I ever took.
How could such a fact actually be possible? Yes, this fills me with awe and makes me feel like I am standing at a point witnessing the mystery and the miracle of a genesis. But as I allow myself to expand my understanding of the possibilities of what still is factual about being human even though science might never be able to explain it, I do include as fact the actual experience I had with my mother as I knew — somehow and most profoundly — from the first breath I ever took — and from the first moment she turned the force and power of her hatred and psychotic mental illness upon me — that she was WRONG.
When we talk about the miracle of healing and of recovery, it is almost mind boggling to me to understand that my personal recovery means that I have to go back to THIS POINT of awareness of knowing I was NOT who and what she said I was, and did NOT do what she said I did and therefore could not possible beg her forgiveness or say I was sorry because I innately KNEW this fact inside of myself.
Nothing she could ever do over a long 18 years could touch me at this core. Nothing she could ever do, and she tried as hard as she possibly could have, could convince ME she was right and I was wrong.
I can sense as I write this today that it is like there was a sacred fire burning at the center of my being that included in its fuel this piece of knowledge. That sacred fire at the center of who I was, and who I am, was somehow absolutely protected from harm. She could not touch it. She could not touch me.
What also happened, however, is that this fire had to remain within its own circle as I grew a body into this world throughout the horror of all the experiences that I had to experience with my mother. Every time that part of Linda tried to move out into the world it was devastatingly attacked and had to retreat back into the safe place that my mother could not get to.
Because I was growing up in a malevolent world without safety and security, I could not integrate this inner self into my own life. The strange part is that even though this hampered me in my development at nearly every turn (my relationship with my 14 month older brother was for my early months of life exempt from her attacks, as was my later relationship with the Alaskan wilderness when I was away from her reach), it also saved me from the betrayal trauma that I believe caused the destruction of my mother’s mind.
My mother, I believe, grew up as any child naturally attempts to grow. The difference between my mother’s experience and my own is that she had, at times, false security offered to her so that she was in fact fooled into believing that her own self could come out into the world and form attachments of some kind to her early caregivers.
I, on the other hand, was never fooled. I actually was betrayed at the time of my birth. The MONSTER was obviously there to greet me at my first breath. My experience was of a consistent hatred while hers was of an inconsistent conditional love mixed with hatred.
My mother had already entered out into the world before she was severely betrayed by the people who had let her believe that they loved her. I knew instantly as soon as I ‘woke into the world’ that something was already terribly wrong. She figured this out too late in her own childhood. And by the time she did, on some deep level, figure out that she was unsafe in the world, it was too late for her to retreat back into that inner place of protective safety that I was forced to never leave from my start.
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My mother was old enough to already be at a stage of trying to form a Theory of Mind as she tried to figure out how the rules of life impacted her. She had already experienced conditional love as it coincided with harm to the point that she was ‘tricked’ into believing that she was somehow responsible for actions that meant her attachment figures could not love her because she was wrong, because she was bad.
I believe that her mind became so entangled with this idea that somehow if she could only be good enough those around her would love her (as in that childhood note she found at the time of her mother’s death as I describe in +What I Suspect of My Mother’s Early Childhood), that it ended up becoming the wound around which her psychosis formed that she later projected in its entirety upon me before I was born. In her psychosis some part of her evidently believed that she was so bad and bad enough that the devil would send an unborn child to kill her in labor. I took my first breath being the personification of the entirety of her intolerable internalized evil.
This psychosis actively played itself out throughout my entire childhood. I see an image as I write of the fairy tale ‘poisoned apple’, only this one doesn’t put you to sleep. It kills you in the depths of your being.
My mother was old enough to eat the poisoned apple during her childhood. She trusted enough in those around her that she COULD be betrayed. She was fooled. Because the poisoned apple was presented to me at birth, well before I was actually old enough to eat it, I never was fooled into believing anyone loved me in the first place. I was therefore spared the eating of the poisoned apple. I was spared any further betrayal past my mother’s hatred of me at my first breath.
I could never believe there was anything I could do to change the situation, one way or the other. I was given an immunity as a result that my mother never had. That means that while I consciously completely and totally believed by the time I was 17 that I was evil, that I was not human, that I was the devil’s child — and I DID completely believe this without question — that belief only had to do with what had been told to me and beaten into me from the time of my birth.
I can never underestimate the power of the actual experiences I had that formed this understanding into my brain. But the truth of the matter is that there MUST be more to us than what is built into our brain — and what a long, strange road of suffering I had to take to be able to be one of the people on this earth who can make this statement from the facts of actual experience.
There IS more to us than what our bodies and our brains actually contain. There WAS a Linda, a self of Linda, present when I was born that had a knowledge, even though it was not verbal or conscious, that stood with its own truth and its own corresponding version of reality, against my mother every single step of the way.
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Tracking this back to the concept of forgiveness I would say at this moment that when we have a choice to forgive or not to forgive we are being given the ability to exercise an option that lies at some fundamental point of our existence as members of our advanced human species. When I say that I don’t understand it, I mean it. The issue of forgiveness goes back to a time when I was in the act of being born because that is where the betrayals first began for me. But I am lucky this is so because unlike my mother I never had to participate in a fundamental betrayal later on, as she did as a child, that might have broken me as my mother’s broke her.
Stop the Storm 
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