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May 2, 1013.  I am in effect writing what feels like a guest post on my own blog this morning.  My dear friend and fellow sojourner on the road of search for the truth about what surviving severe early trauma actually does to change our experience of our life, Sandy Mitchell, sent me an email this morning that includes reference to one of the fantastic trauma recovery sites he has just discovered online.

Sandy is a master lay scholar!  I am extremely grateful to him for providing this source of information which I consider valuable enough to present here in this post.  Please take a look!

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“Because the stress response disrupts  general information processing, survivors of trauma live in a somatic world  rather than a world of language.”— McFarlane

I am not sure who McFarlane is (at this point) but Sandy also sent me this quote.  I agree with the truth of these words absolutely!

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Very clear information about what trauma does to us is presented on Dr. Janina Fisher’s website.  She is a psychotherapist, consultant and trainer (expert) in the field of trauma.

At this link you will be able to click through a series of 4 of the 22 images that Dr. Fisher has created in a flip-chart format about trauma consequences to humans (makes sense we must buy the rest to view them):

“A Psychoeducational flip chart with 22 diagrams and charts summarizing the most current research and theoretical concepts in trauma treatment in simple graphic designs. The use of these simple diagrams increases the ability of the client to understand the nature of the symptoms and the treatment. Clients feel a sense of relief as their puzzling and disturbing reactions begin to make sense,* and therapists find the flip chart a road in to helping the change process begin. Topics covered: common symptoms and difficulties related to experiences of trauma, effects on the nervous system and brain, traumatic attachment, addictions and trauma, dissociative phenomena, and stages of treatment.“

TRAUMA FLIP CHART HERE – sample of 4

The information about how to order this flip chart with reasonable cost with choice of sizes is AT THIS LINK.  This page includes this information:

Psychoeducational supports for trauma treatment

Available in two convenient sizes:

A small size: 10X13. $45 (plus shipping and handling).

A large size: 17X22. $80 (plus shipping and handling).

Download an order form to see shipping charges.

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This is exactly the kind of information that I believe all in the ‘helping’ profession have to have in their own minds as they need to be prepared to offer this information to all clients!  The knowledge presented through the work of Dr. Fisher is most empowering to trauma survivors!  It takes the primitive guesswork out of all attempts to “figure out” how we are changed by early trauma and therefore different from ordinary people in many, many significant ways that we need to understand.

Please take a look!

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Dr. Fisher says on her TRAUMA MODEL TREATMENT page:

“We don’t survive trauma as a result of conscious decision-making. At the moment of life threat, humans automatically rely upon survival instincts. Our five senses pick up the signs of imminent danger, causing the brain to “turn on” the adrenaline stress response system. As we prepare to fight or flee, heart rate and respiration speed oxygen to muscle tissue, and the “thinking brain,” our frontal cortex, is inhibited to increase response time. We are in “survival mode,” in our “animal brains.” Later, we may pay a price for these instinctive responses: we have ‘made it’ without bearing witness to our own experience.”

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I am actively involved in the “bearing witness” to my own experience stage as I work through my book writing (my official self-assigned break is over tomorrow).  Looking out over the vast sea of those who survived severe abuse, neglect and related unsafe and insecure attachment trauma during their earliest most formative stages of life I would be there are so few who can access the kind of therapy that Dr. Fisher offers that they could hardly be seen.

Yet I am highly respectful of and appreciative to the work offered on this site because it offers those of us who cannot access therapy at least a beginning place to reframe how we see ourselves in our life.  Those who do attend therapy can recommend this site and make dang sure their therapist is open to learning this info (if they don’t already know it).  I would seriously question the effectiveness of any therapist who does NOT know these facts presented on this site.

We ultimately are the experts about our own body.  Resources like this one give us the language we need to understand what we already know!

Thank you yet again Sandy for your brilliant research abilities!!

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Related info:

+BELOW THE SURFACE – THE CONNECTION BETWEEN SEVERE EARLY CHILD ABUSE, EAGLES AND BUZZARDS

+A COLLECTION OF LINKS ON BODY-BRAIN CHANGES CAUSED BY EARLY INFANT-CHILD ABUSE

+THOUGHT SALAD: HAVING ‘THIS’ TO SAY ABOUT ‘THAT’

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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I don’t like this abuser image as it is being created.  (Following previous post, +BOOK COVER ART – NEXT FOR ‘STORY WITHOUT WORDS’ – THE ABUSER)  I’m done working with it yet.  It’s color shows too brightly with the camera flash, that’s for certain.  Why the shades of purple?  I know why there’s black.  But the purple?  Perhaps that no person can be all bad?  That’s not how this scene feels to me as it’s being built.  Time will tell how this all comes out….

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I wondered what my image of my abuser would look like before I started forming it.  My initial idea in my mind has obviously been tempered.  I first saw ‘the monster’ as HUGE and much more solid.  However, I think the image that is forming reflects a trans-generational abuser as my grandmother and even my great-grandmother abused my mother – as she then grew up to abuse me.

I had also pondered the color of tissue I would use for the abuser, and realized I did not have any appropriate color in my collection.  Then I visited our local thrift store and there it was — the perfect color!  You will see that color soon….

It is also important to me that the abuser will not be fixed within the scene of the front cover image, hence it is fixed to a stand that I can move around to get the perfect angle and placement of it for the cover photograph.  I also have plans for how the front image will be taken apart and changed for what will hopefully be the images for the back cover.

Motion is an integral and critical factor in the process of children being beaten.  As I have written elsewhere when I stopped a few years ago to consider the minimum jail sentence my mother deserved (mentally ill as she was) for JUST her physical attacks on me, I came up with 15,000 years.

How does abuse of little people, assaults by giants, even begin to be described in words or in illustrations?  I am certainly working toward coming up with at least one way to do it.  Treating this heavyweight topic with such lightweight materials as plastic grocery bags wrapped with masking tape and tissue paper creates its own irony certainly not lost on me.

In the end, I find that letting go of my emotions regarding my history of abuse happens in a way like opening my palms and letting the horrors blow away like so much dandelion fluff.  Keeping those emotions harms me.  This is why I am taking this two-week book writing break — to find my own way to let my ANGER go at what was done to me!!!  The negative emotions belong to the abuser who created the situations of abuse of me.  It does not need to be MY anger.  I do not want it.

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I have an idea for the cover picture of this our first book to be published, Story Without Words.  I have realized that to me my simple art style is whimsical, and as my friend describes what I am doing, these are action figures.  Sadly, the action that will be portrayed in this book is most unpleasant.  But to begin with, here are some pictures of the making of this first completed cover artwork piece – the bed.

The foundation….

Beginning the bed….

Mattress made of wadded newspaper stuffed into a plastic grocery bag, all wrapped with masking tape….

Tissue paper and Mod Podge added….

And here is the whimsical child’s bed….

My thoughts for the background scene for the cover picture include a visual presentation of something I know well from my abusive childhood:  The environment that belonged to me as a child was a world that should have been safe and secure for me, but was not.  Every time my mother (my abuser) split off into her dark psychotic world within which I as her all-bad child was the sole occupant, when she interrupted my ongoing child life of being my own self with her abuse, another reality was created that I was forced to endure.

This reality is going to be portrayed symbolically in the scene for the cover of this book, Story Without Words.  But specifically to this book is the reality that patterns of abuse Mother perpetrated against me were perpetrated against her by her mother.  This is an intergenerational portrayal of what happened to Mother when she was a child as I believe that abuse directly changed her into the abusive monster she became toward me.

This will not be a pretty picture in the bigness of it all.  It will not be an easy one to look at.  I don’t believe personally that there is any other way for the scene I am creating to be illustrated in anything like a tolerable way other than the way I intend to do this.  Nobody wants to SEE child abuse in action.  We cannot tolerate its imagery.  I believe part of the way our society excludes not only very real awareness of the reality of child abuse but also avoids facing its reality head-on happens in part because we will not even begin to let the imagery of its reality into our mind.  How are we going to solve the problems that create and sustain infant and child abuse if we cannot even visualize it — or — THINK about it?

It has struck me during these days I am taking my break from writing for the 10th book in this combined series that MANY people were hurt in their earliest years by violence and abuse.  MANY people!  Not just a few!  The entire topic of child abuse then becomes personal perhaps to nearly the majority of people who are intent upon denying how what was done to them hurt them.  Denial is NOT helpful!

There are 3.3 million confirmed cases per year of child abuse and neglect in the U.S.  1,825 confirmed cases per day!  This says NOTHING about the stories that are not being given words — the silent and hidden cases of unreported infant and child abuse and neglect.  This book and its provocative cover image will address the invisible silence of one intergenerational story of abuse that is finally finding words for its telling. 

My hope is that the primitive, simple and whimsical cover of this book — and the book itself — will help us all to address what is perhaps the darkest side of human nature as it conveys a message of hope that resolution of the problems that create infant-child abuse and neglect IS possible!

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There is no possible way for photographs to begin to convey the charm of this garden along the south borderline between Mexico and the U.S.  I was greatly joyed at having three people actually come visit the garden last Saturday.  One sells potted plants at our local Farmers’ Market — she took home hundreds of starts for plants from the garden and no sign of the tiniest dent was made in this budding and blooming oasis among the dusty dirt of our pre-monsoon high desert landscape.

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The Mermaid Rose – scent from heaven at dawn and dusk.  There’s my adobe chicken coop in the background – and the rusty double border fences.

Darlow’s Enigma – wild rose, blooms spring to freeze

The John Cabot rose with pink salvia and Sundancer Daisies

South view of bed with several kinds of flowers in it including the Darlow’s Enigma

Such lovely pink!

Oh, well – lovely new blooms even though I have forgotten the name of this hardy desert perennial!

They all loved our winter rains!

The Nearly Wild rose coming into bloom.  A modest grower, very easy to grow and maintain!

My friend calls my garden “the Beetlejuice garden.”

Perennial petunias and wonderful sage that blooms only once a season – and that season is now!

Lovely deep red salvia.

There are the two rust brown tall Mexican border fences in the back of the picture.

So lovely – and will be lovier yet come mid-July when our summer rains arrive!

The very hardy John Cabot rose.

This rose is the tenderest of the bunch – but when it blooms I NOTICE!

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I am still on break from my book writing!  This is a small collection of links to music I drum along with – just for fun!  I am hoping to branch out to other styles of music – and hoping to find local company to drum with!

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Just FUN!!!

Santana & Clapton – ”Jingo” live at the Crossroads Guitar Festival

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehGWHd0hGFw

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Marc Anthony – his fans in BLISS – free concert in Mexico City — !!!!!  entire concert at this link –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnHIikdHVb4

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32 albums to this group — Enanitos Verdes — http://www.amazon.com/Enanitos-Verdes/e/B000APEC2M/works/ref=ntt_mus_teaser?_encoding=UTF8&sn=d

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFYPTiPjq7E

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Just FUN

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_hxd8xuM1U

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rumba

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgYrJ0g8Cf0&NR=1&feature=endscreen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9m8wUGcbsM

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This is so SWEET!!!  takes me a-w-a-y!!!!  Love it – honest and humble

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54-GzC_rzh0 

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Peru (with cheerleaders!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvgehYQYsMk

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I use the slide bar through this – great kongas – fantastic drum solo at 44 on bar – ‘Thunder Drums’

Larry Harlow & Latin Legends Of fania – 40 Aniversario

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNlBiavm-Yo

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just a fun song – dancing hands beat

Hector “El Torito” Acosta-Quizas si, Quizas no (LETRA)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcF6d3–_wI

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I believe – Brazilian

Enanitos verdes – Tu carcel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ2pNFwR_hQ

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Adventura has a lot of great music – poppish

La Tormenta Aventura

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EP7Ne7iRbcM

Aventura – Los Infieles

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a-O9EZWREM

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dumb commercial – then…. fun beat (simple)

Juan Magan – Bailando Por Ahi

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m6ogS57sc8

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fun latin beat – simple – makes my hands dance — so many ways to drum this!!

PRINCE ROYCE – Incondicional

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpzT6Wq6pKY

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a fun song – makes my hands dance

CAFE TACUBA – COMO TE EXTRAÑO

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ba-fIkJpysg

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Have to be in the mood for this one –

Tito “El Bambino” El Patrón – Llama Al Sol

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrvGvJ2sjug

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sweet beat – hands/fingers enjoy this – just happy

Toby Love – Casi Casi

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfwX5ThiPn0

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment » 

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I have a lot of very serious things on my mind, so I was especially vulnerable to the effects of this happiness video – I think this is WORTH A WATCH!

VIDEO – LAUGHTER IS CONTAGIOUS

I went searching online and discovered some fascinating information!

WHY IS LAUGHTER CONTAGIOUS?

THE STUDY OF LAUGHTER

LAUGHTER REALLY IS CONTAGIOUS!

WHY IS LAUGHTER CONTAGIOUS?

And, of course, this……

+HOOKED ON ‘D’ SMILES – THE HAPPINESS CENTER

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Here is an angle of the tissue paper studio – for making things out of wire, plastic grocery bags and wadded paper wrapped with masking tape, mod podge and tissue added!

The swing dancers

All by himself….

Ah – but – SHE HAS ARRIVED!  Let the dancing begin!

 

My son’s talented and can paint on facial details if wanted – not my thing!  Just fun to make on my book writing break!  Am beginning to see ideas for lots of people I love!  This could become a smile-full happy habit!

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These are the images that I included in my previous post – though WordPress deleted them – no idea why!

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