Tag: recovery

+WHAT DO I DO ABOUT NEEDING TO BE RESCUED, OR NEEDING TO RESCUE?

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The real world we all live in is not a perfect place.  Our species knows this.  We have evolved to be able to respond appropriately to threat when at all possible, using any means possible.  I know this.  Yet today something new and different seems to be entering my thinking – through reactions I can feel throughout my entire body.  Surviving malevolent and threatening conditions means that we are able to rescue ourselves.  Because we are a social species, we are perhaps equally prepared through our physiological makeup to rescue someone else.

Nature wants each one of us to survive so that we can reproduce offspring in order than our species endures.  First and foremost our instinct is probably to preserve our own life.  But perhaps preserving the life of another member of our species is also so engrained within us that we cannot – truly – separate the two.

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We have a tendency in today’s modern American culture to separate and divide everything into its proper container.  Doing so, however, is not always best for us.  Often we ‘cut off our nose to spite our face’.  Being the abused daughter of a severe Borderline taught me this.  My mother’s brain-mind could not tolerate either ambiguity.  In her ‘either-or’ universe good was always separated from bad.  Godly was separated from evil.  No opposite or duality could exist in the home of her Borderline mind – and because of this ‘all hell broke loose’ in our home, and I paid the highest price.

We often speak of abuse in terms of victim and perpetrator.  Those are among the ‘split archetypes’ where one single whole become split in two, causing serious imbalances of power.  We can also think in terms of the one who wounds and the one who heals the wounds.  Those concepts also reflect a broken archetype of wholeness.  I believe that a split can also occur between one who rescues and one who needs rescuing, a split that can easily occur in homes where violence, abuse and unresolved trauma reign supreme.

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Nature has designed our species so that some members are naturally more than others to be able to protect, defend and rescue.  It is under malevolent, threatening, endangering and traumatic conditions that the widest difference between the two can be seen.  Nature does not intend that threat remains a chronic, persistent condition.  That would wear out even the toughest of us – and does, as chronic stress responses tell us even in our modern culture.

The trauma of severe, early and chronic child abuse creates a situation where the most abused child becomes the least able to rescue their self or anyone else.  The lesser abused, or non-abused siblings are left in a chronic state of needing to be rescuers – whether they know it or not.  This ‘split archetype’ of rescuer and one needing rescue will most likely follow all child abuse survivors into adulthood, and will play itself out over and over again in the unresolved trauma dramas of our lives.

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How do I heal that split within my self today?  How do I recognize and begin to change this fundamental trauma-related archetypal split within myself?

It struck me today that being cut off from contact with the man I love leaves me without reprieve from my fundamental overwhelming sadness.  Although neither he nor I realized at the time what was happening when I was with him and experienced peace and joy in his presence, I am beginning today to realize that when I was with him, he rescued me.

The overwhelming pain and sadness within me was put there as a result of early, severe and chronic child abuse.  It has remained an essential part of my deepest physiological body and being ever since.  I felt peace and joy I had never felt before when I was with that man.  Being with him banished my pain.  But if I wasn’t split within myself between the ‘one who needs rescuing’ and the ‘one who rescues’, I know I would not have experienced that relationship with that man in exactly this same way.

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How do I achieve a balance between these two aspects of the archetype of being ‘O.K. in the world’?  Where is the confidence, and the competence I need to rescue myself?  How do I find my place in a safe and secure world, as a safely and securely attached person, so that I no longer carry the traumas of a malevolent, dangerous world of threat and deprivation within me?

Quite frankly, I don’t think I can possibly ever achieve a full balance such as I am describing, because the trauma not only built my body, but built itself into me.  The best I can hope for is probably to be able to recognize what is happening to me as it is happening.  I see that someone who has always been in the rescuer role is probably equally as split off from being weak, needy, vulnerable and NOT confident and competent.  So the healing must be to aim for the balance between these two extremes – no matter where and how they originated in our bodies, brains and lives in the first place.

We CAN become more consciously aware of being in the kind of a world that makes ‘being rescued’ even an issue.  Living in a primarily safe and secure world means that the need to be rescued or to be a rescuer can remain mostly invisible, to be called upon only in time of current crisis.  I suspect that Posttraumatic Stress Disorder keeps the archetype present in the first place, and then contributes to its fundamental split in the second place.  To know this, I believe, is an important step in finding ways to alter these powerful patterns.

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+1965 LETTER MY MOTHER WROTE TO DAD – THIS TIME WE ARE IN TUCSON WITHOUT HIM 1965

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While I am amazed that so many of my mother’s letters have survived, and am grateful for the window into our childhood that they provide, I am at the same time disappointed to find that the only letters that remain for 1965 are the ones written between October and December.  The events surrounding mother’s pregnancy with her 6th baby, the events of the following winter, spring, summer and fall seem to be gone.  All that remains are the few that I will transcribe and post at

*1965 MOTHER’S LETTERS

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Our family went south to Santa Fe, New Mexico the fall of 1963 and back to Alaska that same fall.  This time, in the fall of 1965 we went to Tucson, Arizona — again without my father who stayed in Alaska to work.  This was my 9th grade year of high school.  We started school late, and stayed in Tucson for the school year.

My parents had another son in between these two trips south.  Not enough money remains a monster issue.  Here again in this letter my mother talks about her needs — now that she’s 40 — with no idea how to get them met.

I do not believe the married, mothering life suited my mother’s personality — above and beyond the mental illness — I don’t think being responsible to and for others was her “thing.”  I think she felt trapped and unfulfilled in many ways.  Few women of her generation realized that they had the choice to remain single — and selfish.  But for better or worse, not only did she ‘stay’, she kept on having babies.  How much of our lives really IS CHOICE?

Do we have permission to access different choices today than what our parents realized they had?  Nobody ever told me I had a choice not to be a wife and mother — and I sure didn’t figure it out on my own!

Yet at the same time I try from my vantage point today to be ‘fair’ in considering the pressures that might have been on my mother ‘back then,’ I have to be very careful not to reject my OWN reality of what she did to me for 18 years.  I cannot lose sight of the fact that she stole from me my healthy, happy self.  She stole from me my childhood.  The saddest part about it is that I’m not sure she had a choice not to…….

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By the way, have any of you readers read this stunning SHORT book?  Highly recommended.  It does remind me of my mother — but it wasn’t my father who oppressed her.  I’ll write more about this later – –

The Yellow Wallpaper (Forgotten Books) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Paperback – Oct 16, 2008)

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postmarked November 16, 1965

Darling

Just a note – am enclosing Dorothy’s letter – came today – and a receipt for medicine for Steven.

He’s better!  Much!  So is his disposition but he still wakes up over and over all nite.

Oh Bill, I love you so much!  So very much!

Such a sweet letter.  Will you love me and talk to me when we’re together.

Oh, I wish I could write and strike gold.  $ could open up a life of travel, a nice home – so much we need.

I had my Stanley party today.  8 women came – but so old and dull – Oh Bill I feel like flying, sailing – so full of fun, life and music.  Should I at 40?

Some of them aren’t much older!  Awful!

John is working and won’t be home ‘til 8:00 P.M.  It’s on a busy street and a long walk home.  I hope I was right in letting him do it!!!

We have to put that other $ for skiis [sic] and stuff back into his bank.

This is a note only.  So much to say.  I wish I had someone interesting to talk to.

I feel as if I don’t belong to the human race – these people – Oh, Bill, how and why am I so different??

I love you, Mildred

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Here is the next letter she wrote:

postmarked November 18, 1965

Thursday morning

Dear Bill,

S.O.S. My bills are paid now and now I need $ for groceries, gas – Thanksgiving – please!

I’ve stayed home so much I have to do something.  I called Mother, as I told you, and told her she could come.  I can’t be penniless when she comes.

Except for the Dr. bills and I can pay that next pay-day I’m O.K. here.  Dental bills and Linda’s eye exam will wait until after Xmas!!  John has a bad boil and I’ve put off taking him but guess I’ll have to.  The car has to be greased now!

Send me 75 at least.  Even then I’ll have to ration it.

I’ve just had breakfast and only Cindy and Linda get up at 6:15 A.M. with me and I leave at 7:30 to bring Cindy to school.

I froze last nite.  I dreamt I went dancing and danced and danced and danced.  Am I wacky?  I’d love to go dancing.

I just had my – ugh – boiled egg, juice and toast.

No snacks at all!  No sweets or lunch.  I have meat and tomato.  For dinner I had beets, salad and hamburg (no fun).

I am so happy I’m losing and it’s for you.  If you don’t come I’ll leave for home as soon as I can find someone to rent this stupid place.

Bill, write me soon.  Some of your letters are so warm – others are nice but like a stranger.

I wish I could bridge whatever gulf there is and keep it strong.  Help me.

You’ve worked so long you haven’t been lonesome but you’ll know soon.

Love, Mildred.

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postmarked November 19, 1965

Thursday

My Own Sweet Darling,

I love you!  Now and forever and ever and ever – first the beautiful card when I was blue as you’ll see in my recent letters – and I am sorry I tell you but have to, as always and have tried so hard today to overcome it – more of that later – BUT

The flowers.  Oh Bill, how perfectly beautiful!!!!  Thank you – already I’ve enjoyed them more than I can say – every time I glace at them I think of you and send love thoughts by thought wave.

Now … this morning I made myself go to Ceramics, good therapy, you know, for boredom and loneliness I told myself and I did, as always enjoy it – not the people – there’s nobody there I like and my neighbor didn’t go but working with the tools, paints and all.  It always looks so different when fired – I never recognize my own things.

I told you my first completed one got knocked on the floor at home??  60 cents.  I’m making another……

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+LINK TO WHAT I CAN FIND OF MY MOTHER’S 1964 LETTERS

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There are very few of my mother’s letters for 1964 – I guess they disappeared somewhere over the years.  This is the year she found herself (at 39) pregnant with her sixth and last child.

*1964 MOTHER’S LETTERS

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+TRANSCRIPTION COMPLETE FOR MOTHER’S 1963 LETTERS

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The transcription of the 1963 letters is complete:

*1963 – Mother’s Letters

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+RUPTURE IN RELATIONSHIPS ALWAYS NEEDS REPAIR – MY MOTHER’S REPAIR LETTER

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The saga continues.  Dr. Allan Schore writes in great detail about how patterns of rupture and repair are built into an infant’s developing brain — either under optimal conditions or under malevolent ones.  Nobody can ever be completely ‘in synch’ with others all of the time.  Ruptures are to be expected.  It is critical that healthy patterns of repairing these ruptures get built into the new brain through safe and secure early care giver interactions.

Without healthy, safe and securely attached rupture and repair patterns, insecure attachment patterns will predominantly ‘rule’ the brain — and a person’s resulting actions.  The dominant patters will be of rupture without hope of repair.  Humans do not do well with that scenario, and thus adapt as they find ways to accomplish the needed repair.

I DO believe that my parents were doing the best that they could do with one another — given what they knew and what they had to work with.  This letter gives us some clues about how the ‘repair after rupture’ part of their relationship worked.

*1963 – September 9 – Mother’s “repair” response letter to dad

In context:

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Please don’t rush by the active link I put up there in the post!  This link leads to important insecure attachment information: 

patterns of rupture and repair

This information describes how in early infant-caregiver interactions, the infant is never the one who causes the rupture.  It is always the caregiver, and it is vitally important that the one who causes an infant-caregiver  rupture is the one who repairs it.  Once an infant can move around in the world by itself some distance from its caregiver, rupture and repair patterns already built into the brain begin to expand their affects — and these expanded patterns begin to build what we can call the

‘shame reaction pattern’.

The increasing complexity of the brain-mind and nervous system are fundamentally tied into how the rupture-repair patterns were established in early infant development, and continue to be ‘directed’ by information the growing infant-child receives throughout the ‘shame reaction’ stage of early human development.  As this new stage of mobilization within the wider world is safely and securely negotiated with others, what our body-brain knows about rupture and repair can be expanded to include our every more increasingly complex interactions between ourselves and other members of our social species.  — see

shame and the nervous system

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+UNEQUAL POWER BETWEEN CLIENTS, PATIENTS AND MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS = DANGEROUS!

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Healer, Heal Thyself!

Digest for Power In The Helping Professions

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I would like to recommend a book that is used in the training of the best psychotherapists and analysts.  I believe it should be a required study for anyone in any branch of the medical professions!

If you are of curious mind and don’t mind stimulation of your thinking, I would suggest this book not only for medical professionals, but for anyone who has ever had the feeling that medical treatment can be inhumane in terms of the attitudes of the supposed helpers – including those who consider it their main job to dish out drugs!  Clients and patients BEWARE.  If your ‘professional’ does not KNOW the information in this book – there’s a problem!!

I think these professionals are around sickness so much, their own minds and attitudes get sick, and they can be so cocky and sure of themselves and their power that they can become extremely toxic when they are ‘out of balance’!  This book has information that can help professionals be accountable for their biases, attitudes and often their stupidity and rudeness.  It will help consumers to be more responsible for their own care.

Beware, be-wary, be-aware.  If you ever walk out of any professional medical appointment of any kind and feel icky, disrespected or even contaminated, it is NOT you that’s the problem.  I guarantee it!!  Take a look at this book — get a copy from your public library — order yourself a copy — it is worth every penny you will pay for it!!

Power in the Helping Professions by Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig (Paperback – Feb 23, 2009)

And, yes, something happened to me today that instigated the posting of this title — but I am too mad to write about it now!

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Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog

October is Parent Involvement MonthPosted: 09 Oct 2009 02:41 AM PDTToday’s youth are tomorrow’s leaders. Their success, in and out of the class room, is the foundation of a prosperous future for all of us.

October is Parental Involvement Month, a time to highlight various ways parents can work with their children’s school to accomplish a shared goal—helping children learn and be successful.

Studies have continually shown that students from families of all different backgrounds and incomes who have involved parents are more likely to: earn higher grades and test scores and enroll in higher level programs; be promoted; pass their classes and earn academic credits; attend school regularly; have better social skills, show improved behavior, and adapt well to school; and graduate and go on to post secondary education.

Quite simply, research shows that students learn more, have higher grades, and have better school attendance when parents are involved.

Tips for becoming more involve in your child’s education:

  • Look for school activities or events that you could be involved in.
  • Attend Parent teacher meetings at your child’s school
  • Eat dinner together as a family.
  • Help your child with homework.
  • Take your child on regular trips to the library.
  • Have a family game night. Have your child keep score.
  • Have a family reading night. One person can read aloud, or everyone can read silently.
  • Talk with your children about their day. What was the best part?

PSA on parental involvement from our friends at Prevent Child Abuse New Jersey.

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+AFTER 100s OF LETTERS, THIS ONE’S GETTING CLOSER TO SHOWING THE REAL WITCH MOTHER

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(This letter also posted:  *1963 – September 4 – Letter from dad to mother)

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Hang onto your hat, the top’s down and we’re going for a ride……

1963 August 6 - Here for the first time in all my mother's letters we can begin to catch a glimpse of a glimmer of the real Mildred
1963 August 6 - Here for the first time in all my mother's letters we can begin to catch a glimpse of a glimmer of the real Mildred

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This letter is mother’s (to me, shocking) response to dad’s long (to me, thoughtful and honest) letter of —*1963 – September 3 – Dad’s Letter to Mother While the Rest of Us Are In New Mexico.   Here is an excellent opportunity to look at the pitiful and destructive dynamics in my parents’  relationship.  This is a rare letter because in it she is honest about how she felt both about her mother and my father — and neither honesty nor the truth was my mother’s strong suit in these hundreds of letters of hers I am transcribing.

This letter shows the kind of ‘switching’ that my mother would do, and shows how, even on pieces of paper with a pen as a weapon she would work herself up into a rage filled frenzy.  The best thing for us children would have been — a long time prior to when this letter was written — for our parents to have chosen a place for us to live in so we could get on with some semblance of growing up while having our needs met.

We were growing up anyway.  *1963 – Trip to Santa Fe – Here at Grand Canyon – mom and kids It was not OUR choice for five of us plus my mother to run over two thousand miles away from my father, or to be jammed into a tiny motel room in a strange town, to start school late in the year, to have no certainty about what was going to happen next in our lives.  And as much as any of us children might have loved the homestead, it was not our biggest need to have ourselves dragged back there as pawns in my mother’s sick, distorted ‘mind games’ with my father.

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Another factor that is of course not mentioned in these letters flying back and forth between my parents is the fact that we had lost what might as well have been another member of our family — the log house.  It had been sold.  In order for massive ‘trauma drama’ to be enacted within a family, there must be a stage and a setting.  The dynamics of my mother’s chaos worked prior to this time with three main settings:  the log house in Eagle River, the homestead, and the Panoramic View Apartments in Anchorage.  She had lost the log house, and that fact — like a child growing up and leaving the family — changed how mother’s, and hence our drama was to play itself out after this time.

(For background on the truth of mother’s actions during the year prior to the time this letter was written in 1963, read particularly her late summer, fall and winter letters here: *1962 – MOTHER’S LETTERS and the letters *1963 – Mother’s Letters written prior to our leaving Alaska in August of 1963)

In this September 6, 1963 letter she tells dad:

“I don’t mind if we don’t live there this winter as it isn’t our fault but I’m not the one for you if you feel we should buy a house.  I can’t return under such circumstances.  I simply can’t.  I know I’ll yell, scream and fuss again and I won’t….Bill if we don’t live on the homestead I don’t want to live in Alaska with you.”

It seems clear to me from letters months and years prior to this that it has always been mother who orchestrated the moves off the mountain and  Dad simply obliged her.

From my point of view, certainly toward the second half of this letter, mother is writing ‘crazy-talk’!  She tells him,

“But I don’t, and won’t deliver ultimatums.  You must feel it’s right.  I can’t build my life or our children’s lives elsewhere and if I live there I must depend on you to build our home and work side by side….I’m convinced – always have been – and you’re not!!”

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Please follow this link to read

*1963 – September 6 – Mother’s Wicked Response to Father From Santa Fe

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In a letter September 5, 1963 she stated about the opposite of her letter 1 day later:

“You’ll know what you want to do after your trip – live there now or next summer.  I don’t care.

I want you – I love you – and will work out our problems together.

I am absolutely lost without you!!

Write soon and often.  Your ever loving wife, Mildred -”

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+MORE LETTERS FROM THE TWILIGHT ZONE!

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*1963 – August 23 – Dad’s Letter to Mother

*1963 – September 6 – Dad’s Letter to Mother

*1963 – September 8 — Dad’s Letter to Mother

*Grandmother’s 9-8-1963 Letter to Mother

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+HECK OF A LETTER! MY FATHER’S SEPTEMBER 3, 1963 LETTER TO MY MOTHER

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*1963 – September 3 – Dad’s Letter to Mother While the Rest of Us Are In New Mexico

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This September 3, 1963 letter is — of course — a private one my father wrote to my mother just after she and we kids arrived in Santa Fe, New Mexico while he stayed in Alaska and worked.  It describes that immediately after they received title to 120 acres of the homestead, they mortgaged it.

This letter is telling because it describes my father’s thoughts as they parallel all the confused, “mixed up” statements my mother makes in her ongoing letters.  He is her husband.  He appears to participate with her in all of it.  My father writes in this letter about the homestead, more than four years after they first moved onto it:  “But after all the wondering, worrying, fretting, back-and-forthing, this is it!  Either that’s our home or it isn’t, and now’s the time to decide.”

Reading this letter does not help me one single bit in understanding my father!  That disappoints me, but it’s a fact.  Their marriage was none of my business.  The decisions they came up with over time directly affected all of their children, as any parental decision is likely to do.  But here I feel as if I am still trying to peer though a closed door without a window to see anything about what’s really going on past it — no different now than if I was trying to understand their world when I was a child myself (though it certainly never occurred to me to think about trying to).

How does one judge ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’?  Even to me now their problems seem so strangely proportioned.  They are not talking about what color to paint the house they’ve been living in for 20 years here.  It seems that chaos was so ‘ordinary’ in our lives that nobody, certainly not my parents, ever noticed they were in the thick of it.  Perhaps it’s like thinking that living in the center of a tornado was normal.  Our family reality just WAS, without question,  in part because there never was any other reality visible within our world to compare our version of life against.

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This letter belonged to a private conversation between my parents.  The contents of it related to decisions that of course affected all of their children.  Yet, 46 years after it was written I still feel like a voyeur reading it, let alone transcribing it, let alone publishing it here on the world wide web.  Obviously it survived.  Obviously it somehow found its way into my house, into my hands, onto this clipboard of mine sitting here beside my computer at this moment.

But I ask myself the questions, “What is your purpose in doing this, Linda?  What do you hope to learn, think you might be able to come to understand about your parents, about their thinking, about their relationship, about the way they made their decisions together — and about how they observed their lives separately and then combined their two separate selves to create a marriage and hence created THE LIFE of their children?”

Do I see in this letter, for example, any of the mental, emotional, verbal and psychological abuse I suspect — no, I KNOW — went on with my mother as perpetrator and my father as victim — during my childhood?  It seems that they so shared their reality that there wasn’t a separate ‘her’ and a separate ‘him’.  I could say that was ‘ordinary’, but I also know long after I left home my father divorced my mother after staying with her for more than 30 years.

Was my father such a ‘giving’ man and such a ‘giving in’ man that he simply found a way to let her push him, push at him, for all those years and he just kept moving in whatever direction the force of her force — forced him?

Reading my father’s letters leaves me feeling as if I am standing dangerously close to an erupting volcano.  I am completely cloaked with soot and ashes.  I see the roiling lava swiftly approaching me where I stand.  Yet my feet are so fixed in place that I cannot move to safety, even if I had the thought to do so.

The air becomes so dark with smoke that I can no longer see my hands in front of my face.  I hear a deafening roar, and a cracking, breaking sound.  The earth begins to quake beneath my feet and I crumple to the ground and I cannot get up.

Unlike my mother in her childhood story of a city devoured by flames, I am completely alone.  My only hope is that my father will love me enough to save me.  He never did.

This September 3, 1963 letter shows me why he never could.  It unsettles me to realize that my father was absent to me because he absolutely shared my mother’s reality.  There was no ‘other dad’.  Just this one.  He did not exist in my world, only in hers.

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So what can I make of it when father writes this in his letter?

“I enjoy the notes and post cards the kids have sent.  I love them all (the kids, I mean), and not just as a group but each one for himself and herself.  It all seems so familiar, writing something like that, only difference is there’s one more now.”

I do not know!  The very old, often beaten into me by my mother, thought pattern arises — “We would all be fine if it wasn’t for Linda.  Linda is the cause of all the troubles in the family.  She’s more trouble than all the other children put together.  ‘Trouble’ should have been her middle name.”

Yes, my left intellectual brain knows now that I was my mother’s dissociated imaginary enemy.  But that fact does not always comfort me.  I have to reach for it — like I would have to reach for an umbrella before I wandered out into a soaking rain.

Mental illness.  Illness that affects the mind.  This letter is in the thick of it, and it’s an effort at this moment as I transcribe this letter not to feel sucked right back into it!  Crazy.  Crazy making!  “Stop this train!  I want to get off!”

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Letter appears in context with  *1963 – Mother’s Letters

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JUST FOR YOUR INFORMATION:

Depression and Heart Disease: 5 Facts You Should Know

+STEALING OUR CHILDREN’S LIGHT

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Every time we try to get our adult attachment needs met through our children we are placing them in our darkness and stealing from them the light they need to build their own strong self so they can live their own good life.  Doing so is the surest way to destroy our children’s lives — which is certainly not what we hope for.

It is critically important that we foster our children’s attachment to us as parents, not the other way around – and not mutually.  Yes, parents need to be bonded with their children, but that is not the same thing as parents having to have their attachment needs met by their children.  Parents are their children’s care givers.  We can only activate our care giving system when our attachment-need system is deactivated, or turned off.  Otherwise the whole natural process of raising healthy-minded, safely and securely attached children is contaminated, and unresolved trauma is passed down the generations.

Adults, particularly those who were not raised themselves by securely attached adults who knew how to meet their own attachment needs appropriately outside their parenting relationship – and thus have a resulting insecure attachment disorder coupled with an empathy disorder themselves — need to become crystal clear about what their own attachment needs are and how to get these needs met appropriately without involving their children.

If we ourselves have an insecure attachment disorder, we will be forever at risk for passing this insecure attachment pattern down to our offspring no matter how hard we try not to.  We need information, we need it NOW and we need it desperately!

I am most strongly recommending the writings of Dr. Daniel J. Siegel.

— WEBSITE:   Mindsight Institute

Parenting From the Inside Out by Daniel Siegel and Mary Hartzell (Paperback – April 22, 2004)

Better Parents, Better Spouses, Better People (Wired to Connect: Dialogues on Social Intelligence, 2) by Daniel J. Siegel and Daniel Goleman (Audio CD – 2007) – Audiobook

The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are by Daniel J. Siegel (Paperback – Oct 22, 2001)

The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being by Daniel J. Siegel (Hardcover – April 1, 2007)

The Neurobiology of “We”: How Relationships, the Mind, and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (Sounds True Audio Learning Course) by Daniel J. Siegel (Audio CD – May 1, 2008) – Audiobook

Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation by Daniel J. Siegel (Hardcover – Jan 12, 2010)

Healing Trauma: Attachment, Mind, Body, and Brain by Daniel J. Siegel, Marion F. Solomon, and Marion Solomon (Hardcover – Jan 2003)

The Healing Power of Emotion: Affective Neuroscience, Development & Clinical Practice (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology) by Diana Fosha, Daniel J. Siegel, and Marion F. Solomon (Hardcover – Nov 16, 2009)

Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy by Kekuni Minton, Pat Ogden, Clare Pain, and Daniel J. Siegel (Hardcover – Oct 13, 2006)

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Adequate parenting means we can respond adequately to the needs of our children.

Please also see on this blog:

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part One

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Two

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Three

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Four

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Five

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Six

**Attachment Styles and Caregiving from Collins Article

**Attachment Styles from Collin’s Article

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