Tag: posttraumatic stress disorder

+SEVERE EARLY ABUSE PERMANENTLY CHANGES THE ‘SET POINT’ IN OUR BODIES

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I described in an earlier post how I define conditions that create the worst of developmental conditions for infants and young children in terms of the absence or presence of pervasive terror.  In talking to friends about this idea there needs to be an addition to my thoughts.  The absence or presence of love is directly connected to terror when the terror is caused by an early caregiver.

I also described in an earlier post how I see anger as being an appropriate response to environmental challenge because it involves active and effective coping skills.  If those skills are ineffective in meeting the challenge, the next reaction will be fear.  I am not talking about what might be a sense of fear coupled with an initial startle response to the possibility of threat.  That initial reaction is designed to lead us instantaneously to an assessment of the challenge — is it friend or foe?  Only when the challenge is identified as foe does the cycle of meeting the challenge come into play.

So if anger responses fail, and fear is triggered, it is at that stage that another, new and additional response must be found and applied to the situation in order that competent equilibrium can be restored so that well-being can be reestablished.  If the state of fear moves into sadness and despair, that means that no new adequate coping skill could be found.  In the state of despair there is absolutely no question that all else has failed, including any attempts to learn and apply something new.

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Nature has established an interrelated caregiver-infant response system so that even the big eyes that infants have elicit caregiving from adults.  Infants learn very early that they can interact with their environment to get their needs met, and they will use every single one of their innate abilities to succeed at this mission.  In circumstances where caregivers do not respond appropriately to these infant response elicitation efforts, only time will tell what happens next.

Because of an infant’s physiological limitations they are extremely limited as to what they can do to help their situation when their inborn efforts are not effective.  Along with feeling any physical consequences that may apply, such as feeling too hot or cold, hungry, thirsty or tired, their inborn abilities to respond to these challenges with an immune system response of physical emotion creates an inner experience of the feeling of anger, fear or despair.

The inner pattern of deprivation and/or maltreatment begins to operate at birth (or even before birth).  These rhythms of ‘rupture and repair’ or of ‘rupture without repair’ become directly connected in an infant’s forming brain to the experience of hope.  If an infant experiences a challenge to its well-being state of equilibrium but is repeatedly responded to adequately, hope begins to form as a comforting experience during the time of waiting ‘for help to arrive’.

If there is no adequate response pattern established within the infant’s early environment, another pattern will form that does not include hope as a solacing middle-ground experience in the ‘rupture and repair’ cycle.  If events appear to happen without any cause and effect pattern, if the infant cannot use effectively and then grow to trust and depend upon its own efforts to elicit caregiving responses within its environment, it will not build an adequate pattern of ‘rupture-hope-repair’ into its body and brain.  Instead it will be forced off onto another developmental track based on perceived threat to its own life very early in its development.  This pattern of ‘rupture without hope of repair’ then becomes the foundation upon which all future development will be built.

This, to me, is ultimately what having a secure attachment of safety or an insecure attachment of threat and harm is all about.  We are sent off down one or the other of these two paths from the time of our birth (or before).  What the angle or degree of our resulting deviation becomes, from a state of optimal experience, is determined by our genetic factors as they respond to our early environmental conditions.

The fact remains that attachment is a physiological experience that has biochemical consequences.  It changes, for better or for worse, how every cell in our body interacts on a molecular level.  How much of our experience later becomes conscious is also influenced and impacted by these biological changes.  And in the end, it is our ability to have conscious control over our lives that leads to a better future.

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Because we are a social species we have built into the chemical operation of our bodies an innate desire to be attached.  Our survival from birth depends upon our attachment relationships with our early caregivers.  Our development on all levels is dependent upon others.  Our brain, as a part of our nervous system, will be geared by these early experiences either to a ‘set point’  of balanced equilibrium from secure attachments or a ‘set point’ of unbalanced disequilibrium from insecure attachment conditions.  Our immune systems also develop in accordance with these early experiences in the same way.

We are being told even before birth about the world — is it safe or not and are we wanted or not?  Conditions of early deprivation tell an infant that the world is not safe, that they are not wanted in the world, and that they are hence left on their own to survive or die.  This is, to me, what the purist form of isolation means.  Because we are a social species not being wanted and not being cared for appropriately signal the growing body that they are absolutely alone with nobody attached to them and nobody for them to attach to.  And because our entire body is naturally geared FOR attachment, all resulting development will be forced to follow an alternative pathway.

I believe that a combination of genetic factors, including our sex, will respond in our early interactional environment to determine the emotional tone of our bodies based upon the very early emotional potential we are born with.  A safe, secure, adequate and happy early environment will build a calm set point of balanced equilibrium into a body and brain that allows a child to grow up competent and confident.  A dangerous, malevolent world will create a set point of deprivation and the resulting emotional tone will be some combination of anger, terror and despair with one of these emotions becoming dominant.

Because male bodies are designed differently from female bodies, their hormonal environment will more likely foster an anger-fight emotional tone.  Males have higher testosterone and vasopressin levels than females, and lower oxytocin (I will describe these chemicals in more detail in future posts).  Males are certainly not immune from acquiring either terror or despair as their set point, nor are females immune from acquiring anger as theirs.

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My simple point for today is that if we ask ourselves the simple question, “What is my overriding and foundational emotional tone?” and ask this question without judgment or critique, we can gain a critical piece of useful information about ourselves.  I say overriding and foundational because this emotional tone permeates our entire bodies and is directly connected to the set point of our equilibrium — or disequilibrium.

If a set point of calm balanced equilibrium — built there through safe and secure early caregiver attachment interactions — was never built into our bodies in the first place, calmness will not be our natural state at center for the rest of our lives.  If we want to have calmness at our center, we will have to WORK hard to put it there, and need to realize that we are having to do this work not because there is something ‘wrong’ with us, but that there was something ‘wrong’ in our early formational environment.

There are instances where the ‘something wrong in our early formational environment’ lies entirely within the genetic combinations we were formed with.  If this is true, we know it.  Otherwise, some form of trauma has interrupted our ability to form a ‘set point’ of calm equilibrium at our center, and thus our ability to EVER get there has been changed.

In my opinion anything that prevents us from having an optimal emotional tone based on calm  and balanced equilibrium creates an unfinished trauma cycle that is physiologically happening in our body and brain.  This  ‘unfinished’ trauma cycle built into our bodies means that on some level we will always carry a sense of anxiety no matter what point on the cycle our bodies are stuck at.

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We might assess our center state and determine that our overriding and fundamental center set point is rage.  We might find that our first response is always to fight, is always to take an aggressive position and from there we have to WORK to experience anything else.  This GO state is built into the nervous system-brain and indicates that all reactions to challenges in the environment are first attempted to be met with active coping skill reactions based on what is already known.  It can become extremely hard to realize and accept that these patterns of response are not as useful and effective as one would like to think they are.  In fact, they can get one into a whole lot of trouble.

The chronic anger reaction means that offense is always seen as being the best choice, and that failure is not an option.  We HAVE to at times accept that failure is a fact or we can never learn anything new.  Learning is risky.  Knowing how to react and using this knowledge over and over again only works if the response truly is appropriate.  If one’s internal set point rests on anger and one’s pattern of responses originate in this active survival ‘place’, letting down one’s guard and admitting one doesn’t know how to respond to a challenge can be seen as an action that will lead directly to extinction.

Being ‘stuck’ at a set point of chronic anger and rage means that the feelings of fear and sadness are being left out of the cycle.  Anger is designed to elicit an immediate and effective response to challenge of threat.  It is normally designed to solve a problem so that the center point of calm equilibrium can be returned to.  During damaging early experiences there was no calm set point created in the first place — so what does any response really accomplish for us?  All it does it keep us alive, or so we intend.  But being alive, for us, rarely means that we get to experience well-being.  There is something else always going on for us — the active act of surviving and staying alive.

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We might find that our set point is at fear and terror.  We never came to believe that we had active coping skills that we could use to solve problems stemming from challenges we faced.  We are weak on the competency-confident position on the response cycle, and often fail to realize that we do in fact have the ability to respond actively and adequately.

In addition, if we are stuck in the fear place on the trauma recovery circle we don’t even necessarily feel the despair and sadness that would normally be the result of a complete failure to respond appropriately.  We are literally frozen in a state of fear, anxiety and panic and cannot move.  Our energy, our life force, is frozen within us, also.  Because we cannot move, we cannot learn.  I believe this fear place is connected to the fact that at some point in time we tried to respond to challenge and our efforts failed.  We do not have a clue what else to do.

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If our set point is at despair and sadness we are in the perfect spot to learn something new but we lack the ability to see this.  All escape routes appear to be sealed off from us and our energy is gone — not stored, not held, not frozen — just plain gone.  We lack the energy available to us in the the anger-fight spot or even access to the energy frozen in the fear spot.

Some of us gave up the fight because circumstances overwhelmed our response ability from the time we were born, thus setting our emotional tone and our inner ‘set point’ at despair.  We were forced to lose the race before we ever got started.  Our inner ‘set point’ is at hopelessness.  We feel utterly and fundamentally unable to marshal competent responses to even the simplest of challenges.

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This first step of accurately bringing into our consciousness the state of our emotional tone and our ‘set point’ allows us to form a realistic picture about ourselves in the world.  If we want to change something about ourselves and about our lives we need to know where we are starting from.  That the patterns within us were formed before we were a year old in no way negates the extreme power our ‘set point’ has in determining everything we experience from that early point forward.

Nature has designed us to know about the conditions of the world from before our birth and has designed us to adapt and adjust to these conditions.  If we find ourselves wanting something different from the world we were born into and formed by, we will have to become clear and conscious of the facts as they relate to the changes our bodies were forced to make to keep us alive in malevolent environments.

I do not believe that our bodies will ever, on their own, be able to change their inner, early developed set points.  We HAVE to apply conscious effort, the physics of applied force or WORK, to attempt to change how we ARE in our lives in relationship to these set points.  Comparing ourselves to others and then judging either us or them as a result is not helpful.  This is about becoming absolutely clear about our own emotional tone which will then let us know where we became permanently stuck on the trauma recovery cycle very, very early in our development.

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Some people find that using the image of an ‘inner child’ is helpful when considering the gulf that might separate who we became from who we could have become had our early severe traumas never occurred in the first place.  I have personally never been able to rely upon this image because I know full well that the changes that happened to me were physiologically built into my body and affected every aspect of my biological development so that the body I inhabit today is directly connected to the abused and battered child that I was.

That child has grown up to be me.  Every single experience I had as a child affected how I developed.  Those experiences created within me a ‘set point’ that will never be at calm and balanced equilibrium.  My ‘set point’ is at a state of terror and despair and is directly connected to a sense of anxiety in my body.  There’s no possible way it could have been created otherwise based on my early experiences because the traumas of my early years were so severe and chronic.

The anxiety is built into my body like a background ‘noise’ that never goes away.  I believe this might be worse for me than for many others because I was genetically created to be extremely sensitive no matter what my early life had been like.  This underlying and overriding anxiety colors even my terror and my despair.  Shades of disaster were communicated to my growing body from birth and built these same responses into the operation of my nervous system-brain, my immune system, and into every cell in my body.  It is NOT some inner version of a child that experiences any part of my present day reality.  It is me, in this body, trying to live every moment of this life today and into my future.

I have to work hard to feel any other kind of feeling, and even when I do my body always responds back after a short period of time to what it knows at its center.  Is this bad?  No, it might be unfortunate but it is a natural reaction to severe trauma survival.  At least now I know what is going on in my body, how things got to be this way, and exactly what I am working with as I continually try to make my life better.

I am realistic.  My body’s set point was built in, by and for a malevolent world of disaster and trauma and that can never be changed.  This is the only body I will ever have in this lifetime.  I might as well understand it — how and why it was built the way it was.  Because I know these facts I can try to live in and with this body as I carve out niches and crannies of experiences that are not closely tied to my body’s natural ‘set point’, but are rather built out of the ‘stuff’ that securely-attached-from-birth people can take for granted all of their lives.

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

+IS MENTAL ILLNESS THE COST OF OUR SPECIES’ GREATEST GIFTS?

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Why has our species retained the potential genetic combinations that result in mental illness?

We need to realize that the cost of the development of our greatest gifts as a species are being paid by those who carry the genetic combinations that put them at risk of developing serious ‘mental illness’ conditions.  These people are forced to suffer at the opposite end of the spectrum and continuum of giftedness because many of our greatest human gifts are actually related to signals related to ‘conspicuous consumption’.  We have our gifts because we can afford to pay for them, and the gifts themselves are reproductive fitness indicators that act as signals of our ability to handle the cost of keeping them.

This brings to mind the current financial complications our culture is experiencing related to an imbalance in conspicuous consumption practices.  In order for this process to operate in a good fashion, what is being consumed and displayed has to be paid for.

From a human point of view, the existence of the pyramids, the Vatican, Versailles, the Parthenon, and even the great wall of China are all manifestations of conspicuous consumption indicators.  Someone could afford the cost and paid for them.

On a more mundane level, I can imagine conspicuous consumption being like a peacock’s feathers if I think about someone going to a store, picking an isle and buying everything in that isle whether they needed the goods or not.  If they take them all home and dump them in a pile in their yard so the neighbors would drive by and think, “My oh my that person must be rich!  All those goods in their front yard indicate that they are.”  We do that in our culture with all sorts of items.  We don’t realize that the basis of our actions are still grounded in the ancient evolutionary practice of signaling our reproductive fitness that we can afford all of these things.

During the evolution of our species it was only when we were not under threat of immediate extinction that we could dance out our dramas or learn to chit chat about our trivial experiences.  It was only as we could afford to protect and provide for mothers so that they had the safety and security to spend the time required for long developmental stages leading to advanced mental capacities that we began to develop our FOXP2 gene’s ability for language in the first place (about 140,000 years ago).

In this way all of our advanced gifts were allowed to evolve as indicators of conspicuous consumption because their existence meant that we had access to the resources we needed in order for them to be developed from the start.  The appearance of these gifts within our species today still reflects the fact that we have access to the resources we need to keep them.

In the end, it always comes back to the issues surrounding resources.  If we don’t have the resources, or don’t use them wisely to protect the unborn and the newly born from the consequences of having to adapt to a malevolent environment, ‘mental illness’ will continue to plague our species far more than is required from us to maintain the existence — in our gene pool — of our gifts.

The most important step we can take toward ending unnecessary traumas during infant developmental stages that trigger many ‘mental illness’ genetic combinations would be to destigmatize ‘mental illness’ by appreciating the gifts of our species that are connected genetically to ‘mental illness’ risk factors.  By doing so we would greatly increase our opportunities to intervene constructively with ‘mentally ill’ parents who are most at risk for severely traumatizing their offspring, thus alleviating a major portion of the suffering of future generations.

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Yet when it comes to our species’ more intangible gifts we can easily lose site of the genetic combinations that allow these gifts to exist.  I believe that many families who can point to ‘mental illness’ in their lineage also could point to many great examples of genius and talent.  It is the unfortunate preventable manifestation of the suffering of ‘mental illness’ that concerns me.  In today’s enlightened world we have information that can help us prevent much of its occurrence.  We can effectively lessen the human cost of keeping our greatest gifts through paying close attention to the early infant traumas that often cause ‘mental illness’ genetic combinations to manifest so that we can prevent them.

Because all of life operates in circles and cycles of balance, our species cannot retain the ability to display our great gifts related to our intelligence, our creativity, language, movement and dance without retaining the risk factors that are connected to these gifts.  Our species beat out at least 19 other hominid species because we have the gift of an extremely agile brain.  But the cost of maintaining the gene pool linked to our agility also means that the risk of fragility must also be maintained.

When we think about reproductive fitness indicators even within our advanced species we need to think in three directions at the same time:  male to male reproductive fitness indicators often related to combat competition, female selection indicators related to preferences for selection of mates, and survival fitness indicators among siblings that allow them to compete with each other for resources that the parents provide.

Then we need to realize and remember that for every group of survival reproductive fitness indicators that we have evolved related to these three different survival spectrums our species has a corresponding genetic potential for opposite risk.  In addition, our most valued resources are so expensive to maintain (like the peacock’s feathers) that all they really do is indicate that we can afford to keep them.

In my thinking this means that when the difficulties of ‘mental illness’ manifest themselves in members of our species we need to hold these people carefully in the palm of our species’ hand because without the negative risks that exist related to the genetic combinations of our species’ gifts we would not have their positive expression, either.  The people who end up suffering most are paying the highest price for the cost our species must expend to retain what made us endure, survive and beat out all our competition in the first place.

That the actual expression of many of these ‘mental illnesses’ results from interaction between the sufferer’s genetic potential and harsh, toxic and malevolent environmental conditions from conception to the age (especially) of two means that the rest of us have an obligation to make sure, wherever possible, that early conditions of infants are maintained well enough that these genetic combinations are never forced to appear in their full negative display.  Current scientific research is confirming that this preventive potential DOES exist regarding mental illnesses.  We need to understand what this research is telling us and we need to apply the research findings effectively through the prevention of early maltreatment to infants and young children.

We need to stop condemning the ‘mentally ill’ as if they are substandard, inadequate members of our species.  We need to realize that within their genetic combinations lies links to the greatest giftedness of our species.  If anything, we need to humbly acknowledge the fact that when early abuse and trauma triggers the full spectrum of the opposite end of our giftedness to appear, we are to a large extent responsible as a culture for their suffering.

Certainly there are instances when the genetic combinations of ‘mental illness’ will manifest no matter how well or how adequately these people were cared for from conception.  But research is also demonstrating that a recognizably large percentage related to the appearance of ‘mental illness’ is directly connected to some form of malevolent conditions as they existed in an infant’s early environment, particularly related to early caregiver attachment disorders.

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I understand that only particularly interested readers will spend the time thinking about this topic that following the links below will require.  I know that I am only at the beginning of following the information through myself.  I find it fascinating that we are, as sophisticated users of technology, simply continuing  a process that takes place from the time of our birth when we use information available on the internet to increase our knowledge about this (or any) subject just as we used the information in the brains of our caregivers to form our own brains.

Infants share cognition with their mothers and earliest caregivers as their brains develop.  We are in a very similar way sharing cognition with all the others who have placed their own thoughts and information on the web for us to access.  Through this process of shared cognition we grow our brains today related to any subject we choose to research and to learn about.

Understanding how the risk factors for ‘mental illness’ are directly connected to the greatest gifts of our species will require that we all pursue new directions in our thinking to understand the implications of this information.  By doing so we will discover that the supposed curses related to mental illness and the blessings of our gifts are simply on the two ends of the same reproductive fitness indicator spectrum.

The gifts of our species are expensive and we retain them by paying the cost.  Just because some people are able to enjoy the benefits and others must suffer the cost does not mean that all of us are not equally responsible for trying to lessen the impact related to risk.

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This has been a difficult post for me to attempt to write because I perceive that I come from a family whose lineage has repeatedly included ‘mental illness’.  Because of this fact there has existed a continued pattern of neglect and maltreatment that continues to influence how our family’s at risk genes are expressing themselves.  It becomes hard for me not to wonder if some families are thus having to pay the price for the ‘goods’ that other humans get to enjoy, while the rest of us end up not able to experience the benefits equally because of our suffering.  Writing this post feels like staring down the throat of the beast.

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Why do male peacocks create their brilliant tail displays when they are not connected to mating success which is instead related to their vocalizations?

SEE on peacocks:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peafowl#Plumage

Note the following:

“The plumage of the peacock, and the peahen’s preference for its exorbitance, is a classical example of sexual selection and especially the handicap principle. However, in recent years scientific research has shown that the size and brilliance of a male’s plumage does not meaningfully correlate with his mating success nor his health, and that instead the key factor for attracting females is the vocalizations made prior to mating.”

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Our concern in today’s post about the appearance of mental illness gene combinations within our species relates to sexual selection and handicap principle.

From handicap principle.:

“The central idea is that sexually selected traits function like conspicuous consumption, signalling the ability to afford to squander a resource simply by squandering it. Receivers know that the signal indicates quality because inferior quality signallers cannot afford to produce such wastefully extravagant signals.”

From the section on sexual selection:

see also for an example of the fascinating connection between ‘intelligence’ in humans and our reproductive fitness indicators —

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection#In_humans

“Some hypotheses about the evolution of the human brain argue that it is a sexually selected trait, as it would not confer enough fitness in itself relative to its high maintenance costs (a quarter to a fifth of the energy and oxygen consumed by a human). [9] Related to this is vocabulary, where humans, on average, know far more words than are necessary for communication. Miller (2000) has proposed that this apparent redundancy is due to individuals using vocabulary to demonstrate their intelligence, and consequently their “fitness”, to potential mates. This has been tested experimentally and it appears that males do make greater use of lower frequency (more unusual) words when in a romantic mindset compared to a non-romantic mindset, meaning that vocabulary is likely to be used as a sexual display (Rosenberg & Tunney, 2008).”

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection#History_and_application_of_the_theory

“The theory of sexual selection was first proposed by Charles Darwin in his book The Origin of Species, though it was primarily devoted to natural selection. A later work, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex dealt with the subject of sexual selection exhaustively, in part because Darwin felt that natural selection alone was unable to account for certain types of apparently non-competitive adaptations, such as the tail of a male peacock.”

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Now if we shift over and look for the direct connection between the cost of peacocks’ feathers and the cost of our most extravagant human gifts, we find a direct connection to the existence of mental illness in our species.

See for example

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia#Genetic

“There is little doubt about the existence of a fecundity deficit in schizophrenia. Affected individuals have fewer children than the population as a whole. This reduction is of the order of 70% in males and 30% in females. The central genetic paradox of schizophrenia is why if the disease is associated with a biological disadvantage is this variation not selected out? To balance such a significant disadvantage, a substantial and universal advantage must be exist. Insofar, all theories of a putative advantage were disproved or remain unsubstantiated.”

The references noted for this quote are:

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Now, to consider a link between reproductive fitness indicators within our species and the continued appearance of autism:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/m775188523140523/

The abstract of this article,

Autism as the Low-Fitness Extreme of a Parentally Selected Fitness Indicator

“Abstract  Siblings compete for parental care and feeding, while parents must allocate scarce resources to those offspring most likely to survive and reproduce. This could cause offspring to evolve traits that advertise health, and thereby attract parental resources. For example, experimental evidence suggests that bright orange filaments covering the heads of North American coot chicks may have evolved for this fitness-advertising purpose. Could any human mental disorders be the equivalent of dull filaments in coot chicks—low-fitness extremes of mental abilities that evolved as fitness indicators? One possibility is autism. Suppose that the ability of very young children to charm their parents evolved as a parentally selected fitness indicator. Young children would vary greatly in their ability to charm parents, that variation would correlate with underlying fitness, and autism could be the low-fitness extreme of this variation. This view explains many seemingly disparate facts about autism and leads to some surprising and testable predictions.”

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LINKS TO NEW PAGES ADDED ON ATTACHMENT, PTSD AND EMOTIONS

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I will be writing another post for today, but for those readers who might find this information useful, the following pages were added this morning:

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under the category of Emotion, in pages on the ANXIETY SPECTRUM

**ARTICLE: Predictors of PTSD

**ARTICLE: Meta-Analysis of PTSD Risk Factors

** Notes on Research About PTSD Core Symptoms

**BIOMARKERS FOR PTSD

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On the brain development of emotional regulation:

**Dr. Allan Schore on Emotional Regulation – Notes

**Schore on Emotion: Orbitofrontal Notes

** Schore – Notes on Developmental Emotional Dysregulation

**Notes on Schore – Development of Attachment

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On disorganized-disoriented attachment:

DISSOCIATION AND DISORGANIZED ATTACHMENT – from Liotti

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On origins of Borderline Personality Disorder:

**Notes on Origin of BPD from Bateman and Fonagy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+FROM FAILED TO FANTASTIC FAMILIES – JUDGMENT WON’T GET US THERE!

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Welcome to today’s post that describes what I think hampers many well intentioned efforts to help ‘troubled families’ improve their quality of life.

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First let me offer to you a link that provides access to vital and marvelous resources for improving parenting abilities no matter what our childhood backgrounds were like.  Once we know these resources exist, we can begin to find ways to access them within our communities because I realize the videos are expensive.

I can personally recommend the S.T.E.P. program as one that was amazingly helpful to me in raising my children.  This site presents other programs, as well, including several designed for parents of infants and very young children.

I believe that everyone can benefit from learning more about becoming a better parent.  I also believe that as a society we could improve our entire overall quality of life as a culture by making this kind of information easily accessible to everyone — even before they become parents.

Take a look at this site, The Center for the Improvement of Child Caring.  I believe you will be happy that you did!

http://www.ciccparenting.org/catalogitem.asp?ci=39&cid=&c=3

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Now for the rest of the story:

Information is a resource.  Having access to resources and being able to use them makes people healthier and happier, and increases their well-being in the world.

Resources exist both inside and outside of our individual bodies.  What happens to us from birth determines what resources are available to us within our own brains, and these brain resources determine how we interact with all other available resources surrounding us for the rest of our lives.

As today’s researchers learn more and more about how early infant and child maltreatment and deprivation changes the way the brain develops, they are also learning about how brains develop and operate under the best of conditions.  Each of these different brains (and bodies) end up developing according to the resources available to the very young child at the start of its life.

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We cannot expect that a severely maltreated infant’s brain will develop to be the same as a well treated infant’s brain because they are each being built in differing circumstances and being ‘fed’ different information about the world.  Both types of brains are alike, however, in that they are designed to keep a person alive in the world they live in.

We have to remember that a developing infant and young child brain only knows the information it is receiving as it builds itself and cannot anticipate a future that is different from its early one.  Of course these adaptations occur in interaction between the environment and the particular genetic potential an infant has within itself.

Yet there is no doubt that early severe abuse and maltreatment will cause any developing brain to adjust itself to a malevolent world if it is forced to, no matter what.  Nobody would be immune to this adaptive process because it is the only way severe challenges to an infant can be survived.  True recognition of this fact humbles us.  Once we have this level of humility we can begin to truly help others to live a better life without heaping shame on them in the process.

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The image comes into my mind of a bulldozer and a space shuttle.  We could imagine that any given infant has the potential from birth to develop (a brain suited) for the future tasks of either one depending upon the information it receives from its early environment.   This information about the conditions of the future,  directly communicated to it by the conditions of its early caregiving environment, determines the infant and young child’s final outcome.

Let’s say that harsh, toxic and traumatic environments create in the young one the need to become a bulldozer in order to deal with these malevolent deprivations.  At the same time we could say that a benevolent environment of safety, security and plenty allows an infant to prepare itself for a better future and in the end it can become a space shuttle.  In both cases mobility would be possible.  In both cases the job of remaining alive would have been accomplished.

Yet from this simple image we can tell that beyond the basic similarities between these two, there are vast differences that resulted as consequences of the information about the possibilities of the future that either ‘type’ of infant received and adapted to.  In both cases the infants made the best use of information and resources possible.  Yet what happens to an infant that was forced through early malevolent conditions to become a bulldozer when it graduates out of childhood into a world built for and by those who had enough resources in their benevolent early environments to become space shuttles?

We are left with a serious, yet I believe unrecognized gap here between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’.

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I mention this now as I introduce some information about improving parenting skills because I believe many attempts to improve the quality of parenting are being made by people who are like our imaginary space shuttles as they try to ‘help’ people who are like our imaginary bulldozers.  Too often well intentioned efforts of the ‘haves’ to ‘help’ the ‘have nots’ become ‘better’ fail because the fundamental differences between these two groups are not currently being recognized or acknowledged.

These differences come from the fact that a brain built in a safe and secure early attachment environment is not the same kind of brain that is built in an unsafe and insecure early attachment environment.  These two kinds of brains operate in the adult (and childhood) world differently.  They process information differently and they respond differently.

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For those readers who might be wondering how to tell which kind of brain they developed and which kind of future their brains were preparing them to live in, I will use one word that, to me, becomes the pivot point (imagine the old fashioned playground teeter tooter here).  Movement toward the benevolent end or movement toward the malevolent end can be determined from this pivot point.  That one word is TERROR.  To the degree that any infant or developing young child experiences terror — a repeated state of complete lack of safety and security — will its brain develop differently from a child’s brain who does not have to experience this state.

From that pivot point, moving toward one end or the other, changes will occur in the individual that is being prepared for a future world that corresponds to similar hostile, dangerous, threatening, traumatic and toxic conditions.  Once we realize that these changes are fundamental we can begin to find ways to talk between worlds.  In order for this communication to be meaningful the basic facts underlying the differences between the ‘secures’ and the ‘insecures’ have to be recognized, described, understood, respected and honored.

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What possible scenarios can I imagine about what kinds of possibly effective interventions that could have happened to protect me from my mother’s abuse of me?  This field of imagination is wide open to me because it NEVER happened.  When considering intervention in relationship to my own experience, I think about when I was in eighth grade and had to wear one of those very short, one piece blue gym suits, and had to take group showers every day after class.  I remember backing myself into the shower corner, always facing away from the wall feeling so ashamed, humiliated and embarrassed because the entire back of my body from the base of my skull to my heels, including my arms, was covered in every imaginable color of bruises — black, blue, purple, green, yellow.

I realize how silly that was on one level because certainly those bruises would have been visible simply as I wore that stupid suit throughout the entire class period.  Yet it was standing naked and visible in the showers themselves that made me feel this humiliation.  Yet nobody — EVER — paid any attention.  Not one single time did someone ask me, either classmate or teacher, how I had gotten even one of those bruises.  They were visible, ugly, horrible, and obvious indicators of the fact that someone was hurting me terribly.  I suspect it was because my mother’s abuse of me had started from my first breath it never entered my thoughts that I could tell anyone or ever expect anyone to either care or to help me.

While we live in a world today that is legally mandated to report physical signs of abuse, those signs are merely the tip of the iceberg.  Those of you who know the reality of all the different levels and kinds of abuse, neglect and maltreatment that children can be exposed to know what I am talking about.

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We are still, today, left with the proverbial vicious cycle with continued questions about how we recognize extreme traumatic stress going on in families, how to intervene, and how to improve conditions on all levels for everyone being affected.  Yet what I can now say is that even if someone had intervened because of my eighth grade bruises, they would still have missed the most important damage of all — the changes that my brain had already made that allowed me to survive in a malevolent world even before I was two years old.

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What I am going to say next is not meant to offend anyone.  I say it because I care that all efforts being made to Stop the Storm of unresolved traumas be as effective as they possibly can be.  I offer my own ‘expert’ opinion based on conclusions I have made as a survivor of terrible infant and child abuse myself.  I believe a dangerous weapon is often being unconsciously wielded against the very people the ‘haves’ are trying to ‘help’.

That weapon is any degree of an attitude of self righteous superiority and judgment of or against those who were forced through their very early malevolent experiences to become bulldozers rather than space shuttles.  Because those of us who formed a body and brain in a worst-case world had to build defense into ourselves from our earliest beginnings, we have an uncanny ability to recognize and to respond defensively against ANY PERCEIVED FORM OF ATTACK.

We detect challenges to the integrity of our being and respond at the speed of light.  I don’t mean this metaphorically.  The electrical impulses that govern communication within and between the cells of our body and brain move that fast.  Once a challenge or a threat is detected, we will protect ourselves at all costs.  We do this unconsciously because our bodies learned from the time of our beginnings that consciousness is far too slow to keep us alive.

And we certainly include an ability to detect anyone’s negative judgment of us as being a threat because we were built that way.  When we consider the fact that information transmitted brain to brain through facial expressions ALONE moves at the speed of a signal every 1/200th of a second, we can begin to understand that people who are assessing and judging us from any position of supposed self righteous superiority may not even realize that they are doing it.

That does not, to me, make their even unconscious transmission of judgment toward us in any way acceptable.  It therefore becomes the job of anyone who thinks they sincerely care about the ‘have nots’ and wish to ‘help’ them to become completely aware and conscious of their own biases and resulting judgments — both of perpetrators and of victims — because nearly 100% of perpetrators were victimized themselves.

This also means that those of us who are survivors of traumatic childhoods need to look within ourselves and detect how we have ‘bought’ or ‘eaten’ the judgments that others may have passed down to us — both in our childhood and our adulthood.  We cannot afford to ignore these seeds of doubt because they directly attach themselves anywhere inside of us where the potential for shame exists.

Because our physiological ability to feel shame originates in our body by the time we are one year old, it is guaranteed that anything that has been passed to us by others and has triggered our shame contributes to its further ‘growth and development’.  Shame usually operates far below our level of conscious awareness.   It is an automatic response that occurs within our nervous system (including our brain) and body.

I understand that humans physically develop the ability to experience shame as our bodies develop from conception.  It is not until we are a year old that our bodies have grown enough for this reaction to occur.  But once we have passed that developmental stage, all of our social attachment interactions are processed through this filter.  It is not helpful for well meaning ‘educators’ to be handing out shame along with whatever new information they are trying to transmit to those that ‘need’ it.

“A spoonful of poison does not make the medicine go down.”  Self righteous judgment based on an attitude of superiority causes an unconscious shame defense reaction within the recipient that distorts all the information that might be offered to a threatened individual at the same time.

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Because of the traumatic experiences that formed my brain, I have an almost excruciatingly sensitive ‘input detection system’ that is geared to exquisitely detect danger and threat surrounding me at all times.  I have built a corresponding protection and defense system within me.  Because I am a member of a social species, any input that I process related to social interactions has to be processed by my ‘shame detection system’.

I now understand that most of my aversion to any supposedly ‘helpful self help’ book I’ve ever read stems from the fact that my advanced ability to detect unbelievably delicate attacks on my level of shame senses judgment in these writings.  I can and do read volumes of information ‘between the lines’.  I have always known on some level that I have to translate and interpret information contained in these books because I have never found a single one of them that addresses the fundamental fact that I have a very different brain and body as a result of the abuse I experienced from birth.

This process of translation and interpretation is exhausting in itself.   It takes an incredible level of focus and energy to do it.  In addition we are forced at the same time to defend ourselves from the underlying projections of shame that affect us at very deep levels as we read these books.  I suspect that everyone with one of these altered brains experiences the same thing that I do even if they don’t recognize it.  Because those like me are already forced to expend so much more energy just getting along in a world we weren’t prepared for and don’t really understand, many of us just can’t make use of the well intentioned information that these books are meant to provide us with.

This makes all the well intended efforts we apply to ourselves or that others might apply to us to inform, transform, reform, conform us to fit a world we were not built in, by or for in the first place remarkably inefficient and ineffective.  In some cases, such as would have been true for my mother, the hoped for results are impossible to obtain due to the vast distortions that took place in a vastly altered brain — made so because drastic measures had to be taken early in life in order to adjust and adapt to and survive drastic conditions.

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I am not saying that it is a waste of time to try to provide information that helps those that could use it to live better lives.  What I am saying is that we often do not consider the full context of the problems themselves and are thus hindering our efforts to address them.  What do we really know about the full context of all the things we are trying to prevent, either?  I don’t care if we look at preventing or addressing child abuse, domestic abuse, war, poverty, crime, sexual predation, ignorance or terrorism.  Humans are contextual beings.  We develop in context.  We live in context.  Everything we do and everything done to us happens in a context.

The contexts that cause some to mature into the equivalent of bulldozers or into space shuttles were very different in the first place.  If we refuse to realize the ramifications of these differences and continue to unconsciously judge people for having them, we might as well be taking our hardest efforts to make the world a better place and throw them like tiny pieces of confetti into a strong wind.

If we continue to self righteously judge one another from our supposed positions of superiority we will continue to offend others in the depths of their being, and they will continue to defend themselves against us.  Not helpful.  They will not be able to hear or apply a single useful thing we are telling them.  Is changing this pattern of judgment between all of us truly what loving ourselves and one another — no matter what — is all about?

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Thank you for reading this long post.  Your comments are welcome and appreciated.

POWER OF PLAY AND THE MEMORIES OF PLAY

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

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

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

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

http://nancycarlsson-paige.org/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+For everything there is a time and a season….

alchemynow4 Comments

I do not want to do this writing.  It makes me scared, ‘crazy’ and miserable.  When I walked away from my computer, writing and research mid December 2008, just when I discovered what I was looking for with ‘substance p’ as it connects emotional and physical pain in the body and the brain, I never went back until the first week of April when my sister, C. called me about starting a blog.

During the time I wasn’t writing I was living in a ‘bubble’ I had created that let me feel like I could begin to float on up and away from being so sad all the time.  The sadness was still there, but I could sometimes look at it from a distance.

Now that I am writing again I can’t find that bubble, I can’t return to that ‘better’ place.  Now I feel like I’m being crushed by a falling mountain, or falling myself into darkness that has no end.  I am again surrounded by a sense of forboding and live daily without a sense of well being or hope.

But now that I’m ‘back here’ I don’t know how to escape again.  My mind does not allow me easy transition between any kind of ‘states’ of mind or of emotions.  I cannot find a middle ground that allows me to write while I’m separated from what I write about, nor can I leave the writing for brief periods of time and separate myself from the reality of who I am based on what I’ve gone through.

I feel caught in the storm.  I feel like I am spiraling downward, not upward.My only hope in writing at all has always been that I might write something that will help someone else understand who they are better in the light of anything new I might be able to offer about what happened to me.  Yet I have no way of even knowing if that’s possible, let alone know if it’s happening.

The only place I can find for self soothing is to disconnect myself from the writing and leave it alone, hoping I can find a way to make a different bubble.  Yet if my greater purpose is to make something useful and beautiful somehow from my life’s experiences, I have to remain at my task.

+FINDING THE CRACK IN MY BORDERLINE MOTHER’S REALITY

alchemynow3 Comments

At 5:35 pm on Good Friday, March 27, 1964 I was 12 years old and not yet a woman.

Then the great Alaskan earthquake happened on this day at 5:36 pm — the second strongest earthquake on record anywhere on our planet.

http://images.google.com/images?q=1964+alaska+earthquake&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3RNFA_enUS270US307&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=Eyz-SfPnA5ectAOtoaDWAQ&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&resnum=4&ct=title

http://wcatwc.arh.noaa.gov/64quake.htm

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I could tell you my personal story of the earthquake that day when my menarche happened, but all I want to mention now is that by the end of that three minutes of terrible shaking, I was a woman.

What matters most to me right now is that because of the earthquake, because of my mother’s writing about her personal experience during it, because those pieces of paper she wrote her story on survived for over 40 years and then found their way into my hands after her death in 2002, I now have proof of a critical point regarding Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) — most importantly of my mother’s version of this mental adaptation to early traumas and my assessment of her condition.

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I believe that an abusive borderline parent will do everything in their power to keep the ‘outside world’ from seeing or being able to detect both their broken mental condition and the abuse that is a result of it.  This is what makes BPD parents so extremely dangerous to their offspring.  Nobody outside of the family is likely to EVER suspect the existence of either the mental illness or the abuse.  (Knowing the signs to look for in order to notice in the first place and then to be able to see through the crack in the reality of BPDs will be covered in future posts).

I am not saying that my mother’s mental illness or her abuse of me was invisible to the outside.  I am saying that a combination of the fact that nobody cared with the fact that these same people did not know what they were seeing even if they were looking, resulted in a complete absence of intervention for the entire 18 years of my childhood I spent being severely abused by my mother.

It is likely that my father also succumbed to these same factors, although the additional fact of him being my father SHOULD have allowed him the ability to intervene on my behalf in some way.  This is a good part of why I am pursuing my writing based on my personal experience.  I believe that personality disorders are so pervasive, consistent and insidious that until our present ‘enlightened era’ it has been nearly impossible for those who are on the inside to recognize what is going on, either.

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This is why what I found in my mother’s writings about her earthquake experience is so empowering to me because it confirmed what I intuitively know about her condition and affirmed my assessment on many levels both of the cause of BPD and of the consequences of involvement on any level with a person — especially a mother — who has it.

You can read her story as she wrote it at My Mother’s Alaskan Earthquake Journal Entry.

In the months just prior to receiving my cancer diagnosis I was hard at work sorting and copying into my computer all my mother’s letters, notes and journal entries concerning her homesteading experiences.  I will post what I have completed for you to reference, but there remains hundreds of disorganized pages and letters that still need to be included to make the entries complete.

These papers my mother wrote traveled thousands of miles, some of them being stored for up to 30 years in her various storage lockers she kept, and finally found their way to me nearly 50 years after she wrote them.  It was in this collection of her papers that I found the stories that she wrote the winter of her 11th birthday.  (SEE also:   My Mother’s Childhood Stories)

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All the time I was transcribing her writings I was searching for a clue that would show me the truth in her writings that would confirm what I know in my own heart about my mother’s mental illness.  Because my mother’s stated intention in writing any of these letters and journals was to eventually write what she referred to as her “Alaskan book,” they were written from the public side of the border wall that allowed her to write under the ‘spell’ of that BPD persona.  Because this borderline split between public and private is so fundamentally and profoundly crafted into the altered brain of a borderline it is usually impossible to detect it through their own description of their version of reality.

That is why what I found in her earthquake writing created in me a state of elation!  I FOUND it!!  I found the hole in her border wall, the crack in her reality.  I found the chink in the armor that she had developed as her brain grew in childhood to protect herself from unbearable pain.  I found the equivalent of my own Silver Chalice.  If I never read another word she wrote I have still successfully completed my mission and my quest.

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I need to take a related diversion, or detour at this moment to make a connection that I believe is vitally crucial to putting severely abusive mothers’ behavior in the social context of the human mythological imagination.

I encountered this ‘myth’ several years ago at the start of my research, Euripides’ Medea, and would like you to find a way to read it if you can.  It is contained in this book

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1417908971

though I read it in an earlier printing of this one

http://www.amazon.com/Greek-Drama-Bantam-Classics-Moses/dp/0553212214/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1241397818&sr=1-1

Refer to this for historical context surrounding the Trojan War and Jason and Medea:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medea

Euripides’ famous retelling of this part of Greek myth in his play about Medea was first performed in 431 B.C., hence this story is a retelling of mythology that is older than 2500 years.  My point is that I believe this story is about a particular form of madness and can be seen as very closely related to aspects of what we now know of as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).  For whatever reasons the authors of the myth ascribe to her, in the end Medea murders her own children.

Had my mother been able to escape any consequence for her actions, I know she would have murdered me. In fact, this is a point of argument that I hold with the experts’ version of what dissociation is and what it does.  I DID NOT dissociate during my mother’s beatings of me.  I felt every single one of them because I had to remain absolutely aware and present during all of them as soon as I was old enough to control my body.  Her rage usually and quickly escalated to the point that she lost control of herself while she was beating me — in rhythm to her recitation of the litany she had created for me — SEE:  Litany from Start to Finish — to avoid the most dangerous falls her beatings caused me or I would have been killed — if possible, killed many times over.

It is evident in Euripides’ play that all the public present knew of Medea’s intent to kill her children because she stated it publicly and yet nobody intervened — not even when they heard the children screaming as she hacked them to death in their home with a massive knife.  Yet while many consider that this play refers to abandonment, one of the key symptoms of BPD, it is the ‘lower layer’ related to a mother’s ‘passion’ to kill her child or children that most fascinates me personally.

Because I understand that extreme childhood trauma can cause an evolutionarily altered brain to form, and because I believe that BPD appears as one of the manifestations possible from these changed brains, I also believe that it is the very, very ancient genetic information about surviving in the worst of all possible worlds that triggers this mother-passion to harm her offspring.  It is no different an instinctual reaction as one pursued by animals when they kill offspring, abandon entire litters, or choose the most ‘fit’ of the offspring to save while abandoning the others.

This is, I believe, the human basis of the killing Medea did of her children and the attempted killing my mother did to me.

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Now back to the earthquake writings:  My proof is contained therein.  If you read her writings at My Mother’s Alaskan Earthquake Journal Entry you will find in her story the following — (Words written in the brackets are mine as is the type bolding.  Eklunds were neighboring homesteaders on the valley floor whose house my sisters, younger brother and I had been staying at while my parents were in Anchorage during the earthquake):

“Finally Eklund’s house was in sight – from outward appearances all seemed fine.  She came running out as we approached.  I could see our children were fine.  I was so thankful!  I hugged and killed [meant kissed no doubt but she wrote killed], each child in turn.  We were all together again.  I can’t emphasize strongly enough – that this was all that was important.  We could always start over again – even though for us, who like so many Alaskans have struggled so long and hard for everything and still have so far to go.  We could and would, if necessary, do it again.  I’m sure there was absolutely no questioning our minds to that.”

BINGO!

Even if we call this a ” Freudian slip, or parapraxis,  an error in speech, memory, or physical action that is believed to be caused by the unconscious mind,” the unmistakable evidence is here in her writings that what I suspect of her mental reality was real.

When I am ready to dig through boxes again, and ready to set up my scanner and do this, I will scan in the actual words as she wrote them with her own hand.  I transcribed them into my computer exactly.  There is no way, once a person sees her writing, that the two middle letters in ‘killed’ could possibly be construed as being the two middle letters in ‘kissed’.

Finding this hole through which I could see her reality may well be the only tangible vindication I can ever discover that proves my mother was who she did not say she was, particularly as she terrorized me from the moment of my birth as a result of her psychosis.

The only other related confirmations that I have found in her writings appears in the last of her childhood stories (mentioned above) and in her writing of the dream about the dark rainbow and the storm which can be seen at

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/about-stop-the-stor/

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Drawing the line between the real world and the reality of the world of a borderline becomes nearly impossible particularly for those of us who were abused by one from birth.   Not only the trauma is built into the body-brain, but as a result, the version of the borderline mother’s reality is built into the survivor, as well.  I know my mother’s is built into me.

These three ‘holes’ that appear in my mother’s writings are thus critically important for me to both possess and to consider as I attempt to face the reality of what happened to me on all the levels that my mother damaged me.  I’m not sure that anybody who was not severely abused by a borderline parent can even begin to imagine how important these tangible expressions that illustrate clearly the break in the nearly perfect facade a borderline shows to the public world is — or imagine the terrible confusion such a parent creates in the minds of those she abuses.

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My mother never knew that she meant to write that word KILL, yet there it was where I was able to find it.  What a gift this discovery is to me, and perhaps to someone else who reads this post.  That word is a direct connection to the ancient genetic potential for survival in a traumatic world that mothers who have been abused themselves CAN form even in this very real current day world.  Because the evolutionary throw-back potential can exist in a brain that was traumatized during its development, it is folly for us to remain puzzled on any level when we hear of a mother abusing her children, not even her infants.

We can no longer afford to be puzzled when mothers actually kill their offspring, either.  All the evidence that trauma can turn a mother into a killer is in the 2500 year old play about Medea which I am sure only reflects a reality that has been with our species from the time of our beginnings.  It was present in my mother’s writings and in her abuse of me.

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I also want to note here that the infliction of self harm and self injury that is common to borderlines did not have to be a part of my mother’s spectrum of behaviors because she made no distinction between herself and me.  I was a projection of all that she had been taught to abhor within herself.  I was thus an externalized aspect of her mind — a mind that was, in effect, turned inside out because the burden of containing her own reality within herself was potentially too much to bear.  She could then heap all kinds of punishments and injuries on me and did not have to self-harm her own body.

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As always, thank you for reading — Your comments are welcome and appreciated.  Linda