Tag: triggers

+PRIMARY A-B-Cs — ATTACHMENT-BRAIN-CAREGIVER

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To begin to understand my mother, how she treated me, and how her treatment of me changed me, I need to understand the most primary A-B-Cs – The patterns of Attachment our forming Brain had with our earliest Caregiver formed the foundation of our brain from which our self-in-the-world originates.

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Babies are born with the basic ‘floor plan’ of their brain already laid out.  All the regions of every human’s brain are in the same place, just as our other organs and limbs are.  A baby is also born with billions more neurons, or brain nerve cells, than will actually be needed in the brain building stages that follow birth.

Genetics in interaction with the uterine experience have already influenced early brain development before birth.  If the infant has not suffered damage-changes within its mother, at birth it has more than enough neurons for what comes next.  I think about my son, who is soon to be 25.  He was a Lego maniac from the first time he picked up one of those bright plastic little pieces at the age of three.  He eventually ended up with a foot locker packed with thousands and thousands of individual pieces (which his mother is requiring him to keep forever).

If he was even now in a Lego playing mood, he would find enough variety and type of piece to create just about anything his imagination could design.  Tear them apart, make something entirely different.  Whatever pieces he might not use in one design can be kept in reserve, recombined, used later, or never used at all.  But he has the choice of keeping them all, and keep them he does.

An infant’s brain growth and development does not work in quite this same way.  Humans are born with far more than enough neurons, and most of them are not specified in the beginning as to what region of the brain they will go to or what kind of neuron they will turn into according to what job they will eventually perform.  This is because brain building is a flexible process.  While it is intended that some of the overly abundant neurons will die, the plan is that as many of them as possible find their way into use as a best possible brain is built.

The kind of interactions and the nature of experiences an infant has within the world it was born into direct the process of body-brain building so that the resulting brain will be adapted in the best way possible for the conditions of the world the infant was born into.  This adaptive brain building process is in full motion as soon as an infant is born.

As I have said, humans are designed to receive, understand and respond to signals from within the environment in the form of communications.  A growing human brain detects signals and builds itself in partnership with the environment itself, an environment that is presented to the infant through the kinds of interactions it has with its earliest mothering caregiver.

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Most of us probably think of a brain as a wrinkled, soft, squishy organ that we would not want to hold in our hands.  Because it is probably the most important organ we have, Siegel’s following description of it might give us a better idea about what we are talking about:

“The brain has an estimated one hundred billion neurons, which are collectively over two million miles long.  Each neuron has an average of then thousand connections that directly link itself to other neurons.  Thus there are thought to be about one million billion of these connections, making it “the most complex structure, natural or artificial, on earth.” [he gives a reference here to Green et al, 1998, page 427]  A neuron sends an electrical impulse down its long axons; this releases a neurotransmitter at the space at the end, called a “synapse,” which then excites or inhibits the downstream neuron.  A synapse is the connection that functionally links neurons to one another.  Because of the spider-web-like interconnections, activation of one neuron can influence an average of ten thousand neurons at the receiving ends!  The number of possible “on-off” patterns of neuronal firing is immense, estimated as a staggering ten times ten one million times (ten to the millionth power).”  (page 13 in the writings of Dr. Daniel J. Siegel in his book The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (The Guilford Press, 1999))

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The firing patterns in a mother’s brain specifically activate similar firing patterns in her infant’s brain as all the adaptive neurons within it are ‘learning’ what to do in relationship to being alive in a body in the world.  As an infant grows, and its newly forming brain gets up and running, the infant will be able to both receive the signals its caregiver is sending accurately, but will also get better and better at sending its own signals back to her.

A safe and securely attached infant will have its own signals received accurately by its mother and as she sends them back to the infant through am accurate mirroring process, the infant begins to clarify and BECOME ITS OWN SELF in the world.  This signaling happens with patterns and rhythms that are instructing the infant’s neurons where to go, what job to do, how to link them together into circuits and networks during this process that is designed to create brain.

An infant is born with a brain blueprint, but it is the experiences it has with its early mothering caregiver that make brain building happen according to emotional information the mother gives to her infant during the critical development stages her infant’s brain goes through.  Brain building happens in predictable stages.  Just as a Jacuzzi cannot be placed in a sky scraper’s pent house before all the steel structural components have been put into place, a baby’s brain cannot ‘think’ in the way we think about thinking from the start of its life.  A brain has to be built that an infant-child can do its thinking with.

The way an infant receives signals from its mother happen through its basic senses in the same way we receive signals from our environment during our entire lifetime.  It might be hard to believe, but at birth an infant already knows its mother.  It knows the feel of her, the rhythms of her, the sound of her and is tuned to her smell and her touch from the moment it is born.  If a newborn is removed at birth from its mother it will experience grief detectable in the physiological responses its body will demonstrate.  Foster and adoptive parents can be trained to recognize the ‘symptoms’ of a newborn’s grieving stages as it passes through and completes them.

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Beginning even before birth communication signaling between and infant and its mother is already taking place.  It is through the increasingly more complex abilities an infant comes to have, through the brain development it experiences in interaction with the mother, that the brain takes its genetic potential complete with the mechanisms that tell the genes what to do, combines it with information coming into the infant from its environment, and grows all the basic brain regions and the operational connections through them.

This early brain growth happens as mother-infant communication signaling involves emotion.  It is through emotional interactions in this dyad, this connection between the two – mother and infant – through smell, touch, rhythm (prosody or the music of speech complete with pitch, loudness and tone), and most importantly through facial expressions that human brains are extremely well prepared to receive, recognize and respond back to.  Nature has specifically designed women-mothers to participate appropriately in these early required emotional interactions with infants.

Siegel writes (in the above mentioned book):

“The primary ingredient of secure attachment experiences is the pattern of emotional communication between child and caregiver….The way the mind establishes meaning – the way it places value or significance on experience – is closely linked to social interactions.  This connection between meaning and interpersonal experience occurs because these two processes appear to be mediated via the same neural circuits responsible for initiating emotional processes.”  (page 6)

The foundation of an infant’s initial brain region growth and development happens through emotional communication with its mothering caregiver.  Done ‘best’ in secure attachment environments, a ‘best world possible’ emotionally regulated brain is built in, by and for a benevolent world.  In turn, a dysregulated, jumbled, mis-qued disorganized, disoriented pattern of instability, lack of predictability, without safe and secure emotional attachment experiences builds a very different infant brain that is adapted to a malevolent world.

All the early infant brain building that goes on is directed by the nature of its early emotional caregiver experiences.  The adaptive, growing brain slides its neurons around, tells them where to go, what to do, how to connect to one anther, where to build pathways, roads and superhighways in response to these early emotional interactions.  It is the critically important emotional-social area of the brain that grows first through these caregiver experiences.  It is this area of the brain, once built, that will primarily orchestrate how a person is in the world for their lifetime.  Remembering the importance of Siegel’s words from yesterday’s post about this area of the brain, I repeat them here:

“The centrally located “limbic system” … plays a central role in coordinating the activity of higher and lower brain structures.  The limbic regions are thought to mediate emotion, motivation, and goal-directed behavior.  Limbic structures permit the integration of a wide range of basic mental processes, such as the appraisal of meaning, the processing of social experience (called “social cognition”), and the regulation of emotion.  This region also houses the medial temporal lobe (toward the middle, just to the sides of the temples), including the hippocampus, which is thought to play a central role in consciously accessible forms of memory.

The brain as a whole functions as an interconnected and integrating system of subsystems.  Although each element contributes to the functioning of the whole, regions such as the limbic system, with extensive input and output pathways linking widely distributed areas in the brain, may be primarily responsible for integrating brain activity.

When we look to understand how the mind develops, we need to examine how the brain comes to regulate its own processes.  Such self-regulation appears to be carried out in large part by these limbic regions.”  (pages 10-11 – bolding is mine)

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If an infant’s earliest mothering-caregiver interactions happen through safe and secure attachment experiences, this area of the brain will organize, integrate and regulate emotion, social interaction, meaning and activity for a ‘best’ world.  In unsafe and insecure environments, this area of the brain will grow itself a different way.

The nature of these early experiences create patterns in the brain that appear as representations of experience, and these ‘mental models’ expand through associations and connections – or through patterns of dissociations and disconnections — to affect how a person is in the world.  Our emotional regulatory abilities, our mental processes, our states of mind, our ability to transition between states of mind, the way we remember ourselves in the world, are all connected in their roots to how our infant emotional brain was formed at the time of our beginning.

Sigel:

“…different mental processes are organized within a state of mind.  These states allow disparate [fundamentally different] activities of the brain to become cohesive at a given moment in time.”  (page 7)

Through our earliest mothering-caregiver emotional experiences, as this area of our infant brain is forming, the trajectory our self-in-the-world will take is determined and set into motion.  Understanding how early infant attachment experiences build our brain gives us an accurate way to look at our self and others in the world as we come to understand the fundamental and profound affect these early experiences have on forming the regions, patterns, circuits and operation of our core brain areas.

In cases such as my mother’s, I can begin to understand that who she was on the adult end of her development cannot be disconnected from how she was formed to operate in the world from her beginnings.  Her brain, as does all of ours, formed itself in response to the kinds of mothering-caregiver interactions she had and did not have.  Obviously, her brain did not form in the ‘best way possible’ for the ‘best world possible’.  Her brain formed in adjustment to deprivation-trauma.

My mother’s case is an extreme one.  Yet, again, we are talking about degrees of deprivation-trauma and degrees of ability to adapt to it.  Once we begin to understand the power safe and secure early attachment has to form a ‘best brain’ we can also begin to understand how degrees of insecure, unsafe attachment experiences change the growing infant brain’s foundation into ‘something else’.

My mother’s brain was not built by safe and secure attachment in a benevolent world.  My mother became a ‘something else’.  No doubt about it.  I know this because I am her daughter.

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+EARLY TRAUMA MEMORY CHANGES ‘THE BODY’ WE DO ALL OUR REMEMBERING WITH

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It is not possible to talk about how we developed into the people we are today without talking about memory.  It is not possible to talk about our Trauma Altered Development without first considering how all our experiences were processed by and stored within our body as memory that built us from our beginning.

Experience forms us.  If this were not true, early infant-childhood trauma would not have the absolute power to change our development that it does.  We cannot talk about how a human being develops or how it remembers itself in the world without thinking in terms of early attachment experiences.  Memory is not only built into the body-brain, it builds the body-brain that does the remembering.

I am including information in today’s post written by Dr. Daniel J. Siegel in his book The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (The Guilford Press, 1999).  Please see the scanned image below of his chart about the types and characteristics of memory.

It is much easier to think about ‘memory’ in terms of this single, simple word.  But there is nothing simple about memory.  Memory is what our DNA is made of.  We carry genetic memory within us from the instant we are conceived.  From that instant our experiences within the environment begin to tell our DNA about the conditions of the world we find ourselves within so that we can adjust ourselves in every way possible to survive within the conditions of the world we are being made in and for.

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All of the terms that Siegel uses in his chart (below) describe different kinds of memory processes.  Siegel says:

“From the first days of life, infants perceive the environment around them.” (page 28)

More accurately, humans “perceive the environment around them” — and within them — from the instant of their conception.  Their DNA has already begun the process of adapting within the conditions of a person’s earliest world.  What Siegel is saying here is that the postnatal infant, once it has been born and now lives independently in a body outside of its mother, continues to process experience in the form of memory.  Memory happens at the point an individual encounters the world outside of its own skin, takes information about the world and uses it to create an increasingly advanced ‘self in the world’ (which of course includes the body).

Experience and early growth and development of an infant-child’s entire body, INCLUDING the brain, are intimately, fundamentally and absolutely intertwined and interconnected.  Siegel writes:

“At birth, the infant’s brain is the most undifferentiated organ in the body.  Genes and early experience shape the way neurons connect to one another and thus form the specialized circuits that give rise to mental processes.  In this way, experiences early in life have a tremendously important impact on the developing mind.  The differentiation of circuits within the brain involves a number of processes including (1) the growth of axons into local and widely distributed regions; (2) the establishment of new and more extensive synaptic connections between neurons; (3) the growth of myelin along the lengths of neurons, which increases the speed of nerve conduction and thus…enhances the linkage among synaptically connected nerve cells; (4) the modification of receptor density and sensitivity at the postsynaptic “receiving” cell making connections more efficient; and (5) the balance of all of these factors with the dying away or pruning of neurons and synapses resulting from disuse or toxic conditions such as chronic stress….Experiences lead to an increased activity of neurons, which enhances the creation of new synaptic connections.  This experience-dependent brain growth and differentiation is thus referred to as an “activity-dependent” process.”  (page 14)

The entire process described in the above paragraph is how memories make us.  This is not an arbitrary choice.  Memory makes everyone through this same interactive experience-memory-body making process.  Looked at in this way, who and what we are on every level of our existence is a result of how we interact in our biological-physiological very real body with the experiences of our life within the environments we pass through — from conception to death.

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MIND is not a tangible ‘thing.’  Brain is not MIND.  MIND cannot operate separately from the physiological body that gives rise to it and informs it for a person’s lifetime.  The entire foundation for our growth and development from birth happens through our earliest interactions with our attachment caregivers.  If our earliest experiences are unstable, toxic, traumatic and malevolent, the direction of our growth and development will be changed.

Siegel writes:

“Interpersonal experiences continue to influence how our minds function throughout life, but the major structures – especially those that are responsible for self-regulation – appear to be formed in the early years.  It is for this reason that we will look closely at the early years of life to understand the ways in which the mind develops and comes to regulate its own processes.”  (pages 14-15)

Siegel proposes “…that the mind develops at the interface of neurophysiological processes and interpersonal relationships.  Relationship experiences have a dominant influence on the brain because the circuits responsible for social perception are the same as or tightly linked to those that integrate the important functions controlling the creation of meaning, the regulation of bodily states, the modulation of emotion, the organization of memory, and the capacity for interpersonal communication.  Interpersonal experience thus plays a special organizing role in determining the development of brain structure early in life and the ongoing emergence of brain function throughout the lifespan.”  (page 21)

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It is not possible to consider human growth and development without considering the kinds of early attachment experiences an infant has with its caregivers.  In my thinking, the kind of interpersonal signaling that Siegel describes here even governs our conception and all our interactive experiences from the time that conception happens.

It is here that I have to say that because I am a survivor of early and long term severe abuse trauma that caused me to change in my development, I begin to take issue with Siegel’s thinking.   I do not have the luxury of taking the kinds of liberties in my thinking that nearly all non-traumatized people can afford to take.

I have found that research-writers frequently make a giant leap between ‘infant’ and ‘child’ in their thinking and this bothers me.  That is why I use the term ‘infant-child’ most often in my own writing.  An ‘infant’ is not the same as a ‘child’.  There is a universe of critical developmental impact and room for Trauma Altered Development to occur between these two stages of being.  Siegel makes that giant leap here as he continues:

“One fundamental finding relevant for developing this “interpersonal neurobiology” of the mind comes from numerous studies across a wide variety of cultures:  Attachment is based on collaborative communication.  Secure attachment involves contingent communication, in which the signals of one person are directly responded to by the other.  Sounds simple.  But why is this type of reciprocal communication so important?  Why doesn’t it happen in all families?  During early development, a parent and child “tune in” to each other’s feelings and intentions in a dance of connection that establishes the earliest form of communication.  Mary Ainsworth’s early studies suggest that healthy, secure attachment requires that the caregiver have the capacity to perceive and respond to the child’s mental state.” (page 21)

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“Collaborative communication” even happens inside our own bodies as our cells signal one another.  It happens on our molecular levels as our DNA interacts with the environment we live in.  Without collaborative communication life cannot continue.  Life happens on its fundamental levels through this “dance of connection” that Siegel is describing.  These signaling patterns and the information that they transmit form our entire body on all levels, not ‘just’ the brain.  Our brain, as a part of our Central Nervous System (CNS) processes all the signaling information going on within our entire body.

Siegel states that neuroscience can now describe

“…the mechanisms underlying how these early reciprocal communication experiences are remembered and how they allow a child’s brain to develop a balanced capacity to regulate emotions, to feel connected to other people, to establish an autobiographical story, and to move out into the world with a sense of vitality.  The capacity to reflect on mental states, both of the self and of others, emerges from within attachment relationships that foster such processes.  These patterns of communication literally shape the structure of the child’s developing brain.  These important early interpersonal experiences are encoded within various forms of memory.”  (pages 21-22, bolding is mine)

These earliest attachment experiences do not ‘just’ form the child’s developing brain.  They contribute to the formation of the entire body including the nervous system and the immune system because they are communicating to the growing body information in the form of memories about either the benevolent or malevolent environment the infant-child is preparing to live in for the rest of its life.

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My thinking continues to deviate from Siegel’s as he begins in his writing to specifically discuss the impact of memory on an infant-child’s development.  I have to read between his lines and begin to translate what he is saying through the filter of my own experiences from birth.  Siegel states:

“Memory is more than what we can consciously recall about events from the past.  A broader definition is that memory is the way past events affect future function.  Memory is thus the way the brain is affected by experience and then subsequently alters its future responses.  In this view, the brain experiences the world and encodes this interaction in a manner that alters future ways of responding.  What we shall soon see is that this definition of memory allows us to understand how past events can directly shape how and what we learn, even though we may have no conscious recollections of those events.  Our earliest experiences shape our ways of behaving, including patterns of relating to others, without our ability to recall consciously when these first learning experiences occurred.”  (page 24 – I added underlining to what Siegel had italicized)

I do not disagree with Siegel’s words, but from my point of view, his thinking is too limited to apply to what I, as a Trauma Altered Development survivor, most need to understand.  DNA is memory.  DNA has recorded within it all the information needed to remember how to make a body from a single cell.  DNA contains the record of what we need to know to be built from conception into a human being rather than into a leaf, a turnip or a toad.

It is not ‘just’ the brain that “experiences the world and encodes this interaction in a manner that alters future ways of responding.”  Our brain does not pursue a course of development that is in any way separate from the ongoing development of our entire body down to its basic molecular operations.  Experience is translated by the mechanisms that tell our DNA what to do every step of the way.  I now have to consider the research discovering and describing epigenetic changes has happened since the 1999 publication of this book.

While Siegel says “this definition of memory allows us to understand how past events can directly shape how and what we learn, even though we may have no conscious recollections of those events” I must expand my thinking to include how “past events” in the form of memories build the entire body.  I have to expand my concept of “learning” to include the learning that is contained within our DNA itself, within the mechanisms that tell our DNA what to do, within the cells of our body that signal one another and receive signals from the larger environment, and within our entire body that contains a brain that eventually grows and develops an ability to inform our mind.

Because I grew and developed from birth in a malevolent environment that influenced my development on all my levels except the fundamental DNA I was conceived with, I cannot take for granted that any of my ensuing development post-birth was not affected by the influence of trauma, and therefore altered.

The only way I can begin to truly understand myself in the world is to begin to understand that trauma and the memory of trauma built my entire body in the first place, and this trauma-formed (trauma in-formed) ‘remembering body built from trauma memory’ is itself the one that I remember every memory with.  Every memory I have, conscious or not, happens within this trauma changed body.

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Siegel:

“In a direct way, experience shapes the structure of the brain.”  (page 24)

Add to this, in a direct way experience shapes the structure of the body itself.

Siegel:

“The infant brain has an overabundance of neurons with relatively few synaptic connections at birth, compared to the highly differentiated and interconnected set of connections that will be established in the first few years of life.  Experience and genetic information will determine to a large extent how those connections are established.  Memory utilizes the processes by which chemical alterations strengthen associations among neurons for short-term encoding and actually activate the genetic machinery required for the establishment of new synaptic connections for longterm memory storage.”  (page 25 – bolding is mine:  I suspect trauma interruptions in the process lead to dissociation)

Experience interacts with our genetic information.  They do not operate separately or independently.  Human beings are created to be adaptable creatures within the realm of what is possible for each of us as individual members of our species.  At its most fundamental levels, all these interactions are stored within our body as memory, and from our beginning these memories are stored as implicit memory that, according to Siegel,

“…involves parts of the brain that do not require conscious processing during encoding or retrieval.  When implicit memory is retrieved, the neural net profiles that are reactivated involve circuits in the brain that are a fundamental part of our everyday experience of life:  behaviors, emotions, and images.  These implicit elements form part of the foundation for our subjective sense of ourselves:  We act, feel, and imagine without recognition of the influence of past experience on our present reality.”  (page 29 – bolding is mine)

People who do not have a body that developed, grew and formed in a malevolent environment of trauma have a different body than does an early traumatized survivor.  The differences in the kinds of early experiences between these two groups formed different memories into the body that will then be the body that remembers everything else in their life time.  That “we act, feel, and imagine without recognition of the influence of past experience on our present reality” includes everything about our self in the world as determined through our earliest caregiving experiences in the world that built us.

People who did not experience Trauma Altered Development do not have to concern themselves with how their past experiences influenced their present reality.  They can roll on down the road of their lives having been built in a ‘good enough’ benevolent world.  Those of us who suffered severe maltreatment during our formative stages will experience the impact of those traumas within the very fiber of our body in which we live our lives.

Nearly all people who experienced Trauma Altered Development have experienced adulthoods that are less than optimal – and most of us eventually are told that we have ‘symptoms’ that place us in some ‘dysfunctional’ category or another.  NONE of us have been told the facts that I just outlined above.  NONE of us have been told that it is not only the terribly harmful things that were done to us that are our problem, not the memory of these experiences that we might or might not consciously remember that is our problem, but that it is the body we live in that was itself built BY THE EXPERIENCES OF TRAUMA we endured and changed as a consequence – through which we live our life and remember everything else with for the rest of our life – that has made us into a different kind of person than non-early-traumatized people are.

This is what Siegel is not telling me.  Severe trauma so changes us in our development that we become what Teicher’s group calls ‘evolutionarily altered’ beings.  I want to know what that means, because I know that without having had these human resiliency factors that allowed me to transform trauma memory from birth into a body that could survive, I would not be here at all.

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from page 33, "The Developing Mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are," by Daniel J. Siegel

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

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+GIVE US THE FACTS SO WE CAN BUILD OUR BETTER LIVES – NOW!

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We had to negotiate our development through treacherous waters from the time we were born.  We deserve to learn how to negotiate our way through the calmer ones now.

Yes, the changes that happened to us through our Trauma Altered Development in our malevolent infant-childhoods can continue to cascade into bigger and bigger problems in our adulthoods, but I believe a big part of OUR problem is that we find no one around us that truly understands what these changes really mean in our lives, how they affect us in real-time, or how we can begin to live a life of increased well-being AS the changed people we are.

We have to change the track of our thinking about our situation from beginning to end so we can find solutions that truly and helpfully apply to US.  It is within our power as survivors, with the help of accurate research that applies specifically to us, to do so.

From Teicher’s article:

“In our hypothesis, postnatal neglect or other maltreatment serves to elicit a cascade of stress responses that organizes the brain to develop along a specific pathway selected to facilitate reproductive success and survival in a world of deprivation and strife.  This pathway, however, is costly as it is associated with an increased risk of developing serious medical and psychiatric disorders and is unnecessary and maladaptive in a more benign environment.”

Article posted yesterday is here:  *SYMTPOMS: 120909 Scan of Teicher’s Research – Trauma Altered Development Paper

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In further consideration of the word ‘symptom’ it was important for me to realize that the word itself is only talking about ‘happenings’ within the body.  The subjective report we give to ourselves and others about what it is like to be in-with a body is a report of how we experience what happens to us.

Main Entry: hap·pen

Function: intransitive verb

Inflected Form(s): hap·pened; hap·pen·ing \ˈhap-niŋ, ˈha-pə-\

Etymology: Middle English, from hap

Date: 14th century

1 : to occur by chance —often used with it <it so happens I’m going your way>
2 : to come into being or occur as an event, process, or result <mistakes will happen>
3 : to do, encounter, or attain something by or as if by chance <I happen to know the answer>
4 a : to meet or discover something by chance <happened upon a system that worked — Richard Corbin> b : to come or go casually : make a chance appearance <he might happen by at any time>
5 : to come especially by way of injury or harm

I could possibly accept that what happened to me during my extremely abusive infant-childhood of trauma happened to me by chance, but in reference to the work of Dr. Martin Teicher’s research group (as contained in the above link), how my little body changed in its development in interaction with this trauma did NOT happen to me by chance.

Teicher’s work clearly anticipates what I believe future research will show, that how a human infant-child changes in its development within a malevolent early world does not happen to it by chance.  The changes that we experience are evolutionarily connected to the history of resiliency factors possible within our species that allowed us to ‘go on being’ within world environments that were far from good, benign or benevolent ones.

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When I began my own research in my attempt to understand how what happened to me as my mother abused me caused things to happen within me in my early development as a consequence, I first encountered neuroscientific writings that described what seemed to be area of damage after area of damage in my brain-body-mind-self.  The picture that began to appear and form itself about these happenings became bleaker and grimmer the more I studied.  It wasn’t until I discovered the work of Teicher’s research group that I finally found hope.  When I found this research it was as if a brilliant light suddenly turned on that allowed me to begin to understand the entire big picture in an entirely different way.

The article at the above link was published in 2003, and does not directly discuss epigenetic changes because that research is just beginning to clarify how early trauma during infant-child development changes how our genes express themselves.  Epigenetics is a new and rich field of study.  It is also a critical one that will eventually allow us to understand that nature has clear and direct mandates and intentions about how to survive in a malevolent world that epigenetic processes signal to our little body on its most basic molecular, genetic level.  This new information will further inform our understandings about what happens during early trauma that allows a growing body to adapt within malevolent environments through epigenetic forces.

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I believe that researchers who continue to pursue serious considerations of what happens during Trauma Altered Development will find that all these changes happen according to preestablished patterns of possibility within a human infant-child.  These changes represent our species’ range of possible resiliency factors.  I believe researchers will eventually discover how each and every one of the changes we experience are directly connected to the operation of our immune system.

Our immune system, operating down to our most basic cellular level, is involved with all our defense, protection and healing processes.  These process are anything but random.  The end goal of immune system actions is always about keeping us alive – either within the best or within the worst environments we happen to be living in.

I believe there are underlying patterns through which Trauma Altered Development happens during infant-childhood.  They are not willy-nilly.  They are not random.  The processes that occur can be detected, and the wisdom of an adapted, altered, and trauma-adjusted body will eventually not only be understood in terms of natural physiological wisdom, but will also be able to be predicted.

I also unfortunately do not believe that it is in the best interests of our current medical model to channel the kind of support into Trauma Altered Development that we need in our adult lifetime to make the best use possible of the information that this arena of research could provide to us about what happened to us because of early trauma and maltreatment, how that trauma changed us, and what we can best do about it today in our lives.  We are left down here at the grassroots level to explore our own reality.

While we might not have the power to alter current directions in research, we do have the power to rethink our own experience of being alive in one of these trauma changed bodies.  ANYTHING that we might report to our self as a ‘symptom’ can be re-thought in terms of its connection to the resiliency factors that allowed us to survive.

Research concerns itself with what is common among people on the larger level.  We each live in our body in a very personal way.  What is happening to us in our body and in our life HAPPENS because of what was done to us and how those happenings caused our changes to happen!  Teicher’s article refers to “a cascade of neurobiological events” that happens because “early severe stress and maltreatment” produced them.

I think again about Galileo’s brilliant work with the physics of motion.  Something that falls increases in speed the further if falls.  Cascades, like water cascading over Niagara Falls, involve this kind of action in motion.  Once our body in infant-childhood began to make adjustments to trauma, the following changes increased proportionately.  The early the traumas happened, the worse they were, the longer they happened, the more complex and pervasive the cascade of changes became.

While I certainly did not, obviously, have the worst childhood imaginable, it was certainly down there near the bottom.   My own infant-childhood was certainly among those that would INCLUDE Trauma Altered Development rather than exclude it.  If I had been able to find anything like adequate ‘helpful’ information within current medical model thinking as it might have applied to what truly happened to me, I certainly would not have been motivated to begin my own search for information specific to my circumstance.

Thankfully I am living in an era where the developmental-changes information is beginning to appear, and is appearing where I can get to it – of course ONLY because of the internet.  I will certainly not placidly accept current mainstream medical model thinking about how my so-called ‘symptoms’ fit into any current ‘mental illness’ model because I understand that these models are missing at least 98% of the facts about how what happened to me changed my development and how those changes created me to be a different evolutionarily altered person today.

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Have you ever watched birds in springtime searching the world for bits of material they can carry away in their beaks to build a safe and secure nest for their offspring?  The body we all have to live in is the equivalent of our nest.  We can use every single tiny bit of helpful information we can find to improve the quality of our body-nest.

Current medical model thinking about our survivor ‘symptoms’ treats only the ‘symptoms’ because very few people are factually identifying what bird the feathers of our symptoms actually originated from.  As long as we continue to apply misguided misinformation about how what happened to us in our malevolent childhood affects what happens to us today, we are following along on an old pathway that does not really apply to us.

I have a memory as I write today.  Years ago on a warm northern Minnesota spring day I drove out alone into the woods along an abandoned narrow logging trail until I reached a spot where the beavers had built a dam that so flooded the road I could not pass by it.  At the same time I knew I could not clear the road from water enough that I could drive through on this particular day, I considered the future.

I spent the entire day playing in the water.  I removed the sticks and logs of that dam one by one so the water could rush in full force across the road thinking that perhaps if enough water could pass through that the dropping water level would free the road for my next spring’s travel.  Of course that wasn’t logically possible.  Whatever I did to thwart the beaver’s plans for the area on this day would immediately be remedied by them as soon as I turned my car around and left.

It would have taken a huge crowd of people working from the beginning of this stream to the end of it to remove the dams each step of the way in order for that water to return to the course of its natural, unblocked flow.  But why fight the beavers?  Why not just let beavers do what beavers tend to do and simply find another way to pass through the woods?

After all, there’s no way to reason with beavers any more than it is possible to reason with medical model thinkers who have no real intention of altering the way they do business.  That the dams they create do nothing for us but block us from our true means of healing is not their problem.  We are free as survivors to find out the truth of how what happened to us changed us and to find our own alternative way through the woods. 

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

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

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Your Page – Readers’ Responses

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+AMERICANS MUST NOT BELIEVE THAT CHILDREN ARE HUMAN BEINGS — THUS, NO HUMAN RIGHTS

alchemynow2 Comments

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Any violation of an infant-child’s rights constitutes abuse in my book.  Our nation can march itself, fly itself, bomb itself, invade itself all around this globe proclaiming to be the great protector of human rights, while within the boundaries of our own nation we refuse to even accept that children are human beings.  If we DID accept this fact, that children are not possessions and are, indeed human, then we would have to recognize EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEIR UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS.  SHAME ON US!  SHAME!  SHAME!  SHAME!

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First, let me say this:  It is an honor to have Pat reading and posting on my blog.  I was concerned that her post today would be lost in the comment tailing pile from the mine of information accumulating on Stop the Storm.  So I copied it over here!!

COMMENT MADE TO +ALIGNING OUR NATION WITH UNITED NATIONS CHILD RIGHTS IS AGAINST OUR OWN LAWS

BY:  Pat Gordon-Smith
on December 6, 2009 at 6:11 AM

There’s an excellent accessible version of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child at http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/en/docs/Know_Your_Rights_poster.pdf

It’s a poster intended to inform children of their rights and, as such, is great for anyone. The language it uses is important, too. It shows the extent to which the world of children’s rights has moved on since the Universal Declaration on Children’s Rights. Then, the version written for children has them as passive dependants. In this version children are active agents, following the spirit of the CRC itself.

Here is the text from the poster. The numbered points correspond to the articles in the convention:

1)  Everyone under the age of 18 has ALL of these rights. You have the right to…
2)  Be treated fairly no matter who you are, where you are from, what language you speak, what you believe or where you live.
3)  Have adults always do what is best for you.
4)  Have all of these rights protected by your government.
5)  Be given support and advice from your parents and family.
6)  Life.
7)  Have a name and a nationality.
8 )  An official identity.
9)  Not be separated from your parent(s), unless it is for your own good.
10)  Be reunited with your parent(s) if they have to move to another country.
11) Not be taken out of your country illegally.
12)  Have your own opinion, which is listened to and taken seriously.
13)  Find out information and express what you think through speaking, writing and art, unless this denies other people their rights.
14)  Think and believe whatever you want to and practice any religion, with guidance from your parent(s).
15)  Be with friends and join or set up clubs, unless this denies other people their rights.
16)  Have your privacy and family respected.
17)  Get reliable information from newspapers, books, radio, television and the Internet, as long as it is not harmful to you.
18)  Be brought up by your parents, if possible.
19)  Be protected from being hurt or badly treated in any way.
20)  Special protection and help if you can’t live with your parents.
21)  The best care possible if you are adopted or in foster care.
22)  Special protection and help if you are a refugee.
23)  Access to education and any support you may need if you have a disability.
24)  The best health and medical care possible, and information to help you stay healthy.
25)  Have your living situation checked regularly if you are looked after away from your family.
26)  Help from the government if you are poor or in need.
27)  A basic standard of living: food, clothing and a safe place to live.
28)  An education.
29)  An education that develops your personality and abilities, and encourages you to respect other people, cultures and the environment.
30)  Enjoy your own culture, religion and language, even if these are not the same as most people in your country.
31)  Rest, play and relax.
32)  Be protected from work that harms your health or education.
33)  Be protected from dangerous drugs and their trade.
34)  Be protected from sexual abuse.
35)  Not be kidnapped or sold.
36)  Be protected from being taken advantage of or exploited in any way.
37)  Not to be punished in a cruel or hurtful way.
38)  Protection and care in times of war. If you are under 15 you should never be forced to join an army.
39)  Special help if you have been hurt, neglected or badly treated.
40)  Be helped and treated fairly if you are accused of breaking the law.
41)  Be protected by national or international laws which provide better rights than the ones in this list.
42) ALL children and adults should know and learn about these rights.

I’ve just written a blog entry about this on my blog, ‘Children’s rights and other things’ (http://patsky.blogspot.com) that includes some further explanation of certain articles.

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Please refer to the December 12, 1989 United Nations General Assembly document from the Convention on the Rights of the Child from which this above 42-Article List of the Rights of the Child have been condensed for ease of understanding and clarity for our globe’s children and youth.

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I remember years ago when I saw a plaque hanging on the wall of someone’s home I was visiting that simply read, “Clarity Begins At Home.”  Today I found this same phrase incorporated into the thinking represented on the website for ERIC – Education Resources Information Center:  ED201555 – Clarity Begins at Home:  An Analysis of Key Ideas of Invitational Education.

ERIC is America’s Education Resources Information Center – an online digital library of education research and information. ERIC is sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education. ERIC provides ready access to education literature to support the use of educational research and information to improve practice in learning, teaching, educational decision-making, and research.

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My search today for ‘United Nations Child Rights’ yielded 257 documents in the ERIC database that represent global action and thought on the topic.

When I added United States of America into the search, 3 documents appeared.  Only one 1991 document “is a curriculum that serves as an introduction to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Designed for the upper elementary and middle grades 5-10.”

I took out ‘America’ and received information on 32 documents, all of which are not specifically about our nation.

Our nation will never begin to bring a discussion of child rights into mainstream educational classrooms as long as we continue to allow corporeal punishment to exist within our schools.  Physical assault, violence and ‘hitting’ by public school staff is still legal in 22 of our 50 states:

Where the states stand on corporal punishment:

Alabama–Legal
Alaska–Illegal
Arizona–Legal
Arkansas–Legal
California–Illegal
Colorado–Legal
Connecticut–Illegal
Delaware–Illegal
District of Columbia–Illegal
Florida–Legal
Georgia–Legal
Hawaii–Illegal
Idaho–Legal
Illinois–Illegal
Indiana–Legal
Iowa–Illegal
Kansas–Legal
Kentucky–Legal
Louisiana–Legal
Maine–Illegal
Maryland–Illegal
Massachusetts–Illegal
Michigan–Illegal
Minnesota–Illegal
Mississippi–Legal
Missouri–Legal		 Montana–Illegal
Nebraska–Illegal
Nevada–Illegal
New Hampshire–Illegal
New Jersey–Illegal
New Mexico–Legal
New York–Illegal
North Carolina–Legal
North Dakota–Illegal
Ohio–Legal
Oklahoma–Legal
Oregon–Illegal
Pennsylvania–Illegal
Rhode Island–Illegal
South Carolina–Legal
South Dakota–Illegal
Tennessee–Legal
Texas–Legal
Utah–Illegal
Vermont–Illegal
Virginia–Illegal
Washington–Illegal
West Virginia–Illegal
Wisconsin–Illegal
Wyoming–Legal

We Must Stop Corporal Punishment Now!

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The focus of my blog is on the intergenerational transmission of unresolved trauma that happens because the Rights of Children are not protected.  Our problem is much larger than corporeal punishment in our schools.  I understand that the sinking Titanic of Dark Age thinking within the current medical model field of mental health services and research remains connected to our public consideration of Child Rights on all levels within our nation, including in our laws, in our homes, and in our public educational system.

The following is included in the Preamble to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child:

“Recalling that, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations has proclaimed that childhood is entitled to special care and assistance,

Convinced that the family, as the fundamental group of society and the natural environment for the growth and well-being of all its members and particularly children, should be afforded the necessary protection and assistance so that it can fully assume its responsibilities within the community,

Recognizing that the child, for the full and harmonious development of his or her personality, should grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding,

Considering that the child should be fully prepared to live an individual life in society, and brought up in the spirit of the ideals proclaimed in the Charter of the United Nations, and in particular in the spirit of peace, dignity, tolerance, freedom, equality and solidarity…”

In the spirit of the aims of this blog, I am particularly concerned that children within our nation experience every possible assistance toward “the full and harmonious development of his or her personality” which can only happen through safe and secure attachment experiences that an infant-child has provided for it “in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding” that happens ONLY when Child Rights are recognized, allowed and protected.

We are not clear as a nation or as individuals about what Child Rights are.  CRIN’s Factsheet on Children’s Rights clearly describes the ONLY way to look at the Universal Rights of Children.  The USA is a nation of materialists.  We must still believe that children are possessions, and therefore believe that children are not HUMAN, they are OBJECTS to be arbitrarily treated in any way we want to – within the boundaries of our laws, which are obviously themselves seriously lacking in regard to the Universal HUMAN Rights of Children.

Is our nation acceptably divided about whether or not children are human beings or not?  I think that is the issue here.  If we believe in the Dark Age thinking that children are possessions and are therefore objects rather than human beings, anything we might assign to them in terms of a ‘right’ or not can remain arbitrary.  I have no illusions about this point, personally.

When my mother and my grandmother engaged in a rage-filled argument over little not quite two-year-old me, it was because they believed I was an object possession, not that I was a human child.

When my mother violently shoved my three-year-old head repeatedly into the toilet bowl and beat me mercilessly, I was not being treated as a human being with rights.  I was being treated more aggressively than if I was a baby’s dirty diaper.

When I was battered and terrorized and forced to spend the night sitting perched on a stool alone in the dark because I got the white cuffs of my parka dirty, I was treated as having LESS VALUE and less rights than the coat did!

When I was made to ride long hours in the car curled in a fetal position on the floor of the back seat ‘like a dog’ when I was seven, I was treated as having less value and rights than a badly abused dog!

When I was 13 and knocked down by my mother over and over again into a giant mud puddle until I crawled around and said over and over again, “I am a pig, I am a pig,” which I refused to do, I was being treated with less value and as having no more rights than would a badly abused livestock animal.

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I realize that I am taking a controversial stand, but believe me, the suffering of the 18 years of my infant-childhood — and the resulting suffering during my entire adult life as a consequence of the violation of my Rights as a Child – backs me up when I say to everyone in our nation:  You either stand on the side of knowing absolutely that children are human beings with Universal Human Rights that must be guaranteed and protected, or you do not and believe instead that children are not human and are objects that are possessions with no HUMAN rights at all.

It is this latter position held by the majority of our citizens that prevents every one of our 50 states, and therefore prevents our entire nation, the United States of America, from ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and from guaranteeing these rights be protected for every American child.

I am sorry, but I cannot find any ‘gray area of the Law’ here.  “Clarity Begins At Home.”  Our ignorance belongs to us.  As long as we deny our beliefs that children are objects, possessions and livestock, we will remain a nation of child abusers on our most fundamental level, because we do not REALLY believe that children are human beings at all, and therefore have no Universal Human Rights to be either guaranteed or protected.

How else can I understand how I could go to public 8th grade PE class wearing one of those little blue gym suits with the entire back of my body covered solid with bruises of every imaginable color and shape all the way down to my heels — black, blue, green, purple, yellow, brown — from the base of my neck, across both of my shoulders and arms, down my back, over my buttocks, down my thighs, my calves — all perfectly visible to those around me on the gymnasium floor and/or in the community girls’ showers?  Nobody blinked an eye or EVER said a WORD!

That was in 1964.  How much progress have we REALLY made since then in recognizing and protecting the Universal Human Rights of our nation’s children?  Where are our laws that tell our children and the world we mean exactly what we say?

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

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Your Page – Readers’ Responses

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

alchemynowLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Your Page – Readers’ Responses

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+ALIGNING OUR NATION WITH UNITED NATIONS CHILD RIGHTS IS AGAINST OUR OWN LAWS

alchemynow7 Comments

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The following comment has brought something to my attention that extremely troubles me.  Perhaps I am experiencing some of the reactions and feelings that others might experience when faced with the reality that child abuse really does occur after they have spent their lives in oblivious ignorance of this fact.

Those of us who have suffered from infant-child abuse and neglect already know, of course, that extreme maltreatment of infants and children happens in our nation.  Yet here I am today, evidently having spent my life time somehow believing that the United States of America exists at some high level of the social food chain and would, given our advantages in the world, OF COURSE lead the world on all fronts that have to do with caring for and protecting our children.

NOT TRUE I find today, thanks to the following comment:

posted comment by Pat Gordon-Smith
patsky.blogspot.com

90.211.0.50

Submitted on 2009/12/03 at 8:47am

The Universal Declaration of Children’s Rights was superseded in 1989 by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child — CRC – http://www.cirp.org/library/ethics/UN-convention/

It is a detailed interpretation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the special case of children whose journey between wholly dependent infancy and legally independent adulthood means that, for a greater or lesser period between birth and age 18, they must rely on others for their physical, financial and emotional security.

Every country in the world has ratified the CRC apart from two – Somalia and the USA, although last week Somalia indicated its intention to sign. This was reported on the Jobsanger blog, where I posted a response (http://jobsanger.blogspot.com/2009/11/statement-on-childrens-rights.html).

Your conclusions seem bang on to me. I agree that, in the US, recognition of children’s rights should be a matter for the federal government. Perhaps you and blogger Ted McLaughlin might join forces in putting pressure on the president for just that.

Good luck.

IN RESPONSE TO:

+VIOLATING THE UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS OF CHILDREN

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I just printed and read the December 12, 1989 United Nations General Assembly document from the Convention on the Rights of the Child.  I highly encourage my blog’s readers to do the same.  President Clinton did sign this, but it has never been presented to our Senate.

I did a Google search for the United Nations 10- member elected Committee on the Rights of the Child, which was established as a result of the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child to help nations improve the conditions of their children.

Article 44 of the Convention’s 54 Article Annex report on the Rights of the Child says,

1.  States Parties undertake to submit to the Committee, through the Secretary-General of the United Nations, reports on the measures they have adopted which give effect to the rights recognized herein and on the progress made on the enjoyment of those rights.”

This is emblazoned at the top of the Google search page:

United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child Adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 20 November 1989, and ratified by all nations except the United States and Somalia. www.unicef.org/crc

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Any great, grand illusion I may have had about our nation’s commitment to the well-being of children – no matter what – has evaporated.  I feel chilled, sickened, saddened and scared.  I want to know on what grounds, and using what reasoning, what licensure, was our nation the ONLY one other than completely unstable Somalia to refuse involvement with this global effort to identify, recognize, clarify and describe the Human Rights of Children, or to participate with an enforced accountability for the treatment and protection of our nation’s children.

This 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was held during the same time period (1985-1990) that the 75% of our young adults who are now unfit for military duty to our nation were born.

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This United Nations Background Note on Children’s Rights outlines global issues and progress made on behalf of earth’s children up until 1995 and includes the following:

A Global Pact on Children’s Rights

“After a lengthy period of careful negotiations, the Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted in November 1989 by a vote of the General Assembly. By September of the following year, the Convention had obtained the 20 ratifications required for its entry into force as international law. Its importance as a foundation of modern human rights law was later underscored at the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna….”

America evidently wants no part of ‘international law’?  Ask the Indigenous People of our nation how well the USA honors its treaties.

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“The failure to ratify the treaty so far is in part due to potential conflicts with the constitution and because of opposition by some political and religious conservatives to the treaty.”

This scares me – why 75% of our youth ended up being misfits today?  How far are we willing to let the condition of our children deteriorate before we recognize that the states are not up to the job of ensuring a standard of Child Rights that even matches the United Nations suggestions?

Evidently we cannot participate in a global Child Right action because it is against our own law:

“American laws for the protection of children are at the state, rather than the federal level, and the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution restricts the authority of the federal government to pass legislation in this area.”

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“International human rights instruments such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its Optional Protocols are negotiated among United Nations Member States and are legally binding on the individual States that become parties to the instrument. There are two ways for a State to become a party: by signature and ratification or by accession.

In ratifying the Convention or an Optional Protocol, a State accepts an obligation to respect, protect, promote and fulfill the enumerated rights—including by adopting or changing laws and policies that implement the provisions of the Convention or Protocol.”

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This appears to be the kind of American reaction to these United Nations global efforts to provide for and protect the Rights of Children that leaves our nation hanging out in nowhere-ville in the company of Somalia, a nation without any government at all:

Updated February 25, 2009

Boxer Seeks to Ratify U.N. Treaty That May Erode U.S. Rights

By Joseph Abrams

– FOXNews.com

Sen. Barbara Boxer is pushing the Obama administration to move forward with ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, a controversial treaty that has never gained much support in the U.S.

“Sen. Barbara Boxer is urging the U.S. to ratify a United Nations measure meant to expand the rights of children, a move critics are calling a gross assault on parental rights that could rob the U.S. of sovereignty.

The California Democrat is pushing the Obama administration to review the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, a nearly 20-year-old international agreement that has been foundering on American shores since it was signed by the Clinton administration in 1995 but never ratified.

Critics say the treaty, which creates “the right of the child to freedom of thought, conscience and religion” and outlaws the “arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy,” intrudes on the family and strips parents of the power to raise their children without government interference.

Nearly every country in the world is party to it — only the U.S. and Somalia are not — but the convention has gained little support in the U.S. and never been sent to the Senate for ratification……” [READ FULL ARTICLE HERE – I find the ‘opposition’ sickening]

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Of course, there’s this, found at the Smart Girl Politics blog:

“Home Schooling families stepped up to represent not only their rights, but the rights of all Americans. The grassroots movement that took place yesterday must continue on a larger scale by educating all Americans about the danger of this U.N. treaty and placing calls to their elected officials.

Once again, our liberal friends in Washington, who claim to love America, are covertly hoping to ratify CRC making it the law of the land here in the United States helping to strip away the rights of parents in America and allow the U.N. to dictate what proper parenting looks like at a global level.

Both Drudge http://www.drudge.com/news/122366/us-may-join-un-childrens-treaty and Free Republic http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2278566/posts reported on this development on June 24, 2009, but this has been on the back burner for Barbara Boxer as reported earlier this year by FoxNews.com. “Sen. Barbara Boxer is urging the U.S. to ratify a United Nations measure meant to expand the rights of children, a move critics are calling a gross assault on parental rights that could rob the U.S. of sovereignty.” http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/02/25/boxer-seeks-ratify-treaty-erode-rights/

According to J. Michael Smith, HSLDA President, in Washington Times Op-ed—U.N. Treaty Might Weaken Families “

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June 23, 2009 post comment on Drudge Report:

“The US was a major player in getting the Convention on the Rights of the Child up and running. In fact, the US signed on to the convention 14 years ago, but has not ratified it. (Just like Somalia.) However, the US has signed and ratified a pair of optional protocols: “Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict” and “Optional Protocoal on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography.” President Obama has described this country’s failure to ratify the convention as “embarrassing.” The text is located here: www.crin.org ”

As mentioned above, these are the

Optional Protocols

Two Optional Protocols to the Convention on the Rights of the Child exist:

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Fortunately I have found some hope in this impressive website concerned with the Rights of the Child:

CRIN – Child Rights Information Network found at http://www.crin.org/

THEIR MISSION:

“CRIN’s mission is to equip the global child rights community with the information it needs to ensure the implementation of children’s rights.

CRIN presses for rights, not charity and is passionate about putting children’s rights at the top of the global agenda by addressing root causes and promoting systematic change. Its guiding framework is the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

Our activities are based on the belief that information is a powerful tool for realising children’s rights – and such information should be made as widely available and accessible as possible. As such, CRIN aims to bridge the gap between the information-rich and the information-poor by maximising the potential of new information technologies, and ensuring that those unable to use them are not excluded.

As a network of, at the last count, over 2,000 members in 150 countries, we aim to capture the expertise and the knowledge of our members, making this available to all actors involved in the implementation of the CRC.”

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Please take a moment to follow this link and read CRIN’s Factsheet on Children’s Rights.  Print it, display it, believe it, share it.

For every single one of us who has suffered the trauma of infant-child maltreatment and abuse, we know the truth of these words within every cell of our body.  These facts give us the common ground we need in order to understand the essence of what was done to us, what happened to us as a result, and why.

Our basic human Child Rights were violated.  We were not protected.  We were harmed, hurt – and changed.

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

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Your Page – Readers’ Responses

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+PTSD AND SEVERE ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – PART TWO

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

Today’s post follows the November 28, 2009 post

+PTSD AND SEVERE CHILD ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – PART ONE

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

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

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

(see yesterday’s November 29, 2009 post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Van der Kolk states:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The author continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Your Page – Readers’ Responses

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

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Presenting a new descriptive concept that applies specifically to severe infant-child abuse and serious neglect survivors of all ages:

Trauma Altered Development (TAD)

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Those of us who suffered enough severe traumas through malevolent treatment including abuse during our growth and developmental stages of our infant-child ‘survivorhood’ to alter how our body developed do not need a diagnosis.

— We need an assessment of the changes that happened to us because of the abuse.

— We need information about how these changes affect us in our lives today.

— We need resources that tell us how to improve our well-being in the world in spite of the changes our body had to make in order for us to survive the traumatic environment that formed us.

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Thinking in terms of changes that happened to me as a result of my development in a severe abuse environment in my infant-child survivorhood, I am beginning to understand that my body developed to manage all resources available to me in my environment – both inner and outer – to maximize my opportunity for successful survivorship.

I am preparing to stand in opposition to the current ‘mental health’ and ‘behavioral health’ models that obviously are not capable of meeting my true needs as stated above.

I want to see the creation of new thinking about the changes that happened to me and to others whose altered early development allowed them to continue living in spite of insurmountable traumatic obstacles.

I have a new name for what happened to me:  Trauma Altered Development (TAD)

TAD is an accurate, factual description of a physiological process that allows individuals to survive in early malevolent environments.  TAD is not a diagnosis.  It is not a label, and it carries with it no stigma toward a person whatsoever.  It is not naming a ‘disorder’, a ‘pathology’ or a ‘maladjustment.’  Trauma Altered Development (TAD) is an accurate descriptive concept that needs to be the starting point for all positive changes we hope to make for ourselves in this world.

Trauma Altered Development (TAD) can be assessed.  In today’s world, it might take a think tank of dedicated people to put together tools to get this job done, but the information DOES exist and an accurate assessment of trauma-forced change can be described for every one of us that went through this process in our early development because of infant-child trauma and abuse.

I would like to see a systematic effort applied to establish national, regional and local Trauma Altered Development Resource and Referral Centers.  These centers would be connected to a global clearinghouse that gathers research, assessment tools, informational and educational curricula about how trauma alters development for the duration of an individual’s lifespan and how well-being for a lifetime can specifically be improved in spite of these trauma altered developmental changes.

Trauma Altered Development (TAD) assessment would consider not only the changes that happened to us in our development and how those changes affect our well-being and our personal resource management systems in our adulthood, but would also increasingly assist in the recognition of how these changes are directly tied to the resiliency abilities that lie within our species.

Trauma Altered Development (TAD) assessment cannot possibly separate any part of an individual from the whole of who they are.  Trying to consider physical health and well-being as being separate from our ‘mental’ or ‘behavioral’ well-being is just plain goofy!  TAD affected our entire being in the world from our beginning and it affects us now.

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I don’t want to save a sinking Titanic of dark-age thinking about so-called ‘mental illness’ or ‘behavioral health’.  I want a whole new boat!  Trauma Altered Development (TAD) is a descriptive concept that appears to me to be that new boat.  I know it sits on the bedrock foundation of what happened to me as a result of my mother’s severe abuse of me.  I believe that TAD must be accurately assessed at this bedrock level for every infant-child trauma and abuse survivor because it affects every aspect of our being in the world for the rest of our lives.

Once an accurate TAD assessment has been completed, all other services designed to address our degrees of lack of well-being will make sense to us because they will be based on the truth of the facts about how we developed through trauma to be the way we are in the world — every step of our lives.

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

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

This is the gist of science told the Dalai Lama:

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

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

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

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

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

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Pity the Poor Lab Rat by Kathy Brown

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

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Mom, Dad, DNA and Suicide by Sharon Begley

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

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Abuse changes brains of suicide victims

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

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

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Buddhism – A meeting of minds by Swati Chopra

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

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

Download MLXII: Neuroplasticity Brochure PDF

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Can Our Minds Change Our Brains?

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

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

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Child Abuse Causes Lifelong Changes To DNA Expression And Brain.

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Mechanisms underlying epigenetic effects of early social experience

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Epigenetics. Child abuse alters genes.

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

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+THREAT OF ATTACK – STAYING NUMB – PTSD AND DISSOCIATION

alchemynow2 Comments

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Something happened inside of me when I reached the end of the post I wrote on November 19, 2009 – +I WILL NEVER BE ORDINARY. IT IS TIME FOR ME TO KNOW THIS TRUTH..  The writing has become so much harder for me to do than it was before.

Do I abandon my efforts?

The ‘transparent moment’ I experienced on November 19 was evidently deeply connected within my body to my present experience of myself in my life.  Evidently transparency does not feel safe to me.  Yet I have courage, stamina and willingness to move forward, though I do not know ahead of time where my writing process is going to take me.

I didn’t know on November 19 that I was writing myself up to that transparent moment.  I didn’t see it coming.  I didn’t predict or anticipate where I was going or where I would end up.  The experience of that transparent moment just happened – but it happened because of the writing.  On some deeper level that I cannot actually SEE within me my instincts say to me – “DON”T WRITE!  STOP!  WRITING IS NOT SAFE.  IT LEADS YOU TO UNKNOW PLACES, AND UNKNOWN IS DANGEROUS TO YOUR WELL-BEING!”

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Because it is my basic premise that I cannot separate any experience I have from the disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment system I have as a direct result of my mother’s abuse of me, I have to allow myself to understand that my current state of NOT WRITING is connected to how this system operates to try to keep me safe and secure in the world.

Hiding is, for me, a trauma related response.  I can translate what is going on for me in the present to:  transparency = dangerous = HIDE NOW!  Hiding means that I am hiding from my own words, which are directly connected in the writing process to who I am – all my memories (even those only my body remembers), how I survived, what I am willing to think about, what I am willing to feel – and to the full consequence of the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that I have along with dissociation that does not allow me to KNOW things in a necessarily ongoing, coherent, integrated fashion.

So, I STOP!

At the same time I am willing to share with you in a somewhat transparent way the following words that are connected to this whole process – as I forced myself to write them across lined sheets of spiral notebook paper —

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Make a difference in someone’s life

I used to believe in this

Is this a different Linda?

This one doesn’t even want to write any more.

Transitions between states of mind

Sometimes they are WIDE and I fall in.

I don’t know where the writing Linda went

I don’t want the sad one here.

Sometimes things cost too much – does caring?

Without the grief, am I just numb to everything?

A Linda-safer-floating around on a raft – but fragile amidst the sharks of chaos I know are all around me.

Don’t tip the raft.  Don’t look down.

Is that state mostly where I spent my childhood in between my mother’s attacks?

Out of nowhere she would attack me.  The raft of numb would disappear from under me.

I’d be in the ocean full of sharks – attacked again.

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Cancer was an attack from within.

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What does that mean

Changing our minds?

Like changing gears?

Or changing jobs?

Or changing our clothes?

Or changing a baby’s diaper?

Making change with money

A change in one’s fortune

A change in the weather

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Paving stones with spaces between them

Grout between tiles

Mortar between stones or bricks

In PTSD-Dissociation our traumatic experiences are separated by fear and confusion

Cracks in a sidewalk

Shifting plates of the earth’s crust

Water surrounding continents

If I go to a place of what seems ‘calm’ to me

I suspect I am really ‘numb’ instead

Because peaceful calmness was never allowed (and did not build itself into my body)

At times I do not wish to disturb this numbness

Once I leave the numbness I don’t know and can’t predict what will get triggered and what state I’ll end up in next

And I don’t know how long I’ll end up in some other ‘changed state’ or if, when or how I can get back to ‘numb’

So it seems best not to disturb or change anything

Like a great game of hop scotch only I can’t control or predict where I’ll end up next

Leave well enough alone

Don’t think

Don’t feel

Just be

Try to leave everything within me alone

Control = control where I am in the environment

I don’t want to be challenged there, either

For all the same

Reasons

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It’s like skating on a deep lake with uneven ice

Places that are thick and solid and I’m safe

Places where the ice is thin and I can crash through

But from the top side I can’t tell which is which

Nobody WANTS to fall through

OPTION?  Stay off of the lake

= do not write

I can’t predict where it will take me

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November is National Adoption Month

Posted: 24 Nov 2009 10:14 AM PST

Currently, there are 130,000 children and youth waiting to be adopted. National Adoption Month urges Americans to “Answer the Call” to adopt children and youth from foster care. National Adoption Month intends to raise awareness about the adoption of children and youth from foster care.

The Ad Council’s latest public service “You don’t have to be perfect to be a perfect parent” urges potential parents that perfection is not the goal. Children just need loving, caring environments with stability. This award-winning campaign is a partnership of the Children’s Bureau, the Ad Council, and AdoptUsKids. This year’s ads target the African-American community and finding homes for African-American children in care. The ads feature humorous everyday scenarios illustrating that parents need not be perfect to offer the stability and commitment that a “forever family” provides to a waiting child.

Visit the 2009 National Adoption Month Website for more information: http://www.childwelfare.gov/adoption/nam/

Additionally, The Children’s Bureau Express has a Spotlight on National Adoption Month webpage The CBE has information about how agencies celebrate National Adoption Month, and find out more about the latest adoption resources and research.  They also offer more information and service on:

PSA Campaign Recruits Families for African-American Children
Adoption Month Calendar Features Innovative Activities
National Survey of Adoptive Parents Releases First Data
Post adoption Support Guide
Positive Outcomes for Late-Placed Adoptees
Court Collaboration Expedites Adoptions
Parent-to-Parent Support for Adoptive Families

To view more information please visit their Spotlight on National Adoption Month: http://cbexpress.acf.hhs.gov/index.cfm?event=website.viewSection&issueID=111&subsectionID=8

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