I write this as I wrap up my stay in the historic town of Oxford, UK, and my first European trauma conference. Oxford is spectacularly beautiful and quaint with elaborately carved steeples and towers, tall, sculptured ancient walls, and lavish, picturesque, manicured English gardens. For me, it is an especially powerful wash of history as my grandmother walked these streets, and her long, silent voice echoes in these halls. I have always been proud to say she was one of the first women to graduate from this iconic, esteemed university.
I brought with me some “sensible shoes:” black lace-up high-ish tops with chunky heels, “old lady shoes,” as we used to say (when she was probably the age I am now!) that remind me of the shoes she used to wear. I have been clacking across uneven stone floors, imagining, wondering how she felt, an 18-19-20 year old coed, conspicuous among the mostly males, as she moved through her young passages. I wonder what her dreams were, what she imagined lay ahead, both in her own life and in the world.
I was scheduled to present about neglect at the conference on the serendipitously assigned date of September 2nd, 2023. Uncannily so my mother was born on September 2nd, 1923. So magically, we were there in Oxford celebrating the centennial of her birth! My talk was one of several in my particular time slot, and entering the room for my final set-up, I was perhaps startled to see there were people there! I had not really thought about it. The child of neglect typically expects, when there is more than one available option, not to be chosen. It was a shock to discover that, wow, some people had chosen mine over other available options. Like the airlines say, “We know you have other choices, thank you…” I had not realized that I had expected to speak to an expansive desert of mostly empty chairs, rather like the old Gestalt therapy… the unwitting default mode of neglect. No one.
I remember growing up, the old adage “Two is company, three is a crowd.” If there were three of us, someone always wound up as the odd one out, “ditched” we used to say. And usually, it would be me, or I would imagine or expect it to be me. As the middle child of three sisters, I was invisible. I have never been particularly taken with the birth order theories, but for whatever reason, I floated around ghostlike for years of my life, expecting to evaporate like smoke, if I ever existed at all. I certainly never expected to exist in anyone’s mind when not in their direct line of sight. It seemed, more than likely that any childhood friend lost interest in me very quickly when ”a better offer” came along. I came to assume that was simply my birthright, which, of course, works quite effectively to make it so.
I was always amazed by the world of threesomes and love relationships of more than two. My few and feeble attempts were awkward and stressful, no fun at all. I remained amazed at how people could make that work. Well, this room full of people defied my age-old circuitry or began to spark something new and pretty wonderful. And it also awakened an uncharacteristic thread of thinking, I began thinking about the many faces of “three.” Associations, myths, triangular shapes, and tercets… dimensions of three.
In the world of trauma and neglect, we are well acquainted with the autonomic trio of fight, flight, and freeze, the primary responses to either actual events or traumatic stimuli. I have also come to identify two other trios in the world of neglect, thus comprising another trinity. The first is what you may have heard me refer to as the “Bermuda Triangle” of emotions, a tri-directional, usually an internal tug of war, a pushing and pulling of contradictory emotions, all of which are undeniably real and all of which make a ton of sense; These are Resentment, Guilt, and Grief. The child of neglect has every reason to be resentful, even enraged, about perhaps a lifetime of “FOMO” and a universe of actual missing out, the huge outlay of time, energy, money, and effort in their quest to reclaim or claim a life. Once they begin to learn about and understand their neglect, they will most likely be boiling mad.
Many of our trauma and neglect survivors come from a long intergenerational line of trauma and neglect. Surely my own parents had tragic, traumatic histories without the benefit of healing. Besides being traumatized by their childhood experiences, my parents then freshly dove into a traumatic immigrant life, with minimal money, post-Holocaust. How do I dare to feel aggression, anger, and even rage when they were simply trying to survive and drag their dysregulated nervous system into a new life? We might say, “They did the best they could,” and many believe saying that is “enough. So, anger about all the “nothing:” all the things that did not happen, feels “wrong,” unsympathetic, not only heartless but clueless. What audacity and meanness are being mad at them? Except that being mad at them makes all the sense in the world. The anger finds itself dragging behind it a mantle of weighty guilt.
And finally, at the far depths of the icy Atlantic region, is the cavernous well of grief for all that was suffered and lost; all the life that was missed: all the nothing, the missing experiences from childhood, all the lost or misspent years of wasted youth and tortured adulthood. The tragedy of waste. Not only is all this loss bitterly unjust, but it is devastatingly sad. Profoundly understandable, incompatible, whipped around by crosswinds, these emotions vie against one another as the sense of self endures the shipwreck.
The third member of our trinity is another triad of emotions, quieter ones but no less painful. These are Rejection, Loneliness, and Shame, another triumvirate that plagues the survivor of neglect and other attachment trauma. The hypersensitivity to rejection, like my unconscious expectation to be abandoned with my waiting PowerPoint in an empty, unchosen hall: “all dressed up like a circus horse with nowhere to go.” Neglect can first be experienced as a devastating rejection, an irreparable unworthiness, and a profound sense of “I don’t matter.” And the expectation that others will catch wind of it quickly and head for the hills.
What follows from the real or perceived rejection can be a bitter and cavernous loneliness if one has the guts and humility to admit it, even to oneself. And finally, the avalanche of shame that shrouds it all into well-hidden secrecy or perhaps self-hatred. A weighty trio. So there you have it: perched on this rigid tripod are some of the toughest challenges for neglect-informed psychotherapy. Three strikes? Oh dear… How do we prevent these three strikes from adding up to “out?”
Well, it is also said that “three is the charm.” So, where is the charm? There is obviously no quick or ready resolution to the contradictions, tensions, and pain. Gentleness, compassion, and understanding for all the struggling and varied triplets, as they all move us toward more peace. And perhaps being on the lookout for other calmer or more joyful trios: the national dance of Chile, the Cueca, like the waltz, moves and sways with 1-2-3 time; the Triptych: a three-paneled art representation, the Tercet, a three-line poetry form that can readily translate to haiku. And apparently, Pythagoras, the ancient Greek philosopher, believes three is “the perfect number embodying harmony, wisdom, and understanding.
Today’s Song:
Painfully often, I hear laments from clients and occasionally from myself, about squandered time. It may be the understandable and often enough blaming impatience about how unbearably, interminably slow it is, if possible at all, to feel better after childhood trauma and neglect. I have come to identify what I call the “Bermuda Triangle” of painful emotions: the triumvirate of resentment, guilt, and grief. Resentment, even rage at how trauma of all kinds, the greedy and gluttonous pirate commandeers and robs us of life and life force; guilt about the aggressive and bitter ferocity of the resentment; and the tragic boatload of grief for all that is stolen, lost and missed. And time, once gone, at least as far as we know, is gone forever.
The time it takes to heal seems interminable, unjustly so. And whose “fault” is that? The inept or self-interested therapist, the hapless or “lazy” client? Adamantly and insistently adhering to a “no-blame” paradigm, I refuse to get caught in that question. But I am interested in the question of “laziness” because I am similarly opposed to the harshly self-judgmental question of that.
I remember in junior high school, the rhetorical question bandied around, “Would you rather be lazy, mean, or stupid?” Mean vs. stupid seemed a no-brainer to me, but lazy? Where does that fit in, and how also in relation to meanness? Being good, not only kind but good in every moral sense, seemed wound in with exerting “enough” well-intended effort, which would certainly cancel the question of “sloth.” And patience? I’ve always found it ironic and weird that all manner of sick people are called “patients” because, as I have always said, “I have none!”
Rather than get caught in morality or rhetoric, I shall attempt to defer to science because if aids in understanding even a bit of what underlies the drag and drain of time and effort that trauma work does and does not extract, it helps even a smidge, to defer the guilt and shame about purposeful action, I’ll take it.
Speaking of time, I am endlessly amazed by how, very briefly, in historical times, we have understood and incorporated the workings and the wisdom of the brain in our knowledge of mind and behavior. However, perhaps being unable to study the living human brain was the reason. It is perhaps no surprise that in the last 30 years, since we have had neuroimaging technology so we could actually observe and study the workings of the living human brain, we have learned more than our total previous knowledge of neuroscience. Yet too many of us swept up in the storms of the Bermuda Triangle lose sight of that. Insistent on one’s own shortcomings, sloth, or blanket failure, becomes a personal character issue.
In the early 1990’s pioneering attachment researchers Allan Schore and Daniel Siegel began to teach the psychotherapy field about the fundamentals of neuroscience. Schore was admittedly a grueling challenge for non-neuroscientists to read, but Siegel’s gentler 1994 The Developing Mind was a game changer. The two of them, not without plenty of effort and some ineptitude, turned my head around. Long story short, they made it abundantly clear that the human infant brain develops in resonance with the brain of the mother, or most typically or naturally the mother, right hemisphere to right hemisphere, through the gaze. That exchange, a rhythmic dance, seemingly magically, stimulates a growing and evolving sense of self in the deep, primitive brainstem area. The sense of self begins there.
Fluctuations of state and in the environment are, of course, natural and certainly to be expected. An infant, being a bundle of endless needs, will, of course, at times be hungry, cold, over-tired, wet, bored, in pain, needing a hug, or simply, well, being an infant, cranky. Similarly, a parent will be sleep deprived, stretched thin by other kids and not enough help, struggling with the demands of partnership and family, making ends meet, or managing their own past or present trauma. The possibilities for interrupted or imperfect attunement are infinite. The attachment researchers insistently and gently remind us that the best of the best are accurately attuned, matched, and in sequence with the infant 30% of the time. The rest of the time, they are working to regain the rhythm, restore the resonant connection, and regulate themselves, meaning return their own nervous systems to the best calm they can muster and similarly restore the child to calm. This is the ideal of the essential dance of attachment. Which is, of course, tragically rare in this dramatically unsafe, unpredictable, and often lonely world. Again, this dance is the regulating ideal. With luck, this experience of regulating others promptly restoring a baseline regulation ultimately stimulates circuitry and the healthy growth of a brain equipped to self-regulate. This is nature’s design. And, of course, it presupposes, it assumes that there is that beloved other.
What happens when the mother/caregiver is not able to provide either a consistent presence, or due to circumstance past or present, trauma past or present, is unable to calm and settle themselves, restore their own balance, let alone that of the dependent other? Or is not loving? The child then gazes into (or attempts to) a terrified, terrifying, angry, depressed, blank face. And god forbid, what if there is no face there at all? This is the beginning of the story of developmental trauma: the experience of being overwhelmed begins the agony of lonely dysregulation.
Attachment is a survival need like food, water, and oxygen. I might add that when the attachment is withdrawn, the child, and most of all the very young child experiences that withdrawal as a lethal threat to their very existence. Loss or withdrawal of attachment, whether it be through an ordinary life in a family, poverty, violence, intoxication, illness, death, or countless other possibilities, endangers survival and, ultimately, existence. It constitutes a traumatic shock, what Dr. Frank Corrigan has aptly named attachment shock.
This is an essential takeaway: this attachment shock, whatever its cause, is no joke! It is not “small t” trauma, not a lesser trauma or “step-child.” Developmental attachment and neglect may be the most destructive trauma it is possible to experience. (Although I try never to compare “worst worsts.”) Suffice it to say, we are decidedly pack animals, and the human child is dependent on caregivers longer than most, if not all, other mammals. The structural development of the brain is not “complete” until we reach our middle twenties, and even then, for many, the dependency and continuing maturation process may persist a good deal longer. Those of my readers with kids even in their twenties know this far better than I do!
In the “inescapable shock situation,” such as a prisoner under torture or, most certainly, a dependent young mammal, the child or prey animal cannot fight or flee. A predator much greater in strength and size than oneself, unless one is like David the “Goliath-slayer,” is rarely an opponent that the prey can harm or incapacitate. And certainly, an infant and most children cannot successfully escape on their own steam. What options do they have? What we see in the natural world is the prey animal will adaptively “freeze” or collapse. Either, like the notorious possum, will feign death, as most predators, not tempted by dead prey, will lose interest in the meal and wander off in search of “greener pastures. Or the prey animal will ratchet down its sensory receptors and basic functions, numbing away the pain of being eaten. The brain in this freeze response may, in spite of the flood of overwhelming stimulation, appear to be firing very slowly, and the impetus for survival, particularly interpersonal action, may be grossly muted or stunted. Thus, the slow-firing brain, the passivity we often encounter with attachment/neglect trauma survivors. It is the thwarted rhythm of the, in effect, under-stimulated brain. Although it is counter-intuitive, due to under-stimulation or inconsistent presence, this infant searches for rhythm and resonance, like the proverbial “one hand clapping.”
Finally, back to our original topic of time and blame: it makes sense to be heartbroken in grief about lost time and the seemingly bottomless “bucket” of aspired-to or longed-for accomplishments and experiences. It may appear, to oneself anyway, as sloth, as the dreaded “laziness,” or simply being “stupid” or not good enough. Let’s do our best to avoid that sort of thinking. A tall order, I know. It is easier for many of us, certainly for me, to reserve compassion and understanding for the other, for parents, whose trauma was decidedly “traumatic,” trivializing one’s own. That kind of thinking is simply not accurate and certainly won’t help us to accomplish more. It is true that the time that was stolen cannot be retrieved or seized back can never be re-earned no matter how “good” we are. We, therefore must find a way to create our own peace, our own “currency” to somehow restore ourselves. I remember when we were growing up. Lots of the American kids around us were rewarded for the achievement of a good report card and got paid cash for their A’s and even B’s. I thought that was a fine idea. Being generally the hardest-working student in most of my classes, my grades would have been worth a nice little jackpot. Dad thought that mercenary little American transaction was insane, routinely, laughingly saying to us, “I want you to be good for nothing!” I never thought it was terribly funny.
Today’s song:
I remember in 1995 when trauma expert and himself a Viet Nam veteran, Charles Figley, published his then-new book, Compassion Fatigue. It was a novel concept to us then. Some trauma therapists were calling the same phenomenon “vicarious traumatization:” essentially infecting one’s own heart and nervous system with perhaps “too much” horror and pain and too much empathy. I remember gobbling up that book. Clearly, this compassion fatigue was an occupational hazard that we had to have the humility and the restraint to consider in our idealism and our zeal. I remember hearing a presentation around that time given by a gifted, young child therapist who had worked in the children’s trauma unit of the local general hospital for roughly a decade. She had recently, out of necessity, converted her entire practice to teaching and consulting, having reached a critical mass. She simply could not bear to hear even one more story about brutalized or abandoned little ones. Routinely awakened by nightmares and then racked by anxiety at the very thought of going to work, she felt she had no choice but to make the radical, if disappointing, career change.
Although I was convinced that it “could never happen to me,” queen of endurance that I considered myself to be, when Figley offered his first compassion fatigue training workshop, my hubris did not stop me from hopping on the plane to Tallahassee, Florida in a hot minute. Admittedly, the prospect, even the slim possibility, perhaps scared me, as I heard and read about young, idealistic, inspired, and intelligent clinicians having careers, not to mention joie de vivre aborted or cut short, traumatized by their work. I don’t remember much about the workshop. I admired Figley (And was most struck by how the little town of Tallahassee was swept up in the furor of high school football that weekend. I’d never seen anything like that!) Even all these years and decades later, I have never lost my caution and respect for the subject of compassion fatigue.
Avid bookworm that I am, as is typical for us, I have my favorite authors. High on my short list is the brilliant and prolific Isabel Allende, who, even at her advancing age of 81, still seems to produce a new blockbuster each year. I buy them all sight unseen and am rarely disappointed. Her most recent book, The Wind Knows My Name, surprised me, being an exquisitely detailed historical novel about the Nazi Holocaust. Having grown up on a steady diet of Holocaust stories, I rarely seek out books on the subject. This one has me glued. Allende’s depiction of Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass,” reminded me of how my parents both described that nightmarish event well before I could understand what they were talking about, brought back flashback memories of the literal nightmares I remember having when I was two. I did not really know what I was dreaming about, but I do remember being spooked already at that early age, which I can confidently place because of where we were living at the time.
Decades later, in 2015 and 2016, some of what was being bandied around in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election had my father sitting transfixed, semi-catatonic on the couch, eyes like saucers, in unmoving flashback-like reminiscence of some of those early days in Nazi Germany. It had seemed astonishingly unreal, and was again, that intelligent people were listening, let alone believing what was being said. He may or may not have been aware of how frightened he now was, but it was frightening to me to see him that way. When George Floyd was murdered in 2020, it was I who was frozen. It seemed I could not think of anything else for some time. I remember having to at least try to counsel my clients, let alone myself, to regulate our news consumption. It was all so chillingly compelling. Trauma micro and macro seemed to be, actually was, everywhere.
In Allende’s book, Samuel, an eight-year-old boy, was sent out of the country alone when his parents were still able to get him safely out of Austria before they themselves were carted off to concentration camps or exile. Many children were transported by boat or train to sympathetic countries where families took them in and kept them safe. I grew up hearing the stories about my mother; she must have been about ten by then, sent alone to England on a train, where she was welcomed and housed by the Clark family, famous for their Wallabee shoes. The Clarks were heroes in our family. Allende’s book awakened imagined images of the little girl, my mother, alone, stoic, most certainly terrified, desperately lonely, and confused, with no choice but to be patient and still, without even the comfort of a familiar language. After reading about young Samuel, my sleep was invaded by an intense barrage of powerfully lifelike dreams about Mom that stayed lodged in my waking mind through much of the following days and left me feeling grief and guilt about my many complaints about her. And although I was perhaps haunted by not only memory but broad and painful reflections, I could not wait to get back to my book the next evening. Books, movies, news, work, and even conversations with friends and loved ones: trauma can readily take over the airwaves if I let it. If I am not mindful, that is easy to do. But it is not sustainable, or rather, it is the royal road to burnout, as well as being not much fun.
I have the good fortune of having an enlightened partner who insists on packing me off to Hawaii at least three times a year. Granted, the Hawaiian Islands are a locus of tragedy at the moment, but hopefully will not be for long. It is, for me, a happy place of such beauty: glorious flowers and plants, birds, fruit and fish, sky and sea, and great peace. I am grateful to have such a refuge to go back to again and again. Miraculously, it is the one place where I can sleep. But it is also essential to strive to find my balance at home, to make sure and create enough time and space for beauty: art, music, time with loved ones, spiritual renewal, bread and cheese. To not let time for love and pleasure slip away. Allow me to remind you as I remind myself. Don’t sweat the small stuff; give peace a chance. Make time for rest, community, beauty, and joy!
Today’s song:
I am a great lover of words. It is hard to say whether I love words, color, or music more, of all the varied and vivid means of expression. I love them all. However, sometimes, I am struck by the poverty of verbal language and how deficient it can seem in conveying its message. Such was the case when recently I was visited by a fleeting whiff, almost like a less than a momentary blast of fragmentary memory. It was so lightning-quick and then vanished, almost like a trick of perception. Except it was so searing and real as to be unmistakable. It carried the label, however deficient, of my timeless, signature, and chronic childhood loneliness. Although it has hardly been a secret or a mystery that I was a desperately and hopelessly isolated little flailing misfit, what was jarring now, was the unbearably wrenching sadness that I did not remember having felt quite this way before. Might that be the most weighty and devastating bequest of trauma and neglect? Perhaps. I found myself pondering that question.
As a trauma therapist, I have invariably found that the unbearable morass, challenge, or chronic failure in the world of relationships was what most brought survivors to therapy. It seemed as if almost anything else was more bearable, but not being able to make a go of friendship, intimacy, parenthood, or other family ties drove a kind of urgency that “forced the issue.” It was simply too hard or too hard to keep on trying in vain to figure it out. Not that I was any kind of expert myself, but I knew plenty about what did not work; I could certainly read and learn, and intuitively empathy made sense to me. Although people seemed to think treating others as one would like to be treated oneself was a good thing, which is certainly true, treating people as they would like to be treated is even better. Why wouldn’t that be obvious? Most likely because of the preoccupation with oneself.
I pondered these questions from early in my solitary little life. I was a heady, bookish, introverted little girl who spent inordinate amounts of time quietly alone. Sadness was a default mode, like ambient air. It was not even noticeable but the omnipresent norm. When I conjure an emblematic self-image, I see myself in grades three through six, making the 30-minute trudge to school and back, reading a book. Walking and reading, how did I do that? Now when I see people walking and texting, I wonder how they keep from tripping. Back then, it was my daily routine. Is loneliness the worst of the symptoms of neglect? Sometimes it seems it might be. How can I forget that?
Becoming a therapist was a natural progression after a decade or so of crashing and burning and finding that psychotherapy was the only thing that kept me from dying. Just as going to therapy had seemed not like a choice but a “do or die” proposition, so becoming a therapist, as for many of us, seemed like a “shoe-in,” so to speak. And what else was there to do? It was a job description that my childhood prepared me for, both in the care-taking-of-parents sense and also in the knowing or thinking I knew what was needed sense. I also knew I had a lot to learn, and so set about the seemingly endless and solitary task of trying to learn it; and trying to be good enough in a world in which, as ever, I never was.
And for the “loner,” lonely social isolate that I was, it was an opportunity to be in a way very “close” to people, or “important” to them in some way, that was not really “real,” like real relationships, but what I could handle and could provide. And there was also plenty of quiet alone time in my office, except when I was working, reading and thinking, and planning where I could go to study and learn next. As I got increasingly immersed in the then young sub-field of trauma, I did a lot of running/jetting around to conferences and training. For some reason. Although the US West Coast is such a trailblazer in so many ways, in the area of trauma, it simply wasn’t. So I was going everywhere I could learn.
And everywhere I went, I was that same little girl walking and reading by herself. I floated around conferences like a wordless ghost, always staking out my seat in the front row of every conference room, large and small, never speaking to a soul, eating my room service dinners holed up with a book, haunting hotel gyms at the wee-est hours. I never spoke to a living soul, lived out my historic invisibility while I accumulated a growing store of knowledge. They were productive years and desolate. It is strange and somehow dissonant to remember them. It is no wonder that the sudden lockdown of the COVID-19 Pandemic did not feel strange or alien. Like for many of us who come from neglect, it was a throwback to a whole life of a similar, if less “intentional,” social distancing. What was striking was to have a partner and two sweet and scruffy dogs and to be sharing the experience so widely.
Thinking about it now, I am astonished. How I am not alone, not alone in my small world, and not alone in the larger world. I have a team that supports and works with me. I don’t have to do it all myself! There are many people near and far, some of whom I have never met or touched in person but whom I can authentically say that I love and even who love me. There is you, reading these words. Maybe I will never see or know you. But maybe I will. And I even, at least sometimes, dare to believe you or people like you are there. Neglect did not prepare me for that, and neglect-informed psychotherapy has that among its tasks. To discover that loneliness, being alone is not a birthright or a death sentence. It is an aberration, and it can turn into something else. Even a wonderful life like what I have now.
Sometimes looking back, my life looks like a honeycomb: a structure of geometric encapsulated, hermetically sealed cells, each with its own signature content. Honey is sweet, and some of the cells are not without sweetness or bittersweetness. It all constellates to make this attempt at a story. The healing of neglect is about elaborating the story out of all the nothing, all the fragmented missing fabric of experience and/or loss. It sometimes amazes me when another piece floats forth when I have long been focused on other things.
I have recently had the experience where a very dear client has felt shocked and incensed, abandoned and unseen by my gross oversight, negligence, and failure to see, comprehend and address her loneliness. It seemed mindless, senseless, colossally neglectful, and unconscionable for someone who is endlessly pontificating about the perils of neglect. She is right! How did this happen? How could I do that? Perhaps it is so “natural,” so familiar, and as we say, “ego-syntonic,” that it could disappear into the familiar field. My deepest apologies. A mistake I must strive to be mindful of and never make.
Today’s song:
Trauma and neglect make for a strange sense of time for adults and, most certainly, for young children. Not only because the brain areas most affected and highjacked by overwhelming experience don’t register time. But also because something about pain and emptiness seems both endless and ephemeral. Also, when events are redundant or unchanging, memory can blur it all into oblivion or doubtful existence. Much of my life seems to have had that quality, and even now, in my advancing age, I am surprised by memory, usually leading with emotion or body feeling that may not have occurred to me in 50 or 60 years of counting or wrestling with time.
I recently had the privilege of participating in a 24-hour continuous, unbroken “Circlesong,” with the legendary Bobby McFerrin. I have written a bit about Bobby before. He is, in spite of his slight (and perhaps shrinking) frame, a larger-than-life musical wonder, part man, part musical instrument. The multiplicity of sound he creates with both voice and body is awe-inspiring. The Circlesong is usually a capela call and response, mostly improvised and usually wordless, not unlike the sacred chants of many cultures. And it seems to similarly evoke altered states of consciousness. I found a few recordings on Youtube that I listened to again and again at home, and I went once to his one-hour weekly Circlesong presentation at a small venue in Berkeley. He generally shares the stage with a group of seasoned compatriots and invites brave members of the audience to come up and lead as well.
I was excited to find the announcement of his weeklong Circlesong School here in San Francisco, although a week was more than I could take on. However, the week culminated in the 24-hour “Unbroken” finale, which I thought would be a brain-changing and amazing new experience. Although I could not tempt my husband or friends to join me, I decided to go for it. It was indeed brain-changing, but not in the ways I had imagined.
The organizers recommended bringing blankets and pillows, and food, I did not imagine I would need those, being something of an aesthete by nature and definitely a struggling insomniac. But I did as I was told. And as the time approached, I found myself exploding with odd butterflies of, was it fear or excitement? Seemed like both. I was beside myself to the point that when my husband was driving me to drop me off, I wildly opened the door of our moving car to lean and call out to a friend I spotted walking down the street (who wasn’t even who I thought he was!) Scared (and baffled) the wits out of my husband, who was driving!)
The venue was the elegant and iconic Grace Cathedral, a Catholic church dating back to the 1849 California Gold Rush days, and now known for being a progressive host for many humanitarian and cultural causes. I had been there before, but not in many years, the last time being 2013 for a reading of Michael Pollan’s then-new, now-classic Cooked. He has become a trailblazer in other ways since then. It is a beautiful old building with high echoey ceilings, lots of marble and dark wood, and elaborate stained glass. Arriving early, I staked out my spot close to the front, as I always do everywhere, so that I could see and hear everything.
It was a lively, eclectic crowd of all ages, races, and types. Perhaps most of them were wearing the arm wristbands that identified them as attendees of the weeklong school event; many of them appeared to be “real” musicians and singers, unlike me. Although I grew up in a musical home and have always swum in a sea of music, and I can say there is always a song in my head, and often on my lips, I claim no formal identification. The singing began, and for a long time, my eyes closed, and my body moving, I was swept.
Around three hours in, there was a kind of “shift change.” People with children scooped up their (mostly sleeping) little ones, and many adults slipped out, including Bobby, who is not young and not well. And the others of his team gathered the remaining 150 or so of us forward so we were in a closer, tighter circle.
As we edged into the fourth hour, I began to notice a change in myself. Unaccustomed to singing non-stop for hours on end, my voice was fading, I had a harder time finding the note I could hit. Sitting under the speaker began to wear on my ears. The hard wooden chair was beginning to grind into my back and butt, and I huddled my two woolen blankets around me. I had to admit, gulp, I was getting tired.
That was when I began to notice I was starting to mark the crawl of time. And memories started to appear, like puffs of smoke, scenes I had not remembered in years. I remember the glacial creep of time when I was anorexic and in a vortex of emptiness. I would watch the clock strain second by second, registering the time that “would have been lunchtime” or the time that “would have been dinner time,” clocking them like the mileage markers on a long agonizing hill. So interminably slowly, it was impossible to think of anything else.
Another flashbulb memory, again I had not thought of in perhaps 5 decades, of being in a Catholic church, perhaps one of the only times I had been before. We were staying with some family friends for a weekend at their cabin in Bodega Bay, the coastal town famous as the location for Alfred Hitchcock’s memorable and terrifying classic, The Birds. We had a few family friends that were Catholic, and these were. I opted to go to mass for my first time and do “what the Romans do,” take communion. The hard wooden benches here at Grace reminded me of kneeling on the hard oak benches back then, in the throes of anorexia, my head beginning to spin. I was weak and wobbly, and again, waiting for the time to interminably end. It didn’t before I fainted dead away. That is all I remember.
I remembered years of depression, knowing that a “watched pot never boils,” but unable to do anything but watch the clock crawl. Running marathon distances in the dark, the 200 mile-in-a-day bicycle rides, things that were supposed to be fun, that were feats of endurance. Neglect is an endurance sport. I knew I could out-endure anyone at anything, and that was perhaps my one dubious talent. As I felt the chill of the high-ceilinged church seep into my depths, I noticed the music was not warming me anymore. I was freezing. And I was having all of these long-forgotten, unbidden memories because I was slipping back into marking time.
When I realized it wasn’t fun anymore. I remembered what I always say, “I am so grateful and glad we live indoors!” I have the privilege of choice about being this cold. I wanted to go home. But what would I tell everyone? I would be “letting everyone down,” and my limitless endurance was failing me. Had it passed its shelf life? By now, I had completed 12 hours, half of the promised 24. It was 7:00 AM. I called my husband to come and pick me up, so grateful that now I have a choice.
Imagining an infant, alone in the crib, in the dark. There is no one there; the cries float like smoke up toward the ceiling, and no one comes. They have no impact; no one sees or hears or registers their loneliness, their despair, their deathly terror. Attachment is a survival need, the human infant remaining dependent longer than perhaps any other mammal. Time is an endless, Sisyphean effort. The brain freezes, and under-firing becomes its default mode, as does a voiceless, impactless collapse. Attention blurs, quicksand. This is how the life of neglect begins.
What a blessing to have a choice. The Circlesong was a wonderful catalyst, but not the way I imagined it would be. Thanks for the music, Bobby! And thanks to all this healing, for having not only a home to go to but a choice.
Today’s song:
Fresh from a glorious vacation in one of my happiest of places, I was inspired to write a “feel good” blog this week. How about a story of attachment gone right? And with the luxury of having my mind free, I could float back in time to some happy memories. Way back in 2014, now amazingly almost a decade ago, driving home from the office, I was excited to catch an interview with the author of perhaps my favorite book of all time, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, (yes a book about food!) the voice of local treasure Michael Pollan. Since then, Pollan has become an even greater hero in my world for legitimizing and putting psychedelics on the mainstream map in a whole new way. In this case, however, Pollan was the interviewer, the interviewee being someone I had not heard of before who has since joined my short list: baker extraordinaire Chad Robertson.
Chad’s delightful and arduous journey could be my whole blog, so I will save it for another day. Suffice it to say, it grabbed me. I love baking, but I had never tried his medium: sourdough bread. Intrigued knowing that his recipe for basic country sourdough was 28 pages long(!) I ordered his then-only book as soon as I got home: Tartine. named after his now legendary neighborhood bakery. Tartine is near my home, and I was accustomed to seeing lines of patient people snaking around the block up to his door. Not knowing what the buzz was all about and never one for waiting in lines, I had never ventured in there.
I was soon to learn that sourdough baking is much like trauma healing, a cautious, painstaking organic process requiring presence, patience, time, and a measure of dogged faith. It begins with a “starter,” or wild yeast. When flour is mixed with water and cared for in its ideal environment and circumstances, it begins to bloom, it ferments into a bubbling living organism, like a thriving child. In this case, it is a requisite blend of temperature, light, regular care, and feeding, air. I am convinced as well, a measure of love. It took me six tries to finally “get it.” But once I got it, I nurtured it like a mother bear, and it continues to bubble and sing to this day. I bake about once a week, my husband having a requisite RDA of bread. And routinely, when the house is filled with the heady aroma of baking loaves, you might hear me wildly shriek: “Thank you, Chad!” I am certain he can hear me!
I also discovered that baking bread, as I was later to find with cheesemaking as well, made me feel connected to people around the world throughout time, who, in some iteration or other, made and “broke” bread. I came to love not only baking but sharing it. And particularly during the COVID-19 Pandemic, along with the cheese, sharing bread with loved ones known and barely known made me feel happy and connected.
On Father’s Day, I was peacefully stirring a vat of cheese and perhaps embarrassedly enjoying the fact that both my husband and I have no fathers and no kids, so a potentially fraught day was simply a gentle Sunday. I happened to hear a radio program that caught my attention. It was an interview with a father and daughter, telling their story. The young girl, Kitty, at the age of fourteen, had been stricken by a bout of ferocious and baffling agitated, doggedly treatment-resistant depression that turned a formerly cheerful and well-adjusted adolescent into a terrified, agoraphobic and nearly catatonic huddled child. I don’t really know enough to understand what happened, but her whole family mobilized into high gear.
Father, Al, took a leave from his teaching job to stay home with her; Mom, Katie, took over the full-time “bread-winning,” and her older sister and brother stepped up to both cope with their parents’ pre-occupation with their sister and help where they could. It all sounds a bit too perfect, but I will go with what they tell us. Al frantically tried everything to help Kitty, to no avail. Until one day, perchance, he happened on baking bread. And something piqued a spark and kindled Kitty’s interest.
When Kitty appeared to be perking up, Al cautiously invited her to join him in the kitchen, and slowly they became a bread-baking duo. Their product, before long at all, was pretty darn good. They became so prolific that the family could not keep up with it all, and they began to share it with their neighbors, all of whom seemed to thrive and clamor for more; and pretty soon were placing orders. Al and Kitty suddenly found themselves with a cottage industry that their little kitchen could not support. Soon, they borrowed their neighbors’ kitchens in the wee hours of the morning, accepting the loan of coveted oven time. And Kitty seemed to be steadily coming back like a plant long parched, finding its nurture and light.
Long story very short for now, the result was a little bakery, the Orange Bakery, which became a raving success. Kitty discovered herself as an artisan, a culinary artist, and miraculously quite well again. And Al retired formally from teaching and even came to think of himself as a baker. It was maybe a year, and the whole family began to heave a sigh of relief that Kitty was OK and really rising higher and higher. My best friend, so often a few steps ahead of me, had found and gifted me their book, Breadsong, for my last birthday, but it had been buried too far down in the stack, and I had not read it until now. Greedily and joyfully, I have read it now.
I learned that Kitty, although a good five decades younger than me, is another cousin. She was quoted in the book as saying almost the exact words that I have repeatedly expressed over these nearly 10 years: baking bread makes me feel connected to humanity through time and diaspora. And now, I would add through mental health challenges. She also is a devoted of Chad, although I have had the privilege of living in his town, and before he got too famous, seeing him around at his (once) new and grand Tartine Manufactory, where I even got his autograph in my now well-worn book. I also learned that the Orange Bakery was located in Oxford, England! Where many of us will be attending the trauma conference in August-September. I was thrilled! I will be able to meet them! Of course, I emailed them. I got a swift reply. I am not sure why, but the bakery was set to close on 23 July, so by the time we all arrive, we will have to rely on their periodic but guaranteed pop-ups. However, they promised to let me know when those will be. I am not sure why they have had to close; most likely, for so many small businesses, it is Pandemic-related. It is not because of Kitty’s health. She is now 18 and going strong. We will still surely meet!
Who knows what the transformative ingredient was that brought Kitty back? Was it the timeless magic of bread? The devotion and presence and steady love of the heroic Al and the whole family, really? The purposeful action and creative agency, the herculean effort of baking and then opening their bakery? Most likely a heady recipe blending them all. But I do believe, of course, the defining and ultimately winning “active ingredient” was the unwavering attachment that, like the starter, “infects” the host, whatever it may be, with bubbling life.
In our family, we had a ritual prayer before meals, the “motzi: “hamotzi lechem min ha aretz…” thank you for the bread from the earth. Although certainly not one for formal religion, I still cherish that.
Today’s song:
I remember when Mom used to get really angry at me. Well, her word was “annoyed.” She would come at me with that really stern face and exclaim, “Ach! Do me a favor!” Sometimes if it was really bad, she would say, “Vadammt!” That was German for “damn!” I never liked the sound of German. I only heard it when my parents did not want us to understand what they were talking about. Or when they were upset. I knew only a handful of words, mostly “bad words,” and a few foods like wienerschnitzel, until I studied German in college so I would be able to read Karl Marx and Hermann Hesse in the original, which I never did.
Usually, when Mom got annoyed, it was something about food. I was always a “terrible eater” right from the beginning. I never liked meat, and that was our most chronic fight; worst of all was liver. Ugghh. Even the memory turns my stomach nightmarishly, and I can even smell it as I write this. (Why do parents make kids eat what they don’t like or even detest?!) The deal was I had to eat a piece the size of a quarter. She would serve liver with “heaven and earth:” mashed potatoes and applesauce, but even deeply entombed under all that camouflage, it still made me gag. More than once, I was “swacked” with a serving spoon.
Worst of all was the deathly feeling of having her mad at me. The loss of the connection was like a death sentence, and even with all the times that it happened, I invariably felt that it was completely and utterly irreparable, the end of the world. And I would never recover. The right amygdala, where the fight/flight response resides, knows no time. It fires its shrieking alarm each time as if survival is truly at stake, and this is it.
I remember the aftershocks of those episodes that seemed to linger an eternity. I was beset by a consuming “ennui,” a lovely French-sounding word I learned only much later; a bottomless pit of despair, hopelessness and confusion. I felt that I had no right and no reason to exist, and I was frantic to figure out how to earn or rent the patch of ground I might occupy on the planet. Why did they have me? Well, I knew from Dad it was imperative to replace the six million. But for Mom, I had no clue. She seemed so sad and so anxious much of the time. I knew it was my fault. Later she said if people did not have children, it was because they were “too selfish.” And secretly, I knew I was because I knew I absolutely never would (although admittedly, to me, it seemed the other way around. Who’s “selfish?”)
For a child, the loss of connection is devastating and truly does feel fatal. Attachment is indeed a survival need for mammals. And the human child is dependent longer than most mammals, so the disconnect is survival terror. Each time it happened to me, the bottom would fall out what little bottom there might have been. And the blanket of “nihilism,” another elegant word I learned much later, the conviction that nothing matters, would descend like the arctic snow that kept us cooped up during those infinite winters that we lived in Indiana. It was like a chronic “passive suicidality,” wishing I would die but not wanting that too to be “my fault.”
The feeling that nothing matters, I don’t matter, no one likes me, and in those moments, I don’t really like anyone translates to what I would now think of as depression. It began to persist beyond those moments of aftershock to an episode with Mom, as disconnection became the “norm,” and she complained of me “walking around with a long face” all the time. Why didn’t I just have more fun?!
For a child, the loss of the connection, or better said, its absence because for many it is never known or experienced, produces this profound and pervasive existential angst, emptiness, depression and confusion. And most often, as children get older, it is compounded by shame and hiding, because there is “nothing to explain it.” A signature of neglect that I first came to recognize was the resounding “Nothing happened to me!” There is no reasonable explanation for feeling this bad. Only a “bad attitude,” a failure of gratitude. After all, “children were starving in Europe!”
Neglect is a universe of loss, of essential missing experiences. Most important of all, what is missing is presence. The attentive effort to see, hear and understand the child’s world and communications. I was moved recently, watching our young dinner guests with their 15-month-old. The little guy subtly rubbed his eyes with his pudgy fists, and they knew that was his language for telling them he was getting tired and it was time to go home. They knew his signals and distinctive vocalizations: which of the cries and utterances meant he was hungry, cold, wet, lonely, or restless to get out of his high chair and check out that little girl at the neighboring table. Their accurate and attentive presence and the ready response with the needed “supplies” gives a child a sense of value, “I matter, and my feelings matter.” What a different life that child will have. Little by little, he will learn to identify and name his feelings and needs himself. He will know that they matter, he matters and the reliable beloved other matters. Life is worth living.
The absence of all this and the poverty of “mirroring” endemic of neglect trauma profoundly matters and is a hotbed for every sort of dysregulation and every sort of problem, micro and macro. Mental health, medical health, sexual health, behavior, every kind of earthly woe. And what is most insidious about it, is that it hides in plain sight, masquerading as “invisible.” I am on a mission to convey that this nothing does matter! To inspire a “neglect-informed” culture and world where “nothing” matters enough to do something about it!
Because it is so well disguised and hidden, even or especially from sufferers themselves, bringing neglect to light is an undertaking. Like cheesemaking or endurance athletics, one must be prepared to stay the course and endure what can seem like a desert of nothingness on an unbearably long road to feeling alive. Too often, because of their often extraordinary drive, like my impulse to compensate for the blight of my sorry existence, by doing, achievement or outward success are deceptive masks. The survivor seems to be “doing” so well: academically, professionally, financially… they slip right past notice. “Passing” or getting over, they garner no care or help. Which on one hand, is a relief, and on the other, is a repetition of the desolation of invisibility.
Being seen, known, recognized, and valued for who one is are such fundamental developmental experiences. They are like yeast, or the rennet, that activate and incite ferment, growth and delicious appeal as we rise, ripen and age. Without them, life is flat, tasteless, or, God forbid, moldy. The most reliable indicator of neglect is an often ferocious self-reliance and profound interpersonal ambivalence. If someone is controlling and inconsistent or confusing about letting us near, that is a hint. There may be a “story-less story” lurking. Gentle, non-intrusive presence and patience, patience with what, sometimes for us as therapists, aspiring friends or loved ones may feel boring or lifeless, is key.
I have learned that my own boredom or listlessness in their company is a clue I must be mindful and attuned to. Because they are otherwise rare for me, these feelings point to contactlessness. I must look for safe and gentle ways to draw them into contact without shame or insult, or danger. I must be able to weather diatribes of devaluing hopelessness about therapy or even about me and intermittent rejection. They are “show don’t telling” me, as the fiction writers say, the story that they don’t remember. I may be inspired to find the opening to inquire, “what do you know about what was going on around you in your parents’ lives when you were in utero or an infant? They won’t remember, but perhaps richly know family lore. Then the plot thickens.
We must bear in mind and hold that they and all of it do matter, including our sitting there with them. To make the entendre even more dimensional and confounding, I will close with a quote from Einstein! He said:
“Energy is liberated matter. Matter is energy waiting to happen.”
Oy vey! Go figure…
Today’s song:
I remember when the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof came out. And a few years later, the blockbuster movie with Zero Mostel. I remember being rather baffled, wondering who would name their kid “Zero?!” Especially when I felt like one. Fortunately, young Zero grew up to become a great and well-loved actor. And I did not remember a popular movie being like this, all about Jewish themes. It was kind of amazing and validating. Dad loved singing the songs, “If I were a rich man, dibby, dibby, dibby, dibby, dibby, dibby dum!” I think they brought out the best in him, and he was never quite so jolly as when he was Tevye. He would belt out, “Tradition!” Made it sound almost as if tradition were a fun thing.
Lately, I found myself thinking about the intergenerational transmission of trauma and neglect and tradition. When taken simply as barren nouns: intergenerational transmission and tradition void of content, they are quite similar. Both are a repeated bequest through generations, a keeping alive across time of, well, something. However, one might be intentional, richly ritualized, even sacred, and laden with meanings. The other is compulsive, dysregulated, perhaps unconscious, even destructive and lethal. Each makes the dogged journey through time. And as we know all too well, they can even spill and mingle into some of the horrible legacies that, because of ancestral roots, can be hardest to excise and extinguish.
I was the child of two Holocaust survivors, who also each had their own iterations of profound neglect. My mother had a Northern German, intellectual, upper-middle-class mother who was coldly proud and proper. I don’t imagine much resonance there. And I am pretty sure my mother was raised mostly by nannies until Hitler blew it all apart. My father lost his mother before he was bar mitzva, while in the Shanghai ghetto. I don’t know much about his earlier years, except a story from an old family friend who remembers him running away from school in kindergarten. I wonder why… I have been the heiress to a bounteous bequest.
For so many reasons, I feel like a zealot; driven to awaken awareness, break the chains of intergenerational transmission, and disrupt the dysregulation of neglect moving through generations, wreaking havoc of all kinds.
It is complicated, however, the blur between legacy and curse. My father’s ferocious tenacity and determination are some of my most cherished gifts from him, and they certainly got me up some of the steepest climbs on the bike and some of the most daunting deadlines for my writing. It has kept me hanging in life-changing ways with some seemingly hopelessly rageful clients. It certainly also brutalized me growing up. And this is often a tangled mess inside of me.
My overwhelmed nervous system adapted to this spectrum of dysregulation by, among other things, rejecting most of the traditions as soon as I was old enough to make my own choices. Interestingly, however, all of the songs have stayed deeply grooved in the playlist of my hippocampus, and often visit uninvited. When I was asked to write about the intergenerational transmission of trauma recently, what immediately popped up in my mind’s ear, was a song I had not thought of in years, “L’dor Va Dor,” from generation to generation. I never even liked that song!
One of the most vicious expressions of dysregulation in my childhood was an eating disorder that almost took me down at age 12. I was most lethally anorexic in 1966-67 when there was little information, let alone help, and a poverty of any sort of understanding. Perhaps I was in some way trying to replicate my parents’ holocaust trauma or suffer enough to be worthy of existence. Who knows? But somehow, I was invisible enough to slip quietly under the radar so I could “do what I wanted.”
One well-honed anorexic trick was to control the food as much as possible by taking over the household cooking, which my mother was more than happy to have me do. So, I learned to cook. I made chicken soup every Friday from scratch. I learned how to roast a chicken to perfection. I learned to make challah and even bagels. I am grateful for this, as these have become the bequests, the gifts of inheritance I have retained. And whatever little bit of tradition I retain that I keep to this day (now that I am blessedly free of eating problems after decades of dogged recovery work) are the foods. The Jewish tradition of sharing food is something I continue, and it gives me great joy. And something about sharing food, giving and sending it to people I love, gives me an odd sense of organic connection, as my “handiwork” goes into their bodies. The recipes that span historical epochs and diasporic geographic wanderings of millennia seem to connect me with the best of my heritage, and sharing them was certainly a source of comfort and connection during the bitterest isolation of the COVID19 Pandemic. And continues to be. It is the best way I know to say “thank you!” and has made me many new friends in many places.
The perils of intergenerational transmission are well known. Resonating to a dysregulated brain, or pulsing alone into empty space, makes for all sorts of adaptations or bitter attempts at adaptation. My eating disorder was but one of a coiling chain of attempts: alcohol, sexual compulsivity, overwork, relentless exercise… Like a rat on a wheel, I kept at it. But my father’s determination commandeered me to stay the course, and I ended up with a pretty wonderful life. And the kind of faith and hope in the power of healing that enable me to shepherd some number of others out of the woods with me.
I am convinced that the vast number of “me too” victims and survivors can be at least somewhat explained by dysregulated, out-of-control nervous systems and poverty of information. Yes, we have grand dysregulations of power and gender inequality in this sorry world, but going upstream to deal with the dysregulation is at least one piece of the complex solution. But that is a gargantuan topic for another day!
In the micro, at least, I am committed to a no-blame paradigm. Certainly, neglect is a tragic failure that often springs straight out of the trauma experience: a failure of presence: attention, awareness and aliveness that, of course, fails to transmit to the hapless infant and child. It is not excusable, nor is the failure of at least attempting to heal. What would have happened if my mother had been blessed with the good therapy I have had and the evolution of ever more efficient and effective modalities, research and now even science? What would my life have been, and hers? We cannot know. But we must do better. And make safe, effective and tenacious healing available, even while we strive to make a larger world that is safe, regulated, and regulating. Meanwhile, if not for this rich inheritance, what on earth would I have to write about?
Today’s song:
Oubao-Moin is based on a poem by Puerto Rican national treasure Juan Antonio Corretjer, and sung by one of my great heroes. Legendary Puerto Rican singer Roy Brown. It chronicles the chain of trauma and the legacy of the Taino people of the Caribbean.
People sometimes ask me, “How do you come up with something to write about every week?” I used to wonder the same thing about local treasure Willie Brown, whose weekly column was my reason for reading the Sunday paper. When Willie quit, we turned off that paper. Well, for me, it has become something I can’t quite turn off. I might be listening to Public Radio, or half listening, or even one-eighth listening, and I will hear something that rousts me out of my kitchen task reverie. And then my mind starts whirring with words and thoughts and, of course, songs.
That is what happened yesterday, when I absently tuned in to an interview with author Henry Hoke, of whom I had never heard, about his new book, Open Throat. Intriguing as it is, narrated by a cougar, the book did not quite sound to my taste in spite of the interviewer’s raves. However, hearing that one of the towns in the book was called “Scare-City,” which, of course, is a brilliant play on scarcity. I thought, “Wow! I wish I could claim that brilliant turn of phrase!” And it got me to thinking about the terror of not enough, which is a scar on the soul, body and brain of the neglected child. I, for one, was born and raised in Scare-City.
I began to think about the nameless quaking terror of not enough. It is no wonder that I chose anorexia. Better to eat nothing than feel the rumbling panic of insufficiency. And, of course. I was insufficient, inadequate, not enough, always driven to do more, do more, do more, vestiges of which still somewhat dog me. And no wonder it never felt safe to share or lend. Sharing, I was convinced there would not be enough for me. Lending, my things would come back diminished, wrecked or not at all. It was safer to kiss it off and only lend what I might be ready to part with or never see again, hide behind a pretext of generosity and give it instead, or buy the prospective borrower their own of whatever it was. Other people could not be trusted where “enough” for me was concerned. I remember my therapist’s enduring patience with trying to convince me that perhaps, in fact, there is enough to go around. Our family was ruled by “zero-sum.” Wherever possible, I opted out of the competition.
Neglect is, in fact, an impoverished city. No wonder so many neglect survivors I know are scrupulously thrifty, sometimes even appearing needlessly stingy, at least with themselves. Or family finances, division of labor and other resources are a challenge for relationships. Of course! Poverty is no fun at all. Is self-reliance a kind of hoarding? Or an insurance policy to huddle around myself against the danger of famine?
Lately, I have had occasion to dialog with grief expert Edy Nathan. I had never thought explicitly about the apparent sisterhood between neglect and grief. The two are united by loss. Neglect is about the loss of what most likely never was, what should have been, or maybe what was for a while, and then no longer. I realized long after the fact that my protracted grief about the loss of my first love was in fact, the boundless and nameless grief of “motherless-ness.” Other than that, or until then, loss simply evoked numbing. I felt nothing. Even though I was not literally motherless, I felt such a void of loneliness, an inexplicable quaking broken heartedness, that only found expression, if for a long time misdirected, reeling from another lost love. Grief is a hard sell! Recovering from romantic heartbreak is so dramatic, especially the first time, it is next to impossible to think of it as something else.
In therapy and in parenting, the task is regulation. That is the royal road to sufficiency, to equilibrium, to balance, to “enough,” whether it be, doing or getting enough. Although I have thought of myself, perhaps flattered myself? Thinking I am pretty darn emotionally intelligent. Perhaps about some emotions or some people’s emotions, I am. But about grief, which lies at the heart of neglect, not so much! I have a lot to learn. And unprocessed grief, where does it go? As we know all too well, it will show itself somewhere.
I have never heard anything even vaguely endearing or attractive about US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Sexual harassment, greed and opportunism were what I knew of him until this morning when I heard an interview with documentary filmmaker Michael Kirk who has recently unveiled a movie about him the man. Hearing his story broke my heart. Born in a small rural town, so poor that there was not only a lack of food but no running water -even toilets. He was fatherless, unwanted by his mother and then grandparents, his cohorts in his attempt at the seminary, and his high-powered colleagues at Yale Law. Even ostracized by his black peers for being “too” dark-skinned, he was rejected everywhere. Thomas never was enough, never achieved enough, and never got nearly enough. The culmination of the haunting unending deprivation, the continued gnawing of ravenous hunger of every iteration must be what spawned the impulse to stockpile and squirrel away to somehow ensure safety and survival. Hardening against heartbreak or need, the attempt to somehow feel a modicum of power, all added up to what is almost a caricature of the neglect adaptation, the despicable character I have read and heard about in the news for years.
The word “regulation” has become very “buzzy” in the last couple of years. I am almost hesitant to use it as it has become almost as hackneyed and tired as “pivot,” “double down” and “deep dive.” Oy vey! How do these expressions become so viral? And I fear regulation could lose its crucial meaning if it has not already.
By regulation, we mean the ability to return to a calm equilibrium after having become activated in one direction or the other. It is the capacity or fluency for calming down after becoming agitated, anxious, aroused, or thawing and returning to presence after a freeze.
Regulation, or “self-regulation”, is the ability to fluidly and naturally move between states. An infant learns to return to a baseline calm, initially by being calmed by a regulating other. That is how we develop the circuitry, how the brain and body learn the pathways, which we ultimately become able to replicate it on our own, -eventually. Certainly not overnight! And as parents of adolescents know, it is phased work and goes on for years to greater and lesser degrees.
The failure of regulation by a present, attentive, and hopefully caring and consistent other sets the stage for all sorts of aberrations that may show themselves and persist in the body, emotion and behavior. And may indeed add up to being one way or another out of control. Thomas shows every indication of that. Which certainly does not excuse his terrible behavior, (even only what we know about.) And clearly, this contradiction between outrage and sympathy again is among the many complications and tangles of healing at both the micro and macro level. Long story short, regulation is the answer.
For those interested, the Clarence Thomas documentary is free and available for streaming on Youtube. I have not watched it yet, but I plan to.
That is enough for today. I wonder what “Da Mayor,” Willie Brown is up to!
Today’s song:
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