For those of you who may want to learn a bit more about Developmental Trauma, check out this podcast Lorna Bremner did with me recently.
Here are her email comments and the link to Closure Optional.
“Thank you again for a wonderful chat! Oh, and your name is spelled incorrectly in this link here, but when you go to the page, it is correct, sorry about that!! http://lornabremner.com/2019/06/09/closure-optional-ep-58-prof-leon-petchovski-psychiatrist/
Kindly,Lorna”
By now the reader will be aware that just as Climate Change is the biggest threat to the earth’s ecology, so is Developmental Trauma to our socio-psychological domain.
If we could only get those first 3 years of life right, a huge range of negative behavioural consequences would be reduced to more manageable levels……less violence, less terrorism, more empathy and compassion, more energy to apply to positive ends.
And yet, there is not a single government on Earth that has a well-developed policy on supportive interventions in the first 3 years of life. Not even the Scandinavian countries.
In the past few years, spurred on by increasing anxiety about child abuse, violent crime, delinquency, and drug misuse, public debate about the contribution of parents has become more intense. It has always been tempting to blame parents for the bad behaviour of their children, but there is a more thoughtful discussion. Without blame, it is possible to see what effects different kinds of parenting have on the lives of children, even extending into their own adult lives in the next generation. An enormous number of books and articles, conferences and policy statements have appeared, to the extent that we can say there is a movement towards supporting parents in their task. It is only possible to do this now that we understand just how difficult and stressful the task is. Until recently there was little public or professional acknowledgement of the immensity of parental commitment, perhaps because much of it was carried out by women, mostly mothers, whose voices were not heard. Even now it is easy for busy adults to resist a serious exploration of children’s needs, because to do so arouses poignant memories of one’s own childhood, both happy and sad, nostalgic and painful. In this chapter I outline a story of parenthood, from past to future, seen through the lens of attachment theory. Those working closely with families, such as health visitors, social workers, child carers and parent supporters in the voluntary sector need a coherent framework in which to understand family processes. They also need to know that their work cannot flourish in the absence of a coherent national policy on parenthood. The privatisation of children’s care and needs is no longer an option.
How to get the political parties in our nations involved in this vital task? They are not interested.
What we need are Ministers and Ministries in Early Childhood Nurturance, departments that can identify mothers/fathers at risk and in stress, and programmes that protect and nurture them, and help them develop their nurturance skills.
We can make a start by educating the public. It would be good to have a range of strong media presentations on the subject. In Australia, the public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), could make a range of programmes for general consumption, examining findings in developmental neuroscience, looking at Developmental Trauma (the consequences of dysfunctional nurturance n those first 3 years) , and featuring a range of preventive and reparative programmes like the Bumps to Babes and Beyond organisation we featured earlier.
The commercial media would then become interested in offering similar productions, and past a certain point, there would be sufficient public energy to impact on the political process.
I’ve been working on this thing for several years…a book about how if we can only put more loving energy into the first 3 years of life, we might just save the Planet………problem was……it was too overarching…….there are so many excellent texts on developmental neuropsychology.
I’ve decided to focus JUST on Indigenous issues……starting with the Wati Kanyilpai story and Dreaming, extending that to what is happening in the Central Australian communities I have been visiting over many decades, but then extending it more broadly, but in a concise fashion.
The central message…….men need to do Watikanyilpai, nurture the nurturers….the more we do that, the more our Planet has a chance of surviving.
This must be the most neglected blog on Planet Earth……is it the subject? the writer? the writing?
In the last two years, I have tried to publish a paper called “Healing Trans Generational Cascades of Distress in Disadvantaged Indigenous Communities”…..I submitted it to 4 different Journals, and it got rejected EVERY TIME….I have submitted many other papers to many other journals…..NO PROBLEMS…at worst, the editors have asked me to make some revision changes.
I continue to write my “Nurturing the Nurturers” book with a sinking heart.
Yelp.
Dear reader
This must be Planet Earth’s most neglected blog……..even I have been neglectful…..is it the subject?……how I write to it?……
I have published many many papers in various scientific journals, but one of my papers, called “Healing Trans-generational Cascades of Distress in Disadvantaged Indigenous Communities” ……has been reject by 4/FOUR Journals. This has never happened with any of my other publications….at worst, with other papers, the editors suggested various changes that I complied with, and the thing got published……what on Earth is going on ?????
Since no-one will read this blog, there won’t be any responses that I can incorporate into making whatever editorial changes might help.
I continue to work on my “Nurturing the Nurturers” book with a sinking heart.
It is obvious that a project to nurture the nurturers needs the men on this Planet to take a major part.
How can we nurture men to develop more nurturance ?
If a man scores high on the ACE scale, and has some degree of Developmental Trauma, then psychotherapy and neurofeedback will be useful.
But what about the rest ? Here the issue is more of a “Peak Performance”one. Some suggestions.
As the males of the species develop more and more “nurturing the nurturers “skills, it becomes easier for the primary carers, usually the women, to do their nurturance more effectively. The babies benefit, the Planet benefits.
A little exercise to bring cheer into your life. Maybe even a tiny bit of power.
Below is a list of 10 major world figures…..politicians or leaders of major organisations.
A wonderful nurturer might get score of 10. A score of 5 indicates that they are just barely good enough. A monster nurturer would score 0. For the purpose of this exercise, nurturance has a broad range. Even though the most difficult job is obviously the one of nurturing a baby, a being that cannot speak, and is utterly dependent, we are talking about the broader aspects of nurturance: how someone might look after babies, but also relate to adults, animals, plants, the environment. This is not an intellectual exercise. Just go with your gut feelings, and arrange them from 0 to 10 on a piece of paper, whatever.
Now give your mother a score from 0 to 10 on this scale. Anything less than 5 tells you that you had a very difficult start in life.
Finally, think about the next election in your state or country ? Who are the candidates asking you to vote for them ? Give each of them a score from 0 to 10.
Leon’s agenda: The more politicians find out about this, the more likely they may be to include nurturance on their political agenda.
Yesterday was Australia Day in this country……..some of us may have difficulties with the date….I for one would prefer a date that our Indigenous people feel good about, rather than the date that commemorates the invasion of this country by Europeans.
But there is one feature that is unreservedly good; the nominations of “Australian of the Year” for 2015 and 2016 were Rosie Batty and David Morrison; and both of them have taken a leadership role in encouraging us to find ways of dealing with Domestic Violence.
While it is clear that exposure to family violence damages children emotionally and psychologically, a range of further research findings supports the obvious intuition that many perpetrators of domestic violence themselves come from backgrounds of the various kinds of problematic early developmental nurturance that have been described at length in various postings on this blog.
The stage is thus set for a transgeneration cascade of domestic violence……..and of course, a perpetrator of domestic violence is unlikely to confine their aggressive action to the home front alone.
It is encouraging to see how plans to minimise domestic violence are coming more and more into national prominence. And here again, while there is a whole range of measures that have a positive effect, the earlier in the life cycle that they are deployed, the better……nurturing the nurturers……identifying those at risk and supporting them sensitively.
I am currently working on Chapter 6 of my “Politics of Nurturance” book. This is the Chapter on identification and sensitive supports and interventions…..and how our recent understandings of developmental neuroscience can inform this. An extremely difficult area……one of the core problems is that because so much of this stuff is PRE-verbal…i.e. addressing the emotional/relational “networks”and “programmes” of the right hemisphere of the baby and infant, but ALSO of the nurturer, much of the supportive input needs to be pre-verbal as well, if it is to be effective. And a book is very VERBAL after all. Prosody is largely absent unless it is read aloud, and then much hangs on the reader’s voice.
I’ve had some ideas about how to subtly address this issue, but I want to do it “under the radar”as it were, without making it so obvious that it loses any good impact.
Any feelings or ideas , dear reader?
I recently presented material at a College of Psychiatrists’ Psychotherapy Conference, on the use of neurofeedback to enhance psychotherapy with deeply damaged (Developmental Trauma) patients.
I’ve been using NF with some of my deeply damaged patients, guided by my supervisor Sebern Fisher at regular Skype sessions.
Sebern is the world’s leading authority/exponent on/of this subject, and has written the definitive book: Neurofeedback in the Treatment of developmental Trauma (Elsevier 2014″).
I gave the audience a particularly vivid example drawn from Sebern Fisher’s book pp278 to 296: the Rennie and baby Madeline story.
Rennie had a horrific history of physical and sexual abuse by every member of her family. Was admitted to S’s residential treatment centre aet 16 . Had multiple psychiatric hospitalisations afterwards, despite this.
Had 2 children by a dysfunctional partner, with lengthy PPD after each birth. Represented to Sebern aet 26 for NF facilitated psychotherapy (at least the contact with Sebern at the residential centre has left a long lasting trusting impression).
Initial T4 P4, T3 T4, T4 P4 downtraining over 18 sessions (weekly). Rennie finds herself managing stressors more easily, but gets pregnant again.
Sebern starts her on a FPO2 protocol which targets the dysfunctional R prefrontal limbic/amygdalar circuitry. The baby has been very unsettled in the womb, with lots of excessive movements, but the movements gradually become much easier.
After session 25, R ejects the abusive boyfriend. By session 28, she has given birth to baby Madeline.
Rennie feels baby Madeline is much more attuned than the previous children. Sebern continues FPO2 training with Madeline lying on Rennie’s chest.
Rennie reports:
“She got more regulated…she felt my heart beat and I could feel hers beating in the same way. And her breathing too. This is so different from my other kids. I love them so much, but this baby is just different. I didn’t know there was this way to be , this lace to be in. I didn’t know it existed. I am attuned to her and she is attuned to me. I regulate HER and she regulates ME.”
When Madeline is 8 months old, Rennie is pushing her in her stroller to the grocery store, when they run into her biological mother and oldest brother. He was the most abusive of R’s siblings and had been incarcerated for molesting children. Although surprised to see him, Rennie reports she felt unexpectedly calm….but Madeline…took one look at the man, whom she had never seen before, and started to scream hysterically and could not be comforted until Rennie took her out of the store, away from the brother….she then quietened quickly.
The BIG problem with the “nurturing the nurturers” program is that it will inevitably offend all the mothers on this Planet. They will feel criticized, marginalized, condescended to, etc etc. This is such a sensitive issue.
And yet, Winnicott reminds us that “good enough” nurturance must NOT be perfect. Lapses are absolutely essential, because they create an opportunity for repair, and once this has happened several times, a microculture is created that includes opportunities for repair, and this in turn makes for a much safer and more secure environment. It is no longer a case of “one mistake and you’re dead”.
How do we address this dilemma? Your comments, anyone out there.
watikanyilpai 