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Several years ago I made an appointment with a therapist to try to resolve some early trauma that was causing me trouble. After I explained exactly what had happened, the therapist dismissed the incident, told me I was wrong about the experience being traumatic, pulled out the DSM-IV, and proceeded to methodically read to me from it. Needless to say, that therapeutic alliance was short-lived.
The incident I brought to that therapist had actually taken place one dull, rainy New England morning many years earlier. I suffered significant damage which I later learned from non-DSM-IV literature, had dramatically impaired a number of cortical and limbic structures in my brain. I was 13 at the time, and of the 25 or so people who witnessed the incident, not a single one of them – me included – realized the severity of the damage that had occurred. It wasn’t until almost 40 years later, as I began researching panic attacks, trauma and social neuroscience that I realized the actual, factual truth of that injury.
To help set a clarifying context – trauma is often best assessed in context – let me first provide a bit of backstory. Shortly after I turned four, the only option for my father for being able to regulate a violent temper – the result of World War II “battle fatigue” – was to abandon me, my two sisters and my mother. Once it was clear my father was gone, and she was able to move us into a State-subsidized housing project, my mother was then left to struggle with her own demons. The end result was that my sisters and I were minimally-parented, poor, wild, unkempt children. In some strange, ironically benevolent way, this was actually okay, since most all of the other kids in the housing project and Kathrine Brennan Elementary School were all pretty much in the same rickety, single-parent, Aid-to-Dependent-Children boat.
However, when I turned thirteen that all changed. I began to be bussed to Susan S. Sheridan Junior High, a much larger school in an upper middle class neighborhood. The kids in my seventh grade class wore clean, fresh-pressed clothes to school, together with socks that matched, and shoes and sneakers without holes. They had full sets of the World Book and Encyclopedia Britannica sitting in custom-built bookcases in their dens and libraries at home. These new kids were clearly different than me, and I was different than them. But I longed not to be.
From day one, Mr. D’s first period Ancient History classroom at Sheridan was a place I dreaded walking in to. He gave lots of homework that required encyclopedia-reading and demanded lots of class participation. After the first day in Mr. D’s class I took a seat in the back of the room where I hoped the six kids seated in front of me would shield me from his line of sight.
“Why did Sparta engage in a conflict with Attica in the Peloponnesian War?” Mr. D asked on the morning in question. I stared down at the penciled carvings in the desktop, my adrenaline rising. Punctuating the ensuing silence, Phyllis Granoff, Edward Modell and Sara Cosgrove immediately thrust their hands up in response. And then suddenly I heard my name called, sending my rising adrenaline levels even higher.
“Why did Sparta engage in a conflict with Attica in the Peloponnesian War?” Mr. D. asked me again by name. I sat in frozen silence unable to answer. This scenario repeated two more times, increasing the tension in the room until finally Asa Berkowitz sitting behind me, simply blurted out the answer in order to relieve the tension: “Because they were afraid of the concentration of power building up in Athens at the time.”
In that moment, sitting frozen with the shame and humiliation, this single incident significantly altered my neurology, making history an unsafe subject for me and school classrooms unsafe places to be in general. For the next ten years I was unable to say another word in a formal classroom setting! The structures of my limbic system – among them, the amygdala, the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland – had instantly paired school classrooms as synonymous with grave threat. It left me essentially a barely functional autistic when it came to school; and all without anyone, including me, ever realizing it. And all without any real mal-intent on the part of any of the people involved.
This past Spring however, I discovered that the treatments I have been receiving for the neural disorganization that resulted from that seventh grade shaming have begun to pay dividends. In June, I was attending a seminar at the Cathedral Hill Hotel in San Francisco entitled, The Wise Heart and the Mindful Brain. My friend Sean and I were kibitzing in the back of a room filled with almost 1000 people, when suddenly I heard my name being called out by Dan Siegel, one of the two seminar presenters. Without the slightest bit of hesitation I immediately stood up, looked around the room, made eye contact with several people, smiled and waved joyfully – something that, had I been able to do it 40 years earlier in Mr. D’s seventh grade history class, could have prevented many years of significant pain and suffering.
In a future column I’ll explore some of the emerging therapeutic methods that actually have been effective in addressing and resolving this kind of traumatic disorganization. And by the way, reading directly from the DSM-IV is not one of them.
Galen Buckwalter is a “proud gimp.” He’s one of the three central characters in physician/filmmaker Gretchen Berland’s new documentary Rolling. You’ll be able to see him next month go to work each day as a psychologist confined to a wheelchair. Two challenges he recently voiced in a National Public Radio interview are of particular interest to me. The first is how other people’s expectations work to have him fall automatically into feeling and acting disabled. This is an example of social neuroscience working in less than optimal ways. What we know from research is that in a different environment, one with positive expectations and possibilities – say a Special Olympics event, for example – Buckwalter would have a very different experience. Environment often significantly adds to or subtracts from neural development.
If the increasing lifespan advocates are correct and many of us are soon to be living 100 or 150 years, we may well be spending some part of those years in a wheelchair. (Although I can 100% guarantee that the wheelchair of 2050, if there are even any around, won’t look anything like the chair of today). These days, as I feel my knees creak and my hips ache and I take my daily dosage of glucosamine and chondroitin, being wheelchair-bound does not seem like some remote possibility consigned to the far-off future. So, Buckwalter’s experience got my attention, especially his second challenge as he attempts to navigate through a day out in the world; that challenge is gaze-aversion. When he’s out doing his daily life, a majority of the people he encounters simply refuse to make eye contact with him.
I’m one of those gaze-averters.
I’ve been a gaze-averter since middle school. Three bullying incidents stand in clear memory from that time, and they seem to have conditioned it. The first was Billy Zwack and two of his friends who cornered me one afternoon in an alley behind the Westville Theater. “What-chu looking at?” Two of them held me while Zwack slapped me several times across the face.
The second incident involved a friend and I. One afternoon, we encountered Dominic Riggione, a high school dropout, in the woods down behind the housing projects where I lived. “Don’t look at me,” Dominic threatened, as he forced the two of us to first walk through, and then lie down in the icy brook. He followed that by forcing us to catch a frog and eat it, and then he ordered us to hit one another with sticks and rocks while he watched and laughed.
The third incident involved Cleveland Benjamin, a kid that I actually liked and had been friends with. He’d been hit by a car the summer before and he ended up having difficulty walking. One day after school, I was watching him limp across the street over to where I was waiting for the school bus. When he got across, he walked up to me and snarled, “Don’t be lookin’ at me.” He then proceeded to take out a straight razor and slash at me three times. Fortunately, it was winter and I was wearing a heavy coat. That, and the fact that I was able to duck and turn, left me with a shredded coat, but with only three small scratches across my back. These three incidents remain powerfully in memory, leaving me with great difficulty in being able to look people directly in the eye. After they happened, looking directly at people suddenly became a very dangerous business.
Gaze-averting, or rather the anxiety that it generates, turns out to be very important information. What it’s telling me, is something that almost all anxiety or upset often tells me when it is not the result of a real, present-moment threat to life or limb – that some traumatic memory living in me longs for healing integration. Some part of my brain is holding life-saving recollections that live in my neural network as one of Bob Scaer’s Dissociation Capsules.
This is both good news and bad news and more bad news. The good news is that I am at least able to recognize that I am anxious. Not being able to look at a homeless person, or a person in a wheel chair is not “simply the way I am.” It’s one way my particular trauma history has conditioned me. The bad news is that I am fearful and anxious about a lot of things – a nasty email, a surly tone of voice, a letter that has the words “Official Business” printed on it from the Internal Revenue Service – all of which do not represent any real, present-moment threat to life and limb. The other bad news is that we haven’t developed very many really effective tools to work with these kinds of daily dissociative experiences. Making contact with people, by smiling and looking them in the eye, as difficult as it can sometimes be though, seems to help. And as I continue to roll through life, I’ll be keeping my eyes out for other healing possibilities. And I’ll be writing more about the importance of eye gaze for mother/baby bonding in future columns. Like people in wheelchairs, it’s a subject that needs to have more attention paid to it.
This past weekend I taught a graduate seminar on this topic. I borrowed the title from a quotation supposedly attributed to Rainer Maria Rilke, although I have never seen the actual quotation in print (If any of you can point me to the original, I’d be most appreciative) – “Love and death are the great gifts in life. Mostly, they are passed on unopened.”
I’ve taught this seminar many times. In recent years I’ve begun to think about death within a framework of social neuroscience. (Paradoxically, five minutes a day spent thinking about death is reported to lead one to a very happy life). During such musings I explore all kinds of strange and wonderful possibilities. We know that neurons die (apoptosis). We know that people die (death). We know that neurons connect (synaptogenesis). We know that people connect (attuned resonance) – we are in fact Hardwired to Connect. Might this being that we have come to call a person, simply be a really big, complex “neuron” in a much larger brain? If so, since brains work better when they are connected and well-integrated, wouldn’t people also do likewise? 
In the framework of death and social neuroscience, the end-of-life trajectory often takes on special properties for both the person dying and the circle of people around them. My friend Kathleen has sat with hundreds of people through this trajectory. In her remarkable book, The Grace in Dying, she reports on this significance:
(Accompanying a person at the end of life) is to be pierced by a power beyond our separate sense of self in a moment that sources both compassion and wisdom. We deepen our capacity to live more fully and freely, awed by the fact that we ARE alive. We become different beings through the transformative power of our insight into the dying process. We become larger, more integrated, and somehow more real with this expansion of our horizons and remapping of our boundaries. We enter levels that allow our now deeper being to open to WHAT IS – giving and taking, in living and in dying, with fewer gimmicks and simpler truth, with less frivolity and more joy, with less suffering and more gratitude.
Part of what often makes this time special, I think, is that it seems to dissolve many of our long-held psychological defenses. When our psychological defenses go, my theory would be that for some of us traumatic incidents stored in implicit memory from conception (even before?), through childhood and beyond, begin to make their way to the surface of consciousness. Those experiences often then show up as symbolic entities that we may be store as fearful, limbically-driven memories, experiences we have little ability to easily put words to – in other words, as waking nightmares or frightful, wounding images from our personal past. These too, have an opportunity to evaporate with the dissolution.
When I visit a hospital ward filled with terminally ill patients, I see many of them curled up, asleep in the fetal position. They remind me of my daughter, Amanda as an infant. As I used to do with her, I often muse upon what might be going on in their brains, in their hearts. It’s difficult not to actually think of them as developing fetuses, preparing much as Amanda did, to leave one known sensory-filled world in order to journey on a forced surrender into another. One question is often asked of me in these Love and Death Seminars, “What happens after we die?” My response to students is that this question is probably much like asking a baby, “What happens after you’re born?” I’ll further answer that question here the same way I do there – from Rilke again in one of his most familiar Letters to a Young Poet:
… have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
One hundred billion dollars (again with that B!). That’s the figure that inspired me to make the commitment and put in the time and energy to begin writing this weekly column. That’s roughly the amount of money that Childserv vice- president, Suzette Fromm came up with when she did an analysis of the direct and indirect costs that result from unskillful parenting. You can see a full breakdown of her categories and costs here: Estimated Costs of Child Abuse in America.
This seemed like a big number to me. Bigger actually, than I could easily comprehend. When I looked more closely at Doctor Fromm’s data, I noticed that she based her estimates on reported incidents of abuse. Thinking about my own life growing up in a housing project in New Haven, Connecticut, I witnessed far more incidents of abuse than ever got reported. In fact, I can’t even recall a single incident of anyone ever reporting anything, ever. Authorities of any sort were simply not part of the Home Team in my world.
This realization intrigued me enough to get in touch with the good doctor and ask her about the decision to base her calculations only upon reported data. “I originally did a range of calculations that could include non-reported incidents,” she told me (I’m loosely recalling our conversation here). “But the costs turned out to be so mind-bogglingly large, that whenever I presented them to peers and policymakers, they would simply glaze over and go numb. 100 billion dollars turns out to be a pretty big number all by itself.”
A big number indeed. For a long time (Fromm’s research was published in 2001), I found my own brain glazed over and numb. What could I possibly do in the face of such an overwhelming social problem? Contribute money to children’s charities? Get an elementary school teaching credential? Become a school psychologist? In truth, what the answer has come down to is: whatever I can do that feels aligned with who I am and what I’m somewhat reasonably skilled at. I’m reasonably skilled, it turns out, at researching and writing.
As a result of reading as much of the research literature as I can – 35,000 new studies are published every year – I’m convinced that the roots of war and horrendous suffering actually DO take hold in the nursery. And they take root there mostly by accident and lack of awareness. Parents and care providers simply don’t know and understand how the things they do – or just as importantly, don’t do – impact a child’s neural development. And that those things they do or don’t do can have implications affecting such things as ability to learn, social-emotional intelligence, immune function, and general life satisfaction … across the whole lifespan!
As a result of this conviction, one of the first things I did was to research and compile a list of practices for parents based upon recent findings from social neuroscience, traumatology and attachment studies. When I published them last year as a Little Book, I contemplated what to say in the subtitle for a long time. I finally settled on “52 vital practices to help with the most important job on the planet.” I chose that subtitle, not because the practices I’ve organized and included are so critically important, but because the job of parenting itself is. And I deliberately made the book small, because parents are well, busy! I have also made it available for the cost of postage and handling ($5) for anyone wishing one. And I give hundreds of copies away for free at talks and seminars every year, not because I’m such a grand philanthropist, but because I truly believe in the power of parents to raise children with profoundly organized and integrated hearts, brains, minds and bodies. They mostly just need to know they can and then learn how.
There have been a whole host of wonderful books and articles written for parents from the point of view of children’s experience. Daniel Stern, a Swiss psychiatrist, has written A Diary of a Baby, Peter Fonagy has written extensively about children’s experience, Penelope Leach has written several editions of Your Baby & Child, and just last year Peter Levine and Maggie Kline published Trauma Through a Child’s Eyes. Each of these offerings share the common virtue of showing us over and over that through the eyes of a child, parents show up as their whole world. And so, my primary goal with this column is similar to each of those authors – to help make that world a wonderful (and less costly) place for children to live in and continually come home to.
Last week a reader, Catherine Wolniewicz sent me a pointer to Maj. Scott Southworth’s story. While over in Iraq, Southworth made a seemingly impulsive decision to adopt Ala’a, a nine-year-old orphan boy with cerebral palsy. Once his impulsive “right brain–heart” connection relinquished a bit of neural real estate, interestingly the fearful left brain took center stage. In no uncertain terms, here’s what it had to say: “You shouldn’t adopt this boy. You are single, you have no job at home, no house, little money, and no medical expertise.” In Southworth’s struggle, we are afforded an opportunity to witness the birth of an Irrational Commitment.
If you read Southworth’s story, you will see that things are working out just fine, not only for Southworth and Ala’a, but for a multitude of others as well. In many ways, this story reminds me of Henry Thoreau’s famous quotation: “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” Or, in this case, begin gathering the people together and begin building the social networks (and the inevitable resulting neural structures) required to establish a solid foundation inside and out. One that can help us march forward fearlessly in the direction of our dreams.
Altruistic actions like Southworth’s, it turns out, are getting a lot of attention in research circles these days. This past March, Stephen Post published a revealing collection entitled Altruism and Health. Don Browning, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago had this to say about Post’s studies:
Do people who act generously and have kindly emotions reap benefits to themselves? Does this happen even though gaining returns does not motivate their altruistic feelings and behaviors? The path-breaking essays in this book answer these questions, with appropriate qualifications, in the affirmative. Better psychological and physical health and a longer life are the main fruits that accrue to the altruistic person. This is true for youth, adults, and the elderly, as well as for those who are already ill. This book inaugurates a new science of giving. It uncovers the realities behind the ancient truth that it is more blessed to give than receive. It is a marvelous resource for health care providers, educators, social scientists, and the inquiring general reader.
Such actions, with the benefits they provide, would seem to be worth modeling to our children, students and friends. But we don’t need research studies and external validation to know if altruistic acts work to make us feel better and improve our overall health. We can conduct our own repeated field trials. And it can actually be something we can engage in creatively, set our own rules around, and have great fun with. Here’s a memorable, magical example from my own life – Trickster Philanthropy. It includes a picture of a search-and- rescue worker that depicts the culmination of the whole story.
