Tag: trauma

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

alchemynow13 Comments

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I am thinking this morning about this job I have taken on to try to learn how what happened to my mother when she was a little girl ended up turning her into the monster that tormented and traumatized me from the time I was born.  Today the word ‘investigator’ rings in my thoughts.  I think about accident investigators, criminal investigators, child protection investigators, and I think about myself as an investigator in the case of what happened to my mother.

Can we learn to tell the difference between child abuse that is a crime and child abuse that is an accident?  Is the dividing line between the two really about conscious, willful choice and intention?  Where does ignorance fit into the picture?  Negligence?  Limitations due to very real disabilities?

What role does assigning blame, fault or accountability fit into the investigation of the causes and consequences of infant-child abuse, neglect and maltreatment or of any other accident, crime or trauma?

Obviously nothing can ever be done to change history, including my 18 year history with my mother.  Yet it is one of the qualities of being human that allows us to both learn from history and then take what we learn to try to create a better future.  Hindsight and foresight have been human allies for many, many thousands of years.  While other animals are certainly capable of learning, of applying what they learned in the past to new situations in the future, it seems to be only our human species that can utilize one single, most important gift:  Insight.

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There will come a day in the future when I no longer concern myself with my forensic autobiographical investigative study about what happened to my mother.  When that day comes, it will be because I have had my curiosity sated, because I gave up, or because I am dead.  Today isn’t that day.

Right now I am turning the light of my conscious investigation into the crime or the accident that was my mother’s entire approach to having me as her daughter.  I am moving my search into a new direction.  I want to know what my mother’s vagal nerve system had to do with the disaster that was her life, both as my mother and as a human being.

I posted the scanned images of Dr. Dacher Keltner’s chapter on compassion from his book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, on January 30, 2010.  I am putting his words under my microscope today as I search specifically for what he says in this chapter about the vagal nerve system.

What, most simply, is the vagal nerve system?  The WiseGeek states:

“The vagus nerve is either one of two cranial nerves which are extremely long, extending from the brain stem all the way to the viscera. The vagus nerves carry a wide assortment of signals to and from the brain, and they are responsible for a number of instinctive responses in the body. You may also hear the vagus nerve called Cranial Nerve X, as it is the 10th cranial nerve, or the Wandering Nerve. A great deal of research has been carried out on the vagus nerve, as it is a rather fascinating cranial nerve.

Vagus is Latin for “wandering,” and it is an accurate description of this nerve, which emerges at the back of the skull and meanders in a leisurely way through the abdomen, with a number of branching nerves coming into contact with the heart, lungs, voicebox, stomach, and ears, among other body parts. The vagus nerve carries incoming information from the nervous system to the brain, providing information about what the body is doing, and it also transmits outgoing information which governs a range of reflex responses.

The vagus nerve helps to regulate the heart beat, control muscle movement, keep a person breathing, and to transmit a variety of chemicals through the body. It is also responsible for keeping the digestive tract in working order, contracting the muscles of the stomach and intestines to help process food, and sending back information about what is being digested and what the body is getting out of it.

When the vagus nerve is stimulated, the response is often a reduction in heart-rate or breathing. In some cases, excessive stimulation can cause someone to have what is known as a vaso-vagal response, appearing to fall into a faint or coma because his or her heart rate and blood pressure drop so much. Selective stimulation of this nerve is also used in some medical treatment; vagus stimulation appears to benefit people who suffer from depression, for example, and it is also sometimes used to treat epilepsy.

Most of the time, you don’t notice the actions of the right and left vagus nerves, but you probably would notice if this nerve ceased to function as a result of disease or trauma, because the vagus nerve is one of the many vital nerves which keeps your body in working order. Without the functions of the vagus nerve, you would find it difficult to speak, breathe, or eat, and your heartbeat would become extremely irregular.”

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While this might all sound very technical, medical and boring, I am trying to understand more about this wandering nerve system because there seems to be a major link between the Borderline Personality Disorder condition and changes in how this system works in a Borderline’s body.

I posted the other day from a research study done by Austin, Riniola and Porges about Borderline’s and their vagal nerve system that concluded:

“The BPD group ended in a physiological state that supports the mobilization behaviors of fight and flight, while the control group ended in a physiological state that supports social engagement behaviors.“  (2007, Borderline personality disorder and emotion regulation: Insights from the Polyvagal Theory)

This is NOT a minor or insignificant finding!

There was something terribly wrong with my mother’s STOP and GO physiological process!  As I begin to study about what might have been terribly wrong with her wandering vagal nerve system I begin to move from a consideration of how her brain-mind didn’t work right into the realization that her problem was probably much bigger:  It was in her BODY as well.

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Turning to what Keltner says about compassion I see that he directly places the human ability to experience sympathy and compassion within the responses of this wandering vagal nerve system in our body.  I’m not after hindsight or foresight right now.  I’m after insight.  What is this mysterious “bundle of nerves” and what might it have to do with my mother’s ability to traumatize little me?

Keltner states that this bundle, known as the vagus nerve,

“…resides in the chest and, when activated, produces a feeling of spreading, liquid warmth in the chest and a lump in the throat.  The vagus nerve…originates in the top of the spinal cord and then winds its way through the body…, connecting up to facial muscle tissue, muscles that are involved in vocalization, the heart, the lungs, the kidneys and liver, and the digestive organs.  In a series of controversial papers, physiological psychologist Steve Porges has made the case that the vagus nerve is the nerve of compassion, the body’s caretaking organ.”  (page 228 from Keltner’s book cited above)

I notice that Porges is one of the researchers who accomplished the Borderline vagal nerve study I mentioned above.  It seems that emotional information that would make a normal person’s Autonomic Nervous System’s (ANS) slow-down or STOP branch kick into gear instead had the reverse affect on these Borderlines.  Their ANS-vagal nerve system not only did not slow down, it sped up into a GO state directly connected to fight/flight.  Somehow, it seems, anything like a normal slow-down compassionate response was missing from their body-brain.

While it’s true that “all that glitters is not gold,” these research findings more than make me think about my mother and her treatment of me!  Her capacity to attack me was the opposite of normal!

Think about the actions of any abuser you might know as you read what Keltner next writes about both Porges’ and his own work:

“…Porges notes that the vagus nerve innervates the muscle groups of communicative systems involved in caretaking – the facial musculature and vocal apparatus.  In our research, for example, we have found that people systematically sigh – little quarter-second, breathy expressions of concern and understanding – when listening to another person describe an experience of suffering.  The sigh is a primordial exhalation, calming the sigher’s flight/flight physiology, and a trigger of comfort and trust, our study found, in the speaker.  When we sigh in soothing fashion, or reassure others in distress with our concerned gaze or oblique eyebrows, the vagus nerve is doing its work, stimulating the muscles of the throat, mouth, face, and tongue to emit soothing displays of concern and reassurance.

“Second, the vagus nerve is the primary brake on our heart rate.  Without activation of the vagus nerve, your heart would fire on average at about 115 beats per minute, instead of the more typical 72 beats per minute.  The vagus nerve helps slow the heart rate down.  When we are angry or fearful, our heart races, literally jumping five to ten beats per minute, distributing blood to various muscle groups, preparing the body for fight or flight.  The vagus nerve does the opposite, reducing our heart rate to a more peaceful pace, enhancing the likelihood of gentle contact in close proximity with others.

“Third, the vagus nerve is directly connected to rich networks of oxytocin receptors, those neuropeptides intimately involved in the experience of trust and love.  As the vagus nerve fires, stimulating affiliative vocalizations and calmer cardiovascular physiology, presumably it triggers the release of oxytocin, sending signals of warmth, trust, and devotion throughout the brain and body, and ultimately, to other people.

“Finally, the vagus nerve is unique to mammals.  Reptilian autonomic nervous systems share the oldest portion of the vagus nerve with us, what is known as the dorsal vagal complex, responsible for immobilization behavior:  for example, the shock response when physically traumatized; more speculatively, shame-related behavior when socially humiliated.  Reptile’s autonomic nervous systems also include the sympathetic region of the autonomic nervous system involved in flight/flight behavior.  But as caretaking began to define a new class of species – mammals – a region of the nervous system, the vagus nerve, emerged evolutionarily to help support this new category of behavior.”  (pages 229-230)

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As I read this information I think about Dr. Martin Teicher and his Harvard research group’s suggestion that infant-child abuse alters brain development toward one that is ‘evolutionarily altered’.  As I combine this information with what Keltner just described I begin to think that it might be entirely possible that early infant-child maltreatment can alter the development of the vagal nerve system ‘evolutionarily altered’ ways, as well.

I would doubt that these changes could possibly happen independently of one another.  My bet is that if the brain is forced to change in its development in a malevolent early environment, the vagus nerve system is probably changed at the same time through similar processes of adaptation to trauma.  Hence, if this is the case, the complete meltdown of my mother as a normal, healthy, happy woman!

In fact, my investigative mind suspects that it is the operation of an infant-child’s vagus nerve system that collects the vital information – in its body — about the condition of the world the tiny one was born into that then feeds this information to the developing brain.  As it turns out, the vagus nerve is directly tied to our immune system.  I’ve often said that it seems completely logical to me that infant-child developmental changes in response to early trauma are an immune response to threat and toxic conditions within a malevolent environment that affect how our genes form the body-brain during critical windows of growth and development.

At the same time I realize that I live in a very brain-head-boss oriented culture, rather than in a vagus nerve-body-boss oriented culture.  What if the real truth is that it is the information our vagus nerve collects from our body that signals our immune system to design our brain according to the conditions of our earliest environment from the start of our life?

This makes perfect sense to me.  I am going to digress here for a moment and include some information from a completely different source that I believe fits into this picture I see being painted in front of me about how our vagus nerve might govern our most critical responses to our environment.

I am referring to the writings of Daniel J. Levitin as he presents them in his 2007 book, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.  Levitin is talking about the development of the human brain’s music system in relationship to our brain systems that support our speech:

“The close proximity of music and speech processing in the frontal and temporal lobes, and their partial overlap, suggests that those neural circuits that become recruited for music and language may start out life undifferentiated.  Experience and normal development then differentiate the functions of what began as very similar neuronal populations.  Consider that at a very early age, babies are thought to be synesthetic, to be unable to differentiate the input from the different senses, and to experience life and the world as a sort of psychedelic union of everything sensory.  Babies may see the number five as red, taste cheddar cheeses in D-flat, and smell roses in triangles.

“The process of maturation creates distinctions in the neural pathways as connections are cut or pruned.  What may have started out as a neuron cluster that responded equally to sights, sound, taste, touch and smell becomes a specialized network.  So, too, may music and speech have started in us all with the same neurobiological origins, in the same regions, and using the same specific neural networks.  With increasing experience and exposure, the developing infant eventually creates dedicated pathways and dedicated language pathways.  The pathways may share some common resources….”  (pages 127-128)

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When I apply my investigative thinking about how infant-child abuse, neglect, maltreatment and trauma changes body-brain development to both my mother and to myself, I am looking backwards in time at the impact of these malevolent experiences on the kinds of developmental processes that Levitin is describing here.  These synesthetic experiences happen to us even before we are born, and most certainly happen within our infant body well before our nervous system-brain has finished development.

I see no possible way that the vagus nerve cannot be centrally involved in these earliest stages of our development.  All the information an infant’s body gathers from the conditions of its earliest caregiver interactions, that communicate to the growing body-brain either a safe and secure benevolent world or an unsafe and insecure malevolent world, would occur to a large extent through the vagus nerve system.  I suspect that all this information is communicated to the immune system so that adjustments in development can be made as necessary.

I will pursue these trains of thought in future posts about our wandering vagus nerve system…..

See this post, also: +LINKS – VAGUS NERVE – ABUSE- HEALING

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+NOT HAVING A PARTICULARLY CHIPPER DAY

alchemynowLeave a comment

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I was looking for something a friend had asked me for today and found, in a very unlikely place, an envelope that included my first grade picture, first grade report card, second grade report card and others.  Against my own wishes, I scanned them in and post the links to them here.  I really can’t say at this moment what the point of this even is.

What I did discover, as mentioned in the link for my first grade report card, is that I was absent 23 days in my first grade year of school.  I was not a sickly child, and even if I had missed a few days here and there for normal childhood sicknesses, 23 is a lot of days.

What is confirmed for me here is that my mother kept me out of school throughout my childhood on occasions when she was in a beating, abusive frenzy.  Part of me says today, “Well, I don’t want to even know that little girl.  I don’t want to know anything about her.  She was not me.”

Yes, she was me.  Yes, I am she.  Obviously what she/me experienced is what this blog is about.  But I don’t want to think about any of it today.  Not one single part of it except to scan in this information and post the links.  Not particularly helpful to anyone, I don’t expect, but it will have to do.

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The other thing that’s been on my mind today was a dream I had last night that I actually remembered having this morning when I woke up.  I died in my dream last night.  I don’t remember how I died, or the actual dying itself.  But first in the dream I was alive, and then later in the dream I was dead.

I find it interesting that the whole dream took place at the home of the woman who found my mother dying in her shabby motel room in 2002.  This woman, I call JV, first met and befriended my mother when we moved to Alaska in 1957, and was the only person that maintained a relationship/friendship with my mother over all those years.

JV was strong enough in some unusual way to stay my mother’s friend for 45 years.  In my dream I was with a group of friends and family at JV’s house when I died.  Nobody could see me then but her.  I could see everyone else.  JV didn’t act like anything had changed, even though I knew she knew I was dead.  I’m not going to worry about the ‘meaning’ of the dream — just having it and remembering it is unsettling and strange enough.

So for now, I will go do my 45 minute walk-jog and then do simple things, like eat supper.  I wish everyone well — and I’ll be back here perhaps more chipper tomorrow.  (PS – I hit ‘publish’ for this post and my Firefox crashed.  Glad it saved the post FIRST!)

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*Age 5 – kindergarten 1956-57

*Age 6 – 1st grade report card 1957-58

Just turned 6, too-old eyes, puffy from crying

*Age 7 – 1958-59 2nd grade report card

*Age 9 – 1960-61 4th grade report card

*Age 10 – 5th grade 1961-62

*Age 11 1962-63 6th grade class picture

*Age 11 – 1962-63 6th grade report card

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Well, this does come to mind:

I used to remember my dreams.  Now I remember remembering the dreams.

Years ago I belonged to a circle of women who met with the elder Grandmothers to learn about teachings.  One time I traveled to a Canadian reserve with some of these women to visit our Grandmother elder, Mary.  I brought Mary some tobacco so I could ask her about a dream I had a few days before.

Mary accepted my tobacco.  She sat across the living room from me on her couch, staring down at her shoes while I talked.  I told her my dream about the group of Native American men that stood talking among themselves on the sidewalk across the street from where I stood talking with a group of women.

Suddenly I looked down at my palms and saw each of them had a hole in it I could see through.  Shocked, I turned to my friends and showed the women, “What happened to me?” I asked them.  “What can we do about this?”

None of the women had a clue.  As I looked up I saw the most handsome young man with long black hair glistening down his back crossing the street toward me, looking straight into my eyes.  When he reached me he gently took each of my hands into his, one at a time, raised them to his lips and blew his breath through each hole, never taking his eyes off of mine.

When he released my hands, the holes were gone, and the man turned and sauntered back across the street without saying a word.  Oh, I was in LOVE!  I wanted to follow him more than anything, but the women restrained me.

“Oh, no, Linda, you can’t go where the men are.  The men have men things they have to do.  We women have our women things we have to take care of.  Stay here.  You cannot go to be with that man.  Leave that man alone.”

So, I didn’t follow him.  I dutifully stayed with the women, glancing across the street now and then, until finally I saw him get into his car and leave.

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At no time while I was telling Grandmother Mary about this dream did she move a muscle.  She did not look at me for a few minutes after I had stopped talking, either.  I sat, barely breathing, waiting for her profound interpretation of what this dream might mean.  Finally, Mary shifted her weight, turned toward me and said with the straightest of faces, “Well, honey, all I can tell you is this.  Next time you have that dream about that man, you call me.  I’ll help you get into his trunk.”

The whole room lit up with her laughter.

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+THE ‘TERROR-ABLE’ CONSEQUENCES OF INFANT-CHILDHOOD VERBAL ABUSE

alchemynow1 Comment

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It is becoming clear to me that I will not be able to approach the topic of ‘teasing’ until I so some serious thinking about verbal abuse in general and about my own infant-childhood experiences with my mother’s severe (from birth) verbal abuse of me.  I have been avoiding this subject until now.  It is going to be an extremely painful one for me to approach and consider.

Research on how all forms of abuse infants and children experience can change the way their brain develops is beginning to specify which brain regions are most susceptible to change during particular time-frames of development.  Because my mother began to abuse me from birth, I suspect that everything about how my brain developed was affected, including the regions of my brain that process verbal information.

Some links are presented below to information related to brain changes and infant-child abuse.  I realize that all this information does is to begin to build the frame of the scaffold I need before I can personally think about verbal abuse.

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February 20, 2009

Cutting Words May Scar Young Brains

Parental Verbal Abuse of Child Appears to Damage Cerebral Pathways

“Sticks and stones may break bones, but harsh words may damage a child’s brain. New work from HMS researchers suggests that parental verbal abuse can injure brain pathways, possibly causing depression, anxiety and problems with language processing.”

Word Power
“Principal investigator Martin Teicher, HMS associate professor of psychiatry at McLean Hospital, became interested in the effects of parental verbal abuse 25 years ago.   A patient of his showed all of the signs of being traumatized as a child, but the only form of maltreatment she had been exposed to was parental verbal abuse.

Later, in 2005, Teicher’s research revealed that parental verbal abuse has the same negative psychiatric influence as witnessing domestic violence or experiencing extrafamilial sexual abuse.  His latest study, which shows that verbal abuse damages specific brain connections, is part of a strategy to isolate different types of abuse, including witnessing domestic violence, childhood sexual abuse and harsh corporal punishment, and to examine the specific effects of each on the developing brain.  The researchers designed this strategy around a hypothesis that all of these will act as stressors that produce similar responses in the brain but along different sensory pathways, said Teicher.

The study on verbal abuse is the first to be published, though the overall hypothesis on distinctive sensory damage has so far panned out when the unpublished work is also considered.  The findings of this study “set the stage for what we’re seeing in the other ongoing studies—that sensory systems are vulnerable,” said Teicher.   “The brain is probably suppressing the development of sensory systems that are providing adverse input.”   That is, children’s brains seem to “turn down the volume” on abusive words, images and even pain.   The result is diminished integrity in these sensory pathways.

“This is the first evidence of the potential deleterious effect of ridicule, humiliation, and disdain on brain connectivity,” said Jeewook Choi, first author and visiting assistant professor of psychiatry from South Korea.”

“Among those who [solely] experienced parental verbal abuse, three statistically significant disturbed pathways emerged: the arcuate fasciculus, involved in language processing; part of the cingulum bundle, altered in patients with posttraumatic stress disorder and associated with depression and dissociation; and part of the fornix, linked to anxiety.  The degree of disruption of the normal flow correlated with the severity of abuse.”   PLEASE READ FULL ARTICLE HERE

There’s an incredible photograph at this link showing these three areas of brain changes!

“…two people who show the same symptoms of depression today may be treated the same. Yet one condition may stem mostly from genetic susceptibility and the other mostly from exposure to childhood adversity. Though the two patients may appear to have the same disorder, “different brain regions or structures may be involved,” said Teicher. “Each may need a very different kind of therapy.”

Teicher and his team are now working to identify sensitive periods when specific brain structures are most susceptible and, if possible, to find ways to reverse the damage.

For now, however, the most important message of this work may be the awareness that parental verbal abuse is damaging. “People hear that spanking is bad, so they stop doing that and become more verbally abusive,” said Teicher. “It turns out, that may be worse.””

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WHEN PARENTS VERBALLY ABUSE ONE ANOTHER THEY CAN BE DAMAGING THEIR INFANT-CHILD’S BRAIN DEVELOPMENT:

The Effects of Verbal Abuse on a Fetus

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Parental Verbal Abuse Affects Brain White Matter

By dr teicher

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Abuse and Sensitive Periods

By dr teicher

“Research from my laboratory, and from other labs here and abroad, have shown that exposure to childhood abuse is associated with alterations in brain structure and function.  This research has largely focused on brain regions known to be susceptible to the effects of stress, such as the hippocampus.  We have recently expanded our knowledge regarding the potential adverse effects of abuse by publishing the first preliminary data indicating that the neurobiological consequences of abuse depend on the age of exposure (Andersen et al 2008).”

“Background

The brain is molded by experiences that occur throughout the lifespan. However, there are particular stages of development when experience exerts either a maximal (sensitive period) or essential (critical period) effect. Little direct evidence exists for sensitive or critical periods in human brain development. Based on differential rates of maturation specific brain regions should have their own unique periods of sensitivity to the effects of early experiences such as stress.

Summary

Within the same group of subjects there were marked differences between regions in the stages of greatest vulnerability.  The hippocampus was particularly sensitive to abuse reported to occur at 3-5 and 11-13 years of age.  In contrast, the rostral body of the corpus callosum was affected by abuse reported to have occurred at ages 9-10, and prefrontal cortex by abuse at ages 14-16.

Discussion

Childhood abuse has been associated with vulnerability to a host of psychiatric disorders and behavioral problems. Based on the present findings, there may be different abuse-related syndromes associated with particular stages of abuse and specific regional brain changes.

Identifying sensitive periods may also provide insight into key ages at which stimulation or environmental enrichment may optimally benefit development of specific brain regions.”

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This information comes from the “A Healthy Me” website.

Yelling at Children (Verbal Abuse)

By Benj Vardigan
CONSUMER HEALTH INTERACTIVE

“…current research shows that verbal abuse of children can be just as destructive emotionally as physical and sexual abuse and puts them in as much risk for depression and anxiety.”

What is verbal abuse?

• How common is verbal abuse?
 • What are signs that a child is suffering from verbal abuse?
 • Does verbal abuse do any long-term harm?
 • Why can’t I seem to control my temper?
 • What can I do to avoid verbally abusing my child?
 • What can I do to prevent someone else from verbally abusing my child or another child?
 • What if I see a stranger verbally abusing a child in the supermarket or at the park?

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From the Find Counseling.com website –

“Child Abuse: An Overview” was written by C. J. Newton, MA, Learning Specialist and published in the Find Counseling.com (formerly TherapistFinder.net) Mental Health Journal in April, 2001:
Child Abuse: Just One Story
Child Abuse Introduction |   Signs of Child Abuse
Child Abuse Statistics |   It’s Under Reported
Effects of Child Abuse on Children: Abuse General
Effects of Child Abuse on Children: Child Sexual Abuse
Injuries to Children: Physical and Sexual Abuse
Effects of Child Abuse on Adults: Childhood Abuse
Effects of Child Abuse on Adults: Childhood Sexual Abuse
Definition of Physical Abuse |   Signs of Physical Abuse
Definition of Sexual Abuse |   Signs of Sexual Abuse
Definition of Child Neglect |   Signs of Child Neglect
Definition of Emotional Abuse |   Signs of Emotional Abuse
Abusers |   Pedophiles
Child Physical Abuse and Corporal Punishment
Treatment for Child Abuse
Costs to Society
Conclusions
References
State Child Abuse Laws
Nationwide Crisis Line and Hotline Directory
National Non-Governmental Organizations and Links
U.S. Government Organizations and Links

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Psychiatric News July 7, 2006
Volume 41 Number 13 Page 28
© American Psychiatric Association

  • Clinical & Research News

Parents’ Verbal Abuse Leaves Long-Term Legacy

By Joan Arehart-Treichel

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Here is a website devoted entirely to the subject of VERBAL ABUSE:

ARTICLE:  Verbal Abuse and Children
by Patricia Evans – Provides information particularly to parents

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From The Parent Zone.com website:

What Are The Effects Of Verbal Abuse On Children?

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This article is one of the ground breaking research papers about how child abuse changes the development of an infant-child’s brain.  This paper is excluding research about how abuse changes the development of the right emotional limbic brain.  It is focused on LEFT BRAIN changes, and presents a ‘preliminary’ study about altered patterns of development in right handed children who do not end up with the usual left hemisphere dominance.  (EEGs are not able to detect the kinds of right brain changes child abuse causes).

This 1998 article is presenting the hypothesis that verbal abuse might be one of the powerful influences that changes how the hemispheres develop in relation to one another with the end result being that information is not processed ‘normally’ by either hemisphere and is not transmitted between hemispheres ‘normally’, either.

Preliminary Evidence for Aberrant Cortical Development in Abused Children

A Quantitative EEG Study

http://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/10/3/298

J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci 10:298-307, August 1998
© 1998 American Psychiatric Press, Inc.

Yutaka Ito, M.D., Ph.D., Martin H. Teicher, M.D., Ph.D., Carol A. Glod, R.N., Ph.D. and Erika Ackerman, B.S.

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Here is another excellent presentation about child abuse written by Dr. Bruce Perry (1997), Incubated in terror: Neurodevelopmental factors in the ‘cycle of violence.’

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The development of dissociation in maltreated preschool-aged children

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Johnson et al 2001

Abstract – Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York State Psychiatric Institute, NY 10032, USA.

Childhood verbal abuse and risk for personality disorders during adolescence and early adulthood
Comprehensive Psychiatry, Volume 42, Issue 1, Pages 16-23

ABSTRACT:  Data from a community-based longitudinal study were used to investigate whether childhood verbal abuse increases risk for personality disorders (PDs) during adolescence and early adulthood. Psychiatric and psychosocial interviews were administered to a representative community sample of 793 mothers and their offspring from two New York State counties in 1975, 1983, 1985 to 1986, and 1991 to 1993, when the mean ages of the offspring were 5, 14, 16, and 22 years, respectively. Data regarding childhood abuse and neglect were obtained from the psychosocial interviews and from official New York State records.

Offspring who experienced maternal verbal abuse

during childhood were more than three times as likely

as those who did not experience verbal abuse

to have borderline, narcissistic, obsessive-compulsive, and paranoid PDs during adolescence or early adulthood.

These associations remained significant after offspring temperament, childhood physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, physical punishment during childhood, parental education, parental psychopathology, and co-occurring psychiatric disorders were controlled statistically.

In addition, youths who experienced childhood verbal abuse had elevated borderline, narcissistic, paranoid, schizoid, and schizotypal Personality Disorder symptom levels during adolescence and early adulthood after the covariates were accounted for.

These findings suggest that childhood verbal abuse may contribute to the development of some types of Personality Disorders, independent of offspring temperament, childhood physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, physical punishment during childhood, parental education, parental psychopathology, and co-occurring psychiatric disorders.

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The region in the primate brain that contains mirror neurons corresponds in our human brain to the region, Broca’s area, that processes speech (see page 184 of chapter reference below).  Think about the impact of all forms of adult interactions with infant-children — especially during the rapid-growth brain developmental stages — as you read the following:

“Relational” Mirror Neurons and the Concept of Representation

“Mirror neurons respond only to intentional motor actions. This is the first evidence that there is an area in the motor cortex that can respond specifically and only to goal-directed, relational actions.”  (page 183)

“When mirror neurons are activated, there is a very tight, precise correspondence between a specific motor action and neuron firing. For example, if a neuron responded to an object held between the fingers, it would not respond to the same object held by tweezers. Self-initiated actions and the individual’s perception of the identical action performed by another evoke the same neural response. So it can be said that the monkey’s brain (and ours as well) is intrinsically relational.”” (page 184)

“The discovery of mirror neurons suggests that certain actions may be represented in the mind because they trigger a neural link between self and other. This representation of the other’s action by means of mirror neurons is direct and immediate and does not require any intervening symbolic code or a mental language, as there is an instantaneous mapping from self to other and from other to self. Mirror neurons support ecological theories of perception in that there is an innate coupling between the self and the other: we respond to directly perceived qualities of the other’s intentionality; we do not require coded information.”  (page 185)

READ REST OF CHAPTER HERE

in Imagination and the Meaningful Brain (Philosophical Psychopathology) – By Arnold H. Modell (2006), The MIT Press

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“Scientists who use advanced imaging technology to study brain function report that the human brain is wired to reward caring, cooperation, and service. According to this research, merely thinking about another person experiencing harm triggers the same reaction in our brain as when a mother sees distress in her baby’s face. Conversely, the act of helping another triggers the brain’s pleasure center and benefits our health by boosting our immune system, reducing our heart rate, and preparing us to approach and soothe. Positive emotions like compassion produce similar benefits. By contrast, negative emotions suppress our immune system, increase heart rate, and prepare us to fight or flee.”

READ REST OF ARTICLE HERE:  We Are Hard-Wired to Care and Connect by by David Korten

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READ REST OF CHAPTER HERE

+IN THE PRESENCE OF LAUGHTER WE ARE SAFE, SECURE AND FREE

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The wind is back at dawn today, roaring around my house like a drunken clan of Cyclops giants.  The tall pine in my neighbor’s yard is dancing a wild, frenzied jig in fast motion.  The wind is trying to rip the leaves off the plum tree before they even come out.  The giants are bellowing at me down the water heater chimney in the corner of my kitchen.

The sky grows lighter with the sound of birds perched in the twigs of the quince tree above their pan of water outside my kitchen window.  The light is all gray today.  It seems to be within the clouds across the sky, even in all directions, masking the outlines of the mountains, yet here and there in the west the clouds are outlined with the faintest tints of peach, ecru and tan.

It looks like a day to stay indoors.  My cold has thickened and settled, making me feel feverish and queasy.  Sneezing, I watch droplets of rain appear on the outside of my window.  I am grateful for this roof and these walls of shelter (thinking about my study last weekend about the precuneus part of the brain and its connection to our human sense of shelter and to the self).  Protection for the body of the self and for the self of the self.

I am not so tough that I can’t appreciate these advantages I have being only one of billions who have so much less to keep them protected from so much more.  Without these protecting walls of shelter around me right now, without this sturdy roof, without some source of heat, I would experience this coming day differently.  It strikes me as I read a little more of Dr. Dacher Keltner’s 2009 book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, about laughter that the presence or absence of laughter seems to correspond to the nature of the protection we have inside our self for our self.

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Keltner and his colleague, George Bonanno, designed a long-term study to examine how laughter operated among 45 adults who were grieving for the loss of a much loved spouse who had died within the previous six months.  Here again Keltner does not include any assessment of previous traumas, child abuse or maltreatment, or to degrees of secure or insecure attachment.  By not collecting this information from his participants, he missed the opportunity to learn about how the presence or absence of laughter during a time of personal storms is directly connected to the nature of the sheltering protection a person has for their self.

Yes, he found that laughter appears as a resiliency factor in human grieving.  Yes, laughter appears to be a ‘fitness factor’ that corresponds to the ability to transcend one’s losses so they can flexibly resolve their traumas and move on into the next stages of life.  But I resist the intimation his writings leave with is readers, that there is plainly something innately superior about those who can laugh in the midst of their grief compared to those who cannot so easily access laughter’s power to heal.

My bet is that those who entered into the rooms of Keltner’s experimental laboratory to complete his interviews and have their most minute reactions critically examined brought with them the condition of the shelter of their self built within them through critical developmental stages of their infancy and childhood.  Those who were early traumatized were most likely to have soggy cardboard boxes to live in, if that.  Those who benefited during their development by being given good strong walls and a good strong roof, doors that sealed out the storms and tight, solidly placed windows of course had the corresponding ability to access their laughter within.

What did Keltner and Bonanno find among their 45 participants?

“Measures of laughter (and smiling) predicted reduced grief as assessed at six, fourteen, and twenty-five months postloss.  Duchenne laughter while talking about their deceased spouses were less anxious and depressed, and more engaged in their daily living, for the next two years.  Just as important, people who showed more anger were observed to be experiencing more anxiety, depression, and disengagement from daily living for the next two years.”  (page 142

These researchers continued to study how these grief-triggered reactions appeared in the body of their subjects and observed the following:

“…George and I went on a search for further evidence in support of the benefits of laughter.  Why did laughing while talking about the deceased partner relate to increased personal adjustment?  What we observed were findings very much in keeping with the laughter as vacation hypothesis.  Our first analysis looked at how bereaved individuals’ experience of distress tracked one physiological index of arousal – elevated heart rate.  The bereaved individuals who laughed showed similar heart rate arousal as those who did not laugh.  But whereas our nonlaughers’ feelings of distress closely tracked increases in their heart rate, our laughers’ feelings of distress were decoupled from this physiological index of stress.  Metaphorically, laughers were taking a vacation from the stress of their partners’ deaths, freed from the tension of stress-related physiology.

“We then transcribed their conversations and identified exactly what the bereaved participants were talking about when they laughed.  Here again, data suggest that laughter is not a sign of denial of trauma, as widely assumed, but an indicator of a shift toward a new perspective enabled by the imagination.  We coded participants’ references to several existential themes related to bereavement – loss, yearning, injustice, uncertainty.  We also coded for insight words that reflect a shift in perspective, phrases like “I see” or “from this perspective” or “looking back.”  Our participants who laughed were most likely to be talking about the injustice of death – the unfair termination of life, the difficulties of raising a family alone, the loss of intimacy – but they engaged in this discourse with perspective-shifting clauses.  Laughter was part of these individuals’ shift in viewing the death of their spouses.  It was a portal into a new understanding of their lives.  A laugh is a lightning bolt of wisdom, a moment in which the individual steps back and gains a broader perspective upon their lives and the human condition.

“Finally, our data speak to the social benefits of laughter.  Our bereaved individuals who laughed reported better relations with a current significant other.  They more readily engaged in new intimate relations.”  (pages 143-144)

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I believe that Keltner and Bonanno missed the most important fact that it wasn’t the presence or absence of laughter itself that mattered most in their study.  It was the presence or absence of a safe and secure attachment system, built into these individuals through the nature of their earliest caregiver interactions during their body-brain developmental stages, that either enabled laughter to exist as the resiliency factor it is, or did not.

Laughter is obviously connected to the benefits this research describes.  Yes, it does have the power to modulate the physiological stress response in the body.  Yes it indicates “a shift toward a new perspective enabled by the imagination” because it is a signal of fitness that reflects the conditions of the environment an individual was formed in, by and for.  Yes, laughter is included in autobiographical narratives when it appears in “perspective-shifting clauses” that are part of the telling of a coherent, continuous life story that is most likely to happen for a safe and securely attached-from-birth person.

Transitioning between contrasting mental states, processing information in insightful ways, being able to obtain shifts in perspective, having a “portal into a new understanding” of one’s life, having the capacity to experience “a lightning bolt of wisdom, a moment in which the individual steps back and gains a broader perspective upon their lives and the human condition” all are possible because of safe and secure attachment patterns built into a person’s body-nervous system-brain-mind-self from the start of one’s life.

And of course having these abilities, which stem from a safe and securely built body-brain, means that such a person will have the capacity also to report “better relations with a current significant other” and will be able to “more readily” engage “in new intimate relations.”

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This research is describing the differences between those who have and those who do not have the insurance-policy benefits of safe and secure attachment built into their early developing body-brain.  The presence or absence of laughter is the internal and external signal that clearly indicates the nature of a person’s attachment system.  Our attachment system is itself a signifier of the quality of the world that built each of us in our beginnings.

Our attachment system is about the quality of the protective structure within us that contains our self.  If I had to try to recover from this cold I have outside in the cold wind and rain of today, rather than trying to recover within the adequate home I have that keeps those stormy elements away from me, I would not be likely to recover as well, as quickly, or maybe even at all.  That’s just plain common sense.

So why do we continue to so stubbornly refuse to accept that the conditions of our inward attachment system that directly formed the who and how we are in this world don’t have an equally powerful influence on how we respond to and recover from the trials and tribulations, the storms that happen to us along the pathway of our lives?

If the presence of laughter signifies the existence of a safe and secure inner protective structure for the self, and its absence signifies that this inner protective structure is not safe and secure enough, then I know more about the meaning of laughter in my own life and in the lives of others.  Just as I would want to improve the physical structure of my dwelling if the rain was pouring in the roof and my siding was blowing off, I want to improve the structure surrounding my self.

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It is with this new “light of understanding” about the powerful signifier laughter is of the conditions of my inner shelter that I will share with you something that made me laugh so hard yesterday my sides literally hurt.  I haven’t laughed like that for a long, long time.

Our rural town weekly newspaper always includes a page called “The Police Beat” where the past week’s 911 calls are presented to the public.  I happen to live in this unincorporated outskirt town of 700 people that I found mentioned in the news yesterday.  I was trying to read this entire piece from start to finish over the telephone to my daughter last evening without laughing.  I couldn’t do it:

Jan. 7 –

“A Naco woman reported a large green half snake half something else was in her bathroom.  By the time deputies arrived, the creature was gone.

Of all the descriptions Keltner has presented (above) about laughter, it is his mention of how laughter is “an indicator of a shift toward a new perspective enabled by the imagination” that most caught my attention.  I thought to myself, “Hey!  I can do THAT!”

Reading this report from the sheriff’s call yesterday captivated my imagination.  The words in that report created for me a playground for my imagination – as I suspect it will yours.  Now, thanks to reading Keltner’s book combined with my own insights, I understand more than ever before the critical place that laughter has as a signifier of human well-being.

I will pay ever more close attention to finding the large and often very small places that humor, smiles and laughter might be hidden around me in my life – even if they are hidden in the words of a paper about something that first appeared in someone else’s bathroom – and then did not.  Now I understand more clearly that my attachment system, my home of my self in the world, will be better off for every instant of genuine laughter I can find.

Human laughter, older than words, might well be the most important language we have.  It tells the stories of the better side of life.  In laughter we share both the oldest and best of who we are and what we know.  In the presence of genuine laughter we are most present in the present because in its embrace we are most completely safe, secure and free.

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+IN THE ABSENCE OF LAUGHTER

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My guess is that if we could count up all the people in our culture on a given day that mention the interpretation of dreams, we could then divide that number by five and get a good idea about the number of differing theories about dream interpretation.  Ten thousand people?  Two thousand versions.  A hundred thousand people?  Twenty thousand interpretations.

I have often wondered if aging changes how people dream.  When I reached the age of about 45, my dreaming seemed to stop completely as if I had suddenly become a different person.  Gone were the vivid Technicolor scenes of flowing activity.  Gone were the presentations of insight in fairy tale formats.  Gone were my dreams.

Last night the wind came.  It tore around the house, picking up anything not tied or nailed down and throwing them against the walls of the house, battering my mind in sleep with its roaring.  Rain pounded on the tin roof above my bed, an ever welcome sound in this high desert, but strange in its silence as both the water pouring out of the sky and its sister wind stopped together as soon as the first faint light of dawn began to creep over our world from the eastern horizon.

It is so silent now it almost feels like the world on the other side of the walls of my house has disappeared.  It is this same kind of silence that greets me when I rise from my bed in the morning, leaving behind me the rattling noise of my sleep.  I woke many times last night because of the storm, and each time I did a part of me thought, “Oh, darn it!  I am not dreaming, I’m thinking!”

There were even times when my eyes opened into the darkness that I found myself in the middle of writing while I was sleeping.  Whole paragraphs of words greeted me just at that threshold between sleep and waking.  One time I knew the topic of my epistle that had been taking place behind the veil was profoundly sociological.   Patterns of human thought, instantly collapsed into a single awareness as I opened my eyes, seemed to contain the wishes for wisdom that follow human generations for thousands and thousands of years.

I gave up on sleeping at 4:30 this morning, and wandered into my kitchen to fix myself some coffee.  At that time the storm was still surrounding my house.  Now it has gone as if it had never existed, just like the words of my dreams.

What has changed in my brain that now I am forced to sleep with a mind full of words instead of images?  Where are the living, breathing connections within me?  They have been replaced with this dry, sterile flat landscape of words.  I resent this.  I miss my dreams.

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As a member of the select group of people who today might wake up wondering about a dream they had last night (even though I doubt I officially even had one), I can join in the medley of dream interpretations by offering what was taught to me about ‘working with dreams’ when I was in art therapy graduate school.

“Dreams are images,” by long white-bearded professor would chant in front of the class.  “They are no different than the images painted on canvas or drawn with pencil on pages of white paper.  Stick with the image,” he would repeat time after time.  “Stick with the image.  It will always tell you what it wants you to know if you simply learn how to let it.”

Besides these sparse words there is one other point I can remember now twenty years later.  “Look for the places in the image where something is changing.  It is in those places that the life force within the image is moving.”

We were taught to find within an image exactly what was there.  Nothing more.  Nothing less.  Within a dream’s verbal telling the change points will always appear in such words as “suddenly” and “but” and “but then” and “if.”  At these points a new perspective appears.  Something different happens.  One thing turns into another.  We were taught to understand that no matter how convoluted and complex dreams might appear, they can always be understood in their essence by the movement of their changes.

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The morning’s slow shift from pitch blackness to daylight doesn’t seem to be captured correctly in the word ‘dawn’ to me like the evening shift can be transcribed into ‘twilight’.  There is just as much mystery to me in this gradual shift happening outside of my windows right now as I wait for what’s missing – the sound of today’s first bird call.  Where are the birds?  Are they frightened, soaked and in hiding?

“Call to me, little ones.  Let me know you are out there.  The sound of your voices will comfort me.  You let me know every day I wake up into the same world I was in last night when I tried to sleep, restlessly, dreamlessly and verbal.  This silent dray world is eerie and everything seems out of place.”

I wait for this half-light transition to complete itself.  Transitions, the stuff all life is made out of.

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I did not intend to write about dreaming this morning.  I intended to write about laughter.  What has happened is that I am stuck in between these two topics at the point where they are connected.  That point is about transitions and insight.  (I am glad.  I hear a small bird’s first chirping outside my kitchen window.  I am home now.  I am awake as the world outside wakes along with me.)

I tried earlier to find a book on my shelves I could read this morning to carry me in time across that great divide between darkness and daylight, but several pages of several books left me feeling the same.  Too many harsh words with edges that left grit between my teeth.  Too few words in each sentence so that as I tried to move my eyes across lines on the page I kept being hit in the face with period after period.  “Just let me read,” my word-dream tired brain bellowed at me.  “I just want to flow with a thought, not be pulled up short each time I barely get going!”

So I ended up simply back again with Dr. Dacher Keltner’s 2009 book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, picking up where I left off in my reading several days ago, before I got sidetracked by my sadness and minor sickness.

I found this morning that Keltner headed the next section of his chapter on laughter “The Cooperation Switch.”  After reading this section, my mind wants to rename it “The Transition-Insight Switch.”  He describes how researchers have discovered that every time we laugh our nervous system responds by relaxing itself.  Keltner describes how as this pause in our ongoing experience happens, we benefit from an instant of opportunity for discovering something new and different about any situation we might be contending with.

Laugher, as the prosocial specialized sound mix it is, in between the ranges in our vocal chords that we use for talking, connects us not only to others around us, but also to our own self.  Laughter represents a loosening of our grip on what we consider to be our usual reality, and makes room for explorations into ‘something different’.

Keltner describes how an infant-child’s capacity for laugher is integrated with the capacity for developing speech and thought.  He writes about the stages of young childhood a child passes through as it pretends one thing is something else.  A bathtub filled with water IS an ocean.  A teaspoon IS a magic wand.  A child bobbing up and down wildly on a bed IS flying.  Children learn about themselves as they transition into the larger world by using pretense in play.

This critical play stage of infant-child development is supposed to involve laugher.  I have written previously about how I don’t believe my mother ever transitioned successfully through this process.  The patterns of human development that Keltner describes are supposed to happen in the same way those nighttime transitions turn into day.

Long before the first rays of the sun outlined the high edges of the clouds to differentiate them from the mountaintops I could then see outside my kitchen window, I knew the daylight was coming because of the chirping of the birds.  When laugher and happiness are missing for a child during this critical developmental stage of development, it is possible that the borderline between night and day in a child’s developing mind is never crossed completely.  The presence of infant-child laugher is as sure a signal of transition as is the chirping of a morning’s first bird.

Laughter does not make a child grow up any more than a chirping bird makes the sun come up.  Yet while it would take a drastic force beyond my imagination to change the natural patterns of a daybreak, I can imagine forces that change a young child’s world so much that laughter ceases to be a part of it.  Such was the early world of my mother.

Keltner writes about childhood laugher, play and the individual evolution of the human mind as he describes a transitional process across the ‘border land’ of development my mother never completed successfully:

“These forms of pretense emerge in systematic fashion at around eighteen months of age.  They are all systematically accompanied by laughter.  And they lead the child to develop the ability to use words to refer to multiple objects.  As children free themselves from one-to-one relations between words and objects, they learn that words have multiple meanings.  They also learn that objects can be many things – a banana can be a banana, a phone, an ogre’s nose, or a boy’s penis (when the parents aren’t’ around).

“In the freedom of pretend play, children learn that there are multiple p0erspectives upon objects, actions, and identities.  The child moves out of the egocentrism of his or her own mind and learns that the beliefs and representations of other minds most certainly differ from one’s own.  And it is laughter that transports children to this platform of understanding and epistemological insight.

“Laughter is a portal to the world of pretense, play, and the imagination; it is an invitation to a nonliteral world where the truths of identities, objects, and relations are momentarily suspended, and alternatives are willingly entertained.  Those hours of pretend play – peek-a-boo games, monsters and princesses, the ogre under the bridge, astronauts – are the gateway to empathy and moral imagination.”  (pages 137-138)

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Keltner has developed a theory about laughter:

“In the observation that laugher accompanies the child’s capacity to pretend, to participate in alternatives to the realities referred to in sincere communication, we arrive at a hypothesis about laugher.  Let’s call this hypothesis the laughter as vacation hypothesis.

“The word “vacation” traces its linguistic history back to the Latin vacare, which means to be “empty, free, or at leisure” and is defined as a formal suspension of activity or duty.  The laugh, then, signals the suspension of formal, sincere meaning.  It points to a layer of interaction where alternatives to assumed truths are possible, where identities are lighthearted and nonserious.  When people laugh, they are taking a momentary vacation from the more sincere claims and implications of their actions.

“A special realm of sound is reserved for laughs, and it is an ancient one that predates language, represented in old regions of the nervous system – the brain stem – which also regulates breathing.  This acoustic space reserved for laughs triggers laughter and pleasure in others [through the actions of our mirror neurons], and designates, like the confines of a circus or theater, a social realm for acts of pretense and imagination.  In the pretend play of young children, laugher enables playful routines that allow them to have alternative perspectives on the world they are facing.  Laugher is a ticket to the world of pretense, it is a two- to three-second vacation from the encumbrances, burdens, and gravity of the world of literal truths and sincere commitments.”  (pages 138-139)

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Steps to the making of a regular day happen without human influence.  Not so the making of a human being.  The book, Ghosts from the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence by Robin Karr-Morse, Meredith S. Wiley, and Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, applies to my mother.  Playing alone and isolated with her delicately painted china dolls, my mother became a ghost of a child.  As my sister puts it, our mother became a Toymaster, not a mother, not a whole person.  My mother’s mind never transitioned out of the imaginary world of her early childhood.

Everyone in my mother’s world, including her, was a pretend doll playing a pretend part in a pretend drama on a pretend stage.  Everything she ever did was a pretense and she never even knew it.  She was a ghostly shadow of the woman she could have become because she never completed the transition across that borderline between what is real and what is not.

What was missing at the beginning of my mother’s life – the prosocial genuine experience of laughter – was also absent in the middle and at the end.  My mother lived a nightmare she never woke up from until the day she died.  It was on the darkest side of her twilight borderline, where she never fully consciously woke up out of her own abused and neglected child mind, that I shared the misery of my childhood with her.

In my mother’s nightmare the darkness could never transform  itself into the light of day.

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+EMOTIONAL BLINDNESS – WONDERING WHAT LOVE IS

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I am trying to think about an emotional experience I had the other day so that I can write about it.  At the same time I realize I cannot think about it separately from writing about it.  If my words don’t follow themselves across a page they disappear like lemmings over a cliff into oblivion.  Partly this is true because I am in an inner battle with ambiguity.  If I write this piece most of the ambiguity will vanish.  But because of the 18 years of abuse I suffered from my severe Borderline mother, her brain patterns were built into me, and it’s a known fact that Borderlines DO NOT LIKE ambiguity as A. J. Mahari describes:

“Borderlines have not learned how to relate in healthy ways. Borderlines have not experienced the world as loving, fair or trustworthy place. Borderline ambiguity is born from the two-faced damage of the betrayal of a parent, both parents and or one’s primary care-givers.”

What I experienced the other day that I MAYBE want to understand has to do with the fact that not once in the 18 years of my childhood did I ever feel loved by either my mother or by my father.  I have written before that one of the main reasons I believe I did not turn out just like my mother is that nobody ever betrayed me the way my child-mother was betrayed.

Nobody ever loved me.  Nobody pretended to love me.  I was not exposed to what were the devastating effects of the conditional love my grandparents used to manipulate my mother and destroy her brain-mind.  I was just plain hated without hope of reprieve.  Yet at the same time the underlying lack of awareness of what it feels like not to be truly loved affects me just as it affected my mother.  The love circuitry from safe and secure attachment with early caregivers was not built correctly into either my mother’s or my own early forming body-brain-mind-self – or later forming one, either.

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My inner battle with ambiguity today is about whether or not I want to face some of what this means to and for me.  Am I better off not knowing what an examination of my last week’s experience can show me about who and how I am in the world?  Is it helpful for me to follow my own thoughts in my writing to some more unambiguous place where I will be out of this thick enveloping fog of not knowing what this experience has to teach me?

I both want to know at the same time I don’t want to know.  Do I stay right here in this murky ambiguous place or do I choose to take a step in my next thoughts toward the light of clarity?  At the same time I ask myself this question I understand that right here is a place where I can differentiate my own self from my mother.  I can make this choice.  My mother could not.

This does not mean that taking this step toward differentiation from my mother’s brain-mind as she formed herself into mine is easy.  This does not mean that stepping toward the light of conscious reflection and illumination, toward understanding of the truth is easy.  It just means that for me, unlike for my mother, taking this step is possible.

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Unlike what Leigh Eric Schmidt, the Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America at Harvard Divinity School might say, I do not believe it is possible for humans to have any experience of themselves in the world that does not directly involve their brain’s processing of information.  The 18 years of severe abuse I suffered from my mother built the brain I now have to use to try to understand all of my experiences of myself in my life.  Today’s excursion into exploring my last week’s experience is no exception.

Nearly all of the associational processes that went on behind the closed doors of my mother’s mind happened completely outside the range of her consciousness attention.  My mother was a dangerous, violently explosive madwoman.  Growing up, I knew about her violence but I did not know about her madness.  How could I?  It had greeted me with the first breath I ever took in this world and it continued unabated throughout all my developmental stages until I was 18.

As a result of the free rein (and free reign) my mother had in her home to do anything she wanted to, there was always only one single pattern for me.  She erupted, hurt me, and I suffered.  All that suffering built me as it built itself into me, and it was never accompanied by any experience of love.

As a young infant-child grows into its body-brain-mind-self, it is supposed to be helped to differentiate experience.  It is supposed to learn that it exists as a separate entity, and it is supposed to form not only its own stable self, but also a clear stable connection to this self.  All of this process is negotiated through the experience of emotion.  Emotions have to become ever more clearly differentiated from one another so that the self can have access to its own information about being in the world.

I did not go through ANY of these differentiation stages of development normally.  My mother overwhelmed me from the moment I was born.  Because my mother did not succeed at physically killing me, she did not succeed at completely obliterating me.  But she did very successfully limit my options of experience down to one.  She made me suffer.

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My mother overwhelmed me with the scourge of her hatred of who she imagined me to be at every step of my infant-childhood that she possibly could.  I see the image of someone continually trying to dump a thousand gallons of gasoline into a tiny little perfume bottle.  My mother effectively did this to me for 18 long years.  I did not escape unscathed.

There were dire consequences of my survival, most of which I will never know.  However, the experience I had last week dropped into the middle of one of them.  I was blindsided by my own emotional blindness.  Can I grab the lantern of my best intentions and spark within it the blazing light of my willingness to learn? Am I willing to go back into the depths of that enveloping fog of sorrow (in my body and in my brain) and take some part of myself back out into clarity?  Is there some new in-sight here for me that is mine and that I really can’t do without?

Yes.  To all these questions I choose to answer “Yes.”  I will walk past these grasping, numbing shadows of doubt.  I will shed this burden of “Shame on you, Linda, for not being a better woman than you are.”  I will not be afraid of my tears.  I will not be afraid that what I will say here or what I will find here will make those who love me, love me any less.

It is not my fault that my mother cut my wings off so that I cannot ever fly in the prosocial world that most others seem to me to take so for granted. “So take your scrawny little bird legs and hop on with this, Linda.  You can do it.  I know that you can.  Go where the angles might fear to tread and know that as you go, they will go with you.”

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Last August I was given the gift of being able to reconnect with one of our closest Alaskan homesteading neighbors in my childhood.  I haven’t heard her voice.  I haven’t seen her.  We correspond via email.

Against all rational logic, I love her.  Our connection means a great, great deal to me.  This woman, now 83, lives well over a thousand miles away from me.  I do not have her telephone number.  While I know she is very busy taking care of herself, her husband, her household and preparing to leave their home to move into an addition her son is building on his house for her, when I hadn’t received an email from her from last Monday to last Friday, I felt like a bomb went off inside of me.

It’s easy to say that given what I know about my unsafe and insecure attachment patterns in my body-brain that of course I would be upset.  Yet ‘of course’ doesn’t give me enough information to understand what I felt.  I became terrified that she was either gravely ill or had died.  I believed on some level of my being that she had been called home through the veil to help the 100,000 Haitian earthquake victims cross over to the next world.  Nothing I could find to tell myself would sooth the depths of my growing sorrow.

I have been much blessed in my lifetime that none of my three children have been threatened by sickness or harm.  My siblings are all safe and well.  Even though I continue to grieve for the loss of the man I am in love with from my life, never before last Friday did I feel the depths of that kind of sorrow and fear that someone I loved was in trouble and there was nothing I could do about it.

Most fortunately I had the telephone number of my friend’s son in Alaska.  Through him I was finally able to find out that his mother was just fine.  Never before, either, had I felt that powerful sense of gratitude and relief at hearing this good news.

Now, I suspect that if I had a normally-formed prosocial body and brain I would have been able to take all of this in stride and gone on with my life.  But thanks to the consequences of my mother’s abuse this didn’t happen.  This experience touched the depths of my attachment woundedness in ways I could not understand.  I had felt something new in a way I had never felt it before.

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Most of the normal prosocial emotional differentiation circuits and their corresponding connection to people I care about in my life are missing in my brain.  This experience I am describing opened up a circuit for me that I don’t believe ever existed before.  The mystery of my experience with these emotions led me to ask my daughter two days later after I had expressed to her how I had felt, “Is that something like all of you felt when you found out I had cancer?”

My daughter paused, and answered, “Yes, mother.  That’s how we felt.”

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What can I say through my tears as I write now that can help me understand what this means to me?  First, I feel terribly sad for my children and for others who love me that it is so nearly impossible for me to comprehend, let alone feel on an emotional level, what it feels like to be loved.  I have to absolve myself of any responsibility for this fact.  It is not my intention to hurt anyone by depriving them of the fullness of the experience of sharing their love for me.  At the same time I am grateful that they both love me, and can experience the fullest spectrum of attachment feelings toward me.

That I cannot participate equally with them in the depths of these life-love experiences is not my fault.  Until I felt what I did last Friday I had no idea how the people who loved me felt as they all traveled thousands of miles, one after the other, to support me and to care for me and to love me as I went through the grueling chemotherapy and eventual surgery that would allow me to remain in their lives.  I know they all love me.  They show me they all love me.  I believe they mean what they say.  But it is nearly impossible for me to FEEL their love inside my own body-brain-mind-self because those circuits were never built inside of me during the first 18 years of my life from the time of my birth.

At the same time I realize that I am now perhaps a fraction of an inch closer to knowing what it FEELS like to be loved, at age 58 I also realize that my emotional blindness is not likely to ever be completely removed from me in my lifetime.  I also understand that part of the pattern of attachment I feel to this homesteading neighbor comes from body memories I have of interactions with her in my childhood that were positive, and were among the very few truly kind and genuine, warm adult interactions I ever had in those miserable 18 years.

Yet I cannot consciously remember this woman.  She has generously sent me photographs of her and her husband from those long-past years, and they help me a great deal as I try to connect the unconscious memories of my childhood to the present day facts of what a wonderful woman this homesteading neighbor truly is.

At the same time I realize I will always struggle with allowing myself to form deep affectionate bonds with other people.  To love is to risk.  I believe that although my mother was able to steal from me the physiological foundations of what it feels like to BE LOVED, she did not remove from me my own ability to deeply love others.  The powers to give love seem to me to operate differently than do the powers of being able to feel love from others.

Of course I don’t know this to be true and I probably never will know for sure.  I imagine my brain to be similar in some ways to the autistic brain given the severe conditions of harm and deprivation in my infant-childhood that interfered with my emotional-social brain’s development.  There is on one in my life who truly loves me that does not also know about my childhood.  They do not have to question their love for me.  They do not have to wonder or guess or doubt.  And they don’t love me any less because I do.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

ON BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER:

  • Symptoms of BPD
  • Finding a BPD Therapist
  • BPD on the Internet
  • Self-Harm Explained
  • When You Encounter Splitting
  • +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

    • +HOOKED ON ‘D’ SMILES – THE HAPPINESS CENTER

    alchemynow7 Comments

    +++++++++++++++++

    The advantage of being in my own think tank of one is that I can be like a frog jumping from lily pad to lily pad, following my own fly, landing when and where I want to, devouring information without having to answer to anyone else.  This is why I can follow my last post on pathological liars with this one on smiles!

    I am still hopping around in the same pond I was in yesterday as I search for information about how my mother’s abusive Borderline brain gave me a torturous, miserable childhood.  I am still trying to understand how what happened to her in her own abusive childhood gave her such an awful brain.  Today I just landed on a different lily pad.

    ++++

    I am back for the moment with Dr. Dacher Keltner’s 2009 book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, having landed on his chapter on smiles.

    It turns out that of the vast number of kinds of smiles humans produce, there really is only one authentic, genuine real one and a whole lot of fakes.  In the field of research that Keltner belongs to, scientists have discovered the facial-muscle vocabulary of all human emotion expressed by the face.  Smiling has a language.

    Keltner describes how the genuine smile originates in the left anterior frontal lobe, a region whose activity is connected to positive emotional experience.  All the phony impostor, fake smiles originate in the right anterior frontal lobe.  We can tell the difference and respond accordingly from nearly the time we are born.  Infants are the first smile detection quality experts.

    There are two very specific facial muscles involved in a real, genuine left-brain smile display:  the zygomatic major muscle and the orbicularis oculi.  The smile these two muscles combine to create by their movement has been named, according to Keltner,

    “…in honor of the French neuroanatomist Guilluame Benjamin Amand Duchenne (1806-1875), who first discovered the visible traces of the activity of orbicularis occuli.  Smiles that do not involve the activity of the happiness muscle, the orbicularis oculi, are sensibly known as non-Duchenne or non-D smiles.”  (page 105)

    “When a ten-month-old is approached by his or her mother, the face lights up with the D smile; when a stranger approaches, the same infant greets the approaching adult with a wary non-D smile.”  (page 106)

    So, we have been able to tell the difference between a real D smile and a fake non-D smile from our first days as breathing creatures.  I’ve just never thought about the difference in words before today.  The D smile involves

    “…the activity of the happiness muscle, the orbicularis oculi.  This muscle surrounds the eyes and when contracted leads to the raising of the cheek, the pouching of the lower eyelid, and the appearance of those dreaded crow’s feet – the most visible sign of happiness – which the Botox industry is trying to wipe out of the vocabulary of human expression.”  (page 105)

    “Duchenne smiles differ morphologically in many ways from the many other smiles that do not involve the action of the orbicularis oculi muscle.  They tend to last between one and five seconds, and the lip corners tend to be raised to equal degrees on both sides of the face.  Smiles missing the action of the orbicularis oculi and likely masking negative states can be on the face for very brief periods (250 milliseconds [1/4 of a second]) or very long periods (a lifetime of polite smiling…).”  (pages 105-106)

    “And importantly, several studies have found that Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles, brief two- to three-second displays differing only in the activation of the orbicularis oculi muscle, map onto entirely different emotional experiences.”  (pages 106-107)

    In other words, these two kinds of smiles are connected to entirely different sides of the brain and their corresponding emotional centers:  The D smile to the happiness center on the left side, the fake non-D smiles on the right, negative emotional side of the brain.  The D smile “accompanies high spirits and goodwill” while the non-D smile “reflects the attempt to mask some underlying negative state.”  (page 108)

    ++++

    I can easily see how these two kinds of smiles communicate to all of us and especially to tiny infants in their earliest brain formation stages, the state of the environment.  A genuine D smile signals through happiness states of safe and secure attachment and at least – at that instant – life in a benign, benevolent world.  (It is really an ‘approach’ signal.)

    The non-D smile communicates something else entirely.  Our sophisticated emotional-social brains are genetically programmed to read these extremely rapid emotional signals from human faces.  We KNOW when a non-D smile happens, and that it happens from the negative (unsafe, insecure, “something is not quite right in the world”) place inside another person.  (It is really an ‘avoid’ signal.)

    The predominant pattern of smiling signals is one of the MAJOR ways our brain is directed in its formation from the time we are born.  Unsafe world equals poverty in the genuine happiness D smile.  Safe world equals lots of signals about what a wonderful, safe and secure place the world is to be in.  The nature of these signals communicate to an infant’s developing body-brain what kind of a world its genetics have to prepare for, and the signals affect the entire body, including the developing nervous and immune system.

    The genuine D smile is a flashing green safe-to-GO light.  Then fake smile, masking negative emotional states is some degree of a yellow warning light or a down right flashing unsafe-STOP light.  Our infant developing body-brain builds itself around this kind of information, and we respond to our environment with this body-brain for the rest of our lives.

    ++++

    Keltner misses what I consider a most important fact about what he talks about next in his presentation about how depressed mothers responses to and with their infants.  It is the nature of these kinds of signaling patterns between a mother and her infant that is building her infant’s body-brain from the beginning of her infant’s life.

    (It is also extremely important to note here that a vastly understated problem exists of women who negatively affect their infant’s development because of postpartum anxiety that does not appear as ‘typical’ as postpartum depression.  This post also underscores how vitally important it is for any ‘mental health’ treatment a pregnant mother or a mother of a young infant receives to be tied into the needs of her developing infant – such as is now recognized through the field of Infant Mental Health.  California, for example, has highly developed services in this regard funded by tobacco taxes.)

    Keltner writes:

    “In the 1980s developmental psychologists Ed Tronick, Jeff Cohn, and Tiffany Field became interested in what postpartum depression does to mother-child interactions.  Their studies, and those of other investigators, revealed that postpartum depression mutes the positive emotionality of the mother – she smiles less, she vocalizes with less warm intonation, and her positive emotional repertoire is less contingent upon the actions of her child.  Children of mothers experiencing postpartum depression tend to show complementary behavior – they are more agitated, distressed, and anxious.

    “This kind of result is compellingly intuitive.  Any parent or friend who has been up close to this phenomenon, who has been in the living room of a depressed mother whose positive emotion is dampened and disengaged from that of her child, readily knows how essential the exchanges of smiles, coos, touch, play faces, and interested and encouraging eyebrow flashes are to the parent-child dynamic.  Yet from a scientific standpoint, the finding – the mother’s impoverished positive emotional repertoire brings about anxiety and agitation in the child – is plagued by alternative explanations.  Perhaps agitated, fussy infants produce muted positive emotionality and depression in the mother.  Perhaps they both share some genetically based tendency that predisposes their parent-child interactions to lack mutual smiles, coos, touches, and play.  Perhaps their shared emotional condition is the product of deeper structural causes – underpaid work, poverty, alienated or abusive husbands and the like.

    “So to study the role of smiling and muted positive emotionality in parent-child interactions, Tronick, Cohn, and Field developed what has come to be known as the still-face paradigm.  This experimental technique is profoundly simple but powerful.  The mother is requested to simply be in the presence of her young infant, say nine months old, but to show no facial expressions whatsoever, and none of the most common of facial expressions for young mothers – smiles.  As the young child navigates around the laboratory environment, approaching toy robots and stuffed elephants and brightly colored objects that make farm animal noises, the child looks to the mother’s face for signals about the environment.  The child seeks information in facial muscle movements about what is safe, fun, and worthy of curious exploration, and what is not, and the mother sits there impassionate, stone-faced, and unresponsive.

    “The results are astonishing.  In a smile-impoverished environment, the young child no longer explores the environment, no longer approaches novel toys or play structures; her imagination shuts down.  The child quickly becomes agitated and distressed, often wildly so, arching his or her back and crying out.  The child will often move to the mother and try to provoke her, stir her out of her stupor, with a vocalization or touch or encouraging smile.  And as the child begins to resign herself to the unexpressive condition of the mother, she moves away from the mother, refusing eye contact, and eventually falls into listlessness and torpor.”  (pages 108-110)

    ++++

    The first thing I want to say about this information is that what Keltner is describing is the difference between safe and secure and unsafe and insecure attachment in the world for the playing, exploring, and still very dependent infant.  The only way this infant can determine the ‘condition of the world’ is through signals sent back and forth between it and its mother.

    My strong suspicion is that if an infant has been exposed from birth to a mother who is depressed, anxious, dissociated, frightened or who abuses the infant, the entire scenario Keltner is describing would take a different course.  The infant reaction he describes could only happen if an infant had a safe and secure attachment with its mother before they entered the laboratory.

    Imagine – taking just these few words and thinking long and deeply about them – how profoundly and negatively a deprived-traumatized infant’s body-brain would have had to develop ALREADY by the age of nine months.  Positive and appropriate safe and secure attachment experiences from birth – or their opposite — would have already had powerful impact on and influence over how the infant’s body-brain had formed itself in critical ways.

    It would be a most excellent sign in the experiment described above if the infant DID become agitated, distressed, and tried to engage its mother.  An abused infant would demonstrate all kinds of alterations in its patterns of interaction with its mother.  But see how quickly the infant gives up trying and slumps into helpless, powerless hopelessness even in this brief of an interaction when the mother does not TELL the infant anything it can use to feel safe, secure and attached?

    ++++

    Keltner continues about the social reinforcement of smiles:

    “…they are the first incentives toward which young children move, and that parents hungrily seek.  In relevant research, when one-year-old infants sit at the edge of a visual cliff, a glass surface over a precipitous drop, with their mother on the other side, the infant immediately looks to the mother for information about this ambiguous scene, which looks both dangerous and passable.  If the mother shows fear, not a single child will crawl across the glass surface.  If the mother smiles…approximately 80 percent of the infants will eagerly cross the surface, risking potential harm, to be in the warm, reassuring midst of their mother’s smile.”  (page 111)

    ++++

    Long, long before an infant can move itself around in the world at a distance from its earliest caregivers, its brain has been shaped in its development as circuits, pathways and regions have developed themselves in direct response to the kinds of facial signals it has had with its caregivers – or not had as in the case of deprivation of appropriate interactions.

    Keltner describes the physiological benefits of both sending and receiving genuine D smiles:

    “Two smiles are exchanged within the span of a second or two…  Within the bodies of those individuals…are reciprocally coordinated surges of dopamine and the opiates.  Stress-related cardiovascular response reduces.  A sense of trust and social well-being rises.  The smile….evolved as a neon-light signal of cooperativeness, it became embedded in social exchanges between individuals that give rise to closeness and affiliation.”  (pages 112-113)

    ++++

    A core belief in my thinking is that our entire feel-good biochemical body systems is designed to keep us attached in positive ways to members of our species.  To the degrees that we have lost sight of this, we suffer from all the kinds of ‘addictions’ and social ills known within our species, not the least of which is severe infant-child abuse.

    I don’t believe my mother’s earliest life was filled with genuine smiles anymore than mine was.  If it had been, I can guarantee I wouldn’t be sitting here writing these words today.  Had any of my readers own mother been born into a world of genuine smiles they would not be hear reading my words, either.

    While the related subjects of humor and laughter await a future post, it is enough today to suggest that by thinking back – mostly within our body – we can track the presence of absence of unresolved trauma in our infant-childhood by the presence or absence of genuine D smiles.  It is most helpful to realize that long before our conscious memory abilities were able to operate, the patterns of smiles versus traumas that we experienced built the very foundation of our brain through which we process our emotions for the rest of our lives.

    It is never too late to learn more about the power of genuine happiness to expand the activity of and connections between what happy center neurons we have – even if we don’t have very many.  That left brain happy center is definitely one that shed unused neurons (those not stimulated by happy caregivers in infancy) as it formed in our early lives.  They can never be replaced.  Safe and securely attached people HAVE MORE OF THEM present!

    Research on brain plasticity clearly shows that exercising areas of our brain can build more and stronger CONNECTIONS BETWEEN NEURONS and thus expand the operation of brain regions – the happy center included.

    But I am a realist.  Those of us who suffered greatly from infant-child abuse, deprivation and trauma and were NOT born to happy mothers or families, simply did not get to build as big a left brain happy center as did those with opposite experiences.  As adults, we actually – in our body – KNOW THIS!

    I personally doubt I would be alive if I had not had my brother John, 14 months older than me, who is by character about the dearest person on earth.  He got to keep his happy neurons because my mother was able to love him, as was my father.  By the time I was born he was fully shining.  It is because he lovingly turned the power of his genuine smiling happy neurons upon little tiny (much hated by my turned-psychotic mother) me that any happy neurons were left alive in my brain at all.

    Learning how to exercise them so that my happy center neurons can form better connections is one of the most important missions of my life time.

    ++++

    NOTE:  Too much happy stimulation can overstimulate an infant and harm its developing nervous system and brain!  A healthy, happy mother knows instinctively how much is enough and when and how to calm her baby down!  HINT:  When an infant turns its head away and breaks eye contact, LET IT!  It is busy with all the information it can handle (like a busy telephone line).  Do not get right back into its face or you will overwhelm it.  At such times an infant is processing information, building its brain, regulating its own emotional state (self soothing), organizing itself, and calming itself down!  The infant will let you know when it is done and ready to reengage with you.  Another hint:  Men in general are not geared as women are to recognize over stimulating activity with young infants – be careful!

    (When such an infant turns its head to the right it is organizing the left side of its brain and vice versa!)

    +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

    REMEMBER THIS:

    “Any parent or friend who has been up close to this phenomenon, who has been in the living room of a depressed mother whose positive emotion is dampened and disengaged from that of her child, readily knows how essential the exchanges of smiles, coos, touch, play faces, and interested and encouraging eyebrow flashes are to the parent-child dynamic.”

    MOST IMPORTANTLY — They are VITAL!  Please do not forget this – and please do remember to find a way to help any parent and infant you might encounter who is experiencing anxious or depressed interactions so that infant can have a better chance to build a better brain and have a better life – When you see negative, anxious, depressed kinds of infant-caregiver interaction patterns, know they are hurting an infant’s brain development and changing the degree of well-being it will experience for the rest of its life.  FIND A WAY TO EDUCATE – TO POSITIVELY INTERVENE!

    +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

    +GREAT BOOK ABOUT THE BEST IN HUMANS

    alchemynowLeave a comment

    +++++++++++++++

    My book Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life – Paperback (Oct 5, 2009) by Dacher Keltner has arrived.  I am eagerly embarking on its study about what’s best about humans.  My insanely abusive Borderline mother sure didn’t teach me anything about THAT!

    Keltner resides in the camp of study about positive human emotions.  Interestingly, researchers could not really study what has always been termed ‘happiness’ equally with the survival emotions such as fear and rage until technology invented photographic equipment that operates as fast as our face moves when we express emotion.

    The more survival-based emergency related emotions happen in bigger ways so that we can watch them happen more easily than we can (could) watch expressions related to happiness and well-being.  Just as we needed really FAST photography to accurately be able to watch the visual information transmitted and received between infants and mothers (that build our earliest fundamental brain regions), we also needed it to see what happens when we treat one another well and with kindness.

    (For an example of how the extremely rapid fraction-of-a-millisecond mother-infant communication takes place please scroll down to page 22 in Dr. Allan N. Schore’s paper, EFFECTS OF A SECURE ATTACHMENT RELATIONSHIP ON RIGHT BRAIN DEVELOPMENT, AFFECT REGULATION, AND INFANT MENTAL HEALTH)

    ++++

    Humans are born with the capacity to experience emotion.  We simply live them without thinking about what they are, what they mean, or what they are named.  In safe and secure infant-childhood environments we are helped by our caregivers to gradually learn about our emotions as we learn about our self and others in the world.  Eventually we learn what emotions are named and about how to ever more effectively regulate them.

    Because this ability to regulate and differentiate emotions happens within our earliest infant-child attachment relationship environment, the process is either assisted or interfered with by our caregivers.  In my own case, as I study Keltner’s book, I doubt I will be able to think about very many instances from my infant-childhood at all where I would have even been allowed to experience the positive emotional states.

    I find it interesting that even in the field of vastly expensive scientific research that the differentiation of ‘happiness’ and the study of this state had to wait until technology caught up with our desire and need to better understand the happiness aspect of who we are.

    Dr. Keltner is at the cutting-edge of this research.  His study happens because he can use the new lens of sophisticated super-stop action photography to see our human finely tuned happiness communications in the same way that evolution of the lens allowed us to see new aspects of our world through microscopes and telescopes.

    ++++

    Keltner states about the study of happiness in the first chapter of his book:

    “The canonical [orthodox] studies of human emotion, studies of the universality of facial expression, of how emotion is registered in the nervous system, how emotion shapes judgment and decision making, had never looked into these states.  The groundbreaking studies of emotion had only examined one state covered by the term “happiness.”  But research is often misled by “ordinary” language, the language we speak rather than the language of scientific theory.  Happiness is a diffuse term.  It masks important distinctions between emotions such as gratitude, awe, contentment, pride, love, compassion and desire – the focus of this book – as well as expressive behaviors such as teasing, touch, and laughter.  This narrow concentration on “happiness” has stunted our scientific understanding of the emotions that move people toward higher jen ratios.  By solely asking, “Am I happy?” we miss out on the many nuances of the meaningful life.

    My hope is to shift what goes into the numerator of you jen ration, to bring into sharper focus the millisecond manifestations of human goodness.  I hope that you will see human behavior in a new light, the subtle cues of embarrassment, playful vocalizations, the visceral feelings of compassion, the sense of gratitude in another’s touch to your shoulder, that have been shaped by the seven million years of hominid evolution and that bring the good in others to completion.  In our pursuit of happiness we have lost sight of these essential emotions.  Our everyday conversations about happiness are filled withy references to sensory pleasure – delicious Australian wines, comfortable hotel beds, body tone produced by our exercise regimens.  What is missing is the language and practice of emotions like compassion, gratitude, amusement, and wonder.  My hope is to tilt your jen ratio to what the poet Percy Shelley describes as the great secret of morals:  “the identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.”  The key to this quest resides in the study of emotions long ignored by affective science.”  (pages 14-15)

    ++++

    My mother was extremely short on jen, as are all people who outright neglect, abuse and maltreat people – infants and children most included.  My mother’s experiences in her own abusive childhood seemed to completely obliterate any ability she was born with to understand what ‘being good’ was all about.  Certainly it was my experience with her that she was never able to ‘be good’ to me and in fact she did not believe I even had the capacity to ‘be good’ myself.

    In fact, my mother projected her own ‘badness’ that she found intolerable inside herself out onto me and proceeded to spend the 18 years of my childhood ‘punishing’ me for being ‘that bad’.  This process was, I believe, entirely connected to abuse in her own childhood as she had been told her ‘badness’ made her unlovable, but if she could only be ‘good enough’ she would be lovable and loved again.  Something became permanently broken in my mother’s early ‘good-bad’ early forming brain, and it made her into a monster.

    Knowing this about my Borderline mother makes me very curious about Keltner’s book whose very title —  BORN TO BE GOOD — addresses the underlying conflicts my entire childhood was consumed with:  Evil versus Good versus Evil versus Good……..  Every interaction I had with my mother from the time I was born was in reality a communication from her to me about how essentially and fundamentally un-good and totally evil I was.

    The extremes of my mother’s psychosis were so severe that she literally believed I was satan’s child and was not even born as a human being.  I was condemned beyond salvation, though my mother believed through every word and deed she abused me with that she was doing her very super-human best to save me as she battled to accomplish the impossible task of turning me into ‘something good’.

    Keltner’s book is about the best in human social interactions.  I want to know more about this because I certainly have vast personal experience about what the worst in human social interactions can be like.  I want to improve my own ‘jen ratio’.  What might this mean?

    By first translating the broad term ‘happiness’ into the broader term ‘goodness’, Keltner then describes the kinds of minute human interactions that both communicate goodness and build it into self and others.  The term “jen ratio” is the kingpin of his writing    About jen itself Keltner states:

    “…Confucius taught a new way of finding the meaningful life through the cultivation of jen.  A person of jen, Confucius observes, “wishing to establish his own character, also establishes the character of others.”  A person of jen “brings the good things of others to completion and does not bring the bad things of others to completion.”  Jen is felt in that deeply satisfying moment when you bring out the goodness in others.

    “Jen science is based on its own microscopic observations of things not closely examined before.  Most centrally, it is founded on the study of emotions such as compassion, gratitude, awe, embarrassment, and amusement, emotions that transpire between people, bringing the good in each other to completion.  Jen science has examined new human languages [My note:  New to scientific study, ancient to humans] under its microscope – movements of muscles in the face that signal devotion, patterns of touch that signal appreciation, playful tones of the voice that transforms conflicts.  It brings into focus new substances that we are made of, neurotransmitters as well as regions of our nervous system that promote trust, caring, devotion, forgiveness, and play.  It reveals a new way of thinking about the evolution of human goodness, which requires revision of longstanding assumptions that we are solely wired to maximize desire, to compete, and to be vigilant to what is bad.

    “The jen ratio is a lens onto the balance of good and bad in your life.  In the denominator of the jen ratio place recent actions in which someone has brought the bad in others to completion….  Above this, in the numerator of the ratio, tally up the actions that bring the good in others to completion….  As the value of your jen ratio rises, so too does the humanity of your world.

    “Think of the jen ratio as a lens through which you might take stock of your attempt at living a meaningful life.”  (pages 3-5)

    ++++++++++++++++++

    I haven’t seen these two words in Keltner’s book yet, hope and enthusiasm, but this is how I feel as I enter into this new journey.  For all my awarenesses about the differences between how my body-brain-mind-self was formed in comparison to others who benefited from having a safe and secure attachment foundation rather than one formed in, by and for trauma, I enthusiastically hope that by understanding how we ALL have a jen ration operating in our lives I can begin to make my own ration better.

    I will keep you posted (literally!) about my experiences with the information contained within the pages of Keltner’s BORN TO BE GOOD book I was fortunate to discover!

    +++++++++++++++

    +21 RICH NATIONS COMPARED ON CHILD WELL-BEING – U.S. AND U.K. AT THE BOTTOM

    alchemynow2 Comments

    ++++++++++++++++

    Please spend some time reading the UNICEF 2007 Report Card on six measurements of the well-being of children.  The United States and the United Kingdom have total scores at the bottom of the 21 OECD [Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development] industrialized nations included in this study (page 2).

    While every measurement is extremely important, the one that is of greatest concern to me in regard to the well-being particularly of infants and very young children is the finding that the United States rates highest in the percentage of births per 1,000 women

    ages 15-19.  See Report Card page 31, Figure 5.2f.

    This report states this about teenage births:

    “For most girls growing up in an OECD country, the norm today is an extended education, a career, a two income household, delayed childbearing and a small family.   And it is in this context that teenage pregnancy has become a significant problem: giving birth at too young an age is now associated with wide ranging disadvantage for both mother and child – including a greater likelihood of dropping out of school, of having no or low qualifications, of being unemployed or low-paid, and of living in poor housing conditions.   But as always, association is not the same as cause.   Many girls who give birth in their teens have themselves grown up with the kind of poverty and disadvantage that would be likely to have negative consequences whether or not they wait until they are in their twenties before having children.  Becoming pregnant while still a teenager may make these problems worse, but not becoming pregnant will not make them go away.

    Beyond the immediate problem, teenage fertility levels may also serve as an indicator of an aspect of young people’s lives that is otherwise hard to capture.  To a young person with little sense of current well-being – unhappy and perhaps mistreated at home, miserable and under-achieving at school, and with only an unskilled and low-paid job to look forward to – having a baby to love and be loved by, with a small income from benefits and a home of her own, may seem a more attractive option than the alternatives.   A teenager doing well at school and looking forward to an interesting and well-paid career, and who is surrounded by family and friends who have similarly high expectations, is likely to feel that giving birth would de-rail both present well-being and future hopes.

    It is as an approximate measure of what proportion of teenagers fall on which side of this divide that the teenage fertility rates shown in Figure 5.2f may be an especially significant indicator of young people’s well-being.”

    ++++++++++++++++

    I consider these findings also especially significant in light of this blog’s strong emphasis on the critical importance of safe and secure attachments as a foundation of body-brain-mind-self development of people.  Take a look at these findings.  The United States and the United Kingdom appear to be failing miserably on these measures of child well-being and are at the bottom of this combined initial attempt to measure attachment on the national level.

    On page 22, Figure 4.0 shows young people’s family and peer relationships – and an OECD overview is presented in graphic form.  The Report states:  “The quality of children’s relationships is as difficult to measure as it is critical to well-being.  Nonetheless it was considered too important a factor to be omitted altogether and an attempt has therefore been made to measure the quality of ‘family and peer relationships’ using data on family structures, plus children’s own answers to survey questions.”

    ++++

    Among the measurements on behaviors and risk-taking of young people presented beginning on page 26, Figure 5.0, the Report states:   “Any overview of children’s well-being must attempt to incorporate aspects of behaviour which are of concern to both young people themselves and to the society in which they live.   This section therefore brings together the available OECD data on such topics as obesity, substance abuse, violence, and sexual risk-taking.”

    Again, the United States and the United Kingdom are at the very bottom in their total scores on these measurements.  Page 27, Figure 5.1 Overview — Children’s health behavior the United States is at the bottom.  Page 28, Figure 5.1d, the United States has the highest percentage of young people age 13 and 15 who report being overweight.    “…the EU [European Union] Health Commissioner has said:   “Today’s overweight teenagers are tomorrow’s heart attack victims”.”

    “…in most countries young people’s health behaviours do not deviate very far from the average for the OECD as a whole.  The exceptions are Poland, where children’s health behaviours are considerably better than average, and the United States whose overall ranking suffers because of high levels of obesity.”

    ++++++++++++++++

    “The great majority of young people growing up in all OECD countries score themselves above the midpoint on the ‘life satisfaction ladder’.”  Fortunately, United States’ young people are among this majority (page 37).

    An interesting observation in this section of the Report about student agreement with negative statements about personal well-being in regard to feeling ‘out of place’ comes from Japan (page 38):

    “The most striking individual result is the 30% of young people in Japan who agreed with the statement ‘I feel lonely’ – almost three times higher than the next highest-scoring country. Either this reflects a difficulty of translating the question into a different language and culture, or a problem meriting further investigation, or both.”

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    From the Report Card:

    “The true measure of a nation’s standing is how well it attends to its children – their health and safety, their material security, their education and socialization, and their sense of being loved, valued, and included in the families and societies into which they are born.”

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    “When we attempt to measure children’s well-being what we really seek to know is whether children are adequately clothed and housed and fed and protected, whether their circumstances are such that they are likely to become all that they are capable of becoming, or whether they are disadvantaged in ways that make it difficult or impossible for them to participate fully in the life and opportunities of the world around them.   Above all we seek to know whether children feel loved, cherished, special and supported, within the family and community, and whether the family and community are being supported in this task by public policy and resources.

    All families in OECD countries today are aware that childhood is being reshaped by forces whose mainspring is not necessarily the best interests of the child.   At the same time, a wide public in the OECD countries is becoming ever more aware that many of the corrosive social problems affecting the quality of life have their genesis in the changing ecology of childhood.   Many therefore feel that it is time to attempt to re-gain a degree of understanding, control and direction over what is happening to our children in their most vital, vulnerable years.

    That process begins with measurement and monitoring. And it is as a contribution to that process that the Innocenti Research Centre has published this initial attempt at a multi-dimensional overview of child well-being in the countries of the OECD.”  (page 38)

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    Any part of the Innocenti Report Card may be freely reproduced using the following reference:

    UNICEF, Child poverty in perspective: An overview of child well-being in rich countries, Innocenti Report Card 7

    2007 UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, Florence. © The United Nations Children’s Fund, 2007

    Full text and supporting documentation can be downloaded from the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre website.

    “This Report Card provides a comprehensive assessment of the lives and well-being of children and young people in 21 nations of the industrialized world.   Its purpose is to encourage monitoring, to permit comparison, and to stimulate the discussion and development of policies to improve children’s lives.

    The report represents a significant advance on previous titles in this series which have used income poverty as a proxy measure for overall child well-being in the OECD countries.   Specifically, it attempts to measure and compare child well-being under six different headings or dimensions: material well-being, health and safety, education, peer and family relationships, behaviours and risks, and young people’s own subjective sense of well-being.   In all, it draws upon 40 separate indicators relevant to children’s lives and children’s rights (see pages 42 to 45).

    Although heavily dependent on the available data, this assessment is also guided by a concept of child well-being that is in turn guided by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child…. The implied definition of child well-being that permeates the report is one that will also correspond to the views and the experience of a wide public.”

    * The United Kingdom and the United States find themselves in the bottom third of the rankings for five of the six dimensions reviewed  [material well-being, health and safety, education, peer and family relationships, behaviors and risks, and young people’s subjective sense of their circumstances]

    * There is no obvious relationship between levels of child well-being and GDP per capita.  The Czech Republic, for example, achieves a higher overall rank for child well-being than several much wealthier countries including France, Austria, the United States and the United Kingdom

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    SEE ALSO – The United States has been taking internal measurements on our nation’s children’s well-being for over 30 years.

    CHILD WELL-BEING STATISTICAL REPORT, SPECIFIC TO THE UNITED STATES:

    The 2009 Foundation for Child Development — Child and Youth Well-being Index (CWI) Report

    Children and youth live unique lives and as such, at some point, each experiences a range of social conditions.   The Index is comprised of Key Indicators associated with different stages of the life course in the first two decades of life.

    The CWI includes the following 28 Key Indicators organized into seven domains of child well-being in the United States that have been found in numerous social science studies to be related to an overall sense of subjective well-being or satisfaction with life.

    Family Economic Well-Being Domain

    1. Poverty Rate (All Families with Children)

    2. Secure Parental Employment Rate

    3. Median Annual Income (All Families with Children)

    4. Rate of Children with Health Insurance

    Health Domain

    1. Infant Mortality Rate

    2. Low Birth Weight Rate

    3. Mortality Rate (Ages 1-19)

    4. Rate of Children with Very Good or Excellent Health (as reported by parents)

    5. Rate of Children with Activity Limitations (as reported by parents)

    6. Rate of Overweight Children and Adolescents (Ages 6-19)

    Safety/Behavioral Domain

    1. Teenage Birth Rate (Ages 10-17)

    2. Rate of Violent Crime Victimization (Ages 12-19)

    3. Rate of Violent Crime Offenders (Ages 12-17)

    4. Rate of Cigarette Smoking (Grade 12)

    5. Rate of Binge Alcohol Drinking (Grade 12)

    6. Rate of Illicit Drug Use (Grade 12)

    Educational Attainment Domain

    1. Reading Test Scores (Ages 9, 13, and 17)

    2. Mathematics Test Scores (Ages 9, 13, and 17)

    Community Connectedness

    1. Rate of Persons who have Received a High School Diploma (Ages 18-24)

    2. Rate of Youths Not Working and Not in School (Ages 16-19)

    3. Rate of Pre-Kindergarten Enrollment (Ages 3-4)

    4. Rate of Persons who have Received a Bachelor’s Degree (Ages 25-29)

    5. Rate of Voting in Presidential Elections (Ages 18-20)

    Social Relationships Domain

    1. Rate of Children in Families Headed by a Single Parent

    2. Rate of Children who have Moved within the Last Year (Ages 1-18)

    Emotional/Spiritual Well-Being Domain

    1. Suicide Rate (Ages 10-19)

    2. Rate of Weekly Religious Attendance (Grade 12)

    3. Percent who report Religion as Being Very Important (Grade 12)

    Taken together, changes in the performance of these 28 Key Indicators and the seven domains into which they are grouped provide a view of the changes in the overall well-being of children and youth in American society.   Each domain represents an important area that affects well-being/quality of life: economic well-being, health, safety/behavior, educational attainment, community connectedness (participation in major social institutions), social relationships, and emotional/spiritual well-being.   The performance of the nation on each indicator also reflects the strength of America’s social institutions: its families, schools, and communities.   All of these Key Indicators either are well-being indicators that measure outcomes for children and youths or surrogate indicators of the same.

    SEE ALSO:

    THE CHILD AND YOUTH WELL-BEING INDEX (CWI)

    Foundation for Child Development and the CWI

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    Check out this article:

    “How Is the Economic Recession Affecting U.S. Children?

    The 2009 Child Well-being Index”

    by Eric Zuehlke

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    +ATTACHMENT: SMART AND STUPID RESEARCH

    alchemynowLeave a comment

    ++++

    Personally I am tired of wandering around in the darkness wondering why I am not a particularly HAPPY person with some kind of an active, exciting, thrilling, fulfilling life full of social connections and emotional well-being.

    Sure, my childhood sucked.  But, so what?  “Too bad, so sad, be glad you are grown up now and can make any choice you want to make about yourself in your life.  Get over it!  Get on with it!  Quit feeling sorry for yourself!  Your life is what you make of it.  Still having problems?  You must have bad genes.”

    My response is, “Oh, yeah?  Says who?  What can ‘the research’ tell us?”

    ++++

    My sister sent me an interesting link the other day that presents information directly connected to what I wrote in my December 26, 2009 post where I mentioned that I suspect my social-emotional brain shares some characteristics with autism.  Take a look at this Yahoo news article about research coming from a study of school children:

    Texas study confirms lower autism rate in Hispanics

    “For every 10 percent increase in Hispanic schoolchildren in a given district, the researchers found, the prevalence of autism decreased by 11 percent, while the prevalence of kids with intellectual disabilities or learning disabilities increased by 8 percent and 2 percent, respectively.

    The reverse was seen as the percentage of non-Hispanic white children in a district increased, with the prevalence of autism rising by 9 percent and the prevalence of intellectual and learning disabilities falling by 11 percent and 2 percent.

    The observed relationships remained for Hispanic children after the researchers accounted for key socioeconomic and health care provider factors, although “urbanicity” of a district, median household income, and number of health care professionals did explain the increased percentage of autism among districts with more non-Hispanic white kids — a finding the researchers call “curious.”

    Whether lower autism prevalence in Hispanics is attributable to other, still-unexamined socioeconomic, health care delivery or biological factors “remains a crucial area for further research,” Palmer and colleagues conclude.”

    SOURCE: American Journal of Public Health, December 2009.

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    Well, will you look at that.  All that time, effort and money spent on this research study and did they think to include a measurement of what matters most?  Did they include any kind of questions about size of immediate family, number of siblings, size of the dwelling, or amount of contact with extended family?

    I can’t access the full research article online, but here’s what its abstract says:

    Am J Public Health. 2009 Dec 17. [Epub ahead of print]

    Explaining Low Rates of Autism Among Hispanic Schoolchildren in Texas.

    Palmer RF, Walker T, Mandell D, Bayles B, Miller CS.

    University of Texas Health Science Center.

    “In data from the Texas Educational Agency and the Health Resources and Services Administration, we found fewer autism diagnoses in school districts with higher percentages of Hispanic children. Our results are consistent with previous reports of autism rates 2 to 3 times as high among non-Hispanic Whites as among Hispanics. Socioeconomic factors failed to explain lower autism prevalence among Hispanic schoolchildren in Texas. These findings raise questions: Is autism underdiagnosed among Hispanics? Are there protective factors associated with Hispanic ethnicity?”

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    Researchers are evidently content to conclude their research with such statements as “this is a curious finding,” while they continue to ask their unanswered questions like, “Are there protective factors associated with Hispanic ethnicity?”  There is no reason I can think of to expect that degrees of human attachment don’t affect genes for autism just like it does for schizophrenia, suicide, depression, PTSD and other ‘disorders’ of the body-brain.

    I have lived for the last ten years in a small town in southeastern Arizona on the Mexican-American border line.  The fence lies right behind my back yard.  99.9% of this town’s community is Hispanic.  Every family I know has a lot of children.  The children are cherished.  Every family has extended ties to extended family.  Their median income is low.  Many children often share a bedroom.  I have watched them as they grow from infanthood in the closest of interactions with one another within all age groups.  They are social and they are connected to one another.  Nobody is alone.

    Duh, researchers.  Do you think that MAYBE the research findings might have to do with safe and secure attachment that builds for these people an excellently formed early social-emotional brain so that autism is not as likely to appear among their culture?

    Is there some kind of STUPID gene operating among researchers that prevents them from bothering to consider collecting what is the most obvious information that would answer their questions?  Or is there some kind of implicit agreement among researchers to keep skipping the gathering of the most important attachment related information so they can keep on doing more and more stupid research without gaining any true understanding – because it gives them job security?

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    I know this pattern exists.  The same kind of researcher ‘stupid gene’ operated during the South African – Kenyan youth research project on the consequences of trauma.  Follow this link for a description of the kinds of information the researchers collected on the 2000 teenagers in their study.  Did they include any standardized, accurate and useful assessment of attachment relationships among their subjects?  Of course not!  How could they justify spending more and more money on research to answer the puzzling results they found?

    “The most striking finding was the discrepancy in the rate of PTSD between South African and Kenyan adolescents in the context of equally high rates of trauma exposure (and even higher for specific types of trauma in the Kenyan sample).  The lower rate of PTSD in Kenya adolescents is difficult to explain.”  Seedat et al, 2004, p 173

    Note the “difficult to explain” statement.  Read for yourself, “Give me more money so I can use my stupid genes and do more research.  I want to keep my job.”

    These researchers noted at the conclusion of their massive project that for all the money spent and for all the extensive effort they put into their research, the were left unable to

    “…account for higher rates of PTSD in the South African students, despite higher rates of exposure in Kenyan youth to both sexual assault and physical assault by a family member, as these are traumas that are likely to be repeated.  Further, these traumas were most likely to e associated with a PTSD full-symptom diagnosis.  This discrepancy is one for which we do not have an adequate explanation.”  Seedat et al, 2004, p 174

    Obviously these Kenyan children were not necessarily safe and secure in their own home, so how might we consider that attachment information might help explain the difference in outcome between these two groups of extremely traumatized youth?

    No standardized or valid attachment assessment tool exists.  These researchers do not seem to be bothered by its absence.  Even though they did not use the word ‘attachment’ in their research conclusions, these researchers did ‘wonder’ if the patterns of differences they observed might be related to the long history of cultural disruption that South Africa has endured in contrast to the retained cultural integrity of Kenya.

    Can degrees of safe and secure versus unsafe and insecure attachment be related to degrees of cultural integrity?  The findings of both of these two research studies point in that direction.  Because neither study contained any (nonexistent) standardized collection of attachment information, both studies are left simply pointing in a “a direction for further research.”  Of course this doesn’t bother the researchers.  It guarantees their job security.

    ++++

    The hole in the bucket of both of these studies validates my thinking.  It is the degree of safe and secure attachment that an infant-child has in its beginning with its mothering caregiver that most influences how a person’s genes manifest themselves as the very young body-brain develops.  The protective factors against any so-called ‘mental illness’, be it depression, aspects of autism, or PTSD are activated very early in a person’s development.

    Looking at the end result of degrees of attachment security, even within school age children, tells researchers nothing about how their ‘subjects’ got to be the way they are.  I want to know, “How safe and securely attached were these children to their mothers and their other earliest caregivers from the time they were born – as their body-brain developed in interaction with the experiences the little one had in its environment?”

    In my thinking, cultural integrity protects mothers and therefore protects the infants who benefit in their earliest, fundamental development from safe and secure attachment.  As the early body-brain is forming, information from the environment has already told an individual’s genes how to respond and adapt.  Although safe and secure attachment is certainly not guaranteed to children like those in Kenya, not EVEN in their home, the underlying structure of their body-brain seems to have included residency factors that protect them from PTSD.

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    Without trying to explain the research today that describes the physiological impact that early stress has on development (notes for a lot of this research can be found HERE), I will simply present some links here today related to research that is showing how child abuse changes genetic expression:

    Child Abuse Causes Damage at Genetic Level

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    Child abuse ‘impacts stress gene’

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    Infant Abuse Linked To Early Experience, Not Genetics

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    Gene protects adults abused as children from depression

    Influence of child abuse on adult depression: moderation by the corticotropin-releasing hormone receptor gene.

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    The Neurobiology of Child Abuse and Neglect

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    Do Genetics and Childhood Environment Combine to Pose Risk for Adult PTSD?

    Association of FKBP5 polymorphisms and childhood abuse with risk of posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms in adults.

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    Selected Publications of the Members of the Attachment Parenting International Research Group

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    And also, the results of a Google search for child abuse brain development

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    Researchers need to come up with an accurate way to measure degrees of safe and secure versus unsafe and insecure attachment and add this measurement tool into the design of all research about the affects that trauma has on human beings throughout the lifespan.

    Every research study being done that does not include a measure of degrees of attachment is missing the critical piece of information about how attachment creates resiliency factors that protect humans from ongoing problems related to trauma experiences.

    All funding channels that support trauma-related research need to mandate that an assessment of the quality of human attachment be included.  Of course, this means that attachment patterns need to be taken most seriously as a primary factor that profoundly influences trauma research results.  Let’s do smart rather than stupid research!  Find a way to accurately measure degree and quality of human attachment – NOW!

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    Please note:  I will be taking a break from the blog until Wednesday, January 6, 2010.  Best wishes for a Happy New Year 2010!

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