Weekly | "Don't Try This Alone"

Tin Can Shot Full of Holes

Posted on October 4, 2013 by Kathy

#10 in my ongoing book blogs from “Don’t Try This at Home”

After my Dad’s funeral, back I flew from Florida again to my consulting gig near Washington DC, and to Dan the rebound affair, who seemed supportive. I was so relieved to be away from the funeral pain, and being with Dan at his farm felt good.

Imagine my surprise when within five days of my father’s death, Dan sat down to the nice dinner I’d prepared for him one night and asked me to leave.

“It’s just not happening for me,” he announced. “I want mah house back. I’m just not comfortable with you.” He had no feelings for me, he said. Whu Nhu? After almost two years and endless hours of intensity, I had been completely blindsided.

Later on that night (much later, after the inevitable rematch), I asked if he could let me know what I’d done wrong, so I could at least learn something from all this. All he could do was repeat “I was comfortable with Maureen (his ex). But you get so excited when you talk that you wave your hands and it distracts me to where I can’t hear what you’re saying. I’m just not comfortable with you.”

“I’m just not comfortable with you.” At the time it seemed merely unjust, but make a mental note of that turn of phrase. It will prove to be another clue to the big picture puzzle.

I left Dan’s farm and rented a room in an elderly widow’s home near the airport to work out my consulting contract for another three weeks, before I could escape back to California.

My Dad was dead — and still I couldn’t cry for him. But now I was crying buckets on the hour for Dan, a stranger I’d known only briefly over just short of two years.

Over the July 4, 2008 weekend I dutifully googled “Grief” on the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) website (since taken over by SAMHSA). I found this on page two, and in all these years, it’s by far the best way to confront grief I’ve ever seen, packed full of heavy truth in each short sentence:

“How will I know when I’m done grieving? Every person who experiences a death or other loss must complete a four step grieving process:
1. Accept the loss
2. Work through and feel the physical and emotional pain of grief
3. Adjust to living in a world without the person or item lost
4. Move on with life.

“The grieving process is over only when the person completes these four steps,” it concluded bluntly. This short but dense RX has since been inexplicably removed from the NIMH website, but I’ve kept a folded shard of the printout all these years. And it proved to be deadly accurate.

I posted “Accept the Loss” in Calibri 16 point font on my computer, my bathroom mirror, and taped it on my wallet (still there to this day), but I couldn’t begin to understand what it meant. I was dead sure that the shattering loss I was feeling was heartbreak over Dan.
I felt guilty but little more for my Dad.

Right on cue as my personal life went down the tubes, it sure did look as if I were in good company and the whole American economy were simultaneously going down in a hand basket.

I was working 14 hour days on a punishing schedule for the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) info-tech proposal. I could remember when a Defense Department proposal was just that: a large technical document written for a major defense supplier, explaining why our satellite system or computer system was better than the competitors’.

Here, however, at times I was sure I was in the Twilight Zone, there was such disorganization bordering on panic. This was a $2 billion project, to be built at hundreds of airports, ports and border crossings around the nation, and every large company in the U.S. was bidding. The company which retained me had thrown their entire budget for a year on this one proposal, bringing in consultants by the dozens — without setting up a reasoned structure.

It was mass chaos. We had computer gurus in turbans from Bombay, and Brits from London who would joke they were here to take back the colonies (to which I retorted “What’s left? There’s no industrial base…”). We had cost cutters from Lower Manhattan who didn’t care whether the equipment we were proposing to sell to Uncle Sam worked or not, if they could just structure the cheapest bid.

We hardly had time to leave our desks to eat and by the last two weeks they were trucking in catered breakfast, lunch and dinner. Anonymous signs began to appear on doors spoofing the insanity. Yes, I saved one and scanned it today (above). Click on it, it’s a riot.

Through the din, every morning at 8 am there was a voice on the speaker phones throughout the building, the voice of the lady Proposal Manager, literally shouting orders to the massed troops. One day I had to tear myself from my workstation long enough to go down to the basement super-bunker to interview some of the top brass leading the project. There in what looked like a 5-foot wide loud yellow shirt was a woman who resembled nothing so much as Jabba the Hut, scratching her arms, chain smoking, and shrieking into the speaker phones. “Well, she’s won $10 billion worth of proposals, so whatever Lola wants,” one fellow muttered.

I really wasn’t very sure I wanted to be in this line of work anymore. But what choice did I have – starve to death alone?
It was as if that Twilight Zone had engulfed my public and my private life in one nasty slurp.

I was leading a double existence, interviewing top executives by day, then crying into the cell phone to my friends in California on my short breaks, standing outside in the muggy Virginia heat. It had all been a series of psychological champagne drunks I was on, I told them ruefully, to cover up my divorce, the fact that I had lost my 27-year marriage, my overseas projects, my music, and my whole life.

I couldn’t “Accept the loss” of my entire life, or my divorce; I couldn’t accept anything. I just ran. First I ran to Dan, then to California dancing, singing Country, sailing, and dating, then back to Dan, I told them. Now I’ve lost the Dan umbilical cord to the East Coast and I belong nowhere.

So what do you do when the champagne factory shuts down? After everyone left the office at 11 pm I stayed on, churning out Dan doggerel well into the early morning.

I didn’t feel any anger at all while I was crying so hard during that summer of 2008; I don’t recall feeling anything like anger for another four years. I just felt unloved, deadly lonely and miserable.

But I still had an empty string bean can with a half dozen jagged wounds, from the day Dan posted it as a target at the far end of a back woods field as part of his efforts to teach me to shoot pistols. Something inside me resonated oddly, to think that I had actually pumped this piece of metal full of lead.

I may not have been aware of any anger, but my reaction to that piece of junk and the poems told another story which didn’t come out until much later.

Tin Can Shot Full of Holes
(Apologies to Bob Seeger)
July 12, 2008

It’s sitting on the wall ledge above my closet door,
It sits and stares right at me; I know what it’s staring for:
To think a serious woman like me would be concerned,
For such a pile of tin and rust, and might even get burned.
The more I think about it, the less I can control
A visceral reaction to that tin can shot full of holes.

I met a man in Mexico, he had an eagle eye,
He warned me not to go too far, he warned me not to die;
He warned me there was nothing alive behind his smile;
He smiled so warm right through me it almost seemed worthwhile.
I thought his smile might save him, as bright as burning coal,
But nothing could bring comfort to a tin can shot full of holes.

We went up on the mountain with little more to say,
I did my level best to focus on things far away,
We used tin cans as targets for pistol practice shots,
But never could be certain to hit any given spot.
With Dorothy, I’ve traveled over Oz from pole to pole,
But all I’ve come away with is a tin can shot full of holes.

I hate it when these poems just overflow my mind;
I’d rather more be sleeping and my work is far behind.
I see him in the shadows, I see him in the sun,
I see him on the grasslands, I see him on the run,
He’ll have to run forever, for he’s running from his soul;
My heart goes out in pity to the tin man shot full of holes.

Hit Bottom Yet?

By the time I flew back to California on July 18, 2008, tail between legs, I was in bad shape. But think you’re hurting now, girl? Ha. It was just the beginning.

Now the Great 2008 Financial Crisis meltdown was in full swing, banks were crashing left and right across America, and my aerospace engineering and IT consulting market on the West Coast suddenly folded up like a Japanese duck pop.

“Japanese duck pop” is a semi-controversial term I’ve been accused of making up, but which I’m sure I learned from a Korean War Vet in some global timezone at some point in the 1990s. Imagine a flock of ducks flying along, and one of them while zipping straight ahead at a good clip, sticks his head directly up his rear… until pop! He simply disappears, in Incheon Landing slang.

An opera-going friend invited me to an elite dinner party in Newport Beach, where of course I did not use this sort of language. One thing I know how to do is put up a glamorous front at an upscale dinner party. The woman seated to my right asked my line of work. “You’re a writer? Fabulous,” she said. “I run an investment fund; my clients invest a minimum of $5 million with me. I want to publish a book on my investing method and I’d like you to be my ghost author. Come to my office on Monday.”

Soon I was in her impressive Newport Beach office, complete with fountains in the palm-swept courtyard, taking down her book in dictation twice a week, as she rattled it off the top of her head. Soon we were talking international finance, and she was talking about taking me on to train me to help handle some of her millionaire investment clients. Magic! A new California Dream.

Until one day I sat down in her office – and the investment bank on Wall Street where she kept all her clients’ funds had just gone down in flames, bringing the markets with it. Her cell phones were ringing, the computers were going haywire, her irate clients were pulling up in limos, and her husband and son were running in and out of the room with slips of paper and messages.

It was like trying to write a book on nuclear war, in the middle of a nuclear war. There went another California Dream. The Great 2008 Financial Crisis made an end to that book project, along with major investment banks.

It was also the end of my California defense career, because the Federal proposal consulting market in California suddenly died, never to be born again as of today. All the technical writing jobs for aerospace engineering near Los Angeles International Airport which I had been eying suddenly were shipped back to the Washington DC Beltway from whence I’d just barely escaped with my life.

I’d put some cash away from all those contracts, but that career was gone, unless I wanted to move back to Washington, world capital of defense consulting, home of the rain, sleet, and the long shadow of Dan Heller. I did not; I physically could not. I was sick to my gut at the thought of travel to the East Coast.

So I was stuck in my one-room in California, which was actually little more than a shack in a young couples’ back yard, with the clothes on my back, $30K in my ex’s debt still on my credit cards, my hard-earned savings, and a stellar resume – curled up in a heap on my bed like a spider checking out for good.

Did I mention that I’d tried dating in California? I did meet several fellows. One was Harvey the Vietnam vet, a sweet man who bore a striking resemblance to Tarzan (he was ripped). Harvey had survived some horrible experiences in combat, though. And now I was beginning to feel like I knew just what he had been through.

Summer 2008, I thought, surely was the the end of my world. Surely it could get no worse than this. One of my journal entries at the height of the 2008 Presidential campaign gave some pretty amazing evidence on my state of mind:

The Helicopter
(Apologies to Senator McCain)
August 2, 2008

My friend Harvey fought in Vietnam as a combat photographer,
At 6’3″ he weighed over 220 pounds.
On one evacuation the GIs pushed him off the helicopter:
“Pansy photographer! We can’t take off with your weight!”
Harvey was captured by the Vietcong. Eventually he escaped.

Sometimes I have that helicopter feeling:
That my parents threw me out of my house,
That my husband threw me out of my life,
That the economy threw me off of the bus.

I forsook my family and gave up everything for you,
But you threw me out of my life,
You threw me into the world completely unequipped,
To know that I was prey.

You threw me, without ever having been loved,
Into Superman’s arms,
He took me for a flight, and I thought “Oh, maybe this is love?”
But soon he was done — and he threw me off the helicopter
—————————–All
———————————————Over
—————————————————————–Again.

Bang! You’re dead. All over again.
I’m MIA — and no one even knows I’m missing,
Or will know whether I die or whether I live…
I’m MIA — and I can’t even run for President;
I don’t even have the dignity of a dog tag.

———————————
This is from Chapter 2 Part II of Kathy’s forthcoming book DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME: The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder – How I accidentally regressed myself back to infancy and healed it all. Watch for the continuing series of excerpts from the rest of her book every Friday, in which she explores her journey of recovery and shares the people and tools that have helped her along the way.

Posted in Attachment, Attachment Disorder, Divorce, Emotional pain, Grief | Tagged 2008 Financial Crisis, affair, Attachment, attachment disorder, Disorder, Divorce, Emotional pain, Grief, Japanese duck pop, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Rebound affair | 2 Comments

No Shame in a Broken Brain

Posted on October 3, 2013 by Kathy

#3 in the news blog series – Original post on ACEsConnection, September 19, 2013

“There’s no shame when any other organ in your body fails – so why do we feel shame if our brain is broken?” This was one of the latest tweets by Pastor Rick Warren at #WarrensOnCNN.

He is so correct.
Emotional pain + failure of our mental health system = Tragedy.

In the wake of his son Matthew’s suicide, Pastor Rick of Saddleback Church, one of America’s largest, said in a July 26 statement: “America’s mental health system is irreparably broken.” The system, he said, “failed Matthew with misdiagnosis and wrong treatments his entire life…America’s mental health system needs far more than repair. It needs to be reinvented and revolutionized.”

Matthew, his dad said, was mis-diagnosed as having bi-polar disorder when he actually had Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and Major Depressive Disorder (MDD).

On September 17, Pastor Rick and his wife Kay spoke out on their grief on CNN’s Piers Morgan. It was the couple’s first media appearance since Matthew’s passing, and, it seems, the start of a much-needed public education drive:

“Matthew was not afraid to die. He was afraid of pain,” Pastor Rick said.

“I remember 10 years ago, when he was 17, he came to me sobbing,” said Pastor Warren. “He said, ‘Daddy,’ he said, ‘it’s really clear, I’m not going to get any better.

” ‘You know, we’ve gone to the best doctors, the best hospitals, the best treatment therapists. Everything … prayer, everything you could imagine … good support.’ And he says, ‘It’s real clear I’m not going to get any better, so why can’t I just die? ‘ ”

Asked by the host for Warren’s reaction to his son at that time, the senior pastor of Saddleback Church shared his message:

“I said, ‘Matthew, the reason why, is there is a purpose, even in our pain. And I am not willing to just give up and say that the solution isn’t there. You might give up, but as your father, as your mother, we’re not ever giving up, that we won’t find the solution,'” he explains to Piers Morgan. “I really believe Matthew could have been a great advocate for children in the world. He was an amazingly compassionate kid.”

Posted in Emotional pain, Grief | Tagged Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), Emotional pain, Grief, Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), Matthew Warren, mental health system, Rick Warren, Suicide | Leave a comment

When Family Doesn’t Get It, Recovery Partners Will

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Kathy

#4 in the news blog series; original post on ACEsConnection, September 26, 2013

When we’re hurting, we all want and need those closest to us to “get it,” but please take comfort from the statistic that it usually does not happen that way. Why? Therapist and scholar Jack Kornfield says, “Even Buddha and Jesus had a lot of trouble with their families when they went home! So did Mother Theresa. Holding up the ring nuns wear as brides of Christ, she told a journalist: ‘ I’m married, too, and He can be very difficult… ‘ ”

That’s because when we humans get close, to those closest to us, that proximity turns on the fight-flight paranoia in all concerned (in everyone, not just in me). Why? That’s where humans get the most vulnerable, so that’s where (our bodies and paranoid brain stems feel) we could potentially get really hurt. There is a lot of literature on this problem – please don’t feel alone on this! You are exactly normal.

Henry Cloud & John Townsend

This is why we have support groups and that is why therapists exist. In my experience it’s instead my recovery partners, my trauma-informed therapist, and trauma-informed folk such on ACEsConnection who get it. And that’s a life-saver.

Dr. John Townsend says: “There will be people who are marked, at the same time as you. Find them.”

Find people who are in the same boat, who are not in denial, who do get it– and spent a lot of flight time sitting with them, face to face. That’s where the real healing is.

When I did that work, I didn’t know about ACEsConnection, the private Facebook of the ACE Study. ACE is the top research on childhood emotional pain and health; it shows Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) actually create most medical, mental health and emotional issues in adults.

What I did in 2009 was to get relief by piling on many extra hours of “flight time” sitting with my Recovery partners, one whose parents were dying, and another whose spouse committed suicide. The emotional pain was excruciating, but the process worked — because we were in the same boat.

We used the “Grief Recovery Handbook” by John James & Russell Friedman and wrote “Grief Letters” as the book assigns. It’s an arduous method and they do caution: Don’t do this alone!

So arduous, we were advised by the pros to “schedule in the flight hours” with a Grief Partner — and we met in pairs every single Wednesday night for 3 hours and Saturday afternoons for even longer — for three years. We just read our Grief Letters to each other.

We shared everything, and I do mean everything, the deepest of grief. One hour sharing by each of us of our letter of the week, sharing in turn, while the other sat with mouth shut (that’s why “Hello Kitty” has no mouth) and practiced compassionate listening. After sharing 1 hour each (no one can take more than that in a day!), we’d have a snack and chat, or go walk on the beach on Saturdays.

I can not possibly say in mere writing how deeply healing that was – it saved my life!

This can not be done by email or telephone. It’s the eye contact that heals the brain; ask Dr. Bruce Perry: the eyes literally carry the image of the soul from one human into another. That’s how mothers co-create their babies’ brains, and that is the only thing that can heal us for the rest of life. “It’s all about the face time.”

But our family members were just not in the same boat (or in denial; they might be in the same boat but couldn’t face it; denial harmful to all concerned). So trying to get from them, something they simply do not have, was just not the best use of our truly valuable time. Sooner or later, they will get it — but probably later. I had one family member in denial who lives 3,000 miles away, and that was all the family I had; I had to wing it from scratch. That was a big ouch by itself. It still stings.

Then I “accidentally” met my recovery partners in choir.

If no recovery partners appear magically in your ‘hood, join ACEsConnection.com — nation-wide and world-wide– and go to or form an ACE meeting. Or find or form a support group at your local house of worship or county health organization. I’ve tried all the groups from DivorceCare to GriefShare, Codependents Anonymous, Celebrate Recovery (aka CR, Pastor Rick Warren’s national group), and even Al Anon.

It was incredibly painful because so many just do NOT get it — but I became a gold mine of ideas on how to find recovery partners. Message me, I’ll help you — I found them, I did recover — and now I feel great most of the time.

If all else fails there are weekly Al Anon meetings in every city in America and they are not just for families of addicts. They will be there for anyone who is hurting and needs loving acceptance; just walk in and admit to that tiny streak of co-dependency that lurks in all of us.

Plus: Here is an incredibly fruitful link I just found on http://acestudy.org/faqs
Q: I’m a survivor and/or perpetrator of child abuse in search of help; what should I do?
A: Talk with your physician, and ask for a referral. No matter what your age, if you do not currently have healthcare coverage, contact the nearest children’s hospital or children’s advocacy center and ask for help. This jumps to the National Children’s Advocacy Center at http://www.nationalcac.org/locator.html and to illustrate, I put in my zip and got 5 matches within 50 miles such as:
1. Child Abuse Services Team (CAST), 401 The City Dr., Orange, 92868 (714) 935-7599
2. Miller Children’s Abuse and Violence Intervention Center, 2865 Atlantic Ave., Long Beach, 90806 (562) 933-0590
3. Children’s Advocacy Center for Child Abuse, 363 S. Park Ave. Ste. 202, Pomona, 91766 (909) 629-6300
4. Riverside Child Assessment Team, 26520 Cactus Ave., Lower Level Moreno Valley 92555 (951) 486-4345
5. Palomar Pomerado Forensic Health Child Abuse, 121 N. Fig St., Escondido 92025 (760) 739-2156

Building a Life Team

I’m no stranger to emotional pain so bad it can lead to suicide. My new book “Don’t Try This at Home: The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder” notes the pain was so intense, it nearly did.

In fact this blog resulted from a Sept. 17 interview with Pastor Rick Warren on his son Matthew’s suicide this year. Pastor Warren told CNN, “Matthew was not afraid to die. He was afraid of pain.”

Pastor Warren and his wife Kay have been passionately calling for a change in our mental health system to recognize and deal with the fact that this happens too often, starting with a July 26 statement calling for complete mental health system reform.

Among the comments I received after posting this warning about how bad the pain can get, were these:

“Thank you for sharing. I have Major Clinical Depression myself and I can totally relate to what his son went through. Many times, even the people who say they love you the most, don’t really get what it’s like to go through such intense emotional pain that you want it to just stop no matter what the cost. Then, those you have no choice but to turn to for support–actually work against your recovery by saying and doing things that are counter productive. It’s the worst ‘Catch 22’ I can imagine being in.”

The next comment was:

“So very well stated! And when folks don’t get that they are acting in a counter-productive way, the person in need is getting re-traumatized again; it’s a mini-re-traumatization. Not unlike a micro-aggression or micro-inequity.

“Micro-aggressions/micro-inquities are usually attributed to minority experiences. There is a ‘dose-response effect’… a cumulative effect of these and other traumas that create a heavier burden for the person in need as time goes by. The fundamental essence is that the person is alienated from ‘the group.’ Being a part of one’s social group is a biological need of all mammals ! ”

I replied, “No, most people can’t get what it’s like ‘to go through such intense emotional pain that you want it to just stop no matter what.’ It’s so hard, that Catch 22 you talk about. Many times in 2008-2011 I was in Matthew Warren’s shoes. But I had to see a friend every day whose spouse had committed suicide, so I had to look the results in the eye. That is the only reason frankly I survived.

“I’ve been thru micro re-traumatizations like that for decades. This is why I so appreciate ACEsConnection. Because there, I can be 100% my real self, trauma and all, and everyone ‘does get it;’ you get the real me. So no re-traumatizations. Priceless!”

Feel like you’re at the End of the Line? Here’s the proverbial bottom line:

It is SO important for us to simply be heard saying the truth of what we feel, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth – and then to , receive a totally accepting response.

As in “you belong, no matter what you are feeling. ” And it’s just very difficult to get family to do that; it’s too intense for them. It’s just human nature; let’s accept it.

That’s why Dr. John Townsend also advises that we all create a “Life Team” of seven people who are not family – Seven “Recovery” team partners – so we can call someone every day and share how we really feel, no bull, and be accepted and validated.

He says it’s only by bringing our “bad parts” into relationship with other humans, that we can heal them. Amazing. You should see what his list of “bad parts” includes, it’s astonishing. He’s for sharing every not-good thing we feel under the sun. Even horrid sexual impulses. Talk about the emotions, so that we can feel it and heal it – then we dissipate the impulse and don’t act out.

Make the Call ! Get Your 5 Supplements…

Dr. Townsend says everybody, every day, requires — as a physiological need — what he calls the Five Supplements:

Grace, Empathy, Validation, Acceptance, and Encouragement.

Can you imagine that? As an ACE survivor, the first time I heard him say this, I thought: “This shrink is out of his mind.” I’d never had such a wonderful experience in my life – let alone every day of my life — and as a doctor-certified requirement of the human soul.

OK, so we need a list of seven people who will do this for us – because obviously, we are also going to be there for them and do it for them! That’s what “General Theory of Love” calls “100%-100%” agape. I’ve been doing this and it really works.

But then: we have to make the call. That’s usually the worst part, we are so mortified.

I once told my therapist: “Last night I felt like the Harlow’s monkey shown in ‘General Theory of Love’. ” It’s a baby monkey huddled up in a ball of agony like a spider about to die — after it was removed from even the terry cloth mother monkey and left in a cold bare wire cage.

But I had called a recovery friend the night before, and simply told them that. And got accepted telling it. My doctor replied: “That’s the point. The monkey couldn’t make the call. YOU made the call!” And I felt better.

To which our team of commentators responded:

“Saying one’s truth and being ACCEPTED as in “belonging” is just spot on! Again, it’s a biological need. Mammals NEED to belong. Dr. Gabor Mate states this often.

“Sadly, an excellent example is bullying. It’s why so many young kids take their lives when bullied. Being ostracized from the group is to inject disease (or as some would point out “dis-ease”) into the victim; denying one from BELONGING. Then one looks at Dr. Daniel Siegel’s work and understands that individual biology is modulated by interpersonal experiences (click the link).”

And:

“I REALLY appreciate what you’ve both shared with us. It has a ring of truth to it (resonating loudly within me) and I wish there was a way to TEACH that to every single person on the planet. It’s as basic a need as food, water, clothing, shelter. Our society suffers when WE suffer — rejection and isolation are such HUGE barriers to self-esteem, feeling loved, being accepted.”

So that’s it: Everybody, every day, requires, as a physiological need, Dr. Townsend’s Five Supplements:

Grace, Empathy, Validation, Acceptance, and Encouragement.

Then, let us build our Life Teams, and let us keep working together here in dialogue.

And remember: the monkey couldn’t make the call – but we can make the call. So make the call!

Posted in Attachment Disorder, Attachment Theory, Emotional pain, Grief, Trauma | Tagged Al Anon, attachment disorder, DivorceCare, Emotional pain, Grief, Grief Recovery Handbook, Jack Kornfield, John James, John Townsend, Matthew Warren, Rick Warren, Russell Friedman, Suicide, trauma | Leave a comment

No Tears for Dad

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Kathy

#9 in my ongoing book series; original post September 27, 2013

After my 27-year marriage fell apart, by late 2007 I was reduced to writing long poems for Dan the East Coast rebound affair, in a bizarre attempt to figure out how his mind worked, why he kept calling me, and how to inspire him to “get it.”

My notebooks repeated one theme for two years: I was dead — but now I want to be alive. I’d been left “home alone” by my ex for so many years I thought I was dead, as I said during my divorce. I emailed friends often in the months to follow that Dan had brought a dead woman back to life. One March 2008 poem ends: “If you someday chose to take a breath/ I’ll be there at your command/ You gave me life, I owe you life/ Call upon it if you can.”

I didn’t learn until four years later that the reptilian brain stem controls a lot of these functions, and this feeling of being dead has a technical tag: dissociation.
Whu Nhu?

But Dan’s every “come here” ended in a “go away,” so I couldn’t stay alive. I’d been so happy to escape the marriage torture chamber, divorce, and start a fabulous new life, I just couldn’t understand why I felt so lousy. “Dan ruined California for me,” I decided, and launched into a new round of kayaking, sailing, dancing and dating on the West Coast to replace him. Good luck in that mindset.

Periodically I’d fly back and forth across North America, making money, visiting Mr. Wrong, and going nowhere at 600 MPH. Who needed meth, I was high as a kite on my own hyper-schedule.

After a late 2007 trip to visit Washington DC defense sector clients and Dan’s Maryland fortress, I flew back to LAX into the worst Southern California fire season of the decade. The desert from the air showed flames and plumes of black smoke rising as far as the eye could see, as if the plane were “just taking the tram into Mordor.” A descent into hell, literally and emotionally.

My California dream had become a nightmare. As 2008 wore on, Dan the Anti-Christ of Anti-Attachment was eating an ever-larger hole in my soul. I spent days near LAX writing billion-dollar proposals for radar systems and nights writing Dan doggerel, trying to fathom my obsession and work it out of my system.

But no matter how I tried to fix my present, it never hit me that all this emotional pain could be from way far back in my past.

Reality Check

Reality finally hit when my father died and I couldn’t cry.

In spring 2008 I saw an ad for a concert of my all-time favorite, Mozart’s final ”Requiem Mass,” at a community college in Huntington Beach, and moved to take back my music. On May 15, 2008, I sang the “Requiem” with full chorus and orchestra, realizing my dream to be singing again and in sunny California with a new start.

The next morning my brother-in-law phoned from New York to say that my Dad in Florida had just had a heart attack, please catch the next plane to Miami Beach. California? New life? A little joy? Kiss the vision goodbye for the Nth time, honey.

Back in the air across the country, back to the dreary East Coast I flew, Mozart’s fearsome call of Judgment Day ringing in my ears. Back to my “family of origin” as it is technically termed, back to my parents and my younger sister. Back, back, back in time.

My father lay in the hospital dying. He had an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth and could do little more than groan and wave penciled lists of things that needed doing in the general direction of my mother. He had had a stroke and acute respiratory failure as well; his major systems had simply given out.

Dad worked long hours into the night and on Saturdays for 40 years for his family because, as the Broadway song from “Carousel” goes: “She’s gotta be sheltered, and fed, and dressed, in the best that money can buy.” Yet there was always something strange about his situation. When at age 4 or so I first noticed Dad, he was controlled access only. He’d come home late, Mom would allow my sister and I each a quick hug, say “Daddy’s tired” (always the same words), seat him in a back room with dinner and the TV on, and close the door with us outside. She’d joke, “They never knew his name was Ralph; they thought his name was Daddy’s Tired.”

It felt as if Dad was always off into the sunset somewhere, like the movie finale of “Carousel” where Billy the Dad returns to heaven after one day on earth. Dad would say, “I learned in a house full of women to keep the toilet seat down,” as if he did not belong.

A few Sundays a year Dad would take us to the carousel in the next town, which I awaited eagerly as my only time of any duration with him. I had such longing to belong with the colored lights and pretty horses, and for Dad to see me and recognize me as part of that beautiful setting. But Dad didn’t seem to notice me; he’d put me on his horse in front of him and focus on jumping for the gold ring. The big scary outside moving horses seemed to go awfully high up when I was so little and when Dad jumped it terrified me, but he just laughed. I wanted to hang onto Dad but he was jumping, so I hung onto the horse’s leather strap instead.

The next memory I have of Dad was in school after the Kennedy assassination, when for no reason anyone could grasp, I began crying uncontrollably and went on sobbing in my room for weeks. Finally Dad came in and said, “That’s enough now, cut it out.” Mom and he were displeased when I cried as a kid and that was the signal to be quiet. It never occurred to either of us for him to ask what was really troubling me, or to hold me while I cried.

Let Me Call You Sweetheart

Dad grew up in a big house with showcases of silver, plastic slipcovers on the furniture, and tennis courts. His father was a New York City merchant who commuted to Manhattan every day by Long Island Railroad. After the 1929 crash, Grandpa lost everything, but still went to the station every morning and sat there all day to keep up appearances. One day the kids at school told my Dad where Grandpa was, and Dad had to go to the station and tell Grandpa “Come on, Dad, let’s go home.” My Dad never connected this to post-war times, but when I heard the story, it hit me that appearances had always been really important in our family.

Now I realized watching Dad in the hospital, waving lists of things to do, that he was still trying to keep up appearances, to maintain some sense that he had control over events — in a situation where that is notoriously impossible. I was reminded of the lists later when my sister Linda and I stumbled over eerily similar boxes of objects Dad had stashed at home. Large cartons of nail clippers, endless cases of pencils, crates of bills from decades past, an empire of things he spent years trying to control. Lynn was bemused, but I remember feeling scared and wondering why.

I haven’t mentioned Mom much, in order to let you continue to look over my shoulder and see events exactly as I did – or to be blind to them, as I mostly was. Let’s simply say for now that another reason it was difficult to communicate with Dad was that it always seemed I couldn’t really speak to him except through Mom. It was still pretty much controlled access.

Mom had her moments; one afternoon she held Dad’s hand and sang “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” until we all were in such tears that emails to the cousins reverberated across the internet. You could hear them singing along with Bing Crosby all 1,200 miles from Long Island, New York to Miami Beach, Florida that night.

But Mom wasn’t glad to see me, as usual. I felt sad I hadn’t visited them more in later years, but Mom never seemed to want me around and I didn’t have the courage to face her.

When I arrived at the hospital Dad was visibly upset – “Kathy?!” he cried, almost in terror. I can still hear the alarm in his voice. It hit me that my face made him realize he must be seriously ill, if I were there all the way from California, and despite Mom’s resistance.

You’ll Never Walk Alone

I spent the rest of May 2008 in what felt like a giant nation-wide United Airlines staging of “Carousel,” jetting round and around, back and forth from the hospital in Florida to Washington DC, where I had a contract this time to work on a $2 billion proposal to restructure the national information systems at the Transportation Security Agency.

I never connected the two at the time, but in retrospect I was in such emotional pain seeing my parents in Florida, pain so severe I couldn’t even become conscious of it, that my resolve to kick the Dan habit went right out the window.

As I said when I first left home in 2006: “I was in so much pain, I just walked out on Newport Beach and proceeded directly to medicate.” Straight from the hospital to Dan I went and for a few weeks his brand of organic chemicals numbed me up right fine.

On June 3, 2008, Dad passed away. Back to Florida I flew. My sister the Wall Street lawyer seemed to have the funeral service as well scripted as a prosecution. But in fact it was Mom who literally wrote scripts for everyone but me to read. Linda’s two sons balked at reading the scripts; they said they loved Grandpa, and wanted to speak of him in their own words.

But finally they had to agree, since Mom was distressed and everyone had to “make Mom feel better.” (Actually that had been everyone’s obligation since at least the 1960s, especially mine.)

Something in me rebelled as I saw this train coming down the track, and when Lynn asked me to start the service, I said “No, I’m the eldest, I’ll go last.” For some reason I’ve never understood, everyone accepted that as fact immediately.

My two nephews each got up and read their scripts, but then extemporized as teens will do, Lord bless ’em. Linda’s husband spoke, then Linda read a speech she’d had me type for her the night before about the greatest Dad on earth. “Of course I can’t type,” she said. “I knew I’d never be a typist so I refused to take typing in high school.” (I type 98.6 words a minute so I wasn’t sure whether that made me chopped liver but I let it go.) At the service, Mom didn’t want to speak; she sat impassively.

No one had any idea what I was going to do, least of all me, until the last moment. I rose and said, “Everyone else has said all the wonderful things there are to say about my Dad. I’d like to do something for my family here.” And then I sang; it was “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” the finale from “Carousel,” a long-time family favorite. The hundred person audience in the posh Miami Beach retirement home all cried and then, almost forgetting it was a funeral, applauded the long high note at the end.

Everyone cried, that is, except me. I sang that whole slow sustained song acapella (no piano, no nothing), and my voice was entirely clear. “I never thought you’d make that high note,” my sister whispered later, “But you nailed it. How did you do that?” I was shocked, too; I had no answer, but it came easily, and with perfect confidence.

The emotional soprano who cries whenever music moves her, at the movies, or on so many other occasions, could not find tears for her own Dad. Actually I had tried to cry for days. Lynn and I both remarked how strange it was. I was worried, too. It did not seem right, but there it was: I somehow felt nothing.

My Dad had died, and I could not cry.

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This is from Chapter 2 of Kathy’s forthcoming book DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME: The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder – How I accidentally regressed myself back to infancy and healed it all. Watch for the continuing series of excerpts from the rest of her book every Friday, in which she explores her journey of recovery and shares the people and tools that have helped her along the way.

Posted in Attachment, Attachment Disorder, Dissociation, Divorce, Emotional pain | Tagged affair, Attachment, attachment disorder, Brain stem, Carousel, Dating, Dissociation, Divorce, Emotional pain, Family of Origin, Mozart Requiem, rebound, You'll Never Walk Alone | Leave a comment

Enter the Dragon

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Kathy

#8 in my ongoing book series; original post September 20, 2013

OK, step away from the brain science; back to how my life fell apart with Attachment Disorder. When we last looked at the end of my 27-year marriage, I’d stumbled into a rebound affair. Dan* had a fake southern accent, I was from southern Long Island, and I was toast. I had no idea how the real world works; I thought he was looking for True Love.

In “Working Girl” (1988), Melanie Griffith’s character Tess is too nervous to make the corporate cocktail party in her boss’s $6,000 dress, so her friend Cyn passes her a few of the boss’s valiums. Tess then passes out in the cab. Eyeing the bottle later, Cyn quips in New York-ese: “Gee, shoulda checked the milligramage. Oh well, Live and Loin…”

That was me in late 2006 – shoulda checked the milligramage.

But Whu Nu, and who cared? After Dan came at me for weeks at the family swimming hole, I finally went to his Maryland farm for dinner. After dinner, we looked at years of photos showing how he had built his house from scratch; in fact, he was so constructive that one thing led to another.

Before I knew it, all my emotional pain from 27 years of married neglect and abuse was being medicated into oblivion.

This went on for the next few weeks, as Dan pumped a flood of feel-good dopamine, oxytocin, and other mating chemicals through my bloodstream with enough intensity to knock a gal senseless. I was like a Stradivarius manhandled by a ham- fisted tone-deaf bass drummer (that would be my ex) for 10 years, tossed into storage for 20 years — and then found by a master violinist. It was a trip from nothing, to a whole lot of something. To call me putty in Dan’s hands would have be a major understatement.

In his college days, Dan had been seduced by the wife of a French diplomat; this exotic lady taught him more things about a woman’s anatomy than Henry Gray ever dreamt possible. If not George Washington University, then at least the CIA should have had him teaching post-grad courses in his area of expertise. Surely there was some branch of our secret services in which he would have been an enormous asset.

Dan was systematic at ensuring my chemical addiction, but he wasn’t just shining shoes to please a client. He took the abandoned delight of a kid in an ice cream store in what he did, and it showed, which naturally made me think he really cared for me. “If you enjoy something, why wouldn’t you want to make it last as long as you can?” he would say, going into hour four at 2 am with no let up in intensity.

New York City Girl found herself literally on another planet, playing farm wife complete with apron, wood fires, and home-cooked meals. (Even though sitting on the tractor, no matter how hard I tried to “go country,” I still resembled nothing so much as Martha Stewart…)

“Grandpa used to say: A woman should be chained to the bed — with a chain long enough to reach the kitchen,” Dan would drawl. We’d go out back down by the lake where he’d give me shooting lessons so that I could one day join his frequent hunting trips which kept the basement freezers stocked with deer and fowl. I got to where I made a killer venison chili.

Suddenly, I had an enthusiastic taker for all that country music I’d been logging mindlessly in my head for months. We’d ride around on the tractor or in his four-wheel drive singing “I Ain’t as Good as I Once Was” by Toby Keith at the top of our lungs (singing and dancing ensued, in fact, at the oddest hours and angles). Everything seemed to fall in place.

War on Bonding

Imagine my surprise when, after three months, Dan began to talk up my earlier plan to move to California. One day, he announced out of the blue that it would be a mistake for a gal to hang around him too long. “Why can’t women be like my guy friends? If I don’t call them for two weeks, they don’t care,” he said. (“Doin’ them same gymnastics with the guys?” I considered asking, but it seemed counter-productive at the time…)

“Women are too obsessed with relationships,” he went on. “Guys don’t care about that stuff. Relationships are for marriage, marriage is for having children, and I’m done with all that,” he said.

“Women who want to hang on to a guy need to get over it. Sex is for adults. Women who can’t have sex without getting attached to a guy need to grow up.”

Back to brain science, where one of the first things you learn is that our brain has three or four gross subdivisions, which behave very differently, as Dr. Bruce Perry’s Slide #1 showed last week. First, in the womb, we develop the brain stem and cerebellum for pure survival, aka “Reptilian brain.” After we are born, the neurons of the Limbic brain aka “Mammalian brain” fire up, so we can manage emotional attachment to Mom. Only much later, the neurons of the Cortex aka “Thinking Brain” finally come on line. [FN1]

Reptiles just don’t get attached; they don’t carry their young, they eat their young. That’s because reptiles have no emotions, and that’s because they have no emotional limbic brain. The limbic brain first developed in mammals, who developed the ability to feel. They felt it was better to carry and care for their young. They developed the ability to feel attachment. The lack of which is attachment disorder.

Dan was militant about not using his mammalian limbic brain – and of reptiles he was rather fond. On one of our vacations in Mexico, I envied the iguana he found, it got so much TLC. Dr. Stephen Porges explained in a recent interview how to detect such folks, but me in 2006? Who Nhu? [FN2]

To be fair, Dan had been through a seriously nasty divorce years before. He never knew that his wife, whom he loved to distraction, was having babies with other men while he was hard at work at Reagan National airport, until their third child. He went ballistic, and vowed never again to become attached. “Ah ripped out mah heart with a pick axe, now Ah’m heartless, and Ah likes it that way,” he’d drawl. “Ah’m famous for being heartless, even at work. She did me a favor: she made me bulletproof.”

Dan had years ago declared nuclear war on attachment. Now he tells me.

Instead, he bought 15 acres of wooded land in the Styx of rural Maryland, way out down a dirt road as far west as he could go. He cleared half of it for a farm, and built himself a fortress by hand, a large, airy, three-story building of wood and stone with a huge fireplace which could heat the entire house even in 20-degree weather.

After one particularly tender evening with me, he awoke next morning with a nightmare which had been repeatedly haunting him for a decade. He saw his wife enter his new house with a crew of workmen, directing them to rip out of the walls all the custom made-wiring, conduits and pipes he had built so painstakingly by hand.

He could run, but could not hide, from the emotional pain of rejection and grief still lacerating deep into his soul.

As I said in blog #8, I was like the Singing Nun right out of a cloister on this ball field. And now in my naivete, I was blown away with compassion for Dan’s tragedy – hook, line and sinker.

“Come Here Go Away”

By now, Dan had learned (one hopes unconsciously) that telling his heartrending tale with his big blue eyes full of hurt, was a surefire way to get a gal’s defenses down. It brought out the mom in her, her co-dependent wish to rescue the underdog, and all her bonding hormones, in one fell swoop. While she was in the grip of this mindless emoting, Dan could get away with murder. Good gosh, it was crazy-making.

I was the No Eye Deer at the time, but it was a classic case of “Come Here Go Away.” Dan used his tale of woe and his carefully induced chemical addiction campaign to have a gal bond like crazy glue. But once she got involved, he would flip and say “Go Away.” [FN3]

Only way, way later did I realize that it all resembled nothing so much as the scene in the Bruce Lee film “Enter the Dragon,” in which Hahn the drug lord has built a factory for the white slave trade under his palatial Hong Kong chateau.

Stealing in to investigate, Lee’s character discovers rows of red cages, each holding a kidnapped young woman. Nurses in crisp white uniforms are systematically injecting heroin into their shoulders to addict them, so they never attempt escape.

Now, all those organic chemicals Dan pumped into me had me rowing in the same slave galley.

Far-fetched? Nope. Helen Fisher, the anthropologist upon whose lab studies all the picky questionnaires on Match.com and Chemistry.com are based, has a book out on it. [FN4] But I was of course clueless at the time. Whu Nhu?

I was convinced (and I wasn’t the first gal or the last to buy it) that I could be the one to melt Dan’s heart and save him from his emotional prison. At first, I heard his stern, high-horse lectures about the moral superiority of acting like an adult and not getting clingy, with disbelief.

Then ruminating on it in the months to follow, I began
to wonder if perhaps this is how all men are, for what did I know of men? Certainly my ex had made even less of an effort to relate to me. If I were to do the math, it’s possible Dan spent more time touching me in those first few months than my ex had in 30 years. And it sure felt “right.”

As Dan repeated his lecture time and again, I began to wonder: what did I know, anyway, about relating in these matters like an adult, man or woman? I knew the global foreign exchange markets and I knew how to build a nuclear reactor, but I was clueless on this playing field.

Perhaps he was correct? Perhaps maturity is being able to rule oneself entirely by one’s mind and not let one’s emotions run away with the stage coach? Either way, what profit argument? If I just kept showering him with love and compassion, wouldn’t his heart melt one day?

Not only had Dan declared war on bonding – he had sold war bonds to me. I knew I had a problem with unruly emotions, so I bought his idea that if I didn’t understand him, it was my own emotional immaturity.

What’s Love Got to Do with It?

So what is this lurid tale doing on a mental health website? Have my editors gone nuts? Nope, but the rest of us might have issues.

As low-brow as my story is, it is a very common one and it may have happened to you a time or two. Put it another way: who in their right mind would put up with Dan’s treatment for a month, let alone almost two years? Exactly. Putting up with this is precisely “not being in my right mind.” Something which is definitely not mental health is at the root of putting up with this.

OK, why? Cry “psycho-babble” all you want, but this is exactly what happens to people who did not receive good secure attachment as kids.

And like I say, that’s up to 50% of Americans. The sad fact is, with a population of over 300 million Americans, about 150 million women and men are putting up with something like this right now, and for years at a stretch.

After the “come here” came the “go away,” and I moved to California as planned in November 2006. But Dan wasn’t done with me. He kept calling and emailing; he knew I had Washington DC Beltway defense sector clients offering lucrative consulting gigs which could bring me to his door for a few months a year. I couldn’t say no to the East Coast contracts after what my ex had done to our finances, and I couldn’t say no to Dan and his perfectly legal and lethal natural organic drugs.

Thus it came to pass that the opium-like nightmare simply went on and on. The rest of 2006, all of 2007, and half of 2008 were a blur of trans-continental red-eye flights, working 70 hour weeks for fat defense sector paychecks, making solo trips from LAX to rendezvous with Dan on the warm beaches of Mexico for tequila plus, and some very interesting long midnight coast-to-coast telephone calls.

This was a guy with a distance thing and an issue against getting close, all right. A 3,000 mile distance thing. The whole long, painful time I thought he must secretly “in his heart of hearts” want me back. But reality was that the only reason he kept calling me was that I was safely (for him) moved in, 3,000 miles away.

*All names, except for mine, have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty, and any resemblance they may have to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

————————————–

This is part four of Chapter One of Kathy’s forthcoming book DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME: The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder – How I accidentally regressed myself back to infancy and healed it all. Watch for the continuing series of excerpts from the rest of her book every Friday, in which she explores her journey of recovery and shares the people and tools that have helped her along the way.

Footnotes

FN1 Lewis, Thomas MD; Amini, Fari MD; Lannon, Richard MD; “A General Theory of Love,” Random House, 2000; See: www.paulagordon.com/shows/lannon/
FN2 Baer, Drake, Interview with Dr. Stephen Porges, “How To Know If You’re Working With Mammals or Reptiles (and Why It Matters To Your Creativity).” “Can you pick out the reptiles in your workplace? According to neurophysiologist Stephen Porges, if you want to be creative, you want to be on the lookout for the scaly types, and seek out the mammals instead. Porges explains how to detect each behavior and become a creative animal.” [Article features an embedded Porges slide show video] www.fastcocreate.com/1682363/how-to-know-if-youre-working-with-mammals-or-reptiles-and-why-it-matters-to-your-creativity
FN3 Earle, Ralph, PhD, “Come Here Go Away: Stop Running from the Love you Want,” Pocket Books, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1991
FN4 Fisher, Helen, PhD, “Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love,” Henry Holt and Co., New York, 2004

Posted in Attachment, Attachment Disorder, Brain Science, Divorce, Emotional pain, Grief | Tagged affair, Attachment, attachment disorder, brain science, Bruce Lee, Bruce Perry, Come Here Go Away, Divorce, Emotional pain, Enter the Dragon, Grief, Helen Fisher, Limbic brain, rebound, Stephen Porges | 2 Comments

How Your Brain Works 101

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Kathy

CLICK to BUY “Don’t Try This Alone”

Dr. Bruce Perry just put out his latest on “How Your Brain Works 101,” in a September 5 webinar for the National Council on Behavioral Health. Perry’s revelations at Dr. Daniel Siegel’s March 2013 UCLA Conference hit me in the solar plexus. [FN1]

You know how your car works – don’t you want to know how your brain works? Click here for an introductory video on how Attachment Disorder causes brain trauma [FN2] Click for Dr. Perry’s YouTube channel with educational videos in depth: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf4ZUgIXyxRcUNLuhimA5mA?feature=watch

I first heard of Bruce Perry in August 2010; not his name, but the substance. I was commuting to another high-pressure defense job on the 91 freeway outside Anaheim, CA, worrying about how to pour concrete at Seal Beach Naval Base. It didn’t look to my clients, or to me, as though I had anything wrong with my high-performance business brain.

On the car stereo was a CD by psychologist Dr. Henry Cloud. “Humans are neurologically designed, physiologically designed, psychologically, spiritually, emotionally, and cognitively designed, to be in a relationship where you are loved,” Cloud said to my shock. “You are designed to take aspects of that relationship inside of you, and they actually become a part of who you are. My 17-month-old came into the world with nothing in her head. A lot of need, not a lot of words, didn’t read. Babies are all need and they cry. Adults must calm them, and the minute we put them down, they start crying again.

“But after we do that a million times, the gap for how long they can tolerate not being held gets wider and wider. They take our love from the outside, and it becomes part of them on the inside… Love becomes actual equipment that you take in and walk around with.” [FN3] I felt sad; I couldn’t identify.

But watch how my body reacts to the right research:

Cloud went on, “We can now do scans of the brain of older kids who were in institutions and were not held, comforted or soothed, and there are parts of the brain which are dark. There’s nothing growing in there — because nothing was planted; neurologically there’s literally no brain activity. But the kids who were held and loved, those parts of the brain are physiologically growing.”

I nearly drove off the 91 overpass at 70 MPH. It hit me in the gut the minute he said it. “Oh, S#$%”, I thought, “parts of my brain are dark!” (Go tell that to the Marines at Seal Beach.)

It wasn’t until 2 1/2 years later when some guy named Perry put up his slides at UCLA in March 2013, that I saw the pictures. It was brain scans of two children aged 3, a normal brain in grey, and one labeled “extreme neglect,” parts of which were black. In that moment, I knew Cloud had referred to Bruce Perry’s work. [FN4]

Some 50% of Americans have a degree of attachment disorder, neurological areas which didn’t get Dr. Cloud’s “love on the inside.” But: we don’t want to go around with parts of our brain dark.

Most Primitive Brain Develops First

Dr. Perry says we’ve got to learn about the neuro-biological growth of the brain — in order of time sequence — from conception to later development in infancy and childhood.

He calls this the Neuro-sequential Model of Therapeutics (NMT). Dr. P’s “Four Part Brain” slide above shows the time sequence from the bottom up: first the brain stem develops (pink); then the diencephalon cerebellum (yellow); they make up our primitive reptilian “survival” brain. Next develop the emotional limbic brain which only mammals have (green), and finally the thinking cortex (blue).

Why time sequence? Our entire big Einstein brain is an outgrowth of its most primitive part: the brain stem (the knob at the top of the spinal chord), and its spin-off, the cerebellum.

This “reptilian brain” is in the back of your head at the level of the ears. It maintains rock bottom survival such as body temperature, heart rate, sleep, and breathing – all the functions you never think about which if they didn’t happen you’d be dead. Not only reptiles have the same apparatus but so do pre-bony fish like sharks. That’s humbling: our whole brain starts with something that primitive.

“During development, the brain organizes from bottom to top, with the lower parts of the brain developing earliest,” Dr. Perry says. Reptile brain better hit the ground running at birth or infants don’t breathe; the rest of the brain can and does grow in later. “The majority of brain organization takes place in the first four years of life,” he says. “Because this is the time when the brain makes the majority of its ‘primary’ associations and core neural networks organize as a reflection of early experience, early developmental trauma and neglect have disproportionate influence on brain organization and later brain functioning.” [FN4 Op cit]

What goes wrong from “conception to 36 months” can fry our reptilian brain and put it in permanent fight-flight or freeze (dissociation shutdown). Then the entire brain can be thrown out of whack starting from its first cell divisions.

As the ACE Study has shown, this results in heart, gut, and many other chronic physical diseases throughout adult life.

“The brain is an historical organ,” Perry said. “The NMT Core Assessment’s first step is a review of the key insults, stressors, and challenges during development. Intrauterine insults such as alcohol or perinatal care disruptions (such as an impaired inattentive primary caregiver) alter the norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine systems of the brain stem and diencephalon that are rapidly organizing. These early life disruptions result in a cascade of functional problems in brain areas these neural systems innervate.”

Think your thinking brain’s in charge? “Think” again – we’re arrogant about how much our thinking brain can do. Fact is, it’s the new kid on the block in the brain. It has a lot less influence than we imagine on the roiling instincts and feelings in the subconscious or “downstairs” brain, as Dan Siegel calls the rest of the brain below the cortex. Siegel says the “downstairs brain” also includes thick clusters of neurons associated with the brain stem that form around our viscera (heart, lungs, gut etc.). Development of all that can go wrong from the hour the sperm hits the egg. It did with me.

“When a child has experienced chronic threats, the brain exists in a persisting state of fear,” Perry says. This “makes the stress response oversensitive, over-reactive, and dysfunctional due to over-utilization of brain stem-driven reactions. Such reactions become entrenched over time, and the ‘lower’ parts of the brain house maladaptive, influential, and terrifying pre-conscious memories that function as a template for the child’s feelings, thoughts, and actions.” [FN4]

“Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is great if you have a developed frontal cortex – but we’re talking about a five year old kid who’s so scared to death most of the time that it’s shut down his frontal cortex ’cause he just saw his mother get shot,” Perry told his UCLA therapist audience March 8. “You’re going to do 20 sessions of CBT and expect change? B#$$%&! (expletive) That’s a fantasy.” (Wild applause).

Listening to him talk, I can feel things inside me resonating, probably things that didn’t develop right in the womb, and I can feel it healing because, finally, here is compassion for my situation. It’s a remarkable experience.

When I hear Dr. Perry and his colleagues identifying these issues, it hits me in the solar plexus and the gut. I feel like someone is telling me “You’re not crazy, this actually happened deep inside you, you don’t have to conceal the pain anymore. You can be understood, you can be accepted as who you are.

“You can say exactly how you feel for the first time in your life and we are not going to run screaming from the room. We are going to accept you, because we can say scientifically that this is the way your cells developed in the environment you were in.”

Once I feel accepted in this profound way, I literally feel the problem begin to heal. Dan Siegel reports that it’s been proven by brain scans that this feeling of acceptance and belonging produces re-growth of damaged brain tissues. It simulates the missed environment of love, acceptance and “we’re glad you’re here” which the infant was designed to experience at birth.

“Born for Love”

Bruce Perry and his Attachment Theory and trauma specialist colleagues like Bessel Van der Kolk, Daniel Siegel, Allan Schore, and Mary Jo Barrett, are also overturning the American Psychiatric Association (APA) apple cart by calling this “developmental trauma.” It starts in the womb and is continuous from there, going on in the pre-conscious years.

It differs completely from incident-by-incident based trauma such as assault, rape, school violence, or combat stress, which can hit at any age. These later “PTSD” traumas have been assumed to what trauma is, yet horrible as they are, they are just not all there is.

Many (like me) take a lot of damage in wrong therapy which treats developmental trauma as if it were incident trauma. The APA’s latest “what’s my disease” bible, the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5),” just out June 2013, doesn’t even recognize the existence of developmental trauma.

How to heal? Dr. Perry lays out the brain science behind Dr. Cloud’s idea of “getting love on the inside.”

“Attachment is when the baby learns by thousands of good experiences that stress is tolerable because it leads to reward opiates such as dopamine in our body, and that this pleasurable outcome is cathexsized to a person, Mom, who consistently attunes to it about this,” Perry said at UCLA. “When the baby feels distress, the attuned Mom feels distress and gets her own pleasure rewards by responding to the baby. So the infant brain weaves together the neurobiology of what interaction with another human being is, and connects it to stress relief, pleasure and safety, when this happens repeatedly. Ultimately, just seeing or hearing Mom makes you feel safe and pleasurable. Let a wounded combat soldier talk to his mom, and he’ll require 45% less pain meds.”

“Patterned, Repeated, Rhythmic Activity”

“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 in therapeutic success is brain stem regulation,” Perry said. “An example of a repetitive intervention is positive, nurturing interactions with trustworthy peers, teachers, and caregivers, especially for neglected children who have not had the neural stimulation to develop the capacity to bond with others.

“Others 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.” An hour here and there of even sensitive therapy is rarely enough, he says.

“Children with relational stability and multiple positive, healthy adults invested in their lives improve; children with multiple transitions, chaotic and unpredictable family relations, and relational poverty do not improve even when provided with the best ‘evidence-based’ therapies. The healing environment is a safe, relationally-enriched environment,” he says.

“The only way you can move from these super-high anxiety states, to calmer more cognitive states, is rhythm,” Perry emphasizes. “Patterned, repetitive rhythmic activity: walking, running, dancing, singing, repetitive meditative breathing. You use brain stem-related somato-sensory network regulation, which make your brain accessible to relational reward and cortical thinking.”

Dr. Perry’s ChildTrauma Academy in Houston offers courses such as “Somatosensory Regulation Plan for Dysregulated Children” and “The Power of Rhythm: Music, Movement & Language.” Somatosensory rhythmic programs at Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s Trauma Center in Boston feature yoga, drama, drum circles, trampoline work, and more.

“If you want a person to use relational reward, or cortical thought,” he says, “they’ve got to be emotionally regulated first! We must regulate people, before we can possibly persuade them with a cognitive argument or compel them with an emotional affect. All our contingency-based models do nothing but merely escalate their negative arousal!”

Sound stupid, like your doctor saying “Scram and go cool off at the gym” ? I thought so – until I tried it. It works, big time. But what happened was so explosive, it’s another blog for another day.

The take-away is 1: Listen to Dr. Perry; figure out how your brain does work; see if anything he says resonates. Call up the ChildTrauma Academy and get their materials and training on Somatosensory Regulation and the power of rhythm.

Or if you can’t wait, as I’ve said before, find a really empathic, loving therapist who knows trauma inside out, and bring him that Peter Levine book. [FN5] That’s what I used to do somatosensory work before I heard of Bruce Perry. You’ll need professional supervision when you do the exercises on the CD in the back of Levine’s book, and look out world.

Even if we’re 92, we can grow parts of our brain. Daniel Siegel did it with a 92-year-old lawyer using mindfulness practice. [FN6]

—————————-

Excerpts from Kathy’s forthcoming book DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME: The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder – How I accidentally regressed myself back to infancy and healed it all and related research of attachment and brain science are posted here every Friday. Watch for the continuing series of excerpts from the rest of her book, in which she explores her journey of recovery and shares the people and tools that have helped her along the way.

Footnotes

FN1 Perry, Bruce D. MD, PhD, “Helping Children Recover from Trauma,” National Council LIVE, National Council on Behavioral Health, September 5, 2013; http://www.thenationalcouncil.org/events-and-training/webinars/webinar-archive/ Scroll down to September 2013.

FN2 Bruce Perry, Daniel Siegel, et.al, “Trauma, Brain & Relationship: Helping Children Heal,” (25 Minutes) www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYyEEMlMMb0 – an introductory video on Attachment Disorder. A new understanding of how trauma effects the development of the mind-body system, and how it affects children’s behaviors and social relationships. Copies at www.postinstitute.com/dvds.

FN3 Cloud, Henry, PhD, “Getting Love on the Inside,” Lecture, April 2002 (CD), Mariner’s Church, Newport Beach CA, www.Cloud-Townsend Resources.com, [Coauthor with Townsend, John, PhD, of “Boundaries,” Zondervan, 2004]

FN4 Perry, Bruce, MD, PhD, “Born for Love: The Effects of Empathy on the Developing Brain,” Annual Interpersonal Neurobiology Conference “How People Change: Relationship & Neuroplasticity in Psychotherapy,” UCLA, Los Angeles, March 8, 2013 (unpublished).
Dr. Perry’s latest research and key slides (otherwise hard to obtain) are in his National Council speech in FN1 above.
Key videos, articles on Interventions, Trauma, Brain Development/Neuroscience, etc. are at: https://childtrauma.org/cta-library/
“The Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics” by Perry, B.D. and Hambrick, E. (2008) is at: http://childtrauma.org/nmt-model/references/

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 Siegel, Daniel J., MD, “How Mindfulness Can Change the Wiring of Our Brains,” National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine, www.nicabm.com, March 2011. Check for the passage on a 92 year old lawyer code-named “Stewart.”

Posted in Attachment, Attachment Disorder, Attachment Theory, Brain Science, Dissociation, Emotional pain, Trauma | Tagged Attachment, attachment disorder, Attachment Theory, brain science, Bruce Perry, Daniel Siegel, Developmental Trauma, Dissociation, Emotional pain, Henry Cloud, Limbic brain, Peter Levine, trauma | 15 Comments

Surgeon General’s Warning: Rebound!

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Kathy

#7 in my ongoing book series; original post September 6, 2013

I never liked the sticky suburbs of Washington D.C. My ex had moved us there from New York City years before. As I was boxing up my three-bedroom Virginia ranch and my life during my divorce, I got a call from a girl friend in Southern California who was gravely ill. When her hair fell out, her husband served her with divorce papers (attachment was not his thing).

Due to the treatments, she couldn’t remember what happened on a given day in court, so I flew out to help. On my first trip, all I saw was courtrooms and hospitals. On my second trip, I stepped out onto Newport Beach and the beauty of the area hit me hard between the eyes.

“Why not me?” I thought, looking at the ocean, the sailboats, the rows of green palms and red Spanish tile roofs sweeping into the bright blue distance. Why should I move down the pike in the dreary Old Dominion, shoveling ice and snow to commute the rest of my life — when I could move across the country to a beautiful place like this? Back to Virginia I flew, now boxing up a storm, with the song of a warm sun, a rolling ocean, and a new life in my heart.

Trouble is, divorce doesn’t come with the warning it ought to have from the Surgeon General’s office: “Caution: Rebound Affairs Can be Hazardous to your Health.” Why didn’t the counselors and lawyers at the women’s center tell us? Why didn’t they tell us that 75% of divorced folks end up in a second divorce?

Why? Because divorce hurts! It hurts a lot! So the natural tendency in divorce is to medicate, and many people do medicate, until they learn the hard way to stop. Medicating includes alcohol, drugs, food, or other substance abuse, workaholism, sports, video games, internet fixations of all sorts — anything which changes the subject, anything to avoid facing up to the emotional pain of the loss of an entire life.

Take my sudden Country & Western music jag. Hindsight stinks, but clearly I was having a profound emotional crisis, emotional pain at a level which I’d later recognize as “break-through grief.” Suddenly, La Soprano Classique can’t bear classical music, but she’ll bang on the steering wheel to Toby Keith for hours on end? A clinical case of medicating with music.

At the top of the medication list is the feel-good of a new romance. But when that’s done on the rebound–
without a time-out to understand what went wrong in the first marriage, or to take concrete measures to heal from such a major wound — then both parties come to the table with a lot of buried hurt burning up their hearts. Character discernment goes out the window, mis-matches are legion, and even the best people –- each in intolerable pain of their own — eventually project it wrongly onto their unwitting partner. As they lash out, eyes wide shut, it ends in another divorce, more hurt piled on hurt.

Who knew? “Whu Nhu? He was the Prime Minister of Burma before U Thant,” was again my tag line. I certainly did not know. “Whaddaya call a blind doe? ‘No Eye Deer’,” was my other refrain. I did not get the memo, because for one thing, there was no memo. Another reason for this book, ‘cos a memo on divorce and the dangers of the rebound sure is needed.

I Thought I Was Dead

In July 2006 when I left home, I had been left “home alone” for dead for so long by my ex, that I thought I was dead. Larry moved us from New York where we met and married, to Virginia, then left the house one morning, and never came home until past midnight. For about 15 years. There was no breaking bread together, no “How was your day?” emotional connection to soothe daily hurts, and for the last 15 years, no physical contact — and no children.

We didn’t have time for that stuff; how could I have kids on airplanes? We were above all that, we had to save the world! So I furiously trotted the globe on business, organized conferences in Tokyo for diplomats from several nations in three languages, and devoured great music in another few languages.

When I turned 50, a perceptive friend actually asked me if I’d ever thought I’d live past 50, which if you think about it, is a shocking thing to ask a female gym rat as healthy as a horse. “No, I guess not” I blurted without self-editing, “Is it so obvious I’ve been burning at both ends?” I’d been lost in East Berlin in the rain on the wrong side of the Wall, and deep under the Korean DMZ in a miner’s rail bucket. I’d been to so many places on so many adventures that a co-worker asked, “Kathy, is there anything you haven’t done?”

Well, er, it turns out there were still a few things, and by Murgatroyd I was going to do them all — and now, starting with a lot of Pacific Ocean water sports. I really never thought I’d make it to 2010 alive, which encouraged a certain devil-may-care attitude. (That’s me in red.)

Larry was so callous for so many years that by the time I left, my view finder was filled with nothing but the sheer relief that I was no longer banging my head against his wall of indifference. Just to be breathing felt like a party. Just to see the sun and the ocean and the odd palm tree, to be free of the constant adrenaline panic of deadlines, was a breath of air so fresh it made me want to dance, and so I did.

I danced a lot of two-step and wailed to hard rock; I sang a lot of country; I raced sailboats; and ocean kayaked; and hiked; and dated up a semi-tropical storm. I had no intention of not doing the right thing. Fun appeared to be the only intensely rational thing to do.

Fact is, I’d taken such an emotional hit with the divorce that I was numb. I had so much pain from all those decades of being left alone, that I didn’t even know I had pain. ( The technical term is dissociation.)

How was I to know I was serial-medicating a whole landslide of pain with all this partying? Whu Nhu? I just thought: “I’m no longer banging my head against the wall! Let’s go dancing instead.” But reality was that I was in so much pain that I just walked out on Newport Beach and proceeded directly to medicate.

In particular, I thought, love is simple. “I married a bad man, he was mean to me. Now I’ll find a good man to love me,” I told myself. Famous last words.

The Singing Nun

I knew the global financial markets, but after a 30-year hiatus from dating, I was like a nun out of a cloister on the ball field of romance. As I was boxing up a storm in Virginia, a statistical fluke hit; at least, I thought it was a fluke. It was to be the first of many. I found myself picked up and dumped into a vat of the ultimate pain medication.

For almost 20 years, every Sunday in August I’d gone to my local pool where everyone knew me as Mrs. Larry. First Sunday in August 2006, while living in my best friend Sandy’s basement, I went to my pool, only to find it padlocked, due to be bulldozed for the construction of a furniture warehouse.

I was weeks from moving to California, and wanted a tan, so across the river I drove to the next pool in Maryland 20 minutes away. It was an innocent family spot where I’d never set foot in my life and in a few weeks would never set foot again; I’d be 3,000 miles gone.

So it was that three weeks out of my home, I was minding my own business in spades, secure in the glum knowledge that Larry found me completely unattractive and certain that no man would ever look at me again as long as I lived. It was 90 degrees in the humid shade and I was half asleep in the pool holding onto a ladder, when he hailed me: “Hey, ladder lady.”

I thought he wanted the ladder, so I swam away.

I was amazed when he appeared minutes later at my lounge chair, a wiry fellow with burning blue eyes, hitting on me like a ton of bricks (not that I knew the term “to hit” at the time). My jaw must have dropped a foot but he wasn’t looking at my jaw. Later he said, “When I saw you, the first thing I noticed was that you weren’t wearing a ring. The second thing was the bikini. I wanted to just eat you all up.”

He chatted awhile, and handed me his impressive business card, which indicated he managed billion-dollar equipment as head of air traffic control at Washington National Airport. “Come to my house for dinner,” he urged. “I’m moving to California,” I said point blank, “I’ll show you my car trunk full of boxes to prove it. It’s pointless.”

I had been with one man for 30 years (including before marriage) and hadn’t dated since college. I was like the Singing Nun out of a cloister, or a dead ringer for Wilma Flintstone with a bone in her hair, from a time capsule out of pre-history. To say I needed to learn about men was the understatement of the millennium (ok, it had been a short millennium so far).

My ex hadn’t touched me since forever and I was a top contender for Loneliest Gal in the Old Dominion. I was already road kill before this truck hit me; I was chum suitable to be tossed to the sharks. I had no tools to handle anything remotely approaching this.

Dan Heller*, for his part, had one heck of a tool box, and was not a man to be deterred. Three Sundays at the pool he came back at me, “Come to my house for dinner.” He had beautiful eyes, and knew how to use them. Finally he figured out that I was fascinated by construction projects and air travel after working on all those Third World development plans on the other side of the world. He guessed correctly that I wouldn’t be able resist a “back stage tour” of the airport.

That next Wednesday at 5 p.m. I met him outside the airport office. We climbed into his official Jeep and roamed far and wide, examining the great soaring machines which move people and economic equipment all over the world from angles a mere passenger never sees. We toured the extensive supporting plant and fuel tank farms, acres of new construction, numerous hangars with aircraft of every variety, and I learned the difference between a taxiway and a runway.

The coup de grace was a ride to the top of the new Air Traffic Control Tower which was 99% complete but not yet in service. The control room at the top had a breathtaking 360 degree panoramic view of the entire airfield, the great runways stretching to the horizons, the glorious landscapes for miles around, and a layer of fresh-smelling sawdust from final woodworking in progress. We were alone way up there at sunset, Dan was in his element, and I leave you to imagine the rest.

On the fourth Sunday, I folded.

Walking into Dan’s Maryland farm house for dinner, we entered a great room all of pine with a two story vaulted cathedral ceiling, an acoustic I was sure would be terrific for Mozart (if I could bear to sing it again). I sang a few bars; Dan looked bemused. There was a bay window with a sunset view of the lake, and a promising grand staircase. “Ah built this house with mah own two hands,” he drawled, having somehow acquired a killer Southern accent, and proceeded to show off his construction photos.

He was from southern New Jersey, I was from southern Long Island – and I was toast. I had no idea what goes on in the real world. I thought he was looking for True Love.

No, Virginia, there is no Santy Claus, and he sure wasn’t. He had a closet full of hunting rifles and camouflage, and he was looking for a deer to take. Once he had the carcass, he was going to lose interest in that deer real fast. But of course, Ms. No Eye Deer was blind to the obvious.

*All names, except for mine, have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty, and any resemblance they may have to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

——————————-

This is part three of Chapter One of Kathy’s forthcoming book DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME: The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder – How I accidentally regressed myself back to infancy and healed it all. Watch for the continuing series of excerpts from the rest of her book every Friday, in which she explores her journey of recovery and shares the people and tools that have helped her along the way.

Posted in Attachment, Attachment Disorder, Dissociation, Divorce, Emotional pain, Grief | Tagged affair, Attachment, attachment disorder, Disorder, Dissociation, Divorce, Emotional pain, Grief, rebound, Toby Keith, Wilma Flintstone | 2 Comments

The Greatest Study Never Told

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Kathy

I first heard Dr. Bruce Perry, MD mention the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study at UCLA in March, 2013. The pyramid at left is their logo; click the graphic to check out the top. [FN1] Months later I found ACEsConnection.com, social media site for the ACE Study, which has the story. [FN2]

In the ACE Study, 17,337 middle class adults at an average San Diego HMO were asked during 1995-97 if they’d had bad childhood experiences, physical or emotional. Results were shocking. Two-thirds (64-67%) had one or more types of child trauma, and 38-42% had two or more types. In 2016, the same survey in inner city Nashville showed that 71% had four or more types and 51% had six or more. I believe a true national average would show some 50% of Americans suffer childhood trauma. [FN3] Check your ACE Score here.

The ACE Study then compared ACE scores to whether subjects developed serious bio-medical conditions as adults – and found a major correlation. As the ACE Pyramid shows, Adverse Childhood Experiences lead to impaired thinking, unhealthy behavior, disease, disability, and early death.

“Adverse childhood exposures showed a graded relationship to … adult diseases including ischemic heart disease, cancer, chronic lung disease, skeletal fractures, and liver disease,” ACE Study co-directors Dr. Vincent Felitti MD and Dr. Robert Anda MD reported in 1998 in the Study’s full text. [FN4]

The Study also showed a “proportionate relationship between ACE score and the likelihood of developing autoimmune diseases decades later in adult life.”

Mental health troubles? The Study found that “depression, suicidality, chronic anxiety, amnesia, and hallucinations were directly proportionate” to a person’s rate of ACE trauma.

“It’s not about ‘them’ – it’s about us,” said Dr. Anda of these huge percentages and widespread lethal results. ACEs are “the leading determinant of what happens to the health of a nation’s population,” says Dr. Felitti.

The ACE Study began in 1995 at Kaiser Permanente, the largest HMO in California, and was done jointly with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC). But this rigorous research hasn’t woken up medicine and psychiatry, despite the fact that Felitti, Anda et. al. have published over 75 medical articles on it. [FN5]

You’ve likely never heard of this, although we all should have been told about 20 years of official study on 17,337 citizens. I never heard of it even as a Kaiser Permanente client during 2010-11. So ACEsConnection is going to the grass roots, some states are doing ACE surveys, and social service agencies are training staff in “Trauma-Informed Care.”

Dr. Felitti never dreamed of any of this. He was an internist who fell into it all by accident. Kaiser had an obesity clinic, it was failing, and Dr. Felitti wanted to know why. Suddenly, by interviewing people who quit, this data jumped into his lap.

Now instead of retiring to the Bahamas after a long career, Dr. Felitti travels the world making speeches like “Why the Most Significant Factor Predicting Chronic Disease May Be Childhood Trauma” [FN6]

He insists that “contrary to conventional belief, time does not heal all wounds, since humans convert traumatic emotional experiences in childhood into organic disease later in life.” One does not “just get over” this, “not even 50 years later,” he says, without serious efforts and treatment. [FN7]

Baby Casey: the Attachment Disorder ACE

This is not an academic issue. Fifty percent of the American population has some degree of attachment disorder (see Blogs #1-4), and attachment disorder is a major component of many Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE).

On ACEsConnection.com, created by journalist Jane Stevens, the first thing I saw was a video of a baby in a Polish orphanage that turned me inside out (click here & scroll down page). [FN8]

This is what the physical pain of attachment failure looks like. Left alone for months in the Warsaw facility, Baby Casey did not get the “face time,” physical holding, emotional attunement, or any of the interactions required for an infant’s brain to grow. Humans from birth require a constant stream of “emotional, spiritual, psychological, and physical inputs” from another loving human, says trauma specialist Mary Jo Barrett — just as we require air, food, and liquid.” [FN9]

A child left without this input stream learns that its own hard-wired biological needs are terrifying. “I learn that what I experienced internally and expressed externally with a cry, was met by a response that didn’t make any sense,” says neuroscientist Dr. Daniel Siegel. “I learned: it doesn’t matter what I’m feeling, because people don’t get what I need. Ultimately, I’ll become disconnected, not only from other people, but even from my own internal bodily self. ”[FN10]

Babies are also hard-wired to be flooded with stress chemicals when those needs are not met, Dr. Bruce Perry explains. And the flood can go on for decades. [FN11]

The emotional pain and terror are so intense that the child will do anything to distract itself from those needs. “In states of distress I can only comfort myself in ways that are maladaptive – I bite myself, rock myself perpetually, so I’m distracting myself from my needs,” Siegel says.

The fight-or-flight stress chemicals flood the bloodstream at a level which feels so terrifying, that the baby would rather pass out — or even die — than to feel it. “The baby thinks it’s going to die,” as Dr. Nancy Verrier puts it. [FN12] I saw this video and said, “That baby’s trying to knock herself out.”

Turning Gold into Lead

Left unhealed, all those stress chemicals and panic feelings begin to physically destroy body parts.

“The ACE Study findings suggest certain adverse childhood experiences are major risk factors for the leading causes of illness and death in the US,” the CDC reports. “As the number of ACE increase, risk for the following health problems increases in a strong and graded fashion:

Ischemic heart disease
Cancer
Chronic lung disease
Liver disease
Skeletal fractures
Alcoholism and alcohol abuse
Depression
Fetal death
Early initiation of smoking
Illicit drug use
Multiple sexual partners
Risk for intimate partner violence
Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs)
Unintended pregnancies
Abortion
Suicide attempts…”

“The odds of having cancer before 50 among women increased twofold for those who had 2+ ACEs versus those with no ACEs,” confirmed a 2012 study of over 6,000 Britons born in 1958, “Childhood adversity as a risk for cancer: findings from the 1958 British birth cohort study,” published by the British Medical Council.

“This is the largest study of its type which has ever been done to examine the effect of ACE on physical health, over the course of a lifetime,” Dr. Felitti says. All 17,337 participants will be followed up for life.

“We’re asking, ‘How do you get from Here, to Here [slide above] ? From a newborn infant with total potential — to a man who is broken, bio-medically, psychologically and emotionally.

“We found that ACEs are remarkably common – what is uncommon is their recognition, or their acknowledgment.

“They are well-concealed by time, by shame, by secrecy, and by social taboo. They turn out to be strong predictors of what happens later in life in health risks, disease, and premature mortality. The combination of their high prevalence, and their great power, makes ACEs the leading determinant of what happens to the health of a nation’s population.” [FN13]

“In no way could you dismiss this as a marginalized population,” Dr. Felitti says of his 17,337 patients. Most of them were white middle class; 47% had attended college; they all had jobs and health insurance; they were at Kaiser.

“ACE are the risk factors which underlie the 10 most common causes of death in the U.S. With an ACE score of zero, you have a very medically uninteresting population – no internist has a chance of making a living with that group,” he notes.

“Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller says:

‘The truth about our childhood is stored up in our bodies, and lives in the depths of our souls. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings can be numbed and manipulated, our perceptions can be shamed and confused, or our bodies tricked with medication. But our soul never forgets. And because we are one, one whole soul in one body, some day, our body will present its bill.’

“In this study, we are looking at it literally. The cost of this is truly enormous. Whoever would have thought that pediatrics is the breeding ground for internal medicine,” Dr. Felitti concludes.

Feel like you might have an ACE or two up your sleeve?

You can go to http://acestudy.org/faqs and take the ACE Survey, to see how many ACEs you might have. If you feel really awful, go to your family doctor, bring him this report, and tell him you want to see a specialist because you are a normal human responding to abnormal experiences.

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

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

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

Footnotes
FN1 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) ACE Study Pyramid: Go to https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/childabuseandneglect/acestudy/ace-graphics.html Then at third item “ACE Pyramid,” click plus sign at right to show graphic. CDC changes the colors periodically.

FN2 CDC “ACE Study DVD Pre-View movie,” 3-minute version: http://www.acesconnection.com/blog/ace-study-co-founders-tell-story-on-dvd-here-s-an-intro

FN3 Dr. Felitti reports that 67% of participants had one or more types of ACEs, and 42% had two or more types of ACEs. The CDC website states that 64% had one or more types of ACEs, and 38% had two or more types of ACEs; http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/acestudy/prevalence.html These percentages varied depending on when readings were taken as more subjects joined the study in the second “wave” of the ACE Study.
Note: all these refer to “types” of ACEs. Thus, if 38-42% of the middle class Kaiser population had at two or more types of ACEs, each likely suffered multiple incidents of that type, be it abuse, neglect, or more.
In less privileged populations, far higher percentages suffer two or more types of ACEs as shown in Nashville, TN by The Family Center in 2016: http://www.familycentertn.org/our-impact

FN4 “Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study,” by Vincent J Felitti MD, Robert F Anda MD, et al, American Journal of Preventative Medicine, May 1998, Vol 14, Issue 4, p 245–258
http://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797%2898%2900017-8/fulltext#back-BIB65

FN5 Felitti, Vincent, MD, “Adverse Childhood Experiences” www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQwJCWPG478

FN6 Felitti, Vincent, MD, official speaker biography at www.apbspeakers.com/speaker/vincent-felitti

FN7 Stevens, Jane, “The Adverse Childhood Experience Study” — the largest, most important public health study you never heard of — began in an obesity clinic” also published by Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-ellen-stevens/the-adverse-childhood-exp_1_b_1943647.html

FN8 Brooks, John, “Video of Baby Casey in the Orphanage,” Warsaw, Poland, 1991, from Brooks, John, “The Girl Behind the Door: An Adoptive Father’s Lessons Learned About Attachment Disorder,” at http://parentingandattachment.com/the-girl-behind-the-door/. Baby Casey video at http://acestoohigh.com/2013/08/02/the-early-heartbreaking-rages-of-a-baby-with-attachment-disorder/. Original video at http://parentingandattachment.com/meet-my-casey/.

FN9 Barrett, Mary Jo, MSW, “How to Treat the Patient Without Further Trauma,” NICABM webinar June 29, 2011, NICABM.com. She is a professor at the University of Chicago; founder and director of the Center for Contextual Change; co-author of “Systemic Treatment of Incest;” and co-editor of “Treating Incest: A Multiple Systems Perspective.”

FN10 Siegel, Daniel J., MD, “Early childhood and the developing brain,” “All in the Mind,” ABC Radio National, Australia.

FN11 Perry, Bruce, MD, PhD, “Born for Love: The Effects of Empathy on the Developing Brain,” speech at conference “How People Change: Relationship & Neuroplasticity in Psychotherapy,” UCLA Extension, Los Angeles, March 8, 2013. See also “Overview of Neuro-sequential Model of Therapeutics (NMT),” www.childtrauma.org, 2010

FN12 Verrier, Nancy, PhD, “Coming Home to Self: The Adopted Child Grows Up,” self-published, Lafayette, CA, 1993

FN13 Op Cit Footnote 3, Felitti 13 minute video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQwJCWPG478

Posted in Attachment, Attachment Disorder, Brain Science, Dissociation, Emotional pain, Stress chemicals, Trauma | Tagged ACE Study, attachment disorder, brain science, Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Depression, Dissociation, Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs), Stress chemicals, Suicide, trauma, Unintended pregnancy, Vincent Felitti | 18 Comments

Plowing Emotions Under

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Kathy

#6 in my ongoing book series; original post August 23, 2013

At the end of last week’s post, after the collapse of my marriage, I was asking “Who Dunnit?” Who’s responsible for so many divorces in this country? First the gals and I blamed our men. Then being an egghead, I blamed the economic crisis for depressing the men.

After that, I blamed electronic devices for replacing face-to-face interaction. I’d been irate since the ’90s about the rise of the sound-byte society, a decade before neuroscience caught on. [FN1]

In luxe restaurants high above the lights of Tokyo and Seoul, my diplomat friends and I whined over the sashimi about the decline in personal connection, which didn’t start with email, cell phones, or texts, but was sure coming to a head with ’em. As we planned development projects for Asia and Eastern Europe after the fall of communism, one Japanese official groaned, “Do we really want to export our so-called ‘modern culture’ to these people? Aren’t the Mongolian plainsmen happier in their yurts, without green hair, pierced noses, acid rap, and cell phone cranial transplants like our kids down there have?”

Mongolia? My beef was watching people show up at meals so glued to their devices that they never saw the living beings in front of them. By 2006 when my divorce began, I’d been to a slew of Washington, D.C. luncheons at which I was the only person not fixed on a cell phone screen.

That Christmas 2006, a friend’s daughter went abroad for a college semester in Lithuania. She was away from home at Christmas for the first time, out of the country for the first time, on the other side of the world in a place barely out from under the Iron Curtain, buried in snow. Eagerly, the extended family in New Jersey gathered around a wide computer screen to video-cam with Laurie. We could see her beautiful life-size face as if she were with us. After a moment’s eye contact, she turned her gaze down to her lap and left it there, not so much chatting as distantly answering our questions about her adventures.

Finally, I turned to her dad and asked, “What’s she doing?” “Oh, she’s texting her friends,” said the beaming parent, as if it were fine.

Egads, I muttered to myself, face-to-face, look-me-in-the-eye-and-please-be-home-behind-your-windows connection, is becoming a thing of the past. I felt like a dinosaur lost in an Atlantic City casino.

What Attention Span?

Next I went on another egghead tear. I’d sung classical music a long time and was bummed about the sharp drop in new gigs.

Americans’ ability to sustain interest in a marriage, I journaled, is also related to an alarming drop in attention span. To me, that was shown by the collapse of interest in longer classical music pieces, in favor of modern 3-minute cuts. Handel’s “Messiah” and Rossini’s “Wilhelm Tell” used to be household fare; check out the movie score of “The Bells are Ringing.” But today, more and more orchestras and opera companies nationwide are closing their doors each year. No audience.

I’d sung mucho Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, and the stuff’s got an architecture the size of the Golden Gate bridge. It requires concentration to write, sing, or even just audit. There’s a scene in the 1984 film “Amadeus” showing how Mozart became famous for extending the length of a musical piece. Before that, the longest single thing ever written with no silent space was maybe a 12-minute Bach chorus (for which Johann S. took a lot of flack; his average was more like 5 minutes). Mozart expanded the length of a single vocal quartet to 23 minutes, and expanded the length of an opera from one hour to four.

Beethoven? His attention span was over the top. The SONY engineer in Tokyo who invented the CD, designed it to hold 80 minutes of music (far longer than an LP) specifically so as to hold Beethoven’s complete Ninth Symphony. (And even then, only with a really fast conductor.) Check out this video:
What Would Beethoven Do? by Jonathan Keijser [FN2]

John F. Kennedy said it in quotes engraved on the walls of the Kennedy Center concert hall on the Potomac: “I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft.

“I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens. And I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength, but for its civilization as well.” – October 26, 1963

Sure didn’t seem JFK was talkin’ ’bout today’s music. I wrote the above in 2006 when my divorce began and it was fine as far as it went.

But while I was railing on everyone else, it never hit me that I had a bad emotional issue with it, inside myself.

Emotions R Us

Emotional pain is an issue for a lot of us. We can get plenty angry in traffic, depressed at a football outcome, or freaked about the boss; that’s the superficial stuff. But when it comes to real, deep emotions that endure, many of us are too shut down to have the depth of serious feelings required for lasting attachment to other humans.

I found a piece of this puzzle much later in 2009, when a friend stumbled on “The General Theory of Love,” a pivotal book by three psychiatrists turned neuroscientists who expose America’s hate affair with emotions (and several other issues).

“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 say. “Science has discovered emotionality’s deeper purpose: emotions allow two human beings to receive the contents of each others minds…For human beings, feeling deeply is synonymous with being alive… Emotions have a biological function — they do something for an animal that helps it live.” [FN3]

In fact, they say, Emotions ARE Us. Emotions are who we really are. I was shocked; I always thought “I” was all my scientific head talk, and America was the Land of the Logical. “Whu Nu? He was Prime Minister of Burma after U Thant,” I mumbled again.

And the peculiar heat of my passion for classical music was actually a sign that my real underlying emotions were almost 100% dead frozen.

Often when I would get up to sing, people were shocked by the intensity. “Sie feuhlt was sie singt! (She feels what she sings,) one German listener exclaimed of my Schubert songs. “It was always going to be different when you sang,” my best friend Sandy remarked, “It was a whole ‘nother emotional experience.” For decades, I was pretty much obsessed with this music.

Yet I actually knew by the ’90s that I was using music as a stand-in for the communication which was absent from my marriage.

“Most of my best friends are dead,” I used to say of Mozart & Co.

What I did not realize was that I tolerated a marriage with no children, in which my husband never came home, so that I hung out instead with men who died 200 years ago, because neither the husband nor the dead guys would ever present me with the challenge to attach face to face with a live human being. (Same song as in Blog #5 last week.)

I couldn’t feel my own feelings, so I gravitated to mega-watt classical because at least I could feel Mozart and Beethoven blasting out their powerful feelings. (I didn’t get until 2012 that “emotionally shut down” is dissociation, another facet of attachment disorder.)

Once my divorce began, however, I did notice a problem with my obsession. Commuting to my latest defense consulting gig outside of D.C. in 2006, I popped in a CD to sing along as usual. It was J.S. Bach’s “Wedding Cantata,” the most glorious celebration of wedded love ever. “Love is better than the joy the flowers feel as they burst forth; now two souls become one jewel,” sings Bach. The man knew, he had 14 children.

“Two souls, one jewel,” I sang… and suddenly I had to pull off the highway, eject the CD, and collapse on the wheel in tears. I loved my husband with all my soul, and never, ever thought it would come to this. This was my first taste of “breakthrough grief,” the devastating emotional pain to come which was just a tiny speck on a distant horizon.

From that day on for over two years, I could not listen to classical music. I got back on the road to work, scanning the radio aimlessly. This being Northern Virginia, there were 3 or 4 stations playing only Country & Western, a genre so foreign to me it coulda been in Transylvanian. But the songs were a riot, with lines like “I met a man in Hollywood, he was a credit to his gender/He really worked me over good, just like a Waring blender.”[FN4]

And boy did I need a laugh or three. Plus, I somehow had the urge to dance, so I began to soak up this new material like a sponge whenever I hit the road and sang along, really loud.
In fact, I did a lot of banging on the steering wheel…

————————–
This is part two of Chapter One of Kathy’s forthcoming book DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME: The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder – How I accidentally regressed myself back to infancy and healed it all. Watch for the continuing series of excerpts from the rest of her book every Friday, in which she explores her journey of recovery and shares the people and tools that have helped her along the way.

Footnotes

FN1 Porges, Stephen,PhD, Page 15 of 2012 webinar “Polyvagal Theory,” http://www.stephenporges.com/images/NICABM%20April%202012.pdf : “Well-developed human beings can self-regulate their emotional state by being with other humans,” said top neuroscientist Dr. Stephen Porges recently. “But what about people who regulate their emotional state with objects?…We’re in a world now being literally pushed on us, by people who are challenged in their own social and emotional regulation, and we’re calling this ‘social networking.’ We’re using computers, we’re texting — we’re stripping the human interaction from all interactions… We’re allowing the world to be organized upon the principles of individuals who have difficulty regulating emotionally in the presence of other human beings.”

FN2 Keijser, Jonathan, “What Would Beethoven Do?” http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/478793577/what-would-beethoven-do?ref=card

FN3 Lewis, Thomas MD; Amini, Fari MD; Lannon, Richard MD; “A General Theory of Love”, Random House, 2000. http://www.paulagordon.com/shows/lannon/

FN4 Ronstadt, Linda, “Poor Poor Pitiful Me,” 1996

Posted in Attachment, Attachment Disorder, Divorce, Emotional pain, Grief | Tagged Attachment, attachment disorder, Bach, Beethoven, Disorder, Divorce, Emotional pain, General Theory of Love, Grief, marriage, Messiah, Mozart | 1 Comment

Death and Taxes

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Kathy

#5 in my ongoing book series; original post August 16, 2013

This book was originally called “Death and Taxes,” a spoof on the ironic realities of dating in today’s American post-divorce shark pool. At the time of my divorce, I was a consultant for several Washington DC arms merchants, and my friend Denise was an IRS official. I was “death,” and she was “taxes.”

This was supposed to be funny because we were such soft-hearted, loving women; that is, two of the world’s worst co-dependents. It had the potential for a really wild movie script. Some day…

“Our new Constitution is now established,and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” — Benjamin Franklin, 1789

We crossed paths the week both our marriages collapsed in 2006, raw, uninformed, and in extremis, at a women’s divorce law seminar just outside the Washington, D.C. Beltway. “Unfortunately, Virginia is not New York or California, community property states where each gets half the assets,” the female lawyer announced. “In Virginia, ladies, you are basically up a tree. If you go to court, the legal fees will cost you whatever you get from a settlement–and then it’s a black box what the judge will do. He could easily make you pay alimony to your husband. If you don’t go to court, you might not get anything, either.”

On that unstable note, Denise and I looked at each other and said, “Doesn’t anyone want to network?” Nothing, in short, was certain–except Death and Taxes. We started to meet ad hoc in restaurants and call each other late at night for moral support.

The first thing we noticed was that neither of us had children (after her 20-year marriage and my then 26-year marriage to my college beau). This detail had hitherto escaped our attention. Had I focused on it at the outset, I might have had an earlier clue that something was wrong, not just with my ex, but with my ability to attach. Until I addressed me, anything else I did would lead in circles. But I didn’t.

Instead, we did what everyone else does: we blamed our spouses. They didn’t want children; they were the problem. Later we realized that these were men who couldn’t attach. Women at the legal seminar would ask each other, “why did you get divorced?” and the cause was always the same: inability to attach.

For example, Denise benefitted financially from her marriage. She would wow visitors from the women’s center with tours of her stately home with swimming pool near the CIA. Her antique tables were piled high with albums of photos of their exotic international travels.

But ascending to the second floor, she would escort visitors to a certain room. Inside, all four walls were filled with rank upon rank of book shelves, shelves along every inch of wall. On the shelves were arrayed: Teddy bears. Rows of pink Teddy bears. Rows of blue Teddy bears. Calico Teddy bears. Teddy bears in cowboy suits. Teddy bears dressed as firemen. Purple People Eater Teddy bears. Teddy bears in tuxedos and top hats and sequined gowns and tiaras. Naked normal Teddy bears.

Denise got to where she developed a dramatic flair for all this. She would silently allow a gal to enter the room, take in the scene, let it sink in, pause, then sweep her arm in the grand manner and proclaim: “And this, is Donald’s teddy bear collection.” Donald was her ex.

Clearly, Donald had better uses for his time, than attaching to Denise. One fine day, he summarily left her for his dental hygienist. She never saw a thing coming and wept for months.

It wasn’t until years later that we realized: he never presented her with the challenge to attach, so she stayed and stayed–until he made it physically impossible for the relationship to go on. Not she.

In a sick system too long

No one at the women’s center could believe the situation I stayed in so long. My ex was sweet during our early years in New York, but once he moved us to the Virginia suburbs of Washington, away from the mobility of the subways, he had me where he wanted me and lost interest. Larry literally got in his car and left one morning and never came back until past midnight–for years. I was lucky to see him on Sundays.

Larry had his businesses, his political ambitions, his expensive tennis and other sports, and I was the junior partner assigned to support his mission. I got to be the out-front sales gal and fly around the world doing international economic consulting, while he stayed in his office behind the scenes. In my ten years of global travel, he never made a single trip with me; there was no one with whom to share all those memories; he’d hardly look at the photos.

I’d return from two weeks in Tokyo and Seoul to find that the litter box for our two good-sized indoor cats had not been touched by human hands since I’d left. The cats, at least, had the presence of mind to feel abandoned.

With all his high-level talk it never hit me, but by the mid ’90s, it would have been clear to anyone with eyes to see: under all the words, Larry lived by the law of the jungle. He had less than zero regard for my personal welfare. One day I got a lucrative consulting gig, and before I knew it, he’d quit working and had me out paying the mortgage.

Soon he had me working two jobs, 14 hour days, 6 or 7 days a week. This went on for ten years. The money was gambled away in his business and political schemes; periodically he’d present me with his credit cards run into the $20-$30,000 debt range and say “take care of it.”

I began to suspect something when I finally googled “marital abuse” and read on a George Washington University women’s website that domestic abuse comes in many forms. I was shocked to read that it need not be obvious physical beating or rape, but that there are such things as purely emotional, verbal, and financial abuse which are still abuse for sure. I’d been clueless. “Whu Nu? He was the Prime Minister of Burma after U Thant,” became my running gag on myself.

While it was dawning on me that I was in deep kimche which could not be thought away by singing “Stand by Your Man” another ten years, Larry began taking the equity out of our home. Late one night, he demanded I sign a $280K refinance. When I refused and tried to leave the house, he got physically brutal, bellowing “You’ve got to protect my credit rating.”

I ran for the bathroom and locked myself in, but never thought of calling 911 on the man I loved (never even crossed my mind another two years). At dawn, I crawled out, signed the papers, then looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and said, “You just signed your life away because you’re afraid to be alone at this age.” I was at the women’s center in days.

Why try to change death or taxes? I’d lived for years as though abuse in relations was just as inevitable. “You’ve been in a sick system so long, you’re numb to it,” Dr. Henry Cloud says; “All your life what was done to you in the name of love was the furthest thing from love.”1 In fact, I was so numb, so frozen, that I was dissociated.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized: But he never presented me with the need to attach, and so I stayed, no matter how miserable I was. And stayed, and stayed, until he made it physically impossible to go on. Not me. He had to beat me into leaving.

Who Dunnit?

Next I blamed the economic decline for badly impacting men. The stealth cause of America’s 50% divorce rate, I thought, must be the economic dislocation tearing society apart. Just as the stock market did not look good, I decided that neither did the guy market. Men were too depressed, too stressed out or too emasculated by the rotten economy to connect emotionally.

I wrote the preceding sentence in 2006, and on the surface, it’s stood up well. More recently this has been dubbed the “mancession,” recession for men.

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, between December 2007 and June 2009, jobs held by men made up 70% of all jobs lost, to the point that TV sitcoms about men posing as women to get hired such as “Work It” have emerged.

Men, when all is said and done, have the need to be builders. They are not all hunters or predators. It is men who build sailing ships and cities and airplanes and travel to the moon, and write things like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony which require tremendous courage–all of the things which I admire so. We just don’t see a lot of women doing that, because women have a different, important job. A real woman ought to recognize, applaud, and appreciate men for doing their job. But what happens when the economy dies and we pull that rug out from under a man’s feet?

“You betcha! This was a matter of reality and necessity in my generation,” exploded one retired engineer who spent a lifetime building missiles at Boeing, upon hearing my theory. “The Cold War was for real; we had to make those rockets work–or Americans could die. Take away the sense of national mission, and you pull the rug out from under a man’s sense of potency. Do that, and how can men have the self-respect to really love a woman, especially when the women are not as connected to the economic reality and do not understand what is going on?”

Yes, it’s been a nasty economy. But what went wrong with these marriages? Who Dunnit? Let the reader beware.

This book spills out onto the page, how I found out the hard way. You will see through my eyes exactly what was in my consciousness (and it wasn’t much at first!) as I walk you through events as I experienced them. You’ve got a ring-side seat in the first row of my astonished brain as I enter a maelstrom which would make Edgar Allan Poe pass out. I do this to you because otherwise you will neither understand nor believe what happens as this mess unfolds. There is no other way to make this story credible.

——————————–

This is part one of Chapter One of Kathy’s forthcoming book DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME: The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder – How I accidentally regressed myself back to infancy and healed it all. Watch for the continuing series of excerpts from the rest of her book every Friday, in which she explores her journey of recovery and shares the people and tools that have helped her along the way.

Footnotes
FN1 Cloud, Henry, PhD, “Getting Love on the Inside,” Lecture CD, April 2002), http://www.cloudtownsend.com/resources/, {Co-author with Townsend, John, PhD, of the bestseller “Boundaries,” Zondervan, 2004)

Posted in Attachment, Attachment Disorder, Attachment Theory, Divorce, Emotional pain | Tagged Attachment, attachment disorder, community property states, Disorder, Divorce, domestic abuse, Henry Cloud, mancession, marital abuse, marriage, National Bureau of Economic Research, post-divorce dating | 1 Comment

"Don't Try This Alone"

Tin Can Shot Full of Holes

No Shame in a Broken Brain

When Family Doesn’t Get It, Recovery Partners Will

No Tears for Dad

Enter the Dragon

How Your Brain Works 101

Surgeon General’s Warning: Rebound!

The Greatest Study Never Told

Plowing Emotions Under

Death and Taxes

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