Certain words I have torn out of my personal lexicon and just tossed. One of those is “stuck.” It is not allowed in my office either. True, sometimes progress is so slow as to be frustratingly imperceptible, but I don’t believe it has stopped and is certainly not cause for giving up.
I was once riding my bike up a hill so steep that I just went splat and fell right on my side. It was not that I had stopped moving completely; I was just not quite a match for that grade yet. I picked myself up, dusted myself off sheepishly, and with embarrassment walked that final stretch. I needed to get a little (maybe a lot?) stronger to tackle that hill again.
Sometimes clients will lament feeling or being stuck, and I know there is nothing I can say in those moments. If I try to disagree and point out the progress that is still slowly being made, they just feel frustrated and not understood or not heard. I have no choice but to just be quiet and empathic and hold the faith. I do remember how miserable and hopeless those moments can feel. And yes, they are moments.
“True, sometimes progress is so slow as to be frustratingly imperceptible, but I don’t believe it has stopped and is certainly not cause for giving up.”
The road to healing can be long and steep, and often interrupted by surprises. I recently heard a radio story about a prison “lifer” who was released on parole after completing twenty-three years of his life sentence. He’d had a tragically traumatic childhood as a ghetto boy: his parents having divorced, he lived with his father, who committed suicide when he was 8. He returned to live with his mother then, who was “more or less homeless.” At age 16, he and some friends had robbed a store, and one of his friends had shot and killed the store clerk. Tried as an adult, our young man had landed a life prison sentence. All of this detail is to illustrate how completely and utterly alone – uncared-for – he had almost always been. And his sentence was in effect, forever… His story of course is sadly not an unusual one when poverty is involved.
Trauma healing often does feel like a life sentence, and like one we will never be free. For some reason, our young man chose to spend the time behind bars working hard to transform himself.
He studied, educated himself, earned a degree, stayed out of trouble, and somehow succeeded, to his own disbelief, in winning a release date.
At 42, he had never worked an honest job. Coming out of prison, he was completely “dazed” and alien, rather like Rip van Winkle. At any moment he expected to be yanked back and locked up again. And as he described it, one is immediately about $25,000 “in the red.” You need a place to live, a car, clothes, basically everything. Most of all, you need a job, which is no small feat, because application forms can legally inquire if one has been convicted of a crime, and no one really wants to hire an “ex-con.”
Our man pounded the pavement, applied “everywhere” including all the current gig type jobs, but kept meeting with the same slamming doors until he happened to wander into a small Kosher bakery in the outer avenues of San Francisco, owned and operated by a young Israeli man named Isaac Frena. Frena, whose Eastern European family also had a story before getting to America, decided to try him out.
Our young man turned out to be the hardest working, most competent baker ever. He loved learning all the Kosher laws, even learning Hebrew. Why did Frena decide to do this? “Kosher is not just about food;” he said. Kosher is a way of life. The first fundamental rule of Judaism is that everyone deserves a second chance.” I for one, had never quite thought about “Kashrut” that way. Our young man gave his all to that chance. “It is the hardest work you could hope to find – high pressure, timing, accuracy. Bread is like… it’s a living organism. I compare it to a baby. It’s growing. if you don’t intervene into that child’s life at the right time, it’s going to grow up to be a monster.”
He began to tell others, and Frena gave others that chance. And before too long there were over twenty-five former “lifers” of all ages and races, working harmoniously together in the Kosher bakery. Of course, it was not smooth always, but here is the most important part: “Frena genuinely cares about people… They gave me love and a sense of security and they were giving love and a sense of security to all the dudes that were around me. That kind of kept snowballing.” Love and security, feeling seen and cared about are the most important ingredients for life: for growth, and for healing. That is why neglect is so devastating.
I once worked with a couple, who seemed to be having the same dialog every week. “I feel hopeless,” said one. “It makes sense that you feel so hopeless.” Then the other would reply “and I feel hopeless too.” The other responded “it makes sense that you feel hopeless too…” And it went on like that, round and round for months. But they kept showing up. And I for one, was still hopeful. Because the main ingredient was in the room. I genuinely cared for them and they still genuinely cared for each other.
After some months, week after week like that, they broke through. They were amazed. How do we keep going? I don’t know. They proceeded to be a happy long-married couple, and I have seen them again over the years from time to time.
Sometimes, when it seems as if there is no progress, like nothing is moving at all, what is happening is that “something” is slowly growing, like yeast rising in the space where that secure attachment never was. One is growing the capacity to metabolize the steady care of a consistent other. In itself, it is regulating. It is really the most important thing in the world.
Baking is a great metaphor and I do love to bake. I started growing my sourdough starter in 2014. That is where you mix a ratio of flour to water, and find just the right conditions, where it eventually begins to bubble and in effect ferment. It becomes natural or “wild” yeast. It took me six tries before my starter “took” so to speak. I had to try different locations with different temperatures, light, draft, etc. Finally, I found a cabinet, of just the right size and temperature, free of light and breeze, where my little jarful could thrive, and it has been ever since. Of course, I have to feed it and clean it every day. I have never thought of it as being like a baby, but certainly a pet. And I continue to find baking with it regulating and calming, not only because dough is tactile and it feels good; but because something that grows does provide that additional missing experience, that even if slow, there may be subtle, even imperceptible movement. It is hard to hold hope sometimes. That is where we may most need the presence of another.
Competent therapy, a variety of regulating modalities and consistency are requisites for good trauma healing. And the solid base of authentic care does keep things moving. That is why I am rather insistent about the combination of neurofeedback with deep psychotherapy. Both are necessary but not sufficient, but the combination is the charm. Sometimes the greatest challenge is to keep showing up, keep pedaling. Meanwhile, everyone seems to love the bread!
I remember when Mom used to get really angry at me. Well, her word was “annoyed.” She would come at me with that really stern face and exclaim, “Ach! Do me a favor!” Sometimes if it was really bad, she would say, “Vadammt!” That was German for “damn!” I never liked the sound of German. I only heard it when my parents did not want us to understand what they were talking about. Or when they were upset. I knew only a handful of words, mostly “bad words,” and a few foods like wienerschnitzel, until I studied German in college so I would be able to read Karl Marx and Hermann Hesse in the original, which I never did.
Usually, when Mom got annoyed, it was something about food. I was always a “terrible eater” right from the beginning. I never liked meat, and that was our most chronic fight; worst of all was liver. Ugghh. Even the memory turns my stomach nightmarishly, and I can even smell it as I write this. (Why do parents make kids eat what they don’t like or even detest?!) The deal was I had to eat a piece the size of a quarter. She would serve liver with “heaven and earth:” mashed potatoes and applesauce, but even deeply entombed under all that camouflage, it still made me gag. More than once, I was “swacked” with a serving spoon.
Worst of all was the deathly feeling of having her mad at me. The loss of the connection was like a death sentence, and even with all the times that it happened, I invariably felt that it was completely and utterly irreparable, the end of the world. And I would never recover. The right amygdala, where the fight/flight response resides, knows no time. It fires its shrieking alarm each time as if survival is truly at stake, and this is it.
I remember the aftershocks of those episodes that seemed to linger an eternity. I was beset by a consuming “ennui,” a lovely French-sounding word I learned only much later; a bottomless pit of despair, hopelessness and confusion. I felt that I had no right and no reason to exist, and I was frantic to figure out how to earn or rent the patch of ground I might occupy on the planet. Why did they have me? Well, I knew from Dad it was imperative to replace the six million. But for Mom, I had no clue. She seemed so sad and so anxious much of the time. I knew it was my fault. Later she said if people did not have children, it was because they were “too selfish.” And secretly, I knew I was because I knew I absolutely never would (although admittedly, to me, it seemed the other way around. Who’s “selfish?”)
For a child, the loss of connection is devastating and truly does feel fatal. Attachment is indeed a survival need for mammals. And the human child is dependent longer than most mammals, so the disconnect is survival terror. Each time it happened to me, the bottom would fall out what little bottom there might have been. And the blanket of “nihilism,” another elegant word I learned much later, the conviction that nothing matters, would descend like the arctic snow that kept us cooped up during those infinite winters that we lived in Indiana. It was like a chronic “passive suicidality,” wishing I would die but not wanting that too to be “my fault.”
The feeling that nothing matters, I don’t matter, no one likes me, and in those moments, I don’t really like anyone translates to what I would now think of as depression. It began to persist beyond those moments of aftershock to an episode with Mom, as disconnection became the “norm,” and she complained of me “walking around with a long face” all the time. Why didn’t I just have more fun?!
For a child, the loss of the connection, or better said, its absence because for many it is never known or experienced, produces this profound and pervasive existential angst, emptiness, depression and confusion. And most often, as children get older, it is compounded by shame and hiding, because there is “nothing to explain it.” A signature of neglect that I first came to recognize was the resounding “Nothing happened to me!” There is no reasonable explanation for feeling this bad. Only a “bad attitude,” a failure of gratitude. After all, “children were starving in Europe!”
Neglect is a universe of loss, of essential missing experiences. Most important of all, what is missing is presence. The attentive effort to see, hear and understand the child’s world and communications. I was moved recently, watching our young dinner guests with their 15-month-old. The little guy subtly rubbed his eyes with his pudgy fists, and they knew that was his language for telling them he was getting tired and it was time to go home. They knew his signals and distinctive vocalizations: which of the cries and utterances meant he was hungry, cold, wet, lonely, or restless to get out of his high chair and check out that little girl at the neighboring table. Their accurate and attentive presence and the ready response with the needed “supplies” gives a child a sense of value, “I matter, and my feelings matter.” What a different life that child will have. Little by little, he will learn to identify and name his feelings and needs himself. He will know that they matter, he matters and the reliable beloved other matters. Life is worth living.
The absence of all this and the poverty of “mirroring” endemic of neglect trauma profoundly matters and is a hotbed for every sort of dysregulation and every sort of problem, micro and macro. Mental health, medical health, sexual health, behavior, every kind of earthly woe. And what is most insidious about it, is that it hides in plain sight, masquerading as “invisible.” I am on a mission to convey that this nothing does matter! To inspire a “neglect-informed” culture and world where “nothing” matters enough to do something about it!
Because it is so well disguised and hidden, even or especially from sufferers themselves, bringing neglect to light is an undertaking. Like cheesemaking or endurance athletics, one must be prepared to stay the course and endure what can seem like a desert of nothingness on an unbearably long road to feeling alive. Too often, because of their often extraordinary drive, like my impulse to compensate for the blight of my sorry existence, by doing, achievement or outward success are deceptive masks. The survivor seems to be “doing” so well: academically, professionally, financially… they slip right past notice. “Passing” or getting over, they garner no care or help. Which on one hand, is a relief, and on the other, is a repetition of the desolation of invisibility.
Being seen, known, recognized, and valued for who one is are such fundamental developmental experiences. They are like yeast, or the rennet, that activate and incite ferment, growth and delicious appeal as we rise, ripen and age. Without them, life is flat, tasteless, or, God forbid, moldy. The most reliable indicator of neglect is an often ferocious self-reliance and profound interpersonal ambivalence. If someone is controlling and inconsistent or confusing about letting us near, that is a hint. There may be a “story-less story” lurking. Gentle, non-intrusive presence and patience, patience with what, sometimes for us as therapists, aspiring friends or loved ones may feel boring or lifeless, is key.
I have learned that my own boredom or listlessness in their company is a clue I must be mindful and attuned to. Because they are otherwise rare for me, these feelings point to contactlessness. I must look for safe and gentle ways to draw them into contact without shame or insult, or danger. I must be able to weather diatribes of devaluing hopelessness about therapy or even about me and intermittent rejection. They are “show don’t telling” me, as the fiction writers say, the story that they don’t remember. I may be inspired to find the opening to inquire, “what do you know about what was going on around you in your parents’ lives when you were in utero or an infant? They won’t remember, but perhaps richly know family lore. Then the plot thickens.
We must bear in mind and hold that they and all of it do matter, including our sitting there with them. To make the entendre even more dimensional and confounding, I will close with a quote from Einstein! He said:
“Energy is liberated matter. Matter is energy waiting to happen.”
Oy vey! Go figure…
Today’s song:
I remember when the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof came out. And a few years later, the blockbuster movie with Zero Mostel. I remember being rather baffled, wondering who would name their kid “Zero?!” Especially when I felt like one. Fortunately, young Zero grew up to become a great and well-loved actor. And I did not remember a popular movie being like this, all about Jewish themes. It was kind of amazing and validating. Dad loved singing the songs, “If I were a rich man, dibby, dibby, dibby, dibby, dibby, dibby dum!” I think they brought out the best in him, and he was never quite so jolly as when he was Tevye. He would belt out, “Tradition!” Made it sound almost as if tradition were a fun thing.
Lately, I found myself thinking about the intergenerational transmission of trauma and neglect and tradition. When taken simply as barren nouns: intergenerational transmission and tradition void of content, they are quite similar. Both are a repeated bequest through generations, a keeping alive across time of, well, something. However, one might be intentional, richly ritualized, even sacred, and laden with meanings. The other is compulsive, dysregulated, perhaps unconscious, even destructive and lethal. Each makes the dogged journey through time. And as we know all too well, they can even spill and mingle into some of the horrible legacies that, because of ancestral roots, can be hardest to excise and extinguish.
I was the child of two Holocaust survivors, who also each had their own iterations of profound neglect. My mother had a Northern German, intellectual, upper-middle-class mother who was coldly proud and proper. I don’t imagine much resonance there. And I am pretty sure my mother was raised mostly by nannies until Hitler blew it all apart. My father lost his mother before he was bar mitzva, while in the Shanghai ghetto. I don’t know much about his earlier years, except a story from an old family friend who remembers him running away from school in kindergarten. I wonder why… I have been the heiress to a bounteous bequest.
For so many reasons, I feel like a zealot; driven to awaken awareness, break the chains of intergenerational transmission, and disrupt the dysregulation of neglect moving through generations, wreaking havoc of all kinds.
It is complicated, however, the blur between legacy and curse. My father’s ferocious tenacity and determination are some of my most cherished gifts from him, and they certainly got me up some of the steepest climbs on the bike and some of the most daunting deadlines for my writing. It has kept me hanging in life-changing ways with some seemingly hopelessly rageful clients. It certainly also brutalized me growing up. And this is often a tangled mess inside of me.
My overwhelmed nervous system adapted to this spectrum of dysregulation by, among other things, rejecting most of the traditions as soon as I was old enough to make my own choices. Interestingly, however, all of the songs have stayed deeply grooved in the playlist of my hippocampus, and often visit uninvited. When I was asked to write about the intergenerational transmission of trauma recently, what immediately popped up in my mind’s ear, was a song I had not thought of in years, “L’dor Va Dor,” from generation to generation. I never even liked that song!
One of the most vicious expressions of dysregulation in my childhood was an eating disorder that almost took me down at age 12. I was most lethally anorexic in 1966-67 when there was little information, let alone help, and a poverty of any sort of understanding. Perhaps I was in some way trying to replicate my parents’ holocaust trauma or suffer enough to be worthy of existence. Who knows? But somehow, I was invisible enough to slip quietly under the radar so I could “do what I wanted.”
One well-honed anorexic trick was to control the food as much as possible by taking over the household cooking, which my mother was more than happy to have me do. So, I learned to cook. I made chicken soup every Friday from scratch. I learned how to roast a chicken to perfection. I learned to make challah and even bagels. I am grateful for this, as these have become the bequests, the gifts of inheritance I have retained. And whatever little bit of tradition I retain that I keep to this day (now that I am blessedly free of eating problems after decades of dogged recovery work) are the foods. The Jewish tradition of sharing food is something I continue, and it gives me great joy. And something about sharing food, giving and sending it to people I love, gives me an odd sense of organic connection, as my “handiwork” goes into their bodies. The recipes that span historical epochs and diasporic geographic wanderings of millennia seem to connect me with the best of my heritage, and sharing them was certainly a source of comfort and connection during the bitterest isolation of the COVID19 Pandemic. And continues to be. It is the best way I know to say “thank you!” and has made me many new friends in many places.
The perils of intergenerational transmission are well known. Resonating to a dysregulated brain, or pulsing alone into empty space, makes for all sorts of adaptations or bitter attempts at adaptation. My eating disorder was but one of a coiling chain of attempts: alcohol, sexual compulsivity, overwork, relentless exercise… Like a rat on a wheel, I kept at it. But my father’s determination commandeered me to stay the course, and I ended up with a pretty wonderful life. And the kind of faith and hope in the power of healing that enable me to shepherd some number of others out of the woods with me.
I am convinced that the vast number of “me too” victims and survivors can be at least somewhat explained by dysregulated, out-of-control nervous systems and poverty of information. Yes, we have grand dysregulations of power and gender inequality in this sorry world, but going upstream to deal with the dysregulation is at least one piece of the complex solution. But that is a gargantuan topic for another day!
In the micro, at least, I am committed to a no-blame paradigm. Certainly, neglect is a tragic failure that often springs straight out of the trauma experience: a failure of presence: attention, awareness and aliveness that, of course, fails to transmit to the hapless infant and child. It is not excusable, nor is the failure of at least attempting to heal. What would have happened if my mother had been blessed with the good therapy I have had and the evolution of ever more efficient and effective modalities, research and now even science? What would my life have been, and hers? We cannot know. But we must do better. And make safe, effective and tenacious healing available, even while we strive to make a larger world that is safe, regulated, and regulating. Meanwhile, if not for this rich inheritance, what on earth would I have to write about?
Today’s song:
Oubao-Moin is based on a poem by Puerto Rican national treasure Juan Antonio Corretjer, and sung by one of my great heroes. Legendary Puerto Rican singer Roy Brown. It chronicles the chain of trauma and the legacy of the Taino people of the Caribbean.
People sometimes ask me, “How do you come up with something to write about every week?” I used to wonder the same thing about local treasure Willie Brown, whose weekly column was my reason for reading the Sunday paper. When Willie quit, we turned off that paper. Well, for me, it has become something I can’t quite turn off. I might be listening to Public Radio, or half listening, or even one-eighth listening, and I will hear something that rousts me out of my kitchen task reverie. And then my mind starts whirring with words and thoughts and, of course, songs.
That is what happened yesterday, when I absently tuned in to an interview with author Henry Hoke, of whom I had never heard, about his new book, Open Throat. Intriguing as it is, narrated by a cougar, the book did not quite sound to my taste in spite of the interviewer’s raves. However, hearing that one of the towns in the book was called “Scare-City,” which, of course, is a brilliant play on scarcity. I thought, “Wow! I wish I could claim that brilliant turn of phrase!” And it got me to thinking about the terror of not enough, which is a scar on the soul, body and brain of the neglected child. I, for one, was born and raised in Scare-City.
I began to think about the nameless quaking terror of not enough. It is no wonder that I chose anorexia. Better to eat nothing than feel the rumbling panic of insufficiency. And, of course. I was insufficient, inadequate, not enough, always driven to do more, do more, do more, vestiges of which still somewhat dog me. And no wonder it never felt safe to share or lend. Sharing, I was convinced there would not be enough for me. Lending, my things would come back diminished, wrecked or not at all. It was safer to kiss it off and only lend what I might be ready to part with or never see again, hide behind a pretext of generosity and give it instead, or buy the prospective borrower their own of whatever it was. Other people could not be trusted where “enough” for me was concerned. I remember my therapist’s enduring patience with trying to convince me that perhaps, in fact, there is enough to go around. Our family was ruled by “zero-sum.” Wherever possible, I opted out of the competition.
Neglect is, in fact, an impoverished city. No wonder so many neglect survivors I know are scrupulously thrifty, sometimes even appearing needlessly stingy, at least with themselves. Or family finances, division of labor and other resources are a challenge for relationships. Of course! Poverty is no fun at all. Is self-reliance a kind of hoarding? Or an insurance policy to huddle around myself against the danger of famine?
Lately, I have had occasion to dialog with grief expert Edy Nathan. I had never thought explicitly about the apparent sisterhood between neglect and grief. The two are united by loss. Neglect is about the loss of what most likely never was, what should have been, or maybe what was for a while, and then no longer. I realized long after the fact that my protracted grief about the loss of my first love was in fact, the boundless and nameless grief of “motherless-ness.” Other than that, or until then, loss simply evoked numbing. I felt nothing. Even though I was not literally motherless, I felt such a void of loneliness, an inexplicable quaking broken heartedness, that only found expression, if for a long time misdirected, reeling from another lost love. Grief is a hard sell! Recovering from romantic heartbreak is so dramatic, especially the first time, it is next to impossible to think of it as something else.
In therapy and in parenting, the task is regulation. That is the royal road to sufficiency, to equilibrium, to balance, to “enough,” whether it be, doing or getting enough. Although I have thought of myself, perhaps flattered myself? Thinking I am pretty darn emotionally intelligent. Perhaps about some emotions or some people’s emotions, I am. But about grief, which lies at the heart of neglect, not so much! I have a lot to learn. And unprocessed grief, where does it go? As we know all too well, it will show itself somewhere.
I have never heard anything even vaguely endearing or attractive about US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Sexual harassment, greed and opportunism were what I knew of him until this morning when I heard an interview with documentary filmmaker Michael Kirk who has recently unveiled a movie about him the man. Hearing his story broke my heart. Born in a small rural town, so poor that there was not only a lack of food but no running water -even toilets. He was fatherless, unwanted by his mother and then grandparents, his cohorts in his attempt at the seminary, and his high-powered colleagues at Yale Law. Even ostracized by his black peers for being “too” dark-skinned, he was rejected everywhere. Thomas never was enough, never achieved enough, and never got nearly enough. The culmination of the haunting unending deprivation, the continued gnawing of ravenous hunger of every iteration must be what spawned the impulse to stockpile and squirrel away to somehow ensure safety and survival. Hardening against heartbreak or need, the attempt to somehow feel a modicum of power, all added up to what is almost a caricature of the neglect adaptation, the despicable character I have read and heard about in the news for years.
The word “regulation” has become very “buzzy” in the last couple of years. I am almost hesitant to use it as it has become almost as hackneyed and tired as “pivot,” “double down” and “deep dive.” Oy vey! How do these expressions become so viral? And I fear regulation could lose its crucial meaning if it has not already.
By regulation, we mean the ability to return to a calm equilibrium after having become activated in one direction or the other. It is the capacity or fluency for calming down after becoming agitated, anxious, aroused, or thawing and returning to presence after a freeze.
Regulation, or “self-regulation”, is the ability to fluidly and naturally move between states. An infant learns to return to a baseline calm, initially by being calmed by a regulating other. That is how we develop the circuitry, how the brain and body learn the pathways, which we ultimately become able to replicate it on our own, -eventually. Certainly not overnight! And as parents of adolescents know, it is phased work and goes on for years to greater and lesser degrees.
The failure of regulation by a present, attentive, and hopefully caring and consistent other sets the stage for all sorts of aberrations that may show themselves and persist in the body, emotion and behavior. And may indeed add up to being one way or another out of control. Thomas shows every indication of that. Which certainly does not excuse his terrible behavior, (even only what we know about.) And clearly, this contradiction between outrage and sympathy again is among the many complications and tangles of healing at both the micro and macro level. Long story short, regulation is the answer.
For those interested, the Clarence Thomas documentary is free and available for streaming on Youtube. I have not watched it yet, but I plan to.
That is enough for today. I wonder what “Da Mayor,” Willie Brown is up to!
Today’s song:
As a devout listener to BBC, I got an earful of the recent coronation event. Monarchy is something I so rarely think about, apart from the recent death of Queen Elizabeth, which similarly took over a day of BBC coverage. From the endless memorial feed, my mind somehow floated back to junior high school European history. Admittedly I don’t remember much. Junior high school was a truly terrible time in my life. A half-starved anorexic, I foggily remember that I stared absently out the window a lot and did not hear much. So perhaps, thankfully, I have little memory at all. Curiously, however, what floated to mind that day, was the term “benevolent despot.” I don’t remember which royal figure it referenced, but I remember thinking, “What?!!” I did not understand how absolute power and the quality of well-meaning kindness could go together. I guess it made about as much sense as “Let them eat cake!”
The world of neglect is fraught with many ironies and contradictions. That is part of what makes recognizing, understanding and working with it so complicated and fraught. Recently, in a conversation about my work with a highly esteemed colleague, she made a comment about “benign neglect.” Somehow that struck the confused and admittedly sensitive nerve about “benevolent despot.” There is something to me oxymoronic about the idea that neglect is “benign” I think of benign as meaning harmless. A tumor, for example, that is malignant is cause for alarm. It may be serious or even fatal. One that is benign may be aberrant or even unsightly. But not to worry. No neglect, if it is, in fact, what I refer to, what Frank Corrigan has so exquisitely named “attachment shock:” rupture, loss of connection, abandonment, withdrawal of the other, is benign. Certainly not for an infant. It is not only devastating but potentially lethal as well. I think my colleague meant not intentionally malicious, which is often the case, but harmless. Not! If intentionality is the question, that is a different conversation.
A lover of words and also admittedly quite fussy about them, I started thinking about the word “neglect.” If I am on a mission to make “neglect informed” a concern for the psychotherapy field, and the world for that matter, I had better come up with precise definitions. Perhaps the noun “neglect” works, but as a verb is floppy and ambiguous. In my mind, neglect, by its very nature, is a failure of awareness, a blip of intentionality, an absence of agency. Whether it be a preoccupation with the urgency of some sort, a limitation of circumstance, emergency or trauma, disability, loss of means, or long or short-term loss of capacity: whatever the cause, the agency goes offline. Something does not get done. In general, my paradigm is one of “no blame.” This means ascribing fault and villainizing the negligent does not serve the sufferer/ victim, or anyone really.
However, the child, or anyone who is abandoned or neglected, is grossly mistreated and pays dearly for it. The losses in terms of opportunity, relationship, choice, capacities, freedom, time, joy, quality of life… I could go on and on… they are too numerous and too costly to begin to try and name. So the grief, rage, agony, bitterness, contempt and judgment are understandable. This is another of the great challenges of neglect, another of the dilemmas the survivor must struggle to navigate. The old saw, “they did the best they could,” with the backwash of every kind of emotion.
Long before I was aware of it, I knew that my mother was overwhelmed and taking care of us was simply too much. I remember being haunted by the newsreels of concentration camps I saw at Hebrew school when I was barely six years old. If I was haunted by movies, what would the impact of lived experience be? My mother was anxious, brittle and sad. I remember hustling to clean up and eradicate clutter before it would make her more jumpy and irritable, being as helpful, inconspicuous and as little of a “bother” as possible. Partly to try and make her “happy,” or happier? And partly for my own benefit, in the hope that she might have more presence and more to offer us if she was calmer. Was she intentionally neglectful? No, of course not! Was it benign, absolutely not! Only after the onslaught of symptoms and problems that plagued me for decades and the years and thousands of dollars of therapy could I figure it out. It was not only what I was previously aware of as my various forms of overt trauma, but the attachment trauma, the missing experiences, and the neglect had scarred me deeply. It was not benign, and I went through at least a decade of terrible conflict and emotion. Of course, she/they “could not help it.” And I was enraged about the price that I was left with. Another Rubik’s cube of neglect. How to hold both?
The child of neglect is caught in the headlights of the “dilemma without solution,” which I talk about endlessly. The object of longing and the source of agony are in the same person. How to manage that. And similarly, the tangle about responsibility. They could not help it? Well, maybe not. And the damage? It is not like the simple calculous of car insurance. The responsible party pays, and the victim is somehow compensated.
For those of us challenged by the work with neglect, whether our own, loved ones’ or clients, we are faced with the flopping dissonance of ambiguities that may blur and alternate, expand, contract, compel, embarrass, frustrate and flummox us for years. They can be paralyzing, or we can think we are crazy or “stuck.” Many of us look so good, accomplished, or are so good at numbing that no one would even know there was someone inside who desperately needed help. I remember how surprised I was when I read Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography and learned that the “Boss” had sometimes spent up to two years in bed with depression, unable, in his words, to “turn off the faucet.” And this was well after he had been long busting charts and filling stadiums. The healing of attachment shock is a complex journey of cycling and often frozen opposites, where both are painfully true and real and yet seem crazily incompatible. That is why great compassion, patience, and the ability to tolerate and hold wild ambiguities and stay the course are all essential.
There is also no substitute for information, about the brain, attachment and healing. And the recovery stories of those ahead of us on the path who can attest to coming out the other side, that a joyful life is, in fact, possible. It is a very hard sell! And certainly, no substitute for the emotional and somatic work that really affects trauma. In those moments when the pre-frontal cortex is firing, they may serve to bolster hope.
I often say, sometimes my main task is to be the harbinger of hope. The one person in the room who is not activated, so I can keep the perspective that it is not happening now, something different is possible, and progress, however glacial is in fact happening. You may not believe me. But I won’t stop holding that. And someday, all of a sudden, maybe for only a minute, you will.
Making our peace and coming to peace takes however long it takes. If it seems to take “forever,” it is not that you are doing something wrong. It is like correcting a terrible environmental insult: nature has been rudely interrupted and the organic processes of restoring it are underway, and not to be rushed. I remember as a child, pulling open the petals of a flower that was not quite ready to bloom. It really only spoiled it. My intentions were not bad. But the result was a small disaster. And we must continue to look upstream to address the social, political, and economic forces that perpetuate these many contradictions, so ultimately peace has some kind of a chance.
Today’s song:
When I was growing up, there was no internet, no Google. There were encyclopedias. I remember a three-tier caste system of them: the most expensive and most sophisticated was the Britannica. The “middle class” was the World Book and the “lowbrow” I think, was called Colliers. I don’t remember. We had the World Book. I think we got it from a door-to-door salesman. There were door-to-door salesmen in those days, invariably men, in cheap suits and ties like the fuller Brush Man, peddling various products. Our World Book was bound in white, not quite 26 alphabetical volumes. I think X-Y-Z were all in one.
The set sat on the lowest shelf of the living room bookshelves. I could curl up quietly on the rug for hours, looking all kinds of things up. No one really knew where I was. And that was one of the few places I could surreptitiously learn about bodies, except for the occasional National Geographic photo of naked indigenous people somewhere. Admittedly I pored over those too. Thank goodness for the World Book! How else was a solitary little child of neglect to learn how the world works?
One of the missing experiences with neglect is having someone to talk to about random, thoughts and questions or teach them about things they might never have thought of or heard of. Children are by nature curious beings, the world, at least at first, is one grand oyster, or ideally so. I am so delighted to see my sister with her little grandson, nourishing his love of octopi by learning all about them with him. And exposing him to many other weird and interesting curiosities of nature. She is a wonderful teacher, and I am infinitely grateful to her as she was the very one who taught me to read when I was probably the age he is now, three-ish? That was a godsend, a lifeline, and books became a lifelong source of comfort, company and information. I have never stopped reading since.
Children lacking an attentive parent or caregiver, who takes time and even takes pleasure in their learning and navigating the big world are once again thrown on their own developing resources to “figure it out.” It involves flailing, looking for models on TV or on the playground to imitate, or as a final resort, making things up. Besides the World Book and what I could get my hands on at the library once I was big enough to go there, all of those were my “answers.” But to be honest, I was, for the most part, pretty clueless. In fact, I remember in my early 20s when I finally started therapy, shyly asking my therapist, “What do people do when…” I still had no idea, and I have always said I only started learning to be a “regular person” when I worked in restaurants, also in my early twenties. The other waiters talked about music and movies and sports, and I learned to imitate them and get over as somewhat “normal.” But I never really knew. And if or when I finally knew anything, I hung onto it for dear life, It seemed tied to existence somehow.
Years later, when I began to formulate what I came to call the “neglect profile,” my anecdotal catalog of consistently observed traits in survivors of childhood neglect, I began to notice or perceive a “charge” at the very least, surrounding the whole notion of “knowing.” Admittedly, earlier on in my work as a therapist, before I put the pieces together, I might become exasperated and more than once lost my cool and exclaiming with frayed or absent patience (and certainly too loudly,!) “If you know everything already, why the heck am I sitting here?” Oy vey! Makes me blush to think about it now. It took a while for me to get it.
Knowing what we know, or what we believe we know, anyway, is a survival strategy. Never having anyone to turn to for answers, the child of neglect resorts to their usual and only default: they pull in on themselves and solve the problem on their own, often with some pride or even self-righteousness. And often become quite defensive or “touchy” about what they know. If I were to mess with that, it might be on the order of taking away a life raft, they might feel rudderless, defenseless. I learned pretty quickly not to argue about these things when possible.
Now on the internet, one can find answers about pretty much anything. There is no shortage of junk science, pop psychology, and “diagnoses du jour.” Admittedly, and it is probably obvious, it can irk me when precisely what I have been doggedly studying, consulting the best research from the top experts in the world for four decades, and a “lay-person:” friend, family member, client or random person, spouts expertise on something that is “my area.” We used to joke, “I heard it on TV, so it must be true.” Now it is the internet. Suddenly surfing the net becomes “research.”
My husband is a devoted supporter of my work, a survivor of hideous neglect himself. Recently reviewing something I had written about my longstanding “three P’s of neglect”, he innocently suggested an idea he had of a 4th P. I was momentarily incensed. My model, my turf, I was once again that reactive, touchy neglect survivor, as if I was in danger of disappearing or dissolving into worthlessness again. Thankfully these things don’t last too long anymore! But a well-worn circuit is persistent, and being a lifesaver, defaults to sticking around without a lot of self-awareness and ongoing mindful work!
It can often happen in couple’s therapy, where one partner will repeatedly say, “We talked about that!” Yes, and of course, they may have talked about it even and often ad nauseum. If it keeps looping back around, something has not been empathically or sufficiently understood and processed. If it had been, it would be laid to rest and stop rearing up. Updating the files can be a tall order! It means relinquishing something one might have been convinced of, which has felt quite essential.
A “know it all” quality is not attractive. Many survivors of neglect, at least before working on it, may come across that way. Sometimes I am able to gently remind myself, “Yes, that is how she makes people not like her,” or he, as it were. Then I am sheepishly reminded of making people not like me that way. Occasionally I can still lapse; briefly, I would hope. Suffice it to say that knowing, and being fierce about what one knows, is another expression of the lifesaving armor of self-reliance. Becoming safe enough to acknowledge interpersonal need and to receive is a goal of our work. It also requires courage and humility, and, unfortunately, time.
The child of neglect craves to be seen, heard and understood. I have learned from my mistakes never to offer unsolicited information if I can help it. I am still accused of “mansplaining” once in a while. I am trying to learn. Learning to learn from others is a rocky road of processing fear and discovering that it can be OK to not know, that someone else knowing or teaching me would not rob, endanger or annihilate me. And is often quite fascinating. What do you know?!
Today’s song:
Throughout this year’s Refugee Week (June 19 – 25) we commemorate the strength, courage and perseverance of millions of refugees. In honor of this week and of Refugee Day (June 20) I have written the following blog.
A few early mornings ago, I heard an interview with a scientist, expert in soil. The interviewer asked her, how on earth (No pun intended of course!) did she end up making her life’s work a study in well, dirt? She replied with a story. As a young person, she was on a camping trip, and her little dog fell into the outdoor latrine. It was a laborious and messy excavation rescuing the little guy, that involved a fair amount of hacking at the hard dirt walls of the hole. In the process of this protracted relief mission, our protagonist could not help but be distracted by the spectrum of brilliant and vivid colors of the well enriched soil. She was mesmerized, not to the point of being interrupted from her task, but enough that when the pup was safe and clean, she was inspired to see more. Perhaps under more deliberate and certainly more savory circumstances. So not only, as is often the case, was there a silver lining to a stinky traumatic event, but it paved the way for a rewarding career. Of course, as a lover of colors, I loved the story, and the many metaphors about how a rainbow of microbial diversity provides the field for a universe of life and growth. It also reminded me of how bizarre and nonsensical it is that we humans can be separated, even go to war about color. Go figure…
I always fancied myself something of a nature girl, with resistance, if not at times outright contempt for electronic modes of connection. Until the Pandemic changed everything in so many ways including that one. Not suddenly but soon and powerfully, I discovered the wide world of Zoom and “webinars,” where my lifelong introversion and solitude, my crazy insomniac hours and my cheese-vat stirring marathons morphed into a veritable social life. I was delighted. First there was “Grateful Ed’s Gospel Hour,” where neurofeedback expert extraordinaire, who happened to have a sense of humor to match, rhapsodized about all sorts of philosophical questions through the lens of brain science and rock and roll. What a wondrous combination for my brain! Then there was world class neuroscience rockstar Ruth Lanius, presenting all manner of brain research wonders in accessible language and adorned with vividly colorful and alive neuroimaging photos, that I could stop and stare at for as long as I had time, not to mention the bingeing replays of recordings that helped me learn the slippery stuff. And sometime later, a new-to-me character, a beautiful young Viet Namese somatic practitioner, Linda Thai, who generously shared her own story as she taught trauma concepts in a style quite different from mine. She even sang a bit. Linda talked especially about refugee and immigrant trauma. In some way she seemed kindred to me. Different personal stories, different sides of the world, different colors, even different historical epochs, but the themes and brains of trauma and neglect resonated deeply, certainly for me.
What a surprise when at a recent conference, in a packed elevator, I found myself face to face with Linda! Well not only face to face, we met in a spontaneous and delighted mutual hug. Suddenly all the people around us vanished, and we were like a couple of long, lost cousins. Only we had never before met. Well only through the ether. And of course, as a bona fide child of neglect, I was amazed that she knew I existed, and had a similar feeling of kindredness to me. Imagine that. And having recently been thinking a lot about Viet Nam, and from different angles than I really ever had before, I was again amazed by the many wonders of serendipity. How do these things happen?
My husband had a lousy childhood, but one thing I have always envied was that he had a wealth of cousins. He had five cousins, all boys around his same age. Their summers, (or my image of their summers) were a Mark Twain wonderland of boys being boys running around together as long as the long summer daylight lasted. My husband having a summer birthday, close to 4th of July, had celebrated with this crowd of boys.
I grew up in a boy-less family, so boy fun and abandon, is probably at least somewhat idealized. And we really had no cousins, to speak of. Yes, all my cousins were boys. The two that were “domestic,” living in the US, were both a good decade older than us. The third lived (and lives) in Switzerland and to this day I have never met him. Our grandmother was one of those types who grandly hyperbolized about the brilliance and perfection of our cousins, as if by comparison we were pond scum (my interpretation.) The Swiss was a child genius; the older domestic cousin being movie star handsome and a tennis star too. The younger domestic cousin was a protégé and then a champion at chess, although somehow he disappeared from the face of the earth. Anyway, I always wished for cousins like my husband had, or better yet, like on the Patty Duke Show. And it was of course never far from mind that, most of our kin had been traumatically wiped out, and as ever we were lucky for all we had. A true but tiring message for a child.
I was always well aware of our status as refugees, less so as immigrants. Until recently in my work with a couple, where one partner is a Caribbean immigrant, and talks about that, feeling like an outsider, or having to abdicate his authenticity or voice, to “fit in.,” and whose ways are dismissed at best, if not outright rejected. I remembered the confusion of messages we got growing up, a strange dissonance of gratitude that we had a relatively safe place to live, but profound mistrust that we could be viciously turned on, on a dime. And appreciation for this country, with more than a spoonful of contempt for the materialism, superficiality and “shallow-ness” of the culture, compared to “our proud intellectual and humanitarian” heritage. Even the messages about earning well were very confused. On one hand we are not supposed to care about those things, and on the other Dad’s abiding, undeniable bitterness about how much higher the rabbi is than the step child cantor on the hierarchical pecking order of both salary and status. My child brain was addled. Not to mention the ever-present pressure to both be accepted, but not “assimilate” too much. Even American Jews were not “like us,” certainly didn’t “get it.” But if we dated or god forbid ever were to marry a non-Jew, there was much more than hell to pay.
Dad’s family fled to Shanghai and for 7 years suffered and survived in the Shanghai ghetto. His mother died there for lack of medical care. All of our stories and images of Asian people were scary and evil. A very far cry from Linda! I had a Chinese boyfriend for oddly, also 7 years. In all that time, Dad never ever referred to him by his name. He was always “that man.” Already at sea in the world of relationship, this did not make a difficult relationship with my father or my boyfriend, any easier. And was a kind of annihilation of both my boyfriend and me, already a teetery young couple.
I suppose I have neglected immigration and refugee status as yet additional forms of developmental and even attachment trauma, that disrupts the formation of identity and sense of self. Feeling unseen, not known, not understood, unwelcome, lees than and unworthy, are all endemic to the trauma of neglect. I am grateful to my client and to Linda, for sharpening my lens on this. Especially now when the tides of climate change, fickle and tragic economies, crazy political conflict and war are fierce. People are emigrating or fleeing from place to place including many to foreign countries, and the US for one is becoming more and more multicolored.
Perhaps my most treasured inheritance from my mom was Pete Seeger. She loved him and he was a soundtrack, always playing and brightening the environment of our bleak little apartment in Manhattan. Pete said on that worn old album “We are all cousins!” Then he would sing the beloved old song All Mixed Up.
Hey, the name of the SF restaurant where I lucked out and met Bobby McFerrin is Third Cousin! Hmmm…
Refugee Week 2023 is 19–25 June. This year’s theme is Compassion.
Today’s song:
Like most any child of neglect, I was a desperately lonely little girl. Convinced I was hopelessly weird, probably of some other unidentified nonhuman species and categorically unlikeable, I peopled my world with idealized, fantasy relationships. A “hero worshipper” right off the bat, Beginning at a young age, my ever-advancing hit parade provided an endless feed of new hero figures.
Characteristically, I was probably on a quest for the powerful and protective and loving parent I wished I had, and later a love partner. Some of those figures still languish on the old playlist after many decades, like my own little Mount Rushmore (no pun intended!). Most of them were/are men, and admittedly while being incredibly smart and brilliantly creative in some genre, had at least a streak, if not more, of unquestionable meanness. I have always wondered if one has to be at least somewhat egotistical to be truly great. As with all of us, I figure my dad was the mostly unconscious template.
Admittedly, I have read all the biographies of Steve Jobs, an iconic example. He was perhaps a hideous parent, and I’m guessing a not-too-empathic employer, with an attachment trauma story of his own which I know only the roughest outlines of, and he changed the world. I still wish he hadn’t died. He is probably an extreme example from my parade. But truly emblematic of them all.
As we know from many famous examples in the history of neuroscience and general anatomy, when one region or body part fails or did not develop in the first place, a neighboring region, organ or body part steps in to take over the lost function. Not always certainly, but often. That was exactly what this resourceful child of neglect did to compensate for my unformed, underdeveloped or simply missing relationships and relationship abilities. So I was really never alone. My husband continues to be amused and is ever tolerant of this progression of characters that persists and even, perhaps only occasionally now, continues to grow. And it is a not unusual, mostly benign adaptation for survivors of neglect to somehow fill in the blanks with something. The trick is to be sure we stay cognizant and mindful of the difference between fantasy and reality.
As time goes on, when sexuality comes online very often for the child of neglect, this becomes a “new” locus of dysregulation. After all, trauma and neglect are all about dysregulations of arousal: hyper-arousal and hypo-arousal in the brain and body’s electrical system. Sexuality is another kind of arousal that can be both hyper, hypo or both. It can make for confusing, chaotic, out-of-control and even potentially destructive feelings and behaviors. Especially lacking quality, evidence-based and unbiased information and sex education. This is a major soap-box diatribe of mine. I believe it to be a significant contributor, besides gender-based power dynamics of course, to what we might abbreviate as the worldwide “Me Too” phenomenon. But don’t get me started…
In my case, the hormone-driven kind of arousal emerged early and intensely. Like most children of neglect with no one to ask and nowhere to turn, I did not know what to do with it. Now we have the internet, which is surely a mixed, mostly not-so-good solution. But back then, I resorted, at least at first, to fantasy which had always worked for me until then.
The child of neglect reaches for and finds adaptations or attempts at regulation for the usually distressing, uncomfortable or even tortuous dysregulations. I was no exception, and from the safety of fantasy, I ventured out a bit and discovered the elixir of alcohol by the age of 13. It was a blessed “fix” and provided me with a feedback loop of both a semblance of “calm” and the false courage to meet real people. One of my regulating mechanisms for hyper-arousal was the discovery of distance bicycling, which also brought me into a community of mostly male others. The feedback loops between alcohol and the false courage provided by alcohol and the other iterations of increasing arousal and impulses resulted in my colorful checkered past. I can mostly laugh about it now, and thankfully nothing really bad ever happened.
I am, however, painfully aware of the vast range of sexual dysregulations and difficulties that, for the most part, no one talks about. People are ashamed, don’t know how to speak about them, or don’t know it is “OK” to either have or speak about them. Let alone to whom. Most clinicians in health and/or mental healthcare fail to inquire due to their own ignorance or shame, or perhaps morals. In many cases, if I do hear about sexual concerns at all, it is most often from an angry, distressed or frightened partner or if the individual has gotten into some kind of “trouble.”
In the 1990s, the AIDS epidemic brought some of these problems and their dangers to unavoidable light. For a long time, they were largely lethal, and thankfully in most parts of the world, that is no longer true. Certainly, my neighborhood and the park on the corner, once a famed destination for anonymous sex, is haunted by ghosts: lives lost to the AIDS crisis.
In the early 2000s, my phone rang like a repeating alarm bell, resounding with the then diagnosis du jour of “sex addiction”, compulsive sexual behaviors that at least initially terrified and mystified individuals and couples and clinicians too.
Although a veritable (and certainly at least partially profit-driven) industry sprung up. It took me a while to find reliable and truly scientific and worthwhile information, theoretical formulations, and treatment approaches that I could accept and attempt to utilize. Those were some hard times.
I have a strong conviction about asking and teaching healthcare and mental health practitioners to educate themselves and become fluent in speaking and inquiring about sexual matters. This means getting comfortable with using precise language out loud and without shame to model and both proffer normalcy and permission to not know or to struggle. I would wish that psychiatrists advise their patients about the possible sexual side effects and even losses that accompany some antidepressants, similarly oncologists about chemotherapy and some surgeries, Ob-Gyn’s about pregnancy. Childbirth and beyond, etc. And that we all learn about the dysregulations that may accompany childhood neglect.
The history of sex education in public schools is another interesting and decidedly political story. But that would be for another day. Suffice it to say, I have to wonder how much individual shame and agony, sexual misconduct and abuse, un-bridled and dangerous sexual and even criminal activity result in dysregulations originating with attachment trauma and neglect, and the tragic poverty of good information.
My alcohol-soaked compulsivity spanned most of my 20’s. When clients ruefully lament the idealized loss of their “youth” I have to at least quietly think “good riddance!” Most of my out-of-control behavior, even if it manifested in the physical world with real live others, was not that different from the old fantasy world and lasted not much longer before evaporating, although sometimes with some humiliation and dramatic heartbreak. All of my copious journals from that decade are filled with nothing but those romance novel-like tales, and although the tattered notebooks are lined up on a back bookshelf, I have never ever cracked the covers and sometimes wonder why I have saved them – perhaps as a relic or hopeful reminder of what recovery can do!
I have recently noticed that a number of (mostly) male survivors of neglect entering midlife (fifties and sixties) are “suddenly beset with alarm and grief about a door possibly slipping shut.” Many who have endured long sexless partnerships as they begin to consciously or unconsciously grapple with mortality worry about missing out entirely on satisfying sex. It becomes unbearable and no longer acceptable. Those who have been working on their neglect, either in couples or individual therapy or both, are gaining the voice and the courage, as well as the self-respect, to insist on creating that in their partnerships before it is too late. I am here to say that such is possible. Again, the sequelae of neglect span a wide swath, and to heal dysregulations and the intergenerational transmission of neglect is not only to better individual lives but to make the whole world better, safer and more fun!
Today’s song:
Pondering how I first happened on the translucent, barely visible child of neglect, the oddest image appeared in my mind. I imagined myself, middle thirties strolling placidly along a quiet beach. In one non-remarkable step, walking through the innocuous and pleasantly warm sand, I am suddenly nudged into alertness to discover that one little mound, apparently indistinguishable from all the others, had a little hole in it. Just as suddenly, it explodes into a geyser-like cascade of tiny ants. They are everywhere, teeming and flowing in every direction. They are immediately all over my feet and ankles. Wow! Where did that come from?
Encountering the unexpected world of neglect was like walking into an industrious, quietly busy camouflaged ant hill, which turned out to be a mountain. My mom used to say, “Don’t make mountains out of molehills!” And she generally did the opposite, at least where I was concerned. But in this case, no exaggeration. I hope likening the hapless child of neglect to an ant does not seem insulting! It is not intended that way, and who knows where these seemingly random flashes come from? Besides, ants are really quite amazing. I have seen teams of the little critters working together to heave and lug a leaf infinitely larger than the whole pack combined across a human-sized dirt hiking path. A remarkable mission of strength and courage, too, as the trail is regularly trudged over by hikers and passersby, most likely not looking down. An amazing feat, no pun intended.
I will dispense with the story of how it all began, in real life, I have told it so many times. I am told I am quite the storyteller. I never realized that I am until only much later when there was actually someone to tell stories to. Rather, I would like to paint a picture of the emerging character that began to take shape in my observation and in my thinking as I watched and studied this to me newly identified population.
In cheese making, a rather astonishing process occurs, which still continues to amaze and delight me. A minuscule amount of rennet, the “coagulant,” maybe one and a half teaspoons in an 8-gallon pot of milk, after adding that and an hour or so of peaceful rest, miraculously, a pot of liquid congeals into a large pot of what becomes increasingly a solid pot of curd. That is how I remember the gradual coagulation of what I came to call the “neglect profile.” I will only begin to sketch it here. Like a good cheese, it has aged and continues to age over months and years.
Pecorino, Parmesano, Provolone? Well, those are all good, but not what I had in mind. The first recurring character pattern that began to jell in my observation was what I came to call the triumvirate of Passivity, Procrastination and Paralysis, or the “Three P’s.” The P’s came to be a signature that I spotted early on that pointed to neglect. They seemed to resonate with people. Why would this be?
Three major tent poles of my thinking, the rennet perhaps, were neuroscience, attachment theory and Neurofeedback. From neuroscience, Allan Schore, one of my earliest and most profound influences, we learned that the infant brain develops in resonance with the brain of the primary caregiver, right hemisphere to right hemisphere, primarily through the gaze. If that infant gazes into a face that is angry, fearful, expressionless or unpredictable, the earliest experience of that developing brain will be fear, uncertainty, confusion: dysregulation. And if there is no one there, the gaze is into a vapid emptiness. Left alone too much, that little brain will be under-stimulated, not to mention scared and sad. But of course, emotion will only register in a sensory or bodily way at that stage. This is the unremembered, at least not in narrative form, beginning of the neglect experience. The under-stimulated brain will lack the encouragement and the incentive; thus, the initiative to reach, to begin, to try. Why bother?
From an attachment standpoint, the child who experiences the presence of a loving, supportive other is safe enough to go forth, to explore. We have probably all seen the videos of infants and toddlers crawling and walking further when they look back to see the encouraging, even applauding loved one attentively watching. Presence, having their back, makes for safe exploration.
Similarly, the essential “dilemma without solution,” which will be addressed in great detail in future writings, where the source of comfort and the source of terror or distress are the same people, and the child is in an irreconcilable quandary: reach toward or withdraw? The ambivalence makes for a toggling to and fro; fogginess at the very least, if not a full-on freeze response. Not conducive to purposeful action.
And a child left alone with minimal response to their cries will soon conclude it is pointless to cry, pointless to reach, pointless to act. Passivity would be a realistic default.
And from a neurofeedback standpoint, the under-stimulated infant brain will fire at slower frequencies, making for perhaps a slowing or clouding of attention. This, in turn, makes for what I have perceived to be a high co-incidence of attention deficit complaints from (or about) children of neglect. And although I have not seen data yet on the correlation between attention deficits and neglect, neuroscience of trauma expert extraordinaire, Ruth Lanius, has informally agreed with the hypothesis in a couple of personal communications. So there you have it: three P’s, and not as yummy as cheese, to say the least!
I might add that a frequent accompaniment to the P’s, or a ready refrain, punctuated with a deep shrug, was “I don’t know what to do!” Or, “there’s nothing I can do!” Of course! There wasn’t! The child had no impact. And there was no one to safely ask.
The hallmark of neglect, however, the signature or flagship, curiously became clear only secondly, after the unmistakably consistent P’s: A ferocious self-reliance. In the US, with a cultural history and iconizing of “rugged individualism,” self-reliance is admired, That is probably why I, for one, did not recognize it sooner, being a beacon of at least nominal or illusory self-sufficiency most of my life. Being pack animals, humans are by nature dependent and interdependent. Attachment is a survival need, and interpersonal need is nature’s design. Neglect is the failure or absence of reliable care. A child left alone too much has nowhere to turn but inward.
Self-reliance is a defense mechanism and a survival strategy originating with pain. It may evolve to become a haven of safety and the only comfortable way to be in the world. It may also be a point of pride. Before I was 15, I had my own little housecleaning business. I rode my bike to those big houses where rich people lived and started saving up my money for college. I could not compete with the Holocaust, but I did quite well at making my own way, and I thought it was pretty great.
Self-reliance, although exquisitely adaptive, also makes havoc in the world of relationship. Satisfying relationship involves reciprocity, and if we don’t let the other give also, they may feel unequal, rejected or unsafe. Or they might also appear to take advantage, which ultimately results in messy and often terminal ruptures. It took me decades before I could keep anyone in my life for long, before I learned how unsatisfying and controlling my over-giving might feel to the other, and how disempowering of them my inability to receive could feel.
Therapy is also a challenge for both neglect survivor client and therapist. To let the therapy “work” punctures the self-reliant armor. It is no longer “doing it all myself.” Being desperate for therapy to help and change something collides with the self-reliant armor, replicating a version of the original dilemma. Oy vey.
Finally, admittedly self-reliance can inadvertently blur into a kind of self-centeredness that I call the “one-person psychology.” The survivor is so busy taking care of everything for themselves that they can appear to forget about the other. Many a partner of a child of neglect complains about feeling similarly forgotten and neglected.
These were the beginnings or the foundational elements of what I have come to call the neglect profile. There was so much more to learn. And there still is. This is a start for now, as I begin to unwind and present the inner and outer, the experienced and the observable markers. I want everyone to learn to see what is not there and recognize neglect in others and themselves. Let’s make this world “neglect informed!”
Today’s song: