Tag: witness abuse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Siegel writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Siegel states that neuroscience can now describe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Siegel:

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

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

Siegel:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Teicher’s article:

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

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

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

Main Entry: hap·pen

Function: intransitive verb

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

Etymology: Middle English, from hap

Date: 14th century

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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+CONSUMERS BEWARE OF TRAUMA TRIGGERS LURKING IN ‘HOLIDAY SEASON MAGIC’

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The Holiday Season can be a Trauma Trigger Trap for unsuspecting infant-child abuse and trauma survivors.

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I am still working on my main post for today about the meaning of the word ‘symptom’, but in the meantime I wanted to present this information from About.Com about Borderline Personality Disorder and the Holidays.  I present this information in memory of my mother, and in memory of her traumatic early infant-child history.

I think difficult emotional states surrounding the Holiday experience can be passed on down the generations just as any other trauma can be.  This is particularly true with holidays that are supposedly child centered.  If trauma surrounds a family’s experience of Christmas in the past, it can be especially true that a child will remember Holiday Season traumas – in their body – without having conscious memory of the facts of the related traumas they endured when they were very young.

I found in my mother’s mother’s own 1930 writings a reference to exactly this kind of Holiday Season trauma when she wrote the following:

“As I remember, the late fall [1929?] everything was normal and happy at home.  Christmas is always an unhappy strain of feelings to me. Constantly I made conscious effort of not throwing arousing antagonistic attitudes in my husband [sic]. “

And where did my grandmother’s difficulties with the Holidays come from?  No doubt from her own early experiences in her own childhood that nobody EVER openly talked about.

Adults can try all they want to try to hide family discord from young children, but humans are emotional detection experts from the time we are born.  It is important to remember that the kinds of emotional distress and traumatic family experiences contained within the Holidays has the power to impact infant-children within their BODY memories for the rest of their lives.

The Holidays thus provide an excellent opportunity to practice changing intergenerational patterns of stress, distress and trauma!  Never that I know of was my mother ever able to admit the truth that the Christmas Holidays were NOT always happy, charming, or pleasant during her childhood.  Why are we so willing in America to practice denial about the truth about Holiday Season trauma?

As I have said before, denial is itself a form of childhood wishful magical thinking.  Because the Holidays are supposed to be these perfect childhood blessed magical times, it is probably exactly HERE that we are most likely to find massive denial present.  Childhood magical thinking (that turns into denial in adulthood) is a perfect fit for Holiday Season emotional set-ups for disaster.

The Holiday Season can be difficult for a lot of people.  From my point of view, it will always be those who did not experience infant-childhood safe and secure attachments, and therefore themselves as adults now have some version of an insecure attachment disorder that will probably be the most high risk people for having emotional complications around this season.

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Just as the Holidays provide a perfect match between the practice of adult denial and fantasy because, after all, Christmas is SUPPOSED to be a magical season, it also provides a perfect stage for trauma dramas to continue their repetition on down the generations.  No matter how much effort caregivers of young children might exert toward disguising their own emotions and internal traumatic dilemmas about the season, their sensitive – and often already trauma sensitized offspring – will be able to detect the underlying truths.  The Holidays thus continue to be fertile ground for the transmission of ongoing adult unresolved traumas.

Any adult who did not experience safe and secure attachments within a benevolent infant-child environment had some form of emotional dysregulation built into their forming early developing right social limbic emotional brain.  This emotional dysregulation came from their caregivers who also experienced the same patterns in their own childhood.  These patterns are formed not only into the early brain, but also into the early forming nervous system on all its levels.

For those who are trying very hard NOT to pass down their own traumas to their own children, this Holiday Season can provide a perfect opportunity for deep, profound and fundamental learning about how insecure versus secure attachments operate.  Insecure attachments happen when adult early caregivers are so consumed and overwhelmed on their own insides by unresolved trauma experiences that they lack the ability to be present for their children.

Children are supposed to be front and center in their caregiver’s life.  Caregivers are supposed to be able to have their own attachment need system turned OFF so that they can care give to their young ones.  When adults cannot experience their own internal state of safety and security in the world, they cannot provide this experience to their offspring.  We can start our efforts to be present for our children by becoming honest and very clear about the truth of how the Holiday Seasons felt to us when we were young.  Trash the fantasy.  We are fooling no one, not ourselves and certainly not our children.

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If you follow the links provided by About.Com concerning helpful information for those suffering with Borderline Personality Disorder and their loved ones, you will find specific ideas about handling the emotional dysregulation that the Holiday Season can so easily present and amplify.  Remember that we are experiencing all of our life with the tools (our brain and nervous system) that were formed in our own early infant-childhood.

Emotional regulatory abilities are not automatically built into an early traumatized little one’s body in an ordinary way.  But it is here that we can begin to practice our growing consciousness about how our changed body-brain-mind-self actually FEELS and how we can consciously change our experience.

We can understand that every difficulty we experience around the Holiday Season is connected to our own early experiences of trauma in unsafe and insecure attachment environments.  Our own unresolved trauma is NOT what we wish to pass down to our children.  How willing and able are we to actually not only KNOW the truth about our own early trauma – and if we had early trauma at all it certainly did not magically skip over the Holiday Seasons of our childhood?  How willing and able are we to actually TALK to our families about the truth of how we feel?

Attachment experts use the presence, absence and quality of child storytelling as a gauge of secure or insecure attachment in children who are old enough to talk.  Adults need to encourage children from the earliest ages to TALK about themselves having the experiences of having the experience of being a person alive in a body in the world.  This is a continuation of the face-to-face emotional-self mirroring processes between an infant and its early caregivers (primarily the mother) that directly build the right brain in the first place.

It is NEVER too late to add safe and secure mirroring processes between people into our lives.  These interactions not only form the early right brain and form the foundation for all future body-brain-mind-self growth and development – but they help to HEAL the same for those of us who did not experience these interactions in the beginning.

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Another extremely important point to remember is that for people like me, the Holiday Season can trigger all kinds of dissociated experiences.  My mother’s chronic and severe abuse of me, that started when I was born and happened for the next 18 years of my childhood, was very likely to be suspended during ‘certain’ kinds of experiences:  Picture taking events.  These included birthdays, any kind of holiday in which a pretend safe and secure attachment HAPPY time was created by my mother inside of bubbles that had nothing whatsoever to do with my ongoing REAL experience of being tormented, tortured and abused by my mother.

Because the abuse seemed to be suspended during these events, and because I was more or less allowed to join with the family during them, and because during these events I was given permission by my mother to be ‘happy’, I COULD tend to continue to pretend that these events were truly special, safe, secure and happy.

They were not.  They simply created more dissociational bubbles of experience that I could not remember in any coherent, ongoing story of my life.  Remember, the inability to tell a coherent life story is one of the MAJOR hallmarks-symptoms of adult insecure attachment patterns and of dissociation.  All kinds of pictures still exist of ‘happy Linda’ during these ‘happy events’.  All dressed up, curls in my hair, opening presents, holding an Easter basket – well, come to think of it I don’t know of one picture of me on a birthday being the center of attention.  But, anyway, you get the picture and my point.

See:  *Age 8 – The Reindeer Envelope – My Own Art Work Analyzed By Me – The Art Therapist

My mother’s ‘nicey nicey’ treatment of me on ‘special occasions’ such as holidays fed into, strengthened and perpetuated the trauma bond that I had with her as my caregiver.  You bet my body has the truth about all these memories!

It has taken me a lot of time and effort as an adult to get to the point NOW where I can clearly see that my mother’s creation of ‘happiness bubbles’ around holidays, that supposedly let Linda out of her miserable captivity of trauma and abuse, simply gave me new dissociational experiences that could not be fit into my ongoing experience of myself in my life.  I never even tried.  I was already a refined, expert dissociator by the time these experiences filtered into my reality.

So think about these types of patterns in your own life, and think about how your experiences of them might be impacting your own children’s experiences.  Why perpetuate the hype?  Are we safely and securely attached today in any of our relationships that we can let ourselves know our own internal truth about how trauma has infiltrated all of our experiences, including the supposed ‘happy times’ of our traumatic infant-childhoods?  Are we continuing to try to create dissociated ‘happy bubbles’ out of the Holidays that have nothing to do with the ongoing nature of our reality?

Because current statistics show that about half of our population had safe and secure attachments in their infant-childhoods, we already know, then, that the other half of us suffered from some deprivation related to attachment.  This other half of us ALL experience (my bet is) some form of infant-childhood trauma memory, deep within our body memory if not consciously, related to insecure attachment experiences around the Holiday Season.  This is a REALITY that does not feed into FANTASY.

It is helpful to make this distinction particularly because the Holiday Season is based in fantasy in all but its most direct Christian historical ties.  It is, perhaps more than any other time of the year, a season when unsafe and insecure attachment trauma histories will appear – one way or the other – to give us emotional (from our body’s memory) big trouble if we are not as conscious as possible about the reality of our infant-childhood life. We can take appropriate care not only of ourselves, but of all those around us who depend upon us not to transmit our trauma drama histories on to them.  (HINT:  Think of this as a Trauma Altered Development allergy to all the fantasy perpetuated about the Holiday Season.)

This is so true that we could actually benefit from attaching a huge consumer warning sign to the Holiday Season:  “BEWARE!  This season is most likely to trigger your early traumatic infant-child memories if you have them!”  It is from this point of awareness that many of us need to prepare for the holidays.  What can we learn from — and how can we change and heal from — our own history of early traumas – no matter where they may be lurking?

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About Borderline Personality Disorder: Distress Tolerance for the Holiday Season

In the Spotlight | More Topics |
from Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD
The holiday season is a really hard time for so many people. There are expectations that we will be joyful, or surrounded by friends and family. But for many this is not the reality, and the holiday season can bring extra stressors on top of the expectations. This week, start preparing by practicing some new skills to help with distress tolerance.

What are Distress Tolerance Skills?

In the Spotlight
The distress tolerance skills are a set of tools that will help you manage intense emotional states without doing anything destructive. These skills will not necessarily wash away the emotional pain you are feeling or even make you feel less distressed. Instead, the goal of these skills is to prevent you from doing something that will make the situation worse.

Not-So-Happy Holidays?
As the holidays approach, lots of people with BPD (and people with BPD in their families) struggle. Holidays are complicated!

“Go-To” Coping Skills
When you are having an intense emotion, it can be hard to know what to do. Unfortunately, many people with BPD turn to unhealthy behaviors in an attempt to cope with emotional pain (e.g., self-harm, substance use, or aggression).

More Topics

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+THOUGHTS ON THE TRIGGER POINT OF SHAME

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I have the advantage of trying to work my way through trauma related information using my own experience as a basis for what I know, rather than being locked into any established patterns of thinking about either trauma or the so-called ‘mental illnesses’ that are directly connected to Trauma Altered Development (TAD).   I am writing a ‘forensic autobiography’.  That means I write from the perspective of being a ‘confessional’ rather than from being a ‘professional’.  I am free to think any way I want to about the topic of trauma as it concerns me and others like me.

I try to understand what the developmental, attachment, and neuroscience experts say about the topic of TAD, but I am certain that if I line up my conclusions on the topic against these expert findings we will not always match point by point.

I want to talk today – again – about how trauma influences our core development as infant-child abuse survivors.  If our earliest caregiver interactions were not safe and secure, our development was altered from the start.

The experience of shame, as I have written before, is a very real physiological Autonomic Nervous System response to explorations within our early environment that caused us to experience conflict – rupture either with or without repair – with our early caregivers.  If there was no serious rupture (we were in agreement with our caregivers about our self in our environment), or there were ruptures that were met with repair through the appropriate actions of our early caregivers, the “GO” and “STOP” balance within our growing Autonomic Nervous System (sympathetic arm = GO, parasympathetic arm = STOP (pair a brakes)) developed optimally and well in a balanced, ‘ordinary’ way.

These ‘shame’ interactions are always based on the experiences prior to the age of one either in a benevolent or malevolent early caregiver environment that has already by this age built our growing brain, nervous system, body and earliest experience of self in a particular direction.  If these interactions were benevolent, a different body-brain-growing mind and self is forming than would be one that is forming under malevolent conditions.

We have to begin to REALLY understand how profoundly our experiences within our earliest caregiver environment affect us – permanently.  Once we are one year old, our development has already been profoundly directed by the kinds of experiences we have had with our caregivers, primarily with our mother.  It is on this earliest foundation that all other experiences will be processed within our little growing body.

By the time we grow a body-brain that is physically developed enough to be able to experience SHAME at one year of age, the course of our development has already been determined – either within and for a safe, secure, trauma-free benevolent world, or for the opposite.

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I mention this today in following my post of yesterday where I described my opinion of our nation as not being completely pro the human rights of children.  The ability to optimally experience shame in a growing body already by the age of one, I believe, is directly tied to how we experience any later event that involves conflict, consciousness, conscience and choice.

I believe the earliest caregiver interactions we have, mostly benevolent or malevolent, color the development of our personality.  Experts still suspect that personality is primarily influenced by our genetics.  However, developmental, attachment and neuroscientists are rapidly uncovering the facts about how our earliest experiences actually tell our genes what to do.  Given these new and extremely important findings, we can no longer ever assume that anyone’s personality follows the same developmental pathways if everyone is not raised with the same Universal Human Rights guaranteed.  Any violation of basic human needs for development, as conveyed through our understandings about basic human rights, causes Trauma Altered Development (TAD) to occur.

Our national personality is built upon the personalities of all the individuals that are a part of the whole.  Because we are a democracy, the most obvious personality we show to the world becomes the personality of the majority of our members.  Each of our own individual personalities, in turn, were built upon a combination of our personal genetics as they manifested themselves within either a primarily safe and secure early environment or within a traumatic one.

If early attachment is not safe and secure, some degree of trauma is present because fundamental universal human rights were not guaranteed.  We are talking humans here.  Humans have basic PHYSIOLOGICAL needs for our optimal development that create us – in an interaction between our genes and the quality of our early environment – to end up being a certain way in the world.

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America prides itself on being a nation of individualists, choosing to consider that within the perhaps one percent of our genes that make us different from one another there is enough individual potential for differences that it outweighs the 99% of our genes that we share in common as members of our social human species.  I suspect, however, that it is only when early developmental needs are met through the application of human universal rights that the development of the foundational 99% of our shared genetic material can manifest itself optimally that the remaining 1% that provides us the buffet of individual differences can grow, develop and shine among us.

If basic human needs are not met in a safe and secure early environment primarily free of trauma (without ruptures for which there are not adequate and appropriate repair) as described within the recognition of basic human rights, the 99% of us has to take a course through Trauma Altered Development that means we have been forced to adjust to the trauma in a way that limits our ability to be far more of our unique, different self as adults.

Early traumatic, unsafe, insecure and malevolent environments seem to me to narrow the ‘channel’ through which we can pass through our early body-brain-mind-self developmental stages – and still survive.  One by one, I can think about everyone I have ever met who suffered from a malevolent early childhood and begin to see how the patterns among them-us-me become more alike in fundamental ways than they are different.

If I simply look at the so-called ‘personality disorders’ that researchers are now finding are nearly ALWAYS tied in their origins to early infant-child abuse and trauma, the end result makes these people enough alike that they can be grouped into ‘functioning categories’ according to the ‘symptoms’ that they demonstrate in their continued lives.

If I look just at three particular people, I see how Histrionic Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and Borderline Personality Disorder lie on a continuum of personality alteration that created these people to be different than I believe they would have been had their Child Rights been guaranteed so that they would have been able to grow up without Trauma Altered Development.

The very best scenario for human growth and development occurs because of development that happens without the mediating and CHANGING affects of trauma.  Only when Children’s Rights are guaranteed within safe and secure environments can a body-brain-mind-self grow up to be free – and by that I mean, free to be MOST flexible and creative throughout their lives in their actions and responses to every life experience (change) that they encounter.

Trauma Altered Development means that we have been forced to sacrifice aspects of our own autonomous development.  We are forced to be more alike than different because SURVIVAL itself has specific requirements that need to be met.  If we are exposed to overwhelming danger, threat and trauma during our early development, our specie’s resiliency factors from within our bodies will be forced into activation.  If the threat to our infant-child well-being endangers our body-brain-mind-self on the most basic levels, the Trauma Altered Development we experience will simply turn us primarily into SURVIVORS    rather into the most unique, flexible, creative original beings that we had the capacity to become.

To the degree that trauma changes a developing infant-child so that they can survive, to that degree will conscious choice and aware decision making be removed from them – unless and until these survivors can learn what the physiological trauma-changes were, how they affect us, and how we can now FORCE ourselves to become increasingly more conscious in our lives.

Non-trauma-altered people who were not forced to physiologically adapt to early traumas naturally end up with a fuller buffet of consciousness – including the ability to empathize, use a broadly built Theory of Mind to understand themselves in relationship to others in the world, and filter their experience through an aware conscience.  They simply have more choices about how to be in the world.

Of course, these non-trauma developed people can choose to be total jerks if they want to be.  Yet we know that a staggeringly high percentage of our nation’s criminal population suffered from Trauma Altered Development in malevolent childhoods.  Compared to people with Trauma Altered Development, the range of potential choices for non-trauma altered people appears to be almost infinite.

The feedback-feedforward information gathering and response loops within the body-brain-mind-self of a non-traumatized infant-child compared to a traumatized one form differently.  When I think about optimal development using the image of the infinity sign, non-trauma development creates an ever expanding, fully operational flow of life force along that “8” pathway.

The more an individual is forced to apply survival-based physiological changes during their infant-child development in the midst of trauma, the smaller the “8” pathway becomes.  In cases such as my mother’s was, the “8” simply broke so that she was left with the repetitive patterns of “0” only, living her life without the ability to allow incoming information to come in without it having to be processed entirely through the filer of the damage she suffered in her development through trauma.  My mother was not allowed to become the fully unique, thriving, creative, flexible person she COULD have become had she not been forced to physiologically adapt in order to survive during her developmental stages as an infant-child.

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The physiological crisis point within our human body-brain-mind-self as we interact with others of our species is at the SHAME point.  No matter how we choose to recognize this point, no matter what word we choose to apply to this very real physiological point in the operation of our Autonomic Nervous System (ANS), it is at this SHAME point that we are notified that there has been a rupture in need of repair between ourselves and others around us.  The SHAME point is where the “GO” and the “STOP” within our body-brain-mind-self happens.  It is at this point that negotiation can happen successfully – or not.

It seems entirely possible to me that this SHAME point is where the two circles of the “8” infinity sign meet one another.  In cases such as my mother’s, it is at this point that she broke and was left with “0”, unable to negotiate herself as a being in relationship not only to others, but also in relationship to her own self.  She lost the ability to consciously identify herself in a complex world of shifting realities.

My mother operated from the extremely limited survival-based point of automatic pilot only.  She could not flexibly and creatively, openly or consciously consider options to solving conflicts because everything about her centered on NOT feeling shame because she could not tolerate it.  When an infant-child’s environment is so unstable, when their basic human needs-rights are not met, when survival becomes the ONLY option, it means that the patterns of rupture without either repair or HOPE of repair have so signaled the developing little person of danger in a malevolent world that all but the most very basic, primitive options have been allowed.

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The problem with overwhelming trauma is that it disturbs the rupture-repair pattern of checks and balances that allows life to continue going on in anything like a normal or ordinary way.  The problem with overwhelming trauma during our infant-child developmental stages is that we are forced to find a way to survive at the same time we have the most limited resources we will have in our lifetime.  Our only option was, in effect, to steal from our own inner bank of resources in order to survive.  This causes the problem to be built right into our developing body-brain-mind-self because we are then depleted from the inside out.

The point of surviving trauma is to eliminate its effects on us.  If we have no power to eliminate its effects (think here, little tiny person) then the next best thing we can do is eliminate our awareness of the experience of being in a state of ongoing trauma that we cannot escape from.  We have no option except to escape on the inside.

Recovery from trauma post-infant-childhood means that we ‘return’ to a normal or near normal state which happens when the rupture that trauma created becomes repaired.  There must be adequate resources available to allow repair to take place so that life can “GO” on, one way or the other.  In the case of Trauma Altered Development during infant-childhood, the resources had to be found within the child itself because they were not available from the outside.

I do not believe it will be much longer before we understand completely that nearly all of what we call ‘dysfunctional behavior’ including ‘mental illness’ is a result of overwhelming trauma during infant-childhood developmental stages that causes survivors to steal from their own inner storehouse of resources at a time when having to do so – in order to stay alive – robs them of the capacity to later experience a full, healthy, flexibly adaptive, creative best-developed-self.

It is for this reason, if for no other, that a guarantee of Child Rights becomes such a critically important factor.  When a child has its fundamental human rights provided, it will not be forced to use up its own internal resources in order to survive.  Those resources HAVE TO COME from the outside of the child.  That is what human childhood is – a developmental period of growing and expanding ability to sustain oneself in the world.  In order for an infant-child to develop optimally, its needs must be attended to and met during these stages of dependency.  If those needs are not met from the outside, Trauma Altered Development will occur, or the infant-child will die.

It is the responsibility of all adults to ensure that all of a child’s rights are guaranteed and protected.  Nature has designed humans so that appropriate and adequate adult caregiving of infants and children is our specie’s primary, number one resiliency factor.  We must lift the yoke of stigma off of the survivors of infant-child neglect, abuse and trauma and place it instead on all the adults in the society surrounding our little ones that allowed this malevolent treatment and trauma to happen to them in the first place.

It is on this level that I place responsibility and accountability on our nation when I say “SHAME on you!”  Either we intend to STOP neglecting our responsibility to our nation’s children or we don’t.  Either we intend to repair the rupture in the fabric of our society that allows the basic rights of children to be violated, or we do not.

If we choose to GO on letting traumas happen to our little ones that is within our society’s power to STOP, then we must realize that the Trauma Altered Development that will happen to these maltreated and traumatized infant-children will change them on their most primary, physiological level — as they are forced to take from inside of themselves what they need in order to survive — because the adults in their world were not there to help them.  Having to do so will change the degree of well-being for these survivors for the rest of their lives.

When the trigger point of shame is touched, it is time to examine conscience and to choose a course of action.  This is true for individuals and for the societies they are a part of.  In cases such as my mother’s, these abilities were removed from her through trauma that caused her Trauma Altered Development.  Is this same kind of pattern also contained within our nation?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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+PTSD AND SEVERE ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – PART TWO

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

Today’s post follows the November 28, 2009 post

+PTSD AND SEVERE CHILD ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – PART ONE

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

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

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

(see yesterday’s November 29, 2009 post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Van der Kolk states:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The author continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Your Page – Readers’ Responses

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

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

Trauma Altered Development (TAD)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Your Page – Readers’ Responses

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