In the final year or so of my dad’s long life, he did not know who I was anymore. That is not so uncommon, but it was a good thing I had done so much work on my early neglect trauma by then because it was painfully reminiscent of my childhood with him. Our visits were not much fun, to say the very least. Until we discovered that he seemed to remember the entire playlist of songs from his whole life.
Dad was always a very musical man, and although the Nazi Holocaust robbed him of his education from age twelve, when he finally got to the US and was able to work his way to being able to pay for it, he found a college that would accept him without a high school diploma. He became a cantor. In Judaism, the cantor is the musical counterpart to the rabbi. That was a fitting job for him.
I always wondered if music was Dad’s real first love, but he would not quite let himself pursue a purely musical career out of some sort of Holocaust responsibility or guilt. Regardless, however, he always sang. I can remember all kinds of songs, including a fair measure of spirituals and even popular songs. He sometimes had moonlighting gigs singing in cocktail lounges and restaurants, although he never cared much for that because the “audience” was eating or drinking and not paying much attention to him. And he loved classical music, my mother did too.
When we were a little older and moved to California, I remember my dad would buy records called “Music Minus One” (MMO.) They were the accompaniment to famous operas or Schubert’s Lieder and the like. He would blast them in the center of the house and vocalize loudly. There was no escaping his bellowing baritone without leaving the house. By then, I was an adolescent, and perhaps part of my rebellion was to reject classical music, from which I have only partially “recovered.” But I hated being displaced that way for hours on end. And although many rhapsodized about his beautiful voice, I found it another of the ways that his large presence dominated our life.
Most distasteful of all was going to his performances with the Stanford Opera Workshop and seeing him prance around, singing in tights. Oy vey. I was so embarrassed! All this is to say, music was deep in my dad’s psyche and nervous system. I even vaguely remember how intrigued and probably relieved my mother was when an old family friend who was a psychiatrist used music to calm him down or comfort him.
As my dad declined towards death, I found that we could spend our visits singing. He still remembered every word, especially of the Jewish holiday songs. We would often sing rounds, and on a good day, when my sister was able to coordinate her visit with mine, she would bring her guitar, which was formerly his guitar. Music would get a smile out of him, he seemed more alive, and the time would pass. When he was in his final hours and barely conscious, I had some time with him alone. I had already said anything I still needed to say to him. So, I sang, mostly the same song over and over, the old spiritual, Twelve Gates to the City. Somehow that seemed a fitting way to send him off. It certainly comforted and regulated me. And I was somehow sure he was hearing me.
I always have a song in my head. Although, as is common for those of us with trauma and neglect histories, I remember very little about my childhood. Even now, my narrative is spotty. But I also remember every word of countless songs. My husband is often amazed. Even the repertoire of Latin American revolutionary songs we sang 50 years ago, I can still sing pretty much word for word in Spanish. And I still love them. I have groaning shelves of old vinyl that I cannot bear to part with, even though we don’t have any device to play “LP’s” on. I am quite struck by the way music has made a home in my brain and body and has ever been a source of sustenance, comfort, and regulation. It still is, and I treasure that.
I also remember when I was young, and a whole category of emotions were either inaccessible or verboten, (mostly on the rage and anger spectrum!) my music helped me to access and, if not process, at least safely discharge some of that. I loved the angriest Rolling Stones albums, and I remember scrubbing floors on my hands and knees alone in the house, blasting my music even louder than Dad’s MMO. I am sure it helped.
I also believe that music registers, even resonates powerfully energetically in the interpersonal field, even when it is quietly contained in my busy head. It is not uncommon that when I am sitting with a neglect survivor client who often has very few words or lacks a coherent story, the song that pops up spontaneously in my head inspires the question that might unlock an upwelling or even a flood of sensory, emotional, or visual somatic memory or association. It is as if some sensibility in my brain is connecting with an age-old communication in theirs. This may sound a little “woo woo,” but I want to learn more about this. The more I learn about energy and frequencies, the less “far out” it seems.
After my brief but memorable meeting with the ingenious musician Bobby McFerrin, I was all over YouTube watching videos of him. He is uniquely able to create such a vast universe and variety of sound with only his voice and body, it is hard to fathom. I even heard him talking about how he trained himself to sing two different notes at once. Imagine being able to create harmony singlehandedly. And what a great metaphor! I discovered that Bobby currently offers workshops called Circlesongs, which are a protracted capella call and response that may extend for hours, even days. Watching a Circlesong video, I was mesmerized and quieted even by merely 54 minutes on a screen.
Recently in a book I read about frequencies, I learned that “Research has shown that the low-frequency vibrations produced by a cat’s purring can have therapeutic benefits for the cat and its owner. These vibrations can help promote the healing of soft tissue injuries in humans, including muscle strains, sprains, and other connective tissue injuries!”* Imagine the healing that might come from the unison of dozens, even hundreds of voices resounding for hours on end together, not to mention the energetic connection between participants. I hope to get in on one of those, perhaps this summer, and see what sort of healing is possible that way for this old body.
Many cultures, of course, have known this for centuries and have rituals and extended chants and ceremonies that surely have those effects. Bobby certainly does not claim to have re-invented the wheel. I have a client whose Buddhist community had group chants that would extend through the nights and for days on end. I never understood that. But I think I am beginning to. I’d like to understand much more about how music can help us grow and heal. Meanwhile, I’ll keep ending each blog with a song!
*What the Ear Hears (and Doesn’t): Inside the Extraordinary Everyday World of Frequency by Richard Mainwaring
Today’s Song:
In my morning workout, I was swept out of my usual reverie by a vocal. Most of the time my Pandora musical feed keeps me happy and in rhythm with instrumental music. My station is a mix of contemporary/jazz/Spanish guitar which for me is just right. At first, I was annoyed, it was a slowish cut and Santana does not exactly belong on my Pandora station. When I began to tune in a bit, I realized it was Santana’s “I Ain’t Got Nobody, That I Can Depend On.” Then I realized that Pandora was suggesting that I write about the core dilemma of neglect, and the terrible dilemma that results from that early experience.
I always loved Santana. The band’s leader, Carlos Santana, was the first to effectively and successfully, broker the intermarriage between two of my favorite musical styles: rock and Latin. It was a pretty gutsy of him, and an innovative undertaking for a young kid from Jalisco, Mexico. But in San Francisco in the late 1960’s, much was possible. Certainly in the music world. In my typical way, I read a biography of Carlos almost a decade ago. I don’t remember much. He grew up in a musical family; he was sexually abused between the ages of 10 and 12, by an American man who brought him across the border. He subsequently lived and went to school in the San Francisco Mission District which was then a Spanish speaking ghetto, of immigrants from many Central and South American countries. (Now it is a wildly gentrified neighborhood and foodie hot spot, where finding a parking space is like winning a Las Vegas jackpot.) I remember walking through the streets of the Mission when I had my first alcohol treatment job, teaching drunk driving school in Spanish. I loved passing the many Latin music record stores, and often stopped on my way home to buy vinyl “discos.”
I remember that many of Carlos’s relationships were stormy, with the band changing members and managers multiple times. But I suppose that is not so unusual in the complex and often drug laced musical world, certainly in those days. He divorced after more than three decades, in 2007 and not long thereafter married his drummer with whom he is still married. I do remember that I reflected when I read about him: his appeared to be a challenging, like many an immigrant, life of neglect. That song came from somewhere!
I always loved Santana. The band’s leader, Carlos Santana, was the first to effectively and successfully, broker the intermarriage between two of my favorite musical styles: rock and Latin. It was a pretty gutsy of him, and an innovative undertaking for a young kid from Jalisco, Mexico.
The core dilemma of neglect, and in my experience, the most common and most insidious, is very early in life, precisely that: no one to depend on. Often it starts in the crib. A safe infancy, involves a primary caretaker, most often the mother, who learns to recognize and respond to the infant’s signals. Not being a mother myself, I have always been in awe of how a mammal mother, (not only our species,) learns to distinguish the various infant cries, for food, a clean diaper, the fussiness of being too tired, cold, fear, and simple company or loving arms. How does she do that? And not perfectly of course! The attachment researchers tell us that the best case scenario, the best of the best, succeed 30% of the time! The remaining two thirds of the time, is the ceaseless dance of rupture and repair. But both the prompt response to the particular cry, with the sought supplies; and the reliable quest for repair and reconnection, make for a securely attached, regulated infant.
The child of neglect for whatever reason, misses out on that. It may be because a mother is depressed, ill, drug addicted, traumatized, desperate to make a living, fighting with the other parent, too young, or simply selfish or careless.
There are innumerable root causes for the neglect, but that notwithstanding, the child who misses out on the well timed, accurately registered response, winds up with a dysregulated nervous system, as what quiets hyperarousal, and the fear that comes with need, is gratification. The accurately gratified child can settle, calm down, and rest in the knowledge that someone is there who gets it, who gets me, who will take care of me. My feelings matter and will be attended to. What an ideal scenario. And of course this happens, or does not, way before we have the brain development to remember it in a narrative, story-like way. This start inhabits the infant’s little body with a calm that adds up to safety, value and trust that someone is there. I matter and I am OK. It lodges in body, emotional and sensory experience that someone is there. This is why I never had the guts to have children. By age five, I was sure I couldn’t do it, and I never wanted anyone to feel like I did.
Missing those experiences, or enough of them, results in a child with many varieties of dysregulation. I sometimes wonder if my disordered eating started that long ago, if signals of hunger and satiety were mis-read, ignored or over-ridden. Who knows? I do know that neglect is the vast and vacuous desert of missing experiences, where the child ultimately has nowhere to turn but inward. These are the roots of the primary default to self-reliance. What else is a little person supposed to do? Pacify or insulate against the “careless” caregiver, and soldier on. You might ask, “how would I know that? It happened so long ago.” Or “my hapless parents did the best they could.” Or “I had a perfectly happy childhood.” Or the most often resounding disclaimer: “Nothing happened to me!” Precisely, too much nothing!
It takes time and hard work to unearth an unremembered story. Often we can only piece it together from body, emotional and sensory cues, and reflecting on what was going on around the mother or parents, when the child was tiny. And an often seemingly ferocious self-reliance. Self- reliance is a lifeline, the survival mainstay, hard to ever want or dare to relinquish. It is also a dead give-away.
Local treasure, Berkeley attachment researcher extraordinaire, Mary Main coined the term “Dilemma without solution” which is the core conflict surrounding neglect. The concept gave rise to what was initially a new attachment style: the disorganized, disoriented. The dilemma is that the source of terror and the source of comfort are the same person. So the infant is an endless ambivalent and confused frenzy seeking both safety and comfort, and succeeding at neither. The dissociation world seized on the concept in a hot minute, because a freeze or numbing response might be the infant’s only recourse, until self-reliance kicks in. Yes, it is a long road to healing. And this is why the wide world of relationship can be a bleak battlefield, littered with the mangled corpses of a parade of misguided or failed relationships of all kinds. At least mine was. That is what brings most survivors of neglect to therapy. Loneliness and confusion about “nothing.”
Local treasure, Berkeley attachment researcher extraordinaire, Mary Main coined the term “Dilemma without solution” which is the core conflict surrounding neglect. The concept gave rise to what was initially a new attachment style: the disorganized, disoriented. The dilemma is that the source of terror and the source of comfort are the same person.
Anyone who reads the acknowledgement of most any book, and I always do, knows that it takes a village to write a book. Of course, I didn’t really get that while writing my first two books. The result was what my husband refers to as the two (respectively) worst years of his life. As I approached my next book, to be a “lay-person’s” book about neglect, which promises to be my most important book yet, my husband adamantly refused to go through anything like the experience of the previous two. He proclaims that each time in effect, “he didn’t see me for a year,” except exhausted, stressed out and with little to offer him. In my advancing years, I finally had enough recovery to get a clue: duh! I hired a helper, who turned out to be an angel.
What an experience! I did not have to know what to do. Amazing! And what did the brilliant angel do? She brought in two more! Imagine that! A team of angels, who know what to do, and know how to do the things that I have no idea how to do, and never would have thought of. And who care about me! Always a solo endurance athlete, suddenly I was playing on a team. Three beautiful, smart, knowledgeable, kind and hardworking helpmates, all there for me! And all working to mid-wife the slowly gestating book. Unbelievable!
So this week, I had a truly astonishing experience. My primary angel got very sick. And like the infant who is torn between taking care of the mother, and worrying about its own urgent needs, I was in a quandary. I love my person so much, I only want healing for her. And I was also starting to stress about the things I don’t know how to do, that I am under deadline about. I did not want to interfere with her healing, and knew she was upset enough about work, while also in pain and fear about pretty much everything. And what happened was the unimaginable. The other two, who love her also, simply stepped in, took up the helm, and basically said, like the old Stevie Wonder song says “don’t you worry ‘bout a thing.” Amazing. Even at this advanced age and after 100 years of “solitude,” more and wonderful healing discovery is possible. I feel a new wave transformation, and awe about what it is like to emerge from self-reliance. I’d like to say, “Try it!” But that would be ridiculous. So I will simply say, stay the course! It is worth it!
Todays 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.
Way back in the middle 1970s, I cooked in a restaurant. I was a pretty good cook, having had the dubious distinction of being the only one who could be in the kitchen when Dad was doing his cyclone-like chef act. Dad had learned to cook by “stealing with his eyes”, as he said, watching the experts and doing what they did, as he worked in restaurants around the world in his diasporic flight from Hitler.
When I was born, he and Mom had a little restaurant in Carmel, and my sister and I spent our early years in the sink. This job, however, was a “movement job” at La Pena de Berkeley, a wonderful restaurant and community center supporting the Latin American solidarity movement. It is still there. It was there I really learned to cook. I was in my early 20’s and had a friend named Erica, who was tall and blond and looked like a model. I never imagined having a friend who looked like that. Erica was an amazing cook and taught me to make soup. Every day I made a 10-gallon pot of the soup du jour. I got pretty good at the soup thing, in fact, once one of my great idols at the time, Puerto Rican singer Roy Brown, praised our food from the stage.
My mom always loved my mushroom soup. Erica taught me how to make cream soups, and I loved the smell of the “roux,” the heady blend of butter and flour slowly roasting in the pot. Mom always started talking about Mother’s Day about three or four weeks ahead of time so we would not forget, so she could tell us what she wanted, and we had plenty of time to make or get whatever that was. She often asked for mushroom soup for her Mother’s Day dinner. It took about half the day to make, and I was so glad there was something worthwhile that I had to offer.
I am not a mother, and my mother and grandmother are long gone. So Mother’s Day is a non-event for my husband and me. Except for the fact that roses are double in price for a week or two. So it is unfettered and free for reflection.
Every day I made a 10-gallon pot of the soup du jour. I got pretty good at the soup thing, in fact, once one of my great idols at the time, Puerto Rican singer Roy Brown, praised our food from the stage.
When my mother died, I simply felt empty. When people expressed heartfelt condolences, I felt embarrassed and guilty. I was not sad at all, only relieved. I had felt so hated for so long, it was like having a vice removed from my throat. My loss came so very long ago. I suffered a protracted grief over the loss of my first real love relationship with a man. Only much later did I realize that the seemingly bottomless intractable grief was really about Mom. By the time my mother actually died, I had mourned for over a decade and had no tears left.
My mother had a trauma-ridden life. First, an upbringing of upper-class northern German coldness and nannies, then the Nazi Holocaust, then finding her way in a new and alien culture, and a long and challenging marriage to a difficult man. By the time my mom was the age I was when I was slinging hash and drinking at La Pena, my mom had three little kids and lived in a bleak apartment in New York while my dad went to school and worked and was barely around. That Manhattan building was like a refugee camp, almost everyone who lived there had numbers on their arms.
It is always hard to navigate the balance between sympathy and compassion for the pretty disabled other, with the bitterness and grief about one’s own deprivation, trauma and neglect. For many of us, the struggle is unbearable, even impossible, for a long time. It points to the great challenge of relationship in general. How in the world do we make space for the pain and subjectivity of two people who are both in agonizing needs, and they are different, and maybe gratifying one costs the other? I don’t use the word “incompatible.” Our work is to find our empathic way.
My mom had three little kids and lived in a bleak apartment in New York while my dad went to school and worked and was barely around. That Manhattan building was like a refugee camp, almost everyone who lived there had numbers on their arms.
I just learned moments ago that our beloved Harry Belafonte passed last night at 96. So sad. Mom loved Harry, and he is one of the great bequests that I cherish from her. Our bleak little apartment was brightened by him, as one of her three record albums was his. I remember waltzing Matilda with my sisters around the linoleum floors, laughing. Those memories are sweet. And when a few years ago, on a trip to Cuba I learned how bananas grow, I could not help remembering Harry singing “Dayo!” the banana boat song. Thanks Mom! My grief about Harry is unadulterated, perhaps it contains some compassion for you.
I am not one for regrets. In fact, I only have one. I failed to make my peace with my mother before she passed. Meaning I failed to reach a point where I no longer felt bitterness and recrimination and a simmer about her negligence or seeming self-centeredness. I never achieved equanimity before it was too late. She died precipitously. We did not see it coming. She seemed so healthy. At 75, she was going to aerobics, riding her bicycle around town, and seemed a picture of health. It was only when she kept dropping things that she got a check-up, and through a routine chest x-ray, it was discovered she was over-run by metastasized cancer: breast cancer, brain cancer, lung cancer. It was seemingly everywhere, and she had seemed just fine. It had always been our Dad who had all the serious medical issues. Five weeks later, she was gone. My sister wisely hypothesized that maybe she simply got too tired of taking care of Dad.
I am certainly not one for advice. I hate getting it unless I ask for it. And I strive not to give it unless I am asked. But there are a couple of things I do freely offer unbidden that you can take or leave. When faced with questions about how to proceed with a parent or any significant other who has hurt us, the question to ask is this: How will I feel about myself after they are gone if I do “X”? How will I feel about myself when they are gone if I do “Y?” And there is the answer. The one I have to live with is me. Who do I want to live with? Who do I want to be? I am sorry I was still angry when she died, that I could not or would not see her off with an open heart. My Mother’s Day is perhaps my day of atonement. Forgiveness is so important to me. I was a decade or two late in learning how.
Thanks Mom, for the soundtrack of Harry and Pete Seeger, for teaching me to sew. For the tiny sewing machine you gave me for my 16th birthday, the little Elna Lotus. I still have it. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to please you at least once a year with that soup.
I sometimes envy the Buddhists or others who have a way of thinking about where people go after they leave their corporeal existence on this earth. I think about my Dad sometimes and wonder where he is, much less often about my mom. Except maybe on Mother’s Day. This year, however, it comforts me to think that maybe she and Harry are in the same realm somewhere. That she can sing with him about Matilda taking his money and running off to Venezuela and laughing together.
Happy Mother’s Day one and all, mothers, grandmothers, sons and daughters, orphans, and everything in between. Have a gentle day. I think I am going to go and look for some mushrooms.
Todays 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.
May is American Cheese Month. No, I don’t mean American Cheese (Kraft Singlets, that hideous impostor masquerading as or feigning to be cheese.) Granted, those singlets were the” perfect melt,” producing an immediate bright orange gooey ooze that dripped dramatically off the burger, providing a mouth-watering visual. It melted as quickly as its single-serving polyethylene wrapper probably would have and didn’t taste much better. The singlets additionally produced an ample supply of landfill, also sadly “American.” But we didn’t think much about those things then. No, this month honors American cheese, or to be precise, and certainly more politically correct, cheeses originating and produced in the US.
So why a month? Probably a commercial initiative to remind and encourage people that the step-child of domestic cheeses actually has an honorable and noteworthy tradition, history and even some products. The fans of a Wisconsin football team call themselves “cheeseheads,” as Wisconsin is one of the most venerated US origins of cheese. But I also remember from years ago, long before I cared much, billboards with beautiful scenes of California landscapes, touting “Come for the Views, Stay for the Cheese!” I often feel that way at our home.
Europe: France, Switzerland, Denmark, Italy, Greece are all the icons of great cheese. Like neglect, “American” cheeses dim and fade from view and allegedly at least can’t compete. I will differ with that (much as I do about neglect!) as some of the creations coming out of Marin, in the Bay Area, are pretty darn good, and even some of mine are getting there, although I would not dream of selling it. So, a month suggesting that we buy some, try it, well, how could that be bad? And for the home cheesemakers like me, a reminder to – as Gavin, my beloved Australian cheesemaking teacher, always counsels, “Keep calm and make cheese!” I hardly need reminding.
And cheese, besides being a passion of mine and an inspiration in countless ways, provides an infinite supply of ready and exquisite metaphors. Like peeling the plastic singlet wrap and setting the stuff to melt, I miraculously get a quick spill of words and ideas. The ups and downs of cheese making, replete with dramatic disasters of failure and the occasional wildly delicious success, replicate the non-linear trauma/neglect healing process. It also reminds us that some things are, in fact, intended to stink, and if we learn or develop the taste, we may even come to like that.
Many know that during my first year or so of cheesemaking, my failure rate was a dismal 60%. Many feel that way about their first year, or even maybe ten, of trauma therapy. What would make one hang in there? People ask the same question when I tell them that my husband and I fired five couple’s therapists back in the early days (blessedly three decades ago now!) before we found one who could help us. We thought we were the couple from hell and probably were. Ultimately after about two years and thousands of dollars wasted, we found someone who could, in fact, help us and who even inspired me to become a couple’s therapist. So, what would make one stay the course, or as Gavin would say, “soldier on?” After all, my husband is the one who, after 30 pages, if the story hasn’t “begun,” gives up on a book. I still can’t do that, always having to keep going and finish the thing, endlessly hoping that “it might get better…” (He did, ultimately, teach me that it is OK to walk out of a movie, although admittedly, it took a while.) Trauma/neglect therapy is not linear, and that is for sure. However, I do believe it will get better. For those who stay with it, in my experience, it invariably does.
We thought we were the couple from hell and probably were. Ultimately after about two years and thousands of dollars wasted, we found someone who could, in fact, help us and who even inspired me to become a couple’s therapist.
I have also learned, and admittedly a form of American cheese has been a great teacher, that like the couple from hell that we were, even the most godforsaken disaster can be salvaged and even transformed into something quite wonderful. A life or a relationship that looks like an abandoned corpse-strewn battlefield can be transformed into a paradisiacal tropical resort destination like Viet Nam has become. Younger people, I have discovered, are surprisingly free of haunting prejudices, ghosts and guilt about the war there, even unfamiliar with the history. It may be something rather like a clean slate, or one might hope.
Gavin and a buddy of his, Larry from Deep South Texas, in a global-partnering attitude-changing effort, collaborated to teach the world “curd nerd” community to “make lemonade,” if you will. It was Larry’s initiative, wanting to improve the world’s view of both American Cheese and American cheese. And for me, it was a lesson or a reminder about new beginnings. Admittedly my husband, in all his politeness and undying patience, was getting tired of joining me in eating my mistakes. Thankfully, looking back, I (fortunately) did not have the 8-gallon pot then and was working more in four-gallon batches. But it was still a lot to ask, a lot of what I have come to call “Cottage Chevre.” Fancy recipes with European titles that somehow come out looking more like cottage cheese or edamame maybe.
Larry created a recipe for making American cheese, minus the polyvinyl packaging, of course, really a quite respectable recovery for cheeses with pure raw ingredients that somehow went awry in their developmental process. But here is the point: not beyond repair! Larry created a method for processing rocky, mushy, stinky or some other variation on “arrested development” into something wholesome and aesthetically pleasing. And additionally, that replicated the perhaps one and only “redeeming quality” of American cheese, that being the perfect melt! Even the original intended cheese may never have achieved that! A skeptical (and big-hearted!) purist, Gavin had the grace and the humility to not only undertake the experiment but to take it live on his channel with its 307K subscribers.
Younger people, I have discovered, are surprisingly free of haunting prejudices, ghosts and guilt about the war there, even unfamiliar with the history. It may be something rather like a clean slate, or one might hope.
I learned and repeatedly re-learn the lesson that there is no failure if we stay the course. The bodybuilders say, “Failure is success!” If you keep pumping until you can’t anymore, that is when you get stronger. (And a lot of them nourish themselves with whey protein!) Neglect, trauma, I’m pouring it all into one pot today. Some of the cheese recipes call for a 60, 70, or 80-minute stir. That means I am standing on my little, short-person’s stepping stool, stirring the 8-gallon vat, usually watching some webinar or maybe a Bobby McFerrin Circlesong all that time. I like to think of it as “kayaking in Kona,” but I am not always able to think so positively, much as I would like to. Sometimes it is a drag, a slog, an eternity.
For any neglect survivor waiting is on the order of fatal, and admittedly at times, I clock-watch, think about cheating, and want it to be over already. Here is the point, the seemingly hopeless case rarely is. I would like to say “never,” but I know never to say that!
May is the start of spring in many places. So for those who don’t care about cheese, it could be that. My husband just informed me while reading the news that May is Older Americans Month as well, so if you are domestic, you might prefer that. They say, “age doesn’t matter unless you’re a cheese,” so that way, we combine the two.
My one major takeaway is for those who are fed up, bone tired of stirring, slogging, pumping, going to therapy, I do understand that. I have felt that way too a lot on this long road, and admittedly occasionally still do. Finding a way to make it bearable, to be able to stay the course, is a tall order. I know that too! But I’m glad I did. And I never would have dreamed I could make something pretty wonderful out of those accumulated bowls of slop that I would have liked to toss if I weren’t so averse to wasting food. I am grateful to Larry for having the gumption to push Gavin and to Gavin for using his platform to get the word out to all of us. I do hope in some small way to pass on a message not only of endurance, but of hope! My friend Bruce, who I met on our first trip to Cuba, gave me the nickname “Cheese Wiz.” I like that!
Todays 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.
After some crazy (for us) storms and the roughest winter drought-parched California has seen in a while, spring seems to be arriving. Sun! It is a source of great joy and energy for me. Piles of bunched daffodils on sale in the grocery store are almost free. I buy them by the fistfuls and put them all over the house. My husband calls them his “happy flowers.” I put a huge bouquet in his office, and it keeps him smiling all day. I love flowers and have always made sure to keep flowers in my office. As far as I am concerned, they are as essential in psychotherapy as the Kleenex and the ever-present clock. I am grateful that I can feel myself well up with joy in the face of beauty: that nature, music, color, and words make me happy. It has not always been easy for me to take pleasure in, to feel it.
I remember when I first started doing neurofeedback in 2009. Exclaiming, “I feel calmer and happier, calmer and happier, and things don’t bother me!” was my incredulous refrain as I did more and more of it. And I added, “A world without fear is a different place! The opposite of fear is joy.” Fear and hyper-arousal inhabiting the body act as a pulsing obstacle, a barrier to joy. Neurofeedback and all those years of dogged slogging therapy of all different kinds have opened the channel for joy to flow. My office is filled with light, and I have the good fortune of being able to see it now – not all the time, of course, but most of the time. Now, when beauty brings me to tears, they are more likely to be tears of awe than longing. What a blessing.
A flashbulb memory recently sprang up. It was 1988; I was in the little kitchen of my apartment in Santa Cruz, doing some chores and listening to the radio. A song came on that I had never heard before, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy!” was the bouncy refrain. The beat was calypso-like and lively. It was hard not to smile and bounce along with its wacky rhythmic wisdom. Those were some rocky times in my life. I thought, “Oh, were it so easy!” Don’t worry, be happy? How do you do that?”
Fast forward to 2023. The other night I was out to dinner with my best friend. I have the good fortune to have a best friend who dates back even further than the remembered song! We get together once a month, which is another blessing I appreciate even more now the pandemic has allowed us to resume the long-standing ritual. I was harried, coming off a rather brutal workday, then traffic and parking. It took me a while to settle down once I finally landed in the restaurant with her. This was a restaurant I had been to before, and I had made friends with the waiter. As I often do with new friends, I had given him some cheese. The waiter rhapsodized about my cheese, which I always love, and I was basking in that. I did not notice the people at the table beside us.
When the neighboring table got up to leave, the man in their group said to me, “You are the cheesemaker!” I said yes, surprised that he knew. Apparently, the waiter had told him I make cheese. He was an interesting-looking man. We chatted briefly, shook hands, and they left. When the group was outside, the waiter said to me, “Do you know who that is?” “No!” I replied. “Bobby McFerrin!” He said. I ran outside to shake his hand again, regretting that I had not recognized him. When I got home, I googled him and got a 1988 YouTube video of Bobby McFerrin singing the delightful song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy!” Both he and I are much older now. I listened to it about five times, thinking, what a different world it is since the last time I heard it.
I told my husband I had met Bobby McFerrin at the restaurant, and he said, “Oh, he sings a cappella, doesn’t he?” I didn’t know for sure, so I played a series of YouTube videos and saw his amazing diversity of sound and voice. In some cases, his sound was so diverse that it was indistinguishable as a cappella. He “played the snare drum on [his] chest” as the only accompaniment. In one piece, there was an instrument, another man playing the double bass. Bobby motioned to him to move to the keyboard. “I’ll sing the bass,” he said, and while his companion played the keyboard, Bobby, with his voice, replicated the precise deep rhythmic sounds of the double bass part. I wondered, what kind of person could write and sing like that? And could laughingly say, “Don’t worry, be happy…”? So, in my customary way, I watched a few interviews.
I am grateful that I can feel myself well up with joy in the face of beauty: that nature, music, color, and words make me happy. It has not always been easy for me to take pleasure in, to feel it.
Bobby’s childhood home was a bastion of music. In 1955, when he was five, Bobby’s father became the first African American singer to perform with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City and later in the New York City Opera. His mother was also a vocalist. Their home was perennially filled with music and song, and music was also a healer.
As Bobby said, “When I was sick, my mother would give me two things. She’d give me some medicine for the aches and pains, and music for my spirit… Music has the incredible power to rearrange your insides.” The gentle, reliable, and melodic presence of both parents created a platform, a nervous system tuned and able to not worry and be happy. Bobby always loved music and sound, but he also deeply loved quiet. As a teen and young adult, he was powerfully drawn to monastic life and nearly chose that. The music, however, won out. And I believe we are all the better for it.
The quiet, the music, the precedence over other things, the play, the love: Bobby’s kids, it appears, grew up in an ambiance and matrix, a field where one can experience joy, not sweat the small stuff, one can not worry and be happy, and not have to spend decades in therapy to get there.
I learned that one member of the party at the neighboring table was Bobby’s wife of 48 years. However, for me, the most striking and moving part of one interview was when Bobby talked about having their own three children. “You can’t have children without that affecting everything that happens to you!” He sang to them “in the belly,” and he and his wife went to concerts when she was pregnant. “They heard a lot of music before they even came out.” But what grabbed me most of all was when he said, “I wanted to be home all the time. I hated missing out on everything… they change so much in a week, in a day. I wanted to be home, all the time, read stories, be the ‘tickle monster…’ change my voice to be the different characters.” He wanted to be home, to be present with them, see them grow and change, become little people. So different from my dad and the parents of so many of my clients – absent in so many ways, for many kinds of reasons. The quiet, the music, the precedence over other things, the play, the love: Bobby’s kids, it appears, grew up in an ambiance and matrix, a field where one can experience joy, not sweat the small stuff, one can not worry and be happy, and not have to spend decades in therapy to get there. What an inspiration!
I am not a parent. To be honest, I was afraid that intergenerational transmission would seep into and haunt my next generation. I feared I could not do better. I now believe that the hard work of regulation, what the attachment researchers call “earned secure attachment,” the regulation one achieves through one’s persistent healing effort, can also be intergenerationally transmitted. We can, in fact, change the gene pool. Bobby’s music and his example are a gift to us all. Thanks Bobby! I am going to see if I can find him so I can give him some cheese!
Todays 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.
When I was young and deeply involved in Latin American anti-imperialist political work, the freedom fighters who organized and fought clandestinely against authoritarian dictatorships were called La Resistencia, the resistance. They boldly left their insignia, a capital R in a circle, as their quiet battle cry to show that they were not vanquished, ferociously not gone. I have always rather liked that it was also my initial, and I could sign off, if not in battle, certainly as a champion of the oppressed and unfree. However, the ways the word “resistance” has been used in the world of psychotherapy and, to some extent, in common parlance has irked me. I even occasionally hear disgruntled spouses hurl it crudely in an unruly couple’s session before I get a chance to nip it. It suggests intentionality, a willful thwarting of something. I rarely see psychological pushback that way. It invariably represents something else, certainly where trauma is concerned.
The core dilemma at the heart of neglect trauma is a profound internal conflict about attachment. Starting from the initial heartbreak, the child interprets the neglect scenario the only way they can, as rejection: “I am not good enough. I don’t matter. I am worthless. I am invisible. I don’t exist.” At first, if the neglect is early, which it often is, there are no words, only a quaking emptiness, hunger, agitation, a shapeless, rudderless flailing disorientation and confusion. After a while, there is collapse into the futility of waiting, and perhaps a freeze. Later, what most often emerges is a default to rock-solid self-reliance. What other choice do they have but to become strong, fierce, enduring, and to do it all themselves? It is the signature of the child of neglect, perhaps their/our version of the defiant “R.” But it is far more than a statement; it is survival, a way of life.
I began to learn about the ferocity of self-reliance in my work as a therapist. Often the child of neglect is reluctant to seek psychotherapy in the first place because they are not used to thinking of another person as a resource, or as being of any use. Often, these children of neglect are some of the most competent, accomplished, and outwardly successful people one might ever hope to find. The fact that there is a gaping interpersonal vacuum or “disability” might slip by unnoticed, even by themselves. They might know that they feel bad, or maybe they don’t even “have time” to notice that because they are too “busy” or too practiced at whatever their chosen medium of numbing out.
The core dilemma at the heart of neglect trauma is a profound internal conflict about attachment. Starting from the initial heartbreak, the child interprets the neglect scenario the only way they can, as rejection.
I had a humbling lesson about my own, perhaps avoidant, self-reliance only a few short years ago. My beloved therapist was undeniably getting old. I had been with her forever and had come a long way in letting myself know how important she was to me. I had always said to her, “I am going to keep coming here until you shut the door!” I was committed to that. By now, she was 89. In all our years together, she had never forgotten things. That stunned me when I first met her. She actually listened to me and tracked what I said! My parents had never even known my friends’ names, if I ever had any. Here was someone who was holding my whole life. Unbelievable. Now at 89, she was occasionally slipping, understandably, of course. I could not deny it.
I am a rather compulsively punctual person. All my years of therapy, I paid riveted attention to the clock, always cautious not to “overstay my welcome.” I liked to pay first, so I had “earned my keep.” I never wanted to impose in any way. And I scrupulously arrived on time. Until now. “Suddenly,” I began arriving at my sessions late. I would walk the mile or so from my office to hers. I had always enjoyed the walk, and window shopping on College Ave. It was a lively, colorful street, and now post-pandemic, it is coming back. I enjoyed being out in the world. And I made a point of managing my work days so there would be time to walk – until this point in time, when things started “running late.” I was unwilling to give up the walk and drive to be on time for my sessions. I stubbornly insisted on walking. We observed me arriving later and later to therapy. My therapist, always attentive to everything, especially where our relationship was concerned, would ask me, “What is up with this lateness?” I shrugged it off. My work… but it seemed I was starting to be sometimes almost 20 minutes late for a 50-minute session.
It took a long time to recognize that I was starting to fear not only her retirement but her death. Anything remotely related to losing her completely unnerved me. Except I did not even let myself know that. She worked to nudge and delicately steer me into that material for a long time before I “got it.” If she or anyone had dared to call it “resistance,” I am sure I would have had a righteous hissy fit.
The fear of loss is so profound it evokes the first “loss,” which was not really having anything in the first place, so far beyond conscious awareness. It took many months of wasted, lost time I could have had with her. She did retire before she turned 90. Now she is 93? I’m not sure. We are still in touch, and I still struggle sometimes to let myself call and see how she is doing. I know she will not live forever, and somehow that is unbearable. Need and loss are two sides of the same lousy coin. Neglect makes one desperately vulnerable to both, so we toggle back and forth, keeping them, as much as possible, outside of awareness. We deny, disavow, OK, resist. It can be a tragic waste.
Yes, our core dilemma is that the source of longed-for comfort and the source of perceived terror, loss, and/or rejection are the same person. What is a child to do?
Yes, our core dilemma is that the source of longed-for comfort and the source of perceived terror, loss, and/or rejection are the same person. What is a child to do? They push and pull, reach toward, recoil from, rock and roll, and ultimately culminate in collapse, freeze, or both. The same conflict can unfold in psychotherapy. On the one hand is a desperate longing, not only to connect, but to have the therapy “work” and actually be helped. On the other hand, is the seemingly lethal danger of interpersonal need, of letting the lifeline of self-reliance be punctured, and the puffed up, imagined, even experienced safety of isolation, whistling airily away. It is perhaps like a balloon with a hole, hissing and shrinking, spinning away from the risk of being abandoned, rejected forgotten again.
Some clients “resolve” or avoid it by having something like “serial monogamy” with therapists: going from one to the next as if they are interchangeable parts, not relationships, as if we therapists have a “shelf life.” It makes logical sense, but it is not what the heart craves. It is not “really” safe. It can most definitely be a challenge for therapist and client. Some view the method as the vehicle of change: the neurofeedback, EMDR, IFS, SE DBT, whichever of the alphabet soup, rather than a person. Those are all essential, don’t get me wrong. But the deepest healing comes in the relatedness.
It is a long-term challenge that I have been at for many years. I try not to think of it as “resistance,” even my own stubborn lateness, my preference to look at all the beautiful clothes in the shop windows. That makes it sound purposeful. Rather it was an urgent gasp to maintain autonomy, to save my life, and to protect my long-ago broken heart. I have come to think of the vacillation, the reciprocal reaching for, pulling back, perhaps as a kind of rocking? Perhaps it is a simulation of the loving somatic experience of being cradled, having a large and containing other’s body gently embrace, enfold us in gentle, rhythmic movement. It is often a grievously missing, even dreamlike experience, and people can try in vain to give it to themselves. What a terribly lonely, if logical, formulation.
We must go kindly with this. It takes its time to heal. Many of my comrades, the Resistance fighters I knew and did not know, I fear have died. Some I know about, some I never heard about again. They quietly slipped undercover, and who knows what happened? A different kind of cover than the craved cradle blanket. I still cherish the mighty R and the songs that honor them. And it is essential not to confuse different avenues of survival: both are heroic, each in their way in the service of freedom and life.
It is turning to spring in my hemisphere. Best wishes for whichever of the season’s holidays you observe.
R
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.
In cheesemaking holes are not flaws. In fact, we call them eyes. In a specific family of cheeses, the “Alpine” cheeses, by design, the cultures ripen, grow and bubble with a lovely, sometimes deliciously smelly aromatic gas that puffs up inside the curd and makes for the little, cavernous jewels. The process is called “eye formation.” I remember when I got my first pathetic little eyes in an early Gruyere. I was so excited. I have since become much more skilled with the Alpines, although I have learned, that in order to get really big holes, you have to have really big wheels. Admittedly I have never aspired to be either a big wheel or a big cheese, so I content myself with my modest, but nonetheless satisfying mid-sized results.
Colloquially, the Alpines are for the most part lumped under the category of “Swiss” cheese, which is hardly accurate, as they have been made all over the world, in the various countries where cows were seasonally herded up and down mountains in winter or summer to where the weather and grazing might be better for milk production. Growing up, I always rather hated the “Swiss cheese” that would routinely appear in our embarrassingly boring and redundant brown bag lunches. It was a pale waxy, perhaps rubbery slab of something that tasted rather like soap. I usually peeled it off and stashed it in the bottom of the bag. Now I love a good Jarlsberg or Emmental.
There is also an unsavory variety of holes in cheese that are in fact flaws. These are the “mechanical holes.” The mechanical ones are those that are the result of some sort of crack, or failure to bind, consolidate, or grow integrally whole. They may result from some oversight of temperature, excessive or insufficient handling, poor timing of something, inattention, lack of sufficient containment or pressure, or some fluke of circumstance. If there are too many mechanical holes, the curd mass can even effectively fall apart, fail to thrive. Back in my early cheesemaking days when my failure rate was about 60%, we routinely had to serve these poor developmentally disabled youngsters, with a spoon. Thankfully my ever-patient husband joined me in eating all my mistakes.
I think of neglect much like holes, gaping absences in developmental experience. Empty spaces inside that burst and open into gaping voids, often to be filled with brilliant and creative adaptations, but lonely and empty nonetheless. And quietly shrouded, existing in the shadow of absence, largely and protractedly it may languish for a long and lonely aging in the dark. I have had to learn to “see” neglect. In effect, developing that capacity for sight, the ability to discern and be present with the trauma of neglect, has been another kind of “eye formation:” growing the eyes, ears and heart to recognize and understand the hidden, seemingly unexplained pain.
I think of neglect much like holes, gaping absences in developmental experience. Empty spaces inside that burst and open into gaping voids, often to be filled with brilliant and creative adaptations, but lonely and empty nonetheless.
I recently read a book about frequency, What the Ear Hears (and Doesn’t): Inside the Extraordinary Everyday World of Frequency by Richard Mainwaring. I did not like the book that much but it definitely opened my eyes in a number of ways. Before I discovered neurofeedback, I really only thought of frequency as meaning now many times a week a couple had sex? Or I did not think of it at all. I have since learned to think about frequency not only in relation to EEG or brain waves, but in the fact that everything is energy, according to Einstein, which means everything has frequency. That is what the book is about, and the author being both scientist and musician, focuses much on frequency as it relates to music and sound. He does tell many interesting stories.
Everything having frequency, includes the deep rumblings of seismic shifts. Living in earthquake country myself, I had never known or thought of this. And apparently the vibration of seismic movement has frequency that can be perceived as sound, but a sound so low, that we humans cannot hear it. But some animals can. The book tells a lovely story about a little girl whose life dream was to ride an elephant, and while on a family trip to Thailand, finally gets the opportunity. Riding high on the back of the mighty creature, he takes her on a lovely ambling walk out on a beautiful, sparkling beach. Until very suddenly the elephant makes a sudden pivot and hurriedly sweeps her in the other direction onto higher ground. Safely up and off the beach, they look behind them to see a massive tsunami has swept through precisely the spot where they had only moments before been strolling. The elephant had heard it coming.
Neglect vibrates at frequencies that a trained and practiced ear/eye/heart/body can hear and feel and sense. Without that special awareness and sensibility survivors truly get washed away by the “waters of oblivion” as my theme song Too Much of Nothing so exquisitely expresses it. Both survivors and therapists, all of us really, must grow the ears of an elephant so as not to miss it.
Story
This is why neglect has slipped under the radar for so long. For the most part, usually having no noisy, thrashing, fiery presence, it easily goes ignored. For an infant, being left alone, or left alone too much, can be as devastating as any more overtly violent life experience. But if the futile cries go unheard, until they exhaustedly and hopelessly cease, there is no witness, no record that it ever even happened. Except the scarred nervous system, the perhaps “mechanical holes” that form inside that infant, later, child and adult.
Recovery from neglect is about learning patterns to look for, frequencies to tune into, to cobble together the fragmented story. One of the first clues, is the poverty of memory. I have always been rather amazed at my vacant and spotty memory of my own childhood. So much of it is blank. Where was I? Equally interesting is how little bits and pieces percolate up from seemingly nowhere, even now after years and decades that I have been working on this.
A second, and probably most salient flag is the morass and complexity of relationship. The ambivalence between both longing for and fiercely fighting against any need for relatedness. Self-reliance is both the life raft and the prison of the neglect survivor, and perhaps the work of a lifetime to resolve. Even after years and decades of study and work, and thirty plus years of (mostly!) happy marriage, I can say it is a work in progress. And relationship challenge is a dead giveaway that most likely a neglect story lurks beneath.
Perhaps a third key marker is some sort of distortion in relation to emotion. For some whose neglect is very early, there may be a rather numb, undifferentiated, largely cognitive “understanding” of feeling – especially for boys and men who grow up in cultures where emotion is viewed as weak and not encouraged. Because we learn to identify, feel, name and express feeling in relationship, through the experience of “feeling felt,” when that does not happen, something is clearly missing. I remember constantly looking outward to try and figure out “what do people do?” Or how I was “supposed to” feel? Unable to take cues from inside, and with no one to ask, I flailed as many of us do, and also became an astute student of the emotional reactions (accurate or imaginary) of others. It is a task (of humility!) for the neglect survivor to reluctantly swallow, that their own perception of the other and their own assumption, may be their very own fiction, and again, a hint to their own story.
I like to think of the study of neglect as a kind of treasure hunt, a searching for clues that will lead us to the treasure: the story and the precious child. Much of the story is outside of ordinary awareness, or the fields of daily consciousness or sensibility. Cheesemaking is a handy metaphor for trauma and certainly neglect trauma healing. Virtually universal, timeless, the study is endless. It is organic and alive, a heady mix of science, art, perhaps even alchemy, time, a large measure of patience, and acceptance that sometimes it truly stinks.
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.
(In the US, the nickname “March Madness” refers to a historical obsession with college basketball during the month of March.)
Hyper-attuned to invisibility, I perk up abruptly when I hear a remarkable but “dated” story. How could I have missed that? Such was the case when Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf came to my awareness. His name was so unfamiliar I had a hard time remembering it, even as I found the man unforgettable. I happened to hear an interview with the filmmaker of a recent documentary about this forgotten basketball legend. Again, I am no sports spectator. But I am fascinated and compelled by the energy, drive, and exquisite body awareness of talented athletes, and have great admiration for those who use their visibility and influence for larger, humanitarian ends. And I am similarly compelled when they vanish from the public mind. How can the seeming amnesia of neglect be so “easy?”
I found many aspects of Abdul-Rauf to be unforgettable. Born in 1969 in the depths of the still racially segregated Southern US, with the name Chris Jackson, he never knew his father. It was a source of persistent grief that his mother “could” not tell him and never did. Already beset with both poverty and hunger, at an early age, young Chris began to suffer from Tourette’s Syndrome. For years, mysterious and nameless, the illness kept him endlessly driven by unstoppable compulsive movements and rituals. It might take him 45 minutes to put on his shoes as he wildly took them off, put them on, took them off, put them on, over and over again. His already beleaguered single mom would become impatient and angry with his noisy opening and slamming, opening and slamming the refrigerator door, taking forever to get the simplest tasks done. Young Chris desperately prayed for the overpowering agony to stop. Finally, after years of struggle, at age 17, the compulsion had a name. He was diagnosed, and although the tradeoffs of the various psych medications (as many of my readers probably know all too well) were another kind of nightmare, at least to some degree, his shame was alleviated.
Basketball was a wonderful discovery for Chris at the age of eight. He called it a “natural love.” He spent hours alone on the street, as he said “using his imagination.” He would imagine all sorts of plays, huge other players, attempting to guard him, complex basketball configurations. For hours on end, he would respond to those phantom situations, over and over again. He proceeded to at least try to “make basketball my father,” in that it took up a lot of his time, and gave him a sense of belonging. And to his surprise, he discovered he was particularly good at it. He also had the secret wish that “maybe if I got really good at something, my father wherever he might be, would want to know me and be with me…” Although his dream about his father never did come true, he did become that good.
NBA stars from various eras rhapsodize about him. Said Shaquille O’Neal, “watching Mahmoud, was like watching God play basketball.” Phil Jackson said “He was Steph Curry before there was Steph Curry.” And local guy, (the only one whose name I knew,) Steve Kerr said “To watch him have Tourette’s Syndrome and still destroy the best players in the league… I had no chance against Mahmoud.” And he was “barely” 6 feet tall.
About the uncontrollable repetitive drive of Tourette’s, as an adult he himself said “It was definitely a blessing, a major blessing. I would’ve stopped practicing after an hour and a half, two hours, and gone on home. But Tourette’s Syndrome said ‘NO!’ ” the forced repetition honed his exquisite skill.
His name was so unfamiliar I had a hard time remembering it, even as I found the man unforgettablehere are so many dimensions of change and transformation.
So what does Mahmoud’s story have to do with trauma and neglect? Surely going undiagnosed with an agonizing disability is familiar to many survivors, especially as countless unknown or unremembered stories are carried and told by the ailing body. Even more than that, however, I was struck by how at age 30, by then an accomplished professional basketball player, Jackson found a home in Islam, both in the spiritual sense, and most likely in the attachment sense as well. He began by reading, first the Autobiography of Malcom X, and then experiencing the love and welcome of the Muslim community, he discovered a kind of affiliation, a sense of belonging, and a meaning system, that seemed to be what had been missing for him. I have to wonder if it had to do with fatherlessness.
I generally think of the mother when I think about the survival need to be attached. It seems organic that the parent to whom the child is literally attached for a significant period of time be at least at first, the primary attachment figure. However, affiliation, belonging to a pack, is also a survival need, at least for mammals. When I looked up the origins of the word affiliation, I found it was adapted from the Latin affiliare “to adopt as a son,” for me it has seemed that acceptance, being good enough, belonging in some way to the world, being part of something greater, were associated with my father. I craved my mother’s love and attention, from my father I longed not only for attention but to be known, and for him to be proud of me: acceptance. I wonder if that is what Mahmoud sought and found in Islam.
At age 30, Jackson changed his name to Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. Inspired by other athletes before him, like Mohammed Alli, and by his own conscience, he began to find it impossible to stand during the National Anthem. He could not stand for injustice, for a history of racism and slavery. He knew that a lot of people who had followed and admired Cassius Clay, were not crazy about Mohammed Ali. He was aware that he risked a lot, yet he was willing to utilize his prominence as a public figure in the service of his beliefs. Some 20 years before Colin Kaepernick valiantly took the knee, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, took his stand. And it cost him dearly. Not only was his basketball career dramatically destroyed; he and his loved ones terrorized by death threats, but the “dream house” he was building for his family was dramatically burned to the ground by the Ku Klux Klan.
Remarkably, Mahmoud has for the most part overcome his anger and bitterness. Although he regrets that he has not done more humanitarian work, like Kaepernick does, he has continued to teach and speak where possible, and his memoir, In the Blink of an Eye: An Autobiography, was published by Kaepernick’s publishing company.
A recent documentary detailing his story, Stand is indeed excellent and worth watching. It is now available on Showtime. Admittedly having researched more and more deeply about Mahmoud, I feel the movie does not convey the extraordinary depth of the man. And when all is said and done, he has no regrets, and Islam has filled in the missing meaning system, the void left by his massive trauma and neglect. Still, I have to wonder, why had I never heard of him? Granted I am not a “sports fan,” but he does indeed belong on the monument with Alli and Kaepernick. I wonder if Ali also had a “missing” father. I will have to look into that.
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.
Warning, this blog contains subject matter that may be disturbing to some readers.
My best friend in kindergarten was Robin Fields. What a great name!
She recently popped into my mind out of absolutely nowhere. Strange how memory is. I don’t recall ever thinking of her. Robin was so pretty and feminine, with shiny strawberry blond hair in a flip. And I loved her mom, Roselyn: she was so “American,” all the things we weren’t. She chewed gum, wore “tennies,” and made those wonderful tuna fish sandwiches on white bread with lots of mayo. She kind of reminded me of Carol Burnett. Best friends are so important to little girls, especially lonely children of neglect. I wonder what happened to Robin. She came to mind when I was thinking about fields.
I have been pondering the vast expanse of energy fields. Admittedly, quantum physics makes my head spin, but I am fascinated by the wordless communication that passes between us energetically and in all sorts of, what are to me, mysterious ways. Einstein taught us that everything is really particles of energy, so that includes the myriad of ways we experience energy in the body. When I first started learning about the brain, I thought mostly in terms of brain chemistry, not electricity or energy transmission, even though that is what firing neurons are. Neurofeedback taught me to start thinking about that.
Now I am learning that everything is energy, including color and music, even emotions and the way they pass between us. Plants also communicate with other plants, and with animals, we humans with both plants and animals, and with each other, if we are tuned in and aware. What a cacophonous babble of conversation swirls around us at all times. This is not “woo woo,” although it does seem rather magical. I even read about how frequencies and botched/misread transmissions caused disastrous casualties in World War II, but that is for another day.
I know when I sit with clients who have histories of neglect, whose stories are unremembered or not stored in the usual cognitive ways, I must keep all my senses wide open and tuned in for transmissions that may arrive through other “media.” If I stay mindful of the vibration, the movement, the frequencies in my own body and system: emotions, sensations, images, my own memories, dreams, and songs in my head, I often get quiet, telegraphed messages that inspire me to ask questions that then may render new puzzle pieces. Of course, I am scrupulously careful to be receptive and not make up their story! Rather, I ask questions, so the story of absence and missing experiences will find its expression as it can.
I am also struck by how our energetic tone powerfully influences what comes back to us. This certainly is not to cast blame, especially on those with histories of neglect, as our experience is to have no impact. No matter what we do, nothing comes back, leaving us with a powerful and enduring circuitry of helplessness and futility. This makes for what I have come to call the Three P’s of Neglect: passivity, procrastination, and paralysis. Oy vey. Many of us know them all too well.
However, something I have been surprised to discover in my own life is that often, when we lead with love, the returns may be surprising. Not always, but enough that it is a worthy practice and an at least aspired to default. It can even make forgiveness fruitful and rewarding sometimes. But that, too, is for another day.
I am also struck by how our energetic tone powerfully influences what comes back to us.
One of the perks of my particular brand of insomnia is that I catch late-night BBC broadcasts and often fascinating interviews. I happened to hear an interview with a documentary filmmaker whose 30-minute film Stranger at the Gate was in the running for an Academy Award. I rarely watch movies, being much too stingy with my reading time, but this one compelled me, and inspired, I sent the link to many others.
Richard McKinney, a virtual caricature of the racist, white supremacist hate monger, was a fiercely traumatized Marine Corps war veteran who served many bloody years in combat and participated in numerous horrific and murderous atrocities. He originally joined the marines as a young man in the futile hope of winning his father’s respect, also a Marine Corps veteran. Although he failed in that endeavor, military service successfully removed him from a downhill trajectory of using and selling drugs. McKinney probably would have finished out his sorry days in that bloody world, but injury sent him home to his mid-western state.
Shortly after his return to the states, 9/11 struck. McKinney, in a blast of florid PTSD, was inflamed with a wild resurgence of hatred for Muslims. His ordinarily quiet town of Muncie, Indiana, had become a refuge for a sizeable Afghan community with a well-attended mosque, and McKinney was seized with the idea of committing mass murder and blowing away as many Muslims as he could, even if it killed him. He began to frequent the mosque, to learn the rhythms of its comings and goings so that he could get “the most bang for his buck.”
Upon visiting the mosque, McKinney was surprised to be met with such warmth, such welcome, such generosity, such openness, such love, that it first gave him pause, and then transformed him. Not only did McKinney dispense with his catastrophic plan, but his soul opened, and he became a Muslim. It is a must-see (and available for free on YouTube.)
There are so many dimensions of change and transformation. There is such a range of visible and invisible conveyance of development, devastation, decay, healing, and growth.
So, what does any of this have to do with energy fields? Well, who knows? There are so many dimensions of change and transformation. There is such a range of visible and invisible conveyance of development, devastation, decay, healing, and growth. Becoming mindful and intentional, where possible, of what we emit and what we receive/consume can have a powerful impact. Certainly not always. So much trauma of every kind, is beyond our control or influence. But there is a sphere of possibility. How could the kindly Muslims know that by simply being themselves and practicing their values and beliefs, they were saving themselves from calamity? How can we know? Well, we can’t know that.
My experience teaches me daily that leading with the positive most often brings returns beyond my imagination. In turn, sadly, I observe people who unwittingly, through the pessimistic or resentful energy (or in the grip of depression) they emit, attract a like energetic response. The prophecy is self-fulfilled; sadly, they “make people not like them,” or worse. Not always, of course! But as the Dalai Lama wisely says, “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” Although certainly not always easy!
Neurofeedback works directly with brain frequencies, actively training and teaching them to “change their tune.” But we work with frequency in countless ways throughout the day, throughout our respective worlds and the larger world. Tune in!
I have often said that one of my most cherished bequests from our mom, starting when I was maybe two in our little slummy apartment in New York City, was Pete Seeger. His upbeat transmissions filled the air, and even though he died in 2014, at the age of 95, in my world, they still do.
Today’s song is a favorite from those days. I wonder if I listened to this with Robin?
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.
My course with Quantum Way is now available for registration!