I have a very hard time putting the macro level of trauma and neglect out of my mind for long. As the poem says (and I am to be sure no poetry person!) “-the world is too much with us.” Certainly true for me. Scarcely a day passes when I don’t strongly feel and proclaim loudly to my husband, “Thank god we live indoors!” Especially in these dark, wet and cold months. I am an admitted sun worshipper and have little tolerance for cold. After a protracted drought in the San Francisco Bay Area USA, rain has returned, and our prolific and notorious unhoused population appears more motley and godforsaken even than usual. I drive past one wind whipped tent city under the freeway on my way home from my Oakland office. The City of San Francisco where I live, has failed miserably at finding viable solutions, not only for the housing problem, but also for the intermingled mental health and substance disorder problems. So, we live with them, lapsing in and out of remembering and forgetting, much like all the other varieties of trauma and neglect, occasionally forced to see and feel.
I was pondering my end of the year blog as I drove to Oakland, the other morning. It was a truly dark morning, pouring rain. And for me, who has little to no tolerance for cold, it was icy. I am also a lousy rain driver, so I drive like the old lady that I am, in inclement weather. So I was concentrating on driving, and also brainstorming about the blog, when I somewhat absently arrived at the office, hurrying to get in, out of the weather. Walking up the stairs I was uncharacteristically met by newspaper billowing around, and when I reached the top of the stairs, I was started “awake” to find a very large man sleeping right smack in front of our office door, huddled under the awning to be out of the rain. I rather jumped back. What was I going to do? The rain pelting down, how would I get in?
I took a breath, and very gingerly said to the sleeping man, “excuse me…” He half opened his most likely drug loaded eyes, “Could I please get around you to open the door?” I was scared, but super solicitous and cautious, not knowing what sort of person with what sort of diagnosis he might be. He sleepily scooted aside, I stepped around him, shakily unlocked the door and slipped inside, hurriedly shutting it behind me. I got safely in and he rolled over and promptly returned to is slumber. Once safely inside, the outside locked door, and my double doored locked office, I sat down. I imagined I was safe now, but what do I do?
I certainly did not want my clients to arrive and find a sleeping, not too clean unhoused person blocking their entry to their psychotherapy session. So what do I do? Do I call the police? The Oakland Police. I did not have the heart to call them. What would the Oakland Police do with/to a poor African-American homeless guy, withdrawing from god knows which drug, very likely toting some psychiatric diagnosis or other? I shuddered to think? I imagined there are non-police homeless services that provide help that does not involve the law or criminal justice system. I simply did not know what they were. As I began to calm down, I settled on texting the landlord. And then calling my husband, so I did both, ang got some tea water going, filled with feelings.
I stayed barricaded in my office, as if there was anything he could do to me, all the while aware of how cold and wet it was out there. The poor guy did not even seem to have any “stuff.” I saw a pair of shoes, a mostly eaten bag of chips, and newspaper. I thought I should see if I had any food to give him? Money? But I did not want to go out there, and certainly did not want to encourage him or make him feel welcome. And to be honest, I did not even want to venture out of my safe four walls and see if he was still there.
A flashbulb memory intruded, I was maybe 22 and traveling in Latin America by myself. I was in a hot dusty desert town, having bought some sort of street food to eat. I was sitting on a stump in my reverie, eating my picturesque lunch. A small band of maybe six little girls appeared. They were dirt poor, dressed in rags and skinny. They began circling around me. I knew they were trying to figure out how to rob this “rich white lady,” even though I was a young activist “kid,” myself traveling in rustic youth hostel style. To them I was the rich American, they might as well have happened on Elon Musk. Back then I was torn by the same feelings as now. On one hand my heart was breaking for them, and I was deeply troubled by the way they must live, by the circumstances of this crazy world. And on the other, I was scared for my own safety, and somewhat “spooked.” I felt guilty, and also reflected on how did it happen that I was born into the life and world that I was born into, and they theirs? So often I had bemoaned my victimhood or loneliness and wondered “what about me?” Now it was what about them? I found a way to steal myself away from there. I don’t remember. But I do remember that feeling, and how it finished me from wanting to travel in the Third World” anymore. It was no longer fun or adventurous for me. I would find other ways to help. I simply could not bear feeling torn apart like that, the same way I felt now in the privilege of my safe and cozy Oakland office.
After about an hour the landlord texted me back. He said he would be right over. By the time my first client arrived, the doorway was clear and cleaned up. There were a few firefighters milling around the parking lot and security people in neon rain gear looking rather busy doing who knows what? I learned later, that the man had meanwhile relocated to a a neighboring doorway and begun to start a fire, but not before relieving himself, over there thankfully. Again, I felt guilty about my self-concern, and perhaps again haunted by the polarity of “me against him?”
It is an age-old duality, a timeless koan of relationship, certainly of trauma and neglect. Why me? What about me? It is all my fault… The mystery of who gets what and how the suffering is doled out in this world, and the joy I always in that signature neglect/self -reliant way, felt unable to turn away from the suffering of anyone, even those who hurt me the most, and felt the quaking conflict of feelings, the “me or you?” So many with haunting stories (or absence of stories) of trauma and neglect, wrangle with long, hard residual feelings: “They did the best they could…” Certainly in my case, my parents’ trauma, even the little that I knew of their dramatic pasts, were so wounded and scarred by their own lot. How could I complain, hold it against them? They didn’t do the work that I did, they did not have the advantage of being able to do the work, that I have had. One of the tangled and challenging tasks of our healing. I still have not resolved it.
The world seems plagued with these dualities, probably no more now than throughout history, but who knows? It is the “bottom of the year,” at least in our hemisphere, to me dark and cold here, but certainly not nearly as much as in many other places. And I have the joyous privilege of being able to flee to warm and peaceful climes, and rest! I hate to leave you with such heavy musings as we are all struggling with the mandate to be merry and bright. As ever, we must strive to manage both.
Wishing you the best of the season. Thank you for sharing the journey with me throughout this very full year.
Not infrequently a (perhaps unwitting) survivor of neglect shows up in my office toting a hefty diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder, (ADD.) They may have been so labeled by a know-it-all partner, possibly the very one who dragged them into this therapy. Maybe they were tagged with it in childhood, along with the accompanying prescription for amphetamine drugs. Never fond of diagnostic labels in general, (and particularly when assigned by one’s spouse or partner!) I listen with curiosity and perhaps some wariness. ADD and ADHD have seemed to be ready and convenient or “diagnoses du jour” in the last decade or two. They seem to me vague and ill defined, and frankly I shudder to think of all the kids growing up, often struggling on those speedy meds. It was only when I started studying neurofeedback that I began to understand a little more about what is going on in the brain of the attention afflicted. I wondered about the possible correlation between attentional difficulties and early neglect. Certain patterns began increasingly to make sense to me, as I connected dots I have often seen.
One of the first signature neglect “markers” I observed, back in the early days when my anecdotal research on neglect spontaneously began, was what I came to call the “Three P’s” of Neglect: Passivity, Procrastination and Paralysis. Particularly in the interpersonal world, these people appeared slow to initiate, follow through, complete things, and they were prone to collapse, feeling powerless or defeated. I began to see how these difficulties seemed to coincide with challenges around focus and concentration.
Studying neurofeedback, I began to understand what was to me a whole new world of brain frequencies. Previously I had been, aware of brain chemistry, and with the advent of what were then touted as the miraculous new SSRI antidepressants, many psychological complaints were explained in “chemical imbalance” language. But I was completely ignorant about the brain’s electrical pulses and impulses. Learning about trauma, I of course knew of the swinging trauma poles of hyperarousal and numbing. Through neurofeedback I began to “get” what that means in brain terms.
My neurofeedback focus from the start was on trauma, and primarily with calming down a hyper-aroused, terrified nervous system, I was perhaps surprised to learn what seemed counterintuitive to me: that attentional issues are treated by “training up” the brain. The pre-frontal (executive and thought centers) are firing too “low,” meaning at slow, maybe “too” low of frequencies. This seemed counterintuitive to me, as I had previously associated ADD type complaints with rapid shifts of attention, and hyperactivity, so I had previously simply assumed a speedy brain. However, continuing to see the co-occurrence of attentional issues and neglect histories piqued my curiosity. What might this mean?
I was always baffled (and sometimes admittedly dismayed,) by the way that my husband, the quintessential child of neglect, coped with the annoyances of all-too-common Bay Area bumper-to-bumper traffic. If we found ourselves mired in a jam, he would swiftly grab the nearest exit, jump off the freeway, and then follow a circuitous seemingly endless zigging and zagging route of surface streets, getting us to our destination probably no sooner, than had we continued to crawl with the glacial freeway traffic. But he always said, it was a phenomenal relief to simply be moving. Similarly, standing in lines was pretty out of the question for us. Go to a restaurant without a reservation? No way! Waiting and boredom are an agony for the child of neglect, and I began increasingly to observe this unbearable intolerance, the excruciating impatience and aversion to dead or empty time. Even if the alternative was pretty darn unpleasant.
I imagine an infant alone in the dark, the cold and vacuous crib, no one around; and the child not knowing if and when there ever would be again. Infants are not designed to be alone, certainly the tiny ones. The little brain with nothing to resonate to is lost in space, floating untethered without gravity, like a stray astronaut in a dark, limitless stratosphere. Terrifying, and desperately lonely. Attachment being a survival need, the loss, absence or withdrawal of attachment will feel life threatening to the vulnerable little one. Traumatic. I imagine that yawning, empty time is enough reminiscent of that trauma, as to activate it. Preventing or avoiding the stimulus, the reminder, becomes a desperately needed defense, a lifesaver. Thinking about our maze of urban circling in that way, made more sense, and certainly inspired more compassionate patience on my part. Many a child of neglect will default to all sorts of seemingly “crazy” strategies to avoid waiting. On some level it is for many, a matter of survival, or it feels that way.
Similarly, for the child of neglect, boredom is a killer. Sometimes even when the alternative is another horror that I have come to call “hand grenades.” I remember one couple I saw. If our session seemed to loll off into what might seem dull, unmoving low energy, the excruciatingly bored partner would shatter the placid space with a comment so outrageously provocative, or specifically objectionable to the other partner’s sensibilities, that she would fly into an instantaneous, paroxysmic rage, It was certainly not pleasant, but did liven things up, and relieve the deathly emptiness. Or him, it beat the alternative.
I also discovered that if I encountered a new client with whom I felt in myself a leaden weight of uncharacteristic boredom or sleepiness, it was again, a clue or marker; perhaps a window into the dark desolation of that probably unremembered but traumatically relived, infant’s world. For me, boredom is so “ego dystonic,” such an unfamiliar state, that it stands out as immediately noteworthy, and generally points to a sense of contactlessness: simply not connecting with the other. I then have to wonder what I am being invited to experience and to know about this person’s inner world. How much of their early life was plagued by enduring the lonely freeze: the absence and/or loss of the beloved other? The withdrawal of that attachment figure, is similarly hugely traumatic, and perhaps the “shock” of that, or some other experienced abuse, are the rare impetus or catalyst to wake up the bleary little brain, and bring a little “life.” How sad to feel alive via experiencing threat and pain.
The brain as we know, develops in resonance, the right hemisphere of the primary caregiver’s brain in a gentle reciprocal dance with the developing right hemisphere of the infant; the stimulation of the deep recess of the brainstem. We are learning more about how the incipient being and sense of self comes into existence. It makes sense that the under-stimulated brain would be perhaps sluggish or slow, that existence would be in question, that movement might be a godsend, or at least a breath of fresh air.
Because my “study” has been anecdotal and hypothetical, I have asked Ruth Lanius, the renowned expert on the neuroscience of trauma and attachment, if there is merit to such connecting of the dots, or such an interpretation of what I observe. Although there is no formal research we are aware of as of yet, she has consistently agreed. Meanwhile I strive for patience and understanding, and to avoid rush hour when we can!