The other day a wise crone friend mentioned an ancient Sumerian story I had nearly forgotten. In it the heroine, named Inanna, descends into the “underworld.” Innana is the Queen of Heaven. Her sister is Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld (or in some stories, Queen of the Earth). Innana visits her sister dressed to kill in every symbol of her power and pride. But as she passes the seven gates of the underworld she is forced to remove one piece of her finery after another until she finally arrives in the underworld stark naked. More adventures ensue for Inanna. They include being ridiculed in anger by a tribunal, having the eye of death put upon her, and being hung on a meat hook for three days by her sis. Some hospitality. Ereskigal is miserable, frantic and we could presume jealous. As Rachel put it, “Of course she is. She is a little like moms with young children. Who really wants to be left alone at home with the kids?” 

Inanna

This simple remark relating the underworld to the plight of modern mothers brought to mind my own descent into motherhood some 25 years ago. I remember feeling like I had descended to a bizarre landscape for which I was unprepared, fighting at times for my life and sanity with four children entrusted to my care. Like Ereshkigal I was sometimes miserable and frantic. Like Innana, I indeed felt naked and betrayed by the culture in which I was parenting, and perhaps the sisterhood as well. It also brought to mind being with women through births in which they too arrived in the end naked, reduced to their essential nature to do battle with death and pain, while bringing new life into the world. Finally it reminded me of the sharp difference between young men’s and young women’s lives. It is curious that biology acting alone takes women into an experience of descent at just the same age that men make their most virile ascent in the outer world, focused on achievement, accomplishment and self-image. How difficult it was for me to accept this in my twenties and thirties when I had just started my own engineering career!

Unprepared for the Descent

I was introduced to a mother’s “underworld” at age 27. Many western women now enter mothering quite mature and empowered,with long resumes and successful careers behind them (their finery). Still, I haven’t met many American mothers who were not shocked by the changes children brought to their psyche. It is often a path of descent into our own early history, the wilderness of our primitive selves and, in this culture, into solitary confinement. In Mark’s neurological terms it is perhaps a return to the depths of the right brain where our own earliest overwhelming memories are stored.

My own story?  My husband and I had met as engineers. We sat on the drafting floor together. Other than the fact that Nick was a few years older, we had nearly the same education and experience. But after our first child our lives became drastically different. I was tucked away in a house in the suburbs with an infant who cried 19 out of 24 hours a day, while he began a magical ascent up the company hierarchy, eventually to become a part owner of the firm. Four children arrived in our home. While his career grew, I worked here and there part-time as an engineer, but mainly descended deeper into the mire of motherhood. I was often happy with babes in arms, but I also remember feeling at times as if my identity was falling like Inanna’s jewels and  clothes at the gates.

Ereshkigal

Viewed from the topside male world, it was. I lost my worldly power. Meanwhile, in the world of my female psyche, I was undergoing a strong tempering, a testing, a death/rebirth experience of exponential proportions for which the culture had no name. Nothing prepared me for meeting the wrath and the desperation of an inner Ereshkigal, the strange sister. Later I would sometimes indeed feel as if I had been hung on the meat hook and left to die within the “eye of death” of my self-judgments. It was crazy. I felt bombarded with internal and external mandates to be an utterly child-centered, patient, loving and joyous parent. From family, community and schools I felt single handedly responsible for  producing children who were attractive, mannerly, who read early, scored high on standardized tests, and behaved appropriately in school. They were further expected  to be highly enriched, motivated and later to know exactly where their lives were going. Our culture naively and rigorously expects Mom’s (and Dad’s) to produce all this while being strictly from Heaven and strongly resists the Dark Sister (which I notice only makes her darker). Is it any wonder that Ereshkigal lives? It is remarkable that our love withstands these crazy conditions for loving.

Maintaining Sanity in an Insane World

Feminists for many years have decried the insanity of western motherhood. I am not a new voice in this collective cry. But I do notice that we do not have enough guides or maps for putting motherhood, history, culture and neuroscience together in new ways that help us embrace the darker parts of our experience and turn them to the gold that Jung knew they were. Usually we attempt to stay in heaven and hope to win the gamble of suppressing the darker parts of ourselves. Mark and I wonder if there is a better way. Perhaps we do not need to wrestle for our freedom all alone.

In the end Inanna was rescued after much politicking and a few horse trades. I was too. Inanna was undoubtedly more wise and less naïve post-journey, and so am I. Indeed, what ultimately saved Inanna were small creatures (fashioned from the fingernail dirt of a god, no less) who showed Ereshkigal compassion. It was learning compassion for my own inner Ereshkigal that saved me, too. The trip did much good for both my dark sister and me. I now consider her a kind of sage, a source of wisdom and strength for when heaven is just too much to bear. 

P.S. Having each done the work of embracing our own dark heart material as it emerged in the wake of our last offering, Mark and I are ourselves a bit more tempered and once again ready to reprise the online Embracing Mother’s Dark Heart webinar for a limited number of people. Click here to find out more information about the upcoming offering. 

Another person who came to visit Steve was Subramanyum. They had been friends for more than 35 years. When he entered the bedroom og the house in Palo Alto, Subramanyum found Steve curled up in the fetal position asleep. He then did what any medical doctor and former director of one of the world’s largest charitable foundations (Google’s) would do: he took off his coat and crawled into bed beside him and cradled Steve in his arms.

Subramanyum, also known as Larry Brilliant, MD, was answering the Big Brain Question for Steve Jobs with an unequivocal “Yes.”

True Lovers Love

When Bob Gaudio met the lead singer of a group called the Four Lovers in the mid-1960s, the two young men hit it off immediately. With only a handshake agreement they made a pledge to one another: no matter how, where, when or with whom either of the two men found financial success in the world, they would always remain 50-50 partners, each entitled to half the other man’s earnings. So if Bob decided to end his music career and become a finish carpenter or a bricklayer, every paycheck would go into the partnership and be divided equally. Well, Bob remained in music, and he and his partner became members of the only band to rival the Beatles for the coveted Billboard No. 1 spot in the late sixties. Bob’s partner in their Big Brain Question-answering deal was a Jersey Boy named … Frankie Valli. And the band, of course, was The Four Seasons.

Psychiatric Hero

One of my very few human heroes is Bruce Perry. The Yale Medical School trained MD is a well-known developmental neuro-psychiatrist who runs the Child Trauma Academy in Houston, Texas. One day some young parents brought their son Peter in to Bruce’s office for a consultation. Peter was an abandoned and neglected Romanian orphan. With Bruce and the parents all working together, Peter made remarkable progress … until he started school. He would become very agitated and emotionally volatile around the other kids and very disruptive in the classroom. When Bruce heard about Peter’s difficulty, he flew up to Oklahoma from his office in Texas, made an appointment with Peter’s  teacher, and spent a day in the classroom teaching the kids “brain science for kindergartners.” He taught the kids how Peter’s brain became easily emotionally highjacked and what that simply meant was that Peter was scared. What they should do was talk softly to Peter, ask if they could hold his hand and rub his back. That would usually work to calm Peter down. And it did. And that remains one of my favorite Big Brain stories. It’s a response many adults would be well-served to model, especially in politics, law and international relations.

Forgiving as Heart Art

Finally, this story from The Art of Forgiveness chapter in Jack Kornfield’s book, Bringing Home the Dharma rounds out these offerings of exemplary efforts in answering “Yes” to the Big Brain Question.

One fourteen year old boy in the (juvenile offenders) program had shot and killed an innocent teenager to prove himself to his gang. At the trial, the victim’s mother sat impassively silent until the end, when the youth was convicted of the killing. After the verdict was announced, she stood up slowly and stared directly at him and said, “I’m going to kill you.” Then the youth was taken away to serve several years in the juvenile facility.

After the first half year the mother of the slain child went to visit his killer. He had been living on the streets before the killing, and she was the only visitor he’d had. For a time they talked, and when she left, she gave him some money for cigarettes. Then she started step-by-step to visit him more regularly, bringing food and small gifts. Near the end of his three year sentence she asked him what he would be doing when he got out. He was confused and very uncertain, so she offered to set him up with a job at a friend’s company. Then she inquired about where he would live, and since he had no family to return to, she offered him temporary use of the spare room in her home.

For eight months he lived there, ate her food, and worked at the job. Then one evening she called him into the living room to talk. She sat down opposite him and waited. Then she started, “Do you remember in the courtroom when I said I was going to kill you?” “I sure do, ma’am,” he replied. “Well, I did,” she went on. “I did not want the boy who could kill my son for no reason to remain alive on this earth. I wanted him to die. That’s why I started to visit you and bring you things. That’s why I got you the job and let you live here in my house. That’s how I set about changing you. And that old boy, he’s gone. So now I want to ask you, since my son is gone, and that killer is gone, if you’ll stay here. I’ve got room, and I’d like to adopt you if you let me.”

And she became the mother of her son’s killer, the mother he never had.

So, now the question becomes, who in your life, in each of our lives, might currently be inviting us to show up and make an irrational commitment to them by offering a major “Yes” to the Big Brain Question?

But her eyes should have served as a wake-up call for me. Sure enough, several months later, after developing a very warm, social, heartful connection – bam! – Delaney reenacted and triggered the very same core wound that my dad perpetrated more than 60 years ago when I was four years old – leaving me wide open, innocent and abandoned on the corner of Salem and Carlisle Streets in New Haven, Connecticut. He remained AWOL for the next 20 years.

It’s All for the Best

I’d long ago come to an intellectual understanding that my dad abandoning the family was the best possible thing a WW II veteran with severe PTSD could have managed. Had he stayed, his inability to control his violent temper – he’d already begun beating my mother – would have eventually ended up getting turned on me. I would have most likely taken that violence and transferred it out into the world and perpetrated it upon others, operating in ways that would have almost certainly ended up with me in prison. As it was, I barely escaped several close encounters with the “justice” system.

But that authentic intellectual realization was only a piece of the healing puzzle. Delaney came late offering up some of the emotional pieces.

It took about two months in the wake of Delaney’s precipitous flight for me to emotionally work through the grief, initially catalyzed by her, but soon threading to and through many connections involving significant people from my past. And of course, at the bottom of that grief tenderloin lay dear old dad.

Grief Will Out

Finishing unfinished business very often involves grieving ungrieved losses. Ungrieved losses often involve traumatic experiences. Traumatic experiences become encapsulated in the neural network and hold hostage much valuable neural real estate – real estate that could be put to much better use by the immune system, for example, or in strengthening impulse control circuitry, or by improving many aspects of Executive Function.

Having worked in grief for more than a quarter of a century, it has become crystal clear to me that “grief will out.” That is, provided the slightest opening or opportunity, the healing impulse will sneak a neuron out of a “dissociation capsule” holding a traumatic memory. That neural fiber, freed from inhibitors, will then begin firing as it begins making connections sufficient to waken conscious awareness. And once one trauma-holding neuron gets out, it will frequently signal and connect with a slew of others – memories of ungrieved loss piled on top of ungrieved loss. Often such memories will surface in darkened movie theatres – an American emporium to unexpressed grief. But we are never crying for the characters on the screen. The tears are always for the losses in our own lives.

So, it isn’t for other people that we do our best to take on the work of finishing unfinished business, or that Step Number 8 in Twelve Step Programs encourages us to identify people we have harmed and begin making amends. It’s for ourselves, for doing the often painful work required to reclaim valuable lost neural real estate. It can be very hard work, not for the faint of heart. That’s one reason many people have to absolutely hit bottom before they become ready to take on such work. From the bottom, even the most painful explorations can begin to look attractive, a place that many of us have had to start from on the long road to wisdom.

The Meriwether Lewis of the Mind

Speech Just Wants to Be Free

I have  friends, of course, who do not love gossip or gossipers. They don’t think there’s any such thing as “Intelligent Gossip,” a phrase coined by Nobel Laureate, Daniel Kahneman, who thinks gossip works to improve our ability to understand errors of judgment and choice, first in others and then eventually in ourselves. But hey, what does Kahneman – considered (with Amos Tversky) one half of the dynamic duo known as “the Lewis and Clark of the Mind” – know?

Those gossip-disdainers would most often be my Christian and Buddhist friends who believe in things like the guidelines of Right Speech. Right Speech admonishes against gossip. Dedicated formal practice only allows for speaking on ten topics: discussions about modesty, contentment, seclusion, non-entanglement, arousing persistence, virtue, concentration, discernment, on release from suffering, and about the knowledge and vision of release from suffering. Truthfully, that feels a little constricting to me. I’d rather be offered ways of skillfully relating to lay people in everyday life who do gossip, who enjoy it and who use it as a tool for learning (or not). Not feeling comfortable with gossipers, it becomes easy for me to begin unconsciously seeing such people as “less than.” People with whom I shouldn’t be spending valuable time. People my mother warned me about: “Those people.”

Gossipers of the World, Unite!

If he was still around, I bet Buddha would have LOVED gossipers. Why? Because Buddha was deeply awake to and loved reality. And one reality in the world is that there are people who gossip. Always have been and always will be. Buddha would have no choice but to love them. Anything else would have shown up as dualistic separation. And Buddha wasn’t much into that.

As far as Right Speech goes, Buddha offered that up as one of eight practices any of us might want to try on in order to reduce or eliminate suffering in our own lives. He didn’t offer up the practice of Right Speech as a “should” that every gossiper in the world needs to begin practicing so that I can feel comfortable spending time with them. Rather, he offered it up to me as something to consider practicing for my own benefit. Should I so choose.

Forgiving Us Our Trespasses

Buddha also didn’t say that Right Speech means we should never talk about other people when they aren’t present, either. Ben Wong and Jock McKeen drove home the complexity of this lesson quite memorably for me one day in graduate school when they broke me and my classmates into four groups. Each group was then instructed to gossip about someone in another group. Afterwards, a few courageous souls elected to speak their gossip aloud so the person gossiped about could hear it. I stood up and spoke about how William had “confessed” to me about experiencing incestuous feelings towards his daughter. As soon as the words left my mouth, I could feel the embarrassment, shame and pain of betrayal flood my nervous system. William was at little risk for actually incesting his daughter, and in fact, erotic feelings in fathers towards children occur commonly. Healthy fathers like William, undeniably know what line not to cross.

Fortunately, William forgave me for my demonstration of non-intelligent gossip. By that process I did learn how we might use gossip intelligently, as a gauge – discerning how what I say about other people makes me feel in my own body. If we’re speaking about others intelligently, then the chance is pretty high that we will feel perfectly fine in our body. Or at least okay. Parents or teachers talking about children and their development, or therapists talking about a client’s lack of healing progress with a supervisor are some ready examples that come to mind. Angry venting in the presence of a trusted friend about a third person is also an example of Right Speech in my view. Why? Because it can work to lower retained levels of stress chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol. It might also work to catalyze and discharge buried neurological “dissociation capsules.” 

But if I’m only talking about others in disparaging or demeaning ways for the sake of idle chatter, talking in ways that might feel shameful were the people actually present, then odds are pretty good that I’ll be feeling pretty poopy in my body. Not to mention that I might very likely be flooding instead of discharging adrenaline and cortisol, and impoverishing important nerve cells in my heart and brain in the process. We actually can trust our body’s response to gossip to guide us, I think. Provided we’re using our brain and body’s inherent intelligence to help us pay undivided attention up close and personal-like.

The first incident occurred in my early thirties, shortly after I discovered the woman I was in a long term committed relationship with in bed with another man. I’ve written here about that painful episode and the learning and healing I ultimately took away from it. Shortly after that discovery, not unexpectedly, Darika and I got into a seriously heated argument in my front yard. Emotional highjacking literally disconnects many of the brain’s logic circuits and so the argument went on without much resolution for too long a time. Finally, Darika jumped angrily into her little beater Subaru to get away from me and go back home. Then suddenly she stomped on the gas pedal and pointed the car deliberately in my direction, attempting to run me over. I barely managed to leap out of the way. I immediately jumped up, ran over to the car, grabbed the door in a rage-fit and literally ripped it off the hinges. With the door held high over my head, I made a mad dash for the creek that ran alongside my house and hurled it as far as I could out into the water. Tossing that car door away served as an effective energy discharge and I was then able to disengage from Darika without any further discussion or damage. One thing I discovered was that having someone first murder your soul, and then attempt to murder your body can be tough to stay emotionally centered around.

Trouble in Paradise

The second incident happened several years later on my honeymoon in the Caribbean. My new wife and I had just arrived after a large stressful wedding and something she said or did – I don’t remember what – touched a hot button over dinner. The anger continued to build throughout the meal and by the time we got back to our cabana, I had reached the boiling point. I walked into the bedroom and she followed after I explicitly asked her not to. I needed her to give me some space and leave me be for awhile. In a flash I erupted, picked up the queen size mattress and literally hurled it at the doorway where she had been standing only moments before.

The anger in the first incident is pretty self-explanatory. When someone tries to kill you, they highjack your limbic system. It reactively acts as if the only two options are kill or be killed. We were both fortunate that I was fast on my feet, and that I didn’t do more than destroy Darika’s car door.

The Roots of Violence

The second incident is more complicated and illustrates that you can’t simply talk or think your way out of some traumatic experiences.

The roots of the mattress-tossing incident actually unfolded several days earlier at the wedding. When the band started up after the meal had been served, I reluctantly stepped out onto the dance floor. First I danced with my new bride. Then I danced with her mother. Then my own mother stepped onto the floor. I had not wanted my mother even to attend the wedding. The reasons were many, but the main one was that there would be an open bar. Her history with alcoholism would be seriously put to the test with no one to insure that she didn’t take advantage. But I finally gave in to pressure from my wife’s family.

The minute she drew near me on the dance floor, I could smell that she had indeed visited the open bar. Moments after we began dancing, with a large number of wedding guests watching the two of us on the dance floor, my mother pulled my head down and French kissed me. Needless to say, I was shocked, repulsed, embarrassed and disgusted. I immediately pushed her away and raced from the room. What I wanted to do in that moment was pick her up and, fueled by a wildly out-of-control rage, fling her full across the room. Instead, two days later, I displaced that rage and discharged it unwittingly in a cabana in the Caribbean. We are indeed, rarely upset for the reasons we think we are.

One key healing element in each of these incidents is the physical activity that operated to discharge the energy of anger. The car door tossing I was able to do in the moment. The mattress-tossing ended up being unfortunately displaced and delayed.  And it was decades later that I learned how the brain works, how memories become stored and how necessary non-harmful energy expression and the freeze discharge are for health and well-being. It was then that I came to understand exactly what my violent eruptions were truly about – an important lesson: once we meet the heart with compassionate understanding, we can begin to find our way back home.

How to Child Molest a 40 Year Old Mother

by Jenny A.

In the 1970’s, sexual abuse was not something people talked about much. Perhaps the subject occasionally crossed my parents’ minds, but not enough for them to stop me from playing at the house of an old man who lived down the street. I suppose my parents thought of him as a harmless old grandfather. He turned out to be a pedophile. My play at his house resulted in me repeatedly being naked, scared and ashamed while he did whatever he wanted with me. I carried the secret of his abuse for decades. This account is the first time I have shared it in a public forum.

The abuse was confusing. My body reacted to his touch, and I also enjoyed the attention, even though somewhere in my little girl heart I knew what was happening was gruesomely wrong. It was also painful at times. Children’s orifices are not meant to accommodate an adult penis. The abuse turned me into a very sexual little girl, and it was not too long before other predators easily recognized the victim in me. Looking back I feel I had a secret sign on my forehead: “molest me.” My story is both similar to and different from Jamie’s Story at the National Child Traumatic Stress Network.

As the years went by I ended up in situations where a doctor, a teacher, a boss, and a handful of men I dated all abused me. I had never learned how to name or heal the original wounds, so I had few tools for avoiding further situations that ended up being traumatic.  Many women who suffer sexual abuse become afflicted with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) without realizing it (I think labels are useless at best and harmful at worst). While this was never my diagnosis, still one of the biggest insults resulted in me having no voice. I had absolutely no idea how to say “No!” Speechless terror does that to children’s voices. I often froze when men put their hands on me. I was completely submissive, my body ready to accommodate their needs. Chronologically, I was 20, 30, 40, but emotionally, psychologically and sexually, I was still six years old. It was not until my daughter turned the age I was when the abuse started, that I mustered the courage to face my past head-on and begin the brutally arduous task of trying to heal. I looked at programs like Model Mugging and the Woman’s Justice Center, but they didn’t fully resonate with me. I mostly did it on my own, for my daughter and for my own inner little girl desperate to be reclaimed and honored.

But the old man down the street wasn’t the only person to exploit me. My father was inappropriate with me first.

Answering the Big Brain Question “NO!”

How does a child make sense of the love that naturally emerges for her father when the things he’s doing are profoundly damaging to her brain, body and soul? And how does she NOT overlay that confusion and disorganization on to every significant relationship with men ever after? How does she skillfully recreate the trauma, not in ways that simply reenact the original wounding, but actually does lead to some kind of healing integration? How does she get back to Square One developmentally speaking? Back, at age 40, to being the innocent child she once was before she was unconsciously betrayed and unskillfully exploited? How does she finally become Incest-Triumphant?

I have had a really hard time trying to figure out how to love my dad and still honor myself in the wake of what he did. Loving fathers don’t violate, betray and abuse their daughters. If I love him and have him in my life, I feel like I am not honoring myself. But, he is my dad and love for our parents is hardwired into us. When we are young we know instinctively that we cannot survive without our parents, so we cling to even the most abusive ones. It’s very confusing. It took an abusive marriage and a handful of later exploitive relationships, and a painful withdrawal from a benzodiazepine tranquilizer given to me to help me cope with my past, to be able to honestly say ”NO MORE ABUSE!! I had to get help to initially stand on my own two feet and learn to take care of myself in every way. Only then was I ready to think about engaging with a man again. Otherwise, I was going to attract yet another perpetrator into my life and once again be sitting in the fire. 

Honoring Healing Wanting to Happen

For me, getting back to square one meant having the courage to accept that I am a sexually abused woman. I’ve had to have the courage to feel the old terror and shame, and allow it to surface and discharge from my body. That means some days I’ve ended up crying and shaking. I’ve had to allow the rage to bubble up. I’ve had to find a healthy outlet for it. Some days I dig holes in my garden and fill them back up again, and dig them up again the next day. I have to be kind and compassionate with myself always, and embrace the little girl inside of me who was so badly dishonored. I have to honor her today, in the here and now. I am still reclaiming parts of myself as I go, but at least now I feel far more real and authentic than I ever have before. And I realize that while my father (and mother, who was complicit in the abuse, but that is another blog entry!) didn’t really love me, I am a good person. I have something precious to share with others: my reclaimed heart and soul. Each and every day, I am more and more at peace with myself and the real suffering in the world.

I’ve recently finished reading Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Steve Jobs. It’s a surprisingly illuminating read, mostly as a compassionate, cautionary tale. Below are a few of the lessons I’ve extracted from Steve’s story.

1. Learn to skillfully manage stress. Steve was pretty driven, which seems to have resulted in him being unskillful in managing his stress levels. By his own admission, the stress of being a father and family man and simultan- eously the CEO of both Pixar Studios and Apple Computer seems to have contributed to the illness that ultimately killed him. He was probably right. Just driving in traffic from Cupertino to Emeryville every week would have done me in.

Three parts to skillful stress management are: A. first, recognize that stress absolutely needs to be managed; B. next, learn your own distinctive signals that indicate when eustress (good stress) has crossed over into distress; and then C. develop personal practices to effectively manage that crossover. Most often the crossover happens when we believe a thought that isn’t true. Which is often much that we believe about the past and frequently imagine about the future.

2. Don’t have friends and family get to know you by having some acquaintance write your biography; have your family write it together with you … one day at a time. This is just SO obviously insane I can’t believe it wasn’t apparent to everyone, especially Walter Isaacson! If Steve was to ask his kids or wife which they’d prefer: to have a book about him and a new iPhone 4S around for the next 30 years, or him alive in the flesh, I would hope Steve alive would have been their preferred choice.

Steve would have additionally been well-served to realize that a biography will not ever make people know or understand anyone. Our hearts, brains, minds, bodies and souls make us all way too complex and dynamic for that. All people will ever know and understand from a biography is the story the writer chooses to tell, a partial and necessarily selective story at that.

3. Practice constructively channeling anger. There are numerous reported instances of Steve unskillfully displacing anger and deliberately hurting people who worked for him, as well as the people closest to him. He would commonly direct anger to wound people where they were most vulnerable. Steve needed to learn to continually challenge the illusion of separation: what harms others, harms oneself even more. He needed to stop the rationalizing and hypocrisy: “This is just the necessary truth-teller I am.” He was constantly challenging his engineers to exceed themselves. What made him exempt from growing into kindness? I suspect the failure to learn that lesson contributed in some way to his life ending early – when we hurt other people, considerable anecdotal evidence suggests it profoundly adversely affects our own neurophysiology.

4. Preferential treatment of sons is less than optimal for daughter’s brain development. As well as for son’s. As social worker, Cathy Jo Cress points out, many kids inherently grok the unfairness of such treatment. But they often feel stuck and powerless to say or do anything about changing it. Feeling stuck and powerless is probably not how most of us would ideally choose to raise our kids.

5. Even integration has a shadow side. Just as Steve yearned for technological integration, the human brain, too, yearns for integration as well. Integrated systems, after all, simply work better. UCLA neuro psychiatrist Dan Siegel often speaks eloquently and forcefully about the need for, and the power of an integrated brain. But just as the mystical poet Rumi observed there are a 1000 ways to kneel and kiss the ground, my guess is there are many more ways to integrate the brain, and some of them, like stringent demands and unexamined assumptions, will often produce disintegration, just the opposite of what’s needed. To paraphrase Jimmy Buffet (who probably borrowed from someone else), “We end up becoming the people our parents warned us about.”

6. Recognize the need for balance. Steve somehow missed this central tenet of Buddhism, a passionate pursuit of his. They don’t call it the Middle Path for nothing. Anytime we’re shooting for something “insanely great,” we may wish to look a bit more closely at the insane piece. Also, the ego piece. When the passionate pursuit of excellence morphs into the compulsive drive for perfection, we’ve crossed an important line. The pursuit of perfection is as bad for CEOs as research shows it is for parents. Even Buddha was satisfied with excellence, with becoming a “good enough” Buddhist.

7. To constantly work to distort reality is to fail to love reality. Rather than pander to people’s addiction to toys and other technologies that will eventually end up in a landfill somewhere, Steve would have been better served substituting his “I-Know Mind” for “Don’t-Know Mind.” That might have allowed him to see that technology most often is a poor substitute for authentic human connection as this recent research suggests.

8. Don’t passionately pursue technological excellence in order to solve the wrong problem. One central problem Steve seemed to be continually trying to solve, that many technology companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google, are still trying to solve, is what NY Times columnist David Brooks terms the world-wide oxytocin shortage. Oxytocin is the bonding hormone. It is essential in order for people to feel great affection and affinity for one another. From the telephone, to radio, to television, to computer-mediated-communication, to Skype video, technology keeps trying, but has so far failed to sufficiently address the oxytocin shortage. I think it might actually require human beings hanging out in person helping other human beings, heart to heart and face to face.

Over a BILLION is the current count of women who have been sexually violated on planet earth at some point in their lives (Don’t believe it? Look around your own personal circle. Also consider sex addiction currently being diagnosed in record numbers). A single sexual trauma can profoundly impact parenting, from the way we communicate with children about how dangerous the world is, to the stress levels we feel about their safety to how easily we can allow their own healthy sexuality to develop. Thus, to me it seems imperative that boys and girls receive useful, coherent, accurate information about proper use of the male sexual organ. And they need to receive it, not as some embarrassed, shameful, icky-quicky, fact-based offering, but in a way which emotionally drives home the point about how male organ mismanagement around the world damages hearts and  brains and results in incomprehensible human suffering. And not just for women! And here’s the important part: boys especially need to receive it over and over from mothers and fathers and teachers and clergy and peers and media until their testosterone-addled brains finally get it! So, here’s a beginning list of guidelines. Some of them have been “reversed engineered” from Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues and her recent writing (Over It) in response to the sex abuse scandals flooding the national news.  Feel free to add guidelines of your own (Please Note: This post is in no way intended to be male-bashing; just the opposite, in fact).

1. Men who love and respect their penis, manage their penis. It’s the responsibility of the penis-owner to learn and practice what is and isn’t skillful management. Anything that leads directly or indirectly to suffering, even decades down the road, damages a penis-owner’s brain.
2. Every action the penis takes or fails to take, the brain records. Each action or deliberate non-action adds positively to identity, health and well-being or else subtracts from it.
3. Skillful penis management is sexy and liberating. If a man or woman knows you practice skillful penis management, they don’t need to flood their systems with a torrent of self-protective, anxiety-generated neurotoxins. Skillful penis management is good for the brain.
4. A penis never, ever goes where it isn’t morally and ethically invited and warmly welcome, ever. Period. Unless you want to seriously damage your brain, powerfully compromise your immune system, be plagued by recurrent nightmares, and descend into a life threaded with pain and suffering.
5. The damage that a poorly managed penis can do is unfortunately rarely later traced back to the source. Similar to how Judge William Adams fails to consider there may be a connection between his daughter Hilary only being able to work minimum wage jobs and his beating her, it’s difficult for most people to see the direct connection between the rape of a 16 year old and her later inability to hold a job for an extended period, struggle in primary relationships, or have so much of her creativity fail to ever fully manifest in the world. The neural disorganization caused by physical and sexual assault can have widespread and lasting repercussions. Without skillful, healing community support, it can last a lifetime.
6. Penises need to remain intact. Some doctors, clergy and parents assume they know more than the intelligence that created the foreskin. Science is replete with subsequent discoveries that demonstrate this kind of thinking is the height of hubristic folly. We don’t circumcise dogs or horses. Why are baby boys so special? Some trauma specialists draw a direct line between foreskin removal – trauma perpetrated upon a very delicate neural network – and the modern propensity for war. Oh, and by the way, the 12 known functions of foreskin play a critical role for emotional sexual functioning (A telling research study, I think, might be to compare circumcision numbers among rapists with age-matched cohorts in the general population. My hypothesis would be that more rapists are circumcised than not).
7. It’s a good idea to both genuinely feel and authentically express gratitude, wonderment, reverence and appreciation for those places when and where a penis is morally and ethically invited and warmly welcome. Always. 
8. Penises are never to be erotically exposed to children of any chronological or emotional age. Those who might advocate for a nudist lifestyles, free and open sexuality, or who suggest that constant exposure normalizes and takes the mystery off the sexual organs frequently fail to consider what might be going on in children themselves, especially as they are required to become an integrated member of the larger culture. Penis mismanagment does not happen in a vacuum.
9. Never expose a penis to toxic environments. Little penises have big ears. And those ears are connected to the self-esteem centers in the brain. Being shamed, dismissed, embarrassed, or in any other way diminished is poor penis management.
10. Take your penis seriously and give your penis a stand-up name, one you can be proud of. Like Sterling or Knute or Ripken or Woody (Toy Story) or Canoodle. Vaginas have names; pets have names; plants have names. Names that are disparaging and derogatory frequently become prophetically self-fulfilling. Those are bad names. We can do better.
11. A penis is part of a whole human being that includes a brain and a heart. Penises are best deployed as an inseparable, integrated ally of that triumvirate. All for one and one for all.

Harmonic Convergence

Not-Tori

Tori was one of those “harmonic” students. Deeply interested in trauma and the brain, she became kind of an informal graduate assistant. Over the weeks and months we began spending more and more time together collaborating on a number of research projects, co-creating highly energized times filled with all kinds of exciting, applied research possibilities.

One day Tori brought me a brochure describing a seminar at Esalen: The Body Keeps the Score. Bessel van der Kolk and Peter Levine were co-presenting a weekend on healing trauma through Somatic Experiencing. “Want to go?” Tori offered. “Sure,” I said. “Book us a couple of rooms.”

When we got to the highly charged environment that is Esalen, somehow or other the room reservation got bungled: they only had one room with two beds in it. “What do you want to do?” I asked. “We’ll take it,” Tori told the woman at the desk.

We walked over and dropped off our bags in the room, looked around at the two beds, one single and one double, and then headed over to the dining room for dinner.

Over garden salad, pilaf and pecan pie, Tori and I began talking about the room and the change in sleeping arrangements. At one point in the discussion, she became quite serious, looked at me and said: “Here’s the deal. I know myself pretty well. We can sleep together tonight and make love – and it will be some of the most sublime, ecstatic sex you’ve ever had – and we might continue our relationship as lovers for a year or two, but then I’ll be moving on. I’ll probably never have anything to do with you again after that. Or, we can not sleep together tonight, in which case the odds of us remaining lifelong friends increases substantially. The choice is yours.”

What followed then was one of the most memorable nights of my life.

Dyn-o-mite!

Back in the room fresh from the hot springs, we both changed into pajamas. Tori crawled into the double bed and got under the covers. I came over and propped up a pillow and got into bed beside her … on top of the covers. Along with me I’d brought my Inspiron laptop computer. I slipped in a Netflix disk and for the next ninety minutes Tori and I spent an unforgettable evening watching Napoleon Dynamite. When the movie was over, I kissed her on top of her head goodnight, and then went over to the single bed to sleep alone. Driving home from Esalen we both experienced more love, connection, innocence and joy than either of us had ever felt with sex.

Every few months, these many years later Tori and I email or talk on the phone. We didn’t buy into the powerful Illusion of Separation that becoming lovers and then breaking up frequently orchestrates. Occasionally we collaborate on projects, or spend time visiting together when one of us shows up in close proximity. When we do, our secret, smiley, heart-connection phrase is: “Vote for Pedro!”

Self, Repecting Women

I offer up this story for several reasons. As a brain educator and trauma researcher, I was more than familiar with Tori’s personal trauma history. As with many students training to be healers, hers was particularly painful, filled with multiple violations and betrayals by important people in her early life. Knowing how trauma, in an attempt at healing, will often draw us back into situations that replicate early overwhelming experiences, I was more than aware of that possibility unfolding between Tori and me (The poetic irony wasn’t missed by us that we were at a seminar focused on healing just such trauma as Tori’s. Reenactment between us would most likely not have led to healing in the least).

Over the years I have borne personal witness to untold suffering visited upon other graduate faculty who have succumbed to such enticing offers as Tori’s. Not only did such faculty add yet another traumatic reenactment to the already over-encumbered neural real estate of the student, but they inevitably added more trauma to their own storehouse of suffering. Promising careers became ruined, self-esteem plummeted. I’ve seen police get involved, lawyers, prosecutors … trauma upon trauma leading to suffering on top of suffering.

Even in a permissive, super-charged sexual environment like Esalen (and external environs can play a big role in such dynamics), Tori’s offer of erotic nirvana held little draw for me. My interests have long been in something greater, something much, much different. It’s something evoked by the easily remembered, child-like innocence that unfailingly arises every time I hear the rallying cry, “Vote for Pedro!” As Napoleon Dynamite himself would say … “Sweet!”

One of my early romantic explorations involved a protracted “courting period” with a woman that involved great chemistry. Alana and I shared a number of mutual social and spiritual interests and in general just enjoyed hanging out together. Over time the barriers to the experience of love’s energies began to simultaneously intensify and dissolve and we opened discussions about the possibility of becoming romantic lovers. When we agreed we would, I rented a secluded cabin in the Adirondacks, and with the requisite candles, incense and music, we consummated the relationship. At one seminal moment during that first time together, I looked down at Alana and was shocked and horrified to discover the face of an eight year old child staring back at me. Eight was the age when Alana’s father began sexually molesting her. And now, as the result of an unexpected, regressive, energetic facial morphing process orchestrated by her brain and body, it suddenly felt like I too, had just committed a sexual violation. From that moment forward, Alana’s incest trauma hung like the Grim Reaper over our relationship. It wasn’t too long afterwards until her pain – repeatedly triggered and never resolved – became too much for either of us to bear. Finally, one day the Relationship Reaper thankfully came to collect each of us and put us out of our mutual misery.

Deny Anything Damaging Happened

In spite of current TV’s interest in exploiting the cultural taboo, incest is still prohibited in every culture on the planet for a range of reasons. Prohibiting it is part of what makes us human (the reverse may also be true, especially when we’re able to successfully turn our wounds into our gifts). While I’m not an expert, it seems reasonable that sexual abuse damages the vulnerable neural circuitry of young children in complex ways, and every perpetration is different. I also suspect it definitely disrupts the emerging Cortisol Awakening Response.

Some women I’ve talked with about the experience have told me that their greatest pain was not the incest itself, but that they had absolutely no one they could tell the full truth to about what happened. And not that they hated it … but that they loved it! The experience afforded a glimpse of heaven. And every sexual experience afterwards provided glimpse after glimpse. They weren’t sex-obsessed, though; they had become God-obsessed. Sex had simply become a vehicle to know God. At least for a while. Until the insistent need for living life on earth began to show up.

Other women recognized that for them, the day the abuse began was the “day the music died.” And still other women, especially when violence was involved, recognized that their ability to easily get emotionally hijacked, under even minimal stress, was directly tied to the early abuse. Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman remarks in her book Father-Daughter Incest, “incest becomes like a small, nasty pet that you have for many, many years.” The brain had become like the one depicted on the right: severely compromised in its ability to process energy and information, particularly under stress.

Sexual abuse of young children is sadly one of the most under-reported of all crimes. In addition to the Cortisol Awakening Response, it also appears to damage children’s GABA supply system (essential for homeostasis) and exposes their hearts, brains, minds and bodies to stress loads their development is rarely equipped to handle. Because abuse never happens in a social vacuum, at the very least abuse delays and distorts emotional and social development. And without skillful, effective intervention – intervention that restores psychological and somatic functioning to high levels – that early overload can echo and reverberate across the canyons of our lives forever.

Make Frequent Attribution Errors of the Heart

Children easily make what I call “attribution errors of the heart.” The brain is first and foremost an association organ. Anything that happens in close sequence or proximity, the brain tends to make meaningful connections with. The problem with such meaning-making is that more often than not we make errors in attribution and assign false cause. Children’s immature neurological development makes them particularly susceptible to this error. Healthy, well-cared for children are born with and then naturally strengthen a compassionate heart. So, if something bad happens, they often automatically feel responsible. The problem becomes exacerbated by the fact that intense experiences like sexual abuse generate all kinds of associations children’s immature neurology is simply not equipped to handle. Early abuse can often result in extreme disorganization in thinking, often showing up in later life as fugue states, spacing out, hypo- (depression) or hyper-arousal, physical illness along with recurrent frequent emotional reactivity triggered in oneself and by resonance in others.

Give in to the Impulse to Isolate

Over many years of hearing stories from women about their experiences of abuse, one theme I’ve heard over and over is the wish to go live in a cave or a monastery or go and live as a hermit in the woods. The need to isolate and insulate and set up strong protective boundaries shows up often among abused men and women. But trauma-imposed isolation is not solitude. That’s often the explanatory fiction we tell ourselves to make sense of why we’re alone. One challenge with the wish to isolate is: Wherever You Go, There Your Neurology Goes, Too. And often what the protective barriers end up doing is locking us alone inside with our demons (or our ecstatic divinity?). One result: many older women in America living alone and out of touch.

In an interview with Shane Bauer, one of the young American hostages released from Iran, he said that the most unbearable aspect of his imprisonment was the time he was forced to spend in isolation. Self-imposed isolation for abused adults is really trauma-imposed isolation. The brain is a social organ. Without the deep stimulation of other authentic hearts, brains, minds and bodies, like plants untended in a garden, neurons begin to wither and die. Being locked alone, even in the Garden of Eden, can end up doing profound damage.

Go Searching for Dr. Good Dad

A transcendent impulse lives in all of us that is constantly attempting to move us in the direction of health and healing. Like plants orienting towards the sun, that impulse can draw us to seemingly compassionate, loving, replacement father figures (and often mother figures as well). It’s often kind of like attempting a neurological do-over. One main challenge with that approach and perspective is that in order for healing to happen, the trauma will, if not unskillfully reenacted in physical reality, almost certainly become reenacted emotionally. We have to feel it to heal it. Good Dad is destined, often through the mechanisms of transference and projection, to be neurologically morphed into Bad Dad. The left brain often overlays the past onto the present, often creating a kind of reality distortion field. Without help discerning what’s real, what’s scary, what’s safe, and what’s an overlay from our personal traumatic past, perceiving accurately becomes an almost impossible task. And where once we might have felt safety, joy and the possibility of healing, Good Dad’s very presence now begins to stir up great fear and anxiety. This dynamic often results in many relationship ruptures, even between people of the same age and the same level of development. Sadly, repair can become difficult to sort through. But not impossible. Healing continually yearns to happen.

Avoid Grieving the Losses

The losses involved with childhood sexual abuse are considerable. An organic, timely unfolding childhood is lost. Innocence is lost. Trust is lost. Safety is lost. Security is lost. Peace of mind is lost. Sisters are lost. Dad is lost (or possibly uncle-brother-neighbor) and often mom as well. Neural real estate is lost. Sacred sanctity of self is lost. Voice is lost. Ungrieved, these losses inevitably begin to weigh on us with increasing gravity. Grieving cannot be avoided forever. Suffering knows suffering. One way to live solidly grounded in the world and ultimately know deep, sustainable joy – to begin to regain heaven on earth – is to inquire into and fully grieve our losses. 

Discount The Healing Power of the Trauma Narrative

It helps to express the story of the abuse in words, pictures and voice. Voice is often murdered by sexual abuse: secrets must be kept, a code of silence must prevail, no one is ever to know “our special secret.” Taking The Golden Rule of Social Neuroscience into account, one potentially promising way to approach this area of healing might be to become involved with a local chapter of RAINN. Important will be to resonate strongly with one or two experienced people in such a group. Trusting them will hopefully provide help when the crazy thoughts begin distorting reality.

And while expressing the trauma narrative might be necessary for healing, it is often not enough. The body holds memories as well, and they too, need for full expression. For that reason, one possibility to consider might be getting involved with an organization like Peace Over Violence where self-defense is taught in ways that peacefully result in triumphant, healing resolution. Equally good might be to take charge of our own healing and use Craig’s List or Drew’s List to organize incest empowerment groups co-led or co-facilitated by people who have managed to find their own healing paths. As with any healing journey, skillful guides can make all the difference. Each time we pick up a thread and give voice to the pain of our losses or any other truth in our experience in the presence of understanding, compassionate fellow travelers, some bit of healing happens. However much our brains and hearts manage to increase their capacity to process energy and information, depicted in the scan on the left, the world inevitably begins to become a kinder, safer place.