So much is relatable here, but I'll focus on the Dobson tantrum thing. That was such an explicit and relentless part of my childhood. When I finally went into therapy in my early twenties, I remember what a breakthrough it was to hear my Christian therapist at the time say, "But what if tantrums aren't sin?"
My parenting was not influenced by Dobson at all - I was more a Dr Spock baby, and my upbringing wasn’t churched, but being born in the UK in the early seventies, there was a kind of authoritarianism built in to most adults and all of the systems one existed within. Corporal punishment was used in the home and in schools, and shaming was thought to be a good way of “encouraging”!
Your last paragraph describes most of my life experience. Reading Laura Anderson’s book “When Religion Hurts You” made me realise that the “high control social norms” can be just as harmful as the high control religion she describes.
I’m only now beginning to see how much my social upbringing harmed me, since I am learning a different way of interacting in life as part of my person-centred psychotherapy training.
Thank you for bringing that perspective in!! I’m very curious about parenting that doesn’t necessarily come from a religious perspective but is still quite authoritarian — when was this more common, and was there a time in recent history when it *wasn’t* common?? High-control social norms are also damaging especially when shaming and corporal punishment are used as the methods of control! Therapy training made a huge difference for me too!
I’ll talk to you about that anytime. Gen xer. I was raised by a firmly deconstructed exvangelical Boomer mom. Who knew there were already exvangelicals then? Woman hated her Southern Baptist parents with a white hot fury. And yet she used to say things like, “your child should believe that the sun comes up in the morning because Mommy lets it” and “children don’t have rights.”
I like the idea of not accepting chronic or really any physical pain or unexplained emotion at face value but digging into it to see if any trauma lies behind it. We shut things out of our minds, but the body reminds us they are still unresolved. We are such deep and complex beings!!
It's hard to understand crushing a small child's spirit in the name of obedience. What a perverse distortion of the gospel!
I've done EMDR before (and found it super helpful) but didn't know it could be used to process pre-verbal experiences. It's often so frustrating not to have the whole story about our early childhoods; I'm glad to know that this stuff can be healed even if it isn't explicitly known.
Christine, this is one of the most helpful blog posts made by anyone, ever. Profoundly insightful. And what you wrote reflects a great deal of current knowledge about contemporary modalities for treating complex trauma, including EMDR. Thank you so very much for your work.
You mentioned something I had never before heard of, resetting affective circuits. Would you be willing to write more about that, specifically, in a future post? I think I for one could really benefit from knowing more about that so that I could combine it with the other body-based methods I've found useful for healing my religious trauma-based C-PTSD: EMDR, Somatic Experiencing (including somatic tracking), Forward Facing Trauma Therapy, Internal Family Systems theory, and art therapy (there's that tactile element).
Alternately, or in addition, I would be grateful if you were willing to write more about the idea of identifying at least just a general time period from one's earliest years and possibly some event or events that occurred during that time period and then using bilateral stimulation to allow whatever-it-is-in-the-way-of-bodily-sensations-one-has to just process, period, no matter that what's getting processed is just vague and impressionistic sensations that the brain is interpreting to mean one "should" be ashamed to exist.
A phenomenal book I'm reading right now (Max Bennet's _A Brief History of Intelligence_) is helping me understand how the failure of the granule cell layer in neurodivergent folks' agranular [sic] prefrontal cortex (aPFC) to atrophy away can set us up to be extra vulnerable to getting traumatized by, well, anything or anyone, but especially by parents who use shaming, since we are from what I can tell consigned to perceive there is no distinction between the world/others and us ourselves, such that if we get raised by parents who drink the Dobson Kool-aid and heap disgust on us continually, to say we take it to heart is the understatement of the century. It's so much more than that. Basically, from what I can tell, when our gPFC (which helps us/makes us draw conclusions as to what kind of people we are) generates *its* model of the *aPFC's* model of the signals coming from the hippocampus and amygdala, it's going to convince us we are terrible, blameworthy people who are disgusting in some moral fact [sic] sense, period, and that that is just capital-r Reality, period.
(I'm chafing here at how the idea I am trying to convey is not one I can use language to convey. Language is too constraining. When I use language to try to describe "the is," there occurs all this importation of subject, object, nouns, dualism, and so on, all of which are the very delusions that, from what I can tell, protect neurotypical people from becoming shame itself.)
Oh MK — thank you, and thank you for the thoughts and knowledge you’ve shared too! You’ve done a lot of reading on the topic and I appreciate you breaking it down for us here! So, because of the decreased pruning in neurodivergent brain, it’s more susceptible to traumatic experiences because the input is that much greater (…right?). And since as young children are highly identified with parents and the environment, if the messages coming in are shaming, ND children especially are prone to experiencing themselves as morally wrong or disgusting.
(Also I love your reflections on the limitations of language! Delusions that protect NT people from becoming shame itself!)
So much is relatable here, but I'll focus on the Dobson tantrum thing. That was such an explicit and relentless part of my childhood. When I finally went into therapy in my early twenties, I remember what a breakthrough it was to hear my Christian therapist at the time say, "But what if tantrums aren't sin?"
Yes!! I’m glad your Christian therapist could tell you that! Amazing the things that feel like shocking revelations, right?!?
My parenting was not influenced by Dobson at all - I was more a Dr Spock baby, and my upbringing wasn’t churched, but being born in the UK in the early seventies, there was a kind of authoritarianism built in to most adults and all of the systems one existed within. Corporal punishment was used in the home and in schools, and shaming was thought to be a good way of “encouraging”!
Your last paragraph describes most of my life experience. Reading Laura Anderson’s book “When Religion Hurts You” made me realise that the “high control social norms” can be just as harmful as the high control religion she describes.
I’m only now beginning to see how much my social upbringing harmed me, since I am learning a different way of interacting in life as part of my person-centred psychotherapy training.
Thank you for bringing that perspective in!! I’m very curious about parenting that doesn’t necessarily come from a religious perspective but is still quite authoritarian — when was this more common, and was there a time in recent history when it *wasn’t* common?? High-control social norms are also damaging especially when shaming and corporal punishment are used as the methods of control! Therapy training made a huge difference for me too!
I’ll talk to you about that anytime. Gen xer. I was raised by a firmly deconstructed exvangelical Boomer mom. Who knew there were already exvangelicals then? Woman hated her Southern Baptist parents with a white hot fury. And yet she used to say things like, “your child should believe that the sun comes up in the morning because Mommy lets it” and “children don’t have rights.”
Whew!! What a stark generational difference (I assume...that's most of the explanation?). That's sad! I'm so glad times are changing!
I like the idea of not accepting chronic or really any physical pain or unexplained emotion at face value but digging into it to see if any trauma lies behind it. We shut things out of our minds, but the body reminds us they are still unresolved. We are such deep and complex beings!!
It's hard to understand crushing a small child's spirit in the name of obedience. What a perverse distortion of the gospel!
Yes!! Amazing what answers the body can give us when we just learn to listen to it right!
I know — giving such awful messages about children just seems…abominable!
I've done EMDR before (and found it super helpful) but didn't know it could be used to process pre-verbal experiences. It's often so frustrating not to have the whole story about our early childhoods; I'm glad to know that this stuff can be healed even if it isn't explicitly known.
Yes, it's so wild! Hopefully as the mental health field develops that knowledge will become even more common!
Christine, this is one of the most helpful blog posts made by anyone, ever. Profoundly insightful. And what you wrote reflects a great deal of current knowledge about contemporary modalities for treating complex trauma, including EMDR. Thank you so very much for your work.
You mentioned something I had never before heard of, resetting affective circuits. Would you be willing to write more about that, specifically, in a future post? I think I for one could really benefit from knowing more about that so that I could combine it with the other body-based methods I've found useful for healing my religious trauma-based C-PTSD: EMDR, Somatic Experiencing (including somatic tracking), Forward Facing Trauma Therapy, Internal Family Systems theory, and art therapy (there's that tactile element).
Alternately, or in addition, I would be grateful if you were willing to write more about the idea of identifying at least just a general time period from one's earliest years and possibly some event or events that occurred during that time period and then using bilateral stimulation to allow whatever-it-is-in-the-way-of-bodily-sensations-one-has to just process, period, no matter that what's getting processed is just vague and impressionistic sensations that the brain is interpreting to mean one "should" be ashamed to exist.
A phenomenal book I'm reading right now (Max Bennet's _A Brief History of Intelligence_) is helping me understand how the failure of the granule cell layer in neurodivergent folks' agranular [sic] prefrontal cortex (aPFC) to atrophy away can set us up to be extra vulnerable to getting traumatized by, well, anything or anyone, but especially by parents who use shaming, since we are from what I can tell consigned to perceive there is no distinction between the world/others and us ourselves, such that if we get raised by parents who drink the Dobson Kool-aid and heap disgust on us continually, to say we take it to heart is the understatement of the century. It's so much more than that. Basically, from what I can tell, when our gPFC (which helps us/makes us draw conclusions as to what kind of people we are) generates *its* model of the *aPFC's* model of the signals coming from the hippocampus and amygdala, it's going to convince us we are terrible, blameworthy people who are disgusting in some moral fact [sic] sense, period, and that that is just capital-r Reality, period.
(I'm chafing here at how the idea I am trying to convey is not one I can use language to convey. Language is too constraining. When I use language to try to describe "the is," there occurs all this importation of subject, object, nouns, dualism, and so on, all of which are the very delusions that, from what I can tell, protect neurotypical people from becoming shame itself.)
Oh MK — thank you, and thank you for the thoughts and knowledge you’ve shared too! You’ve done a lot of reading on the topic and I appreciate you breaking it down for us here! So, because of the decreased pruning in neurodivergent brain, it’s more susceptible to traumatic experiences because the input is that much greater (…right?). And since as young children are highly identified with parents and the environment, if the messages coming in are shaming, ND children especially are prone to experiencing themselves as morally wrong or disgusting.
(Also I love your reflections on the limitations of language! Delusions that protect NT people from becoming shame itself!)
Excellent observations. Thank you! I fully agree.