Dr. Vincent Felitti, MD again joined our SoCal (Southern California) ACEs Group March 7 for our alternate-month San Diego meeting. He’s shown with author-activist Morgan Rose (details below). I felt so grateful.
Earlier March 7 we began with the alternate-month meeting of the San Diego Trauma-Informed Guide Team (SD-TIGT), on what we can do to create a trauma-informed and ACEs-informed society. The mission of SD-TIGT is to promote the development and provision of trauma-informed services in San Diego County’s agencies and systems by collaboration, advocacy and education to achieve transformation. Leaders discussed training community leaders and a trauma-informed care workforce.
Several focused on making trauma recovery “consumer-driven.” They reported success with it after forming committees of parents, youth, and other clients to do peer-led trauma-prevention training and learn empathic methods help each other and help children to recover. We also discussed the latest brain science on Developmental Trauma by MDs Bessel van der Kolk, Bruce Perry, and Daniel Siegel. Perhaps San Diego County might create a Trauma Remediation Center modeled on Dr. van der Kolk’s Trauma Center in Boston and Dr. Perry’s ChildTrauma Academy in Houston?
SoCal ACEs meeting
Next, SoCal ACEs met separately. Dr. Felitti related his efforts since the 1990s to promulgate the ACE Study results in the U.S. and worldwide medical literature, traveling to Washington to meet personally with Senators, traveling the world and beating the drum generally with policy leaders. He repeated his hope to see an article in The New Yorker about the ACE Study, “because my wife says that if policy leaders are too busy to get it, this way maybe their wives will pick up on it and get active.”
Dr. Felitti emphasized his vision that now we need to communicate directly to the hearts of the public “grassroots,” in ways that meet people “where they are” (that’s trauma-informed). He’d like to see a popular TV series, maybe a soap, depicting attached, loving parenting in one story thread, versus an ACE childhood and what that does to people in another thread. He thinks it would hit average viewers directly in the heart where it counts. He’d like to see movies, too. “Look at Sesame Street, ” he said; it shows a TV series or film that really speaks to ordinary folks can be lucrative.
Dana Brown, Project Director of San Diego’s Trauma-Informed Community Schools (TICS), briefed us on their grassroots efforts. Funded by The California Endowment, it’s a systems-change initiative in densely-populated City Heights. TICS goes deep in the community to support parent and youth leadership and school staff where they work and live; it’s “place-based.” Dana (left) helps a student leader with kids at Cherokee Point Elementary.
TICS programs help community leaders discover their strengths and empowers them, creating leaders who sustain themselves by advocacy and efficacy. San Diego State University support TICS inter-generational mentoring by training community leaders in child/family development, in-home health, and more. Parent leaders have led four “Train the Trainer” Workshops including three on trauma-informed methods since Oct., 2013. See the ACE Study in action, with all the science and the heart, in Dana’s educational report at: TICS programs at Cherokee Point (second item under Dr. Felitti).
Morgan Rose, MS, founder of America’s Angel (with Dr. Felitti at top), told us about her America’s Angel Campaign, a national initiative to end ACEs and promote education about the ACE Study. Its board includes top psychologists and trauma-informed leaders such as James Sporleder, former Principal of Lincoln High (see Jane Steven’s Huff Post “Lincoln High School’s ‘Out of School Suspensions’ reduced by 85%.” )
Morgan stressed her “to the heart” idea to to have 100 Celebrity Parents make TV spots and do a media blitz to spur parents to learn about positive, attached parenting. For example, celebrity dads will speak on how dads can “Be the Daddy They Deserve.” Morgan gave Dr. Felitti her new book (photo again at top) aimed to be a hit with teens and moms, “On Becoming NaughtABimbeaux” It’s based on 13 years of research into the psychology of relationships and intimacy. The book has five pages on the ACE Study and its relevance to choosing a spouse capable of creating a healthy family, and a Facebook page.
“Frozen” No Mas
It left me thinking how to organize one of Morgan’s Celebrity Parents to get a hit movie made as Dr. Felitti dreams. A TV series couldn’t be far behind. (Dr. Felitti and me at our previous SoCal ACEs meeting.)
Look at what a hit the film “Frozen” is (over $1 billion revenue), with that lead song “Let It Go” about how Elsa can’t hold in her traumatized emotions anymore. Click for video: ” ‘Conceal, don’t feel/ don’t let them know!’ / Well,now they know!” She’s gonna feel what she feels! People have had it with being traumatized, yet society doesn’t want to hear.
Dr. Felitti is onto something with his TV and Hollywood vision. So are Morgan and Dana. That’s a billion dollars of grassroots emotions connecting out there.
Betcha that’s why “Avatar” was such a hit, when at the end the giant heroine Neytiri picks up her fiancee Jake with his tiny, broken body, looks into his eyes, and says “I see you.” That means: “I see your soul, I love you for who you truly are.”
I don’t know if Hollywood’s more ready to face the facts in the ACE Study than are the Senators whom Dr. Felitti met. But ordinary people crave to be accepted for who they really are. People are tired of being Frozen. So many are forced into that box: “conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know,” don’t show your true Self.
Because our true Selves hurt; the ACE Study showed that two-thirds (64-67%) of 17,421 middle class subjects had one or more types of childhood trauma, and 38-42% had two or more types. In less privileged populations, these numbers are far higher. A national average of all economic groups would likely show 50% or more suffer severe trauma from ACEs. There’s money in an exposee, and it’d do all our hearts good to be out of the closet.
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Kathy’s news blogs expand on her 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 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.
The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) study since 1994 shows that 50% of Americans have some degree of failed attachment in childhood. These are rigorous psychiatric studies of the general public which have nothing to do with “addicts.” It’s not just about “them.” [FN1]
It’s about “the hole in me” inside half of us. Secure attachment is necessary for the neurons in a baby’s brain to develop. “The hole” is caused by any problematic bonding with the mother. That means “parts of my brain are dark” — the neurons just don’t fire. (Above left: normal 3 year old. Right: major attachment disorder)
No coincidence, 50% of Americans also abuse not only alcohol and drugs (including prescriptions) but also tobacco, food, gambling, internet porn, sex… Those of us who’d never “use” anything, often become work-aholics. All these, abused, often cause premature death.
Until we treat the underlying childhood trauma, says Dr. Vincent J. Felitti, nothing will change and people will keep dying early. That’s the point of his 2003 “The Origins of Addiction: Evidence from the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study,” published here last week: click here. [FN2]
“My point is that there is a Public Health Paradox,” Dr. Felitti wrote in transmitting his article, “wherein some of our most difficult public health problems are actually unconsciously attempted solutions, at the individual patient level, to problems that are unrecognized because they are lost in time and then protected by shame, by secrecy, and by major social taboos against exploring certain realms of human experience…
“Needless to say, vacuous cautionary advice doesn’t do much, coming from people who have no idea what has gone on. Thus, ‘Obesity is bad for you,’ but it’s sexually protective; ‘Smoking is bad for you,’ but nicotine has been known for almost a century to have potent anti-anxiety, anti-depressant, appetite suppressant, and anger suppressant activity. Moreover, those occur within 15-20 seconds of inhalation, whereas the risks, which are certainly real, occur in 15-20 years.”
“The current public health approach of repeated cautionary warnings has demonstrated its limitations,” as Dr. Felitti put it in his 2003 piece, “perhaps because the cautions do not respect the individual when they exhort change without understanding.”
Treat ACES vs Early Death
Dr. Felitti is elegant and to the point: unless we treat Adverse Childhood Experiences per se, people will find something, somehow, anyhow, to numb the emotional pain of childhood trauma. Details on the ACE pyramid. [FN3]
“People with attachment-based developmental trauma can start to feel so threatened that they get into a fight-flight alarm state, and the higher parts of the brain shut down first,” neuroscientist Dr. Bruce Perry, MD told a 2013 UCLA conference.
“First the stress chemicals shut down their cortex (thinking brain). It’s instinct; they can’t control it. Now they physically can not think. Ask them to think and you only make them more anxious.
“Next the more primitive emotional brain (limbic brain) goes. They have attachment trauma so people seem threatening; they don’t get reward from emotional or relational interaction. Their own emotions feel like a threat to them.
“Now the only part of the brain left functioning is the most primitive: the brain stem and diencephalon cerebellum (reptilian brain). Here they can get rewards, but only from sweet/salty/fatty foods, drugs, sex — only the strongest sources of opiates can sooth these lower brain parts.
“They know cognitively it’s wrong to steal from Grandma, they may even love Grandma, but the brain is state-dependent. At that moment, cognitive thinking or emotional-relational consequences, just can’t relieve their anxiety. They are in such distress in the lower parts of the brain that they need the food, drugs, etc. too badly.
“You can get to the point where you can’t even reach the lower part of the brain. If you’re so ramped up and anxious, the only thing you want is to relieve the distress, and the only thing that can do it is to drink. Alcohol will reduce anxiety, and make us more vulnerable to other unhealthy forms of reward pleasure.”
The problem is that the emotional pain from ACE is buried inaccessibly deep in our neural structures since our brains first developed, so we don’t even know it’s there.
“If you want a person to use relational reward, or cortical thought -– first the lowest parts of the brain have got to be regulated,” Perry concludes. “We must regulate people, before we can possibly persuade them with a cognitive argument or compel them with an emotional affect.”
Perry has proven in thousands of clinical trials that the only way to do this is to treat the underlying childhood issues. [FN4]
FN1 George, C., Kaplan, N., Main, Mary, “An Adult Attachment Interview,” Unpublished MS, University of California at Berkeley, 1994; and Ainsworth, Mary D.S., Blehar, M.C., et al, “Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the Strange Situation,” Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, 1978
FN2 Felitti, Vincent J. , MD, “The Origins of Addiction: Evidence from the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study,” English version of the article published in Germany as:
Felitti VJ, “Ursprünge des Suchtverhaltens – Evidenzen aus einer Studie zu belastenden Kindheitserfahrungen,” Praxis der Kinderpsychologie und Kinderpsychiatrie, 2003; 52:547-559.
FN3 ACE Study Pyramid, www.cdc.gov/ace/pyramid.htm; and “Adverse Childhood Experiences by Vince Felitti, MD,” 13 min video, Academy on Violence and Abuse, 2006: www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQwJCWPG478
FN4 Perry, Bruce D., MD, PhD, “Born for Love: The Effects of Empathy on the Developing Brain,” Annual Interpersonal Neurobiology Conference “How People Change,” UCLA, Los Angeles, March 8, 2013 (unpublished). See also Perry, B.D. and Hambrick, E. (2008) The Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics. Reclaiming Children and Youth, 17 (3) 38-43, at: http://childtrauma.org/nmt-model/references/
After I heard Russell Brand say that what compels addicts is the “hole in me,” I wrote Feb. 14 that this means: “parts of my brain are dark.” And it’s so painful, we just medicate. Ten % of us use hard drugs and alcohol. Another 40% abuse tobacco, food, gambling, internet porn, sex, sports and more.
All these, abused, cause premature death. Huge numbers of us are in pain so bad, we’d rather die than live with it.
In response, Dr. Vincent J. Felitti with great patience sent me his 2003 article, “The Origins of Addiction: Evidence from the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study.” It reported these facts 10+ years ago in hard statistics — and more.
Until we treat the underlying ACE trauma, Dr. Felitti says, nothing will change and a high percent of people will continue to die early. These abuses create the top ten causes of death in the U.S.
This week I’m writing to send you Dr. Felitti’s article and make it your Friday read. [ FN1] Click here for the English pdf.
Dr. Felitti also sent this fascinating photo, a full page ad in a 1943 American medical journal for the successful new antidepressant of that day, Methamphetamine. “Does it mean anything that in impure form and unknown dose the same chemical is sold as the street drug known as crystal meth?” he wrote. “Like maybe, ‘My kid is buying antidepressants on the street’ ? ”
If anyone says Dr. Felitti “wants to hand out drugs,” I’d love to see them in libel court. Nope, his message is short and sweet.
Unless we treat ACE trauma, traumatized people will find something, anything, somehow, to numb the horrific emotional pain of ACE trauma. They’d rather be dead than live with it un-numbed. And what they find will kill most of them prematurely. Period.
“Our findings… imply that the basic causes of addiction lie within us and the way we treat each other, not in drug dealers or dangerous chemicals,” Dr. Felitti states. “They suggest that billions of dollars have been spent everywhere except where the answer is to be found…
“Because cause and effect usually lie within a family, it is understandably more comforting to demonize a chemical than to look within,” he concludes.
—————————— FN1 Felitti, Vincent J. , MD, “The Origins of Addiction: Evidence from the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study,”
English version of the article published in Germany as:
Felitti VJ, “Ursprünge des Suchtverhaltens – Evidenzen aus einer Studie zu belastenden
Kindheitserfahrungen,” Praxis der Kinderpsychologie und Kinderpsychiatrie, 2003; 52:547-559. http://attachmentdisorderhealing.com/resources/key-articles/
My Feb. 7 post “Love Theory” introduced “General Theory of Love” (GTL), the best book I’ve seen on the three-part or “triune” brain and human emotions. Basic survival instincts are in the reptilian brain, mammalian emotions are in the limbic brain, thought is in the frontal lobe. [FN1]
After adding that the brain’s distinct parts create a “stove-pipe” problem because they don’t communicate well with one another, GTL proceeds to Attachment Theory. The very development of an infant’s brain after birth, they say, depends utterly on the mother’s close affectionate attention, using a deep eye contact they dub “limbic resonance.” If the baby doesn’t get deep eye contact and attunement? Brain damage.
Not Mom. Not Again. I’m sick of being upset about Mom. Couldn’t I be upset at someone else, say Dick Cheney? OK laugh, but he’s relevant. How did Mrs. Cheney’s bouncing baby grow up to become Darth Vadar, anyway? Let’s look at the biological facts.
“Mothers use the universal signals of emotions to teach their babies about the world,” begins GTL. “Babies continuously monitor their mothers’ expressions. If a mother freezes her face, her baby becomes upset and begins to cry in short order…
“Why should a creature with relatively few skills be so monomaniacally focused on tiny muscular contractions beneath the skin of another creature’s body? Emotionality enables a mammal to sense the inner states and the motives of the mammals around him…
“A baby is born with almost no limbic programming. It needs continual feedback from the mother’s face to learn how to run basic physical functions… Mammals developed a capacity we call ‘limbic resonance’… whereby two mammals become attuned to each other’s inner states” by deep eye contact.
“Secure attachment resulted when a child was hugged when he wanted to be hugged, and put down when he wanted to be put down. When he was hungry, his mother knew it and fed him…. By what grace? Limbic resonance gives her the means to that telepathy…”
The “Still Face” Experiment
“By looking into his eyes and becoming attuned to his inner state, a mother can reliably intuit her baby’s feelings and needs,” says GTL. “The regular application of that knowledge changes a child’s emotional makeup… Attachment penetrates to the neural core of what it means to be a human being.”
These concepts are demonstrated graphically by a one-year old baby in the “Still Face” experiment. Dr. Ed Tronick of the U Mass Boston’s Infant-Parent Mental Health Program did his first “Still Face” work in 1975; his 2007 video has over 1.3 million hits. First a mother and child play in an eye-to-eye and also responsive, attuned way, so the baby learns to interact with the world. Click here for video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=apzXGEbZht0&feature=youtu.be
Then the mother presents a still, emotionally barren face – her eyes give the baby no feedback. The baby in seconds goes into a tailspin, unable even to maintain body posture. When the mother resumes her normal empathic expressions, her baby is visibly relieved. “Prolonged lack of attention can move an infant from ‘good’ socialization, to periods of ‘bad’ but repairable socialization,” Dr. Tronick says. “In ‘ugly’ situations the child does not receive any chance to return to the good, and may be traumatized.”
“A mother continuously adjusts her infant’s physiology,” as GTL puts it. “When the mother is absent, an infant loses all his organizing channels at once. Like a marionette with its strings cut, his physiology collapses into the huddled heap of despair…
“The mammalian nervous system depends for its neurophysiological stability on a system of interactive coordination, wherein steadiness comes from synchronization with nearby attachment figures,” our three shrinks forge on. “A baby’s physiology is maximally open-looped; without limbic regulation from the mother or some human caretaker, his vital rhythms will collapse and he will die… Limbic regulation directs…the development of the brain itself.”
When I first read this in 2009, I felt a wave of fear. Fear? That makes no sense, why so much fear? Oh, well, I can’t imagine my mom looking into my eyes much, let alone to do something as silly as figure out my “feelings and needs.” I thought feelings were something stupid to get rid of. Needs? What does that even mean? Mom wasn’t into eye contact, and who cares? I sure didn’t; I had no idea people looked much at kids, except if we annoyed them.
Except, wait: now science sez this means my brain was maybe fried as an infant? That could cause some fear. As if reading my mind, the three shrinks proceed:
Isolating Mammals
“Take a puppy away from his mother… and you witness the universal mammalian reaction to the rupture of an attachment bond,” GTL writes. “A lone puppy first enters the protest phase. He paces tirelessly, scanning his surroundings, barking, scratching vainly at the floor… He lets out a piteous whine, high-pitched and grating. Every aspect of his behavior broadcasts distress…”
And it’s not all in his head. “A mammal in protest shows a distinct physiology. Heart rate and body temperature increase, as to levesl of catecholamines and cortisol… Cortisol is the body’s major stress hormone, and its sharp elevation tells us that the relationship rupture is a severe bodily strain.”
But wait. “If the separation is prolonged, a mammal enters the second stage,” the doctors warn, and it’s called despair. “Despair begins with collapse into lethargy; the animals stops his back and forthing, stops whimpering, and curls up into a despondent lump. He drinks little and may show no interest in food… The physiologic signature of the despair phase is a widespread disruption of bodily rhythms. Heart rate will be low… sleep will change… the level of growth hormone in the blood will plummet…”
My innards sank. At the bottom of page 78 was a photo of a mammal fallen into the despair phase after prolonged separation, captioned “Isolated rhesus monkey” (above). It was from the 1950s experiments by Harry Harlow. [FN2]
I didn’t know then what Harlow had done to the baby monkeys — but I knew that physiological state all too well. I physically felt it. I felt my body scream that I had been in precisely that state many times, and I had a purely gut impulse to go “curl up in a lump” — like, now.
I fought with myself not to collapse in exactly such a heap for over 30 minutes until I no longer had any strength and did collapse sobbing in that posture on my bed. I had definitely been there before and it was almost impossible not to connect it to what my first non-attaching therapist Dr. Rita did by sending me on that trip to Isolation Row.
A few days later I phoned two friends and read them each the passage about protest, despair, and the physiological down-spiral which felt so horribly real inside my own body. “Gosh I hope you don’t feel like that poor baby monkey” said one. “I don’t just feel like, I know I amthat baby monkey” I shot back.
“A mother continuously adjusts her infant’s physiology… when the mother is absent, an infant loses all his organizing channels at once,” GTL concludes. “Like a marionette with its strings cut, his physiology collapses into the huddled heap of despair.”
At this point in my first read of GTL in 2009 I was sure I was a dead bunny, er, monkey — and I’d only made it to page 83 of 240.
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Kathy’s news blogs expand on her 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 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
FN1 Lewis, Thomas, MD; Amini, Fari, MD; Lannon, Richard, MD; “A General Theory of Love”, Random House, New York, 2000. Dr. Lannon interviews : www.paulagordon.com/shows/lannon/
Preface excerpts: www.nytimes.com/books/first/l/lewis-love.html
FN2 Harry Harlow worked with Attachment Theory founder John Bowlby to demonstrate that attachment trumps Freud’s earlier mechanistic assertions. Harlow was known for his maternal-separation and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he mentored pioneer psychologist Abraham Maslow as a student in the 1930s. The cruelty to animals got out of hand, but behind it was an attempt to halt the Freudian and Behaviorist cruelty to humans which dominated psychology and medicine in the 1950s and 60s.
What causes that “pain” which drives us to use? Russell calls it “the hole in me,” “the gutter within,” “the unfulfillable void,” his “private hell.” What causes “the hole in my soul,” as William Moyers dubs it in “Broken,” in the first place?
It’s all about “the hole in me.” Hardly anyone speaks of it – but “the hole” is the real problem. Hardly anyone speaks of it because 50% of the population in most OECD countries suffers some degree of it and it scares the heck out of us all.
Russell Brand says 10% have this pain so severely, they use hard drugs and alcohol. OECD statistics show upwards of 30% of us have it so bad we abuse food and are overweight to obese, which kills too. I’ve not seen statistics on child abuse, gambling, or “respectable business folk” like me or my ex husband who are work-aholics or addicted to sports, political power, abusive romance, internet porn, sex, and so on. That’s at least another 10% (if not far higher).
In fact, the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) Study of over 17,400 college-educated employed Americans done by top medical doctors shows that over 50% of Americans have some form of childhood trauma and of these, a significant percent suffer from food, alcohol, or other addictions.
I discovered “the hole in me” by accident. I never heard of it, either, after 50+ years of extensive education. After my divorce in 2008 I just starting saying “I have a hole in my heart” because I literally felt it in my chest.
In 2009 I got Dr. Robin Norwood’s “Women Who Love Too Much” which says that if we simply sit quietly, we can “feel the wind blowing through the empty place where our heart should be.” I could feel the hole in my chest. She notes that this is why we never sit quietly (without which cure is impossible). [FN1]
In 2010 I got “Motherless Daughters” by Hope Edelman, case studies of people who were little when their moms died, and a similar book by Dr. Maxine Harris. My Mom died in 2008; why read such books? It fell into my hands “by accident.” Yet time and again the case study subjects spoke of growing up feeling as though they had a “hole under their feet” or a “hole in the heart.” [FN2]
I started to bawl as it hit me that I’d felt as if I had a “hole under my feet’ all my conscious life. I just alternated between denial and praying my parents wouldn’t notice my terror. My first memory of TV was a documentary about open heart surgery on a “blue baby” 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 could never forget his voice.
Last month, I finally heard a specialist identify “the hole” as that which must be cured or nothing works. It was therapist Dr. Tara Brach in her talk “Reacting Wisely to Desire” (Aug.10, 2011) min 24: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hka8c4OteYA
She quotes William Moyers, an alcoholic activist, speaking at a scientific conference. “I was born with a ‘hole in my soul,’ a pain that came from the reality that I just wasn’t good enough, that I wasn’t deserving enough, that you weren’t paying attention to me, that you didn’t like me,” he said. “For us addicts, recovery is more than a pill or a shot. Recovery is about dealing with that hole in the soul.”
But what is this “reality” of so many human beings? What causes the “hole” and “private hell of pain” in the first place?
The cause of “the hole in my soul” is Attachment Disorder, a mental and physiological condition both, which results from injury to an infant or child’s brain stem while the brain is still developing.
Science has only recently demonstrated that unless kids (and other mammals) are given solid emotional connection and eye contact (“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, dubbed “Limbic Resonance” and documented in “A General Theory of Love.” [FN3]
When a mother doesn’t respond to her baby this way (she’s being battered, stress at work, is unable to attune to others), the infant’s brain stem reads that as a survival threat. This floods its bloodstream with fight/flight stress chemicals. If an adult doesn’t make the baby feel safe, stress chemicals overwhelm its brain and within 45 minutes the baby goes into shock (dissociation). [FN4]
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 dark holes in the brain scans above; the left side is a normal 3-year old, and the right side a 3-year-old with attachment disorder. [FN5] The pain we feel is immense; more in: http://attachmentdisorderhealing.com/ the-silent-epidemic-of-attachment-disorder/
That’s why an “attachment wound” made when a lover (for example) rejects us sends us running to our drug, as Russell almost did in March (see his Spectator piece). It touches the original wound, an infant or childhood wound buried deep and not accessible to consciousness.
“As a baby’s precarious neurophysiology falls under the steadying spell of his mother… he is modulating his emotions via an external source… an attuned parent can sooth him; he cannot sooth himself,” as “General Theory” reports. “As a consequence of thousands of these interactions, a child learns to self-quiet… The child of emotionally balanced parents will be resilient to life’s minor shocks…
“Those who miss out… find that in adulthood, their emotional footing pitches beneath them like the deck of a boat in rough waters. They are incomparably reactive to the loss of their anchoring attachments — without assistance,they are thrown back on threadbare resources. The end of a relationship is then not mere poignant, but incapacitating.” [FN3 op.cit., p.156-8]
That’s what Russell Brand said drove him off the edge and halfway down the freeway to a Santa Monica crack house just last year — his woman broke the attachment bond (see his March 2013 Guardian piece).
I’ve felt doubled over in just that way by romance so many times. Now I know why and I know what drove my addictions.
Alcoholics Anonymous Works
That’s why the “attachment wound” responds to the compassionate sound of a friend’s voice when Russell calls from LA to London; the pain eases for a day.
That’s why the “Anonymous” programs work: we have a wound made when we didn’t get the simple human acceptance and compassion that a child’s very brain needs to grow. When we walk into a room of co-sufferers and we receive that human acceptance, and compassion, it literally fires up some of those dark neurons in our brain, and the pain eases. With regular attendance, this can work for decades.
But why do people like Philip Seymour Hersh or Russell Brand relapse after twenty or thirty years? Why do I still feel the occasional twinge from my old addictions, after four years clean and nearly 24 x 7 study of all this? (Hope it’s not my new addiction…) Blame genes if you like but I don’t buy it.
The “Anonymous” programs are as indispensable as food or water; without their “people support” we can’t even make a start. Yet they can’t possibly provide enough support or go deep enough to heal the original wound.
When will we see that “so many broken people” must be caused by society’s ignorance, and not by the individual user’s screw-up? Why is the true cause of all this pain never addressed? Society is militantly oblivious and illiterate about it. And why?
Some 50% of the population in most OECD countries suffers some degree of the childhood emotional pain of Attachment Disorder. There’s an Adult Attachment Interview which has been used by psychologists in enough studies to prove it since 1994. [FN7] The ACE Study backs this up with 17,400+ hard medical exam statistics.
The number is so high that the very existence of Attachment Disorder and of its symptoms are literally incomprehensible to most who suffer from it. Sufferers include large percentages of “high achievers” in business and government. Denial is rampant to the point of arrogance.
Our entire society is virtually structured for, and dedicated to, the precise purpose of providing these distractions from the “hole within.” Such distractions give us temporary bursts of endorphins to ease the pain. But since they can’t heal the real pain, we require more and more of our addictions until the stress kills us.
Fact is, 50% of us have some degree of “hole within,” and 40% are in denial. The other 50% are uneducated.
Until the “hole in the brain” from Adult Attachment Disorder, and the causes of Adult Attachment Disorder are addressed, the 40% who don’t use hard-core drugs or booze, will go on wagging their fingers at the 10% who do use – blaming the wounded for the wound. These superior folks have the same wound killing them, only more slowly.
We need mass education to publicize the cause of the “hole in the soul” so that people know not to walk around all their lives thinking they are the only one on earth who feels it. We need publicity to wake up the many who don’t feel the hole because their hyperactivity and addictions numb them – especially those in high places.
Congressmen check their cholesterol, but Adverse Childhood Experiences are the real cause of heart disease as the ACE Study shows. If they knew the truth, wouldn’t they get an ACE score and an Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) check-up?
People need to know to go for help – and to know that if they go for help, they won’t be stigmatized, as they are today, but supported. We need more publicly-supported programs modeled on the Anonymous groups for healing hearts and minds. We need those groups in every flavor, for every addiction, in every city and town. We need them to be publicly supported so that large numbers of people know that it’s ok to go for help.
We need a referral system so that people in enough pain after doing all – like Russell and me – get referred to therapy. We need a real mental health system in which therapy has insurance which makes it feasible, not a pipe dream as it is today for 99.99% of Americans.
“General Theory of Love” also demonstrates in depth that a huge percent of therapists haven’t healed their own “hole inside me” and so are tone deaf and clueless about how to heal. We need a serious overhaul of our therapy training programs and remedial re-education programs for therapists now in practice.
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Kathy’s news blogs expand on her 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 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
FN1 Norwood, Robin, PhD, “Women Who Love Too Much,” Pocket Books, New York, 1985
FN2 Edelman, Hope, “Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss,” Da Capo Press, 2006. See also: 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
FN3 Lewis, Thomas, MD; Amini, Fari, MD; Lannon, Richard, MD; “A General Theory of Love”, Random House, New York, 2000. Dr. Lannon interviews at: www.paulagordon.com/shows/lannon/
FN4 Herman, Judith, PhD, “Trauma and Recovery,” Basic Books, New York, 1992
FN5 Perry, Bruce, MD, “Overview of Neuro-sequential Model of Therapeutics (NMT),” www.childtrauma.org, 2010
FN6 Flores, Philip J., PhD, “Addiction as an Attachment Disorder,” Jason Aronson, Inc., 2004: “Addiction is a disorder in self-regulation. Individuals who become dependent on addictive substances cannot regulate their emotions, self-care, self-esteem, and relationships.”
FN7 Ainsworth, Mary D.S., Blehar, M.C., et al, “Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the Strange Situation,” Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, 1978. See also: George, C., Kaplan, N., Main, Mary, “An Adult Attachment Interview,” Unpublished MS, University of California at Berkeley, 1994
CLICK to BUY “Don’t Try This Alone” “A General Theory of Love,” after Einstein’s “General Theory of Relativity,” is by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, three MDs and professors of psychiatry. They’re men on a mission to break the truth about the brain to America. It was passed to me with the promo that it has the latest science on how to re-program painful mental patterns like a broken heart. [FN1]
Emotions, they report, are imprinted in the infant brain via what they call “limbic resonance” and create how and whom we love, which creates who we are. See Part 2: Limbic Resonance.
I never meant to get into brain science. But once I read “General Theory of Love” or GTL as we dubbed it, I saw that what I didn’t know was killing me. It became obvious that I had brain trauma from infancy and I was walking around mis-attuned to people from deep in my brain stem.
GTL also demonstrated that no matter how much “lonely pain” I had after my divorce, romance was only getting me into deeper kimche because my mis-attuned brain kept “finding” mis-attuned men. It showed why my men couldn’t relate; it also showed that I couldn’t, either.
The doctors conclude (no surprise) that truly good, attuned therapy is the only way to get our brains re-tuned — at the expense of five to ten years’ time and the price of a college education.
But I’d just been through therapy — it only made me feel much worse. They explain that, too: most therapists are poorly attuned to their clients! One must take pains to locate the select few who can manage. In fact, GTL is a wake-up call by three top shrinks to alert the public that therapy is failing us.
Now we have: my brain is fried; romance only creates more pain; most therapists are clueless; and every time I see my best friend, I have to look at what a suicide in the family does to survivors. I faced No Exit from the emotional pain.
That left me two choices: become a nun or research the brain. I sang and listened to Schubert’s song “The Young Nun” quite a bit to test-drive the impulse, but my body wasn’t buying it. On to brain science.
War on Emotions
GTL starts with a bang: American society has declared war on emotions and that’s a tragedy, they state, because emotions, led by love, are what allow mammals to survive, humans included.
“Traditional versions of the mind hold that Passion is a troublesome remnant from humanity’s savage past, and the intellectual subjugation of emotion is civilization’s triumph,” says the Preface. But the last ten years’ brain science discoveries show instead that “the brain’s ancient emotional architecture…is nothing less than the key to our lives.”
“Modern America plows emotions under, a costly practice that obstructs happiness and misleads people about the nature and significance of their lives. That… is more damaging than one might suppose” they write. “Science has discovered emotionality’s deeper purpose: emotions allow two human beings to receive the contents of each others minds…
“Emotions have a biological function — they do something for an animal that helps it to live.”
The authors show the importance of emotions with the “triune brain” model, posited by neuroscientist Paul D. MacLean, MD in the 1960s and proven by subsequent brain scan techniques. Mammals have three distinct brain regions with different physiologies and functions almost as different as those of the lungs and kidneys. Even the neurons in each region are different. [FN2]
Take the three in archeological order of appearance. At the top of the spinal chord sits the reptilian brain stem. It provides raw survival instincts, basic functions such as breathing, heart rate, body temperature, and digestion, and also appears in the most primitive reptiles.
Next, mammals uniquely have developed the limbic brain, which provides emotions, something entirely new with the advent of mammals; it wraps around the brain stem. It allows mammals to carry and care for their young (rather than hatch and eat them as do reptiles). (I’m not familiar with www.bible.ca but they do a great cartoon.)
For this the limbic brain gives rise to love, nurturing, joy, etc., which release “feel good” opiates into the bloodstream so we do more of that. It also provides hatred, fear, anger, etc., which release “feel bad” stress chemicals, so we know when we’re being hurt instead of loved. Hopefully.
Wrapped around all that is the third and late-comer frontal cortex, best developed in primates, which allows thought, language, future planning, willpower etc. During development, every mammalian fetus recapitulates this three-lobe brain phylogeny.
“A body animated only by the reptilian brain stem is no more human than a severed toe. Reptiles don’t have an emotional life,” GTL notes. “The advent of the mammalian limbic lobe, uniquely, allows mammals to care for their own, have emotions, and risk and lose life for another.”
“Emotions are good? I can’t think them away? These societal voices in my head telling me to ‘just stuff it and grow up’ are wrong and maybe damaging? That’s a relief,” I thought. “But I’ve sure got a lot of ’em and they’re a mess; now what?”
Stovepiped Brain
There’s the rub. Unfortunately, this “Lizard-Squirrel-Monkey Medley” is “stove-piped together” to optimize our survival long enough to reproduce, but “can often make for lousy quality of life,” as Dr. Ron Siegel puts it. Our brain is “fragmented, in-harmonious, and to some degree composed of players with competing interests” agrees GTL. [FN3]
The limbic brain “hasn’t changed much in size or function from primitive mammals to man, and is pre-historic relative to the frontal cortex,” GTL continues. All three lobes “interdigitate like… like dusk and dawn,” but light and dark are not the same. “The cleavage between reason and passion is an ancient theme but no anachronism; it has endured because it speaks to the deep human experience of a divided mind.”
The frontal cortex only imagines that the other two take orders and obey logic. “Not so” says GTL. “Words, good ideas, and logic mean nothing to at least two brains out of three. Much of one’s mind does not take orders.” In reality the lower two lobes regulate the thinking cortex “unseen, unbidden, and largely uncontrolled…
”We say ‘I will’ and ‘I will not,’,” they quote novelist Gene Wolfe, “and imagine ourselves our own masters, when the truth is our true masters are sleeping. When one wakes within us, we are ridden like beasts.’ ”
Cripes, my heart won’t obey my head because it lives in a different country! “Frontal” (head) can’t tell Limbus (heart) to “just shape up” because Limbus doesn’t speak Frontal. My thinking cortex tells me not to run out into the street for my next romance and get hit by a truck, but my emotions ride me like a beast. So it’s baked into my physiology to keep running out into the street to be hit and eaten by reptiles in trucks. I’m really screwed.
Moreover, we need love to live and without love, we die, GTL continues. Here my anxiety went through the roof. I sure did feel like I was going to die without love, and soon; that was the whole nature of my roiling emotional pain. But I’m not finding any cozy mammals; I keep meeting reptiles who treat me like prey, so my doctors tell me to stay on Isolation Row.
How am I going to survive out here alone in the wilds without love?
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Kathy’s news blogs expand on her 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 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
FN1 Lewis, Thomas, MD; Amini, Fari, MD; Lannon, Richard, MD; “A General Theory of Love”, Random House, New York, 2000. See Dr. Lannon interviews at: www.paulagordon.com/shows/lannon/
Preface excerpts at: www.nytimes.com/books/first/l/lewis-love.html
On therapy: www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1503539.Thomas_Lewis
FN2 MacLean, Paul, MD, The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral Functions, Springer, 1990, 704 pgs. MacLean formulated his model in the 1960s as the head of the section on the limbic system at the Laboratory of Neurophysiology, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
FN3 Siegel, Ronald D., PhD, “The Neurobiology of Mindfulness,” NICABM, April 15, 2011, available at http://www.nicabm.com/mindfulness-2011-new/ reports:
“Basically our brain evolved over a series of evolutionary accidents.
We have what’s often called the reptilian brain, which is the brain stem and disassociated structures. You could think of that as the “lizard brain.”
Then, on top of that is the mammalian brain, which involves our limbic system, all of our different emotional response systems, which we actually share with most of the other mammals, and of which a principle feature is our fight-or-flight system that responds to danger.
Then, we have the primate, or monkey brain that’s sitting on top of that. Here are all the higher cortical structures, so heavily developed in humans compared to the other animals, which allow for judgment, thought, and prediction.
So, this combination is sometimes called the Lizard Squirrel Monkey Brain Medley, and that’s what we have inherited.
And these different structures don’t always work so well together.
As we know, how many of us haven’t experienced ourselves at three in the morning suddenly awake because some combinations of these three brains are terribly activated, worrying about something, with lots of psycho-physiological arousal, when there’s actually nothing at all we can do about it. There’s no adaptive purpose to it, but, were up, and we’re aroused. And we have countless other examples where we experience ourselves being stressed, even though, rationally, we know it doesn’t really make any sense to be stressed.”
In last week’s blog, I was surprised by sudden overwhelming feelings of being loved which could only be described as physical. I’ve had these odd explosive physical experiences before. I had one with music so striking at the end of last year, that I wrote to brain scientist Dr. Bruce Perry (left) about it. Why? He’s got rhythm!
My blog on Perry last Sept. 13 “How Your Brain Works 101” notes the three broad areas of the brain: the brain stem aka reptilian survival brain, a knob atop the spinal cord that reptiles have too, which regulates raw survival functions; the limbic brain, first developed in mammals, which wraps around the brain stem and regulates emotions; and the cortex or thinking brain, which wraps around all the rest.
Next I quoted Perry on how the apparently primitive brain stem is the key to the whole shebang:
“Because the brain is organized in a hierarchical fashion, with symptoms of fear first arising in the brain stem and then moving all the way to the cortex, the first step is brain stem regulation,” Perry said. This, he revealed, requires “patterned, repetitive rhythmic activity.” Examples are “dance, music, or massage, especially for children whose persisting fear state is so overwhelming that they cannot improve via increased positive relationships, or even therapeutic relationships, until their brain stem is regulated by safe, predictable, repetitive sensory input…
“The only way you can move from these super-high anxiety states, to calmer more cognitive states,” Perry said, “is rhythmic regulation: Patterned, repetitive rhythmic activity: walking, running, dancing, singing, repetitive meditative breathing – you use brain stem-related somato-sensory networks which make your brain accessible to relational [limbic] reward and cortical thinking. If you want a person to use relational reward, or cortical thought – they’ve got to be emotionally regulated first!”
Two months after that Sept. 13, 2013 blog, I had a musical experience so intense that I wrote this letter :
Dear Dr. Perry,
I just had an explosive physiological experience which demonstrates your thesis that “We must regulate people with patterned, repetitive, rhythmical activity, before we can persuade them with a cognitive argument, or compel them with an emotional affect.”
It involved the attached song. Ever consider using music in your presentations? One audio example can pack quite an emotional punch to get audiences to see how deep your ideas actually are. [I sent the audio MP3 but here’s the whole video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_sDwUFQkt4] And the healing has to go ‘way far deep to tune up some of us who have seriously jangled cells.
I’ve sung and conducted operatic music for 25 years; Mozart, Bach, Beethoven. Not your average rocker. So this train of events is pretty unusual, which also kinda proves your case. Here’s what happened:
Today I was feeling some fear and anger triggered by a friend who occasionally flips out and disconnects emotionally when the holidays approach (a rough emotional time for us all). I began to dissociate a bit from the disconnect, and boy do I hate that frozen feeling; the pain is terrible.
Suddenly the attached recording by P!nk popped up on my MP3 player earphones while I was doing a chore.
Within five seconds I had pretty much involuntarily dropped everything and found myself dancing violently around the condo – and I do mean violently. I had to take off my socks since without skin traction against the carpet I’d have slipped and broken my neck. I was dancing that hard. I was banging my hands against the walls at certainly points. My body also went into the usual full-body infant sobbing, just thrashing away.
Then it hit me: as usual, the real problem wasn’t with “the person in my present” at all. My real problem was that my present experience of emotional disconnect, had brought up “the pain from my past.” There was actually deeply buried grief coming up, from the way my husband of 27 years, and before him, my mother, used to disconnect as a way of life – repeatedly and continuously disconnecting and pushing me away emotionally over decades.
The present-day incident was only a trigger, and an opportunity. I’ve learned to use “incidents in my present” as a “pull-tag” – to pull up the more important buried pain from my past and grieve that in order to get rid of it! So I did.
Just thump and bang
The first thing according to your formula, was to just thump around a lot dancing. My body more or less did that without asking me. This P!nk song is a great example; it has intense patterned, very reliably repetitive, highly rhythmical activity. To be blunt: it bangs. Think “native drum circle.” My brain stem says: “I feel angry – ok, I can bang!”
You’re right: it’s important for the brain stem that the body be able to simply bang – over and over and over. For me, and I’d bet a lot of folks, it’s a form of “infant protest” against the developmental trauma of being disconnected.
Second, we need “love and acceptance” (limbic brain) when we come out of the closet and just simply bang. We need to bang, protest, beat the drums in a social (limbic) context. As you’ve noted, that’s why native cultures do drum circles all over the world. That’s why Vietnam vets do drum circles on beaches all over California.
Third, the words (thinking brain) are very intense and “relevant” – and you keep emphasizing, “It’s got to be relevant” to the trauma at hand.
The song is a duet between P!nk (soprano) and Nate Ruess (tenor). The soprano is paranoid that the tenor doesn’t love her anymore, he’s talking in his sleep, he must have someone else. Her words are all about the trauma of emotional disconnect – which often gets us caught in arguments fatal to relationships.
But the tenor doesn’t get caught. Instead, he responds: “You’ve been having real bad dreams” (no doubt due to her childhood trauma), but “your head is running wild again, my dear, we still have everything!” I’m here for you now and I really do love you. “I’ll fix it for us – our love’s enough,” he sings. He’s saying he loves her enough to put in real work on it, our love is that important.
Mis-Attune – Repair
I was completely overwhelmed by the feeling the tenor models of REPAIR. “My God, he loves her enough to do REPAIR,” I kept thinking, as if witnessing some impossible miracle which had never before occurred on planet Earth.
Attachment Theory leader Dr. Allan Schore (above) writes about “attune – mis-attune – repair.” That means learning that getting out of tune with another is not the end of the world, as we in trauma often experience it to be in childhood. Gosh I certainly had! But Schore says that instead, getting out of tune, if handled well, can be a temporary and very useful learning experience.
When we get out of tune, instead of slamming the door on each other, we can learn to take it as a signal that we both need a time out. We can learn to sit down, take deep breaths, get back in touch with ourselves – and then talk it out in a collaborative way. We can express our fear and hurt and anger in reasoned words, only – instead of acting out with doors or verbal abuse. After we each feel that we’ve been seen and heard, we’ll often feel better. Doing this we also get to know each other better, so we grow closer for the whole experience. Tricky but potentially invaluable.
The more I brought the word “repair” into consciousness – the harder my legs and arms wanted to bang on the floor and the walls, stretching out to the four corners of the globe. And then I knew it wasn’t even about my 27-year marriage coming up. My body was telling me it went a whole lot deeper.
Repair, was what my mother never could do. If anything went wrong, if anything didn’t go so as to satisfy her (which was pretty difficult) – she would fly off the handle and disconnect. The cold shoulder often went on for weeks at a time, why not? She was mad.
Repair? “Repair? ‘Let’s make up? ‘ Are you out of your mind?” I can hear mom saying. I had sinned terribly somehow and it was out of the question for her to talk to me or look at me nicely; I didn’t deserve it.
The very concept of repair, the idea that human beings ever did any such thing, in fact, had never crossed my mind as a possibility in human relations – until I read about it in Allan Schore in 2011.
So yeah, “He loves her enough to do REPAIR!” was enough to make me barf up, process, and release some really deep grief. Like from kindergarten. Like about my Mom, not anyone in my present.
Afterward, as usual when I can manage to feel the childhood pain, bang it out and be done with it, I felt absolutely fantastic. That’s what music can do with patterned, repetitive, rhythmical activity.
The Back Story
Also fun is the “back story” as to how this “rock bit” got onto my MP3 player.
About six months ago, shortly after I heard your March 8 UCLA talk, I was out food shopping. Suddenly this P!nk duet came blasting out of the grocery store sound system; it seemed everyone knew it but me. I’d never heard it before – I had no idea what in heck it was.
But suddenly I was dancing around the Korean vegetable store, stomping my feet and raising my arms to the ceiling in a peal of pure unadulterated joy – much to my own shock and to the surprise and delight of the onlooking shoppers (Koreans adore music). And I’m a pretty good dancer, which figures. I guess that’s why so many abused women end up becoming dancers of some sort, ballet or pole. Check out ballerina Gelsey Kirkland’s book “Dancing on My Grave.” No Polish jokes, please, I’m Polish.
So yeah, we get release when we do “patterned, repeated, rhythmical activity” – at the oddest times. Then the creativity flows. Later I downloaded the audio of the P!ink duet and filed it away on my MP3 player, where it popped up conveniently six months later as the subject of this letter.
Using music in your presentations? I wonder how many of your clinical audiences have ever had a personal experience of this? Could have a massive impact. So if you ever want a musical trauma consultant, I’m your gal.
You rock, Doc!
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Kathy’s news blogs expand on her 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 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.
Last week, after the video class by therapist Dr. Tara Brach (left), I said that for one day, I’d try to be Present with What Is. Hey, I struggle with a regular meditation for 45 minutes, so this’ll be a stretch. [FN1]
On Day 1, when the alarm rings, instead of growling, I lie there and take as many deep breaths as I need, until I can greet the alarm with wonder: “Wow, I have a cell phone that works; look, it’s even got an alarm.” I sit up, and my back hurts, so I take as many breaths as needed until I can say “Hello Back, let’s stretch” and feel the wonder that I still have a sturdy back.
Seeing my calendar for today, I take as many deep breaths as needed until I can relax the rising stress about all those calls and emails. Instead, I delight that my bed is supporting me as I stretch, that the floor is supporting my bed, and the Earth is supporting us all, as Peter Levine points out (these hints have a reason). [FN2]
What’s really amazing is that I have this tofu between my ears known as a human mind which can perceive all that. And “all that” is organized, oddly enough, so that it supports my back and my body (if I just take a moment to feel into them). All without my doing anything except paying the el cheapo movers $150 to move the bed up the stairs back in 2010 when I was suicidal and got this place thinking it would be my mausoleum.
I start to faintly believe Tara’s wild idea that all of it, like me, is made of stardust. It feels really, really good. I’m likin’ this…
“Stardust… stardust” I mutter to myself and my normally anxious cells as I get up, brush my teeth (amazing Procter and Gamble can put stardust in a tube), and drink a liter of liquid stardust, er, water. The water is the best part; drinking slowly and with deep breaths, I can feel it flowing down my throat and my happy little digestive cells just soaking it in.
I make it to the kitchen; what a quandary. A friend has left a vase of flowers on the counter. The sight, the scent intoxicate me; the fact that someone did this for me overwhelms my heart; my eyes well up. Then there’s my kitchen window: sunlight and tropical foliage and the bright blue California sky, has this denizen of the New York underground gone to heaven? Can I go swing on my deck swing?
But I haven’t even opened the fridge to see what avocado or fruit treat awaits me… Just walking into the kitchen, I’m like the cat in the delicatessen: he couldn’t decide whether to eat the ham, the salami, or the baloney, so he starved to death.
Yikes, how long is it going to take me to be Present and really taste breakfast (oh, yum), choose a dress from my closet (all so gorgeous) and get outside? Then how do I make it past all those flowers and trees and birds in the parking lot to my car? How do I not drop to my knees (bad for the panty hose) in awe of the cherubim of Infiniti, that they could forge such a steed? How do I choose from a dozen uplifting musical recordings for my soul while driving? Drive? What a concept… By the end of the day, I’m in happy but exhausted shock. Good God, God is time-consuming!
Day at the Beach
By Saturday I’m exhausted and not feeling so mahvelous dahling anymore. I walk to the beach listening to that same Tara class again on my mp3, dejected that I’m so tired and by the way, walking to the beach alone.
If you recall, Tara starts with the need-fear dilemma: being deeply present with other human beings is love, and we need that kind of love for our brains to develop. But once we’re born, “the primal mood of the separate self is fear.” [FN3] No birth or parenting process is perfect, so we get “conditioned” by painful experiences to fear love. And coming from infant brain stem trauma, I’ve had boatloads of fear and its stand-in, anxiety. (Details in Stardust 1)
Again Tara makes her biggest leap (right after minute 19): If we only wake up out of our bad conditioning, she says, “The basic principle… is that love is intrinsic to what we are. In the most real way possible, we belong to this living world. We’re made of stardust, we all are composed of the same stuff. We’re breathing in this world, we’re breathing out into it; everything effects everything else. We belong, that’s the basics. ”
I reach the ocean and it’s so gorgeous that it hits me smack in the chest as it always does. Do I have a questionabout whether I intrinsically belong to this world?!
I pause the audio. She says I belong. Wait, I said it makes no sense, this shrink’s crazy! “No, remember, it’s physics and biochemistry that we’re made of stardust. So we’re loved 24 x7, by the Creator of the stars, no less. Except we don’t feel that way ‘cos of our bum programming.”
Sitting there staring at the sun on the ocean, suddenly I’m sobbing full-body heaves–a wave of astonishment too big to contain so that it shakes me from head to toe or maybe vice versa. This has hit me often when I’ve gone to the ocean; I’ve always been moved by it; I’d stand in the water or sit by it for hours or days at a time. Because something within me said: this is here for you. Something deep that goes to the core of my being, without having a word for it.
It all subsides; I take deep breaths and restart Tara’s audio. “And when the heart experiences that truth — in a visceral, vivid way — the experience is love,” she says. “Awareness, when it’s awake, when our awareness is aware of our own Presence: we belong to the world, and the world is part of our heart. It’s intrinsic.”
The love we need is already inside us.
Visceral? Did you say visceral? Damn right it’s visceral, it hits me in the chest and the gut. This goes way beyond anything head talk can manage; this is a physicalexperience. No other way to put it.
Mendelssohn No. 4
And then I remember the Mendelssohn. I remember Thanksgiving 2012 after singing Handel’s “Messiah” when I had to drive home alone in despair in a ballgown, hairdo and jewels, singing “I Know that My Redeemer Liveth” at the top of my lungs down Interstate 5 for an hour. (That’s my pic at left, but here’s Lynn Dawson singing; she really captures the wonder).
I got home and put on a favorite, Mendelssohn’s 4th Symphony, 3rd movement — and began sobbing for the sheer beauty of it. “Oh, this is what love feels like!” I said into my mp3’s record button. “This is what Mom should have felt like. This is what God love feels like; this is what people love should feel like — platonic, romantic, I don’t care! Yeah, I like this, this is what I like.” [FN5] (To play Movement #3 now, left click on “Download file,” then click “open.”)
To download mp3, click below: (Firefox users: right-click link, select ‘Save Link As…’ Internet Explorer users: right-click link, select ‘Save Target As…’ ) Mendelssohn Nr4 Tr3 Con moto
“But ‘it’s just not happening for me’!” I cried, quoting Dan the first rebound guy. “What’s up, Lord, why is it always No?” Then I simply had a really good sob about it, it was so painful to let it go through me, but when it was over, I felt better and better, then fell asleep in my clothes, exhausted but oddly happy.
“Maybe it started with you marinating so long in ‘My Redeemer Liveth’,” said my therapist Dr. R. next day. “Sometimes we are so much in God’s presence, that it’s ok that it all sucks. It’s ok you’re alone, again, that it hurts so bad – because there is a comfort here which you and I have a hard time putting words to. God spoke to you in that Mendelssohn, God knows you well enough to know that if He speaks to you in music, to say ‘I’m with you,’ you’re gonna get it. This is what Pure Love feels like.”
I thought that was nutty in 2012; how could an unseen ethereal being make me feel better, when what I needed was a flesh and blood husband? Still I had to admit: I did for no reason feel a whole lot better.
And then I remembered stepping onto this beach later in 2012, right after the Mendelssohn, and my best friend Cynthia calling from back East. I told her about my body’s reaction to Mendelssohn, and to the sun on the water, and…
She talked about Kepler. Cynthia’s the only gal I know who translates Kepler from Latin for fun. “You see the sun on the ocean and you know: God made all this for you!” she said.
“Remember Kepler writing that God made the harmony of the worlds and the harmony of music so we could know Him? He gave us a direct emotional experience of great beauty moving our souls. Kepler said we’re created to belong to the universe, designed to see and be delighted by it.
“Logic alone can’t prove we belong; first, we feel we belong.
“Yeah, you belong to this world,” she concluded. “In particular, you belong to my world.”
And I had that same reaction: Cynthia says I belong. Cynthia says I belong! Every cell in my body is suddenly singing at the top of their little cellular lungs, “We BeLO–NG” and yes, Virginia, they believe it.
“A car can’t gas itself,” says Dr. R. I had to hear it from another mammal like Cynthia. Back in 2012, I sat down, played Mendelssohn’s third movement, and out poured the whole reaction again.
“Thank you, Lord, I have never felt this wonderful in my life. I am safe,” I said. “I can feel secure no matter what anybody does! I can feel safe no matter what happens, because I can release my bad feelings.
“Think of the freedom! Think of how loved I can feel, and no one can take this from me. I just want to sit here and cry and listen to Mendelssohn for about five years.”
And then my body took off down that beach like there was no tomorrow, my limbs hijacking me, volition had nothing to do with it.
Now a year later, on my bench, I switch from Tara to Mendelssohn’s 3rd movement, still on my mp3. And here it comes again, I feel it all over again: I hear Mendelssohn, I see the sun on the ocean -– and the sobbing starts in overdrive. I getit, Tara, thank you, thank you: We AREMade of Stardust.
I’ve been pondering this mystery for a year, so I sit for ten minutes letting it all slam over my body and out again, and the less my head gets in the way asking why, the deeper and wider the bodily reaction gets. Then suddenly it’s done, and I feel like a million bucks, again.
Again, just like in 2012, my body took off down that beach running for the ocean like there was no tomorrow and I was even less in control of it in 2013 than in 2012.
I hit the water and then I was dancing all over the beach sobbing for about an hour, playing the third movement a dozen times, running the length of the entire two mile strand, dancing and singing and skipping and jogging.
Then I danced my way through the whole symphony, just like a year ago, starting with the first movement. (Click “Play” arrow at left below for Movement #1:)
To download mp3, click below : (Firefox users: right-click link, select ‘Save Link As…’ Internet Explorer users: right-click link, select ‘Save Target As…’ ) Mendelssohn #4, Movement #1 Allegro
Eventually I crawled off the beach to my bench with a huge grin across my face. Gosh, this Presence thing sure is time consuming! Who’d believe that just spending a week practicing being Present With What Is for every little ordinary thing, could lead to such a wave of physical emotion of belonging and being loved?
Physical Experience
No matter what the people were doing, I’ve known that something in me had some deep connection to this world since I was little, without knowing to use the word “belong.” It was bizarrely simple. I connected to the beauty of nature, and that’s what’s resonating now.
It puzzled me no end as a kid. I remember thinking from grade school, “Seeing that tree over there really moves something inside my heart. But that tree is 20 feet away, and my eyes are over here; why should I feel any connection? Why should that be?” The question has no tangible answer, none; in fact at times it seemed downright impossible to me.
And yet as a kid I had this physical experience over and over, every time I saw trees or stars or the ocean. It was just too beautiful for me, so I felt it as “visceral.”
Now Tara Brach has put a word to it: Belong. Just the word sets off an earthquake in my heart. Something deep inside me, without reason or logic, has felt all my life a desperate need to belong, and when I got that in nature, it hit me hard. It’s a big deal to have that big a physical experience of belonging, even if I only had it with a tree.
Eventually I wander home in a state of shock, trying to be present with the sunset and how beautiful is the path back to my place. I try not to go into sensory overload or fall asleep en route. Below is a video mp4 of sunset there and my path home.
Sorry, it may only work with Internet Explorer. After you click the Play arrow, watch the moving bar because that may show how long it will take to load. Or better, forget the electronics, close your eyes, lean back and just imagine.
Look at all the stuff I didn’t get done today! I missed five crucial emails, didn’t make a pile of calls, and now it’s dark and I won’t even get to the gym until really late. Darn. Does anybody really have time for all this?
Oh well, consider the alternative.
Suppose all of the above is claptrap. Perhaps we humans are in charge of all that we see? Not only did we make my bed and my floor and the toothpaste, but we’re pretty much responsible for everything? Well then, obviously we don’t have time to sit back! We’ve got our achievement programming to obey! Step on it -– we’ve got to get out there and make the world run, get all those emails out, go sell things, phone clients, write even more programs (this time with computers), or go do whatever it is we do all day. We’ve got to achieve! We’ve got to hustle and tote that barge, lift that bale. No time for this stardust hooey, forget it.
I guess free will means it’s up to each of us to choose. I don’t like that second alternative. It doesn’t feel good; it doesn’t even make sense. Me, I’m developing a taste for stardust (yum).
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Footnotes
FN1 Brach, Tara, PhD, “Releasing Barriers to Unconditional Loving” – Part 1A (5-15-13) at:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHiEAykuvvY&feature=player_embedded
Books: Brach, Tara, PhD: “True Refuge,” Bantam Books, 2013 and “Radical Acceptance,” Bantam Books, 2003
Biography: www.tarabrach.com/about.html
Website Audio & Video page: www.tarabrach.com/audiodharma.html
FN2 Levine, Peter A., PhD, “Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body,” ‘Sounds True, Inc.,’ Boulder CO, 2005; ISBN 1-159179-247-9
FN3 Need-Fear Dilemma: “We have a need in our heart for love, but when it’s wounded or hurt or unavailable, something very bad happens. We don’t just sustain need. If my Mom dies when I’m age 7, I can’t just wait 20 years and say ‘OK now I’ll find someone nice to love me.’ Instead, when we have unmet need or injured need, something bad develops called the need-fear dilemma. What we need the most, we begin to fear. If it’s needing love, then we’re uneasy around love. If we need understanding of our weaknesses, we get very uneasy about being weak.”
– Cloud, Henry, PhD, “Getting Love on the Inside,” Lecture, April 2002 (CD), www.Cloud-Townsend Resources.com
“The insecure resistant ambivalent child shown in the video is experiencing what has been referred to as the need-fear dilemma; he both needs the mother for comfort, but something in his history with this mother has instilled fear, and distrust whether he will find what he needs. The video is of the Strange Situation, developed by psychologist Mary Ainsworth in the 1970s to describe secure and insecure attachment. These two attachment patterns are vividly seen in the interaction of two mother-child pairs: http://youtu.be/DH1m_ZMO7GU ”
— Gerson, John, Phd, “Understanding Secure and Insecure Attachment,” www.theravive.com/research/understanding-secure-and-insecure-attachment
FN4 Marty Stuart, “Souls’ Chapel,” #3. “Way Down.” Scroll down to song list and click on arrow to right of #3 at www.amazon.com/Souls-Chapel-Marty-Stuart/dp/B000AA7I14
FN5 Felix Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 in A major, Op. 90, “Italian” was composed from 1829 to 1831. Its inspiration is the color and rich history of Italy, where Mendelssohn wrote: “This is Italy! And now has begun what I have always thought… to be the supreme joy in life. And I am loving it. Today was so rich that now, in the evening, I must collect myself a little, and so I am writing to you to thank you, dear parents, for having given me all this happiness.”
I’m going to tell you the cure for Attachment Disorder and its many related ills in this simple two-part blog. But as the good witch Glenda told Dorothy, you won’t believe me until you experience it for yourself.
I recently spent several weeks absorbing an astonishing talk by therapist Dr. Tara Brach (above), “Releasing Barriers to Unconditional Loving.” A good way to start experiencing cure would be to watch this. [Click here for video]
“Enlightenment,” she begins, quoting Zen master Dōgen, “is just Intimacy With All Things.” [FN1, FN2]
“Just,” Tara laughs. This shrink’s crazy, I say to myself. Yikes, I’m supposed to let All That inside me and be intimate? “Intimacy!” she dances on, “Intimacy with the Life inside you. Intimacy with someone at work… Intimacy with a cousin or a sister… with the person sitting next to you even if you don’t know them. What does it mean? What’s the quality of heart?
“Intimacy with the squirrels that eat the bird seed at the feeder… intimacy with the weeds…intimacy with the wind. Can you begin to sense the quality of openness, of awake-ness, of tenderness, that unconditionally makes room? The “heart space” where Everything That Is, is welcome? Intimacy is our potential to realize, and trust, and live from, Loving Presence.
“It’s also a need. We need Love, to develop in a healthy way. We need a certain amount of loving attention, intimacy, loving presence from others, for our neurons to grow. Research shows that even rat pups who don’t get enough attention, don’t grow as many neuron synapses.
“So we have a longing for love and we flourish when love is there, when there’s a sense of belonging. The poet Hafez says: ‘The subject tonight is love, and tomorrow night as well. As a matter of fact there’ no better topic to discuss, until we all die ‘.” “When you figure out love is all that matters after all,” says Carrie Underwood, “it makes everything else seem so small.”
Yikes again, did she just put meditation together with attachment love from a good mom, as if it were the same thing? This shrink’s crazy. She doesn’t bother to say we need someone else to do it, or specifically with us. She just says we need loving intimacy and she’s calling that Attachment. To her it’s the most natural transition in the world – but to me it’s like jumping over the Grand Canyon.
OK, I have a regular meditation practice, I’m used to the meditation concept “be present with my breath, the sounds, the flowers, with my friends at the restaurant and the calamari.” But it never occurred to me to draw a comparison between Present on the one hand — and loving another human being on the other, let alone to say it’s identical. Astonishing. Simply being present with another person constitutes loving them? Whu Nhu? I guess the words “loving” and “intimate” get sexualized too much?
The real reason I’m so shocked is: I can’t even begin to imagine my mother being Present like that. Tara says: “And that’s all we need from Mom, to simply feel she is Present.” But what a leap from Presence with my breath, to intimacy from my mother! She was so compelled to performance, doing something, getting somewhere. I can’t imagine my mother just sitting and being gently Present with me. Just saying it sounds like a stark staring mad idea.
Then I notice what’s going on in my gut.
“Ahhh, Yes!” every jangling, anxiety-ridden cell in my body cries out, “this is the source of our attachment disorder, all us cells down here need Love! We don’t feel loved or wanted, we’re terrified of being alone. Skip the new age Intimacy blather, we need love and we need it now! Hey, what’s playing on Match.com? Let’s get this Search for Love on the road!
“Us anxious cells were programmed from birth to be practical and to get things done, Skeeter. Yeah, we read that “General Theory of Love” book by the three shrinks who say “Too many Americans are spurred to achieve, rather than attach.” [FN3] You said it brother – we cells were programmed to achieve. We’ve got to get to work and get things done! If we don’t perform, nobody will ever love us.”
The Separate Self and Fear
Hold on, I tell my cells, Tara’s only at minute 4:25 of an hour talk. OK she’s a little nutty but let’s see where she goes next.
It’s another whopper. “Then,” says Tara, “We have Rilke, who says: ‘For one human being to love another, this is the most difficult of all our tasks.’ The human realm is filled with misunderstanding, conflict, hurt, anger and insecurity — because we have a basic perception of separation.
“The primal mood of the Separate Self is fear. It’s core in our conditioning to feel separate, to have all the fight/flight activity from separation. We start with fear, and due to that, we don’t trust belonging easily. To the degree we don’t feel a sense of belonging, we don’t trust anyone really loves us… It brings a real deep mistrust… A core wounding that appears… is a basic sense that “I’m not loveable for who I am. I don’t belong, I can’t trust belonging, I’m not loveable in a real way.”
“The primal mood of the Separate Self is fear,” I walk around muttering for a few days. OK, this one’s definitely is notcrazy. Everyone in brain science says that being born is absolutely terrifying; it was warm, now it’s cold; it was dark, now it’s blinding; it was hushed, now it’s scary loud; “and what’s this stuff in my lungs?” says Bruce Perry.
I know that fear, I’ve felt it all my life, because Dr. Perry also says the baby is designed to feel stress chemicals when this shock hits, so that it cries until the mother holds it, because if it didn’t and she didn’t, the baby would die. And when she does, the stress chemicals stop and they both get a flood of reward (feel-good) chemicals like oxytocin. [FN4]
Or not. If mom doesn’t respond, or the baby’s locked up in a glass box in incubation for a few weeks and then after that mom doesn’t respond, the stress chemicals never stop, and the fear continues unabated until it’s overwhelming. Which is how I lived my entire life until I found that Peter Levine book. [FN5]
“Conditioning” in Buddhism refers to the false beliefs imprinted on each living thing from birth by external culture and family, the habit patterns of the unconscious.
“The biggest way conditioning gets solidified is the imprint of parenting,” Tara continues. “I’ve kept a long time this cartoon, a little boy with goggles on a ladder spraying paint onto the wall. It says ‘I need love!!’ But his mother and her friend are talking and she says ‘He’s just doing that to get attention.’ [audience laughs] ‘I need love!!’
“But when the love doesn’t come, when there’s neglect, major criticism, abusive behavior, even just a lack of attunement, then the child has to protect from the pain of that. A lot of our personality becomes how we protect ourselves from that raw pain of ‘I’m not loveable as I am.’
“So the fear of love, the fear of intimacy, is also a universal conditioning. We have this perception of separateness, and our nervous system is wired for it, we’re kind of stuck with it.”
“Omigod” say my wounded cells, “we need love, we can’t live without love – but the basis of our entire central nervous system is to FEAR love. You thought we were freaked out before, now we’re really screwed!” “Wait a minute,” I say, “Didn’t Henry Cloud identify that as the ‘Need-Fear Dilemma’ and explain in depth how to get out of it? [FN6]
Intrinsic Love
But Tara’s just getting started, and she sees a way out. If we study this need-fear mess we make of love and see how we’re creating the mess, she says, we can use Dōgen’s “intimacy with all things” to stop messing, heal our bad conditioning, and find the love we need. Let’s explore, says Tara, “what makes Love so difficult… and how to bring our practices of awareness and heart so we can wake up from our conditioning.”
Huh? I say. This shrink’s crazy. So why do I trust her so much?
Then she makes another gigantic leap and says: “I’ll name the basic principles at the root of any inquiry into waking up in relationships, and one of them is that love is intrinsic to what we are.
“In the most real way possible, we belong to this living world. We’re made of stardust, we all are composed of the same stuff. We’re breathing in this world, we’re breathing out into it; everything effects everything else. We belong, that’s the basics.
“And when the heart experiences that truth -– in a visceral, vivid way — the experience is love. Awareness, when it’s awake, when our awareness is aware of our own Presence: we belong to the world, and the world is part of our heart. It’s intrinsic.
“The yearning to realize love is universal. Just like a flower wants to bloom, each of us wants to unfold into our wholeness, realize who we really are, and live in that, that’s universal.”
Love is intrinsic, it’s already inside me? This shrink’s crazy!! Now even my cells are blowing a raspberry, all in unison.
“Oh phooey! We don’t believe we’re made of stardust for a New York minute,” my cells yell — at me, Tara and the general public. “Everyone knows we’re made of 98 cents worth of chemicals, meat and bones. Plus we’re all drenched in anxiety and stress from all that fear that we ain’t getting no love, which floods us with cortisol poison at the drop of a hat.”
Hmmm… Wait a minute, dear cells, I say, now perhaps that’s circular reasoning? Why all the cortisol? Maybe it’s our bad conditioning?
Maybe our brain stem received bum programming from conception to 36 months, when nobody remembers anything? Forty-five months is a long time to be in adversity for helpless cells. Plus Bruce Perry says that the brain stem gives rise to the rest of the brain and nervous system, which drives the development of our viscera – so if our brain stem got fried, significant parts of our insides got fried in development.
Tara’s got a plan for us to Feel Loved 24×7: we start to really get it that we are stardust. Hey, now I think of it, it’s physics and biochemistry that we’re made of stardust. So obviously we are loved 24 x7, by the Creator of the stars, no less. No small deal.
Except we don’t feel that way; we often feel like cr–p, ‘cos of our bum programming. So much happens every day to cause my cortisol to rise. Bad news from the doctor or the bond market, no time for a good breakfast, traffic, freeways, meetings, hordes of emails in my in-box.
So here’s the plan: let’s take Master Dōgen at his word and try this Intimacy with All Things bit. Let’s try to be intimate – be Present – with everything and every one we encounter, and do that more and more moments of the day. Tara says the more we do that, the more loved we’re gonna feel. Ultimately if we want to feel Loved 24 x 7, we need to be Present with everything and everyone we encounter 24 x7 – they’re all stardust, too. Sound’s crazy but what have we got to lose?
Tomorrow for just one day, let’s try to implement the Dōgen Plan. For one day, or as big a part of a day as we can hack, we will put 100% of our effort into being Present with What Is. Come what may.
————————-
Kathy’s news blogs expand on her 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 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
FN1 Brach, Tara, PhD, “Releasing Barriers to Uncondtional Loving” Pt 1A (5-15-13) www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHiEAykuvvY&feature=player_embedded Books: Brach, Tara, PhD: “True Refuge,” Bantam Books, 2013 and “Radical Acceptance,” Bantam Books, 2003 Biography: www.tarabrach.com/about.html Audios & Videos: www.tarabrach.com/audiodharma.html
Some of my favorite videos:
1. Learning to Respond, Not React 8/3/2011 (46 min)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar-L41QMYCM#at=1908
2. Reacting Wisely to Desire 8-10-11 (50 min)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hka8c4OteYA&feature=player_embedded
3. Releasing Barriers to Uncondtional Loving – Pt 1A (5-15-13)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHiEAykuvvY&feature=player_embedded
4. Releasing Barriers to Unconditional Loving – Pt 1B (05/15/13) www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5-AC3re9Ak
5. Being to Being: Loving Beyond the Trance – Part IA (5-22-13)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ha30OPZ_-OI
6. Being to Being: Loving Beyond the Trance – Part IB (5-22-13)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqiUMCohJXQ&feature=player_embedded
FN2 Dōgen Zenji: “Do not be concerned with the faults of other persons. Do not see others’ faults with a hateful mind. There is an old saying that if you stop seeing others’ faults, then naturally seniors are venerated and juniors are revered. Do not imitate others’ faults; just cultivate virtue. Buddha prohibited unwholesome actions, but did not tell us to hate those who practice unwholesome actions.” Japanese Zen Buddhist teacher born in Kyōto (1200 – 1253).
FN3 Lewis, Thomas, MD; Amini, Fari, MD; Lannon, Richard, MD; “A General Theory of Love”, Random House, 2000. Great link (check it out): www.paulagordon.com/shows/lannon/
FN4 Perry, Bruce, MD, “Born for Love: The Effects of Empathy on the Developing Brain,” speech to Annual Interpersonal Neurobiology Conference “How People Change: Relationship & Neuroplasticity in Psychotherapy,” UCLA Extension, Los Angeles, March 8, 2013 Perry, Bruce, MD, “Overview of Neuro-sequential Model of Therapeutics (NMT),” www.childtrauma.org, 2010
FN5 Levine, Peter A., PhD, “Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body,” ‘Sounds True, Inc.,’ Boulder CO, 2005; ISBN 1-159179-247-9
FN6 Need-Fear Dilemma in my blog Excommunication Blues
“We have a need in our heart for love, but when it’s wounded or hurt or unavailable, something very bad happens. We don’t just sustain need. If my Mom dies when I’m age 7, I can’t just wait 20 years and say ‘OK now I’ll find someone nice to love me.’ Instead, when we have unmet need or injured need, something bad develops called the need-fear dilemma. What we need the most, we begin to fear. If it’s needing love, then we’re uneasy around love. If we need understanding of our weaknesses, we get very uneasy about being weak.”
– Cloud, Henry, PhD, “Getting Love on the Inside,” Lecture, April 2002 (CD), www.Cloud-Townsend Resources.com
“The insecure resistant ambivalent child shown in the video is experiencing what has been referred to as the need-fear dilemma; he both needs the mother for comfort, but something in his history with this mother has instilled fear, and distrust whether he will find what he needs. The video is of the Strange Situation, developed by psychologist Mary Ainsworth in the 1970s to describe secure and insecure attachment. These two attachment patterns are vividly seen in the interaction of two mother-child pairs: http://youtu.be/DH1m_ZMO7GU ”
— Gerson, John, Phd, “Understanding Secure and Insecure Attachment,” www.theravive.com/research/understanding-secure-and-insecure-attachment
And now, the New Year’s face of trauma recovery: I am so grateful for how wonderful I feel this year! That’s why I wanted you to see some of my holiday pictures – so that when I tell you in mere words that “it’s worth it” to confront all this trauma by feeling it to heal it, you can see for yourself that it’s true.
My holidays kicked off with a shine on Nov. 24 when I sang Handel’s “Messiah” at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda in a full-scale replica of the White House East Ballroom. They even handed me a 17th-century gown and said “here, wear this.”
I looked like Bo Peep searching for her lost sheep amidst the crystal chandeliers (I called the Dollar Store to see if they had any shepherd’s crooks, but they just said “Yeah we get a lot of crooks in here…”). It was a riot… and we sang good. DVDs to come, ask me.
Many of us, whether in trauma or just excess stress, unfortunately find the holidays to be the worst time of the year. When the whole world is supposed to be joyous because they’re cuddling up with family, those of us who don’t have the Picture-book Perfect family can feel like failures, feel unloved, and even feel that we don’t belong to exist. I sure did, in particular for the ten years 2002-2012, in spades.
But not this year. It’s no exaggeration to say that 2013 was the best holiday season of my entire life.
Trauma stinks, to put it politely, and I’ve been posting some pretty awful stuff about about “as bad as it gets” with infant brain stem trauma and how the emotional pain can louse up a whole life. I had some friends back east who in jest (usually) didn’t call me “Lousy Brousie” for nothing.
I’ve also noted that the worst of infant trauma can happen not only in poor and violent areas, but in the most wealthy and educated families. In fact it happens in 50% of American households.
So there are a lot of us in this together –- whether some of us know it or not.
I wanted to let you know that every step we take to walk fully through whatever trauma we may have, is so worth it. It’s worth it, to feel all the even terrifying feelings we sometimes need to feel to heal them — because the healing can feel “as good as it gets.”
I may be clowning around now and having Thanksgiving dinner at the beach, which I did — but it was a result of a lot of hard internal work. Doing this work results in a growing feeling of “love inside” as Dr. Henry Cloud puts it, which at times can feel as if God’s love were pouring in the windows of our soul. Or at least of the Nixon Library, which are some pretty huge floor-to-ceiling ornate windows…
And: this year I actually had Christmas! It’s amazing how much of the joys of Christmas we can miss when we’re frozen in dissociation. But now that I’m unfreezing, I get to experience the wonder of finally being alive. Starting in December I went to so many tree lightings and caroling parties that I began to gain weight because I could finally taste the food for the first time this year.
I went to the Nutcracker Ballet with a dear friend, just at a local high school – and got 100 times more out of it than if I’d flown to New York to see the New York City Ballet’s world-famous production.
I could hardly keep myself from leaping up onto the stage. It was a shock how fully I could hear Tchaikovsky’s music, feel it in my heart, see the children prancing around, like never before. It feels like the joy a child feels when we just jump for the sheer joy of being alive. Everything feels so real. I tried to get tickets to go see it a second time but they were sold out…
Emotional Attachment
It took deep emotional attachment from good friends and more to heal me over the last five years. Here I am toasting one such friend at the Newport Beach Christmas Boat Parade on Dec. 22.
Humans can only feel safe in the presence of caring humans. “The Mind is a dangerous place – never go in alone.” So yes: I do mean it when I say “Don’t Try This at Home.” And I wanted you to know that it’s all worth it. And that you are worth it. And yes – you can find compassionate friends who will let you attach.
Dealing with trauma has required me to set up a very broad safety net: an empathic, painstaking therapist skilled in Adult Attachment Theory; support groups modeled on the AA and other “anonymous” organizations’ principle of total acceptance and emotional support for the wounded; and close friends who were serious about staying attached to me — because they wanted to heal, too.
Keep looking until you find people who have issues of a similar severity and who also want to heal. They’re out there, and they’re worth it. I know; they saved my life.
A lot of these snowmen on the gingerbread house on Newport’s Balboa Island were quite frozen in dissociation when I first met them. But over the years, as we shared our histories and helped each other grieve our real grief, we began to heal from the past, and melt our frozen hearts. So now above on Dec. 22 we’re all enjoying Christmas! (And yes there were real people involved, but the first rule of this kind of deep sharing is 100% confidentiality – so I can’t use their pix…)
Therapy alone won’t do it. It requires the whole “recovery suite.”
As the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, attachment disorder, brain science and the biology of brain stem dysregulation have become understood in the last ten years, we’ve all focused on creating “preventative programs” to help babies and children now. We’re trying to alert parents to be more attentive to their infants and to these issues. Obviously this is necessary and mission-critical.
But I’d also like to point out: if half of today’s parents themselves, like 58% of the adult ACE Study participants, have moderate to severe brain stem developmental trauma, will working with parents on how to be better parents be enough? Necessary, but not sufficient, as mathematics textbooks put it.
I wanted you to know that you are worth it, specifically. You can find Recovery friends and support groups to really lean on — so that you can get to the parts of the traumatized brain where you can feel the deep stuff and really experience deep healing.
Dr. Dan Siegel calls it widening our “window of tolerance” to feel things which are repressed in dissociation. This biologically can only be done in “dyadic consciousness,” in the presence of other compassionate human beings whom we can trust and to whom we can therefore become attached.
Otherwise the brain stem just knocks us out into dissociation and we can’t feel a thing, period. You can’t fool your brain stem; it knows you much too well.
Don’t we need a campaign to heal the parents, too? Not for some socio-economic brackets – but all Americans? It sure is worth it! That’s me in the ocean at Dana Point on Christmas Day, in 80-degree sunshine! A New York girl’s dream come true. (You can see the grin on my face if you click on the picture… )
In one example, scientists report that the infant brain, from conception and early cell division, must divide cells and grow based on some kind of rhythm, and for nine months it is driven to tune on a cellular level to its mother’s heart and breathing rates, among her other vitals. “We have a pregnant employee who’s an athlete who’s resting heart rate is 40 beats/minute; she’s likely to have a very relaxed baby who likes relaxed rhythms. And a hyper-thyroid mother whose heart rate is 95 may have a baby who finds a higher regulating rhythm,” Bruce Perry reports.
But a mother with ACE trauma herself, hysteria, or any high stress often has “a totally irregular heart rate, breathing and other vital signs,” he notes. “These moms end up with kids who are difficult to sooth because the mother had no rhythm consistently present for them to entrain to in utero. After birth, they can’t find any rhythm that is soothing.” Perry says that can easily cause developmental trauma.
Such mothers themselves, even the most determined to love their baby, require deep psychological and biological healing for their own trauma. That is often true for fathers who marry such women as well.
If a mother isn’t “attuned” inside herself, how can she truly attune to her baby? I had so little ability to attune to a baby in my 20s and 30s that I literally “didn’t even have it in me” to have children. “I would have thought the very idea would have been absolutely terrifying to you,” my fourth — and last! — therapist said (finally found a good one). Without far reaching programs to heal the parents, many will remain biologically incapable of attuning to children.
It’s Adult Attachment Disorder which is the underlying cause of childhood trauma — not babies.
So remember, all you adults out there, including you who may be in this field of endeavor because of your own childhoods or because you just can’t bear watching the inter-generational trauma being repeated over and over:
You’re Worth It.
I raise this cup of spicy home-made Christmas Tea to you, with the most contented smile I’ve ever had on my face, to prove it.
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Kathy’s news blogs expand on her 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 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.
The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study showed that for 17,337 patients, childhood trauma correlated to serious adult medical conditions. “Contrary to conventional belief," says co-Director Vincent Felitti, MD, "time does not heal all wounds, since humans convert traumatic emotional experiences in childhood into organic disease later in life.”
FEATURED BOOKS – QUOTES
"Too many Americans are spurred to achieve, rather than to attach." --A General Theory of Love
"Trying to fix the heart using the head, is like trying to paint with a hammer - it only makes a mess."
"You can be strong - or you can be human."
-- Grief Recovery Handbook
"Gosh, I shoulda checked the milligramage! Oh, well, Live and Learn." -- Working Girl
"Any book you haven't thrown across the room at least once because it smashed your world view, probably isn't worth a long shelf life." -- Kathy
"Mental health. For everything else there's MasterCard." -- Kathy
Dr. Vincent Felitti, MD again joined our SoCal (Southern California) ACEs Group March 7 for our alternate-month San Diego meeting. He’s shown with author-activist Morgan Rose (details below). I felt so grateful.
Dana Brown, Project Director of San Diego’s Trauma-Informed Community Schools (TICS), briefed us on their grassroots efforts. Funded by The California Endowment, it’s a systems-change initiative in densely-populated City Heights. TICS goes deep in the community to support parent and youth leadership and school staff where they work and live; it’s “place-based.” Dana (left) helps a student leader with kids at Cherokee Point Elementary.
It left me thinking how to organize one of Morgan’s Celebrity Parents to get a hit movie made as Dr. Felitti dreams. A TV series couldn’t be far behind. (Dr. Felitti and me at our previous SoCal ACEs meeting.)
