Certain words I have torn out of my personal lexicon and just tossed. One of those is “stuck.” It is not allowed in my office either. True, sometimes progress is so slow as to be frustratingly imperceptible, but I don’t believe it has stopped and is certainly not cause for giving up.
I was once riding my bike up a hill so steep that I just went splat and fell right on my side. It was not that I had stopped moving completely; I was just not quite a match for that grade yet. I picked myself up, dusted myself off sheepishly, and with embarrassment walked that final stretch. I needed to get a little (maybe a lot?) stronger to tackle that hill again.
Sometimes clients will lament feeling or being stuck, and I know there is nothing I can say in those moments. If I try to disagree and point out the progress that is still slowly being made, they just feel frustrated and not understood or not heard. I have no choice but to just be quiet and empathic and hold the faith. I do remember how miserable and hopeless those moments can feel. And yes, they are moments.
“True, sometimes progress is so slow as to be frustratingly imperceptible, but I don’t believe it has stopped and is certainly not cause for giving up.”
The road to healing can be long and steep, and often interrupted by surprises. I recently heard a radio story about a prison “lifer” who was released on parole after completing twenty-three years of his life sentence. He’d had a tragically traumatic childhood as a ghetto boy: his parents having divorced, he lived with his father, who committed suicide when he was 8. He returned to live with his mother then, who was “more or less homeless.” At age 16, he and some friends had robbed a store, and one of his friends had shot and killed the store clerk. Tried as an adult, our young man had landed a life prison sentence. All of this detail is to illustrate how completely and utterly alone – uncared-for – he had almost always been. And his sentence was in effect, forever… His story of course is sadly not an unusual one when poverty is involved.
Trauma healing often does feel like a life sentence, and like one we will never be free. For some reason, our young man chose to spend the time behind bars working hard to transform himself.
He studied, educated himself, earned a degree, stayed out of trouble, and somehow succeeded, to his own disbelief, in winning a release date.
At 42, he had never worked an honest job. Coming out of prison, he was completely “dazed” and alien, rather like Rip van Winkle. At any moment he expected to be yanked back and locked up again. And as he described it, one is immediately about $25,000 “in the red.” You need a place to live, a car, clothes, basically everything. Most of all, you need a job, which is no small feat, because application forms can legally inquire if one has been convicted of a crime, and no one really wants to hire an “ex-con.”
Our man pounded the pavement, applied “everywhere” including all the current gig type jobs, but kept meeting with the same slamming doors until he happened to wander into a small Kosher bakery in the outer avenues of San Francisco, owned and operated by a young Israeli man named Isaac Frena. Frena, whose Eastern European family also had a story before getting to America, decided to try him out.
Our young man turned out to be the hardest working, most competent baker ever. He loved learning all the Kosher laws, even learning Hebrew. Why did Frena decide to do this? “Kosher is not just about food;” he said. Kosher is a way of life. The first fundamental rule of Judaism is that everyone deserves a second chance.” I for one, had never quite thought about “Kashrut” that way. Our young man gave his all to that chance. “It is the hardest work you could hope to find – high pressure, timing, accuracy. Bread is like… it’s a living organism. I compare it to a baby. It’s growing. if you don’t intervene into that child’s life at the right time, it’s going to grow up to be a monster.”
He began to tell others, and Frena gave others that chance. And before too long there were over twenty-five former “lifers” of all ages and races, working harmoniously together in the Kosher bakery. Of course, it was not smooth always, but here is the most important part: “Frena genuinely cares about people… They gave me love and a sense of security and they were giving love and a sense of security to all the dudes that were around me. That kind of kept snowballing.” Love and security, feeling seen and cared about are the most important ingredients for life: for growth, and for healing. That is why neglect is so devastating.
I once worked with a couple, who seemed to be having the same dialog every week. “I feel hopeless,” said one. “It makes sense that you feel so hopeless.” Then the other would reply “and I feel hopeless too.” The other responded “it makes sense that you feel hopeless too…” And it went on like that, round and round for months. But they kept showing up. And I for one, was still hopeful. Because the main ingredient was in the room. I genuinely cared for them and they still genuinely cared for each other.
After some months, week after week like that, they broke through. They were amazed. How do we keep going? I don’t know. They proceeded to be a happy long-married couple, and I have seen them again over the years from time to time.
Sometimes, when it seems as if there is no progress, like nothing is moving at all, what is happening is that “something” is slowly growing, like yeast rising in the space where that secure attachment never was. One is growing the capacity to metabolize the steady care of a consistent other. In itself, it is regulating. It is really the most important thing in the world.
Baking is a great metaphor and I do love to bake. I started growing my sourdough starter in 2014. That is where you mix a ratio of flour to water, and find just the right conditions, where it eventually begins to bubble and in effect ferment. It becomes natural or “wild” yeast. It took me six tries before my starter “took” so to speak. I had to try different locations with different temperatures, light, draft, etc. Finally, I found a cabinet, of just the right size and temperature, free of light and breeze, where my little jarful could thrive, and it has been ever since. Of course, I have to feed it and clean it every day. I have never thought of it as being like a baby, but certainly a pet. And I continue to find baking with it regulating and calming, not only because dough is tactile and it feels good; but because something that grows does provide that additional missing experience, that even if slow, there may be subtle, even imperceptible movement. It is hard to hold hope sometimes. That is where we may most need the presence of another.
Competent therapy, a variety of regulating modalities and consistency are requisites for good trauma healing. And the solid base of authentic care does keep things moving. That is why I am rather insistent about the combination of neurofeedback with deep psychotherapy. Both are necessary but not sufficient, but the combination is the charm. Sometimes the greatest challenge is to keep showing up, keep pedaling. Meanwhile, everyone seems to love the bread!
Although I am committed to zero tolerance, no rushing, I am rarely successful. I am always trying to do too much in a day; the time gets away from me. I wind up feeling disappointed about all that I did not get done and wondering, where does the time go? I have no idea where it went, and there is never enough. It is hard to remember the long, lonely years when the time weighed so heavily on my hands as to be unbearable. Getting through the day was like pushing Sisyphus’ leaden boulder, invariably feeling it refuse to move. I thought there was something wrong with the clock. Now I know the amygdala has no time.
Neglect is a bleak, empty cavernous void. I imagine an infant lying alone in a darkened room, helpless, with no way of “knowing” if anyone will ever come, let alone when. I am often visited by that image when sitting with a client who describes their days as interminable, desolate, powerless, and hopeless. I have no doubt that is how it was. What is so insidious about trauma healing is that experience is not remembered but relived. The neglect story being one of absences, holes in time, empty space, and no story to remember, is a reliving of that. Often accompanied by a panoply of somatic mystery symptoms, it is puzzling. People often ask me, “Why do I feel so much worse than ever? When is this going to end?” The very musing of the young child, I imagine, who, of course, does not have the words.
I remember watching out the window, counting cars; I must have been six because that window was at the house in South Bend, and I knew how to count. Counting and waiting for Daddy’s Chevy to pull in and for him to bound in the door, calling out, “Ho ho!” Why did I look forward to that? I don’t know… I know it was invariably a long wait. I remember one time when I fasted for two weeks, with only a bit of water now and then. I called it “the Long March.” I would count the hours as “meal times” would come and pass. There was lunch, check. There was dinner, check. Day one, day two, up to fourteen. How did I do that? I don’t remember. I remember watching the clock not move, waiting to get to the magic hour of 4:45 when I could crack my bottle of Old Crow, $6.95 a quart rotgut bourbon. But it worked. Getting through the day. I remember that old song by John and Yoko, “Whatever gets you through the night, is alright, alright…”
It is true, the healing years can be slower, longer, and arguably even worse than the original trauma experience, especially because it makes no sense. “I am worse than before! Is this therapy making me worse?” I wondered, and people ask me. It is hard to provide an answer that makes any difference. The best I can do is hold the certainty that I know it will. And I do. That is why I always say everything I have ever been through serves me.
Trauma and neglect are like a childhood of wild scribbles, not the orderly coloring book of a safe childhood.
I have always loved art. I love pretty things, I love looking at art, I love making things, and I love beauty. I can say I love visual beauty more than music, maybe. Like many of my era, I idealized the iconic Frida Kahlo. She had terrible trauma and physical pain, but she managed it most successfully by painting prolifically, mostly graphic and dramatic self-portraits. Bright, primary colors, realism and symbolism, tragedy but also the beauty of nature, flowers, birds, animals, even hope. She found her way, and even with the ongoing trauma of her brilliant and cheating husband, she prevailed. Her life never ceased to be hard, but her powerful work is a legacy and an inspiration to many, especially women.
During the worst of those interminable years, probably after I finally surrendered alcohol to start trudging the rugged road of recovery, I don’t remember how it happened. I started to draw – I used colored pencils, never having the patience for unwieldy media and needing to feel a sense of control. I drew myself, largely rendering from old photos of many ages, but my family members too. I had my own symbology of icons and monsters that recurred. I sat, and I drew and drew and drew, and it gobbled up the time. There was no clock, there were no meals to track. I was in what that famous Hungarian guy with the unpronounceable name called “flow.” And I was amazed. My artistry was very good. It has never been that good since.
So much story was unearthed and even processed in those long hours at the kitchen table. Then I would roll up the large sheets and take them to therapy to review them with the “witness,” my therapist. I wonder how much quicker things would have moved if I had had neurofeedback then. Quite a few years later, when EMDR came on the scene, and I was studying and practicing that, I had an EMDR therapist who was also an art therapist. I can’t remember how she combined them, but it was a good idea. I am sure it was good, at least at the time. I don’t remember much. However, nothing was again like those hours at the kitchen table.
I still have the drawings, sheaves of them in large, now ragged brown cardboard portfolios. They trailed with me through all of my vagabond moves over decades. I don’t look at them often, but they are a record of where I was, that long slog. They certainly keep me grateful. My best friend was in film school at that time, and made a movie with my drawings, about the power of art for healing. She recently had the VHS converted to DVD. Now, if I could just find my DVD attachment, I’d like to have another look!
I agree with John and Yoko, whatever gets you through the night, is alright…. Well, as long as you don’t do any harm to yourself or another. Colored pencils are definitely better than bourbon or starvation.
This was actually intended to be a missive of hope. I am not sure if it came across that way! Trauma and neglect are like a childhood of wild scribbles, not the orderly coloring book of a safe childhood. Of course, healing will be largely outside the lines, sometimes wildly so. My artwork was not cheery, but the colors are strong and have stood the test of time, as has the rocky but persistent healing work. Sometimes I feel as if my main task is a hope monger, to keep the faith somehow. I still occasionally have days where I have to be that for myself. That’s OK. Now I know that the clock is not broken; time does not really stand still, or at least not for long. And I agree with John and Yoko, whatever gets you through the night, is alright…. Well, as long as you don’t do any harm to yourself or another. Colored pencils are definitely better than bourbon or starvation.
Cheese is an excellent teacher. The Monterey Jack I made last week required 70 minutes of stirring. That’s right! I stand on my little stool, stirring my 8-gallon pot for that long. I get to watch a whole lot of great webinars! The aging time is another story. I remember when I first started making cheese, and the idea of waiting four months before it was ready seemed like a cruel joke. Now four is a short time, and a good Parmesan or cheddar will take a year or more. Gardening is the same way. I used to grow roses when I lived in Berkeley. I read that when you grow asparagus, it takes eight years before you get a crop! The waiting is part of the protocol, part of the deal. Hard to metabolize that some of these invaluable processes are simply not to be hurried. Some of those cheeses really stink! But we find them delicious.
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.
I hate it when I don’t follow my own advice, and even more, I hate admitting it. Way back when we got the Trump government in 2016, it seemed as if everyone went out of their minds daily, experiencing some variety of trauma activation from some latest news item. The restimulations were neverending. I urgently admonished everyone, including myself, to regulate their news consumption! But one thing I never stopped doing was tuning in to the BBC first thing after waking up. I managed my quantity pretty well, but the timing, well, not so much. First thing in the morning is a delicate moment. On November 22nd, shortly after awakening, I flipped on the news to a passing clip of literally seconds, announcing, “…Pablo Milanés has died. He was 79.” It hit me like bricks and then an immediate avalanche of memory.
Pablo, along with his colleague and often collaborator Silvio Rodriguez, was the founding voice of the Nueva Trova Cubana, the New Cuban Song Movement emerging in the late 1960s. A mix of traditional and folk rhythms and instruments with political, social, lyrical, and popular themes, the “trova” was the soundtrack of some of my loneliest, most painful, and at the time, inexplicably difficult post-traumatic years. Pablo’s honey-like baritone was the ever-available company and comforting accompaniment to the darkest of times. His song Tengo (I Have) is the epitome of gratitude: a musical accounting of all the precious things one has. It became my favorite song of all time.
Pablo also introduced me to the exquisite poetry of Jose Marti, which he even more exquisitely transformed into glorious song. I keep only two CDs in my car for those times when I am completely addled by the Bay Bridge traffic: Pablo’s Versos de Jose Marti and Silvio’s Mujeres. They unfailingly get me over the bridge and home. It was on my bucket list to see Pablo in person. I did manage to see Silvio in Oakland once. But Pablo – it never came to be. Now it never will. I was heartbroken.
Attachment trauma makes relationships such a minefield, a Rubik’s cube of challenges.
Attachment trauma makes relationships such a minefield, a Rubik’s cube of challenges. Loving and often idealizing iconic figures I had never met was a way to populate a lonely world—an illusion of a relationship, certainly company in the bittersweet solitude. I say bittersweet because being alone was a refuge: a cozy, comfortable, safe place, like my carnation pink weighted blanket, where, when swaddled in its soft and caressing velvet folds, I find restful peace. But at the same time, it was the gnawing echo of being left alone too much, the punishing, unchosen, agonizing solitude that defies nature’s design and evokes something else. We cannot “remember“ our infancy. But the aching heart and disproportional, unrelenting pain of loss that feels like dying is usually an undeniable clue that the core injury was interpersonal and usually unimaginably early. Even if all the family lore might tell us that there were people there who loved us, hidden in the deep recesses of brain and body is a story of parents who, for whatever reason, simply couldn’t.
“Hero worship” became a middle ground for me. There were important people in my life who I did not have to worry about whether they liked me; they taught and influenced me, became my beloved role models. Sometimes I made an effort to learn about their real lives, which was much harder before we had Google, Wikipedia, and other technological avenues of inquiry. Other times I did not, and often, in fact, ignorance is bliss – finding out who the real person is can be a disappointment or even a blow. I did not want to know if there was animosity or competition between Pablo and Silvio in real life. I wanted to get lost in the harmony. Reading the recent memoir by Bono is a case in point. Although he is not on my shortlist, I have always admired and appreciated him, and still do. But I don’t “like” him very much. Just as many solve the conundrum of intimacy by creating a fantasy cyber sexual world, a “relationship” that is quiet, interior and inherently safe fills a certain void – sort of. Thankfully, now on my own Tengo accounting, I have both. But the loss of Pablo is still a blow.
Trauma has no time sense, no time stamp, as it were.
For the child of neglect, loss and disappointment seem on the order of life-threatening. In their own minds, the intensity is completely normal, even “reasonable,” like ambient air. Often a partner or loved one simply cannot understand why experimentation, or even moderate risk, is not an option. What is the big deal? Hope and disappointment are to be avoided like the plague, because the primal loss was in the domain of survival. An infant alone will die, and the early, unremembered experience of being left, even the later remembered experiences of inexplicable invisibility or abandonment, strike way too close to feeling fatal.
Things never did change in that family, or not in a good way. The very notion that someone would change who or how they are out of love for me? Out of the question. It is what makes relationship therapy such a hard sell for so many adult children of neglect. What’s the point? Things don’t change, not for the better, and certainly not in relationships. The risk of disappointment is simply too great, not worth it. Where, on one hand, disappointment is a fact of life, as familiar as an old shoe, that it is almost like a companion on the trail for many the child of neglect, it is to be avoided at all costs – which can also be a sticking point in couples. Often, I struggle with those close to me being “hope averse,” or I am impatient with their hopelessness. I have to work hard to stay empathic and compassionate; perhaps it strikes too close to my own mostly healed trauma.
Certain catchphrases from years of training in whatever discipline have always stuck in my mind. One that is indelibly etched is “the amygdala knows no time.” Trauma has no time sense, no time stamp, as it were. I used to wonder why in my art therapy drawings and paintings I so often produced a clock stopped at 4:10. I don’t know why. But I do know that trauma feels interminable, like it will never end, while also being at dizzying, breakneck speeds. In a split second, the world has crashed irreversibly into something else. I remember being told that the “nature of the beast,” in this case, the beast being depression, was that while in it feels like it will never end. However, in the rearview, it is hard to imagine or even remember how or why it felt that bad. “Pandemic time” is kind of like that…
All the trauma treatment modalities I studied seemed to have a protocol or practice for awakening a sense of time, a sense of movement. In EMDR, it was “what happens next?” In Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, it would be following the sensation as it morphs into one and the next iteration of itself and moves through the body. In some relaxation approaches, there would be counting. The intention is to activate a sense of movement, of time passing, of a possibility, a seed of change, of something different being possible. That is perhaps one reason why we measure anniversaries and orbits around the sun. We need to know that there is some forward movement and a reason to keep going. That is what I like best about the changing of the year. Something old is closed; something new will open in its place. Grief, if not ending altogether, will diminish and change over time. Something else will take its place. Cheesemaking, gardening, pregnancy: these are endeavors that we can only undertake if we believe there will be a future. Why else would we spend hours and sometimes backbreaking effort for something that takes months or longer to come to fruition?
I wish for all that the closing of the year will bring a promise of something different and better. One thing I love about Tengo, is the recounting of life treasures connotes that these are perhaps things I did not have before, or that many do not have. The line that invariably still brings me to tears is when Pablo sings ”Aprendi a leer, a contar, y aprendi a escribir!” I learned to read, to count, and I learned to write!” What blessings!
I close the year with these words translated from Jose Marti’s Versos Sencillos, “Simple Verses:”
Everything is beautiful and constant
Everything is music and reason,
And everything, like the diamond,
Before light, is coal.
Gracias, Pablo. Happy New Year
Today’s song is the beautiful Tengo by Pablo Milanés. I hope you love it as much as I do.
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.
Certain words I have torn out of my personal lexicon and just tossed. One of those is “stuck.” It is not allowed in my office either. True, sometimes progress is so slow as to be frustratingly imperceptible, but I don’t believe it has stopped and is certainly not cause for giving up.
I was once riding my bike up a hill so steep that I just went splat and fell right on my side. It was not that I had stopped moving completely; I was just not quite a match for that grade yet. I picked myself up, dusted myself off sheepishly, and with embarrassment walked that final stretch. I needed to get a little (maybe a lot?) stronger to tackle that hill again.
Sometimes clients will lament feeling or being stuck, and I know there is nothing I can say in those moments. If I try to disagree and point out the progress that is still slowly being made, they just feel frustrated and not understood or not heard. I have no choice but to just be quiet and empathic and hold the faith. I do remember how miserable and hopeless those moments can feel. And yes, they are moments.
“True, sometimes progress is so slow as to be frustratingly imperceptible, but I don’t believe it has stopped and is certainly not cause for giving up.”
The road to healing can be long and steep, and often interrupted by surprises. I recently heard a radio story about a prison “lifer” who was released on parole after completing twenty-three years of his life sentence. He’d had a tragically traumatic childhood as a ghetto boy: his parents having divorced, he lived with his father, who committed suicide when he was 8. He returned to live with his mother then, who was “more or less homeless.” At age 16, he and some friends had robbed a store, and one of his friends had shot and killed the store clerk. Tried as an adult, our young man had landed a life prison sentence. All of this detail is to illustrate how completely and utterly alone – uncared-for – he had almost always been. And his sentence was in effect, forever… His story of course is sadly not an unusual one when poverty is involved.
Trauma healing often does feel like a life sentence, and like one we will never be free. For some reason, our young man chose to spend the time behind bars working hard to transform himself.
He studied, educated himself, earned a degree, stayed out of trouble, and somehow succeeded, to his own disbelief, in winning a release date.
At 42, he had never worked an honest job. Coming out of prison, he was completely “dazed” and alien, rather like Rip van Winkle. At any moment he expected to be yanked back and locked up again. And as he described it, one is immediately about $25,000 “in the red.” You need a place to live, a car, clothes, basically everything. Most of all, you need a job, which is no small feat, because application forms can legally inquire if one has been convicted of a crime, and no one really wants to hire an “ex-con.”
Our man pounded the pavement, applied “everywhere” including all the current gig type jobs, but kept meeting with the same slamming doors until he happened to wander into a small Kosher bakery in the outer avenues of San Francisco, owned and operated by a young Israeli man named Isaac Frena. Frena, whose Eastern European family also had a story before getting to America, decided to try him out.
Our young man turned out to be the hardest working, most competent baker ever. He loved learning all the Kosher laws, even learning Hebrew. Why did Frena decide to do this? “Kosher is not just about food;” he said. Kosher is a way of life. The first fundamental rule of Judaism is that everyone deserves a second chance.” I for one, had never quite thought about “Kashrut” that way. Our young man gave his all to that chance. “It is the hardest work you could hope to find – high pressure, timing, accuracy. Bread is like… it’s a living organism. I compare it to a baby. It’s growing. if you don’t intervene into that child’s life at the right time, it’s going to grow up to be a monster.”
He began to tell others, and Frena gave others that chance. And before too long there were over twenty-five former “lifers” of all ages and races, working harmoniously together in the Kosher bakery. Of course, it was not smooth always, but here is the most important part: “Frena genuinely cares about people… They gave me love and a sense of security and they were giving love and a sense of security to all the dudes that were around me. That kind of kept snowballing.” Love and security, feeling seen and cared about are the most important ingredients for life: for growth, and for healing. That is why neglect is so devastating.
I once worked with a couple, who seemed to be having the same dialog every week. “I feel hopeless,” said one. “It makes sense that you feel so hopeless.” Then the other would reply “and I feel hopeless too.” The other responded “it makes sense that you feel hopeless too…” And it went on like that, round and round for months. But they kept showing up. And I for one, was still hopeful. Because the main ingredient was in the room. I genuinely cared for them and they still genuinely cared for each other.
After some months, week after week like that, they broke through. They were amazed. How do we keep going? I don’t know. They proceeded to be a happy long-married couple, and I have seen them again over the years from time to time.
Sometimes, when it seems as if there is no progress, like nothing is moving at all, what is happening is that “something” is slowly growing, like yeast rising in the space where that secure attachment never was. One is growing the capacity to metabolize the steady care of a consistent other. In itself, it is regulating. It is really the most important thing in the world.
Baking is a great metaphor and I do love to bake. I started growing my sourdough starter in 2014. That is where you mix a ratio of flour to water, and find just the right conditions, where it eventually begins to bubble and in effect ferment. It becomes natural or “wild” yeast. It took me six tries before my starter “took” so to speak. I had to try different locations with different temperatures, light, draft, etc. Finally, I found a cabinet, of just the right size and temperature, free of light and breeze, where my little jarful could thrive, and it has been ever since. Of course, I have to feed it and clean it every day. I have never thought of it as being like a baby, but certainly a pet. And I continue to find baking with it regulating and calming, not only because dough is tactile and it feels good; but because something that grows does provide that additional missing experience, that even if slow, there may be subtle, even imperceptible movement. It is hard to hold hope sometimes. That is where we may most need the presence of another.
Competent therapy, a variety of regulating modalities and consistency are requisites for good trauma healing. And the solid base of authentic care does keep things moving. That is why I am rather insistent about the combination of neurofeedback with deep psychotherapy. Both are necessary but not sufficient, but the combination is the charm. Sometimes the greatest challenge is to keep showing up, keep pedaling. Meanwhile, everyone seems to love the bread!
Each time I write a blog, I always try to think of a song that I love that goes with what I’ve written. Today’s is Don’t Give Up (ft. Kate Bush) by Peter Gabriel.
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.
I remember once, I had a garbage can-sized bin full of old papers, tax records, client files much older than the seven-year legal time requirement, junk mail, newspaper clippings, and who knew what else. The very idea of shredding and disposing of them completely overwhelmed me. I would walk into the room with the closet housing that bin, open the closet door, see it there and run, not quite shrieking from the room, flinging the door shut behind me. I just could not face it. The insurmountable pile; the task seemed truly interminable.
One day I had the flashbulb thought, “what if I just did ten minutes a day? I dragged our old shredder into the room thinking “let’s just see what ten minutes is like. So, I fired up the shredder and loaded it for ten minutes. That wasn’t so bad… enough to give me a kind of rhythm with it. The timer went off after ten, and I calmly left the room. “I can do that.” Amazing. So, each day, I set the timer for ten minutes and fulfilled my quota. It became routine, until one day, it was all gone, the pile had gone away! In AA they figured this out years ago. Thinking of a lifetime barren of drinking is too much to imagine, even for a minute. But twenty-four hours? Well, I can probably do that, so a day at a time becomes my now 39-year sobriety.
I have a vague visual memory from when I was very young, probably not much more than two. We used to go to the Catskill Mountains every summer, and our dad worked in one of those fancy resort hotels to get us out of the City in the unbearably hot and humid New York summers. Our dad worked about sixteen hours a day, waiting tables and singing in the lounge at night. We stayed in a little bungalow on the grounds. On this particular afternoon, I woke up from a nap to find myself in the darkened bungalow alone. Where was everyone – where was my mom? It was of course wordless, like a bottomless pit of dark terror. It may have been only minutes. I don’t know. For that tiny child it was eternity. Sometimes when I am sitting with a client who seems to have no story, I am visited by that image, an iconic symbol of early neglect. I imagine something unremembered, that is perhaps communicating itself in some unspoken language from the client’s brain and body to mine.
I first started thinking about neglect, now over thirty years ago. It now boggles my mind to find myself remembering things that happened thirty, forty, fifty, even sixty years ago. These are such big numbers, years that passed a day at a time, some of them interminable. Back in the beginning, all my “data” about neglect was anecdotal observation of clients. I had no science then. The brain was nowhere near my radar yet. I noticed that these clients found things like boredom and insomnia excruciating, even lethal. I remember one man in couple’s therapy with me, who when he got too bored in a session, would lob a known inflammatory remark sure to get a rise from his hapless wife, just to get energy moving in the room. Waiting in lines for things, lying sleeplessly in bed at night, were like dying. I could only imagine a child left alone too much or too long.
I remember reading the trauma story of a political prisoner in a book once. I don’t even remember what book or what country it was about. One of the tortures used to deprive the man of sleep was playing the song Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits, really a quite good song, over and over again for nine days. Time was interminable. I can never hear that song without thinking of him. And trauma knows no time. In both incident trauma and developmental trauma like neglect, time stands still and does not move, which makes it that much more deadly. I have since learned that all the somatic therapies have some component of noticing “What happens next? What happens next?” The idea being to become aware of change or time moving and passing.
Again, when I was first collecting observations and compiling what I later came to call the “Neglect Profile”, I identified the “Three P’s of Neglect: Passivity, Procrastination and Paralysis.” I wrote about it in my first book. At the time, I was simply aware of the pattern, that survivors of neglect seemed to have a hard time initiating and completing purposeful action and then collapsing into despair about it. I assumed that it was due to the absence of the life-sustaining other, who first demonstrated and, in effect taught, and also rewarded such behaviors. If no one is there to teach me, how will I learn? And without feedback, how will I know I am on track? The child is adrift in a sea of lonely uncertainty. Crying, reaching, lashing out into the empty space is all futile at best, if not devastating. Ultimately collapse, passivity, freeze, become a default, even a baseline.
Both sense of time and agency are prefrontal brain functions: they are mediated by the most “highly evolved” executive neocortex areas of the brain. This area is where the initial resonance between infant and primary caregiver brains is supposed to occur in the earliest weeks and months of life. When that does not occur, or not enough, the little developing brain is under-stimulated, under-aroused. This later can coagulate into three P’s, and then all the shame, self-blame and self-hatred that accompany it. “Of course it is my fault; who else is there?” The prefrontal cortex is also the brain area that goes offline when the brain is overwhelmed by stimulus greater than what it is designed to process in its customary way. That by definition constitutes traumatic experience, such as the infant overwhelmed by drowning in a solitude of abandonment way too early.
Ironically, attention issues also have the origin of under-stimulation. Even though the brain flitting from thing to thing might feel like hyperarousal, it is faster brain firing that creates focus and ability to concentrate, and under-firing that makes for the clutter of attention deficit. Again, the early under-stimulation of the infant brain, the lack of attention received makes for the subsequent deficit. I used to think that ADD and ADHD were neglect markers, as I saw them so often in neglect survivors. We now know that these diagnostic categories are far from precise or diagnostic. They are rather a collection of observed symptoms that might have a variety of origins, like many of the other codes. What to me is compelling is that some of the most brilliant, creative people I know or know of have struggled with these issues and also developed the most ingenious workarounds to compensate for them.
Before March 20, 2020, I used to fill my Prius with gas every week. Commuting from my San Francisco home to my Oakland office every day, and whatever extraneous other driving I did each week, did not use up nearly a whole tank, but I always felt most secure with the car on full. In August of 2021, I found myself at the gas station. I barely remembered how to put gas in the car, it was the first time I had done so in seventeen months! (It hadn’t been washed either, oy vey!) My hair was ragged, my husband had a ponytail now. I had been hunkered down day after day, as we all had, in the house with my husband, then two (now sadly just one) dogs, and my on-screen clients. How did this happen? Time had somehow evaporated like the old time-lapse photography. Groundhog Day. The repetition, the sameness, made for a strange complex of endless time and split-second vanishing. Suddenly it is gone, where did it go and what do I have to show for it? Depression is like this; this intolerable slogging, getting through the day, and then looking back on an embarrassing expanse of “nothing?” Very strange.
I think early neglect had to be like this, which is why the child becomes so expert at dissociation: numbing out, “going away,” and is also traumatized by emptiness. Waiting in a long line can evoke that hideous traumatic sensory memory that is coupled with what the child often comes to associate to rejection. Of course, time and its passing or not become a sort of enemy, and altering one’s state is a welcome relief. And this blurry relationship to time or to “nothingness,” has become a window and often an indicator of early neglect – or at least something to wonder about when considering whether one might be a child of neglect.
“The repetition, the sameness, made for a strange complex of endless time and split-second vanishing. Suddenly it is gone, where did it go and what do I have to show for it? Depression is like this; this intolerable slogging, getting through the day, and then looking back on an embarrassing expanse of “nothing?” Very strange.”
Don’t ya hate it when well-meaning people (like therapists) say rather glibly or cheerily, “this too shall pass…”? But you know what? It does. It turns into history and might even become interesting. As a home cheesemaker, I continued making cheese every weekend through the Pandemic years. With all the wheels of aging cheeses dated in the caves, I would suddenly be astonished to find that wow – this cheddar is a year old already! Healing is like that too.
When I first went to therapy at the age of 23, my therapist literally seemed like a blur of colored fog in the far corner of the room. It took some years before she actually coagulated into human form, even though I went to multiple sessions per week. Early sobriety was the same way, I have no memory of sitting in meetings, except the clock on the wall, and the billowing of tobacco smoke, as in those days, people smoked openly everywhere. And now, looking back, my relationship to time and to life is like, well, night and day. There is never enough, certainly for all I want to do. And I have to keep reminding myself, “No! Sleep is not a waste of time!”
“And now, looking back, my relationship to time and to life is like, well, night and day. There is never enough, certainly for all I want to do.”
As we age, now in my advancing years, the passing of time seems to be a kind of foe, if I am not careful. I slip into animosity with nature. I hate the wrinkles, the undeniable physical pains that I never had before and always rather had contempt for, limitations of fatigue, losses that will not be returned. It is something to befriend if one is wise or in harmony with nature’s design.
Admittedly I am not there yet. And there is no getting back that time that slogged unbearable, emptily, and then was gone. But at the risk of being annoying, I can say it does pass. Hang in there!
Each time I write a blog, I always try to think of a song that I love that goes with what I’ve written. Today’s is All Things Must Pass by George Harrison.
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!