BRIEF COMMENTARY ON "RESILIENCY"

Sparking thoughts, Robert.  Not that I can pursue them very far at present.  My trusty right brain brings images of "birds on a wire" -- of my father often singing "Pack up your troubles in an old kit bag..." -- Maybe Pandora has moved on

 

The word "wary" comes to mind.  As does "taboo."  And of course the myth of Jason and Medea, that so-old story of (a probable borderline) and butchered children while "the public" did nothing to prevent the inevitable.

 

Also Anglo history, the church's separation (for all of us, it turns out, participating in that legacy culture) of the angel-from-the-demon.  What Jungian conception of dark and light splitting of the daimone do we foster by shutting out truth because we do not like "the feeling" some words generate within our body?

 

That word, "perjorative" and its interesting roots:  Late Latin pejoratus, past participle of pejorare to make or become worse, from Latin pejor worse; akin to Sanskrit padyate he falls, Latin ped-, pesfoot — more at foot

Tina, I thought you used words rather well, to explain yourself, in the post just above my last one. Sometimes, when I write about situations that occurred in my childhood, I find myself at a loss for an "abstract concept" to describe something that may be a part of a pattern, which I may have had sources of resilience that I used to cope with some of them. .... I'm glad you've articulated and chronicled many of the Human Rights Abuses you endured. Growing up in a small town, has some similarities to the wide open space of Alaska.... ---Bob

Hi again Linda,

     I think there is an unfortunate pejorative connotation to the word  "Radical", like Judith Lewis Herman notes in her book: "Trauma and Recovery"-where she notes the pejorative use of "diagnostic constructs" like "Borderline Personality Disorder" or just "Borderline". One of the things that so impressed me about Charles Hampden-Turner's book: "Radical Man: The Process of Psycho-Social Development", was how many of the "Radical" character traits he noted, that were an affirmation of our humanity, our ability to "Risk Connection", to validate others viewpoints-even if we disagreed with their "world view", and the capacity to Empathize!  Hampden-Turner noted many of these traits among student "Radicals" of the 1960's. Saul Alinsky's book: "Rules for Radicals" was one of my "Community Organizing 'Bible's". ....I also think there are positive connotations to the word "Radical", going back to Thomas Paine's time (especially his treatise on "Women's Rights"), as well as some of Sharon Wise's artwork and quotes which decorate: "Engaging Women in Trauma-Informed Peer Support: A Guidebook" by Andrea Blanch, Beth Filson, and Darby Penney...

I'm not sure where to go here. But I do want to respond. Maybe you could call escape learning. There certainly was a component of watching, being very observant of facial expressions and body postures in an attempt to learn how to avoid and protect myself and my siblings as much as possible. This learning I would like to unlearn because it is not useful anymore. In fact it is down right bad for my current life. I also don't think I am special. Anyone subjected and there are many probably millions alive in the U.S. right now who learned and were fortunate enough to escape with their life. It is what survival in the face of massive threat demands - we all will use whatever means we can and use our reptilian brain to learn what we can do to survive. If there is nothing we can do, we collapse ..... I collapsed many times..... And I often felt extremely helpless. In fact I was musing over how my learned helplessness was a real burden to me now.  It made sense at the time like the flow of a stream taking the path of least resistance... Now it is the warn path in my mind that I'd also like to dam up and then divert the stream towards new a path of "I have agency".  I am not 6, 7, or 8 anymore and my dad cannot hurt me. He is dead.  I believe we should give families and children the tools to strengthen their resilience to the 'no way around them' adverse events that we all will have to face. I don't think we build up kids resilience so we can dish them out more trauma ....no no .... but that isn't how I am seeing resilience... We educate parents about what will hurt their child, we help them feel more confident in their abilities so they are less stressed so they are less likely to hurt their child and build children's skills too to help them better cope w/o or with reduced to the inevitable stuff that comes up in life and we teach parents that purposefully torturing kids just ain't right. If people knew what my dad was doing actually torturing me with cigarettes and electric cords and other sick stuff, he wouldn't have been able to continue... I don't think... No one knew. We were totally isolated.  When kids are isolated I get scared. Behind those walls can be some monstrous acts and you cannot get to the kids to give them the love they need. They are alone and that is when it is really hard cause then you do whatever a 6, 7, 8 etc year old can come up with to survive no adult assistance at all and that is incredibly damaging to the mind. There were recently two kids found in a freezer in Detroit a 7 and 13 year old. They were only found because their mom was being evicted. The siblings were forced to live with them in the freezer one 17 and another 8 or something. Who would ever think a 17 year old wouldn't say anything about a torturous mother who has two dead siblings in the freezer? Most adults would believe this unthinkable (and they want to try 17 year olds as adults and give them the death penalty-absolutely nuts) but this didn't surprise me at all because I know how confused about what makes sense and fearful your parents can make you. I have no doubt I would not have said anything either and I'm sure most people if forced as kids to experience such things over long periods of their developing childhoods don't know it, but they wouldn't speak either. You have no freedom when you grow up like that and you have no idea who if anyone is safe or what is it okay to tell someone my mom killed my brother and sister and they are in the freezer so leaving siblings killed by mother in the freezer is what most of us would naturally do.  I know my sister Renee nor my brother Steven would ever say anything if my parents had killed me and stuck me in the freezer.... Not cause they are bad or because someone even told them not to tell but the fear level is so high you don't dare do anything that would send them off into a rage because you will be next but it's even more than that there is this unconscious thing that guides you and you just don't speak... I cannot explain this well with words!!!! Thanks T

Linda, Tina,

     It's been an enlightening time, reading your posts on this "thread". I had a thought about Alex...and how I found Peter Levine's book: "Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma" addresses childhood "medical trauma", and how the body keeps the score (Bessel van der Kolk called Peter Levine in to do consults with patients of his--and a few are cited in the book). But the Chapter on First Aid for Children, in the section (IV) First Aid for Trauma, may offer some helpful clues, in portions dealing with "Traumatic Reenactment and Renegotiation"; as well as "Key Principles for Renegotiating Trauma with Children". I hope it's helpful. ... 

Thinking about how trauma is to large extent defined as experience outside the range of ordinary.  There is a danger in - in broad terms - helping anyone "handle trauma better" in that making trauma less extraordinary and more ordinary (easier to live with) is NOT the direction we want to go in!

My bedrock rests on this:  Any efforts made by anyone to "help a child become more resilient" to survive in an environment containing ANY preventable human-caused trauma is as wrong as that trauma is.

 

Where does THIS idea lead?

All kinds of peripheral thoughts wish to crowd into my day's arena - which cannot happen any more than this briefest mention as little buy is fully in motion here:  TOLERANCE.  process of.  degrees of.  acquisition of.  etc.  How do human beings come to be able to TOLERATE this strange new world we are born into?

Like stringing up another needed clothesline between trees my next line of thinking opens up:  Choice.  What choice does severe psychotic mental illness leave its victim?  What choices do children have as the victims of such illnesses?  What choices are involved in any arena of experience for which the concept of "resiliency" COULD possibly be applied?

 

What is human existence without choice?  Do choices take place in the absence of empowerment and/or self efficacy? What does this look like from birth forward?

Thursday, April 9, 2015 – Tina, fire meets fire in the two of us.  In the middle of my eleven hour day caring for young, needy little boys yesterday, as I stood washing dishes at the kitchen sink (I did not have time to read your posted comment until very late evening) I had the inner image come to me of people like us:  We are like fish who were able to come ashore, stand on legs and stand air.  Speaking of air, your words took my breath away.

 

This morning as I determine to write a reply to you in these brief moments before my w-year-old grandson arrives for yet another day of my care the word – the one simple word for which humans at present really have no true definition for – comes to mind:  Learning.

 

You and I LEARNED how to endure and survive what was done to us, the unimaginable brutality, the fundamental insane madness, the encroachment of evil done to small children – only we were somehow NOT helpless.  We were able, instant by instant, to LEARN as our lives passed through the time of our childhoods from birth, how to keep our inner self intact along with our body which houses us.

 

“Learning” is a much humbler word than “resiliency” is.  It carries no special stretch of thought to imagine.  Does a newborn learn how to cry?  Does an infant learn how to smile, roll over, sit up, crawl, walk?  I say my youngest grandson is learning to talk.  How is gaining the ability to talk any different than gaining the ability to crawl – or to survive the in-survivable?  For how we made it through to the other end DID come from within us.  Somehow.

 

To me it is this “somehow” as it applies to all I mention in this prior paragraph that needs to capture attention when considering how unbearable trauma is made bearable to those who survive it.  And for some, like my mother and your father, the ability to bear whatever happened to them during the most critical stages of their early life seemed to have forced madness to erupt without cessation.

 

There is no line between survival and triumph, absolute triumph, when it comes to people like you and me.  Of what shape and form was our lifeline?  This line of thought only sends me backward in my thinking.  Does a zygote learn to grow its body?  Does it grow only because it is so-called resilient?

 

And again I question even the growing collective body of thoughts about “attachment.”  It is essentially an attachment of self from the start of life to self that causes a life to move forward in time no matter what circumstances it may be traveling through.  Attachment is not a series of Hallmark Moments.  It is a very literal physiological process of interactive relationships that take place according to critically important discernable patterns that sustain, maintain life so that death does not occur.

 

It seems, Tina, that you and I could importantly collaborate on a book about these topics and our time, effort and investment would not be wasted.  If, however as I suspect, humans are involved in an organic process of learning right now it may be that a requisite level of maturity has not yet collectively been reached that would allow for comprehension of what we have to say.  What we know.

 

In the meantime you and I exist as chaos theorists discovered within that “mystic” space where creation itself takes place in the “insignificant” realms of statistical improbability. 

Great Blog.  I totally get what you are saying. I don't want anyone else to get mad or think that I think their trauma was less significant. Any trauma is significant but there is this really bad thing that happens when your parents are purposefully sadistic to you starting as an infant. It is really hard to explain and when there is no one to go to, I at least, really have felt like a fish without water flopping on the deck and still trying to survive in this world which lacks an understanding of how bad this type of torture is.  I often felt I grew up in a concentration camp and my "Josef Mengele" was a man named Francis Leo (my dad) and the other twin was a little boy named Steven.  He would tell me I was his slave and that he could kill me or Steven at any minute.  I knew he was not kidding.  I was really scared of him.  I will probably always be afraid of Leo.  I will say more later but for now this is all I can muster.  

 

If a parent duck tapes a kid to a chair and then bares an electric cord and shocks the kid... how much child resilience does it take to get the parent to stop.... you could use your intellect and find a way (hopefully to get him to stop -- for me crying didn't work so I let that go quick --- sitting there and taking it didn't work --- so I had to dissociate )---- and if the crazy didn't stop and kept doing it or upped the current to a level beyond what the body can take we are asking children to use resilience to defy human physiology..... I think that is where we feel a little upset by all this resilience talk...... There comes a point when left with really insane parents there is nothing a kid can do if chosen for sadistic maltreatment... you cannot smile enough, you cannot beg enough, you cannot tell him you will do what ever it is that he wants you to do enough.... you have no control and it doesn't matter how smart, cute, creative or whatever adjective you would like to use.... it ain't gonna work....... That is why I really hate some of the resilience questions used because they basically insinuate that children are supposed to defy human physiology..... it ain't happening unless children somehow learn to become either God or Superman....

 

I was listening to a Bessel van der Kolk talk (and by the way thanks for all the Teicher links -- another hero of mine)  and he said something (paraphrasing here) that he was a little leary on all this resilience stuff too because with massively overwhelming trauma ANYBODY's resilience could be overwhelmed.  It makes sense because what is the etiology of resilience? The bending of a thin limb from a tree.  If you bend it some, the limb will take it without breaking (there may still be damage to the limb), you could put a steel pipe around the limb and try to break it (get a pipe wrench or a blow torch bet you could still break it)  but if you continue to bend and twist eventually any limb and even the largest Redwood sooner or later WILL break.....

 

For me, it is about teaching parents about the horribly negative effects that can happen to their kids if they don't get help and stop bending their child. The child WILL indeed MUST eventually break (and it doesn't matter how much resilience, sweetness, cuteness, intelligence or whatever a child has).  I want parents to at least have the knowledge that the fear they are placing in their child can create a broken adult (or a dead kid). Some parents will be receptive, some will not. At the time mine would not have been interested .... but my mom learned ... tragically ..... what a terrible mistake she had made.   We can educate parents and we can save children.... that is my life's goal......................

Tina, our conversation last night was surprisingly good for me.  I guess it has been awhile since I have had the opportunity to meet someone like you!  Some of my related thoughts are in this post

 

+TEMPORARY TRAUMA-BURDEN VACATIONS! (locating our trauma-healing peers)

Thank you!

I think, Tina, that in the end I continue to fight for those that whatever research might say are not "doing well."  This topic is rather central in my thinking right now, in what few moments of quiet I can glean in a busy week of days caring for my daughter's youngest who turns 3 in July, because this brilliant daughter of mine is currently lining up her own research involving the ACE questionnaire combined with resiliency study for her doctoral dissertation.

 

We do not (yet?) see anything like eye-to-eye on this topic.  She knows my history well.  She knows, honors and respects me.  And yes, it is primary to me to support her in finding her own way as I have all of her life.  BUT!!  What about "the rest of us?" I want to know.

 

The rest, who are still alive, GOT this way by using a combination of amazing abilities that allowed them to survive when surviving was not an option.  

 

++

 

I had not yet read your comment about your patients when I began to write this.  How you brought yourself to such a high level of service to humanity has to be a stunning story.  In the decades I did seek therapy NEVER did any therapist suggest to me that Mother was mentally ill!!  Of course the diagnostic category of borderline didn't exist until recently, but some one of those therapists needed to TELL me my mother was insane!

 

The closest any therapist ever got to telling me this truth, and even she was shooting in the dark, was the one who told me to read People of the Lie by M. Scott Peck.  And, yes, BINGO with that identification of the snakes-in-the-gut feeling from being around someone who is evil.

 

I now know that this sense of evil is not that the person is evil, but rather than the person is SO SICK there can be no consciousness that could prevent evil actions from being taken.

 

When my oldest daughter was in about 2nd grade her teacher in that very small town school asked a question of her students one day that I thought was very astute!  "Has anyone ever made you eat part of a bar of soap?"  This took place nearly 40 years ago.  Smart teacher!  What she did if a student said yes, I have no idea, but it does make me think that there must be some very simple, creative and yes SLY ways to find the sickest of the sickest parents.

 

I "accidentally" ended up with all of my mothers letters and diaries when she died.  I am hoping my daughter will someday have time to edit them.  There are 10 manuscripts finished from these writings which include some with my commentary included.  If nothing else, I believe these writings from Mother provide an extremely rare long term look inside the mind of an incredibly abusive mother.  

 

The babies!!  Oh, these sickest parents are so clever!  It may be that ONLY people like you can protect them.  I so honor the person you are and the work that you do.

       
       


Yes I remember my hair pulled and caught many times.

I gotta say I cannot say it any better....they isolate and then methodically destroy the soul such that an envy of the dead has been a frequent companion of mine....

This is the darkness of what sadistic abuse does to a human....

I too am often concerned about how to screen for these parents. I have screened for aces in the pedi office but always knew these ones, the sadistically damaging soul murderers, are the ones I don't think can be picked up either and they are common... My thought is show serve and return early.... Show how rewarding it can be interacting with the infant from the start... In no way disrupt the birth bonding not for checking weight or a dumb blood sugar or what ever... Then lots of info about how abuse and trauma for young kids brain development is a kin to feeding a child lead... Now it is important to use finesse and this won't work for those really mentally ill who just cannot seem to get it but that's my start.

And our homestead Jamesway's roof was curved canvas, right over the beds!

 

There was a LOT of forced isolation and solitary confinement done to me - massive amounts!  Along with the terrible abuse.  Such bizarre parents and HARMFUL - and no way society is prepared to screen for them or get children away from such harm!  Borderlines can be so "charming" and cunning - making it even harder for their abusive madness to be detected.  We have a LONG way to go to protect children

 

You are very correct on the threat to life!!  And what that does to a very young person - even an infant - especially the very young!  But ultimately LIFE ITSELF was bigger than those who harmed us.  To this day I have times I envy the dead!  The continuing to live - it is very complicated for some of us

I just finished reading your entire story. We have lots in common. My dad was the insane one with BPD or sociopathic personality disorder. My mom was an angry observer who never stopped my dad at all. You parents were absolutely as sick as mine and I am so sorry.... I know how very very bad treatment like that is...and yes we had the same stupid sawed off stacked three high army bunk beds whenever I was up there, I felt like I was in a coffin.

I too have had lots of problems with all these definitions of resilience. Could it be the time you got away from them for a short time and went deep into the inner workings of ones mind, or left thoughts of them for a time to look at the beauty of a monarch on a milkweed or just chase clouds in the sky... When it is as bad as your story ... I think we get completely back to the wall pushed to survival and really just about survival only... I knew at any time my dad could and would have killed me or my brother if he wanted and he made sure we knew it.... I bet you felt that your insane mother could kill you too at any minute.. That's what I think when it is God awful bad with no reprieve from fear of death, resilience is mearly a manifestation of doing whatever it takes not to die.

Sawed off metal Army bunks!  HA HA!!  Do not sit up on the bottom ones and expect to keep your HAIR!  Ouch!

To me this is weird. I read Age 8 bloody nose. We had the same three stacked army beds in my small room in the trailer. Me on top no more than about 18 inches (cause I'm the oldest), Renee in the middle and Steven on the bottom.. It gave me weird déjà-vo..... We might have lots in common...

Tina, I can tell even from what you are describing here in this limited format that you KNOW what I am saying about this topic!  Always my heart BREAKS for other sufferers!  SO WRONG!!!  The world has to CHANGE - you are AMAZING!!!!! 

 

Yes, "that one relationship" would be NICE and of course most excellent - BUT - there IS more to "this story" of resiliency!  Oh, well.  Shouting into the wind?  And I tell you, living at present in North Dakota the wind SHOUTS BACK!  Last week many residents couldn't leave their office buildings or open their car doors the wind was SHOUTING so loudly!!!