The most important work we can do, individually and globally, is the healing and prevention of traumas so that we don't pass them down to future generations. This blog is a working tool to contribute to this good work.
My company-related thoughts concerning my experiences of this past week have come to include what I am trying to learn and understand about the interplay between our human attachment and our caregiving systems. It is most common for those of us who are survivors of severe infant-child abuse to have a body-brain that was changed in its physiological development in such a way that our stress-distress (insecure attachment) system works differently from ‘normal’.
Our ‘warning’ system shows its nearly continual activation through our patterns of attachment to self, others and to our world around us as it manifests in our insecure attachment patterns that are very difficult to ‘turn off’. This means that when we ‘caregive’ we are accomplishing this feat in different ways from ‘normal’. A body-brain built in a safe and secure earliest attachment-relationship environment will activate when ACTUAL threat exists in the environment. At other times it will turn itself off and caregiving smoothly happens within these times.
These two systems — our attachment system and our caregiving system — are not ordinarily designed to operate at the same time. Once our attachment needs are met the system turns off (and body-felt anxiety all but disappears). I believe many people, especially parents, can react appropriately in caregiving their offspring because they can accomplish BOTH system activations at the same time. Experts refer to Earned Secure attachment when this happens. Based on my own experience I call this Borrowed Secure attachment.
When it comes to adult-to-adult interactions it can be harder to gain clarity about how these two systems are operating within relationships. Needing ‘more than normal’ is an understandable and very normal consequence stemming from abuse, trauma, neglect and maltreatment of infants and children. Gaining clarity about WHAT we need, WHEN we need, HOW we need, and WHO we feel we need what from are part of our never-ending healing process.
Give and receive is what our rupture-repair patterns are about. I am very clear about how these patterns work when I am in interaction with children, but am having to learn as much as I can about adult interactions that seem foggy to me in these areas. In the meantime as I continue to learn, I try to achieve a gentle forgiving stance that is most clearly connected to this thought as I struggle in adult relationships: “Linda, this isn’t the end of the world!”
From the time I was born everything in my universe felt like ‘the end of the world’ or ‘the world is ending NOW (or very soon)’. Just taking a breath, backing up from the specific details of a troublesome experience and giving myself time to process accomplishes a lot for me! The experience of the passage of TIME itself becomes altered in the midst of trauma. I try today to literally manage time so that it slows down. In that slowing down I can allow more and more information into the picture that can help me gain a better, clearer perspective about what matters most — and what doesn’t.
Maybe if I can go down another level I can make some movement off of the dead-center feelings I described earlier. How do I REALLY feel right now? I feel great grief and sadness. I feel lost, alone and hopeless. Everything that happened last week seems like it happened at a great distance away from both me — and from reality. I can no longer well-tolerate a world in which people do not offer their FEELINGS and emotions within the context of relating and in relationships. THOSE kinds of human interactions feel dead to me.
I in part have to ‘blame’ the culture in which we all reside, the one that decided hundreds of years ago that feelings don’t matter, no does the body in which the feelings reside. We live in a culture that tells us that FEELINGS themselves are not real! That they don’t ‘have matter’. That they ‘don’t count’. Our culture-society seems determined to find all sorts of ways to erase feelings – bad plan in my thinking!
Feelings DO matter! And I believe that’s the way humans are best designed – to be fully informed on all levels from the feelings we experience in our body as they are translated into verbal meaning through our brain-mind. Without acknowledgment of feelings the most important information we have about our self in the world is left out and this most important information is then missing in our relationships.
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I am working today to pull my own self back into my own body. It does me no good to ‘reach out’ to others in the way I am most prone to do — reaching outside of myself in my attempts to understand other people who are not clear to me. This lack of clarity happens because I never built emotional information processing into my body-brain ‘correctly’ in the first place. And because I do not truly understand LANGUAGE between humans.
Maybe last week was like ‘beating my head against the wall’. Whatever that wall is, I am not the only one that put it there. If other people choose to let their walls exist — and wall of their emotions — I want to learn to be perfectly OK MYSELF when they do that! Yes, I end up feeling like I am losing relationships when I can’t detect that feeling-felt feeling within myself AND when I can’t detect that others are feeling it. The lost-lonely-sad feelings I then feel are MINE and have nothing to do with ‘them’.
These people who came here live a long way away and will not be back for a long time, at best. I suppose if we were in proximity of one another more often perhaps I would understand these patterns more easily. Or not!
What matters to me is that I don’t like feeling unbalanced and so lost like I do today. I can’t find my own firm footing. Understanding them is not the point right now. Understanding myself better is.
My next realization following my writing of my previous post (+INFANT ABUSE AND NEGLECT: THE PERVASIVE IMPACT OF ‘WHAT IS MISSING’) has to do with a major set of manifestations of the physiological reality I live with in my body. Related to ‘dissociation’ is the frequent (and to me common) related experiences of feeling ‘depersonalized’ and ‘dereal (derealization)’.
I am suffering today from strong senses related to both of these states. Nothing from this past week feels ‘real’ to me, and I feel the ‘depersonalization’ related to my own self AND to the other people I just spent the past week with. This seems like a pervasive sense that I am not ‘real’, that my experiences of the past week were not (are not) ‘real’, and that the people were not ‘real’, either. I HATE this feeling!
My ‘realization’ is that perhaps I just clearly learned that when I have this sense in part it is an exactly very real (true) reaction to having spent time with people who are perhaps not ‘real’ to their own self or to others, either! If, as I strongly suspect many, many people suffer from degrees of the same emotional-social early right brain formation attachment-related difficulties that I do, it would make sense then that I can learn to understand that it is often very true that these senses of depersonalization and derealization exist OUTSIDE of myself within other people and thus my own sense of what is real and of who/what a person actually is can often be impacted by this fact.
If a human being’s true state is meant to be one of healthy well-being, and if degrees of early abuse, trauma and deprivation diminish this true state, then those of us who are extremely sensitive beings WILL NOTICE when another person has ALSO been trauma-changed during their earliest developmental stages.
Can I now begin to pay closer attention to how I feel when the depersonalization-derealization senses ‘come over’ me? Can I begin to separate (as per become more clear about ‘boundaries’) about where these senses are actually originating when I experience them? Is there anything I can do for myself that will help me keep ‘their stuff’ from affecting how I feel?
Is there a great risk that survivors of harmful early developmental trauma naturally respond to one another within these ‘dereal’ and ‘depersonalized’ places because they happened to be our first and therefore primary and ‘natural’ states (built into our body-brain)?
How much of the smothered feeling I feel today of being overwhelmed by ‘derealization’ and ‘depersonalization’ actually — and very really — existed within the patterns present in the OTHER people I just spent my week with?
How exactly DOES it feel to me as a ‘dissociational’ person when I am around and interacting with other people who are this same way — and don’t even have a clue about their condition? Well, if there was ever a day for me to work on my clarity about this topic, today certainly is a prime one!
I can’t say I want to write this post. I HAVE to write this post, because I don’t believe there is anyone — not ANYONE — who will truly understand what I have to say except for infant abuse survivors. Even if we don’t know that we know what I am going to say here, we DO KNOW it because we live with this condition all of our lives because it was built into our body-brain from the time we were born (or even before that time depending on our pre-birth experiences).
It won’t be until we realize consciously as survivors that we have this ‘condition’ that we will be able to talk about it. Conscious realization might not so much change HOW this condition operates so much as it might change how we feel about ourselves and other people.
A week of out-of-town guests (family) has concluded. I am left feeling confused and bogged down by (almost) unnameable feelings from this past week’s experiences of being around people I love and who love me. But at the same time I am working to gain some clarity about all of this I realize that I have nobody to verbalize my process or insights with. While our nation is itself increasingly suffering from this unnameable and invisible malady to one degree or another, it is those of us who suffered from the most trauma, neglect, abuse and maltreatment from birth (and/or before birth) who — I believe — have the truest capacity to recognize this first (other than developmental neuroscientists who very well know what this condition is and where it comes from — though I don’t believe they know PERSONALLY what it FEELS like as we infant survivors do).
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How can we talk about a condition that seems to be so unnameable and so invisible? Where are the words we can use to talk about something that is becoming dangerously prevalent in our culture in the degrees of damage it creates within people — and within all of our relationships to self, others and the world around us?
My first comment would be that I can’t say (or feel as if I KNOW) the true reality of any single human transaction that just happened during this past week. Next, I would say that I am a survivor of such severe infant abuse (followed by the next 18 years of abuse) that I am far, far, far over on the ‘this sure happened to me’ continuum. So although it is therefore easier (and even possible) that I would be the one to identify that whatever it was that happened this past week, it was the HOW of HOW it all happened that most disturbed me.
Don’t get me wrong. There were no fights, no cross words between any of us. All that happened remained in the realm of the ‘silent and unspeakable’.
When experts talk about less-than-optimal infant-caregiver attachment interactions in disturbed early relationships they speak – yes – of resulting insecure attachment disorders. They are ALSO saying at the same time that ’empathy disorders’ directly connect to the same painful, neglectful, frightening, inadequate and non-loving interactions.
As I look around at our nation and consider that our cultural and societal platforms of safety and security that are needed to provide support on all levels to young infant-children and their parents, I recognize that degrees of these ‘insecure attachment disorders’ and their related-connected empathy disorders are GOING to be the lifelong ‘condition’ of most little ones that are suffering today.
While it might take obvious and direct abuse to create such a trauma-changed body-brain in survivors of the worst of infant maltreatment, there is no possible way that little ones who experience deprivation even unintentionally committed against them can escape having some form of insecure attachment-empathy disorder created in their developing body-brain.
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We will recognize these patterns as confusing interactions between others (and within our self) as they contain emotional messages that are communicated within social exchanges. We are members of a social species, and all the ‘wiring’ we receive during ESPECIALLY our first year of life establishes the physiological capacities we will use the rest of our life to relate as social-species members.
I just went through a week where most interactions I experienced fell squarely into the GUESSWORK category. When the emotional-social circuits in a little one’s body-brain form under duress, patterns of communication and interaction simply WILL NOT work RIGHT (optimal-health). Emotions existed on all levels this past week and NONE of them were directly expressed — or even recognized — for the entire week.
I will never claim that I have the ability — or ever will in this lifetime have the ability — to be able to clarify or make clear any aspect of human exchange that the OTHER person can’t do the same for within their own self. When OTHER people have suffered in their earliest developmental stages enough trauma that their own body-brain wasn’t built to process emotional-social information ‘correctly’ (optimal health) — I am LOST LOST LOST!
I can ONLY function smoothly (safely and securely) when I am around people who had enough safety and security in their earliest attachment relationships that they were able to form a body-brain during the first year of life that processes emotional-social information ‘correctly’. Certainly not one single person connected to my own family of origin received what they needed for this to happen. Even though I was most definitely the ‘chosen one’ to receive the horrors of the direct abuse, all of my siblings were witness and also grew from birth being ‘trained’ by a mad woman who NEVER processed emotional-social information correctly.
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I HATE how I end up feeling — like every single tiny interaction this past week was a ‘misdirect’. I will NEVER truly comprehend or be comfortable with human emotional-social exchanges. I am absolutely dependent upon the ability of the OTHER PERSON to know how all those interactions are SUPPOSED to work. If the other person suffered from some degree of ‘damage’ to their physiological development in their RIGHT emotional-social development I am LOST LOST LOST.
The problem nearly ALWAYS IS that the other person (people) don’t even begin to realize that these trauma-altered patterns are going on. The problems appear invisibly, are unnameable, are left unidentified and unresolved. The ‘ruptures’ in conversations and in the communication of need and intent are left without ‘repair’. The most critically important quality of human interaction that relates to FEELING FELT does not exist, and everything lands in the murky world of ‘what the heck is actually going on here’?
I don’t understand myself how to overcome these difficulties because I was nearly entirely built in a world of trauma and extreme abuse. All I know at this point is that what I just experience this past week was very, very real — and equally invisible. It is NOT, however, completely unnameable to me because I have spent a great deal of time and effort trying to learn about how I was trauma-built in my body-brain.
In addition I can FEEL what just went wrong last week even though I have no clue how I personally could have made anything ‘better’. So this is one of those ‘I am writing a message and stuffing it into a bottle hoping someone will know what I am trying to say’ posts.
We are obviously not living in an infant-child friendly culture, no matter what words we mouth as a nation to the contrary. Problems with empathy and its resulting potential for true compassion and for truly feeling felt and for helping others to feel felt are flying into our nation’s past the same way they flew into my past when I was born. I NEVER was allowed to experience these most precious and vitally important emotional-social patterns of interaction from the time I left my mother’s womb. Those deprivations built themselves into me at the same time they built me during the formation of my emotional-social earliest-forming right brain.
To know that I am not alone in this, and that many, many others experienced ‘degrees of damage’ through the same process (though not so extremely) actually greatly disappoints me! What hope do I have to find large numbers of optimally love-formed, non-early-traumatized people that can help ME understand what it means to be a well-being-human?
I KNOW all this now! I know that anything less than clear, open, loving, appropriate and stable patterns of interaction between a mother (and other earliest caregivers) and an infant ESPECIALLY until age one cannot possibly create those same optimal patterns and their corresponding capacities-abilities within a growing infant’s body-brain.
When these optimal patterns are missing all emotional-social patterns for a lifetime will be reflecting their absence. As a consequence, healthy empathy, quality compassion and complete communication between suffers will be missing. What is left, then, are patterns of missing information, distortion of priorities, incomplete communications (transmissions), misdirected efforts to interact with others, absent critical emotional information, vague recognition of self and others, and some degree of dismal-abysmal relationships that do not (because they most often cannot) include the fullest potential of what human beings can actually accomplish as emotional-social beings.
I have been thinking a lot lately about my so-called (treatment resistant) ‘major depressive disorder’ that I know was directly created because of continual severe abuse and trauma I could not escape from my birth until I left home at 18. Yesterday (as I mentioned) I continued to try to think of one instance during those 18 years when my ‘reward’ (dopamine-related) system was allowed to fully operate within my growing and developing body-brain normally. Didn’t happen.
I have been thinking about addictions and their known connection to a thwarted reward system due to early infant-childhood malevolent treatment. I think about the continual pain I was in for those 18 years. At the same time I have been thinking about NO REWARD experiences = ZIP I also realize that the complete inability to escape the pain combined to create within me physiological patterns of so-called ‘depression’ that nobody is going to help me untangle but myself.
I am recognizing that I MUST discover some things in my current life that feel rewarding to me – no matter how small the activity or goal might be. I even found these super-fun videos last night in my search for reward – and they made me giggle when I tried to follow him!
I call them THE ORANGE SHIRT GUY moves – I am learning Salsa dancing in my living room alone with my favorite broom. Since the moment I left home I have loved to DANCE – and by golly I am going to DANCE NOW!
I am thinking back as far as I can think in search of what rewarded me INTRINSICALLY (inside my self) – those qualities of ME my mother did not touch because she was too busy projecting her darkness on to me and then trying to abuse it out of me. My SELF held seeds of a love of beauty, a love of movement, a love of the outdoors, of flowers, of gardening, of making things with my hands – and I need to find ways to build THOSE REWARDS into my days somehow so that I won’t sink out of sight into the quicksand of the great (unbearable) sadness inside of me that is always on the near-verge of consuming me.
It also struck me yesterday what a miracle it was that I found MOTHERING-caregiving my children ABSOLUTELY REWARDING!
I think about my own physiology (because my body-brain was built in trauma) in terms of overloaded Substance P (pain) coupled with underloaded reward (including problems with all my safe-secure attachment-reward circuits – CLICK HERE FOR ARTICLE ON THE ‘DRUGS’ and depression).
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In my searching today I found this fascinating article! Well worth a read! It also includes info on ‘learned helplessness’ – something severe early abuse concretizes in our little trauma-altered-development body!! We need to understand that all our seeking and reward systems begin to be built as our earliest seek-reward attachment behavior either protects us — or does not (causing cascades of Trauma Altered Development).
“Although the details of human hopes are surely beyond the imagination of other creatures,” writes Jaak Panksepp in Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (1998), “the evidence now clearly indicates that certain intrinsic aspirations of all mammalian minds, those of mice as well as men, are driven by the same ancient neurochemistries.” Regarding what he has labeled the SEEKING system, Panksepp explains that the mesolimbic and mesocortical dopamine pathways….”
“Panksepp suggests that the SEEKING system “responds not simply to positive incentives but also to many other emotional challenges where animals must seek solutions.” In “The Involvement of Nucleus Accumbens Dopamine in Appetitive and Aversive Motivation” (1994), J.D. Salamone explains that dopamine release and metabolism within the nucleus accumbens “is activated by a wide variety of stressful conditions.” Salamone points out that blocking dopamine transmission or otherwise interfering with nucleus accumbens dopamine transmission “has been shown to disrupt active avoidance behavior.” In other words, when dopamine is decreased, animals cease trying to escape aversive stimulation. Instead of trying to cope with stress, they give up.”
NOTE: I write about MY OWN PATHWAY, not yours. Your medical needs belong to you and your professional provider.
Awake most of the night – up for good well before the sunrise. Waiting for the sun, I have work to do. I have cleared out whatever money I have accumulated these past months and invested all of it in yet another fence. How antisocial of me, erasing what I can now of my neighbor on the west side of my yard whose trailer sits not 6 feet away from that fence line.
Up went the posts, painted the cross boards, up with the corrugated aluminum panels. I blocked the sight of their falling apart lattice sided screened porch. I blocked their never ending porch light from penetrating the still darkness of my yard’s night sky. Or did I?
I had to laugh when I went outside last night to sit, finally, in the privacy of my yard. Nope, no more of THEIR light in my yard, but wait? The siding, like tin foil, now reflects every tall street light behind my house on the Mexican side of the border wall!
I dug around on my pantry shelves last night for a look at all the cans of strange colored paint I have accumulated from here and there over the years. Is there something I can use to cover that corrugated reflective shine, something to flatten the surface, to darken my yard? Oh, yes, here it is. I am waiting for the sun to rise so I can take these two mixed gallons of interior paint, one orange, the other dark terra cotta, so I can work some more on my task.
(The trick I discovered ‘accidentally’ to using interior paint on exterior metal surfaces is to thin it with water. Somehow the paint seems to then forget it’s supposed to pucker and buckle and flake and peel!)
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I am reminded of a time about 20 years ago when I worked as an art therapist on a northern Reservation. I had a caseload of 40 sexually abused and traumatized children under the age of 10 (over half of them boys). The Indian Health Service had given me some ‘spare’ money they had for these children’s therapy, and I stretched that money out for a year and a half. When the money finally ran out and was not replaced, I had to leave, and as I ‘checked out’ another Reservation therapist made this parting comment to me: “You have been so focused all the time you’ve been up here.”
Even back then I knew his comment reflected something about me that ‘wasn’t quite right’ but I had no idea what I had ‘done wrong’. To me, whatever I could offer to those children meant more to me than sitting around, wasting time and socializing with other workers possibly could have.
And yet doing EXACTLY that would not only have been ‘normal’, but was expected. I had failed to shmooze!
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I thought this morning as I waited with pinpoint bright star lights above me for the sun to rise so I could go back to work (before my 2 pm doctor’s appointment this afternoon) on my Secret Garden about my ability to focus. Being focused these past few days has NOT been about words. It has NOT been about writing. It has not even been about thinking, or about feeling.
My focus, whenever it comes upon me, is simply about being alive — in the moment — as I find things to do that involve work — and work I WANT to do, for whatever reasons.
As I think about my powerful ability to focus, I also realize that this ability is not within the ‘normal or ordinary’ range of what MOST people do or HOW they do what they do. My focus is about being ‘in a space’ where NOTHING else can reach me.
And I know this ability is something that was built into me through the 18 years of terror, trauma and abuse of my infant-childhood, and it has served me well all of my life.
My states of focus have their own patterns of the passage of time. Stimulation is so moderated that a bomb could probably go off within my sphere and I would hardly notice.
What this topic has also brought to mind today is how I now see my continually operating stress response system that so rarely ever turns itself off that I barely know what CALM peacefulness is or what it feels like.
I think about the three main emotions that get themselves built into the nervous system-brain of severely traumatized little people while they are growing and developing their body at the start of their life in adaptation to the terrible duress, distress and stress they are under: ANGER, FEAR and/or SADNESS.
I think about what I believe about anger, that it is stimulated by changes and pressures within the environment that could not be solved by immediately known means. “Find another way — NOW” the body-brain says. “Learn something new — NOW — and use it to solve this immediate problem.” Anger includes this important fact: “YOU CAN DO IT!”
I have been increasingly angry about the noise and lights that stream from my neighbor’s close-to-me yard. I can do nothing about noise, but I can visually do something about my privacy. I had to have the RESOURCES to purchase the material I needed to build this fence-wall. But equally as importantly, I had to have the CONFIDENCE and COMPETENCE to do this work myself.
The interplay-balance between stressors from the environment implicate anger as a reaction that reflects the need to SOLVE the problem, the resources needed to accomplish a solution, AND confidence and competence needed to personally DO SOMETHING useful to make things better to increase well-being. Anger is NOT so much about learning something completely new as it is about using what one knows in a new and different creative way.
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There was NOTHING I could do about the terrible abuse I suffered for the first one-third of my life. NOTHING except to survive it. I survived that abuse without any anger at all — and that could still amaze me if I didn’t now understand that in order to feel ANGER one must have access to some degree and version of what I wrote in my previous paragraph.
I am old enough NOW to understand that my anger at my neighbor’s ‘intrusion’ into my space is my problem, not theirs. I didn’t tell them I was going to build a fence ASAP. I did try to choose a color for the cross boards (very light blue) that would hopefully be pleasing or at least not too offensive to them. That’s the best I could do about taking care of what I need while trying to be kindly considerate of them.
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Everything I have been doing these past five days has been about that fence: planning, preparing, purchasing, leveling the 40′ of ground along my west line, and doing the work. I am very, very, very much a project oriented person. Focus provides a safe inner place/space for me. While in my focus mode, most everything and everyone else is EXCLUDED from my realm of awareness.
Focus is an emotional-regulation tool I HAVE to use because my right brain did NOT experience ‘normal or ordinary’ early safe and secure attachment experiences with my caregivers that would have built ‘normal and ordinary’ emotional regulation abilities into my body-brain in the first place.
Early trauma during especially an infant’s earliest developmental stages prior to one year of age creates emotional DYSREGULATION patterns rather than ‘ordinary’ regulation patterns. Survivors of early trauma and abuse live with these changes for the rest of their lives.
My focusing abilities are very much about so-called dissociation. I know that now. It is something that was built into me from birth in response to the trauma of the environment that I grew and developed within. Focused survival — that’s what I spent the first 18 years of my life doing. It can be an extremely ISOLATED process — as I become my own ‘Army of One’.
I do not mean for this post to be a morbid one, only an informative one. In looking at the power than unresolved trauma has to follow in families on down the generations I want to write about two discoveries I have made regarding important MEN in my family tree that have to do with the ‘missing’ children, the dead ones, whose initial ‘being in the world’ no doubt impacted the entire lives of these MEN, albeit perhaps invisibly.
Perhaps it is simply my own limited range of thinking and vision that alerts me to the possibility that it is NOT so much the stories that are told in a family — as few or as many as there may be or have been — that truly matters most. It seems more likely to me that it is the stories that are NOT told that are the ones that contain the storms of intergenerational unresolved trauma that can combine to impact future generations in traumatic ways that TRULY MATTER.
Those of us living today receive the benefit of medical advancements that have lessened or eliminated especially the risk of premature death for infants and children. It was not too many generations past that the continued life of one’s offspring could be counted on.
There are schools of thought that suggest that modern efforts toward the protection of children did not come into play until the survival of children was more likely to happen than it did in the past. Before medical advancements came along to help protect the life of people from diseases we can now prevent and treat, so many parents lost their little ones that a sort of emotional (and affectionate) vacuum existed to lessen the profound grief that losing one’s infants and children had on parents in the past.
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It was not unusual in the past for infants and children to be treated as possession-objects rather than as human beings with needs, feelings and rights of their own. In order to more fully understand how we, as early infant-child abuse survivors experienced the ongoing trauma that DID come down to us from our family’s past history, we need to gather for ourselves as much information as we can about the possible CONTEXT that is NOT told in the stories that belong to and within our family tree.
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I contrast to what I am writing here don’t consider myself especially interested in a genealogical search for my ancestral connections. Yet at the same time I have devoted many, many hundreds of hours to transcribing the writings of my mother, even of her mother, letters of my father as these words filtered down over time into my possession.
I only through accident have come across two streams of information that directly apply to my words here today.
The first piece of information relates to the contextual history of my own father. The stories told within my family of origin always included the fact that my father was an ‘unwanted’ child that arrived late among his siblings. We were told that his sister (unwillingly) was given responsibility for his care when he was young and ‘raised him’.
Much later when I was an adult over 30 my father told me that during his childhood his mother ‘never left the house unless she had to go to the store’ and ‘never had company come to her home’. This information gives me a sense of the context of my grandmother’s depression and/or sadness that I am quite certain PROFOUNDLY affected my father’s infant-child development.
It has only been in the past few months since my daughter began gathering family records to connect herself to my father’s mother who was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution that an important NEW piece of information arrived about the context of my father’s family. Included on my father’s birth certificate is the fact that there were FOUR children born living while only THREE were living as my father was born.
A MISSING CHILD among my father’s siblings.
This fact was NEVER mentioned in spoken words at any time that I know of, and yet is SUCH an important one that it has rearranged and changed everything I know about myself, as the daughter of a man who never stood up to his abusive wife, who never ONCE intervened to protect me or any of my siblings from my mother’s insanity and abuse.
I know enough to understand that the grief of losing a child affected my father’s parents — and siblings — and within the bigger picture, the enlarged context of my family of origin — that missing child affected me.
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This past weekend I had a woman come visit me overnight who has been a friend of mine for 30 years. She lives in Annapolis but was in Arizona visiting her sick brother and popped on down to visit me. My friend has been deeply involved in researching her family tree, and generously spent time online showing me information that can be accessed on my own family history.
I chose to have her look into my mother’s father’s ancestral line. While she couldn’t go back very far, what was found is fascinating.
And NOTHING that we found was EVER mentioned in story by my mother whose parents divorced in 1930 when my mother was five. My mother’s mother remained angry and embittered, full of hatred for her ex husband until her death. She forced her hatred into my mother so that my mother ‘disowned’ her father and never saw him again past about the year 1932.
My mother’s father’s side of the family tree was amputated and erased from the spoken history of our family, but the effects of even this bitterness and the family trauma it was connected to DID affect not only my mother, but also impacted me, and through me, my offspring.
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We could find no information further back than the 1881 Canadian Census, and moving forward to the 1900 United States Census.
Perhaps because my friend is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church she immediately noted that my mother’s father’s father (my great grandfather) had listed himself as a member of the Universalist Church on the 1881 census. His father was listed as born in England, his mother as born in France and French speaking. We could not find the name of either one of these ancestors of mine.
We did find that the first Canadian Universalist (Unitarian) church was started in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canaca in 1937, and that my great grandfather was born there in 1845. (His wife was also born there). These people immigrated to the Boston, MA area in 1882 and by the 1900 census were listing three children: Ada (23) who I know nothing about, her brothers Howard (11) and Charles (9). Charles became my mother’s father.
ALSO included in the census information is the fact that there were FIVE dead children probably between Ada and Howard. No matter what happened to them, that is a LOT OF GRIEF AND TRAUMA that I never heard anyone ever say anything about.
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What this tells me in simple fact is that my mother’s father was the youngest child in his family as was my father in his. I know enough to suspect that the silent, invisible grief in BOTH of these families affected these MEN — right on down the line.
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The other piece of information about my great grandfather’s connection to the Universalist Church in Nova Scotia has provided an avenue for continued ancestral search because according to my friend’s online search that church still has all of its records. I have emailed them asking for help. I would like to know if my unknown great great grandparents were involved in the founding of this first church in Canada.
I am also intrigued with the unique religious affiliation that these ancestors of mine had outside of the ‘mainstream’ of Christian culture. Learning this piece of information rearranged how I think about free-thinking self and my own very free-thinking children. That all of these ancestors, all the way back to the French ones (I hope to find my great grandmother’s maiden name from the marriage records of the church in Halifax), were NEVER mentioned by my mother is a clear sign to me that just as there are road signs to unresolved trauma within families carried in the death of children, there are also road signs to unresolved trauma carried within other family history that is encased within silence.
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I do not believe that severe infant-child abuse EVER EVER simply pops up within a family out of nowhere. If there is abuse, it came from somewhere and is a part of a much bigger picture of trauma and is part of a much larger context that we MUST find as much information about as we possibly can to further our own healing process.
It might seem like nonsense within our culture to put the emphasis that I do personally on the need for severe infant-child abuse survivors to go back through any safe way they can to gather ANY and ALL POSSIBLE INFORMATION about family history so that our understanding about how unresolved trauma FROM THE PAST directly impacted what happened to us can be broadened.
Trauma does NOT easily resolve itself in silence — not when it happened and not as it passes down through the generations.
I also believe that blaming and shaming the perpetrators of abuse is NOT helpful to gathering the kind of contextual information that we need to know. If, as I suspect, trauma does not resolve itself until somebody, somewhere at sometime LEARNS what the trauma has to teach, we need to learn as much as we can about what the signals/signs/symptoms of unresolved trauma are.
Finding that there are amputated branches from the family tree, such as there are in mine, and finding that we had ancestors that died as babies and children so that the unresolved trauma of grief passed down the generations and no doubt affected our parents IS NOT MEANINGLESS TIDBITS OF INFORMATION.
Every bit of unresolved trauma from ‘back there’ found its way, sometimes in trickles, sometimes in roaring rivers, into the ocean of sadness, violence, confusion, loss and rage that fed the traumatic abuse that happened to us. The more we can know about these histories, the more we can find, hear, tell and learn from the stories (especially in the silent ones carried within families), the more coherent our OWN life story and our telling of our own life narrative will become.
Because the inability to tell a coherent life narrative is the number one sign of an adult insecure attachment system-disorder, it is critically important that we find and use anything we can find that helps us make sense out of trauma. We can make progress this way in smoothing out the pathway that leads through us from the past into the future.
Our individual participation in this ‘smoothing out’ process, gained through knowledge that leads to understanding and compassion, will increasing contribute SOOTHING healing and equally soothing calmness for our own self and for all those we are in contact with as we work to put trauma to rest.
I was able to sit in my garden this morning to watch the first sun rays touch the delicate leaves of the Ballerina Rose bush I moved yesterday. “Ah-Ha!” I thought to the rose. “I can tell you will be happy there, and I am glad! No longer will you have to wait too long each morning for that light you so desperately need. You will grow into a beautiful plant now. Just wait until next summer. You will see!”
I hope 'my' rose reaches this fullest expression of beauty -- in its own time.
It was cool last night, though still not quite a hard freeze. There is no breath of wind, and I was able to hear each leaf collapsing off the branch of the old Mulberry tree I hard-pruned last summer. Plink! Click! Clatter! Each single leaf marked its falling with a sound hitting the hard adobe walkways.
Does a falling leaf remember its life growing upon the twigs and branches of a tree each year? Does it remember its falling? Can a leaf remember itself once its eaten by a worm and becomes new soil that in turn can feed the growth of something else?
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I thought about how hard my day was for me yesterday. I realized how critically important my garden is to me — for a reason I have not until now clarified in words.
My garden is a collective storehouse of my memories.
This helped me to understand more clearly that just as a leaf is not likely to remember itself in its life, I cannot really remember myself in my life, either. My memories are not ‘attached’ to me as I suspect ‘ordinary’ people’s memories are attached. My memories are attached externally to objects and to people.
Semantic memory is a memory for facts, I think always available in their connection to descriptive words.
Autobiographical memory is SUPPOSED to form so that a self is in the middle of the memory — because they were in the middle of the experience of not ONLY the experience as it happened in time — but most importantly they were in the experience of HAVING the experience as it happened.
This is connected to the critical FEELING FELT process that is supposed to happen for an infant as its body-brain is building through interactions it has with its earliest caregivers. The nature of the infant-caregiver interactions are SUPPOSED to mirror back to the infant, reflect back to the infant, and resonate with the infant in such a way that the infant begins — through the experience of FEELING FELT — to know that it has a SELF inside of it that is having the experience of feeling its own self in its own life.
I MISSED THIS STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT, and once this stage was missed and the ‘feeling felt’ neurons did not develop in an ordinary way, I have lacked the ability to FEEL FELT in my body in my own life — for ALL of my life.
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I thought again this morning about the very first time I encountered a literal awareness of the passage of time. When I was 18, fresh away from home and just out of Naval boot camp, I met a man I fell in love with, had a child by, and eventually married (and soon divorced).
This man had friends with money who lived high on a hill somewhere in the San Francisco Bay area. We went to visit them one day and I saw my first hammock. It was pure white, strong and new looking, hanging in the sun from the branches of two trees that overlooked a vineyard.
Nothing should have been especially noteworthy about my seeing the hammock, and there wasn’t until I returned 2 years later on another visit with my partner and encountered the hammock again.
There is STILL something intangible about my experience of having the experience of encountering this hammock a second time. There it was, the same hammock, but now it was sun rotted, broken and shredded, dirty and in threads half hidden in a growth of weeds.
I remember standing there gazing at the hammock in SHOCK!
It wasn’t the hammock itself that I was responding to so much as it was my very first experience of SEEING the passage of time.
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As I remember this memory this morning — the hammock as I first saw it, the hammock as I saw it next — and as I remember the stunned sensation that filled me at realizing PHYSICALLY in my body that enough time had passed by since I had first walked upon that spot that the hammock and disintegrated into nothing but a tangled web of broken strings — I realize that this is the clearest example I have in my life of how the passage of the time of me in my life is connected NOT to my own internal experience of myself passing through time but is rather connected to how everything I can notice OUTSIDE of myself passes through time.
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My memory returns to the second experience I am clearly aware of that again involves a physical object (as if these things have a life of their own — like a leaf) with its own ‘life in and over time’.
When I was 20 and first moved with my little daughter to Fargo, North Dakota I was blessed with the sweetest landlady anyone could every have — Lily. Over the few months that I lived in Lily’s basement apartment I often sat with her at her kitchen table and shared coffee with her and visited.
After many such encounters one day something came into my awareness — again with a sense of shock. There on the lowest shelf of her narrow shelves built into the wall next to her kitchen table was the exact same sand-filled, metal-topped, plaid cloth-bottomed ashtray — that had ALWAYS been returned to sit in that same exact spot.
Thinking about my own inner reaction to my realization that the ashtray ‘resided’ in that spot over time reminds me of something my son said when we were eating burgers at a restaurant when he was three. Well, actually, he was NOT eating his hamburger — a fact that created this specific memory for me.
We were ready to leave and as I looked at my son’s plate with its burger still intact I said to him, “You haven’t even touched your hamburger!”
He replied from his three-year-old’s perception, “Here, momma, I am touching it now,” as he gingerly placed the tip of his right pointer finger on the bun.
“Oh,” I said next. “I guess we’ll just have take it home.”
My son, in his young thinking-processing stage was NOT being sassy when he responded back. “But Momma! We can’t take the hamburger home! It already is home! This is where it lives!”
At three years of age and beginning at the end of the second year a child “can construct accurate representations of events that endure and are accessible over time.” These are imprinted into the right brain hemisphere as AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY.
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My son was very much involved in related growth and developmental processes that happen as ‘Theory of Mind’ develops — as he went through them HIS WAY. Eventually, of course, he grew to understand that hamburgers don’t ‘live’ anywhere and don’t have a ‘Theory of Mind’. Hamburgers also don’t have memory — at least not as we usually think of memory.
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I have a whole collection of sticky notes attached to this growth chart I am looking at. I have been waiting for years to be ready to address them, in all their simply stated accuracy, in my writing. These statements are about critically important inner growth processes that happen from age one to age four. These stages of development are built upon the first foundation of body-brain development that happens from birth to one through early attachment relationships an infant has with its caregivers.
So far I cannot look directly at these next stages of development because I personally know that NOTHING went as it should have in my development up until age one — and therefore all of my future development was altered, as well. I have not wanted to face what all these changes did to me!
Yet I also know that my ability to have ‘ordinary’ experience of having experience with the FEELING FELT in my own body as the experiences happen — and then storing those memories autobiographically — was stolen from me by severe abuse from birth. I was amputated from my own life, separated from it as surely as each leaf I watch plummet to the earth on a windless morning has been amputated from its tree.
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Identifying specifically HOW I experience my life is hard enough. Finding words to describe it is equally as hard. While I know I am the person who watched those leaves fall this morning, I cannot FEEL it.
As I have worked toward being able to write my own story about my own experience of my severely abusive infant-childhood I have struggled with being able to remember what remembering myself in my first 18 years was REALLY like.
As I do this work I increasingly realize that how I experienced those first 18 years is the same as how I have ALWAYS experienced myself in my life.
Perhaps nature had no better way to assist me in surviving those 18 years of traumatic hell other than to remove from me the ability to truly FEEL myself feeling myself as I went through those experiences.
Instead every experience, as an amputated individual snippet in time, appears to me as if I had remotely WATCHED what happened from a very great distance away (like watching a hammock or an ashtray over time). Today it is becoming even more clear to me that the process I use — have always used — to remember my life is SEMANTIC recall of the facts as they happened and does not involve what ‘ordinary’ people would use as autobiographical memory building and retrieval.
I have always been left outside rather than inside my own life. I believe I lack the neurological underpinnings that would have formed the circuits and pathways inside my body-brain so that I could CONNECT and ASSOCIATE and ATTACH my own self in a ‘feeling felt’ way through time as I live in this body in my lifetime.
On this physiologically-trauma-changed level I ALSO lack those same required neurological pathways and circuits that would enable me to truly feel felt WITH and BY anyone else. I am left wondering what the ‘ordinary’ experience of life is even like for other people — and I truly believe I will never know. Once these emotional-social patterns are built into the body-brain BEFORE THE AGE OF ONE they cannot be changed.
The earliest foundations of body-brain growth and development happened for me in the midst of terrible trauma in such a way that my pathways and circuits were made in a different-than-ordinary way.
As surely as the body of the little girl me in those two pictures I included in my last post look like they were cutout and pasted into a picture of ongoing life of OTHERS that had nothing to do with the reality of my life, I am STILL a cutout-and-pasted-in person in the midst of a stream of life that I experience very, very differently from others.
Yes, I experience feelings. Intensely. But somehow my emotions are disconnected from my memory process in such a way that the literal facts of events are stored (as they are for everyone) separately from the emotions. In my case the emotional of memory (stored by a different process in the body as it is for everyone) is ALWAYS disconnected, unattached and dissociated permanently from my memory recall.
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In rewinding the ‘movie’ of my thinking process this morning I need to add in the part about going to visit yesterday’s post commenter’s blog and reading what he says there about Dissociative Identity Disorder from his experience and perspective. As I read I found myself being envious of people who can experience the experience of having ANY identity — from inside their own self — at all!
I think about looking at my newly moved rose bush shining away in the sunshine this morning. I can only begin to try to imagine what the rose bush’s experience MIGHT be like. As I look at my newly planted apple tree, also shining away and gently swaying in the emerging morning breeze I can wonder what it MIGHT be like to be that apple tree.
As I remember myself yesterday I try to IMAGINE what it was actually like to be me, to have my feelings and thoughts as I did yesterday, because I cannot FEEL myself in my memory from yesterday any more than I can feel what it might have been like to be anyone else — yesterday.
I document all of this simply because I know I was formed in an extreme environment — yes, like in a perfect storm. My mother was so insanely focused on what she did to me from birth that she was able to effectively beat, terrorize and remove from me all of my own ability to know what it was like to actually be me in my own life in any way except in the exact present moment as it was/is happening. Not only did she cut me off from nearly all human contact other than with her, she also cut me off from my ability to be in contact with my own feeling-felt self in my own life.
I therefore have a version of Dissociative Identity Disorder without any real, stuck-together, feeling felt version of any identity at all. I exist from one moment to the next because I semantically (factually) KNOW that I do — and because I exist to other people. No wonder I responded powerfully to the quip about “If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” when I first heard it shortly after I left home at 18.
Here is a big collection of posts on this blog related to CALM — CONNECTION — (NOTE: WordPress does not automatically create a new tab or page when you click on one of these links – be sure to right click and choose! Or, click on a link, check it out and hit your back button up at top left of your screen! WordPress does, however, automatically correct the capitalization of its own name — SPOOKY!)
This is my 59th birthday post today. I am deadly (life-ly) serious about this! Learning how to read? YES! What is different about US and why-how it matters: We severe infant-child abuse survivors, with our trauma-changed body-brain-mind-self, life in a different world because we were made in, by and for a different (malevolent rather than benign-benevolent) world. I am going to present two very short articles from “O” – The Oprah Magazine that I pulled out while I was searching for little images to cut out for my daughter to use in her light switch collage project.
Because I am a severe, severe infant-child abuse survivor, and because I was FORCED to go searching for the truth nearly seven years ago when my youngest child left home (my serious disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder trigger), I have LEARNED A LOT. It is the purpose of my blog writing, and my greatest hope that somehow what I share in everything I write can benefit the suffering FEW (overall and in perspective) of us that are severe early abuse survivors.
Yet at the same time I mention and take seriously that ONLY a recognizable half of our current population is seen by researchers to have had a safe and secure enough early attachment environment (good-enough benevolent) to NOT have ended up with some degree-version of an insecure attachment disorder that affected every single aspect both of their early growth and development and therefore how they experience and live their life.
What I see happening — and what will continue to happen for the roughly 10% + of US – the severe early neglect and abuse survivors — is that not only did our early traumatic environment change our development, including the way our genetic code manifests and operates — we are DISSED (disrespected) in every possible way from that early point forward.
We NEED information. We need to understand the platform that we stand on within our physiology — our body-nervous system-brain-immune system-mind-self AS IT TRULY EXISTS. We need to STOP the disempowering (life force leakage) that continues to happen for us because we live in a society that has not yet recognized the power that early infant-childhood deprivation and abuse in a malevolent environment has to CHANGE development and create lifelong complications for us in everything we face.
These two little articles present me with an opportunity to elucidate what the ‘gibberish’ I am talking about!
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Without further explanation, please read these (right-click on image and choose ‘open in new tab or window’, and on page it brings up, use ZOOM from your toolbar View button if you need to):
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Those of you readers who have followed this blog for a period of time can probably already know what I am going to say. In the first article we are reading about how MOSTLY safe and securely attached people are likely to experience ’empty nest’. Nobody ever tells us that we early abuse survivors are NEVER GOING TO HAVE A CHANCE to experience what is being touted here as not only POSSIBLE, but within the realm of NORMAL.
No, for the abuse survivors I am talking to and about, we fit into the ‘tainted’ category of “Oh well, what else can be expected of THESE PEOPLE? They were already flawed, already depressed. Let’s just ignore them (after we DISS them) and go on with our happy, well-adjusted lives!”
Yes, ‘already depressed’ people are going to experience MEGA difficulties when their primary attachments are disrupted, altered and perhaps nearly evaporated. They are also the likely ones NOT to have good partner relationships that would help support then through these transitional passages in adult life.
We MUST begin to understand the insecure attachment ‘disorders’ and the changes they created in our genetic code expression (that’s how abuse activates most depression genes in the first place) so that we can all get on with the business of recognizing that if we choose to ACCEPT the existence of early infant-child abuse, we are choosing to punish those survivors with our societal arrogance and ignorance.
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The same pattern exists in this second article about “Smoking & the Blues.”
“Oh, those ‘mentally ill’ and those ‘depressed’ (flawed) individuals….”
MOST of so-called mental illness, and I would guess a whole lot of ‘depression’ is directly tied in its origin and its continued existence to early infant-child abuse, neglect, maltreatment and trauma that so changed the little one’s early growth and development that these ‘mental illnesses’ had no choice but to manifest. Those ‘mental illnesses’ go hand-in-hand with what our body had to do to adjust enough within our malevolent early environment to survive at ALL!
Again and again and again I will mention — it is of HIGHEST value and importance to begin to KNOW the truth about subjects like these two high-in-the-sky-apple-pie articles are ACTUALLY — and in an undistorted REAL world talking about (in other words, in a word without childish denial and magical thinking). What you will find when you do a Google search using just these three simple terms for your search means more to me than anything that has ever been discussed in connection with “O”:
CDC ACE STUDY
No kidding! Take a look, a refresher if you have done so before and follow those links that show up there! (And I would suggest a serious study of this information for all attached to the ‘O-Empire’.) When I point the proverbial “GET REAL!” finger at Oprah and all she represents — as clearly demonstrated by the angle of these two articles and the slanted information they present — we have to KNOW OUR OWN TRUTH AND OUR OWN REALITY.
The CDC’s (Center for Disease Control) ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) Study is ongoing and is finally carrying enough absolute WEIGHT to begin to displace the biases, the stereotypes, the prejudices, the ignorance and the PARTICIPATION MYSTIQUE that our society continues to wrap around so-called ‘mental illnesses’ at the same time our society will not recognize with grateful appreciation, humility and even SHAME what the HAVES were given in their earliest infant-child caregiver interaction environments in CONTRAST to what the HAVE NOTS were not given!
The kinds of changes that we were forced to make in our physiological development to endure and survive within our deprived malevolent early world DO NOT GO AWAY. The contribute to, exacerbate, and CAUSE the difficulties for us over the duration of our lifespan that the CDC ACE Study recognizes — and these ridiculous “O” – Oprah articles DO NOT!
WHO IS READING AND WEEPING NOW! It’s our time to empower ourselves to know who we are and how we are in the world WAS NEVER OUR CHOICE! We have long ago paid the price for our survival or we wouldn’t even be here with our complicated body and our complicated life.
At the same time, “Society around us — WAKE UP! Get real! And be grateful you never suffered as we have! Get with it! Blaming and shaming victim-survivors is so PASSE!”
(These are the same kinds of processes described regarding autism in my previous post. We need to add early abuse and neglect to the array of possible toxins and realize that nearly ALL so-called ‘mental illnesses’ are included in the kinds of consequences that originate from interactions with ‘malevolent’ and toxic early environments during early human developmental stages from conception onward.)
Stop the Storm 
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