I remember when Mom used to get really angry at me. Well, her word was “annoyed.” She would come at me with that really stern face and exclaim, “Ach! Do me a favor!” Sometimes if it was really bad, she would say, “Vadammt!” That was German for “damn!” I never liked the sound of German. I only heard it when my parents did not want us to understand what they were talking about. Or when they were upset. I knew only a handful of words, mostly “bad words,” and a few foods like wienerschnitzel, until I studied German in college so I would be able to read Karl Marx and Hermann Hesse in the original, which I never did.
Usually, when Mom got annoyed, it was something about food. I was always a “terrible eater” right from the beginning. I never liked meat, and that was our most chronic fight; worst of all was liver. Ugghh. Even the memory turns my stomach nightmarishly, and I can even smell it as I write this. (Why do parents make kids eat what they don’t like or even detest?!) The deal was I had to eat a piece the size of a quarter. She would serve liver with “heaven and earth:” mashed potatoes and applesauce, but even deeply entombed under all that camouflage, it still made me gag. More than once, I was “swacked” with a serving spoon.
Worst of all was the deathly feeling of having her mad at me. The loss of the connection was like a death sentence, and even with all the times that it happened, I invariably felt that it was completely and utterly irreparable, the end of the world. And I would never recover. The right amygdala, where the fight/flight response resides, knows no time. It fires its shrieking alarm each time as if survival is truly at stake, and this is it.
I remember the aftershocks of those episodes that seemed to linger an eternity. I was beset by a consuming “ennui,” a lovely French-sounding word I learned only much later; a bottomless pit of despair, hopelessness and confusion. I felt that I had no right and no reason to exist, and I was frantic to figure out how to earn or rent the patch of ground I might occupy on the planet. Why did they have me? Well, I knew from Dad it was imperative to replace the six million. But for Mom, I had no clue. She seemed so sad and so anxious much of the time. I knew it was my fault. Later she said if people did not have children, it was because they were “too selfish.” And secretly, I knew I was because I knew I absolutely never would (although admittedly, to me, it seemed the other way around. Who’s “selfish?”)
For a child, the loss of connection is devastating and truly does feel fatal. Attachment is indeed a survival need for mammals. And the human child is dependent longer than most mammals, so the disconnect is survival terror. Each time it happened to me, the bottom would fall out what little bottom there might have been. And the blanket of “nihilism,” another elegant word I learned much later, the conviction that nothing matters, would descend like the arctic snow that kept us cooped up during those infinite winters that we lived in Indiana. It was like a chronic “passive suicidality,” wishing I would die but not wanting that too to be “my fault.”
The feeling that nothing matters, I don’t matter, no one likes me, and in those moments, I don’t really like anyone translates to what I would now think of as depression. It began to persist beyond those moments of aftershock to an episode with Mom, as disconnection became the “norm,” and she complained of me “walking around with a long face” all the time. Why didn’t I just have more fun?!
For a child, the loss of the connection, or better said, its absence because for many it is never known or experienced, produces this profound and pervasive existential angst, emptiness, depression and confusion. And most often, as children get older, it is compounded by shame and hiding, because there is “nothing to explain it.” A signature of neglect that I first came to recognize was the resounding “Nothing happened to me!” There is no reasonable explanation for feeling this bad. Only a “bad attitude,” a failure of gratitude. After all, “children were starving in Europe!”
Neglect is a universe of loss, of essential missing experiences. Most important of all, what is missing is presence. The attentive effort to see, hear and understand the child’s world and communications. I was moved recently, watching our young dinner guests with their 15-month-old. The little guy subtly rubbed his eyes with his pudgy fists, and they knew that was his language for telling them he was getting tired and it was time to go home. They knew his signals and distinctive vocalizations: which of the cries and utterances meant he was hungry, cold, wet, lonely, or restless to get out of his high chair and check out that little girl at the neighboring table. Their accurate and attentive presence and the ready response with the needed “supplies” gives a child a sense of value, “I matter, and my feelings matter.” What a different life that child will have. Little by little, he will learn to identify and name his feelings and needs himself. He will know that they matter, he matters and the reliable beloved other matters. Life is worth living.
The absence of all this and the poverty of “mirroring” endemic of neglect trauma profoundly matters and is a hotbed for every sort of dysregulation and every sort of problem, micro and macro. Mental health, medical health, sexual health, behavior, every kind of earthly woe. And what is most insidious about it, is that it hides in plain sight, masquerading as “invisible.” I am on a mission to convey that this nothing does matter! To inspire a “neglect-informed” culture and world where “nothing” matters enough to do something about it!
Because it is so well disguised and hidden, even or especially from sufferers themselves, bringing neglect to light is an undertaking. Like cheesemaking or endurance athletics, one must be prepared to stay the course and endure what can seem like a desert of nothingness on an unbearably long road to feeling alive. Too often, because of their often extraordinary drive, like my impulse to compensate for the blight of my sorry existence, by doing, achievement or outward success are deceptive masks. The survivor seems to be “doing” so well: academically, professionally, financially… they slip right past notice. “Passing” or getting over, they garner no care or help. Which on one hand, is a relief, and on the other, is a repetition of the desolation of invisibility.
Being seen, known, recognized, and valued for who one is are such fundamental developmental experiences. They are like yeast, or the rennet, that activate and incite ferment, growth and delicious appeal as we rise, ripen and age. Without them, life is flat, tasteless, or, God forbid, moldy. The most reliable indicator of neglect is an often ferocious self-reliance and profound interpersonal ambivalence. If someone is controlling and inconsistent or confusing about letting us near, that is a hint. There may be a “story-less story” lurking. Gentle, non-intrusive presence and patience, patience with what, sometimes for us as therapists, aspiring friends or loved ones may feel boring or lifeless, is key.
I have learned that my own boredom or listlessness in their company is a clue I must be mindful and attuned to. Because they are otherwise rare for me, these feelings point to contactlessness. I must look for safe and gentle ways to draw them into contact without shame or insult, or danger. I must be able to weather diatribes of devaluing hopelessness about therapy or even about me and intermittent rejection. They are “show don’t telling” me, as the fiction writers say, the story that they don’t remember. I may be inspired to find the opening to inquire, “what do you know about what was going on around you in your parents’ lives when you were in utero or an infant? They won’t remember, but perhaps richly know family lore. Then the plot thickens.
We must bear in mind and hold that they and all of it do matter, including our sitting there with them. To make the entendre even more dimensional and confounding, I will close with a quote from Einstein! He said:
“Energy is liberated matter. Matter is energy waiting to happen.”
Oy vey! Go figure…
Today’s song:
Alarmed by the barrage of horrifying mass shootings in the US of late, we are all shaking our heads and wondering, “what is happening to us? What is going on here? What does this mean?” Researchers have been looking into what, to me, are “new” places in an effort to comprehend what appears to be a not only alarming but growing trend. The most recent run of rampages, apparently neither politically, racially, nor ideologically motivated, have sent some researchers to the internet to track shooters’ “online footprints” in search of warning clues or explanations.
In studying the most recent suspect in the “Highland Park” mass shooting, experts discovered a trail that I certainly had no awareness of. I, of course, am no paragon of savvy about what goes on in the online or social media worlds. Tracing the 21-year-old shooter’s recent activity, including his online activity, revealed a startling, dramatic, and relatively new cyber sub-world or underworld. Emerging in the last couple of years, it was certainly new to me.
This new genre of online communities consists of blood, gore, nihilism and the creation of fictional identities exhibiting and glorifying those traits. Particularly jarring, according to researchers, is the way they appear to blur reality and fantasy, creating a psychotic-like confusion of Self. An opportunity to “be” someone else, and then an obscuring of identification of who I am “really.” Designed to be immersive, “viral”, or result in prolonged and repetitive hours of “play,” apart from whatever the psychological impact of such horror might be, combines with the still not fully understood brain impact of protracted screen time, on especially developing brains. And these sites tend to be most frequented by young people between 13 and 21 years of age. We see, in effect, a scrambling of alarming content with a potential for brain damage, precisely in prime years of identity formation and brain development. Where I might be inclined to exclaim “oy vey!” that would seem trivializing here. Throw in the context of climate change, and any vision of the future may seem apocalyptically blighted.
Trauma simmers (and potentially ultimately boils) with confusion, conflict or simple lack of identity at the heart of neglect. So, a child of neglect might be particularly vulnerable and susceptible to the offer of an alternative and powerful identity and even a loose posse of similarly searching and lost souls like themselves, all lacking distinction, purpose, connection or even something to do.
Apart from this troubling digital footprint, what about the concrete and observable signals that something is terribly amiss? Who is even watching? The young Highland Park suspect was hardly subtle in scattering his clues: suicidality, homicidal threats to family members, violence-laden artwork, even a chilling mural-sized painting he left on an outside wall of his mother’s home of a sinister smiley-faced figure brandishing an assault rifle. Somehow, he remained stunningly invisible in the days, even years leading to the massacre. What was this young man’s story? Attempting to track his actual history did not turn up too much.
Living with his father and a paternal uncle, he was quiet and withdrawn, tending toward depression. The men thought he was a good kid, but to be honest, it appeared no one was really looking. When his father helped him obtain his weapons, he claimed the boy was going to use them for target practice, or so he “believed.” Some neighbors commented that his “parents worked long hours.” Perhaps he was left unsupervised too much? In 2002, his mother was convicted of leaving him alone in a hot car when he was two years old. These are the stray crumbs of childhood material I was able to find. His father matter-of-factly and non-defensively said, “I want a long sentence; that’s life. You know you have consequences for actions. He made a choice. He didn’t have to do that.”
To my lens and sad eyes, this adds up to another story of deadly neglect; in this case, deadly for so many more than the original “child” in question.
So often, I hear clients say – at least those new to me or my work – “—-But nothing happened to me!” If one isn’t using the familiar and perhaps “valid” triumvirate of sexual abuse, physical abuse and more vaguely defined “emotional abuse,” they come up empty. They may even come from significant privilege, pointing to paid-for fancy educations, plentiful food, money and creature comforts. Or, in the cases of less plenty, they may point to hard-working parents doing the best they could to provide, often with their own traumatic backgrounds. This may make for additional layers of shame and guilt for “complaining, suffering, or inexplicably feeling so bad.” Layer on top of that, the “protective lenses” of denial or even gaslighting that much of the larger world wears, and individuals feel that much more despicable and unworthy for feeling bad.
The field of psychological trauma has known for years about the pivotal and decisive impacts of early attachment relationships (the primate researchers have known even longer.) Trauma experts decades ago coined the term “developmental trauma” as catchment perhaps for all these uncategorized or unacknowledged micro or even macro-injuries. The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – the diagnostic “dictionary” relied upon by clinicians for insurance coverage) has yet to include them, despite well-documented field trials.
In 1995-97 the ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) Study was admirably undertaken, turning up reams of hugely valuable data about the relationship between “small” and “large” childhood experiences, linking them to medical and mental health outcomes. Only in the last few years, a quarter of a century later, has this information penetrated the larger medical and mental health fields, let alone the field of education and the public at large. Neglect in its various iterations is, of course, included. Childhood neglect is not nothing! Perhaps everyone is tired of hearing this from me. And maybe my emerging from my own invisibility is to wave this flag.
Again, as the attachment researchers began to document and teach us long ago, mirroring or not has profound developmental impact. Many of us are very familiar with the famous ‘Still Face” research on this. It is impressive if you have not seen it and well worth the quick watch. Being seen, mirrored and understood are like food and shelter for the growing and developing organism. They are foundational building blocks to knowing who we are; to coherent identity formation.
The shootings leave a whole new population traumatized: families and loved ones of those murdered, witnesses to the atrocities, and the larger world. Meanwhile, how many young and old are still glued to their screens, or unaware, as I was, of an additional variety of internet infections and potentially magnetic or “bingeable” content. As essential as connection is, babies to caregivers, communities, nations, is the mandate to connect the dots. Twenty-five years later, families of the Columbine dead still grieve. They will never get over it, nor really will any sufferer of traumatic loss. It behoves us to connect the dots.
Increasingly I am compelled by the interconnection of social, social justice and individual psychological trauma. It can seem to be a Gordian knot of complexity to tackle it all. That is another reason why we need each other. You have skills and inclinations, creativities and ideas that I don’t have, and universally vice versa.
Let’s work together.
Today’s song (an all-time favorite of mine!):
My book “Working with the Developmental Trauma of Childhood Neglect: Using Psychotherapy and Attachment Theory Techniques in Clinical Practice” was published on August 31st. It provides psychotherapists with a multidimensional view of childhood neglect and a practical roadmap for facilitating survivors’ healing.
Doggedly committed as I am to therapy modalities that diverge from the “talking cure” I must admit that I love words. In the last few years, maybe since the internet became such a rapid-fire vehicle of fad and fashion, I have noticed with curiosity how certain words and phrases seem to be echoing everywhere, suddenly out of the blue. About a year or so ago, I noticed first with one client, almost every utterance ended with…”do you know what I mean?” At first, I thought she must feel uncertain about whether or not I am hearing or understanding her, a typical neglect issue. Then I began noticing those words everywhere, and still do. I have heard something similar with the term “gaslight,” which has become a household word. I don’t recall hearing it bandied around until somewhat recently.
I remember the old classic movie, Gaslight, from which it emerged. Always a Hitchcock fan, I loved it, although it was not Hitchcock, but similar in vintage and style. For those who have not seen it, it is well worth watching, the story of a beautiful, wealthy young woman being swindled into believing lies that cast her perception/sanity into question, enabling her handsome and conniving beau to viciously rip her off. I won’t spoil it here, but rather say that “gaslight” has evolved into a verb meaning deception such as to confound one’s own perception of reality, even sanity, into confusion, doubt, or outright disbelief. It is truly “crazy-making.”
An undeniable factor in what the lasting impact of trauma and neglect will be, is the response, or not of important caregivers or important others, to a child’s distress. Parental, or authority denying, ignoring, minimizing or outright blaming for the child’s experience may be even more injurious than the original injury. Sadly, we know how much this happens.
In the case of neglect, where there is often “nothing” to point to, it can be all the more confusing. The child may wonder, “why do I feel so bad?” or so hated, worthless, forgotten, excluded… all the ways that a child of neglect will feel. It is insidious. And the more we learn as a field about developmental trauma including neglect, because it defies perhaps our deepest human and mammalian need: the need to be attached and connected, is perhaps the most devastating trauma of all.
I had one client who struggled to make sense out of her history, and when she finally did, and tried to talk to her mother about it, her mother’s retort was “Unless you say that did not happen, we simply can’t have a relationship.” The young woman felt ripped apart, rather like “Sophie’s Choice.” She felt in a position to choose between herself and her own integrity; and her essential longing and need for her mother’s love. She could not resolve it, her mother ultimately died, and she was left haunted with the pain, remorse, guilt and confusion. This is a big part of why I am on a mission to “correct” or re-cast the story of “nothing happened to me.” Not in a gaslighting sense, but rather in a “fact-finding” sense.
An undeniable factor in what the lasting impact of trauma and neglect will be, is the response, or not of important caregivers or important others, to a child’s distress. Parental, or authority denying, ignoring, minimizing or outright blaming for the child’s experience may be even more injurious than the original injury. Sadly, we know how much this happens.
I recently heard a story where, in light of the horrors of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, interest returned to research about a Pulitzer Prize awarded in 1932 to New York Times’ chief correspondent to the then Soviet Union, Walter Duranty. Perhaps Duranty was the “father” of “fake news” now 90 years ago. Then, without the internet and the instantaneous wildfire of world events, the reporting in the Times carried even more weight than now, and a Pulitzer is a weighty honor. In the 1930’s it was Stalin whose decrees led to mass deaths of Ukrainian citizens. Scholars studying the history and looking to rescind the prestigious award found in Duranty’s reports that Stalin was the “strong leader” that the Ukrainian people needed.
One example of Duranty’s “airbrushing history” was his use of the word “malnutrition” to euphemistically describe the widespread famine that plagued Ukraine, leading to hungry Soviet soldiers systematically going door to door, confiscating food from Ukrainian citizens. They seized grain, vegetables, livestock – whatever people had – resulting in mass starvation and death. Duranty’s prize-garnering reporting shrouded such facts in confusion. Both the Times and the Pulitzer Prize Board, even if they “distance themselves” from Duranty’s reporting, have resisted rescinding the prize. They believe they are “making up for the paper’s past shortcomings” in their sharp reporting of current Russian war crimes. Perhaps it is no accident that “gaslight” has penetrated our common lexicon.
One example of Duranty’s “airbrushing history” was his use of the word “malnutrition” to euphemistically describe the widespread famine that plagued Ukraine, leading to hungry Soviet soldiers systematically going door to door, confiscating food from Ukrainian citizens.
Another source of internal chaos for the neglected child might be parental narcissism.
The parent might be so wildly intrusive, overbearing or doting that the child might not even recognize how completely unseen and unheard they are. They might instead feel guilty, ungrateful and ashamed for not feeling cared for; or simply perplexed about what is “really going on.” Even more so when the parent has their own tragic trauma history. The child is left to wander in a lonely daze. In Amy Tan’s beautiful Where the Past Begins, a Writer’s Memoir, she poignantly declares, “loneliness is not about being alone. Loneliness is about not feeling understood,” – a hallmark of neglect. When there is parental narcissism, I often say, “There is no you!” Is there any wonder that the child would feel so empty?
It is absolutely true that words do not take us nearly far enough to heal from trauma and neglect. We need a full tool shed of modalities addressing body, emotion, brain and spirit. And yet words do matter also. John Gottman, the marriage researcher in developing his model of emotionally coached parenting, reminds us that when we accurately name the emotion that the child is feeling in the moment, that in itself serves to calm their nervous system down. Of course, in a full-on trauma state, it is not quite so simple, but accurate naming is the soundtrack for the essential mirroring function. I learn who I am by being seen and known by another person and putting words to my experience. If the words are accurate, I learn how to accurately name my experience and ultimately express it. Then I am able to connect with another. These are but a few of the missing experiences that come with neglect.
For many a child of neglect, the language of emotion is a torn-out page from their personal “dictionary” and from their internal world. It may be a gibberish of sensation or physical pain, a cavernous void, or a “simple” non-category having no reference. Or it may be bursts of activation, seeming out of control, “metabolically expensive,” or nonsensical. Often a child of neglect will unwittingly choose a partner who, much the opposite, seems floridly or “disproportionally” emotional. Much as they “seek” to learn, it may be a bitter struggle to find equilibrium and harmony between them as they each wrangle with the missing part of the Self that they see in the other. Oy vey! No wonder relationship is so hard!
For the decidedly self-reliant child of neglect, for whom disavowal of interpersonal need is on the order of survival, the value of a “trusted witness” may be a hard sell. That does make sense. Especially if that witness is a paid professional. Even the adjective “trusted” may seem oxymoronic. However, the injury of neglect and of gaslighting being so very endemically interpersonal, the power and impact of being accurately and authentically seen and heard and understood by another person is ultimately a gamechanger. At least as far as I am concerned. Much as I love and believe in Neurofeedback, for example, without the accompanying psychotherapy, it is, as our dad used to say about reading poetry in translation: “like kissing a bride through a veil.”
John Gottman, the marriage researcher in developing his model of emotionally coached parenting, reminds us that when we accurately name the emotion that the child is feeling in the moment, that in itself serves to calm their nervous system down.
Today’s Song:
My book “Working with the Developmental Trauma of Childhood Neglect: Using Psychotherapy and Attachment Theory Techniques in Clinical Practice” was published on August 31st. It provides psychotherapists with a multidimensional view of childhood neglect and a practical roadmap for facilitating survivors’ healing.