The Body Bears the Burden is the title of neurologist Dr. Robert C. Scaer’s book about trauma and chronic pain. For 20 years Dr. Scaer was the director of a multi-disciplinary programme for treating chronic pain. Physicians referred patients they were unable to help to his service. Many who were on huge doses of narcotics were still in pain despite the medication.
A number of factors caused Dr. Scaer to be curious. Read more
I asked Sarah Olson to be my guest blogger. Sarah, like me, has chosen to write a book in order to share with others her story of childhood trauma.
Sarah’s form of dissociation was particularly severe.
A child’s brain does whatever is necessary to survive trauma. First lines of defense are daydreaming, numbing, forgetting, going dead inside or floating out of body while looking down at “another child” being abused. When all these strategies are insufficient, the child’s brain creates “other children” to suffer the abuse. The “self” remains unaffected. All the bad stuff happens to others, known as “alters.” As new, intolerable abuses occur, more parts split off to form more alters.
Here then, is Sarah Olson’s message: Read more
If you were traumatized in childhood, you probably have trouble managing your fight, flight or freeze response, your body’s reflexive reaction to perceived threat. We share a limbic system with the rest of the animal kingdom and the racing heart of the panic attack is meant to help us survive physical danger. We are getting prepared to run or to fight. The animal strategy is not very effective management in the 21st century when we are seldom in physical danger. Read more
Believe it or not, “you” are not a steady state. “You” are made up of many different ego states. Normal people, like nations, need their children, their creative types, their farmers, their business types and their organizers. You are different when you’re at work than when you’re at home. And you are different playing with little children, than with authority figures. You can be serious and, hopefully, playful. But you recognize all these states as being “you.” Read more
Remember Linda? I wrote about her in “Confessions.” Harvey and I took this disturbed teenager into our home because Harvey believed that with a stable environment, she could flourish.
Before she came to live at our house, Linda had been living in a lean-to she built for herself in a ravine. Winter was coming and she had nowhere to live. Her mother had died, she told us. (Later we found out there had been no funeral.) She smoked and drank and with her dissociative identity disorder, and we never knew whether we would meet the sweet seductive part or the tough guy part of her personality.
If you’ve read my book, you know that the rescue operation pretty well drove me crazy. I didn’t have my own memories of child sexual abuse at the time and her anguish stirred my own unresolved depression. I finally said had to leave.
This same Linda stayed with us last weekend. She lives in Thunder Bay, is married and has two adopted sons. She’s a wise and loving mother. Linda devotes a lot of energy to telling her story to high school children and anyone whose life she can positively influence with her own experience in overcoming numerous addictions. She is, to say the least, mentally stable.
We spent a lot of time, she and I, reviewing those terrible teenage years. She told me she figured she’d touched off some awful stuff inside me when I got so mad at her and told her she had to leave. She told me that she’d met up with her mother and had seen her with her compassionate adult eyes as a helpless, defeated woman. Linda’s children now have a grandmother.
Where did this disturbed, antisocial kid get so much wisdom and understanding?
There’s got to be a moral to the story. Never underestimate the power of the human spirit?
