And now: the face of trauma recovery giving thanks! On Sunday, Nov. 24 I was privileged to sing Handel's "Messiah" at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda in a full-scale replica of the White House East Ballroom. Somebody even handed me a 17th-century gown and said "here, wear this." I looked like Bo Peep searching for her lost sheep amidst the crystal chandeliers (I called the Dollar Store to see if they had any shepherd's crooks but they just said "Yeah we get a lot of crooks in here..."). It was a riot... and we sang good. DVDs to come, ask me.
I've posted and will post a lot of horrifying effects of trauma here on ACEsConnection about "as bad as it gets." I've also said that the worst of infant trauma can happen not only in poor and violent areas, but in the most wealthy and heavily PhD'd families. In fact it happens in 50% of American households, bar none.
So I wanted to share these pix with you all and wish you a Recovery Thanksgiving -- to let you know that every step we take to walk fully through our trauma is worth it. It's worth it, to feel all the even terrifying feelings we sometimes need to feel to heal them -- because the healing can feel "as good as it gets!"
That's why Jane Stevens insists: we can find our inner resilience.
Doing this work results in a growing feeling of "love inside" as Dr. Henry Cloud puts it, which at times can feel as if God's love were pouring in the windows of our soul. Or at least of the Nixon Library, which are some pretty huge floor-to-ceiling ornate windows...
I wanted you to know that you are worth it, specifically. You can find Recovery friends and support groups to really lean on -- so that you can get to the parts of the traumatized brain where you can feel the deep stuff and really experience deep healing. Dr. Dan Siegel calls it widening our "window of tolerance" to feel things which are repressed in dissociation. This biologically can only be done in "dyadic consciousness," in the presence of other compassionate human beings whom we can trust and to whom we can therefore become attached. Otherwise the brain stem just knocks us out into dissociation and we can't feel a thing, period. You can't fool your brain stem, it knows you much too well.
Humans can only feel safe in the presence of caring humans. "The Mind is a dangerous place - never go in alone." So yes. I do mean it when I say "Don't Try This at Home."
And I wanted you to know that it's all worth it. And that you are worth it. And yes -- they will let you attach.
I may be clowning around now and looking forward to dancing at the beach on Thanksgiving Day, which I am -- but it took deep emotional attachment to heal the adult me over the last years.
It required a broad safety net: an empathic, painstaking therapist skilled in Adult Attachment Theory; support groups modeled on the AA and other "anonymous" organizations' principle of total acceptance and emotional attachment for the wounded; and close friends who were serious about staying attached to me -- because they wanted to heal, too. Keep looking until you find people who have issues of a similar severity and who want to heal, too. They're out there, and they're worth it. I know; they saved my life. Therapy alone won't do it. It requires the whole "recovery suite."
As the ACE Study, attachment disorder, and the biology of brain stem dys-regulation have become understood in the last ten years, we've all focused on creating “preventative programs” to alert parents to be more attentive to their infants and to these issues. Obviously this is necessary and mission critical.
But I'd also like to point out: if half of today’s parents themselves, like 58% of the adult ACE Study participants, have moderate to severe brain stem developmental trauma, will working with parents on how to be better parents be enough? Necessary, but not sufficient, as mathematics textbooks put it.
Don't we need a campaign to heal the parents, too? Not for some socio-economic brackets - but all Americans?
In one example, scientists report that the infant brain, from conception and early cell division, must divide cells and grow based on some kind of rhythm, and for nine months it is driven to tune on a cellular level to its mother’s heart and breathing rates, among her other vitals. “We have a pregnant employee who’s an athlete who’s resting heart rate is 40 beats/minute; she’s likely to have a very relaxed baby who likes relaxed rhythms. And a hyper-thyroid mother whose heart rate is 95 may have a baby who finds a higher regulating rhythm,” Bruce Perry reports.
But a mother with ACE trauma herself, hysteria, or any high stress often has “a totally irregular heart rate, breathing and other vital signs,” he notes. “These moms end up with kids who are difficult to sooth because the mother had no rhythm consistently present for them to entrain to in utero. After birth, they can’t find any rhythm that is soothing.” Perry says that can easily cause developmental trauma.
Such mothers themselves, even the most determined to love their baby, require deep psychological and biological healing for their own trauma. That is often true for fathers who marry such women as well.
If a mother isn’t “attuned” inside herself, how can she truly attune to her baby? I had so little ability to attune to a baby in my 20s and 30s that I literally "didn't even have it in me" to have children. "I would have thought the very idea would have been absolutely terrifying to you," my last therapist said (finally found a good one). Without far reaching programs to heal the parents, many will remain biologically incapable of attuning to children.
It's Adult Attachment Disorder which is the underlying cause of childhood trauma – not babies.
So remember, all you adults out there, who may be in this field of endeavor because of your own childhoods or because you just can't tolerate watching the inter-generational trauma being repeated over and over:
You are Worth It.
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