Hole in My Heart

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Kathy

#4 in my ongoing book series; original post August 9, 2013

brousblog4a Siegel Hawn CooperIf there’s been an Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) since 1996 which can diagnose the 50% of Americans with attachment disorder, why doesn’t our medical system use it? [FN12a]

Why aren’t family doctors asking why a patient “just feels lousy” for years, to send us at least for one AAI check by a therapist? Why haven’t more than a small minority of therapists even heard of the AAI? Using it would’ve saved me three years in failed treatment hell.

Instead it’s been left to activists like comedienne Goldie Hawn, alarmed by the jump in stress and violence among children, to put attachment specialists like UCLA’s Dr. Dan Siegel, MD on TV with plastic models of the brain, to wake us all up.  Check out the priceless video above.  “You sent us a brain in the mail !” Anderson Cooper exclaims. [FN12b]

Models of the brain and brain science show a lot: where Attachment Disorder gets created, why we don’t even know that it’s there, and how to heal it.

Most of what occurred with family or caregivers in the almost 4 years from conception to 36 months, which makes us securely or in-securely attached, happened ‘way before we had much of a thinking brain – and before we had any conscious memory banks. So we still fly blind about it today.

Our brain parts which allow us to calm ourselves, feel good alone, or even make sense of sights, sounds, touch, and other sensory data pouring in from outside, weren’t working at the time attachment misfired. Babies can’t self-calm or feel good alone. The “thinking brain” hippocampus which makes sense of that barrage of incoming data, doesn’t even work until 24 to 36 months. That’s why we can’t remember much before age 3.

But the problem is down there, in the pre-thinking, un-conscious parts of the brain which were online, and down in our body with a vengeance. We can have cancer for a long time and be unaware of it until late in the game. Attachment Disorder too is usually an 800lb gorilla which is utterly outside of consciousness. Yet wounded un-conscious parts of our brain have been in a state of panic since attachment misfired before age 3.

Hole in My Heart

brousblog4b Cyndi Lauper“There’s a hole in my heart,” or  “a hole under my feet,” people report. We’re anxious, panicky, depressed about being dropped off at school, or to do work, marriage, child rearing. We feel unequipped to do Life.

I’d felt emotional pain as a “hole in my heart” ever since I could remember; I alternated between denial and praying my parents wouldn’t notice my fear. My first memory of TV was a documentary about an early open-heart surgery on a “blue baby” born with cardiac perforation.

As the camera showed a scalpel probing a gap in bloody tissue, the announcer intoned, “Here is the hole in Julie’s heart.”  I couldn’t forget the sight and my terror at the announcer’s voice for years.  Fairy tales with witches, children’s stories like Peter and the Wolf, TV and movies were as likely to terrify me as a kid as to entertain. “Normal?” Anything resonate?

One day in 2010, I went to my local library on a job request for a sale coaching book, a branch so small that self-help and psychology were shelved together.  I stumbled on books of case studies of people whose parents died early, like “The Loss That Is Forever: The Lifelong Impact of the Early Death of a Mother or Father,” by Dr. Maxine Harris. [FN13a]  “Irrelevant, my parents died in 2008,” I said, but tossed the book in my car trunk with the rest.  There it sat for six weeks until the night before due date.

I opened it and was blown away.  The case studies report exactly the disoriented feelings I’d had all my life.  A week later my branch closed for two years renovation; what an accident.

I wrote this long before I ever saw Cyndi Lauper’s video “Hole in My Heart,” but it’s a shock how empty she feels inside. [FN13b]  “I’ve got a hole in my heart that goes all the way to China!” she wails, “You gotta fill it up with love before I fall inside… You can’t see the bottom, you can’t see the bottom, but believe me – it’s a long way down…”

Poor Cyndi, she thinks the hunky guys who bail her out at the end are gonna solve her problem.  She doesn’t know her pain is from her childhood emotions about parents.  Those hunks are just gonna hurt her again.

OK, so that’s Psychiatry 101: “80% of the pain in adult romantic relationships is projecting the pain we received in childhood.” [FN14]  Trouble is, 99% of Americans are unaware of that fact, and we 50% with Attachment Disorder fight it tooth and nail. We want someone to hold us so bad we could die – someone, anyone, who cares!  So don’t confuse us with the facts.  But it never works, ‘cos it’s a flight from reality.

Emotional Object Constancy

There’s a way out, recently dubbed neuroplasticity.  As the Anderson Live video shows, we can re-train our brains using compassionate therapy, meditation and other “brain gym work” to change the neural structures that hold painful old memories. It was thought that nerve tissue, if damaged, could never heal, but recent science shows the reverse.  “We’re hard-wired to heal,” say doctors Henry Cloud and John Townsend. [FN15a]

But to do it, humans require “face time,” face to face work with other “Safe People,” human beings who actually care enough to be present with us. [FN15b] Because it was face time, or lack of it, which damaged our developing brains in the first place.

brousblog4c Claire+MosesFace time is what develops a baby’s brain into an adult brain. An emotionally attuned mother, who feels her baby’s internal states, shows it how to sooth and feel better.  She does it wordlessly, with a lot of eye contact (tech term “limbic resonance”).  The emotional lobes of the mother’s brain and the baby’s brain actually resonate to each other, as attachment specialist Dr. Allan Schore has shown. [FN16a,16b]

This is my neighbor and her son, whom she’s carried pretty much constantly for a year in a face-to-face carrier, not because anyone told her to, but because, she says, “it feels natural.”  I see them several times a week and I have never seen this baby without a glorious smile.

Like any newborn, he would have cried non-stop at first if she weren’t always there; again, babies don’t have the neural hardware to sooth themselves. But gradually over weeks and months, this baby could be put down for a longer and longer time without getting upset.

“Why should that be?” asks Dr. Henry Cloud. What’s he got now, that he didn’t have before?  The mother’s love comes from the outside, then literally goes inside her baby, via limbic resonance.  She gives the gift of feeling loved inside to her baby, called “emotional object constancy.”

This is a deep knowing, that we have so warmly attached to mother, the love object, that even when she is absent, we do not feel alone or lonely. We instead feel constancy: we feel that we carry around mom’s love inside us 24×7. This is the source of the strength which allows a healthy child to be dropped off at school and feel so secure inside, that he’s eager to try something new and play with strangers.

The way out of attachment disorder is to create more emotional object constancy, that feeling of deep attachment and safety the baby in the photo has. The reason we feel bad, anxious, depressed or have chronic emotional pain, is usually that this did not develop well when we were kids.

Communicating object constancy to kids is a major reason humans have families. Pre-agricultural man required at least six adults to raise one child safely – four to feed and take care of mom while dad hunted, so mom could safely take care of the child 24 x 7 and get this job done. Who has time for that in this ratty economy? [FN17]

If you have Attachment Disorder, my tale will start to resonate if you let it. If you let yourself feel the hurt with me, you’ll start to unfreeze your frozen bad feelings and if you get the right help, you’ll feel the healing, too.

Secure attachment can be “earned,” as Dr. Mary Main, creator of the AAI, also said.  But we need  face time with safe people to do it, to widen what Dan Siegel calls our “window of tolerance” to feel frozen feelings.

Days before Christmas 2011 at a local nursery, a friend dared me to sit on Santa’s lap.  As I alighted gingerly, he asked, “And what do you want for Christmas, young lady?” Lost and alone for the holidays, I looked the poor guy straight in the eye and blurted without thinking, “Please Sir, I want peace of mind.”

“Don’t we all,” he said, tearing up.

I think I’ll go find the nice man this Christmas 2013 and thank him for making my wish come true.

———————————-

This is from Kathy’s forthcoming book DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME: The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder – How I accidentally regressed myself back to infancy and healed it all. Watch for the continuing series of excerpts from the rest of her book each Friday, as she explores her journey of recovery by learning the hard way about Attachment Disorder in adults, adult Attachment Theory, and the Adult Attachment Interview.

Kathy Brous from FEMHC 1READ MORE from “DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME: The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder”
by Kathy Brous

 

 

Footnotes
12a. Op Cit blog #3: George, C.; Kaplan, N.; Main, Mary, “An Adult Attachment Interview,”  Unpublished MS, University of California at Berkeley, 1994
12b. Siegel, Daniel J.,MD & Hawn, Goldie, TV Special on the Brain, CNN Anderson Live, Sept. 24, 2012.  See www.drdansiegel.com/press/ for more; or direct to video at http://cdnapi.kaltura.com/index.php/extwidget/openGraph/wid/0_c40uup5m
13a. Harris, Maxine, PhD, “The Loss That Is Forever: The Lifelong Impact of the Early Death of a Mother or Father,” Penguin Books, New York, 1996
13b. Cyndi Lauper video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP9b4zlO2cU
14.   Verrier, Nancy, PhD, “Coming Home to Self: The Adopted Child Grows Up,” self-published, Lafayette, CA, 1993
15a.  Cloud, Henry, PhD, “Changes that Heal,” Zondervan, Grand Rapids, 1990. See also:  “Getting Love on the Inside,” Lecture CD, April 2002, Cloud-TownsendResources.com
15b.  Townsend, John, PhD & Cloud, Henry,Phd, “Safe People,” Zondervan Press, Grand Rapids, 1995. Also by both: “Boundaries,” Zondervan Press, Grand Rapids, 2004
16a.  Schore, Allan N., PhD, “Affect Regulation and Mind-Brain-Body Healing of Trauma,” National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine (NICABM), June 15, 2011, www.nicabm.com  See also his book  “Affect Regulation and the Origin of the  Self”, Norton textbook May 2003; first edition 1994.
16b.  Op Cit blog #2: Lewis, Thomas MD, Amini, Fari MD, Lannon, Richard MD; “A General Theory of Love”,Random House, 2000. Great link: www.paulagordon.com/shows/lannon/
17.  Perry, Bruce, MD, PhD, “Born for Love: The Effects of Empathy on the Developing Brain,” speech at conference “ How People Change: Relationship & Neuroplasticity in Psychotherapy,” UCLA Extension, Los Angeles, March 8, 2013. See also his article  “Overview of Neuro-sequential Model of Therapeutics (NMT),” www.childtrauma.org, 2010

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The Day That Einstein Feared Has Arrived

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Kathy

CLICK to BUY “Don’t Try This Alone”!

brousblog3a Cat Bad DayAs I’ve shown based on the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), some 50% of us have a degree of attachment disorder.  How can there be so little information on it available?  What about us blindsided adults who suffer this?

The federal NIMH estimates about 6% of Americans are technically “mentally ill,” and the rest of us attachment-challenged are just the “worried well.” [FN1]

I believe attachment work can cure not only us 50% “worried well,” but lots of the NIMH’s 6%.  I wrote that here back in 2013.  More recently,  experts like Dr. Allan Schore and Bessel van der Kolk MD have begun to point this out.  As for us 50%, attachment disorder may not be a “classic” mental illness like total schizophrenia, but it sure is not mental health.  Yet a college psychology professor objected to me in 2013, “What you’re writing about is just sociology, it’s not a mental disorder.”

So Widespread It’s Sociology

He was wrong; it’s both!  It’s us “worried well” that worries me–exactly since attachment trauma is so widespread that it’s a “sociological phenomenon” like surfing.  Plus, there’s the enormity of the emotional pain that so many of us “worried well” each feel, in secret, with no clue where to go for help. I think that pain comes from attachment trauma. But we don’t know it, so the pain gets worse and worse as we trudge on, trying to perform, without knowing there is some nasty crud accumulating over the decades around our hearts.

Attachment Theory is not new; British psychiatrist John Bowlby developed it in the 1950s. [FN2]  Bowlby’s co-worker Dr. Mary Ainsworth and her successor Dr. Mary Main studied infant attachment using the “Strange Situation” procedure during 1969-1999.  Researchers concluded that only 55% of us had “secure attachment” as infants. That means almost half of us, 45%, have trouble with committed relationships.[FN3]

Next, Dr. Main discovered enough upset babies to become concerned about the parents, so she created the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) in 1982 to study adults. Main’s initial results showed that almost half the adults were not securely attached either, corresponding to their infants to an amazing degree. [FN4]

Now take the radical changes since 1999 in how we relate, after the rise of cell phones, texting, and social networking.  There’s nothing social about it.

“Well-developed human beings can self-regulate their emotional state by being with other humans,” says neuroscientist Dr. Stephen Porges.  “But what about people who regulate their emotional state with objects?…We’re in a world now being literally pushed on us, by people who are challenged in their own social and emotional regulation, and we’re calling this ‘social networking.’ We’re using computers, we’re texting — we’re stripping the human interaction from all interactions… We’re allowing the world to be organized upon the principles of individuals who have difficulty regulating emotionally in the presence of other human beings.” [FN5]

I’ve interviewed a number of specialists who have seen a large volume of patients in almost 20 years’ clinical experience since 1996, who believe that with people spending so much more time on electronic devices, rather than face to face, we’re lucky if we’ve got 40% who are well-attached these days.

“I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction,” warned Albert Einstein.  That day is now.

brousblog3c Day Einstein Feared

Whether it’s 55%, 50%, or 40% of Americans who are securely attached – it leaves  roughly the other half of us in some degree of attachment disorder.  With a 50% divorce rate, and all that’s happened to destroy attachment since 1999, 50% seems a good talking point.  Believe me, I don’t want it to be so high. I’d like to remarry – and the idea of having to ditch 50% of the frogs is annoying.

Which 50% are you in?

Don’t think, focus only on your physical sensations as you read this list:

• Unusual birth stress for mother and/or infant
• Exposure to extreme heat or cold, especially in children and babies
• Childhood surgery or other major illness terrifying to a child
• Childhood neglect, left alone for prolonged periods, abandonment
• Childhood emotional, physical, or sexual threats or abuse
• Sudden loud noises now or at any time

If you’re in my 50%, you may feel discomfort or constriction in the chest, gut or elsewhere, however minor.  This can be the re-activation of stress experienced in some childhood event which never made it to our conscious memory banks.  Not everyone grows agitated reading this list.

“It’s very important to understand that nervousness, anxiousness, or almost any response you might have, has to do with the activation of the energy you experienced during the original overwhelming event,” writes trauma expert Dr. Peter Levine. “When you are threatened, your body instinctively generates a lot of energy to help you defend yourself… the unused energy aroused when you are threatened can get frozen into your body and cause problems and symptoms years later.” [FN6]

Wondering why your therapist, or your several failed therapists (I had three duds) haven’t helped? You may not be the problem. Attachment Theory, which shows how Attachment Disorder works, was hardly taught during college training until after 2000. A new Norton Textbook Series is just being published. [FN7]  Many therapists today don’t diagnose attachment disorder well or are at sea how to treat it.

Why don’t all professionals use the AAI? What are they thinking?  No wonder three psychiatrists-turned-neuroscientists felt compelled to publish “A General Theory of Love” in 2000, a book about attachment which also warns that their profession is failing America. [FN8]

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Footnotes

FN1  “Even though mental disorders are widespread in the population, the main illness is concentrated in a much smaller proportion — about 6 percent, or 1 in 17 — who suffer from a serious mental illness (Kessler RC, Chiu WT, Demler O, Walters EE, “Prevalence, severity, and comorbidity of twelve-month DSM-IV disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication (NCS-R),” Archives of Gen. Psychiatry, 2005 Jun; 62(6):617-27)” From “The Numbers Count: Mental Disorders in America,” www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-numbers-count-mental-disorders-in-america/index.shtml

FN2  Bowlby, John, “The Nature of a Child’s Tie to His Mother,” British Psychoanalytical Society, London, 1958; “Attachment and Loss,” New York, Basic Books, 1969
—Ainsworth, Mary D.S., Blehar, M.C., et al, “Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the  Strange Situation,” Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, 1978

FN3  Benoit, Diane, MD, FRCPC, “Infant-parent attachment: Definition, types, antecedents, measurement and outcome,” Paediatr Child Health, Oct 2004; 9(8) p. 541–545 at: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2724160/ “Infants with secure attachment greet and/or approach the caregiver and may maintain contact but are able to return to play, which occurs in 55% of the general population... Infants with insecure-avoidant attachment fail to greet and/or approach… avoiding the caregiver, which occurs in 23% of the general population. Infants with insecure-resistant [ambivalent] attachment are extremely distressed by separations and cannot be soothed at reunions… in 8% of the general population.” Benoit reports that “in normal, middle class families, about 15% of infants develop disorganized attachment.” Her first three categories add to 86%, leaving 14% in the disorganized category.
—van IJzendoorn MH, Schuengel C, Bakermans-Kranenburg MJ, “Disorganized attachment in early childhood: Meta-analysis of precursors, concomitants and sequelae,” Dev Psychopathol. 1999;11:225–49.  https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/1530/168_212.pdf?sequence=1 “During the past 10 years nearly 80 studies on disorganized attachment involving more than 6,000 infant-parent dyads…In normal middle class families about 15% of the infants develop disorganized attachment behavior.

FN4  Main, Mary,  2000, “The Adult Attachment Interview: Fear, attention, safety and discourse processes;” also titled “The Organized Categories of Infant, Child, and Adult Attachment: Flexible vs. Inflexible Attention Under Attachment-Related Stress,” Jour of Amer Psychoanalytic Assoc, 48:1055-1095; 2000.  *p.1091: “The same average parent-to-child, secure/insecure match of 75% holds even when the interview is conducted before birth of the first child…” Lifespanlearn.org/documents/Main.pdf
—Hesse, E., (2008) “The Adult Attachment Interview: Protocol, Method of Analysis, and Empirical Studies,” Chap. 25 of Cassidy, Jude &  Shaver, Phillip R. (Eds), “Handbook of Attachment: Theory, research, and clinical applications,” 2nd edition, 2008, p. 552-598, New York, Guilford Press, retrieved August 2014 from http://icpla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Hesse-E.-Adult-Attachment-Int-Protocol-Method-ch.-25.pdf

FN5  Porges, Stephen, PhD:  — Social Networking: page 15 of “Polyvagal Theory,” National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine (NICABM) webinar, April 2012; retrieved July 21, 2014 from: http://www.stephenporges.com/images/NICABM%20April%202012.pdf
— Overview of his work, 2013: “Body, Brain, Behavior: How Polyvagal Theory Expands Our Healing Paradigm,”  NICABM Webinar, http://stephenporges.com/images/NICABM%202013.pdf
— On Trauma, 2013: “Beyond the Brain: How the Vagal System Holds the Secret to Treating Trauma,” http://stephenporges.com/images/nicabm2.pdf
—  Academic background, 2001: “The polyvagal theory: phylogenetic substrates of a social nervous system,” International Journal of Psychophysiology 42 Ž, 2001, 123 146, Department of Psychiatry, Uni ersity of Illinois at Chicago, http://www.wisebrain.org/Polyvagal_Theory.pdf

FN6  Levine, Peter A., PhD, op.cit “Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body,” ‘Sounds True, Inc.,’ Boulder CO, 2005; ISBN 1-159179-247-9

FN7  Norton Textbook Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology, featuring:
Siegel, Daniel J., MD et. al, “The Healing Power of Emotion: Affective Neuroscience, Development & Clinical Practice,” November 2009; 368 pages
Schore, Allan N., “Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self,” Norton textbook May 2003;  first edition 1994; 432 pages

FN8   Lewis, Thomas MD; Amini, Fari MD; Lannon, Richard MD; “A General Theory of Love”, Random House, 2000. See: www.paulagordon.com/shows/lannon/

Comments are encouraged, with the usual exceptions; rants, political speeches, off-color language, etc. are unlikely to post. Current software limits comments to 1030 characters (2 long paragraphs).

This blog expands on my 2018 book Don’t Try This Alone: The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder.  Watch as my journey of recovery teaches me the hard way about Adult Attachment Disorder, Developmental Trauma, Attachment Theory, and the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI).

Copyright © 2018 by Kathy Brous.  All right reserved. No portion of this website, except for brief reviews and live links to this website, may be copied or used in any form or manner whatsoever. All use must show prominent and clear attribution to Kathy Brous at https://attachmentdisorderhealing.com

Medical Disclaimer: This website is for general information purposes only. It is simply my own research. Individuals should always see their health care provider or licensed psychotherapist before doing anything which they believe to be suggested or indicated herein. Any application of the material on this website is at the reader’s discretion and is the reader’s sole responsibility.

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This Is Gonna Hurt – It’ll Be Worth It

Posted on October 1, 2013 by Kathy

#2 in my ongoing book series; original post July 26, 2013

brousblog2a Mordor w.Frodo“Don’t Try This At Home” takes you along on the journey to the center of my brain, tripping down what felt like my old New York City apartment building’s incinerator shoot, blind and alone, after the first professionals I saw called the wrong shots. I discovered, with no desire to do any of this, the realities of Attachment Disorder in a world half sick with it – unbeknownst to all but a few of the 3.5 billion folks involved.

Some 50% of Americans have some form of Attachment Disorder, also the average worldwide. This story is meant not to depress you, but to inspire the 50% of us in this reality to recognize it, respect ourselves and our injuries, and seek serious healing – because it can happen. This mess can even turn out to be a blessing; but you won’t believe such an ending could come about until much, much later.

So bad news first, then good.

The bad news is way bad: this is really gonna hurt.  Healing is impossible without feeling the boatload of emotional pain hiding frozen inside us.

Attachment Disorder often involves “developmental” injury to the brain stem in the womb or before age 5, which no one involved ever knew happened. We just walk around all our lives feeling hyper-sensitive to feelings. I couldn’t believe how bad it hurt when I first got in touch with this “baby pain.” When I say pain in my chest or gut, we’re talking knife-stabbing level pain. Some days it felt like crawling across Mordor, except on my belly, butt naked.  Frodo at least had clothes.

The emotional pain is so bad, that the brain stem actually knocked us out into oblivion whenever it was first experienced, to protect us from feeling it as a helpless kid in the first place. It’s the same biological mechanism that takes charge when we see a mouse pass out as the cat picks it up, often called “freeze,” or technically, “dissociation.”

brousblog2b PterydactylIt’s a raw instinct of fight or flight, and when that’s impossible, freeze, which goes back to the advent of bony fish. The fish doesn’t have time to debate “should I freeze now?”  It just passes out.

Trick is, we’ve got to un-freeze the frozen pain from those early months and years, and feel it – to release or “discharge” the stored-up stress energy deep in our muscles and viscera. And feeling our feelings, I learned, bad as they felt, can never kill us. It doesn’t even harm us in the slightest. In fact, afterward we feel better, though it might take a while.

It’s when we refuse to feel this stuff that it silently eats at us from the inside, first emotionally, then by generating enough stress chemicals to physically destroy body parts. That’s what actually kills many of us.

Attachment Disorder stems from any disruption to an infant’s attachment to the mother, and unfortunately, babies are very easy to damage. It can start as soon as the sperm hits the egg, or at any time in the next 45 months, since a baby requires solid, calm attachment from conception to 36 months, for the brain to develop in a healthy way. Any stress to a mother carrying a baby is a warning sign. Recent studies show it is prevalent in underprivileged areas, orphanages, alcoholic homes, or any home where mom is under existential stress. Neuroscientists in a recent book call it the “hidden epidemic.” [FN3]

But Attachment Disorder also occurs “in the nicest families” due to factors as simple as a mom smoking while pregnant as did moms of many baby boomers. Unwanted pregnancies (however wealthy the home) are at high risk. Neonatal incubation and adoption deeply damage attachment; only recently have remedial treatments been introduced. Infant or childhood surgeries or any medical trauma are a red flag. Mothers who as kids had little air time with their own mom and thus are tone deaf to others’ emotional state, unwittingly pass the damage on to their infants.

Many health professionals today did not adequately study attachment during training, if at all. It goes unnoticed in schools, medical systems, and houses of worship, all the places where hurting people go for help.

This makes a chunk of our population an emotional health time bomb. It may account for much of our 50% divorce rate and the work productivity crisis draining our economy. The top trauma specialist for the Pentagon says it’s one reason Congress can’t seem to function. [FN4]

brousblog2c Death Valley Lots of RocksNo, I’m not sitting on the brink of Mordor  – but it is Death Valley.

The good news, however, is so good: healing is worth the fight.

As I move further into my own healing, I feel so much better than I ever have in my life. This may be difficult to believe until you experience it.

I sure didn’t feel this way when I first started contemplating all those layers of pain — but I got through it.

You will never trade how you lived before for how you’re going to be able to live now, the fullness of feeling everything wonderful you haven’t been able to feel all your life, freedom from all that raging anxiety deep inside, which kept you as frozen up as that conked-out mouse or fish.

Trauma specialists compare recovery from AD to a religious experience of God or a metaphysical awakening to enlightenment, the relief is that profound. [FN5]

Whatever the words, it’s a transformation which can make us feel so loved and full of life and relief that weeping for joy can become a bad habit. The feelings of sheer gratitude have put me on a first name basis with God, and He’s a really nice Man.

Since most of this book is going to tell you in graphic detail how bad it feels when we first discover Attachment Disorder and walk through the necessary early stages of pain and healing, there’s no reason not to believe me about the happy ending.

And I’ve even got clinical proof.  Never in my wildest imagination (and that’s saying something) did it occur to me to even address the various medical issues “we all develop” after 40. Just by addressing my emotional pain, feeling it, and finally releasing it, the oddest results began to materialize in my body.

During the first 18 months of this purely emotional program, my cholesterol dropped 35 points, my kidney disease numbers dropped way back into the “lots better than normal” range, a nearly crippled foot simply healed itself, and the list goes on. Just wait, it’s all in Chapter 14.

These days, my family doctor looks at my annual check-up lab results and asks “Do you plan to live forever?”

Meanwhile, my friends have to put up with hearing me repeatedly blurt out, wherever we go: “I can’t believe how much better I feel than the last time we were here!”

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This is from the Preface of Kathy’s forthcoming book DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME: The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder – How I accidentally regressed myself back to infancy and healed it all.  Watch for the continuing series of excerpts from the rest of her book each Friday, as she explores her journey of recovery by learning the hard way about Attachment Disorder in adults, adult Attachment Theory, and the Adult Attachment Interview.

Footnotes
3. Lanius, Ruth A., MD, Vermetten, Eric, Pain, Claire, Editors, “The Impact of Early Life Trauma on  Health and Disease: The Hidden Epidemic,” Cambridge University Press, 2010.  “Early Childhood Adversity, Toxic Stress, and the Role of the Pediatrician,” American Academy of Pediatrics,  2012 (New York Times 1-7-12), and many more.
4. van der Kolk, Bessel, MD, “What Neuroscience Teaches Us About the Treatment of Trauma,”  June 6, 2012 webcast, National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine  (NICABM). Dr. van der Kolk said the US Congress is “dissociated,” or they’d feel the simple human compassion to know that sending youth to war brings back a flood of PTSD suicides.  (To me that means more than 50% of Congress has attachment problems, which is why they made a career of trying to control others. )  See footnote 9 in http://attachmentdisorderhealing.com/developmental-trauma/
5. Levine, Peter A., “Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body,” ‘Sounds True, Inc.,’ Boulder CO, 2005; ISBN 1-159179-247-9

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The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder

Posted on October 1, 2013 by Kathy

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Brousblog1a Perry brains X-secAre parts of your brain dark?  Silly, you say.  Well, did you ever have a broken heart?  Closer to home?  Hey, I had such a successful global career that I didn’t know it for decades, but parts of my brain were dark, and my heart was ‘way far broken.  [3-Year-Old Child, Left: Normal; Right: attachment disorder [FN1]]

So goes attachment disorder – and it turns out maybe 50% or more of Americans have some brand of it.  No wonder we’ve got a 50% divorce rate and a government that can’t seem to function (not to mention the ratty odds in internet dating). [FN2]

Science has only recently demonstrated that unless kids (and other mammals) are given deep emotional connection (“attachment”) from birth by parents or others, infant neurological systems just don’t develop well.  The infant brain literally requires programming by an adult’s eyes and facial expressions to begin to program its own neurons.

When a mother doesn’t respond to her baby with strong positive emotions (she’s being battered, has stress at work, is unable to attune to others), the infant’s instincts read that as a survival threat.  This floods its bloodstream with fight/flight stress chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol.  But a baby is helpless to use these to act in self defense.  If some adult doesn’t make the baby feel safe, stress chemicals overwhelm its brain and within 45 minutes the baby goes into clinical shock (dissociation). [FN3]

What began as emotional stress ends in physical brain damage.  We can now do brain scans showing that whole chunks of neurons in some brain regions don’t fire.  I felt this as “parts of my brain are dark.”  There is literally a “hole in me.”  You can see the black holes in the brain scans above.

The resulting attachment disorder causes intense emotional pain to be transmitted by the brain stem to the neurons around the heart and other viscera, producing, literally, a broken heart – and it hurts, big time.

This means a lot more of us do need to have our heads examined; we need help!  Yet, it is definitely not “all in our heads.”  Attachment disorder is a medical condition at the interface between the emotions and the body.

I performed with apparent success as an international business gal and opera singer (in several languages) for decades, without the faintest notion I might be shrink fodder.  Suddenly in 2007 I was in divorce from a 27-year marriage to my college sweetheart which left me bankrupt. I ran like hell, 3,000 miles from back east to California.  Then both my parents died and I had two bad rebound affairs – five life disasters in 18 months.

It felt like being hit by two cars, two trucks, and a jet airplane. I came to where my father died in 2008, and I couldn’t cry.

“You need to have your head examined,” me, myself, and I decided. I saw one therapist who listened helplessly, a second who said “grow up,” and then I read enough studies on the incompetence of psychotherapy to barf.

So I quit therapy in 2009 and opted for do-it-yourself.

Brousblog1b Flatten MeA friend gave me a book on grief and, heeding the ancient wisdom that forgiveness clears heart and mind, I began to write Grief Forgiveness letters to my ex, mom, and dad [FN4].  I drew myself a cartoon, “This is going to flatten you for a few days (to face all this pain),”  but then  I’ll be ready to re-marry.  No need to jump off my second floor balcony.

Grief, however, doesn’t do take-out orders.  I sobbed over my feelings towards my ex for 18 months, even held a funeral for my lost marriage. Yet after a week’s relief, intense “break-through” grief about my dad suddenly surfaced. Taking a breath, I had at it again, but the more grief I addressed, the more and deeper layers of emotional pain surfaced.

The feelings coming up, I gradually saw, were those of a younger and younger me. As I wrote forgiveness letters to my ex, I felt feelings from my twenties. As I wrote letters to my dad, I felt feelings from grade school; the voice of a five-year-old girl literally popped up speaking in my head at times.  (I’d sung Joan in Verdi’s opera “Joan of Arc” in 1996 but this was a stretch.)

Then as I wrote letters to my mom, I went back, and back, and back – but where was the bottom, with a mom?

Drilling the Grand Canyon

Drilling the Grand Canyon

There were so many deep layers, it felt like falling through miles of rock layers as deep as the endless striated walls of the Grand Canyon.  Some days I made jokes and friends took pix of me moving striped mountains.

Some days I began to feel emotional pain, with physical chest and gut pain, of an intensity resembling nothing so much as a 24 x 7 bone marrow transplant, no anesthesia, which went on for about three years.

It was all an accident. I didn’t mean to do it, a point I never tired of making later to astonished doctors and in prayer (God took it in stride).

But once I was falling through the layers of the Grand Canyon, there was no way to stop – short of alcohol or the like, which disgusted me – or suicide.

Jumping off my balcony often did seem quite attractive, it turned out.  Imagine my annoyance when I had to give up even that, after seeing suicide’s nasty effects on a friend whose spouse took that route.

I literally had No Exit and it stank – so down and down I went, down through the layers of flash-backs and pain until one 2011 morning at 2 am I found myself on the bedroom floor in a fetal position, clutching a large stuffed dog, and eyeing a soggy toothbrush with which I had not even been able to brush my teeth before crumpling.

The phrase “She’s not old enough to be dropped off at school” kept repeating in my skull. I crawled to the sink, but had to hang on to the stuffed animal to stand up and brush.

Somewhere in a textbook I had read about regression, the devolution of the mind back through childhood development stages.

With my extensive notes of the last few years, I staggered into yet a third therapist’s office a week later, presented the goods, and asked, “Do you think I’ve just accidentally regressed myself back to infancy?”  Upon examination, he leaned forward, eyes wide, and nodded solemnly, “Yes. Aren’t you scared?”

You said it, brother, but not nearly as scared as I was gonna be. Since the sperm hit the egg, I’d had traumatic attachment disorder, and bad.

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Note:  I’m against false use of the terms “attachment disorder” or “attachment therapy” to excuse abuse, as exposed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_therapy.  But it’s also a problem that the psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) only recognizes Radical Attachment Disorder (RAD), which only affects a tiny percent of the population. I believe other legitimate forms of attachment disorder affect 50% of Americans. I wasn’t RAD, so the DSM didn’t recognize my illness, and I got no treatment until I collapsed after age 50.  That can’t be right.  “Attachment problems extending beyond RAD, are a real and appropriate concern for professionals,” concludes the 2006 Report on Attachment Therapy by the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (APSAC) which convened to study this problem.

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News blogs expand on my book Don’t Try This Alone:  The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder.  Watch as my journey of recovery teaches me the hard way about Adult Attachment Disorder, Developmental Trauma, Attachment Theory, and the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI).

Copyright © 2018 by Kathy Brous.  All right reserved. No portion of this website, except for brief reviews and live links to this website, may be copied or used in any form or manner whatsoever.  All use must show prominent and clear attribution to Kathy Brous at https://attachmentdisorderhealing.com.

Medical Disclaimer: This website is for general information purposes only. It is simply my own research. Individuals should always see their health care provider or licensed psychotherapist before doing anything which they believe to be suggested or indicated herein. Any application of the material on this website is at the reader’s discretion and is the reader’s sole responsibility. ———————————————————-

Footnotes
FN1  Perry, Bruce, MD, “Overview of Neuro-sequential Model of Therapeutics (NMT),” www.childtrauma.org, 2010.  See also FN5
FN2  Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, MD, has said that the US Congress is “dissociated,” or they’d feel the simple human compassion to know that sending youth to war brings back a flood of PTSD suicides.  (That means 50% of Congress has attachment problems, which is why they made a career of trying to control others. ) See van der Kolk, Bessel, MD, “What Neuroscience Teaches Us About the Treatment of Trauma,” June 6, 2012 webcast, National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine (NICABM), footnote 9 in http://attachmentdisorderhealing.com/developmental-trauma/
FN3  Herman, Judith, “Trauma and Recovery,” Basic Books, New York, 1992
FN4   James, John W., Friedman, Russell, “The Grief Recovery Handbook,” Harper Collins, New York, 2009 (original 1998)
FN5  Brain scan source: Perry, BD and Pollard, D., “Altered brain development following global neglect in early childhood,” Society For Neuroscience: Proceedings from Annual Meeting,New Orleans, 1997  at https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubPDFs/earlybrain.pdf . The PDF says: “These images illustrate the negative impact of neglect on the developing brain. In the CT scan on the left is an image from a healthy three year old with an average head size. The image on the right is from a three year old child suffering from severe sensory-deprivation neglect. This child’s brain is significantly smaller than average and has abnormal development of cortex. These images are from studies conducted by a team of researchers from the Child Trauma Academy (www.ChildTrauma.org) led by Bruce D. Perry, M.D., PhD. ”   This article also cites Perry, B.D., Pollard, R., Blakely, T., Baker, W. & Vigilante, D. (1995), “Childhood trauma, the neurobiology of adaptation and ‘use-dependent’ development of the brain: How states become traits,” http://www.childtrauma.org/ctamaterials/states_traits.asp Also in Infant Mental Health Journal, 16 (4), 271-291, 1995.

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