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Monday, May 4, 2015. On the one hand I am thinking Poor Me! On the other hand I recognize that having the ability to THINK the way I am this morning is a gift. Only it doesn’t so much FEEL like a gift. The Poor Me thinking self feels cursed to wake up on a Monday morning with no ability to sidestep the currents of CDC ACE Study-related thoughts that are streaming through my mind.
This having been said, all those words that really mean nothing and are a waste of time (and of internet space), just leave me with those same currents of thought that I seem to have little choice about what I do with them. I write. Here I am at this juncture of my life in time and space within the masses of billions of human beings alive on this planet…. Having something to say….
My lengthy telephone conversation yesterday afternoon with one of my sisters stirred up the pot of what I know and of what to do with what I know.
My sister lives in the country on her organic farm south of Austin, Texas. She told me that her chiropractor in Austin has a flatscreen TV on the wall of his waiting room that does nothing but continually stream ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study information. She also told me that even her primary care physician is asking questions right along with increasing numbers of people (“the public”) who want to know, “What are we supposed to DO with high ACE score information?”
People are asking, “Does a high ACE score mean I am doomed?”
I hear these things and my mind does not acquiesce into any belief that all these problems are not my concern. They are somebody else’s.
I don’t have the LUXURY of shutting of my seemingly unbidden near-torrents of thinking about how do we take the in-the-air findings of scholarly research that is confirming what to me is simply common sense: Truly traumatic childhoods undermine well-being over the course of a lifetime.
Is there a Niagara Falls worth of complexity ahead as more and more people begin to understand what the ACE studies are showing us? How do humans even begin to constructively counteract these patterns within a culture, society, civilization?
When it comes to influencing the impact and even the existence of ACEs — What can be done? By whom? How? When?
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I do not want to be burdened with thoughts about this subject. I seem to have no choice. I was born into an extremely high ACE infancy and childhood. I might as well be telling myself, “I don’t want to have blue eyes.”
A good friend of mine told me that currently most ACE-related information is online and is being discussed via blogs. My morning torrents tell me we have to take these concerns out of the air, make them visible, and ground them into the very real material level of existence where we all reside.
How is this going to happen and who is going to do it?
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I just discovered a word I have never heard before. It summarizes my psychotically mental ill mother’s severely abusive relationship with me – ANATHEMA.
There is a straight arrow track from the first breath I ever took as her accursed newborn to each breath I take today. I might complain all I want about the horrors of my childhood and what they did to even change my physiological development. I can complain all I want to about what feels like “a burden of proof” that resides within me. I could not escape my mother or what she did to me. I seem equally incapable of escaping what I feel now.
These two ends of the trajectory of my life are fundamentally bound together. There I was. Here I am.
I ask myself the same question about my own high ACE experience as I ask about the WHOLE MESS! What is the MEANING of THIS?
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I might yet live long enough and in the right conditions to foster whatever good I am supposed to accomplish with what I know, which is the same thing as saying, with who I am.
There is a mighty reservoir of information IN EXISTENCE about this entire subject from start to finish. I seem to hold within myself a portion of this information.
All I know at this moment is a kind of vague and nebulous image connected to answering the questions I pose in this post.
I see an hourglass. Instead of grains of sand moving from top toward and through a narrow opening towards the bottom I see PEOPLE.
I think that if I could devise only one single kind of intervention for high ACE score people it would be tailored to create a “net” set to capture as many young people close to age 18 as could be found.
It is there I would begin the work toward resolving these kinds of high ACE concerns for the future (which is coming one breath at a time for all of us).
I would work to create a way to catch the next generation of parents exactly as they slip through that tiny hourglass hole from childhood into adulthood.
All of my thinking is, therefore, is beginning to narrowly focus on THIS!
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I am finding this hourglass image helpful as I think about the upper triangle’s base, its widest part as the circumstances in the earliest months of life (attachment interactions) as they dictate even physiological developmental patterns in body-brain. Research NEEDS to demonstrate the high correlation between high ACE scores and insecure adult attachment.
From there movement to and thru that tiny hole in the middle — if we could catch those young people transitioning from childhood to adulthood and educate them right there about ACEs – we could change where they land on the lower pyramid levels.
We could prevent high ACE people from finding their way to the broad base of the pyramid at the bottom where the greatest lifelong difficulties from high ACEs currently resides.
It is here I would apply pressure to those great trauma wounds to minimize those traumas from being passed to the next generations, as well as to help survivors to heal ASAP.
Every step of positive change accomplished in this way will also have a “lateral” impact as the ripples of informed healing begin to increasingly move out into the wider circle of cultures to permeate a new culture of trauma healing.
In this war on trauma a strategy is needed. A way to focus all available resources in the most effective way. My thinking? This is the direction it is leading me.
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Here is our first book out in ebook format. Click here to view or purchase –
Story Without Words: How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?
It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.
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NOTE: I am still stuck with this new version of the blog’s posting page that I do not like and cannot get out of. It has refused to post or include my chosen tags:
adult attachment disorders, adult reactive attachment disorder, anxiety disorders,borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, brain development, child abuse,depression,derealization, disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorder, empathy, infant abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factors, PTSD, resiliency, resiliency factors, risk factors, shame
Stop the Storm 
It’s me Gingercat, I am BACK! Sorry it’s been so so long. Dear Alchemynow I read your post and all I can say is: you have made a major contribution to my life and days with your posts and comments. Nothing can make your daily existence easier or better perhaps even though as humans we really want to make what happens to us somehow meaningful or having some kind of golden thread of something good comes out of even a, b or c. Maybe that’s part of our humaneness and humanity – and I always think it’s a miracle that anyone can find way of using their troubled lives to make a difference in the world or in one person’s life..
Thinking of you as always!
love
Oh, Gingercat, your words bring sunshine to my heart on this so gray, wet and very cool morning! Your words are always music to me, harmonizing the deep and difficult layers of life with hope to continue through what lies ahead each moment in the best way possible. I think those of us with such depths of trauma histories have perhaps many more instruments in our own orchestras. We work hard to keep each “channel” of thought, feeling and action in the best repair we can manage, in the best tuning, as we work toward moving through our lives in the best harmony and uplifting of melodies. But there is also a great variety including extremes of tones and pitches, complicated harmonies – wafting and sometimes very plaintive notes– throughout our lives from beginning to the end we cannot yet see — as we do the very best we can with what we have been given.
I am blessed to be sharing some of the music of my life with the music of yours. I am so happy to say HELLO with LOVE to you today, dear Gingercat!! So good to hear from you! blessings on all of us!!