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To get my stories straight — I wrote the commentary that appears below in THIS post before I wrote the post this one follows: 

+WHO CARES? 23.1% of American children fall below the “relative poverty” rate

To clarify, by the time my words had spun themselves out to the end of my commentary I was genuinely concerned that maybe I just woke up this morning with my mean streak showing.  So I decided I better get my facts straight before publishing what is in this post.

My thinking is not off target.  For America to be OK with having nearly 1 in 4 of our children falling so far behind in overall well-being reflects — to me — that our nation has a serious problem with conscience and compassion — if not also with our common sense.

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COMMENTARY:

Everything humans do is about regulating our body chemistry.  Eat.  Drink.  Sleep.  Work.  Play.  Stay warm.  Cool off.  Have friends.  Care about others.  Have others care about us.  Go on holidays.  Relax.

We are physical beings in a body run on body chemistry.  Do we think that because we can think about what we think about that we can decide that our body chemistry — which has to be regulated — is only of the most minor concern to us?

Is it because in our culture our strides in science have been outmatched by commercialism that we can separate ourselves as consumer-beings from ourselves as marvels of biochemical engineering?

My bugaboo this morning has to do with how we think about the one word we use (if we are aware enough to use it at all) so naively in our culture that actually describes how we all got started on our merry road to personal freedom in the first place — and how we stay on it.  That word is ATTACHMENT.

By itself this word seems to be as nearly useless in its use to describe what it actually means as is the word LOVE.  As far as I’m concerned love is a philosophical word that describes a nebulous, ill-defined, amorphous state that carries within it no common or scientific sense at all.  Nobody can actually prove love exists.  It is not a tangible object (although it turns out that through attachment it is a tangible process).  Nobody can agree what love is and the word is used so generally as to be so diluted as a concept that it seems nearly useless.

But in our culture we love to use the word love so we use it as much as we possibly can.  This word love reminds me of the children’s story of the emperor who had no clothes.  If we use the word as if we know what it actually means — and if we use it often enough in every possible context where it might apply, we can include ourselves in the IN crowd.  This makes us feel like more regular people, I suppose.  After all, we can love pancakes.  We can love our car.  We can love a pair of shoes, a movie, our pets, our nation, our mates and our children.

And because love is such a lose-knit word it handily gives us the widest possible net within which we can toss everything that seems to have a value to us.  And then we hold on tight.

It then becomes simple common sense to connect the word love directly to the word ATTACHMENT in our minds.  If we love something or someone then of course we are attached to it – or her – or him.  Our language makes no real distinction between love of animate versus love of inanimate objects, so why bother to think through any further complications regarding attachment, either?

We can learn a new word, attachment, and then simply use it interchangeably with that old world, love.  We can be attached to a shirt, a skirt, a car, a pet, a sports team, a movie star, a community, and to one another.  And of course we all know we can be strongly attached to our ideas about everything from gun to birth control, from religion to politics, and we are of course attached to our habits — and to our babies.

But then there is an entirely different level of consideration possible in thinking about both love and attachment.  This level requires the acceptance of a common round between these words as they might describe what actually matters.  But what fun is it, really, to be bound together on a common level of understanding that rests on factual truths?

As long as we personally attach our own meaning to these words we are free to be individuals, not common blended members of a species who cannot escape the gravity of reality.  How is it possible to be both common and unique/special at the same time?

Who cares to talk about specifics, anyway?  Who wants to know that we don’t escape the fundamental operation of our biochemistry as it is regulated and dysregulated by what/who we love and what/who we are attached to?  Why would we want to know that where attachment and love matters most is exactly where our biochemistry cannot keep us alive without being regulated?

Is it blasphemy to accept the fact that what one human being does with its baby from the time it is conceived and then born directly modulates and directs the biochemistry that builds the nervous system and brain of the baby in direct response to caregiver interactions? 

Is it even criminal to think about the fact that attachment to babies is a BIOCHEMICAL NEUROLOGICAL INTERACTIONAL REGULATORY PROCESS that determines what kind of body, what kind of a nervous system, brain, stress-calm response system and immune system an infant will grow up with and then live with for the rest of its life?

We live in a culture that increasingly provides its population with increasing chemical compounds designed to be consumed to regulate the biochemistry that regulates mood.  Antidepressant consumption alone in our nation should be alerting us to the fact that something is wrong.  Terribly wrong.

We accept that we hold more people in more prisons than does any other wealthy nation.  We have rampant rates of sexual assault, domestic violence, harm to children, extremes of poverty and wealth that are both appalling and insane.  Addictions to alcohol, legal and illegal drugs, to spending, food and sex riddle the fabric of our society.  Our education systems are failing, our health is declining, our local community roots are disintegrating and our families are struggling greatly.  (It is becoming unpopular to talk about divorce/break-up rates, children being raised without both of their parents, or about working families that do NOT have access to high quality day care that babies and children need.)

As a nation we are continuing to build gross dysregulation into our future generations as our youth become unfit even for military duty at the alarming rate of 75%, and we continue to turn our backs on the fact that we are regressing in the quality of our overall well-being — not progressing. (See: 75% of young Americans unfit for Military Duty)

Whatever we are in love with, and whatever we are attached to, it’s not working.

The point of our physiological stress-calm response system is to take our startle response seriously when we need to.  When we experience a state of shock in our body systems it is a sign of health.  We are supposed to notice what is wrong, pay attention and then respond appropriately to a problem — and SOLVE it.

We use words like empathy, compassion, conscience and consciousness as if we know what they mean just like we use love and attachment  (all processes involving biochemical interactions in our body-brain).

Psychopaths do not have a normal startle response, tied to the fact that they do not have a conscience.  Do we as a nation have the ability (a fright-filled thought) to no longer be startled by flaws in our personal and social system to situations that are harmful?  What critical level of distress and trauma must exist in our society before our lethargic narcissism and ignorance gives way to asking the right questions about our choices?

Are we so distracted by the noisy clutter of what occupies our attention that we can no longer respond to the scream of our inner alarm system that should have already alerted us to the fact that all is not well in this nation we live in?

We can do better.

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Reminder:   Please always click on the title of a post and go to the blog directly to read – my edit process often lags behind my posting – apologies!

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UICEF  – Innocenti Research Centre – Report Card 10

Measuring Child Poverty:  New league tables of child poverty in the world’s rich countries

May 2012

http://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/rc10_eng.pdf

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“Yet it is arguable that the child poverty rates is one of the most important of all indicators of a society’s health and well-being.  For the here and now, it is a measure of what is happening to some of society’s most vulnerable members.  For the years to come, it is a pointer to the well-being and cohesion of society as a whole.”

In the second of the two tables presented at the above link, this report indicates that as sown in Fig. 1b A league table of relative child poverty, 35 economically advanced countries

USA is second from the BOTTOM heading up only Romania.  But what measurements should be taken?  Which present the most useful accurate picture of the facts?  This report presents an excellent description of the problems connected to measurements of “relative poverty” as this condition creates “the sense of falling so far behind the norms of one’s society as to be at risk of social exclusion.”

23.1% of American children fall below the “relative poverty” rate in our nation. 

In Fig. 5 Child poverty rates by different relative poverty lines, USA remains at the bottom only above Romania using three different poverty lines set at 50%, 40% and/or 60%.  In Fig. 7 The poverty gap, USA is at the very bottom BELOW even Romania.  (The report also notes that there are many invisible children in Romania whose state of existence escape measurement.)

In spite of the variance of measurements being used in the tables presented in this report, it is true that “a greater proportion of the children are allowed to fall significantly below the norms of their societies in the United states than in the Czech Republic.”

“When presented for what it is – an approximate measure not of absolute poverty but of falling so far behind the normal standard of living in the society as to be excluded from the advantages and opportunities that the majority take for granted – the idea of relative child poverty does make intuitive sense.”

In furthering discussion about advantages and disadvantages of choosing poverty measurements, the report states:

“Ideally, the monitoring of child poverty would include its timing and duration as well as its breadth and depth.  The earlier the privation and the longer its duration, the greater the potential impact on the child.  This is true both because of the inherent vulnerability of the earliest years of life and because the longer a family stays poor the harder it may become to maintain essential expenditures (as savings and assets run down, for example, or as borrowing and other sources of help reach their limits).”

“In other words, child poverty should be monitored in three dimensions – asking not only how many children fall below national poverty lines but how far and for how long.”

The Conclusion to this report:

“This report has set out the latest internationally comparable data on child poverty as measured by rates of child deprivation and relative child income poverty.

The two measures are profoundly different in concept.  Both have strengths and weaknesses.  Taken together, they offer two different but complementary measures and offer the best currently available comparative picture of child poverty in the world’s wealthiest nations.

Both measures are also behind the times, and the seriousness of this failing has been exposed by the post-2008 economic downturn.  At this critical moment for low-income families in so many countries, very few have detailed information on the impact the crisis is having on children’s lives.  It may of course be argued that in times of crisis governments have more to worry about than producing statistics.  But without up-to-date information there is little possibility of putting in place policies that use limited resources in cost-effective ways to protect children from the effects of poverty.

Failure to offer this protection brings heavy costs.  The biggest price is paid by individual children whose susceptible years of mental and physical growth are placed at risk.  But societies also pay a heavy price – in lower returns on educational investments, in reduced skills and productivity, in the increased likelihood of unemployment and welfare dependence, I the higher costs of social protection and judicial systems, and in the loss of social cohesion.  In the medium term, these costs must be met in the hard currency of the billions of extra dollars spent in attempting to cope with the wide range of problems associated with high levels of child poverty.  The economic argument, in anything but the shortest term, is therefore heavily on the side of preventing children from falling into poverty in the first place.

Even more important is the argument in principle.  Childhood by its nature, and by its very vulnerability, demands of a civilized society that children should be the first to be protected rather than the last to be considered.  This principle of ‘first call’ for children holds good for governments and nations as well as for the families who bear the primary responsibility for protection.  And because children have only one opportunity to grow and to develop normally, the commitment to protection must be upheld in good times and in bad.  It must be absolute, not contingent.

Nor can this principle of first call be side-stepped by the argument that the protection of children is an individual rather than a social responsibility.  No one can seriously claim that it is the child’s fault if economies turn down or if parents are unemployed or low-paid.  That is why the league tables showing the different degrees of protection provided to at-risk groups should be weighed by politicians, press and public.  A society that fails to support parents in the task of protecting the years of childhood is a society that is failing its most vulnerable.  I is also a society that is storing up intractable social and economic problems for the years immediately ahead.”

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SEE ALSO this GLOBAL report:  Progress for Children:  A report card on adolescents – Number 10, April 2012

Following post – commentary:

+FOR THE LOVE OF OUR NATION’S CHILDREN, WHAT ARE WE DOING WRONG?

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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Twenty four hours of rain and a nighttime of snow.  Winter in the Arizona high desert.  All is still dark and very still outside.  I awoke thinking. 

“No, please.  No writing in my sleep yet – this time.  It’s not the time.  I am not done cleaning my writing castle.”

In this 100-year old house the dirt accumulates like someone swept it all in here off of somebody else’s porch steps.  Right into my space, every tiny corner of my space.  When the wind blows during dry seasons – which includes all but a few weeks per year – there is little to stop the dirt from sweeping in.  Under my bathroom sink I find it, under the kitchen sink, too.  In all of my closets, in every groove of every lamp, falling within the pages of my books on my shelf.  Burying into the rim of every unopened can in my larder.  Dirt.

Now that the snow is holding the earth down, sitting as it is this dark 4 a.m. morning, I can get more than a handle on this creeping earth inside of my house.  (Inside of my brain?)  Nobody knows but the survivors of the dust bowl days what THAT dirt was like as it ate up your soul and left only a body that tried to survive in Texas eating tumbleweeds.

Nobody lives here but me (and a small dog, two cats that live outside and eight hens which obviously live out there, also).  When I feel lonely, which I can often do if I let THAT dirt creep in and accumulate in the spaces surrounding my heart, I think about this situation being rather a luxury.  Alone.  A writer with her thoughts.

Damn thoughts.

My friend Sandy has sent me a book by Alfred Lansing, Endurance:  Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage.  It could have been titled, How to Survive on a Few Penguin Feet and Like It.”

I have been fasting for many, many years.  I only read developmental neuroscience.  I have reasons for this fast, and I won’t know until I know when I will be free again to read any old (or new) thing that I like.  Right now, because I know I have a trauma-formed body-brain from severe abuse that began at my birth, I will not feed my brain other people’s words any more than I can help it.

My brain is extremely efficient.  It has no ownership (as I have complained on this blog in recent times) of words.  Any handy combination of words is good enough for me.  My brain doesn’t give a “tinker’s damn” (or is that “dam?”) where any words come from, so if something is needed I will be as likely to snatch something stored in my verbal memory and use it that belongs to someone else (so they say) as reinvent the literary wheel.

But this book.  Wise, Sandy is.  What am I finding in these pages?

Endurance.

“Oh, yes Sandy.  I remember.  I know what that word means.”

Or at least I am beginning to remember.

An ultimate sort of tale.  How to be continually miserable as you live through it.

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Cleaning my thinking castle.  I want to chase words like those 28 men during the years of WWI chased land.  Or tried to as they floated around on rotting ice floes that tried to eat them alive, but not quite, ’cause the men were quicker.

I want to romp around with words like one of those sled dog puppies would rather have tossed around a half dead rabbit than be shot and eaten by the very men they worked so hard to help stay alive.

But life is life.

And too many words spoils the appetite for more.

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I could tell you that in the dark of morning, using what shadowed light my own few lamps provide me, damp rag in hand, pulling every stocked up useless thing from the crannies of my computer desk – whose arrival in my life itself belongs to a story with too many words in it – I just removed my wonderful now-loved copy of Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition off of its shelf where it’s been sitting since the last good desert rain accumulating dust and dirt.

Taking the book I spank its pages together hard.  The dust flies out.  The words stick, because hard copy dictionaries are made that way.

Years ago when one of my beloved daughters won a spelling bee she was gifted with one of these dictionaries and she gave it to me.  One of my regrets for my misbehavior in life.  Years ago a bit later I was living with a woman whose esteem I evidently sold a part of my soul to obtain.  She criticized me as so many had done before since I was 18 for using TOO BIG WORDS.  Who did I think I was?  A snob?

We were standing in front of her raging fireplace.  I reached for the poor defenseless dictionary and in an act of “Love me!” I threw my precious book into the flames so it could turn into ashes, words and all.

I half-way later replaced that book with this one, but no inscription lives inside its cover to my dear daughter.  Yes.  A shame on me, a shame I was so removed from being perfectly OK with who I am:  A thinker and a writer.  (Among many other things).

Now?  I use the online versions for word searches. 

ENDURANCE

1: permanence, duration <the endurance of the play’s importance>

2: the ability to withstand hardship or adversity; especially : the ability to sustain a prolonged stressful effort or activity <a marathon runner’s endurance>

3: the act or an instance of enduring or suffering <endurance of many hardships>

I have to go to ENDURE to find this word’s origins as it came into Modern English

1: to undergo (as a hardship) especially without giving in : suffer <endured great pain>

2: to regard with acceptance or tolerance <could not endure noisy children>

intransitive verb

1: to continue in the same state : last <the style endured for centuries>

2: to remain firm under suffering or misfortune without yielding <though it is difficult, we must endure>

ORIGIN OF ENDURE

Middle English, from Anglo-French endurer, from Vulgar Latin *indurare, from Latin, to harden, from in- + durare to harden, endure — more at during

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What about this word?  How do these two states of being connect and relate, coexist with one another?

SURVIVE

1: to remain alive or in existence : live on

2: to continue to function or prosper

transitive verb

1: to remain alive after the death of <he is survived by his wife>

2: to continue to exist or live after <survived the earthquake>

3: to continue to function or prosper despite : withstand <they survived many hardships>

ORIGIN OF SURVIVE

Middle English, to outlive, from Anglo-French survivre, from Latin supervivere, from super- + vivere to live — more at quick

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Surviving 18 years of childhood from birth under the constant watch of Mother’s evil eye and the nearly continual interruptions of my experience of being myself in my life by her horrendous psychotic abuse.  Yes, this counts as OUTLIVING what Mother did to me.  It counts as SUPER-LIVING.

And endure?  This word intimates a deeper state of inner permanence that allowed me to come out of “all that” intact. 

But the truth is I don’t really understand the difference between these two words.  Are they redundant?  Does language clean up its own house over time to remove extraneous words that really aren’t necessary because some other word says exactly the same thing – and why keep two when one will do?

I don’t know.  Only solution?  Get back to cleaning the outside out of the inside of my house as I do the same for my thinking mind – because some part of me KNOWS the difference.  The other parts of me don’t yet know what I know.

This is, I suspect, exactly why Sandy sent me this book to read.

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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Now that today I am better, with the love of friends who truly know what I am and what I am about in this world, in this body, in this lifetime, and from the high desert soaking rain — the high tumbling multi-shadowed clouds — with the help of the wind and its companion breezes — sunlight brilliant against the blue outlining edges — and the rainbow I saw this morning as I answered a friend — the full low humble rainbow arching close to me in the north as it called to me “I am here” — as all called to me “We are here!  You are not alone!  You are befriended.  You can breath.  You can relax and move away from those so-sharp razor edges that tell you — you have gone far enough.  Come back now.  Back to your body.  Back to time and place.”

Yesterday I searched online for hours reading what neuroscientists in USA, China, Germany, Japan, Iran, India, the Netherlands, Israel — have found in the past two years about the brain.  About especially brain wave oscillating rhythms.  AH!  They say. 

Each single individual neuron responds and is responded to as these patterns of music play, region to region, community to community inside our skull.  “Synchrony.”  The scientists talk about.  “Asynchrony.”  1 – 400 Hz.  Do they know with their EEGs they are hearing the sound of the beat in the beta and gamma, alpha and theta music all seven-plus billion of us here on this planet (plus all of those animals) are singing together?  Do they hear it?  Can I hear it?

So focused I become when I search deep space through echannels.  I follow and follow each trail of information, tendril wisps of vapor.  Thoughts so small and ultimately so connected.  All those trails lead in gigantic loops so far I search also for where the trails of thought turn to loop over and into and through one another.  Sometimes this takes years.

The tiny little glial cells.  I learned about them, too.  (I want to learn more.  But not now.)  From the Greek word “glue.”  They take on many tasks, but the one that I followed yesterday has to do with how they are the first “pioneers” (the researchers call them) to travel during fetal brain development into new territory, new geography in the newly formed skull, creating molecular signposts and molecular trails into new regions where other new cells will follow.  The neurons segregate, congregate, speicialize and form communities that communicate with one another as they form our brain and our mind.  Little “entrymen” as homesteaders like my father were called.  Little homesteaders. 

I also searched about the corpus callosum, the region of neurons at the center of our brain as they link the two halves of our brain together — our left and our right.  Across this formation, through this bridge information is passed so our two brains can integrate and process and talk to one another.  They decide.  They know what matters, what doesn’t, why and how.

At the same time I know from previous study that early trauma changes all of this for its survivors.  Both our brain hemispheres, our corpus callosum – and so much more.  All changed.  We have a different kind of brain.  Always, I ask of mine, “Who are you?  What do you know and how do you know it and how do I find out what you know?  Different knowledge.  We know it in different ways.

Yesterday I followed with my left brain (I am quite sure) volumes of factual detailed information that is written and published in little tiny unrelated pieces.  My right brain was left far behind, unable to sing to me, “This is what all of this means!”  Sing loudly.  Sing insistently.

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But when I follow what intrigues me in the PubMed online database with my windows open and the research flooding my poor old worn laptop, it slows down, so far down I am forced to stop.  Close this world down.  Lose all of my trains of intent thinking, reboot my computer from dead stop-off, and begin again.  This is frustrating.  This slows ME down.

I dream of having a big room with large flat high-quality monitors covering its walls so I can put on them all those thoughts when I find them — sit back — walk around — read those research thoughts as the works of wonderous discovery of truth and beauty that they are!

As it is, I have no printer to even print them.  Which is just as well.  Last time I did this searching (about 5 years ago – so much new has been discovered!) I filled over 60 feet of running board bookshelf feet with binders full of reports on the state of a miniscule snippet of the cosmos that fascinates me — the human body, especially the brain.  Eventually I felt crowded.  I emptied it all into the ground and fed it to my garden worms.

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Today.  I am back to ink pen in hand, riding my writing as I would the perfect steed.  Wind in my hair while I empty 10-20 pens a week at least and think “What a frustrating waste of manufacture and resources.”  Pens are created cheaply today and sold with so little ink.  No longer can I find them refills.  Most of them don’t even open.  But, no, I have yet to sharpen a quill and find a pot of ink to ride with across lines on paper until long after sunset.

(I have 180-page spiral notebooks all over my house where I can lay my hands on one in an instant.  All purchased for two bucks each at our small town’s Family Dollar store.  No college ruled sheets to be found in this town.  I make do.)

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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I fell into a chasm today.  I don’t know when but I probably know how.  Being a bridge between the lived experience of being a being so changed by early caregiver relationship trauma (as “they” call it) means I live with a different kind of geography inside of me.  There are breaks where they shouldn’t be.  There are gaps and losses, wishes and hopes smashed, missing pieces,  lost dreams.

Somewhere in all my neuroscientific study today I encountered a piece that said, “60% of Americans experience at least one severe trauma in their lives and 40% don’t.”

I can’t remember where I read that!  Of all the notes I took today I lost the reference for that one.  The most important one it seems to me as four hours after first trying to sleep tonight I am still awake, still struggling.  How is it possible for any one person to go through their entire life without a trauma?

What world does that happen in?

Am I that out of touch?  60% is still a LOT of people.  And there’s us.  Those of us who knew very little that wasn’t trauma when we were little.  At least that was my world for my first 18 years.  I feel like I life on some skinny jut of land out into some foreign dark water where no other life I can see or hear keeps me knowing I have a void inside of me that will not be filled in this lifetime.

I try to study the actualy facts, the neuroscience research that documents this and that and that and this that goes so wrong in the entire developing brain and body of a baby exposed to severe, chronic, unending, unendurable trauma that – indeed – life makes sure we survive.  Thinking in all those cold hard facts seems to have snapped something inside of me, some little warm connection I seem mostly to keep ahold of — that today I lost.  Completely lost.

I am wondering if that kind for dense close cold reading took me far out to sea and then left me there to live or to die.  Yes.  These things do happen.  But I didn’t see this coming.  I didn’t see myself going out with some invisible tide in the ‘abstract’ direction, so far out now when I try to sleep I can’t seem to find my real self anywhere.  Not that I am certain that I HAVE a real self, but I usually have at least some makeshift version of a real self I at least DON’T FEEL LIKE THIS!

All those researchers, psychotherapists, news people, book writers who so seem to have ALL the answers.  If they don’t they seem to be quite sure of themselves and quite content stating whatever small facts their particular focus of study has given to them.

Then.  Here I am.  A continent of discontent — and I now know why — but I don’t think I belong to the group that can PROVE what I know.

I’ll get past this.  I always have found a way to go UP again after I have gone DOWN again.  I think there’s a kind of lesson in how I feel right now.  I was not cautious.  I did not monitor my emotional reality state as I plowed and plowed through information about the insides of all of us.  What does right.  What goes wrong.  I will have to more carefully consider where I am going to take myself and my mind next in my work on this trauma thing.  Carefully consider.

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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I am doing some writing about how trauma changes an infant’s developing brain.  Heavy developmental neuroscience in there.  But, maybe I can keep this in my chapter titled Dry Ice and Fire Ants.  The chapter is specifically about how the heat of the arousal in the brain from a trauma trigger of the  ‘GO’ branch of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) kicks in during trauma only to be frozen out by the ‘STOP’ branch’s energy conservation response.  Both responses can severely damage infant brain and nervous system development in environments of chronic abuse and trauma in early caregiving relationships.

Is this memory accurate?  I have no idea, but it’s always stayed just like this.  I wish I could find a classmate from around 1960 – 1962 that could confirm or deny the validity of this one:

°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°

+DRY ICE AND FIRE ANTS

I have childhood associations to both dry ice and fire ants.  My fire ant memory originated when I was five before our family joined my father in Alaska.  Supposedly, according to my psychotic mother, I “let” my two-year-old sister sit on a fire ant hill because I was so irresponsible when she asked me to watch my sister (I doubt that she had), or maybe because I hated her.  (This story is in the first book of the Mildred’s Mountain series containing Mother’s letters in Suburbia to Alaska.)  Because I was beaten over the remaining years of my childhood for this supposed ‘crime’ I had committed I clearly remember those fire ants. 

Dry ice belongs to an Eagle River Elementary School memory from the day a fireman came to talk to us at one of our many school assemblies.   All the children filed into the auditorium just as he finished setting up his display on the stage.  Dressed in his full fireman outfit this speaker was the most impressive yet.  He got my fullest attention.  Especially when he got to the part of his talk when he waved a carrot slowly through the air in front of him like a magician would brandish a magic wand (although I had never seen either) and then laid it very carefully in the center of a block of dry ice smoking in a pan sitting on a table beside him.  Next he put on his gigantic leather fireman gloves and made a big show of picking up a second block of dry ice that had been smoking away in another pan and set it carefully down on top of the carrot.

I then became very distracted from thinking about the carrot as Mr. Fireman gave a big speech about the importance of having a fire extinguisher in every household.  Although I didn’t really even know what such a thing was, I sure knew we didn’t have one.  But I soon learned that’s why the fireman came.  To teach us about fire extinguishers.  Both the good and the bad of them.

There he was, bellowing across the heads of all we little kids as he made sure we understood that “NEVER NEVER EVER EVER put your finger in the way of a fire extinguisher in use!”   Roar!  Hiss!  SWOOSH!  He aimed white spray into a garbage can while he told us that if he took his gloves off and put his finger into that spray it would FREEZE SOLID. And then if he touched anything it would break into a million pieces. 

A finger?  A million pieces?  Grim.  Very very grim.  I was suitably scared before he even got to the next part of his demonstration.  He put his fire extinguisher down, reached over to lift the top block of dry ice off of the carrot, and put it back in its pan.    Then with his very large glove hands, he managed to pick up the carrot and hold it high in the air over his head.  “Watch this very carefully children,” he said to us with words slow and definite.  Pausing for emphasis and then pausing a little more.  We were hushed.  Silence.  Then CRACK!  He dropped the carrot to the stage floor and yes indeed it disappeared into a million shattered pieces.  “That would be your finger!” 

But actually the words in this title are exactly backwards from the way I should have written them.  I just liked the sound of those words the way I wrote them.  I liked the imagery of the ice smoking and melting followed by tiny ants scrambling off to do whatever fire ants do – assuming they are not under attack from a fire extinguisher.

 As I progress through this chapter I will write about heat before cold.  GO!  Before STOP!  Fire ants before dry ice.   The topic of this chapter is about what is very likely to happen inside the rapidly developing right brain hemisphere and the developing nervous system of an infant in its first and second year of life if it is exposed to repeated patterns of trauma through neglect and abuse.

Most of us probably know more about how Burger King makes French fries than we know about how our brain operates or how our attachment interactions with our primary caregivers during our infancy give our brain the information it needs to build itself in cooperation with our earliest environment. We cannot talk about what goes right and what goes wrong during these most rapid, most critical early brain-building periods of our development without being able to use some basic words to describe these processes.  While many of these words might not be familiar to us, we can learn them – because we must.  We cannot learn about how early traumatic stress damages an infant’s growing brain without this information.

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Programmed cell death (PCD), happens through an orderly pattern of events carried out by cellular machinery intrinsic to cells.  Cell death by suicide is called apoptosis.  (There is no consensus about how to pronounce apoptosis:  some say APE oh TOE sis; some say  uh POP tuh sis.  I prefer A POP TOSIS, like bad popcorn breath.)  This process is as necessary for proper development as mitosis is.  (Cells having a nucleus of genetic material contained in a membrane envelope go through mitosis as part of the cell division.  Mitosis divides chromosomes into two roughly identical sets in two separate nuclei that will end up in duplicate, or sister cells.)

Apoptosis reabsorbs a tadpole’s tail before the frog hops out; removes the tissue between a fetus’ fingers and toes; causes the inner lining of the uterus to slough off at the start of menstruation; eliminates T-cells that might otherwise cause an autoimmune attack on the body.  In this book the apoptosis of interest has to do with how this process enables the formation of the proper connections (synapses) between neurons (nerve cells) in the brain by eliminating surplus cells.  (The human adult brain has approximately 100 billion neurons.)

Nerve cells or neurons have specialized projections called dendrites and axons, which do not exist as a part of any other cells in the body.  Dendrites bring information to the cell body and axons take information away from it.  Information from one neuron flows to another neuron across a synapse which is a structure in the nervous system (of which the brain is a part) that permits a neuron to pass an electrical or chemical signal to another cell (neural or otherwise) across a small gap separating neurons. 

Neurons can be classified by the direction in which they send information.  (1) Sensory (or afferent) neurons send information from sensory receptors (e.g., in skin, eyes, nose, tongue, ears) TOWARD the central nervous system.  (2) Motor (or efferent) neurons send information AWAY from the central nervous system to muscles or glands.  (3) Interneurons send information between sensory neurons and motor neurons and are mostly located in the central nervous system.  (Please visit this website for a visual about neurons:  http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/synapse.html.)

Apoptosis that is triggered by signals inside of a cell follows what is known as the intrinsic or mitochondrial pathway to destruction.  Mitochondria are a cell’s power producers.  They are tiny organelles with an inner and an outer membrane that act like a digestive system that takes nutrients in, breaks them down, and creates forms of energy that a cell can use.  The fluid inside of the mitochondria is called the matrix. 

In a healthy cell, the outer membranes of its mitochondria display the protein Bcl-2 on their surface.  Bcl-2 is protective and inhibits programmed cell death (apoptosis).  If a cell is hurt on the inside this causes a related protein, Bax, to migrate to the surface of the mitochondrion where it inhibits the protective effect of Bcl-2.  A process is then put into motion that executes this cell.

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This is nowhere near done yet – will be a piece of work……….

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January 23, 2013 (I have no idea why the blog has altered parts of the text formating in this post!)

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+BUILDING A HUMAN BEING:  VERY NARROW MARGIN FOR ERROR

Insane Mother Mildred:  Her Sustained Aggression and Violence Against Me:  I could write a book about this title.  Every word I ever write is really about this title as I ask perpetual questions for which I am forever left searching for answers.

What is it about me that I continue to search for the truth about what happened to my mother that changed her as a human being into a raging abusive monster toward me?

What is it about me that I cannot bury in insignificance the fact that I know that what she did to me when I was a baby is what torments me most?  I read the developmental neuroscience as if my life depended on it to learn about her so I can learn about myself.  I see where changes along similar developmental lines happened to her as they happened through her to me.  Yet, I am so different from her.

Even this morning I clearly know how one part of my damage keeps me from sleep.  I cannot make trite sounds as I am supposed to be able to, a consequence in my brain as it was changed in its development by her out-RAGE-ous screaming abuse.   Sounds do not fade into the background for me that belong there outside the range of my attention.  I cannot sort sounds out.  Even voices, fingernails scraping on chalkboards. 

Sounds hound me, chase me, plague me, torture me.  They jump out at me.  Insignificant sounds I should not hear, should not listen to, that should not capture my attention as if they are wild beasts intent on eating me alive, shredding me into pieces.

These sounds torment me.  Dogs barking angrily in the distance in the middle of the night.  My refrigerator humming peacefully.  To me it’s a roaring freight train intent on obliterating me.  Every sound as I grow older fits a pitch, a range of tone, a rhythm that belonged to the range of sound the monster made when she was going to attack – or was attacking – me.  From the time I was born.  For the next 18 years.  These changes are built into my brain, all the way into my brain.

In my brain sounds can be in more than one place at the same time.  They are always moving.  I am insulted in my senses by anything above the sound of silence.  Sounds intrude into my body and through it as if I don’t even exist.  I am the hearing one.  I am the always listening one.  I am the one under threat.  I am the one attacked.

I cannot tune sound out.  I cannot tone it down.  I cannot ignore it as if it doesn’t exist, as if it belongs somewhere else and to someone else.  All sound I hear is MINE to pay attention to.  I had this knowledge built into me from the start of my life.  There was no safe zone between myself and sound.

  Mother hurt me from the beginning of my life in ways that I am only now discovering.  She hurt my forming brain, my growing body on the INSIDE of me all the way into the formation of my brainstem itself, just as this happened to her.  I need to know this.  I cannot turn and walk away from my search for understanding about how early trauma changed me for my lifetime.  Being alive torments me.  This is not what I deserved.  This is not the way being alive is supposed to be.  It is not what any of us early abuse, neglect and trauma survivors ever deserved.

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We all have a body-brain formed in its essence by the quality of our mother’s attachment system.  All that plagues me where it matters most does so because I am the victim of my mother’s flawed and faulty attachment system.  Faulty.  An understatement bigger than Manhattan.  Disastrous is the better word for me to use to describe how what happened to Mother when she was a baby came down directly to me.  But to say so now, to say that Mother’s treatment of me was psychotically pathological, puts me way ahead of my story.  Just as with each life, each story must begin at the beginning.  Finding where that beginning actually starts seems to me to be the essence of my story itself.

I cannot walk away from any part of my story as long as I remain in a body.  I read developmental neuroscience research as others might read their Bible.  I am looking for my creation story.  I am looking for that story for other people who suffer in ways that I do.  I search for answers as if I am called even from the beyond the beyond to do so.  I am hounded by the echoes of Mother’s abuse of me in every breath I take, in every cell of all my tissue, and I know that every baby who misses out on the right kind of interactions with its mother that it needs ends up with some kind of deepest damage like I have.  The kind of trauma-triggered changes that happened to my body-brain development happen to others.  The difference is only a matter of degrees.

At the same time I know these researchers are speaking to me in their writings of fundamental yet rudimentary facts about what a growing baby’s body and brain need to be right in this world, I know they could not have possibly had the kinds of infant abuse trauma happen to them that happened to Mother.  That happened to me.  That happened and is happening to so many others.  Or they, too, would lie in shambles on their insides, broken from the bottom up and from the inside out struggling to make it – barely – through one day let alone through the rest of their life.

What motivates these brilliant, dedicated thinkers to study and learn and write what they do?  How can they look at the facts they know and be content to realize there is such a massive gap between they and we who suffer from the infant abuse trauma changes they so clearly describe to one another while nobody on the outside of their world has the ability to access or to comprehend what they are saying?

What light keeps burning to keep them going ever further toward the darkness of the truth about such horrible permanent irreversible damage done to babies who will be forced to endure their entire life suffering so tragically from consequences that were so preventable?

All those babies screaming.  All those babies dying inside a little at a time while their bodies live and live and live.  All those babies, over the edge, hanging onto the slippery wet rocks and breaking tiny twigs as they hang on, dangling over the precipice of the greatest cliffs.  About to fall.  Falling, falling while nobody alive stops what happened to them from happening again and again and again from sunrise to sunrise to other babies somewhere else?

I know in my body exactly what these researchers are saying.  I stop my falling by believing I can read their science, eat it up until I am so clear I can transform their words – of course being bound by polite (legal) rules of publishing manners not to plagiarise – not to overwhelm readers, either, from how I say what needs to be heard and understood about molecular changes abuse of infants  and trauma to them creates that can never be undone.

I seem to bear a burden of cognizance,  of being able to exist in a void between the truth in the researchers’ words, within the void where tiny babies die, tumbling into oblivion while they remain alive.  Screaming until they become dulled in silence.  Broken.  Into pieces inside.  Tiny hopeless shards of humanity.  And their ranks are growing.

Yet in this world where the “competitive struggle for existence” has yet to be transformed into patterns of true, heartfelt cooperation between members of our species, it is considered proper etiquette to so speak the unspeakable truth of science while obeying the rules about the ownership of words and the most important truths they contain that I feel I have had the tongue of my soul cut out while I bleed to death for myself, for my dead mother, for my dead father who had the very life and mind sucked out of him by the terrible, devastating mental illness contracted I believe by Mother exactly because she was abused, neglected and traumatized as an infant during the most critical stages of her body-brain’s development. 

My soul cries, “Where is the soul in science?”

At the same time I know I endured for 18 years such a hell as few can begin to imagine.  I reach for the knowledge that if I could find a way to stay alive and keep myself HERE – I can use all that strength, all that determination and excess of deep inner personal power to reach inside the pages of this icy cold book I study, whose pages are increasingly cluttered at their edges with Dollar Store sticky tags marking every important passage I must digest and somehow make my own. 

I must retrieve truth for the good of every cliff-hanging baby alive but screaming or dulled into near oblivion.  I must tear those words apart to find out and then explain in common language how trauma turned our very body and brain into our perpetual enemy – because that’s the best our early life could do for us:  Keep us alive.

I must take the sterilized, so-owned words of these scientists across a great divide between what they know and what early trauma survivors know so I can put these two worlds together.  I must pull the truth out as it exists in the facts.  I must use my mental forceps to bring those words through a kind of birth canal so they can come to life where we live it, can contribute to life, no matter how agonizing and bloody this birthing process may be.

“How can they own all these words?”  I want to know, “when they are genesis words?  When they belong to life itself?”

I am perfectly free to use a word like “spoonful” in my writings and nobody can bash and batter me for stealing a word.  Or for using (How dare I?) a word my readers do not comprehend.  I could write about smut and pulp, about rise and fall, but dare I write about the actual patterns of interactions required absolutely by nature between a mother and her infant for an entire human being to be formed correctly and undamaged without falling victim to the academic clutchings of,  “THOSE WORDS ARE MINE!  I and I alone – well, in tandem with my publisher – discovered through science what those words contain and we own them (like Monsanto owns the worlds’ seeds).  Leave my words alone”  – or – What?

Those words.  Cathedrals to science.  These books appear to have been written upside down and backwards.  Words scrunched so densely together all crunched up with no spaces between them either side to side or up and down.  I swear even the punctuation in these books is written in a foreign, unintelligible script nobody but those in the Great Labs and Ivory Towers can understand!

I fight.  I fight for the right to access this information and to share it with others who need to know it.  I NEED to know it.  I NEED to understand what happened to me where it matters most.  I don’t care if I am generations ahead of the crowds.  I need to understand.  If I have to read even this one book by Schore – Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self– over and over and over and over again as many times as there are grains of sand in the hourglass that is running out for what days are left in my lifetime, I will do so. 

I will write this.  I will find my images and they will find me.  And then, if heaven will help me, I will use my own words because they “belong” to me to convey these obtuse weighty so-dense developmental neuroscientific facts to make sense out of a special kind of world we do not currently have words to talk about.

Words about how a baby gets made by its mother’s interactions with it either in the right, good way so it can grow a body-brain unbroken inside by distressful stress in its first year of life – or not.

I am captive to this work by choice, or am I?  I spent the first 18 years of my life being the captive of an incomprehensible mad woman’s torments.  I will take these words out of the pristine pages of this one book, at least, that I am studying so I can pull the facts about this madness through from the academic world into the world I live in – So help me God.

And when I am done I hope I will be able to say something people can understand.  “Take your hands and interlock your fingers.  Tip your right elbow up and your left one down.  You have just created an image of your right brain hemisphere’s limbic system.  Your top hand represents the higher order executive functions of your orbitofrontal cortex.  This is the part of the human brain that, grown right, makes us the best humans we can be.

This high part of your brain is interlocked with and interconnected to every other process in your body in one way or another all the way down to your brainstem.  If its development is altered due to stressful trauma?  There will be shades of hell to pay for a lifetime and beyond.  Without intervention these trauma changes pass themselves down the generations.

As a newborn baby, these brain regions and all of their connections form themselves directly through interaction with the patterns that happen most significantly between the infant and its mother.  If these interactions are flawed and faulty, the infant will develop in response a faulty, flawed body and brain.

Mis-information about safety and well-being for the self in a body in this world is communicated through mother-infant interactions directly into the ‘fabric’ of the infant’s forming body-brain.  If a mother cannot give her infant what it needs, the infant’s entire brain top to bottom including all its connections will be damaged and changed through trauma-induced stress reactions to this harm-filled environment.  Possibilities for safety, security and goodness in life will correspondingly be omitted from such a developing brain.  This infant will spend the rest of its life continuing to struggle and suffer from the effects that trauma had on its so-rapidly developing body and brain. 

These trauma-induced changes impact the development and operation of the Central Nervous System of which the brain is a part, of the Autonomic Nervous System connected to the stress-calm response system.  The immune system is affected, how genes manifest themselves, the biochemical actions and interactions in the body will be altered to the negative, and all these seemingly invisible changes will leave the infant forever gasping, grasping to create a better life somehow that is continually out of reach.”

Who is telling survivors the facts about what happened, why that happened and what that means?  And what about the other half of the brain and its development in inadequate mother-infant attachment interactions?  Dare I find out?

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It is my greatly growing concern that increasing damage is being done to increasing numbers of babies in America directly due to social changes in our culture.  Stress is stress.  Distress of a chronic nature creates trauma in people’s lives.  This trauma directly impacts the quality of care infants receive in families.

As economic conditions continue to deteriorate certainly for at least half of our population, increasing burdens for working mothers will mean an overall degeneration of the very quality of our population now and into the future.  We cannot afford to continue to blind ourselves to the fact that stressed mothers, no matter how pure their intent may be to “do right” for their babies through the second year of their infant’s life, are at EXTREMELY HIGH RISK for unintentionally creating harmful trauma-triggered stress related changes in the development of their baby’s body and brain.

Now more than at any time in the history of our species we need to know, understand and put into meticulous practice what the developmental neuroscientists now know about the essential nature of the mother-infant and father-infant attachment system as it is designed to regulate the development of an infant.  These patterns of attachment interaction literally build a human being from the ground up to match the patterns as they exist in infant caregivers.  Any mistake outside the range of “good enough” mothering creates harm in an infant.  We need to be very clear what “good enough” is and why that matters.

Due to the speed of early development “critical periods” of specific growth are open and then are closed in rapid order.  Once traumatic stress changes begin to happen in an infant’s development they cannot be undone.  It doesn’t take the special abilities my psychotic abusive mentally ill mother had to harm an infant where it matters most during its earliest development.  Believe me, anyone can do it.  Knowing that fact terrifies me.

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I am working with information found in Dr. Allan N. Schore’s 2003 book published by W.W. Norton & Co., pages 252-255 —  Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self

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+INFANT ABUSE THROUGH ATTACHMENT TRAUMA:  PART ONE

It is a mother’s job (or a replacement early primary caregiver who can never replace the mother completely) to care if her infant is upset or not.  She is supposed to help her infant return to a state of peaceful calm if it is upset.  In neuroscientific attachment lingo a mother is supposed to “attune” to her upset infant and help it by “repairing” a “rupture” created when something too intensely troubling happens to her baby.  A mother is most certainly NOT supposed to be the cause of her infant’s “rupture.”  She is not supposed to traumatize/abuse or neglect her baby. 

Severely negative emotional states hurt how a baby develops.  The right limbic brain region grows very fast during the first year of life.  Repeated patterns of traumatic interactions between a baby and its mother (or other primary caregiver) create intense biochemical reactions in the baby that have great power to damage infant nervous system and especially right brain development.

Neuroscientists know that every time trauma causes an “intensely dysregulated” state in an infant, potential harm is done.  When the mother does not respond to her infant appropriately to calm it down, is the cause of the infant’s distress, and when these patterns continue over time, this “massive misattunement” between infant and caregiver cause biochemical changes in the infant’s body and brain that begin to accumulate and do not diminish their harmful impact on the baby’s brain and nervous system development. 

How can a baby defend itself against the massive over-stimulation caused by traumatic interactions with its caregiver?  Much of its defense must occur on the level of chemicals that are designed to internally take care of the infant’s body.  As trauma continue to happen over time both the overstimulation and the biochemical changes to the developing right brain they create become embedded in the rapidly developing brain, especially in the right hemisphere.  Any defenses a baby’s little body can use to survive these traumas become a part of the right brain, as well.  In addition, as Dr. Allan Schore states, these effects which include the defenses are also built into “the core structure of the evolving personality.” (p. 252)

Well, I’m not a scientist but this sounds like a whole lot of “Uh-Oh!” to me.  Because I have a personal history of being the recipient of 18 years of terrible abuse from the time I was born at the hands of my psychotic Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) mother, I want to understand what Schore means when he mentions “core structures” and “personality” being changed through early traumatic attachment interactions with primary caregivers especially a mother.  I know my mother acted “fine” in public.  I know she was fully capable of acting the opposite when nobody was around to see or to hear what she did to me.  I have no reason to believe that the same kind of overwhelming chronic kind of overstimulation from trauma didn’t happen to my mother when she was a baby.  The same kind of biochemical distress reactions that Schore describes probably began to negatively impact Mother’s personality, brain and nervous system development from the time she was a very small baby (as I describe in my upcoming book, Story Without Words).

That trauma changes do impact the early rapid forming right brain in the “core structure of the evolving personality” in extremely damaging ways is exactly what I need to know in order to begin to make sense out of what harmed my mother so much she could end up doing what she did to me.  Why would I want to begin my search for understanding of my mother’s mental illness anywhere else than at the very beginning?

In a “good enough” or “best possible” early caregiver-infant environment, what most could consider as a “typical” environment, I imagine that an infant’s developmental trajectory would head off in its best possible direction.  Because the stages of development build upon what has already been built first, one good change could follow another.  We can call a traumatic infant-caregiver environment “atypical.”  One harm-triggered developmental change would then change the trajectory of further development in a trauma-related direction.

While most experts claim that such changes due to trauma survival are diversions from an “adaptive course,” I disagree with the assumptions contained in that term.  While these changes might be maladaptive to continued survival in a benign, benevolent world, if they are necessary to continued survival in a malevolent world I see them as bordering on miraculous.  That these adaptations to trauma do cause difficulties themselves cannot diminish the power they can have to keep a baby alive in a malevolent world.  The traumatized infant’s body has no other choice.

Schore refers to trauma-triggered developmental changes as being “deflections of normal structural development.”  (p. 252) How could they not be, I would ask?  An infant immersed in the horrors of a traumatic early world is not trying to stay alive and grow its body and brain in anything like a normal environment.  Trauma changes are normal in its world.

Yet Schore points out that it is exactly during its earliest stages of rapid brain growth that an infant is “maximally vulnerable” to any kind of stress at all, or to what Schore calls “nonoptimal environmental events.”  (p. 252)   I interpret this to mean that being an infant who MUST rapidly grow a brain means that at this stage of our life we are at highest risk for the greatest harm from even minimal traumas – let alone from massive ones.  During these critical periods of brain growth we are extremely sensitive to our environment. 

What we experience shapes the way the synapses in our brain behave as our growing brain is shaped, and stress-filled early environments are “growth-inhibiting” when they “negatively influence the critical period organization of limbic cortical and subcortical connections that mediate homestatic self-regulatory and attachment systems.”  (Schore, p. 252)  Critical periods of growth happen once.  The changes created during these periods are permanent.  These are not minor developmental milestones that Schore is describing as he states that caregiver-infant trauma “leads to a regulatory failure” that impairs the homeostasis (balance) of the autonomic nervous system (ANS), disturbs function of the limbic system, and creates dysfunction in the hypothalamus portion and in the reticular formation of the brain.

(One of the most important functions of the hypothalamus, which has several functions, is to link the nervous system to the endocrine (hormone) system via the pituitary gland.  I find it very interesting that this brain region is also connected to important aspects of parenting and attachment behaviors.  I would wonder how the damage that Schore is describing from infant abuse trauma to this portion of the brain could not help but end up impacting parenting and attachment behaviors in infant trauma survivors.

The reticular formation, a region of the brainstem, is one of the oldest portions of the brain.  It is involved in multiple important tasks, including the filtering of incoming stimuli to discriminate between what are irrelevant background stimuli and what stimuli is relevant.  I wonder if early trauma changes to this brain region can show up in symptoms that are connected to adult anxiety and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.  This area of the brain is also involved in motor control and body movements, cardiovascular control, pain modulation, and sleep-wake cycles.)

Schore also states that “transcriptional regulation of gene expression” (p. 252) in the growing infant brain is modulated by intense stress.  Distressful infant-caregiver interactions that create hyperarousal (heightened arousal due to stress) cause the release of powerful chemicals in the infant’s brain designed to regulate arousal.  These chemicals can damage sensitive brain areas in the baby.

An abused infant’s right brain development is also significantly altered by the release of major stress-regulating neurochemicals that influence energy available to vital organs in the body and help contain or stop activation of the sympathetic (“GO!”) branch of the ANS.  These Big Gun stress hormones are directly regulated by the kinds of interactions an infant has with its mother and other early primary caregivers – or severely dysregulated when these interactions are abusive and traumatic. 

Too much for too long for too often of these Big Gun stress hormones directly harms infant brain and nervous system development during the most critical periods of growth.  It is up to an infant’s caregiver to “repair” over stimulation that happens to an infant (this can also happen through too much excitement due to play), thus reestablishing homeostasis – or what I call a balanced state of peaceful calm, or equilibrium.  When this does not happen – and often an abusive adult is likely to escalate the infant’s distress rather than down-regulate the infant’s stressful state – the prolonging of the infant’s stress response and the physiological dysequilibrium it creates in the infant’s body and brain begin to cause toxic harm. 

This harm is especially centered in the infant’s right limbic brain region exactly during its most important, most rapid stage of development.  Researchers are discovering that these kinds of interactions between high-powered, stress-related chemicals in the brain may be directly linked to the “primary etiological mechanism for the pathophysiology of neuropsychiatric disorders.”  (Schore, p. 252)  I have a strong suspicion that these patterns are exactly what sent my mother off in that direction from the time she was an infant.  (I also think about this information when I hear of adults who suddenly and supposedly “out-of-the-blue” are struck by some kind of mysterious “psychological” malady – that I believe originated in exactly these same kinds of traumatic earliest relationships.)

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Well, here it is Monday, January 21, 2013.  I began the work of sorting and organizing, and then transcribing into digital form all of my mother’s papers in 2005.  I just finished.  This current work I completed today includes the final organization of the family collection of photographs which also arrived in my hands undated and in a shambles.  Tomorrow I will ship the hard copies of the pictures to my son in Seattle who is most generously going to scan and size them as he inserts them into their spot within the text of 7 books of my mother’s writings.

This is a small example of the kind of information he will be working with.  This comes from the ‘picture insert info’ document for voume 4 of the Mildred’s Mountain series, The Up Down Mountain Waltz.

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4 3 051859DadKidsSideRoad   …. (3) – 5/18/1959 – great pic dad and kids on side of road – end parag — KEY:  up the mountain he trudged

4 4 051859AlderForest   …. (4) – 5/18/1959 – alder forest – after parag —  KEY:  which is so witchy

4 5 051859MudRoadKids   …. (5) – 5/18/1959 – SLIDE – mud on road with kids (I think me in there) – needs darkening/contrast – end parag —  KEY:  twisted alder tree forest all swampy

4 6 051859RoadScene   …. (6) – 5/18/1959 – one of my all-time favorite pictures – scenery showing road – at end of parag — KEY:  suddenly you come to the high land

4 7 051859WalkRoadDadKids   ….   4 8 051859WalkRoadDadKids   ….   4 9 051859WalkRoadDadKids   ……..   4 10 051859WalkRoadDadKids   …. (7 – 10) – 5/18/1959 – FOUR PICTURES – walking the road, kids and dad – I love these pics – so hope they can be repaired – use what you want but I hope all of them, crop if absolutely necessary – after parag — KEY:  steep area we can look below us

4 11 051859CaAltadenaFam1953    …. (11) – 5/18/1959 – mil bill kids 1953 in front of the Altadena house on Calavaras st outside of LA – end of letter, KEY:  We got papers from lawyer on

4 12 051859PileDirtSnow    …. (12) – 5/18/1959 – pile of dirt with snow in the middle we used for our water – after parag — KEY:  in back of the hut are several

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The underlined parts are the file names he will copy and then paste into the file for each picture he creates.  The keys are the phrases that he can use to find exactly where in the text of 500,000 words each picture gets inserted.  There are probably around 400 images he will be working with.  I thank him for his help on this task with all my heart.

All of this needs to be done before I can go through each book to see what pictures next need captions.  From there the entire body will go to my professional editing daughter for that task — which it turns out she will have no time to tackle until June at the earliest.

Now, with my disappointment at the overall slowness of this process locked away somewhere, I will begin the next stage of my writing.

I seem to be finding that it is my particular passion to discover how healing one’s family story and one’s own story can help heal insecure attachment disorders.  Because insecure attachments BREAK people’s stories, my guess is that healing the story itself must have some positive influence on healing families — individuals — and eventually as a planet, healing the story of all of us together might help heal us all.

In order to move forward with my next writing efforts I will be studying all that Dr. Paul Renn has collected in his book about the workings of human memory — as those workings are directly affected by insecure attachment trauma from the beginning of life — or not, for the lucky people.

I will be taking a very critical look at a concept that gets thrown around a lot:  Dissociation.  My current guess is that dissociation itself changes the way memory processes operate in human beings (thus of course changing how we remember our own self in the story of our life).  When dissociation begins very early in an infant’s life through neglect, abuse and trauma, it is my guess that dissociation itself becomes the key factor that influences how memory operates in many important ways.

Well — time will tell.  All I know right now is that I have finished the bulk of work on an eight-year project that directly has improved my own ability to remember myself in my abusive childhood.  Our family story has been at least partly retrieved from chaos.  That the words of Mother only tell the half of the story (or less) that her mental illness allowed her to tell leaves me with my next-self assigned task of finding a way to tell the other half of the story.

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January 20, 2013

What in the world are we talking about?

What does it mean to us and for the quality of our life when we are deprived – because we were deprived from the start of our life – of the ability to “safely” regulate our emotions?  We are most certainly not born with this ability.  It comes with the growth, development and advancement of our body. 

When we were tiniest, when we were born, we could do very little of anything by ourselves.  We could breath.  We could swallow.  We could do what a newborn mammal can do.  But given the complexity of being human we were meant for so much more.  But without being given what we needed to move toward our potential for advancement, we suffered then and will suffer in ways invisible to our comprehension for the rest of our life.

Time passes by.  We stay alive.  We appear to have made it through all of the common developmental milestones.  We grow and grow as we pass one milestone after another until we’re all grown up.

Here we are in adulthood.  We’ve made it!  Nobody ever tells us what we might have missed out on during our development.  Nobody tells us what mattered most.  Nobody told us what shortages of inner supplies plagued us from the beginning of our lives – and thus – always will.

If anything goes wrong as we make it through our life we are told that we’re to blame.  We are expected to be autonomous.  We are expected to be self-sufficient, self-reliant, self-motivated, self-contained.  If we need something, go get it.  If we want something, go get it.  If we fall flat on the ground with our face in the dust, it’s our own fault.  Pick yourself up.  Don’t expect anyone to be there to help you.  Don’t expect anyone to care.  You are on your own.

Don’t you dare complain, either.  Don’t look around you and notice that there seems to be some kind of invisible inner difference between people who seem to fall naturally into the confident, competent and therefore successful category while there are others who seem to never make it ‘there’ no matter how hard they try.

It’s like some people know something we don’t know, have something we don’t have.  They seem to live in one kind of world while the rest of us live in a different one.  Some people just seem somehow blessed.  They “get it” and we don’t.  Whatever “it” is, “it” seems vague to us and impossible to understand or define.  We move through our life being nagged with a feeling that we missed something somewhere but we don’t know what.  There’s a secret ingredient that is absent for some and present for others.  We don’t know what that ingredient is and we sure don’t know where to get it.

We don’t even know where to look for what’s different between us and so many others who seem to feel, yes, a different rhythm than we do as they live their lives.  If we turn and look within we know there’s a kind of emptiness in us.  Somehow we have a hollow space inside our body.  Some of us know this.  Others have found a way to walk around believing it’s not possible to fill this place of void, so it’s best to find any way possible to ignore that it exists.

Don’t look inward!  Look outward!  If we’re missing something then, by golly, there must be a way to find it.  We believe this because if we didn’t we know there’s a certain time coming when we will fall down and we will not be able to get back up.

What if someone told us that what we are missing, what we have lost, what has been stolen from us lies not inside of us because it was never put there in the first place?  How is it possible to go all the way back, back before we could walk or crawl or sit up or even roll over to look for what got left out of the story of our lives?  To even try to imagine what happened to us when we were so small seems to make our mind go blank.  Blank without words.  How can we think?  Yet I ask you, “What did you know before you could first think in thoughts about yourself in the world that you have never forgotten and can’t quite remember?”

Sending a part of our self back there from this present moment to that distant past requires only one ability.  Simply trust what you know.  Don’t read your life in words.  Read it in feelings.  There is no part of our body that doesn’t remember all it has been through.  All the way backwards we remember the sound of the voices of who welcomed us into this world – or did not.  We know the feeling of our small self, vulnerable, fragile in the hands of giants.  What did they do with us and to us when we needed them most? 

We haven’t forgotten.  We remember and we know in every fiber of our being if we started from our beginning being loved and feeling completely safe and secure in the world at all times, or if we did not.  Our body, if we pay attention to what it can tell us – if we ask and we listen – will never lie to us.

This process of being able to hear what our body tells us might seem to be mysterious because it is so foreign in our culture to believe that which our physical self can tell us about everything else we think we know.  We take up space.  We move around.  We think in noisy thoughts with words.  If we find something is wrong we look for solutions.  If something is broken we either fix it or throw it away.

After all, being in a body is no different than being tuna in a can or jelly in a jar.  It’s what’s inside the container we place the value on.  That we ARE our container-body with a self all put together inseparably until the moment of our death has to matter to us.  Once it does we will then be able to grow to understand that both how our body grew along with our self cannot be taken apart from one another.  Each exists as a whole entity whose patterns of being in the world were set into place long before we knew we had a name.

For those of us who have always known there was something terribly wrong with how we were raised, and for those who listen to the memory that is in their body itself and discover this very same thing, chances are that what happened so long ago has always directly caused difficulties in our lives we have never been able to describe.  We can’t expect anyone to appear, either, who will say to us, “Oops!  So sorry!  Please excuse the mess.  We never meant for this to happen.  Let me fix this for you.”  Nope.  Not going to happen.

So what is the point of searching backwards for the missing ingredient in our life if nobody is going to be able to fix now what went wrong for us way back then?  How are we supposed to change the past, anyway?  Are those who stand on one end of the tug-o-war rope having all they need within them to win the game equal with those on the other end who were born missing out on what they needed most to find a smoother way through life?

As my mother wrote in one of her childhood stories when she was nine, “I don’t think you would like to hear what happened in the cave that night but I will tell you….”  Yes.  We are equal.  We are also very, very different.

Just because we look around and see other people whose containers seem so alike in all the essential ways does not mean if we looked a little deeper we wouldn’t find that in the ways that matter most – as they hold the greatest power to influence how we live a life in this world – we wouldn’t find exactly that same dividing line we already really know exists.  There are those of us who were loved and cherished into this world and there are those of us who were not.  And between these two groups of people, according to degrees of deprivation from birth, lies the greatest chasm we could imagine.

We either grew a body-brain-self that knew it was safe and secure in this world or we didn’t.  It is exactly within this difference between us that we must search for what we have always known and cannot name.

There is one word we can use to begin to explore the differences I am describing.  That word is “attachment.”

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