Tag: PTSD

+DID ZERO MERCY IN MY CHILDHOOD SAVE ME?

alchemynow2 Comments

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I checked in with myself this morning to see how I am feeling in comparison to how I felt yesterday morning.  I found that I am OK.  I feel proud of myself that I instantly recognized yesterday what I was feeling and how I arrived at that ‘grim reaper’ state.  I feel proud that I was able to escape that feeling state through my process of recognition and choice so that today I am free of it’s grip and can live now being happier.

I am thinking this morning about all the baby plants my sister so sweetly and carefully dug up and transported from her property in north Texas to mine here in southeastern Arizona.  I need to find a place to plant them into the ground, a task that’s made harder because of the two months of dryness and increasing heat that all life faces here in the cycle of seasons that lead up to the coming of our hoped for July monsoon rains.  Nothing I plant will live without daily watering, and the more plants I have to take care of the more time I have to spend watering them.

And as I puzzled about my unfinished landscaping projects and thought about where I can temporarily make this spring’s garden arranged carefully around the watering range of the two 50 foot soaker hoses I picked up yesterday, three words popped into my mind as if they were displayed in the air in front of my face:  Scrambling for Mercy.

Immediately following this odd mental display I saw in my mind three images appear as if they were pearls connected on a string.  I saw:

– Twenty children at a party excitedly and very noisily taking their turns at being blindfolded.  With a stout stick in their hands, they wildly swing at a brightly colored piñata that’s tied to a rope swung over a tree limb.  The free end of the rope is yanked up and down so the piñata spins and leaps through the air until finally some lucky child makes solid impact.  As candy pieces spill though the air, all of the children scramble in and grab as much as they can of prized loot.

–  Next I see a similar interaction between children and candy.  In the excitement of watching a holiday parade children stand on sidewalk curbs, poised on their toes, bent at the waist like sprint racers at the starting line, waiting for someone to heave candy into the air so they can all scramble again for their prized loot.

– Next I see some imaginary setting that involves coins being tossed into a group of children or adults, and another scene where paper money is thrown into the air as people race and scramble to grab it.

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I have to look closely at the mental gymnastics my right and left brain are doing right now to see how any of these thoughts actually fit together.  What information is passing back and forth between my insightful right brain and my linear left brain that is trying to make sense out of any possible connection between how I feel, what I am preparing to do with my day, and these thoughts about ‘scrambling for mercy’?

First, I want to know more about this word MERCY.  As I’ve mentioned before it is our right brain that knows about a word’s life – its connection into history, action and multiple meaning.

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MERCY

Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French merci, from Medieval Latin merced-, merces, from Latin, price paid, wages, from merc-, merx merchandise

Date: 13th century

1 a : compassion or forbearance shown especially to an offender or to one subject to one’s power; also : lenient or compassionate treatment <begged for mercy> b : imprisonment rather than death imposed as penalty for first-degree murder
2 a : a blessing that is an act of divine favor or compassion b : a fortunate circumstance <it was a mercy they found her before she froze>
3 : compassionate treatment of those in distress <works of mercy among the poor>

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Well, look at this!  My right brain instinctively and intuitively KNEW that the image of scrambling for MERCY as if it was candy or money were right on target.  My left brain is still waiting for more information…….

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As I peer behind the curtain of my thinking this morning, I know that I started with my appreciation that NOW I understand when the ‘grim reaper’ feeling takes over my life, when the vast storehouse in my body of trauma-related memory-feelings steals away all awareness of anything different, I have ways to process this experience because I understand it.

As I wrote in yesterday’s post, I can always try to avoid being overwhelmed by my trauma memory-feeling state.  I can recognize it when I ‘blow it’ and miss my opportunities to avoid its being triggered.  Once it does get triggered, I now have information about how to settle my body memory down so that the feeling becomes quiet again.  Once I find ways to ground myself in my body in my present moment, and once the terrible (very real) body-based trauma memory feeling states can be lulled back to sleep again, I can participate in all kinds of different ways in my present day life like I never could before.

My left brain is happier now that it can see the ‘before and after’ connections in my thinking right now.  Before the ‘scrambling for mercy’ thought-image appeared, on some level I was thinking about the uniqueness of my perspective on everything I think and write about.

I did not ‘scramble for mercy’ yesterday in a panic to make that terrible ‘grim reaper’ feeling that had overwhelmed me go away.  I have practical understandings about trauma triggering today, and I have increasing practical experience in how to live better when it happens.  Once I understood this today, I also understood that not once in my extremely abusive childhood did I ever have a glimmer that mercy existed.   I could not possibly have begged for something I did not know existed, nor could I scramble for it.

That might be a rather unique fact that others with severe infant-child abuse histories might not share.  I can’t say that this realization about finding better ways to endure today and about having to find these ways within our own self because no mercy ever existed for us and was not available to be scrambled after, begged for, waited for, expected or anticipated, or ever granted at all.

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I am not going hunting for some earlier root-word connection (back to before the 12th century) for this word MERCY, though it puzzles me I don’t easily see this word’s clear footprints leading back into its past.  How are the meanings of MERCY as they connect to compassion also connected to merchandise transactions?

I have often said that traumatic conditions in a malevolent early environment signal a growing body to prepare for either plenty or scarcity of resources.  The trauma-altered changes that are required during development to help ensure survival then signal to others the conditions of the world a person was made in.

Nature, on its own, has no more interest in anthropomorphizing human experience than it does in anthropomorphizing the experience of a stone.  In this word MERCY, in its history and in its connotations, I suspect that we can find the cold, hard practicality of nature being reflected in human language origins and uses.

There was no mercy in my childhood because my mother did not have enough resources in her childhood as she developed to end up with the resource of mercy to give it to me – EVER.

I am surprised at this moment to realize that I have been led to discover a connection between what I have always said about a major difference between my mother’s early experiences as they led to her demise and mine.  Even though the abuse she did to me was probably far more severe than what was done to her, mine did not damage me in the same way.

When a parent wields MERCY over a child and hands it out manipulatively and meanly, as was done to my mother, an entirely different developmental growth pattern is followed than when MERCY does not EVER exist at all.

We can talk about this in terms of ‘conditional’ love, but it has nothing to do with love.

In the root origins of our word MERCY there are connections to prices being paid, wages and merchandise.  These are concepts directly tied to commodities (resources).  When MERCY is given and taken away viciously, maliciously, conditionally and unreasonably, does the child who has been made dependent in their emotional survival on parental actions come to understand that people, too, are no more than commodities (objects)?

My left brain makes a very clear connection here:  My mother’s father was a successful stock broker before the crash of 1929.  Did he so think about life in terms of ‘commodities’ that he infected his emotional relationships with the same kind of thinking that he applied to his profession?

Was his wife, and were his children nothing more than commodities?

This now leads me to a new thought I have never had before:  To what extent was the damage done to my mother in her earliest formative years accomplished not only by her mother but also by her father through processes like these I am just now thinking about?

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In the Absence of Mercy

I have mentioned this before and here it is again:  My life as an infant-child was simple.  Even though it was full of horror, suffering, trauma and abuse, it was simple.  I wasn’t treated like a commodity.  I wasn’t even treated as a human being.  I was always, consistently and permanently just ONE thing:  the devil’s child.

I didn’t ever deserve mercy.  Mercy was not in my mother’s world toward me.  I represented the part of my mother’s ‘badness’ (she projected en masse out on me) that kept my mother as a child from receiving the mercy she so desperately wanted – and needed.

I have never wanted or needed mercy.  For some reason after my trauma-memory-triggering of the ‘grim reaper’ reality flooded me yesterday, and as I found my own way out of that state so that I am OK today, I realize this.  For me, mercy has nothing to do with it because the experience of mercy never built my body, nervous system, brain, mind or relationship between self and others in the first place.  Unlike what happened to my mother, nobody ever involved the commodity of mercy in their transactions with me for my first 18 years.

At the same time I can say at this moment that it’s very strange that the zero-mercy of my childhood very well saved me from turning out like my mother did, I can say, “How cool is that!”

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+THE DANGERS OF EMPATHIZING WITH ANOTHER’S TRAUMA

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It’s been quite awhile since I have added the warning to a post:  BE VERY CAREFUL OF YOURSELF IF YOU CHOOSE TO READ THIS POST, IT MAY TRIGGER TRAUMA MEMORY FOR THOSE WITH EARLY AND SEVERE INFANT-CHILD ABUSE HISTORIES!  But here it is.  While what I describe here might be subtle and difficult to identify in a world with words, it is very real and with a trauma history, your body might very well let you know it.

There seems to be a kind of overlaying of experience that can happen at times when adult survivors of severe infant-child abuse are faced with the reality of someone else’s sorrow.  Of course as a survivor I cannot be at all objective so that I can report this feeling with accuracy.  I just know that it exists because I am so familiar with the experience.

If I choose a name for it, I would call it “the dark night of the soul.”  I know it so well because I spent the first 18 years of my life engulfed within its shadowy realm and didn’t know it.  Looking at it so early in the morning, having had a sleepless and troubled night, I can tell that I know this feeling.  At the same time I recognize it – and feel it – I don’t want to admit to myself how familiar its cold embrace actually is.

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I know what has triggered this for me:  Stories of another person’s life whose experience of being so lost in life that they cannot see a possible way out of the darkness without help from of loving and supportive friends and family.

As adults we expect our self to know ‘the answers’ both about how we fell into the inky abyss and how we get out of it.  But sometimes it seems the risk for losing our way in the labyrinth of who we are versus who we have become simply exists because we do.

I can in no way speak about the experience of the person whose story was told to me in parts these past two days.  I can only speak for myself when I say that something has triggered my own deep body memories of living for the first 18 years of my life within a world within a world – all by myself.

At the same time my mother’s treatment of me was directly responsible for the darkness I was forced to live in – day in and day out, night in and night out – I also know that because I never escaped the darkness I didn’t know the light of day existed at all.  I think of someone sitting in public appearing to read a book.  Looking from the outside others could see the cover, perhaps the title along with the shape and size of it – but inside of this opened book there is another one that cannot be seen from the outside.  The book that is actually open and hidden inside is a completely different one – and in my case, not a nice one.

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I can’t remember the last time I felt this exact feeling.  It’s almost like it has a physical form.  It has a sound.  It has a pressure against my body, both from the outside and from the inside.  I remember it because I could not escape it as a child, and because I had no altered perspective that would have let me know there was any other way to feel.

The sound is like a low, droning hum, like of a vicious animal that has me in its jaws.  I must remain completely still.  If I move it will crush me to death with its jaws.

The feel of this darkness is that it is so immensely bigger than I am that I hardly exist as all.  In fact, all I am is the one being nearly crushed to death by this force that fills the universe with me at its center.

I don’t think this feeling has a name.  If I were to call it ‘fear’ I would only be describing what someone on the outside of it might call it by its color.  “It looks like fear.  It smells like fear.  It tastes like fear.  It feels like fear, so it must BE fear.”

But it isn’t.  Fear exists for me when I know there is some alternative to it.  This feeling does not have an alternative because it comes from 18 years of body memory of being not snatched from safety into its sticky, thick, endless blackness.  It is something I was born into without an alternative.

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To give it the most efficient adult name, I would simply have to call it ‘trauma drama’, but not so that its presence and clutch would be diminished or dissipated.  I would call it this with the complete understanding that while it is in operation in a person’s life, it happens both on the outside of the person — in the ongoing experiences of the external environment — at the same time that it goes on inside of a person.  It’s like these two realities attach themselves to each other like two huge, powerfully attracted magnets that cannot be pried apart from one another.

The quality of the experience of being squashed between these two trauma drama magnets is one of waiting for impending extinction.  It involves an altered sense of time.  Time both stops and feels ongoing without an end in sight.  “Things have been this way forever and they always will be the same.”  There is no escape, as if I have fallen into someone else’s nightmare that sucked me in and will not let go.

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I did not realize that I made any kind of choice to recognize what this other person might be feeling in their time of crisis.  I didn’t know my insides would mirror the darkness that I must, through some version of my own empathy, imagine that they are feeling.  When two tuning forks are placed close enough together, and one is plucked and begins to hum, the one sitting next to it will begin to mirror back in resonance what the one next to it is playing until their vibrational patterns match exactly.

The risk and danger for me is that when I don’t recognize that my empathy for another in deep sorrow in their time of soul darkness is putting me at risk for waking up the dark giant of my own trauma body memories, when I don’t pay attention and step away or shield, screen or in some way protect myself, my own trauma will resonate with another person’s until I am left wrestling within the death grip of the monster of misery that consumed the first 18 years of my life.

My mother’s needs were so great, her emotional wounds so deadly, that when I was born the vibrational patterns of her constantly ringing tuning fork of herself completely overcame and overwhelmed whatever little infant-child vibrations of my own.  She consumed me.  Her need consumed me.  Her projections consumed me.  Her psychosis consumed me.

I was left to breathe my own breaths in the vacuum she created and cast around me like a net.  She consumed the light of the world around her like a black hole sucks in everything within its gravitational range.  There was nothing left for me except my very life that she did not ACTUALLY take away from me.  This feeling I have right now is what that experience of being her daughter felt like.

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Now, being the 58 year old adult that I am, I still fight against the power of that vortex of trauma memory that does not lie back there in the dim past.  It lies within my body, within the unending body memory of what a continual state of trauma feels like.

At this moment I can see how valuable it is for me that I haven’t felt this feeling within my recent memory.  I have not been sucked into that nameless place where no escape feels possible, the place between inhale and exhale when I know I have run out of air and have no idea where or when or how the next breath of air will ever arrive – or if it will.

What I can see about this feeling state now at this moment, what I am understanding about my experience of it, is that it is NOT one I can dissociate from.  It is bigger, ancient to the time of my beginnings, and more enveloping.  It carries a more permanent risk for being there ‘forever’ than anything else that ever came to me after THIS feeling first came to me, very shortly after my birth most likely.

This feeling probably came to me the first time I ever experienced a direct attack from the monster that was my mother.  It came to me the first time I recognized on an instinctual level that my existence was threatened and that I would most likely not survive.  But I did survive.  And because I did this feeling came with me, as if I was captive within a womb of darkness that I could not be born out of.

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At this instant as the first morning’s rays of THIS day’s sunlight change into colors the darkness of the night that just passed, I realize that although I resist the use of the term ‘recovery’ in relation to what needs to happen for those of us who were born into vast trauma, at this instant I will use that term:  I have the right to recover for myself the right to be alive.

That darkness seems to be about having lost sight of that right so early in my life that it only exists for me now when and as I CLAIM it – consciously and with effort.  Within my range of possibilities now I DO have some tools for grounding myself in my body today in spite of the horrendous history of trauma that formed my body when I was young and formed itself into me.

I see it like learning a second language, my first native language being one where nothing else existed but trauma.  At this moment I must feel the weight of my body upon my feet as I cross the floor.  I must feel the texture of my curtain against the tips of my fingers as I pull them open to let in the new light of day.  I must feel this hunger in my belly, walk into my kitchen and find food for my breakfast.

The memory of trauma is within me.  Last night it again nearly took me as its captive.  I must exercise in my brain what I have learned about time passing.  The trauma memories in my body are a part of me, but they are not the whole of me.  Not any more.

I will need to be very full-of-tender-care for myself today.  I need to understand that I will never be able to feel ‘normal’ empathy for another person’s experience of their own travails because I cannot draw that most important line within myself that would let me recognize their state without having my own similar one triggered.

These thoughts are also letting me know that not only do I have the right to recover my right to be alive, I have the right to recover my right to be alive, in my body, in this world, without experiencing suffering.  Knowing this was not given to me with my birth.  I have to work to keep this knowledge close to me, even though  might always wear it like a second skin.  Doing so certainly beats the alternative.

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+A POINT FROM ANTHROPOLOGY: ASKING ‘WHY?’ IN A MALEVOLENT WORLD IS POINTLESS

alchemynow2 Comments

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The thought came to me this morning that something is missing within me that used to be there:  My inner questions about the ‘WHY” of the abuse I suffered from my mother without my father caring, seem to have disappeared from any consideration I might now make about what happened to me.

I could ask,” What has happened in my long search for healing and understanding about my life that I no longer give any time or space whatsoever to asking any questions about why my childhood happened to me the way that it did?”

I could ask, “When did this happen?  How did this happen?”  Today it seems that I never even asked those questions or wondered those wonderings in the first place.  But I know that I did.  Those thoughts seem to have existed so far back in my mind that I can hardly remember they ever existed at all.

Certainly I never once asked “Why me” during all those years of my childhood, even though I could clearly see that my siblings were treated far different than I was.  Of course I know now that for me, things had ‘always been this way’, and I therefore had no other point of perspective – not for my feelings, not for my words, and therefore never for my thoughts.

Awareness of my abuse never crossed my mind, nor did it for many years into my adulthood.

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I came across the following passage this morning in a book I discovered while I was in art therapy graduate school in 1989:  Eskimo Realities by Edmund Snow Carpenter, (Hardcover – 1973).  During the span of time Carpenter covers in his writing and photography, the area of the eastern Canadian Arctic where the Aivilik Eskimo whose life Carpenter describes had not yet had any contact with Christian missionaries, and only minimal contact with any ‘westerners’ up until the time Carpenter arrived in their region of the world in the 1940s.

The book passage that caught my attention today has to do with what I see as a cultural clash between the Aivilik and ‘western’ thinking about this question, “WHY?”  Perhaps because for the entire 18 years of my extremely abusive childhood I could never ask this question in regard to my life, my parents, or my childhood home, I think I know what Carpenter’s point was in including the following within the covers of his book.

Having no ability to question why, and I mean NO ABILITY happens within a mind (and/or mindset) that has been formed without certain options in it.  The absence of the question, “WHY?” is simply a reflection of a certain kind of reality that mostly only those who exist within that reality can truly understand – from the inside.

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I do know that I could not make any progress in my own healing until I encountered so-called ‘treatment’ and ‘mental health’ information that for the first time, when I was 29, allowed me to begin to understand that there was something different about me because my childhood had been something different.

Yet looking reflectively within myself today, I suspect that at some point in the next 29 years that have followed my introduction into active healing of my infant-childhood severe trauma body-mind-self, I must have taken a turn along the road and realized that what REALLY mattered is that my home of origin existed the way that it did because it was able to so isolate its reality from the eyes or concern of anyone outside of the home.

What that translates into for me today is actually more of an anthropological perspective than a ‘mental health’ one.  My family of origin had its own culture.  I mean this literally.  Our family could have been picked up and transported somewhere else in the world and everything that impacted me personally within our home would have stayed just the same.  Only by intrusion from some outsiders’ influence could anything have been changed.

Such an outsiders’ influence really would have been the same as it would be should any different culture become introduced into any other intact and different culture.  That is an anthropological process from my point of view.  I realize that the power my mother had to control her family and to isolate us from outside contact was complete – certainly in regard to me.  My mother could just as well have been both the object of her own religion and the enforcer of its practices, as well.

This means to me that the moment I left my home of origin I essentially immigrated to an outside foreign culture.  More accurately, I was a refugee, but I did not know this.  How could I?  Certainly I recognized as familiar the trappings of the outside society and civilization the culture I was raised within was ensconced in.

Yet I, as an individual, had been no more included or integrated into the world outside my family’s home than were the automobiles used to transport me here and there beyond the walls of the houses I grew up in for those first 18 years.  In fact, I had no conception of what being a person as different from an automobile or a house could possibly even mean.

I was not a person who could even ask the question, “WHY?” about anything that concerned me until I was 29.  Here I am today at double that age, and although I know I went through a phase when that question seemed to be important to me in regard to my early experiences, that phase has faded so far back into my adult past that I cannot imagine ever asking that question again.

This passage from Carpenter’s book is about that ‘state of being’ where the question, “WHY?” does not exist.  For those of us with severely abusive infant-childhoods, where the culture of madness, trauma and abuse was present and surrounded us as we came into the world, we can recognize a part of our reality in the reality of these words.

Our own inability to describe to anyone else what our reality was truly like as we grew up — as we experienced it on the inside of who we are – is reflected (mirrored) back to us here.  We can see this ‘why-less’ state as being a cultural reality that happens when nobody thinks in ‘why’ terms at all.

Carpenter writes:

“Knud Rasmussen, the arctic explorer, in a sensitive, moving account, tells of a conversation with an Iglulik [Eskimo – circa 1922] hunter:  “For several evenings we had discussed rules of life and taboo customs, without getting beyond a long circumstantial statement of all that was permitted and all that was forbidden.  Everyone knew precisely what had to be done in any given situation, but whenever I put my query:  ‘Why?’, they could give no answer.  They regarded it, and very rightly, as unreasonable that I should require not only an account, but a justification of their religious principles.

“They had of course no idea that all my questions, now that I had obtained what I wished for, were only intended to make them react in such a manner that they should, excited by my inquisitiveness, be able to give an inspired explanation.  Aua had as usual been the spokesman, and as he was still unable to answer my questions, he rose to his feet, and as if seized by a sudden impulse, invited me to go outside with him.

“It had been an unusually rough day, and we had had plenty of meat after the successful hunting of the past few days, I had asked my host to stay at home so that we could get some work done together.  The brief daylight had given place to the half-light of the afternoon, but as the moon was up, one could still see some distance.  Ragged white clouds raced across the sky, and when a gust of wind came tearing over the ground, our eyes and mouths were filled with snow.  Aua looked me full in the face, and pointing out over the ice, where the snow was being lashed about in waves by the wind, he said:

“’In order to hunt well and live happily, man must have calm weather.  Why this constant succession of blizzards and all this needless hardship for men seeking food for themselves and those they care for?  Why?  Why?’

“We had come just at that time when the men were returning from their watching at the blowholes on the ice; they came in little groups, bowed forward, toiling against the wind, which actually forced them now and again to stop, so fierce were the gusts.  Not one of them had a seal in tow; their whole day of painful effort and endurance had been in vain.

“I could give no answer to Aua’s ‘Why?’, but shook my head in silence.  He then led me into Kublo’s house, which was close beside our own.  The small blubber lamp burned, but with the faintest flame, giving out no heat whatever; a couple of children crouched, shivering, under a skin rug on the bench.

“Aua looked at me again, and said:  ‘Why should it be cold and comfortless in here?  Kublo has been out hunting all day, and if he had got a seal, as he deserved, his wife would now be sitting laughing beside her lamp, letting it burn full, without fear of having no blubber left for tomorrow.  The place would be warm and bright and cheerful, the children would come out from under their tugs and enjoy life.  Why should it not be so?  Why?’

I made no answer, and he led me out of the house, into a little snow hut where his sister Natseq lived all by herself because she was ill.  She looked thin and worn, and was not even interested in our coming.  For several days she had suffered from a malignant cough that seemed to come from far down in the lungs, and it looked as if she had not long to live.

“A third time Aua looked at me and said:  ‘Why must people be ill and suffer pain?  We are all afraid of illness.  Here is this old sister of mine; as far as anyone can see she has done no evil; she has lived through a long life and given birth to healthy children, and now she must suffer before her days end.  Why?  Why?’

“This ended his demonstration, and we returned to our house, to resume with the others the interrupted discussion.

“’You see,’ said Aua, ‘you are equally unable to give any reason when we ask why life is as it is.  And so it must be.  All our customs come from life and turn towards life; we explain nothing, we believe nothing, but in what I have just shown you lies our answer to all you ask.’

“Commenting on this moving passage, the anthropologist Paul Riesman writes:  “A very important idea emerges from this intense episode.  This idea is clearly stated at the end when Aua says, ‘All our customs come from life and turn toward life.’  It is an idea which is so basic to the Eskimo sense of place in the universe that it is not really an idea at all, but a way of being in relation to life.  This way of being is the highest value for the Eskimo.  It is not an easy way to be, but it is a necessary condition for being Eskimo.”  (Carpenter:  pages 46-49 – bold type is mine)

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If an anthropologist had entered our home’s culture of trauma, deprivation and abuse in our childhoods, what we could have said about our experience would probably have been very similar to what the Eskimo told this one.

I believe that this is a large part of what the isolation experts refer to in relation to abusive homes is about:  One must enforce within the home the culture that best ensures survival within a malevolent world.  This culture is not one based on ‘reason’ that might exist in a far more benevolent universe.

When Dr. Martin Teicher and his Harvard research group talk about the ‘evolutionarily altered brain’ that develops within severe infant-child abuse environments, he is describing what happens when change is required for adaptation ALSO to a future in a continued malevolent world.  Once these changes have occurred in development (as they did for my mother), there is no vision of a better world and no possibility of changing BACK the consequences of these early forces that shaped the survivor.

The way Eskimo adapted to the malevolency in their environment was built into them individually as well as into their culture (including, of course, their language).  The same process happened within my home of origin.  Just as the Eskimo described in this passage do not ask the question, “Why?” within their world because it would be pointless – and there is no answer – those of us who grew up in the malevolent world of severe early abuse without reprieve never learned to ask that question in the culture we were raised within, either.

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While so-called ‘therapy’ approaches DID introduce the question of “Why?” into my own thinking about my childhood, it served me no purpose and I have evidently completely let the question go for the same reasons that these Eskimo never asked it in the first place.  The question of “Why?” in regard to abusive and traumatic malevolent homes of origin only applies if we look at the entire BIG picture of the entire culture that existed not only within that home, but also at the larger culture our smaller culture was contained within.

Just as anthropologists are carefully trained not to take their cultural biases into the field with them as they ‘study’ other ‘foreign’ cultures, we need to be just as careful about taking understandings from benevolent environments and applying them to malevolent ones.

In my mother’s culture, the only thing that mattered to her was her own continued survival.  Whatever part anyone else played in her continued survival was peripheral to her main aim.  I cannot begin to imagine what the outcome would have been had anyone from the outside tried to introduce a more benevolent culture’s reality into hers.  I cannot begin to imagine that such an attempt would have been successful.

So today, if I look at my mother and my experiences of trauma within the culture my mother created in her home from an anthropological perspective, the question of “Why?” evaporates as if it never existed at all.  I am left having to take the same perspective about life that these Eskimo did:  “How do we best ensure our continued survival given the circumstances of our existence?”

That is what my mother did.  That is what I did.  We found “a way of being in relation to life” as the Eskimo did so we could keep on living it.  Staying alive   ” is not really an idea at all.”  In a harsh and malevolent world survival IS all that matters.  To try to add “WHY?” into this kind of an equation is pointless.

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+TITLE ON SALE NOW BY DR. BRUCE PERRY: BORN FOR LOVE

alchemynow1 Comment

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I have faithfully continued to add the tags ’empathy disorder’ and ‘infant abuse’ to nearly every single one of my many, many blog posts because I am waiting for ‘science’ and the mainstream to catch up to these two most important topics any day now.  Here, tonight, I have found the perfect subject that fits both of these category tags RIGHT NOW!

If there is one thing abusive parents are lacking, IT IS EMPATHY!  Take a look at this!

I am thrilled and delighted to have just discovered that  Dr. Bruce D Perry — an internationally recognized authority on brain development and children in crisis — along with Maia Szalavitz, authors of The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook–What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing, released on April 6, 2010 yet another critically important title.

Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential–and Endangered by Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz (Hardcover – Apr. 6, 2010)

This is what his website says about the title:

Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential–and Endangered

In BORN FOR LOVE: Why Empathy Is Essential—and Endangered (on-sale April 6, 2010), Dr. Bruce D. Perry and journalist Maia Szalavitz argue that empathy, the ability to recognize and share the feelings of others, is a crucial human quality that underlies much more than love, friendship and parenting. Through compelling personal stories and wide-ranging research, they explore how empathy affects everything from emotional depression to the Great Recession, from physical health to mental health, from our ability to love to criminal behavior and even the rise and fall of societies.

Sounds wonderful to me!  Ordering a copy immediately.  Dr. Perry’s work seems extremely grounded to me because he is in clinical practice with children, and does not draw his writing from any ‘ivory tower’ thinkology academy.

Dr. Perry is the one person I would like to have write a ‘blurb’ about/on my book.  I don’t even know what that’s called – but you know what I mean.  This new book covers the subject of empathy with the full understanding of the authors about the critical role of early attachment in brain formation as well as a complete understanding of how early trauma changes human development.

Developmental neuroscientist Dr. Allan Schore states in his writings that every insecure attachment pattern includes within it as a matter of course a corresponding empathy disorder.  Learning as much as we can about empathy will help us to grow even more knowledgeable about how our early insecure attachments and resulting adult insecure attachments have impacted our empathic abilities — and therefore our physiological development and our entire life.  I don’t think there could be a better author to read on the subject than Dr. Perry.

This is what I found on Amazon.com about “Born for Love”:

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

An inside look at the power of empathy: Born for Love is an unprecedented exploration of how and why the brain learns to bond with others—and a stirring call to protect our children from new threats to their capacity to love

From birth, when babies’ fingers instinctively cling to those of adults, their bodies and brains seek an intimate connection, a bond made possible by empathy—the ability to love and to share the feelings of others.

In this provocative book, renowned child psychiatrist Bruce D. Perry and award-winning science journalist Maia Szalavitz interweave research and stories from Perry’s practice with cutting-edge scientific studies and historical examples to explain how empathy develops, why it is essential for our development into healthy adults, and how it is threatened in the modern world.

Perry and Szalavitz show that compassion underlies the qualities that make society work—trust, altruism, collaboration, love, charity—and how difficulties related to empathy are key factors in social problems such as war, crime, racism, and mental illness. Even physical health, from infectious diseases to heart attacks, is deeply affected by our human connections to one another.

As Born for Love reveals, recent changes in technology, child-rearing practices, education, and lifestyles are starting to rob children of necessary human contact and deep relationships—the essential foundation for empathy and a caring, healthy society. Sounding an important warning bell, Born for Love offers practical ideas for combating the negative influences of modern life and fostering positive social change to benefit us all.

About the Author

Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D., is the senior fellow of the ChildTrauma Academy (www.ChildTrauma.org), a not-for-profit organization based in Houston that is dedicated to improving the lives of high-risk children, and he is an adjunct professor of psychiatry at the Northwestern University School of Medicine in Chicago. He is the author, with Maia Szalavitz, of The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, a bestselling book based on his work with maltreated children.

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Please also take a few minutes to wander around Dr. Perry’s website.  Meet The Childtrauma Academy:

A not-for-profit organization, based in Houston, Texas, working to improve the lives of high-risk children through direct service, research and education. We recognize the crucial importance of childhood experience in shaping the health of the individual, and ultimately, society.  By creating  biologically-informed child and family respectful practice, programs and policy, The ChildTrauma Academy seeks to help maltreated and traumatized children.

A major activity of the CTA is to translate emerging findings about the human brain and child development into practical implications for the ways we nurture, protect, enrich, educate and heal children. The “translational neuroscience” work of the CTA has resulted in a range of innovative programs in therapeutic, child protection and educational systems.

The CTA is a Community of Practice. Etienne Wenger, a leading social learning theorist, defines communities of practice as groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. This model has been discussed as optimal for promoting social change in our current complex world. The CTA works to create collaborative working relationships between organizations and individuals to most effectively promote positive change for children.

The CTA started as a typical center of excellence in an academic setting, initially at The University of Chicago and later at Baylor College of Medicine. Over time however, it was clear that the problems of abuse and neglect in children were much more complex and multi-dimensional in ways that our medical model was unable to address.

A medical school centered work group investigating and solving physiological problems in humans makes sense. Solving problems which involve parenting, education, the law, child protection systems, mental health, law enforcement and a host of related systems across every professional discipline is more challenging. In response to this challenge we have created a collaborative, multi-site, interdisciplinary virtual Center of Excellence, The ChildTrauma Academy.

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There is  information on this site about the work this Community of Practice is involved in.  I wish they had a little house for me down there, with big shade trees, lots of flowers, a gentle fountain – and an art therapy studio for me to play in with others – I would be happy to move right in!!

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And, in memory of my Borderline mother, here’s more BPD info –

From Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD, your Guide to Borderline Personality Disorder

Did that subject line get your attention? Very few researchers have explored the relationship between BPD and sexual problems. But, more and more research is finding a link — problems such as sexual avoidance and reckless casual sex may be linked to BPD.

BPD and Sexual Difficulties

BPD symptoms can affect your emotional state, your relationships, and your ability to control your behavior. So, not surprisingly, BPD can have a major impact on your sex life.
Impulsive Behavior in BPD

Impulsivity can be a very troubling aspect of BPD, leading to problems with relationships, physical health, and finances, as well as legal issues.
BPD and Your Physical Health

BPD does not only have an impact on your mental health. People with BPD are more likely to report a variety of physical health problems, and are more likely to need to be hospitalized for medical reasons, than those without BPD.
Conditions Related to Borderline Personality Disorder

Learn more about conditions and disorders that are related to or frequently co-occur with borderline personality disorder.

What is BPD? Symptoms of BPD Diagnosis of BPD Treatment of BPD
Living with BPD

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+HEARING AND HONORING OUR INNER ‘GONG!’

alchemynow2 Comments

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I remember watching a few episodes of The Gong Show many years ago.  It was a terrible show!  But my memory of it comes back to me in my thinking about how I now trust my own inner GONG when I hear it inside of my body, even when I can’t track EXACTLY why it’s obnoxious tones are resonating LOUDLY within me.

When someone says something to me like, “What your mother did to survive in her madness if your life story!” I don’t hear the gong.   When I heard – actually read them in an email – they made me feel ‘fed’.  The truth of these words resonated within me as being the truth.  They felt profound to me and I know they always will.

But in my telephone conversation with a dear friend yesterday, I experienced exactly the opposite reaction.  We were talking about the same thing I wrote about in:  *Age 20 – Horrible visit ‘home’ with my daughter.

My friend, who did not come from a perfect childhood home, still never experienced abuse.  She trained herself with a degree in social work and worked for several years in the field of Child Protection but she rapidly ‘burned out’ and left the profession.

Where, within her own self, her response to me in conversation ACTUALLY came from doesn’t matter to me one single bit.  What matters to me is that as she talked about her response to my experience at age 20 of ‘going home’ again to see my family I heard my inner GONG so loudly it was deafening.  What also matters is that I did not question my reaction, no matter how persistent she was in insisting she was right.

To paraphrase:  “Well, you know what they say.  Anytime someone with a difficult childhood returns home, no matter how long they have been gone, the family – every member present – is likely to instantly return to the familiar roles they played in the family when they were young.”

GONG!

As soon as I heard my inner gong I recognized there was a ‘cultural’ division between what she was saying (based on what ‘experts’ suggest) and what I know about myself, my childhood, and my experience during that age 20 visit.

I did not ‘assume the role’ I had in my family when I was growing up.  My entire being, body-brain-mind and self WAS ‘the role’.  I was built that way.  It wasn’t something I could remove like a suit of clothing, and then step back into.  Not a chance.

Now, here is my dividing line, I bet.  For those of us who suffered extreme attachment-related traumas chronically and terribly from birth, the so-called ‘role’ is built right into our developing body and becomes a part of our physiology.  Therefore, there IS NO ROLE.  In line with the quote I put first in this post, the reactions my mother and father had to me from the moment I was born were not roles, either.  Who I was forced to be, how my growing body was forced to adapt its development, had nothing to do with me ‘playing a role’, either.

The day my father put me on that jetliner headed for Naval boot camp when I was 18 marked the day my physical body exited the ‘stage’ of the ‘drama’ that I had participated in since I was conceived.  When I ‘left’ I obviously took with me the body that had every experience of my first 18 years built into its foundation, right down to the molecular interactions between my cells.

To hear someone outside of my reality refer to my reality as a ‘role’ – well – GONG!

It is extremely affirming and empowering of my SELF HOOD to be so consciously aware of the difference within my entire being-body between my response to ‘the truth’ and ‘the lie’.

I am not saying that for MOST people, who experienced safe and secure attachments during their childhood with SOMEBODY, that the ‘role playing’ description of both in-childhood and post-childhood home-of-origin experiences is not accurate.  But my inner GONG instantly tells me it isn’t true for me – and I no longer have to doubt my own reality for one single instant.

HOW I recognize ‘the lie’ and what that means to me is the subject of this blog.  I just wanted to mention this because it’s fresh in my body-mind.  I am glad I was able to experience my two different reactions so clearly and powerfully within the same week!  The first outsider’s comment resonated harmoniously – I ‘felt felt’.  The second comment created the opposite reaction:  I knew this friend has no clue what my reality was or is – and no matter WHAT I can ever say to her – she never will.

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None of this discussion has anything to do with my potential and efforts toward healing, growth and change.  Nothing about my improved well-being over time has anything to do with my parents – then or now.  They did the damage.  I do the repair.

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+MY ENTERTAINING JOURNEY TO UNDERSTAND THE WORD ‘TABOO’

alchemynow3 Comments

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This is turning out to be the STRANGEST POST I have ever written!  Never could I have imagined where my writing on the subject of “TABOO” would end up going today!  I feel at this instant like I found a mystery I never knew existed because I just found its solution.

It makes me think at this instant of all the strange twists and turns everybody’s life takes, and about how we all take our place somewhere in the long march of human history.  Our lives, and therefore our life stories, touch one another in consequential and seemingly inconsequential ways.

These seemingly random intersections in pathways, these transient transits can have meanings that nobody even notices at the time, but these random acts of touching do mean something even though we can’t comprehend the impact we have on changes that happen continually as the history of our species unfolds itself in space and over time.

Today I am experiencing how this same process can operate within the realm of thought.

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What on earth am I talking about?  I started out today writing this:

TABOO:  What an interesting and unexpected origin for this word, a very latecomer into the modern English language – in 1777!  How did English get this word from a Tongan language?

TABOO

Function: adjective

Etymology: Tongan tabu

Date: 1777

1 : forbidden to profane use or contact because of what are held to be dangerous supernatural powers
2 a : banned on grounds of morality or taste <the subject is taboo> b : banned as constituting a risk <the area beyond is taboo, still alive with explosives — Robert Leckie>

Function: noun

Inflected Form(s): plural taboos also tabus

Date: 1777

1 : a prohibition against touching, saying, or doing something for fear of immediate harm from a supernatural force
2 : a prohibition imposed by social custom or as a protective measure
3 : belief in taboos

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I began my searching to find out what was happening in the world around this 1777 date that might have contributed to the ‘birth’ of this word TABOO from the Tongan  language into the English language at this specific time, and found what seems to be to be a very interesting (strange) and unique connection to my own childhood.

Perhaps ONLY because I grew up around Anchorage, Alaska for much of my childhood did I recognize the name of Captain James Cook as it appeared here and there within my wandering internet information search.

Anchorage sits on the shores of an inlet named Cook Inlet after this famous British Naval officer seafaring explorer.  All fine and good, but how could I possibly know that he would make an appearance in my search through history for the origins of our English word – TABOO?

WHO WAS THIS MAN?

Well, for starters, here’s an account of his wanderings according to THE ENCHANTED LEARNING WEBSITE:

“James Cook (October 27, 1728 – February 14, 1779) was a British explorer and astronomer who went on many expeditions to the Pacific Ocean, the Antarctic, the Arctic, and around the world.

Cook’s first journey lasted from August 26,1768 to July 13, 1771.  He sailed on the Endeavor from Plymouth, England, to Brazil, around Cape Horn (the southern tip of South America), and to Tahiti (April 11, 1769), where he stayed for months in order to observe the transit of Venus as it passed between the Earth and the Sun (in order to determine the distance from the Earth to the Sun).  Cook was also searching for a large, southern continent that was thought to exist (but does not).

“Cook sailed to New Zealand on October 6,1769, where he and his crew fought with the Maori (the earliest inhabitants of New Zealand) and mapped much of the two major islands (the strait between these two islands is now named Cook Strait) and showed that is was not part of a larger southern continent.

(See also:  Discontentment Brews Over The Genographic Project — “Along with other indigenous populations, the Maori of New Zealand have objected to the use of their DNA on the grounds that it might disprove some of the stories about their origins that have been passed down from generation to generation.”)

“He then sailed to and mapped eastern and northern Australia (The Endeavor was stuck for a day on the Great Barrier Reef off northeastern Australia; the ship was damaged by coral and almost sank). They repaired the ship in northern Queensland, Australia (the site of Cooktown and the mouth of the Endeavor River), completing the repairs on August 6, 1770.

“Cook’s second expedition (1772-1775) took him to Antarctica and to Easter Island on a voyage intended to show there was no large southern continent. Cook’s two ships on this voyage were the Resolution and the Adventure.

“Cook’s last expedition (1776-1779) was a search for a Northwest Passage across northern North America to Asia – he searched from the Pacific Ocean side of the continent.  Cook sailed from England on July 12, 1776, on the Resolution. Officers on the ship included George Vancouver and William Bligh (who would later be the captain of the Bounty and have his crew mutiny).

“Cook arrived at Capetown, South Africa, on October 18, 1776, and sailed to the Indian Ocean and on to New Zealand (in early 1777), the Cook Islands, and Tonga. Heading for Alaska, Cook sailed to and named the Christmas Islands (arriving on December 25, 1777, hence the name). He then sailed to and named the Sandwich Islands (named for the Earl of Sandwich, one of Cook’s patrons). Cook searched for a Northwest Passage in Alaska, but was unsuccessful.

“Cook was killed by a mob on Feb. 14, 1779, on the Sandwich Islands (now called Hawaii). At the time, he was trying to take the local chief hostage to get the natives to return a stolen sailboat. The ship returned to England without Cook on October 4, 1780.

“Cook was the first ship’s captain to stop the disease scurvy (now known to be caused by a lack of vitamin C) among sailors by providing them with fresh fruits. Before this, scurvy had killed or incapacitated many sailors on long trips.”

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This next description of Cook’s travels comes from the writing of Murray Lundberg, in her paper, Captain James Cook in Alaska:

“Captain Cook is universally regarded as one of the most ambitious explorers of all time – in particular, his three expeditions in 1768-1771, 1772-1775, and 1776-1779 accomplished an impressive list of “firsts,” including the first European sighting of Hawaii. While his exploration of the coast of Alaska in 1778 was not one of his greatest accomplishments, it added an enormous amount of information to the blank spots on the maps of the northern coast.

“Born on October 27, 1728, Cook rose rapidly through the ranks after joining the Royal Navy in 1755. He received his promotions the hard way, through sheer determination and ability, with no powerful connections to assist him. After serving in several battles against the French, his mapping abilities earned him a posting as surveyor of Newfoundland, and for the same skill, he was appointed to his first expedition command in 1768. During this first voyage he conducted the first detailed mapping of Tahiti and New Zealand.

“On his second voyage, Cook had made one of the great non-discoveries of the age, arriving home with proof that Terra Australis Incognita, the continent that was imagined to be in the southern hemisphere to balance the Earth, did not exist. He was also able to conclusively prove that with a high level of cleanliness and a proper diet, scurvy could be prevented, regardless of the length of time spent at sea.

“The primary reason for organizing another expedition for 1776 was to find the fabled Northwest Passage, a trading route across the top of North America, from Europe to the Orient. Over the previous 280 years, dozens of unsuccessful expeditions had been launched – so important was the discovery of this route that a £20,000 prize had been offered by Britain. Although Cook had been given an honourary shore posting in gratitude for his previous service, and was not initially considered to lead this new expedition, the prize money must surely have been a consideration in his offer on January 9, 1776 to lead the expedition.

“The 462-ton Resolution finally left England on July 12, 1776, eight days after the Declaration of Independence had been signed on the opposite side of the Atlantic. At Plymouth Sound on June 30th, Cook had encountered 3 warships and 62 troop transports heading for the revolution on the east coast of North America.

“Following months exploring the South Pacific, the coast of New Albion was sighted on March 6, 1778, south of present-day Newport, Oregon. Three weeks later, after fighting violent weather, Cook arrived at Nootka Sound (he named it St. George’s Sound) on March 29, making the Resolution the first British ship on the Northwest Coast.

(For the detailed 1778 dates of Cook’s Alaskan route see HERE.)

The Demise of Captain James Cook

“October 30 – the last view of Alaska for Cook, as they pass Umnak Island in a storm.  November 26 – sights Maui.  On February 14, 1779, Captain James Cook was killed at Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii, along with Royal Marine Corporal John Thomas, Privates Theophilus Hinks, John Allen and Tom Fatchett, and many Hawaiians. Cook’s body was dismembered and burned, but the remains were returned to Captain Clerke, who had taken over command on the Resolution and the expedition, despite being so ill that he could barely stand. On February 21, 1779 as much of Cook’s remains as could be recovered were buried at sea.”   VIEW IMAGE HERE

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Where on EARTH was Captain Cook in 1777, the year Webster’s dictionary states the word TABOO appeared in the modern English language?

It turns out that in this year in question, given all of the extremely important historical events that were taking place on America’s shores during this time period, Captain James Cook was a long ways away – on our very small world.

In 1777 Captain Cook and his crew were in the Kingdom of Tonga (today’s population about 101,000) in the South Pacific about one-third of the way from New Zealand to Hawaiʻi.

– The Maoris of New Zealand were first encountered by Europeans during Captain Cook’s 1772-73 voyage.

– February 10, 1777 – Captain James Cook with Resolution and Discovery sighted New Zealand just south of Cape Farewell on his third voyage

– February 12, 1977 – Captain James Cook’s Resolution along with the Discovery arrived at Queen Charlotte Sound

– February 26, 1777 – Captain James Cook’s final departure from New Zealand on the Resolution along with Discovery (on his 3rd voyage)

(The above three date-related facts are cited here from The New Zealand chronology compiled by John Mitchell)

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Before I finally realized how significant  the travels of Captain James Cook actually WERE in regard to the history of the word TABOO’s appearance into English, I had compiled the following 1777-era information:

– 1777 – Napoleon Bonaparte celebrated his 8th birthday this same year his father Nobile Carlo Buonaparte, an attorney, was named Corsica’s representative to the court of Louis XVI in France.

– 1777 – The first step was taken by playwrights in 1777 that led to the French Assembly passing the first law in the world to officially recognize authors’ rights to their written words.

– January 1777 – In Salzburg, Austria, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (born January 27, 1756) wrote a piece that, for the first time, proclaimed him to be not merely one of the best composers in Europe, but one of music’s greatest geniuses.

– 1777 – The Organization of the Atlantic Slave Trade in Yorubaland, ca.1777 to ca.1856 – (see:  African bondage in the colonies north of the Mason-Dixon Line)

In America:

– September 5, 1774 – The First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia’s Carpenters Hall

– March 6, 1775 – Prince Hall and fourteen other Free Blacks became members of the British Army Lodge No 441.  Prince Hall faced discrimination and was not allowed to join the White Masonic lodges in America, “Even though these Masons preached brotherhood, they insisted on keeping Blacks out of their lodges.”  In response to their refusal, Prince Hall turned to the British Masons stationed in America. The creation of the first African Masonic Lodge came about due to the unrelenting efforts of Prince Hall and these fourteen others who were taking the “initial steps to form America’s first Black institution”.  Prentice Hall drafted the 1777 petition for a Gradual Process of Emancipation for slaves in America.

(Our family-history rumor mill has it that we have Free Mason involvement on both my father’s and my mother’s sides of the family orchard.)

– April 19, 1775 – The American Revolution began in 1775 with the “shot heard round the world” fired at Lexington on April 19, 1775. The Revolution lasted eight and a half years and finally ended on September 3, 1783, with America and the King of England signing the Treaty of Paris.

– July 4, 1776 – The United States Declaration of Independence is a statement adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, which announced that the thirteen American colonies then at war with Great Britain were now independent states, and thus no longer a part of the British Empire. Written primarily by Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration is a formal explanation of why Congress had voted on July 2 to declare independence from Great Britain, more than a year after the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War. The birthday of the United States of America—Independence Day—is celebrated on July 4, the day the wording of the Declaration was approved by Congress, even though it was not until after the American Revolution ended that we won our independence.

– 1777 – “The year 1777 was probably the most perilous period in the “beginning of the nation,” and marked one of the great crises of the world’s history.”

– January 1777 –  Considered to be a month of epochal events in world history. In the bitter cold of New Jersey, George Washington and his ragtag band of soldiers saved the American Revolution from collapse.

– 1777 – Vermont becomes the first U.S. territory to abolish slavery.

– January 13, 1777 –  Prince Hall and seven other African American men petition the Massachusetts legislature for freedom based on the stated principles of the Declaration of Independence and military service in the Revolutionary War.  They directly challenged the commonwealth of Massachusetts’ government to live up to the principles of liberty and rights which had been set forth less than a year before in the Declaration of Independence. (see:  Slavery in Early America 1777-1829)

– June 14, 1977 – The Marine Committee of the Second Continental Congress passed the Flag Resolution which stated: “Resolved, That the flag of the United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new Constellation.”

– November 15, 1777 – Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, customarily referred to as the Articles of Confederation, which was the first constitution of the United States of America and legally established the union of the states. The Second Continental Congress, as the government of the new United States of America, appointed a committee to draft the Articles in June 1776 and sent the draft to the states for ratification in November 1777. Under the Articles, Congress was the sole authority of the new national government.

1777 – Most of the world was skeptical about the effectiveness and of vaccinations. Still, George Washington had the entire Continental Army vaccinated against smallpox. Having only 1,000 men at the time he couldn’t afford to lose any to sickness.
December 17, 1777 – At Valley Forge in Pennsylvania, the Continental Army led by Washington sets up winter quarters.

– 1777 – Morocco became the first country in the world to grant diplomatic recognition to the United State.

My father’s ancestors on his mother’s side were already living on this land.  (His mother was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.)

– 1778 – Virginia abolishes the slave trade

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So here I reach a point where I have to wonder, for all the important contributions Captain James Cook made in his life, is it the introduction of this TABOO from its Tongan roots the most noteworthy of them all?

Did Captain Cook pick up this word on his voyage, or did some member of his crew?  Was it carried as a living yet invisible cargo across the seas to English speaking lands so that it planted itself into our language and sprouted into the powerful concept that it is in governing the moral behaviors of our people?

I cannot imagine that accepted social and cultural beliefs didn’t already exist to govern behavior before this word appeared in our language, but what word did we use prior to 1777 to name them?

I find this as I look at Tongan related languages at Wickipedia:

Tongan is one of the many languages in the Polynesian branch of the Austronesian languages, along with Hawaiian, Maori, Samoan and Tahitian, for example. Together with Niuean, it forms the Tongic subgroup of Polynesian. By comparing Tongic to the other subgroup, Nuclear Polynesian, it is possible to reconstruct the phonology of Proto-Polynesian, the theoretical source of the Polynesian languages.

There are three registers which consist of

  • ordinary words (the normal language)
  • honorific words (the language for the chiefs)
  • regal words (the language for the king)

There are also further distinctions between

  • polite words (used for more formal contexts)
  • derogatory words (used for informal contexts, or to indicate humility)

And yet, 233 years after TABOO supposedly appeared as a formal member of the modern English family, when I typed the word into this site nothing came back to me.

FREELANG Tongan-English and English-Tongan online dictionary

That’s like calling an important and familiar telephone number and receiving the recording, “The number you have dialed has been disconnected or is no longer in service.”

Yet, again at Wickipedia, I found an entire page devoted to the facts about our English word TABOO and its origins in the Tongan language:

A taboo is a strong social prohibition (or ban) relating to any area of human activity or social custom that is sacred and forbidden based on moral judgment and sometimes even religious beliefs. Breaking the taboo is usually considered objectionable or abhorrent by society. The term comes from the Tongan language, and appears in many Polynesian cultures.

In those cultures, a tabu (or tapu or kapu) often has specific religious associations. When an activity or custom is taboo, it is forbidden and interdictions are implemented concerning it, such as the ground set apart as a sanctuary for criminals.

Some taboo activities or customs are prohibited under law and transgressions may lead to severe penalties. Other taboos result in embarrassment, shame, and rudeness. Although critics and/or dissenters may oppose taboos, they are put into place to avoid disrespect to any given authority, be it legal, moral and/or religious.

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Well, will you look at this!  I would have completely missed this entire amazing adventure and thrilling journey I just completed (coming full circle in my search and ending up ‘back home’ – Play song from Lala.com) had I just searched on Wickipedia for this word TABOO in the first place!  This MAKES ME REALLY CHUCKLE (I must be easily entertained!)

Etymology

Common etymology traces taboo to the Tongan word tapu[1][2] or the Fijian word tabu[3] meaning “under prohibition”, “not allowed”, or “forbidden”.[3]

In its current use in Tonga, the word tapu also means “sacred” or “holy”, often in the sense of being restricted or protected by custom or law.

In the main island of the Kingdom of Tonga, where the greater portion of the population reside within the capital Nuku’alofa, the word is often appended to the end of “Tonga”, making the word “Tongatapu”, where local use it as “Sacred South” rather than “forbidden south”.

The use of taboo in English dates back to 1777 when English explorer, Captain James Cook, visited Tonga

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I was RIGHT, though.  I feel like I was challenged to a quest, without being given any clues about how to successfully complete it and accomplish my mission – and I DID IT RIGHT!

In the process I used an invisible resource:  My personal connection to Captain James Cook as his name has been assigned to Cook Inlet that hugs the mudflat shore of Anchorage, Alaska.

What, in the end here, strikes me personally as most critically important on my search to understand the word TABOO and its relationship ESPECIALLY to abuse and maltreatment of newborn infants and very young children, is that this word, now living in BOTH languages of Tongan and English – belongs within the realm of  – “sacred” or “holy” – and cannot be severed in its roots, origin, meaning or truth from the states of being it refers to.

As I pursue my writing, I realize that social and cultural relationships to what is “restricted or protected by custom or law” does change over time.  The information available in the mainstream about infant-child abuse in the 1950s during my earliest years of childhood was no doubt nearly nonexistent.

That does not mean that the moral, commonsense, instinctive awareness of right and wrong did not exist.  That does not mean that the nervous system-brain connections, especially in relation to the human vagus nerve system did not alert MOST people to actions that stimulated shame, embarrassment – and most importantly for my topic of severe infant-child abuse – REMORSE – for millennium before TABOO traveled its long watery journey into modern English.

What I feel as one branch of my personal ‘mission’ as a severe infant-child abuse survivor is to help people understand that without the physiological ability to feel remorse, behavior toward and treatment of children (and adults) will not be governed in anything like a normal way by any social standards – TABOO ones or not.

These people DO exist, and it’s time for all of us to realize that they are not JUST lurking in the shadows with axes in their hands waiting to butcher the unsuspecting masses.  We need to remove the TABOO against the IDEA of sociopathy and psychopathy (as we need to remove the taboo-based concepts about ‘mental illness’ as a whole).

At this point in my life, both as a survivor of an 18-year childhood of severe abuse and trauma and as a fairly intelligent researcher-thinker, I understand that the issue is NOT helped by asking questions about whether someone has a so-called ‘conscience’ or not.

That, to me, is a stupid and useless position to assume in one’s thinking about perpetration of crimes against humanity.  On the other hand, it is most realistic and useful in my opinion to start learning about trauma-altered developmental changes that happen during early infant-childhood years that cause people to grow into a body that is NOT PHYSIOLOGICALLY capable of experiencing REMORSE (or related physiologically-based states like true embarrassment).

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My mother was an educated, articulate, gregarious, gorgeous ‘socially acceptable’ woman.  My professional father fit a similar profile.  That my mother was a hair’s breadth away from axe murdering me was an invisible fact to the world.  She never, not one single time in 18 years of severely abusing me, EVER considered that what she was doing was wrong.  Not once.  Her brain did not process the right information to reach that conclusion.  She was not built that way.

As a consequence, OF COURSE she never felt remorse.  In her world any TABOO that might have existed for everyone else did not even cast a shadow into the universe of her mind or her home.

Along with my intention to broadcast this fact as widely as I possibly can, I also want to say that our societal and cultural TABOO against thinking anything ‘bad’ about one’s parents HAS GOT TO GO!  It has to die a permanent cultural death.

In fact, we need to rise to a new cultural height where it will be considered TABOO NOT to tell the truth about abuse of children (and I know parental abuse of children can continue for the lifespan of both the parent and their offspring).

We need to overcome our cultural TABOOS against recognizing the fact that there are adults who TERRORIZE children.

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+A REFRESHER ON ATTACHMENT AND RESILIENCY

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In writing about attachment as the patterns present in the narration of one’s life story reflect the patterns of secure or insecure attachments, I just came again across this book:

A User’s Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain by John J. Ratey (I am referencing from the Vintage 2001 edition)

with this important statement:

“”Some stress makes us tougher in the face of future adversity.  There is even research that shows that exposure to reasonable challenges during childhood alters the balance of brain chemicals so that children are able to respond better to stress later in life.”  (page 365)

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This statement, of course, brings questions to mind for those of us who certainly NEVER experienced anything like ‘reasonable challenges’ during our abusive infant-childhoods.  If ‘reasonable challenges’ during childhood can alter ‘the balance of brain chemicals’, imagine what happened to us!!

But, to move to what Ratey covers next  — which includes a description of how important secure attachments are to children — perhaps most significantly for children who do NOT have safe and secure attachments with their primary caregivers.  Ratey also mentions the importance of secure attachment in adulthood:

“Houston psychologist Emmy Werner found evidence for this when she studied the offspring of chronically poor, alcoholic, and abusive parents to understand how failure was passed from one generation to the next.  To her surprise, one-third of the children ended up leading more productive lives than their parents.

“Many social scientists now suggest that while we must continue to study children who fail, there may be much more to learn from children who succeed despite adversity.  Such children, researchers find, are not simply born that way.

“The presence of a variety of positive influences in their lives often makes the difference between a child who fails and one who thrives.  The implications are profound; parents, teachers, volunteers, peers, and all those who are in contact with children can create a pathway to resiliency.

“Werner later studied women who overcame adversity in their adult lives.  She found that several factors made the difference:  at least one person who gave them unconditional love and acceptance; a sense of faith in themselves; the willingness to seek support; and finally, hope.”  (page 365)

See also by Emmy Werner:  Resilience: A Universal Capacity

Related posts:

*RESILIENCY – WHY I’M ALIVE – NOT A MYSTERY

+ATTACHMENT – HOW WE ARE WHO WE ARE

A search of this blog on RESILIENCY HERE for more related posts

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resiliency.chap1.id

A search of this blog on RESILIENCY HERE for more related posts

+LINK TO A WHOPPER OF A TALE ABOUT TELLING OUR TALE

alchemynow3 Comments

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I didn’t create the hell of my childhood.  I didn’t create the changes that hell forced upon my growing and developing body-brain.  I might like what happened to me.  Others might not like to hear about it.  But this IS my story – And I’m Sticking To It.  (Play song from Lala.com)

Here is a link for the brave among you readers who have a vested interest in thinking about your own life in terms of the narrative life story you TELL and the one you COULD TELL.  Because the inability to tell (narrate) a coherent life story is considered to be the NUMBER ONE symptom of an insecure attachment (which any of us with severe early abuse in our lives are EXTREMELY likely to have), thinking about the telling of our story has a critically important purpose:

Healing our self will heal the telling of our story (making it more coherent), and improving the coherency of the telling of our life story helps heal us!  (Think infinity sign)

There are a LOT of words at the other end of this link!  But what is telling a life story about if it’s not about WORDS?

The topic is personally important to me because I am stuck with a Catch-22 in that I want to make a book from my experience.  A book is SUPPOSED to be coherent, yet my #1 symptom of having a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment pattern due to early and long term severe infant-childhood abuse took away my ability to tell a coherent life story in the first place!  (That’s sort of a broken infinity sign situation!)

So, in working to put my book(s) together I am thinking about words related to this whole process.  How it all got broken and how this might all be repaired is part of what I write about at this link.  Feel free to scan rather than read it, but perhaps there is something in here that you might find of interest:

*THE MEANING OF MENDING OUR LIFE STORY

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+WHAT IF AN ABUSIVE CHILDHOOD IS JUST TOO SIMPLE?

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What if Chinese biophysicists are right?  What if “…our consciousness is subject to evolutionary development…?”  Popp, 254

What if Dr. Martin Teicher is right?  What if severe child abuse in a malevolent environment creates an “evolutionarily altered brain?”

What if the second happens directly because the first does?

I was thinking about increased complexity as a good thing in life.  I was thinking that my mother was too simple.  She created an environment that was too simple for me.  As a result of this, I got a changed body-brain – a different one from hers, obviously, but one like hers because we each shared related experiences as we developed.

The simple, unconsciously-driven world of my mother’s and mine went like this:  “Let’s play a game.  I’ll be the mean monster mother who hates and hurts you.  You try to survive me.”

Day after day, week in, week out, year in and year out.  Same old game.  Nothing original in that!  Nothing that increased the complexity of our relationship.  Nothing that fed an increase in complex communication between us.  Nothing that challenged me to THINK.

Of course the isolation my mother enforced for me kept me from developing any diverse and increasingly complex relationships with anyone else, either.

Popp, the Chinese biophysicist mentioned above, also writes about a theory that – “essentially claims that the guide-line of evolution is the expansion of coherent states.”

Nothing very coherent about my mother’s state, and thus, because she had kept so much control over me from birth, was there much coherence in my state, or in our relationship.  Just the same old ‘game’ repeated over and over again.

When I think about an ‘evolutionarily altered brain’ the way Teicher describes it, I think about far earlier years in the experience of our species when ‘group think’ had not evolved into ‘individual think’.  Considering our species has only had spoken language for about 140,000 years, it doesn’t take much imagination to picture communication happening back then in far more simple and primitive ways.

(‘Group think’, to me, has different boundaries.  My mother included me as a part of her group – not mine.  Actually, she and I were an enmeshed group of one!  Her – and me as her projection.  I could not escape to become a separate more complex and differentiated person – like constantly fighting being sucked into a black hole – unable to escape a gravitational pull.  An individual has to become increasingly differentiated from the ‘group’ – or we remain (develop into) a more ‘ancient’ being than a ‘modern’ one.)

So, what if simply put, both mine and my mother’s childhoods were just too primitive and simple:  Survive?  Hard to get increased complexity (and a matching ‘evolutionarily advanced brain’) out of that situation!

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+TRANSPARENCY AND MY CHANGED SOCIAL BRAIN

alchemynow1 Comment

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My sister gave me some valuable and insightful feedback last night in a telephone conversation about my writing and about this blog.  She spends far more time than I do reading other people’s blog writing – on far different topics that what I write about.  But what she told me fits in with something I have been thinking about a lot recently:  What do humans show to one another and what do they hide?

I have mentioned recently how much I am enjoying the Netflix gift subscription my children have given to me as I stream the Australian television series, “McLeod’s Daughters” and watch some of it daily.  Perhaps I so thoroughly enjoy watching this series because it portrays very confident and capable women ranchers, perhaps because it portrays country living, perhaps because it is about a culture that is certainly ‘western’ in that everyone speaks English and shares a background similar enough to mind that I don’t have to stretch very far to imagine the story but does not come from an American-Hollywood perspective.

But ultimately what I am most enjoying about this series is that it offers me the opportunity to watch ‘ordinary’ people interacting with one another.  It’s the same reason I love the movie, “The Secret Garden.”  I can’t count the number of times I’ve watched this movie because from it I can glimpse a little bit of what it might be like to be a child.

The truth is, I don’t have any more personal information about what being a child is/was like than I do about what being an adult is REALLY like.  I missed that show when it came to town.  I was too busy surviving being tortured, tormented, terrified, overwhelmed, traumatized and isolated as an infant-child and then trying to make my way through my adulthood as a confused survivor.

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What this has to do with ‘writing a book’ and the conversation I had with my sister last night is that I will never be able to write a single word that comes from a so-called ‘ordinary’ point of view.  I have often written about ‘the spectrum of abuse’, but today I am not feeling that as a linear concept.  I am feeling it as a circle.

Those of my readers here who suffered from parental abuse that happened within a context of true madness will always be most qualified to understand what I say and the way that I say it.  I cannot, however, offer anything to anyone if I don’t get to a place of knowing and accepting that I (and the readers I mention) are in a narrow percentage range having to do with surviving ‘the worst possible childhoods.’

I don’t want to be in some vague exclusive group.  I never wanted that from the moment I was born to my mad, mean mother.  But it happened, and I AM there.

My sister was describing to me aspects of my blog writing that she sees as being ‘different from others’.  I am not sure that I exactly understand what she said to me, but I think it had something to do with TRANSPARENCY.  In watching the actions and interactions of people on “McLeod’s Daughters” I am learning something about the reality of the social species I belong to.  I can do it far more safely than is possible when I am in interaction with REAL people because I am not expected to say or do anything as I watch.

The concept of TRANSPARENCY in my writing has to do with how much I disclose in my writing versus how much I ‘hide’ from public view.  It has to do with my inability to participate in any ordinary way in social interactions.

I have written far more about the early developing EMOTIONAL right limbic brain through very early infant-caregiver interactions than I have about THIS SAME BRAIN REGION as it governs SOCIAL interactions.  In fact, emotional cannot physiologically be split off and separated from social.

When I say “I cannot read or respond normally to social cues,” I mean it.  That inability cannot help but show itself in my writing.  I simply have no concept of ‘filters’ or ‘screening’ of information that evidently ordinary-built people do normally.

I see this filtering all the time on “McLeod’s Daughters” as the characters are shown to have inner thoughts, feelings, motivations, intentions and ‘blockages’ that the watcher is privy to but that the individual characters do not know about one another.

This has to do with the early developing emotional-social brain (and all its corresponding nervous system connections) that are involved in the development of what is called Theory of Mind.  To be extremely blunt about this topic, mammal Theory of Mind is just as real as ‘human’ Theory of Mind.  My mother’s abuse of me interfered with my developing even as rudimentary a Theory of Mind as a dog or a monkey might have.

And this will always show in my writing just as surely as having an altered brain-mind development is a sure sign of the presence of an Autistic-spectrum person’s relationship with self and others.

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So when I say today that suddenly I feel the ‘abuse spectrum’ exists in a circle rather than ‘on a line’, I am saying that ALL Theory of Mind processes, ALL human interactions happen through ‘social-emotional’ brain processes that were built into it from the start of our life by social interactions with caregivers.  All these social interactions happen within social-societal environments.

If you follow any circle around far enough from the point of origin we will come back to the beginning.  Those of us in the far extreme away from normal-ordinary early caregiver interactions are simply closer to the starting point of the RANGE of what is humanly possible.

What is normal-ordinary is socially defined.  At the same time I can say that I am extremely limited in my ability to interact socially in normal-ordinary ways with other people (or with myself), and therefore am dis-abled to fit into mainstream human society, I can also say that I am en-abled to operate in a very different way that so-called normal and ordinary people cannot begin to imagine.

As I watch the Australian dramas unfold on “McLeod’s Daughters” what I am ACTUALLY WATCHING is the keeping and sharing of SECRETS.  What I see is that evidently adults not only keep secrets from other people, they keep them from their own self.  This, to me, quite simply means that the ‘legal tender’ of normal-ordinary human social interactions on ALL levels is about the TRUTH.

Who has the truth?  Who knows the truth?  When will the truth be revealed?  How will the truth finally appear?  Will the truth ever be discovered?  What is the truth, anyway?  What happens when the truth finally pops out – one way or the other?  What power does the truth have to change people’s lives?  What power does keeping the truth secret have on people’s lives?

Is all truth equal?  Are all secrets equal?  When does the truth appear accidentally?  When does it appear intentionally and why?  Who knows what about whom?  And on and on and on social interactions seem to go.

Theory of Mind then becomes about this whole connected circle that exists between having secrets, keeping secrets, revealing secrets, hiding the truth, knowing the truth — or not.  It seems people have a variety of techniques for keeping this circle broken, for keeping the truth a secret – or not.  It seems that their are an infinite number of ways that these patterns of truth-secret interactions play themselves out.

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My transparency comes from my having experienced so much abuse, trauma and isolation that none of these physiological circuits ever developed within me in the first place.  When ‘self help’ writers talk about survivors of ‘dysfunctional childhoods’ having no clue what ‘normal’ is – so they have to ‘guess what normal is’ – I cringe now.

The most important truth here has not been revealed by these writers.  Some of us were formed in environments that were so far from being socially normal-ordinary that we never received the social-emotional information during our development that would have put these normal-ordinary social circuits into play.  So – they aren’t there and they never will be.  We are a different sort of human.  I am a different sort of human.

I am on the far extreme of the social-game interaction circle.  I did not develop WITHIN that arena.  I was always on the outside, I AM on the outside, and I will ALWAYS be on the outside.  I can ‘watch and learn’ about how humans interact about as effectively as a high-functioning Autistic person can.  I watch and try to learn about social interactions around REAL humans equally as I do with television and movie people.

But I have no more illusions or delusions that anything I will ever be able to do will let me BE on the inside of that circle.  As a consequence of being a survivor of early abuse on the far end of the abuse-spectrum, I simply will never have the same in-formation that less abuse or non abused people have built into them.

It is here that my ability becomes my disability, right where the whole circle of what is socially possible for my species connects itself:  I can both know what I am NOT SUPPOSED to know about others at the same time I don’t know what I am SUPPOSED to know.

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According to developmental-attachment experts, I am in the small percentage of people who have a ‘disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder’.  Looking at myself from this ‘whole circle’ perspective, I can say that of course having the experience of operating with a completely different social-emotional brain puts me at a disadvantage when and if I find I need to interact with people who are, themselves, different than I am.

But because the social mainstream was built ordinarily, they set the rules.  What is normal for them is NOT normal for me and vice verso.  Because of what I now know about this whole subject, I can OFTEN watch people who interact with me express their confusion and disarray as they try to understand my reactions and interactions.  We speak a different language – and most of the time, unless I am interacting with people who care about me greatly, there is simply not enough time or opportunity for the TRANSLATION to occur.

Communication between species members is most efficient and effective when the arena is a shared one, when the ground rules are known and understood, and when everyone participating is on equal (shared-learned-understood) ground.

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The topic gets really complicated at this point.  It seems that human interactions are meant to negotiate power, competence, status and connectedness.  This all happens within a shared Theory of Mind arena that allows patterns of truth-revelation and secret-keeping to operate.  These patterns, it seems to me, help to define who is who, who is a self, how they are a self, what self they are with whom.  These patterns define the individual self, the group self, the connections of the self to others as members of a social species.

Being as TRANSPARENT as I am sets me apart from all of these patterns of interactions.  Am I sitting at the table with other people playing cards with no cards in my hand?  With a hand full of wild cards?  Trump cards?  Crap cards?  Am I playing with the same number of cards as others have?  Are all my cards showing to others?  Are all their cards showing to me?

What am I supposed to pretend?  What am I supposed to know, or not know?  What am I supposed to hide?  What am I supposed to reveal?  To whom, when, under what conditions?  How am I supposed to KNOW?

By connecting the trauma/abuse spectrum ends together into a full circle range of human social interactional patterns together, I would guess that if everyone was raised the way I was, everyone would be about as transparent as I am.  How would power and the boundaries of selfhood and connection-disconnection with others be negotiated then?

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Related post:

+DEGREES OF CHANGEABLITY = HOW WELL WE CAN PLAY THE CARD GAME OF LIFE?

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