Adverse Childhood Experiences present in both immediate behaviur, and long term illness later in life. Punishment does not work.;

Rather a long title, I know.

It's just that this has been rattling 'round my heart recently when I saw a brief article suggesting it's time to make emotional abuse a criminal offence, and the article avoided the subject of how to help parents break cycles of behaviour that are effectively institutionalised in our Society. Including coercive schooling.

And at the same time, I have to look at my own health, and observe the changing health of those older than I, as well as my peers, as it is emerging now I am in my 50s. For sure some of my behaviour - I smoke - is causing me some damage. There are also a number of visible behavioural issues, such as unreasonable anger I might find difficult to control at times, intense political rants at in appropriate moments,  shyness, telling dreadful jokes. 

There's a damaged knee from a fall long, long ago that was never diagnosed, my changing eyesight. 

These and other symptoms are all visible. My friends probably see them clearer than I do.

Q. Are there processes within my body that have been disrupted as a consequence of my earliest experiences such as caesarian birth, incubator baby etc etc.... events that I cannot recall?

This is a question that has been of interest to me for some time, and I have taken steps to explore and to a small degree deal with some of this. There's always more I could do.

As much as I might have expressed my pain, grief, anger and resolution at the time, I certainly have suppressed some of each in turn, buried it, stored it in my body somewhere.

We experience our lives, and if the earliest years are adverse, or there is trauma at any time, that experience is written into our bodies, our minds, our hearts and souls. So too the good stuff. Our response to those experiences can be external or internal. Resolution or just coping. Or enjoying.

It terms of 'just coping' here are two modes of presenting outcomes of a situation where the natural mandated experience are disrupted, over time.

Externalisation : the expression of distress outwards, presenting as anti-social behaviour, aggressiveness, non-compliant children, etc.... visually observable

Internalisation : the holding of that distress within the body, the distress goes inwards, as in one's boo-chemsitry is thrown out of balance as a result of adverse traumatising events, and coping means resolution does not happen, so the feelings of pain, fear, grief remain, stressing the body's systems, eventually presenting as as physical symptoms or a disease state that emerged over time ....usually invisible until the symptoms become noticeable, or cause pain, discomfort or organ failure.

Externalisation : punishment for 'bad behaviour, blame and sanctions.

Internalisation : medication, surgical intervention, suppression of symptoms, make the pain go away, complications and death due to some inherent weakness of patient not any inadequacy of treatment.

Object : to avoid discussing the source of the distress, which if carried out honestly, scientifically and logically would demand that certain Institutional Influences/Powers would have to abdicate, step aside, take the gold watch, retire or just go. Or accept the information and change accordingly, as a mature and psychologically healthy adult no doubt would do.

 1. In truth, ALL adults are parents, for parenting was never meant by biology to be a couple based process, let alone a working couple based process.

2. So we are where we are.....

3. I am looking at two sets of symptoms of distress or trauma, one's that emerge at the time and are visible, and as such, provide a useful starting point for a resolution of the distress or trauma.

3.a Others, less visible, emerge many years later, often as disease states, some of them life threatening, all life debilitating to some degree.

4. A little empathy towards children would go a long, long way to reducing the NHS annual budget on a wide range of conditions.

4.a The use of punishment to control the child, which Institutional Society accepts as necessary. and standard parenting jealously guards as a 'right'. Indeed as corporal punishment was outlawed in public schooling, it was replaced with psychological behavioural modification punishment through highly structured, target based educational processes which stress both teacher and child.

4.b The widespread practice of medication to suppress disease or ill-health symptoms are both qualified with 'it's for your own good'. They are linked.

4.c Psychology, dysfunctional or functional always seeks congruence throughout.

5. The science : The Adverse Childhood Experience Life Survey http://www.cdc.gov/ace/year.htm in brief... there is much, much more solid science on all this, and it all points towards a biological mandate towards empathy, and self empathy as an expression of optimal human health.

6. A good doctor is always trying to ensure he is not needed. Prevention ought be the primary concern of any public health system, the primary drive of any decent physician.

7. I have heard that there is some political movement towards criminalising emotional abuse expressed towards children by parents, and other primary carers. It sounds like punishment..... which we know does not work.

In this, prevention is surely the most important aspect to be concerned with, by a long margin.

Most parents follow the parenting 'style' that Institutional Society suggests, the ideal of the 'normal parent', and most parents will also, as a basic biological process repeat with their own children aspects of their earliest learnings and experiences, much of it unconsciously, because in the biology, the child grows into the psychological state of the parents, and of their world, which in our case is very largely defined by Institutional Power, through Governance, Wars, Economics, Ideology and Religion, and the defenceless child must adapt to that psychology as best he or she can, and some adaptations, or survival strategies the emerge in that situation become 'dysfunctional' psychological and behavioural patterns, many of which are damaging in the long term if they are maintained.

The child cannot be held responsible, and the adult must be held accountable; though within each adult is a child. wounded, fearful, surviving. So the psychology that determined that child's environmental habitat is also linked to the Institutional structure's psychology, and it's behaviours as much as it is linked to the individual parents.

Both share responsibility. Punishment is often a means to an end: one party can avoid it's responsibility in the matter.

That an adult CAN see the harm they could be or are causing, ought to be enough for that adult to choose to stop harming action. That choice is always there, no matter what the person might say.....  no matter who they are, whether they stride across the corridors of power or walk the streets.

So there's this element of choice or will, and of past psychological conditioning, stressful situations predicated by the way Power expresses itself throughout Society, resulting in presenting behaviour that is harmful, and both past and present must be understood and worked with, including incarceration as containment (not as punishment) where the danger to any other person or child is real, and with the clearest intent and mandate to resolve each case, and to prevent future occurrences, through honest education, and practical support, aiming to reduce the incidences across society over time.

Clearly, current punishment paradigms, current consumerist ideology, current understanding of what Governance means in practice, is all working against this potential pathway.

That does not diminish the value of this approach. It enhances it.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

What is Natural?

Every creature. eats, shits, and dies. and in all three processes materials are passed on to nurture more life for all life. That is nature.

Mome creatures when abused or stressed abuse or stress others. That's natural.

Most creatures, when treated well, will not do this. That's natural.

Some people think Dominant Industrial Culture is superior to nature. That's un-natural.

Some people think the costs born by those who are bombed, whose lands are degraded, whose cultures are made extinct are 'worth it'. That's un-natural.

Some people know that the Dominant Industrial Culture is toxic. That's natural.

Some people ignore that fact, due to conditioned self alienation, insecurity and adverse psychology. That's natural.

The Dominant Industrial Culture cannot metabolise it's effluents. That is un-natural.

The effluents of all other living process can be metabolised by natural processes. That's natural.

We have the choice to metabolise the adverse affects of our experience and conditioning and to make compost of those that nurtures life from the outputs. Or not.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

Bill Hicks, Maggie Thatcher and a decent funeral.

"All members of society deserve decent burial." wrote a good friend.

I agree.

 
Just as all members of society deserve a happy birth, a nurturing and playful early childhood, joyous exploratory late childhood to teen, in effect a healthy environment within which to learn as they grow in to mature adults who function as an empathic community, and so on.

Notwithstanding accident, illness or freak events.... in context of reality, here.

Without the grief and weight of a culturally imposed behavioural relational 'generation' gap, a psychic and physical misunderstanding which now exists, as state and corporate and ideological policy which makes understanding, even of shared experiences, less likely between people within families.
For example, John Holt explained how state educational protocols and practices harms children in How Children Fail , which is probably one of the best books on the subject, ever!

In 'How Children Fail' Holt explores the adverse outcomes of compulsory state education are made more understandable, and therefore more preventable, from the child's point of view. Written by an empathic adult.

This experience is so far from the biological 'norm' - optimal health - of our aboriginal ancestral experience even to the present, where such societies are still living. And that experience is replicated at every level of the dominant hierarchical system, affecting all who live within it. 'no child left behind'.....

Most Statist style mothers and their children, as well as between grandparents and grand children, teachers and pupils, experience on a daily basis aspects of this lack of empathy, of understanding.

I call it Unconscious Statatism Experience.

It's most certainly not the human biological mandate.

 

"All members of society deserve decent burial." wrote a good friend. Once they are dead.

I agree.

All members of society also deserve clean, nurturing food, and a place to rest. The needs of life well met. As a shared ethic. Just the basics.

Oh, there's also this innate expectation that peace reigns: ALL babies have it more or less, it's an emerging sense, an understanding or an intuition that peace is more, much more than the merely the absence of war. 

Quite a lot more.

Including, as we noted before, a decent burial on event of Death.  Not before, That would be most indecent.

The feeder of life.

 
Life being the icing on this particular cake, death being part of the the base of it all.

We get one living chance as who we are, and to use it to nurture is biology winning. 

Some do. Some don't. You know who you are.

Perhaps more will do, in time. We can nurture more.

It's likely in as much as it's a biological mandate, optimum health.

Bury the dead. Take the piss out of Power while thwarting it's adverse behaviours.

Always.

It is appropriate to note any particularly adverse Official, or other persons or entities wielding power over people in ways that are harmful, at any level of society, community  or family, by taking the piss out of those people and entities, be they alive or dead, exposing their behaviour for what it is, or was and at the same time ensuring the performance generates a show that is side hurtingly funny. Even timeless.

Partly in the hope, on my part at least, that such accolades for IMPORTANT INSTITUTIONS AND PEOPLE SERIOUSLY FUCK THINGS UP would reflect a growing, broader, wider, well informed diverse and active dissent.

It might reflect the presence of an active people ethic capable of organising as a single societal actor, like a crowd source wave, an ethical flash mob if you will, consisting of an informed electorate and an honest judiciary, acting together, which might in time be so common, and thus thwart or deter to some greater degree behaviour by Power of a similar nature in the future.

Things ARE hard for so many people.

And it's not 'life' - it's the outcome of the hierarchical power relationship dynamic of people who live within what we call Society, where those with Power harm those without power, and then conveniently blame the powerless for their powerlessness.

Life is mostly nurture.

Decent Life, Decent burial.

Whatever the state of the economy.

Brian Blessed on 'Have I Got News For You' or BBC offered to help the economy, (always a solid conservative policy), by putting in a bid to make the coffin, for Margaret Thatcher's funeral. For £25.

The Blessed One told the audience that had once he worked making coffins, when he was quite young, and that he had made a few hundred in his time.

The whole first half of the show takes the piss out of the news of Margaret Thatchers passing (the news of it, the 'reporting' not the actuality of it) with some degree of spot-on-ity and I found it rather funny.

The show reminded me of the late Bill Hicks, whose hatred of the outcome's of Power never diminished his comprehension of the humanity, warped as it may be, that lies at the heart of all our lives. Even the lives of tyrants.

That grace enables the humour, and in good satire it does not dissuade dissent. It encourages it, feeds it non biased inspiration. It's a love thing, really.

Bill Hick's. Rest in Peace, bro!

"Life is but a ride.......... shut him up!"

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe