SENTIENT TIMES April/May 2002

Deep Scars Can Be Healed

Peter Moore, MFCC, CGP

In the March, 2002, edition of Scientific American, there’s an article by Martin Teicher that is well worth reading, “Scars that won’t heal: the neurobiology of child abuse.” I would like to suggest changing the first part of the title to something like, “Scars that are deep.” I have for many years viewed the task of life-changing psychotherapy (Greek for soul-healing) as building not only new pathways of thinking and feeling, but also new pathways in the brain. This is why patience is such a precious commodity for those who seek healing, because such a forging of a new identity requires many repetitions of small steps. I say “new identity,” because, although for the person in a deep change process it seems as though they are becoming more of who they really are, in a sense the old patterns which are a response to survival issues of childhood are so pervasive and so total that there are many crises of identity in any course of therapy.

Teicher’s article makes it clear just how deep such changes need to be. His brain function studies of patients with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from childhood sexual or physical abuse reveal a number of anatomic differences from people who don’t have this diagnosis. In “normal” subjects, who were asked to recall painful memories, both left and right hemispheres of the brain exhibited equi-valent activity. In PTSD sufferers, the right hemisphere dominated and there was even evidence that the left hemisphere was smaller. Not only that, the communicative pathway between the two halves of the brain, the corpus callosum, was significantly smaller. This may explain why, when someone with this history has a flashback or a similar rush of feelings, often the experience is overwhelming. The painful feelings in the right brain cannot find their way to the left brain, where such feelings could find context, meaning, and understanding.

The left brain has a specialty in perceiving and expressing language, and so an important aspect of therapy is to provide for not only the stimulation of painful memories, but also an emphasis on the understanding of the feelings in these memories. When such memories are not brought to new understandings and associations, they operate autonomously and bombard the sufferer with either overwhelming feelings or a primitive, proto-adult language which uses the body or behaviors to express these feelings in a metaphorical way. It is up to the therapist to try and understand these communicative attempts, and, bit by bit, or neuron by neuron, help the patient build new bridges of understanding: of their bodies, feelings, and behaviors; and of the images they have of themselves and others. Invariably, with this understanding comes greater levels of compassion and forgiveness, and an overall relaxation and a coming down from high alert status.

Other structures in the brain associated with emotions, the amygdala and hippocampus, are found to be less developed in several studies of adult survivors of abuse. An area in the brain, which is stimulated and helped to grow by gentle rocking movements, is also underdeveloped. This cerebellar vermis is significantly deficient in blood flow in PTSD sufferers, and, since it helps regulate the production and release of non-repinephrine and dopamine, people with childhood abuse often have symptoms of depression and attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity.

These findings underscore what any good therapist does. The provision of safety, a good “holding environment,” is crucial for quieting the system down sufficiently that the painful memories have a chance to be brought into healing. Direct suggestions, as used in “inner child work,” are helpful for many people, using the proven power of imagination: in your mind, pick up your young self and rock him or her, or switching roles imagine that a good parent has come to you, reassures you, and gently rocks you. These techniques have to be titrated, however, because the thirst for love, nourishment, and safety is so strong that even a small taste of these longed-for commodities can be overwhelming; so proceed with wisdom, attention, and listening: in the role of the parent, don’t force your love on the child; if all she can tolerate is your sitting near her, do that for awhile, and then gradually move closer until she can tolerate touch and eventually holding and rocking. Remember, for survival reasons, she (if her childhood involved abuse or trauma of any kind) developed a brain that views the world and the people in it as hostile; her system is charged up, ready to fight or flee. It will take some time for her habilitation to succeed.

I use the word “habilitation” rather than “rehabilitation” because we are working toward the creation of new functions. They have always existed in potentiality, so to speak, and it is for this reason that there is nearly always an intuitive sense something is wrong. Every child abuse survivor has probably had tastes or glimpses of an altogether different reality: one of acceptance and love, even if that has only been gained through fantasy. But the task of creating an ongoing, enduring, and loyal capacity to self-soothe and regulate tension is altogether different from the rehabilitation of a physical loss of function following an accident or stroke. In the latter case, the sufferer, if the damage is not too extensive, has both a clear picture of what is wrong—for example, loss of movement in one arm—and also a clear memory of long-term use of that limb. Not so the adult survivor of childhood abuse or neglect: he or she has to painstakingly discover precisely what the deficits are as well as create a new pattern almost from scratch; the difficulty is compounded by the fact that thought patterns and emotional disturbances can’t be seen as obviously as an immoveable arm.

When reading Gimbutas’ work on the early European equalitarian societies (Marija Gimbutas, Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 7000-3500 B.C., University of California Press, 1982) and Eisler’s which goes over the same material in the first few chapters of The Chalice and the Blade (Harper & Row, NY, 1988), I was struck by the dissatisfying description of the end of such societies. It was a “Kurgan invasion” which brought a sudden shift in values, to war and power and dominance, which is the culture that still prevails today. I often wondered what could have caused this? I realized from the behaviors of some Tibetan Buddhist teachers that a shift can occur in only one generation. In my explanation, before Chinese aggression, a healthy child indeed was the norm in Tibetan culture, so issues of transcendence would make sense, not mucking around in all this low self-esteem, violence, self-hatred, neglect, abuse, etc. In Teicher’s article he mentions a study where in boys, neglect “exerted a far greater effect than any other kind of maltreatment.” Could it be that Chinese aggression has damaged certain lineages more than we’d like to think, and certain teachers have been looking for mothers in their female students?

What if some natural disaster occurred in those areas where the Kurgans lived, which caused massive disruption of primary caretaking duties during crucial formative years among thousands of children. These would have grown up with many symptoms: diminished ability to soothe themselves, sudden overwhelming internal negative emotional states, and heightened triggering of the fight or flight response. Calm, peaceful people living in an equalitarian society would have been sitting ducks for armies composed of men grown from such roots. As a swath of destruction spreads, it likewise sows the seeds of continued aggression or fear in the children who are exposed to war.

Imagine if all resources were immediately diverted from weapons dealing and military might to the long, but ultimately most fulfilling road of dealing with conditions of child abuse and neglect, hunger and poverty, and fulfilling basic human needs for nourishment, safety, and peaceful coexistence. Patterns of neglect run deep, and many presently accepted parenting practices, like letting babies cry by themselves, make it clear that we’ve got a lot of work to do.

Peter Moore graduated from Oxford University, and, since 1980, has pursued his interest in healing. Peter is a licensed marriage and family therapist with a practice in Eureka, CA, and can be reached at (707) 442-7228.

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