With some dismay I read a recent article that the US game giant Hasbro is unveiling its new and updated version of the familiar board game Monopoly. Although we only lived in parts of the country with snowy winters until I was seven, I can remember sitting in the cozy basement with my sister for long hours playing monopoly. The game was surely long enough to fill a long housebound afternoon. Of the tokens or markers used to advance around the board, I always chose the old shoe, for some reason. And I liked the pink $5.00 bills even though they were not worth as much, because I always loved pink. All that buying and selling made arithmetic, never my strong suit, and certainly not usually my favorite intellectual skill, pretty fun. My parents were probably upstairs. If they ever played a board game it was Scrabble, and it never included us. Monopoly 2.0, about to hit the market, has offloaded the banking function to an app the players download to their smart phones. No more pink fives or pale gold hundreds. No more practice adding and subtracting. The most valuable properties, Boardwalk and Park Place are a rocket launch pad, and the moon. The old shoe is replaced by a VR roller coaster. You get the idea. The twenty first Century edition is designed to go much more quickly. No more snow-bound lazy afternoons floating like snowflakes. I guess I am feeling my age.
Several weeks ago, the Sunday New York Times still lay loosely stacked on the kitchen table with one of its numerous feature sections on top. I try to stay away from reading the Times because I could easily get lost in it, spending time that I really cannot spare. With great self-discipline I limit myself to the irresistible Book Review and occasionally indulge myself and flip through the rather amazing, glossy fashion section. But this headline caught my eye: “Weapons of Mass Distraction.” I never did read the article, but grabbed the title. What a great line! I wish I could claim it. Instead, I am “borrowing it”, hopeful that the Intellectual Property police won’t come after me. And I trust that my well-informed team will keep me safe. (What a concept to hear myself saying that! This old child of neglect now able to say both “I trust” and “keep me safe” let alone in one casual sentence, would have been unimaginable most of my life!)
The essence of what is missing in early neglect trauma, and early is of course the key word, is the invaluable steady and reliable presence of the caregiver, ideally at least at first, the mother. The gaze, the resonance, right hemisphere to right hemisphere infant and mother is what activates the infant’s brain development and begins the foundational capacity to regulate the ups and downs of the nervous system and affective or emotional states. I learned about this from the greatest of the greats, attachment neuroscience researcher Allan Schore. The parent’s attentive gaze is as nourishing as food and oxygen. Especially right at the start: from birth to 6 months. Schore teaches there is no line, no clear demarcation between nature and nurture. Experience shapes gene activation, epigenetics is all about the interplay between biology and experience. It is all pretty seamless, so temperament and “human nature” are according to Schore, not particularly useful or credible designations (or excuses!) for the ways we might be. And Schore reminds us too that the mother’s stress hormones while pregnant are the sea that the developing fetus bathes in, in utero, and have their various impacts on gene expression. Calm, regulated, attentive parents, and later presence, are the ground zero of mental health, and physical health too.
Interestingly, to me anyway, in her seminal work Magnificent Sex, sex therapist/researcher Peggy Kleinplatz, in my estimation the greatest sex therapist in the world, learned from decades of scientific research on what are the key elements of satisfying, long term monogamous sexual relationships, that the top of the list invariably turned out to be presence. The focused, resonant and attuned attention of both partners to both their own and the partner’s emotional, sensory and relational experience were the essential elixir, apart from anything they might “do.” Is it any wonder that we now have a booming mindfulness industry, featuring all sorts of apps and gadgetry to learn and practice being mindful. Oy vey, I’m really feeling my age! However, I digress. Presence is the key to learning regulation in the first place, and regulation is the base that later not only enables resilience and relative tolerance for the ups and downs of this crazy and distressing world, but also some insulation against the lasting impacts of traumatic experience. I am not sure if the likelihood of traumatic experience is greater than in other historical times, or if it only seems that way right now. But in any case, some degree of trauma is unfortunately not unlikely in this sorry world!
When I first left home to go to college, I remember feeling my usual chronic invisibility. My parents were all wrapped up in their own lives, and I as ever, felt there was no attention for me. Of course, the impact of that is to feel worthless, the old “I don’t matter,” which is the soundtrack, the ambient air, of neglect. Many have heard me say it before, the only thing that changed in my parent’s world, was that my mom had to hire a cleaning person. So, I guess it registered in some way what I had quietly been doing for years. Admittedly I had my own motives as well as simply the effort to be a “good girl.” Keeping my mother calm by maintaining a modicum of order and cleanliness in our environment would most likely serve me. She would be less likely to be harsh, anxious or simply irritable. Unwittingly in an ironic reversal of roles, it was my effort to regulate her. For all of our benefit.
The first time I came home from college on a holiday break, it was the beginning of my “launching” and I was filled with all the newness of living on my own for the first time ever. My mom had not seen me in three months. I remember when I first came, rather excitedly into the house. She was sitting at the kitchen table reading her mail. There was quite a stack of it, and it looked like primarily junk mail and perhaps some bills, at least to me. For whatever reason, it was compelling enough that she continued reading, making her way through her mail, until she got to the bottom of it. I sat and waited quietly until she was done and looked up. It was about half an hour. I can’t say I was surprised. As I often say to clients, “there are no surprises with them…” And I was heartbroken, again, nonetheless. Clearly, I have never forgotten it.
I remember when I was five, looking up into her sad, vacant eyes, and feeling a fierce conviction already then. I never want anyone to feel the kind of loneliness I felt. I knew then “I will never be a mother…” I simply knew I could not do better. It was the only way I knew to break the chain of intergenerational transmission of trauma and neglect. So, I have profound admiration and respect for those that have chosen to heal themselves and do better. I want to do whatever I can to support that.
When parents ask me for one piece of advice about breaking the chain, I say sternly “TURN OFF YOUR CELL PHONE!” Clearly there was no phone involved in my mother’s riveted attention to her mail. But it is also undeniable that we are plagued by these “weapons of mass distraction.” I frequently see kids tugging on their mother’s sleeve, while she is glued to a screen. It seems I hear much more concern about kids’ screen time than parent’s own. So much trauma is raining on us daily in this ailing world. Practicing presence is a place to begin. As Amy Tan eloquently wrote in one of her invaluable memoirs, “Loneliness is not about being alone. Loneliness is about not feeling understood.” The simple act of being seen, of a truly present other, is a most powerful place to begin.
Today’s song:
(The Crazy Hurry of Life) This song by an old favorite group of mine, Puerto Rican Roy Brown and Aires Bucaneros, recounts some of the many things we miss when we are madly rushing around. This song dates back to 1979, and my childhood memories much further back than that. Clearly electronics are not required to be madly and mindlessly distracted.
The Nazi Holocaust is very much a part of my personal story. However, this does not in any way reflect my feelings about the current tragic and heartbreaking situation in the larger world.
Our Dad always said his first view of the Golden Gate Bridge was from below. He would reminisce that when he first came to this country as a young refugee, they sailed under the Bridge. The Bridge is such a majestic sight, it was hard for me to imagine that view, it sounded rather unsightly, even obscene, or like a scene from a dungeon or gutter. I suppose I was more accustomed to his unsavory recollections, but as I recall, it was a sweet memory. My mother, who arrived at the other coast, described her initial greeting as the Statue of Liberty, another majestic icon, with the famous words “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” She must have taught us Emma Lazarus’ poem, because somehow those words still echo in my memory. Especially now as there is so much commotion in the US about immigration, deportation, and who is from where. I grew up hearing that we, from the beginning, were always an acclaimed “melting pot.”
In my City by the Bay, especially with aberrant weather of late, masses of homeless huddle under freeway overpasses in windswept, threadbare, ragged tents. Almost daily I exclaim to my husband, “I am so glad we live indoors!” And that he bought our house in 1983. I complain of the cold here when it has been 41 degrees F (5 degrees C) which does not begin to compare with some of the freezing climes where people are homeless and starving, that we daily hear about on the news.
Being immigrants and refugees blur together in my memory. Both were confusing. And where identity and affiliation are chronic areas of confusion for the child of trauma and neglect, I remember the chaos of messages. On one hand my parents both were shocked and stunned by the sudden and extreme lethal rejection from the places that had been up until then, home. Shockingly and violently threatened, only the lucky escaping with their lives…the meaning of “home” became shaky at best. I remember the heart-breaking story from when I was very young, of my mother losing her best friend from one day to the next. Out of nowhere, adorned with swastikas, an up until then unfamiliar image, the door slammed in her stunned face. To me, yearning for the dreamed of “best friend,” that was particularly unbearable.
The messages we got growing up were messy to sort. We were on one hand fortunate to be “welcomed” here. But were we? The simultaneous messages were “…We can’t trust them here,” “We are not like them…” with an undeniable measure of judgment and contempt. “Fit in- but not too much.” Assimilate was one of those long, many-faceted words that stayed muddled. Although New York City, where we lived when I was small, seemed to teem with people of different colors, accents and languages, in our apartment building were mostly people like us, with sad eyes, numbers on their arms.
My mom had three record albums: Pete Seeger, Harry Belafonte, and Burl Ives. I did love the Calypso rhythms most. The child of neglect categorically feels like a lonely outsider even in the family, even at home. The bustling outside world where I did not really belong anywhere, was like a concentric ripple in the pond, that continued undulating outward. My mom, vociferous about Civil Rights, my dad advocating for more money for the underpaid African American (then referred to as Negro) custodian at his work; those were some important and deeply remembered messages.
And there were others. Ironically however, my first serious boyfriend when I was fourteen, was Chinese American. The fact that he was much older than I, old enough to be in trouble by today’s legal and ethical standard, did not register. But his ethnicity did. My dad having escaped Germany to the Shanghai Ghetto, where he also lost his mother, exhibited a prejudice that did not fit with the other messages I had previously gotten. I guess the fact that not only was I hanging out for years with a non-Jewish guy, he was so obviously not Jewish, was particularly objectionable. I don’t think my dad ever learned his name. If he did, in the seven years I was with him, that name was never uttered aloud.
My boyfriend’s parents were immigrants from China. I remember attending a few family banquets where many dozens of his relatives of all ages, teemed in a large restaurant private room. I heard barely a word of English. My boyfriend did not speak Chinese either, so we were both in the dark in the noisy Babel. Heaping platters piled with unfamiliar foods, addled my eating disordered mind. I felt dizzily out of place, and questionably welcome there. I, the skinny Jewish girl was about as welcome in his clan as he was in ours. How strange and incomprehensible this otherism.
A few holiday seasons I worked in my boyfriend’s parents’ florist shop, where I felt that same rejection of me. I did not understand what they were saying to each other in Mandarin, but I figured it was some kind of head shaking disapproval. Truly none of it made sense. Which is how I am feeling about the sorry state of affairs in the US now. I now have nieces and nephews who are brown skinned. I wonder if I need to be worried about them.
I remember shuddering to hear the stories back in probably 2015, of long lines of unaccompanied young children, streaming north from over the border, in search of safety, refuge, a home. Little children, tired, thirsty, hungry and under hot sun for hours on their little feet. Or waiting seemingly endlessly and confined, at the border, some held in cages. Without families? I wonder what has become of them. What will happen next. More orphans, more attachment trauma, abandonment, loss, disenfranchisement, loneliness, more existing in the world, or barely, without a place to belong, Much like our child of neglect, more neglect.
I remember when I was first in college in 1973. Cesar Chavez was organizing the farm workers to help them get decent working conditions, living conditions and a survival wage. Most of the farm workers were migrants from Mexico, probably without papers, living in hellish squalor, harvesting our crops so we all had food. Every Saturday morning a group of us were out picketing the supermarket, and trying to convince people to boycott – I think it was mostly lettuce in those days. It was our regular weekly get-together for quite a while. Without those migrants, who would do that unsavory work? We were fortunate that we had people who were willing to do it…
When my father was in his final years and he and his second wife could not care for themselves, he had a caregiver who was an angel. None of us could have done what she did for him, with efficiency, tireless kindness, gentleness, plenty of common sense and love. We all believed Dad loved her more than anyone else in those twilight years. She probably cried most when he died. Similarly, my husband’s mother in in her final years and days, had a devoted and beloved helper, in what was certainly a thankless task. In both of these cases and typically in this country – at least in my part of the country, these jobs are most often performed by immigrants and refugees from many places, with varying skin colors. Who will do this work if they are all cast out?
For many of us who are children of immigrants and refugees, the intergenerational transmission of trauma and neglect produces an ever larger, universe of nothing. What are we going to do?
Today’s song:
Another voice from the soundtrack of my childhood falls silent. On January 28 Marianne Faithfull died at the age of 78. Her song, a compendium of addiction, eating disorder, tortured love of Mick Jagger, figurative and in her case at one point even literal homelessness, and a general landscape, a continuing background or set of loneliness, she could have been my twin. I was trying to remember the art class terminology of composition where there was a particular and poetic lexicon of design elements, like figure, ground and…I could not remember any of them except interestingly, “vanishing point,” which I guess is no surprise as it is probably the element I could most relate to. So, in terms of the poetry of art and music, the best I can do to name that loneliness, is nothing. Nothing was the landscape, the musical or visual, emotional ambient air I grew up in. So, Marianne’s rueful voice and story, what I knew (or imagined of them) were good and kindred company.
Growing up, most of my “friends,” certainly the more lasting ones, were distant, not quite imaginary but certainly not what we would call “real.” Back then, the word friend was measured more concretely, and the cyber variety counted in hundreds and even thousands now, were as yet not imagined, or not by me. So, my little “circle” could be counted on fingers, and may have worked its way eventually up to two hands. But at least, unlike the flesh and blood variety, I was able to keep them, and not drive them out in short order, due to petty jealousies, real or imagined betrayals or disappointments, or irreparable ruptures. And my own little in-crowd kept me from the stark and complete emptiness of lonely nothing.
By now if you have been with me for any long or short amount of time, you are well familiar with my continuing explorations of nothing, and admittedly my ongoing search for a more fitting, perhaps more sophisticated nomenclature for Neglect Trauma, one more likely to be deemed worthy of inclusion in the categories of Developmental Trauma, more descriptive than simply the often misunderstood or too-narrowly understood category of Neglect. By whatever name, as with any of us, loneliness was the theme, the ambient air, the background hue, the backbeat, the context, the ever-present and constant companion from the start. And that is precisely the heart of neglect trauma, or what Dr. Frank Corrigan has so aptly named attachment shock. Hard wired and designed, not to mention in every way dependent on the mother and/or most primary of caregivers, their withdrawal, loss, failure, unreliability or simple but utter absence is experienced as life threatening, truly and organically lethal. The infant body riddled with the lethal terror, comes to “know” the sensation, emotion and somatic experience of nothing, as the known sense of familiar, as a homeostatic baseline. Nature’s design of what biologist Sue Carter has coined “Sociostasis” is unknown. The search or quest for such balance, begins. The children’s book “Are You My Mother?” which many of us may remember, is hardly fiction. And the lack of mother, the essential other, becomes the basis for the lasting and pervasive, often nameless and elusive experience of ennui, depression, nihilism, desolation, pick your word. As Amy Tan reminds us in her exquisite Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir, (Ecco, 2017) loneliness is not about being alone, but rather about not feeling understood. I would add seen, heard, known, remembered, valued.
Many of us grew up in the company of many, often perhaps “too many” others. Feeling not understood, unseen, unimportant, not known are the heart of neglect trauma. In the US there is much buzz these days about an “epidemic of loneliness.” Some social and even medical researchers attribute it to social media, technology, the recent and lingering pandemic. I have to wonder if the “hidden epidemic” of Neglect trauma is chicken or egg, certainly no pun intended.
So, returning to Marianne, I was struck in noticing that for myself, how few of my imaginary friends were female. My circle was primarily peopled with (mostly young) men. Growing up in an age of feminism, although I strongly supported the causes of women and women’s liberation which were certainly a loud and welcome presence in my development, it was never my primary lens. And passionate about social justice, I was preoccupied perhaps to a lesser degree with women’s causes. And like many survivors of sexual trauma, I was confusedly ambivalent about the objectification of girls and women, at least as it related to me. On one hand it had humiliated, cheapened and scarred me deeply, on the other, in some weird way being desired also gave me value, appeal, and a conduit to the also ambiguous and fleeting connection and admitted “high” of sex. That, and also as an endurance athlete, my omnipresent quest to match or beat the men…Oy vey.
As I evolve my model of Neglect Informed Sex Therapy I become aware of another “symptom” category of neglect trauma, a variety of gender dysphoria. This is not to in any way cheapen or dilute the profound experience of non-binary biology and psychology about which I have much more to learn. But I am becoming aware both in myself, and many other neglect survivors, a dysregulation/ambivalence about one or both parents’ disappointment or even overt rejection of one’s assigned gender. I remember somehow knowing and ever feeling, that my father had always wanted a boy. The story went, that certainly one of us was always anticipated and primed to be “David,” who never did appear. Many like myself, grow up in families or cultures where male children are decidedly more valuable and more worthy than in some cases the even disposable female. I think I strove to be (unachievably of course) masculine enough to please him.
However, I am also discovering in my work with clients, that some male clients recall their mothers’ profound disappointment, even rejection or denial of their masculinity which may have resulted in gender identity or certainly self-image confusion. And many have never ever before talked about it. All the more reason for those of us who are therapists, but all of us really, to educate ourselves about the growing body (again no pun intended, really!) of knowledge and research about gender. I have made dumb and sometimes hurtful mistakes in language and pronoun usage. But failing to see is that much worse.
This morning around 3:00AM I happened upon another BBC treasure that I had not known about, World Book Club. Wow, what a goldmine for a lonely bookworm child of neglect, that I would have loved in my lonely bookworm childhood. An interview with an author about a particular book; readers from all over the world, calling in and emailing their questions and feelings about her book. It was amazing. The author this morning was Meg Rosoff, I had never heard of her, discussing her (young adults) novel, How I Live Now (2006, Wendy Lamb Books). It was like an interview with myself, Holocaust, attachment trauma, sexual trauma, eating disorder, addiction, loneliness, sex and relationship confusion, and finally therapy. And the novel was of course about all that. I thought what if…what if I had had a world book club when I was in the throes of nothing, what if I had had that book then, or one like it? What if I had had a community of readers, like the callers I heard from Belgium, Sweden, France and San Diego, USA? Would that have made a difference? Who can know? In any case it was a great find, and can be accessed at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003jhsk
Marianne died at age 78. I will soon be 70. Does that mean I am in the evening of the day? It is true that the rock and roll life is a hard life in many ways, certainly on the body. And her run with drugs was much rougher and deeper than mine, thankfully for me. But with the benefit of so much healing work, I feel so much more like it is the dawn, not the dusk, well some realities of the body notwithstanding…
I write this on February 1st. My sister and I have a longstanding tradition, and now that we have text messaging, it is all the more immediate. It goes like this, on the first of every month, you rush to say to the other “Rabbit, Rabbit!” Now of course we do it with Emojis. Whoever “gets there,” i.e. remembers and says it first, wins. In this case the sleep disorder is a boon, and I almost always win by the simple fact of being awake. Although occasionally I do forget. Well, today after I beat her out again, she sent me a history of the custom. What she found was it is a “highly scientific fact (!)” that if you say “Rabbit Rabbit” as your first words of the month, they will bring good luck all month. Additional irrefutable fact is that in worrisome times, the more mentioned the better. So, Rabbit Rabbit to you!
Today’s song:
My husband bought the Miata in 2013. From the beginning, we affectionately named it “the Mouse,” because it was small and gray and could vanish at lightning speed (It was however far from as quiet as one!). I loved that car, not only because it brought out the 17-year-old wanna-be race car driver in my husband, but best of all, because it had magical powers over me. Like the mother I never had, it held me and rocked me to an immediate deep sleep. Anyone who knows my sleep issues, knows how amazing that is. In 2019 in the final year of my dad’s life, every weekend my husband would fire up the Mouse, and we headed out for the weekly visit, which involved a 50 or so minute stretch of freeway. As soon as I was in the passenger seat, and the top was down, I leaned back my head, closed my eyes and poof I was deliciously out. Both directions. The Mouse made those visits bearable.
About a month ago, my husband was out running errands in the Mouse, and suddenly he had no clutch, which in this, “The City on 7 Hills”, is no joke. My husband took the poor old car to the shop, and the mechanic said it would cost a fortune to fix, and that it really did not make sense to do the repair. So, my husband found a place to give it to, that quietly made the Mouse disappear. Admittedly I was sad to see it go. They even sent us an unexpected $2,500.00 USD for it, which is not nothing. They say people die as they live. The Mouse was no exception.
We were going to try to share one car. But my husband admits a sports car makes him so happy. And I feel strongly we need to have one car that can carry additional passengers. My Prius is decidedly good for that. So good in fact, that once when I was driving somewhere in Berkeley, I stopped at a traffic light, and a small crowd of college kids piled into the back seat. “Hey what are you doing?!” I yelled, shocked and startled. They thought I was their Uber!
My husband has been looking at the new 2025 Miata’s. He seems to be picking the blue one, so we probably won’t be calling it Mouse. The Mouse broke its clutch, it was not worth repairing; I broke my clutch and it was definitely worth repairing. And out of the breach, the cracked open space in my broken bone, stuff seemed to come blowing out, like smoke, but a stronger gust, like a genie from a bottle. All this material about repair. So strange how the body holds memory. We all know that by now. But ever deeper. Did I have to break a bone to learn these more primitive lessons about rupture? It sounds so trite, so woo woo…First all this stuff about my grandmother, that I had never really thought about before. And I never had a break with her. Apparently, my mom did.
A common little game that is typically played with very young children, at least in the US, is “Peek-a-Boo,” where the child’s eyes are momentarily closed and the older person surprises them when they are opened, with “peek-a-boo!” which in effect laughingly means, “I am still here!” The implication is, even though you could not see me, I was still with you! This is not nothing! It is a powerful developmental lesson, sadly missing for the child of neglect, who generally experiences the opposite, even with eyes open. The object relations people call this capacity object constancy. My husband initially thought the term was “object incontinence!” When he learned the correction, he continued to laughingly call it that. Although to me it is no joke. Quite the opposite. In fact, in my earlier years of therapy I had no object constancy at all, and truly believed I had to start the relationship anew in every single session (and for those first 6 years, I went 4 days a week). But I was convinced as soon as I was out of my therapist’s sight, I, ghostlike, ceased to exist.
Existence can be a complicated issue when one’s childhood experience is to be or feel unseen, unheard, and unimportant. I certainly always questioned whether I had a right to exist, or if I had to earn that right somehow. And if I had to earn it, well how? Or is it even possible? And somehow, nonsensically I could imagine, that although I did not and/or was not entitled to exist, somehow in spite of that, everything bad or wrong, was my fault. How on earth does that work? Well in my dysregulated little universe, I could believe both. And interestingly, even after all these years, when wildly activated by my recent injury, I obsessively begged my husband to keep telling me over and over again, “it is not your fault!” And even then, I was hard pressed to believe it.
So strange how our memory works, and especially trauma memory. I kept having momentary auditory flashbacks of little phrases my dad used to often say. He would laugh, finding himself so clever and funny: “Get your drum and beat it!” “Take a slow boat to China!” Don’t call us, we’ll call you!” Or worst of all, “I’m going to cut your water off!” (??) Clearly, I was a bother, no, worse: an annoyance, a blight, not someone who he wanted to have around. I guess I did exist that much.
Interestingly however, I had no memory of anything my grandmother ever said. No memory of her voice or accent at all, even though I spent quite a bit of time with her. She was a cool, formal, emotionally unexpressive, physically wooden and unaffectionate upper middle class intellectual Northern German woman. And actually also, quite child-like. In many ways, I mothered her, I would hug her and hold her hand, which she awkwardly but seemingly gratefully loved, and I made dresses for her, which she proudly wore and showed off about.
Both times I was in Oxford, I excitedly told everyone I met “my grandmother was one of the first women to graduate from this esteemed university!” Walking around the ancient and echoing halls, clacking in my “sensible shoes” reminiscent of hers, I thought of her as a 19 year old, a 20 year old, filled with vision and anticipation of what her life would bring, not knowing that she would be met with death, terror and destruction on a grand scale, that she would lose her husband young and spend the last 60 years of her life alone. How odd, that I had no memory of her voice or any words she said to me at all. Until the recent night when out of the triggered activation, out of the breach, the crevasse, the crack in my arm, I heard her voice, loudly, sternly, yelling at my mother “DON’T do it!! Eva, I am telling you DON”T marry that man! DON’T DO IT!” I had always known, our dad never let us forget, that she had tried to talk them out of getting married, right from the start, even on their wedding day. He had not graduated from high school; he came from poor and uneducated beginnings. We all always believed those were the reasons…Dad was bitter about it, and they had a strained relationship all her life. Suddenly that night I had a feeling, she “knew” something else.
Something happened to me that night, I began to have a whole new view of my mother. The little girl sitting alone on a train out of Germany, sent away to save her life, not knowing if she would ever see any of her family again. I had thought about that many times. But I thought of the young woman, who not that much later, met this good-looking guy with an, in some ways, similar background, and who wanted to marry her. By then she was 26. She probably thought her window was closing, who else might ever want to marry her? It was 1949. The war ended in 1945. Her trauma was fresh and unprocessed (not that it ever was). Her mother presented her with a new and freshly devastating dilemma without solution. And she made her choice. Suddenly out of the shock and pain of my cracked open bone, I had visions of her early attachment with the cold, childlike woman, the later impossible choice, and I wept a new depth of empathic tears, compassion for her.
After this late night, protracted spontaneous catharsis, I fell asleep. And in the morning, I felt different. I had always felt that the one regret of my life, was that I had never made my peace with my mother. She died so quickly, there was no time. It took a traumatic accident and somehow out of the brokenness, came an unanticipated compassion and forgiveness, one that I never thought I would achieve. It’s not my fault, it’s not her fault. The long line of women, no one’s fault. Interesting how the word for the rupture lines of an earthquake, are the fault lines. And how out of my cracked arm, came so much reconstruction, healing and growth.
Meanwhile, my arm is healing beautifully. I am so much better! And I got this. A lineage of traumatized women, and I have the privilege of climbing out of it, and with a body offering this story about healing to tell.
Today’s song:
Got to get something done today
Give accomplishment a shot
Might not have a full palette to use
But I’m gonna paint with the colors I’ve got
Bruce Hornsby, This Too Shall Pass
Usually, the wee hours are a time of quiet solitude, productivity and comfort for me. I guess those three things have always gone together. And I guess I realize that the magic of their success depends on having all three. One missing ingredient and the whole thing falls apart. This seemed to be one of those mornings where for the life of me, I could not get anything to “work.” And I could not seem to settle down. One of the advantages of this one finger typing is that everything is so glacially slow that it facilitates or perhaps imposes a heightened level of awareness. It reminds me of those mindfulness practices that I always found unbearable or stupid, where we had to chew one raisin 100 times. I figured you have to be on acid to get anything out of that.
I broke my right arm once before. It was 1974, I was 19. I was cheating on my boyfriend with a guy I met on the bus. It was that eye contact thing. Eye contact is powerfully erotic and connecting. That is why children of neglect tend to avoid it like the plague. It was one of the first “markers” of neglect I came to notice. We avoid it because it tickles the unremembered memory or the void, the missing experience of gazing. The loving exchange that is nature’s design, or first communication other than nurturing touch. For the deprived, it becomes unbearable to feel, to stimulate any of that. Anyway, that was how we met.
He took me to a Grateful Dead concert at Frost Amphitheater at Stanford. He was old enough, so we had a gallon jug of Annie Greenspring, $1.99. In the US that is a pretty darn big bottle and almost no money even then. And they did not have rules about bringing your refreshments, even glass containers, into shows. Annie Greenspring was heavily food colored sugar water with a massive alcohol content, masquerading as “wine.” Horrible but it definitely “worked.” I fell and broke my arm. Of course I had to stay until the end of the show, I was feeling no pain anyway. By the end my arm had ballooned to a grotesque size. He took me to “Rock Medicine,” they sent us to Stanford Emergency where they put it in a monster plaster cast. This guy was kind enough to wait, and then deposited me at 4:00AM at my boyfriend’s place. Ah the hubris of the drunk. I don’t remember a whole lot more than that. It was my sophomore year of college, I lived alone. We only wrote longhand back then. My left-handed writing was pretty good. A lot better than now. I had no choice. Three months later, poof, it was history.
I figured I could tell people that story. It’s much more entertaining, colorful. About as useful as any other drunkalog you hear at an AA meeting. You get a laugh, that is that. It wasn’t making me laugh, however, this morning.
Most people who know me know I always have a song in my head, a constant and endless backbeat. Now with my aging memory, sometimes I only get a fragment, or a fitting phrase. This morning it was a few incomplete lines from a Bruce Hornsby song I could not place: “Got to get something done today, give accomplishment a shot – full palette to use – gonna paint with the colors I’ve got…” I could not remember any more of it, but somehow, I did remember which album. I wasted a lot of time on a fruitless search, until I thought to simply enter the fragments I did remember, and the wonders of Google took me to a YouTube video of the song. I watched it, listened to it, again and again. And the clouds began to break, I could feel this quaking in my belly, and I could think. I thought, oh yes. This is that primordial emptiness, the nothing. Without the “benefit,” the cloaking disguise of alcohol, food, sex, compulsive exercise, work…This is the darkness I had so effectively mostly eluded, defended against. I know no better word than nothing. This is what I can tell you about. The song broke through it.
I watched Bruce’s hands on the piano. I have always profoundly admired and appreciated those hands, not only his genius, but the hours and hours I imagined he spent alone practicing. What it would have meant for him to injure an arm or hand, wondering if he ever had. But mostly thanking him. And I felt better.
I realized, this is what I can tell you about, nothing clever or cute. Our defenses work. They create their own agonizing tyranny, but powerfully insulate us from something even worse. And we fight them and focus on them until we don’t need to anymore, at least most of the time. Blessedly for me, alcohol, food, starvation, compulsive exercise…they are all out of the way now. The last holdout, admittedly, is work, although an army of helpers and true loved ones are on me about that. I guess not getting that one to work for me this morning left me stripped bare, flailing untethered in space, the dreaded “memory” of nothing.
I remember back in 2002 when I was at the Sensorimotor training in Boston, and incidentally when I first listened to that song, we learned the Sensorimotor definition of mindfulness. Back then it wasn’t a household and widely marketed word. It meant part of you is in the experience, and another is outside of the experience, and able to watch, notice and think about it. The psychodynamic people called it observing ego.
Around that same time, driving my little old rattle-trap Toyota, I would listen repeatedly to my grainy cassette tapes of Bessel talking about the brain. In trauma we go completely limbic, into raw terror. Running from a tiger, we cannot think or speak. Bringing the prefrontal cortex, the thinking brain, online is one of the great tasks of healing from trauma and neglect: becoming mindful. Bessel, Bruce, they were my attachment figures then. Not completely imaginary friends, but not exactly real attachments either. Nothing like what I have now. But they calmed and comforted me then, much as Bruce did again today.
Now with a firing prefrontal, I can tell you, even in this slow, one-finger, hunt and peck way, that is what we desperately flee in all kinds of ways. Until we don’t have too anymore. Yay.
And I thought, “OMG you can’t tell the people that!” It is way too pathetic, my “expertise,” any pretext of usefulness to anyone – out the window. But I realize that trauma in all its iterations is a great leveler. And it is humbling. After years and decades of work I am unfortunately reminded or taught that there is ever deeper we can go. We can’t entirely erase that original circuitry, only build ever stronger alternate pathways, viable most of the time. Thankfully I am not alone anymore. And I am also able to share this with you.
As we enter 2025, I am pleased to say that 148 Ukrainian therapists, thanks to the stewardship of EFT therapist Sandy Jardine and Brian Spielman of the Academy for Therapy Wisdom, have received a gift of my ATW introductory course on Neglect Informed Psychotherapy. I am heartened and gratified to be able to help even in this small way. Hope and healing to all for 2025.
Today’s song:
I write this in a hunt and peck, one-handed fashion from my perch in paradise: Hilo, Hawaii, where the drama queen volcano Kilauea is wildly dancing and singing, erupting in her fiery, spectacular way. I take pleasure in knowing that when she settles down, or “pipes down,” as my mother impatiently used to say, there will most likely remain a blanket of littered pebbles: the cooling lava hardened into the sea green gemstone Peridot, which happens to be my birthstone. A blazing show of force and fury, a residue of quiet jewels. It is the bottom of an eventful year, that leaves us all with our own blend of anticipation, uncertainty and attempted hope. For so many reasons I am no exception.
A little over a week ago, as I was listening to my wee-hour BBC news programs, I heard an interview with Judy Robles, telling the story of her son Anthony. Raised in a traditional and religious family, much to her shock and shame she found herself pregnant at age 16. It was 1988. Unambivalent in her desire to keep and raise her baby, she knew she was in for a rough ride. She had no idea. Little Anthony was born with only one leg, the other missing all the way up to the hip. There was no stump even; nothing to attach a prosthesis to. But the young mother was undeterred. She loved her little son and undertook the unimaginable challenges of his care and upbringing. Being of color, fatherless and seriously disabled, little Anthony was up against great odds. It was a Hallmark attachment story, where the mother’s indomitable love, presence and encouragement inspired young Anthony to discover, hone his skill and excel as a competitive wrestler. By the age of 23, he rose to the level of US national NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) champion for his weight class. It was a feel-good adversity story of parenting gone right. I thought, “I have to write about this.” Fast forward, one week later.
One thing I have discovered, to my chagrin and admitted embarrassment, is that one side effect of “spine issues” is irregularity of balance, a fact reverberating with ironies for me. In its literal sense, physiological balance is regulated by the vestibular system of the brain, located in the brainstem and receiving information from the inner ear. I remember only a little of what I began learning from Ruth Lanius about the attachment-developmental significance of vestibular stimulation and function. But I did remember it was significant. And I was humbly reminded that much like the vagus nerve, the spine appears to be connected to everything. Balance, however, in all its ramifications, has always been elusive to me. I remember already when I was about five, my mother impatiently and irritably attempting, clearly without success, to teach me the word and its practical meaning: moderation!! To this day I hate to say I still haven’t “got it.” Back to the present: literal balance.
I have increasingly discovered over the last year or so, that my balance is not good. For this lifelong endurance athlete, it has been a humbling blow that I have intermittently “faced” or been in denial about. Recent experience, as well as visits with various spine specialists have made it increasingly and painfully undeniable…
So last week, we went out with my beloved sister and brother-in-law. After a delightful evening, we were finding our way to the door of the busy San Francisco restaurant, and balance eluded me. Ungracefully I landed hard on my right wrist. Thankfully I did not hit my sorry head, so my few remaining neurons were spared. But it hurt. No, I do not drink or use substances: I was not “guilty” of that. Clearly it was my own raw clumsiness and/or pathology. Already after the brief drive home, my wrist and arm, besides being fiercely painful, were hideously swollen and grotesquely bent out of shape. But worst of all, the fear: Oh no!!! What does this mean, a disabled right arm? And what disability?
My sister, who had seen me go down, was of course worried and sad. They had hosted what was until then, a really nice time. Admittedly it was a rough night. Thanks to the eight-hour time difference, one of my angels in the UK was available at what was 2:00AM to me, and generously stayed on the phone with me for almost two hours, when I was finally able to go to sleep.
Later in the morning, we went to the emergency room. It was Sunday, right before a major holiday, so it was a skeletal staff. The wait in the ER is rarely short. But we were remembering the last time we were there, in the height of Pandemic lockdown, when I had an unrelenting mysterious nosebleed, that my husband was not allowed for COVID safety reasons to wait with me. Thankfully all of that is long past, and I have enormous gratitude and good feelings about that hospital, which is conveniently right down the hill from our house.
The X-rays showed what was no great surprise: my wrist is seriously broken. Yes, it hurts like a MF, but not all the time. I scrupulously declined all pain meds, citing my lifelong love of morphine. And much as I love and admire Keith Richard, I prefer to avoid his little detour. And now I must find my way, for a while one armed and without my ordinarily dominant hand. Thankfully, our trip to Hawaii was planned and in place. Cold and tired, I had been eagerly anticipating it, now more than ever. To be sure, as a one-armed, unaccustomed southpaw, everything, if I am able to do it, takes extra time and ingenuity, and a measure every child of neglect’s nemesis: asking for help. The hardest thing is opening jars or bottles, that require steadying and twisting, so my husband finds himself doing a lot of that.
Fortunately, here in Hawaii, sleeves are blessedly superfluous, as getting anything over the bulky and uncomfortable girth of my “temporary cast,” is an untoward challenge. And at home I tend to be unhappily freezing in what to many are the temperate climes of the Bay Area. When we return, I must see the orthopedic doc who will determine the “next steps,” the ER doc being uncertain as to whether it would be a simple “permanent” cast, or the dreaded “s word.” It is wait and see.
Meanwhile, I must adapt to what I can do and not do. Thinking of Anthony Robles, of course I want to do everything as usual. Even though I am almost 70 years old…Perhaps I must have the humility to scale it down, and most definitely to continue advancing the neglect recovery task of graciously requesting, receiving and appreciating help. Fortunately, I have an angel for a husband, a phenomenal team, and wonderful friends to help me with that. And we have both the resources and availability for good medical care. So far, the hunt and peck is working OK for writing. And for the videos you will have to indulge me the absence of makeup and earrings for a while.
Meanwhile, there are much larger fish to fry in this sorry world of ours. Before all this happened, I was going to write about a wonderfully hopeful turn of events, and thank EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy) clinician, Sandy Jardine, and Academy for Therapy Wisdom’s Brian Spielmann for facilitating the delivery of Neglect Informed Psychotherapy to 148 Ukrainian therapists. It is a source of great joy, to make a contribution, however modest, to that misbegotten people.
My rallying cry for 2025 continues to be GIVE PEACE A CHANCE! And who know, perhaps I will be able to bake my sourdough with one hand? Or make cheese, if in smaller denominations? Let’s see!
Hope and Health, and Happy New Year to all!
Today’s song:
For many of us with sexual abuse trauma, our first “knowledge” of sexual stimulation, eroticism, or any kind of sexual experience, was likely to be frightening and most likely confusing. It is painful, not to mention distasteful to think of eroticism and childhood in one sentence. The very idea of eroticizing children is unbearable. But the truth is that stimulating even a young child in certain body parts will be arousing in some way, and for some even pleasurable. It is unbearable to even consider this. The fact is, however, that certain body parts, like the clitoris for example are bestowed with an uncanny number of nerve endings. According to the International Society for Sexual Medicine, the human clitoris is composed of over 10,000 neurons, although it does not specify the age of the person. Messing with that or other erogenous body areas of anyone, including a young child will be in some way arousing, and for a young child especially, more stimulation than that under-developed little nervous system is designed to process in its customary way, which is of course precisely the definition of trauma. So clearly from the start, any incident of sexual stimulation of a child is an “overwhelming experience,” and categorically traumatic. This means that the child starts out with wires crossed. The accompanying emotions may vary, and generally do, as many of us know from our own or our clients’ experience.
I remember when I was a teenager, freshly starting college, and certainly no stranger to sex by then. I volunteered with a community organization in my college town, that visited the women in the County Jail. I can’t remember if we facilitated support groups or brought books and discussed them, or what we did in there. I spent two hours each week locked in with the women in conversation. Early on, after I had only visited a few times, the women were all introducing themselves, and one woman said “I am a ‘sex-change,’ I used to be a man.” I had never heard of that before. Actually, I had heard of something similar, the “castrati sopranos,” somehow curiously, talked about by my dad when I was pretty small. This was the practice of castrating young male singers before puberty in order to retain singing voices equivalent to that of a soprano, mezzo-soprano, or contralto, begun in 16th Century Italy. I had not thought about this again until that moment in the jail. My reaction was identical, a full body chill went through me and I was terrified. I had no idea why, but I was haunted, especially being locked in for rest of the session. I had nightmares for some time, afraid to do my next shift in the jail, afraid that she would still be in there. I never saw her again, but I never forgot it.
Now that there is a growing awareness about transgender and all manner of non-binary sexualities, I am terribly ashamed to have reacted that way. I take seriously the mandate as a therapist, a sex therapist and a human being, the mandate to educate myself about a whole world of sexuality that I was ignorant about. I have made mistakes in my language, sometimes in cases where a parent has gently corrected me, sometimes less gently by an angry client. But my point is that trauma skews reactions, assumptions and feelings for a long time to come. Duh!! And I do hope my recounting of this story does not hurt or offend anyone!
Many mistakenly believe that explicitly sexual trauma is the sole cause of sexual “problems” and if there is no known history of sexual trauma, one must either fish for it, or has no “excuse” for the difficulty. I answer with a resounding NO!! Sex, as we know, involves a delicate balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic arousal. The sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system is arousing, the parasympathetic is calming. Harville Hendrix, founder of Imago Relationship Therapy describes this as Safety and Passion. We must feel safe, i.e. relaxed in order to enjoy sex, and we must feel some level of excitement in order to have a pleasurable experience. Without the balance of both, sex is no fun at all. Even mammals in the wild know this. They will stop their sexual activity immediately if they perceive a predator in the field, drop and run.
This means that neglect which involves a profound over and/or under-arousal of the nervous system of the child, particularly a young child, is categorically dysregulating, thereby destabilizing of any kind of balance. The failure of mirroring and reflection, the absence of feeling seen and known, the experience of nothing results in an under-stimulated little brain. In turn, as we know from neuroscientist Ruth Lanius, “the withdrawal, loss or absence of the mother is experienced by the infant as life threatening.” It feels like lethal danger, pitching the young nervous system into hyper-arousal. The entire nervous system may be thrown off balance and in effect dysregulated, which can of course show itself in any aspect of the function, including of course the delicately balanced system of sexuality. In any gender.
In our work as Neglect Informed therapists, we will encounter sexual challenges of many a stripe, including perhaps in ourselves. Again, no need to probe for overt sexual trauma, or dismiss or minimize the problems in its absence. For years I tried my damnedest to cross pollenate between the trauma and sexuality fields, as the trauma field seemed to have a narrow focus around the explicitly sexual. Now at long last it is slowly happening. Please join me in bringing a neglect informed perspective to sexuality!
I first trained in couples work in 1998, when I discovered Imago Therapy. After firing five therapists and wasting untold quantities of money, time and hope, my husband and I landed there and got some help. I am infinitely grateful. I knew I wanted to study and practice that because it works. One aspect of deep attachment work, which is so central both to my own work and my own journey, is the attachment relationship with the therapist. It is in effect where I learned or became capable of authentic attachment that I have since been able to replicate, filling my life with wonderful relationships. That was never true before. So, the relational aspect of trauma and neglect healing is perhaps its most powerful aspect. One of the ironic and assuredly frustrating aspects of that relationship is that if successful, we become able to fly away from therapy; often and certainly in my case after a very long time, by design, we lose the person! How weird is that?
What I discovered in Imago, and in deep couple’s therapy for trauma and neglect, is that partners can heal in therapy while learning to attach, and take the healing relationship home when they finish. That is another reason why I find couples therapy as so potent and rewarding a venue for healing the core attachment wounds left by trauma and neglect. And certainly, the optimal place to work on sexual difficulties. Invariably both partners bring their own share of dysregulation to the mix, and there is never only one “problem child.”
I can’t completely neglect the bombardment, certainly in the US, of this madly dysregulating season of consumerism, congestion and pressure to have an idyllic family to be with and lots of money to spend. Sadly, much if not most of the world has neither. But we all have a body, and I can certainly wish calm and comfort and joy to all. Best wishes to all and a desperate wish for peace!
Today’s song:
You are receiving this on what in the U.S. is Thanksgiving Day. I am writing it, however, on the 22nd of November, a sad day in 2022, when we lost one of my great heroes, Pablo Milanes. He was 79 which seems increasingly young to me as I rapidly approach 70 myself. Milanes was one of the two great icons of La Nueva Trova Cubana, the “new” Cuban song movement that filled the air waves and certainly the background of my life, in the 1960’s and 70’s, and the airways in my various homes and certainly in my head, ever since. He is also the buttery, sweet voice of my favorite song of all time, which happens to be a song about gratitude: Tengo. As I ponder gratitude, accompanied by that timeless song, I feel the grief again, about his passing. I don’t know his story, except that he ended up in Spain and died of blood cancer. I hope he did not suffer too much.
Thinking about his age and our loss, brought to mind another developmental issue that, certainly in my country, we don’t talk about, or not nearly enough. Rather, like many essential topics, we somehow manage to comfortably ignore it and then are painfully shocked and blindsided when it intrudes into our lives, as if unexpected. It may be in the context of our abusive or neglectful parents, or even benign and beloved parents in those rare cases: the gnarly and largely taboo, unspoken subject of aging. It is as if we don’t see it coming, and then we are knocked down by it. The U.S. is a youth crazed culture, and our denial and rejection of age and aging, is glaring.
I remember several years ago I read a book called Elderhood (by Louise Aronson, Bloomsbury, 2019) probably prompted by the changes I was beginning to observe in my then aging father. The author, a local San Francisco physician, commented that we in effect have two words for life stages, in our impoverished language: childhood and adulthood. Childhood is birth to, what, 25? And adulthood is 25 to 100+? As if these are monochromatic, stable phases of development. As one who has navigated several of the post-25 decades, I can surely attest, they are anything but steady and unchanging! Many of us are first visited (invaded?) by these issues when our parents start to fail or become more difficult or decidedly ill. Others of us begin to encounter distressing changes in ourselves or our partners. There is such silence and often alarm around all this. Certainly, the child of neglect never had anyone to ask and was always expected to simply know. All too often in the case of parents, the dreaded “Bermuda Triangle” makes its stormy appearance or reappearance. For now, I will say, that the essence of neglect is loss: essential life experiences that were withdrawn, erratic, or never there at all. And to some extent, aging involves a compendium of loss.
You have probably heard me talk before about what I call the Bermuda Triangle, the fierce internal shipwreck that all too often accompanies neglect. The seemingly violent collision is of rage, grief and guilt in a storm of crashing conflict, all at once and all authentic and understandable, each in its own way pretty unbearable. The rage is about all that was lost, or never there, the lost years, the thousands spent, the pain and anguish of years of therapy instead of “living.” All that we miss spending years climbing out of a hole. Righteous indignation! How could they have done (or not done) what they did or did not, how could they fail to do the work, after all, we are doing it! Why on earth not?! The grief, about our own colossal losses, all the missing experiences, the failures at connection and love. The way so many of us with early neglect, right from the start, began the “race” at a disadvantage; the grief about all that our parents suffered, that “explains” (does not justify or excuse!!) but makes sense out of their tragic failures with us. My parents went through unspeakable trauma, and most of it never was spoken of, although a lot was in dysregulated eruptions of rage and out of control behavior on their part. Most of us have the devastating stories of these episodes and are haunted by them. And then the guilt. Guilt about the rage, guilt about the impulse to blame, guilt about anger at victims who had suffered so much as many of our perpetrators did. Guilt about privilege, I have so much, how could I…blah, blah blah. You know what I mean. The Bermuda Triangle is a kind of torment in itself, apart from all of its various origins.
So why do I bring that up again here, when we are talking about aging? Well, I see it often, certainly in this country where there is a large generation of adults whose parents are hitting the stage of “elderhood,” where they are starting or rapidly continuing to fail, and may be asking for, requiring more care, more attention, more intervention. I have had clients called upon to provide levels of care and support that exceed their natural emotional impulse. A sense of duty, obligation, morality or plain fear compels them/us to do more. And so, the Triangle rears up again. I had the good fortune to have my father living in reasonable driving distance. That I have two sisters who all live in the area, so we could work together collaboratively, and that our dad had his own resources, so we were not in a position to have to make hard financial decisions that would directly affect us and our own families. Many are not so fortunate.
And I will also say I was challenged. Because as he got older, he began increasingly to resemble the worst of the father I remembered from my childhood, when there “was no me.” I would arrive for my weekly visits and his wife would say loudly into his ear, “Ruth is here! Ruth is here!” But he would not look up, did not register my entrance, my presence. Now it was based on his function, his fading awareness and his dimming brain capacity. But it was chillingly familiar. And I find with clients going through it with aging parents. There is massive trauma activation, painful triggering, more work to do. I don’t want to tell you it is inevitable. But rather I am naming something that like neglect and sexuality, is not talked about enough, and is essential to be aware of to stay regulated through the vicissitudes of life’s journey. It is nature’s design, and more work for us.
Some psychologists and philosophers believe that our terror or denial about mortality are at the root of many other problems. I don’t know if I agree with that, but I know it is out there for all of us, and is the price of loving. Someone will alas, go first.
As I navigate the crooked road of issues surrounding my spine, I am aware I must at least mention the personal losses, and for many of us “insults” we may experience with aging bodies. I for one have always had the hubris, denial and determination to some how feel indestructible. I was an endurance athlete, and I always said “I don’t have any talent, but I can outlast or “out-endure” anyone.” I simply would not quit. And I insisted to myself, that if there was something I “could not do,” I was “lazy” and not trying hard enough. And everything was my fault. The voice reared up quickly in my head, “don’t be lazy!” And I hate to tell you this, but now there are things I am stopped by, that I used to not even think about. And the voice might say, “you are pathetic!” But I’m learning about the natural course of nature.
So many things I was never warned about, or never learned about. Clients may come to me with shame “admitting,” too embarrassing to them, changes in their sexuality that they did not foresee or know about. I was not aware of how bladder control might change when we get into our 60’s, across gender lines. Energy, strength, vitality, intensity, all things I took shamefully for granted. Not to mention wrinkles, fatigue, bruising, unexplained spurts of bleeding, hearing loss, vision. Tech ineptitude…Oy vey! I now must have the humility and courage to face and deal with, maybe accept more help. And being a generation (or two!) ahead of many of my clients and readers, perhaps I can help, at least to diffuse the shock/surprise factor. Like the changing seasons, it is natural…
I will close with one last thought, a “tool” of sorts, if you will. Back to aging parents and the torment of the Bermuda Triangle. When we are at those painful crossroads or decision points figuring out how much we can authentically give, that is in proportion and consonant with our feeling, in response to aging parent’s needs: I ask myself, “How will I feel ABOUT MYSELF when they are gone, if I do “X”? How will I feel ABOUT MYSELF when they are gone, if I do “Y?” Then I decide. The one I will have to live with, is me. We don’t want to betray ourselves, or “fake it” anymore by over giving. And as ever, as with raising children, we cannot do any of it alone! And my grandmother used to say, “The golden age is not so golden…”
Here in the U.S. we learned we could get a lifetime senior pass to enter all the national parks in the country for a one-time fee of $20.00, simply for being over 65. A good deal for all that beauty! I am grateful for that!
Best wishes of the season to all!
Pablo Milanes sings about the passing of anos, years, change and loss as we age. Rest well, Pablo. Your music lives on and on.
Today’s song:
As I reflected on the upcoming domestic Thanksgiving holiday, it occurred to me that I have so much more to say about food and eating. Eating disorders are a lonely and seemingly endless tyranny, not uncommon for those with any sort of trauma, but I think even more for those of us with attachment trauma. And while pondering what to write, I ran across an article that had grabbed my attention a while back with the header John Lennon and Yoko Ono were Obsessed with their Weight, according to their old friend Elliott Mintz, who recently wrote a book, (We All Shine On: John, Yoko and Me, Dutton 2024) about his long and close friendship with them. Apparently, John journaled daily, and recorded that day’s weight, and the couple kept a rotating rack where they hung their clothes in order of varying waist sizes. I was amazed.
I remembered when I lived alone in a tiny apartment in South America, at the age of about 24. I was desperately lonely but my obsession with being ever thinner was a constant companion, preoccupation and ghostly authoritarian presence. With that I was never truly alone. In those days, I probably subsisted mostly on the cheap, local Gato Negro white wine. I remember I had a picture I had clipped of John and Yoko, the skinny iconic couple I so admired. I thought they were of that coveted species of “naturally,” “effortlessly” or “perfectly thin,” what I later learned some people wildly imagined about me. Little did I know they/we were comrades in this agony.
My eating problems began probably from the beginning. I was always a “bad eater” with my mom chronically annoyed with me. I hated most meat, but had a special and violent aversion to liver, and the second worst was hot dogs. The house rule was, I had to at least eat a piece the size of a quarter, or I would never be released to get up from the table. More than once I was whacked with a serving spoon, or chased around the table. My dad would terrorize us all, bellowing about his traumatic history of going hungry, or subsisting on “bread and worms.” And Aunt Gertrud, my elderly great aunt, called me a “dickkopf” (fathead) for being so unreasonably “difficult.”
I became decidedly anorexic in the middle 1960’s. In 1967 I was just turning 12. In those days it was still a relatively nameless, mysterious, unknown pathology. I remember only much later, finding one book: Hilde Bruch’s, Eating Disorders, that I swiped from the library and hid in my closet. It had pictures of little half undressed, emaciated girls with their faces blocked out, and a brief, unintelligible to me at that time, psychoanalytic analysis that did not help me at all.
Anorexia provided a confusing illusion of control, in a life where I felt profoundly out of control in every imaginable way. My chaotic mood swings, widely pitching me between what I only much later have come to understand as the hyper and hypo-aroused traumatized nervous system. However, anorexia was a strangely contradictory kind of control. Because I had no control over it. When I would have intermittent bouts of terror and guilt, that perhaps I was starving myself to death, I could not stop. And as mysteriously, suddenly I would be bingeing uncontrollably on sugar. For years at a time, I nightly consumed half a gallon (roughly 2 liters) or more, of ice cream, directly out of the carton, standing at the kitchen counter in the silent solitude of the night, until numbed and catatonic, bloated and racked with shame I would stumble off to bed. No one ever spoke about it, but the freezer was always stocked. And I was completely out of control and could not stop.
Although thankfully, I never became bulimic. I discovered endurance exercise as a seeming solution, at least to keep me from gaining weight. So, the other half of the secret was the compulsion to sneak out of the house in the wee hours and run marathon distances, sneaking back in, hiding my sweaty sweats in the far reach of the closet, and creeping back into bed pretending I had never been gone. This unwavering regimen of compulsive control kept me completely and utterly out of control for years, accompanied by the obsession described by gloriously slender John and Yoko. And the obsession was exquisitely effective in keeping my trauma story out of awareness for decades.
Now after years and decades of searching, futilely trying every diet and regimen under the sun, to no avail, I have become that elusive “naturally thin” person I never thought could be me. And I have come to understand, why we do all that, why we put ourselves through that protracted agony, and cycle for years and decades on a carousel of despair. Too many people die or make themselves very ill in the process. I am one of the blessed few who came out of it without brain damage (as far as I know!) or medical consequences that I am aware of. Although admittedly I have a huge rage and resentment about a (certainly in the US) profit driven eating disorder treatment industry that is largely useless; and the domestic food production industry which pedals largely processed and unnatural, “junky” foods, that appear to sustain the cycles and keep themselves in business. This is not to disparage or discourage those in our field who have found effective treatment approaches, but grief and bitterness for the many of us who suffered too long, or may not have had the positive outcome that I have had.
Especially from my experience of the eating obsession alternating or operating in tandem with my alcohol addiction, it was a no-brainer that both served a similar function: a flight from pain and consciousness, an effective way to not feel and not remember, and to be preoccupied with something else. The obsessions became the primary relationship in a nervous system unable to sustain a human relationship. So, the healing of course was a long course of relationship and regulation work. I was blessed with a brilliant, tenacious and infinetly patient attachment-oriented therapist who I stayed with for decades, to work the attachment piece, and many and varied modalities of regulation work. For me, neurofeedback and sensorimotor work were the most effective. But the relationship work was the most important, long, hard and unspeakably rewarding and worth it. I don’t work with eating disorders per se, although sometimes it creeps into my practice, and I use what has worked for me. I am always interested to know what others are finding that works. I know in our field, there are clinicians that do. I applaud them, thank them and wish them well.
So, I am immensely grateful for the way my journey has left me healthy, and very much the joyful “foodie.” I live in a town obsessed with delicious food, and in a region blessed with wonderful abundance. I can eat what I want and don’t stress about it. I am a home cheese maker now, which is another kind of regulation, the calming rhythmic movement of stirring, the protracted waiting while cheese ages, and the joy of sharing the wealth are all huge rewards. And for this non-mother, the fact that the medium is milk, seems to have meaning to me. I am also a sourdough baker, another living breathing food, that takes less time to grow and cultivate, but similarly is a source of joy to both produce and share. Perhaps On Thanksgiving I will celebrate stirring a large vat of Cheddar, or some other wonderful bequest of the world’s gastronomy. A day of quiet, peace and immense gratitude. Thankfully my husband does not mind the scrooge in me, and he reminds me almost daily how much he appreciates the cheese and bread, and all the sweet aromas. He is one of those “perfectly” slender folk that I had imagined to be among the illusory, magically effortlessly so. When I first met him in 1991, I asked him, “have you always been thin?” He answered unhesitating, “No! I’ve always been fat!” He suffered as a chubby little kid and a fat adolescent. Somehow lost weight in high school and has worked to maintain his seemingly “perfect” weight ever since. But even many decades later, he still sees that fat kid in the mirror. It is true what I learned from one of my great mentors, “Your self image is the last thing to change.” Best wishes of the season, whatever they are for you. And practice gratitude!
Today’s song:
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