Tag: trauma

+WORDPRESS SHARED THIS TODAY: 2010 in review

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The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 37,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 5 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 400 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 719 posts. There were 506 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 283mb. That’s about 1 picture per day.

The busiest day of the year was July 1st with 260 views. The most popular post that day was ++MY CHILDHOOD STORIES.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were en.wordpress.com, mail.yahoo.com, google.com, search.aol.com, and en.search.wordpress.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for sunflower, avoidant attachment, earned secure attachment, borderline mother, and stop the storm.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

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++MY CHILDHOOD STORIES April 2009

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*Attachment Simplified – Organized Insecure Attachment – Avoidant-Dismissive October 2009

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*Attachment Simplified – Disorganized Insecure Attachment – Disorganized-Disoriented October 2009
2 comments

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+MY MOTHER’S VAGUS NERVE: THE MAKING OF HER PERFECT BORDERLINE STORM? February 2010
7 comments

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MY BORDERLINE MOM June 2009
6 comments

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My most sincere gratitude and appreciation goes to WordPress for all the amazing free services they provide — thank you!

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+THE MISSING MONTHS OF THE ‘ANTWONE FISHER’ MOVIE-STORY: WHAT WE MOST NEED TO KNOW

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I rewatched the movie “Antwone Fisher” yesterday.  This movie is about an adult working to heal from terrible child abuse inspired by a true story and marks Denzel Washington’s directorial debut.

From my point of view, what the movie never describes is what probably makes the biggest difference in the outcome of this story.  What were Antwone’s first foster parents like?  Did they love that parentless infant RIGHT?  Did they form a safe and secure attachment with the baby?

According to the story Antwone was removed at age two from his first foster home he had been placed in when he was two months old.  For all concerns about interfering with early bonding-attachment relationships, I do not believe that age two is a permanently damaging age to change primary early attachments.  In this case the child was moved to a horribly abusive home, but nothing in the story addresses the nature and the quality of the earliest, most critically important caregiver attachment patterns BEFORE the age of two that impact the direction that all fundamental physiological development follows.  (See update in comment section to this post.)

I would say by looking at the story as it is presented in this movie that Antwone’s first two years HAD to have taken place within an adequately non-malevolent caregiver-attachment environment.  The remarkable recovery that occurs post-terrible LATER abuse would NOT have followed the same course it did if Antwone’s physiological body-brain development had been changed by severe trauma during his infancy.

When looking at our own recovery from our own severe child abuse it remains MOST IMPORTANT that we understand how profoundly our physiological development is impacted by our earliest experiences in our environment.  If we continually struggle to overcome the horrors of severe abuse experiences that we KNOW about, and can never manage to ‘get our wings’ and soar out of the ugly mire of abuse we know we experienced, I would ALWAYS say that it’s most likely that our body-brain development was changed by trauma in profound ways during the earliest months of our life.

I personally know that if the first two years of my life had been perfectly FINE I would not be in the same body NOW that I am in – no matter how severely I had been abused post-two-years-old.  It is the Trauma Altered Development that happened to me before that age because I was BORN into a malevolent, abusive and traumatic malevolent environment that has created these lifelong difficulties that I (along with all infant-toddler severe trauma-abuse survivors) continue to struggle with.

Because the presentation of Antwone’s story in this film completely ignores those first two MOST CRITICAL years of the child’s life we are left guessing that all infant-child abuse survivors could recover by following a pathway such as this survivor did.  Not so.  Not so.  Not so!

It is not ‘getting lucky enough’ to benefit from high quality therapy that makes the biggest difference.  It is not ‘being willing enough’ to face our traumatic childhood memories of experience that makes the biggest difference, either.  It is not ‘being genetically superior’ or even ‘being resilient enough’ that matters most.

As Dr. Bruce Perry clearly states, children are not born resilient.  They are born MALLEABLE.  When the earliest environment deprives a rapidly growing and developing infant-toddler of what it needs for its body-brain to follow an optimal pathway, Trauma Altered Development will occur – BECAUSE of this malleability.  The resilience a little person needs in order to develop a body most able to ‘deal with’ severe traumas anytime after the age of two comes in ONE WAY and ONE WAY only – FROM THE PEOPLE WHO CARE FOR THAT BABY from the time it is conceived UNTIL it has ESPECIALLY reached the developmental milestones a body has built into it by two years of age.

As far as I can tell a description of these first critical months of experience are complete missing from the Antwone Fisher story.

Is this same time-frame description missing from your child abuse story?  If you continue a struggle to heal from early traumas you DO know about in a body that does not seem to be operating ‘quite right’, my guess is that whatever description of your first months of life that you GUESS happened to you needs to be closely examined in the bright light of reality.

None of us just happened to end up in a Trauma Altered Development body through bad luck.  We were built this way because we grew from (conception) birth in a caregiving environment that did NOT do exactly that:  Give us the care we needed prior to age two so that we could have a body healthy and resilient enough to fully process and recover from our later abuse.

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+ALL MY MOTHER’S ABUSE? IT WAS THE FORCED ISOLATION THAT HURT/CHANGED ME THE MOST

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I feel today like a survivor of an evil experiment designed to determine exactly  how much a human infant-child could be deprived of and still go on living.  I feel like an inhabitant of a freaks-only sideshow as I realize gradually over the span of my lifetime how completely, thoroughly and vilely abusive the first 18 years of my life truly were.

In some ways the absence of overt sexual abuse just makes my own personal experience all the stranger because that’s about all that was missing short of broken bones and actual death to make the first 18 years of my life so unique that I doubt I will ever encounter anyone who will ever be able to share with me what their own experience of a similar infant-childhood was like — or what it did to them.

My mother’s sense of her own needs for self preservation was enough to keep me from ending up at a doctor’s office or a hospital as a result of her violence toward me.  That and the fact that as soon as I was old enough I participated actively with her violent beatings to prevent my body from being broken to bits as I avoided calamitous crashes into solid objects.

Yet after all the years I have spent trying to ‘get real’ about the reality of my infant-childhood, it is only now at age 59 that I am finally finding myself face-to-face with one of the most critical factors of my mother’s unique abuse of me — the solitary confinement and isolation she encapsulated me within.

As a survivor of the 18-year abuse experiment I endured, right now I would say that for all the thousands of physical beatings, for all the nearly constant verbal abuse I endured, for all the terror and sadness I felt, my reality today was probably most powerfully and negatively influenced by extreme isolation.

And again, the same as with all the other abuse my mother did to me, she isolated and confined me as early as she could after my birth — because she COULD.

My mother was perfect at what she did.  She was perfect at making sure nobody interfered, nobody questioned, nobody noticed.  She created the perfect prison for me, the perfect trap, the perfect living tomb that I had no hope of escaping from.  She spun me into the center of her madly abusive psychosis and kept me there for 18 years.

Yet today I would say that for all the voracious physical and verbal attacks against me it was the fact that she completely disallowed me from having any meaningful human contact that was the aspect of her abuse that has most contributed to my lack of well-being.  All the damage my mother did to me impacted the way my body-brain physiologically developed, but with the theft of my opportunity to engage in positive meaningful human contact nearly all of my permanent internal ‘wiring’ was created to operate within a human vacuum.

Understatement:  NOT GOOD for me as a member of a social species.

Does it give me any consolation and comfort to know that, given parallel deprivation and abuse from birth, there isn’t a member of any mammal species on earth whose physiological development wouldn’t have been as equally and negatively interfered with as mine was?

No.

My only ray of hope is that there is something about my extreme and bizarre story of infant-child abuse that can offer something of vital importance to somebody about what humans truly NEED from birth to live a life of well-being.

What I would say today is that for all the different kinds of abuse, neglect, trauma and malevolent treatment little ones might be forced to endure and survive it is the deprivation of caring, positive meaningful human contact that damages us the MOST.  The absence of this contact, call it safe and secure human attachment for ease of translation across the various fields of human developmental study, most detrimentally alters the physiological developing wiring in the body-nervous system-brain of an infant-child.

Given the most extreme and severe cases these changes are permanent and irreversible, and in members of our human species they are accompanied by corresponding FEELINGS of suffering and awareness of loss.

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I don’t write to gain sympathy or pity.  I write to document as accurately as I can what the long-term permanent consequences of severe abuse and deprivation from birth can and will most likely do to its survivors.

Through my own process I am clarifying what I see as priorities — no matter how severely abused an infant-child abuse survivor was.  Digging around for the actual specifics of this event or that one — no matter how fundamentally overwhelmed with sorrows someone’s formative years actually were — pales in importance when compared with what we need to understand about the entire array of human contact experiences we had.

Social species’ members are NOT designed to be raised in solitary confinement or isolation.  Without positive and caring human contact within our immediate circle of infant-childhood life — no matter what other abuses are going on — we cannot escape the consequences of physiological developmental changes that happen to us and leave us as outsiders in the great circle of humanity.

As I become increasingly clear about the worst damage I suffered during the 18 years of abuse I suffered from my mother, and as I reconsider some of the stories I have written of my experiences, I am realizing that it was the power my mother had to remove me from human contact that has made me continue to suffer in my life.

It was the isolation my mother enforced to keep my father, my grandmother and my siblings away from me that removed the most important resiliency factor I needed to have come out of those terribly abusive years better than I did.

It was the thousands and thousands of hours of being made to lie in my bed as a child and the thousands of hours of being stood in corners all alone while everyone else went on with their lives as if I did not exist, as if I were dead that created the internal isolation burden that I suffer most from today.  It wasn’t the beatings or the terrible screaming and verbal abuse or being dragged around by my hair, not the bruises and cuts and abrasions to my flesh that damaged me most.

It was the being forced to be absolutely alone.

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*Age 5 – THE BUBBLE GUM

*AGE 6 – FIRST GRADE — NIGHT ON THE STOOL

*Age 7 – Sad me, homestead birthday BBQ

*AGE 7 – MUD PUDDLE INCIDENT

*Age 9 – BLOODY NOSE

*Age 10 – 1960-61 fantasy locked in the semi trailer

*Age 14 – SILENT TREATMENT

*Age 14 – Gardening and the Sabotage

*Age 15 – FORCED TO WATCH AN ALASKAN SUNRISE

*Age 15 – MY ‘VISION’ – ALONE NAKED IN THE WOODS SINGING

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+MY HOLIDAY BLUES — ANY WORSE THAN USUAL?

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Well, if this is the jolly time of year I sure don’t feel one bit jolly.  Family is too far away.  Trying to go ‘out in public’ to make some kind of human connection is, well, just about hopeless.  So here I am home alone again, as usual.

by Petr Kratochvil -- on publicdomainpictures.net

I wouldn’t MIND that so much if the ratio weren’t so completely lopsided.  Maybe one percent of the time when I am ‘out there’ where the ‘other people’ are I MIGHT feel a little bit connected to someone.  But like a groove worn all the way through one of those old fashioned LP vinyl records, my being alone just seems to be a fundamental fact of my existence – no matter how much I wish it (I) were otherwise.

I will go out on Christmas day to a local community dinner and that will help — in part because I know the people who have no other place to go that gather there are more like me than most people are in the world.  That still won’t guarantee that I will feel CONNECTED, though, because of my lack of ability to feel connected to other people is a consequence of the serious insecure attachment pattern built into my body-brain from the time I was born (thanks to my insanely abusive mother who was able to pull off her horrific abuse of me without anyone’s intervention).

So while I would much rather be able to write of a different tale, I am left with the one that is the true one for me.  It is NOT that I ‘don’t need people like other people do’ as someone told me once.  It’s that I desperately need people and always have — but I honestly don’t believe I have the internal wiring necessary to ever feel true connection with others even when I am around them (with the exception of a very very very few people who are closest to me).

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Even though I am living in the same body that trauma built during my first 18 years of life, I didn’t know THEN that I would eventually, as an adult, have to try to consciously PRETEND that my being around others is the same for me as it looks like as I watch most everyone else.  In fact, I didn’t even know as an adult that I pretended to be a socially-engage-able person.

Now I know that I didn’t have a safe and secure attachment with ANYONE during my childhood — not ANYONE — and therefore all of the incredibly complex wiring didn’t get put into place for me.  I can no longer genuinely pretend that being with others is remotely satisfying or soothing to me.

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There is always The Watcher.  The Watcher is not alone, of course.  There are a multitude of Others who watch the Watcher.  The Watcher is never truly engaged with other people.  The Watcher ‘goes away’ if I am EVER truly and wholly engaged.  But that is so seldom that it rarely happens.

There are The Coaches, too.  There is the one that tries to help me keep up with others during social engagement, trying to give me cues to help me read other people’s social cues.  I can’t keep up.  I can’t trust or know or believe or act like I know what all the social cues people learned through human interactions from the time they were born even ARE — let alone how they operate and how I am supposed to respond to them.

There is a Verbal Coach who tries to help me stay in synch in conversation, tries to keep me in beat with the rhythm of the verbal exchange.  The Watcher is always there watching me AND the coaches — because The Watcher has no emotion (more like a Razor’s Edge).

Mostly when I am attempting to engage with other people I am extremely aware of being The Outsider.  I was an outsider in the life of my family for the first 18 years of my life.  Being The Outsider is probably as natural a state for me as being an adequately engaged human social being is for most other people.

I say ‘most other people’ because the ONLY people who are not naturals in their essence at social engagement are those who were either born with rare shyness genes, autism spectrum genes (etc.), or are those of us who suffered from extreme trauma, abuse and unsafe and insecure attachment relationships — alone — birth to age one and most usually AT LEAST birth to age two while the social-emotional-preverbal language brain-nervous system was forming itself.

ALL of these people who are not ‘naturals” (with the exception of the shyness gene people as long as they were not an abused/neglected infant) are NOT native language speakers and are missing most of the most primary and fundamental human social connection body-brain wiring/circuitry necessary to truly be able to connect — and to FEEL connection to and with other people.

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So here come the holidays.  At least I am fortunate that I do not have to deal with any negative family charades which must be very difficult for severe infant-child abuse survivors that DO.

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I used to pretend to be a socially OK person because I used to be able to BORROW the attachment patterns of other people.  I was very very good at being an attachment-chameleon — which by itself was NOT a ‘bad’ thing.  Being able to borrow the attachment patterns of other people enabled me NOT to abuse my own children because I could borrow the attachment abilities they were born with at the same time I was able to respond appropriately to them so that their attachments could grow and develop in safe and secure ways.  Borrowing attachments also allowed me NOT to be as socially isolated all of my adult life as I am now.

I know this now, looking back from my age-59 vantage point at all the different kinds of relationships I used to be able to maintain at different stages of my adult life.

Borrowed Attachment is directly connected to having a Disorganized-Disoriented (Reactive) Insecure attachment pattern.  I simply was able to organize and orient myself around other people’s attachment patterns.  (And yes, as I have said before on this blog, being this dependent upon others was like being on life support.  I was borrowing from them what I did not and could not have myself — like being dependent on a life support system.)

At least in my life my own insecure attachment patterns have not caused undo hardships on others.  While these others might WISH that I was able to form strong, clear and sustained attachment connections with them, I simply can’t, and these others are not harmed.  They are simply unable to form the kinds of connections with me that they might rather have because I cannot form attachments of my own with them.

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Rather than go into any more detail here about any of this, I just want to present a stark contrast to how I am feeling and to how I am as an isolated being unable to form attachments in the world (except with the ‘chosen few’ who love me enough in spite of all my difficulties).

My daughter told me of how my 9-month-old grandson attended a meeting with his mother and father today at a bank.  One of the women there wanted to take the baby off so that his parents could concentrate on paper signing.  Back came the woman in only a few moments with baby and his tear streaked cheeks and hearty bawling.

Back to his parents he quickly quieted back to contentment.

“Most excellent!”  I assured my daughter.  “That’s EXACTLY what you want the little one to be doing at this age.  He is wonderfully demonstrating his secure attachment.”

I also told my daughter that a baby that will, at this age and up to around the age of one, happily go off with strangers is NOT likely to have a happy life.  A healthy infant HAS to have powerfully strong safe and secure — loving and happy — attachments with its earliest caregivers FIRST AND FOREMOST because EVERYTHING else in its growth and development has already depended on this and will for the rest of its life depend on this firm, good and RIGHT foundation.

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Given my mother’s severe Borderline (abusive) condition I never stood a chance and I will the price for what she did to my attachment system as it built itself into my growing body-brain for the rest of my life — holidays or not.

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+INSECURE ATTACHMENT: WHY I WORRY ABOUT WORRYING

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It’s 7 a.m. now, and I’ve been waiting since 2 this morning for the sun to rise.  Silly me.  My waiting doesn’t make the sun come up one second earlier than it will otherwise.

Maybe my waiting is connected to my worrying, the same worrying that no doubt got me up out of bed so early this morning.  I have a whole palette of things to worry about, yet worry itself seems like such a complete waste of time.

Because I already know that my insecure attachment pattern-disorder to and in the world forms the bedrock of EVERYTHING about me, I have cause to wonder this morning what the connection might be between ‘attachment’ and worry.  Let’s see:

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Expectation and Attachment – The Anti Buddha Consciousness of Anxiety, Fear and Worry

By Glen Russell

“Expectation and attachment are the worst enemies of man. These two simple words keep humanity trapped in a place of anxiety, fear and worry. Fear can only exist if you have an expectation and an emotional attachment to an outcome either happening or not happening.

In Earth society expectation and attachments are actively promoted and humanity is encouraged to adopt these as part of its psyche. Humanity is conditioned to chase after this and to chase after that. Humanity is conditioned to form emotional attachments to many different things. Yet the cost is great.

The cost is humanity suffers and its inner peace is now gone. Whenever you “expect” an outcome to happen or not happen – and it either does happen, or doesn’t happen, or doesn’t happen quickly enough, anxiety, fear and worry is created within your mental body and your emotional body. You then feel disappointment, anger, frustration, inner turmoil and suffering. Your inner peace is now gone.

It is not the outcome that stole your peace – it is your decision to have expectations and emotional attachments to a specific outcome that stole your inner peace.”  (Click on above link to read the rest of this article)

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My “inner peace,” huh?  Severe early infant-child abuse survivors are not likely to have had any ‘inner peace’ built into them in the first place.  Can we find it NOW?  Infants don’t ‘decide’ to expect their early caregivers to do exactly THAT – take care of them!

Yet as I think about all the things I can find to worry about in the middle of the night (and in the middle of the day), I realize that every one of those worries is fundamentally about TAKING CARE OF SOMETHING, OR HAVING SOMETHING I WORRY ABOUT INVOLVE TAKING CARE OF MYSELF OR SOMEONE ELSE I CARE ABOUT.

“Where do I get the money I need to pay my heat bill?  How do I get rid of those ugly finger-sized “C” shaped grubs lying in wait in my soil to eat every root of every living plant I cherish in my garden?  How do I baby proof my house before my very very active 9-month-old grandson comes with his mommy to visit the first week of January?  Why don’t I want to do a single dang thing for Christmas and will that make my children upset with me?  How do I build yet ANOTHER stretch of fence to keep my stupid neighbors’ stupid rampaging buffalo dogs out of my yard?  When I go to my early January oncologist appointment will they find my cancer is back?  Etc.”

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Perceived attachment: relations to anxiety sensitivity, worry, and GAD symptoms.

Viana AG, Rabian B.

“This investigation examined the relation between perceived alienation from parents and peers, anxiety sensitivity (AS), and current worry and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) symptoms with the goal of expanding the knowledge base on factors that may contribute to the development of AS and its role in worry.”

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Worry and Coping:  An Attachment Perspective

By Colleen J. Allison

“Attachment anxiety…associated with the tendency to worry.”

(Contains excellent references for further reading)

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Fostering Healthy Attachment
An Interview with Dr. Karen Walant

“Creating the Capacity for Attachment looks at how we, as a society, have raised our children with the expectation that they become totally self-reliant and autonomous rather than with the hope that they have the capacity to form close, loving, intimate relationships with others.”

“This unhealthy pattern of reliance on objects is encouraged in the detached parenting styles so common in Western society, and it’s easy to see how, from this tendency, as adults we continue to seek comfort in other non-human objects, such as drugs, food, money, etc.”

“Very early on, children are generally taught not to disclose to others when feeling “weak” or scared, “needy” or alone. Many of the emotions we felt in childhood – what people call the “negative” emotions – we were taught not to share. So, we sought comfort from blankets, pacifiers, and teddy bears, and we learned not to seek comfort from our mothers, our fathers, our family. As we got too old for blankets and teddy bears, we turned instead to other comforts – food, alcohol, money, etc. As adults, we struggle with holding our emotions within because we fear that by sharing our inner souls with others, we will – as in childhood – be discounted, dismissed, or denied.”

“Many people spend their lives feeling like nobody hears their cries – they feel alone, afraid, and powerless. When children are not responded to, in their earliest and most primary relationships, they learn that their thoughts and feelings are burdensome to others and that their needs are shameful. As adults, these same people often go underground with their feelings and seek comfort in substances. Or, alternately, these same people become so vocal in their neediness that, again, they are met with disdain from others and go on to find comfort, as well, in non-human substances.”

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OK, I get it – yet again.  Worrying about the fact that I worry is just another piece of my insecure attachment puzzle.  Dropping the worry bundle and looking at myself instead as a whole person living in and with a body that was altered in its development due to terrible trauma as I grew this body in the first place allows me to look up at the brightening skyline with hopes that today I will heal some part of myself rather than worrying that I won’t.

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+LINK TO ARTICLE ON ATTACHMENT, COMPASSION AND ALTRUISM

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I found an excellent, very informative article (2005) online today as I was searching for the ‘difference between empathy and compassion’ as they relate to attachment.  The article represents the thoughts of an Israeli and three American researchers, and is titled:

Attachment, Caregiving, and Altruism:  Boosting Attachment Security Increases Compassion and Helping.

These researchers use the attachment measures for amounts of anxiety about attachment and avoidance of attachment.  Anxiety and avoidance are found in the insecure attachment patterns – and are absent in the secure attachment patterns.

This article takes some thoughtful time to read, but is well worth the investment.  There is a lot of information here, and as I read it I could place people I know and have known along the dimensions the authors describe as I realized that people FIT PATTERNS of attachment that then makes them very much like one another depending on these pattern types.

I am too tired at the moment to say anything more right now, but I hope you follow the above link and take a look at this article.  I hope to spend some more time taking notes in a few days as I process the information this article contains.

Depending on the variety of early caregivers around us that we could form attachments to — or not — our body-brain development was set down a course before we were one year old along the attachment pattern dimensions this article describes.

Once we reach adulthood these patterns, built right into our physiology, can be extremely difficult to change.  I believe that for the most part people with the avoidant dimensions of insecure attachment live their lives in such a way that they can appear cold and self-absorbed and don’t seem to even know it, let alone care.  On the other hand, people with the anxiety related insecure attachment patterns are far more likely to KNOW there is something wrong so they are most commonly the people who might identify their problems so that they can find new ways to relate to others.

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+INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA: ITS TRANSMISSION AND ITS HEALING

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It is important for me to understand the reality of my own words.  If I wish to write about the intergenerational transmission of unresolved trauma – most usually through abuse and neglect of offspring (as well as through the epigenetic transmission of trauma-caused genetic changes) I have to know where my own limitations are.

Through my recent thought processes about writing a book I am coming to understand that it will most probably be my daughter who will need to ‘step up to the plate’ and accomplish that task.  I have presented the idea to her very clearly and in her very busy schedule at present, she is considering my request.

I know that I more than cringe at the thought of relegating the lifelong consequences for infant-children who are/were raised under the burden of active transmission of intergenerational trauma through abuse to the professional categories of ‘mental illness diagnostic categories’.  As a very severe infant-abuse survivor I now understand that my entire physiological development was altered through trauma exposure, I now understand that I am NOT ill I am simply different from those who were raised in the ‘pampered’ worlds of love, safety, security and supportive attachments to caregivers.

It is my job from the place I hold in the generation chain of my family to understand as fully as I can what happened to me that changed me, what those changes are, what living with those changes is like, and how learning new information about what ALL of this means will contribute to all of the positive changes I seek.

As I define how my language development, along with its social-emotional body-brain developmental channels has been changed through trauma, I realize that I do not speak the common language of ‘the masses’ and I never will.  I realize that this limits my ability to write a book that will accomplish the goals I hope for.

As I understand that ‘mental illness’ is NOT what about I am coming to recognize that a sociological rather than a psychological or psychiatric perspective would be the most accurate frame of reference for every word a book about my topic needs.  My daughter is a professional sociologist, and is also a professional researcher, interviewer and writer.  She is also has a gift for language.

Looking back as far as I can at the chain of my family’s history that directly impacted the severe abuse trauma I experienced I can point vaguely to my mother’s grandmother, more clearly at my mother’s mother, VERY clearly at my own mother, most clearly at myself, and from there I see my daughter who now has her first child, my first grandchild.

It is HER perspective as the survivor of being MY daughter that matters to me most, and from there it matters to me how what my daughter knows is impacting the raising of her children (which of course also involves her husband).

In recognizing my limitations I am understanding that I AM NOT THE BRIDGE.  I have continued to work as hard as I possibly can ALL OF MY LIFE at surviving as a trauma altered individual to the best of my ability.  I have massive amounts of information, and through a very tailored interview process that my daughter can orchestrate and accomplish, I can transmit that information to HER — and she can write ‘the book’.

I can never physiologically take my feet out of the burning building that represents what is left of the edifice of intergenerational transmission of trauma that came to me through my father.  My daughter has some ‘smoke inhalation’ problems from being raised as my daughter (mostly due to my depression at the time she was born that altered my patterns of interactions with her).  But I did not abuse my children (with one exception noted), and there is NO WAY in the known or unknown universe that my grandchildren will EVER be abused in any possible way.

With every fiber of my being I hope that my daughter decides to undertake this mission I ask of her.  For all my recurring discouragement that overtakes me at times because the more I understand my story the more I realize that it was so unique in its trauma that probably very, very few people can truly relate to or find anything useful in what I have to say, the more I realize that THIS FACT IS EXACTLY WHAT WOULD MAKE THE TELLING OF MY STORY a BEST SELLER.

If there is anyone on earth that can find a helpful common threat between what I have experienced (and what I know about the consequences of those experiences) so that something can come out of the ‘fire’, be polished and perfected, and then passed onto others in the form of useful information for their betterment, it is my daughter.

I cannot consider any part of my story without fully understanding that it was the job of the society I was born into to rescue and protect me.  My story exists as it does because my society failed me as much as my mother and father (and grandmother) did.

That ‘arm’ of intergenerational trauma transmission HAS to be addressed head-on, and as far as I can tell that is a sociological issue.  My daughter can do that, also.

In addition, translating the language I know as a society of one into the language of the many is also a job I cannot do, but she can.  She will also be able to address how language forms a fundamental core of society itself.

All I can do now is hope, pray and wait……..  It is her decision.  It will require great dedication — and time — and effort — on her part to help me with this vital project.  Nothing on this earth would make me feel happier than for her to decide “Yes.”

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+WORDS DO NOT MEAN SOCIAL CONNECTION TO ME – THEY ARE OBJECT-TOOLS-WEAPONS

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I know I better write a post right now before I head out to do some serious adobe work in my garden today because if I don’t track the process of my thinking at this moment I know I will soon make such a quantum leap in what I know about myself, my trauma altered development that happened because of the severe infant-child abuse I experienced, dissociation and my language development that I will never be able to go back and track how my conclusions about the connections between all these vitally important topics actually arrived.

As I ‘play around with’ the experiences I had last week with the medical clinic, and as I anticipate the medically-related appointments that I am going to have to go through in the near future, and as I sift through the facts of MY experience to gain information about what happened last week I am finding myself headed straight for some amazing discoveries.

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Much of what I experience as dissociation when I am engaged in a stressful situation with people who actually escalate my stress response rather than sooth it — dissociation that includes an inability to hear spoken language, to process verbal information or to even THINK in words (the blank state) — is directly related to the way my physiological development was affected by severe trauma from birth.

The trauma that matters most to me as I consider the consequences of it that I live with DAILY at age 59 happened from birth to age two.  I have focused much of my writing so far on this blog on the critically important right-limbic-social-emotional brain development that happens directly through early attachment relationships with caregivers.

I have to move forward now in my thinking to age two.

While there are specific developmental stages and milestones that happen during this second year of life, the one I want to look at right now has to do with the continuation of the development of LANGUAGE.

An infant begins its breathing life with the ability to send and receive signals in the form of PREVERBAL communication.  All ‘attachment’ interactions with early caregivers happen on the level (from the infant’s point of view) of this PREVERBAL communication.

An infant’s caregiver is also using NONVERBAL and VERBAL communication signals with the infant.  As the infant’s body-nervous system-brain grows and develops, its physiology has been built by the PATTERNS of the earliest (attachment) interactions.  These patterns literally tell the DNA and the cells of the infant’s body WHAT TO DO.

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As an infant moves toward the acquisition of WORDS and the ability to understand and use them, it uses ALL the patterns that have been built into it as ‘traffic flow channels’ for its growing abilities to communicate.

If everything the infant has experienced has happened in an extremely traumatic, abusive, neglectful environment of malevolence, chaos, unpredictability and NONEXISTENT contact between the infant’s SELF and its caregiver, the infant’s ENTIRE REPERTOIRE INVOLVING VERBAL LANGUAGE HAS ALREADY BEEN SENT DOWN A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PATHWAY than the kind a safely and securely attached infant’s has.

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‘Ordinary people’ are familiar with part of what I wish to describe if they think about trying to communicate with a police official after a serious car accident, or if they think about how words failed them in an important interview, or failed them at the moment they received a cancer diagnosis.

This tells me that the ‘dissociatable’ regions of the human brain that can separate emotional experience from verbal articulation (both spoken and in thinking abilities) is perfectly POSSIBLE for everyone.

What happens to me is that I experience these changes in how words include themselves in my ongoing experience at times that ‘ordinary people’ would NEVER experience.  That is the difference between how I operate and how they do — not that ‘I dissociate words from my experience’ and they do not.

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Researchers know that a ‘bad mother rat’ is a nervous, over amped-stress response rat who will NOT LICK HER OFFSPRING like a safely and securely NON stressed mother rat will.

Researchers also know that if they switch offspring between a high licking rat mother and a low licking mother (meaning highly stressed and nonstressed), the offspring RAISED by either of these types of mothers will build into their developing physiology the corresponding high or low stress level responses.

Researchers now know that the degree of stressed-out response in the offspring is NOT due to genetics.  It is due to the ability an offspring’s body has to alter its physiological development in direct response to the nature of the environment is is formed by and in.

In human terms we can translate this very basic fact into what happens to infants raised in secure, safe, loving, appropriate, adequate MOTHER-early caregiving environments versus those who are raised in opposite conditions.

Severe infant abuse and neglect constitutes a LOW LICKING environment — which is the same as a HIGH STRESS environment.

Most simply put, there is NO POSSIBLE WAY THAT THESE CONTRASTS IN ENVIRONMENTS COULD NOT AFFECT AN INFANT’S LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT.

The stages of preverbal to nonverbal to verbal development are directly affected by the level of stress and trauma present or absent from an infant’s universe during its most critical windows of early physiological development.

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Now, to switch thinking tracks:  There are language development experts who look back over the word-utilizing history of the human species who see in our verbal-language development a pattern that suggests the following.

Many other living creatures (bats and primates included) have the same gene that humans eventually made use of to develop our ability to TALK.

This is the FOXP2 gene.

Researchers believe that it was ONLY about 140,000 years ago that this gene was activated in humans so that it could directly alter the development of our brain AND OUR LARYNX so that we could begin to talk.

All the interactions that mother’s have with their offspring are part of how this ability evolves in all of us now as they are directly tied to the development of our infant body-brain in our earliest attachment caregiving universe.

Some researchers also believe that once the world became benign enough that more early humans had safety and security to spend more time sitting around socializing with one another — which amounts to GROOMING BEHAVIOR in both primates and rats.

The quality of grooming behavior in both primates and rats is used as a measurement of HIGH and LOW stress.

It is evidently very possible that humans began to utilize their FOXP2 gene simply to expand their ability to sooth, bond and communicate with one another — researchers refer to this in humans as GOSSIP — with spoken language as an advancement over gesture that could then include more people within the circle of communicative signaling — or GOSSIP.

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Human infants, as they interact with their earliest caregivers, are engaged in a mutual dance of signaling communication — sending and receiving — with their caregivers.  In abusive, neglectful, traumatic and malevolent early infant environments, the signaling DOES NOT GO ACCORDING TO OPTIMAL PLAN.

The infant’s language-communication-signaling patterns are therefore correspondingly altered within its physiological body-brain development.

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Use of signaling in patterns of listening and responding (rupture and repair) in ‘healthy’ early attachment environments are tied to the development of emotional regulation abilities in an infant’s growing right-emotional-limbic brain AT THE SAME TIME that this same brain region is also developing its SOCIAL-emotional patterns.

Because I was abused and traumatized from birth I did not participate in ‘normal or ordinary’ preverbal or nonverbal communication patterns with my caregivers.  There was no possible way that my physiology could pattern itself AS IF I had magically grown them in a safe, secure, optimal or even adequate environment.

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I therefore suggest that for every single person who has been given the so-called ‘mentally ill diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder’ and that KNOWS that something was NOT OK in their early infant-caregiver interactions that DISSOCIATION as it includes the component of verbal communication with others and within our self in our thoughts HAS BEEN CHANGED right along with all our other Trauma Altered Development.

What happened to me the other day at the medical clinic has also highlighted a critically important point to me:  When I was born nobody gave a single solitary HOOT about what I needed.  They didn’t respond to me as if I existed as a human being at all.  Because all my patterns of communication included patterns of abuse and trauma, I DID NOT DEVELOP A RIGHT BRAIN THAT INCLUDES ‘NORMAL OR ORDINARY’ use of preverbal and nonverbal social-emotional cuing.

What this means to me when push comes to shove NOW is that — as a component of my nonattachment reality tied to the so-called insecure Reactive Attachment Disorder or Disorganized-Disoriented attachment disorder — is that not only can I NOT include ‘normal’ nonverbal social communication cues in MY communication to others, I cannot read the ones they send to me, either.

In the end — I DO NOT CARE ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE.  That level of signaling caring was NOT built into my infant (birth to 2) physiology during my precursory stages of verbal language ability.

Nobody cared about ME so very realistically, how could CARING possibly have been included in my language acquisition physiological patterning?  (This is part of the ’empathy disorder’ Dr. Allan Schore describes as a component of all insecure attachment disorders within the 45% of our population that has some version of one.)

Because the ability to include EMOTIONALLY relevant information and to read its signals and clues was not a part of my preverbal-nonverbal-verbal physiological development, the bottom line TO ME is that I am excluded from the highly developed human social specie’s GROOMING and GOSSIPING behavior.  I was not born into an environment that included me as a PART OF THE GROUP to be safely and securely attached to and within.

The solitary confinement and isolation I experienced due to my mother’s abuse continued to one degree or another to profoundly affect me through my entire 18 year childhood.  (No play included.)

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Language – spoken and nonverbal — not only does not work the same in my body-brain, it does not mean the same to me as it no doubt does to ‘ordinary people’, either.

Although I obviously am able to understand words themselves, I do not believe that my language abilities are wired into me in anything like a normal way when it comes to interactions with members of my species.  And who the hell else would CARE if I could talk or not?

I am an excluded-from-ordinary person, and my latest clarity of discovery is that THIS is perhaps one of the MOST IMPORTANT consequences of being raised from birth so that my development was physiologically patterned in and by trauma.

I am excluded from being truly attached in my lifetime to members of my species who developed normal and ordinary language abilities.

This does leave me to wonder if I could learn more about how I am in the world by coming to understand how language develops in people who are blind and/or deaf from birth (and Autism-spectrum brain holders).  These people also would have to move through the preverbal-nonverbal-verbal developmental stages differently.

But even here, it would only be those who were NOT LOVED or treated kindly in safe and secure attachment earliest caregiving infant environments that would have experienced the kind of base-line, bottom-up truly altered right-limbic-emotional-social-preverbal brain development that I did.

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So when my stress response is activated like it was at the clinic last week, other people can feel extremely threatened and defensive around me and interaction with me because we are from completely different worlds when it comes to the use of words.

Words are simply a tool to me — to be used as a tool to accomplish an end.  I was not built with words included in my development to be primarily about exchanges involving emotion between people that belong to and in a human group (involving degrees of social bonding).

I believe the more I clarity I can gain about this topic the more I might be able (if I am willing) to NOT move very quickly between using words as TOOLS and using these TOOLS as weapons.  This means to me that words are OBJECTS to me — and I suspect this happens for me on very deep, profound, fundamental levels of my Trauma Altered physiology.

I tried to explain to the doctor at the clinic that all stress has to be deescalated in that environment for me to begin to understand verbal exchange.  I also know that written words are ACTUALLY my primary language.

Social-emotional spoken language exchange, with its normal roots in preverbal and nonverbal language development, IS NOT MY FIRST OR MY PRIMARY LANGUAGE.

If this fact is true for many people with the a so-called ‘anxiety-dissociation diagnosis of mental illness’ — what I am saying is IN HIGH NEED OF SCIENTIFIC VALIDATION.

If what I am discovering about myself as a survivor of extreme early and long-term infant-child abuse is correct, much of the ‘mystery’ and therefore of the social stigma based on misunderstanding about DISSOCIATION can be traced back to Trauma Altered Development as it affected our ability to communicate with others of our species AND MOST IMPORTANTLY in verbal cognition-verbal thought WITHIN OUR OWN SELF.

When I ‘go blank’ during ‘dissociation’ I have followed back a track of development in my physiology that moves far more quickly to a place where words do not exist in information gathering and processing interactions or transactions (either with others or within my own thoughts).

The ONLY hope-for-balm to heal this in the moment it happens would be for all around me to recognize INSTANTLY the need to erase all threat of harm and stress from the encounter.  More importantly, once the ‘dissociation’ involving my altered language processing happens, it is too late to fix it at that moment.

AWARENESS that allows for proactive prevention of the conditions that lead to this dissociation of word meaning from language transaction would be most helpful, along with the very real understanding that I, and others who were abused as infants like I was, do not have the ‘ordinary’ connection between emotional information and ‘verbal fact’.

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It struck me after I published this post that one powerful effect of my mother’s horrific verbal abuse of me all of my life is that I KNOW what the end product of words as object-tools-weapons REALLY can mean.  All verbal abuse survivors know this.  But when it comes to the ADDITION of terrible verbal abuse as it bombards an infant that is ALSO being neglected, physically abuse and traumatized, there is no possible way that profound physiological development of language abilities can be avoided.

We survivors of trauma on these most profound language-development levels are therefore language exiles from our species and are probably ONLY able to truly communicate with survivors whose brain-language abilities were built with these same altered preverbal-nonverbal-verbal physiological Trauma Altered patterns.

This all must tie in on the deepest human physiological levels with the reasons why it is the ability or disability to tell one’s life narrative ‘coherently’ according to compliance with or ‘incoherently’ in deviation from Grice’s conversational maxims that is the foundation of the assessment tool used to determine a secure versus insecure attachment pattern-system-disorder in adults.  (Adult Attachment Assessment Interview)

Those of us raised in extremely malevolent early attachment environments did not have the same communication ‘rules’ built into our body-brain.  We do NOT, therefore, speak the same language as do those who were not equally as exposed to severe trauma during critical early physiological developmental stages.

(To know a LANGUAGE is a far more complex and expansive operation than simply knowing a collection of WORDS.  There are, for example, nearly 3000 words in this post, but I believe it is only those who have some ‘cultural immersion’ experience in the universe of severe infant-child abuse trauma that will know exactly what I am actually talking about here!)

The Meaning in Words by Dr. Bruce Perry

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+DAYS WITHOUT WORDS – FOCUSED SURVIVAL AND DISSOCIATION

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Awake most of the night – up for good well before the sunrise.  Waiting for the sun, I have work to do.  I have cleared out whatever money I have accumulated these past months and invested all of it in yet another fence.  How antisocial of me, erasing what I can now of my neighbor on the west side of my yard whose trailer sits not 6 feet away from that fence line.

Up went the posts, painted the cross boards, up with the corrugated aluminum panels.  I blocked the sight of their falling apart lattice sided screened porch.  I blocked their never ending porch light from penetrating the still darkness of my yard’s night sky.  Or did I?

I had to laugh when I went outside last night to sit, finally, in the privacy of my yard.  Nope, no more of THEIR light in my yard, but wait?  The siding, like tin foil, now reflects every tall street light behind my house on the Mexican side of the border wall!

I dug around on my pantry shelves last night for a look at all the cans of strange colored paint I have accumulated from here and there over the years.  Is there something I can use to cover that corrugated reflective shine, something to flatten the surface, to darken my yard?  Oh, yes, here it is.  I am waiting for the sun to rise so I can take these two mixed gallons of interior paint, one orange, the other dark terra cotta, so I can work some more on my task.

(The trick I discovered ‘accidentally’ to using interior paint on exterior metal surfaces is to thin it with water.  Somehow the paint seems to then forget it’s supposed to pucker and buckle and flake and peel!)

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I am reminded of a time about 20 years ago when I worked as an art therapist on a northern Reservation.  I had a caseload of 40 sexually abused and traumatized children under the age of 10 (over half of them boys).  The Indian Health Service had given me some ‘spare’ money they had for these children’s therapy, and I stretched that money out for a year and a half.  When the money finally ran out and was not replaced, I had to leave, and as I ‘checked out’ another Reservation therapist made this parting comment to me:  “You have been so focused all the time you’ve been up here.”

Even back then I knew his comment reflected something about me that ‘wasn’t quite right’ but I had no idea what I had ‘done wrong’.  To me, whatever I could offer to those children meant more to me than sitting around, wasting time and socializing with other workers possibly could have.

And yet doing EXACTLY that would not only have been ‘normal’, but was expected.  I had failed to shmooze!

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I thought this morning as I waited with pinpoint bright star lights above me for the sun to rise so I could go back to work (before my 2 pm doctor’s appointment this afternoon) on my Secret Garden about my ability to focus.  Being focused these past few days has NOT been about words.  It has NOT been about writing.  It has not even been about thinking, or about feeling.

My focus, whenever it comes upon me, is simply about being alive — in the moment — as I find things to do that involve work — and work I WANT to do, for whatever reasons.

As I think about my powerful ability to focus, I also realize that this ability is not within the ‘normal or ordinary’ range of what MOST people do or HOW they do what they do.  My focus is about being ‘in a space’ where NOTHING else can reach me.

And I know this ability is something that was built into me through the 18 years of terror, trauma and abuse of my infant-childhood, and it has served me well all of my life.

My states of focus have their own patterns of the passage of time.  Stimulation is so moderated that a bomb could probably go off within my sphere and I would hardly notice.

What this topic has also brought to mind today is how I now see my continually operating stress response system that so rarely ever turns itself off that I barely know what CALM peacefulness is or what it feels like.

I think about the three main emotions that get themselves built into the nervous system-brain of severely traumatized little people while they are growing and developing their body at the start of their life in adaptation to the terrible duress, distress and stress they are under:  ANGER, FEAR and/or SADNESS.

I think about what I believe about anger, that it is stimulated by changes and pressures within the environment that could not be solved by immediately known means.  “Find another way — NOW” the body-brain says.  “Learn something new — NOW — and use it to solve this immediate problem.”  Anger includes this important fact:  “YOU CAN DO IT!”

I have been increasingly angry about the noise and lights that stream from my neighbor’s close-to-me yard.  I can do nothing about noise, but I can visually do something about my privacy.  I had to have the RESOURCES to purchase the material I needed to build this fence-wall.  But equally as importantly, I had to have the CONFIDENCE and COMPETENCE to do this work myself.

The interplay-balance between stressors from the environment implicate anger as a reaction that reflects the need to SOLVE the problem, the resources needed to accomplish a solution, AND confidence and competence needed to personally DO SOMETHING useful to make things better to increase well-being.  Anger is NOT so much about learning something completely new as it is about using what one knows in a new and different creative way.

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There was NOTHING I could do about the terrible abuse I suffered for the first one-third of my life.  NOTHING except to survive it.  I survived that abuse without any anger at all — and that could still amaze me if I didn’t now understand that in order to feel ANGER one must have access to some degree and version of what I wrote in my previous paragraph.

I am old enough NOW to understand that my anger at my neighbor’s ‘intrusion’ into my space is my problem, not theirs.  I didn’t tell them I was going to build a fence ASAP.  I did try to choose a color for the cross boards (very light blue) that would hopefully be pleasing or at least not too offensive to them.  That’s the best I could do about taking care of what I need while trying to be kindly considerate of them.

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Everything I have been doing these past five days has been about that fence:  planning, preparing, purchasing, leveling the 40′ of ground along my west line, and doing the work.  I am very, very, very much a project oriented person.  Focus provides a safe inner place/space for me.  While in my focus mode, most everything and everyone else is EXCLUDED from my realm of awareness.

Focus is an emotional-regulation tool I HAVE to use because my right brain did NOT experience ‘normal or ordinary’ early safe and secure attachment experiences with my caregivers that would have built ‘normal and ordinary’ emotional regulation abilities into my body-brain in the first place.

Early trauma during especially an infant’s earliest developmental stages prior to one year of age creates emotional DYSREGULATION patterns rather than ‘ordinary’ regulation patterns.  Survivors of early trauma and abuse live with these changes for the rest of their lives.

My focusing abilities are very much about so-called dissociation.  I know that now.  It is something that was built into me from birth in response to the trauma of the environment that I grew and developed within.  Focused survival — that’s what I spent the first 18 years of my life doing.  It can be an extremely ISOLATED process — as I become my own ‘Army of One’.

But that’s a whole OTHER part of my story……..

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+HAD THERAPY? DID ANYONE TALK ABOUT WHAT MATTERS MOST?

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For all the variety of difficulties adult survivors of early severe infant-child abuse might have that land them into one kind of therapy or another, how many opportunities are we given to understand the bare-bone underpinnings of how our body-brain gets made in the first place so that we can better understand how what happened THEN directly affects how our body-brain operates now?

For those of us who either STRONGLY suspect or know as clear fact that we were born into madness, chaos, trauma, neglect and abuse, here is a website that describes infant development in simple words and can be read from the beginning to help us to better understand how things are designed to move along in safe and secure early attachment environments where babies are loved, attentively and appropriately cared for, and get their needs met..

Check out BABYZONE – Their section on ‘Baby Week by Week’ provides a wonderful description of an infant’s physical-social-emotional developmental ability stages during the first 52 weeks of life as they are designed to be met, matched, and resonated with by its earliest caregivers.

Their ‘Toddler Week by Week’ pages describe the critical stages of development and an older infant’s needs through week 104 of life.

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It is nearly always ASSUMED that every single person goes through these same stages equally and comes out at the other end, say entering week 105 of life, having achieved, accomplished and acquired whatever happens ‘naturally’ and is therefore equally prepared for ‘what happens next’.

Not true.

In cases where the range of early trauma means that safe and secure attachment patterns do not exist, development – which means the growth and formation of the body-brain-nervous system can very easily be trauma-altered.  Through the process of reading the 104 week descriptions BABYZONE provides, and by using even just a little bit of imagination about what YOUR earliest days of life (the most critical ones for all development because they establish the physiological foundation of the body a person lives in for the rest of their life) I believe we can begin to untangle the knotted twisted thread of our lives in a ‘reason-able’ fashion.

What the information on this site provides is a straightforward account of how the interactions an infant has with its earliest caregivers, who establish the quality of the environment an infant is building itself within, need to feed an infant the RIGHT information in the RIGHT way at the RIGHT time.

Read these descriptions and then imagine what happens to an infant that is being influenced by terror, physical harm, deprivation/neglect, trauma and malevolent treatment.  While we might, as a culture, wish to ALSO imagine that these conditions NEVER surround infants that fantasy does not bear itself out in everyone’s reality.

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Sometimes I wonder what the course of my own ‘recovery’ journey would have been like if 30+ years ago when I first received ‘help’ someone had been educated enough, informed enough, and patient enough to go back to the roots of who I am in this body in this lifetime and assess what the conditions of my earliest life (during critical developmental stages) were like so that I (and ‘them’) could have determined how trauma had changed me way back there at the start of my life so that I ended up with a different trauma-changed body that was forced to find ways to continue down the road of life no matter how traumatic the world I was in actually was.

I encourage anyone who already knows that something was very, very wrong with their childhood to stretch their thinking back as far as they can in an effort to understand that severe child abuse does not necessarily begin at some magical ‘later age’.  Truly mad, abusive and neglectful parents were just as likely to maltreat an infant as they were a child of 2, 3, 4 plus.  Just because nobody wants to think or talk about these realities does not magically mean they don’t and didn’t happen.

Remember, also, that INCONSISTENT treatment of infants is damaging to their patterns of development.  The inability of caregivers to respond appropriately to ‘the person inside’ the baby body is also extremely detrimental to development.  Nature has provided a range of ACCEPTABLE flaws in early infant-toddler caregiving patterns – but beyond that (and in interaction with the susceptibilities of the infant), patterns of trauma change patterns of development.

This website gives us an idea – for our own selves regarding our own possible early environmental conditions – exactly what we needed to build the best body-brain possible.  Those of us who end up with troubled adult lives very probably did not get these most important early needs met RIGHT and in some cases got exactly the opposite — what we LEAST needed.

Bear in mind that our body KNOWS what happened THEN.  If we consider this whole arena of information about trauma in our earliest critical stages of development WITHOUT allowing the internal adult censor to shout and scream distractions at us, our body will simply tell us, “This is what happened to me, and it still matters.”

The clearest way I know of to listen to our body tell us what we most need to know about our earliest developmental trajectory is to imagine our severe abuser from childhood, and then imagine THAT person having little bitty baby us in THEIR hands!  How well did THAT go for you — THEN?

AND please remember:  Going back to our body for this information is HARD tough work.  Be gentle and careful of yourself.  Journaling/blogging along the way is highly recommended as is art work of any kind (and movement/music).  The information our body often holds was given to it before we had words though certainly NOT before we could — did — and tried to — communicate with those who mattered most to us — our earliest caregivers.

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