Unfinished business

"Once in a while, a piece of old business surfaces; some item on life's agenda you thought you'd dealt with years ago.

"Suddenly, it's there again at the top of the page, competing for your attention, despite the fact that you're completely unprepared for it."

- Sue Grafton, O is for Outlaw

Wise words from an Ohio foster care alumna

"If I'm ever gonna get over it,
first, I've got to get it out."

Kudos to the courage of this young person facing her past and working through difficulties!

Quotes from Torey Hayden book "Twilight Children"

A friend of mine was sexually abused as a child, and she has never talked about it. She doesn't want anyone to know. She has been reunified with her mother after a stint in foster care, but doesn't trust her mother to be able to handle the knowledge.

Her counselor is ready, willing and able to help her -- but she finds it difficult to open up her mouth and speak about what happened.

After a traumatic experience, when you discuss these things, it is painful, because you find yourself reliving it all over again. The violation. The fear. The feelings of powerless.

This is because traumatic experiences encode themselves in the brain via images and emotions, not words. We remember the taste, the touch, the sight, the sound...

But it is by giving them words, verbalizing the experience, that we are able to lasso these huge, powerful, scary experiences and get them under control.

After our phone conversation, I sent this young woman the following quote by Torey Hayden, from her book Twilight Children. Torey is talking with a young girl named Cassandra, and she says:

"What's wrong with you is inside of you. So, wherever you go, your trouble goes inside of you...

"Some really awful things have happened to you. Things children shouldn't have to experience... (Now) you are just trying to protect that troubled place inside of you, because it hurts so much, and you don't want it to get hurt again."

Torey continues:

"Unfortunately, there is a really big problem in doing this. And the problem is: You've protected your troubled place so well that you've ended up taking its side."

"Our minds are kind of funny things. When something big happens to us, it tends to stay really big in our minds and won't become a proper memory unless we talk about it. Our minds, on our own, don't seem to be able to get big events sorted out enough to squish them down to size with our other memories. We need to talk about it.

"Talking helps our minds to organize what happened... It lets us put away things that have happened to us, so they aren't in the way every time we are thinking.

"We talk about them until our mind gets organized about what happened. Then, they're not such a big deal anymore. Finally, they start to feel like ordinary memories and we can stop thinking about them all the time.

"We don't forget them, (but) they stop taking up all our thinking... (so) we can get on with what's happening now in our lives and not worry any more about it."

"BUT just the opposite happens if we have to keep something big a secret. First of all, we have to create a special place in our minds to keep it... chock full of all the stuff we can't tell...

"You have to lock it up really tight, so even you can't get there very easily. And if you don't, then you don't have any room in your mind for other thinking."

"When you first do it, first create a Troubled Place and manage to get it locked up, it's easy to think you've made it go away.

"But the fact is... just the opposite is true... Everything you put in there, it keeps really fresh, like its just happened. So, if you accidentally crack open the door... everything will hurt horribly all over again."

"What happened to you... didn't happen to you because you are a bad person. It didn't make you a bad person because it happened. It just happened.

"And now it's time for it to be OVER. It's time to open the door on the troubled place and clean all that junk out. Not to throw it away, because those memories are a part of your memories, part of what makes you 'you.'

"But it's time to make them ordinary. To talk about them until you understand how you felt, what you feel did, what other people did.

"To talk about them until there aren't any secrets left in your Troubled Place to stay fresh and scary, to talk until you're bored with them. That will turn them into ordinary memories, like all the rest of memories in your life."

Men and fear of intimacy

"She prefers the senseless pain that we inflict on each other to the pain that we might otherwise inflict upon ourselves."

- William Hurt, Altered States

"Too many women mistake a man's hostility for wit and his silence for depth."

- Sue Grafton, L is for Lawless

The aftermath of rape

http://www.backinskinnyjeans.com/2006/01/the_last_time_i.html

More Quotes from The Unsayable

- "At first, words are babbling stream of sound. And though very young children play with words and sounds in turn-taking rhythms with others, they don't use language with the purpose of communicating.

"But as a child begins to see that words can make things happen, can call forth specific response from others, she is able to make what Lacan calls 'a demand.' This is a request for recognition of what she means and for a response that affirms she is loved."

- "Provided with food and warmth, yet without recognition or any evidence of love, a child will become lethargic, stop growing and even die. The capacity to ask for something, and make herself understood, is crucial to a child's sense of being loved. But making a demand requires a risk; the other person may not understand, or may understand and say no."

Source: The Unsayable by Annie G. Rogers, PhD

Quotes from The Unsayable

"Although some see me as an 'expert' on trauma, I'm not. Trauma is bigger than expertise of any sort - it's in our midst, in our language, our wars, even the ways we try to love, repeating, repeating. No one is an expert on trauma."

"Even then I had a reputation for reaching 'unreachable' children... If a child is suffering, in that quiet invisible way that children really do suffer, I am drawn to find that child and make contact. Maybe I am going back to myself as a child... I simply won't be turned away."

"In my practice I want to hear children in a way that invites them to say more, to find words for the unsayable - and this necessarily means listening to the unconscious."

"I gradually learned that trauma follows a different logic, a condensed psychological logic that is associative, layered, nonlinear, and highly metaphoric."

"Trauma is a letter written on the body in vanishing ink.... a message emerges that demands to be read, to be known."

Source: The Unsayable by Annie G. Rogers, PhD

The Myth of Child Resiliency

Bruce Perry has made it his life's work to understand how trauma affects children, and to develop innovative ways to help them cope with it. In 1996, he founded the Child Trauma Academy, since research demonstrates that the impact of PTSD is far greater on on children than it is on adults.

Children can recover from unspeakable trauma -- but adults' responses to children during and after traumatic events can greatly affect their chances of recovery.

Quotes from The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog:

- "It's hard to imagine today, but when I was in medical school in the early 1980's, researchers didn't pay much attention to the lasting damage that psychological trauma can produce. Even less consideration was given to how trauma mgiht harm children. It wasn't considered relevant. Children were believed to be naturally "resilient" with an innate ability to "bounce back."

- "The brain is a historical organ. It stores our personal narrative. Our life experiences shape who we become by creating our brain's catalog of template memories, which guide our behavior, sometimes in ways we can consciously recognize, more often via processes beyond our awareness."

- "if anything, children are more vulnerable to trauma than adults... Resilient children are made, not born. The developing brain is most malleable and sensitive to experiences - both good and bad - early in life."

- "Children become resilient as a result of the patterns of stress and nurturing that they experience early on in life... we are rapidly and easily transformed by trauma when we are young. Though its effects may not always be visible to the untrained eye, when you know what trauma can do to children, sadly, you begin to see its aftermath everywhere."

- "Ultimately, what determines how children survive trauma, physically, emotionally , or psychologically, is whether the people around them - particularly the adults they should be able to trust and rely upon - stand by them with love, support and encouragement."

The story in this book that most deeply affected me as a reader was one about a three-year-old girl named Sandy who witnessed her mother's murder, and almost died herself.

Yet, her CPS caseworker did not believe that she needed to see a mental health professional. For nine months, Sandy was moved from foster home to foster home, with no counseling whatsoever -- and the details of her life were not shared with any of her foster parents because she was in hiding from the murderer.

No Man's Woman; Nobody's Child

"I could see in a flash the extreme pleasure I'd taken in being related to no one.

"I'd actually managed to feel superior about my isolation, I was subtle about it but I could see that I'd turned it into a form of self-congratulation.

"I wasn't the common product of the middle class. I wasn't a party to any convoluted drama. The feuds, the unspoken alliances, secret agreements and petty tyrannies.

"Of course, I wasn't a party to the good stuff either."

- Sue Grafton, J is for Judgment

"Pain and sadness are homeless beggars in my life, displaced feelings that come and go, plopping down for their own reasons, sleeping in any corner of my brain. They wear at me with a constant tiredness that I have to chase out.

"Sometimes, though, a trigger pulls inside me, and the pain goes off, getting bad. It isn't like I know all the triggers, but school newness is a definite."

- Clinton, Cathryn. The Eyes of Van Gogh.

Strategies for Coping With Panic

1. Remember that although your feelings and symptoms are very frightening, they are not dangerous or harmful.

2. Understand that what you are experiencing is just an exaggeration of your normal bodily reactions to stress.

3. Do not fight your feelings or try to wish them away. The more you are willing to face them, the less intense they will become.

4. Do not add to your panic by thinking about what "might" happen. If you find yourself asking "What if?" tell yourself "So what!"

5. Stay in the present. Notice what is really happening to you as opposed to what you think might happen.

6. Label your fear level from zero to ten and watch it go up and down. Notice that it does not stay at a very high level for more than a few seconds.

7. When you find yourself thinking about the fear, change your "what if" thinking. Focus on and carry out a simple and manageable task such as counting backward from from 100 by 3's or snapping a rubber band on your wrist.

8. Notice that when you stop adding frightening thoughts to your fear, it begins to fade.

9. When the fear comes, expect and accept it. Wait and give it time to pass without running away from it.

10. Be proud of yourself for your progress thus far, and think about how good you will feel when you succeed this time.

Source:
Jerilyn Ross, M.A., L.I.C.S.W., The Ross Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders, Disorders, Inc., Washington, DC. Adapted from Mathews et al., 1981.

PMS and PTSD: A bad combination

The reason that PTSD survivors are affected differently from others when faced with the same stressful situation is that person carries a different emotional history inside our bodies. The external event may reawaken the lingering memories of similar events from the past, memories that carry their own set of anxieties.

The residue of emotional trauma from earlier in life can be held deep inside the body where it influences the way we live our lives, and disrupts normal bodily functioning. When an event occurs that is similar to the originating event, it can aggravate the hidden emotions and cause them to flare up, worsening our behavior and exacerbating our physical problems.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to a terrifying event or ordeal in which grave physical harm occurred or was threatened.

Many people with PTSD repeatedly re-experience the ordeal in the form of flashback episodes, memories, nightmares, or frightening thoughts, especially when they are exposed to events or objects reminiscent of the trauma. Anniversaries of the event can also trigger symptoms.

Emotional symptoms can include:
■ Hypervigilence
■ Exaggerated startle response
■ Irritability or outbursts of anger
■ Heart-stopping terror
■ Emotional numbness
■ Depression, anxiety
■ Feelings of intense guilt
■ Sleep disturbances such as nightmares and recurring dreams of the event

People with PTSD tend to have abnormal levels of key hormones involved in response to stress. Fear, an emotion that evolved to deal with danger, causes an automatic, rapid protective response in many systems of the body. For people with PTSD, the "fight or flight" response becomes inappropriately aroused.

PMS: Pre-Menstrual Syndrome
Emotional symptoms can include:
■ Mood swings
■ Fear, nervous tension
■ Feeling overwhelmed, powerless, out of control
■ Depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts
■ Phobias, feelings of suspicion
■ Sleep disturbances

The words used to describe panic disorders are often frightening. But there is great hope: Treatment can benefit virtually everyone who has this condition.

Several types of medication, particularly the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and other antidepressants, can help relieve the symptoms of both PMS and PTSD.

Additional treatment options:
■ Breathing exercises: Control breathing to avoid hyperventilation
■ Replace alarmist thoughts with calmer ones
■ Approach fearful situations gradually
■ Join a support group

Source:
National Institute of Mental Health
Toll-Free: 1-88-88-ANXIETY (1-888-826-9438)
E-mail: nimhinfo@nih.gov
NIMH Web site: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/

Recent research on PTSD

According to the National Institute of Mental Health:

■ In brain imaging studies, researchers have found that the hippocampus—a part of the brain critical to emotion—appears to be different in cases of PTSD. Scientists are investigating whether this is related to short-term memory problems. Changes in the hippocampus are thought to be responsible for intrusive memories and flashbacks that occur in people with this disorder.

■ People with PTSD tend to have abnormal levels of key hormones involved in response to stress. Some studies have shown that cortisol levels are lower than normal and epinephrine and norepinephrine are higher than normal.

■ When people are in danger, they produce high levels of natural opiates, which can temporarily mask pain. Scientists have found that people with PTSD continue to produce those higher levels even after the danger has passed; this may lead to the blunted emotions associated with the condition.

For more information:
National Center for PTSD: http://www.ncptsd.org/

Source:
National Institute of Mental Health
Toll-Free: 1-88-88-ANXIETY (1-888-826-9438)
E-mail: nimhinfo@nih.gov
NIMH Web site: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/

Helping Traumatized Children Learn

The Massachusetts Advocates for Children has released a report and policy agenda to help ensure that children traumatized by family violence succeed in school.

The report sets forth an education and policy agenda to help schools become more supportive environments where traumatized children can focus, behave appropriately, and learn.

http://www.massadvocates.org/helping_traumatized_children_learn

MICKY: POST - TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER

MICKY: POST - TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER

Another survivor of the system shares statistics and information about PTSD...

Intimacy can bring emotional damage to the surface

Whatever the surface appearances, most human beings come equipped with convoluted emotional machinery... With intimacy, the wreckage starts to show.

- Sue Grafton, D is for Deadbeat

Postcard Project on the Culture of Foster Care

Link to "Without A Tribe"

http://withoutatribe.blogspot.com/2007/05/session-with-betty-throwing-yourself.html

Triggers and Vietnam War veterans

Some veterans from the Vietnam War were so traumatized that any loud noise similar to the sound of gunshot triggered flashbacks of the war.

Grown men rolled into a gutter in order to 'take cover' from the sound of a car backfiring. The sound triggered a full-body reenactment of the war experience.

This experience of post-traumatic stress disorder was not under the veteran's concious control. It was an automatic response when the neural network associated with the trauma of war was triggered.

Again, take note that a Harvard/Casey study has proven that foster care alumni experience post-traumatic stress disorder at a rate twice that of Vietnam War veterans.

Source:
McGraw, Patricia. It's not your fault: How healing relationships change your brain and can help you overcome a painful past. IL: Bahaii Publishing, 2004.

Learning to disconnect from thoughts, feelings and behavior

Behavior doesn't come out of a vacuum. Underneath the surface, there are deep roots from which that behaviour has grown.

When babies are born, as part of the imprinting process, a baby experiences their parents' emotions as if they were his/her own. It's an emotional merger, wherein the parent and child are meant to "attune" to one another's experience.

Ideally, the environment would be stable and safe.
Ideally, the growing child will be given words to describe his/her emotions.

In this ideal situation, a child would be secure and ensured of protection and love. This child would learn to identify feelings when experiencing them, and think about how to respond to that emotion.

But what if a child's safety and well-being are seriously threatened?
What is there is an external threat that seems frightening and insurmountable?
What if the first relationships of a child's life are broken?

Foster care creates repeated trauma. Children learn to disconnect with thoughts and feelings in order to survive.

Trauma can also create a disconnection with personal behavior: If you, or someone that you know, are involved in self-destructive behavior, over and over, examine their pasts for imprints of relationship patterns in which that type of behavior was born.

Consider a child who was sexually molested -- and ends up exploiting his/herself through unhealthy relationships or becoming a stripper or prostitute. In a sense, what this person is doing is reenacting the abuse from their past in order to make sense of it.

Numbing out: Victims of trauma often try to escape their emotional pain. They try to numb out by sexualizing events, eating emotions, drinking to dull the event, smoking to feel the buzz of nicotine or using drugs to make the situation temporarily 'disappear.'

These are survival techniques. In the face of danger, memories become fragmented, mental processes shut down and the only focus is on survival.

But emotions are basic to survival. When a person's outer life and inner life are disconnected, that person cannot heal.

It takes courage to seek help.
It takes courage to stop running and look yourself in the eye.
Even after the healing process has begun, there will be moments of uncertainty.

In post-traumatic stress disorder, fear from the past raises its ugly head and causes the body to react with fight-or-flight or freeze responses. This experience can be very unpredictable and confusing.

Here are the stages of healing, according to Dr. McGraw:

1.) Attunement to self: Take time to be aware of your emotions, including physical symptoms such as increased heart-rate. Journal about the emotions and bodily sensations that you are experiencing, as well as the thoughts and memories that emerge.

You need this time to remind yourself that your physical state and emotions are important.

Learn what your 'triggers' are... To be triggered is to reexperience an event from the past in the present. You will experience the bodily sensations and emotions of a terrifying event that happened long ago.

2.) Strengthening and stabilization: Create safe and stable life circumstances for yourself. Inasmuch as it is in your power, keep your everyday life free of crisis and chaos. Do not participate in behaviors that you have been using to avoid or act out traumatic experiences.

You need this time to give yourself a base of happier memories and safe experiences.

3.) Working through traumatic experiences: After having a base of happier memories, adults find that they are better able to deal with the past.

-This stage should not be rushed. Rushing this process can be damaging and counterproductive.

-Simply talking about a problem will not heal it. The actual events are less important than their emotional impact.

-Pace yourself. Take baby steps. If a conversation becomes too painful, end it. Revisit the problem later, when the emotional intensity has subsided.

Shocking, surprising or overwhelming yourself with emotional experiences that you are not prepared to handle will not help you heal.

4.) Acceptance and service: This is characterized by:

-No longer hiding from yourself, your past or your true feelings. See yourself within your own story with compassion and empathy. Be the hero of your own story.

-Being aware of your triggers and not letting your emotions take you hostage. Creating a strategy for coping and recovering when triggers occur.

-Building the capacity to develop warm, loving relationships with others. Avoid or discard harmful relationships. Seek to build new, positive connections.

-Establish a goal and direction for your life. What unique abilities do you have to offer the world?

Source:
McGraw, Patricia. It's not your fault: How healing relationships change your brain and can help you overcome a painful past. IL: Bahaii Publishing, 2004.