Tag: violence

+EARLY TRAUMA CHANGES HOW WE THINK AND TALK

alchemynowLeave a comment

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When infant-children do not receive what they need NOT TO CHANGE their development in response to early trauma, well, their body-brain-mind-self has no choice but to change!  These changes then have no choice but to appear as altered patterns of being in the world, including patterns of verbal exchange.

This post concerns a posted comment and my reply to it.

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COMMENT FROM:  Randy Webb, aztraumatherapy.com —  2010/01/08 at 6:58am

TO:  *Chapter 3a Symptoms

“I’ve noticed anecdotally that my clients who have reported experiences of trauma seem more likely than others who have not reported trauma to indicate “black and white” and relatively more “rigid” views of religion, definitions of happiness or success and other people’s behavior. Could these be indications of relatively less CNS plasticity and an indication of something getting “frozen” instead of “completing” some cycle of recovery in response to trauma?”

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REPLY:

Your comment and question relate in my mind to my December 28, 2009 post:

+ATTACHMENT – HOW WE ARE WHO WE ARE

While the kinds of thinking you are describing can be reflected in cultural attitudes in the form of biases, prejudices and their resulting stereotypical thinking, because you are specifically noticing them in relation to traumatized people I will suggest that the nature and quality of early attachment experiences might lie at the root of what you are describing.

We are not used to thinking about what people say as being representations of the patterns of communication that exist on the molecular, physiological level of the body, they are.  Our earliest infant-child interactions with our mothering caregivers create us at these fundamental levels, and determine how our genetic potential manifests itself.

These interactions, which signal to our growing and developing body-brain-mind-self the condition of the world as being mostly either safe, secure and benevolent, or as being mostly unsafe, insecure and malevolent, will determine how we receive and process all information from the world around us.  The patterns of signaling communication in our body will eventually show itself both in the quality and nature of the ‘trauma dramas’ we experience for the rest of our lives, and in the patterns of spoken and unspoken communications – including our thoughts – that we use to describe ourselves in relation to the world we live in for the rest of our lives.

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The connection you are making in your own thoughts that led to your question are fascinating:   “Could these be indications of relatively less CNS plasticity and an indication of something getting “frozen” instead of “completing” some cycle of recovery in response to trauma?”

If we think about communication patterns in terms of how they were influenced and formed during our earliest developmental stages, CNS plasticity as it connects to how our immune system interpreted the quality of our experience and then signaled all our developmental pathways, yes, you are completely correct.

It becomes essential that we think about people’s traumas in terms of ‘age at first onset’ (see link to 12-28-09 post above).  People, who were formed without severe relational traumas in infancy, have a completely different CNS (including the brain and Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) homeostatic set point.  They formed a ‘trauma centered’ body-brain-mind-self from the beginning which limited and changed the range of possible ‘free choice’ options for response they will have in and to the world.  Their body has taken over for them far more aspects of ‘being alive’ that non-early traumatized people’s body do.

When people seem to be struggling with recovery from adult trauma, the most important first step we need to take in order to most help them is to determine the quality and nature of their earliest attachments during their early growth and development stages.  While birth to age one is the most critical stage, these critical windows of development continue certainly through age 4-6 while a person’s Theory of Mind is forming.

We can listen to adults talk about their lives and begin to hear disturbances in their ability to tell a ‘coherent life story’.  Unresolved trauma will show itself in disturbances in our patterns of processing information on all levels within the body.  The earlier the traumas happened, most certainly before the age of 2, the more an appropriate, flexible, and coherent ability to converse verbally about one’s experiences in their life will be absent.

If early trauma did not build a person’s body-brain-mind-self, the ‘frozen’ interruptions in signaling communication – as they appear as you say in decreased CNS (body) plasticity – can hopefully be overcome.  The more usual approaches to resolving these traumas will allow the ‘lessons’ from the trauma to begin to unfold and take hold – as the hold the unresolved trauma has on a person will lessen its hold over them.

HOWEVER, if trauma built a person’s body-brain-mind-self from the beginning there is no ‘recovery’ to be made in anything like the normal sense of this process.  Because our earliest experiences of attachment form us, these patterns (such as you are describing) are hard wired into us on all levels, including our CNS-brain.

People who suffered what I refer to as Trauma Altered Development are evolutionarily altered people, built in, by and for a malevolent world of deprivation and trauma.  All their communication signals have been adjusted on their most fundamental levels in response to this kind of a world.  All later traumas they may experience will be processed by their trauma altered body-brain.  These people are most likely not to be able to respond with the ‘plasticity’ or resiliency that non-early traumatized people can.

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If infant development has been sent of course through early relational deprivation and trauma, the later stages leading to a plastic, flexible, adaptive, resilient and accurate Theory of Mind will not occur correctly.  Early trauma will show itself in patterns of behavior for these survivors, including thought and verbal communication, for the rest of their lives.

Treating trauma effectively in these survivors requires a detailed understanding about how trauma altered all aspects of their development from their beginning.  They have altered patterns of attachment to the world, to their own self, and to everyone else.  These physiological alterations have been permanently set into place.  They receive different information from the world in different ways and process this information differently.

I would say that while healing trauma in these survivors IS POSSIBLE, ‘recovery’ in the usual sense is not.  The trauma-changed body has no pre-trauma state to return to.  Their healing can utilize all the resilient powers of plasticity contained in the trauma changed body-brain, but these powers have to operate according to how a survivor was formed from their start.  Recognizing early trauma changes through the attachment signaling patterns they create is the first step.

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

alchemynow2 Comments

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

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

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

This report states this about teenage births:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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From the Report Card:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Family Economic Well-Being Domain

1. Poverty Rate (All Families with Children)

2. Secure Parental Employment Rate

3. Median Annual Income (All Families with Children)

4. Rate of Children with Health Insurance

Health Domain

1. Infant Mortality Rate

2. Low Birth Weight Rate

3. Mortality Rate (Ages 1-19)

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

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

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

Safety/Behavioral Domain

1. Teenage Birth Rate (Ages 10-17)

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

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

4. Rate of Cigarette Smoking (Grade 12)

5. Rate of Binge Alcohol Drinking (Grade 12)

6. Rate of Illicit Drug Use (Grade 12)

Educational Attainment Domain

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

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

Community Connectedness

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

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

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

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

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

Social Relationships Domain

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

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

Emotional/Spiritual Well-Being Domain

1. Suicide Rate (Ages 10-19)

2. Rate of Weekly Religious Attendance (Grade 12)

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

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

SEE ALSO:

THE CHILD AND YOUTH WELL-BEING INDEX (CWI)

Foundation for Child Development and the CWI

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Check out this article:

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

The 2009 Child Well-being Index”

by Eric Zuehlke

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+SILENCE. TURN AROUND AND WALK AWAY?

alchemynowLeave a comment

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I cannot imagine anyone WANTING to write about or talk about child abuse.  Why spoil a perfectly gorgeous day by even thinking about that so dark side of life, especially when those days lie so far back hidden in the dim and distant past?

Why no simply enjoy, if not cherish, everything that seems so good and right in one’s present moment?

If nobody wants to speak or write about those days and nights of misery, those months, those years of abuse and torture — so the silence can continue without words — can each of us forget equally?  Both those of us who have endured abuse equally with those who have not?

Who will tell those stories?  “I don’t want to,” people say.  So they don’t.  “What’s the point of it?”

Today I join those people who have to still admit we don’t know the point of it.  I don’t know the good of it.

Turn around and walk away?

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What matters?

From service dog to SURFice dog…

turning disappointment into a joyful new direction

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From service dog to SURFice dog… turning disappointment into a joyful new direction

+ATTACHMENT: SMART AND STUPID RESEARCH

alchemynowLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

Texas study confirms lower autism rate in Hispanics

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

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

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

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

SOURCE: American Journal of Public Health, December 2009.

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

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

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

Explaining Low Rates of Autism Among Hispanic Schoolchildren in Texas.

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

University of Texas Health Science Center.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Child Abuse Causes Damage at Genetic Level

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Child abuse ‘impacts stress gene’

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Infant Abuse Linked To Early Experience, Not Genetics

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Gene protects adults abused as children from depression

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

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The Neurobiology of Child Abuse and Neglect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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+LEARNING STYLES AND LONELINESS

alchemynowLeave a comment

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People have differing styles of learning about themselves in the world which are no doubt influenced by our earliest experiences.  I present a link today to a very simple ‘test’ that will show you clearly what your own individual preferences for processing yourself in the world are.  This information comes to us ‘free and easy’ from the engineering department of North Carolina State University.  I found their website today that presents extremely clear and concise information about the four main styles of learning:

INDEX OF LEARNING STYLES (ILS)

It contains a link to the  ILS questionnaire.   Click on this link and complete the 44-item questionnaire that can be submitted and automatically — and instantly — scored on the Web.  This is an ‘older person’s’ version for determining learning styles – just right for us!

Many people believe (myself included) that if our public educational system bothered to do a version of this simple assessment for students, and then bothered to tailor instruction for students according to the learning styles that are most a part of their individual nature, the current miserable state of education among our youth would not exist as it does.  Our learning styles continue to influence how we process ourselves in the world for the rest of our lives.

I hope you will take a few moments to take this test for yourself before you read the rest of this post because I think our first response to the questions will be more on target if we don’t think too much about them ahead of time.  I would recommend going through this experience from your ‘gut’ (body) rather than from your ‘head’ (second-guessing) so that you can better ALLOW your responses to come naturally rather than force them.

After you complete the 44-item questionnaire, your results will appear immediately as soon as you submit them.  You will see a continuum between the extreme ends of all four main learning styles.  Your result will show an ‘X’ above some point on each of these four lines.  THEN click on LEARNING STYLES AND STRATEGIES for the description of what each of these four styles are.  (This link is also at the bottom of your ‘results’ page.)

If you are the type of learner who wants as much information as possible BEFORE you attempt any unfamiliar task, this link (above) will give you an explanation related to the results as it describes the ‘playing field’!

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How did your scores come out on the continuums between these four dimensions of learning styles?

These are my scores::

—  ‘1’ toward the ‘reflective’ end on ‘active-reflective’

— ‘11’ toward the ‘intuitive’ end on ‘sensing-intuitive’

— ‘9’ toward the ‘visual’ end on ‘visual-verbal’

— ‘9’ toward the ‘global’ end on ‘sequential-global’

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I believe that where we find ourselves on this MAP shows us how we are in the world, period.  Our learning style shows us how we pay attention, how we perceive, how we process, how we order and orient ourselves in the world.

Here, as with everything else about how I am in the world, I have to consider the impact that severe ongoing early trauma and abuse had on me as my body-brain-mind-self developed in the world through Trauma Altered Development.

How did the trauma of my childhood affect and influence the development of my learning style for me?  I see that I am very nearly at the extreme ends on three of the four continuums.  Only on the ‘active-reflective’ scale do I lie within a middle, more balanced range.

I can more clearly NAME and understand my own writing process when I think in terms of my position on these four scales.  I intuit my writing, I visualize from within myself (really by a sort of sensing and feeling from within my body) what ‘wants’ to be said, and the whole process operates in a globalized fashion where the end result becomes a ‘whole’ rather than a collection of parts that can be rearranged, reordered or restructured.

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For example, my thinking about how things end up being connected to one another makes more sense when I can simply allow my own individual style to shine.

As I have been thinking about my Christmas Eve post +TRAGEDIES OF CHILD ABUSE REFLECTED IN STORIES, I realize that my ‘cup runneth over’ with thoughts than seem disconnected (dissociated)  from the theme of the post.  Yet I know they are related and are connected (associated) in some way or I wouldn’t have them all tumbling around inside of me.

So, what is my inner logic?  What is the pattern and what are the connections?  I won’t begin to know until I write them down!

First of all, to own for myself the truth of what I wrote in this December 24th post I have to accept that my brain did not form in an optimal way through safe and secure attachment – obviously – or I would not have had the experience as a child in relation to the story-movie I wrote about.

In-tune reflection, empathy and mirroring between an infant as it grows its brain and its earliest mothering caregiver are meant to build a social-emotional brain that is built with patterns of human familiarity and connectedness.  The infant is supposed to see its own emotion-states-self mirrored back to it by its mothering caregiver.  As this happens, the infant is learning about patterns of harmonious similarity between itself and the human world it has been born into as these patterns both build the brain and build themselves into it.

At the same time patterns of how the infant is a separate DIFFERENT individual get harmoniously built into the early forming foundation of the infant’s social-emotional brain at the same time it is learning about similarities.  Ideally patterns of ASSOCIATION (similarities – “WE are socially human.”) form the foundation of the social-emotional brain rather than patterns of DISSOCIATION (“Gee, I have no idea what’s going on, or who is who, or what in the UNIVERSE is happening here!”)

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The first scenario happens through safe and secure attachment in a benevolent world.  The infant has repeated experiences of being shown that there is a WE that is made up of two separate people.  The self of the infant is growing in relationship to the self of the caregiver.

The second scenario happens in a malevolent environment where trauma is present.  Trauma is trauma because it is not ordinary or normal, and because it interrupts the ongoing experience of being safely and securely attached in the world.  If trauma is not resolved, and continues to place itself at the center of infant-mothering caregiver interactions (in all kinds of miserable ways), the infant will not be able to either clearly see the OTHER or be able to form its own self in relationship to this scrambled and scrambling messed up maybe-other.

The main relationship then ends up being to the ongoing TRAUMA rather than being a relationship between two benevolent entities in a benevolent world.

Voila!  Enter here a connection to my December 24th post.  What amazes me most is that I survived my severely traumatic childhood being able to function in anything like a human way!!  Making point one:  My version of being human is NOT normal!

If my first truly social-human experience of feeling myself mirrored back to myself happened the way I describe in my December 24th post, there is no possible way that I can feel – and here comes point number two – connected within myself to other people in anything like a normal way.

Oh – I am going to pause here and say something about use of the word NORMAL.  I have avoided this word, but my professional statistician daughter assures me that it is a fallacy to ever think that normal is not real.  Take a look at any Bell Curve.  Think about these images.  NORMAL is there in the middle, and pretending it isn’t is a childhood magical thinking stage illusion!  Normal exists, and it IS measurable once we define what we are talking about.

So, normal.  Oh, yes.  I experienced Trauma Altered Development and I am not normal.  Normal for members of a social species like ours has to do with comfort level that is connected to our experience of well-being – being well as a safely and securely attached member of our species.

What is my own experience of being an evolutionarily changed, adapted to trauma since my early social-emotional brain formed human?

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I am alone.  That is what happens within a traumatized infant-child’s brain in an unsafe and insecure, violent, chaotic, unstable, unpredictable malevolent early brain forming world.  Patterns of overwhelming isolation and DISSOCIATIONS built my brain.  My brain did not form within itself patterns of associations and similarities between myself and others.

If we go back to the foundational brain-building facts of Dr. Allen Schore’s most important 60-page article about infant early development, we can see how things are normally supposed to work between an infant and its mothering caregiver as its social-emotional brain is being built – from the beginning.  My brain did not get built normally.  I am a trauma altered person.

My growing brain could invent nothing outside of the experiences I had that built it.  I had very limited exposure from my birth to anyone besides my mother.  She designed my environment.  She controlled it.  In the beginning, most fortunately, she did not ban my 14-month-older brother from having contact with me.  It was those experiences that my earliest forming infant brain had with a human being – my little brother who loved me as much as it is possible for a human being to love another person – that I believe most saved my life.

Without those early human interactional face-to-face mirroring interactions with my baby brother, my growing brain would not have formed hardly ANY human connection circuits, pathways and patterns into my brain.  As I continued to grow from being an infant into a toddler, my mother began to interfere with and prevent contact even between me and my brother in the same ways she prevented my contact with my father, grandmother and other children.

But while the early interactions I had with my brother probably saved my life, they were NOT enough to save me from Trauma Altered Development.  My brain formed itself with human beings on one side of an impenetrable wall, and what self I could manage to form on the other side.

That means I was formed ALONE, disconnected and dissociated from the experience of being WITH other humans in the world.  That fundamental fact is what my December 24th post is ultimately about.

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My brain formed in isolation.  Isolation is NOT a GOOD condition for humans or any other mammal to form within.  I believe my Trauma Altered Development contributed to the fact that how my self is in the world lies on the extreme ends of three of the four learning style spectrums presented at the beginning of the post.  In my intuitive, visual, global way of knowing things, I KNOW that how my social-emotional early-formed brain developed itself is so far outside the Bell Curve range of normal that it is far closer to one shared on a continuum with autistic people.

I do not anticipate ever being able to find a so-called ‘mental health’ professional who would agree with me.  But I KNOW what I KNOW, and I am right.  I am my own living proof that I know what I am talking about.

It enrages me that I was forced to form a social-emotional brain that does not contain within it normal patterns of being a social human being.  I was BORN with full potential to have a normal brain.  I was FORCED through abuse and trauma to grow a different one.

Another thing that enrages me is that nobody ever told me – ever HAS told me about the facts regarding how my social-emotional brain formed differently from normal.  Luckily ‘they’ did the research, I found it, and now I DO understand what happened to me to give me this unending inner feeling of being not just lonely in any normal sense of the word – but fundamentally isolated and alone – within the very fabric of my body-brain-mind-self’s molecular construction.

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I write this post today for all readers who suffered extreme early trauma and abuse and who suffered from Trauma Altered Development as a consequence.

If you picture Michelangelo’s image of God giving life to Adam painted on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and imagine the space between the finger tips as a visual presentation of a gap that cannot ever be bridged between an individual self and the world of other people, others of you without Trauma Altered Development might begin to get a sense of what our kind of isolation, aloneness and loneliness is like.

I believe that a person with a social-emotional brain built through mostly safe and secure early attachment experiences can FEEL connected to others which bridges this gap.  The gap that is supposed to exist between people is supposed to be closed through this ‘feeling felt’ experience.  This gap is only supposed to exist between human beings on the most central levels of selfhood where the boundaries that allow for selfhood itself to exist are not meant to be crossed.

On all other levels people are supposed to have early brains formed that can so communicate with one another between selves through empathic reflective mirroring — that happens in their normally formed social-emotional brain — that they have a choice about being connected to others of their species that the rest of us will never have (including people on the Autistic spectrum).

I am no longer remotely concerned with couching the reality of my state of being in any kind of terms that might make other normally developed social-emotional brained people feel comfortable.  I am different from most human beings, and now I know it – along with the why, how and what of it.  I am not ‘disordered, dysfunctional, blah, blah, blah’ either.  I am different.

I was left isolated and alone with a brutal monster of a mother who did not want me to be alive.  How she treated me – along with the absence of anyone else in my life who gave a damn – gave me a nonsocial emotionally altered body-brain-mind-self.  None of these changes happened as a result of my choice.

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I attended a community Christmas dinner yesterday.  Now that I know HOW I feel being a human in relationship to other humans, I can understand and accept that at no time in my life have I EVER, nor do I hope to in the future to EVER, feel connected to or with them.

I now know I am specifically skilled at pretending to be ‘one of them’.  I can watch them and interpret their actions.  I can mimic these communications in return.  I have a human body, so I look like other people.  But I know the differences between us now, and because I do I also know more and more about how my own feelings inside of myself stem from this fundamental disconnection (dissociation) between myself and other people that exists at the foundation of my long ago formed right social-emotional brain.

I might as well be on the other side of a glass wall forming a barrier between myself and others that can never be removed.

I cannot imagine a greater loss in life than is the loss of any ability to truly FEEL connected – through the circuitry of our brain – to others of our species.

When I write about child abuse, when I speak about the abridgment of fundamental universal human rights of children, when I talk about the consequences of maltreatment in infant-childhood that CAUSES Trauma Altered Development, I am talking about the crime of allowing human beings to be formed in the world so absolutely, fundamentally, essentially ALONE in a dangerous world that their brains are prevented from forming the beginning circuitry that would allow human connection to take place.

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About three years ago I accidentally discovered information that came about through an offshoot of primate brain research that was accomplished through surgical alteration of the victim brains.  I cannot locate my source, and will be very happy when I can.

The gist of it is that at some primate brain study facility that had a very large and ‘nice’ compound for the subject-victims to live in, a discovery was made in a surprising way.  All the primates in the compound had enough space and enough food, etc. so that their social patterns happened most certainly according to the following:

Researchers discovered that the primates bonded to one another and formed their social groups exactly and specifically according to which area of their brain had been tampered with, damaged and changed.  The victims of brain region alteration found one another based only on the similarity of changes caused by what had been done to them.  Each group was self sustaining and had no interaction with any other group who had suffered from damage to any different part of their brain.

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When I talk about having a changed social-emotional brain due to Trauma Altered Development, I am talking about every one of us who survived our terrible childhoods because of these changes knowing on an intuitive, global and visual level – which includes ALL of the information we KNOW from within our entire body-brain-self – that we are lost in a world where we cannot find one another in the way that these (really) trauma-changed-brain primates could.

When we feel lonely, when we feel isolated and alone, when we feel ‘alien’ and ‘different’ from mainstream normal others – it’s because we are.  If nonhuman primates can figure this out, it’s certainly time that the humans did.

I am tempted to say that we DO find one another – in prisons, on the streets, in battered spouse centers, in poverty, ‘mental health’ centers, etc.  While I DO believe this is true, there’s far more to the story.  Most of us find ourselves among people who did not suffer developmental early social-emotional brain changes.  We then additionally suffer from all kinds of mismatches between our experience of being alive and theirs.

We need to validate what we KNOW and how we KNOW it so that we can fully celebrate who we are.  We need to understand HOW and WHAT happened to us – on our most basic, fundamental, essential levels.  We need to know how to live better lives in spite of the changes that happened to us, and I will never be able to say this enough:  We need to HONOR who we are and how we are in the world.  (And we must remember that changes to our early growing social-emotional brain happened according to degrees of early deprivation-trauma we experienced.)

So — THIS is what I wanted to write about today.  Now that I wrote it – I know it – and so do you.  Those brain-changed primates evidently can easily tell how they are different – so they can be different together.  As members of another social species, it is time humans understand this same fact.

If we don’t like the fact that some people end up with a trauma-changed social-emotional brain, we need to  – STOP CHILD ABUSE NOW!  STOP TRANSMITTING UNRESOLVED TRAUMA DOWN THE GENERATIONS NOW!  STOP THE STORM NOW!

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

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+FANTASTIC LINK — FANTASTIC INFO ABOUT THE HUMAN BRAIN!!!

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What kind of a GG (‘goofy geek’) am I turning into that I consider what I just found FREE online to be THIS EXCITING?  Holiday Season reading at its very best!!!

Brain Facts – A primer on the brain and nervous system

This fantastic GIFT is presented to the public by

The Society for Neuroscience

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Lots of very readable information and COLOR pictures and diagrams.

THIS is where I believe we need to go to begin to understand ourselves in the world as human beings.  PLEASE PAY SPECIAL ATTENTION TO THIS SECTION (included in list of contents below) — Brain Development: Birth of Neurons and Brain Wiring | Paring Back | Critical Periods

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THIS IS WHAT ‘BRAIN FACTS’ CONTAINS:

Download the full book (PDF) or download individual sections below. All downloads are PDFs.

Overview
Table of Contents | Introduction

Main Content
The Neuron: Neurotransmitters and Neuromodulators | Second Messengers

Brain Development: Birth of Neurons and Brain Wiring | Paring Back | Critical Periods

Sensation and Perception: Vision | Hearing | Taste and Smell | Touch and Pain

Learning, Memory, and Language: Learning and Memory | Language

Movement

Sleep: Brain Activity During Sleep | Sleep Disorders | How is Sleep Regulated?

Stress: The Immediate Response | Chronic Stress

Aging: Aging Neurons | Intellectual Capacity

Neural Disorders: Advances and Challenges: Addiction | Alzheimer’s Disease | Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis | Anxiety Disorders | Attention Deficity Hyperactivity Disorder | Autism | Bipolar Disorder | Brain Tumors | Down Syndrome | Dyslexia | Huntington’s Disease | Major Depression | Multiple Sclerosis | Neurological AIDS | Neurological Trauma | Pain | Parkinson’s Disease | Schizophrenia | Seizures and Epilepsy | Stroke | Tourette Syndrome

New Diagnostic Methods: Imaging Techniques | Gene Diagnosis

Potential Therapies: New Drugs | Trophic Factors | Engineered Antibodies | Small Molecules and RNAs | Cell and Gene Therapy

Neuroethics

Conclusion
Glossary | Neuroscience Resources

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+DECEMBER 21, 1925 MY SEVERELY ABUSIVE MOTHER WAS BORN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See *February 1958 – Mother’s Letters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Borderline Personality Disorder

In the Spotlight | More Topics |

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

In the Spotlight

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

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

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+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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+TO BE OR NOT TO BE A TRAUMA-CHANGED HUMAN — THE QUALITY OF MOTHERING HOLDS THE ABSOLUTE KEY

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Early mothering-infant caregiver interactions build a human body-brain-mind-self from the foundation on up.  We cannot change the way Nature remembers to make a human being.  If Nature’s laws are broken, a surviving infant-child-adult will suffer the consequences from having to change its early physiological development in adjustment to deprivation-trauma for the rest of its life.

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I am again returning to 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).

Siegel writes:

“What are the mechanisms by which human relationships shape brain structure and function?  How is it possible for interpersonal experience – the interactions between two people – to affect something so inherently different as the activity of neurons?”  (page 9)

I have already laid out in my thinking that human infant-children have basic needs that are met through having their Universal Human Rights met as described in the December 12, 1989 United Nations General Assembly document from the Convention on the Rights of the Child.  Yesterday’s post describes my belief that mothers are ultimately responsible for the well-being of the children they bring into the world.  Just as mothers are biologically designed to carry and birth offspring, they are also biologically designed to provide all that is necessary for an infant to continue to develop in the best way possible most critically through the first year of an infant’s life.

If a mother cannot or chooses not to provide for the necessary memory-making processes her infant requires for its best development, another WOMAN can certainly provide these experiences to an infant under the age of one.  What an infant needs, as I will begin to clarify today, is MOTHERING.  I am not using the word ‘mothering’ interchangeably with ‘nurturing’, which is certainly something anyone can provide.  Mothering is based on the biological memory contained within our specie’s DNA that forms the structure of human-being-making.

An infant’s body, including its nervous system-brain, grows best under adequate care provided by its mother.  Next in line for an infant’s best care are other women who also have the ability to adequately meet the developmental needs of the infant.  As I will describe here, those needs are very specific.  The wonder of making a human from ‘scratch’ is that under ordinary circumstances, women have always known from the origins of our species how to meet the needs of infants.  It does not take a rocket scientist to tell us how to mother.  I believe if we have not experienced infant-child deprivation and trauma-related changes in our own development ourselves as women that we are automatically born with everything we need to raise our offspring right – and by right I mean in the best way possible.

Siblings and other children have, I believe, always been important in the early care of infant-children.  They can certainly be adequate for the job on some levels if they have also been built from conception in the best way possible.  But children cannot take over the job because it is an appropriately regulated brain within the mother than interacts with the developing brain of her infant that paves the way for all future development of her offspring.  It is the ‘interpersonal experiences’ an infant has with its mother (or other mothering female) that shape its early forming (foundational) body-brain.

Love between an infant and its father is no less important than mother-infant love.  Fathers are also important to the well-being of an infant’s development, but nature has designed their contribution (other than the obvious first one) to be in the role of provider and protector of the mother and the infant so that the earliest needs of growing humans can be met by women.  Men tend to excite and overstimulate infants.  They are not biologically designed for the early job of establishing all the nerve-growth factors that create a balanced, healthy brain and nervous system in a tiny person.

Fathers are naturally meant to participate actively with their offspring AFTER the first year of life at the time that an infant has grown a body-nervous system-brain (at about a year of age) that allows it to venture away from its mother further and further into the exciting, stimulating bigger world.  Before that time it is the primary safe and secure attachment an infant has with its mothering caregiver that builds the foundation for all growth and development that will follow.

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Over the millennia of human evolution mothering has always been a basic, critically important process that happened naturally.  Mothers were adequately mothered in their own development so that nothing interfered with their memory of how to mother, and they were naturally able to go on to have offspring of their own that they, in turn, adequately mothered.

I do not believe that women evolved to share the earliest infant interactional experiences with men.  Women evolved to share these experiences with other women.  Living in cultures that today isolate women from one another is contributing to the difficulties women are facing in being the best mothers they were naturally designed to be.  In today’s world it has become too easy for women to forget what mothering young infant-children is supposed to be like.  I think it is a pitiful symptom of the decline in the value our species has always placed on the mother-infant-child relationship that makes us now have to turn to neuroscience to tell us about the specifics of building a human being that we have always naturally known how to do.

Even though women are biologically prepared to mother, even those fundamental memories can be tampered with, changed and removed through interactions a human mother has with all those around her as her own DNA memories are telling her how to prepare herself for life in the world she is born into.  The more disconnected mothering becomes from its biological roots, the more complicated our return to mothering naturally becomes.

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It does no good whatsoever to sit around, whine and wring our hands when any problem appears that needs to be resolved.  If it takes an understanding of brain development to convince women that the mothering of their infant-child is the most important job they will ever do, then so be it.  If it takes an education in the importance of safe and secure attachment experiences before an infant is one year old to build a ‘best’ human body-brain, we better get to work.

If we were not adequately mothered ourselves, these regions that Siegel is describing (below) have already been altered during their early growth periods of our own infant-childhood in direct response to the deprivations-traumas we experienced during our own development.  Pay particular attention to the information Siegel is presenting on the limbic system.  This system is the main area of the brain being built by mother-infant interactional experiences from birth until age one – and is directed in its development by the degree of safe and secure attachment an infant has with its earliest, primary caregiver.

Siegel writes:

“The brain is a complex system of interconnected parts.  The “lower structures” include those circuits of brainstem deep within the skull that mediate basic elements of energy flow, such as states of arousal and alertness and the physiological state of the body (temperature, respiration, heart rate).  At the top of the brainstem is the thalamus, an area that serves as a gateway for incoming sensory information and has extensive connections to other regions of the brain, including the neocortex, just above it.” (page 10)

Pausing for a moment, I will note here that human infants are not developed enough when they are born to be able to regulate or modulate much about themselves at all.  Their body can regulate respiration and heart rate, but they are not yet developed enough to even control their bodily temperature.  An infant is born with more fat cells on its back side to keep it warm, which works fine because adults naturally remember that holding a baby close to one’s body keeps its front side warmest!  Adult caregivers, especially the mothering ones, provide all the interactional experiences necessary to ‘train’ a baby during its development so that it can increasingly regulate everything about itself in the world.  This happens through natural processes – we hope.

Siegel continues, and we have to remember that he is describing brain areas and functions that develop within an infant-child during a succession of growth and developmental windows over time (note:  He wrote the following as one paragraph that I am breaking apart for ease of reading):

“The “higher structures,” such as the neocortex at the top of the brain, mediate “more complex” information-processing functions such as perception, thinking, and reasoning.  These areas are considered to be the most evolutionarily “advanced” in humans and mediate the complex perceptual and abstract representations that constitute our associational thought processes.”

[My note:  These regions are formed later in an infant-child’s developmental journey.  The neocortex is not fully developed in humans until between the ages of 25-30.  However, as Dr. Martin Teicher notes, traumatized and abused children’s neocortex actually “atrophies early” and never finishes its course of development properly.  For these survivors, the best growth and development of their neocortex has been robbed from them during their Trauma Altered Development that also affected the development of all the other regions – and the nervous system and immune system – of the survivor during all their preceding critical developmental stages.]

The centrally located “limbic system” – including the regions called the orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, and amygdala – 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 I cut the fluff, I can simply say that a screwed up, dysregulated mother will ‘download’ her screwed up, dysregulated limbic brain directly into her infant’s growing brain – especially the earliest forming limbic structures —  from birth to age one.  It is within the attachment, caregiving interactions a mother has with her infant that the infant’s brain is formed.  These interactions FORM the infant brain through the ongoing interactional experiences that an infant has with its mother.

Evolution has determined that this is the way growing a body-brain happens.  No infant is ever given the choice to say, “Gee whiz!  There’s something wrong with my mother!  She has an awfully dysregulated brain and she is forcing me to grow one, too!  Help!  Somebody get me a different mother NOW!”

Nope.  Doesn’t happen this way unless someone external to the mother-infant relationship is smart enough to helpfully intervene (and this usually means consciously informed in today’s world) because they know that a dysregulated-brained mother is creating a replica of her own brain as she builds the brain of her infant.

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Siegel continues, and this information is critically important.  Any of us who have ‘anxiety’ related disturbances in our body suffered changes in our Hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis (HPA axis responsible for regulating the stress response), as it was formed in us through combinations of early deprivation-trauma to these developing regions:

“The limbic and lower regions of the brain also house the hypothalamus and the pituitary, which are responsible for physiological homeostasis [Linda note:  or feedback control.  Our earliest attachment experiences build into our body a memory of how to BE in relationship to our center point of balanced equilibrium.  This point is set at CALM in the best safe and secure attachment environment, and is set somewhere else if we experience deprivation-trauma during this early developmental stage.], or bodily equilibrium, established by way of neuroendocrine activity (neuronal firing and hormonal release).  Stress is often responded to by the “hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis, and this system can be adversely affected by trauma.  This neuroendocrine axis, along with the autonomic nervous system (regulating such things as heart rate and respiration) and the neuroimmune system (regulating the body’s immunological defense system) are ways in which the function of the brain and body are intricately intertwined.”  (page 11)

[My note:  Autonomic Nervous System – ANS: Remember sympathetic GO arm and parasympathetic STOP arm “pair a brakes” as I have written about it earlier in relation to the age one onset of the physiological experience of shame.  I also believe, and I have tracked my thoughts through research, that it is the developing immune system itself that orchestrates through signals to the growing infant whether or not the world is a safe, secure benevolent place to be living in or not.  If the immune system, whose job it is to protect and defend us down to our most basic molecular level,  identifies deprivation-trauma, it signals the entire cascade of Trauma Altered Development to occur.]

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I will close today’s post by adding the following description Siegel presents about brain development as it applies most importantly to an infant’s early body-brain development before the age of one:

“The activation of neural pathways directly influences the way connections are made within the brain.  Though experience shapes the activity of the brain and the strength of neuronal connections throughout life, experience early in life may be especially crucial in organizing the way the basic structures of the brain develop.  For example, traumatic experiences at the beginning of life may have more profound effects on the “deeper” structures of the brain, which are responsible for basic regulatory capacities and enable the mind to respond later to stress.  Thus we see that abused children have elevated baseline and reactive stress hormone levels.”  (page 13 – bolding is mine)

Researchers seem forced to use the term “may be” in their writings to avoid some kind of potential peer sanction against their own thinking.  There is nothing “may be” about how early experience IS “especially crucial in organizing the way the basic structures of the brain develop.”  What I hope to convey today is how profound and permanent adaptations to deprivation-trauma are in terms of infant body-brain-nervous system-immune system development.

Early attachment interactional experiences that an infant has with its primary mothering caregiver tells all the mechanisms that govern its early development HOW to build themselves in preparation for either a benevolent, safe and secure world or for an unsafe, insecure and malevolent one.  Once all these critical regulatory structural systems have been built – with or without the need for changes – they will operate on an implicit memory unconscious level, guiding a person’s future interactions from within the core of their body, for the rest of their lives.

If infant mothering is inadequate so that deprivations and trauma are allowed to occur during first-year critical growth stages, Trauma Altered Development is GOING to occur.  There is no possible way it can’t.  And there is no possible way to consider Trauma Altered Development without considering the quality of mothering an infant receives because it is those interactions an infant has with its mothering caregiver that either tell an infant’s DNA to respond to trauma or not to.

If deprivation-trauma does exist in an infant-child’s interactions with its mothering caregiver, this ONLY happens because the same kind of deprivation-trauma was built into the infant’s mother at the start of her life.  This is the way dysregulated trauma-based patterns of ‘being in the world’ topple on down through the generations.  It is in this way, and through these processes that the malevolent conditions of the world are signaled through direct mother-infant communications so that Trauma Altered Development –built right into the forming infant body-brain — can change a growing human into one that can survive in a malevolent world both in the present as well as in the future.

Trauma and the memory of the experience of trauma causes physiological developmental changes because they both build the traumatized infant’s body at the same time they build themselves into it.  This is not like knitting a sweater where an identified mistake can be fixed by unraveling the sweater back to the mistake and correcting it, so a person can start over again and do things right.

Trauma-related adaptive physiological changes that happen within a developing human infant cannot be corrected later.  Any future efforts made to give such a survivor a ‘better life’ have to happen WITH and WITHIN the body-brain that was altered in the first place.  Humans do not REALLY get a second chance to mother an infant right, and we need to drop the illusion that we do.

We have no power to change the way Nature remembers how to make a human being.  The way we form, through mothering-infant social-attachment interactions happens according to Nature’s laws.  If those laws are broken through unsafe, insecure, malevolent early experiences, the developing body-brain of the infant will build all that information into its most basic, fundamental trauma-changed structures.  Survivors of infant-child abuse and maltreatment are left to live with and within a trauma-altered body-brain for the rest of their lives.  I kid you not.

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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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+”MOTHER! WHERE ART THOU?” — RESPONDING TO AN INFANT-CHILD’S CRY OF NEED

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I did not intend to write about what found its way out the ends of my finger tips on this keyboard today.  Degrees of deprivation of a young human’s developmental needs cause degrees of deprivation adaptations to happen – translated by the tiny growing body as degrees of trauma – as they build the body from its start. When mothers cannot, or will not provide the necessary care to their infant-children during their critical early developmental stages some degree of Trauma Altered Development will occur.

‘Response-ability’ – are mother’s losing their ability to adequately respond to the needs of their offspring?  Is our society losing its ability to respond to the needs of mothers so that they can no longer adequately respond to the needs of their young?  My mother was simply on the far end of the infant-child deprivation of need spectrum.  How many other mothers share this offspring-deprivation spectrum with her?

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Humans are presented at conception with a package of material that is our portion of our species’ memory contained within our genetic material.  Within our DNA is the information needed to send and receive signals of communication within our growing self in relationship to the environment outside of us.  Within this DNA package we were also given abilities to accomplish an impressive range of flexible adaptation to and within our first environment.

By the time we are born our genetic memory as contained within our DNA, including the memory of what to DO with this DNA, has already accomplished an impressive amount of remembering work.  If we are fortunate, all has gone well and we appear into our next arena of development healthy.  Whatever adjustments we needed to make in order to survive and grow within our first environment were made efficiently and well.

We carry all our communication and flexible adaptive abilities right out of the womb with us, along with the rest of the package of our DNA material.  But being born has nothing to do with us having completed all of the most critical stages of our early development.  Nature was faced with two interconnected problems:  How to make an increasingly complex human being even though if left in the womb too long it would be too big to get out without killing its mother, and how to provide continued required nurturing for the infant while it completed the rest of its critical early development.

Nature solved these two problems through a sophisticated maternal preparation process that genetically and hormonally gives mothers what they need to not only carry the unborn but also to be prepared to care for the newborn as it passes through the rest of its early body-brain critical-windows of developmental stages.

All this probably sounds common knowledge to the point of, “Ho!  Hum!” until we begin to understand that HOW the mother cares for her offspring continues to determine the course of its development post-birth just as profoundly as it did pre-birth.  The mother IS an infant’s universe, and it is to THIS universe that an infant’s DNA-communication-adaptation package is going to continue to respond to in its development.

Certainly there are usually other caregivers present surrounding a newborn.  All the interactions an infant has with these significant others are important, but it is to women, the females of our species, that Nature gave the specific biological, physiological nurturing abilities an infant requires to continue its postnatal development in the best way possible.  Any deviation from what is best for an infant will result to it having to make some form of alteration as it adapts to a less-than-best environment.

Deprivations signal to the infant’s growing body that stress exists in the world it is being made for.  Changes that happen in an infant’s course of development depend on the degree of deprivation it is exposed to during the critical windows of its early growth stages.  These changes can and will be made because the original DNA package the infant received at conception contains information that not only tells the infant what conditions of its world ARE less-than-best, how to detect them, but also HOW to adjust to them in order to survive.

Depending on temperament and personality of an infant as contained within its DNA, there are allowable degrees of deprivation to which infant-children can adapt without noticeably altering the direction their overall development has to take.  Results from many years of twin study research has shown that while 50% of temperament and personality stem directly from DNA the other 50% comes directly through the experiences a developing infant-child has within its environment.

In the sophisticated juggling act that an infant-child engages with in interaction with its early primary caregiver, the margin for allowable deprivation-before-adaptation is much smaller than we might think.  I believe that we have reached a point in civilization where the given boundaries of what an infant can flexibly adapt to without having to fundamentally CHANGE itself for survival in a malevolent world can be usefully identified.

In line with the adage that “When a disease appears so will its cure,” it is now, at this point in our evolution, as women make major changes in their lives that affect the quality of care they provide to their young offspring that we must understand how these changes are impacting infant-child development.  Just because cultures allow women increasing opportunity to change their lives during their childbearing years does not in any way mean that the critical needs of developing infant-children can or will change in equal measure.  If these needs are not met, trauma-based changes will occur within the developing body-brain that will last a life time.

Advancing attachment research and increasingly sophisticated findings from the field of development neuroscience are beginning to show us in detail exactly what the best early caregiving environments are that meet the needs of young infants in the best way possible.  If mothers are no longer prepared to take care of offspring the way nature designed them to within a benevolent world in the first place, their little ones are going to suffer changes in their own development as they adapt to the deprivations present within their early environment.

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I am obviously not simply writing today about the long term and permanent adaptive adjustments an infant-child body-brain has to make to survive a severely abusive malevolent early environment as it prepares for a lifetime of living in the same.  I am talking about the universal human needs of children.  Any deprivation of basic need an infant-child suffers exists on a continuum of severity, as do the developmental changes these deprived little ones will experience and suffer from for the rest of their lives.

We have to ask ourselves, “How much deprivation of an infant-child’s fundamental human needs is OK?  How much deprivation is allowable?”  Given the 18 years of severe maltreatment I suffered from birth and throughout my childhood, I am sensitized to concern about the developmental needs of human infant-children from the far end of the maltreatment continuum.  At the same time, it is because I have been forced to learn about the permanent adaptive changes a developing little one will have to make to deprivations that I can stand on the line of this continuum and see how these degrees of deprivation cause changes all the way along its length.

I have thought long, hard and deeply about the topic of human infant-children’s fundamental needs during their early developmental stages.  I have honed my thinking to the point where what I know about the topic appears to be fact.  Best-possible human development requires that certain fundamental human needs be met adequately or some degree of deprivation-trauma will cause adaptive changes to occur during these developmental stages that create corresponding degrees of deprivation of best well-being for a lifetime.

When a society loses sight of the critical role mother’s play in the quality of their offspring’s development that society is in a state of decline.  This slide will take such a society past ‘shabby’ right into ‘a shambles’.  With 75% of our nation’s 17-24 year old young adults being currently unfit for military service I would say our national slide is moving quickly into the ‘shambles’ state.  I will also say that I strongly suspect this rapid decline of quality of life among our nation’s youth can be directly correlated with mothers’ increasing exit from their job of providing for the fundamental human developmental needs of their young infant-children.  (Keep in mind, my maniac abusive mother was a stay-at-home mom!)

I absolutely believe that when a mother brings offspring into the world it is her naturally given responsibility to meet the best-possible developmental needs of that infant-child.  If she chooses to pursue her own life away from her offspring, it is her responsibility to know exactly what the needs of her infant-child are, and to make absolutely certain those needs are being met elsewhere.  If mothers cannot or will not take care of their offspring, even with encouragement and assistance, those little ones need to be removed and be cared for appropriately – elsewhere.

In cases such as my mother’s was, it was (or should have been) obvious that something went terribly wrong during her own young development that caused her to adjust in ways that prevented her from being a mother to me at all.  But it is easy to point a finger at such a complete disaster of a mother while at the same time not paying attention to the kinds of deprivations that cause deprivation/trauma-related changes to happen in the body-brain development of little ones in much less obvious ways.

Any deprivation of ‘best’ will create a deprivation-based memory to be built into a human being’s developing body because memory builds our body in the first place.  Every single adjustment away from ‘best’ treatment in a ‘best’ environment is translated by the body into a need to prepare for a ‘less than best’ future.  When these changes happen particularly during the first year of life, they affect all of development from those foundational changes onward in ways that are permanent and can never be reversed.

It is the degree of quality in mothering during the first developmental years of life that causes these changes to happen.

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