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March 22nd, 2010
That’s an Apology?
NY Times: Pope Offers Apology, Not Penalty, for Sex Abuse Scandal
In his Pastoral Letter Of the Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI To the Catholics of Ireland, the Pope does not actually apologize to the victims of sexual abuse perpetrated by employees of the Catholic Church. Instead, he invites Irish Catholics to seek solace from the very institution that has betrayed them, exhorting them to pray and remember the suffering of Jesus Christ.
Although Pope Benedict XVI writes about the pain of the victims, he takes no responsibility for any of it, using terms like “the church in your country.” In fact, the letter is replete with references to others and has few “I” statements. It seems designed to prevent a massive defection from the church in Ireland rather than to atone for the grievous acts committed by priests and their superiors on children in their care.
What constitutes a meaningful apology? Start with owning up to the specific wrong committed, acknowledge how the behavior has negatively affected others, then offer restitution. This pastoral letter reads more like an apologia. No wonder the Catholics in Ireland were not happy with it.
Posted in Therapist Musings |
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March 19th, 2010
“I’ve been in therapy umpteen years and I’m still struggling with this stuff. The abuse happened so long ago, why aren’t I over it already?”
When someone asks a why question like that, I hear an expression of feelings. In this case, I detect frustration and perhaps anger at oneself. Sometimes an explanation can make inroads by providing a way to transform negative beliefs into compassion for oneself. So here goes.
When you’ve been abused and/or neglected as a child, your development gets derailed. By age three, the brain has already reached 90% of adult size compared to the body’s 15%. There’s a lot of potential there for things to go wrong when you’re so young, helpless and dependent.
The left side of the brain, the seat of reasoning, calculations and language, doesn’t begin to develop until age two, remaining limited till five. The right brain, the site where stress, emotions, intuition, voice tone (the music of speech) get processed, remains dominant till seven at which point language takes over along with narrative, a sense of linear time.
How does the right brain manage stress and what has that got to do with the question?
During times of stress, the autonomic nervous system (ANS) runs the show, outside of conscious control. Initially, the sympathetic nervous system part of the ANS revs up the body to react, either by fighting or fleeing: the heart starts beating quicker, breathing becomes rapid, blood pressure increases, the body readies for action.
Once the threat has subsided, the parasympathetic nervous system part of the ANS kicks in to calm the body by inhibiting the state of arousal, restoring the body’s equilibrium. Too much of this results in dissociation.
When the stressors continue unabated, when the child cannot escape or fight back, the body remains in a state of arousal, pumping out stress hormones, oversensitizing the brain to stress; the ANS ceases to function properly. If the details of this interest you, check out David Baldwin’s Trauma Information Pages for several articles that address the neuroscience of your problems.
For purposes of answering the question, there’s one more aspect of brain functioning that’s relevant: the limbic system and its role in emotional experience and memory formation. Part of it, the amygdala, a small brain organ shaped like an almond (hence it’s name), processes negative emotions, frightening faces and unseen fear. It communicates with the hippocampus, a nearby part of the brain shaped like a seahorse, where declarative/narrative memory is stored. Integrating information from the senses and other parts of the brain, forming coherent memories of events and placing them in the context of place and time, the hippocampus is essential for learning and memory.
Studies have found a smaller hippocampus in children who have been abused or lived through wartime, in women with severe dissociative disorders and in those suffering from depression. The amygdala is hyperactive in depressed individuals. Memories remain unprocessed, not integrated, returning later as symptoms.
What does all this mean for you? Even though the abuse or neglect happened many years ago, its impact continues because it has taught your brain to react to anything reminiscent of the original threat in the same way it did back then. You might flare into a rage at a slight because you feel humiliated like you did as a child. You might not be able to take an exam because of the panic you experience. Or you might find yourself in a dissociated, spaced-out state, not so much an absence of feelings so much as a disconnection from them. Your stress response system goes into overdrive because of the chronic stress you experienced as a child.
It’s a brain thing and clearly not your fault. It even has a name: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
So look at your progress. Remember when you began your journey of recovery, when you didn’t have a clue about what was ailing you and you were sure you were crazy. Notice how much you have changed. Sure it’s not where you want to be but the work does pay off. The brain is plastic enough to heal. Check out Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself for inspiring stories about neuroplasticity. And hang in there.
Posted in Ask the Therapist |
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March 17th, 2010
Fear Slows Time or Not
Many people who have experienced terrifying experiences report that time slows down, a phenomenon known as time dilation. Writing in his Psychology Today website, Jeff Wise described an experiment in which researchers sought to discover whether the brain actually does something, like speed up sensory input and cognitive processing, or whether it just seems that way in retrospect.
Using subjects and a thrill ride that entailed a very long free fall, he first had them estimate how long it had taken them to land (in a net). Not surprisingly, they guessed it took longer than it did. Then he strapped onto their wrists a device that flashed numbers just fast enough to be imperceptible by someone in a neutral state. If the brain did speed up, he figured, then subjects would be able to read the numbers. They couldn’t.
He concluded that fear doesn’t speed up perception and processing; it simply enables more detailed memory. The hypothesis states that remembering more makes elapsed time seem longer.
One experiment does not a conclusion prove and needs replication. Perhaps reading those numbers just didn’t qualify as necessary for survival. Additional research using imaging techniques to uncover what goes on in the brain during heightened states of fear could contribute to greater understanding of time dilation.
Something different must be going on in the brain to accumulate far more details than usual, if that’s in fact what does happen. Certainly, from an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that the brain would evolve to pay closest attention to those things that are perceived as most dangerous.
Crime and accident victims, survivors of childhood abuse, and others, describe an acuity of perception and altered cognitive state of knowing that differs markedly from ordinary experience, shifts that often result in life-saving decisions and actions. This research raises interesting questions that call for further exploration before conclusions can be reached.
Posted in Therapist Musings |
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March 16th, 2010
The Lost World
of Old Europe
By about 30,000 years ago, homo sapiens had driven Neanderthals to extinction, crowding them out of central Europe, driving them further and further south until they had nowhere else to go but gone. Not long after that, humans were forced south too–by advancing glaciers from the north.
With the end of the last ice age, around 11,500 years ago, peoples inhabiting the Levant began a steady migration north and by 6,000 BCE had settled in southeast Europe along the Danube Valley stretching from what is now Serbia to Ukraine. In the exhibition, The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley, 5,000-3500 BC, at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, archeological treasures, mostly from Bulgaria, the Republic of Moldova, and Romania, tell the incomplete story of the various Neolithic cultures that thrived during these times.
Were they matriarchal Goddess worshipers? A majority of unearthed figurines (the term for these small sculptures) depict women; representations of men are rare. A cache of 21 figurines with 13 chairs upon which the larger sculpted women can sit has been called, “The Council of the Goddess.” If the two prongs on the back on one chair represent bull horns, then the grouping becomes a reference to a fertility cult.
In the exhibit, a descriptive caption elaborated on “the ubiquitous” sculptures of women nursing babies “in the Neolithic period…as evidence of a cult dedicated to a goddess of Birth and Nurturing and to rituals associated with the renewal of life.” But not so fast, subsequent wall text cautions: “the great variety of contexts in which [all types of female] figurines are found (burials, households, hoards, and sanctuaries) suggests that they might have assumed different social, cultural, and even religious connotations.” This seems to strengthen rather than diminish the likelihood that the feminine was highly revered in these cultures, lending additional support to the idea these were matriarchal societies.
A stunning female figure from Hamangia (Romania) characterized a particular style. Of fired clay, about 8″ tall, with protruding breasts, arms that run alongside the chest and across the belly, wide hips that taper into legs the shape of which echo the long, headless neck, the sculpture could easily have been used in rituals of fertility. The long neck, a bit like a skewer, begged for a piece of fruit or bread to be stuck on it, which would have heightened its association with nurturing and fecundity. But since the figures in “The Council of the Goddess” as well as some others had long necks with pinched clay noses and gouged out eyes, probably it was a stylistic quirk, akin to the Mannerism of a much later time.
Other arresting sculptures come from Cucuteni. Armless with prominent shoulders, tapered waist, large hips and narrowing legs ending in small feet, they are wrapped by parallel scoring that emphasizes their shapes. There is a simplicity and elegance about them.
Though many mysteries still remain about the uses of these figurines, as objects of art they stand on their own and are well worth seeing.
The Lost World of Old Europe:
The Danube Valley, 5000-3500 BC
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
New York University
15 East 84th Street
New York, NY 10028
Posted in Art Reviews |
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March 15th, 2010
Effective Therapy:
A Major Force in Enhancing Moral Intelligence
John Bradshaw, MA
John Bradshaw is on a mission. Speaking on March 12, 2010, in New York City, mostly about the contents of his new book, Reclaiming Virtue: How to Develop The Moral Intelligence To Do The Right Thing At The Right Time For The Right Reason, he gave the audience marching orders to take his message out into the world of therapy offices, treatment programs, hospitals, other such venues and one’s own family to make the world a safer place.
Bringing to the lecture his unique blend of theology, philosophy, psychology, addiction studies, and personal recovery from alcoholism and sexual compulsivity, Bradshaw gave a rousing sermon on the nature of moral intelligence and what it takes to develop it. During the breaks, he signed copies of his new book.
Bradshaw defined moral intelligence quite simply as “making the right choice at the right time for the right reason,” a skill that can be taught and learned. Because “unbridled human nature can be very dangerous,” emotional literacy forms the bedrock of moral intelligence. “Contained feeling is more important in making a moral judgment than logic.”
Lest one think that emotions don’t enter into moral decision making, consider an experiment in which subjects had to decide whether or not to throw a switch that could save five people on a runaway trolley by sending it to another track where it would kill somebody. Most chose to sacrifice the one person. But when told they could stop the trolley by throwing a very old person onto the track, no one wanted to do it. Logic didn’t operate in the second decision.
In 1988, Bradshaw published Healing the Shame that Binds You in which he wrote about toxic shame. In his recent lecture, he revisited the issue of shame as he did in the 2005 revision of the book, making a clear distinction between toxic and healthy shame. Toxic shame is carried shame, a feeling that one is either beneath others (self loathing) or above them (grandiosity). Healthy shame allows for the experience of being human, of making mistakes, and constitutes an important ingredient of moral intelligence. Humility, modesty, teachability, civility, even manners require humans to experience a healthy feeling of shame.
Children who grow up in families with addictions, sexual and other forms of abuse, neglect, mental illness, or who are singled out because they are different (e.g., lesbian/gay, disabled), develop a distorted sense of themselves, believing that there must surely be something horribly wrong with them. They live out lives of isolation, hiding their true selves from others by shunning social activities or by cultivating masks of functioning and achievement.
Returning to his long-running mission of spreading the word about healing, which Bradshaw has been doing for years in his inner child workshops and self-help books, he advises all that doing “original pain work” that heals toxic shame “allows for the development of healthy shame…to accept [one’s] perfectly imperfect human nature.”
Much of the time Bradshaw speaks from his own experiences, from his heart. He performs and informs, leaving the audience with plenty to ponder and an interest in learning more about the concept and development of moral intelligence. He was still signing books long after the lecture ended.
Posted in Lecture Reviews |
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March 14th, 2010
Say What?
NY Times: Vatican Sees Campaign Against the Pope
Apparently the Vatican considers sexual abuse of children a matter of “attraction” rather than predation.
In a public interview, “Msgr. Charles J. Scicluna, the director of a tribunal inside the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal arm,” (NY Times, 3/14/10), admitted that the church had received 3,000 accusations of sexual abuse by priests in the past ten years and then made the startling calculation that 300 have been accused of pedophilia in the past nine years. What happened to the other 2,700?
It’s not the math; it’s the definitions. A paragraph missing from the current online version of the Times article but existing in the printed version of the Sunday Times states, “We can say about 60 percent of the cases chiefly involved sexual attraction towards adolescents of the same sex, another 30 percent involved heterosexual relations, and the remaining 10 percent were cases of pedophilia in the true sense of the term; that is, based on sexual attraction towards prepubescent children.” Someone must have quickly retracted all that, realizing what had been revealed about the church’s understanding of sexual abuse.
And then there’s the part about sparing the aging priests (60% of the cases) from the undue strains of trial (though they were disciplined in some other way). Only 20% of the cases went to trial and of those some were acquitted.
Just for clarification: the sexual abuse of children (and teenagers are still children) involves the abuse of power and the eroticizing of fear. What turns on the perpetrators is the child’s terror. Sexual abuse is not about attraction. Remember, informed consent requires the power to say no along with the understanding of what is happening. Children do not have either. Where the abuser is a priest, there is also the betrayal not just by a trusted authority figure but also by the god the child worships.
The Vatican still has a long way to go in its dealings with victims of abuse and the men who prey on the children in their care.
Posted in Therapist Musings |
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March 14th, 2010
A Lie of the Mind
by Sam Shepard
The action begins with Frank in his bathrobe, on the phone, worriedly begging his older brother Jake to give him the pay phone number. Jake says there is no number and keeps repeating, “I killed her. This time I killed her.” In the next scene, the two sit at opposite ends of a couch as Jake spins his delusional tale of betrayal by his wife, Beth, who he believes was having an affair with an actor. Why else, he argued, would she get all dolled up to go to rehearsals? Frank insists it’s just acting, not real; Jake believes actors become the roles they play.
We meet Beth in a hospital bed, unwrapping bandages from her head, slurring her words, sounding barely coherent, learning to stand and take a step, attempting to convince her brother Mike, who helps her, that she is not dead. She pleads to be released from the tomb that imprisons her.
Sam Shepard, in his brilliant and creative depiction of profound but distressingly familiar family dysfunction, gives us the basics in the first few minutes of his drama, A Lie of the Mind. The action unfolds amid an array of objects attached to stage walls and ceiling, the detritus from the lives we will soon encounter on home visits to the families of Jake and Beth. Reminiscent of a Louise Nevelson sculpture, the set consists of wooden chairs and tables, lamps (some lit), a crib, a wheel chair, an old television, foot lockers, suitcases and much, much more.
Two musicians, Shelby and Latham Gaines, work their magic on the right side of the stage, strumming an old telephone-booth sign, singing into a large enamel pot, playing a broom handle and other instruments as eccentric as the folks on stage. The director, Ethan Hawke, writes in the play’s notes, “Each instrument has been created to give `VOICE’ to a different character.”
Jake, bereft from losing Beth, returns to his family where his widowed mother, Lorraine, blames his sister Sally for the father’s death and welcomes the opportunity to sequester her dear son from the rest of the world. She keeps him in bed and feeds him cream of broccoli soup, protecting him from getting into violent confrontations caused by brain attacks that engulf him in intolerable states of fear and feed him paranoid thoughts. Sally tries to abet Jake’s escape; the specter of incest haunts the house.
Frank, who carries a bottle of booze, travels to ascertain Beth’s condition and ends up stuck in her family, where the perfectly self-involved father, Baylor, whose focus is hunting, has no patience for the needs of others, and brother Mike desperately seeks to avenge his sister’s brain injury. Mother Meg lives in a world of complete denial.
And that’s just the general framework. The plot unfolds with surprising twists and turns, revealing enough about each person for a complete mental status assessment and diagnosis. The talented actors bring to life individuals with unique pathologies and defense mechanisms, who are simultaneously enmeshed with and disengaged from each other.
Shepard understands domestic violence. At one point, determined to explain why she misses Jake and still loves him, Beth declares with her brain-addled speech, “He’s still alive in me.” Jake mourns the loss of the wife he loves dearly despite his having been the agent of her presumed demise.
“Lie of the mind” refers not just to Beth’s traumatic brain injury but also to the rampant psychoses (disconnections from reality) in both families. Each person lives in a world of her/his own. Shepard writes as an expert on the lying mind, however he might have come by such knowledge. The play is worth seeing for its window onto a reality well known to anyone who wrestles with symptoms of family-based post-traumatic stress and/or dissociation, and to those who listen to their stories, but seldom seen and/or acknowledged by others.
A Lie of the Mind
The Acorn @ Theater Row
410 West 42nd Street
For an interview with the playwright, see Sam Shepard Opens Up in The Observer, online, March 21, 2010.
Posted in Theater Reviews |
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March 12th, 2010
Newborns & Smell Memories
Recent research demonstrates that within the first week of life, newborn babies encode olfactory (smell) memories of their mother’s milk when nursing and retain a preference for that odor up to a year later. The research, described in Science News, provided evidence of infants’ ability at a very early age to associate particular smells with positive experiences, forming memories that stay with them.
What might this mean for smells associated with negative experiences? One symptom of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder involves re-experiencing the original horror, with all it’s associated feelings and thoughts, when confronted with anything reminiscent of it. Just as the smell of cookies baking in the oven can elicit fond images of other times, the scent of the perpetrator’s cologne or body odor, clean (or dirty) bed sheets, or anything else, can trigger the switch on the time machine of PTSD, catapulting the unsuspecting survivor into a sensory and emotional state that’s enough to make one feel ambushed and crazy.
So much is encoded before language parts of the brain develop. Survivors of childhood sexual abuse (and other forms of abuse and neglect) struggle with symptoms that erode their hard-won self esteem because of how beyond conscious control these triggered states can be. It can help to know it’s a brain thing. Babies are learning sponges that absorb everything that happens to them and goes on around them, and they learn in a visceral way that eludes ordinary cognitive memory in adult years. Memories of abuse and neglect from the first years of life can wreak a particular havoc because of their preverbal nature.
Posted in Therapist Musings |
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March 11th, 2010
From time to time, when I have artwork on exhibit, I’ll put that information here so you can stop by to see it. Look for other announcements about my work here as well. And don’t forget to check out the Work In Progress page to view my current project.
Posted in Introductions |
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March 11th, 2010
I find especially intriguing artistic expression that hints at or deals directly with trauma. Works like these peak my curiosity about their creators so I search for information about the artist’s background, gather up whatever bits and pieces about childhood history are available, then read between the lines. Using this autobiographical material, I reexamine the work. Here’s where I’ll be sharing my hypotheses with you.
Posted in Introductions |
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