Another remarkable BBC story in the wee hours inspired and compelled me; an interview with an Afghan refugee speaking about his narrow escape from the death grip of the Taliban, actually from death itself. Knowing he was in perilous danger, of survival necessity he had planned his precarious flight from the country. He describes his painful good-by to his dearest friend. His friend, understandably desperately worried about him, had wrapped his own passport in a little case. In the course of their heartfelt exchange he placed it securely in the speaker’s left side chest shirt pocket. The speaker tried to decline, but his dear friend, insisted that he might need it, and gently patted his friend’s left chest pocket. Hugging goodbye, they did not want to let go, not knowing if they would see each other again.
Sure enough, the protagonist was apprehended by a band of Taliban, badly shot up, left for dead, but he wasn’t. He woke up in a hospital, badly injured and not knowing quite what had happened. He had lost an eye and numerous bullets had to be excavated from various parts of his body. But no bullet had penetrated his heart. His friend’s passport in its little case, however, was riddled with shrapnel. By tucking the passport securely in his left chest pocket with great love, is friend had saved his life. Obviously, he recovered and healed enough to find his way out of the country to tell this story of angels on BBC. Moved, almost to tears, I was grateful to be up in the middle of the night to hear it.
When I was a little girl, I use to love to watch Queen for a Day. It was not exactly a “game show,” but had real life contestants competing for some larger than life prize. They were all women with tragic, hard luck stories. The winner would be crowned with a sparkling tiara, and handed a huge bouquet of red roses. The band played Pomp and Circumstance as she cried, walked ceremonious across the stage, and went to accept the prize: the much needed home when she teetered on the brink of homelessness; the desperately needed surgery for a sick child, or whatever her tremendous winnings were to be. I would cry as I watched her. Sometimes I would hold a small pillow in the crook of my arm pretending it was red roses like hers, and march with her. I loved that show. And I cried because I was so lonely, and because nothing like that would ever happen to me. Or so I thought. Now I know that is not true. Angels are all around, if we are paying attention.
When I was a recently certified sex therapist, I was pretty shy and withdrawn. As I always did with everything I would take all the trainings I possibly could, to try to fortify myself with knowledge, which as we all know, only helps so much if one has the integral sense of worthlessness that comes with neglect. I could never quite know enough to “break even,” or be as good as or as smart as the others. It was news to me when I heard in a training that we all become sex therapists because we “think about sex 24 hours a day.” And we all think we have sexual “dysfunctions” because no one ever speaks aloud about such things. Except, as I was to learn, in sex therapy trainings, or some of them anyway. There I might discover that I was not the only one.
I met Gina as she was a senior clinician who gave workshops all over the country. Sometimes I could attend one without even having to travel. I had read all of her books, at that time, I guess there were about 5 of them. I liked her 4-prong approach to sexuality which included body, mind, emotion and spirituality. She was a lovely, kind person and I learned a lot from her.
Some years later, Gina was vested with producing a special issue of the Journal of Marital and Sexual Therapy on “Extraordinary Sex Therapy.” I dislike academic journals so much that I am not proud to say, I avoid them for the most part. Probably because it was Gina, I took a chance and submitted a manuscript. Lo and behold it was accepted. With Gina’s help I landed my first ever academic journal article. It was followed by a few more over the years, although admittedly I have never particularly sought out that genre. That special issue of JMST was later published as a little book.
Fast forward to 2017, I was beginning to gestate the book that became my recently released book on neglect. I sought out a good solid consultant to help me with my book proposal and I found Waverly. She was a pro: extremely knowledgeable and experienced with helping people write book proposals that bore fruit into published works. She was no-nonsense and said exactly what she meant- not always what I wanted to hear but I knew I could trust her, which goes a long way with me. And although she was not warm and fuzzy, she was patient and I knew she wanted the best for me. We hammered out a proposal, and she taught me about resilience and persistence with the many drafts required to come out with something good, which I think we did. I was so grateful.
When the proposal was done, then I needed to find a home for the book, ie a publisher. I thought to write to Gina, and ask her if she might have time to look over my proposal and perhaps have any ideas where I might send it. Gina responded right away. She was generous and welcoming as ever. She also told me she really could not take anything on now. Then she told me she was in an advanced stage of terminal cancer and was getting ready to die. This news was so sad to me. But a deeply spiritual person, Gina was quite peaceful about it. 80 years old, she felt she had had a very good life. Content, she was spending her remaining time with her partner of many years and with great equanimity and even joy, getting ready to go. She did, however, offer me the name and contact information of her publisher at Routledge, where she had published all of her by now 6 books. She said “Just tell her I sent you; my name is gold over there.” So I did.
Shockingly, I got a return email within the hour. Gina’s publisher told me that she headed the sexuality department at Routledge, but that she had forwarded my proposal to their trauma editor. The trauma editor also responded immediately, and told me to send my proposal along. No joke that Gina’s name was gold! And everyone at Routledge was so prompt, responsive and kind to me. I did not know if that was because Gina had prepared the path for me, or because that is the culture of the organization, but it was a surprising and spectacular relief and joy that even my often-distorted perception could not deny. It was not long before I received a welcoming acceptance. We were good to go.
When I went to tell Gina the good news, and to thank her again, she had already departed.
Waverly and I had done so well together. She was delighted that our proposal had been successful. As I thought it through, I thought I would like to work with Waverly through the whole writing process. I like to write with an additional pair of eyes, chapter by chapter, to keep me accountable and on schedule, and also to help monitor my output as we went along. Re-writing is never easy for me, and doing it in smaller chunks, or sometimes what seemed like “wads” was somewhat easier. I wanted to hire Waverly to be my coach.
When I contacted Waverly to inquire, uncharacteristically she did not respond. I re-sent the email several times, resorted to text and finally even the old-fashioned telephone. Still silence. Then I began to wonder, was she OK? I knew she had not been feeling well.
I called the organization where I had found her and asked her colleague, “Has Waverly changed her contact info? Is she OK?” He paused and softly responded, “Oh Waverly, she passed away.” Apparently much like my own mother, she had been feeling mostly fine, then too late, an advanced and metastasized cancer became detectable, that precipitously and rapidly whisked her away. How very sad. Waverly was close to my age, and unlike Gina, she had had not time to prepare for the journey.
Both of these two precious women, delivered me safely to a worthy publisher before they took their leave. The book is at least in part, the work of angels.
The little girl with the imaginary roses never could have dreamed it, that such grace, such miracles “could happen to me?” I once found a simulated-antique large wall hanging that prominently reads “Work hard and be nice!” It has been hanging in my bathroom for many years, to keep me mindful. If I do that and pay attention, I will notice all the angels, and even perhaps better yet, sometimes be one.
My book “Working with the Developmental Trauma of Childhood Neglect: Using Psychotherapy and Attachment Theory Techniques in Clinical Practice” was published on the 31st August. It provides psychotherapists with a multidimensional view of childhood neglect and a practical roadmap for facilitating survivors’ healing.
As I was pondering the recurring devastating dynamic between a couple I work with, a memory from my own life bubbled up. For those of us who have the minimal and spotty memory of early life, typical of neglect, these little forays into memory are rather like wandering through a curio shop. Much of what is there is uninteresting “junk.” But occasionally there is something surprising, or worthy of a closer look. Out of nowhere I found myself reflecting on a joke my father used to tell.
Our dad had a very quirky way of telling jokes. He thought he was pretty funny, but I remember also seeing a book by Henny Youngman a Jewish comic of that generation, and sometimes other joke books lying around, so he must have studied a little bit to make himself a more entertaining singing-waiter back in the day, and later in his profession as a cantor. When he told a joke, the “body” of the joke was unremarkable. But as he approached the punchline, he would burst into peels of laughter, to the point that he could hardly get the words of the punchline out. It would take a few tries. By the time he actually told us the punchline, we were all doubled over with contagion laughter and barely heard it. Then he would repeat the punchline maybe six times, and we would all be in stitches. In “ordinary consciousness,” it may not have been funny at all, but these moments of family hilarity now seem somehow sweet.
I remember one joke however, well I don’t remember the joke, I just remember the punchline, which was an emphatic “Ernest, Answer me!” And for some reason I just did not think it was funny. Ernest Ansermet (pronounced like “answer me”) was a world-class Swiss conductor of our dad’s era, a contemporary of Debussy and Stravinksy, so it was a play on words. But to me, a wife being desperate for her husband to just speak, was anything but amusing. I found myself remembering with a chill, the urgency, even terror I felt when the loved other would clam up, withdraw, or appear in a word, to abandon me.
Even before we got the PTSD diagnosis, neuroscience and psychology, and ultimately all the rest of us, were familiar with the “fight-flight” response to fear and trauma, even when we had little understanding of what trauma was. Later we learned that there was an additional adaptation or reaction to danger or fear: the “freeze” response. (We have since learned of a number of others, but those will be for another day). The freeze is the response to the “inescapable shock” situation, when fight and flight are simply impossible, like in the case of chronic torture, or abuse in the home where the nightmare does not stop, and the child cannot leave; or a prey animal being cornered and trapped by a larger, stronger, or faster predator. It also may be a kind of “death feigning” where the prey animal pretends to be dead so the predator will lose interest and just go away. Most predators don’t want to eat dead prey.
In the case of early neglect, the child learns early, that there is no point in crying or protesting, because there is no response, certainly not a favorable response. So withdrawal into the self is an understandable adaptation, and most likely becomes a default. If I know I have no impact, why bother? I might make myself more of an irritant or a blight than I already experience myself to be, or just simply call attention to myself which may not be such a good idea. Of course these are not “cognitions” or thoughts per se, as the cognitive apparatus is not nearly developed for a long time. But they are “procedural” or bodily, emotional or sensory modes that are installed rather like software, through experience. And they are stimulated in sensory ways at points later in life, so not experienced as “memory”.
One of the most devastating experiences that a young child can have, is what I refer to as the tragic poverty of “mirroring”. Mirroring is where the child experiences being seen, heard, and known, and in effect, “felt.” “Feeling felt” or an empathic reflection back to me, of what is accurately and receptively “me” is how I come to know who I am, and also how I learn to recognize and express feelings. The child of neglect has little or no experience of being mirrored. And without that, there are gaping holes and blank spots. As a cheese maker I object to these holes being likened to the holes in cheese. In the cheese-making world, those highly desirable, elegant markers of a good “Alpine” cheese, are referred to as “eyes”. In neglect, they are more like ravenous caverns of emptiness and hunger. They might be experienced as dull flatness, physical hunger, or some other misguided attempt at getting “filled up”.
As a result of the failure of mirroring, the child misses out on an emotional “education”. The capacities to perceive, identify and express one’s own emotions, and the emotions of others is minimal at best, as is a comprehension of why that would matter anyway. If the child is male, US and western culture will re-enforce a cognitive or “logical” default, and possibly devaluation of emotion. Although neuroscience has taught us that emotion is an important aspect of cognition and even coherent thought, that can be a very hard sell. Meanwhile if my partner is unexpressive of their own emotion, or rather oblivious to mine, if they are a child of neglect, it may be, not because they don’t care, but literally that they can’t – or not yet.
Powerful change is possible in psychotherapy. In a well facilitated couple’s therapy, a child of neglect can experience strong emotion safely and learn to comprehend and process it. Through experience some of the important brain areas are helped to develop later in life. Neurofeedback is another royal road to emotional intelligence, as it might bring relevant brain areas into connection with each other. None are a quick fix, and like working out, take consistency and practice to sustain change.
Of course, it can be very confusing when there is both early shock trauma, or incident trauma and neglect, which is most often the case. A child most likely cannot be assaulted, beaten, or somehow ravaged, with an attentive, caring protector present. Or if they are, there is a caring and comforting response process that can make a world of difference in impact of the injury. Often the failure of having a place to turn with the traumatic event is even more traumatic than the injury itself. When there is a history of both: incident trauma and attachment trauma/neglect, often the default for that child is fight-flight.
In the couple we opened with (a heterosexual couple although that need not be the case;) she had a tragic history of both. When he seemed to go silent and withdraw, she would vociferously protest. Her loud cries would awaken in him a helpless overwhelm, that left him speechless. When he did not speak, she would panic, and get louder and more shrill. He would withdraw farther. She would by now be semi-hysterical, running from a tiger, unaware of how both extreme and critical her screaming was. He felt so ill equipped to do anything to make it stop, that sometimes he would leave the room, the house, even leave her somewhere. I have seen couples mired in this dynamic where one partner was left on a dark street in an unfamiliar town, and the other drove off. They persisted a long time in their agonizing pattern. When this unbearable dynamic would constellate in my office, as it could on any topic, I could feel the sense of life-threatening emergency of both in my own body. It could begin with either partner. (And that was a hard sell indeed!). Both felt terribly victimized by the other. It might take weeks to recover. Both were desperate to learn what to do. These two were not unique by any means.
So, what is to be done? Well, there is little hope of convincing anyone that no one is to blame! At least not while activated. I always tell people, “The reason why you have me, is so there is one person in the room who is in present time! Everyone else is deep in their traumatic history. But there is no way to say that when we have two brains deep in trauma. So, what to do?
First of all, quiet the nervous system enough so the thinking brain comes back online. I might as well be “passing gas” in the wind, so to speak as to try and teach anything to anyone in that state. It is even hard to do this much, but I try to teach them: “stop action!”.
Take a break and breathe. Your breath is your best friend. Your inhale is ‘sympathetic’ or stimulating. Your exhale is ‘parasympathetic,’ or calming. So looooong exhale. I recommend closing the eyes, breathe in on six counts, out on nine, and do that, ten times. No one leaves the room.
It is hard to teach this, but as we learn to revisit the tragic stories of those two little kids, it eventually becomes easier. If from the quieter state, either one is able to say, “please talk to me…” or the other is able to say simply “I don’t know what to say,” or “I was afraid if I said anything I would make it worse…” a gentle truce may become possible. That is our goal.
I always wondered why I loved that old song by Peter Gabriel, “Please Talk to Me!”.
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.
Early in my career, when I was in a post-graduate training program and just beginning to see clients, I remember when one of my first clients gushed hyperbolically about how wonderful I was. I was dazzled and delighted. “Maybe, just maybe I will be good at this!” I thought. When I proudly told my supervision group what she had said, a woman in my group, a year ahead of me in the program sarcastically retorted, “Isn’t transference grand?!” I went silent, feeling deflated and ashamed. And although at the time I thought she was snotty and mean, I never forgot her words.
Transference is the projection onto the therapist of feelings for a real or longed for important other, commonly but not exclusively a parent. What my colleague was reminding me, or telling me, was “It’s not about you, Dummy!” Also, we invariably come crashing down from the proverbial pedestal, to become worse than scum. I have since come to understand, how these projections can be some of the richest sources of information about a client’s often unremembered past. Neglect leaves such gaping holes in interpersonal memory, that other media of communication than the spoken word become the requisite vehicle for the telling and reconstructing of personal narrative.
I remember one client telling me, “I really don’t remember anything about other people. When I try to remember my childhood, I just see bushes, and maybe our various dogs.” We slowly began to learn her story by studying her present relationships, and dynamics she did remember.
It is curious to me, that as I find with many of my neglect clients, although I have blank or spotty memory about my childhood, I have vivid memory of books. I remember from second grade Sunday school a picture from a Bible Story picture book of Abraham smashing the idols. We were learning the Ten Commandments and the concept of “One God.” In Jewish synagogues there were to be “no graven images” meaning no images or statues of human subjects who might be attempting to upstage the One God. Abraham, in the picture, a young boy, not that much older than me, in his little toga with a stick thrashing the white marble statues to the sanctuary floor. I remember thinking this was very strange. The lesson was, we were not supposed to worship idols. Somehow I did not quite get it.
I was always a hero worshipper. I could not seem to find real people to connect to, I just did not know how. But I would create them out of some raw material that I found in the environment, and invent the relationships I did not know how to have. When I was about 12, my “first love” was Thomas Wolfe. He was an author who wrote mammoth 500-600 page novels, known to be autobiographical, where the protagonist was depressed, intense, insatiable, creative and desperately alone. Wolfe the writer died at 39. So even though he was dead, I believed I had found my match, he was like me, I was not the only one. Wolfe was from Asheville, North Carolina. It was on my bucket list to go to Asheville, see his home and the birthplace of all these stories that filled my world.
In 2012 I had the opportunity to go to Asheville for a Neurofeedback training. I was delighted! By now it was 45 years later. I had a different brain and a completely different relationship landscape, thankfully. I booked a hotel across the street from the Thomas Wolfe House, the boarding house Wolfe’s mother ran, that featured in all the books; and where the real people had lived. I spent a day taking pictures of everything there.
In the gift shop I bought a little miniature of the marble angel made famous in the title of his book Look Homeward Angel; and a 560-page biography. After the training I eagerly devoured the biography in the same devouring way that Thomas Wolfe the man had related to most people and things. I learned from the biography, that he was a misogynist, he was an alcoholic, he was antisemitic, he was racist. What was I thinking? Who was that young girl?
I recently heard Bessel van der Kolk say, “idealization is a defense against terror.” I was terrified that I was a different species, that there was never and never would be anyone like me. In my quest for a partner or twin, I had to make someone up. Wolfe was the clay. The void left by neglect is so gaping, it terrifies. We have to fill it with something besides bushes or book illustrations.
In my twenties I became politicized. By then I had given up on being seen or known by my parents. My father’s suffering and his hero story or overcoming his suffering and making a successful life, became the model. But I also was angry and rebellious. I wanted to get his attention and approval, but I also disavowed that wish. So, I chose something that would perhaps outrage or anger him. At that time democratic governments were tumbling all over Latin America, smashed by military dictators not unlike Hitler. I adopted an identity as freedom fighter, out to overthrow fascist rulers, and perhaps even die doing it. The ideal was Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
Originally from Argentina, Che grew up with privilege and became a doctor. But he sacrificed everything to be an internationalist fighter, who led the Cuban people to freedom and died doing it. Perfect! That was who I wanted to be. The new female version of Che. Ever trying to fill the empty void left by neglect, find an identity, a way to be like my father, but not too much. To be seen and known, respected and loved. And with luck to die doing it, a noble way to end the pain. I tried to do this and had a terrible psychological crash doing it, which ultimately led me to psychotherapy.
The child of neglect, lacking a mirroring other, has no self to be. I have shown Ruth Lanius’s shocking brain scans of the child of neglect, whose brain is firing faintly if at all. The default mode network which is the home of the sense of self, is virtually missing entirely. “Without a self” as Lanius reminds us, there is no other. So we continue to create some version of relationship, but being distorted and alienating, they don’t last. Like many survivors of neglect, I left a trail of relationship wreckage behind me, until I finally attached to a therapist, and stayed for many, many years. I am happy to say I now have very fulfilling and mutual relationships, a partner of 35 years, and dear friends. But I did not grow the circuits in the way we were designed to. That is the task that neglect leaves us with. And that is why we must learn to become the therapists that can heal this.
In Cuba I saw a billboard that said “Seremos Como Che,” This means we shall be like Che. The emphasis is mine. We will aspire to emulate, but not to be him. The void of self is devastating. The tragic impact of neglect. Getting a spine, getting a voice, big tasks. And big tasks for the therapist to learn all the possible access routes to assist. We must also resist the temptation to buy into the inevitable projections, positive and negative, or even to recognize them when they occur. Another reminder of why the therapist who works with neglect, perhaps even more than any other therapist, must do their own personal work. We don’t want to miss that boat like our clients’ parents did!
My book “Working with the Developmental Trauma of Childhood Neglect: Using Psychotherapy and Attachment Theory Techniques in Clinical Practice” was published on the 31st August. It provides psychotherapists with a multidimensional view of childhood neglect and a practical roadmap for facilitating survivors’ healing.
I have a special affection for leopards. As I love to say, “you know the old adage ‘A leopard can’t change its spots?’ Well, I can. And I change my spots every chance I get.” Healing is all about that. The “Decade of the Brain” and neuroimaging technology taught us that “Neurogenesis” is possible, that we can grow new neurons. Before that we believed we were born with our life’s quota of neurons, and that was that. We now know that with neurofeedback, psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, somatic therapies, mindfulness practice, and yes even the old fashioned “talking cure,” we can generate not only connections, ie networks, but molecules. This is wonderful news for all of us, both with respect to our own brains and our clients’ brains if we are practitioners of some kind. So why do spots have such a bad rap?
I remember when I used to drink alcohol, I had to either stop wearing white, or switch from red to white wine. All my pretty white blouses were speckled with unsightly red spots. Oy vey, I always was a sloppy drinker. As an adolescent, ugly facial spots, we called them “zits,” were referred to in commercials for acne products as “blemishes.” Spots were blights on the skin, and on faces that in so many cases already housed shame and self-doubt, or self hatred. Spots were like nature’s “mistakes.” But nature, for the most part, does not make mistakes. If left to itself, it has a brilliant unshakeable plan. Occasionally there is an aberration or mutation, as with the Corona Virus for example, but perhaps we will ultimately come to discover what the ecological (or existencial) intention of that was to be. Most likely it is human intervention that produces disasters of nature, or so is my jaundiced and not-research-based speculation.
Once I had the privilege to visit Milan, Italy. I admit, in my love for pretty things of many kinds, I love clothes. Milan is a wonderland as the fashion hub of the world. Of course, we had to visit the Armani showrooms, a veritable museum of haute couture, clothes I could and really never would buy, but love to look at like I love looking at art. I was struck by a theme, that in every window in a long seeming small city of windows, each of the numerous masterpiece garments, whether on a mannequin or a hanger, had a conspicuos wrinkle in the way it was hung or draped. It was striking. I wondered, “what is he trying to say?” My husband did not notice until I pointed it out. Was he trying to teach us something about “mistakes?”
Once in a training with the somatic therapy genius Peter Levine, we were instructed to make four “mistakes” in every practice session. It was an intentional part of the assignment. The idea was to integrate the idea that mistakes are inevitable in this work. And to develop the humility to tolerate and learn from them. And then to learn to repair them. So many of us who grow up with trauma and neglect, come to learn that mistakes can be life threatening, or have the “hubris” to strive to be “perfect,” blameless or safe from retribution; or worthy of love. A futile aspiration.
In relationship, “mistakes” are an inevitable ingredient in development. The attachment researchers teach us, that even in the ideal secure attachment, where the attunement of primary caregiver and infant is “good enough,” the optimal percentage of accurate attunement, the best we could hope for is 30%. 30%!! That means that the other 70 percent of the time is the delicate dance of rupture and repair, rupture and repair. That is how we learn about relationship, and really about being. How sad that in the world of trauma and neglect, these skills are rarely learned, so the inevitable ruptures are terrifying, even life threatening. And relationship comes to in effect be an icon for suffering, however much it is longed for.
Much like Peter, the attachment research people teach us that the “mistakes” of rupture are invaluable, and much better training than smooth sailing without rupture. As my husband exclaimed many years ago when we emerged from the nightmare of chronic cycles of triggering and reactivity, “Wow, knowing how to recover when we disconnect is such a relief! I don’t have to worry so much about screwing up, because I know we can get back together if I do. I don’t feel so chronically unsafe and fearful around you anymore!” What a blessing!
As long-time serious bicyclist, my nemesis became potholes. I have only had two serious crashes in my in my 50 plus year cycling life, and in both cases I lost consciousness, so I don’t really know all of what happened. I admit, that I am grateful to have had those two traumatic events so I could experience different trauma modalities on those sorts of “one-time” incident traumas. What I did know was that I came out of the accidents with anxiety about bad road surface, and a veritable phobia of potholes.
Riding in Cuba, was like a dream come true. Just going there was a bucket list item of many years. I could not believe it when we were riding through the beautiful scenic countryside, carefully dodging chickens and navigating around horse drawn buggies carrying crates of fresh eggs. Coming around a bend to the base of a hill on our first long riding day, I happened upon the most colossal potholes in the known world. Of course, after six decades of being suffocated and strangled by the world political economy, the Cubans certainly had not had resources for infrastructure, especially as they used the meager resources they had, to first take care of people. The roads were tragically un-maintained. I gasped. It was only our first day of riding!
Embarking on that pothole scarred road, out of nowhere I was visited by a flashbulb image. Back before the pandemic when I drove to the office every day, I was routinely stopped by a traffic light, just as I was getting off the freeway. At that street corner was a little skateboarding venue, a little “park” of concrete, fitted out with sharp hills and walls, obstacles and vaults to jump, slalom type circles. Groups of adolescent boys (I never once saw a girl!) in baggy hoodies wildly flying round and round, jumping, crashing, rolling up the steep sidewalls, clearly having a blast. From the large graffiti on the walls, it appeared they referred to themselves as “punks.” As I waited for the long red light to change, I loved to watch them, always thinking “You wouldn’t catch me doing that!” Never!
Well suddenly that day in Cuba, the “light changed.” Was it a neurofeedback “moment?” I don’t know…Suddenly the Cuban potholes reminded me of those kids, who intentionally sought out the bumpiness, the vertical crashing and landing on their wheels upright, the slalom curving and dodging and missing each other, they do this for fun! Suddenly I imagined myself one of the ”punks,” having fun with the Cuban potholes. For the rest of that trip, I made a game of pothole dodging and jumping. Missing infrastructure, and prior trauma became my game: joy, fun and triumph!
Another symbol of transformation that I love, are butterflies. However, I‘ve never been fond of caterpillars. I even have a terrifying childhood memory from when I was three or four, of a park in New York where there were so many squiggling caterpillars that I literally could not put my little feet anywhere without stepping on them. All I remember is just wailing “Daddy, Daddy carry me!” I don’t remember if he did, just the terror. Anyway, those unsavory little creatures somehow become butterflies. Which are beautiful and I love them!
Interestingly, we call nervous excitement “butterflies” in our stomachs. I remember Peter Levine’s reminder that in the body, excitement and fear feel very similar. The Cuban word for potholes is “paches.” Que Vivan los Paches!
My first book, published in 2010, was a sorry child of neglect. At that time, I lacked the knowledge, the wisdom, and most of all the confidence to do any promotion at all. Ironically, there is also a measure of humility required, it would be a magical belief to assume that “my child, however exceptional, will raise itself!” Oy vey! A recipe for tragic neglect, which is what I did. The book languished in semi-obscurity, although those who read it seemed to like it. It stayed in print and I continue to get an annual accounting from the publisher of some meager number of copies that went out each year. That is not bad, for an eleven year old book, but nothing like it would have been, if I had given it a good start in life. It is an apt metaphor for the shame, grief, loss and anger that so many adult children of childhood trauma and neglect are often bathed in. “What would my life have been like?…”
The two key tasks of recovery from neglect, are “getting a spine and getting a voice.” I learned this from Stephen Johnson, a brilliant pioneer in somatic therapy who wrote a series of wonderful books on character theory. Getting a spine means emerging from shame and hiding, and standing tall and visible. Neglect, with its primordial solitude and the accompanying assumptions about “why” one is “unwanted;” worthless;” “untouchable;” “hopelessly different and alien;” etc, etc, etc, makes for a perennial withdrawal into crouched shadow, and the well recognized stooped posture of shame. It is no way to begin the life of a book, or any life of course, and most especially a book that touts hope.
Voice means having the willingness, again the confidence and the humility to speak up. The child of neglect imagines, if I am not the natural recipient of attention, there is nothing to be done about it. (For an infant that may indeed be a tragic fact of life.) In fact, when I fist began collecting my anecdotal data about neglect, way back at the turn of the century/millennium, a signature or marker that alerted me to a client being a neglect survivor, was the shrugging, default refrain, “I don’t know what to do!” Or “there is nothing I can do!” I had no science back then, but it was a dead give-away. And I also did not realize then, that I too had that gene.
Voice, is besides standing up, using not only spoken language, but certainly using spoken language, to call attention to oneself. In the case of an infant, it is often about essential need. For an adult, it could be anything, even “hey, have a look at my new book!” even if I have not “earned” the attention.
With my new book, that came out on August 31st, I resolved to do it differently. I found myself a rock star marketing person, who has begun to inundate your in-box with unsolicited mail. I hope it does not drive you crazy, but I am also well acquainted with the invaluable “unsubscribe” button that I am not ashamed to liberally use when I receive unwanted mail. Of course I invite you to do the same, should you see fit.
Not one for advice giving, there is one piece I will readily dispense. Any measure of success I have ever achieved, was facilitated by this: find the best consultation money can buy, tell them everything, and do what I am told! So that is what I have done. She said, “write blogs!” Initially I always believed, “who the hell wants to hear it, my random mind wanderings?” But here we are, and I even discovered that I love it!
Some of my close people have long said, “resuscitate the first book!” As you can most likely see, this is what she has done. It is never too late to heal from neglect! She has culled chapters from it that may seem of interest, packaged them anew and sent them out into the world. Again, the child of neglect later in life, comes to experience the world, perhaps later then one would have hoped, but yes, at last.
So here I am practicing what I preach, and modeling what I am trying to inseminate: I am very pleased to announce my new book will appear on August 31st. Although it is first and foremost a clinical book, devoted as I am to teaching therapists to recognize and help the long neglected population of neglect survivors, all my reviewers, have offered the unsolicited feedback, that it can certainly be of interest and utility, and is accessible to the sophisticated psychotherapy client. Meanwhile I am preliminarily hatching the blueprint of the lay-person’s version, which will follow before long.
Should you buy the book on Amazon, please do take a moment to post a review. It is helpful to me to know what does and does not “work” for people. And my friend and colleague, Deirdre Fay, whose excellent new book Becoming Safely Embodied, sprinted to best-seller status in seeming no time, advised me, the reviews that post in the first few days after publication show the most powerful and speedy results. You don’t have to read the whole thing before you say something.
And finally, those with visual impairment, or who simply like to “read” while walking the dogs, or stirring the cheese vat, have requested an Audible version. If you are one of those please do say so in your review, or let me know. My publisher has said if there is sufficient demand they will consider adding that to the roster of offerings. So there, I did it! If you are a child of neglect, you might try this. It didn’t hurt at all!
It was March 16th, 2020 when the San Francisco Bay Area went into lockdown. That was the last time I was in my psychotherapy office. At the time, the mayor said it would be two weeks. On June, 15th 2021, the State of California re-opened. What a long, strange 15 months it was, filled with tragedy; painful and some invaluable lessons, and no shortage of traumatic triggers of many stripes.
Blessedly, the Pandemic was very kind to me. My 93-year-old father died barely a month before it struck so the agony of not being able to spend his final days and weeks with him, and also laying him to rest as a family, in the traditional ways. All of my loved ones stayed healthy and safe, including one who completed her chemotherapy also, just in time. And I could work relatively comfortably, from home. Interestingly, almost my entire practice stayed on for remote sessions. And I have quite a number of “new” people whom I have yet to see in person.
Before I had the hubris to believe I could never work by Zoom or telephone. To my surprise I learned that I could. It was not an easy transition I discovered that “Zoom Fatigue” is no joke. Because the many subtle communications and cues conveyed energetically; through eye contact, subtleties of voice and emotion are infinitely harder to discern, if at all, on an electronic screen. The brain concentrates extra hard to attempt to compensate for the elusive information. For months, “commuting” down the stairs at the end of my work day, I felt mind-numbingly exhausted. And the ongoing stress of failing technology, or fear of technical freezes and glitches, kept me on edge. But all of this settled over the long months, and by now, we are all fairly used to it.
Trauma, as we know, is not remembered but relived. My clients, being pretty much exclusively survivors of trauma and neglect were floridly activated much of the time. The Trump government managed to evoke virtually everyone’s traumatic childhood: caregivers who did not care about them; narcissistic parents; deceit and denial; self- interest; sexual exploitation; and plain and simple neglect of basic needs. Of course when triggering is intense and persistent, it is trying to tease apart, what is real time horror, of which there was plenty indeed, and what was being implicitly remembered. So much valuable therapeutic work was accomplished, but not without tremendous effort and pain. Thankfully city ordinance allowed me to cautiously and selectively open for Neurofeedback eventually, which was a great relief to many. Although they were equally pleased and proud to see how well their progress from our prior neurofeedback work, did “hold.”
In particular, those with histories of neglect swam in a sea of unremembered memory. My young niece aptly referred to Pandemic time as “blursday…” a haze of timeless, vacuous, redundant, lonely time.
Renowned neuroscience researcher Ruth Lanius has studied the traumatized brain now for over two decades. She has dramatic neuroimaging scans comparing the brains of survivors of trauma, which include survivors of developmental trauma and neglect. One painfully jarring set of images compares the Default Mode Networks of the traumatized brain with those of healthy controls. The Default Mode Network or DMN is the set of structures, mostly at the back of the brain, where the brain “idles” when it is not under task, but “resting.” Both idling and resting are “luxuries” that the traumatized brain rarely enjoys. The DMN is also the locus of self-reflection, the daydreaming or wandering mind of the healthy brain. In the scans, the back of the brain and its connections with the prefrontal area are brightly lit, which means blood is flowing to these areas, they are actively firing. In the trauma brain, virtually the entire brain is shockingly blank. There is no activity in this painfully under-aroused brain. This is story of the neglected child’s life. Lacking resonance with a caregiver’s brain, lacking attention, enriched environments, or contact, it is a desert of isolation. It is little wonder that many neglect survivors have attention and learning difficulties, due to their devastating lack of stimulation and care.
Blursday not only replicated but evoked the desolation of childhood. It was timeless, as is the experience of neglect, it seemed like it would never end, and the neglect didn’t. That is largely what is so heartening about this Pandemic’s opening. It is a change in the seemingly endless “waters of oblivion” to quote Bob Dylan’s profound song “Too Much of Nothing,” which to me is the anthem of neglect.
Again, trauma is not remembered but relived. Going through this Pandemic, which remarkably twinned the neglect experience: isolation, vast emptiness and confinement, boredom and redundancy, sleepy lack of stimulation, timelessness, was so familiar that it may not have been noticed by many. One client said, “I feel as if my whole life was training for this.” The astute therapist, with good timing, could take advantage of it, because it actually did evoke memory. And it also explained the depth of depression that many a child of neglect experienced going through it.
Of course all the fear and death associated with the Pandemic, added complexity, as well as the rash of hate violence that was a backdrop for it. So more aspects of trauma and developmental trauma were chronically activated. Oy vey! What a year plus it has been. And yet in that annoying way that therapists have of saying, a whole lot of invaluable work got done, material became accessible to work on, that may not have been for a long time.
Hooray for a respite from it all! Let’s hope that the world will begin to recover and heal from all of this. There is still much to be grieved. So many deaths and terrible cancellations, losses and disruptions. And yet as I am fond of saying,
“Hope will not be cancelled.” Soldier on.
My course with Quantum Way is now available for registration!