Tag: trauma bond

+INSECURE ATTACHMENT BREEDS CHILD ABUSE

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I did not intend to write myself around in a big circle about attachment today, but I did.  I guess that is what my ‘global’ thinking just naturally does.  In the end my conclusion is that child abuse continues to happen quite simply because we let it.

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As usual I have a collection of thoughts that I can’t make sense out of until I write them down.  Once I open a Word page and begin to place all these letters together, one after the other, in rows I begin to see a THING, a post, as it forms itself on my computer screen.

Hum.  What is it I want to say?  I think about myself at age 18, having been sent away from my parents’ home out into the world some thousands of miles away from Alaska and into Navy boot camp.  What did I know of the world outside the doors of my childhood home(s)?  Nothing.

What did I know about interacting with other humans on the level playing field of so-called adulthood?  Nothing.  What did I know about what had been done to me, all the violence and hatred, fear and sadness my childhood had built up inside of me?  Nothing.

Who could I talk to about what had been done to me?  Nobody.  Who cared?  No one.  Did any of this matter to the bigger world outside of my own skin?  No, it didn’t.

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Sometimes I find myself thinking about what good I could do with the profits of a bestseller if I actually could write one and it sold well.  How could one book, or even two or three generate enough capitol to do anything that could make much of a difference toward improving the quality of life – either for survivors of child abuse or for the offspring of those trauma-changed people?

Whenever I think about efforts that might be designed to prevent child abuse my thoughts return to my mother like a compass needle pointing North.  I can’t say that women like me, who become pregnant in their teens and face the world alone are at highest risk for abusing their children.  I didn’t abuse mine.  My mother wasn’t married until she was 23.  She and my father wanted children, planned them, brought them into the world as if they were part of some perfectly orchestrated drama with the stage set and all the necessary actors trained, present and accounted for.

Would it have made a difference in my case if someone had given my parents an infant-child growth and development chart that described the needs of a human social-emotional brain in some up-beat, attractive, catchy format that would have told them clearly what safe and secure human attachment LOOKS like and FEELS like especially between a mother and her offspring?

Well, gee.  Any kind of a cutesy, informative infant-child brain growth and early development chart presented to MY MOTHER in a little pamphlet would have had to say inside as soon as she opened it up:

1)  DO NOT HATE YOUR BABY

2)  YOUR BABY IS NOT SATAN’S CHILD

3)  YOUR UNBORN INFANT DID NOT TRY TO KILL YOU AS SHE WAS BEING BORN

4)  YOUR INFANT-CHILD IS NOT A CURSE UPON YOUR LIFE

5)  YOUR BABY WAS BORN PERFECT AND IF YOU CANNOT LOVE HER, GIVE HER AWAY TO SOMEONE WHO WILL

OK.  So what if I don’t think about my mother and about other mothers and fathers who obviously have something seriously wrong with the way their own early social-emotional brain-body-mind-self developed.  Do I aim at simply trying to heighten the overall public mindset about the critical impact that all early interactions with an infant have on its growing brain?

Would anyone who had been so specifically enlightened have EVER recognized what my mother was doing to me even if they had learned this infant-brain building information.

Nope.

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I reached a dead end in my thinking.  Don’t you hate it when that happens?  Where do I go next?  Toward educating the mates of mothers such as mine was?

When I turn my thinking in the direction of my father the first thing that comes to mind is adult attachment disorders.  In order to begin to think about what kind of information could have reached my father, I think about how I could perhaps put proceeds from a bestseller into an effort to enlighten the public about what human attachment is, about how our attachment patterns are formed through our earliest brain-building experiences with our mothering caregiver, and about how those attachment patterns form how we relate to others – including our mates and offspring – for the rest of our lives.

My mother was a gregarious, charming, extremely attractive woman.  She LOOKED like quite the catch.  She ACTED like quite the catch.  My father was quiet, reserved, gentle, handsome, smart and educated.  He also appeared at quite the catch.  Mildred meets Bill, Bill marries Mildred.  End of story for the next almost 40 years until my father gave up and divorced my mother.

How to have reached my father so that he could possibly have understood that something was terribly, terribly wrong in my home of origin?

OK.  So my father did not abuse me.  So my father never once intervened to protect me.  Nobody would have spotted what was happening to me through studying my father.

UNLESS……What?

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Let me talk for a moment about how infant-childhood formed insecure attachment patterns operate in adult relationships.  First of all, if we still believe that about 50% of infant-children grow up in ‘normal’ families with good enough safe and secure attachment so that their social-emotional brain foundation operates in safe and secure patterned ways, we would pretty well know just from a description of how safe and secure adult attachment operates that even if a securely attached person should choose a mate who is insecurely attached, chances are that relationship will not last.

In fact, given that the securely attached person has a much better formed social-emotional brain from the start, they are likely to recognize the insecurely attached pattern from the beginning and then will smartly avoid any involvement in the first place.

Think about the groups of brain-changed primates I wrote about in yesterday’s post.  Those primates expertly found one another according to the patterns of signaling that each transmitted, received and understood.  If we understood ourselves better as humans, our changed-brain detection systems are every bit as capable of knowing the truth about one another as any ‘lower’ primate does.

Humans ignore the signals of secure and insecure social-emotional brain patterns.  We ignore the signs of insecure attachment.

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This brings to mind a strange collection of images.  First I think about the Ray Bradbury story that was made into a movie, Something Wicked This Way Comes.  Bradbury wrote the signs of Wicked into the story.  Signs of Wicked exist in humans.  Do we know what they are?  That depends.

In a social-emotional brain-body that has had trauma built into it and then responds to the world with insecurely attached patterns, changes in the Wicked, or Danger detection systems have been changed.  Although primates would still evidently be able to detect signals and signs from one another clearly enough to act on these differences, humans have reached a social evolution point where they can choose to ignore them and still survive.

Another image that comes to my mind is about how all kinds of living creatures can detect and ‘predict’ earthquakes.  They can sense the coming of a Tsunami.  That happens because they have no interference with their ability to remember signs and signals and to act on them the best way that they can.

Living creatures have amazing abilities to know when threat and danger is coming so that they can avoid the consequences of related potential harm whenever possible.  While humans might not have senses refined enough to be able to sense and predict earthquakes and Tsunamis that other living creatures do, we are certainly supposed to be able to do so in regard to human relationships.  If we LACK the ability to sense and detect danger that lies ahead if we chose to become ‘involved’ with another person, that only happens if we have an insecure attachment-formed early social-emotional brain.  Unfortunately, in a best-case scenario, this group includes – on some level – at least half of our adult population.

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If suddenly we gained our ability (I can’t say regained because we never got to build a securely attached social-emotional brain in the first place) to detect ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ both in ourselves and in those around us, we would still have to be able to ACT appropriately (better) in response to this information.  Very few of us with insecure attachment patterns are going to be able to do this.

We would need to be able to recognize the signs of insecure attachment patterns BOTH within our own self and within other people.  It is the nature of insecure attachment patterns that we are lacking in the ability to recognize the signs within EITHER others or within our self.  This does not mean that the signs do not exist and it does not mean that we cannot learn to understand what they are.  Once we do this, we empower ourselves to make different choices every single step of the way.

Those of us trained to drive a vehicle on public roads are trained to know what a green, yellow and red light mean when we encounter one at an intersection.  This brings to my mind one of my very favorite ideas:  BIFURCATION POINT.  A bifurcation point is a decision point where a choice is made.

Some people describe chaos as a state where all possibilities exist.  As we move forward through space and time in our life, we make billions and billions of choices we don’t think about.  For every choice we make we are ordering chaos into patterns.  One of my favorite books, Eskimo Realities, by Edmund Snow Carpenter, describes an ancient cultural approach to bringing life into existence through the ordering of chaos.

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My mother and father reached a significant bifurcation point when they met one another in the winter of 1948-1949.  Both of them ignored (for whatever reasons) the warning signs and signals about the Something Wicked that would come if they continued their relationship on down wedding lane.  What happened to me was obviously a result of their choices – or I would not exist.  The rest of what happened to me, the 18 years of severe abuse I suffered from my mother with my father’s full support of my mother, also happened to be because of the choices they made at their significant bifurcation points.

Trauma Altered Development that changes the way an infant-child’s body-brain-mind-self forms itself in a malevolent environment happens every infitesimally small bifurcation point at a time.  Every single brain neuron that responds to the conditions of an infant-child’s early environment does so at the molecular bifurcation point of early brain development.  The resiliency factors that we have as humans within our DNA operate in response – continually – to and within our environment.  This is how our attachment patterns come into being within us.

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At this point in my writing today as some inner force nudges each letter into existence on this page boils down to one single word.  INFLUENCE.

Our early environment, as it communicated its condition to us during our earliest development through our attachment experiences with our earliest mothering caregiver, influenced the molecular decisions our body-brain chose to make as it built itself.  Every time a bifurcation point was reached our body-brain physiologically, automatically and without our conscious informed consent made a decision and a choice for us.

What we need to understand is that ALL of these influences and the corresponding choices that were made within our body-brain are essentially and fundamentally ABOUT attachment in the world.  Because we are a social species (not something we have a choice over), which means that social attachment patterns are at the core of our existence, and because being a social species means that we have a prescribed range of possible responses to an influence when it occurs, ALL OF OUR RESPONSES at every bifurcation point we encounter and pass through in our lifetime means that we are having a social attachment-related experience.

We have no choice but to be influenced by all the containing parameters of the species to which we belong – our social one – in whose image we are created.

This means to me that if there is one thing that would most benefit us from learning about so that we can empower ourselves to make the best and wisest conscious choices at every bifurcation point we reach, it would be about how our human attachment systems operate.

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I could duck briefly under the umbrella of ‘ongoing life’ here and simply state that as long as we remain attached to this world we remain alive.  When we are no longer attached to this world we die.  We need basics, like air, water and food to remain attached and alive.  We have ongoing attachment systems within us that let us utilize this air, water and food.  All of our attachment systems are connected and operate together throughout every instant of our ongoing life.  Our connections to one another as members of a social species are, most simply put, a part of the same ongoing attachment-to-life system.  Our environment influences us, and our attachment systems respond.

Consciousness cannot be in any way disconnected in our thinking from attachment.  The same brain that formed itself within us during our critical windows of early infant-child development allows or disallows consciousness to manifest according to how our early attachment experiences influenced our growth.  This was no less true for my father as it was for my mother or for my self, or for any of the rest of us.

Our brain-building human attachment experiences influenced what we are conscious of and how.  There is only one other point that comes to mind as I write these words:  CARING.  Although what we care about and how is obviously tied to the body-brain we were built with from the start of our life here, I believe that it is at the level of CARING that we can most influence not only one another, but our own ongoing experience in the world.

The saying “You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink” comes to mind.  Interestingly, some say that this might be the oldest proverb in the English language.  If a horse doesn’t care to drink, it won’t.

What might influence human caring?  A donkey or a chicken could detect the signs and signals from the environment that an earthquake or a Tsunami is coming until it was ‘blue in the face’, but if nobody pays attention, if nobody gives a damn, if nobody cares, what is the point?

So, again, what might influence human caring?  One thing and one thing only comes to mind:  PAIN.  Yet the word ‘pain’, as it came into modern English in the 14th century, has roots to both ‘punishment’ and through Sanskrit roots to ‘he revenges’.  These ideas are connected in our language to ‘vengeance’, ‘payment’, and ‘penalty’.  In order to find the oldest 9before the 12th century) connecting concept in the roots of our language, I had to go back to the word ‘bear’ as in ‘to bear’.

It all goes back to what influences we tolerate, either through choice or because we have to.  The word ‘tolerate’ in our language goes directly back in its roots to ‘to bear’, which of course goes back to ‘carry’.

As severe infant-child abuse survivors, we had no choice but to tolerate, bear and carry within our body-brains the malevolent treatment we received.  Our deprivation-traumas changed how we developed.  That means our attachment patterns within our self to the world changed.  These changes happened according to the degree of safe and secure or unsafe and insecure attachments we had with our earliest caregivers.

How much we continue to bear remains up to us.  When and if it ever comes down to how I choose to spend any future book sale proceeds, I will allocate them exactly and specifically to public education efforts about the human attachment continuum because attachment is how our life originates and how it continues.

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What each of us had to bear when we were little is exactly what we continue to bear unless and until we care enough to change.  Caring enough will happen as people come to understand exactly what IT is that they are bearing in the first place, and that different options DO exist so they don’t have to bear IT any more.  Neither do they have to pass what they are bearing down to future generations.

IT is made up of the unsafe and insecure attachment patterns that were built into our body-brain when we were tiny while our body-brain was being built.  Conditions of our early life influenced our entire existence in the direction of survival in either a benevolent or a malevolent world.

While everyone after the age of consciousness can be influenced to be informed enough to care enough to learn to make better attachment-related choices, it is only each individual person who can actually make their own choices.  As a social species we have the power collectively to care enough to prevent – what?

I have come around full circle to the concept of free will, free choice, freedom.  Our word ‘free’ (before the 12th century word) ties back to Sanskrit ‘own, dear’.  ‘Own’ goes back to roots before the 12th century to ‘owe’.  ‘Owe’ goes back before the 12th century to Sanskrit ‘he possesses’.  The word ‘dear’ also goes back in our language to before the 12th century as it connects to ‘costly’.  Not surprisingly, by following the connections through the concept of ‘cost’ back through ‘constant’ to before the 12th century we end up here:  ‘to stand’.

What are we able to bear?  What are we able to stand?

What are we willing to bear?  What are we willing to stand?

Are we as a society willing and able to bear that little tiny infants and children are being maltreated?  Are we as a society willing and able to stand for infant-child abuse to continue along with its cost to individual and collective well-being?

Or are we willing and able to care enough to stand up and stop it?

Think about the nature and quality of your own human attachment system.  Who do you include and who do you exclude?  If other people do not care about other people’s children enough to take a stand against all maltreatment of all children, the tragedy of child abuse will remain a reality quite simply because we choose to bear it.

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Don’t forget to check out — Brain Facts – A primer on the brain and nervous system

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+CALM THE CRYING BABY — IMMUNE SYSTEM STIMULATES VAGUS NERVE TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT

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I have been in HOT pursuit of an idea all day.  This thought has lingered inside of me for 4 years in a ‘body knowing’ place because of what I know as a survivor of severe abuse and malevolent treatment from birth until I left home at 18.

In order for this idea to be given form I need to link it to other people’s related thoughts, and many of these ideas are only recently appearing as science races into a new place of truth about what it means to be a human — and how we develop in interaction with our environment from out conception.

I am not a scientist.  Even if I come up with a theory, and develop an hypothesis, I cannot create or perform research to either prove or disprove my ideas.  So, I have to use the interactive thinking the web provides and see what I can come up with.

And I found something very exciting – but I could not find it until I included the words ‘fish’ and ‘evolution’ into my search on the ‘vagus nerve’ and ‘the immune response’.

It has been my thinking that there has to be a point within the body — and within the body of a developing infant-child exactly ‘where the fire meets the gunpowder’.  A tiny person is powerless to stop trauma that happens to it from outside of its body.  It is therefore forced to try to stop the trauma ON ITS INSIDES.

This STOP action is the job of the vagus nerve as it controls the parasympathetic STOP arm of our Autonomic Nervous System and interacts with our immune system.  Right at this point where the developing body has to try to STOP the force of the impact of trauma ON ITS INSIDES is where Trauma Altered Development is forced to kick in.

It is RIGHT here, at this present moment in time where I cannot think into the future and must patiently await for science to confirm what I know is true – that RIGHT here where the fire meets the gunpowder, where a developing infant-child has to adapt within a malevolent environment and alter who it is becoming that EPIGENTIC forces that interfere with normal development by altering the immune system-vagus nerve-Autonomic Nervous System and brain interactions in preparation for survival within a toxic, malevolent unsafe and insecure attachment environment come into play.  The research proving this point is coming, but it is not entirely here yet.

This, I believe, is where and how what Dr. Martin Teicher calls evolutionarily altered development happens.  When a tiny growing body cannot STOP the ongoing affects of trauma happening to it from outside its body, the STOPPING happens on the inside.

This form of Stop the Storm of the impact of trauma — within a developing little body — causes things to happen like what happened to change my mother into the monster she became.  She could not afford to experience the suffering deprivation-trauma caused her so her body found a way to STOP it.

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My idea goes back to the very beginnings of how severe abuse and neglect in a malevolent environment force a newborn to begin to alter its development in adaptation to the deprivation-traumas that surround and impact it.

Thinking about how a tiny little body has so much work to do to grow its Central Nervous System including its brain, and about how its Autonomic Nervous System is able to at least control its heart rate and breathing from birth, knowing that an infant’s immune system is already in operation, I think about how all these developing processes interconnect.

I believe that it is the job of the immune system to protect and defend us within our environment.  I therefore suspect that it is our immune system that responds to the toxins in our environment – and if our earliest caregivers actually maltreat us and are themselves toxins in our early world, then our immune system must respond accordingly.

In this response to threat, to trauma, all our development is changed.  I suspect that there is an intersection within us where our immune system affects our Autonomic Nervous System (ANS).  The vagus nerves are intimately connected with the parasympathetic STOP arm of our ANS.  (I have collected pages of information and active links today on the subject.)

I think about how development altered through trauma ends up often making people into such changed people that their lives become very difficult in adulthood, both for themselves and for those around them.  I think about my mother’s birthday post I wrote for her last night, and I think about how compassionate would be the opposite of the way she turned out.

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I have spent the best part of this day searching for information I read online a few years back about how information transmitted through the vagus nerve reaches male brains differently than it does female’s.  I remember reading that men receive the information from one branch of the nerve – the left one – only while women receive information into both sides of their brains through both branches of the vagus nerve at the same time.

I combed through every gender and the brain link I presented last Sunday, and found nothing about this!  So I have been on the hunt, in pursuit, ever since.

I just found a fascinating article connecting the vagus nerve to compassion—something that my mother, through her trauma altered early development, did not grow up to possess – compassion.  Something about her adaptation to early deprivation and trauma changed her – and eliminated the possibility of having this experience from her for the rest of her life.

This article 9referenced below) follows exactly my line of expanding thought about how early trauma interacts with our immune system, our developing brain, and impacts our Autonomic Nervous System’s development.  It seems very probable to me that the evolutionarily altered person Dr. Martin Teicher describes due to developmental changes through early exposure to trauma experiences changes related to what this article is describing.

Compassion at the Core of Social Work: A – Florida State University

This article by Dan Orzech contains the following:

THE SEAT OF COMPASSION:

THE VAGUS NERVE?

 

“… Dacher Keltner, PhD, believes that the seat of compassion may just lie somewhere else: the vagus nerve. Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and coeditor of Greater Good, a magazine about prosocial behavior such as compassion and forgiveness. For the past several years, he has been examining the novel hypothesis that the vagus nervea bundle of nerves that emerges out of the brain stem and wanders throughout the body, connecting to the lungs, heart, and digestive system, among other areas-is related to prosocial behavior such as caring for others and connecting with other people.

The vagus nerve is considered part of the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. That means it’s involved in relaxation and calming the body down-the opposite of the “fight or flight” arousal for which the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system is responsible. Medicine has traditionally focused on the vagus nerve’s role in controlling things such as breathing, heart rate, kidney function, and digestion. But researchers lately have experimented with stimulating the vagus nerve to treat epilepsy as well as drug-resistant cases of clinical depression (see sidebar).

Keltner has been exploring the idea that the vagus nerve-which is unique to mammals-is part of an attachment response. Mammals, he says, “attach to their offspring, and the vagus nerve helps us do that.” Researchers have already found that children with high levels of vagal activity are more resilient, can better handle stress, and get along better with peers than children with lower vagal tone.

In his laboratory; Keltner has found that the level of activity in peoples vagus nerve correlates with how warm and friendly they are to other people. Interestingly it also correlates with how likely they are to report having had a spiritual experience during a six-month follow-up period. And, says Keltner, vagal tone is correlated with how much compassion people feel when they’re presented with slides showing people in distress, such as starving children or people who are wincing or showing a facial expression of suffering. Among other things, Keltner is interested in the implications of these findings for human evolution. “Much of the scientific research so far on emotions,” he says, “has focused on negative emotions like anger, fear, or disgust”-what Keltner calls the “fight or flight” emotions. “We tend to assume,” says Keltner, “that evolution produced just these fight/flight tendencies, but it may have also produced a biologically based tendency to be good to other people and to sacrifice self-interest.

Evolutionary thought is increasingly arising at the position that the defining characteristic of human evolution is our sociality We are constantly cooperating, constantly doing things in interdependent fashion, and constantly embedded in relationships. From an evolutionary perspective, that suggests that we should have a set of emotions that help us do that work.”

MORE:

WATCH THIS VIDEO – HE SAYS WHAT I’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR – THE VAGUS NERVE CONTROLS OUR IMMUNE SYSTEM!!  I believe that it is here that an abused developing infant-child experiences the start of its Trauma Altered Development.

 

Dacher Keltner in Conversation

43 min – Feb 5, 2009
Why have we evolved positive emotions like gratitude, amusement, awe and compassion? Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at UC Berkeley …
fora.tv/2009/02/05/Dacher_Keltner_in_Conversation

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HIS BOOK:

Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life by Dacher Keltner

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The Evolution of Compassion

Dacher Keltner

University of California, Berkeley

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Dacher Keltner
Professor
Ph.D., Stanford University

Campus Contact Information
Departmental Area(s): Social/Personality; Change, Plasticity &
Development;
Director: Berkeley Social Interaction Laboratory

Interests: Social/Personality: emotion; social interaction; individual
differences in emotion; conflict and negotiation; culture

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Well, this is enough thinking and research for one day!  I am not going on to read the following today!!  It has just always made perfect sense to me that something in a traumatized tiny developing body causes its immune system to respond – and triggers the vast array of changes that we see in severe infant-child abuse survivors.  I believe the answer lies along this track.

What happens to an infant’s physiological development when no one calms the crying baby?

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN PARENTS HIT AND TERRIFY THE BABY?  Immune systems changes to development through interaction with the vagus nerve, that’s what.

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Vagal activity, early growth and emotional development – Elsevier

by T Field – 2008 – Cited by 1 – Related articles
The vagus nerve is a key component in the regulation of the autonomic nervous system and … Infant growth and development. Several studies have documented a ….. including the hypothalamic-pituitary–adrenal axis and the immune system

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Parental Meta-Emotion Philosophy and the Emotional Life of …

by JM Gottman – 1996 – Cited by 228 – Related articles – All 5 versions
nerve. The tonic firing of the vagus nerve slows down many physiological processes, such as the …. a central part of the immune system that is …..

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Calm Sleeping Baby – Baby Massage

Relaxation and enhancement of neurological development. Massage provides both stimulation and relaxation for an infant, … Massage stimulates a nerve in the brain, known as the vagus nerve. … Strengthens the immune system. Massage causes a significant increase is Natural Killer Cell numbers. …

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Tears – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Strong emotions, such as sorrow or elation, may lead to crying. … lysozyme) fight against bacterial infection as a part of the immune system. … A newborn infant has insufficient development of nervous control, so s/he “cries without weeping. … of the facial nerve causes sufferers to shed tears while eating. …

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TOUCH IN LABOR AND INFANCY: Clinical Implications

Increases in infants’ vagal activity during massage may lead to an increase … As noted earlier, massage has been shown to increase activity of the vagus nerve, … As in animal studies, massage has shown immune–system benefits in humans. … autonomic nervous system; a disturbance in the development of sleep-wake …

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INFANT IN PAIN

Oct 29, 2009 … Does your infant suffer from colic? Reflux? Projectile Vomiting? … In her book, Molecules of Emotion,8 Dr Candice Pert (a recognized … system interference are a hindrance to normal immune system function. … Scientists are still discovering exactly how the immune and nerve systems interrelate. …

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[PDF] Emotion

File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat – View as HTML
vagus nerve— a branch of the parasympathetic autonomic nervous system — may be involved in positive …. New research on the immune system suggests a biological …… Handbook of infant development

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[PDF] Phylogenetic origins of affective experiences: The neural …

File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat – Quick View
by SW Porges – Cited by 3 – Related articles – All 3 versions
The healing power of emotion: Affective neuroscience, development ….. how the autonomic nervous system interacts with the immune system, … nervous system. The vagus nerve exits the brain stem and has branches …… Porges SW, Doussard-Roosevelt JA, Portales AL, and Greenspan SI (1996) Infant regulation of the …

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Evolution and Emotions

File Format: Microsoft Powerpoint – View as HTML
Neurological Development and the Limbic System. R-Hemi has closer connections to limbic system than L-Hemi. R-Hemi develops earlier in infancy than L-Hemi. Emotions appear in … Stim vagus nerve, slows Heart 1 (H1). ….Effectiveness of the immune system; ability to ward off illness, …

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The Brain and the Neuro-psycho-immune System – Anne Baring’s Website

When Cannon stimulated the vagus through electrodes implanted in the …. Emotions are in the digestive system, in the immune system, … The nervous system consists of the brain and network of nerve cells … We remember most the most vivid memories – this was probably of great help in evolutionary development, …

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Vagus Nerve Is Direct Link From Brain To Immune System

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Deep Brain Stimulation … – Blogs – Revolution Health

which explains how the brain and the immune system are interconnected through the vagus nerve. “It turns out that the brain talks directly to the immune …

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How the Dalai Lama can help you live to 120… « Terryorisms

Oct 5, 2006 … it is the way the immune system responds to the mind. Let me explain. You immune system is controlled by a nerve call the vagus nerve

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The Dana Foundation – Seeking the cause of deadly inflammation ….

May 3, 2007 … And the vagus nerve story is progressing on multiple fronts, for device development, for understanding classical physiology, meditation, … “Look, everybody knows that meditation is good for your immune system. …

 

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Breakthrough “Neuro Nutrition” Targets the Brain and Vagus Nerve …

Jul 6, 2008 … The Vagus Nerve is the body’s most powerful anti-inflammatory … the Vagus Nerve, has a direct ability to restore the human immune system …

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NSLIJ – Scientists Figure Out How the Immune System and Brain …

When they stimulated the vagus nerve, a long nerve that goes from the base of … Many laboratories at The Feinstein Institute study the immune system in …

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Cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway – Wikipedia, the free …

Kevin Tracey found that the vagus nerve provides the immune system with a direct connection to the brain. Tracey’s paper in the December 2002 issue of …

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The vagus nerve, cytokines and depression

The vagus nerve mediates behavioural depression, but not fever, in response to peripheral immune … The immune system, depression and antidepressants …

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Article: Scientists figure out how the immune system and brain ….

Jul 21, 2008 … Scientists figure out how the immune system and brain communicate … When they stimulated the vagus nerve, a long nerve that goes from the ……..In a major step in understanding how the nervous system and the immune system … Pain & Central Nervous System

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Brain ‘talks’ directly to body’s immune system – The Hindustan …

Brain ‘talks’ directly to body’s immune system – Report from the Asian News … Pain & Central Nervous System Week, Vagus Nerve Stimulation Can Suppress …

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FASCINATING IDEAS HERE — DOES THE VAGUS NERVE HELP ORGANIZE CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE SELF?

[PDF] Does vagus nerve constitute a self-organization complexity or a …

File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat
by B Mravec – 2006 – Cited by 3 – Related articles
nervous system modulates immune functions via vagus nerve (5, 6). … from the immune system to the brain via the vagus nerve

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[PDF] Evidences for vagus nerve in maintenance of immune balance and …

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Brain ‘talks’ directly to body’s immune system

post: Nov 14, 2007

He discovered that the vagus nerve speaks directly to the immune system through a neurochemical called acetylcholine. …

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Vagus Nerve Schwannoma: effects on internal organs?

I just gave a talk the vagus nerve and the immune system–the vagus nerve > probably plays a very important role in many important chemoregulatory …

 

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BiomedExperts: The vagus nerve mediates behavioural depression ….

We propose that behavioural depression is mediated by the vagus nerve … indicate that the recently proposed vagal link between the immune system and the …

 

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MY MOTHER’S DREAM – March 29, 1960
The whole family was out walking and suddenly we looked up to see a dark rainbow appear – then it got bright and behind it a skyline appeared outlining massive dormed buildings such as I’ve never seen and skyscraper buildings – then it all disappeared and a big wind came.

We realized it was a hurricane. We could hardly stand up against the wind. We saw big apartment buildings on the sides of the streets but the entrances faced another street and we were on the wrong side. The wind grew stronger – finally a door appeared and we went in the building and the person asked us what was wrong? We told her of the great wind but as we pointed outside – all was silent and the wind was gone … and I awoke.

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Stop the Storm of the intergenerational transmission of unresolved trauma carried on through the maltreatment of little infant-children.  If we don’t do this, changes in development will continue to rob these children of their own life free from Trauma Altered Development.

If we don’t stop the trauma from happening on the outside, the tiny developing body will do everything in its power to stop its affects on the inside.  This is what happened to my mother.

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Don’t forget to check out — Brain Facts – A primer on the brain and nervous system

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+DECEMBER 21, 1925 MY SEVERELY ABUSIVE MOTHER WAS BORN

alchemynow2 Comments

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My severely abusive Borderline mother died over seven years ago, but if she hadn’t, today would be her 84th birthday.  Given that without all the troubles my mother caused me through her severe child abuse of me for 18 years there would be no Stop the Storm efforts to understand her and what she did to me as well as what the life long consequences are to me from her abuse, I thought it is fitting that I write a post in recognition of her birthday.

I found an interesting section in my mother’s February 18, 1958 letter she wrote to her mother:

“As you know by now the Valentine Party was a success with JV running it all as usual.  I had some explaining to do to John.  He wanted to know how come ‘she has all the ideas’.  I slaved baking and decorating 40 heart shaped sugar cookies with red and white frosting but she made girl and boy faces on hers and had cute idea of decorating plates.

She’s so bossy and I don’t want a run in with her.  Everything has to be JV’s way or else.  You could tell her off but she’d ‘fix you’ and is respected and well liked (?) or to steer clear of doing things with her (which I’ll do in future) or to glide along with her and keep tongue in check (which I thought wise to do being new here).

I explained to John [my note:  2nd grade, age 7 – no doubt he received one of my mother’s infamous lectures] and I think he understood – we had a long talk about people – good and bad – etc.  Just hope he doesn’t carry story to the kids that I called her “bossy,”  He better not but she sure is!

As I said she’s just like Bill’s sister [my note:  my father’s sister whom my mother hated and frequently accused me of being like] but I see little of her and I’m not a close neighbor.  I bet she bosses the farm, her husband and the help.  I think underneath it all she has an inferiority complex which appears the opposite.  Right?  I’ll tell you more next summer.

I do like her though – a little goes a long ways.  Every community needs her type though.  She’s to be again in play put on by P.T.A., is treasurer of P.T.A. etc. etc.

She’s full of ideas, enthusiasm and means well though.  Is now starting sewing course Mon. nites at College.  She’s busy as a bee on farm, does all book-keeping, deliveries etc. + all the others SO I won’t see much of her!!”

See *February 1958 – Mother’s Letters

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This is just one snippet from my mother’s letters in which she discusses her ambivalent feelings about this woman, JV, who remained a friend to my mother for nearly 50 years.  JV is the woman who found my mother dying in her shabby motel room and got her to the hospital where my mother died in 2002.

My mother did not have the capacity to simply make Valentine sugar cookies and help in my brother’s 2nd grade classroom with his party ‘just because’ she was a mother and loved her son.  My mother was robbed of this capacity, I believe through deprivation-traumas in her own early childhood that changed her in her young development into a different sort of person that she could have been if her needs had been met as an infant-child.

I believe someone could have written my mother’s obituary by the time she was five years old because already by that age my mother’s Trauma Altered Development had sent her down an alternative pathway of development that robbed her of her life.  Sure, my mother walked around for another 70+ years, but who my mother COULD have been, and SHOULD have been, disappeared very early in her life.

While my mother’s words in her 1958 letter might seem innocuous and ‘ordinary’ upon surface reading, I don’t believe that they are.  My mother never had a truly satisfying relationship with a human being in her life.  My mother’s insecure attachment disorder was so severe that she NEVER found a way to shut it OFF.

Eighteen years of trauma and abuse I experienced at the hands of my mother from birth could never make me suffer to the point where my complete connection to the world outside of me was severed like hers was.  It’s as if my mother got turned inside out by the time she was five years old.  Nowhere could she look and not see her own suffering in front of her face, which blocked her from having any meaningful access to or connection with anything outside of herself.

I suspect that my mother’s childhood suffering was so great that it overwhelmed her – and in order to continue living from childhood on she had to make her own suffering invisible to her self.  She made awareness of suffering vanish.  Once this shift happened, she lost the ability to identify suffering – not only within her self, but within anyone else, either – especially within me.

Suffering.  I believe my mother suffered her entire life, though her entire body-nervous system-brain-mind operated continually in desperate ways to make her experience of suffering vanish.  If something so innocent and simple, so sweet and caring as making cookies for her 2nd grade son’s classroom Valentine party could present such a challenge to her self worth, concept, and well-being, what chance did she have of being an adequate mother at all?  To any of her children, let alone me, the chosen one for the target of her severe abuse?

None.  None at all.  Even though I am not convinced of the validity of ‘mental illness’, ‘mental disorders,’ ‘diagnostic categories’, etc., I also know that it wasn’t until 1984 that the category of ‘Borderline Personality Disorder’ was even recognized and named according to patterns of being in the world for people on a spectrum to which I believe my mother belonged.

I never knew my mother was not a ‘good mother’.  I had no frame of reference to think about how she treated me or about what she did to me.  Neither did she.  Would anything be different in today’s world if I was born to her today and she was the same and did the same things to me?

I do not know.  I post this today in memory of her December 21, 1925 birth as I also wonder, would the same things happen to her today that so harmed her as an infant-child?  My mother, whose ashes are spread over our Alaskan mountain homestead, cannot ask these questions.

Adult severe insecure attachment disorders (from their infant-childhood) can create severe empathy disorders.  I have no doubt whatsoever that if current neuroscientists had been able to watch the operation of my mother’s brain, the patterns they would have found in the way her brain regions, circuits and pathways operated would have shown as clear as day what was WRONG with my mother.

We don’t need a diagnostic category of mental illness to understand someone like my mother.  We need realistic and factual information about how what happened to them when they were very young CHANGED THEM IN THEIR EARLY DEVELOPMENT and made them into the dangerous people they turned into.

But on this day 84 years ago my mother was born a beautiful and perfect infant with needs that were not met well enough so that she suffered too much — more than she could bear — until in desperation trauma itself turned her into somebody else.

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IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER – HERE’S INFORMATION FROM:

Borderline Personality Disorder

In the Spotlight | More Topics |

from Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD
There is a common misperception that all people with BPD are violent. This is simply not the case. That said, BPD is associated with an elevated risk of violence because there is a subset of people with BPD who act out with physical aggression– this week learn more about the connection between BPD and violent behavior.

In the Spotlight

Are People With BPD Violent?
No, but BPD does increase the risk of violence. Here are some reasons that BPD can elevate the risk of violent behavior.
More Topics

Other High Risk Behaviors: Self-Harm
Self-harming behaviors may seem like they have nothing to do with violence. But actually both are impulsive behaviors that are often related to intense feelings and poor emotion regulation.
Understanding Dissociation
Dissociation is one of the least understood symptoms of BPD, but researchers are beginning to understand what dissociation is and why it happens.

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+GENDER AND THE BRAIN — DIFFERENCES AND EARLY TRAUMA

alchemynow1 Comment

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While severe early infant-child maltreatment will often cause Trauma Altered Development, those changes will occur according to our gender.  As we begin to understand how maltreatment of infants and children changes the way a body-brain-mind-self grows through adaptation to trauma, we must consider the physiological differences between the female and the male brain.

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I have been thinking about a man’s comment posted yesterday to +PTSD AND SEVERE ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – CONCLUSION, which included the following:

“There are times when I am doing certain things that I have mastered so purely, that when I am in the middle of “being”, I am, whole, relaxed and alive.


There is no me and you, there just IS, if that makes sense.


This tells me that when we can let go of all the memories of pain, anger, abandonment, being on the defensive all the time, that WE can get for ourselves what was not there.”

This brings to my mind a topic that I haven’t included yet on my blog – physiological differences between a female and a male brain which affects how we receive and process information.  As we learn about how severe early maltreatment changes an infant-child’s growing and developing body-brain, we must also consider that gender differences occur every step of the way.

I replied to this comment in terms of the fact that memory not only builds an early forming body-brain, but also forms itself into that body-brain.  We cannot ‘let go’ of these memories.  They ARE integrated with who we are – body-brain-mind-self – from the time of our beginnings.

We continually make new memories into our body.  We can achieve amazing consciously altered changes in the present.  Yet we have no choice but to process our self in our lifetime with the structural foundation of the body-brain that was made for us – through secure and safe attachments in a mostly benevolent world, or through insecure and unsafe attachments in a mostly malevolent one.  Our fundamental physiology evolved in our infant-early childhood according to the signals we received from our environment so that we could adjust and alter our development accordingly.

BUT – I need to put the big BUT in here:  Male and female brains are different from our conception.  There is much yet to be learned about what these differences actually are and how they affect us.  When I talk about Trauma Altered Development, it is important to include the concept that our developing early brains are responding to input from the environment differently — according to our sex — from the start.

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What follows is a presentation of links to LOTS of information about the differences between the female and male brain, and about how severe maltreatment of infant-children during development changes them – each according to their body-brain’s gender.

As you read them, think “adult” rather than just “child” — if we survive our abuse, these trauma consequences do not simply disappear!

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Here is a link to an excellent (and readable!) article – highly recommended!

Understanding the Effects of Maltreatment on Early Brain Development
In Focus: Understanding the Effects of Maltreatment on Early Brain Development

“The effects of abuse and neglect on the developing brain during children’s first few years can result in various mental health problems. For example:

  • Diminished growth in the left hemisphere may increase the risk for depression (Teicher, 2000).
  • Irritability in the limbic system can set the stage for the emergence of panic disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (Teicher, 2000).
  • Smaller growth in the hippocampus and limbic abnormalities can increase the risk for dissociative disorders and memory impairments (Teicher, 2000).
  • Impairment in the connection between the two brain hemispheres has been linked to symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (Teicher, 2000).
  • Severely neglected children who have been deprived of sensory stimulation-including touch, movement, and sound-may be at risk for Sensory Integration Disorder (SID) (Parent Network for the Post-Institutionalized Child, 1999).
  • Children who have been raised in environments that totally disregarded their needs for comfort, stimulation, and affection may be at risk for Reactive Attachment Disorder (Parent Network for the Post-Institutionalized Child, 1999).

We are learning more about the serious, long-term consequences of abuse and neglect on brain development, and subsequent physical, cognitive, emotional, and social growth.”

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An interesting collection of information about sex differences in the brain is presented on the Medical Education Online website, I encourage readers to click on this link for a straightforward description of what some of these fundamental differences are.  Note the description of differences between the sexes in their emotional-social limbic brain structure and operation.
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Another interesting presentation of research related to this topic can be found at:

Female, male brain differences studied

BY: MELANIE MORAN

5/05/2006 – New research attempting to shed light on the age old question of how male and female brains differ has found that timing is everything.

I personally strongly suspect that a severely abused infant experiences brain developmental trauma-related changes as their brain-mind grows to experience TIMING.

My own experience through a severely abusive infant-childhood left me with permanent changes in regard to how I create, store, process and consider my own memory of myself in the world.  I suspect that because I am female my dissociation might have originated and therefore operates differently than it would if I had been born a boy.

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Sex Hormones Influence Human Cognitive Pattern

“There are consistent differences between men’s and women’s cognitive skills, indicating, whatever the source, that their nervous systems also differ. Cognitive sex differences appear well before puberty, are present across cultures, and to some extent parallel differences seen in nonhuman mammals. Nonetheless, we must keep in mind that in the larger comparative context, the similarities between men’s and women’s brains far outweigh the differences.”

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Here’s another great article that describes in part how women relate to young children differently than men do:

Understanding the Difference Between Men and Women

by Michael G. Conner, Psy.D,

“What is very interesting about the differences between men and women is their access to right brain. Women are more connected to their right brain because the connective tissue is greater. Men can access their right brain but they have to “listen” for the messages it provides. It is easy for most men to ignore what the right brain has to offer.

The right brain is focused, for the most part, on information that is not left brain. The right brain “makes sense” of the qualities of voice such as tone, pitch, volume. It also “makes sense” of facial expressions, gestures, body language and the feelings we get. In a sense, our right brain is our emotional radar. It picks up on information that is felt, perceived, heard or seen. This is one reason why women are so much more aware of how children and adults are feeling. This comes in handy to a mother because it allows a mother to “read” and understand an infant based on behaviors and sounds. That’s important because children can’t speak. It is also why women are usually much more attuned, sensitive and unable to ignore an infant who is upset. Mothers seem to know more for reasons that they cannot explain fully to fathers.”

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This Psychology Today article, The New Sex Scorecard by Hara Estroff Marano, about sex differences and the brain, states, “Males and females, it turns out, are different from the moment of conception, and the difference shows itself in every system of body and brain.”  It’s an excellent, easy to read description about our differences, and from here we can begin to think about how early infant-child trauma during our body-brain develop can affect us differently.

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Are There Differences between the Brains of Males and Females?

Renato M.E. Sabbatini, PhD

“The conclusion is that neuroscience has made great strides in the 90s, regarding the discovery of concrete, scientifically proved anatomical and functional differences between the brains of males and females.”

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Male brain vs. female brain I: Why do men try to figure out their relationships? Why do women talk to their cars?

“These sex differences emerged during the course of human evolution because men and women often faced different selection pressures. Men have come to acquire systemizing and mechanistic skills because such skills were necessary for inventing and making tools and weapons. At the same time, low empathizing ability was helpful for men in tolerating solitude during long hunting and tracking trips, and for committing acts of interpersonal violence and aggression necessary for male competition. (It is very difficult to kill other people if you strongly feel for them.) Similarly, women have come to acquire empathizing and mentalistic skills because they facilitate various aspects of mothering, such as anticipating and understanding the needs of infants who cannot yet talk, or making friends and allies in new environments, in which ancestral women found themselves upon marriage.”

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Differences in Male and Female Brain Structure

“… depression and chronic anxiety are diagnosed far more often in women; this may have to do with differences in the chemical composition of the brain, as one study has shown that women produce only about half as much serotonin (a neurotransmitter linked to depression) as men and have fewer transporters to recycle it.

Or, it may have to do with how the various sides of the female brain respond to emotions and pain. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to be diagnosed with autism, Tourette’s syndrome, dyslexia and schizophrenia, to name a few.

Additionally, disorders like schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease can show up differently in men and women.

Based on the location of neurons, brain injuries may affect men and women differently.

This sort of knowledge could affect drug treatments, or at least explain why some drugs work differently in men and women. It extends beyond just drugs, though. One study has found that men and women’s brains fire differently when they do plan a visually guided action, like reaching for an object. This may necessitate changes in physical therapy after a brain disorder that affects one side of the brain, like a stroke.”

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Gender-Specific Differences Found In Human Brain

“Men and women’s brains are distinctly different. While men have more neurons in the cerebral cortex, the brain’s outer layer, women have more neuropil, which contains the processes allowing cell communication.”

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Gender differences seen in brain connections

“Human brains appear to come in at least two flavours: male and female. Now variations in the density of the synapses that connect neurons may help to explain differences in how men and women think.”

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The Effect of Childhood Trauma on Brain Development

“As recently as the 1980s, many professionals thought that by the time babies are born, the structure of their brains was already genetically determined. However, emerging research shows evidence of altered brain functioning as a result of early abuse and neglect. The key to why this occurs appears to be in the brain.”

The following studies highlight some of the effects of maltreatment on brain development:

Bremner, J. D., Southwick, S. M., & Charney, D. S. (1991, fall). Animal Models for the Neurobiology of Trauma. National Center for PTSD Research Quarterly, 2(4), 1-7. (PDF Format – Acrobat Reader required)

Clinicians will notice parallels between the behavioral and biological sequelae of inescapable stress and the phe-nomenology of PTSD symptoms in their patients. The animal model of inescapable stress parallels the experience of being pinned down in combat or being the victim of repeated assaults. Inescapable stress produces a variety of behaviors in animals including abnormal alarm states, aggression, sensitivity to stress, altered sleep patterns, deficits in learning and memory, and withdrawal. These behaviors resemble those seen in patients with PTSD. For instance, evidence from animal findings of alterations in noradrenergic brain systems is consistent with emerging findings of abnormalities in noradrenergic systems in patients with PTSD as evidenced by abnormal responses to the alpha-2 noradrenergic receptor antagonist yohimbine. The identification of specific neurobiological abnormalities may lead to the development of new psychopharmacological and psychotherapeutic treatments based on the pathophysiology of PTSD.

Bremner JD, Randall P, et al. (1997). MRI-based measurement of hippocampal volume in posttraumatic stress disorder related to childhood physical and sexual abuse: A preliminary report. Biol Psychiatry, 41, 23-32.

Bremner, J. D. (1999). The Lasting Effects of Psychological Trauma on Memory and the Hippocampus.

Childhood abuse and other extreme stressors can have lasting effects on brain areas involved in memory and emotion. The hippocampus is a brain area involved in learning and memory that is particularly sensitive to stress

Bremner, J. D. (2000). The Invisible Epidemic: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Memory and the Brain. (PDF)

The biology of soul murder: Fear can harm a child’s brain. Is it reversible? (Nov. 11, 1996). U.S. News & World Report

Excerpt: “Once viewed as genetically programmed, the brain is now known to be plastic, an organ molded by both genes and experience throughout life. A single traumatic experience can alter an adult’s brain: A horrifying battle, for instance, may induce the flashbacks, depression and hair-trigger response of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). And researchers are finding that abuse and neglect early in life can have even more devastating consequences, tangling both the chemistry and the architecture of children’s brains and leaving them at risk for drug abuse, teen pregnancy and psychiatric problems later in life.“

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (2008). The Effects of Childhood Stress on Health Across the Lifespan

This booklet summarizes the research on childhood stress and its implications for adult health and well-being. Of particular interest is the stress caused by child abuse, neglect, and repeated exposure to intimate partner violence. Intensive and prolonged stress can lead to a variety of short- and long-term negative health effects. It can disrupt early brain development and compromise functioning of the nervous and immune systems. In addition, childhood stress can lead to health problems later in life including alcoholism, depression, eating disorders, heart disease, cancer, and other chronic diseases. This publication provides violence prevention practitioners with ideas about how to incorporate information on childhood stress into their work.
http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/pub-res/pdf/Childhood_Stress.pdf (warning large file)

Chamberlain, D.B. (1989). Babies Remember Pain. Pre- and Peri-natal Psychology, 3(4), 297-310.

We are still enthralled by popular myths that babies don’t feel, don’t think, don’t remember, and have no sense of self. Scientific research shows these myths to be false and calls into question painful procedures and rituals at birth that are both inhumane and unnecessary.

De Bellis, Michael D. (1999). Developmental Traumatology: Neurobiological Development in Maltreated Children With PTSD. Psychiatric Times, 16 (11),

Science shows that child abuse may be associated with alterations of the body’s major stress systems. These neurobiological effects may cause delays or deficits in a child’s ability to achieve age-appropriate behavioral, cognitive and emotional regulation.

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What about differences in brain between the sexes when it comes to Trauma Altered Development related to malevolent early treatment?

Here is an excellent article on differences in brain development between girls and boys:

Gender Differences in the Sequence of Brain Development

by Leonard Sax, M.D., Ph.D.

“The most profound difference between girls and boys is not in any brain structure per se, but rather in the sequence of development of the various brain regions. The different regions of the brain develop in a different sequence, and different tempo, in girls compared with boys.”

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Gender Differences in Dissociation:  A Dimensional Approach

From abstract:

“Considering that epidemiological research on dissociative disorders has suggested a 9 to 1 predominance of female cases, this study investigated the relationship between gender and dissociation using a dimensional approach. A total of 2,153 participants from different diagnostic groups completed the Dissociative Experience Scale. …. There were no significant sex differences in the distribution of high dissociators. Our findings suggest that men and women do not generally differ in dissociative psychopathology.”

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Sex differences in brain maturation in maltreatment-related pediatric posttraumatic stress disorder

“These data suggest that there are sex differences in the brain maturation of boys and girls with maltreatment-related PTSD.”

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Developmental traumatology part II: brain development

(study of 44 maltreated children and adolescents with PTSD and 61 matched controls )

“Results: PTSD subjects had smaller intracranial and cerebral volumes than matched controls. The total midsagittal area of corpus callosum and middle and posterior regions remained smaller; while right, left, and total lateral ventricles were proportionally larger than controls, after adjustment for intracranial volume. Brain volume robustly and positively correlated with age of onset of PTSD trauma and negatively correlated with duration of abuse. Symptoms of intrusive thoughts, avoidance, hyperarousal or dissociation correlated positively with ventricular volume, and negatively with brain volume and total corpus callosum and regional measures. Significant gender by diagnosis effect revealed greater corpus callosum area reduction in maltreated males with PTSD and a trend for greater cerebral volume reduction than maltreated females with PTSD. The predicted decrease in hippocampal volume seen in adult PTSD was not seen in these subjects.

Conclusions: These data suggest that the overwhelming stress of maltreatment experiences in childhood is associated with adverse brain development.”

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Brain Development:  Evidence of Gender Differences (text review page)

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(I couldn’t access the text of this online, but you can order it if you want)

Brain structures in pediatric maltreatment-related posttraumatic stress disorder: a sociodemographically matched study
Biological Psychiatry, Volume 52, Issue 11, Pages 1066-1078

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Developmental Problems of Maltreated Children

“Research has estimated that 10% to 61% of maltreated children have mental health problems….  Undoubtedly, differences in maltreatment status, duration, and severity as well as the way psychopathology was measured account for some discrepancies in prevalence.”

[Linda note:  Whether or not a child has a safe and secure adult attachment is a MAJOR factor that affects a traumatized child’s resiliency.]

“Maltreated boys display higher rates of aggression than maltreated girls whereas maltreated girls displayed higher rates of internalizing problems (e.g., depression, anxiety, somatic, etc.) than maltreated boys

“Health, Growth and Motor Delays, and Compromised Physiological Systems

These fast facts highlight key issues related to the occurrence of developmental problems for maltreated children younger than the age of 3:

  • Twenty-two percent to eighty percent demonstrate acute and chronic health problems
  • Eleven percent demonstrate failure to thrive
  • Twenty percent demonstrate growth delays
  • Four percent to forty-seven percent demonstrate gross and fine motor delays

The occurrence of developmental problems for maltreated children younger than the age of 3

  • Twenty-three percent to sixty-five percent of maltreated children demonstrate cognitive delays
  • Fourteen percent to sixty-four percent of maltreated children demonstrate speech and language delays

Common problems seen in maltreated children younger than the age of 3:

  • Poor emotional comprehension
  • Heightened arousal to negative emotions
  • Increased expression of negative emotion
  • Increased evidence of insecure attachment relationships
  • Poor peer relations and social competence

Diagnosable mental health difficulties in very young children. The occurrence of developmental problems for maltreated children younger than the age of 3 is summarized in these prevalence data:

  • Fourteen percent to thirty-seven percent of maltreated children demonstrate externalizing problems such as aggressive behavior and oppositional behavior
  • Approximately 11% of maltreated children demonstrate internalizing problems such as depression, anxiety, and somatic [physical] complaints
  • Maltreated children exhibit the following specific disorders:
    • Reactive Attachment Disorder — approximately 7%
    • Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or the PTSD symptom of hypervigilance approximately 7%
    • Adjustment Disorders — 40%
    • Regulatory Disorders — 22%”

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+KIDS NEED TLC — NOT TRAUMA!

alchemynowLeave a comment

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I took the day off from writing a post yesterday and spent the afternoon hanging out in the local laundromat cafe visiting friends.   Even so, I sure didn’t take the day off from thinking about child abuse.  I find that I am asking questions about severe infant-child abuse survivors that there are no answers for — at least not yet.

I’m not even sure these questions could be asked until NOW — at this point in time — when the research is in full support not only of the questions themselves, but of what we will find in answer to them.  We can now see what happens to infant-children when they are given traumas instead of TLC.

I can find the new neuroscientific research about the links between infant maltreatment and life long adult ‘maladaptive’ conditions, but this research cannot possibly begin to tell me what the very real experience of living with the Trauma Altered Development survivors is like from the inside!

I have to ask questions for which there are no answers — yet — because so many people (including probably all the neuroscience researchers) just GOT their social emotional brain in the first place through their safe and secure early caregiver attachments, and therefore already have the answers built right into their body-brain from the start.  To them, there ARE no such questions as I have to ask – therefore, no answers.

Are we survivors supposed to continue to pretend that we don’t know the difference between ourselves and ‘them’?  Are we supposed to be content to have ‘them’ tell us we have a ‘psychopathology’, a disease, a dysfunction, a disorder, take our diagnosis and shut up about it all?  I don’t THINK SO!

I am working my way in my thinking through the most important mother-infant brain building article by Dr. Allan Schore that I introduced two days ago in my post.   In the meantime I am busy making Holiday cut out cookies, a task I haven’t done for 20 years, with the hopes of delivering them to people who have no home.

As I prepare to decorate these cookies, I think about the profound links between severe infant-child abuse and maltreatment and the long term health consequences to survivors – including homelessness.

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Maybe in part because I didn’t write a post yesterday, I dreamed on last night.  I was disappointed this morning when I woke up, opened my eyes, and realized the post I wrote while I was sleeping wasn’t available to ‘cut, copy or paste’ into my blog!

I do remember the very clear visual image that was contained in that dream post, though.  I was thinking about carnations, my grandmother’s favorite flower.  I saw this flower as a white one in a glass of pure water.  In a ‘good enough’ benevolent safe and securely attached infant-childhood body-brain-mind-self development naturally follows a ‘best’ pathway so the little one (in the image of a white carnation) is in no way changed in its development by trauma it suffered in its  malevolent early experiences.

Then I saw an image of a carnation (little person) who did have to go through Trauma Altered Development — and in the image there was the white flower in a glass of water that looked purple in my dream.  The stem of the white flower had to suck up all that purple up its stem — through wounds it received through its development in a malevolent hurtful environment.  In the dream I watched the injured flower turn from white into increasingly darker shades of purple.

First the outside ruffled edges of these traumatized flowers began to change.  According to how long the white flower was left in the wounding environment, the color of the flower was forced to deepen until all of the flower’s ‘development’ changed.

I might have lost all the words to the dream post I wrote, but I did not lose the image of the flowers which followed me into my waking day.

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I also thank ‘totanaca‘ for the comment posted today to CONTACT INFO in regard to work being done toward creating and implementing a national ban on corporeal punishment — of legalized physical assault — against children in our public schools.  Please visit this site dedicated to the banning efforts and make your voice heard:

Ways to ban Corporal Punishment of Children

If you haven’t already found them, please read related posts on this blog.

Corporeal punishment in the public schools creates an atmosphere of terror for our children.  Children form bonds with their teachers and school officials, and violence against children then forms a trauma bond where there should be safe and secure attachment.  Witness abuse is also fostered among all children in a corporeal punishment environment who are helpless to protect not only themselves from physical assault, but also cannot protect their peers.  These are human rights violation concerns.

Children have human rights.

CHILDREN ARE TO BE TREASURED AND PROTECTED!  THEY NEED TLC — NOT TRAUMA!

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Cookie baking note: I just ignored the timer that went off to remind me and warn me that the sheet I was baking of tiny little purple cookie people needed to be attended to.  I got preoccupied and busy doing other things until I smelled the burning cookies!

Sure enough, they are all burned to a crisp and I had to throw them out.  Children are not cookies!  When their needs are not met, when their human rights are violated, when they are maltreated in a malevolent environment so that they suffer Trauma Altered Development — and then have to suffer without a best-built social-emotional brain (and changed body, including nervous and immune system changes) for the rest of their lives — what do we do with them?  Throw them out?

Adult survivors of severe trauma in childhood are dying on the average 20 years earlier than non traumatized children (adults), fill our hospitals and clinics with severe adult onset disease, fill our prisons, our battered shelters, our ‘mental’ and ‘behavioral’ health centers and our streets.  We allow them to be traumatized when they are children and throw them out when they are ‘damaged’ as adults.

Our nation’s statistics are matching this dismal state of our national affairs.  We are ignoring all the warnings — are we going to let this continue?  Believe me, it was not my tiny purple cookie people’s fault they got burned!  The job of baking them right was MINE.

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+WHEN OUR TEARS TAKE AWAY OUR WORDS – WHAT IS THE TRUTH ABOUT OUR TRAUMAS?

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By the end of this post I cannot write my way through my tears…..

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I decided to take a look today at this book, hoping to find within it some new information that will give me some new insights about how to ‘recover’ from the effects of the 18 years of chronic trauma I experienced from birth and throughout the survivorhood that was supposed to be my childhood.

The Trauma Spectrum: Hidden Wounds and Human Resiliency by Robert C. Scaer (Hardcover – Jul 17, 2005)

Yet, here again, in spite of Scaer’s many years of experience in treating trauma survivors, in spite of his careful writing based on meticulous research, this book does not truly address my condition.  He misses the fundamental fact that those of us who suffered overwhelming trauma while our body-brain-mind-self was passing through our early critical-window growth and developmental stages have been deprived of the most basic human right possible – the right to live our lives in a body that has not been permanently changed by having trauma built right in to it.

Because I live in a trauma formed body, I have NEVER had a body that did not include these trauma adaptation responses in it.  I do not have the luxury, therefore, to return to any pretrauma state.  Well, I do have to make an important distinction here.  Because the full development of my mother’s mental psychosis did not originate until the time she was actually birthing me, the conditions my body formed in while she was pregnant with me were benign and adequate.  Without at least having had those nine months of untraumatized development, I most certainly would not be alive today.

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Except for the critical 9-month reprieve from developmental trauma that I had the luxury of experiencing within my mother’s womb, all the rest of my development occurred in a malevolent environment of trauma.  I now know enough about myself and those like me to understand that everything in Scaer’s book is missing the mark about how trauma ‘facts’ apply to me.

Very few researchers are ready yet to look our situation square in the face.  They treat our reality as if they were trying to consider what a full eclipse of the sun looks like.  We cannot look unaided at an eclipse without suffering permanent visual damage.  Researchers are evidently unprepared to look at our situation without suffering damage to their own vision of what life is SUPPOSED to be like in regard to the impact that trauma truly has on the most powerless and helpless humans on earth – infants and very young children.

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I am sorry, but I just cannot find it within me to get too excited about or to feel too hopeful because Scaer starts his book by paying passing lip service to the reality of Trauma Altered Development (TSD) when he writes on page 12:

“The nature versus nurture, genes versus experience dilemma is especially important in the field of development of the brain and behavior.  Many mental illnesses and behavioral and personality traits are considered to be primarily genetic in nature.  In fact, genes are routinely activated or “switched on” by experience, often only during a window of opportunity in early infancy.  The long-term effects of early life experience on behavior throughout the lifespan must be considered when diagnosing and treating behavioral disorders, especially when considering the perplexing tendency for victims of trauma to repeat behavior closely associated with prior life trauma.”

HOGWASH!   This is just another example of ‘sinking Titanic’ Dark Age thinking.  Yes, “genes are routinely activated or “switched on” by experience” but there’s nothing ‘often’ about this process.  It occurs on the most fundamental level in a continual process during our early infant-child growth and development – it is HOW we get made!  The experiences we have with our early caregivers, either in a safe and secure attachment relationship or not, set in motion all the physiological, biological adaptations to our benevolent or malevolent environment that determine the creation of the body we will live in and with for the rest of our lives.

Those of us forced to endure overwhelming trauma during these ‘windows of opportunity’ in early infancy (and early childhood) that Scaer mentions in passing so change us that we do not belong to the ‘ordinary’ group the rest of his book is designed to help.  I am left, again, with a mind full of ‘yes, but…..’ – WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF US?

If overwhelming traumatic experiences build us in the first place, we absolutely have no chance to EVER ‘return’ to a pretrauma state.  Very few researchers and clinicians seem to get this critical point.

(see an example of an exception: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook–What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing by Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz (Paperback – Dec 24, 2007) )

How do I begin to pick my way through the rubble of thinking that is contained in books like Scaer’s so that I can learn SOMETHING useful about the impact of trauma and hoped-for so-called ‘recovery’ from its effects when I know from the start that this author has no clue about how Trauma Altered Development has changed me?  Filtering what Scaer is saying about trauma through my own body-brain-mind-self that was built through my own experiences of overwhelming trauma from the moment I was born and for the next 18 years of my life is a daunting task.  I have to translate and transform his thinking one word, one concept, one ‘lesson’ at a time.

Scaer’s book would be dense and difficult to read even if I knew ahead of time that he knew what he was talking about as his information applies to me.  Knowing ahead of time that he doesn’t have the remotest clue about who and how I am in the world leaves me ONLY with my own desire to better understand the fundamental nature of trauma as it impacts human beings.  I cannot hope or trust that this author has prepared a pathway for me to travel through this information he considers himself enough of an expert to present.

I have to rely upon my own desire for knowledge and understanding about how the trauma that happened to me changed me from the first breath I took on this earth if I am ever going to be able to achieve any healing.  I refuse to accept my assigned status of being a casualty of a war I was born into as I was forced to fight to stay alive and continue my development with every possible human resiliency factor I had in my little, tiny body.

I find myself at this moment up against my own tears that spring from the deepest levels of who I am as I seek to help all of us who were forced to change on our cellular levels in order to remain alive against all odds.  We were terribly, terribly hurt and we remained alive.  Where are the words that we can use to begin to understand what these hurts did to us?  If the trauma experts cannot even find and use these words accurately, how can I?  How can we begin to articulate what our body knows on its most profound levels about the reality of the power trauma has to impact human beings and to forever change us?

How do we begin to translate our experience and transform our tears directly into words?  I have to get back to you on that.  Right now my tears are taking my words away.  I doubt that’s a problem trauma experts like Scaer ever have to face.

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+PTSD AND SEVERE ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – PART TWO

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This second post about Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) refers again to a book called Healing Trauma: Attachment, Mind, Body, and Brain – Hardcover (Jan 2003, W.W. Norton and Co.) by Daniel J. Siegel, Marion F. Solomon, and Marion Solomon, chapter 4 (pages 168-195) written by Bessel A. van der Kolk:  “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and The Nature of Trauma.”

Today’s post follows the November 28, 2009 post

+PTSD AND SEVERE CHILD ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – PART ONE

PLEASE NOTE:  Do not take anything I say as a reason to alter any ongoing treatment, therapy or medication you are receiving.  Consult with your provider if you find something in my writing that brings questions to your mind regarding your health and well-being.

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The following is taken from pages 172 of the above text.  I will consider this information in my writing below:

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It is now easier for me to work with this information because I have described my own version of an alternative way of thinking about the ongoing complications severe infant-child abuse and malevolent treatment survivors face as a direct result not only of the specifics of the actual horrific traumas they lived through, but also because of the very real physiological changes that surviving these traumas created in their infant-child growing and developing body.

(see yesterday’s November 29, 2009 post

+TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT (TAD) – A NEW DESCRIPTIVE CONCEPT)

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An accurate primary and initial assessment of TAD for those of us who are Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors would allow us to know immediately how the changes our body-brain had to make created us to be different from ‘ordinary’ people who do not have the history of trauma that we do.

In this TAD assessment two critical resiliency factors would also need to be assessed because these two resiliency factors (one primary, the other secondary) are known to have the ability to nearly completely modify and modulate the power that early trauma has to change our developing body-brain.

The presence of safe and secure attachment to some early primary caregiver is the most basic and important resource an Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivor had.  The current assessment tools available to assess adult secure and insecure attachment need to be simplified, refined and made accessible to the public.

Stemming from the degree of safety and security available through early caregiver attachment, the ability to play is a secondary but critical resiliency factor that impacts an Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivor’s body-brain development.  I believe that assessment criteria and tools to measure this critical factor consistently and accurately can be developed and also made available to the public.

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NOTE:  In our new age of technology, the public has the right to be able to access critically important information about themselves and how their early infant and childhood experiences impacted their development.  At present this information remains ONLY available within ‘clinical’ settings, if even there.

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As far as I am concerned, anything and everything that is currently lumped under so-called ‘psychological’ categories belongs to the sinking Titanic of dark age medical model thinking that I referred to in yesterday’s post.

Until Trauma Altered Development (TAD) is assessed at the bedrock level of how Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors changed at their own bedrock (molecular) level, any attempt to moderate so-called ‘symptoms’ remains a crap shoot in the dark.

TAD assessment can connect the consequences of early trauma to altered physiological changes that an Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivor’s body was forced to make to best ensure continued survival in early malevolent environments,

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Early caregiver attachment experiences from birth build the body-brain we will live with for the rest of our lives.

Van der Kolk (scanned text above) writes that it is not usually the symptoms of PTSD itself that brings those seeking help to a clinical setting.  Rather, he says that it is “depression, outbursts of anger, self-destructive behaviors, and feelings of shame, self-blame and distrust that distinguished a treatment-seeking sample from a nontreatment-seeking community sample with PTSD.”

Through an accurate TAD assessment, any ongoing difficulty an Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivor has with emotions and social interactions can be traced to inadequate early caregiver interactions in a malevolent environment that built for the survivor an entirely different early-forming right-limbic-emotional-social brain.

When the foundation of the early forming right brain is altered because of maltreatment, the Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivor’s later developmental stages involving shame, guilt and embarrassment will also be off course from ‘ordinary and optimal’ and will cause altered patterns of development in the body-brain.

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Van der Kolk states:

“The majority of people who seek treatment for trauma-related problems have histories of multiple traumas.”

OK, I can certainly understand this, but here again, as I mentioned above, I do not agree with applying so-called ‘psychological’ and ‘symptom based’ medical model diagnostic thinking used in the author’s next statements.  I absolutely disagree with ever using terms such as ‘character pathology’ in reference to Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors!

“One recent treatment-seeking sample…suffered from a variety of other psychological problems which in most cases were the chief presenting complaints, in addition to their PTSD symptoms:  77% suffered from behavioral impulsivity, affect lability, and aggression against self and others; 84% suffered from depersonalization and other dissociative symptoms; 75% were plagued by chronic feelings of shame, self-blame and being permanently damaged and 93% complained of being unable to negotiate satisfactory relationships with others.  These problems contribute significantly to impairment and disability above and beyond the PTSD symptoms….Focusing exclusively either on PTSD or on the depression, dissociation and character pathology prevents adequate assessment and treatment of traumatized populations.”

TAD assessments will clearly show that ‘impulsivity’, ‘affect liability’, most aggression, and dissociation are directly connected to changes in how an Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivor’s nervous system, including their brain – and here, particularly their right brain – formed differently from ‘ordinary’ due to growth and development in trauma.

“Chronic feelings of shame, self-blame and being permanently damaged” are also directly connected to trauma through developmental changes an Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivor’s nervous system, including their brain – and here, particularly their later forming (after age one) left brain – had to make while developing in an early malevolent, trauma-filled environment.

Rather than referring to these changes as ‘character pathologies’, which in my thinking is the maltreatment, abusive stance taken by the medical model toward Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors, a TAD assessment can accurately and specifically pinpoint the origin of these changes in the body-brain and describe the consequences of them.

Receiving an accurate TAD assessment will show us exactly how our body was forced to adapt during our development through trauma so that we could survive it.   Yes, I do believe we KNOW we are different from ‘ordinary,’ but we are not ‘permanently damaged’.   We ARE permanently changed.

The changes Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors experience are fundamental and profound!  Everything about us was subject to adjustment for our trauma survival – our body, our nervous system and brain, our immune system, our mind, and our connection between our self and our self and between our self and the entire world around us.  NOT facing the truth and discovering the facts through TAD assessment will NOT resolve the difficulties we face with our continued survival into adulthood.

The only long term solution societies have is to STOP Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment!!!  Part of that solution is to provide the kind of TAD assessment Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors need, and to make available to us the resources necessary for us to live the best life we can in spite of the changes we had to make in order to stay alive because nobody STOPPED the Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment that happened to us.

It is the pathological character of the society we were born into that allowed what happened to us to happen at all, let alone allowed it to continue to the degree that trauma changed our physiological development.  If there is any self blame to be had, it is on the level far beyond OURS as the Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors.

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That the grand sinking Titanic of the archaic dark age’s medical model about Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors has at least THOUGHT about throwing us a life boat becomes apparent in van der Kolk’s next words:

“As part of the DSM IV field trial, members of the PTSD taskforce delineated a syndrome of psychological problems which have been shown to be frequently associated with histories of prolonged and severe personal abuse.  They call this Complex PTSD, or Disorders of Extreme Stress Not Otherwise Specified (DESNOS).”

Great!  A life boat full of holes!  Gee, why are we NOT thankful for that?

“A syndrome of psychological problems” be damned!  Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors do not suffer from a ‘syndrome’, and ours are not ‘psychological problems’!  For all the reasons I have repeatedly described, we simply need a TAD assessment that will tell us HOW our little body adapted down to our molecular level during our development in the midst of, and in spite of, toxic malevolent trauma.  Then we need resources that inform us how to live NOW with these profound trauma-caused changes that happened to us THEN.

The author continues:

“DESNOS delineated a complex of symptoms associated with early interpersonal trauma.”

Again, we don’t have ‘symptoms’.  We have a different body-brain-mind-self that adapted to survival in a malevolent world and caused us to have Trauma Altered Development (TAD).

We don’t have symptoms, we have consequences.  Every single item in the list of so-called ‘complex symptoms’ (see them in the page scan below) that van der Kolk describes are directly connected to our TAD.  EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE ITEMS exist within us because of changes our body-brain was forced to make.  They are consequences of the changes our body had to make through our TAD.

The only real progress in the right direction I can see – given to us like faulty patches to a sinking life boat thrown to us from a sinking ship – is that at least an association ‘with early interpersonal trauma’ is finally being considered in the current medical model thinking.

But this tiny droplet of hoped for healing balm offered by the creation of a construct named “Complex PTSD, or Disorders of Extreme Stress Not Otherwise Specified (DESNOS)” is not what we Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors need in my book.

We need our entire society to understand and accept the truth that the Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment that happened to me and others – and continues to happen to children around us today – is nothing short of a form of parental-selected genocide that did not fulfill its intent to completely destroy us.  We are Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors because we are still alive, and we ONLY SURVIVED because we were able to adapt our body throughout our Trauma Altered Development to and within the malevolent environments that formed us.

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The rest of van der Kolk’s words (below) simply bring into my mind the image of the author being like a modern day Paul Revere, whose horse’s hooves pound along the streets of our nation as he screams a warning.  I am certainly not convinced, however, that even this author knows which message it is that most needs to be delivered.

The Trauma Altered Development that Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors experienced had no choice but to build itself into every part of who we are BECAUSE we live in a body, and our body had no choice but to change so that we could stay alive.

To describe any aspect of what happened to us in terms of a ‘diagnosis’ or a ‘symptom’, ‘complex’ or not, to call us ‘maladjusted’ or to tell us we suffer from any form of a ‘character pathology’ or ‘psychological problem’ is to continue to condemn us with stigmas and stereotyped prejudice which makes as much sense as applying all of the above labels to someone who is tall versus short, or who has red hair rather than blond.

If we wish as a society to remain in the dark ages about the consequences of Trauma Altered Development for Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors then at least we should have enough honor and common sense to admit it.  If we are appalled by the ignorance that is still applied to our circumstances, today is the day we can enlighten ourselves and get on with the legitimate task of figuring out how to accurately assess Trauma Altered Development so that we can begin to live well as the changed, extraordinary Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors that we are.

Our Trauma Altered Development did not affect WHO we are in the world, but it absolutely changed HOW we are in the world.  It is up to all of us to learn what that means.

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The following is taken from pages 173 of the above text:

Again, it is not a picture of ‘long-term psychiatric impact’ nor a ‘diagnosis’ that Trauma Altered Development affected Infant-Child Severe Maltreatment Survivors need.  We need to understand the changes our body had to make to guarantee our survival and specifically how those changes affect us, and specifically how to improve our quality of life and well-being in the world in spite of our TAD.

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+FORCED THROUGH ABUSE IN INFANT-CHILDHOOD TO GROW A DISSOCIATING SELF

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Growing a self (with matter) in a body in the world is an infant-child’s sole job in childhood.  Our early caregivers either help us or they harm us in our efforts.

For someone as abused as I was from birth and throughout their childhood, with without a safe and a secure attachment to any early caregiver that would allow them to develop their self in connection to their body in the world, feeling as if one MATTERS or even is a self WITH MATTER is extremely hard to do.

Everyone is born with a spark of life that is uniquely theirs and nobody else’s.  Parents are not supposed to work to destroy that spark.  They are supposed to recognize it in the body (and as the body) of the little one under their care.  They are supposed to recognize the growing self of their infant-child as being separate from their own self, so they can fan the spark and feed it fuel to grow on.

Parents who have serious unresolved trauma complications of their own often cannot do their job.  In my mother’s case, she never recognized ME as a separate being from herself at all.  She overwhelmed me, threatened my spark of life, and my growing and developing body-SELF from the moment I was born and for the next 18 years of my childhood.

Only no matter how hard she tried she could never destroy the spark of life that was-is me.  She heaped every possible obstacle in the way of ME growing my SELF in my body in the world that she could.

I see in my mind the terrible image of an un-jolly giant wielding a gargantuan sledge hammer (like in a tragic cartoon), smashing it down on top of me every chance she got.  In this image I am no bigger than a tiny ant.  As much as it was possible for me to do, my growing self had to stay hiding in order to stay alive at all.

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When early caregivers are not available to recognize and nurture and reflect an infant-child’s spark of life self back to it, that little self can seem to all but disappear over time.

I was never allowed to have happy genuine time to grow my self or to even be my self from birth (except in hiding).  The ugly giant with her weapons of destruction was always present or near5 by.  Any time she caught me out in the open being my self in play, exploration or in a state of mistaken safety, she would attack me again.

I see another image in my mind that reminds me of the Phantom of the Opera, because this image is of a stage.  I was only allowed to be like a shadow on the stage of my family’s play.  My mother completely controlled and directed the show.  Mostly I was ‘in trouble’ and being punished somewhere off stage.  I was banished and forbidden to be a part of the ongoing play.

I was left alone in misery because that’s where my mother wanted me (short of dead, which she dared not accomplish).  I could only appear in some version of her dramas such as “It’s a fun family holiday” or “This is Linda in the classroom.”

Mostly I remained either hidden, or under attack.

The REAL me was able to remain hidden back stage and could only sneak around like a phantom where she couldn’t detect me.  Over time, as I aged, I learned to appear on stage in different roles, both as an older child and later as an adult.  But my self-in-hiding could not become integrated within the body that appeared in all of its roles.

Only I didn’t know this was happening.  I have seen in my adult journals how lost I was to myself.  As I’ve mentioned before, my being lost in the world appeared in an unending sequence of patterns of questions that I could never find the answers for no matter how hard I searched or tried.

I have only been able to see the parts of myself that are reflected in my actions performed either around other people, or in my actions I perform when I am alone.  I so rarely have any sense that my WHOLE SELF exists at all that doubt I even have one.  I’ve always had a sense that most of who I am remains somewhere in hiding.

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Some would say that loving my ‘inner child’ would give her permission to come out of hiding.  I do not attach an age to the self.  A self moves forward in time just as a body does.  Neither exist ‘back there’ somewhere, suspended in the past.

From my perspective as I write this, I would think that the WHOLE of me simply knows things, as do its ‘parts’.  This self of me was forced to make decisions about how to remain alive in a dangerous world every step forward through my childhood from birth.

Every time my growing and developing self was attacked, my body-self was forced at the same time to make a decision about how best to adapt its growth and development so I could survive in a malevolent world.  Those decisions were made automatically in my body on the cellular, molecular level – including the epigenetic processes that used all the available options possible to tell my DNA how to ensure my survival in a chaotic and dangerous world.

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As   strange as it might seem as I write this, I believe by body-brain continued to develop throughout my entire childhood without the ‘usual’ connections to the ongoing presence of a continuous self within it.  Any time I was attacked by my mother and a survival-based decision had to be made in my tiny body about how to stay alive, my growing body went one way and my spark-of-life-self went a different way.

I was supposed to be growing an intimate, inseparable connection between my self and my body.  My mother’s attacks on me were so threatening and continual that this connection could not be formed – physiologically – in any ordinary way.

My ongoing responses to attacks during my early growth and developmental stages changed not only how my body-brain developed, and changed this connection between my self and my body, it also changed how I experienced my self in a body in the world.  Both my growing body and self had to include these changes on a structural and operational level.  There was no magic.  There was no possible alternative.

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These patterns of interruption between my growing self and body happened so many times that they cannot be counted.  Two examples that I’ve written earlier come immediately to mind.

One happened when I was two:  *AGE 2 – CINDY BORN – 1953

The other happened when I was three:  *Age 3 – THE TOILET BOWL

I already suffered from an extremely disorganized, disoriented insecure attachment to my ‘caregiving’ mother, to the world around me, and most importantly to my developing body-self connection well before these experiences happened to me.  I believe my mother had already overwhelmed my ability to have any ongoing self experience of having an experience an uncountable number of times well before I reached the age of two.  Without safe, secure and stable early caregiving interactions a safe, secure and stable connection between a growing self and a growing body cannot possibly be made.

After my mother dragged me out of the safety of my grandmother’s bed on the day a month and a half before my second birthday, my mother’s version of this incident was added to her abuse litany of me as proof that I wanted to be an only child, that I loved my grandmother more than I loved her, that I was able to deceive my grandmother by hiding my true, terrible self from her, and that I wanted my grandmother to be my mother and not her.

I first remembered this incident from my vantage point of being a very small toddler floating above my body which I could see in lying at the head in the middle of the expanse of my grandmother’s bed.  I can also remember this experience from within my body on the bed and see the ‘other me’ up there above me looking down.  Only by closing my eyes in my remembering process or by not looking up at all can I make ‘that one’ go away.

I can float around my grandmother’s entire house in that little body.  I can float over the heads of the two screaming women.  I can float over to the window and touch the lace of the curtains.  I can float through the open walk-in closet door, out the bedroom door, down the long curving hallway, into the massive kitchen, into the dusky living room.  I can experience the whole nasty, terrifying event from within the little physical body on the bed, but I cannot bring these two states of experiencing the experience together into one.

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When it comes to the toilet bowl incident that happened a month and a half before my fourth birthday, I cannot experience both sides of my memory’s experience.  This ‘event’ was added to my mother’s ongoing abuse litany as proof that I was a murderer who wanted my little sister dead, and that I tried to kill her.

I can remember being in my small battered body as it crumpled against the cold hard surface of the side of the bathtub where my mother threw me after she had exhausted herself in beating me.  What I experienced next I cannot put back together.

As my mother turned to storm out of the bathroom I turned my eyes upward to the window high on the wall across from my sobbing, shaking body.  I can return to this memory in my body.  I remember feeling some part of me rise out of my body and float up toward that window and out of it into the radiant blue sky.  In this memory my awareness remains in my tortured body as the other part of me left my body-self behind.

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These are remembered patterns of who-what separates from who-what.  I believe that because I was older and further down the body-brain-self developmental pathway when the toilet bowl attack happened that the separation between my body and self that happened then has continued as a pattern of my being in the world ever since.  What happened that day was an inner rupture without repair.

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As I sit here writing at this moment, thinking about what I might be willing or able to say about the part of my self that drifted up out of my body, aimed itself at the window, found its way to escape and floated away, I am having a rather ‘Disney Moment.’

Those of you who watched the movie, ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’, can probably remember the final scenes as the wall disappears and a magical world of animation opens up into motion, light, music and color.  At this moment I can sense a similar scene going on behind my shoulders as I write these words.  Thousands of brilliantly colored butterflies dance in the sunlight behind me, each one being a fragment of my experience of myself in my life.

Yet I also know that if I could enter that scene, and travel more deeply within it, that the light would dim, the sounds would change, the butterflies would not be dancing………there I will not go.

This sense I am having of this other world is eerie and makes the hairs on the back of my neck begin to crawl.  I turn around and look behind my back.  There is nothing there but my kitchen wall.  It helps to see a framed picture of Johnny Depp in his pirate guise hanging there.  Seeing it there, I smile.

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For those of you who might be curious, this is the link to the latest ‘counseling’ report I asked for from astrologer Zane:

*Age 58 – Astrology reading about life and death

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+LIGHT T-DAY READING ON RATS AND THE DALAI LAMA

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I’m not at all sure why I feel safer on the planet knowing the Dalai Lama is here, but I do.  The following links are to information related to the conference presentation to the Dalai Lama about the effects of maternal distress behaviors on her offspring – just a little T-Day light reading!

This is the gist of science told the Dalai Lama:

If a distressed mother rat raises all her own babies, they will all turn out distressed.

If a calm mother rat raises all her own babies, they will all turn out calm.

If you change the litters at birth, and give the calm mother’s babies to the distressed mother, all those babies will grow up distressed.

If you take the distressed mother’s babies at birth and give them to the calm mother, the babies will all grow up calm.

In essence, the distressed mother’s treatment of her babies triggers epigenetic changes in the way the babies she raises turn out because their genes are triggered differently by the distress.

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Pity the Poor Lab Rat by Kathy Brown

“…in spite of all our advances in knowledge about mental disorders and the advances in technology that have resulted in an impressive smorgasbord of pharmaceutical agents, the overall prevalence of depression is increasing at an alarming rate. Moreover, the average age at onset continues to drop. Whereas patients once presented with their initial depressive episode in their fifth decade of life, the average age of onset has now dropped into the twenties.”

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Mom, Dad, DNA and Suicide by Sharon Begley

“Such changes are called “epigenetic,” to distinguish them from changes that affect the sequence of nucleotides in DNA. Epigenetics is arguably the next frontier in genetic research, promising to show why people with identical DNA, such as monozygotic twins, have different traits, including traits known to be strongly affected by genes. The answer seems to be that the events of our lives, including parental behavior, turns some genes on and some genes off. In this case, parental care (or, specifically, abuse) changed the expression of the crucial glucocorticoid-receptor gene in the brain.”

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Abuse changes brains of suicide victims

“Suicide victims who were abused as children have clear genetic changes in their brains…”

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While the new research on neuroplasticity in the brain is important, those of us whose body and brain were changed as a result of severe early child abuse, again, may not be in the realm of ‘ordinary’ when it comes to the changes we can expect in our brains compared to others…..

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Buddhism – A meeting of minds by Swati Chopra

“At the 12th mind and life conference in dharamshala, buddhism and modern science found points of convergence as the dalai lama and western scientists spoke about neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to change with experience and focused training.”

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2004: Neuroplasticity: The Neuronal Substrates of Learning
and Transformation — a 2004 conference that got neuroscientists together with the Dalai Lama

Download MLXII: Neuroplasticity Brochure PDF

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Can Our Minds Change Our Brains?

Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform OurselvesBy Sharon Begley

“At the Dalai Lama’s private compound in Dharamsala, India, leading neuroscientists and Buddhist philosophers met to consider “neuroplasticity.”  The conference was organized by the Mind and Life Institute as part of a series of meetings, beginning in 1987, for brain researchers and Buddhist scholars to share insights into the workings of the mind and brain. The 2004 meeting set out to answer two questions: “Does the brain have the ability to change, and what is the power of the mind to change it?””

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Child Abuse Causes Lifelong Changes To DNA Expression And Brain.

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Mechanisms underlying epigenetic effects of early social experience

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Epigenetics. Child abuse alters genes.

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What role might epigenetics have in shaping a person’s development?

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

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+PLAY AS AN INDICATOR OF SAFETY AND SECURITY IN A BENEVOLENT WORLD

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Mothers have evolved throughout the millennia to play with their infants.

Having the ability to engage in healthy play has evolved through the millennia to build healthy body-nervous system-brain-mind selves in our species.  Play happens when the world is a friendly place to be.  Play TELLS us that the world is a friendly place to be.

When the environment surrounding mother and infant-child is benevolent, healthy play is most usually present.  This benevolence in the environment is then built into the growing-developing offspring.

When the environment surrounding mother and infant-child is hostile, toxic, lacking in essential survival qualities and therefore is malevolent, a mother’s ability to engage in healthy play with her offspring is interfered with.

Thus, the absence of healthy playfulness between mother and offspring signal the developing infant-child on every physiological level that trauma exists in its world.  The offspring will then be forced to change and adapt to the best of its physiological abilities to prepare itself for a lifetime within a malevolent world.

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Healthy playfulness between a mother and her offspring only happens to the degree that the environment is safe and secure enough to allow this play to happen.

If a mother grew and developed in her own early childhood in a world that signaled her body-nervous system-brain-mind self that the world was malevolent, she is most likely carrying unresolved trauma within herself that then signals to her offspring that the world is malevolent.  Her offspring will then have to change according to the trauma-present-in-the-world message just as its mother did.

Both mother and infant-child will then suffer from a lack of safety and security perceived as permanent and real by their physiological development.  When trauma is present, healthy play is interfered with because our evolution has designed our species so that degree, quality, kinds of, presence of healthy play and playful attitudes directly indicate the degree of either benevolence or malevolence in the world.

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I am not talking about play as we might think about it in today’s world.  This kind of play has nothing to do with toys or ‘stuff’.  Healthy play that signals to offspring the condition of the world is about direct face-to-face interaction between mother and infant-child.  The presence of a world safe and secure enough to allow for this kind of play between early caregivers and offspring has operated throughout our evolution.

It was only when the world because safe and secure enough, adequate and benevolent enough for this level of play to grow and thrive that humans ever achieved powers of speech at all (only about 140,000 years ago).  The physiological systems within our body and brain had to have already evolved sophisticated organizational and orientational abilities to have ever allowed our powers of speech to manifest in the first place because speech uses all those preexisting abilities.

Any time trauma happens it always disrupts ongoing coherent life.  If trauma cannot be resolved, consequences happen.  Dissociation represents one of the fundamental consequences of a being’s inability to resolve trauma.  Dissociation continues to affect a mother because its very existence means that something malevolent occurred that was not able to be resolved.

A dissociating mother thus communicates her state of unresolved trauma to her offspring primarily through an interruption in her ability to engage in healthy play and playful attitudes with her offspring.  The key to healthy playfulness between a mother and her offspring is that it is APPROPRIATE.

Appropriate, and therefore healthy play and playfulness between a mother and her offspring, the kind of play that then signals the offspring to grow an entire body geared for life in a benevolent world, happens when the mother’s entire focus is on fostering the well-being of her infant-child.

Mother’s have evolutionarily evolved to respond appropriately to their offspring so that their play-filled responses do not overwhelm, over stimulate or under stimulate them.  When a mother has experienced enough trauma during her own development that incoherency in the form of dissociation has been built into her entire body, she is not likely to be able to operate from this optimal, benign, benevolent-world-condition state within herself.  She will then communicate her own preexisting, unresolved trauma states directly to her offspring.

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Terror, pain and trauma interrupt play and the ability to play.  This lack of play and the ability to play then acts as a direct signal that communicates malevolence in the world.  When healthy play and playfulness exist, they happen in a safe and secure world, not in the midst of trauma.

A mother who does not carry unresolved trauma into her interactions with her offspring will be able to focus on the well-being of her offspring and demonstrate the benevolence of the world to her developing infant-child through her healthy, appropriate play and playfulness with it.

These interactions operate from birth to form first the right, limbic, emotional, social brain.  As the infant-child continues to grow, the foundation of play or its absence, built within its body-nervous system-brain-mind-self will further influence the development of its later-forming left brain, the connection between the two hemispheres of its brain, and the development of its higher-processing cortical abilities.

A non-dissociating mother is able to have appropriate hopes, dreams, wishes and desires for the well-being of her offspring.  She will automatically be able to orient herself and organize her interactions with her offspring.  Her goal, destination, direction and purpose regarding her offspring will be benevolent.  This benevolence will be communicated through safety and security that manifests itself in healthy play and playfulness toward her offspring.

A dissociating mother will experience breaks in her ongoing interactions with her offspring that will vary in degree according to the changes that had to happen to her during her own development in a malevolent early environment.

In my case, my mother’s dissociation toward me was extreme, fundamental and complete.  In her psychosis she believed that I was evil, that I tried to kill her while I was being born, that I was not human, and that I was sent to be a curse on her life.  Her psychotic dissociation in-formed every interaction she ever had with me from the time I was born.

My mother’s unresolved trauma, manifesting itself in her dissociation, prevented her from ever being able to respond to me with anything like appropriate, healthy play or playfulness.  She was not able to consider my well-being because she could never understand that I was a separate entity from her.  I was merely and continually the recipient of her slit-off projection of her intolerable perception of her own badness.

She not only could not have playful interactions with me that I needed to build a non-trauma centered body-nervous system-brain-mind-self, but her psychosis was so severe that she prevented ME from ever being able to play at all.

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The absolute disturbance in the necessary operation of play in my childhood directly ties into my own dissociation.  The trauma I experienced in the malevolent environment of my childhood could not possibly be integrated into a coherent self.  However, as a mother to my own children I was able to know they were separate beings from me, and I was able to focus as much as I possibly could on them and on the development of their well-being.

In other words, I was able to organize and orient a ‘mothering self’ within me that existed to foster the development of my children.  Because I could do this, I could offer to them enough play and playfulness that it communicated to them a relative lack of trauma in the world and enough of a sense of safety and security in the world that I did not pass my unresolved trauma onto them.

They did not have perfect childhoods because the unresolved trauma and the changes that had to happen to me so that I could survive my childhood affected every other aspect of my being-in-the-world, and therefore DID affect them.  But these problems were MINE and I was able to keep them myself.  I did not force them INTO my children the way my mother forced her unresolved trauma INTO growing and developing me.

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As we return in our thoughts to consider our infancy and childhood through the lens of playfulness and play or its absence, we can become much more clear about how our caregivers’ unresolved trauma — or the absence of it — operated to directly communicate to our growing and developing body on all its levels what the condition of the world was like.

If appropriate and healthy play and playfulness was there for us, it is during those experiences that we were developing in an ‘ordinary’ way.  If it was absent, some degree of trauma was present, and we were forced at those times in our development to try to adapt to that malevolency.

Who we are today and how we are in our bodies in the world is directly connected to play and playfulness because it is only in times of safety and security that play exists at all.

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