Tag: secure attachment

+SOME LINKS FOR CHILD ABUSE TRAUMA BLOGS I VISITED TODAY

alchemynow4 Comments

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I occasionally get the bright idea that I could wander around the web and find sites related to healing infant-child abuse trauma so that I could promote my blog-info in a little comment inviting readers to come over here for a visit to my Stop the Storm blog.  The only problem is that I never get that far and instead end up wanting to present other people’s blog work here for my readers to visit, learn from and support.

So, a word of thanks to any of my blog readers who might leave a link to my blog when they go visit someone else’s and leave a word about my work in a comment.  Just copy this and paste into your comment https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/

So what follows are some links for places I visited today!  (I was following a Google search for ‘child abuse trauma blog’)

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I want to highlight a post on the blog of Dr. Kathleen Young (a therapist in Chicago) entitled Treating Trauma: Top 10 for 2010.  These are among these top posts Dr. Young mentions:

Depersonalization Disorder. In this most read post of 2010 I defined depersonalization, as a normative experience, a symptom of other diagnoses or a type of dissociative disorder. I also shared research that explored the role of childhood interpersonal trauma in depersonalization disorder.

Complex PTSD describes a variant of PTSD that applies to those who have experienced prolonged, repeated abuse from an early age. This was one of my favorite posts of the year as it is at the heart of much of my practice. It was also inspired by a fantastic training I attended in 2010:  Contextual Therapy: Treating Survivors of Complex Trauma.

Verbal Abuse: Words Can Hurt. I am so glad this topic got a lot of attention, given how little we understand the impact of verbal abuse. Here I shared research that indicates that parental verbal abuse alone can impact the child’s brain development in ways that lead to language processing issues and symptoms common to complex PTSD.

Understanding Dissociation was another favorite post of mine. Dissociation and trauma often go hand in hand, and yet it is not well understood even by trauma therapists! One take away idea: while dissociation helps you survive childhood trauma, it may be maladaptive later in life.

Does Self-Care Mean Others Don’t? is the most recent post in my top ten and part of a bigger conversation about self-care. The comments in response to both these posts are well worth reading and my favorite part of this entry. Your feedback and responses make me think and grow. That is what I love about blogging and what keeps me committed to it as we get ready for 2011.

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Here is an informative article posted online by Prevent Child Abuse America:  Fact Sheet:  Emotional Child Abuse

Click here for the main website for Prevent Child Abuse America where the following can be found among the many informative links on this site:

Here are some helpful tips:

Recognizing Child Abuse: What You Should Know [pdf]

An Approach to Preventing Child Abuse [pdf]

Ten Ways to Help Prevent Child Abuse [pdf]

Twelve Alternatives to Lashing Out at Your Child [pdf]

For even more helpful Prevention tips click here.

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I found this excellent post on the Nursing School Blog that includes a list with an active link along with a brief description for

40 Excellent Blogs for PTSD Support

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I also found this Child Abuse Effects blog hosted by survivor/educator Darlene Barriere (Canadian).  Worth a visit and a click around – lots of information from professionals and readers alike along the left side of the blog.

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Child Abuse Survivor

An interesting blog —   “About a male survivor of childhood abuse, and the issues he faces in adult life.”

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Take a meander through the list on the right side of this one:   

Dr. Laura blog

America‘s #1 Female Talk Radio Host

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Here is a blog about child abuse though I can’t quite figure out what it is actually CALLED!  My Windows says it has something to do with someone named Karen Holmes – comes complete with heart-touching comments —   CLICK HERE to read

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An Interview with Author Chris Knight Capone by KevaD

An Interview with Author Chris Knight Capone

“Chris Knight Capone’s moving novel “Son of Scarface” is not another book about Al Capone. What it is, is the unnerving story of an abused child, through the eyes of the child abused, seeking to unravel the mysterious life of his beloved father and the mother who physically and emotionally battered her son and daughter.

“Son of Scarface” is a book about healing and the tribulations of one man’s lifelong struggle to identify the past and heritage hidden from and denied him.”

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Here on SelfGrowth.com (scroll down a little) there’s a

list of Overcoming Trauma Websites.

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This entire (2001) article is available free online by clicking on the title:

The Role of Childhood Interpersonal Trauma in Depersonalization Disorder

By Daphne Simeon, M.D., Orna Guralnik, Psy.D., James Schmeidler, Ph.D., Beth Sirof, M.A., and Margaret Knutelska, M.A.

“In conclusion, this study is the first systematic demonstration of an association between depersonalization disorder and childhood interpersonal trauma and suggests that emotional abuse may play an important role in the genesis of depersonalization symptoms. In contrast to physical and sexual abuse, psychological maltreatment appears underestimated and neglected in the psychiatric literature and merits more attention. Finally, the various dissociative disorders may lie on a spectrum of severity associated with different types of childhood traumatic antecedents.”

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+PUKING IN THE HIGH CHAIR: PATTERNS OF RUPTURE AND REPAIR BEFORE THE AGE OF ONE

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Now I am having ‘second thoughts’ related to the post I just finished:  +IN THE EPIC OF MY ABUSIVE CHILDHOOD THE MOUNTAIN RAISED MY SOUL

In light of my thinking about the book title for my collection of childhood stories as they relate to the absence of mercy, I am wondering about SHAME transactions as they relate to human attachment interactional patterns of rupture and repair.

As Dr. Allan Schore writes, an infant’s nervous system has not developed itself enough prior to the age of one for shame to be physiologically experienced.  The timing of the nervous system’s development that DOES allow for the experience of shame corresponds with an infant’s physical development that allows it to ‘hatch’ from its caregiver’s lap.

As an infant begins to explore the wider world, and as it returns to its caregiver, the experience of rupture and repair with the caregiver take on a bigger purpose.  If the infant returns to a caregiver that does not express joy, the infant’s nervous system will ‘crash’ in the autonomic nervous system’s STOP reaction – which is the first experience of shame.

At this age the infant is beginning to be an active participant in the repair-of-the-rupture process.  If the infant returns to a caregiver that is NOT joyful at the return-reunion-attempt to repair a ‘rupture’ caused by the infant’s distancing itself physically from its caregiver, the TWO (infant and caregiver) can now begin to actively negotiate what needs to happen for the joy-filled repair of the rupture to happen.

Schore is very clear that prior to the age of one it is almost entirely up to the caregiver to repair ruptures in the safe and secure attachment pattern with an infant.  That is because prior to age one it will always be the responsibility of the caregiver to accomplish repair because the infant is not fully equipped to begin to do this on their own.  The parent is building rupture and repair patterns into the physiology of the infant’s growing body-nervous system-brain so that in time the infant can internalize actions that lead to needed repair.

Schore states that whomever initiated the rupture is BEST able to repair it, and needs to be the one that initiates it.

I think of an example from my own early mothering experience that happened when I was just 20 and my first born was 9 months old.  Being quite astute and very smart, she had figured something out to do that would guarantee her LOTS of attention!

As soon as I finished feeding my daughter in her high chair, and turned away from her to carry her dishes to the sink, I would hear her throwing up.  Oh, the POOR BABY!  “Oh, honey, WHAT’S WRONG!”  Over I would go to her, and you can imagine the scene that followed in my concern for her obvious lack of well-being!

That worked until the moment one day that I happened to catch what she was doing out of the corner of my eye as I turned toward the sink.  She had figured out how to stick her finger down her throat and MAKE herself throw up!

OK.  End of that game!  I did not get mad at her.  I did not SHAME her.  I did not punish her.  I simply began to completely ignore her.  Of course I had to continue to clean her and the mess up a few times afterward, but I gave her ZERO reinforcing attention for the ‘trick’ and she soon ceased it completely forever.

At nine months of age, my daughter’s nervous system had not developed enough for her to be able to handle or process a shaming interaction.  Of course I had not neuroscience information to tell me that.  I knew it intuitively and acted appropriately.  While I could say that SHE was the one that initiated ‘rupture’ that needed repair, it was appropriate and necessary that I as her caregiver handle this situation appropriately – and safely and securely.  As she grew into a bigger body-brain that had the capacity to negotiate rupture and repair, of course she became increasingly responsible for her own actions.

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This all ties back into what I just posted about the rupture and repair attachment-related experiences I had as a child with our mountain homestead.  There was NEVER any shame-based transaction about those patterns of rupture and repair.  Whether we stayed, left or returned had nothing to do with me.

Of course in my universe that was a very good thing, but that also left me with no safe and secure experience growing up with healthy, stable, sensible, or even reasonable patterning of how to repair ruptures in human attachment relationships.  BIG PROBLEM for me on some fundamental levels of how my body-brain developed.  As a consequence, I continue to struggle to work my way around the complexities of human relationships and I always will.

Because I didn’t CAUSE the patterns of rupture in my attachment relationship with the mountain, I didn’t gain any experience in PERSONALLY either initiating or accomplishing repair.  But I did gain experience both in safe and secure attachment (love) to the mountain and experience in the rupture-repair patterning process.  What got left out was ME being an active agent in the whole process.

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+WHAT WE MOST NEED TO KNOW: HOW MOTHERING BUILDS THE INFANT BRAIN

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There is a link here to the most important article you will ever read — complicated at the same time it describes what matters most to us as human beings.

When you click on the title of the article I am presenting here today, which is an active link that will lead you first through a series of language translations of the abstract, simply scroll down to the full article which is written in English.

It is my opinion that the information contained in this article, written by Dr. Allan N. Schore, is the most valuable we will ever read in our lifetime.  Or, I can say, the most important we will TRY to read.

Every single word I have written on my blog up until this moment is really ONLY in introduction to the information contained in this 60-page article.  I will work with this information later to try to present it in a more digestible, understandable format, but this is the ORIGIN of all of my thinking.

I discovered Shore’s neuroscientific description of the building of an infant’s brain through emotional interactions it has with its mothering earliest caregiver well before I discovered the work of Dr. Martin Teicher and his Harvard research group.  I carefully picked my way through the dense, complicated and vital information contained in Schore’s books.  The essence of all Schore’s discoveries about this critical period of infant brain development is condensed into this article I am presenting the link to today.

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Whether we have EVER thought about it up until this moment or not, when any of us ever interact with a newborn and very young infant, or as we watch a mother interacting with her newborn and very young infant, we are watching GENESIS IN ACTION.  We are watching neuroscience building a human brain – in real time, in the moment, during every single flash of a tiny millisecond interaction after another – human interactional experiences with the infant is actively BUILDING its brain.

I could say the following with every breath I ever take for the rest of my life and it would not be enough:  When an infant has a safe and secure attachment to its earliest mothering caregiver ALL these brain building interactions happen completely naturally – and adequately.  There is then no particular reason to  have to think in terms of neuroscience except that it is fascinating to understand mothers and infants together through this critically important lens of information.

HOWEVER!!!  If an infant was born to a mother whose own earliest mothering caregiver interactions were NOT safe and secure, she did not receive the kind of face-to-face brain building experiences that would have allowed her to build a BEST emotionally regulated social brain herself.  Her interactions with her infant will not follow the BEST patterns needed for her infant to build its own best brain — except under special conditions (read on).

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My daughter asked me the other day after reading my Sunday post why she doesn’t have a dysregulated brain if I have one as her mother because my own mother had one and therefore built a dysregulated brain into little infant me.

We are getting down to the most important nitty-gritty information about the truth regarding intergenerational transmission of parental unresolved trauma – through abuse, neglect and maltreatment of offspring — with her question.  She did NOT ask me why I did not abuse her the way my mother abused me.  She knows enough now to understand that the most important intergenerational issue is WHAT KIND OF BRAIN PATTERNING DOES A MOTHER TRANSMIT TO HER INFANT.

The simplest way I can answer her question is that (1) I have a different genetic composition than my mother did; (2) I suffered different patterns of deprivations-traumas than my mother did; (3) the timing during our later infant-child developmental stages that our deprivations-traumas happened to us were different; (4) these deprivations-traumas affected the genetic-change mechanisms within my mother and myself differently.

At the same time I know that both my mother and I had DISSOCIATION built into our earliest forming trauma-changed infant brain.  HOW the dissociational patterns operated were different because of the four points I just made.   What is critically important to understand is that I was able to form an entire oriented and organized dissociated ME, as a mother, that did not stand in the way of or change in any way the inborn ability my own children had to build safe and secure attachments.

My mother’s brain had formed an entirely different set of patterns related to her ‘self’ than mine did.  I could organize and orient ‘a mothering self’ that put my children at the center of my life.  My mother could not do this.

I was able, within my dissociated safe and secure mothering dissociated universe to let my children form a safe and secure attachment to me – which meant most importantly not that I literally never abused my own children – but that I was able to interact with them from birth in safe and secure attachment interactions that let THEM build a BEST brain from the start.

Of course it matters that I did not abuse them.  But what my 33-year-old daughter who is now carrying her firstborn child is, herself in her own life, MOST benefiting from is that she has a SAFELY AND SECURELY built excellent brain – that was formed from its very foundation on the BEST kinds of face-to-face mothering caregiver interactions Schore is describing in this article.

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The foundational experiences that humans have as members of a social species happen through the way their earliest mothering caregiver experiences shaped their brain’s development.  Our ability to experience and regulate our emotions, our ability to read and appropriately respond to social cues, what motivates and rewards us, what gives us meaning in our lives, what tells our body how to respond and what to respond to, what coordinates all our memory storage, processing and recall for the rest of our lives happens according to HOW our earliest mothering caregiver experiences formed our brains.

If our mother was able to ALLOW a safe and secure attachment with us, even if she herself did not get a BEST brain in her own early unsafe and insecure attachment environment, our mother was probably able to avoid building into us a replica of her own dysregulated brain.  This alternative to the feared inevitable passing on of intergenerational unresolved trauma happens through what the experts call an ‘earned secure attachment’ and what I call a ‘borrowed secure attachment’.

If development from conception to birth has not been interfered with, and certainly even at times when some prior-to-birth disruptions did occur, humans are born with the ability to form safe and secure attachments, and are designed to build the best brain possible.  That best brain, however, cannot be built without signals of communication between the mother and her infant that the world is a safe and secure place to be in.  It is the nature and quality of these earliest mother-infant signals that determine what kind of a foundational brain we build — either trauma-based or not.

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I have not in my own lifetime of 58 years ever been able to change the core foundation of the trauma-built brain I received because of my mother’s far less than best treatment of me from birth.  Every experience I have had (as happens for all of us) is directed by and processed through this earliest brain we built.  As I return to my work with my mother’s 50+ year old letters, I can see the thread of her distorted relationship with herself in the world in her writing.

I now understand that her earliest brain was formed through deprivations-traumas, and that her experiences along her continued development certainly through age five sent her course of development down a road different than mine went as a young child.  A consideration of these differences is not my concern today, because the most important place we can focus our attention is on what goes right or goes so very wrong at the very beginning of our earliest brain stage development as a brain’s foundation is built.

It is at these most important earliest brain developmental stages that the following information Schore presents matters the most.  PLEASE try to read this article.  Skip what doesn’t make sense if you must, but you WILL have some (what I call) BINGO! experiences as you read.  This information can change  how you think about yourself in the world, whether you experienced Trauma Altered Development or not.  It can change how you understand every other person you know in your life, including your infant-childhood caregivers.

Skip down immediately by scrolling to his page 22 and you will get the picture, literally, as Schore presents his visual about the nature of mother-infant emotional communication signaling.  Now you can go back and begin to read the text!  Genesis of the human brain.  Neuroscience in action.  Once we truly GET this information, especially those of us who were abused, maltreated, traumatized and CHANGED through early maltreatment, light will begin to shine on the most important facts about our being in the world.  GOOD LUCK in your reading!!

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CLICK ON THIS TITLE TO REACH THIS FULL ARTICLE:

EFFECTS OF A SECURE ATTACHMENT

RELATIONSHIP ON RIGHT BRAIN DEVELOPMENT,

AFFECT REGULATION, AND

INFANT MENTAL HEALTH

ALLAN N. SCHORE

Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences

University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine

INFANT MENTAL HEALTH JOURNAL, Vol. 22(1–2), 7–66 (2001)

2001 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health

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Please feel free to comment directly at the end of this post or on

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Your Page – Readers’ Responses

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+SECURE AND INSECURE ATTACHMENT AND THE CHILDHOOD NARRATIVE

alchemynow2 Comments

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This post follows +DISSOCIATION AND THE TRAUMA-SPECIALIZED BRAIN from November 11, 2009

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I woke today as if in a different world than usual.  The wind is tearing around my house as if it is demanding something from me and I don’t know what it wants.  The wind is angry.  It rips leaves off of trees and chases them madly around the yard.  With its roaring and whistling it has stolen all my peace away.  It is harder to remember who and when and where I am.

If only the wind would stop and the sun would come out so calm would again surround this body I am in.  Then I could be more certain that my past was in the past and I am in the here and now.  I can I not help feeling challenged and disturbed, made uneasy and agitated in this wind.

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I wanted to continue to write this morning about secure-autonomous attachment.  I read Dr. Daniel Siegel’s words again:

“The abilities to reflect upon one’s own childhood history, to conceptualize the mental states of one’s parents, and to describe the impact of these experiences on personal development are the essential elements of coherent adult attachment narratives.  (Siegle/tdm/312)”

I do not understand these words.  I do not have the “abilities” Siegel is describing.  I cannot possibly begin to “conceptualize the mental states” of either one of my parents.  I cannot “describe the impact of these experiences” on my development without consulting complicated information from infant and child brain scientists’ research.

If having the ability to “reflect” on my childhood, to “conceptualize” the minds of my parents, to “describe” the impact my childhood experiences on how I developed “are the essential elements of coherent adult attachment narratives,” then I am forced to admit I am coming up empty and confused as if some drastic, terrible wind ripped any chance I might have to begin to think about myself in my life ‘coherently’ from the beginning of my life away as surely as this morning’s wind is forcing away any semblance of a calm and peaceful day.

I feel angry that I have been robbed.  There is no corner of my childhood I can return to without being engulfed in turbulence and trauma.  I am as incapable of ‘conceptualizing’ particularly the mind of my mother at age 58 as I was the day I was born.  That children and the adults they grow into are SUPPOSED to be able to conceptualize the minds of their parents seems beyond belief to me.  I cannot begin to make an attempt in that direction, any more than I can begin to conceptualize the mind of the wind.

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Can I begin to understand that my lack of ‘abilities’ to convey even to myself a coherent story of myself in this life from the time of my beginnings is NOT because I am personally deprived, but that this lack of abilities comes directly from the kinds of terrible experiences I had to survive in my parents’ home?  It doesn’t FEEL that way.  It feels that somehow there is something wrong with me that I do not possess these essential requirements Siegel lays out for being an ‘ordinary’ safe and securely attached individual.

Do I understand that I cannot control the wind?  Do I understand that the only way I can ensure that the force of the wind is not directly affecting me is by seeking shelter from it?  Was there any possible shelter I could have sought as an infant-child to escape the terrible storm of my childhood?  No, there wasn’t, except as I could isolate myself in my brain-mind because the only hope of remaining apart from the traumas that I endured ONLY existed within the walls of my own skin.

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The words, “There are many rooms in my Father’s mansion” come into my mind.  Because from birth I had no choice but to try to survive within my body as my only protection from insane abuse, it was within me that I had to create these ‘many rooms’ so that the overwhelming traumas I had to endure did not engulf me, swallow me up and destroy me.  My mother’s mind was a cauldron of malevolent chaos.  I am sorry, child development experts, but conceptualizing that kind of mind is not only humanly impossible, it is against all instinct for ongoing survival.

In order to ‘reflect’ on another person’s mind so that it might be ‘conceptualized’, one must be able to make some connection between one’s own mind and the other’s.  Do attachment researchers understand how humanly impossible it is to do this when a parent’s mind is ‘on the other side’ of being human?  My mother was the antithesis of being a mother.  I know I am not alone in my experience.  But I take issue with the suggestion that there’s something wrong with me that I lack the abilities necessary to accomplish the impossible!

The only people I can imagine that could possibly ‘conceptualize’ the mind of my mother would be other mothers who had minds nearly exactly like hers.  What a fantastic delight of an experience it would be to put my mother and the other two mothers I know of like her in an observation room and then ask them all the ‘right’ questions!  Now THERE would be an opportunity for learning!

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Short of having this kind of opportunity to explore my mother’s mind – which is, of course impossible because she is dead – I am fighting against having to take on the burden of believing I am at fault in any way for not being able to conceptualize her mind.  Ability is not the right word.  I was born with the ability to accomplish what Siegel is suggesting IF I had been provided with parents whose minds were ‘conceptualizeable’!  Nobody can conceptualize what is impossible to conceptualize!

“The abilities to reflect upon one’s own childhood history” – I have the ability to state today that my mother was insane, that my father supported her madness, that my childhood was chaotic, malevolent, dangerous, traumatic, and only survivable because I had the ability to survive it!  That the thousands of abuse memories I might have are stored in their corresponding ‘many rooms’ in the ‘mansion’ of my body where I cannot get to them does not mean that I am in any way more ‘disabled’ than anyone else would be if they had endured the same experiences.

The mansion of my body DOES coherently remember everything that has ever happened to me.  However, it is also a physiological fact that if there were enough stress hormones present at the time the traumas occurred, they would have fried the brain cells designed to store the facts of my experience so that only the emotional memories remained — in my body.

Coherency, as the developmental brain specialists are using the word, applies to their version of remembering the FACTS that tell the linear (left brain) story in words (narrative) of a person’s childhood.  These researchers neglect to mention that an intact, living, breathing, moving, sustainable body is proof enough that coherency is a much larger concept than they seem willing to conceive of.

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If I am fighting for the right to stand on my square foot of ground upon this earth in dignity without being judged as being somehow deficient or insufficient or unable to tell a coherent life story, if I am making the statement that I was born with the ABILITY to do so, that I still have this ability, and that the problem is in NO WAY because of any fault of mine but rather lies in the fact that my childhood was simply NOT COHERENT – and that nobody could tell a true story of madness and MAKE it coherent – then where do I go for my proof?

I am going to the dictionary.  I want to learn about this word ‘abilities’ (root word being ‘able’) that Siegel has thrown out as his defining qualification for everything else he says about being the kind of parent who can provide safe and secure attachment to their offspring.

What did I find in my exploration about the word and its family of relatives?  When I try to find ‘coherency’ or understanding about words I always try to find how they are connected in the language of English at the time of their appearance into our language as far back as I can find them – which is always ‘before the 12th century’.

I find that ‘able’ is a young word in our language.  So are its relatives ‘habit’ and ‘give’.  I tracked the word back to its older ancestor words ‘have’, ‘heave’, ‘hold’, and ‘take’.  Interestingly, the word ‘heaven’ is connected through its origins to ‘heave’, and by association of opposites, I find ‘hell’ connected to the word ‘conceal’ and from there to ‘hide’.

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I would understand that a dive into the origin and meanings of words might not be something many readers have found to be useful in the past.  Yet we are talking about a BIG subject – our lives and our well-being as it began either in a childhood close to heaven, or in a childhood closer to hell.  If you keep an open mind and meander among the following words, you can see that in our language such subjects as entitlement appear.

Being ‘able’ involves having resources to accomplish a goal.  I was born with and have retained the ability to tell a coherent story about my childhood if I had been given a coherent childhood to tell about.  I have the skill, but I cannot accomplish an impossible task to make madness, chaos and insanity into anything else other than what it was:  incoherent.

I was ‘given’ that childhood’  It was a nasty ‘present’, and I would much rather have had a different one.  The experiences of terrible trauma that I went through were put into my possession and I work as hard as I can to make the best use possible that I can out of what was done to me-given to me.

I cannot make my childhood into anything other than what it was.  It is the childhood that I have.  It is a part of the whole of who I am.  Under the definition of ‘have’ we read:  “to experience especially by submitting to, undergoing, or suffering.”  I performed the best that I could both to endure it and to survive it.

What is the relationship between this subject and ‘heave’ as it relates to ‘heaven’?  ‘Heave’ being related to labor and struggle.  Yet in the origins of this word we can directly see the same origins connected to our word for ‘heaven’.  Both words contain an image of ‘’lifting and heaving something up into the air’.  We are talking old language thinking here.  We are talking about trying to conceive of a ‘place’ beyond comprehension.  Where else would we put our conception of heaven but ‘up there’?

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Children are supposed to have good childhoods.  Good childhoods provide no challenge to telling a coherent story about them.  The reality is that some of us have the opposite kinds of childhoods, and it is through no fault of ours that we cannot make them into coherent childhood stories.  On our end, where hell was the norm, ‘concealing’ and ‘hiding’ from our conscious mind experiences that would have overwhelmed our self to death was our only alternative.  Dissociation allowed us to do this.

We cannot possibly tell a coherent childhood story in words about what is hidden and invisible, which is where most of our childhood realities are stored.  We have to believe ourselves!  We have to trust what we do know about our childhoods, even if we simply reduce what we know to our sense of ourselves when we were little.  We know.  Nothing was ever hidden FROM our body.  What we cannot access directly is hidden WITHIN our body.  There is no other possible place for it to be.  I AM my life story.

That means to me that being here alive today IS my coherent story.  My body IS my coherent story – all of it, every single last minute detail of it.  Seigel and other developmental experts are suggesting that it is in the telling of a coherent VERBAL narrative that all hope of having future and ongoing safe and secure attachment lies, including those with our children and mates.  I have to think bigger, because I know better.

I am not my mother.  My mind is ordered in a very particular trauma-survival-based way, but it is NOT in chaos, even if I cannot detect in words what I most know about having been raised through 18 years of terrible abuse.  ‘Coherent’ is a young 1555 word in our language.  Where did it come from?  What meaning is it connected to?  What are its ancestors?

It is related to the idea of sticking things together.  ‘Stick’ has been in our language from before the 12th century:  “to put or set in a specified place or position.”  I am here to tell all the attachment experts that I am stuck together just fine!  Everything I have been through is stuck somewhere inside of me, as well.  That I don’t have words to neatly spin a tidy heavenly story from my childhood in hell does mean I COULD NOT if I had an entirely different story to tell.

To me, what Siegel is really saying is that most patterns of ongoing intergenerational transmission of safe and secure attachments happen among adults who can put their childhood narrative into words.  OK.  I get it.  I can tell my childhood narrative with a three word statement about my childhood.  “It was hell.”  If I tell someone that and they do not understand what I am saying, there are not enough words in the universe to explain to them what my childhood was like.

Meanwhile, the wind has stopped blowing.  All is calm outside my house now.  I like that.  Peace and quiet now mean the world to me.  The version of hell I endured was a very wild and noisy place!  Those of you who have been there, too, know exactly what I am talking about, and I don’t have to spin a coherent narrative to tell you what I mean!  How cool is that?

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HERE ARE THE WORDS RELATED TO THIS POST’S  SEARCH:

able

Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin habilis apt, from habēre to have — more at habit

Date: 14th century

1 a : having sufficient power, skill, or resources to accomplish an object b : susceptible to action or treatment
2 : marked by intelligence, knowledge, skill, or competence

habit

Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin habitus condition, character, from habēre to have, hold — more at give

Date: 13th century
3 : manner of conducting oneself : bearing
5 : the prevailing disposition or character of a person’s thoughts and feelings : mental makeup
6 : a settled tendency or usual manner of behavior
8 : characteristic mode of growth or occurrence

give

Etymology: Middle English, of Scandinavian origin; akin to Old Swedish giva to give; akin to Old English giefan, gifan to give, and perhaps to Latin habēre to have, hold

Date: 13th century

1 : to make a present of
2 a : to grant or bestow by formal action b : to accord or yield to another

3 a : to put into the possession of another for his or her use

have

Etymology: Middle English, from Old English habban; akin to Old High German habēn to have, and perhaps to hevan to lift — more at heave

Date: before 12th century

transitive verb 1 a : to hold or maintain as a possession, privilege, or entitlement  b : to hold in one’s use, service, regard, or at one’s disposal  c : to hold, include, or contain as a part or whole

3 : to stand in a certain relationship to

4 a : to acquire or get possession of
5 a : to be marked or characterized by (a quality, attribute, or faculty)

6 a : to experience especially by submitting to, undergoing, or suffering b : to make the effort to perform (an action) or engage in (an activity)

heave

Etymology: Middle English heven, from Old English hebban; akin to Old High German hevan to lift, Latin capere to take

Date: before 12th century

intransitive verb 1 : labor, struggle

heaven

Etymology: Middle English heven, from Old English heofon; akin to Old High German himil heaven

Date: before 12th century

1 : the expanse of space that seems to be over the earth like a dome : firmament —usually used in plural
2 a often capitalized : the dwelling place of the Deity and the blessed dead b : a spiritual state of everlasting communion with God
3 capitalized : god 1
4 : a place or condition of utmost happiness

hold

Etymology: Middle English, from Old English healdan; akin to Old High German haltan to hold, and perhaps to Latin celer rapid, Greek klonos agitation

Date: before 12th century

transitive verb 1 a : to have possession or ownership of or have at one’s disposal  b : to have as a privilege or position of responsibility  c : to have as a mark of distinction
4 a : to have or maintain in the grasp
6 a : to enclose and keep in a container or within bounds : contain

take

Etymology: Middle English, from Old English tacan, from Old Norse taka; akin to Middle Dutch taken to take

Date: before 12th century

transitive verb 1 : to get into one’s hands or into one’s possession, power, or control

4 a : to receive into one’s body (as by swallowing, drinking, or inhaling)

hell

Etymology: Middle English, from Old English; akin to Old English helan to conceal, Old High German helan, Latin celare, Greek kalyptein

Date: before 12th century

conceal

Etymology: Middle English concelen, from Anglo-French conceler, from Latin concelare, from com- + celare to hide — more at hell

Date: 14th century

1 : to prevent disclosure or recognition of <conceal the truth>
2 : to place out of sigh

hide

Etymology: Middle English hiden, from Old English hȳdan; akin to Greek keuthein to conceal

Date: before 12th century

transitive verb 1 a : to put out of sight : secrete b : to conceal for shelter or protection : shield
2 : to keep secret
3 : to screen from or as if from view : obscure
4 : to turn (the eyes or face) away in shame or angerintransitive verb 1 : to remain out of sight —often used with out
2 : to seek protection or evade responsibility

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

alchemynow2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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