Caution: this blog contains references to sexual violence.
I have always loved clothes: color, textiles, buttons, lace, all of it. For as long as I can remember, I always felt like I had to compensate or justify my existence, by creating and giving objects of beauty. When I think about it, what I most treasure and appreciate about my mom, perhaps the greatest thing she ever did for me, was to teach me to sew at age 9. She wasn’t that good at it, but got me started. And my home economics teacher in 8th grade was a pro and taught me the rest. Sewing became a source of regulation and even pleasure, and I made clothes for everyone. Somewhere I learned to crochet, and even when I was completely disabled and bed-ridden by my nearly fatal anorexia at age 12, I could not do much, but propped up with pillows, crocheted yards of colorful and elaborate lace that I would later use to trim the clothes I would make.
Not surprisingly it piqued my interest to hear the recent interview with high fashion designer Prabal Gurung about his new book, Walk Like a Girl (Penguin Random House 2025.) As it turned out, it was about much more than clothes. Prabal preferred to be called simply by his first name, rather than his full name, as he disliked the patriarchal tradition of carrying the father’s name. And he was hardly fond of his own father, who was deceitful, angry and beat his wife. He vanished and then turned out to be cheating with and later married Prabal’s aunt, his wife’s sister. Prabal, however was devoted and unquestionably securely attached to his beloved mother who remained his ground zero and inspiration throughout his life’s journey.
Born in 1979 in Singapore, Prabal grew up in Kathmandu, Nepal. Before reading his book (which of course I had to, after hearing the compelling interview,) all I knew of Nepal is that it is where people go to climb Mount Everest. I had never imagined life, or a childhood there. The youngest of three, Prabal recounts an early childhood story when he was three or four, and discovered his mother’s red lipstick. Having seen his mother put it on, he proceeded to try it himself. When his mother walked in on him playing with her lipstick, she said, “Oh Prabal no!” She gently took the lipstick from his little fist and said “Here, I will show you how to apply lipstick.” And she lovingly demonstrated how to correctly apply lipstick first to his bottom and then softly, gracefully to his top lip. Similarly, when he loved her, and his older sister’s brightly colored dresses and shoes, she let him play and wear them, which was certainly unique, I was to learn, in 1980’s Nepal.
Gender has been much on my mind lately as I have been studying some of the differences in brain development between genders, in preparation for my talk at the Oxford Trauma Conference. And because there is plenty of disinformation blowing about as if gender and gender non-conformists are a “fad” or a hoax, or some sort of sin. This surprising openness to Prabal’s early delight in what were clearly not the gender norms of his culture piqued my curiosity, and I was further to learn that Prabal’s is also a story of how a secure early attachment is the “base layer.” With that as a foundation, a child is somewhat inoculated against later incident trauma, of which as I would come to find, Prabal would have plenty. On reading the book, I was to find it raised further questions of great interest to me. Besides some of the more insidious variations of homophobia and intergenerational transmission; and pursuit of our dreams, or our apparent dreams, what might be our primary purpose, and even larger questions of identity.
Prabal’s school life was a wide departure from his accepting home life. His hostile father being largely absent, the loving environment with his mother and older brother and sister was accepting and encouraging of his being himself freely. In school he was teased and bullied mercilessly, and shamed for being effeminate, non-athletic, and not particularly scholarly.
In his adolescence, he was sent away to boarding school in Delhi, India, which was hardly better. There he began to have the confusing and infuriating experience of repeatedly being both bullied and raped or gang raped by the very boys who mocked him. Prabal rage and affront simmered and grew as he got older, although he kept the secret of the repeated sexual assaults, he did not attempt to hide his nature. He continued to love beauty: color, texture, fabric and clothes. He admired the traditional and cultural dress of Nepal and India, the deep silken hues of saris and other draped garments worn by his mother and other traditional women, and he took up drawing which gave him comfort in the brutal loneliness of his youth. When he wanted to pursue fashion design, his mother did not dissuade him, and when he was of college age, he departed for New York, USA, a young gay Asian alone in a big world with a big dream.
New York was only slightly more accepting, he was to discover. There he encountered racism that garnered the slur “Gaysian,” which is I was to learn, the gay Asian equivalent of the “n” word. Buoyed undoubtedly by the foundation of secure attachment with his beloved mother, whom he never ceased to think of as his anchor and his fountain of hope, he pursued the seemingly impossible American dream of becoming a designer in the high-end fashion world.
My husband always faithfully saves me the thick glossy fashion magazine of the Sunday New York Times. The photography, the clothing, the mysterious and now decidedly androgynous models with their curious and hard to read expressions, and elaborate hair designs, leave him confusedly shaking his head. He used to flip through them and say “I don’t get it…” Now he quietly slides the magazine over to me. I, however have always curiously viewed the pictures with interest, and seeing them as some sort of modern art form, both the designs and the photography. I am fascinated. High fashion, Prabal was to discover, is a complex hybrid between art and business. One has to find a way to navigate both. As a young immigrant with scant resources, in a vicious and competitive world, not to mention the concrete jungle of New York City, USA. With the necessary combination of determination, perspiration and undeniable talent he soldiers on.
I will jump ahead to the good part. After phenomenal ups and downs, Prabal makes it big in that wild and crazy world of high fashion with its unimaginable price tags, designing and making gowns for Oprah (one of his first great inspirations,) Michele Obama, Madonna, Demi Moore…to name a few. Ultimately his is able to start his own label and truly made a big name for himself in a very exclusive world. It is a great story. But it gets better. Prabal begins to ask the larger questions, what matters really? What does it all mean? He realizes he wants to advance the culture and well-being of his own people, and to promote and support the traditions and well-being of people from the Developing World.
Such important self-inquiry, what really matters to me? Fame and fortune, and the competition that surround them are tantalizing, and ubiquitous, and too many can get lost in the weeds there, including us if we are not mindful. Interestingly, and frankly to my surprise, Prabal found his way into therapy, again unique for his culture and in that high profile world, at least as far as we know. So, all that being said, enjoy your pretty clothes! I love my Prada pants (that I paid almost nothing for!)
Today’s song (Although this song is a different race, and story, it captures the same essential and unifying theme):
It is hard to believe we are about to observe the fifth anniversary of the barbaric murder of George Floyd on May 25th, 2020, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. I feel compelled to make sure we observe and remember him, even as he drifts further into a muddy haze of years. Admittedly I do think of him or am haunted by him fairly often throughout the year, an iconic reminder of the persistence and extremes of injustice, brutality and violence. I remember from my activist days, a ritual call and response as we honored fallen revolutionary heroes of Chile and Latin America. A speaker would ceremonially call out the name of the martyr, the crowd would roar back a united chorus of response “Presente!” as if to reassure them, “you are still with us!” The energy of all those voices in a powerful unison was a boost to our battered morale. “Your death was not in vain, your spirit, our struggle, continues.”
I do love call and response. It seems many cultures and religions seem to incorporate them. They are unifying, uplifting, perhaps hopeful. Yet somehow hope seems perhaps elusive these days. And how we do need it!
Neuroscience researchers Ruth Lanius and Frank Corrigan are busy studying the most primitive regions of the brainstem: The PAG (Periaqueductal gray) and the superior colliculus, which I know little about. Except that when they fail to develop, another missing capacity becomes the ability to predict. So, the failure to stimulate those regions in the earliest attachment experience (or missing experience!) affects the ability to predict. And thus, the ability to hope. Is there any wonder, therefore, as to why the child of neglect suffers bitterly, lacking the ability to hope? How could they? Lacking the stimulation of a present other to arouse growth and development in those regions, there is similarly no future. Dangling seemingly nowhere with an empty past, of course they are left to believe nothing matters. And events in the modern world don’t seem to help much with that. Have we learned anything at all since George Floyd gasped his last?
On the plane to Boston, the WiFi was spotty to non-existent. I was pretty much unable to work. Oh well…I guess I had no choice but to watch movies, something I rarely do at home. Admittedly I am not too much of a movie person, much too stingy with my reading time. But I was tired, so I combed through the offerings. I had wanted to see the Bob Dylan movie, A Complete Unknown, being a child of the 60’s who grew up with and dearly loved his music. I can’t say I liked the movie too much. I did enjoy the music and there was a rich dose of it, but I suppose I objected to making a centerpiece of his mistreatment of two adoring women, swinging back and forth, cheating on both, and appearing indifferent to either of them, or their devotion. I guess I prefer not to see the steamy side of my cultural heroes and icons, preferring their idealized images. But somehow it seemed as if the film maker by seeming, at least to me, to put such a spotlight on that part of Dylan’s character, was exploiting or making some sort of unnecessary point. I suppose I did not want to come out disliking him.
I did love learning or being reminded of how profoundly Dylan’s work sprang from deep roots in the music of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. And where Dylan’s love was most palpable was in his grief and admiration for the dying Guthrie. And I did love how Pete Seeger was portrayed as the iconic, all-around good guy. I grew up with Pete have always loved him. I was visited by the memory of the one time I did see him in person. I had not thought of that in many years. I recently learned that the sense of hearing, of all the senses, is the most richly endowed with brain receptors associated with emotion. We feel more through hearing, than the senses of vision, smell, taste or touch. No surprise there for me – I who always have a song in my head.
However, I was surprised to emerge from the movie with hope from an unexpected direction. I had forgotten that the rich ferment of the nineteen sixties in the US sprang from the muddy soil of the 1950’s “Red scare.” Activists, artists, writers, actors, people of every stripe were being spied on, vilified, rounded up and locked up willy nilly for being spies or communists, or some other so called “subversive” element. Everyone was terrified, suspicious of everyone else, and fearing they would be thrown under the bus one way or another. Thinking of the current state of the world, and remembering that somehow, we emerged from that horror and swung into a generation of anti-war sentiment, free love, women’s liberation, drugs sex and rock and roll, I remembered the history of humankind is a story of pendulum swings from one pole to the other, endlessly through time.
I came out of the movie thinking I wanted to call not only “Presente” to George Floyd, but something more. Do we learn from experience at all? Or are these pendulum swings nature’s design? I guess the answer is blowing in the wind. Interestingly I also remembered my dad used to sing that song…
The movie ended and I still had a ways to go before landing in Boston. I found another documentary, called Becoming Madonna. Although never a great fan of Madonna’s music, I was always enthralled by her dancing and fascinated by her character. I was interested to learn that Madonna had started her dancing from a foundation of classical ballet. I was amazed to see the grainy old black and white footage of the little girl in a tutu, on toe, in that tightly circumscribed form, from there evolving into the later dynamo and sensation she became.
That movie was great. Again, I was reminded of the tides of history, and how the culture around sexuality has whipsawed back and forth through the epochs. Madonna through brazenness, chutzpa and a measure of shock value, woke the world up to the beginnings of non-binary awareness, AIDS education, research and prevention, as well as sexual outspokenness and pleasure for all. History does waddle along, not always at the pace or in the ways we had imagined or intended, but it seems never to stop, and is unlikely to now, although when we are deep in it, it can be devastating nonetheless, and many are lost along the way. Somehow, I was able to emerge from that movie with hope. I wanted to tell George Floyd, “take heart”. We will spawn something better from your ashes.
Here at the trauma conference, I had another burst of hope. Dr. Karlen Lyons-Ruth from Harvard, is an attachment research rock star from way back. I have followed her work for three decades. Today she presented new research, that as I sat in the first row where I could see and hear everything, brought me to tears. She showed with hard data, absolutely everything I have been working hard to teach. It was as if she was providing the evidence basis in hard science, in effect putting the legitimizing legs under all that I had anecdotally put together over the years. I don’t know if I have ever felt so utterly validated. She was proving that early infancy attachment trauma is the most profoundly injurious of any trauma there is. And the inter-generational transmission of neglect trauma is insidious and must be treated and prevented. She talked about the dissociation, the scourge of nothing, the injury of nothing. Wow. So, I do feel a new wave of hope and conviction. Nothing matters, history advances. Like neglect trauma, invisible in plain sight, George Floyd, Presente! We can’t see you, but we know you are there.
Today’s song:
The internet as we know, is a wide world of “answers!” There is a definite answer, or three, or three thousand on any topic! It is dizzying and confusing for many who are looking for “true information.” All claim to be “it!” Truth! And stated as such. I recently read the quote from some erudite author, Nabokov or James Joyce, I could not find it, that stated authoritatively “cheese is the corpse of milk!” What?!! I was offended! Cheese is quite the opposite of a corpse, more like a re-birth that both extends and gloriously enhances milk’s lifespan! It was originally discovered simultaneously by many cultures as a nutritious way to prolong milk’s longevity. Clearly, wildly different points of view. Perhaps as jarring as the assertion was the insistent way it was expressed as truth. As a cheese lover and devoted home cheese maker I categorically object! But my real point is, in a world where every imaginable self-proclaimed pundit speaks with iron clad certainty on any question, how on earth do we know what to believe?
In my work with neglect, I have learned that because the child of neglect is so alone in finding their answers, they become profoundly attached to the ones they do land on. Self-reliance makes them fierce in rejecting the input of others, and often they insist and truly believe that they are “right.” Married for over thirty years to a child of neglect who was an engineer and a scientist, I was regularly regaled with long-winded detailed didactic “explanations” on any topic. In the bad old early days of our relationship before I knew about neglect, I would become deathly tired and impatient with his being the expert on absolutely everything. I have since come to recognize that this is a signature of neglect: survival in a lonely and confusing solitary universe. As a therapist I have come to recognize that when a neglect survivor actually wants to hear what I think or what I have to say, it is a blessed sign that we are making progress. It reveals a chink in the armor, a however miniscule expression of letting me in.
One of the first things I try to teach couples where one or both is a child of neglect is to speak in subjective rather than declarative terms (stated as iron clad fact,) although, teaching anything is often a challenge. I take pretty much as given that there are very few absolutes about anything! Almost everything is subjective, is our own experience/interpretation of the world. This can be a hard sell! John Gottman the marriage researcher pointedly asks: “Do you want to be right? Or do you want to be married?!” The power struggles can be endless. In the lonely world of neglect, however, there is only one point of view. There is simply no discussion.
So, what is “the Truth?” Who in the world knows? It utterly depends whom you ask, who you read or listen to, and/or “choose” to believe! Or even one’s own construction. I had a client once who was deeply involved with a religion I knew little about. She colloquially referred to her faith as “The Truth.” They truly believed they “have it,” as do many researchers of every (and competing) stripe. We have Google and Wikipedia “know-it-alls” who refer to their web surfing as “research”. When clients or loved ones defer to the internet as their go-to for medical answers when they or someone close to them has an ailment, I think, “oh no….” Much as I feel when clients or others have the last word about something that I may have been studying painstakingly for almost 50 years. Oy vey. That is today’s world.
My own workaround with this problem, is that I have a handful of people whom I trust. I trust their intellectual, professional and ethical heads enough to consult, to ask for an opinion or a reference. I never want to teach something that has no evidence basis, no scientific legs under it, and I live in the same multicolored world as you and everyone else, a cacophony of viewpoints and competing interests. For many, being “right” is tied to power, money, privilege or some other additional advantage besides the immediate gratification of intellectual acknowledgement. My small cadre of “trustees” may or may not know I exist. Some are friends some colleagues, some are noteworthy others, dead or living, who one way or another won my esteem and confidence. I turn to them, and them only. The child of neglect, at least for a good long time, flails at sea without that. There was no one to ask, no one to tell. An ironic spin on “don’t ask, don’t tell!” If only there were someone! It is nature’s design that there should have been. There is only oneself. For that child, there is no other truth. It becomes a kind of life raft. I know what I know!
I remember when I was a child, and for a good long time, I had this odd sensation, especially when I heard the news or read something about distant places unimaginably far away. Looking at a globe of the world, or different colors and kinds of people in National Geographic Magazine, I would imagine none of it, none of them were “real.” Rather it was all background scenery, props or “extras” in the movie about me. I was all that was “real”, and all the rest was the soundtrack, backdrop and the only reality was me. Oddly, I felt very much the opposite in terms of how important I was to anyone else. I never quite figured out how to reconcile those two.
Simultaneously, and this is what I came to recognize as a signature of neglect, was an exquisite sensibility to all the nuanced shift in energy, affect, mood, attention, body language and communication of any kind, coming from important others, beginning and most importantly with the primary caregiver. This acute radar was a way both of minimizing doing something that would put one in more danger, real or imagine, or interrupt hope for likelihood of getting something “good,” or preventing something “bad”. I remember well the hyperawareness and vigilance about all the subtle or not so subtle shifts in my own mother’s energy, body language, voice or face. Like a hawk, I was poised to jump into pre-emptive service. I knew she was sensitive, even jumpy about clutter and “mess”. If I scurried around ahead of her, made sure to prevent counters or tabletops from devolving into what she called everyone’s “dumping ground”, perhaps she would be a little calmer, gentler. Perhaps she would be a little warmer toward me? Well, I could hope, I could try. And looking back I did an amazing amount of cleaning…probably more than I have ever done since.
So, it is an odd duality, one of the reliable markers of neglect, the “one person psychology,” whereby one is both hyper-attuned to the other, and a self-styled “expert” on that other, while similarly being siloed, alone, and existing in a solitary world. It can be profoundly confusing if not downright infuriating to those attempting to be in relationship with them (although admittedly and often without awareness we are the same way!) I remember being so activated and hurt by my husband’s long and detailed conversations with himself or the dog when I was right there with them. It definitely hit my invisibility nerve, until I began to understand about the loneliness of his early existence. Another of the ironies of neglect trauma. I know, I know…the healing journey seems endless.
Again, deepest apologies for the lateness of this blog. I do know that I am not so powerful that my blog not arriving on its schedule is a “big deal”. And yet, I am indelibly trained not to disappoint!
Today’s song:
I remember when the Pandemic began in March of 2020. London Breed, the then mayor of San Francisco, announced that we all had to “shelter in place” for two weeks. I had no idea what “shelter in place” meant, I had never heard that expression before. When I learned that it meant stay home, and she was saying we had to stay home for two weeks, I thought “You gotta be kidding! I am not doin’ it! And certainly not for two weeks!” I figured I was an essential worker, and there was no way. Little did I know that we would be locked down for more like two years. It seems like a distant dream now. Occasionally I see a faded set of footprints once painted on the side walk, that says “six feet.” It seems unreal even though it was only a few short years ago. I learned so much from it all.
It baffled me, then, that nature somehow continued as usual. Here in the Bay Area, USA, the flowering plum and cherry trees begin their pink spectacle about now, and city streets are awash with gentle color and scent. I have always loved it. I love the sweet rosy pink, and as if a massive impressionist paint brush has splashed through town, it is everywhere. Never fond of cold weather, (and “cold” San Francisco weather is what many of you would call downright balmy!) right about the time when I am getting truly tired of it, I am reminded of the promise of spring. Some of the neighboring yards even sprout bright yellow daffodils. And the wealth of city parks large and small which are generously scattered throughout the city, are beginning to light up with bright California poppies. It all admittedly resembles emerging from a particularly miserable trauma-triggering episode, into the longed-for calm. Although a few more straggler rain storms are on the horizon, spring at last is near. Perhaps these cycles, these trees and birds, piercing and emerging from the bleakness, are messengers of hope.
During the Pandemic years, it always rather amazed me that in spite of all the havoc going on around us humans, the flowers and birds did not seem disturbed. They seemed to go on oblivious to the whirlwind of havoc and confused terror, not to mention loss and death that permeated the wind around the world. I do remember feeling simultaneously a sort of strange gratification. The whole world was forced to be aware and mindful of the body. We were aware of things like proximity and breath, touch and its absence, energetic physical contact, as opposed to a “remote” version. The word remote itself took on a whole new meaning. We had to make do with a whole new way of attempting to stay connected, which we have not yet really emerged from (here in San Francisco, I continue to be startled by the frequent whizzing past of what I call the “ghost cars.” They are the driverless taxis that are beginning to dominate the rideshare economy here. Last night when we were out for dinner near the ball park we saw what seemed like a procession: five of them one after another, powering past. That has become fairly common here).
There was also something oddly connecting during the Pandemic years: knowing that all over the world, we were all, at least to some extent, going through, finding ways to cope with the same thing. It was a great unifier of sorts, although I was certainly daily aware of my own privilege, of being able to work remotely at home, with enough space and privacy to coexist with my husband and his doing the same, and our two dogs as well. And the moon continued to wax and wane as ever, the seasons went through their usual progression, the daylight lengthened and shortened. Pink trees bloomed; the birds returned. I don’t mean to minimize the climate disaster that we are embroiled in, but somehow in spite of it all, nature was doing its best to stay with the program. As it is continuing to make its best effort to do even in the throes of noisy violence of all kinds that we find ourselves in today, including the internal wars, storms, earthquakes and wild fires of trauma and neglect freshly experienced and processing from the past.
In the western, Judeo-Christian world, there are major holidays celebrating spring. Symbols of birth and re-birth like eggs, baby animals and flowers accompany the more explicitly religious and spiritual stories. Similarly, Passover is a spring holiday that celebrates rebirth and renewal. And Passover is a celebration of freedom, freedom from slavery.
As with pretty much all the holidays, I annually approached Passover with dread. For an anorexic kid, being trapped at the table for a hefty four-hour meal, brought a whole new meaning to the “inescapable shock situation.” Until I got a little older and found my role as cook, waiter and bottle washer, it was excruciating. The one saving grace I came to discover, was the “Manischevitz:” the four cups of syrupy sweet wine that ritual dictated became a way to make it bearable. I guess that became my attempt at “freedom.”
As soon as I became old enough to make my own choices, I abandoned the whole endeavor. My sisters and their families have the grace and empathy to include me in the guest list, and to understand with compassion when I regularly decline. However, I do love the spring, the return of the flowers, new life: bunnies and baby chicks, and the reminder of the preciousness and privilege of freedom. This of course includes breaking the chains of bondage from a lonely, alienated and traumatic past, micro and macro. As well as interrupting its intergenerational transmission. I know I can never be truly free until everyone is free. Too many are still far from it.
This morning I found myself actually mindful in the way that the mindfulness teachers people remind us to be, basking in the immense pleasure of a hot shower, of washing my hair. I have always enjoyed the whole process, start to finish – the smells, the bubbles, painstakingly keeping the shampoo from getting in my eyes, the pleasure of clean hair. As a curly haired child in the 1960’s, briefly when it was wet, my hair could pretend to be straight and perhaps even a little bit longer – at least momentarily. Today, however, I had a new awareness I had never had before. Washing the shampoo out, my hair was matty, disheveled, riled up and tangled all into itself from being lathered and softly hammered by warm water. I rubbed in the little blob of conditioner, and suddenly as if by magic, it was un-knotted, smooth and tangle free. And I thought “wow… I wish I could do that.” I wish I could apply a small creamy dab, a gentle massage and erase the ratty chaos that is so endemic, ubiquitous, sadly universal. Is it worse now? I don’t know.
In the depths of the Pandemic of 2019, when people were dying by the thousands every day, I feared “this one is different, this will never end.” Now the faded footprints on once again peopled sidewalks are like washed out old family photos of unremembered childhood. The depths of trauma and neglect healing can seem similarly dark, cold and unending. In my better moments I do know, even that will pass. The trees are pink again. The breeze is warming. Birds are coming back. May I be as conditioner! Lather, rinse, repeat.
Today’s song:
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:
My course with Quantum Way is now available for registration!