Infancy trauma - any others can relate??

[Blueberry]

If I slow down any more I'll start moving backwards...But thanks thanks thanks, support is so helpful.

The feeling of going backwards in healing or moving backwards because so slow is pretty common around here too. 25 years ago I was told I needed to do less. I couldn't believe it because I was already doing way less than other adults my age, I mean I couldn't even clean one room in my apt all in one go, never mind the whole apt the way my age group did back then. Little did I know that for some reasons that I'm still not clear on I was being triggered and my energy disappeared at the mere thought of cleaning. The more I followed the "do less" (for a lot more examples than cleaning my apt), the sicker I seemed to get, my ability/energy/wherewithal to do whatever got less and less... As crazy as it may sound, doing less and less was still the answer in my case. The less-and-less might not be the answer in yours but the slow-and-slower-and-even-more-slowly might be in your case.

As Armee says, there are better days ahead. She's right, it does get better!! Probably not 100%, certainly not in my case, but better. Just as baby steps count in active healing (what I do in and out of therapy), it's good to look for and notice the tiny shifts that come to each of us over time during recovery. If you don't notice these yourself, in time forum mbrs will notice and let you know. We're often perceptive of other mbrs' progress while not noticing our own.

[Chart]

Indeed doing still more less seems impossible. But I guess I can try.

[Armee]

I know this is not too relevant to your core question of how is it different but I wanted to suggest a couple thoughts...


1. Blueberry answered really well I think about going slow and doing less. I'll add that opening these boxes can be pretty destabilizing that's part of why slow ends up being much much faster. You don't get knocked as far back. You shuffle forward instead of leaping ahead and straight over a cliff. I've learned this lesson the hard way as have pretty much everyone else here. Over and over I've learned this lesson. You'll learn it too and then you'll be able to go "oh yeah...slow is faster."

I also want to gently point out that the ongoing emotional trauma with your mom might be more significant than you are letting yourself realize right now. 

[Blueberry]

Here we have a new pathology topic, no? Prenatal and Infancy  Trauma... Often this is followed up with more trauma, if the "caregivers" are still around... but in my case not so much... My mom was (still is) pretty messed up but not so extreme toxicity as my biological father. So sometimes the major trauma comes to an end and "normal" childhood sets back in. Of course I remember my childhood and I was pretty messed up by that point. But at least the severe trauma was "past"... Or rather, no new trauma...
Course the question of this thread remains: How is infancy trauma "different" than later childhood trauma? And what are some ways to approach it to try to heal? Specific to pre-verbal and pre-memory...

To go back to some of your comments and questions here. I agree with Armee on not discounting how much you may have continued to be traumatised by your M, even if it might not have been intentional on her part. In your own words you were pretty messed up already by the time your bio F left, so having been traumatised already makes it easier for you to be re-traumatised by ensuing stuff.

How is infancy trauma different from childhood trauma? One way is that your brain is being damaged or wrongly wired from conception or birth onwards and so there is no healthy to go back to. You can't recover your emotional/mental health because you never had it in the first place. This is actually more of a difference between adult onset and childhood onset. An adult who got ptsd only (no complex in front) due to an accident or earthquake or witnessing too many bad things (as emergeny workers do) can recover a healthy self, they can reconnect with a healthy or healthier adult self from before the traumatising event. Even with childhood onset that doesn't really work, because a child by definition hasn't even nearly finished developing by the time the trauma starts.

Maybe a teen has a better chance, especially if traumatised outside the family and then supported by the family and doctors, therapists etc. Because a teen from a good-enough healthy stable family would normally have learnt some healthy behaviour e.g. knowing (some of) what emotions are which, being able to stay with the emotions briefly instead of dissociating, maybe have some healthy self-soothing mechanisms in place and some healthy belief-in-self (or not such a huge and virulent Inner Critic as lots of us have) despite everything going topsy-turvy during adolescence anyway.

Healing pre-verbal, pre-memory? I'm not sure that it's that different to healing trauma from a later date because processing and healing trauma doesn't necessarily mean being able to remember it detail for detail and talking about it. Traumatic memories are by definition usually all over the place in our brains and in our bodies. Trauma really does get stored in our bodies, like my body used to run cold, and my hands and arms used to get really painful. Long ago I thought that was really weird because I know nothing physical and drastic was ever done to my hands and arms like being tied up. It was actually emotional abuse that contributed to hand and arm pain.

The above is based on my opinion and my experiences and what I've read so may not be completely correct or completely based on scientific evidence, but it's what I believe.

There are different ways of healing trauma and I hope at some point you can find a qualified therapist again with whom you can work and who can work with you. A good therapist ought to be able to find the method or a method or even a mix of methods that works for you.

btw your FOO (family of origin) may think or tell you that their care and especially emotional care of you as well as your childhood was/were 'good enough' but if that were the case, you probably wouldn't be on the forum. My parents think they were 'good enough' too    

[Blueberry]

Well actually here is some professional information on the differing affect on traumatisation on very young children versus older children and obviously teens/adults. I came across the info quoted below in another post of my own
https://www.cptsd.org/forum/index.php?topic=13694.msg104359#msg104359  (or if my link doesn't work for you, then see: Physical and Psychological Comorbidities / Co-morbidities / Physical issues / Itchy lower legs  (1st post Aug. 17, 2020)

"In one of the multiple recent free trauma seminars, they mentioned how in early-childhood trauma the whole physical body slows down so it doesn't digest properly, the blood doesn't flow properly, and things like that. I know that's what happens physiologically in a dangerous situation so that you can fight the wolf or flee from the sabre-tooth tiger. It seemed that with infants or toddlers the effect is immediate and turns chronic quite early on, whereas with an older child or adult the chronic stage doesn't happen so early. Or something like that. Don't quote me on it. It would make sense though for some of my not very serious but nonetheless bothersome physical symptoms I've had since early childhood."

Although you are more interested in the long-term emotional results of infancy trauma (most of us probably are), you can't separate them completely for reasons which my tired brain can't explain rn. Maybe tomorrow.

[Lakelynn]

Papa Coco,

Thank you so much for your kind words and sympathy. Yes, that trifecta was THE moment in my life which set the path/journey forwards. This is the first time I dared to type it all out. The earth didn't shatter, and you responded sweetly-your reply feels like that same hug to the heart. I haven't been on for a week, and today is the perfect day to receive your energy.   

[juliannmhall]

I can really really really relate. My mother was a teenager who was being physically and emotionally terrorized by my father. She did not want children and abortion was illegal back then. Her brain wasn't even developed enough to have empathy or understanding of other human beings suffering, let alone a child's suffering. I don't remember my mother even talking to me about anything my whole childhood until I came into adolescence when she always screamed at me and treated me like an enemy, always trying to catch me doing something wrong, so she could psychologically terrorize me. She always screaming that she'd never be a mother who baked cookies for her kids, like if we needed food or clean clothes.

[Armee]

 

[Papa Coco]

One week ago today I met up with a person who knew my FOO before I was born. She told me things nobody had ever disclosed to me before. Dad, who was a son to Norwegian immigrants, came back to the farm from WWII after a massively traumatic experience. He had 8 sisters and a brother. Mom was a 15 year old Catholic girl. They got together. Mom got pregnant.

Here's the part I did not know: Dad's family hated her. They treated her horribly for being pregnant and young. She had the baby, married Dad, and over the years, made general peace with most of Dad's family, but there was always tension.

Mom had 5 more pregnancies, (4 live births) after that. Each pregnancy made her go crazier than the last one. She would go into severe anxiety and Dad, who was 100% non-violent, but extremely strong, would have to hold her down to keep her from hurting herself or others until she could calm down. This was the 1940s and 1950s so there was NO help for a woman who had these anxiety spells.

After my discussion with this friend, I went into some deep meditation and I realized the true story of all that had happened. Mom, who, I already knew had almost died multiple times from a kidney disorder when she was 10 years of age, had a fragile emotional connection to safety and the world, and was then seriously shamed for being pregnant when she was way too young to know how to process the vulnerability of being attacked by an enormous family.

I now believe that each pregnancy acted as a stronger trigger than the one before it. She had to feel at serious risk of being abandoned or hated for being pregnant. We all understand how irrational these triggers can be, and how powerful they are. She was unsupported and probably felt like her anxiety was her own fault. I was in Utero 13 years and 4 pregnancies later. This person I talked with last week remembers Mom being in a severe anxiety chaos for parts of each follow-on pregnancy, including her pregnancy with me.

I was born HSP. Stories I've heard over the decades are that I was an anomaly in the hospital with the nurses who couldn't get over how alert I was. Staring at every person and jumping at every noise. Well of course I was born hypervigilant. Somehow, in utero, I already felt the terror that the world I was about to be born into was going to be a world of danger and hatred and shame. I was the subject of that shame. I came into the delivery room watching to see who was going to hurt me first.

It now makes clearer sense to me why I have lived a life unable to feel like I'm welcome on the earth. I watch every face, and read every word, trying to spot who is going to hurt me next so I can adjust or run.

After reading It Didn't Start with You, I can clearly see that Mom's trauma of being attacked for being pregnant with her children, translated to each of us 5 live births as a feeling that we are not wanted by the world. SHE wanted us. The world didn't.

For 40 years I've been angry at how Mom reacted with each of my wife's pregnancies. Each time I told her we were having a baby, she'd instinctively go into anxiety and yell into the phone, "OH NOOOO!!!!!!" It would take several conversations with her to get her to stop thinking that our babies were the worst things that could happen to us. I have been angry about that for 40 years, but now, after hearing what she went through, I, at least, understand why she did it, and why each of us children felt like the world is a dangerous place for us.

For the past week, as I've been pondering, reading, and meditating on this new information, I've been reaching all new levels of forgiveness for both she and Dad. I'm starting to hear a new voice in my head whenever I feel like the world isn't fair or isn't welcoming to me. The voice says, "this is Mom's trauma playing out in me." The old voices would have just said "This is Mom's fault." I'm still struggling, but I have a new voice now helping me see my struggles from a different perspective. I can now see a longer arc in the wave of abuse in my FOO. It didn't start with me, but it didn't start with Mom or Dad either. This is a longstanding multigenerational trail of racist hatred that attacked the little Catholic French/German girl for infiltrating the Norwegian family.

One reason I never knew any of this is that by the time I was born, we had left. Dad didn't speak to, or about, his family. Mom only told snippets of them, never really saying she hated them, but never connecting any love to them either.  I knew nothing about them because nobody had any good things to say about them.

I don't hate her anymore. I don't hate Dad anymore either. I still know what they did to bring me so much grief in my life, but I'm not taking it as personally as I always have.

[Chart]

Wow Papa Coco... Thank you for that history and everything woven around it. It resonates deeply with me. I'm reading It Didn't Start With You but it is sooo much information and I'm struggling to process it all. Your personal story is much more accessible and there are some distinct similarities in my own family history. Your post possibly makes me see my mother a little differently. And oddly I just saw her tonight by video-telephone. Your story hints at a kind of closure for you (if I understand correctly). I hope that translates into a more profound peace for you, parallel to the healing you so rightly merit. Thanks again and sending hugs. -Chart

[Armee]

Knowing out histories helps so much.