Tag: trauma

+WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO US: VIOLENT TRAUMA, MALTREATMENT, ATTACHMENT – BIRTH TO AGE THREE (and beyond)

alchemynow8 Comments

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All survivors of infant-toddler-child violent trauma and maltreatment share a common ground.  Although the information I am presenting here might be difficult for some to read, what is being said here is extremely important.  When I say that it isn’t the exact memories of what specifically happened to any one of us that matters most, it is to the kind of information that follows that I am referring to that DOES matter most.

We survivors have always struggled.

Please spend a little time at least skimming through the rest of this post – if you are a survivor of a chaotic, unstable, violent early life I believe you will feel reverberations in your BODY to this topic.  I don’t believe we can truly follow our pathway through healing if we don’t truly comprehend the impact of the violent trauma and maltreatment we experienced – and what it did to us on all the levels of our development.

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What follows comes from this book:

Handbook of infant mental health By Dr. Charles H. Zeanah, Jr.

Publisher: The Guilford Press; Third Edition (July 15, 2009)

From Chapter 12 – The Effects of Violent Experience

(I present this copyrighted material here for educational purposes only – please refer to the actual book article for exact references to research noted)

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Neurobiology

“We noted earlier in this chapter that violent trauma early in life – particularly when involving repeated and severe exposure – impacts the central nervous system, brain development, and the overall health of the individual (McEwen, 2003).  We now review in greater depth the underlying neurobiology of the sequelae of violence exposure in a developmental and relational context.

“Preclinical studies have shown that areas of the brain that are particularly prone to the adverse effects of maltreatment and violent trauma during the first 3-5 years of life include (1) those that have a prolonged postnatal developmental period, (2) those with a high density of glucocorticoid receptors, and (3) those that have the potential for postnatal neurogenesis (Teicher et al., 2003).  These areas include, most prominently, the hippocampus, amygdala, corpus callosum, cerebellar vermis, and the cerebral cortex.

“When a rat infant undergoes severe stress, such as repeated foot shocks, the hippocampus fails to form the expected density of synaptic connections.  Normative pruning of these connections nonetheless occurs later in the prepubertal period, so adult animals who were repeatedly stressed in infancy end up with far fewer synaptic connections in this region (Andersen & Teicher, 2004).  These results support Carrion et al.’s (2007) findings that differences in hippocampal volume in patients with PTSD are more likely due to the neurotoxicity of stress hormones than to a constitutional size difference.  Clinical implications of hippocampal and amygdalar damage due to stress hormones may include increased propensity for confusion of past and present, flashbacks, and dissociative symptoms (Sakamoto et al., 2005).

“The corpus callosum is a heavily myelinated region of the brain that is associated with hemispheric integration.  High levels of stress hormones during infancy and early childhood have been associated with suppressed glial cell division, which is critical for myelination (Berrebi et al., 1988).  DeBellis et al. (2002) observed that reduced corpus callosum size was the most significant structural finding noted in children with a history of maltreatment and PTSD.  Disturbances in the myelination of the corpus callosum and cortex due to excessive exposure to glucocorticoids during the first 3 years of life may explain some of the difficulties that maltreated preschool-age children have in integrating cognitive and emotional information and in taking others’ perspective, in comparison to nonmaltreated age-matched controls (Pears & Fisher, 2005).

“Among the most exciting research that illustrates the interaction of development and traumatic experience is that regarding the differential effects of specific types of maltreatment and violent trauma on the brain at critical periods of development through early adulthood in both animal and human models (Hall, 1998; Teicher, Tomoda, & Andersen, 2006).  For example, repeated episodes of sexual and physical abuse were associated in the same group of subjects with reduced hippocampal volume if the abuse was reported to occur in early childhood, but with reduced prefrontal cortex volume if the abuse occurred during adolescence (Teicher, 2005).  Similar exposure during different, temporally discrete windows of development may have very different clinical implications.

Effects on Memory

The psychological and neurobiological implications of exposure to traumatic events also involve the infant and young child’s developmentally determined capacity to encode, remember, and recall those events in order to subsequently make meaning of their experience.  Recent evidence suggests that even prior to 1 year of age, infants’ capacity to recall events is well underway.  By the end of the second year of life, long-term memory is reliably and clearly present, especially when there have been reinforcing memories (i.e., repeated exposures or explicit reminders), which are unfortunately all too common in cases of maltreatment and family violence (Bauer, 2006; Hartshorn & Rovee-Collier, 2003).  Based on her review of the literature, Fivush (1998) has noted that traumatic events perceived before the age of 18 months are frequently not verbally accessible, whereas events experienced between 18 and 36 months can often be coherently recounted and retained as long-term memories.

“Early chronic and/or severe exposure to violence and/or maltreatment has also been noted to lead to greater pervasive insult to memory functions and to promote dissociative processes that can interfere with memory retrieval (Howe, Cicchetti, & Toth, 2006; Nelson & Carver, 1998).  One mechanism for this biological insult to memory function is thought to be primarily the effect of excessive glucocorticoids, which damage the developing structures involved in memory contextualization and storage, such as the hippocampus (Sapolsky, 2000; Sapolsky, Uno, Rebert, & Finch, 1990).  It is clear that over the course of formative development, exposure to violent trauma and maltreatment can affect the degree and nature of changes in the neurobiology of the brain.

(Pages 203 – 205)

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The Relational Context

“The violent traumatization of an infant or very young child, whether due to maltreatment or exposure to familial, community, war, or terrorist violence, is most significantly a breach in safety.  Unlike older children or adults, very young children experience their world contextually, from within the embrace of the primary attachment relationship (Scheeringa & Zeanah, 2001).  Their sense and expectation of safety are therefore inherently bound to the caregiver.  To appreciate the effects of violence on young children requires an understanding of the goals and mechanisms involved in the attachment relationship as well as the ways in which trauma impacts attachment.”

Attachment, Safety, and Violence

“In the anchoring concept of attachment theory, the ethological wisdom of a caregiver-infant behavioral system is seen as ensuring species’ survival (Bowlby, 1969).  The infant’s drive to maintain safety is paramount and is expressed in attachment behaviors that may phenotypically change over time but that serve the same purposeful goal of achieving “felt security” (Bretherton, 1990).  Perturbations in the infant’s ability to achieve felt security necessarily result in adaptations that may be more or less pernicious, depending on the quality and degree of frustration.  In response to the primary attachment figure’s track record of providing “felt” security, the infant constructs an “internal working model” of self and other.  This internal representation consolidates over the first 3 years of life and guides the infant’s expectations and behaviors in times of stress.

“The experience of violence, with its attendant physiological “felt anxiety” might therefore be conceptualized as the exact affective opposite of felt security.  The young child does not yet have the cognitive ability to mediate feelings of fear that result when exposed to violence, either as a victim or witness.  For young children, the caregiver’s role is to function as external regulator of negative or overwhelming internal affect and sensation.  Several violence scenarios may be imagined in which the caregiver is unavailable to soothe infant anxiety:  when the caregiver is being victimized, when the caregiver is a witness to violence and becomes too hyperaroused or too dissociated/avoidant to provide safety, or when the caregiver is the source of the violence – as in the case of parental child abuse (Carlson, 2000).  A toddler who has internalized a working model in which he or she is unprotected and repeatedly left subject to overwhelming fear – one of the definitional criterion for trauma – may develop what has been termed distortions in secure-base behavior (Lieberman & Pawl, 1990).  Such distortions are, in fact, attempts by the child to manage unmanageable anxiety without the actual or “real time” mentally represented assistance of the caregiver.

“If early childhood is characterized by a relational context in which the child’s ability to manage stress is determined by caregiver response, then the mental health status of the caregiver becomes a vital concern.  Fraiberg, Adelson, and Shapiro (1975) called attention to the profound effects of maternal mental health on the developing child.  The “ghosts in the nursery” that Fraiberg et al. described were malevolent internalized attachment figures who had subjected the caregiver to various forms of maltreatment during his or her own childhood.  Fraiberg et. al. observed that caregiver traumatization in the past resulted in (1) his or her present-day inability to respond appropriately to infant anxiety, or (2) his or her engagement in behavior that actually induced anxiety.  From an attachment perspective, the infant’s working model of self and other is thereby shaped by the caregiver’s disturbed attachment representations.

“Exploring representational models, Fonagy et. al. (Fonagy, Moran, Steele, Steele, & Higgitt, 1991; Fonagy, Steele, Moran, Steele, & Higgitt, 1993) identified the capacity for “reflective functioning” as an awareness of a meaningful relationship between underlying mental states (feelings, thoughts, motivations, intentions) and behavior in and between both self and others.  Fonagy’s group found that caregiver reflective functioning was significantly predictive of infant attachment classification.  The caregiver’s capacity to “read” infant mental states accurately, and with inference of meaning, allows for sensitively attuned responses that create a subjective experience of security/safety and support the infant’s developing capacity for self-regulation (Bretherton & Munholland, 1999).  However, when engaging in reflective functioning leads to the experiencing of highly negative affect, certain aspects of mental functioning may be defensively inhibited (Fonagy, Steele, Steele, Higgitt, & Target, 1994) or excluded (Bretherton, 1990).  A caregiver in a state of defensive inhibition will be incapable of accurately responding to and reflecting the child’s mental state, leaving the child to manage states of arousal and anxiety on his or her own.  Consistent with this formulation is the finding that young children assessed as having a disorganized attachment have caregivers who are often unresolved with respect to past traumatic experience (Lyons-Ruth & Jacobvitz, 1999).  In short, caregiver history of attachment relationships and of trauma exposure determines not only the dyad’s quality of attachment, via reflective functioning, but additionally the manner in which trauma exposure will be processed by both child and caregiver.

“Thus, traumatic violence can interfere with the initial development of a secure and organized attachment or derail a previously secure attachment if the caregiver is sufficiently adversely affected.  Disturbances in attachment, in turn, confer increased [sic] for (1) recovery from trauma exposure by the child and/or caregiver (Fisher, Gunnar, Dozier, Bruce, & Pears, 2006), (2) enactment of maltreatment by the traumatized caregiver (Cicchetti, Rogosch, & Toth, 2006), (3) child exposure to trauma via inadequate caregiver monitoring (Schechter, 2006; Schechter, Brunelli, Cunningham, Brown, & Baca, 2002; Schechter et al., 2005), and (4) subsequent repetition and transmission of risk by the traumatized child and/or caregiver (Weinfield, Whaley, & Egeland, 2004).  Such evidence supports the contention that we must view infant mental health disturbances through the dual conceptual lenses of attachment theory and trauma theory (Lieberman, 2004).”  (pages 205 – 206)

Relational Neurobiology

Like all psychological functions, the child’s expectations in relation to attachment figures have neurobiological correlates.  In addition to the effects of cortisol noted earlier, physical abuse, compounding its clear effects on emotion regulation and separation anxiety within the context of attachment, has been found to be associated with attentional dysregulation and selective biases to angry and negative affect (Pollak & Torrey-Schell, 2003).

“Moreover, from early infancy, children are dependent on their attachment figures to reflect back to them how they are feeling and to make sense of their experience.  Expectation of the contingent responsiveness during early infancy has been described empirically in the work of Gergely and Watson (1996), who also first described the “marking” of the infant’s affect by the primary caregiver – the processing and modulation of that affect, which feeds back a sense of empathy as well as serving a modulatory function for the baby, beginning in the period of the second to fifth months of life.  Subsequently, Gergely (2001) noted that lack of marking and overidentification with the child’s perspective may interfere with affect regulation, particularly around crises and trauma.

“We now know that specific neural circuits in the developing brain, among which the mirror neuron system figures prominently, are crucial to the development of social cognition, self-awareness, affect regulation, and learning (Jacoboni & Dapretto, 2006).  The functional implications of these cortical pre-motor planning and parietal structures in the context of early development are only just beginning to be understood.  The impact of violence exposure on the development of these circuits with respect to expression of aggression remains to be studied.

“Myron Hofer (1984) has described multiple “hidden regulators” embedded within the attachment system across mammalian species.  The need for mutual regulation of emotion and arousal in humans lasts approximately as long as it takes for integrative structures in the brain to myelinate and prefrontal cortical areas to develop, all of which serve to assist the child in self-regulation in the face of stress and fear.  In other words, the primary caregiver is, during the first 5 years of life, crucial to the infant’s developing self-regulation.  The hidden regulators embedded within the attachment system include those of sleep, feeding, digestion, and excretion as well as higher functions of emotion, arousal, and attention.  The literature contains many examples of how the sequelae of a caregiver’s experience of violent trauma and maltreatment, PTSD, affective disorders, severe personality disorders, and substance abuse can impair this fundamental regulatory function during formative stages of development, both at the representational and behavioral levels of attachment.  (Lyons-Ruth & Block, 1996; Schechter et al., 2005; Theran, Levendosky, Bogat, & Huth-Bocks, 2005), and contribute to intergenerational transmission of violent trauma and maltreatment.

“Neurobiologically based studies of primates, specifically, macaque monkeys, have helped to elucidate the role of attachment in interrupting versus promoting intergenerational transmission of maltreatment (Barr et al., 2004; Maestripieri, 2005; Shannon et al., 2005).  In Shannon et al.’s study (2005), maternal absence (i.e., neglect) was associated with decreased serotonin replenishment, a finding associated with mood and impulse disorders, as well as with increased alcohol consumption (in Barr e al.’s study, 2004).

“Recent research has also supported transgenerational transmission of biological response to trauma.  Whether this finding proves ultimately to be a risk or resilience factor remains a question.  An affected mother’s exposure to violent trauma during pregnancy (i.e., the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City) and her glucocorticoid stress response were linked to the glucocorticoid levels, upregulation of the receptor setpoint, and behavior of her infant by 9 months of life (Yehuda et al., 2005)….  Could this transmission of response to shared stress during pregnancy be one example at the very beginning of the organism’s life of adaptation in the service of evolution?  Is the mother’s biology preparing the offspring for expectation of threat?  If so, can one say that the development of PTSD (and/or other posttraumatic psychopathology) is a form of risk if no further threat actually exists, or resilience in the form of potentially beneficial hypervigilance to actual subsequent threat?  [bold type is mine]

“As the hypothalamic-midbrain-limbic-paralimbic-cortical circuits in the caregiver respond jointly to infant stimuli, as has been found in recent neuroimaging studies among normative mother-infant dyads (Swain, Lorberbaum, Kose, & Strathearn, 2007), one can imagine a cycle of dysregulation in which unquelled infant distress becomes a stressor particularly for a traumatized parent.  Indeed, while watching video clips of their children during separation and other stressful moments, group differences between violence-exposed mothers of toddlers and nonexposed mothers have been noted with respect to measures of integrative behavior, autonomic nervous system activity, and brain activation (Schechter, 2006).

“We know that an important determinant of the effects of traumatic exposure (e.g., how long they endure) is the primary caregiver’s ability to help restore a sense of safety via regulation of infant emotion, sleep, arousal, and attention (Laor, Wolmer, & Cohen, 2001; Scheeringa & Zeanah, 2001).  These emerging findings may illuminate the ways in which the experience of violent trauma and its sequelae interfere with this primary caregiving function.  On a positive note, we have also begun to understand how new relationships, most dramatically that of foster care, can curb if not reverse at least some of the effects of early violent trauma exposure (Fisher et al., 2006; Zeanah et al., 2001).

(Pages 206 – 208)

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+SOME PATTERNS OF ‘RELIGIOUS ABUSE’ AND THE GENE CONNECTION

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I found this sensitive, informative and thought provoking blog today (licoriceroot) that contains many posts that get me to thinking in new ways about the ‘complex’ of my own severe infant-child abuse history and its (most obvious) connection to my abusive mother’s own infant-childhood history of malevolent treatment.

One of the posts on this blog is about ‘hyperreligiosity’:  Hyperreligiosity: Fabulous Article Published Jan. 2010

I used to tract my mother’s ‘fundamental religious fanaticism’ to when I was in 10th grade and she became a member of an Assembly of God church.  The stories I wrote concerning the religious abuse I suffered post-mother’s getting religion contain traumatic experiences I suffered that I believe have interfered with my ability to be comfortable with ANYTHING that has to do with religion.

I have come to realize that the foundation of my mother’s terrible psychosis she placed me at the center of (that because she and I were ‘dying’ during her difficult breach birthing of me and that the devil had sent me to kill her – meaning to her that I was never human, that I was the devil’s child) WAS absolutely a religious-based thought and belief that not only affected my entire infant-childhood but that lasted for the rest of my mother’s life.

As my mother’s friend of 45 years told me in a recent interview about my mother’s aging years my mother had answered her knock on my mother’s door with 666 written on her forehead and hands to keep the devil from being able to find her when he came for her I realized how pervasive my mother’s religion-based terror actually was.

I further believe that someone in my mother’s deeply disturbed earliest years of life didn’t put the ‘fear of god’ into her but rather instilled in my mother the ‘fear of the devil’.  I strongly suspect that the abuse related to my mother’s deepest terrors was in some way sexually based.

I understand now that even my mother’s insane obsession with my ‘cleanliness’ was connected (wired) into her by something she had experienced as a child that she was told was ‘dirty’.

In fact, I can consider the entire violent abusive pattern of my 18-year childhood with my mother as being connected to religious abuse within a system that could not resolve the range of ambiguities – the grey scale – of good-bad within her Borderline body-brain.

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I went looking for the source of the article posted on the licoriceroot blog and found it here:

Website:  The Hindu:  Arts/Magazine

Article: A Japanese genius and his God module!

By Dr. Ennapadam S. Krishnamoorthy

This article discusses the idea of there being a ‘God module’ in the brain as it presents neurobiological underpinnings for the human experience of religion – and its experience of THE EXTREME.

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I also located this article posted on The New York Times site November 14, 2009

The Evolution of the God Gene by Nicholas Wade

“IN the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico, the archaeologists Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery have gained a remarkable insight into the origin of religion.

During 15 years of excavation they have uncovered not some monumental temple but evidence of a critical transition in religious behavior. The record begins with a simple dancing floor, the arena for the communal religious dances held by hunter-gatherers in about 7,000 B.C. It moves to the ancestor-cult shrines that appeared after the beginning of corn-based agriculture around 1,500 B.C., and ends in A.D. 30 with the sophisticated, astronomically oriented temples of an early archaic state

This and other research is pointing to a new perspective on religion, one that seeks to explain why religious behavior has occurred in societies at every stage of development and in every region of the world. Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland.”

And…..

“It is easier to see from hunter-gatherer societies how religion may have conferred compelling advantages in the struggle for survival. Their rituals emphasize not theology but intense communal dancing that may last through the night. The sustained rhythmic movement induces strong feelings of exaltation and emotional commitment to the group. Rituals also resolve quarrels and patch up the social fabric.”

[Read entire article by clicking HERE]

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After you take a look at the above article, consider this also:  Google search ‘genes dancing’ and a fascinating universe of information will appear before your eyes.  I already knew about this 2006 study that comes up with the Google search term combination of ‘Israel genes dancing’:

‘Dancing’ Genes Discovered by Israeli Researcher

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These articles I mention here point to a fascinating connection for me.  When an individual’s actions appear to us as unbelievable, we can think a bit more deeply about who and how these people are in the world.

The insane infant-child abuse my mother perpetrated against me involved a distortion in how her original genetic potential displayed itself, just as it undoubtedly did for the young paranoid schizophrenic man who was capable of perpetrating the horrific violence displayed in last Saturday’s Arizona shooting.

See post:  +IS MENTAL ILLNESS THE COST OF OUR SPECIES’ GREATEST GIFTS?

I don’t believe that our continued survival as a species was ever determined by what tore us apart.  Our survival depended then – and still does today – on what brings us together and binds us together.

When we look at extremes of abuse and perpetration of violence and trauma we are looking at the ABSENCE of the positive traits that ensured our specie’s reproductive fitness and the continuance of our genetic lines.

Rather than try to examine the faults of any single individual representative of our species I believe it would be far more helpful and productive to search for the malevolent conditions that existed in their earliest caregiving environment that CHANGED how their genes manifested themselves during the earliest critical windows of their development.

If we can manage to take a step back as we examine human behavior that represents a ‘tearing apart’ of the fabric of healthily bonded social connections and their expressions we will begin to notice how clearly these negative patterns reflect malevolence in an environment of deprivation and trauma.  The negative displays the absence of the positive.

As we begin to focus on the necessary POSTIVE qualities that contribute to building the best body-brain possible in a new little human being we will automatically lessen the potential for a lifetime of trouble that growing a body-brain in a malevolent environment causes.

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+WORDPRESS SHARED THIS TODAY: 2010 in review

alchemynowLeave a comment

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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.

1

++MY CHILDHOOD STORIES April 2009

2

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

3

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

4

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

5

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

alchemynow2 Comments

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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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