#6 in my News Blog series, studies for my new book:
"Don’t Try This at Home-The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder - How I accidentally regressed myself back to infancy and healed it all" at AttachmentDisorderHealing.com/book/
Fear with a capital F has been bred deep into our neurons since man first walked the earth. Neurobiologists call it the “negativity bias” of the brain. For most of history, our brains needed to fear a stick far more than we needed to enjoy a carrot. “If you fail to avoid a stick in the Serengeti today, you’re finished – but if you don’t find a carrot today, you’ll likely be alive to find one tomorrow,” as Dr. Rick Hanson puts it. [FN1]
It hits me that my trauma is a cosmic joke based on fear: I’m the logical consequence of human evolution. And the numbers are coming in now to show that our failure to respect how our bodies have evolved is the reason 50% of Americans have some degree of Adult Attachment Disorder, childhood ACE trauma, and their dire medical effects.
“Thank you for flying Reassociation Air,” I joked to a friend, “This is your Captain speaking from the Butt End of Evolution. Since we left the caves, the human brain has been evolving to develop an ever-more exquisite ability to feel fear. Only the most fearful and anxious of us survived (for dissociation and reassociation see FN2).
“Finally my great-grand parents traveled from London to Cape Town to Canberra to Denver while having 13 children, of whom my grandma was the 12th. How much attachment, attuned face-to-face emotional attention, could grandma have received? Do the math; she couldn’t have gotten much more attention than the 12th piece of luggage. So how much attuned parenting could she have given my mother?
“By that point humans had evolved to be so fearful and anxious that great-grandma probably treated grandma like luggage, who treated my mother like luggage; then my mother didn’t even want the luggage; she didn’t want a child, as she made clear to me. So here I am at the Butt End of Evolution: I couldn’t manage to procreate at all, or stay married. I have no children and no family.
“The moral is: if you have a lot of emotional baggage, the reason might be that you, too, were treated like luggage.”
Too depressing? Never fear! There are solutions. There are programs to create resilience and deep healing for us wounded adults so we don’t pass it on to the kids. I know healing and transformation do come; I’ve experienced it deeply. That’s why I make these jokes. But healing comes only when we give up denial and look deeply into these issues.
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