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This electronic article talks about something I wanted to mention today: The peritraumatic sense of the passing of time.
Acute Stress Disorder Symptoms in Children and Their Parents After Pediatric Traffic Injury
By Winston, et. Al. (‘and others’) found in PEDIATRICS Vol. 109 No. 6 June 2002, pp. e90
Although the article presents information about the trauma of car accidents, the processes described here apply to everyone of any age. Yet my major concern (as usual) is with what happens when similar conditions of trauma and its impact create changes in severely abused infants and children.
I am particularly interested in these aspects of the subject: peritrauma components (dissociation, fear/helplessness/horror, and an altered sense of time)
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Nobody – no body – is designed to operate well under chronic conditions of ACUTE TRAUMA.
And, it is especially the very young growing and developing body that is most vulnerable to the impact that ACUTE TRAUMATIC CONDITIONS create as they alter development of the body, nervous system-brain, autonomic nervous system (ANS), vagal nerve system, and the immune system. As presented on this blog many times, epigenetic changes also occur as the mechanisms that tell the DNA what to do (for the rest of a person’s lifetime and on down the generations) to best ensure survival under truly chronic, malevolent conditions.
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Very few people are yet able to discuss the long-range impact that ACUTE TRAUMATIC CONDTIONS create in young abused infants and children as they grow and development in adaptation to these conditions. Fewer still are able to openly and accurately admit that the risk for so-called ‘mental illness’ in these survivors is astronomically high. These so-called ‘mental illnesses’ are direct symptoms of the trauma that created them in interaction (most often) with genetic combinations that would NEVER have manifested themselves had these same infant-children been raised in safe, secure and benevolent environments.
What most survivors, myself included, ACTUALLY have is a trauma changed body. The most accurate description of what these changes did to us, and both ‘gave’ to us and ‘took away’ is NOT within the field of so-called ‘mental illness’ even though our difficulties appear to lie along this spectrum of dis-ease and lack of well-being throughout our lifetime.
No. What we early severe abuse survivors actually ‘have’ is more closely and accurately described as an insecure attachment pattern (disorder) that is the NATURAL and also the LOGICAL consequence resulting from what was done to us as we tried to be children growing up.
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Many of severe early abuse and neglect survivors end up with physiological changes from trauma altered development that most closely fit the DISORGANIZED-DISORIENTED (D-D) insecure attachment pattern (disorder). I now know, having only done my research-homework of related research in the last six years that allowed me to figure this out, that this is what I live with in consequence of all that my mother did to me for the first important critical developmental years of my life.
Every other so-called ‘diagnosable’ condition I have – be it major depression, dissociation, and PTSD is actually a manifestation of this D-D attachment pattern.
It is time for severe early abuse and neglect survivors to recognize both the earthquake-trauma of our early environments, and the power that the trauma we survived had to change the core of our physiology.
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In follow-up to the post I wrote yesterday about being ‘broken hearted’ I wanted to add this information today because being fundamentally ‘broken hearted’ in my trauma-altered physiology is very much concerned with the peritraumatic sense of the passage of time.
I don’t believe that ANY DISSOCIATION ever happens without this peritraumatic sense of the passage of time being present. And this is important because our body does not measure time by any clock or calendar. Trauma induces conditions within the body during the duration of the traumatic episode that match only ONE thing – how much time does the body have to spend in the ACUTE TRAUMA stage of actually being in the midst of ongoing trauma before the trauma STOPS.
As infants and children endure the many-faceted components of trauma – both as it is happening to them FROM THE OUTSIDE and as it is happening to them ON THE INSIDE OF THEIR BODY – they are at the same TIME experiencing this peritraumatic sense of time passing in a changed-altered way.
Trauma creates a state of immediacy because trauma IS an emergency condition and the body knows it – no matter how old it is. When left in the ACUTE TRAUMA stage for too long – as severely abused infants and children are – the body has no choice but to adapt to these conditions. And one of the adaptations the body is forced to make – permanently – is a changed sense of the passage of time that is most often recognized and named – DISSOCIATION.
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When I write about the consequences of living with a ‘broken heart’ from having been formed in infancy-childhood during ACUTE TRAUMA that happened to us in environments where we had no safe and secure attachments to mitigate the traumas we endured – I am ALWAYS writing at the same time about this peritraumatic altered sense of time.
People who were not severely and chronically abused during their earliest developmental stages, and who therefore did not experience physiological alterations in their body-brain in response, do not REALLY know what I am talking about. When we enclose our personal expressions as survivors about what it is like to live in and with our trauma-changed body, what we can also KNOW and recognize is that the passage of time will never be the same for us as it is for those who developed in safe and secure-enough early caregiver environments.
Having been ‘given’ a D-D insecure attachment pattern (disorder) MEANS that at the same time the passage of time for us could not possibly be built into our body-brain in any ordinary way.
Therefore, when it comes to ANYTHING in our life, or about us, that involves threat of harm or actual harm during ‘later on’ in our lives, this altered sense of time will hop right up to the forefront within our trauma-altered body.
“Leaving the past behind” or “letting go and moving on” or “forgiving and forgetting” does not operate in the same way for severe early abuse survivors. We are in effect at risk for being caught in what I will call a ‘TIME LOOP’ that does not match ordinary time perception. Our TIME LOOP has at its center an ACUTE TRAUMA, perpetual peritraumatic sense of time passing – or NOT passing.
Having a Disorganized-Disoriented Insecure Attachment Pattern (disorder) built into our body (in my opinion) ALWAYS includes BOTH dissociation and this peritraumatic sense of time passing. Only when healing can happen surrounding the traumatic experience as described in this article I mentioned at the beginning of this post will a survivor NOT be ‘doomed’ with permanent body changes that mean these disorienting-disorganizing dissociating experiences of peritraumatic time become continual underlying patterns of ‘being in a body in the world’.
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Naturally those of us survivors who were not given an adequate reprieve from the pain and terror of severe abuse as our body-brain grew and developed had no choice. Adaptation to perpetual ACUTE TRAUMATIC CONDITIONS became a part of our body, and hence both of who we are in the world and HOW we are in the world.
Researchers and other professionals who ‘deal with’ so-called ‘mental illness’ both in children and in adults need to understand these facts. Trying to apply ‘healing’ information and strategies to physiologically trauma-changed people is both ridiculous and harmful.
I know that I am ‘ahead of the curve’ on this topic, but I have to be. I have to be. Otherwise it is far too easy for me to get caught up in the societal loop that says there is something WRONG with me, when the truth actually is that there is something DIFFERENT about me.
Learning what this ‘different’ actually is means that at the same time I have to learn about what happened to me as my body-brain developed, and how what happened to me changed me. And one of the changes that I DO have is a nearly continual altered sense of the passage of time – acute trauma — peritraumatic time – altered sense of the passage of time.
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All this having been said, I will add that we were blessed with a wonderful soaking rain yesterday early evening, and the ground where I am beginning to work my adobe magic is perfectly moist and soft to receive my efforts. So, out I now go to place myself in ADOBE time – time connected to the most ancient of us all – the earth itself.
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WORKSPACE for Stop the Storm 