I will try to avoid avoiding writing. My procrastination is maddening as well as frustrating.

During this pandemic, while children are isolated with abusive parents/parent or with a sexual abuser which may be a sibling or caretaker, many children have more to fear than the virus. It is a pandemic all its own, and most children have no place to turn for help.

“Research on the effects of early maltreatment tells a different story: that early maltreatment has enduring negative effects on brain development. Our brains are sculpted by our early experiences. Maltreatment is a chisel that shapes a brain to contend with strife, but at the cost of deep, enduring wounds. Childhood abuse isn’t something you “get over.” It is an evil that we must acknowledge and confront if we aim to do anything about the unchecked cycle of violence in this country.”

—Martin Teicher, MD, PhD, Scientific American

“There are hundreds of thousands of children like the ones I am about to describe, and they absorb enormous resources, often without appreciable benefit. They end up filling our jails, our welfare rolls, and our medical clinics. Most of the public knows them only as statistics. Tens of thousands of schoolteachers, probation officers, welfare workers, judges, and mental health professionals spend their days trying to help them, and the taxpayer pays the bills.

The Long Term Effects Of Incest

The results were unambiguous: Compared with girls of the same age, race, and social circumstances, sexually abused girls suffer from a large range of profoundly negative effects, including cognitive deficits, depression, dissociative symptoms, troubled sexual development, high rates of obesity, and selfmutilation. They dropped out of high school at a higher rate than the control group and had more major illnesses and health-care utilization. They also showed abnormalities in their stress hormone responses, had an earlier onset of puberty, and accumulated a host of different, seemingly unrelated, psychiatric diagnoses.

The sexually abused girls have an entirely different developmental pathway. They don’t have friends of either gender because they can’t trust; they hate themselves, and their biology is against them, leading them either to overreact or numb out. They can’t keep up in the normal envy-driven inclusion/exclusion games, in which players have to stay cool under stress. Other kids usually don’t want anything to do with them—they simply are too weird. But that’s only the beginning of the trouble. The abused, isolated girls with incest histories mature sexually a year and a half earlier than the nonabused girls.

Sexual abuse speeds up their biological clocks and the secretion of sex hormones. Early in puberty the abused girls had three to five times the levels of testosterone and androstenedione, the hormones that fuel sexual desire, as the girls in the control group.

Results of Putnam and Trickett’s study continue to be published, but it has already created an invaluable road map for clinicians dealing with sexually abused girls.” The Body Keeps The Score by Besel Van Der Kolk

Everybody has a story. I am just beginning to understand mine. How many times have I said to myself or another “I don’t know how I got here.” My words were met with exasperation by others, and helplessness by myself, followed closely by deeper depression. It always seemed I was in someone else’s body and they were in control and I was the one to blame. I mindlessly allowed every emotion to guide me, and I continually found myself in places I did not want to be,

“Can You Thrive After Childhood Trauma?

Recovery from traumatic events is never easy.

Posted Dec 09, 2014

Recovery from traumatic events is never easy. However, humans are amazingly adaptable. Unfortunately, survival does not mean thriving. A person can survive traumatic events and be scarred for the rest of their life. Trauma affects children particularly profoundly. Children do not just get over trauma; they live with the consequences for a lifetime.

Children adapt so they can cope, but if they are emotionally overwhelmed, their brain goes into survival mode, which changes the way it grows and develops. An early traumatic experience has a profound effect on the way in which a child’s brain forms and functions. A brain that grows in response to a perceived threat is in overdrive and senses threat everywhere. Stress causes the brain to work too hard, too often, for too long. This creates a foundation for psychological distress and mental illness later in life.”

Constance Scharff, Ph.D., is science and research chair on the board of directors at Rock to Recovery.

As posted in Psychology Today

There are people who will read my writings through a filter of lies and years of invalidation by my foes (mostly family). They will not be moved. Then there are people who will read with their heart and mind wide open and know me for who I am.

Survival. There may be as many modes as there are people who create for themselves a way forward when all about is fear and chaos. Without this ability many more children would be lost.

I survived in a dream world. Reality was the necessary evil which I escaped as often as I could. It served me well as a child experiencing ongoing traumas. But living outside of reality failed as I grew to adulthood. Sadly, I had no comprehension of the true (real) state of my mind.

But I want to talk about survival the winter of 2008-09.

I had written the wrong book for the wrong people. Not many wanted to know me, and when they were through beating me down, I had no power to move forward. My money was gone, I’d risked everything to return to NY State, being a veteran resident of my many dream worlds I believed I could bring some peace to my family. I did not yet fully understand the incest family system I had escaped so many years earlier. They were ready with outstretched claws.

Nothing had gone as hoped for. Not living in reality, perhaps not ever living in reality, my downfall was swift, my depression and agony deep.

The biggest sadness was that I was stuck in NY State for at least the coming winter. How did I get to that moment? My mind could not work it out. The only thing I knew for certain was I would not make it through the winter if I could not get back to my family in North Carolina. I was destitute and desperate.

Then one morning I was drying the dishes at the kitchen window and a bright red bird landed on the snow laden branch of the Blue Spruce in the front yard. Of course, it was a cardinal. I had seen pictures. Then a tiny chickadee landed, and sparrows, and blue jays. My sister had just filled the bird feeders. The reality is that even the tiniest chickadee is equipped to withstand the frigid north, but in that moment reality meant nothing. I decided if they could survive, so could I.

After that day the birds easily filled my time, my mind, and my computer. I took thousands of pictures with the idea of using my best pics in a book of witty and uplifting life lessons and cheery anecdotes.

My sister and I had a lot of merry moments over the birds. But I was living in a dream world and that was not good for either of us. Photographing birds, and soon flowers also with some hazy idea of putting them to use and making money was helping to cope, but it did not put food on the table or money in my pocket.

Survival, for me, has never been pretty, and often seemed unkind, selfish, and kept me at a distance from loved ones. Survival was everything and the birds became a full blown obsession.

It was all downhill from there. The family pounced on me, I had to be gotten rid of. My eldest sister wrote me a cruel letter telling me if I would just be one of them, the family would welcome me with open arms. I knew that meant re-integrating with the incest family system. It meant denying my own memories and experiences, denying all the struggle I had lived through, and maybe even letting people believe I was a bad person instead of an abused person.

My sister had been co-erced into signing a statement saying her baby was not her brother’s child. For the sake of our sick family she denied her own life happened and all those years she struggled just to survive meant less than nothing.

I was not even tempted to deny my own life happened just to satisfy the family.

Nor can I ever. My life has often been a living hell in survival mode. I blamed myself. But I did not cause the trauma and chaos I was born into. Nor did I choose to abdicate reality for so many years.

Survival. It was not pretty.

When children feel pervasively angry or guilty or are chronically

frightened about being abandoned, they have come by such feelings

honestly; that is because of experience. When, for example, children

fear abandonment, it is not in counter-reaction to their intrinsic

homicidal urges; rather, it is more likely because they have been

abandoned physically or psychologically, or have been repeatedly

threatened with abandonment. When children are pervasively filled

with rage, it is due to rejection or harsh treatment. When children

experience intense inner conflict regarding their angry feelings, this is

likely because expressing them may be forbidden or even dangerous.

Bowlby noticed that when children must disown powerful experiences they have

had, this creates serious problems, including “chronic distrust of other people,

inhibition of curiosity, distrust of their own senses, and the tendency to find

everything unreal.” John Bowlby

“As we will see, this has important implications for

treatment.

Our study expanded our thinking beyond the impact of particular

horrendous events, the focus of the PTSD diagnosis, to look at the long-term

effects of brutalization and neglect in caregiving relationships. It also raised

another critical question: What therapies are effective for people with a history

of abuse, particularly those who feel chronically suicidal and deliberately hurt

themselves?

SELF-HARM

During my training I was called from my bed at around 3:00 a.m. three nights in a row to stitch up a woman who had slashed her neck with whatever sharp object she could lay her hands on. She told me, somewhat triumphantly, that cutting herself made her feel much better. Ever since then I’d asked myself why. Why do some people deal with being upset by playing three sets of tennis or drinking a stiff martini, while others carve their arms with razor blades? Our study showed that having a history of childhood sexual and physical abuse was a strong predictor of repeated suicide attempts and self-cutting.8 I wondered if their suicidal ruminations had started when they were very young and whether they had found comfort in plotting their escape by hoping to die or doing damage to themselves. Does inflicting harm on oneself begin as a desperate attempt to gain some sense of control?

Chris Perry’s database had follow-up information on all the patients who were treated in the hospital’s outpatient clinics, including reports on suicidality and self-destructive behavior. After three years of therapy approximately twothirds of the patients had markedly improved. Now the question was, which members of the group had benefited from therapy and which had continued to feel suicidal and self-destructive? Comparing the patients’ ongoing behavior with our TAQ interviews provided some answers. The patients who remained self-destructive had told us that they did not remember feeling safe with anybody as a child; they had reported being abandoned, shuttled from place to place, and generally left to their own devices.

I concluded that, if you carry a memory of having felt safe with somebody long ago, the traces of that earlier affection can be reactivated in attuned relationships when you are an adult, whether these occur in daily life or in good therapy. However, if you lack a deep memory of feeling loved and safe, the receptors in the brain that respond to human kindness may simply fail to develop. If that is the case, how can people learn to calm themselves down and feel grounded in their bodies? Again, this has important implications for therapy, and I’ll return to this question throughout part 5, on treatment.” The Body Keeps the Score Besel Van Der Kolk

I fail to comprehend the relief many people get from cutting or burning themselves with cigarettes. How can anyone feel what they feel? It has been explained to me by several people but the nearest I can come to understanding is the earnest look in their eyes of relief just to get the opportunity to tell someone.

I have punished myself in other ways, but it brought no such relief. For years I either beat my head against walls or beat my temples from both sides at once, perhaps to drive out the evil in me that drove me “crazy.”

I also held suicide in front of me like a carrot on a stick. If things aren’t better tomorrow…and one day at a time remained above ground. The true carrot was the hope of resolving the difficulties between my children and I. That is still an unknown.

But what I mostly want to bring attention to is the plight of children today. Millions of children live every day in spite of sex abuse, physical or verbal abuse, and neglect. When they act out they are not being “bad.” They are the walking wounded. They do not need a spanking, to be arrested, body slammed to the floor, or told to “be good.”

Sadly, most people turn a blind eye to child abuse, especially sexual abuse.

Surely a civilized country can do better for the most vulnerable. But are we civilized?

I think not, with children going without healthcare, enough food in their bellies at night, scant protection from harm within their own family.

I know what it’s like to be a child in fear, watching my back, and all the while trying not to show any emotions. I remember. I grew up to be a woman with many coping mechanisms that did not work in the outside world.

I remember being 15 and my dad saying that all I needed was a good spanking.

What I needed is what every child needs and deserves, to be safe and loved within the family home.

“Initiation, intimidation, stigmatization, isolation, helplessness and self-blame

depend on a terrifying reality of child sexual abuse. . . . “Don’t

worry about things like that; that could never happen in our family.”

“How could you ever think of such a terrible thing?” “Don’t let me ever

hear you say anything like that again!” The average child never asks

and never tells.”

—Roland Summit The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome

I have two nieces who were assaulted by one of their uncles. One of them died a number of years ago. The other girl has a mother who brags that her daughter would never LET anyone do that to her. Yet she was raped in the military and assaulted by a favorite uncle who is adored by her mother and a frequent visitor.

No victim LETS themselves be raped or sexually abused and people who think they would have some magic power to stop it are ignorant of the facts.

Victims blame themselves. We don’t need other people heaping on more blame.

All perpetrators are at sometime a member of someones family, and when people say it can’t happen in my family, again, they are ignorant of the facts. Families are the greatest protectors of sexual predators.

Family is a main cause of re-abuse of the victim. The victim is shamed, accused of making up atrocious stories, and ultimately silenced, that is, IF he/she ever tries to get help.

I am not responsible for my nieces being assaulted by my brother. He was a grown man and fully capable of not assaulting those girls. But he was one of my nightmares growing up and when I threatened him off he went after our sister. I blamed myself. But I cannot to this day figure out how I could have stopped it. I had not as yet told, I felt I was on my own guarding me from this person.

Who could have done something? The family. After Valerie, with much wailing and desperation, tried to get help, she was soon convinced that nothing happened and thereafter silenced. Like all good little victims.

Our brother went on to harm others.

Family, with their combination of disbelief and determination to cover up and protect the perpetrators, have been my most ardent re-abusers. They figuratively tore me limb from limb in order to hide the fact that our family reeked of incest.

I judge myself harshly. There is no time to procrastinate, what is wrong with me? I am human. I open Mahjong and the time passes like water down a drain. When I stop I say “no more.” I will get back to my research and writing, tomorrow.

As interesting as it is to see how far I have come by reading journals from decades past, the pain is as fresh and resilient as a new born dandelion. Most interesting are my interactions with god through random bouts of pleading for relief, death, and taking my children in his hands to care for as I could not.

I am an atheist. And no, I will not turn back to a non-existent god on my deathbed. I am slightly embarrassed by the lameness of my god reliance. I find the facing of reality far more productive and effective.

But for a few years in the mid-nineties I spoke of god as though he had some part in my life, he was my non-existent friend, without power to act but comforting to believe in. God was all there was to keep me from being completely alone with myself, a crutch to lean on, a fluffy teddy bear to hug in the dark of the night.

Perhaps had I believed more in me, I would not have fallen off the edge of the earth in the winter of 96-97. My children were estranged, my mother, whom I had prayed would die for years, was dying, and I nearly married a Sunday-school-teacher sex-abuser. Add to that attending the muck and mire of a family reunion and losing my job, by fall I was living in my car in the Kmart parking lot.

I was lost to reality. I had no ability to come back. I was “just fine.”

I departed North Carolina in a panic. Florida, AA, and 500 miles distance felt like my only hope of surviving. I was depressed, desperate, and as always, alone. Still homeless, within days I had returned to an abusive relationship. From there I entered a domestic abuse shelter, found a job, rented a room in a half-way house, and bought a bicycle.

During that time my children did not know where I was. I was so deep in self-loathing, shame, and guilt I could only think my children were better off without me. How could I face them? What could I say? I could not explain my actions to myself. I had no answers.

God did not help me. I will not give up my credit for every fight I fought or every time I had to pick myself up off the floor when life was bent on crushing me. I worked for survival, for progress, and for understanding. Nobody gave it to me. If I forget that, I might slide into complacency and start taking the easier way of leaving it all to god. Then I will lose.

I can do this. I can trudge through this book one moment at a time. I will procrastinate some days, but for self preservation.

A couple of weeks ago I brought out all my journals and random writings of the past 32 years. I sorted them into piles according to time periods and there they sit on my folding table ready for perusal. Last week I hooked up my external hard drive and tossed out the expendable and organized dozens of text files into folders.

It feels like a mountain standing before me and there is no way back. I must climb. I put it off one day at a time and get nowhere.

32 years of recovery from childhood and the inevitable abusive adulthood that followed. It must be of some use to somebody. Suffering is never popular yet millions upon millions of us do it.

In truth I am beyond suffering. It is enough to feel the pain of life and loss. Suffering is optional. I reject it totally.

In that light I will tackle my mountain with an eye to usefulness and set aside the mournful wailing and ramblings which may never be read again in my lifetime.

Taken from Psychology Today

“In my last post, I described the differences between needs, which ensure your psychological and emotional survival and growth, and needs which arise from the neuroses, pathologies, and just plain whims of your parents and the environment and culture in which you are raised and have likely caused you considerable unhappiness and dysfunction in your life.

One of the most painful aspects of needs is that you may blame yourself for not getting your needs sufficiently met as a child, thus turning them into needs. You may have come to believe that you didn’t deserve having your life-affirming needs met by your parents in a healthy way: you didn’t feel that you deserved to be loved and valued, feel safe and secure, or see yourself as a competent person. These perceptions may have created in you a profound sense of inadequacy. Through your efforts to meet those needs in childhood and into adulthood, you have been attempting to prove your worth and demonstrate that you do, indeed, deserve to have your needs met.

Let me say something as emphatically as I can that I hope will lighten the load that you may have been carrying for so many years: It’s Not Your Fault. Why your needs as a child became needs had nothing to do with you. Do you know whose fault it really was? Your parents. It was their needs that caused them to not meet your needs and that led your needs to become needs. My gosh, you were just this helpless little child that only wanted to feel loved and safe and didn’t do anything to deserve such treatment.

So here is another thing I encourage you to do: Blame Your Parents for what they did to you.”

Jim Taylor, Ph.D., teaches at the University of San Francisco.

I have struggled with this for years saying my parents did the best they could with what they had. It is likely true, but it cannot stop there. Their best was catastrophic for their children. Most of their children hated and/or still hate them. I do not imagine many forgave them. Like most children, they and I took the mantle of guilt upon our own shoulders and got on the best we could. Sadly, we did not fair well with our own children. Again, we did the best we could with what we were given.

The definition of blame is to assign responsibility. Someone has to shoulder the responsibility. It makes no sense to keep burdening new generations with the responsibility for their own upbringing. The system requires them to try to fix something they did not break and have no power over. And the idea is ludicrous that once a child is 18 they are adults in charge of their own destiny when for so many millions of children early programming has already set the stage.

I did the best I could with what I had, it is true, but I left home to escape a brother who’d already molested and/or stalked 5 of my older sisters, another brother who took every opportunity to give me suggestive looks, and a dad that decided it was his turn. I escaped into a world I had no preparation for with a man who abandoned me and our children continually.

Those are reasons, not excuses for my behavior and I gladly shoulder my share of the responsibility for my children’s upbringing. But only my share. I am nobodies scapegoat any more.

There was a time when facing the harsh realities of my life was incomprehensible. I did not understand how I could be blamed when all I ever did was try to survive the best I was able. Wasn’t that enough?

No. And yes. Yes, because it was all I was capable of. No, because my children felt the sting of abandonment too many times thus passing on dysfuntion to a new generation.

My children are adults now, in charge of their own healing. The least I can do is take responsibility for my share. Our childhoods are not our fault.

“Teaching Notes

I. GOALS OF THIS MODULE (DISTRESS TOLERANCE HANDOUT 1)

Main Point: Distress tolerance skills enable us to survive immediate crises without making things worse, and to accept reality when we can’t change it and it’s not what we want it to be.

Distress Tolerance Handout 1: Goals of Distress Tolerance. This handout lists goals, not specific skills. Briefly review the three goals; provide enough information and discussion to orient participants to the module; link the module to participants’ own goals; and generate some enthusiasm for learning the distress tolerance skills. An important point is that crisis survival skills are needed for getting through crisis situations, but they are not intended to become a way of life. Over the long term, reality acceptance and problem solving have to be practiced if a client is to have a life worth living.

Explain the goals of distress tolerance skills to clients as follows.

A. Survive Crisis Situations without Making Them Worse

The skills in this module are ways of surviving and doing well in crisis situations without resorting to behaviors that will make the situation worse. They are needed when we can’t immediately change a situation for the better, or when we can’t sort out our feelings well enough to know what changes we want or how to make them.

Note to Leaders: If you plan on teaching the skills for addiction (Distress Tolerance Handouts 16–21), it can be useful here to define “addiction” as “any behavior you are unable to stop, despite negative consequences and despite your best efforts to stop.” Note that many repetitive behaviors qualify as addictions.

B. Accept Reality As It Is in the Moment

Acceptance of reality—of life as it is in the moment—is the only way out of hell. It is the way to turn suffering that cannot be tolerated into pain that can be tolerated. We can think of it as follows:

􀂄 Pain + nonacceptance = Suffering and being stuck

􀂄 Pain + acceptance = Ordinary pain (sometimes extremely intense) and the possibility of moving forward

Emphasize to participants that life is not all crisis. Although some clients may live as if their lives are a constant crisis, life in its totality is not all crisis. Living life as if it is always a crisis perpetuates the experience of crises, because it interferes with problem solving that will resolve problems over the long term; thus it can actually backfire and create more crises. At some point, therefore, we all have to experience and accept the lives that we have in front of us (so to speak). This is ultimately the only way to build a life worth living.

􀀹􀀃C. Become Free

We are truly free when we can be at peace and content with ourselves and our lives, no matter what circumstances we find ourselves in. In many ways, freedom is an outcome of mastering both crisis survival and radical acceptance. The crisis survival skills are the bulwark keeping us from giving in to cravings on the way to freedom. Radical acceptance skills produce the quieting of intense desire.

When we are free, we can look in the face of our cravings and desires and say “I don’t have to satisfy you.”

10. Distress Tolerance Skills: Distress Tolerance Handouts 1–2

Our intense emotions become like a passing tempest at sea, instead of a demand for action we must give in to.

Note to Leaders: The distress tolerance goal of becoming free is identical to the goal of freedom in practicing mindfulness from a spiritual perspective. The important point is that both mindfulness practice and reality acceptance practice lead inevitably to a greater sense of freedom. In a sense, mindfulness practice is a reality acceptance practice. If you have not covered this goal in teaching mindfulness, you can teach it now. If you have previously taught it, simply make the connection between the two sets of skills. (The teaching notes are very similar.)

From DBT® Skills Training Manual, Second Edition, by Marsha M. Linehan. Copyright 2015 by Marsha M. Linehan.

Permission to photocopy this material is granted to purchasers of this book for personal use only.”

This is where I began in January of 2018, 9 months after uprooting myself once again from all that was familiar. The main events of those 9 months will be covered in my book, along with my state of mind, rather, my state of mindlessness when I began DBT. Every day was a tight-rope-walk emotionally. I worked at being grateful, mostly that I had a roof over my head, though it was not where I’d hoped to live. Through my mindlessness I lost my housing voucher from New York and the long lists of people waiting for reasonable housing gave me one option, downtown Raleigh. I am still grateful to have a roof over my head besides my car. There are many not so well off.

DBT was like a foreign language in the beginning but I was told to practice, keep notes and a diary and it would become clear how DBT can benefit. I held out hope through the first months of twice a week therapy, homework I did not comprehend, diary cards to chart progress, meditations and mindfulness. Sometimes hope is enough to keep a body going, but this time my hope began to move me forward.

By the end of the first year I began to notice upsets upset me less, I no longer lived on the edge of an emotional cliff waiting for the first breeze to blow me away. I’d slowed down to a pace I could live at instead of always running about frantic that there was not enough time.

I have now been through the other three modules, emotion regulation, interpersonal effectiveness, and mindfulness twice each, and I will do one more year because all areas of my life have improved. I used DBT skills to help me be open to more family relationships, though the word family is and always has been, a frightening place for me emotionally.

I expect to have my book finished by the end of DBT

“Children who don’t feel safe in infancy have trouble regulating their moods

and emotional responses as they grow older. By kindergarten, many disorganized

infants are either aggressive or spaced out and disengaged, and they go on to

develop a range of psychiatric problems.

They also show more physiological

stress, as expressed in heart rate, heart rate variability

stress hormone responses, and lowered immune factors

Does this kind of biological dysregulation automatically reset to normal as a child matures or is moved to a safe environment? So far as we know, it does not.

Parental abuse is not the only cause of disorganized attachment: Parents who

are preoccupied with their own trauma, such as domestic abuse or rape or the

recent death of a parent or sibling, may also be too emotionally unstable and

inconsistent to offer much comfort and protection

While all parents need all

the help they can get to help raise secure children, traumatized parents, in

particular, need help to be attuned to their children’s needs.

Caregivers often don’t realize that they are out of tune.” The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk

This is painful. I look back on the state of my mind when I was a young mother, overwhelmed by the aftermath of my own childhood, and I see my children. They need so much. I have so little to give. I gave all I could. It was never enough because what they needed most was me and mentally and emotionally I was stuck in another time and place.

Or rather, another time and place was stuck in me. Flashbacks and nightmares and paranoid days occupied me, and the fear of being “found out” and losing more people from my life.

People say we cannot blame our parents or our childhoods. People say we make our own choices, make our own beds and must lie in them. People say we are old enough now to know better.

I say we pass down our own damage in ways we cannot imagine or bear the pain of. It must end, but how? I do not have an answer. I begin by not blaming my children for their reactions to a family system too disturbing for words and in particular a mother too busy battling old demons to be a steady, nurturing presence in her children’s lives.

That is not enough. It is enough for this day.

“the birth of three new branches of science has led to an explosion of knowledge about the effects of psychological trauma, abuse, and
neglect. Those new disciplines are neuroscience, the study of how the brain
supports mental processes; developmental psychopathology, the study of the impact of adverse experiences on the development of mind and brain; and interpersonal neurobiology, the study of how our behavior influences the emotions, biology, and mind-sets of those around us.
Research from these new disciplines has revealed that trauma produces actual physiological changes, including a recalibration of the brain’s alarm system, an increase in stress hormone activity, and alterations in the system that filters relevant information from irrelevant. We now know that trauma compromises the brain area that communicates the physical, embodied feeling of being alive. These changes explain why traumatized individuals become hypervigilant to threat at the expense of spontaneously engaging in their day-to day lives. They also help us understand why traumatized people so often keep repeating the same problems and have such trouble learning from experience.
We now know that their behaviors are not the result of moral failings or signs of lack of willpower or bad character—they are caused by actual changes in the brain
This vast increase in our knowledge about the basic processes that underlie
trauma has also opened up new possibilities to palliate or even reverse the
damage. We can now develop methods and experiences that utilize the brain’s own natural neuroplasticity to help survivors feel fully alive in the present and move on with their lives. There are fundamentally three avenues: 1) top down, by talking, (re-) connecting with others, and allowing ourselves to know and understand what is going on with us, while processing the memories of the trauma; 2) by taking medicines that shut down inappropriate alarm reactions, or by utilizing other technologies that change the way the brain organizes information, and 3) bottom up: by allowing the body to have experiences that deeply and viscerally contradict the helplessness, rage, or collapse that result from trauma. Which one of these is best for any particular survivor is an empirical question. Most people I have worked with require a combination.” The Body Keeps the Score Bessel Van Der Kolk

I cannot stress the following quote enough. “We now know that their behaviors are not the result of moral failings or signs of lack of willpower or bad character—they are caused by actual changes in the brain.”

For most of my life I believed I was too stupid, too weak, too permanently damaged to “fix” what needed fixing in me. People seemed to expect that I could just put my childhood behind and be happy now and oh, how hard I tried always left feeling inadequate and so very tired.

I am relieved, but also saddened that so many years and so many tears have been spent trying to be like other people when I was not and never could be.

I am changing. It is both a relief and frightening. I find myself making decisions through thoughtful process rather than according to the roller coaster of my emotions. Two years of DBT with its mindfulness, emotion regulation, interpersonal effectiveness training, and distress tolerance have brought a measure of peace to my once chaotic life.

Where once I listened to 70’s rock for energy, I listen to piano-violin duets. Where once I took drugs to help me sleep, I do guided meditation. And where once my emotions told me it was the end of the world, I now sit quietly and let them pass.

We live in a world of walking wounded; domestic violence, sexual abuse, war, natural catastrophe. Few pass through these events unscathed and yet people sit in judgement wanting them to be stronger willed and “do better.”

Then there are God touting people who mean to help and send their thoughts and prayers but no meaningful answers. They do not understand how solid my belief was as a child living in the wasteland of abuse and neglect or how my belief turned to hate when the Jesus I sang about in Sunday school never showed up to save me.

Science is saving me. Good old science. Amazing science.