Certain words I have torn out of my personal lexicon and just tossed. One of those is “stuck.” It is not allowed in my office either. True, sometimes progress is so slow as to be frustratingly imperceptible, but I don’t believe it has stopped and is certainly not cause for giving up.
I was once riding my bike up a hill so steep that I just went splat and fell right on my side. It was not that I had stopped moving completely; I was just not quite a match for that grade yet. I picked myself up, dusted myself off sheepishly, and with embarrassment walked that final stretch. I needed to get a little (maybe a lot?) stronger to tackle that hill again.
Sometimes clients will lament feeling or being stuck, and I know there is nothing I can say in those moments. If I try to disagree and point out the progress that is still slowly being made, they just feel frustrated and not understood or not heard. I have no choice but to just be quiet and empathic and hold the faith. I do remember how miserable and hopeless those moments can feel. And yes, they are moments.
“True, sometimes progress is so slow as to be frustratingly imperceptible, but I don’t believe it has stopped and is certainly not cause for giving up.”
The road to healing can be long and steep, and often interrupted by surprises. I recently heard a radio story about a prison “lifer” who was released on parole after completing twenty-three years of his life sentence. He’d had a tragically traumatic childhood as a ghetto boy: his parents having divorced, he lived with his father, who committed suicide when he was 8. He returned to live with his mother then, who was “more or less homeless.” At age 16, he and some friends had robbed a store, and one of his friends had shot and killed the store clerk. Tried as an adult, our young man had landed a life prison sentence. All of this detail is to illustrate how completely and utterly alone – uncared-for – he had almost always been. And his sentence was in effect, forever… His story of course is sadly not an unusual one when poverty is involved.
Trauma healing often does feel like a life sentence, and like one we will never be free. For some reason, our young man chose to spend the time behind bars working hard to transform himself.
He studied, educated himself, earned a degree, stayed out of trouble, and somehow succeeded, to his own disbelief, in winning a release date.
At 42, he had never worked an honest job. Coming out of prison, he was completely “dazed” and alien, rather like Rip van Winkle. At any moment he expected to be yanked back and locked up again. And as he described it, one is immediately about $25,000 “in the red.” You need a place to live, a car, clothes, basically everything. Most of all, you need a job, which is no small feat, because application forms can legally inquire if one has been convicted of a crime, and no one really wants to hire an “ex-con.”
Our man pounded the pavement, applied “everywhere” including all the current gig type jobs, but kept meeting with the same slamming doors until he happened to wander into a small Kosher bakery in the outer avenues of San Francisco, owned and operated by a young Israeli man named Isaac Frena. Frena, whose Eastern European family also had a story before getting to America, decided to try him out.
Our young man turned out to be the hardest working, most competent baker ever. He loved learning all the Kosher laws, even learning Hebrew. Why did Frena decide to do this? “Kosher is not just about food;” he said. Kosher is a way of life. The first fundamental rule of Judaism is that everyone deserves a second chance.” I for one, had never quite thought about “Kashrut” that way. Our young man gave his all to that chance. “It is the hardest work you could hope to find – high pressure, timing, accuracy. Bread is like… it’s a living organism. I compare it to a baby. It’s growing. if you don’t intervene into that child’s life at the right time, it’s going to grow up to be a monster.”
He began to tell others, and Frena gave others that chance. And before too long there were over twenty-five former “lifers” of all ages and races, working harmoniously together in the Kosher bakery. Of course, it was not smooth always, but here is the most important part: “Frena genuinely cares about people… They gave me love and a sense of security and they were giving love and a sense of security to all the dudes that were around me. That kind of kept snowballing.” Love and security, feeling seen and cared about are the most important ingredients for life: for growth, and for healing. That is why neglect is so devastating.
I once worked with a couple, who seemed to be having the same dialog every week. “I feel hopeless,” said one. “It makes sense that you feel so hopeless.” Then the other would reply “and I feel hopeless too.” The other responded “it makes sense that you feel hopeless too…” And it went on like that, round and round for months. But they kept showing up. And I for one, was still hopeful. Because the main ingredient was in the room. I genuinely cared for them and they still genuinely cared for each other.
After some months, week after week like that, they broke through. They were amazed. How do we keep going? I don’t know. They proceeded to be a happy long-married couple, and I have seen them again over the years from time to time.
Sometimes, when it seems as if there is no progress, like nothing is moving at all, what is happening is that “something” is slowly growing, like yeast rising in the space where that secure attachment never was. One is growing the capacity to metabolize the steady care of a consistent other. In itself, it is regulating. It is really the most important thing in the world.
Baking is a great metaphor and I do love to bake. I started growing my sourdough starter in 2014. That is where you mix a ratio of flour to water, and find just the right conditions, where it eventually begins to bubble and in effect ferment. It becomes natural or “wild” yeast. It took me six tries before my starter “took” so to speak. I had to try different locations with different temperatures, light, draft, etc. Finally, I found a cabinet, of just the right size and temperature, free of light and breeze, where my little jarful could thrive, and it has been ever since. Of course, I have to feed it and clean it every day. I have never thought of it as being like a baby, but certainly a pet. And I continue to find baking with it regulating and calming, not only because dough is tactile and it feels good; but because something that grows does provide that additional missing experience, that even if slow, there may be subtle, even imperceptible movement. It is hard to hold hope sometimes. That is where we may most need the presence of another.
Competent therapy, a variety of regulating modalities and consistency are requisites for good trauma healing. And the solid base of authentic care does keep things moving. That is why I am rather insistent about the combination of neurofeedback with deep psychotherapy. Both are necessary but not sufficient, but the combination is the charm. Sometimes the greatest challenge is to keep showing up, keep pedaling. Meanwhile, everyone seems to love the bread!
I remember when Mom used to get really angry at me. Well, her word was “annoyed.” She would come at me with that really stern face and exclaim, “Ach! Do me a favor!” Sometimes if it was really bad, she would say, “Vadammt!” That was German for “damn!” I never liked the sound of German. I only heard it when my parents did not want us to understand what they were talking about. Or when they were upset. I knew only a handful of words, mostly “bad words,” and a few foods like wienerschnitzel, until I studied German in college so I would be able to read Karl Marx and Hermann Hesse in the original, which I never did.
Usually, when Mom got annoyed, it was something about food. I was always a “terrible eater” right from the beginning. I never liked meat, and that was our most chronic fight; worst of all was liver. Ugghh. Even the memory turns my stomach nightmarishly, and I can even smell it as I write this. (Why do parents make kids eat what they don’t like or even detest?!) The deal was I had to eat a piece the size of a quarter. She would serve liver with “heaven and earth:” mashed potatoes and applesauce, but even deeply entombed under all that camouflage, it still made me gag. More than once, I was “swacked” with a serving spoon.
Worst of all was the deathly feeling of having her mad at me. The loss of the connection was like a death sentence, and even with all the times that it happened, I invariably felt that it was completely and utterly irreparable, the end of the world. And I would never recover. The right amygdala, where the fight/flight response resides, knows no time. It fires its shrieking alarm each time as if survival is truly at stake, and this is it.
I remember the aftershocks of those episodes that seemed to linger an eternity. I was beset by a consuming “ennui,” a lovely French-sounding word I learned only much later; a bottomless pit of despair, hopelessness and confusion. I felt that I had no right and no reason to exist, and I was frantic to figure out how to earn or rent the patch of ground I might occupy on the planet. Why did they have me? Well, I knew from Dad it was imperative to replace the six million. But for Mom, I had no clue. She seemed so sad and so anxious much of the time. I knew it was my fault. Later she said if people did not have children, it was because they were “too selfish.” And secretly, I knew I was because I knew I absolutely never would (although admittedly, to me, it seemed the other way around. Who’s “selfish?”)
For a child, the loss of connection is devastating and truly does feel fatal. Attachment is indeed a survival need for mammals. And the human child is dependent longer than most mammals, so the disconnect is survival terror. Each time it happened to me, the bottom would fall out what little bottom there might have been. And the blanket of “nihilism,” another elegant word I learned much later, the conviction that nothing matters, would descend like the arctic snow that kept us cooped up during those infinite winters that we lived in Indiana. It was like a chronic “passive suicidality,” wishing I would die but not wanting that too to be “my fault.”
The feeling that nothing matters, I don’t matter, no one likes me, and in those moments, I don’t really like anyone translates to what I would now think of as depression. It began to persist beyond those moments of aftershock to an episode with Mom, as disconnection became the “norm,” and she complained of me “walking around with a long face” all the time. Why didn’t I just have more fun?!
For a child, the loss of the connection, or better said, its absence because for many it is never known or experienced, produces this profound and pervasive existential angst, emptiness, depression and confusion. And most often, as children get older, it is compounded by shame and hiding, because there is “nothing to explain it.” A signature of neglect that I first came to recognize was the resounding “Nothing happened to me!” There is no reasonable explanation for feeling this bad. Only a “bad attitude,” a failure of gratitude. After all, “children were starving in Europe!”
Neglect is a universe of loss, of essential missing experiences. Most important of all, what is missing is presence. The attentive effort to see, hear and understand the child’s world and communications. I was moved recently, watching our young dinner guests with their 15-month-old. The little guy subtly rubbed his eyes with his pudgy fists, and they knew that was his language for telling them he was getting tired and it was time to go home. They knew his signals and distinctive vocalizations: which of the cries and utterances meant he was hungry, cold, wet, lonely, or restless to get out of his high chair and check out that little girl at the neighboring table. Their accurate and attentive presence and the ready response with the needed “supplies” gives a child a sense of value, “I matter, and my feelings matter.” What a different life that child will have. Little by little, he will learn to identify and name his feelings and needs himself. He will know that they matter, he matters and the reliable beloved other matters. Life is worth living.
The absence of all this and the poverty of “mirroring” endemic of neglect trauma profoundly matters and is a hotbed for every sort of dysregulation and every sort of problem, micro and macro. Mental health, medical health, sexual health, behavior, every kind of earthly woe. And what is most insidious about it, is that it hides in plain sight, masquerading as “invisible.” I am on a mission to convey that this nothing does matter! To inspire a “neglect-informed” culture and world where “nothing” matters enough to do something about it!
Because it is so well disguised and hidden, even or especially from sufferers themselves, bringing neglect to light is an undertaking. Like cheesemaking or endurance athletics, one must be prepared to stay the course and endure what can seem like a desert of nothingness on an unbearably long road to feeling alive. Too often, because of their often extraordinary drive, like my impulse to compensate for the blight of my sorry existence, by doing, achievement or outward success are deceptive masks. The survivor seems to be “doing” so well: academically, professionally, financially… they slip right past notice. “Passing” or getting over, they garner no care or help. Which on one hand, is a relief, and on the other, is a repetition of the desolation of invisibility.
Being seen, known, recognized, and valued for who one is are such fundamental developmental experiences. They are like yeast, or the rennet, that activate and incite ferment, growth and delicious appeal as we rise, ripen and age. Without them, life is flat, tasteless, or, God forbid, moldy. The most reliable indicator of neglect is an often ferocious self-reliance and profound interpersonal ambivalence. If someone is controlling and inconsistent or confusing about letting us near, that is a hint. There may be a “story-less story” lurking. Gentle, non-intrusive presence and patience, patience with what, sometimes for us as therapists, aspiring friends or loved ones may feel boring or lifeless, is key.
I have learned that my own boredom or listlessness in their company is a clue I must be mindful and attuned to. Because they are otherwise rare for me, these feelings point to contactlessness. I must look for safe and gentle ways to draw them into contact without shame or insult, or danger. I must be able to weather diatribes of devaluing hopelessness about therapy or even about me and intermittent rejection. They are “show don’t telling” me, as the fiction writers say, the story that they don’t remember. I may be inspired to find the opening to inquire, “what do you know about what was going on around you in your parents’ lives when you were in utero or an infant? They won’t remember, but perhaps richly know family lore. Then the plot thickens.
We must bear in mind and hold that they and all of it do matter, including our sitting there with them. To make the entendre even more dimensional and confounding, I will close with a quote from Einstein! He said:
“Energy is liberated matter. Matter is energy waiting to happen.”
Oy vey! Go figure…
Today’s song:
I remember when the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof came out. And a few years later, the blockbuster movie with Zero Mostel. I remember being rather baffled, wondering who would name their kid “Zero?!” Especially when I felt like one. Fortunately, young Zero grew up to become a great and well-loved actor. And I did not remember a popular movie being like this, all about Jewish themes. It was kind of amazing and validating. Dad loved singing the songs, “If I were a rich man, dibby, dibby, dibby, dibby, dibby, dibby dum!” I think they brought out the best in him, and he was never quite so jolly as when he was Tevye. He would belt out, “Tradition!” Made it sound almost as if tradition were a fun thing.
Lately, I found myself thinking about the intergenerational transmission of trauma and neglect and tradition. When taken simply as barren nouns: intergenerational transmission and tradition void of content, they are quite similar. Both are a repeated bequest through generations, a keeping alive across time of, well, something. However, one might be intentional, richly ritualized, even sacred, and laden with meanings. The other is compulsive, dysregulated, perhaps unconscious, even destructive and lethal. Each makes the dogged journey through time. And as we know all too well, they can even spill and mingle into some of the horrible legacies that, because of ancestral roots, can be hardest to excise and extinguish.
I was the child of two Holocaust survivors, who also each had their own iterations of profound neglect. My mother had a Northern German, intellectual, upper-middle-class mother who was coldly proud and proper. I don’t imagine much resonance there. And I am pretty sure my mother was raised mostly by nannies until Hitler blew it all apart. My father lost his mother before he was bar mitzva, while in the Shanghai ghetto. I don’t know much about his earlier years, except a story from an old family friend who remembers him running away from school in kindergarten. I wonder why… I have been the heiress to a bounteous bequest.
For so many reasons, I feel like a zealot; driven to awaken awareness, break the chains of intergenerational transmission, and disrupt the dysregulation of neglect moving through generations, wreaking havoc of all kinds.
It is complicated, however, the blur between legacy and curse. My father’s ferocious tenacity and determination are some of my most cherished gifts from him, and they certainly got me up some of the steepest climbs on the bike and some of the most daunting deadlines for my writing. It has kept me hanging in life-changing ways with some seemingly hopelessly rageful clients. It certainly also brutalized me growing up. And this is often a tangled mess inside of me.
My overwhelmed nervous system adapted to this spectrum of dysregulation by, among other things, rejecting most of the traditions as soon as I was old enough to make my own choices. Interestingly, however, all of the songs have stayed deeply grooved in the playlist of my hippocampus, and often visit uninvited. When I was asked to write about the intergenerational transmission of trauma recently, what immediately popped up in my mind’s ear, was a song I had not thought of in years, “L’dor Va Dor,” from generation to generation. I never even liked that song!
One of the most vicious expressions of dysregulation in my childhood was an eating disorder that almost took me down at age 12. I was most lethally anorexic in 1966-67 when there was little information, let alone help, and a poverty of any sort of understanding. Perhaps I was in some way trying to replicate my parents’ holocaust trauma or suffer enough to be worthy of existence. Who knows? But somehow, I was invisible enough to slip quietly under the radar so I could “do what I wanted.”
One well-honed anorexic trick was to control the food as much as possible by taking over the household cooking, which my mother was more than happy to have me do. So, I learned to cook. I made chicken soup every Friday from scratch. I learned how to roast a chicken to perfection. I learned to make challah and even bagels. I am grateful for this, as these have become the bequests, the gifts of inheritance I have retained. And whatever little bit of tradition I retain that I keep to this day (now that I am blessedly free of eating problems after decades of dogged recovery work) are the foods. The Jewish tradition of sharing food is something I continue, and it gives me great joy. And something about sharing food, giving and sending it to people I love, gives me an odd sense of organic connection, as my “handiwork” goes into their bodies. The recipes that span historical epochs and diasporic geographic wanderings of millennia seem to connect me with the best of my heritage, and sharing them was certainly a source of comfort and connection during the bitterest isolation of the COVID19 Pandemic. And continues to be. It is the best way I know to say “thank you!” and has made me many new friends in many places.
The perils of intergenerational transmission are well known. Resonating to a dysregulated brain, or pulsing alone into empty space, makes for all sorts of adaptations or bitter attempts at adaptation. My eating disorder was but one of a coiling chain of attempts: alcohol, sexual compulsivity, overwork, relentless exercise… Like a rat on a wheel, I kept at it. But my father’s determination commandeered me to stay the course, and I ended up with a pretty wonderful life. And the kind of faith and hope in the power of healing that enable me to shepherd some number of others out of the woods with me.
I am convinced that the vast number of “me too” victims and survivors can be at least somewhat explained by dysregulated, out-of-control nervous systems and poverty of information. Yes, we have grand dysregulations of power and gender inequality in this sorry world, but going upstream to deal with the dysregulation is at least one piece of the complex solution. But that is a gargantuan topic for another day!
In the micro, at least, I am committed to a no-blame paradigm. Certainly, neglect is a tragic failure that often springs straight out of the trauma experience: a failure of presence: attention, awareness and aliveness that, of course, fails to transmit to the hapless infant and child. It is not excusable, nor is the failure of at least attempting to heal. What would have happened if my mother had been blessed with the good therapy I have had and the evolution of ever more efficient and effective modalities, research and now even science? What would my life have been, and hers? We cannot know. But we must do better. And make safe, effective and tenacious healing available, even while we strive to make a larger world that is safe, regulated, and regulating. Meanwhile, if not for this rich inheritance, what on earth would I have to write about?
Today’s song:
Oubao-Moin is based on a poem by Puerto Rican national treasure Juan Antonio Corretjer, and sung by one of my great heroes. Legendary Puerto Rican singer Roy Brown. It chronicles the chain of trauma and the legacy of the Taino people of the Caribbean.
As a devout listener to BBC, I got an earful of the recent coronation event. Monarchy is something I so rarely think about, apart from the recent death of Queen Elizabeth, which similarly took over a day of BBC coverage. From the endless memorial feed, my mind somehow floated back to junior high school European history. Admittedly I don’t remember much. Junior high school was a truly terrible time in my life. A half-starved anorexic, I foggily remember that I stared absently out the window a lot and did not hear much. So perhaps, thankfully, I have little memory at all. Curiously, however, what floated to mind that day, was the term “benevolent despot.” I don’t remember which royal figure it referenced, but I remember thinking, “What?!!” I did not understand how absolute power and the quality of well-meaning kindness could go together. I guess it made about as much sense as “Let them eat cake!”
The world of neglect is fraught with many ironies and contradictions. That is part of what makes recognizing, understanding and working with it so complicated and fraught. Recently, in a conversation about my work with a highly esteemed colleague, she made a comment about “benign neglect.” Somehow that struck the confused and admittedly sensitive nerve about “benevolent despot.” There is something to me oxymoronic about the idea that neglect is “benign” I think of benign as meaning harmless. A tumor, for example, that is malignant is cause for alarm. It may be serious or even fatal. One that is benign may be aberrant or even unsightly. But not to worry. No neglect, if it is, in fact, what I refer to, what Frank Corrigan has so exquisitely named “attachment shock:” rupture, loss of connection, abandonment, withdrawal of the other, is benign. Certainly not for an infant. It is not only devastating but potentially lethal as well. I think my colleague meant not intentionally malicious, which is often the case, but harmless. Not! If intentionality is the question, that is a different conversation.
A lover of words and also admittedly quite fussy about them, I started thinking about the word “neglect.” If I am on a mission to make “neglect informed” a concern for the psychotherapy field, and the world for that matter, I had better come up with precise definitions. Perhaps the noun “neglect” works, but as a verb is floppy and ambiguous. In my mind, neglect, by its very nature, is a failure of awareness, a blip of intentionality, an absence of agency. Whether it be a preoccupation with the urgency of some sort, a limitation of circumstance, emergency or trauma, disability, loss of means, or long or short-term loss of capacity: whatever the cause, the agency goes offline. Something does not get done. In general, my paradigm is one of “no blame.” This means ascribing fault and villainizing the negligent does not serve the sufferer/ victim, or anyone really.
However, the child, or anyone who is abandoned or neglected, is grossly mistreated and pays dearly for it. The losses in terms of opportunity, relationship, choice, capacities, freedom, time, joy, quality of life… I could go on and on… they are too numerous and too costly to begin to try and name. So the grief, rage, agony, bitterness, contempt and judgment are understandable. This is another of the great challenges of neglect, another of the dilemmas the survivor must struggle to navigate. The old saw, “they did the best they could,” with the backwash of every kind of emotion.
Long before I was aware of it, I knew that my mother was overwhelmed and taking care of us was simply too much. I remember being haunted by the newsreels of concentration camps I saw at Hebrew school when I was barely six years old. If I was haunted by movies, what would the impact of lived experience be? My mother was anxious, brittle and sad. I remember hustling to clean up and eradicate clutter before it would make her more jumpy and irritable, being as helpful, inconspicuous and as little of a “bother” as possible. Partly to try and make her “happy,” or happier? And partly for my own benefit, in the hope that she might have more presence and more to offer us if she was calmer. Was she intentionally neglectful? No, of course not! Was it benign, absolutely not! Only after the onslaught of symptoms and problems that plagued me for decades and the years and thousands of dollars of therapy could I figure it out. It was not only what I was previously aware of as my various forms of overt trauma, but the attachment trauma, the missing experiences, and the neglect had scarred me deeply. It was not benign, and I went through at least a decade of terrible conflict and emotion. Of course, she/they “could not help it.” And I was enraged about the price that I was left with. Another Rubik’s cube of neglect. How to hold both?
The child of neglect is caught in the headlights of the “dilemma without solution,” which I talk about endlessly. The object of longing and the source of agony are in the same person. How to manage that. And similarly, the tangle about responsibility. They could not help it? Well, maybe not. And the damage? It is not like the simple calculous of car insurance. The responsible party pays, and the victim is somehow compensated.
For those of us challenged by the work with neglect, whether our own, loved ones’ or clients, we are faced with the flopping dissonance of ambiguities that may blur and alternate, expand, contract, compel, embarrass, frustrate and flummox us for years. They can be paralyzing, or we can think we are crazy or “stuck.” Many of us look so good, accomplished, or are so good at numbing that no one would even know there was someone inside who desperately needed help. I remember how surprised I was when I read Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography and learned that the “Boss” had sometimes spent up to two years in bed with depression, unable, in his words, to “turn off the faucet.” And this was well after he had been long busting charts and filling stadiums. The healing of attachment shock is a complex journey of cycling and often frozen opposites, where both are painfully true and real and yet seem crazily incompatible. That is why great compassion, patience, and the ability to tolerate and hold wild ambiguities and stay the course are all essential.
There is also no substitute for information, about the brain, attachment and healing. And the recovery stories of those ahead of us on the path who can attest to coming out the other side, that a joyful life is, in fact, possible. It is a very hard sell! And certainly, no substitute for the emotional and somatic work that really affects trauma. In those moments when the pre-frontal cortex is firing, they may serve to bolster hope.
I often say, sometimes my main task is to be the harbinger of hope. The one person in the room who is not activated, so I can keep the perspective that it is not happening now, something different is possible, and progress, however glacial is in fact happening. You may not believe me. But I won’t stop holding that. And someday, all of a sudden, maybe for only a minute, you will.
Making our peace and coming to peace takes however long it takes. If it seems to take “forever,” it is not that you are doing something wrong. It is like correcting a terrible environmental insult: nature has been rudely interrupted and the organic processes of restoring it are underway, and not to be rushed. I remember as a child, pulling open the petals of a flower that was not quite ready to bloom. It really only spoiled it. My intentions were not bad. But the result was a small disaster. And we must continue to look upstream to address the social, political, and economic forces that perpetuate these many contradictions, so ultimately peace has some kind of a chance.
Today’s song:
Like most any child of neglect, I was a desperately lonely little girl. Convinced I was hopelessly weird, probably of some other unidentified nonhuman species and categorically unlikeable, I peopled my world with idealized, fantasy relationships. A “hero worshipper” right off the bat, Beginning at a young age, my ever-advancing hit parade provided an endless feed of new hero figures.
Characteristically, I was probably on a quest for the powerful and protective and loving parent I wished I had, and later a love partner. Some of those figures still languish on the old playlist after many decades, like my own little Mount Rushmore (no pun intended!). Most of them were/are men, and admittedly while being incredibly smart and brilliantly creative in some genre, had at least a streak, if not more, of unquestionable meanness. I have always wondered if one has to be at least somewhat egotistical to be truly great. As with all of us, I figure my dad was the mostly unconscious template.
Admittedly, I have read all the biographies of Steve Jobs, an iconic example. He was perhaps a hideous parent, and I’m guessing a not-too-empathic employer, with an attachment trauma story of his own which I know only the roughest outlines of, and he changed the world. I still wish he hadn’t died. He is probably an extreme example from my parade. But truly emblematic of them all.
As we know from many famous examples in the history of neuroscience and general anatomy, when one region or body part fails or did not develop in the first place, a neighboring region, organ or body part steps in to take over the lost function. Not always certainly, but often. That was exactly what this resourceful child of neglect did to compensate for my unformed, underdeveloped or simply missing relationships and relationship abilities. So I was really never alone. My husband continues to be amused and is ever tolerant of this progression of characters that persists and even, perhaps only occasionally now, continues to grow. And it is a not unusual, mostly benign adaptation for survivors of neglect to somehow fill in the blanks with something. The trick is to be sure we stay cognizant and mindful of the difference between fantasy and reality.
As time goes on, when sexuality comes online very often for the child of neglect, this becomes a “new” locus of dysregulation. After all, trauma and neglect are all about dysregulations of arousal: hyper-arousal and hypo-arousal in the brain and body’s electrical system. Sexuality is another kind of arousal that can be both hyper, hypo or both. It can make for confusing, chaotic, out-of-control and even potentially destructive feelings and behaviors. Especially lacking quality, evidence-based and unbiased information and sex education. This is a major soap-box diatribe of mine. I believe it to be a significant contributor, besides gender-based power dynamics of course, to what we might abbreviate as the worldwide “Me Too” phenomenon. But don’t get me started…
In my case, the hormone-driven kind of arousal emerged early and intensely. Like most children of neglect with no one to ask and nowhere to turn, I did not know what to do with it. Now we have the internet, which is surely a mixed, mostly not-so-good solution. But back then, I resorted, at least at first, to fantasy which had always worked for me until then.
The child of neglect reaches for and finds adaptations or attempts at regulation for the usually distressing, uncomfortable or even tortuous dysregulations. I was no exception, and from the safety of fantasy, I ventured out a bit and discovered the elixir of alcohol by the age of 13. It was a blessed “fix” and provided me with a feedback loop of both a semblance of “calm” and the false courage to meet real people. One of my regulating mechanisms for hyper-arousal was the discovery of distance bicycling, which also brought me into a community of mostly male others. The feedback loops between alcohol and the false courage provided by alcohol and the other iterations of increasing arousal and impulses resulted in my colorful checkered past. I can mostly laugh about it now, and thankfully nothing really bad ever happened.
I am, however, painfully aware of the vast range of sexual dysregulations and difficulties that, for the most part, no one talks about. People are ashamed, don’t know how to speak about them, or don’t know it is “OK” to either have or speak about them. Let alone to whom. Most clinicians in health and/or mental healthcare fail to inquire due to their own ignorance or shame, or perhaps morals. In many cases, if I do hear about sexual concerns at all, it is most often from an angry, distressed or frightened partner or if the individual has gotten into some kind of “trouble.”
In the 1990s, the AIDS epidemic brought some of these problems and their dangers to unavoidable light. For a long time, they were largely lethal, and thankfully in most parts of the world, that is no longer true. Certainly, my neighborhood and the park on the corner, once a famed destination for anonymous sex, is haunted by ghosts: lives lost to the AIDS crisis.
In the early 2000s, my phone rang like a repeating alarm bell, resounding with the then diagnosis du jour of “sex addiction”, compulsive sexual behaviors that at least initially terrified and mystified individuals and couples and clinicians too.
Although a veritable (and certainly at least partially profit-driven) industry sprung up. It took me a while to find reliable and truly scientific and worthwhile information, theoretical formulations, and treatment approaches that I could accept and attempt to utilize. Those were some hard times.
I have a strong conviction about asking and teaching healthcare and mental health practitioners to educate themselves and become fluent in speaking and inquiring about sexual matters. This means getting comfortable with using precise language out loud and without shame to model and both proffer normalcy and permission to not know or to struggle. I would wish that psychiatrists advise their patients about the possible sexual side effects and even losses that accompany some antidepressants, similarly oncologists about chemotherapy and some surgeries, Ob-Gyn’s about pregnancy. Childbirth and beyond, etc. And that we all learn about the dysregulations that may accompany childhood neglect.
The history of sex education in public schools is another interesting and decidedly political story. But that would be for another day. Suffice it to say, I have to wonder how much individual shame and agony, sexual misconduct and abuse, un-bridled and dangerous sexual and even criminal activity result in dysregulations originating with attachment trauma and neglect, and the tragic poverty of good information.
My alcohol-soaked compulsivity spanned most of my 20’s. When clients ruefully lament the idealized loss of their “youth” I have to at least quietly think “good riddance!” Most of my out-of-control behavior, even if it manifested in the physical world with real live others, was not that different from the old fantasy world and lasted not much longer before evaporating, although sometimes with some humiliation and dramatic heartbreak. All of my copious journals from that decade are filled with nothing but those romance novel-like tales, and although the tattered notebooks are lined up on a back bookshelf, I have never ever cracked the covers and sometimes wonder why I have saved them – perhaps as a relic or hopeful reminder of what recovery can do!
I have recently noticed that a number of (mostly) male survivors of neglect entering midlife (fifties and sixties) are “suddenly beset with alarm and grief about a door possibly slipping shut.” Many who have endured long sexless partnerships as they begin to consciously or unconsciously grapple with mortality worry about missing out entirely on satisfying sex. It becomes unbearable and no longer acceptable. Those who have been working on their neglect, either in couples or individual therapy or both, are gaining the voice and the courage, as well as the self-respect, to insist on creating that in their partnerships before it is too late. I am here to say that such is possible. Again, the sequelae of neglect span a wide swath, and to heal dysregulations and the intergenerational transmission of neglect is not only to better individual lives but to make the whole world better, safer and more fun!
Today’s song:
Pondering how I first happened on the translucent, barely visible child of neglect, the oddest image appeared in my mind. I imagined myself, middle thirties strolling placidly along a quiet beach. In one non-remarkable step, walking through the innocuous and pleasantly warm sand, I am suddenly nudged into alertness to discover that one little mound, apparently indistinguishable from all the others, had a little hole in it. Just as suddenly, it explodes into a geyser-like cascade of tiny ants. They are everywhere, teeming and flowing in every direction. They are immediately all over my feet and ankles. Wow! Where did that come from?
Encountering the unexpected world of neglect was like walking into an industrious, quietly busy camouflaged ant hill, which turned out to be a mountain. My mom used to say, “Don’t make mountains out of molehills!” And she generally did the opposite, at least where I was concerned. But in this case, no exaggeration. I hope likening the hapless child of neglect to an ant does not seem insulting! It is not intended that way, and who knows where these seemingly random flashes come from? Besides, ants are really quite amazing. I have seen teams of the little critters working together to heave and lug a leaf infinitely larger than the whole pack combined across a human-sized dirt hiking path. A remarkable mission of strength and courage, too, as the trail is regularly trudged over by hikers and passersby, most likely not looking down. An amazing feat, no pun intended.
I will dispense with the story of how it all began, in real life, I have told it so many times. I am told I am quite the storyteller. I never realized that I am until only much later when there was actually someone to tell stories to. Rather, I would like to paint a picture of the emerging character that began to take shape in my observation and in my thinking as I watched and studied this to me newly identified population.
In cheese making, a rather astonishing process occurs, which still continues to amaze and delight me. A minuscule amount of rennet, the “coagulant,” maybe one and a half teaspoons in an 8-gallon pot of milk, after adding that and an hour or so of peaceful rest, miraculously, a pot of liquid congeals into a large pot of what becomes increasingly a solid pot of curd. That is how I remember the gradual coagulation of what I came to call the “neglect profile.” I will only begin to sketch it here. Like a good cheese, it has aged and continues to age over months and years.
Pecorino, Parmesano, Provolone? Well, those are all good, but not what I had in mind. The first recurring character pattern that began to jell in my observation was what I came to call the triumvirate of Passivity, Procrastination and Paralysis, or the “Three P’s.” The P’s came to be a signature that I spotted early on that pointed to neglect. They seemed to resonate with people. Why would this be?
Three major tent poles of my thinking, the rennet perhaps, were neuroscience, attachment theory and Neurofeedback. From neuroscience, Allan Schore, one of my earliest and most profound influences, we learned that the infant brain develops in resonance with the brain of the primary caregiver, right hemisphere to right hemisphere, primarily through the gaze. If that infant gazes into a face that is angry, fearful, expressionless or unpredictable, the earliest experience of that developing brain will be fear, uncertainty, confusion: dysregulation. And if there is no one there, the gaze is into a vapid emptiness. Left alone too much, that little brain will be under-stimulated, not to mention scared and sad. But of course, emotion will only register in a sensory or bodily way at that stage. This is the unremembered, at least not in narrative form, beginning of the neglect experience. The under-stimulated brain will lack the encouragement and the incentive; thus, the initiative to reach, to begin, to try. Why bother?
From an attachment standpoint, the child who experiences the presence of a loving, supportive other is safe enough to go forth, to explore. We have probably all seen the videos of infants and toddlers crawling and walking further when they look back to see the encouraging, even applauding loved one attentively watching. Presence, having their back, makes for safe exploration.
Similarly, the essential “dilemma without solution,” which will be addressed in great detail in future writings, where the source of comfort and the source of terror or distress are the same people, and the child is in an irreconcilable quandary: reach toward or withdraw? The ambivalence makes for a toggling to and fro; fogginess at the very least, if not a full-on freeze response. Not conducive to purposeful action.
And a child left alone with minimal response to their cries will soon conclude it is pointless to cry, pointless to reach, pointless to act. Passivity would be a realistic default.
And from a neurofeedback standpoint, the under-stimulated infant brain will fire at slower frequencies, making for perhaps a slowing or clouding of attention. This, in turn, makes for what I have perceived to be a high co-incidence of attention deficit complaints from (or about) children of neglect. And although I have not seen data yet on the correlation between attention deficits and neglect, neuroscience of trauma expert extraordinaire, Ruth Lanius, has informally agreed with the hypothesis in a couple of personal communications. So there you have it: three P’s, and not as yummy as cheese, to say the least!
I might add that a frequent accompaniment to the P’s, or a ready refrain, punctuated with a deep shrug, was “I don’t know what to do!” Or, “there’s nothing I can do!” Of course! There wasn’t! The child had no impact. And there was no one to safely ask.
The hallmark of neglect, however, the signature or flagship, curiously became clear only secondly, after the unmistakably consistent P’s: A ferocious self-reliance. In the US, with a cultural history and iconizing of “rugged individualism,” self-reliance is admired, That is probably why I, for one, did not recognize it sooner, being a beacon of at least nominal or illusory self-sufficiency most of my life. Being pack animals, humans are by nature dependent and interdependent. Attachment is a survival need, and interpersonal need is nature’s design. Neglect is the failure or absence of reliable care. A child left alone too much has nowhere to turn but inward.
Self-reliance is a defense mechanism and a survival strategy originating with pain. It may evolve to become a haven of safety and the only comfortable way to be in the world. It may also be a point of pride. Before I was 15, I had my own little housecleaning business. I rode my bike to those big houses where rich people lived and started saving up my money for college. I could not compete with the Holocaust, but I did quite well at making my own way, and I thought it was pretty great.
Self-reliance, although exquisitely adaptive, also makes havoc in the world of relationship. Satisfying relationship involves reciprocity, and if we don’t let the other give also, they may feel unequal, rejected or unsafe. Or they might also appear to take advantage, which ultimately results in messy and often terminal ruptures. It took me decades before I could keep anyone in my life for long, before I learned how unsatisfying and controlling my over-giving might feel to the other, and how disempowering of them my inability to receive could feel.
Therapy is also a challenge for both neglect survivor client and therapist. To let the therapy “work” punctures the self-reliant armor. It is no longer “doing it all myself.” Being desperate for therapy to help and change something collides with the self-reliant armor, replicating a version of the original dilemma. Oy vey.
Finally, admittedly self-reliance can inadvertently blur into a kind of self-centeredness that I call the “one-person psychology.” The survivor is so busy taking care of everything for themselves that they can appear to forget about the other. Many a partner of a child of neglect complains about feeling similarly forgotten and neglected.
These were the beginnings or the foundational elements of what I have come to call the neglect profile. There was so much more to learn. And there still is. This is a start for now, as I begin to unwind and present the inner and outer, the experienced and the observable markers. I want everyone to learn to see what is not there and recognize neglect in others and themselves. Let’s make this world “neglect informed!”
Today’s song:
In the final year or so of my dad’s long life, he did not know who I was anymore. That is not so uncommon, but it was a good thing I had done so much work on my early neglect trauma by then because it was painfully reminiscent of my childhood with him. Our visits were not much fun, to say the very least. Until we discovered that he seemed to remember the entire playlist of songs from his whole life.
Dad was always a very musical man, and although the Nazi Holocaust robbed him of his education from age twelve, when he finally got to the US and was able to work his way to being able to pay for it, he found a college that would accept him without a high school diploma. He became a cantor. In Judaism, the cantor is the musical counterpart to the rabbi. That was a fitting job for him.
I always wondered if music was Dad’s real first love, but he would not quite let himself pursue a purely musical career out of some sort of Holocaust responsibility or guilt. Regardless, however, he always sang. I can remember all kinds of songs, including a fair measure of spirituals and even popular songs. He sometimes had moonlighting gigs singing in cocktail lounges and restaurants, although he never cared much for that because the “audience” was eating or drinking and not paying much attention to him. And he loved classical music, my mother did too.
When we were a little older and moved to California, I remember my dad would buy records called “Music Minus One” (MMO.) They were the accompaniment to famous operas or Schubert’s Lieder and the like. He would blast them in the center of the house and vocalize loudly. There was no escaping his bellowing baritone without leaving the house. By then, I was an adolescent, and perhaps part of my rebellion was to reject classical music, from which I have only partially “recovered.” But I hated being displaced that way for hours on end. And although many rhapsodized about his beautiful voice, I found it another of the ways that his large presence dominated our life.
Most distasteful of all was going to his performances with the Stanford Opera Workshop and seeing him prance around, singing in tights. Oy vey. I was so embarrassed! All this is to say, music was deep in my dad’s psyche and nervous system. I even vaguely remember how intrigued and probably relieved my mother was when an old family friend who was a psychiatrist used music to calm him down or comfort him.
As my dad declined towards death, I found that we could spend our visits singing. He still remembered every word, especially of the Jewish holiday songs. We would often sing rounds, and on a good day, when my sister was able to coordinate her visit with mine, she would bring her guitar, which was formerly his guitar. Music would get a smile out of him, he seemed more alive, and the time would pass. When he was in his final hours and barely conscious, I had some time with him alone. I had already said anything I still needed to say to him. So, I sang, mostly the same song over and over, the old spiritual, Twelve Gates to the City. Somehow that seemed a fitting way to send him off. It certainly comforted and regulated me. And I was somehow sure he was hearing me.
I always have a song in my head. Although, as is common for those of us with trauma and neglect histories, I remember very little about my childhood. Even now, my narrative is spotty. But I also remember every word of countless songs. My husband is often amazed. Even the repertoire of Latin American revolutionary songs we sang 50 years ago, I can still sing pretty much word for word in Spanish. And I still love them. I have groaning shelves of old vinyl that I cannot bear to part with, even though we don’t have any device to play “LP’s” on. I am quite struck by the way music has made a home in my brain and body and has ever been a source of sustenance, comfort, and regulation. It still is, and I treasure that.
I also remember when I was young, and a whole category of emotions were either inaccessible or verboten, (mostly on the rage and anger spectrum!) my music helped me to access and, if not process, at least safely discharge some of that. I loved the angriest Rolling Stones albums, and I remember scrubbing floors on my hands and knees alone in the house, blasting my music even louder than Dad’s MMO. I am sure it helped.
I also believe that music registers, even resonates powerfully energetically in the interpersonal field, even when it is quietly contained in my busy head. It is not uncommon that when I am sitting with a neglect survivor client who often has very few words or lacks a coherent story, the song that pops up spontaneously in my head inspires the question that might unlock an upwelling or even a flood of sensory, emotional, or visual somatic memory or association. It is as if some sensibility in my brain is connecting with an age-old communication in theirs. This may sound a little “woo woo,” but I want to learn more about this. The more I learn about energy and frequencies, the less “far out” it seems.
After my brief but memorable meeting with the ingenious musician Bobby McFerrin, I was all over YouTube watching videos of him. He is uniquely able to create such a vast universe and variety of sound with only his voice and body, it is hard to fathom. I even heard him talking about how he trained himself to sing two different notes at once. Imagine being able to create harmony singlehandedly. And what a great metaphor! I discovered that Bobby currently offers workshops called Circlesongs, which are a protracted capella call and response that may extend for hours, even days. Watching a Circlesong video, I was mesmerized and quieted even by merely 54 minutes on a screen.
Recently in a book I read about frequencies, I learned that “Research has shown that the low-frequency vibrations produced by a cat’s purring can have therapeutic benefits for the cat and its owner. These vibrations can help promote the healing of soft tissue injuries in humans, including muscle strains, sprains, and other connective tissue injuries!”* Imagine the healing that might come from the unison of dozens, even hundreds of voices resounding for hours on end together, not to mention the energetic connection between participants. I hope to get in on one of those, perhaps this summer, and see what sort of healing is possible that way for this old body.
Many cultures, of course, have known this for centuries and have rituals and extended chants and ceremonies that surely have those effects. Bobby certainly does not claim to have re-invented the wheel. I have a client whose Buddhist community had group chants that would extend through the nights and for days on end. I never understood that. But I think I am beginning to. I’d like to understand much more about how music can help us grow and heal. Meanwhile, I’ll keep ending each blog with a song!
*What the Ear Hears (and Doesn’t): Inside the Extraordinary Everyday World of Frequency by Richard Mainwaring
Today’s Song:
On the 24th of April, we lost another queen. Admittedly where I was amazed and perhaps baffled by the dramatic display of emotion and attention following the death of the British monarch last September, when Tina Turner, also known as the “Queen of Rock’n Roll” died last week, the outpouring of grief around the world, made perfect sense to me. The old rolling Stones’ song, “I Know It’s Only Rock’n Roll But I Like It…” well I guess that is me in a nutshell. Turner was an icon in so many ways. She was, among her many “firsts,” perhaps the first public figure to speak openly about domestic violence, which of course had a tremendous impact on women everywhere. She was the first African American to break into the white world of rock, without following a rhythm and blues, jazz or MoTown route, and like a phoenix, she rose out of destructive flames repeatedly in her life. She was a powerhouse and an inspiration.
Tina’s trauma began long before her well known battering by first husband and musical partner, Ike Turner. She knew from the start that she was not wanted and never felt loved by her parents. They already had two children and had no intention of having another when her mother was unexpectedly pregnant again.
Born Anna Mae Bullock in a small Tennessee town where her father was a sharecropper, she picked cotton as a small child, before her parents left to relocate to another town. She and her two sisters were separated, and all sent to live with different relatives, Anna Mae staying with her cold, strictly religious paternal grandparents. When the family reunited two years later, Anna Mae witnessed her father, now clearly alcoholic, violently abusing her mother, until her mother ultimately left, abandoning the three girls. Two years later, her father remarried, and Anna Mae and her sisters were sent to live with their other, the maternal grandmother.
When she was a young teenager, one of Anna Mae’s sisters died suddenly in a car crash. Attachment shock, as psychiatrist and trauma expert Frank Corrigan so elegantly renamed the developmental trauma of attachment and loss, like hers, were her earliest experience, and the “hits” just kept on coming.
Anna Mae sang in the church choir, and from early life loved music and dance. Later as a teen she frequented music clubs, which is where she first saw and heard the musical performance of Ike Turner. She was mesmerized and immediately wanted to sing with him. Ike however, had no interest, at least at first. Somehow when Turner’s drummer’s back was turned and he had stepped away from his mic, Anna Mae grabbed it and belted along. The listening crowd was transfixed by her voice and energy. So originally unwanted by Ike, she suddenly appeared to offer some kind of “ticket” or entrée for his aspirations. Although highly talented as a musician, he lacked the magnetism and verve that this young woman displayed. So Ike took her on.
Ike right away changed Anna Mae’s first name to Tina, and her last name to Turner after marrying her. He patented the new name so she could not leave him, or if she did, she would not be able to take it. Thus, Tina Turner was “born.”
Unwanted from the start, then unwanted again, nameless and used even before being beaten, the young woman, now Tina, never intended to become intimately involved with Ike. Their first intimacy was non-consensual, but she went along. They became the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, and in spite of his ongoing infidelities and violence, she lived and worked with him for 16 years. This is perhaps where the emblematic ferocious self-reliance and survivorship that accompany early neglect, can be a mixed blessing.
It took two years more (after their initial 14 years) of Ike’s drug use and violence, and her one thankfully failed suicide attempt for Tina to finally leave Ike. She even lost a son to suicide along the way. But like the “Grey Goose” of the old spiritual, who simply would not die, in spite of unending parade of assaults, somehow, Tina’s volcanic energy and undying persistence prevailed. After some years of recovering herself which included becoming a Buddhist, with a sustaining (and I would guess regulating,) serious practice of chanting, she did the unthinkable. She made her spectacular re-entry to the music scene, becoming a solo rockstar in her 40’s. Tina performed with the likes of the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Rod Stuart, Bryan Adams and more, which, if you are anywhere near my age, you would recognize as the top of the top. And she was a fireball in her own right, loved all over the globe. She said, although she was not a “superstar” like Madonna in the US, in Europe she actually was, and she later made her home there.
Tina met and married her husband Erwin Bach when she was 47. He was 30 at the time. They were close and intimate for 26 years before they finally married. She continued her progression of “firsts” becoming the first woman and the first person of color featured on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. Mick Jagger credits her with teaching him some of his most cherished dance steps. She scored 10 Grammy Awards; and was twice, (the first time being with Ike,) inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Tina’s final decade, however, was a tragic series of serious illnesses. A massive stroke made it impossible for her to speak or walk for a time, all of which through dogged determination and hard work, she regained, although singing by then became a challenge. Thankfully she could still chant.
Next came a serious run of colon cancer, which resulted in a surgery that cost her much of her large intestine. And finally, a bout of kidney failure that nearly took her down. Although she was unafraid of death, and was prepared to go whenever her time might come, she graciously assented when her husband underwent surgery to give her one of his kidneys, which kept her going for her final years. She died at 83.
Turner was proud and grateful for her life and her accomplishments. She continued to feel a debt of gratitude toward Ike, in spite of everything. I can understand that feeling as I like her feel profound and immense admiration and gratitude for the man who most hurt me in my life. Tina similarly experienced great joy and fulfillment in her also pain racked life. Like many of us who have histories of trauma and neglect, she felt that all that adversity gave her the depth and intensity, the energy and indomitable drive, the creativity and understanding, that marked her life and her work, and contributed perhaps more than anything to her gifts to the world. I can relate to that too, if on my much smaller scale.
Tina also garnered a prestigious star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which this past week has been blanketed with a deep drift of flowers, gifts and missives of appreciation, love and grief. Tina was, as a part of her great legacy, a tribute and a testament to the indomitable power, strength and healing possible, even for the most traumatized. She was indeed “Simply the Best.”
I am sure Tina would have wished to be remembered having this much fun! And like me, she always had a crush on Mick.
Rest well Tina, you so earned it, and you will be deeply missed!
Today’s Song:
As we all know far too well, trauma activation is redundant, miserable, and exhausting. I avoid the word “triggering,” because it summons the imagery of gun violence, (although activations certainly can feel that violently jarring and even lethal,) but also because the word is used is too loosely in popular discourse. It can lose its real meaning. What I am referring to is the invasion of traumatic history into the present moment as if the horrific event is happening again right now. It is the insidious way that trauma rather than being remembered, is re-lived.
Actually however, these activations are a brilliant adaptation of nature in service of preservation of the organism, and the species. In its infinite wisdom, the brain is hell bent on preventing the traumatic event from ever recurring, so it reacts to any stimulus reminiscent of the trauma, as if it were the trauma, the real thing all over again. The explosive flip into survival mode is immediate and fierce: fight/flight/freeze, whatever is most available and most likely to facilitate safety. It is nature’s unsavory way of teaching us to learn from experience. Unfortunately, all too often, especially in the mine field studded realm of interpersonal relationship, we get lost in the confusion of time, and only after much repetition and effortful work, can we learn to tell past from present. I might be convinced that my partner really is attacking, terrorizing or abandoning me. And I certainly don’t want to let them off the hook by owning that I am being visited by ghosts from my past. Oy vey.
Learning from experience, in all its myriad iterations throughout our lives, is a worthy endeavor. And economical too, it would save so much time, heartbreak, waste and destruction. But it is no fun at all, and certainly rarely quick, probably the hardest thing we ever have to do. At least that is what I tell my couples, and I know to be true for myself.
“I’ve got my shortcomings and my flaws and I ain’t no better than nobody else. But man, the shootings that’s going on. I don’t care what ‘hood’ you’re from, where you’re at, man. I love you and God loves you. Put them guns down.”- George Floyd in a selfie video he shot several years before his death in 2020.
May brings with it another anniversary and painful memory of George Floyd’s traumatic murder in 2020. I think of him, perhaps as if haunted, often throughout the year, but being something of a walking day-runner of orbiting anniversaries and milestones, dates stick in my mind like super glue. I remember birthdays of boyfriends, friends, even clients that I have not seen in decades. My own flagged dates often serve as reference points for reflecting on my past cycles. I reflect, “where was I last year on this day?” and these dates help me track change. It is hard for me to believe that it is so many years already since Floyd gasped his infamous dying words. What have we learned? What have I learned?
Looking at the larger world, I might say, “not much.” Mass shootings are daily fare. Girls and women barred from opportunities for education, work, even reproductive justice. Wild and erratic, unfamiliar and often lethal cataclysms of nature, from drought to storms, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, destroyed harvests, devastated herds make it hard to deny the human perpetrated trauma to the climate. I, for one found it easier to minimize a year ago, being more compelled by the pillage of humans than of land. Now admittedly I am forced to “get it.” They are of course indistinguishable. Dysregulation on every scale.
Each day’s news is another bombshell of war, incomprehensible conflicts resulting in yet another intergenerational chain of attachment shock and trauma, not to mention PTSD; physical disabilities; widowed; orphaned; wrenched away loved ones and liked ones; traumatic grief and loss. All to trickle stubbornly through blood lines for years to come; “new” aberrations of attachment; and wrecked land rural and urban, forced to re-invent itself or persist as rubble. Again, dysregulation on every scale.
Each day’s news is another bombshell of war, incomprehensible conflicts resulting in yet another intergenerational chain of attachment shock and trauma.
Perhaps what I feel I have learned this year is a new discovery or deepening of a profound lesson, not really new to me, but that has bookended my life for as long as I can remember. I am anguished, flummoxed, and kept awake by what has often seemed to me to be competing demands of macro and micro. Compelled and driven by a life committed to activism, justice, and peace on the mass scale, I felt there was no other reason or excuse to live. Crashing and burning from my own dysregulation, and the unanswerable questions of the micro: interpersonal world, I have devoted my last four decades to the mysteries and miseries of that: the more micro, interpersonal world. But I never quite made my peace or reconciled the choice.
I remember when I first started studying and practicing somatics in the early 1980’s, something about sitting and breathing seemed so utterly self-indulgent, and “individualistic” to use the contemptuous language of my activist comrades. I didn’t have a clue back then how essential breath was to regulation. We activists “did not have time.” There was too much to do. Our relationships with each other were largely a disaster, children were born and often ignored, or their importance minimized in comparison with our ideological and tactical priorities. Our health was not on the table. What sort of breathless world will we create?
Breath is nourishment and metronome of regulation, which is the basis for any sort of order. When I work with couples who can’t speak because they are so desperately running from an imagined tiger (their partner!) I teach them to stop action and practice 6:9 breathing. “Breathe in on 6 counts, out on 9 counts. Your inhale is stimulating: sympathetic. Your exhale is calming: parasympathetic. The long exhale will calm you down, bring you back into present time, regulate you anew. Try it for 10 breaths.” It is a very hard sell. But it is true, when we are calm we can think. When we are activated, we are like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off, flailing wildly to its sorry end. Breath. Precisely what George Floyd was robbed of. But the lesson of breath is not what is new to me. What have I begun to comprehend differently this year?
It is this no-brainer seared into my awareness in a different way: addressing trauma and not social justice is like trying to slay the hydra. We succeed in felling one head, and then sprout nine more, or 100 more. We must find a way to do both, regulate our own brains and relationships, and attend to a larger wildly dysregulated world. Trauma and social justice are two wings of the same bird. We “simply” must learn to find our way in relationships so we can work together to stem the deadly tides. Regulation, regulation, regulation.
Reading this over, I fear I may have ignored neglect today. When I say “trauma and social justice” of course I include neglect in the category of trauma, but I am afraid if I don’t name it, it will disappear. I was the quiet middle of three sisters. I remember Aunt Gertrud and Aunt Lottie, my quirky old great aunts. Both would say of us through their thick German accents “one is prettier than the next.” Must be an old German expression. Anyway, being the one in the middle I came up short either way you started the count, or at least in my mind. I fell out of the picture. So let me explicitly say it so neglect does not fade out as the forgotten middle child. Trauma-and-neglect, and social justice are two wings of the same bird. Regulating one without the other is a lost cause.
Have a few delicious, deep regulating breaths in memory of George Floyd (and Eric Garner too, the “forgotten” prior utterer of the same famous words “I can’t breathe!”) And may all the countless martyrs of injustice throughout the world and across time, rest in peace.
Todays song:
My book “Working with the Developmental Trauma of Childhood Neglect: Using Psychotherapy and Attachment Theory Techniques in Clinical Practice” was published on August 31st. It provides psychotherapists with a multidimensional view of childhood neglect and a practical roadmap for facilitating survivors’ healing.