May is American Cheese Month. No, I don’t mean American Cheese (Kraft Singlets, that hideous impostor masquerading as or feigning to be cheese.) Granted, those singlets were the” perfect melt,” producing an immediate bright orange gooey ooze that dripped dramatically off the burger, providing a mouth-watering visual. It melted as quickly as its single-serving polyethylene wrapper probably would have and didn’t taste much better. The singlets additionally produced an ample supply of landfill, also sadly “American.” But we didn’t think much about those things then. No, this month honors American cheese, or to be precise, and certainly more politically correct, cheeses originating and produced in the US.

So why a month? Probably a commercial initiative to remind and encourage people that the step-child of domestic cheeses actually has an honorable and noteworthy tradition, history and even some products. The fans of a Wisconsin football team call themselves “cheeseheads,” as Wisconsin is one of the most venerated US origins of cheese. But I also remember from years ago, long before I cared much, billboards with beautiful scenes of California landscapes, touting “Come for the Views, Stay for the Cheese!” I often feel that way at our home.

Europe: France, Switzerland, Denmark, Italy, Greece are all the icons of great cheese. Like neglect, “American” cheeses dim and fade from view and allegedly at least can’t compete. I will differ with that (much as I do about neglect!) as some of the creations coming out of Marin, in the Bay Area, are pretty darn good, and even some of mine are getting there, although I would not dream of selling it. So, a month suggesting that we buy some, try it, well, how could that be bad? And for the home cheesemakers like me, a reminder to – as Gavin, my beloved Australian cheesemaking teacher, always counsels, “Keep calm and make cheese!” I hardly need reminding.

And cheese, besides being a passion of mine and an inspiration in countless ways, provides an infinite supply of ready and exquisite metaphors. Like peeling the plastic singlet wrap and setting the stuff to melt, I miraculously get a quick spill of words and ideas. The ups and downs of cheese making, replete with dramatic disasters of failure and the occasional wildly delicious success, replicate the non-linear trauma/neglect healing process. It also reminds us that some things are, in fact, intended to stink, and if we learn or develop the taste, we may even come to like that.

Many know that during my first year or so of cheesemaking, my failure rate was a dismal 60%. Many feel that way about their first year, or even maybe ten, of trauma therapy. What would make one hang in there? People ask the same question when I tell them that my husband and I fired five couple’s therapists back in the early days (blessedly three decades ago now!) before we found one who could help us. We thought we were the couple from hell and probably were. Ultimately after about two years and thousands of dollars wasted, we found someone who could, in fact, help us and who even inspired me to become a couple’s therapist. So, what would make one stay the course, or as Gavin would say, “soldier on?” After all, my husband is the one who, after 30 pages, if the story hasn’t “begun,” gives up on a book. I still can’t do that, always having to keep going and finish the thing, endlessly hoping that “it might get better…” (He did, ultimately, teach me that it is OK to walk out of a movie, although admittedly, it took a while.) Trauma/neglect therapy is not linear, and that is for sure. However, I do believe it will get better. For those who stay with it, in my experience, it invariably does.

The Vietnam War was the big bang that hurled us into awareness of trauma and sparked the birth of what was to become the field of traumatic stress studies. I say both “the” and “Vietnam”, somewhat embarrassed by a new awareness of another expression of cultural chauvinism. Centuries of war bloodied that small country, colonized and embattled with China, Japan, France, Britain, Cambodia… so “the” war with the US was one of many. Similarly, I am newly aware that spelling “Vietnam” as one word instead of two is somewhat of a corruption of the indigenous “Viet Nam”, which ironically means “unity.” 

American veterans returning from that war with glaring, seemingly intractable symptoms, commanded long-needed attention to what in 1980 became the diagnostic category of overwhelming experience: PTSD. Nightmares, flashbacks, irregularities of memory, exaggerated startle response, depression, and anxiety all became the growing and perhaps similarly overwhelming list of boxes to check. When I worked at the VA some 15 years after the real-time end of the war, I saw how many of the aging men, (and most of our patients were men,) were still living it. Florid drug addiction blanketed many of their unbearable symptoms. Sadly, living close to Haight Ashbury and Golden Gate Park, I believe some of our homeless are those same guys, now 48 years older.

I recently woke to another population that at least I had completely ignored. Once again, I was awakened by an interview in the wee hours on public radio with Viet Namese author Que Mai Phan Nguyen about her new novel Dust Child. Besides the population of US veterans I am familiar with, and (by now I have had more than a few clients who were their sons and daughters,) I became aware of vast groups, generations, of attachment-traumatized American veterans, Viet Namese women, and Amerasian or mixed-race offspring of the two. 

The novel artfully weaves together threads of three different stories representing a new view of the intergenerational transmission of attachment trauma and neglect. We meet a white male war veteran, like most GIs, barely more than a child when he finds himself embroiled in a bloody war far from home. Like most of his cohort, he does not choose to be there and does not really understand what it is all about. Like many of his buddies, lonely, bored, and desperately needing to block out painful reality, he whiles away his evenings in the seedy bars of Sai Gon (also two words in the native language,) drinking and being “entertained” by attractive young local women.

Secondly are the sad stories of painfully young Viet Namese women attempting to stave off starvation and save their families from homelessness by working in bars, serving drinks and providing company, and “more.” And finally, a generation of “Amerasians,” the often abandoned and orphaned offspring of desperate and lonely bar liaisons. These children are of any and all mixed-race colors, with apparently African American fathers (these being the most painfully outcast,) some mixed Asian and Latinx, and every imaginable variation. Our character in the story is dark-skinned, curly-haired, and unspeakably lonely, longing for family, hopelessly wishing his father would come looking for him and transport him to the dreamed-of better life in the US, and in search of a loving mother who would want him.

One protagonist is the now middle-aged white veteran, visiting Viet Nam and searching for the beautiful barmaid whom he had truly loved, now ashamed that he had both cheated on his faithful wife waiting at home and had left his young girlfriend pregnant. He did not know if the girlfriend or the child of unknown gender had survived the war.

We get the backstory of the then-young “girlfriend,” fleeing the extreme poverty of the countryside, seeking to earn enough to keep her family from losing the small plot of land that sustained and housed them, only to discover she had unwittingly signed on for sex work. I won’t spoil the rest of the story. Suffice it to say, the battlefields of Viet Nam are haunted by the gruesomely dead, the walking wounded, and the multitudes of ghost-like orphaned and abandoned whose invisible scars of attachment trauma, deprivation, and neglect leave many with huge questions about identity.

After some crazy (for us) storms and the roughest winter drought-parched California has seen in a while, spring seems to be arriving. Sun! It is a source of great joy and energy for me. Piles of bunched daffodils on sale in the grocery store are almost free. I buy them by the fistfuls and put them all over the house. My husband calls them his “happy flowers.” I put a huge bouquet in his office, and it keeps him smiling all day. I love flowers and have always made sure to keep flowers in my office. As far as I am concerned, they are as essential in psychotherapy as the Kleenex and the ever-present clock. I am grateful that I can feel myself well up with joy in the face of beauty: that nature, music, color, and words make me happy. It has not always been easy for me to take pleasure in, to feel it.

I remember when I first started doing neurofeedback in 2009. Exclaiming, “I feel calmer and happier, calmer and happier, and things don’t bother me!” was my incredulous refrain as I did more and more of it. And I added, “A world without fear is a different place! The opposite of fear is joy.” Fear and hyper-arousal inhabiting the body act as a pulsing obstacle, a barrier to joy. Neurofeedback and all those years of dogged slogging therapy of all different kinds have opened the channel for joy to flow. My office is filled with light, and I have the good fortune of being able to see it now – not all the time, of course, but most of the time. Now, when beauty brings me to tears, they are more likely to be tears of awe than longing. What a blessing. 

A flashbulb memory recently sprang up. It was 1988; I was in the little kitchen of my apartment in Santa Cruz, doing some chores and listening to the radio. A song came on that I had never heard before, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy!” was the bouncy refrain. The beat was calypso-like and lively. It was hard not to smile and bounce along with its wacky rhythmic wisdom. Those were some rocky times in my life. I thought, “Oh, were it so easy!” Don’t worry, be happy? How do you do that?”

Fast forward to 2023. The other night I was out to dinner with my best friend. I have the good fortune to have a best friend who dates back even further than the remembered song! We get together once a month, which is another blessing I appreciate even more now the pandemic has allowed us to resume the long-standing ritual. I was harried, coming off a rather brutal workday, then traffic and parking. It took me a while to settle down once I finally landed in the restaurant with her. This was a restaurant I had been to before, and I had made friends with the waiter. As I often do with new friends, I had given him some cheese. The waiter rhapsodized about my cheese, which I always love, and I was basking in that. I did not notice the people at the table beside us.

When the neighboring table got up to leave, the man in their group said to me, “You are the cheesemaker!” I said yes, surprised that he knew. Apparently, the waiter had told him I make cheese. He was an interesting-looking man. We chatted briefly, shook hands, and they left. When the group was outside, the waiter said to me, “Do you know who that is?” “No!” I replied. “Bobby McFerrin!” He said. I ran outside to shake his hand again, regretting that I had not recognized him. When I got home, I googled him and got a 1988 YouTube video of Bobby McFerrin singing the delightful song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy!” Both he and I are much older now. I listened to it about five times, thinking, what a different world it is since the last time I heard it. 

I told my husband I had met Bobby McFerrin at the restaurant, and he said, “Oh, he sings a cappella, doesn’t he?” I didn’t know for sure, so I played a series of YouTube videos and saw his amazing diversity of sound and voice. In some cases, his sound was so diverse that it was indistinguishable as a cappella. He “played the snare drum on [his] chest” as the only accompaniment. In one piece, there was an instrument, another man playing the double bass. Bobby motioned to him to move to the keyboard. “I’ll sing the bass,” he said, and while his companion played the keyboard, Bobby, with his voice, replicated the precise deep rhythmic sounds of the double bass part. I wondered, what kind of person could write and sing like that? And could laughingly say, “Don’t worry, be happy…”? So, in my customary way, I watched a few interviews.

When I was young and deeply involved in Latin American anti-imperialist political work, the freedom fighters who organized and fought clandestinely against authoritarian dictatorships were called La Resistencia, the resistance. They boldly left their insignia, a capital R in a circle, as their quiet battle cry to show that they were not vanquished, ferociously not gone. I have always rather liked that it was also my initial, and I could sign off, if not in battle, certainly as a champion of the oppressed and unfree. However, the ways the word “resistance” has been used in the world of psychotherapy and, to some extent, in common parlance has irked me. I even occasionally hear disgruntled spouses hurl it crudely in an unruly couple’s session before I get a chance to nip it. It suggests intentionality, a willful thwarting of something. I rarely see psychological pushback that way. It invariably represents something else, certainly where trauma is concerned.

The core dilemma at the heart of neglect trauma is a profound internal conflict about attachment. Starting from the initial heartbreak, the child interprets the neglect scenario the only way they can, as rejection: “I am not good enough. I don’t matter. I am worthless. I am invisible. I don’t exist.” At first, if the neglect is early, which it often is, there are no words, only a quaking emptiness, hunger, agitation, a shapeless, rudderless flailing disorientation and confusion. After a while, there is collapse into the futility of waiting, and perhaps a freeze. Later, what most often emerges is a default to rock-solid self-reliance. What other choice do they have but to become strong, fierce, enduring, and to do it all themselves? It is the signature of the child of neglect, perhaps their/our version of the defiant “R.” But it is far more than a statement; it is survival, a way of life.

I began to learn about the ferocity of self-reliance in my work as a therapist. Often the child of neglect is reluctant to seek psychotherapy in the first place because they are not used to thinking of another person as a resource, or as being of any use. Often, these children of neglect are some of the most competent, accomplished, and outwardly successful people one might ever hope to find. The fact that there is a gaping interpersonal vacuum or “disability” might slip by unnoticed, even by themselves. They might know that they feel bad, or maybe they don’t even “have time” to notice that because they are too “busy” or too practiced at whatever their chosen medium of numbing out.

In cheesemaking holes are not flaws. In fact, we call them eyes. In a specific family of cheeses, the “Alpine” cheeses, by design, the cultures ripen, grow and bubble with a lovely, sometimes deliciously smelly aromatic gas that puffs up inside the curd and makes for the little, cavernous jewels. The process is called “eye formation.” I remember when I got my first pathetic little eyes in an early Gruyere. I was so excited. I have since become much more skilled with the Alpines, although I have learned, that in order to get really big holes, you have to have really big wheels. Admittedly I have never aspired to be either a big wheel or a big cheese, so I content myself with my modest, but nonetheless satisfying mid-sized results.

Colloquially, the Alpines are for the most part lumped under the category of “Swiss” cheese, which is hardly accurate, as they have been made all over the world, in the various countries where cows were seasonally herded up and down mountains in winter or summer to where the weather and grazing might be better for milk production. Growing up, I always rather hated the “Swiss cheese” that would routinely appear in our embarrassingly boring and redundant brown bag lunches. It was a pale waxy, perhaps rubbery slab of something that tasted rather like soap. I usually peeled it off and stashed it in the bottom of the bag. Now I love a good Jarlsberg or Emmental.

There is also an unsavory variety of holes in cheese that are in fact flaws. These are the “mechanical holes.” The mechanical ones are those that are the result of some sort of crack, or failure to bind, consolidate, or grow integrally whole. They may result from some oversight of temperature, excessive or insufficient handling, poor timing of something, inattention, lack of sufficient containment or pressure, or some fluke of circumstance. If there are too many mechanical holes, the curd mass can even effectively fall apart, fail to thrive. Back in my early cheesemaking days when my failure rate was about 60%, we routinely had to serve these poor developmentally disabled youngsters, with a spoon. Thankfully my ever-patient husband joined me in eating all my mistakes.

I think of neglect much like holes, gaping absences in developmental experience. Empty spaces inside that burst and open into gaping voids, often to be filled with brilliant and creative adaptations, but lonely and empty nonetheless. And quietly shrouded, existing in the shadow of absence, largely and protractedly it may languish for a long and lonely aging in the dark. I have had to learn to “see” neglect. In effect, developing that capacity for sight, the ability to discern and be present with the trauma of neglect, has been another kind of “eye formation:” growing the eyes, ears and heart to recognize and understand the hidden, seemingly unexplained pain.

(In the US, the nickname “March Madness” refers to a historical obsession with college basketball during the month of March.)

Hyper-attuned to invisibility, I perk up abruptly when I hear a remarkable but “dated” story. How could I have missed that? Such was the case when Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf came to my awareness. His name was so unfamiliar I had a hard time remembering it, even as I found the man unforgettable. I happened to hear an interview with the filmmaker of a recent documentary about this forgotten basketball legend. Again, I am no sports spectator. But I am fascinated and compelled by the energy, drive, and exquisite body awareness of talented athletes, and have great admiration for those who use their visibility and influence for larger, humanitarian ends. And I am similarly compelled when they vanish from the public mind. How can the seeming amnesia of neglect be so “easy?”

I found many aspects of Abdul-Rauf to be unforgettable. Born in 1969 in the depths of the still racially segregated Southern US, with the name Chris Jackson, he never knew his father. It was a source of persistent grief that his mother “could” not tell him and never did. Already beset with both poverty and hunger, at an early age, young Chris began to suffer from Tourette’s Syndrome. For years, mysterious and nameless, the illness kept him endlessly driven by unstoppable compulsive movements and rituals. It might take him 45 minutes to put on his shoes as he wildly took them off, put them on, took them off, put them on, over and over again. His already beleaguered single mom would become impatient and angry with his noisy opening and slamming, opening and slamming the refrigerator door, taking forever to get the simplest tasks done. Young Chris desperately prayed for the overpowering agony to stop. Finally, after years of struggle, at age 17, the compulsion had a name. He was diagnosed, and although the tradeoffs of the various psych medications  (as many of my readers probably know all too well) were another kind of nightmare, at least to some degree, his shame was alleviated.

Basketball was a wonderful discovery for Chris at the age of eight. He called it a “natural love.” He spent hours alone on the street, as he said “using his imagination.” He would imagine all sorts of plays, huge other players, attempting to guard him, complex basketball configurations. For hours on end, he would respond to those phantom situations, over and over again. He proceeded to at least try to “make basketball my father,” in that it took up a lot of his time, and gave him a sense of belonging. And to his surprise, he discovered he was particularly good at it. He also had the secret wish that “maybe if I got really good at something, my father wherever he might be, would want to know me and be with me…” Although his dream about his father never did come true, he did become that good.

NBA stars from various eras rhapsodize about him. Said Shaquille O’Neal, “watching Mahmoud, was like watching God play basketball.” Phil Jackson said “He was Steph Curry before there was Steph Curry.” And local guy, (the only one whose name I knew,) Steve Kerr said “To watch him have Tourette’s Syndrome and still destroy the best players in the league… I had no chance against Mahmoud.” And he was “barely” 6 feet tall.

About the uncontrollable repetitive drive of Tourette’s, as an adult he himself said “It was definitely a blessing, a major blessing. I would’ve stopped practicing after an hour and a half, two hours, and gone on home. But Tourette’s Syndrome said ‘NO!’ ” the forced repetition honed his exquisite skill.

Transformation

One of the perks of my particular brand of insomnia is that I catch late-night BBC broadcasts and often fascinating interviews. I happened to hear an interview with a documentary filmmaker whose 30-minute film Stranger at the Gate was in the running for an Academy Award. I rarely watch movies, being much too stingy with my reading time, but this one compelled me, and inspired, I sent the link to many others. 

Richard McKinney, a virtual caricature of the racist, white supremacist hate monger, was a fiercely traumatized Marine Corps war veteran who served many bloody years in combat and participated in numerous horrific and murderous atrocities. He originally joined the marines as a young man in the futile hope of winning his father’s respect, also a Marine Corps veteran. Although he failed in that endeavor, military service successfully removed him from a downhill trajectory of using and selling drugs. McKinney probably would have finished out his sorry days in that bloody world, but injury sent him home to his mid-western state.

Shortly after his return to the states, 9/11 struck. McKinney, in a blast of florid PTSD, was inflamed with a wild resurgence of hatred for Muslims. His ordinarily quiet town of Muncie, Indiana, had become a refuge for a sizeable Afghan community with a well-attended mosque, and McKinney was seized with the idea of committing mass murder and blowing away as many Muslims as he could, even if it killed him. He began to frequent the mosque, to learn the rhythms of its comings and goings so that he could get “the most bang for his buck.”

Upon visiting the mosque, McKinney was surprised to be met with such warmth, such welcome, such generosity, such openness, such love, that it first gave him pause, and then transformed him. Not only did McKinney dispense with his catastrophic plan, but his soul opened, and he became a Muslim. It is a must-see (and available for free on YouTube.)

Loss

Attachment is indeed our most profound and foundational survival need, which is why neglect is the most pervasive and destructive injury of all, certainly to humans. Although massively unacknowledged (and I am doing my best to change that!), it quietly wreaks its devastating damage, especially in the realm of relationships, which of course, has unspeakable ramifications in both individual and collective life. Trauma therapists are well aware that loneliness and interpersonal pain are what drive people, often with deep ambivalence, to our office doors. Most certainly, with neglect, survivors really don’t want to need us or our help. But the sense of deadness and isolation, pandemic or not, becomes unlivable.

Recently at a conference, I met a charismatic super couple, a physician and an attorney. The doctor, Laurie was her name, had recently won a national award in her country, and in the past, might have been someone who intimidated me. But she was so approachable and delightful, as was her partner of 36 years. They sat across from me at breakfast, so making conversation, I asked if they had children. Like myself, they had long ago opted against it, but somehow ended up telling me the story of when they accompanied a close friend to China to support her in adopting a baby girl. 

When the three roamed the orphanage, not unlike my own experience in Sac some 13 years prior, they met up with baby “Anna” (not her real name.) For some unknown reason, and to the surprised dismay of the prospective adoptive mother, the 18-month-old orphan magnetically reached for Laurie. It was as if she had found the missing part of herself. I remember, years ago, reading about adoption, that after nine months of inhabiting the mother’s body, living with her rhythms, her voice, her chemistry, the climate of her energetic and emotional vacillations, they profoundly know her. When they are passed, even at birth, to the adoptive parent, they seem to profoundly know, “This is the ‘wrong’ one!” Well, little Anna, drawn almost as if by a vacuum aspirator to Laurie, felt as if she had found the “right one.” Now in her twenties and recently married, that never changed. 

Anna’s legal mom has had to live with the primary and primal love that the child, and now the young woman has had and continues to have for Laurie, and secondarily Laurie’s wife. Laurie proudly showed me pictures from Anna’s wedding not long ago, the two beaming together. And Laurie, her wife, and Anna’s legal mom have graciously navigated this challenging configuration over now decades; it remains mysterious. This indescribable, inexplicable, and super-glue-like attachment. What is that?

Presence

Although Jennette rarely had a moment free of Debra’s towering invasion into any space she found herself in, her mother was never present with her. That invaluably vital developmental ingredient of being truly there with her never happened. Many clients I have seen bear all the scars of neglect but are hard-pressed to recognize, let alone name, their experience of nonexistence, of not being seen or known. They can’t understand why they feel so bad, shamefully calling it a failure of gratitude or some other sort of personal failure. Sometimes, their only identifiable (to them) and barely “legitimate” complaint might be in bodily symptoms. 

Jennette’s eating disorder is florid and undeniable, and she portrays the mysterious swings between anorexia and terrifying, uncontrollable binge eating as well as I have ever read. Although I never “graduated” to bulimia the way she did, I remember that runaway train, being out of control in both directions and not in control of which. It is a nightmare I hate to remember. How courageously and graphically she exposes it! And it helps her to recognize that something is truly wrong. Sometimes only the body can communicate this, or force it into awareness, as we are all finally starting to understand.

I was recently reminded of the unspeakable power of simple presence. I had a minor surgery that required anesthesia, and I was still pretty drugged on the car ride home and our return to the house. Apparently, it was early afternoon when my husband delivered us safely home. My memory is spotty to blank for most of it. I floated through the afternoon in a deep sleep and woke up somewhat disoriented about what day or time it was. But opening my eyes, the first thing I saw was my husband and our little dog, Angel. He had been reading, and she was keeping him company while I slept. I began to cry. Presence. Perhaps the most precious expression of love, and so tragically missing in the neglect experience. In awe of the experience, I was, of course, (gratefully) reminded of the tragedy of its lack.