Birth Trauma Quotes

Trauma destroys the fabric of time. In normal time you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy or bouncing like a rubber ball from now to then to back again. ... In the traumatic universe the basic laws of matter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be mustard gas.

My mother gave birth to the child I was, but it was me who gave birth to the man I am today.

Even the youngest must have known they were now steaming away from the country of their birth, never to return. They’d all suffered through the trauma of the war and the loss of their parents and were presently being further traumatized by their banishment to Australia.

Our society has a twisted sense of motherhood. They believe that all mothers are kind, tender, gentle, and loving. Unfortunately, not all women who give birth to children are a good parent. Not all women are fit to be mothers.

Common to the many theories about the birth trauma is the assumption that the feelings produced by this event were recorded and reside in some form in the brain. This assumption is supported by the great number of repetitious dreams of the “drainage pipe” variety

The most powerful ties are the ones to the people who gave us birth . . . it hardly seems to matter how many years have passed, how many betrayals there may have been, how much misery in the family: We remain connected, even against our wills. —Anthony Brandt, “Bloodlines

Across the country, red states are poorer and have more teen mothers, more divorce, worse health, more obesity, more trauma-related deaths, more low-birth-weight babies, and lower school enrollment. On average, people in red states die five years earlier than people in blue states. Indeed, the gap in life expectancy between Louisiana (75.7) and Connecticut (80.8) is the same as that between the United States and Nicaragua. Red states suffer more in another highly important but little-known way, one that speaks to the very biological self-interest in health and life: industrial pollution.

I knew that I was the least-loved child because I was a girl and because my mother had died giving birth to me.

Just because your mother gave birth to you doesn’t mean they are capable of caring for you. Just because a woman had a child doesn’t necessarily equate to being safe, respectful, or healthy. NOT ALL MOTHERS CAN LOVE.

If you are told you will have a spiritual experience, chances are pretty good that you will, and, likewise, if you are told the drug may drive you temporarily insane, or acquaint you with the collective unconscious, or help you access “cosmic consciousness,” or revisit the trauma of your birth, you stand a good chance of having exactly that kind of experience.

I was born with my fists out Against you.

As I discussed in the previous chapter, attachment researchers have shown that our earliest caregivers don't only feed us, dress us, and comfort us when we are upset; they shape the way our rapidly growing brain perceives reality. Our interactions with our caregivers convey what is safe and what is dangerous: whom we can count on and who will let us down; what we need to do to get our needs met. This information is embodied in the warp and woof of our brain circuitry and forms the template of how we think of ourselves and the world around us. These inner maps are remarkably stable across time. This doesn‘t mean, however, that our maps can‘t be modified by experience. A deep love relationship, particularly during adolescence, when the brain once again goes through a period of exponential change, truly can transform us. So can the birth of a child, as our babies often teach us how to love. Adults who were abused or neglected as children can still learn the beauty of intimacy and mutual trust or have a deep spiritual experience that opens them to a larger universe. In contrast, previously uncontaminated childhood maps can become so distorted by an adult rape or assault that all roads are rerouted into terror or despair. These responses are not reasonable and therefore cannot be changed simply by reframing irrational beliefs.

every cell in my body is filled with the code of generations of trauma, of death, of birth, of migration, of history that I cannot understand. Just piecemeal moments I collected from Auntie over the years.

Trauma lives in the body long after the events that birthed it go away. It builds a home for itself in our memories, where it asserts itself as reality: I was treated this way because there is something wrong with me, and if I am to protect myself, then I must carry a healthy, vigilant sense of paranoia with me at all times. Never again, it says. The

NICUs are like the bowels of the technological underworld.  They are places where infants are literally held captive for weeks and months and subjected to all manner of painful and torturous medical procedures, most of the time without being given any form of pain relief whatsoever.

There’s a reason they call childbirth labor. Making a healthy baby takes effort: It requires foresight and self-denial and courage. It’s expensive and demanding and tiring. You have to learn new things, change many habits, possibly deal with complicated medical situations, make difficult decisions, and undergo stressful ordeals. I had a wisdom tooth pulled without Novocaine while I was pregnant—it hurt a lot and seemed to go on forever. The kindness of the very young dental assistant, holding back my hair as I spat blood into a bowl, will stay with me for the rest of my life. Pregnant women do such things, and much harder things, all the time. For example, they give birth, which is somewhere on the scale between painful and excruciating. Or they have a cesarean, as I did, which is major surgery. None of this is without risk of death or damage or trauma, including psychological trauma. To force girls and women to undergo all this against their will is to annihilate their humanity. When they undertake it by choice, we should all be grateful.

Humans love sex. Both men and women are wired to be sexually responsive. Sex is the social glue of the human species. It takes heavy-handed training or trauma to kill a human's sex drive. Religion has that power. Sexual training in guilt, shame, and fear begins virtually at birth by sexualizing nudity. The religious signal is that nudity is always sexual and the body must be covered for modesty. The Adam and Eve story is taught to young children even though they have no way to know what it means.

My newfound and hard-earned freedom had birthed fresh horrors: grief,despair,guilt and trauma. These were monsters I couldn't not outrun,hide from or battle with and axe.

Perhaps the beauty of life eclipses the trauma of birth.

Bodies are terrifying; they’re powerful and fragile, bloody and imperfect, uncanny, impressionable vehicles that carry our minds from birth until death. And of course they’re inherently haunted. Haunting is a kind of impression; a lingering effect from a physical act like a shoeprint or a cloud of perfume left in the air. In the same way, bodies carry trauma and choices of our ancestors. Our DNAs are blueprints of the past.

It has just been discovered that women carry fetal cells from all the babies they have carried. Crossing the defensive boundaries of our immune system and mixing with our own cells, the fetal cells circulate in the mother’s bloodstream for decades after each birth. The body does not tolerate foreign cells, which trigger illness and rejection. But a mother’s body incorporates into her own the cells of her children as if they recognize each other, belong to each other. This fantastic melding of two selves, mother and child, is called human microchimerism. My three children are carried in my bloodstream still…. How did we not know this? How can this be a surprise?

Civil war is an exercise in building group loyalties. The trauma of civil war and massacre works not just to desocialize the victims but to socialize the killers into a particular ethical and political stance. Men who had killed together were bound together.

Later, I interviewed a prominent psychoanalyst, who told me that trauma destroys the fabric of time. In normal time, you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy, or bouncing about like a rubber ball from now to then and back again. August is June, June is December. What time is it? Guess again. In the traumatic universe, the basic laws of matter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be mustard gas. Another odd feature of traumatic time is that it doesn’t just destroy the flow of the present into the future, it corrodes everything that came before, eating at moments and people from your previous life, until you can’t remember why any of them mattered. What I previously found inconceivable is now inescapable: I have been blown up so many times in my mind that it is impossible to imagine a version of myself that has not been blown up. The man on the other side of the soldier’s question is not me. In fact, he never existed. The war is gone now, but the event remains, the happening that nearly erased the life to come and thus erased the life that came before. The soldier’s question hangs in the air the way it always has. The way it always will.   Have you ever been blown up before, sir?

Growth of the Body and the Brain. The physical growth of the human body increases in a roughly linear manner from birth through adolescence. In contrast, the brain’s physical growth follows a different pattern. The most rapid rate of growth takes place in utero, and from birth to age four the brain grows explosively. The brain of the four-year-old is 90 percent adult size! A majority of the physical growth of the brain’s key neural networks takes place during this time. It is a time of great malleability and vulnerability as experiences are actively shaping the organizing brain. This is a time of great opportunity for the developing child: safe, predictable, nurturing and repetitive experiences can help express a full range of genetic potentials. Unfortunately, however, it is also when the organizing brain is most vulnerable to the destructive impact of threat, neglect and trauma.

gaslighting:36 getting people to override their own experience and perceptions by repeating a lie over and over, and then “proving” it with still more lies, denials, and misdirection. Eventually, if the gaslighting is successful, the lies are widely accepted as truth—or even as essential facts of life, like birth, death, and gravity.

They were trying to orchestrate a revolution, which almost by definition generated a sense of collective trauma that defied any semblance of coherence and control. If we wish to rediscover the psychological context of the major players in Philadelphia, we need to abandon our hindsight omniscience and capture their mentality as they negotiated the unknown.

In the course of my travels I met a scientist who enabled people who had been blind since birth to begin to see, another who enabled the deaf to hear; I spoke with people who had had strokes decades before and had been declared incurable, who were helped to recover with neuroplastic treatments; I met people whose learning disorders were cured and whose IQs were raised; I saw evidence that it is possible for eighty-year-olds to sharpen their memories to function the way they did when they were fifty-five. I saw people rewire their brains with their thoughts, to cure previously incurable obsessions and traumas. I spoke with Nobel laureates who were hotly debating how we must rethink our model of the brain now that we know it is ever changing.   The

Atsushi hated pain. But pain had been an intimate part of his life for as long as he could remember. The pain of being stabbed, the pain from being punched, the pain of his hands numbing in the cold, pain inside his head, the pain of hunger—suffering clung to Atsushi like clothing, shaping him. Pain made Atsushi feel like himself. He didn’t know any other way to experience this feeling. After joining the detective agency, the nature of the pain changed, he got hurt less often, and he stopped feeling miserable. Instead, the crushing pressure of necessity tore at Atsushi’s flesh. It split open his shoulder, pierced his chest, and snapped off his leg. The agony was so unbearable that it was as if he could feel his soul leaving his body, but even then, he fought through the pain because it was worth it. He knew he could stubbornly resist the pain no matter how bad it got. There’s a beast inside me, thought Atsushi. And that’s not a metaphor. There’s a literal beast inside me. Right now, he’s howling and wildly feasting as he rampages. For some reason or another, he seems to have the power to negate wounds. Not the power to heal them or to recover but to negate. The reason he’s able to do this isn’t totally unrelated to my birth, probably. It’s not unrelated to the suffering I’ve had to bear all these years. The beast—the tiger—is a manifestation of something within me. I still don’t know what that something is, but if he commands me to stand, then I can’t not stand—just like if he negates my wounds, then my wounds have no choice but to disappear.

The Swedish town of Överkalix has the most comprehensive and oldest birth, death, and crop records in the world. Their records go back generations—a remarkably rich data set. And in analyzing this data set, scientists found some fascinating correlations. There were good and bad years for the crops in Överkalix and some particularly bad years where families were forced to go hungry. But scientists discovered that when children suffered starvation between the ages of nine and twelve, their grandchildren would on average live thirty years longer. Their descendants had far lower rates of diabetes and heart disease. On the other hand, when children were well-fed during those ages, their descendants were at four times the risk for heart attacks and their life expectancy dropped. In some strange way, the trauma of starvation changed descendants’ genes to be more resilient. Healthier. More likely to survive.[5] — Clearly, it wasn’t just my ruthless nurture that had shaped me into who I was, though who knows what kind of rampant methylation savaged my epigenome during my beatings and assaults. Beyond that, every cell in my body is filled with the code of generations of trauma, of death, of birth, of migration, of history that I cannot understand. Just piecemeal moments I collected from Auntie over the years. My family tried to erase this history. But my body remembers. My work ethic. My fear of cockroaches. My hatred for the taste of dirt. These are not random attributes, a spin of the wheel. They were gifted to me with purpose, with necessity. I want to have words for what my bones know. I want to use those gifts when they serve me and understand and forgive them when they do not.

We assume, in other words, that an anxiety-state is the reproduction of some experience which contained the necessary conditions for such an increase of excitation and a discharge along particular paths, and that from this circumstance the unpleasure of anxiety receives its specific character. In man, birth provides a prototypic experience of this kind, and we are therefore inclined to regard anxiety-states as a reproduction of the trauma of birth.

Who can define reality? Isn't everything subjective? If you & I witness the same event, we will recall it and recount it differently. ... Memory is conditioned by emotion, we remember better, and more fully, things that move us, such as the joy of a birth, the pleasure of a night of love, the pain of a loved one's death, the trauma of a wound. When we call up the past, we choose intense moments--good or bad--and omit the enormous gray area of daily life.

They learn to relate by caretaking, pleasing, isolating, or acting out rather than fully relating with their true and authentic selves. As a result, they feel accepted for their roles, not for who they were. Adult Children often have no idea how to have an equal partner relationship with healthy communication and normal conflict. As one ACOA said, “I feel that everyone else got a book at birth on how to live life, have relationships, and parent—and I never got my copy.

The trauma of the Soviet collapse was economic, cultural, political, strategic—and demographic. Between 1986 and 1994, the birth rate halved while the death rate nearly doubled. Russia today is deindustrializing at the same time its population is collapsing. Dark? Yes, but Russia is probably one of the best-case scenarios for much of the industrialized world. Russia, after all, at least has ample capacity at home to feed and fuel itself in addition to sufficient nuclear weapons to make any would-be aggressor stop and think (a few dozen times) before launching an assault.

If you want to be saved from your present suffering, you must be willing to change and be changed in the present. That change can be tangible—leaving an abusive relationship, going back to school, moving down the hallway in an assisted-living facility. But it can also be a change in perception. This, in fact, is the harder change. A change of perception to knowing you are enough, and have been since birth, to seeing a world suffused in love and swimming in beauty, despite loneliness, despite pain, despite illness, loss, trauma, and even atrocity—now that’s hard. That seems impossible. Yet it happens, again and again, and again.

Sandra has lived largely in stealth since the early 1980s. I didn't realise it at the time, but it was singular that halfway through our first interview she told me - a stranger still - that she had been assigned male at birth. I didn't know then why she chose to be that candid with me that early; maybe I was lucky enough to ask the right questions in the right way at the right time. But knowing her now, I suspect it had less to do with me personally and more to do with the fact that I crossed paths with her at the point in her life when she was, finally, bursting at the seams with her story, with the need to tell and be truly known.

In some instances, even when crisis intervention has been intensive and appropriate, the mother and daughter are already so deeply estranged at the time of disclosure that the bond between them seems irreparable. In this situation, no useful purpose is served by trying to separate the mother and father and keep the daughter at home. The daughter has already been emotionally expelled from her family; removing her to protective custody is simply the concrete expression of the family reality. These are the cases which many agencies call their “tragedies.” This report of a child protective worker illustrates a case where removing the child from the home was the only reasonable course of action: Division of Family and Children’s Services received an anonymous telephone call on Sept. 14 from a man who stated that he overheard Tracy W., age 8, of [address] tell his daughter of a forced oral-genital assault, allegedly perpetrated against this child by her mother’s boyfriend, one Raymond S. Two workers visited the W. home on Sept. 17. According to their report, Mrs. W. was heavily under the influence of alcohol at the time of the visit. Mrs. W. stated immediately that she was aware why the two workers wanted to see her, because Mr. S. had “hurt her little girl.” In the course of the interview, Mrs. W. acknowledged and described how Mr. S. had forced Tracy to have relations with him. Workers then interviewed Tracy and she verified what mother had stated. According to Mrs. W., Mr. S. admitted the sexual assault, claiming that he was drunk and not accountable for his actions. Mother then stated to workers that she banished Mr. S. from her home. I had my first contact with mother and child at their home on Sept. 20 and I subsequently saw this family once a week. Mother was usually intoxicated and drinking beer when I saw her. I met Mr. S. on my second visit. Mr. S. denied having had any sexual relations with Tracy. Mother explained that she had obtained a license and planned to marry Mr. S. On my third visit, Mrs. W. was again intoxicated and drinking despite my previous request that she not drink during my visit. Mother explained that Mr. S. had taken off to another state and she never wanted to see him again. On this visit mother demanded that Tracy tell me the details of her sexual involvement with Mr. S. On my fourth visit, Mr. S. and Mrs. S. were present. Mother explained that they had been married the previous Saturday. On my fifth visit, Mr. S. was not present. During our discussion, mother commented that “Bay was not the first one who had Tracy.” After exploring this statement with mother and Tracy, it became clear that Tracy had been sexually exploited in the same manner at age six by another of Mrs. S.'s previous boyfriends. On my sixth visit, Mrs. S. stated that she could accept Tracy’s being placed with another family as long as it did not appear to Tracy that it was her mother’s decision to give her up. Mother also commented, “I wish the fuck I never had her.” It appears that Mrs. S. has had a number of other children all of whom have lived with other relatives or were in foster care for part of their lives. Tracy herself lived with a paternal aunt from birth to age five.

In the period following birth, the human brain, unlike that of the chimpanzee, continues to grow at the same rate as in the womb. There are times in the first year of life when, every second, multiple millions of nerve connections, or synapses, are established. Three-quarters of our brain growth takes place outside the womb, most of it in the early years. By three years of age, the brain has reached 90 percent of adult size, whereas the body is only 18 percent of adult size. This explosion in growth outside the womb gives us a far higher potential for learning and adaptability than is granted to other mammals. […] Greater reward demands greater risk. Outside the relatively safe environment of the womb, our brains-in-progress are highly vulnerable to potentially adverse circumstances.

A great paradox...red states are poorere and have more teen mothers, more divorce, worse health, more obesity, more trauma-related deaths, more low-birth-weight babies, and lower school enrollment....The gap in life expectancey between Louisiana (75.7) and Connecticut (80.8) is the same as that between the U.S. and Nicaragua....And the problem transcends race; an average black in Maryland lives four years longer, earns twice as much, and is twice as likely to have a college degree as a black in Louisiana. And whites in Louisiana are wrose off than whites in Maryland or anywhere else outside Mississippi. Louisiana has suffered many environmental problems too: there are nearly 400 miles of low, flat, subsiding coastline, adn the state loses a football field-size patch of wetland every hour. It is threatened by rising sea levels and severe hurricanes, which the world's top scientists connect to climate change.

Imagine the daughter of a narcissistic father as an example. She grows up chronically violated and abused at home, perhaps bullied by her peers as well. Her burgeoning low self-esteem, disruptions in identity and problems with emotional regulation causes her to live a life filled with terror. This is a terror that is stored in the body and literally shapes her brain. It is also what makes her brain extra vulnerable and susceptible to the effects of trauma in adulthood.                              Being verbally, emotionally and sometimes even physically beaten down, the child of a narcissistic parent learns that there is no safe place for her in the world. The symptoms of trauma emerge: disassociation to survive and escape her day-to-day existence, addictions that cause her to self-sabotage, maybe even self-harm to cope with the pain of being unloved, neglected and mistreated. Her pervasive sense of worthlessness and toxic shame, as well as subconscious programming, then cause her to become more easily attached to emotional predators in adulthood. In her repeated search for a rescuer, she instead finds those who chronically diminish her just like her earliest abusers. Of course, her resilience, adept skill set in adapting to chaotic environments and ability to “bounce back” was also birthed in early childhood. This is also seen as an “asset” to toxic partners because it means she will be more likely to stay within the abuse cycle in order to attempt to make things “work.” She then suffers not just from early childhood trauma, but from multiple re-victimizations in adulthood until, with the right support, she addresses her core wounds and begins to break the cycle step by step. Before she can break the cycle, she must first give herself the space and time to recover. A break from establishing new relationships is often essential during this time; No Contact (or Low Contact from her abusers in more complicated situations such as co-parenting) is also vital to the healing journey, to prevent compounding any existing traumas.

While I am free to speak my mind, Kelly, now 14, is not so fortunate. Kelly has yet to receive rehabilitation for her shattered personality and programmed young mind. The high tech sophistication of the Project Monarch trauma based mind-control procedures she endured, literally since birth, reportedly requires highly specialized, qualified care to aid her in eventually gaining control of her mind and life. Due to the political affluence of our abusers, all efforts to obtain her inalienable right to rehabilitation and seek justice have been blocked under the guise of so-called "National Security." As a result, Kelly remains warehoused in a mental institution in the custody of the state of Tennessee--a victim of the system—a system controlled and manipulated by our abusive government "leaders" a system where State Forms make no allowances to report military TOP SECRET abuses--a system that exists on federal funding directed by our perverse, corrupt abusers in Washington, D.C. She remains a political prisoner in a mental institution to this moment, waiting and hurting! Violations of laws and rights, Psychological Warfare intimidation tactics, threats to our lives, and various other forms of CIA Damage Containment practices thus far have remained unhindered and unchecked due to the National Security Act of 1947 AND the 1986 Reagan Amendment to same which allows those in control of our government to censor and/or cover up anything they choose.

The Blue Mind Rx Statement Our wild waters provide vast cognitive, emotional, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual values for people from birth, through adolescence, adulthood, older age, and in death; wild waters provide a useful, widely available, and affordable range of treatments healthcare practitioners can incorporate into treatment plans. The world ocean and all waterways, including lakes, rivers, and wetlands (collectively, blue space), cover over 71% of our planet. Keeping them healthy, clean, accessible, and biodiverse is critical to human health and well-being. In addition to fostering more widely documented ecological, economic, and cultural diversities, our mental well-being, emotional diversity, and resiliency also rely on the global ecological integrity of our waters. Blue space gives us half of our oxygen, provides billions of people with jobs and food, holds the majority of Earth's biodiversity including species and ecosystems, drives climate and weather, regulates temperature, and is the sole source of hydration and hygiene for humanity throughout history. Neuroscientists and psychologists add that the ocean and wild waterways are a wellspring of happiness and relaxation, sociality and romance, peace and freedom, play and creativity, learning and memory, innovation and insight, elation and nostalgia, confidence and solitude, wonder and awe, empathy and compassion, reverence and beauty — and help manage trauma, anxiety, sleep, autism, addiction, fitness, attention/focus, stress, grief, PTSD, build personal resilience, and much more. Chronic stress and anxiety cause or intensify a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more. Being on, in, and near water can be among the most cost-effective ways of reducing stress and anxiety. We encourage healthcare professionals and advocates for the ocean, seas, lakes, and rivers to go deeper and incorporate the latest findings, research, and insights into their treatment plans, communications, reports, mission statements, strategies, grant proposals, media, exhibits, keynotes, and educational programs and to consider the following simple talking points: •Water is the essence of life: The ocean, healthy rivers, lakes, and wetlands are good for our minds and bodies. •Research shows that nature is therapeutic, promotes general health and well-being, and blue space in both urban and rural settings further enhances and broadens cognitive, emotional, psychological, social, physical, and spiritual benefits. •All people should have safe access to salubrious, wild, biodiverse waters for well-being, healing, and therapy. •Aquatic biodiversity has been directly correlated with the therapeutic potency of blue space. Immersive human interactions with healthy aquatic ecosystems can benefit both. •Wild waters can serve as medicine for caregivers, patient families, and all who are part of patients’ circles of support. •Realization of the full range and potential magnitude of ecological, economic, physical, intrinsic, and emotional values of wild places requires us to understand, appreciate, maintain, and improve the integrity and purity of one of our most vital of medicines — water.

Interactions with the world program our physiological and psychological development. Emotional contact is as important as physical contact. The two are quite analogous, as we recognize when we speak of the emotional experience of feeling touched. Our sensory organs and brains provide the interface through which relationships shape our evolution from infancy to adulthood. Social-emotional interactions decisively influence the development of the human brain. From the moment of birth, they regulate the tone, activity and development of the psychoneuroimmunoendocrine (PNI) super-system. Our characteristic modes of handling psychic and physical stress are set in our earliest years. Neuroscientists at Harvard University studied the cortisol levels of orphans who were raised in the dreadfully neglected child-care institutions established in Romania during the Ceausescu regime. In these facilities the caregiver/child ratio was one to twenty. Except for the rudiments of care, the children were seldom physically picked up or touched. They displayed the self-hugging motions and depressed demeanour typical of abandoned young, human or primate. On saliva tests, their cortisol levels were abnormal, indicating that their hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axes were already impaired. As we have seen, disruptions of the HPA axis have been noted in autoimmune disease, cancer and other conditions. It is intuitively easy to understand why abuse, trauma or extreme neglect in childhood would have negative consequences. But why do many people develop stress-related illness without having been abused or traumatized? These persons suffer not because something negative was inflicted on them but because something positive was withheld.

The crime was discovered when Trina became pregnant. As is often the case, the correctional officer was fired but not criminally prosecuted. Trina remained imprisoned and gave birth to a son. Like hundreds of women who give birth while in prison, Trina was completely unprepared for the stress of childbirth. She delivered her baby while handcuffed to a bed. It wasn’t until 2008 that most states abandoned the practice of shackling or handcuffing incarcerated women during delivery. Trina’s baby boy was taken away from her and placed in foster care. After this series of events—the fire, the imprisonment, the rape, the traumatic birth, and then the seizure of her son—Trina’s mental health deteriorated further. Over the years, she became less functional and more mentally disabled. Her body began to spasm and quiver uncontrollably, until she required a cane and then a wheelchair. By the time she had turned thirty, prison doctors diagnosed her with multiple sclerosis, intellectual disability, and mental illness related to trauma. Trina had filed a civil suit against the officer who raped her, and the jury awarded her a judgment of $62,000. The guard appealed, and the Court reversed the verdict because the correctional officer had not been permitted to tell the jury that Trina was in prison for murder. Consequently, Trina never received any financial aid or services from the state to compensate her for being violently raped by one of its “correctional” officers. In 2014, Trina turned fifty-two. She has been in prison for thirty-eight years. She is one of nearly five hundred people in Pennsylvania who have been condemned to mandatory life imprisonment without parole for crimes they were accused of committing when they were between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. It is the largest population of child offenders condemned to die in prison in any single jurisdiction in the world.

(Notably, temporary loss of blood or oxygen or excess carbon dioxide in the blood can also cause a disruption in the temporoparietal region and induce out-of-body experiences, which may explain the prevalence of these sensations during accidents, emergencies, heart attacks, etc.) NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES But perhaps the most dramatic category of out-of-body experiences are the near-death stories of individuals who have been declared dead but then mysteriously regained consciousness. In fact, 6 to 12 percent of survivors of cardiac arrest report having near-death experiences. It’s as though they have cheated death itself. When interviewed, they have dramatic tales of the same experience: they left their body and drifted toward a bright light at the end of a long tunnel. The media have seized upon this, with numerous best sellers and TV documentaries devoted to these theatrical stories. Many bizarre theories have been proposed to explain near-death experiences. In a poll of two thousand people, fully 42 percent believed that near-death experiences were proof of contact with the spiritual world that lies beyond death. (Some believe that the body releases endorphins—natural narcotics—before death. This may explain the euphoria that people feel, but not the tunnel and the bright lights.) Carl Sagan even speculated that near-death experiences were a reliving of the trauma of birth. The fact that these individuals recount very similar experiences doesn’t necessarily corroborate their glimpses into the afterlife; in fact, it seems to indicate that there is some deep neurological event happening. Neurologists have looked into this phenomenon seriously and suspect that the key may be the decrease of blood flow to the brain that often accompanies near-death cases, and which also occurs in fainting. Dr. Thomas Lempert, a neurologist at the Castle Park Clinic in Berlin, conducted a series of experiments on forty-two healthy individuals, causing them to faint under controlled laboratory conditions. Sixty percent of them had visual hallucinations (e.g., bright lights and colored patches). Forty-seven percent of them felt that they were entering another world. Twenty percent claimed to have encountered a supernatural being. Seventeen percent saw a bright light. Eight percent saw a tunnel. So fainting can mimic all the sensations people have in near-death experiences

In this way we can create in our own selves a person who can satisfy at least some of the needs that have been waiting for fulfillment since birth, if not earlier. Then we can give ourselves the attention, the respect, the understanding for our emotions, the sorely needed protection, and the unconditional love that our parents withheld from us. To make this happen, we need one special experience: the experience of love for the child we once were. Without it, we have no way of knowing what love consists of. If we want to achieve this experience with the help of therapy, then we need assistance from a therapist who can accept us for what we are, who can give us the protection, respect, sympathy, and understanding we need in order to realize how we have become what we are. This is the fundamental experience that enables us to adopt the role of parents for the wronged children we once were. What we do not need is an educator, someone who “has plans” for us, nor a psychoanalyst who has learned that in the face of childhood traumas the main thing is to remain neutral and interpret the analysand’s reports as fantasies. No, we need precisely the opposite: a partial companion, someone who can share with us the horror and indignation that is bound to arise when our emotions gradually reveal to her, and to us, how the little child suffered, what it went through all alone when body and soul were fighting for years on end to preserve a life threatened by constant danger. We need such a companion—what I have called an “enlightened witness”—if we ourselves are to act as companions for the child within, if we are to understand its “body language,” to engage with its needs instead of ignoring them in the same way that our parents once did.

A week before my due date, Marlboro Man had to preg-test a hundred cows. Preg-testing cows, I would learn in horror that warm June morning, does not involve the cow urinating on a test stick and waiting at least three minutes to read the result. Instead, a large animal vet inserts his entire arm into a long disposable glove, then inserts the gloved arm high into the rectum of a pregnant cow until the vet’s arm is no longer visible. Once his arm is deep inside the cow’s nether regions, the vet can feel the size and angle of the cow’s cervix and determine two things: 1. Whether or not she is pregnant. 2. How far along she is. With this information, Marlboro Man decides whether to rebreed the nonpregnant cows, and in which pasture to place the pregnant cows; cows that became bred at the same time will stay in the same pasture so that they’ll all give birth in approximately the same time frame. Of course, I understood none of this as I watched the doctor insert the entire length of his arm into a hundred different cows’ bottoms. All I knew is that he’d insert his arm, the cow would moo, he would pull out his arm, and the cow would poop. Unintentionally, each time a new cow would pass through the chute, I’d instinctively bear down. I was just as pregnant as many of the cows. My nether regions were uncomfortable enough as it was. The thought of someone inserting their… It was more than I probably should have signed up for that morning. “God help me!” I yelped as Marlboro Man and I pulled away from the working area after the last cow was tested. “What in the name of all that is holy did I just witness?” “How’d you like that?” Marlboro Man asked, smiling a satisfied smile. He loved introducing me to new ranching activities. The more shocking I found them, the better. “Seriously,” I mumbled, grasping my enormous belly as if to protect my baby from the reality of this bizarre, disturbing world. “That was just…that was like nothing I’ve ever seen before!” It made the rectal thermometer episode I’d endured many months earlier seem like a garden party. Marlboro Man laughed and rested his hand on my knee. It stayed there the rest of the drive home. At eleven that night, I woke up feeling strange. Marlboro Man and I had just drifted off to sleep, and my abdomen felt tight and weird. I stared at the ceiling, breathing deeply in an effort to will it away. But then I put two and two together: the whole trauma of what I’d seen earlier in the day must have finally caught up with me. In my sympathy for the preg-tested cows, I must have borne down a few too many times. I sat up in bed. I was definitely in labor.

Nothing was written in stone. Neither the mother’s personality, nor the infant’s neurological anomalies at birth, nor its IQ, nor its temperament—including its activity level and reactivity to stress—predicted whether a child would develop serious behavioral problems in adolescence.20 The key issue, rather, was the nature of the parent-child relationship: how parents felt about and interacted with their kids. As with Suomi’s monkeys, the combination of vulnerable infants and inflexible caregivers made for clingy, uptight kids. Insensitive, pushy, and intrusive behavior on the part of the parents at six months predicted hyperactivity and attention problems in kindergarten and beyond.21

This doesn’t mean, however, that our maps can’t be modified by experience. A deep love relationship, particularly during adolescence, when the brain once again goes through a period of exponential change, truly can transform us. So can the birth of a child, as our babies often teach us how to love. Adults who were abused or neglected as children can still learn the beauty of intimacy and mutual trust or have a deep spiritual experience that opens them to a larger universe.

Critically, what if the ‘resurfacing’ of birth trauma is homeostatic in essence, a story told to be heard and not ignored as it was at birth, so that emotional stability may be restored to the psyche? How would such an understanding change the way we treat those who suffer from anxiety and depression? How would it change the way we treat all mental illness?

Mother: a humanoid thing blinded by bandages, nurturing breasts hidden, limbs restrained, tongue lolling from its slack mouth, and with no recognisable sweat signature.

This doesn’t mean, however, that our maps can’t be modified by experience. A deep love relationship, particularly during adolescence, when the brain once again goes through a period of exponential change, truly can transform us. So can the birth of a child, as our babies often teach us how to love. Adults who were abused or neglected as children can still learn the beauty of intimacy and mutual trust or have a deep spiritual experience that opens them to a larger universe. In contrast, previously uncontaminated childhood maps can become so distorted by an adult rape or assault that all roads are rerouted into terror or despair. These responses are not reasonable and therefore cannot be changed simply by reframing irrational beliefs. Our maps of the world are encoded in the emotional brain, and changing them means having to reorganize that part of the central nervous system, the subject of the treatment section of this book.

In a later book, The World I Live In, Keller again described her birth into selfhood: “Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. . . . I had neither will nor intellect. . . . I can remember all this, not because I knew that it was so, but because I have tactual memory. It enables me to remember that I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking.

Animals follow the rhythms of nature-mating, birthing, feeding, hunting, sleeping, and hibernating in direct response to nature’s pendulum. So, too, do the responses that bring traumatic reactions to their natural resolution. For human beings, these rhythms pose a two-fold challenge. First, they move at a much slower pace than we are accustomed to. Second, they are entirely beyond our control. Healing cycles can only be opened up to, watched, and validated; they cannot be evaluated, manipulated, hurried, or changed. When they get the time and attention they need, they are able to complete their healing mission.

By birth, the newborn has 86 billion neurons; these will continue to grow and connect to create complex networks that allow the newborn to begin making sense of their world.

Since the turn of the twentieth century we’ve believed in genetic causes of diagnoses— a theory called genetic determinism. Under this model, our genes (and subsequent health) are determined at birth. We are “destined” to inherit or be exempt from certain diseases based on the blind luck or misfortune of our DNA. Genetic determinism doesn’t consider the role of family backgrounds, traumas, habits, or anything else within the environment.

Imagine that, surrounded by your loved ones, you and your disease-riddled body have finally just breathed your last. No, scratch that. It’s really much more vile than that, because, even though you still had much life left in you, you’ve just been put to death, and not just in the most painful of ways, but, treacherously, by those whom you thought truly loved you, or, if not that, then, at the least, valued and respected you! Fortunately, or unfortunately, you disappear into the mists of time, and that means neither you nor your beloved face will ever be seen again. That one of those who had so cruelly abused you might ever try to track you down, or even be able to, is not possible, right? No, of course not, because, as we all know, birth is the beginning and death is the end of all that ever accidently took place in between. Whether birth is the beginning and death actually the end, it certainly is how the badly disfigured, yet somehow still disturbingly alluring, Virginia Finsterwald thinks. So, when a dying lady shows up at her door - with a duplicate version of her own previously perfect face - it would be impossible for the former spy, now private detective, to take this event as anything more than mere Happenstance. Meanwhile, just a couple of blocks up the way, Virginia’s principal patron is confronted by a woman who, inexplicably, has the exact face of his aunt, only, she had been lynched when he was a child! As a highly educated man who believes only in materials and reason, the only way Alistair Alligood, the a multi-zillionaire collector of gender-dysphorick pubescent boys, can prevent being undone by this unsettling matter is by writing it off, and yet:------does he really believe that such an occurrance is mere Happenstance? Maybe so, but, what is not mere Happenstance are the church exorcists, psychicks, mesmerists, physicians, psychologists, and mediums who, when Alistair Alligood falls gravely ill, war with each other over whether he is bodily ill, suffering from past-life trauma, under a witch’s spell, and or is it that he has become demon possessed? What unravels behind the curtain of Alistair’s malady is a centuries’long tale of Poisonings, Duels, Rape, Revenge, Possession, the Black Arts, and Taboo Familial Doings, the seeds of which will miscegenize and explode in ’Beyond The Last Breath’.

There are three types of “developmental adversity” that will predictably alter the CRNs and cause widespread problems. The first is disruption that happens before birth, such as prenatal exposure to drugs, alcohol, or extreme maternal distress (of the kind that can occur with domestic violence, for example). The second is some form of disruption of the early interactions between infant and caregiver; if these are chaotic, inconsistent, rough, aggressive, or absent, the stress-response systems will develop in abnormal ways. The third is any sensitizing pattern of stress. This can result from a host of circumstances, many of which we will talk about later in more detail; the basic idea is that anything that can cause unpredictable, uncontrollable, or extreme and prolonged activations of the stress response will result in an overactive and overly reactive stress response (see

During my first year at Cambridge, I began preparing notes for this book. I had plenty of time to think about what a weird childhood I had--the flashbulb memories of living in a car with my birth mother and seeing her arrested in our cramped apartment, getting dragged away to foster homes, the drama and heartbreak after being adopted, and all the rest. In his bestselling book The Body Keeps the Score, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk wrote, "Sooner or later most [trauma] survivors...come up with what many of them call their 'cover story' that offers some explanation for their symptoms and behavior for public consumption. These stories, however, rarely capture the inner truth of the experience. It is enormously difficult to organize one's traumatic experiences into a coherent account--a narrative with a beginning, middle, and an end." With this book, I have attempted to accomplish such as a task as honestly as I can.

To be honest, I’m still not okay with it. To be honest, I still get really fucking angry about it. To be honest, I struggle when I put my focus on that pinched skin. To be honest, I will always take a breath before I bare myself naked to a partner. To be honest, I still struggle to run my fingers across it in the bathtub.

Often a woman encounters herself in an entirely new way during the process of giving birth. She may encounter the effects of traumas long buried, or she may encounter fear long denied, she may also discover power deep within herself that she had never imagined. —RETURN TO THE GREAT MOTHER BY ISA GUCCIARDI, PHD, FOUNDING DIRECTOR OF THE FOUNDATION OF THE SACRED STREAM, BERKELEY, CA

The act of adoption is often centered around the crises of the adults—the untimely pregnancy or the removal of a child for abuse or neglect for the birth parent, the infertility or desire to increase one’s family through adoption for the preadoptive parents. Rarely do we truly think about the trauma to the baby or child that happens in the process of what ends in adoption. If adoption were truly child-centered—about finding families for children—we would be working very hard to prevent attachment problems and to provide transitions that are kind and loving for the infant or child.

Apparently many professionals do not truly believe that the need to honor our connections is an essential part of family life, as this belief is not reflected in the way that they work with families in stress who are dealing with complex issues of foster care, guardianship, kinship, and adoption. Whether it was a closed or open adoption, an adopted child must learn to integrate at least two distinctly different families—the birth family and the adoptive family. The biracial or other-culture child must also integrate two distinctly different cultures. The challenge to adoptive parents, and to others connected to this child, is to help the child to develop his/her own identity within the framework of both cultures. The challenge to professionals is to help the whole family to see itself as a multicultural family, and to develop its identity while integrating—not ignoring—the distinctively different cultures. How can that happen if the professionals don’t see the importance of respect for culture? How can that happen if the professionals don’t see any difference in culture because the race is the same? The psycho-education and modeling done by the professionals who are initially involved in building these complex families can set a tone, and begin a process of respect and integration. Without this education and modeling, the parents might be so busy with other essential psychological and emotional issues, and with possible trauma management for this child, that they might ignore the very important issues of culture and development of identity. Without that awareness, how will the parents be prepared to model and teach the larger community—the schools, courts, religious institutions, and neighborhoods—thereby creating a holding environment for that child that both honors and respects all of who he/she is?

He ignored her, still catching rain in his withered hands. “The mortal life is as futile as a raindrop.” He shook his head wearily. “Beginning in splendor and comfort, surrounded by a thousand others like itself, by the walls of the cloud. So like the walls of the womb.” He paused to contemplate. “But things concealed must at length be revealed. The womb of all things becomes too crowded; the cloud becomes too weighted. And a raindrop is shoved away, dismissed as useless, forgotten. Its beauty fades, turned grey by the trauma of birth. And then. . . then, Shiloh, the inevitable fall begins. Alone, the raindrop falls, surrounded by other outcasts, yes, but still so alone. And alone, the soul falls, cold. Mortals are so cold, Shiloh. Cold and dead inside their cocoons of imagined warmth.” Again, he stopped, watching the water fall. “Some fall for only a short time. Some fall for years.” He was talking solely of souls now, forgetting the raindrops. “But all fall. In time, all fall. And what comes at the end of the fall, Shiloh? What then?” She watched the drops pelt the ground. “They die and fade away.

Recovery is a resumption of the work that was not completed when the woman was a girl. It is a coming into her own. It is an opportunity to resume the normal process of development that was sidetracked, perhaps first by constrained roles, perhaps by trauma, and then multiplied many times by hiding in the addiction. Her development was sidetracked by not accepting her needs as legitimate and not finding healthy ways to meet them, by not even knowing her needs. And so this is what recovery is: a developmental process of finding and building a new self. Recovery is a process of radical growth and change. When you are in recovery, you give birth to a new self. [...] Many women initially think that recovery means a move from bad to good. They think that being addicted is evidence of shameful neediness, of deep and lasting failures. Recovery is not a move from bad to good, but from false to real. [...] It is reality, being real, that now guides her rather than her efforts to be good or bad.

Recovery is a resumption of the work that was not completed when the woman was a girl. It is a coming into her own. It is an opportunity to resume the normal process of development that was sidetracked, perhaps first by constrained roles, perhaps by trauma, and then multiplied many times by hiding in the addiction. Her development was sidetracked by not accepting her needs as legitimate and not finding healthy ways to meet them, by not even knowing her needs. And so this is what recovery is: a developmental process of finding and building a new self. Recovery is a process of radical growth and change. When you are in recovery, you give birth to a new self. [...] Many women initially think that recovery means a move from bad to good. They think that being addicted is evidence of shameful neediness, of deep and lasting failures. Recovery is not a move from bad to good, but from false to real. [...] It is reality, being real, that now guides her rather than her efforts to be good or bad.

If you want to be saved from your present suffering, you must be willing to change and be changed in the present. That change can be tangible-leaving an abusive relationship, going back to school. But it also can be a change in perception This, in fact, is the harder change. A change of perception to knowing you are enough, and have been since birth, to seeing a world suffused in love and swimming in beauty, despite loneliness, despite pain, illness, loss, trauma, and even atrocity-now that's hard. That seems impossible. Yet, it happens, again and again, and again.

nightmarish memories of the trauma of birth into postnatal freedom and the oceanic bliss of the womb. And even that was only the surface. Behind all biologically determined needs there was also dearly a genuine craving for transcendence that could not be reduced to any simple formula of natural sciences.

Let me begin by saying that no, I am not crazy. I had no intention of initiating this little trauma with one child while giving birth to another. In fact, I was thinking middle school was probably a good target for the whole process. But he, apparently, had other plans. "I go potty!" he said. We were standing at the sink brushing our teeth. "What?" I asked, looking around to see if there was someone else in the room. "I go potty!" he said again. He got down from his little stepstool and stood adamantly before the toilet. "Well, OK, little guy," I replied, hesitantly, "I mean, sure, if that's what you want to do . . . " I certainly couldn't discourage him without being the focus of therapy for years to come. And besides, what kind of mother says, "No, honey, I'd really rather you stayed in diapers until you're old enough to date"? I dutifully took off his diaper and pants, popped in his little potty seat, and lifted him up. "All done!" he squealed with delight. "What?" I practically screamed. "What do you mean, all done? You haven't been up there ten seconds!" "All done!" he said again, and started to hop down. He stood there in the middle of the bathroom, looking very proud of himself, and proceeded to pee on the floor. OK, I said to myself. It's just going to take some time. "Good job, honey! Nice try! We'll get 'em next time!" I said cheerfully. I then put a clean diaper on him, put his pants back on, cleaned up the floor, and started down the stairs. "I go potty!" he called after me. "I go potty again!

Perhaps the beauty of life eclipses the trauma of birth. Do you dwell on the pain you experienced when you delivered your babies?

A fine line exists between quitting on ourselves and letting go of a restrictive position in life and moving forward to reach our ultimate destination based upon our natal predisposition honed by a lifetime of experimentation. Who has not been forced to stop and ask ourselves, ‘who are we,’ ‘what are we doing,’ and ‘where are we going?’ Who has not been forced to pause by life’s dynamic forces and ask ourselves, ‘what mystical chords bind us as a species; what is the meaning of life; and how do we give birth to our genetic blueprint while shaping a sense of purposefulness out of our own existence and striving to bring joy to other people’s hearth?’ To answer these life affirming questions that gnaw most voraciously at our consciousness at the time when tension and unsettling trauma besieges us, we must appreciate our heritage, be mindful our epoch, accept responsibility for our adult decisions, and strive to accumulate wisdom that segues our entrance into the future. Each of us must arrive at a unifying philosophy that guides our living quest, and the sooner we come to terms with our eccentric self the quicker we will perceive and appreciate the ineffable beauty of nature.

Neither the mother’s personality, nor the infant’s neurological anomalies at birth, nor its IQ, nor its temperament—including its activity level and reactivity to stress—predicted whether a child would develop serious behavioral problems in adolescence.20 The key issue, rather, was the nature of the parent-child relationship: how parents felt about and interacted with their kids.

More generally, according to McKenzie, abandonment can be interpreted in many different ways by a child, but it always results in separation anxiety and guilt. He writes, “Thus the human infant is very sensitive and can be terrified or overwhelmed by what it experiences as a threat of separation from its mother. Not just the obvious separations such as the mother dying, but subtle ones such as the family moving to a new house, the birth of a sibling, or an older child getting sick and requiring all the mother’s attention for a period of time. And if there are five older siblings there is five times the chance of this happening. There are literally thousands of events that can cause the infant to experience a separation trauma and feel threatened—by physical OR emotional separation.” A child in its greed for love does not enjoy having to share the affection of its parents with its brothers and sisters; and it notices that the whole of their affection is lavished upon it once more whenever it arouses their anxiety by falling ill. It has now discovered a means of enticing out its parents’ love and will make use of that means as soon as it has the necessary psychical material at its disposal for producing an illness. — Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria

And as we’ve mentioned, one of the most powerful tools we use to help regulate a distressed infant is rhythm. Oprah: Why is that? Dr. Perry: All life is rhythmic. The rhythms of the natural world are embedded in our biological systems. This begins in the womb, when the mother’s beating heart creates rhythmic sound, pressure, and vibrations that are sensed by the developing fetus and provide constant rhythmic input to the organizing brain. These experiences create powerful associations—essentially, memories—that connect rhythms of roughly sixty to eighty beats per minute (bpm) to regulation. Sixty to eighty bpm is the average resting heart rate for an adult; it’s the rhythm the fetus sensed, and it equates to being in balance, to being warm, full, quenched, safe. After birth, rhythms at these frequencies can comfort and soothe, whereas the loss of rhythm, or high, variable, and unpredictable patterns of sensory input, becomes associated with threat.

If you want to be saved from your present suffering, you must be willing to change and be changed in the present. That change can be tangible—leaving an abusive relationship, going back to school, moving down the hallway in an assisted-living facility. But it can also be a change in perception. This, in fact, is the harder change. A change of perception to knowing you are enough, and have been since birth, to seeing a world suffused in love and swimming in beauty, despite loneliness, despite pain, despite illness, loss, trauma, and even atrocity

From the trauma of birth to the agony of death, human existence seemed fraught with suffering, and even death brought no relief because everything and everybody was caught up in an inescapable cycle (samsara) of rebirth, so the whole distressing scenario had to be endured again and again. The

The abusive man learns early in life, from his surrounding society and beyond, that when he becomes an adult he has the right to swallow a female whole, and that in this way he will fill the vast emptiness inside of him and feel empty no more. He learns that the female of his choosing owes him her life entire in this fashion, that it would be wrong of her to fail to sacrifice her life and herself in this way. Not only that, but he learns that this self-erasure will be her greatest joy. He gets these messages all over the place, from his own unhealthy relatives all the way up to police responses, courts, and Disney movies. All of what he learns is a lie. It is a moral lie, meaning it’s a lie about what’s right and what’s wrong; no woman’s life should ever by martyred to fill a man’s (or anyone’s) emptiness. But not only should this not be done, it also cannot be done. Thus it is not only a moral lie but also a lie about the nature of reality. A human being cannot be vacuumed into the inside of another person and become part of that person, in some kind of twisted reversal of the birth process. It’s absurd that it’s even necessary for me to state this. The abusive man hates the woman for continuing to exist outside of him. No matter how hard she may try, in her terror and in her trauma, to disappear inside of him, she simply cannot do it. (And if she gets some support in her life, she may even attempt to refuse to continue trying.) He hates her for this, for still being there, because he was taught that to disappear inside of him is her unlimited obligation and will make him whole. When you find yourself wondering why the abuser hates you – as most abused women do at one point or another – this is why: because you continue to breathe, because you have skin, because you eat food and then move with the energy of that food, because by getting out of bed and standing up in the morning you have once again demonstrated your failure to become him.

father didn’t even know about me until my mother sent him a birth announcement and asked for money to buy baby clothes.

Requiring caretaking and at the same time providing solace, “textiles are often mobilized in the face of trauma, and not just to provide needed garments or coverings but also as a therapeutic means of comfort, a safe outlet for worried hands, a productive channel for the obsessive working through of loss,” explains one art historian.17 Fabric is a special category of thing to people—tender, damageable, weak at its edges, and yet life-sustaining. In these distinctive features, cloth begins to sound like this singular planet we call home. Cloth operates as a “convincing analogue for the regenerative and degenerative processes of life, and as a great connector, binding humans not only to each other but to the ancestors of their past and the progeny of their future,” fiber artist Ann Hamilton has written. “Held by cloth’s hand,” she continues, “we are swaddled at birth, covered in sleep, and shrouded in death. A single thread spins a myth of origin and a tale of adventure and interweaves people and webs of communication.

people are not trustworthy, that when stressed he cannot really emotionally stay connected to them, and that he is unworthy of being loved. This way of seeing the world is typical of insecure attachments and these unconscious emotional biases will guide overt behavior, especially under relational stress. What is more, the infant of a misattuned mother will frequently be presented with an aggressive expression on his mother’s face, implying he is a threat, or with an expression of fear-terror, implying that he is the source of alarm. Images of his mother’s aggressive and/or fearful face, and the resultant chaotic alterations in her bodily state, are internalized, meaning they are imprinted in his developing right brain limbic circuits as an implicit memory, below levels of consciousness. Although out of awareness, they can plague him and his relationships for his entire life unless he finds a way to bring them into conscious awareness and work with them. Furthermore, when the caregiver is attuned in her early interactions, her more mature nervous system is regulating the infant’s neurochemistry and homeostasis. This, in turn, has a profound influence on the structural organization of the developing brain. Conversely emotional trauma will negatively impact the parts of the brain which are developing at the time of trauma. For example, if high levels of stress hormones are circulating in a pregnant mother, it up-regulates the fetus’ developing stress response – making the child, and future adult hypersensitive to stress. Relational trauma that occurs around the time of birth has a negative impact on both the developing micro-architecture of the amygdala itself, and the amygdala’s connection to the HPA axis, as well as to other parts of the limbic system. Thus high levels of early unrepaired interpersonal stress have a profoundly harmful effect on the ability to form social bonds, and on temperament. Suffering unrepaired and frequent emotional stress after about ten months interferes with the experience-dependent maturation of the highest level regulatory systems in the right orbifrontal cortex. This opens the door

Oprah: In every single interaction, there is a moment when we all wonder, Do you see me? Do you hear me? Children know from birth whether their caregiver’s eyes light up when they enter a room. They sense and respond to tenderness, playfulness, compassion, and patience. They know the true feeling of quality time. They know they are loved.

I was born to an unwed female in a settlement that makes Windhaven look like a tolerant, welcoming paradise. She was shunned for bearing a child out of wedlock, and forced to give birth to me alone in a tent in the dead of winter.' Horror lurched through her. She'd known Cassian was low-born, but that level of cruelty because of it... 'What of your father?' 'You mean the piece of shit who forced himself on her and then went back to his wife and family?' Cassian let out a cold laugh that she rarely heard. 'There were no consequences for him.' 'There never are,' Nesta said coolly. She blocked out the image of Tomas's face. 'There are here,' Cassian growled, as if he sensed the direction of her thoughts. Cassian gestured to the city below, hidden by the mountain and the House blocking the view. 'Rhys changed the laws here in the Night Court, and in Illyria.' His face hardened further. 'But it still requires the survivor to come forward. And in places like Illyria, they make life a living hell for any female who does. They seem it a betrayal.' 'That's outrageous.' 'We're all Fae. Forget the High Fae or Lesser Fae bullshit. We're all immortal or close to it. Change comes slowly for us. What humans accomplish in decades takes us centuries. Longer, if you live in Illyria.' 'Then why do you bother with the Illyrians?' 'Because I fought like hell to prove my worth to them.' His eyes glittered. 'To prove that my mother brought some good into this world.' 'Where is she now?' He'd never spoken of her. His eyes shuttered in a way she had not witnessed before. 'I was taken away from her when I was three. Thrown out into the snow. And in her so-called disgraced state, she became prey to other monsters.' Nesta's stomach twisted with each word. 'She did their backbreaking labour until she died, alone and...' His throat worked. 'I was at Windhaven by then. I wasn't strong enough to return to help her. To bring her somewhere safe. Rhys wasn't yet High Lord, and none of us could do anything.' ... 'It's a story for another time. But what I meant to try to explain is that through it all, through every awful thing, the training centred me. Guided me. When I had a shit day, when I was spat on or pummelled or shunned, when I led armies and lost good warriors, when Rhys was taken by Amarantha- through all of that, the training remained. You said the other day the breathing helped you. It helps me, too. It helped Feyre.' She watched the wall rise in his eyes, word after word. As if he waited for her to rip it down. Rip him down. 'Make of that what you will, but it's true.' Oily shame slithered through her. She'd done that- brought this level of defensiveness in him. Heaviness weighed on her. Started gnawing on her insides. So Nesta said, 'Show me another set of movements.' Cassian scanned her face for a heartbeat, his gaze still shuttered, and began his next demonstration.

studies have found that faced with a stressful life event, such as divorce, the birth of a severely disabled child, or military trauma, avoidants’ defenses are quick to break down and they then appear and behave just like people with an anxious attachment style.

Tracey Vogel, an anesthesiologist also trained as a rape crisis counselor, told me that trauma-informed care, crucially, shifts power. "It takes us from 'I am your doctor, and this is what I'm going to be doing to you' to 'I want to know what you might need from me,'" she explained.

Nursing is not for everyone,” Miss Perkins said. “You see every facet of life—birth, death, illness, healing, trauma, madness, despair, joy. To take all that in demands both an iron constitution and a gentle soul. That’s the type of woman we’re looking for. That’s what matters.

Though it is becoming an increasingly popular area of advocacy, the United States continues to top the list of nations that are disconnected from the basic concept of relieving a mother of overwork and giving her dancing hormones the time and space to regulate through rest and proper nutrition. It's a grin-and-bear-it moment (complete with dark circles and wan complexion). And, these days, with more and more women literally and energetically holding the home together as the primary breadwinner, and very often as the emotional center of the home as well, the postpartum period becomes a pressure cooker. The unconscious message beamed from all angles is, "Get back at it. You can't afford to rest." But it seems we can't afford not to. Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that when deliberate physical care and support surround a new mother after birth, as well as rituals that acknowledge the magnitude of the event of birth, postpartum anxiety and its more serious expression, postpartum depression, are much less likely to get a foothold. Consider that the key causes of these disturbingly common, yet still highly underreported, syndromes include isolation, extreme fatigue, overwork, shame or trauma about birth and one's body, difficulties and worries about breastfeeding, and nutritional depletion, all of which suggests that when we let go of the old ways, we inadvertently helped create a perfect storm of factors for postpartum depression.

Our failing physical health is a reflection of our unresolved deeper emotional status through a disruption in the normal functioning of the autonomic nervous system. "Removal of the infant from the mother immediately after birth…to perform the usual rituals…does result in separation and actually traumatizes the infant in the process. Trauma is basically in its purest form disregulation, (meaning) an interruption in the normal smooth regulatory patterns of autonomic cycling which we call homeostasis: optimal state of regulatory function within the brain and body, and that’s what’s disrupted because the part of the brain that develops and grows with attunement regulates that autonomic cycle and that brain does not develop as well if one doesn’t have the early experience of attunement and bonding." — Robert Scaer, MD, The Body Bears the Burden Attunement is a responsive, harmonious relationship. The lack of immediate connection, or attunement, especially with mother—beginning at birth—ignites a lifetime of longing to be reconnected, causing various sorts of autonomic irregularities, depression, and anxiety. Many TMS sufferers report they never bonded with their mother or father, leading to a lifetime of emptiness filled with continuous self-punishment. The father’s role comes along a little later, but is just as critical in the emotional development process that feeds the child what it needs for harmony and balance. Without these connections comes a deep void that is often filled with drugs, depression, anxiety, violence, perfection, and of course TMS. That person who brings tears to your eyes when you reflect back in your life is the one you never made a connection with—and deeply longed to. Early Separation = Fear = Anger = Energy =Autonomic Disregulation ARISING SIMULTANEOUSLY

We all have traumas in our childhood that can make us overlook the beauty that surrounds us. Oftentimes we believe we have to focus more on the negative events because they created so much pain. Some of us believe holding on to the negative is what protects us from not experiencing that pain again. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Unfortunately, we tend to relive aspects of the negative experiences because we stay stuck, by consciously or unconsciously holding on to the negative thoughts our painful experiences birthed.

A deep love relationship, particularly during adolescence, when the brain once again goes through a period of exponential change, truly can transform us. So can the birth of a child, as our babies often teach us how to love.

Nursing is not for everyone,” Miss Perkins said. “You see every facet of life—birth, death, illness, healing, trauma, madness, despair, joy. To take all that in demands both an iron constitution and a gentle soul.

Not just pleasure, not really, more like the stanching of a wound, more like the holding of a tide, a sacrifice, negating the trauma of his birth.

There is now converging evidence supporting the idea that offspring are affected by parental trauma exposures occurring before their birth, and possibly even prior to their conception.’ Rachel Yehuda

The idea of justice being unrealistic is deeply embedded in our psyche. We’ve been socialized from birth to ignore our deepest imaginings, to rush and to believe that our entire lives are built upon what we do for capitalism. It is a relentless attack happening daily and hourly. Rest exists to repair this trauma, fear, and misinformation.

With a break in the mother-child bond among siblings, each child might express his or her disconnection with the mother differently. One child might become a people pleaser, fearing that if he’s not good, or he makes waves, he’ll lose connection with people. Another child, believing that connection is never hers to have in the first place, might become argumentative and create conflict to push away the people close to her. Another child might isolate and have little contact with people at all. I’ve noticed that if several siblings have breaks in the mother-child bond, they’ll often express anger or jealousy, or feel disconnected from one another. For example, an older child might resent the child born later, perceiving that the younger child received the love that he or she did not get. Because the hippocampus—that part of the brain involved in creating memories—isn’t fully operational until after the age of two, the older child may not consciously remember being held, fed, or cuddled by the mother, but remembers the younger child receiving their mother’s love. In response, the older child, feeling slighted, can unconsciously blame the younger child for getting what he or she did not. And then, of course, there are some children who don’t seem to carry any family trauma at all. For these children, it’s quite possible that a successful bond was established with the mother and/or father, and this connection helped to immunize the child from carrying entanglements from the past. Perhaps a window of time opened in which the mother was able to give more to one particular child and not the others. Perhaps the parents’ relationship improved. Perhaps the mother experienced a special connection with one child, but couldn’t connect deeply with the others. Younger children often, though not always, seem to do a bit better than first children, or only children, who seem to carry a bigger portion of unfinished business from the family history. When it comes to siblings and inherited family trauma, there are no hard and fast rules governing how each child is affected. Many variables, in addition to birth order and gender, can influence the choices siblings make and the lives they lead. Even though it may appear from the outside that one sibling is unscathed by trauma, while another is encumbered, my clinical experience gives me a different perspective: Most of us carry at least some residue from our family history. However, many intangibles also enter into the equation and can influence how deeply entrenched family traumas remain. These intangibles include self-awareness, the ability to self-soothe, and having a powerful internal healing experience.

When it comes to siblings and inherited family trauma, there are no hard and fast rules governing how each child is affected. Many variables, in addition to birth order and gender, can influence the choices siblings make and the lives they lead.

What could a postscript, or even fake explosions, staged gunfire, and well-rehearsed screams tell the predominantly non-filipino audience about what had happened in my birth country?How could they even come close to understanding what had brought me to tears, what still lived in my body-not as my firsthand experience, but as my psychic inheritance-and what we remember: the historical traumas that do not, cannot leave a people?

feelings.8 Our sensory world takes shape even before we are born. In the womb we feel amniotic fluid against our skin, we hear the faint sounds of rushing blood and a digestive tract at work, we pitch and roll with our mother’s movements. After birth, physical sensation defines our relationship to ourselves and to our surroundings. We start off being our wetness, hunger, satiation, and sleepiness. A cacophony of incomprehensible sounds and images presses in on our pristine nervous system. Even after we acquire consciousness and language, our bodily sensing

The archaic injury is a term Kohut (1971, 1977) used to refer to the child’s earliest emotional injury or narcissistic vulnerability, be it the birth of a sibling, an unattuned parent, or a parent giving excessive attention to one child over another. To punctuate the importance of continually reminding couples of the role their archaic injury plays in their relationship, I devised a new concept called the “V-spot,” an area of extreme vulnerability that gets aroused when one’s partner hits an emotional raw spot. In psychoanalytic terms it is the seat of the archaic injury, the epicenter of emotional sensitivity It is a product of early trauma that affects all relationships and often creates inappropriate and disproportionate reactions.

Love is a multicultural language with so many faces & rituals. Not everyone loves the same way and I think that's beautiful. Love isn't happiness. It is an action, a choice. Love isn't attachment, love is looking at your mortality and saying "thank you" for the moments it broke, bent, and birthed you. Love is the experience of all emotions and making the choice to move forward with them. Love is you talking to your anxiety when it weighs heavy on your chest and listening to what it has to say until it is quiet. It is the discomfort before the peace the smile across your cheek when your favorite movie is on TV. It is being able to breathe even when you're alone out in the street. Love is you & it is me.

OH, NIETZSCHE The last Christmas Eve of the nineteenth century was very cold Piercing winds and snow stuffed themselves into the cracks of every door and window As professors of philosophy gathered in the Golden Hall Their nonsense and hollow academic jargon were winning applause Feeling a chill, professors furrowed their brows And refined ladies unconsciously pulled their collars closed No one paid attention to the chill, no one even responded But the howling wind outside the window Swept across Europe’s wide sky Outside, Nietzsche was wandering around in the wilderness His thoughts were accompanied by the snowy winds and howls of wolves In this frozen world his thoughts shed their skin again and again Like a bloody struggle to be free of incorporeal chains He relentlessly pursued the truth No one could understand his eccentric and arrogant disposition No one could answer his disdain for this world For only a blizzard of manuscripts accompanied him Weathered by a tormenting disease Nietzsche bitterly suffered from his solitary meditation His discontent with thoughts surged like gales blowing the heavy snow Sweeping the sky and earth with a wild fervor What a pure yet brutal world At that moment the bells of a new century were ringing The generation of heroes Nietzsche called “supermen” From “Martin Eden” penned by Jack London To the old man who went fishing with Hemingway Have already shocked the whole world Through so many sleepless nights he endured the torture of disease Yet nurtured the poetic longing of solitude and indifference An infant thought undergoes the trauma of birth To finally cry out in an earth-shattering voice Nietzsche, before the sunrise changed the world The entire sky shimmered with your incandescent thoughts The nearly extinguished candle was burning your final passion Nietzsche, oh Nietzsche, let us walk on together

Bodies spasm in birth, death, and trauma. So too do civilizations.