This week’s blog is all about pain, inspired by The Master Series: Pain Edition, coming soon in February. Use my code RC20 to get 20% off your tickets.
When we were growing up, if we did not feel well, our dad would say, “Get all ready for school and see how you feel after breakfast.” By the time I had done all that, I had pretty much no idea how I felt, and as a result, I ended up with a lifelong near-perfect attendance record. Unless I was actively vomiting, I assumed I was fine, and that too was rare. One of the handful of occasions I did was the unforgettable time in first grade when I threw up on the blacktop at recess, and someone circled it in chalk and scrawled in large caps, “RUTH DID THIS!” Oy vey, I guess that cured me of that particular affliction.
In my first 30 years of private practice, I missed only two days of work for health reasons. Only in 2014, when I was struck by a systemic, near-septic infection that even I couldn’t ignore, I landed in the hospital for a week, and home watching baking YouTube videos for another week. There went that record. Until then, I was not only blessed with sterling health, but also cursed with florid hubris/denial and a completely failed sensibility of interoception.
Interoception is the awareness and ability to perceive and read sensations within one’s body. The well-oiled organism emits constant signals to remain regulated, in balanced equilibrium and good working condition: food, hydration, rest, sex, temperature control, comfort, medical attention, etc. A good enough primary caregiver works to accurately read the cues and respond to them – not perfectly, of course, but well enough. That is how a child learns to perceive and interpret them, and ultimately, with luck, learns about self-care. With luck, that is. Many are not so lucky. Many of the little organisms, as we know, are met with pain and/or confusing overstimulation instead.
I developed an early interest in the ways trauma, eating disorders, and substance abuse met in a seamless braid because of my own sorry experience. I sought and found a largely unscientific little world of body approaches to psychological problems. My always ahead-of-her-time psychotherapist referred me to a colleague of hers who practiced what was called Self Acceptance Training probably well before 1980, which was the first body approach I ever tried. I don’t remember much of anything about it, but I stayed with it for quite a while and then became interested in bioenergetics and the writings of Wilhelm Reich, one of the early founders of more systematic body psychotherapy approaches. Although his work is in some ways quirky, I still find his book The Function of the Orgasm to be one of the great tomes of all time, and his unique way of bringing together social justice, psychology, and sexuality to be truly fascinating and not without merit. (His biography, Fury on Earth by Myron Sharaf, is also well worth the read!)
Now, as a field, we are blessed with truly evidence-based and effective body-oriented methodologies as well as a sophisticated literature that takes somatic psychotherapies out of the fringy or “woo-woo” category and into the highly respected trauma and even broader public mainstream. No need to mention Bessel van der Kolk’s record-defying blockbuster The Body Keeps the Score. We have all read it by now.
It is now largely acknowledged that there are a host of (too many) confounding, somatic aberrations that may be the harbinger or the mouthpiece of a trauma story. Because neglect is often storyless, it communicates in painful code. It behooves us to learn its language, not only for the purposes of translating to a precise language narrative, but also because so many survivors are abandoned yet again by a medical system that tells them it is “all in their heads.” Unhelped or over/mis-medicated, they suffer, roaming from practitioner to practitioner or one bogus internet remedy to the next, depleting money they often do not have, and feeling more pathological, humiliated, often blamed, and alone.
Thankfully, the ACE Study of 1995-1997 has finally come to the awareness of the larger world, broadcasting the “surprisingly” astronomical numbers of “Adverse Childhood Experiences” endured by the employed largely middle-income research pool of 17,000 North American subjects. Researchers have begun to link childhood trauma to health and disease (see neuroscientist Ruth Lanius’ 2010 book on the subject.) Many survivors like myself wandered in a desert of numbness or a tortured world of often alternating or otherwise confounding expressions of “disease.” Many are not so fortunate as I to have had a helper who could connect the dots.
It is now largely acknowledged that there are a host of (too many) confounding, somatic aberrations that may be the harbinger or the mouthpiece of a trauma story.
On my otherwise idyllic recent holiday vacation, I had a little “mishap.” Admittedly, grace has never been one of my stronger suits, and as the years advance, my balance is not what it once was. In the middle of the night, in a very dark, unfamiliar bathroom, I slipped in my banana-peel-colored socks and crashed into the edge of the bathtub with my unsuspecting rib cage. Oy vey. My initial reaction was fear, knowing that at my age, many women have bones that crumble, and an injury could be serious. But well-schooled by Dad, I found I could pick myself up, finish my business and take myself back to bed. Sure it hurt, but…
In the morning, I did tell my husband, and we worked around it, whatever it was, for the rest of the trip. I think I probably did crack a rib because when I yawned or coughed, I felt that sharp catch in my side. I remembered when our parents once had a little fender bender in the little Datsun, and Mom cracked a rib. There was no treatment for it, but she kept telling us, “DON’T MAKE ME LAUGH!” because that made it hurt. Fortunately for me, laughing was not a problem, but a sneeze could do it. I also happily discovered the analgesic properties of coffee, although the in-room coffee was not nearly as effective as the lattes made by our little friend at Starbucks.
When we got home, however, I had one really bad night. It was the night after I discovered that the heating pad was a real “game-changer” and quieted the pain so I could get my few hours of sleep easily and undisturbed. This next night, however, the pain was off the charts. I couldn’t get comfortable, and I could not sleep at all. My poor husband was frantic. I could not stop crying and could barely speak as I tried different every imaginable position, first in the bed, standing, and then sitting.
Finally, as I sat up, wept uncontrollably and shook, my body was wracked by involuntary movement that reminded me of the training I had done in the early 2000s with Pat Ogden and Peter Levine, where the body is completing unexpressed movement patterns locked in traumatized tissue. The movement kept going for quite a while, but it seemed to be moving the pain. Thankfully, well-trained by Peter and Pat, I was able to let it sequence through, albeit without the sort of mindfulness I learned back then. And the pain lessened.
I was able to go back to bed and sleep. In the morning, I awoke to what I think was an unremembered fragment of early trauma memory, most likely loosened and freed by a body sensation that resembled/evoked it just enough. And I woke up pain-free. My husband later woke up more rattled and less easily convinced than I. But that is my story, and I’m sticking to it.
When the body is in pain, it compels all attention.
I remember in graduate school, which for me was back in the stone age, I read a book called The Body in Pain by a woman named Scarry. I remember being amused by the author’s name of a book on that subject. Again, how odd that of the thousands of books I have read in the intervening years, I remember that one and its author. I only remember one little factoid from the book: when the body is in pain, it compels all attention. One truly can’t think of anything else. The body is hell-bent on communicating that something is wrong.
Chronic pain is a short-circuiting of the communication system, where long after physical injury might compel attention and action, the alarm bell continues ringing, probably trying to summon emergency care for some other purpose. We must work to stay present and listen: to both the language, and the story itself. The good news is that once the story is received and can be told in words, with luck, the messenger is free to go!
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.
For better or worse, we are all too aware that nature’s design is to exist, survive and persist into the future by proliferating one’s likeness and perhaps broadcasting that. It is as if the world were a giant Petri dish of infinite rabid species in a wild race to replicate their own. Some organisms cross ethnic lines and collaborate to help one another in the endeavor of spreading: mushrooms helping trees, bees helping plants, many plants helping each other, and some of the heroic people who work to rescue the endangered from extinction. In Michael Pollan’s lovely book, The Botany of Desire, he poetically describes this.
Left to ourselves, however, across nature, we would all be blindly cloning ourselves into perpetuity. With great frustration, I saw this during months when I was too busy to keep up with regular daily cheesemaker “hygiene,” and the roqueforti, like greedy imperialist pirates, ferociously took over the world in my “caves.” It was everywhere. Blue cheese is delicious and all, but when you are trying to make Gouda or Gruyere, it should not voluntarily turn blue. Oy vey. After my book was written, like rebuilding after a war or flood, recovery took many months. Lesson learned.
Many parents indeed strive, perhaps unwittingly, to sculpt little echoing 2.0 iterations of themselves, maybe attempting to get a few bugs out, maybe actually failing to see those and passing them on. There is, of course, great pride in tradition, bloodlines, and culture, and there is something comforting and safe about more and more of the same. I remember, as kids, singing “rounds:” Row, Row, Row Your Boat, Frere Jacque, Hinay Ma Tov U Manayim, repeating the same little song over and over with a different little voice jumping in at intervals, continuing to make a lovely harmony. We could go on like that for ages – it was so simple and sweet. As one with some undeniably OCD-like tendencies (unlike my variety-loving husband,) I find repetition and routine to be regulating and reassuring as well as efficient – call me boring. (I do get a lot done!)
Often, we work to “manipulate” or control proliferation or the direction of transmission and development.
And of course, we find the inevitable mutations, some devastating like cancer, some less so. Some are for the better, which is how we get evolution. Before Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile in 1954, such speeds were deemed humanly impossible. Since then, the record has been broken many times over, and by 1999, a mere 45 years later, another 20 seconds had been shaved off by subsequent generations.
Often, we work to “manipulate” or control proliferation or the direction of transmission and development. This can be dicey and controversial: pesticides, genetically engineered food, test tube babies, some producing the stuff of horror movies. Some results are miraculous, like vaccines and disinfectants, or processes like pasteurization or retrofitting. So, it is complicated. I find it amazing that the addition of minuscule quantities of starter “cultures” (and I love the irony of that multi-definitional word) changes the nature of milk, making it receptive to transformation not only from liquid to solid, but changes in its sensory character, giving us literally thousands of delicious flavor varieties. Yes, interrupting nature is indeed a mixed bag.
By now, we are all painfully aware of the intergenerational transmission of trauma and neglect, the complex chain of repetitions that continue to enslave, infect, and blind ad infinitum. I am like a broken record on the gnawing subject. And yet it persists seamlessly in both the macro and micro. The nature of untreated trauma is to re-enact it, attempting to recount in behavior, a story too deeply hidden or too despicable for ordinary language. The language of re-enactment is insidious, and the ramifications can be like a tumor where the aberrant cells are so entangled with nerves and healthy tissue as to make extrication a deadly operation. Where to begin? Or where to continue, as we are certainly not the first to wonder.
In 1865 slavery was officially abolished in the U.S. That was President Lincoln’s most admirable intent. But the change only went so far – we did not get to the root level. We got “Jim Crow,” a way of formalizing and canonizing segregation and inequality, becoming a vigilante free-for-all. With “redlining” or refusing loans and insurance to targeted groups, the freedom-endowed blessings of home/land ownership, to hold and bequeath for generations, and suffrage were legally and culturally unobtainable to huge groups of the nominally “free” citizens. The wealth and intergenerational progress that might have been accessible in a truly just and equal nation were barricaded and jealously kept for the white and male. Obviously, we are still saddled with the self-perpetuating impact. Anger, poverty, disenfranchisement, alienation, and unaddressed trauma, large and small, is being visited on subsequent generations, who, if not helped, are doomed to repeat and pass it on. So, how do we break these intergenerational chains? A resounding question.
Acknowledgment is precisely naming and owning the wrongdoing, fully and to the satisfaction of the injured party, without minimizing, qualifying, or “explaining,” and verifying if the acknowledgment encompasses the extent of the hurt.
Admittedly my own checkered past catapulted me from trying to work on a grand macro level to finding my place of work in the micro. It is only new for me to begin to work and speak more widely about trauma and neglect. I suppose it took me a while to get a voice, but there is no one right way to engage. We must simply do something, and if we do heal and transform ourselves, even unwittingly, like the roaming roqueforti (or Covid-19!), there is an undeniable contagion or call and response of some kind.
On the macro level, again, it is “complicated.” In San Francisco, there is a loud debate about a local public high school long known to have super-achieving graduates with the highest test scores in the country. It has historically been predominantly, if not exclusively, white. There is vociferous disagreement about desegregating it and making it more inclusive versus maintaining the strict “merit” system of admission. “Merit” versus some iteration of affirmative action. What is “just?” How do we break the chains of repetition that cement the growing divide between rich and poor, which certainly in San Francisco is becoming cavernous, with legions of individual trauma and neglect survivors or victims exploding within it. Where do we locate the ”affordable” housing, if it is to be built at all? In “my backyard?” Hot discussions here.
I spoke with my longtime colleague and friend Dr. Forrest Hamer, an African American Jungian analyst who thinks deeply and teaches about reparation, asking him his thoughts about confronting this gnarly and enduring hydra. He described a three-step model of reparation, primarily based on the famed Truth and Reconciliation Process undertaken in South Africa in 1995. His model is undeniably and, of necessity, quite fluid, owing to the different needs and injuries of different victims or afflicted populations. It is not terribly different from the model of apology I teach couples, but it inspired me to rethink my own protocol, because this one sounds even better. It consists of three steps: acknowledgment, redress, and closure. I can hardly hope to do justice to it here, but I will lay out the broad strokes, and think on it much more for future writings.
Acknowledgment is precisely naming and owning the wrongdoing, fully and to the satisfaction of the injured party, without minimizing, qualifying, or “explaining,” and verifying if the acknowledgment encompasses the extent of the hurt. Just yesterday, perchance, I had a flashbulb memory of a client I had some 25 years ago, a man with a deep childhood neglect injury who, in adulthood, lost his life savings in the now mythical Madoff Ponzi debacle that spanned 17 years in the 1980s and 90’s. My client was wiped out, losing all that he and his little family counted on to supplement his meager earnings. He was never made whole and died way too young. What sort of acknowledgment is in order there, let alone remuneration? How much is enough?
The second step is “redress.” What sort of action would be a salve and a meaningful recompense or gesture of rectification in each case? Would it be restitution in the form of financial compensation? How do you put a price tag on George Floyd? The legions of “disappeared” in Latin America? The robbed and ravaged First Nations of the many colonized lands? I heard from a gentle Hawaiian man the story of how his ancestral land on the Big Island was slowly devoured by mainland real estate moguls as it became increasingly impossible for Natives to pay quadrupling taxes on their long-held family properties. He himself, as a construction worker, was forced to build the very homes and resorts that displaced him, torn apart by internal conflict about participating in his own devastation, because he needed the work to feed his kids. It reminded me of concentration camp victims forced to dig their own graves. What would repair the loss of his grandmother’s sacred property, now dotted with multimillion-dollar homes? It is a very personal, painstaking process. For some, the cash is the redress. But not all.
The final step is closure, where both parties in dialog agree that some measure of justice is, at the very least, in progress. For many, this would include symbolic, ideological, and policy changes that would allow healing to endure and the wrongs not to be forgotten. Policy change alone, without community dialog and ideological discussion, can make for a whole new set of problems. I had one profoundly neglected African client, who, when he survived a round of layoffs in his tech workplace, was certain that he was retained simply for the purpose of diversity “quotas.” It made him not only less certain of his performance but the target of bitterness from apprehensive or displaced colleagues. I have heard other stories about workplace dissonance between “diversity hires” and “merit hires,” creating a 3.0 of racism. True closure, says Forrest, involves some kind of commitment to change that will stick and have meaning, that it is more than simply changing the street or sports team’s name.
Today I have more questions than answers, food for thought. For trauma and neglect survivors, what sort of response from perpetrators, if any, might heal? Or is complete detachment the more self-affirming path? And on the macro level, examining one’s own attitudes deeply and searching for a way to engage. When I embarked on the overwhelming process of cleaning up the roqueforti rein of terror, I committed to disinfecting the cave walls and checking each aging wheel every single day. Now perhaps eight months later, it is pristine in there and free of the blue scourge. Ah, were it all so simple…
Today’s song (our dad used to sing this):
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.
As all who have been in the world of trauma, whether as clinician, researcher, survivor, or some combination thereof know, the area of greatest injury to life and to function is the domain of relationship. That has certainly been the crippling pain, anxiety, shame, or simple cluelessness most likely to bring people to my therapy office door, and was certainly true for me. As mammals, attachment, connection, and interdependence are primordial, fundamental to survival. That would begin to explain the urgency and despair we experience in its absence.
As human beings, love and relatedness are at the heart of what makes life most worth living, as exemplified in our art, music, literature, and all other media of expression around the world. It is a great motivator. It is the pivotal and most often missing ingredient in childhood neglect, especially in the developmental or earliest incidence of neglect, which is so much of what I see. By early, I mean the very tender and, of course, “unremembered” infant months and years. I say unremembered cautiously, because the desolation and uncertainty of isolation are in fact on record in the nervous system and the body. We know that by now, yet it is so “easy” to forget.
For many adult children of neglect, their mechanisms of compensation and disguise may be more skilled than what is turned out by the world’s top makeup artists. The void behind the facade of high function and success may thus be elusive to the naked eye, even to the self, at least some of the time. Because solitude becomes a default and even a “cozy” hiding place, it would be easy to chalk it up as being an introvert or “highly sensitive person” until some undeniable symptom compels attention, appearing in the form of a dramatic emergency – for example, my anorexic downfall, now almost 55 years ago to the day. I literally fell crashing out of my hiding place, certainly not on “conscious” purpose. Alcohol became another good clue if anyone had had a road map, but as has been endemic with neglect, nobody did
I flailed for a long time in a punitive world that lacked the psychological, neurobiological, and clinical options that we are now increasingly beginning to have, although critically insufficient. And I had the privilege of being white, middle class, with access to good schools and libraries to hide out in, which I liberally did. Even now, I often exclaim spontaneously to my husband, “I am so glad we live indoors!” I truly am, and so grateful.
I remember thinking I only began to learn how to be a “regular person” when I got my first waitressing job and spent enough hours with “regular people” that I could learn how to talk about movies, sports, television, and mainstream activities that I felt so ambivalent and clueless about. Of course, alcohol became a great companion in the process, as not only did it make it easier to fake it, but it also made me not care as much. Later on in therapy, I (not infrequently) would ask my infinitely patient therapist “So what do people do when…?” When they are at home in the evenings with their families, or on vacations with others? I still had only the vaguest clue.
I routinely admonished myself, “I just can’t get along with humans!”Although I have bristled against the term “impostor syndrome” dismissing it as too “pop psychology-esque,” it is probably too close to home. I was undeniably aware that I felt for many decades as if I was indeed of some other, probably mostly extinct and certainly less evolved species.
Central to the experience of childhood neglect is a devastating conundrum, a Gordian knot that, for many, plagues and tortures them throughout their lives if it has not been vanquished by early and prophylactic numbing (which it all too often is). Attachment researcher Mary Main has aptly called it the dilemma without solution: when the source of infant comfort and the source of terror are the same – the essentially needed primary caregiver.
Abandonment, loss, and the absence of connection feel life-threatening which, certainly at the most vulnerable stages of life, it actually is. That is where the other side of the dilemma is congealed or constructed: the impenetrable Fort Knox of self-reliance. It is the safe house, the bomb shelter, the default survival mechanism until it breaks or fails, which it often does. The results are all too lethal both for the child of neglect themselves and for others in their wake, as we are all too often seeing these days as the disenfranchised “go off” and act out violently in the world. So many reasons that I am adamant about helping the world become “neglect informed.”
Neuroscience is forcing us to understand the profound and developmentally crucial impact of attachment on regulation.
Neuroscience is forcing us to understand the profound and developmentally crucial impact of attachment on regulation. Regulation is the management of energy in the organism, the balance between high and low-frequency electrical activation in the brain, sympathetic and parasympathetic, stress and calm, terror, rage or nameless anxiety, and a quiet return to a hopefully comfortable baseline. A flexible and adaptive flow and a reasonable level of control over life’s inevitable vicissitudes is the great blessing of secure attachment. It is the gift of the good enough caregiver, and increasingly we are coming to understand this. Even the larger, non-trauma specialized psychotherapy field is increasingly learning this (no disdain intended.) Regulation is profoundly necessary, and sadly, far too rare. The mainstream is all too slowly connecting the dots, often failing to recognize the devastating damage of the desperate attempt to find regulation somewhere to the self and others, especially when it has not been learned at the developmentally appropriate time. Discomfort, terror, rage, or sheer amorphous compulsivity fuels the search for a way to manage unbearable ups and downs.
Because the feelings and isolation are so often points of shame, people often ask, “What is wrong with me?” How many “friends” one has, certainly in the time of social media, is a measure of “value” or self-worth, so the isolated may be even more ambivalent than usual about their need.
Interpersonal need is so lethal that the child of neglect keeps it carefully locked away, often even from themselves. Because they might look good on the outside, helpers and the world at large readily miss the cues, or do not even imagine such an outwardly successful individual as being so distraught. So they slip through the cracks and remain invisible. They often defy recognition, even among therapists, if they even think to approach therapists. Suicide rates among medical students and physicians are disproportionally high. Where can people turn? And where can they turn if they do not even know what is wrong, or that something is “legitimately” wrong?
Regulation is profoundly necessary, and sadly, far too rare
In the affluent town of San Francisco, the number of deaths by fentanyl overdoses beat the number of Covid-19 deaths in 2021. I find that to be chilling and profoundly alarming. In another story, six San Francisco fentanyl overdose deaths were stopped, and several lives were saved in the space of days by passersby administering Narcan to users who most likely would have died if not for such good samaritan luck. What if those good citizens had not walked by?
I am an avid supporter of local Crisis Support and Suicide Prevention organizations. I am so grateful to them for doing the essential crisis/emergency work that I am decidedly not good at. It is so needed, and so neglected. Oy vey. Neglect upon neglect upon neglect. It is literally deadly.
It saddens me that some of the most powerful treatment modalities we now have for restoring regulation are not yet accessible on a larger scale. Neurofeedback is such a godsend, and yet too expensive (for most prohibitively so) to provide on a large enough scale. Where do we start? Well, you and I can start by helping the world become “neglect informed.” It took 30 years for the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) Study to hit the mainstream, but it finally has, and it does acknowledge neglect. Educate the world, support services, and policy insofar as we can, and we can save lives, not to mention ease unbearable suffering.
I was gratified to learn that our US Surgeon General, the young Vivek H. Murthy, has identified a major public health crisis in this country: loneliness! 22% of the US population self-identifies as profoundly lonely. We are coming to understand more and more of the consequence of that. This is the subject of his book, Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World. I find that gratifying and hopeful, as it joins mental health on the incipient roster of important social and political matters. Yay!
Again, my deepest appreciation to the Trauma Research Foundation for tying political and social meaning to the epidemic of trauma. More than 40 years after the PTSD diagnosis was identified and named, the larger world is adopting the understanding and necessity of being “trauma-informed.” It is a term that people are coming to know, adhere to, and use. I would hope to do the same with neglect.
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.
When I started therapy in 1978, long before many of my readers were born, our mom muttered bitterly, not quite under her breath, “…the ‘blame your mother’ generation!” I have no idea why I even told her. From then forward, my therapist ever retained her reign as “public enemy number one.” Blame is not my paradigm – that I want to underline – and my purpose is anything but that! Rather connecting perhaps counterintuitive dots, that might lead to better self-understanding is my wish. And admittedly, sharing insights that might be interesting to me.
Similarly, “Refrigerators, Helicopters and Tigers” (oh my!) may seem to evoke Dorothy exclaiming the perils of a terrifying world or a bad joke (what do the three have in common…) So, bear with me please as I seek to elucidate more less than obvious expressions of neglect.
Again, the deepest and most injurious sequela of neglect is the rupture or failure of the primary, most important attachment(s,) most notably with the mother whose body houses the child at first, and ideally would continue as a home and source of comfort, regulation, and protection from the perils of that dangerous world.
Perhaps the most integral and the first vehicle of comfort and regulation is the “simple” experience of being seen. Gazing into the face of a present and loving (ideally calm and regulated) other is foundational. Brain development begins with the resonant dance of the gaze and evolves into being accurately heard and responded to. Not perfectly of course. It seems so simple, no? A no brainer in more ways than one. Sadly, it is so very often lacking. Missteps and mistakes, of course, are part of the deal, but with repair, we are actually better for them. Confidence or knowledge that repair is possible makes the inevitability of imperfection bearable and survivable.
The most devastating impact of neglect is the deathlike loneliness of not feeling seen, but even worse, not being or feeling known. When I am known as me, as distinctly, uniquely ME, this means I exist. This feeling or sense that I exist may, with luck, evolve to a sense of self, and with even more luck, a sense of self-worth: I exist, and I matter. Without it, we may drift unmoored in a foreign world, wondering what is wrong.
Gazing into the face of a present and loving (ideally calm and regulated) other is foundational.
I recently encountered the term, previously unknown to me, “Refrigerator Mom.” (If not for the chill factor, I would associate such a label with an abundance of food!) I came to find out that, in 1943, Austrian psychiatrist Leo Kanner theorized that cold, unresponsive, and emotionally inattentive parenting resulted in children who failed to develop and retreated from social contact. Kanner identified the child’s aloneness from early in life as the explanation for autism. In the later 1940s through the 1960s, Bruno Bettelheim, renowned psychologist, researcher, and educator at the University of Chicago, advanced further acceptance of the theory with the medical establishment and with the wider public.
Although understanding of autism has evolved since then, I find it interesting that some time ago, the connections were already being drawn between maternal emotional distance/absence, the young, developing brain, and subsequent social withdrawal. I also think that my serious, intellectual, decidedly cool-tempered, proudly Oxford-educated grandmother might have qualified as a refrigerator mother to our mom. She was stiff and unaffectionate, undemonstrative and matter of fact. She certainly was not a fairytale baking and gift-bestowing type of grandmother, either, and when our mother was a child, pre-Holocaust, being of substantial means, I am sure nannies contributed to the distance. No wonder our mom, from my point of view, was disconnected and lacking in emotion, presence, and warmth.
Confidence or knowledge that repair is possible makes the inevitability of imperfection bearable and survivable.
In our part of the world, hovering in the shadow of Silicon Valley, where many over-achievers are made, horizons are crowded with the so-called Helicopter Moms. These are the micro-managing moms that are on top of the child’s every move, pushing and pulling, prescribing and buzzing, or roaring as it were around the suffocated and overstimulated child. The hovercraft is everywhere, researching and making decisions for the breathless little one, who has no opportunity to even see what the choices might be. Play dates, after-school activities, sports teams… These are the parents overzealous in the stands, cheering the child on as if their lives depended on winning the championships.
In his 2017 book, The Matheny Manifesto: A Young Manager’s Old-School Views on Success in Sports and Life, professional baseball manager Mike Matheny describes in detail the behavior of these roaring sports “chopper” parents, many of them trying to compensate for their own mediocrity, or failure, living vicariously through their young jock child. Mothers are far from immune. The incidence of Tommy John shoulder surgery, once unique to elite professional pitchers, has proliferated among younger and younger kids, being allowed and perhaps overly encouraged to practice and play too much.
Helicopter mothers are of course not limited to athletics, but it is a good example of the child being micromanaged, controlled, pressured to perform in some way that does not originate with their own will and preference, and too much. The same can be true for playing a musical instrument, some other form of art, academics… anything really. In effect, the child is a foil or surrogate, an alter-ego, and not a unique and treasured individual. Treasured most specifically for their exquisite uniqueness.
The term Tiger Mothers was originally associated with Chinese mothers who mercilessly pushed their children academically to the point of illness and injury. In effect, it is a variety of abuse. Although that is where we got the term, I am more inclusive in how I would use it, having seen examples of these poor, exhausted kids across national and ethnic borders. I have been amazed hearing what kids had to do to be accepted to a local high school, in the way of not only academics and sports, but additional extracurricular activities (not to mention the application process itself and the tuition costs of such schools!) I would be breathless and wiped out from merely hearing about it! Perhaps the mothers did not roar or bite, but ferocity of the wild feline often sadly did seem to fit. I would find myself uncertain as to whether it was good news or not when the final acceptance or rejection from the school arrived.
It may seem counterintuitive to recognize profound neglect in such seemingly attentive, “involved,” seemingly child-centered parents. It is similarly painstakingly challenging to help such a child of any age recognize their experience as neglect. Some may be blindly “successful” in their honed abilities and live dissociated and detached socially and/or emotionally: Kanner’s autism. Some may crash in their struggle around partnering, finding the fulfillment of the marriage and family part of the script beyond their super capabilities. Some may be like the superstar Miss USA, Cheslie Kryst, who seemed to have it all, and shocked the world when she committed suicide by jumping from a high building. As Amy Tan powerfully stated, “loneliness is not about being alone, it is about not feeling understood.”
In spite of being seemingly swaddled with devoted attention, when what is being seen is not really me, it can be some of the most devastating, life-destroying iterations of neglect. Especially as the child, whatever their age, feels so guilty and unentitled to feel bad.
I recently heard an interview with Michelle Obama, talking about her new book, The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times. She said that we can create authentically independent, strong, and self-actualized kids by being present as long as they need it, then showing them that we trust them enough to let them do it their own way. Parents evolve, she said, from “managers to advisors,” thus enabling kids to grow into, and feel free/able to manifest, their own unique authenticity; kids that have the delicious opportunity to say with pleasure and pride, “That’s me!”
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.
Our dad passed shortly before the pandemic of Covid-19 struck. What a blessing that was, as it would have been hell for him and for all of us to go through. The final couple of years, and worsening over the last months, he was increasingly vacant and absent, barely “there.” It was hard to tell if he was bored and disinterested, if he was hovering on the bridge to the next world, or if his tired old brain cells (those that were left) were not firing anymore. He was almost 93 when he died. When I arrived to visit, his second wife would bellow loudly in his ear “(whatever strange nickname she called him), Ruth is here!” His hearing aids were powered on, intact, and in place, but he usually did not even look up. It was as if I was not there. Sadly, to be perfectly honest, it was not that different from much of my life with him.
I had the good fortune to make my peace with him, so I enjoyed a stretch of a surprisingly happy father-daughter relationship before he began his protracted fade-out departure. Granted, I did all the healing work on my own without his participation, but that is a story for another day. He did participate in a truly loving relationship with me for a time, and I am infinitely grateful for that.
Our dad’s final years, however, were a quiet agony. Thankfully, my sisters and I were a good team. But having my presence or absence not register, questioning whether those long, vapid visits had any meaning at all, was not only interminably empty and boring for me, but a potent reminder of the years of feeling as if I did not matter or even exist in his eyes. They were a living reminder/stimulus of long years of painful and confusing neglect. Admittedly, I lived much of those last two years in various degrees of trauma activation. Being excessively busy and perennially sleep-deprived, the routine visits took a chunk out of every weekend. But for whatever reason I kept them going diligently until the end – not without confusion and unbearable fatigue.
Why? Was I afraid I might miss something if I did not take advantage of every possible moment with him? What might I possibly miss? I could rarely ask him questions about his life anymore. I found I would collect stories and topics and come with a “playlist” of things in mind to talk about, to entertain either him or myself. I honestly don’t know which. Due to his various cancers, he had been on a feeding tube for years, so my stories about cheesemaking challenges, my baking masterpieces, or food-related conversations, which are ordinarily pleasurable and easy for me, were off the table, so to speak. Our best bet on a good day was to sing. Interestingly, although he did not remember much of anything else, he did seemingly remember all the songs and their lyrics. Sometimes we filled the time that way, especially when I had the good fortune to visit at the same time as a sister, who brought his old guitar. She played it, but it did seem to awaken and cheer him.
Secretly, however, I remembered an old Cuban song I used to listen to and love: “La vida no vale nada…” life is not worth anything. And even though the song is about how life is not worth anything if others are suffering, I had to wonder, what keeps him going? What would make it worth continuing to live and breathe that vacuous existence? And when I dared to be really honest with myself, why doesn’t he just go?
When there is a long history of trauma, neglect, hard-earned healing, and profound ambivalence about its perpetrators and purveyors, their final years can be complicated at best. Some of us are too enraged and hurt still to be dutiful; some of us too dutiful to allow ourselves to feel enraged or hurt. If we are glaringly aware of both the parents’ own tragic and unconscionable trauma and misfortune and their own tragic and unconscionable lack of healing, it is even more complicated. Add to that whatever feelings we might have about what others (those mythical others) might think about how we navigate the loss of a parent. Some of us care. And many of the feelings are outside our awareness.
I remember when our mom died in 2000. I was so embarrassed when people expressed sympathetic condolences as I felt nothing but grateful relief – or so I thought. I was driving the day after she passed, however, and my car broke down on the freeway. Much to my own surprise, I fell apart on the phone with the Triple A operator who took my call for emergency road service, crying rather hysterically to her about how my mother had just died. It was as if I and not the car had broken down.
When there has been attachment trauma, especially neglect, when little is “concrete enough” to point to, the final years and days of the parent’s life can be racked with troubling ambivalence.
In his newly released memoir, Bono, who lost his mother as a small boy, recounts a legacy of rock stars who lost their mothers at a young age. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, John Lydon, and Bob Geldof are the ones he names, but there are many more, according to him. He refers to something parallel about father loss in the hip-hop world but does not name names. Interesting. He muses about some possible relationship between attachment trauma (not his language, of course!) and creativity.
After the death of his mother Iris, Bono grew up in a world of men – a much older brother and a stern, emotionless father. He had few memories of Iris at all, probably largely because the three of them never spoke of her, the space she had occupied simply closing up. At least, that is how Bono explains it. Neglect and abundant loss, however, are very often, if not usually, accompanied by a copious blankness of autobiography. In fact, one of the gifts of recovery is reclaiming or even constructing, for the first time, a personal narrative.
Interestingly, Bono did have one perfectly intact memory of Iris. His father was in an upstairs room, doing one of his many typical construction projects, working with a chainsaw or some sort of power saw, which apparently had slipped out of his hand. Loud screams echoed from upstairs, and when Bono and Iris ran up to see what had happened, his blood-spattered father was yelling in terror that he had castrated himself. Iris’ puzzling response was to burst into uncontrollable peals of laughter. She was no Lorena Bobbitt, and his father was not abusive. Bono was simply baffled. Iris must have been an odd bird. Indeed a curious bit of memory in a desert of idealization. (We never do learn what his dad’s injury turned out to be.)
To be visited by confusing, even contradictory impulses, and lots of trauma activation during the dying and death of a traumatic parent, be it incident trauma or neglect, is a natural and expectable response.
When there has been attachment trauma, especially neglect, when little is “concrete enough” to point to, the final years and days of the parent’s life can be racked with troubling ambivalence. One might, as I was, be horrified in shame for feeling such apparent and undeniable numbness around my mother’s passing. Over subsequent years of neurofeedback and other healing work, fragments of feeling come to me that surprise me. For whatever reason, I have her old sewing scissors on my desk. I don’t use them for sewing, but I keep them near. They remind me of her hands… I recall her terrible cooking almost fondly. Little things that she said will come to mind, and I will quote her, often reprimanding someone with a smile and shouting, “Put on a sweater, I’m cold!” or remembering the German swear words I learned from her momentary fits of temper. So, I don’t feel completely void of feeling anymore, and I do regret that I was not able to make my peace before she went. She went so quickly. It is really the only regret I have.
To be visited by confusing, even contradictory impulses, and lots of trauma activation during the dying and death of a traumatic parent, be it incident trauma or neglect, is a natural and expectable response – even the silent, perhaps shameful wish that they take their leave already. I urge all to be gentle and forgiving of oneself, for one’s own swirling inconsistencies or perhaps even incomprehensible thoughts, behaviors, and feelings. If I am to offer one, my best recommendation is to do what will make you feel best about yourself in the long run, so the survivor of trauma and/or neglect can live, and in effect, “rest” in peace.
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.
The child of neglect, often virtually from the point of conception, floats in a sea of solitude. Like a fish, the water may not even register, as it can seem “natural” or the norm, the absence of attachment being all that is known. Attachment, however, is not only a birthright – it is nature’s design. To be connected is a survival need, and in effect, nurture is nature. To be left alone and adrift is a crime against nature as far as I am concerned.
As the child grows older, solitude may become the default, seemingly “preferred” state, most likely not consciously. The less familiar state of being in company or connected with anyone may feel like a strain at the very least, if not foreign, impossible, even terrifying. More than a few neglect survivors I have known found the isolation of lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic barely noticeable or even a welcome “permission” to simply lay low. Often, I have heard their partners complain bitterly of feeling perennially rejected.
When I first started my anecdotal study and data collection about neglect and began to formulate the outlines of what I came to think of as the “Neglect Profile,” I noticed what I perceived as a seismic shrug, often accompanied by the words “I don’t know what to do!” or “There is nothing I can do!” Going back probably to the beginning of time in their relationship world, they felt that they had no impact at all, so the experience of powerlessness seems to rumble and quake from deep in their core. Often, these people are extraordinarily accomplished and proactive in other ways, be they professional, creative, athletic, or some other significant pursuit.
The domain of relationships confronts the child of neglect with their core paradox: the central conundrum that plagues them, whether or not they are aware of it. It is what local treasure, Berkeley attachment researcher Mary Main, calls the dilemma without solution. If they allow themselves to feel their natural longing for connection, they are faced with a story and the ongoing threat of agony and, at the very least, vulnerability. What is to be done? Most likely, the only viable adaptation is to freeze or avoid. Often this also is the complaint of their partners: numbing, avoidance, even paralysis.
The domain of relationships confronts the child of neglect with their core paradox: the central conundrum that plagues them, whether or not they are aware of it. It is what local treasure, Berkeley attachment researcher Mary Main, calls the dilemma without solution.
Most who have sought answers in the complex world of relationships have heard of the marriage researcher John Gottman. I have been an avid student of his for my entire couples’ therapist life of thirty years now. Although his therapy methods are different from mine, he provides a goldmine of scientific data, perhaps 40 years now of longitudinal research on what makes a relationship successful and the predictive factors of separation and divorce. He amassed all this information utilizing what he called his “Love Lab,” where couples would spend an uninterrupted weekend in his specially designed and equipped apartment/lab, with a video camera on them the entire time. It is amazing to imagine volunteering to be studied in that way – a heroic contribution to science and all of us, really.
Gottman is famous for identifying what he calls The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the four top predictors of relationship demise: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and withdrawal. I won’t detail each of them here, but Gottman’s books are imminently readable and well worth it. (Interested readers might start with his book, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.)
Often the adult child of neglect, when faced with relationship conflict, might lapse into defensiveness, which is a denial of responsibility or a pushing back when faced with a complaint, criticism, or rupture. And, of course, if I truly believe I am powerless, it is easy to claim, “I didn’t do anything!” or “It’s not my fault!” Ironic that the complaint might, in fact, be about what they did not do, when the child of neglect themselves have been largely victimized by missing behaviors that also were not done and experiences that did not happen. Oy vey.
Unwittingly, an expression of defensiveness can be “explaining” (“I only did what I did because…”), which sounds to the injured party like nothing but excuses, and is not helpful as a repair tool, unfortunately. But how would a survivor of neglect learn anything about relationship repair, having grown up in a relationship desert? None of us with attachment trauma of any ilk learned about relationship repair, which is what makes relationships so dicey. Without repair, any rupture in the connection is “fatal.” And, of course, no relationship is without missteps and misunderstandings at the very least. Of course, they seem like a collision course at best, and fatally dangerous at worst.
Unfortunately, for many a child of neglect whose futile effort at being perfect, or some other adaptation to the disconnection, resignedly resort to “leaving.” That was certainly my strategy, in its various forms: I tried to be away on my bike and then backpacking as much as I could; I lied and I drank, all from early ages. There was “nothing I could do…”
Though thankfully I was able to stop drinking and lying, I still hit the fourth of the horsemen pretty squarely if I am severely activated. If I am not mindful, I am still capable of withdrawing into a private and impenetrable cave if I am upset enough. And admittedly, withdrawal indeed has the potential to be the most deadly of all.
And what if I am not so fortunate as to have a partner who will go to therapy with me? Are we doomed to relationship misery or destruction? It is a good question.
Like many of us, I am a “double winner” with both attachment trauma in the form of neglect, and plenty of “shock” or incident trauma, so I am a veteran of some of the worst relationship-busting behaviors. Fortunately, although I defaulted to self-reliance like most of us children of neglect, that did not stop me from always seeking help. So, the one piece of relationship advice I ever give traumatized people of any stripe (or anyone really!) is to seek out a partner who is also willing to work on the relationship, because we will need to!
And what if I am not so fortunate as to have a partner who will go to therapy with me? Are we doomed to relationship misery or destruction? It is a good question. Partnering with a neglect survivor who is convinced of their powerlessness (blamelessness?) may make one feel saddled with all the blame and all the work of transforming both oneself and the relationship. Often there is a collusion about that, with both partners believing there is one problem child. Well, not on my watch.
I remember when my partner would say with the signature neglect shrug, “I will just sit here and wait until the sun comes out…” I would ignite with rage at the implication that the problem was all me, and its resolution was all my job. That in itself would make for a colossal escalation. I now know, and it is my intention to teach, that all relationship dynamics are in self-re-enforcing feedback loops – self-re-enforcing if they are allowed to continue with their own momentum. The best way forward is to work together to change dynamics. The good news, however, is that we each have the power to interrupt the cycle by simply not lapsing into the behavior that incites the other when they have activated us. I say simply, which is not to be confused with easily! Healing trauma is required, as well as building new brain circuitry. And yes, couples therapy is the more efficient way to create a new dynamic. Even that is a very tough road and takes longer than we’d like.
What if my partner, for whatever reason, can’t or won’t go to therapy with me? Does that mean we’re through? Well, not necessarily. It will mean that if one partner is willing to work hard, and carry the burden of stopping their side of the dynamic, knowing that it takes both of them to keep it going, or as I am fond of saying, “It takes two to escalate.” That means if I don’t react to the trauma reaction with my own trauma reaction, the old explosion will sizzle and extinguish; the drama will fade.
It is a hard sell that that might be the only way to change the tide of the relationship. It may be too much of a repetition of one’s lonely and burdened relationship past. It may also be a source of bitterness, that once again, “If I don’t do it all, there is no relationship…” However, there is a chance that it might begin a positive feedback cycle which makes the previously unable or unwilling partner believe, that it might be worth pitching in and doing more. At the very least, it might be a source of pride, joy, pleasure, and even gratitude. “I did it for us, because I could, and I win by ending up with you.”
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.
From seemingly out of nowhere, into my mind popped the theme music from Captain Kangaroo. I have no idea why; I had not thought of it in years – certainly not as long as I can remember. I always have a song in my head, but usually I am aware of the stimulus. I never even really liked the Captain. With the remembered whistling tune came a rather painful memory I don’t recall having before, when my sister was a baby, being parked in front of the Captain while my mother was with my sister. I felt lonely and left out, but also the spectrum of typical neglect feelings: rejected, unimportant, less loved/lovable, hurt, mad, and jealous– and most certainly unaware of all those feelings. To be sure, I had no language for any of it, but it all swirled in my little body and wafted faintly back with the snippet of musical recall.
I was two and a half when our little sister was born. I have always, and continue to, adore her. And admittedly, I was jealous. She was the pretty one, with great big beautiful eyes. People stopped on the street and remarked about those gorgeous eyes. Our mom was plain and non-descript-looking, but the new baby looked like our dad, who was proud and rather vain about being decidedly handsome. We recently found an ancient, dog-eared black and white of him flexing his muscles on the beach when he was in his twenties. Dad called our new sister his ”Little Monk” or “Little Monkey Baby.” Of all of us, she did not have a biblical name, so it seemed the wheels were greased from the start for her to be more “mainstream” or “American,” which I always rather envied. But long story short, her arrival meant greater scarcity of the already meager emotional resources in that house. So whatever neglect I was feeling was heightened and multiplied. Thankfully it never turned into resentment of her.
Our oldest sister was always more popular than I, or so I thought. I remember kids often saying to me in junior high, “Oh! You’re Becki’s sister!” And I bitterly thought but did not say, “NO! I’M RUTH!” But by then, I already doubted if, in fact, there was a distinct me, if I did exist, let alone had a right to. Existence is often a question that accompanies neglect. If I existed, would I not exist in the mind of the other? Oy vey, a child cannot think such complex thoughts. I just knew unquestionably that I did not matter and needed to find a way to compensate for it. (I have often wondered, how does Venus Williams do it? How does one continue to live and perform with such grace and dignity, even with immense talent in her own right, in the shadow of such a legendary sister? Kudos to Venus!)
Often neglect is a function of simply too many kids. How on earth could parents, especially single, traumatized, impoverished, enslaved by impossibly long and depleting work hours, or otherwise disabled parents possibly attend to more than a couple of children, especially in light of a western atomistic, individualistic, lacking a “village” culture of parenting? Neglect is yet another expression of all of these. And, of course, this makes it more difficult for the child of neglect to name their experience as traumatic, viewing the parent as the afflicted one, and trying to compensate for that.
Many a neglect client of mine has been the younger or youngest of “too many” children when often there was not enough to go around to begin with, and jealousy is often the shameful and/or painful byproduct. In fact, whenever I encounter, particularly in couples, an extreme of jealousy, the first place I will want to look is at the history related to siblings. We often find the answer there. It may even be a case of a sibling with disabilities or illness that requires a disproportional amount of parental emotional energy or attention, making it even more challenging to feel worthy or to own the embarrassment of resentment.
Whenever a client laments a jealous partner or their own jealousy in general in the world, the place to look first is at the sibling story. Some profound neglect arises from the fact of simply too many kids. There was never enough to go around and with each additional birth, even less.
I envied not only my sisters but others too. I was always perhaps too aware of who got what and how much. I perennially seemed to come up short, hungry, explaining it as proof that I was not enough, and of course, the infantile lament, “It is NOT FAIR!”. I worried and envied about money for years, and when I finally became solvent enough to pay taxes without worrying about floating checks and holding my breath that they would clear before they bounced, I probably became one of the few people I know who actually took pleasure in paying my taxes – which I still do!
I was always perhaps too aware of who got what and how much. I perennially seemed to come up short, hungry, explaining it as proof that I was not enough, and of course, the infantile lament, “It is NOT FAIR!”.
I heard an interview on late-night radio – well, I should not say I actually heard it, as I was busily doing too many things, and my attention was spotty, like the I imagine the failing attention of a too-busy mother to be. What I did hear was a novelist, whose name I did not catch, being asked why he locates his fantasy stories on an island. He replied without hesitation, “Because that way, one can study a people or a culture without the influence of the outside world: the world outside the confines of the isolated island world.” I thought about what I think of as the “one-person psychology” that comes with neglect. There is such an ocean surrounding the child and the child’s solitary world, that the presence or influence of an “outside” world may be miles away, or simply non-existent. I always felt I had my own little culture, and in some ways, embarrassedly, still do. Until we recover enough to build a boat, an ark, or a bridge to connection.
Interestingly a life-changing event for me was in junior high, when I entered a national essay contest. High school kids from all over the US entered, and although I was one of the youngest entrants, I won. The theme we were all writing on was John Donne’s “No Man is an Island.” How ironic that, little island that I was, I wrote a winning essay on that. I will have to dig up that essay – I am sure it is somewhere in the archives of our family. The prize was $100, which I used to buy my first ten speed bike, which indeed became a bridge to life in the world for that disconnected young girl.
Similarly ironic, some of my favorite places in the world are tropical islands: Hawaii and Cuba. And the British Isles and Greek Islands are definitely high on my bucket list of destinations.
I have always found it easier to give than to share. I am decidedly generous when it comes to giving. However, I never lend anything without being fully prepared to say goodbye to it, and sharing evokes even still the shadow of a gnawing fear that there will not be enough, so deeply grooved was the circuitry of scarcity and, to be sure, injustice.
I have always found it easier to give than to share. I am decidedly generous when it comes to giving. However, I never lend anything without being fully prepared to say goodbye to it, and sharing evokes even still the shadow of a gnawing fear that there will not be enough, so deeply grooved was the circuitry of scarcity and, to be sure, injustice. Sharing people? For me, that was always out of the question! And when others talk of polyamory, I honestly can’t imagine how they do it.
All this to say, jealousy, envy, hunger, and thirst may be lingering sequelae of neglect. Ironically, I hear the echoes of the old revolutionary rallying cry, Basta Ya! Enough now! Enough injustice, trauma, and neglect! And in our healing, may we strive to create the trust and safety emerging from that gnawing, when in real-time, in fact there will be enough. Basta!
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.
As the world reels from the recent death of a young Iranian woman at the hands of the “morality police,” I heard a recent interview with another young woman who was stopped, but thankfully not detained, for the “incorrect” wearing of the hijab, the controversial mandatory head covering required for women in Iran. Her breathy recounting of the story, her experience of the event, and its aftermath was like reading the checklist of PTSD symptoms from the DSM. She could check every box: flashbacks, nightmares, terror of even leaving the house, and fearful aversion to even the thought of the street corner where the trauma occurred. Listening to her sent a chill from my belly and up through my whole body.
It was a familiar chill, taking me back to my Aleph class, the first grade of Hebrew School, which corresponded to third-grade regular school, making me about seven or eight years old. I remember watching the grainy black and white newsreels of the Nazi concentration camps, seeing the naked skeleton-like bodies, some of them very small, being kids like me, or too emaciated to tell if they were young or if they were shrunken by starvation and suffering. Clearly, they were almost or soon to be dead.
The chill, the same sensation I was feeling once again, even then, resonated with something as yet unremembered in my own life; that kept me awake or awakened by nightmares and horror. Why they were showing those films to such young kids and without helping to make sense out of them, if there was any sense to be made, continues to be beyond me. The rallying cry of the then-radical Jewish Defense League was “Never Again!” But still, seven- and eight-year-olds?
That same chill, like an intractable ghost, revisited my belly and nightmare-ridden nights in my first year of college. It was another September 11th milestone that became a haunting anniversary in my annual date book: September 11th, 1973, when the bloody Pinochet dictatorship overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile. Thousands were rounded up, brutally tortured, raped, murdered, and/or disappeared during a reign of terror which spread over much of the Latin American continent. Having grown up on a diet of such stories, I was both riveted and haunted. Many of the torture stories were hideous and graphic, often involving genitals, that lingered in particular in my horror-ridden mind and body.
I have often been curious about the vast menu of symptoms the dysregulated psyche and body land on to both calm the hyper-aroused system down or metaphorically enact the trauma story.
As a therapist, I have often been curious about the vast menu of symptoms the dysregulated psyche and body land on to both calm the hyper-aroused system down or metaphorically enact the trauma story. In our home, we grew up with a steady diet of the, to my mind, nonsensical admonition to “clean your plate, because children are starving in Europe!” (I never understood how my eating unwanted food would help them!) Our dad never let us forget his years of hunger and deprivation, and I felt a similar chill in my body hearing his tirade about “bread and worms,” with which he not infrequently seemed almost to threaten me. I was a decidedly “bad eater.”
Frequently gripped by the hideous and scary image of squirming creatures burrowing in and out of dry old bread heels, I guess it was no surprise when my “symptom of choice” was a near-lethal run with the then virtually unknown, certainly unstudied anorexia, which nearly took me down. But since it was starvation at my own hand, rather than at the hands of some vicious social or political power that be, it was my own “fault,” and certainly did not earn me the badge of courage that our dad wore. I was a “bad girl” and not a martyr.
The play of social forces, of history, left its indelible mark on both of our parents – indelible because neither of them had the impulse or the privilege of healing that I have had. The intergenerational transmission took many forms, both in actions taken and not taken on us kids and also in these less obvious psychological, somatic, and other forms of dysregulation, but also in the more complex and more difficult-to-discern re-enactment and unspoken messages. Somehow, I came to believe that martyrdom was redeeming, suffering noble, and being killed for it the highest possible merit of honor. I suppose on some level, I came to believe that to go up in smoke, to die a tragic or at least some sort of hero’s death, was the way to win our dad’s approval and love. That became my life script, although, of course, I did not realize it. I ultimately set about making my life path to, like Che Guevara, be a selfless internationalist fighter, and go down in fiery glory for the cause. That would also, of course, solve the problem of ending my miserable and unworthy life. Oy vey! That is another story for another day…
My point is that social and political violence in all its forms – racism, homelessness, wild economic, educational, and power disparities – are all the ultimate perpetrators of dysregulation and trauma in their myriad manifestations. How can we dream of addressing one without the other? It is the endless chicken and egg, cycling ever faster like a bicycle wheel careening down a steep, bumpy hill.
My point is that social and political violence in all its forms – racism, homelessness, wild economic, educational, and power disparities – are all the ultimate perpetrators of dysregulation and trauma in their myriad manifestations.
Our parents did get involved in Post-Holocaust healing efforts. Our mom was a high school teacher, and together they participated in taking “friendship” delegations of Jewish kids to Germany to have educational and healing conversations about the wreckage wrought by and upon their parents. It was perhaps healing for our parents. Our dad’s bitterness softened some. However, when it came to Arabs and Israelis, not so much. His rage at Arabs never seemed to abate, and he even was prone to ranting, at least for a time (until Donald Trump sent him into flashbacks about Hitler?) about “Obama being a Muslim.” Thank god he got over that one. I remember shortly after I met my now husband, loud, red-faced arguments they had about Zionism. I was so embarrassed in front of my new boyfriend. Those feelings went with him to the grave. How can Arabs and Israelis, essentially cousins, dig their heels in so endlessly, with an unending, tragic waste of life, decade after decade? It is beyond me.
So, it warmed my heart to hear a story the other morning on the BBC, an interview with a man just slightly older than me. He also was a child of Holocaust survivors, but his father died when he was a child. His family migrated to Israel, and he grew up there. Like all young Israeli men and women, he had to serve his time in the Army, and ended up participating in the now-historical Six-Day War.
In this story, he was about 19 years old, somewhere on a noisy battlefield, when he heard the voice of a little boy crying in Arabic, “Doctor, Doctor!” It was a loud wail. Turning to see what the child was calling about, he saw the little guy gesturing toward a woman who was bloody – but not by injury. She was having a baby and needed help. The youth had no clue how to deliver a baby, but he figured clean water was needed and sent the boy in search of it, which he quickly found and brought back. By some sort of natural emergency intuition, he figured out how to assist the baby’s arrival into this crazy world. Arab? Israeli? Who cared? The baby emerged loudly crying. That’s good – it means she’s alive. A baby girl. The mother, the daughter, and the young soldier never saw each other again. Paths crossing in humanity.
How can we treat one without the other? Trauma and social justice? Two wings of the same bird.
Kudos to TRF for weaving the two skillfully together into a powerful learning event: The Social Justice Summit. See Trauma Research Foundation’s website for details.
Today’s song:
In this song, Sueno con Serpientes, Cuban troubadour Silvio Rodrriguez sings “I dream of serpents, serpents of the sea. I kill one, and another appears. Ohh… oh.., With much greater hell in digestion…”
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 we went to hear football legend Jerry Rice speak about Black History Month a few years ago, what struck me perhaps the most was the immense size of his hands. Getting my picture taken with Number 80 was a thrill, and having his arm around me momentarily for my photo op reminded me of the old song, “He’s got the whole world in his hands!”
I love that picture. I am no fan of football, and that is for sure. I have never watched even a fraction of a game in my life. But somehow, Jerry remains on my shortlist of iconic heroes, mostly for the fact that he got everywhere that he got, which was quite far, through perseverance and essentially out-efforting everyone else. That I identify with.
Jerry grew up in the deep American south in a small town of 500 people. He was the sixth of eight children in a poor family, so I can imagine how much attention he got. I found out he had learning disabilities when he spoke about literacy to a crowd of Oakland middle school kids. As a very young child in a family where there was rarely enough food, Jerry helped his dad, a bricklayer. At age 5, he learned to catch bricks tossed by his brother and handed them to his dad one by one as the walls went up. That will give you some hands!
I had a client who thought recovery was supposed to be like building a brick wall. Once you lay the foundation, you place brick upon brick and build a whole new structure. She was frustrated, believing she had spent years trying to lay a foundation, and felt terrible failure, disappointment, loss, anger and shame that she had not put any building on it. She certainly felt let down by me! I was startled and rather jarred by her metaphor, which was so far from my own vision of recovery.
My Oakland office is in a lovely quaint Victorian building. It was not built on the site where it now stands – rather, the old house with whatever its story was transported from some other part of town, deposited in this upwardly mobile neighborhood, and remodeled into a rather classy office building. I once saw a picture of a house being moved across a town. What a strange and disorienting sight, a large vehicle with a family-sized dwelling occupying the whole width of a city street.
My vision of healing is far from a brick-and-mortar construction or a “fix,” but something much more organic. Just as neurofeedback is not something we do “to” someone or “on” someone, but a shared endeavor I do with someone, in a swaddle of caring, attentive psychotherapy. Similarly, I think of healing as something that arises, that emerges gradually from the inside out. It seems to me to be something that grows. How did Jerry’s hands get so big? There was some raw material, and then there was some long-term repeated action, and they emerged big and strong.
I think of healing as something that arises, that emerges gradually from the inside out. It seems to me to be something that grows.
We lived in South Bend, Indiana, for two short and immensely long years, second and third grade. I have a few flashbulb memories of South Bend – I remember when the new sensation the Beatles burst on the scene with I Wanna Hold Your Hand, and we were all doing the “twist” to it. I remember the endless procession on TV when John F. Kennedy was assassinated and seeing little Jon-Jon saluting. And I remember the crocuses. Winters in South Bend seemed to be at least half the year (with the summers being blazing hot and always putting our mom in a bad mood.) The winter brought huge piles of snow. We could build a fort in the yard, which would freeze and last for months. But I have never liked snow or cold.
The first little sign that the winter might end was the crocuses. The little, bright green sprouts began gingerly to poke up through the snow. There was still plenty of snow, but those fiercely determined little fighters not only pierced the chill, but bloomed, splashing the bright white with kisses of color and hope. They seem to say ahhh… relief is coming. Maybe not right away, but it will. Little sprigs of hope.
I think of healing that way. Not as something we can figure out, manipulate or construct externally, but nourish and care for, providing the necessary inputs for nature to work its magic, often outside our view. And we must be mindful and attentive to the often subtle seedlings of evidence that something is, in fact, happening, always more slowly than we would wish.
Perhaps that is one reason why I like cheese making and sourdough baking so much. With pure ingredients, thoughtful and consistent attention, the requisite inputs on their optimal schedule, and patience with the glacial passage of time, and voila – a transformation into something new, delicious, healthful, and joyous. It seems I can make so many people happy with it!
The hardest cheesemaking lesson for me to learn was the patience part. I could not believe I had to wait two, three, and four months, often managing mold and sometimes stink. After some years of experience, I rather love the stinkers, and I age some of my cheeses two years and more. How did this happen? I guess my whole life, I have been learning about organicity. And that loving attention is the essential ingredient for everything. Of course, the other unbearably essential ingredient is time…
Brick structures are not my model of recovery. It is rather an organic unfolding. Like sourdough bread and the vast myriad of cheeses, often it looks like nothing is happening at all.
In this crazy world, monarch butterflies are an endangered species. What a tragedy. I am proud to say that our sister and brother-in-law have a little monarch butterfly rescue operation going on in their backyard. They nurture the caterpillars, protect the chrysalises, and tend to the babies until they are ready to fly. I have never seen a baby butterfly.
Taking care of caterpillars has never occurred to me. I admit to being a rather squeamish non-fan of insects of any ilk. In particular, I associate caterpillars with a horrible memory, barely more than a flashbulb. I was probably about three at the most. We were at a little park in New York. All I remember was that the ground was covered, carpeted in a squirming mass of solid green caterpillars. Yecchhh. It was terrifying. Wearing little pink buckle Mary-Janes, there was nowhere to put a little foot without crushing and killing them. There was no way to make a step. They were everywhere. I was panicked and terrified. I remember screaming and screaming, “Daddy, carry me!” That is all I remember. But ever since, I have had a particular aversion to caterpillars in spite of their unmistakable association with butterflies, which I love.
Fast forward. About a week ago, our brother-in-law proudly whipped out his phone to show off pictures of the little pet monarch caterpillars they are tending. I was amazed at how lovely they were, especially since my only real association, at least visually, was so horrible. Striped with color, they did actually betray a bit of the wonder ahead, the monarch, the royal pinnacle of butterflies. Wow! Who would have thunk it?
Bricks are great, square and solid. I love my house, and it keeps me safe. It held steady through two big San Francisco shakers: ’06 and ’89, and it is still going strong. I admit that hunkering down during the pandemic in this safe haven was quite pleasant.
However, brick structures are not my model of recovery. It is rather an organic unfolding. Like sourdough bread and the vast myriad of cheeses, often it looks like nothing is happening at all. But last week, when I cracked a 16-month-old cheddar, it was that same feeling of wow! How did this happen? I am so glad I waited. The delicious depth and complexity were worth it and made me forget about the slow slog of time.
To me, recovery is a lot like that. If we stay the course, eventually, it does come up roses. Looking back, we are seeing with different eyes. What was so hideous and deplorable and seemed to expand endlessly to eternity looks different, and might even faintly betray a whiff of the beauty which lay ahead. It may be slow, but certainly not as I, for one, imagined it would ultimately turn out. Save the monarchs!
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.
My course with Quantum Way is now available for registration!