Limbic Brain Flashbacks From Trauma
There is nothing without love. Life starts within the mother’s womb, where she and her child are one. She is all he knows, and he needs her to develop his emotional brain, until he can become an autonomous self. Therefore, why are the role of women so inferior in society? They basically make up a human’s development of skills, true self-worth (that they are loved by another person), and growth potential. Nancy Verrier says in Coming Home to Self that the experiences we have during the first three years of life “play a big part in our overall attitudes and beliefs” (Page 382).
Personally I felt beaten down a lot, in my emotional body and ability to use my strengths of giving love. I feel like a shadow of a person, in this world, my skills and worth invisible to myself and to everyone else. This has to do with my suffering from the primal wound of being relinquished from my biological mother, and then adopted when I was a few months old.
Verrier states, “Severing of the bond with the birth mother.... calls into question basic human relationships,” for the adoptee who’s earliest experience of life is of “disconnection from the mother/ self” (Page 17). The trauma that I was “not good enough” as a person to be loved and nurtured by everything I knew and needed (my real mother), caused me a huge wound which never got the chance to heal. My adoptive family never acknowledged the wound, wanting to pretend it wasn’t there and that I was perfectly happy in their care. I always felt something was missing, unable to place my finger on it. Nancy Verrier in Coming Home To Self describes the difference of genetics of the adoptee and adoptive mother causes the baby to develop hyper vigilance, because he doesn’t know how to “be” as his mother expects, innately in her dna. How can a baby fit in, when “she doesn’t have one gene in common with the adoptive parents.... and the basic personality is as much part of our genetic coding as the color of one’s eyes...” (Page 385). The child who’s post natal experiences are one of separation lives with hyper vigilance, “rarely do adoptive parents get to see the true personality of their child. What the see is behavior, the child’s attempt to cope with his original loss and avoid a new one” (Pages 382-383).
I noticed that the primal wound gets triggered very often, in relation to other people. I spin out of control when I realize that I am not understood, it is part of my baby self that is expecting people to understand me without my explanation. I feel like I live life in a constant regressive state, of being a child inside that is unloved and vulnerable. I feel so sensitive that I keep my walls up very high because I don’t trust people can care about me. It’s not my fault, it was my defense mechanisms to protect me. Verrier says, when there is a trauma before one could verbalize feelings, the person uses unconscious means to defend themselves. Projective identification “can be extremely valuable in identifying and healing pain... used in feelings, thoughts, and behaviors and is used to evoke other’s feelings which are congruent with one’s own feelings... to “project pain onto others,” and as a way to show the feelings that they cannot verbalize. If a mother can understand the projections and does not act defensive and shut down, the child can heal. If she denies and defends against them, it “will confirm the adoptee’s fear that the feelings were indeed too dangerous and unbearable to tolerate” (Pages 377-378). I thought I’d never get out of it, that I was stuck in having to pretend I was confident and not needing other people, but deep down I feel the opposite.
All my life I was running from others, scared they were out to hurt me. I didn’t realize that I was reliving the script of my adoptive mother, who never understood nor seemed to care about my emotions. I shut down, as Nancy Verrier describes adopted babies do when they sense that they are unsafe to express their trauma. They give up on other’s love only 45 minutes after they see that their mother never returns, Verrier states in Coming Home To Self (Page 8).
All this adds to everything else that goes on in the adoptive family, and the child/ person loses all faith in humanity. That people will actually care for his wounded, broken inner undeveloped ego. It splits off from him, that in everyday life he can no longer feel it, so it can never be hurt again. This is a defense mechanism created by the trauma that is recorded in the trauma brain, which is responsible for self-preservation and survival. It causes one to be living in constant hyper vigilance and hyperarousal, “permanently on alert,” and responding to “repetitive stimuli” as if in danger. The person is triggered without knowing why (Pages 13-14).
Being separated from their mother at a preverbal age causes a person to think something must be wrong w it’s me or she wouldn’t have let me go. “Shame inhibits attachment,” the child feels the need to hide their true self (Pages 98-99). The child feels that the anger, shame, sadness and rage from the early trauma imprinted on his amygdala/emotional brain, before the neocortex was even developed, is who he is because “It has always been this way” (Pages 87-88). Raising an adopted child is wildly different from raising one’s own, in the trauma and many, many other issues that come with it. I feel like I am barely a person, after 26 years and I still have a body full of trauma and repressed pain, that storms up at almost every turn I take. I feel like every step I take to understanding my trauma and wounds, I can heal and clear up a bit of the murky window of my true self with.
One thing I will share is awful experiences with a therapist that I went to. Nancy Verrier explains that adoptees use transference with their therapists much more deeply than other trauma victims, because of the false self that they have always lived by. The unhealthy therapists who have not done their own emotional work often do not realize it, and come to believe that the false self of the adoptee is his true self, very detrimentally as the adoptee also believes that. This is exactly what happened to me, for the two years that I was seeing a therapist who was supposed to help me with my emotional issues. I went, and became very compliant and people pleasing to this therapist. I was looking to her as a baby to its mother for love, as I was stuck in my infant needs of having my mother connect and empathize in my grief, as “A baby cannot self-soothe. It takes thousands of interaction between her and her soothing mother to learn to self-soothe” (Page 377).
Transference is where two people experience healing love and have strong feelings, says John Sanford in The Kingdom Within. “‘In psychotherapy both counselor and counselee may be aware of the existence of such feelings.... To the extent that they are seeing in each other only idealized images, the love is not personal, but divine.... different than one human being’s coming to know, respect and love the personality of the other human being’” (Pages 440-441). The therapist must be conscious, in order to understand how to help the adoptee move forward from their dependency to independence. Adoptees uses transference on the therapist by seeing her as the adoptive mother, at first seeing her as all-loving. However, the other side always appears later, where they will turn against her and see her as bad. Sanford says they must recognize their individuality and be able to “driven apart and differentiate” (Pages 440-441).
The adoptee is in the stage of learning his independence from “mother,” and sees their therapist as the “unloving mother” (Page 442). “Without a strong therapeutic alliance,” therapy my be terminated (Page 442). This is similar to happened to me. At first I was very compliant and totally a false self, looking for validation. When I saw I could not get it, I fell into despair and connected with my false self as she seemed to expect of me. She told me, one time when I was crying so desperately and feeling alone, that I was “so special” and I should try to overcome my emotions because they are not going to help me to be where I want to be. My heart sank hearing that, a flashback of all the times I felt like I was nothing, and my pain was not to be heard. I needed to hear that the way I was was great just as it was presently. I remember excusing myself to go to bathroom, and bawling my eyes out in there by how hurt I was by her, it was just like the way my adoptive mother acted about my feelings when I expressed them. I had to shut them down again, and pretend I was okay, to keep my pain to myself. It hurt so much. Another time, when I was sullen and could not create the happy face that she seemed to want to see in me, and I told her I didn’t know what was wrong with me I thought so much about it before I came but not I am unsure. And she said to me, “Why do you leave all your thinking for outside and do not think in here? You should be not thinking so much outside, and thinking more in here.” It was very wounding to me because I was once again, from my youth and on, trying to feel and get heard by another human being there, but she was again telling me that how I felt was unacceptable and I had to “think” my way out of it. She could not accept my true self, and when I told her I did not feel validated by her, finally years after starting, she was very against it, trying to convince me that if I left it would be detrimental to my further relationships. I felt she was trying to control me, and I had no choice but to leave in order to be my true self.
Is it so wrong to feel? Why did all the people in my life make me feel crazy for feeling?
As adoptees, we get hurt in so many “invisible” ways because of a trauma that happened when we were so small, and grew with us by being un-acknowledged and added onto by unassuming, wounded people. They were so stuck in their own wounded egos that they could not understand the adoptee who is crying out for love and help, through his seemingly unattached and apathetic, or self-sacrificing behavior which also roots in disconnection. The truth is, the adoptee’s ego and needs were so far from being met, that it caused them to have to retreat into deep shells in order to protect themselves from what they are hurting from the most: being seen and felt as invisible and worthless to other people. They have to force themselves to not care, because caring would put too much at stake- their very core selves, which they think will not survive if it is seen by others, because their very mother did not keep them. This is a very primal, preverbal wound, so the feelings are just felt and floods their prefrontal cortex but cannot be put into words or understood without knowledge. John Bradshaw in Healing the Shame That Binds You says that the limbic brain stuck in trauma needs not being met causes anger and impulsiveness due to never learning how to self-soothe (Page 46).
Personally I felt beaten down a lot, in my emotional body and ability to use my strengths of giving love. I feel like a shadow of a person, in this world, my skills and worth invisible to myself and to everyone else. This has to do with my suffering from the primal wound of being relinquished from my biological mother, and then adopted when I was a few months old.
Verrier states, “Severing of the bond with the birth mother.... calls into question basic human relationships,” for the adoptee who’s earliest experience of life is of “disconnection from the mother/ self” (Page 17). The trauma that I was “not good enough” as a person to be loved and nurtured by everything I knew and needed (my real mother), caused me a huge wound which never got the chance to heal. My adoptive family never acknowledged the wound, wanting to pretend it wasn’t there and that I was perfectly happy in their care. I always felt something was missing, unable to place my finger on it. Nancy Verrier in Coming Home To Self describes the difference of genetics of the adoptee and adoptive mother causes the baby to develop hyper vigilance, because he doesn’t know how to “be” as his mother expects, innately in her dna. How can a baby fit in, when “she doesn’t have one gene in common with the adoptive parents.... and the basic personality is as much part of our genetic coding as the color of one’s eyes...” (Page 385). The child who’s post natal experiences are one of separation lives with hyper vigilance, “rarely do adoptive parents get to see the true personality of their child. What the see is behavior, the child’s attempt to cope with his original loss and avoid a new one” (Pages 382-383).
I noticed that the primal wound gets triggered very often, in relation to other people. I spin out of control when I realize that I am not understood, it is part of my baby self that is expecting people to understand me without my explanation. I feel like I live life in a constant regressive state, of being a child inside that is unloved and vulnerable. I feel so sensitive that I keep my walls up very high because I don’t trust people can care about me. It’s not my fault, it was my defense mechanisms to protect me. Verrier says, when there is a trauma before one could verbalize feelings, the person uses unconscious means to defend themselves. Projective identification “can be extremely valuable in identifying and healing pain... used in feelings, thoughts, and behaviors and is used to evoke other’s feelings which are congruent with one’s own feelings... to “project pain onto others,” and as a way to show the feelings that they cannot verbalize. If a mother can understand the projections and does not act defensive and shut down, the child can heal. If she denies and defends against them, it “will confirm the adoptee’s fear that the feelings were indeed too dangerous and unbearable to tolerate” (Pages 377-378). I thought I’d never get out of it, that I was stuck in having to pretend I was confident and not needing other people, but deep down I feel the opposite.
All my life I was running from others, scared they were out to hurt me. I didn’t realize that I was reliving the script of my adoptive mother, who never understood nor seemed to care about my emotions. I shut down, as Nancy Verrier describes adopted babies do when they sense that they are unsafe to express their trauma. They give up on other’s love only 45 minutes after they see that their mother never returns, Verrier states in Coming Home To Self (Page 8).
All this adds to everything else that goes on in the adoptive family, and the child/ person loses all faith in humanity. That people will actually care for his wounded, broken inner undeveloped ego. It splits off from him, that in everyday life he can no longer feel it, so it can never be hurt again. This is a defense mechanism created by the trauma that is recorded in the trauma brain, which is responsible for self-preservation and survival. It causes one to be living in constant hyper vigilance and hyperarousal, “permanently on alert,” and responding to “repetitive stimuli” as if in danger. The person is triggered without knowing why (Pages 13-14).
Being separated from their mother at a preverbal age causes a person to think something must be wrong w it’s me or she wouldn’t have let me go. “Shame inhibits attachment,” the child feels the need to hide their true self (Pages 98-99). The child feels that the anger, shame, sadness and rage from the early trauma imprinted on his amygdala/emotional brain, before the neocortex was even developed, is who he is because “It has always been this way” (Pages 87-88). Raising an adopted child is wildly different from raising one’s own, in the trauma and many, many other issues that come with it. I feel like I am barely a person, after 26 years and I still have a body full of trauma and repressed pain, that storms up at almost every turn I take. I feel like every step I take to understanding my trauma and wounds, I can heal and clear up a bit of the murky window of my true self with.
One thing I will share is awful experiences with a therapist that I went to. Nancy Verrier explains that adoptees use transference with their therapists much more deeply than other trauma victims, because of the false self that they have always lived by. The unhealthy therapists who have not done their own emotional work often do not realize it, and come to believe that the false self of the adoptee is his true self, very detrimentally as the adoptee also believes that. This is exactly what happened to me, for the two years that I was seeing a therapist who was supposed to help me with my emotional issues. I went, and became very compliant and people pleasing to this therapist. I was looking to her as a baby to its mother for love, as I was stuck in my infant needs of having my mother connect and empathize in my grief, as “A baby cannot self-soothe. It takes thousands of interaction between her and her soothing mother to learn to self-soothe” (Page 377).
Transference is where two people experience healing love and have strong feelings, says John Sanford in The Kingdom Within. “‘In psychotherapy both counselor and counselee may be aware of the existence of such feelings.... To the extent that they are seeing in each other only idealized images, the love is not personal, but divine.... different than one human being’s coming to know, respect and love the personality of the other human being’” (Pages 440-441). The therapist must be conscious, in order to understand how to help the adoptee move forward from their dependency to independence. Adoptees uses transference on the therapist by seeing her as the adoptive mother, at first seeing her as all-loving. However, the other side always appears later, where they will turn against her and see her as bad. Sanford says they must recognize their individuality and be able to “driven apart and differentiate” (Pages 440-441).
The adoptee is in the stage of learning his independence from “mother,” and sees their therapist as the “unloving mother” (Page 442). “Without a strong therapeutic alliance,” therapy my be terminated (Page 442). This is similar to happened to me. At first I was very compliant and totally a false self, looking for validation. When I saw I could not get it, I fell into despair and connected with my false self as she seemed to expect of me. She told me, one time when I was crying so desperately and feeling alone, that I was “so special” and I should try to overcome my emotions because they are not going to help me to be where I want to be. My heart sank hearing that, a flashback of all the times I felt like I was nothing, and my pain was not to be heard. I needed to hear that the way I was was great just as it was presently. I remember excusing myself to go to bathroom, and bawling my eyes out in there by how hurt I was by her, it was just like the way my adoptive mother acted about my feelings when I expressed them. I had to shut them down again, and pretend I was okay, to keep my pain to myself. It hurt so much. Another time, when I was sullen and could not create the happy face that she seemed to want to see in me, and I told her I didn’t know what was wrong with me I thought so much about it before I came but not I am unsure. And she said to me, “Why do you leave all your thinking for outside and do not think in here? You should be not thinking so much outside, and thinking more in here.” It was very wounding to me because I was once again, from my youth and on, trying to feel and get heard by another human being there, but she was again telling me that how I felt was unacceptable and I had to “think” my way out of it. She could not accept my true self, and when I told her I did not feel validated by her, finally years after starting, she was very against it, trying to convince me that if I left it would be detrimental to my further relationships. I felt she was trying to control me, and I had no choice but to leave in order to be my true self.
Is it so wrong to feel? Why did all the people in my life make me feel crazy for feeling?
As adoptees, we get hurt in so many “invisible” ways because of a trauma that happened when we were so small, and grew with us by being un-acknowledged and added onto by unassuming, wounded people. They were so stuck in their own wounded egos that they could not understand the adoptee who is crying out for love and help, through his seemingly unattached and apathetic, or self-sacrificing behavior which also roots in disconnection. The truth is, the adoptee’s ego and needs were so far from being met, that it caused them to have to retreat into deep shells in order to protect themselves from what they are hurting from the most: being seen and felt as invisible and worthless to other people. They have to force themselves to not care, because caring would put too much at stake- their very core selves, which they think will not survive if it is seen by others, because their very mother did not keep them. This is a very primal, preverbal wound, so the feelings are just felt and floods their prefrontal cortex but cannot be put into words or understood without knowledge. John Bradshaw in Healing the Shame That Binds You says that the limbic brain stuck in trauma needs not being met causes anger and impulsiveness due to never learning how to self-soothe (Page 46).
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