Our children live in a culture of endless cries of “think of the children” – and attend schools that are crumbling, overcrowded, understaffed, and short on necessary supplies. They hear again and again about “family values” – but see their parents struggle to pay for health care or childcare, often isolated from family and friends and disconnected from neighbors. They hear talk about caring and sharing – but see around them mainly fear, arguments based on personal attacks, and competition.
One word the translators were able to figure out was that “Mum” meant “adult or caregiver,” just as similar sounds mean mother in almost every known human language, since the “mm” sound is the first one babies learn to make while suckling.
Neural systems have evolved to be especially sensitive to novelty, since new experiences usually signal either danger or opportunity. One of the most important characteristics of both memory, neural tissue, and of development, then, is that they all change with patterned, repetitive activity. So, the systems in your brain that get repeatedly activated will change, and the systems in your brain that don’t get activated won’t change.
The capacity to love cannot be built in isolation. I.
Reducing economic inequality and helping victims of domestic violence and child abuse are critical if we want to cut violence and crime.
Why do money and possessions so rarely bring the happiness we expect? Because they often distance us from one another, rather than bringing us closer, emphasizing status gaps, not narrowing them. And, finally, what causes much of life’s most agonizing pain? This, too, is related to relationships – those we lose, fail to maintain, or that become one-sided or abusive.
What I’ve learned from talking to so many victims of traumatic events, abuse, or neglect is that after absorbing these painful experiences, the child begins to ache. A deep longing to feel needed, validated, and valued begins to take hold. As these children grow, they lack the ability to set a standard for what they deserve. And if that lack is not addressed, what often follows is a complicated, frustrating pattern of self-sabotage, violence, promiscuity, or addiction.
We elicit from the world what we project into the world; but what you project is based upon what happened to you as a child.
Because what I know for sure is that everything that has happened to you was also happening for you. And all that time, in all of those moments, you were building strength. Strength times strength times strength equals power. What happened to you can be your power. – Oprah.
The elders were very patient with my curiosity, and gently amused at my Western medical-model formulations of “disease” when I asked how they handled depression, sleep problems, drug abuse, and trauma. They kept trying to help me understand that these problems were all basically the “same thing.” The problems were all interconnected. In Western psychiatry we like to separate them, but that misses the true essence of the problem. We are chasing symptoms, not healing people.
All life is rhythmic. The rhythms of the natural world are embedded in our biological systems. This begins in the womb, when the mother’s beating heart creates rhythmic sound, pressure, and vibrations that are sensed by the developing fetus and provide constant rhythmic input to the organizing brain.
Our ancestors recognized the importance of connectedness and the toxicity of exclusion. The history of the “civilized” world, on the other hand, is filled with policies and practices that favored disconnection and marginalization – that destroyed family, community, and culture.
In fact, the research on the most effective treatments to help child trauma victims might be accurately summed up this way: what works best is anything that increases the quality and number of relationships in the child’s life.
Rhythm is regulating.
Connectedness regulates and rewards us.
Humans are social animals, highly susceptible to emotional contagion. Training, logic, and intelligence are often no match for the power of groupthink.
Your connectedness to other people is so key to buffering any current stressor – and to healing from past trauma. Being with people who are present, supportive, and nurturing. Belonging.
In fact, some theories of language development suggest that humans learned to dance and sing before we could talk, that music was actually the first human language.
This is incredibly unlike our modern world. We expect a single working mother to be the one to throw the baseball with her eight-year-old, rock the newborn, read to the three-year-old, and, by the way, cook a nutritious meal, help with homework, do the laundry, get everyone to bed, then wake up and get them all ready for childcare and school so she can go work all day, only to rush home to do it all again. All alone.
Oprah: She needs people to step up – people who support her, give her some breaks, step in and do some of those things with her children. We’re not meant to be isolated and alone. We’re actually meant to work together. So when a single mom is living on a limited income, trying to manage four children, trying to be mother and father, and she feels overwhelmed or feels like it’s impossible to do it all – it’s because it is impossible.