Showing posts with label brain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label brain. Show all posts

Childhood Maltreatment, Institutional Society and the Biology of The Brain




WE ARE NOT DESIGNED FOR CHRONIC STRESS - NO ORGANISM AND NO LIVING SYSTEM IS.

"The exquisite vulnerability of the hippocampus to the ravages of stress is one of the key neuroscience discoveries of the 20th century.

Sapolsky et al. provided early clues when they found that elevating corticosterone stress hormone levels into the high physiological range for an extended period reduced the number of hippocampal neurons in rats.

Further studies showed that the deleterious effects of glucocorticoids could occur in other regions but that the hippocampus was the primary target.

The outcomes of excessive exposure to glucocorticoids range from the reversible atrophy of dendritic processes and suppression of neurogenesis with acute exposure to frank neuronal death with chronic high-level exposure 

The sensitivity of hippocampal neurons to stress and glucocorticoids has been confirmed in a host of other species, including nonhuman primates."

This was, and remains a really important mainstream article.

Seven years old... pre-Brexit.

http://healthland.time.com/2012/02/15/how-child-abuse-primes-the-brain-for-future-mental-illness/

"
Child maltreatment has been called the tobacco industry of mental health. Much the way smoking directly causes or triggers predispositions for physical disease, early abuse may contribute to virtually all types of mental illness.

  

Now, in the largest study yet to use brain scans to show the effects of child abuse, researchers have found specific changes in key regions in and around the hippocampus in the brains of young adults who were maltreated or neglected in childhood.

These changes may leave victimised children more vulnerable to depression, addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as adults, the study suggests."

here is the study - https://www.pnas.org/content/109/9/E563

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I understood over three decades ago that my experience was written into my neurology as I  developed, that my brain was and is always, always growing, and that it is growing in response to and in reaction to my social and material environment and my lived experience within those environments...

Any new practice creates a new neural network.

This is happening all the time.

Music as my practice teaches me this.

Gardening teaches me this.

Just as a state of contentment fosters healthy development, chronic stress distorts and inhibits development.

Chronic Stress.

Repeated stress creates distortions in a developing child's neural networks, and excess chronic cortisol, and other stress hormones, can kill or inhibit the growth of neural cells. 

My childhood taught me this. 

 
Our brains and indeed our bodies and minds need a generally contented background state in order to healthfully develop all our various functional skill sets - learning to walk, learning how to talk, poop in the right place at the appropriate time (becoming aware of our own bodies), moving hand and eye co-ordination, sensing and feeling others emotions and states of being, communicating, listening and hearing, to explore, investigating, understanding and relating to people and events in our lives.

There are body systems designed to deal with occasional stress, because being vulnerable in a dynamic environment, where there are dangers, is to say that unexpected accidents can happen, events can occur that demand rapid reactions, and the body has systems for such occasions.

Extended or chronic distortions of that happy state such as long term abuse, neglect, trauma, chronic stress, bullying etc at any stage from conception through to birth and infancy, and indeed at any time in life, will seriously damage the many systems within in the brain and throughout the body that are designed for short term stress management. We are designed to bounce back from the occasional stress situation.

The more incidents, the more the damage. Because we tend not to remember much of our childhoods, and because the damage is internal, as in neurological and hormonal and other physiological changes occur within the body itself, beyond our vision., a lot of the damage is invisible, in physiological terms, and it may take years, decades for symptoms of that distortion to emerge as disease states.

And because each person is of such unique nature, the outcomes will vary across a population, a family, a community...

That said we would be able to see patterns of behaviour associated with trauma and chronic stresses that are normalised emerge as characteristic of a given group, family, society, traits that would be symptomatic of  the invisible distortions,  expressed as attitudes and reactions that would be woven into their traditions, their biases, their fears and prejudices.*

(*for example, cultures that practice circumcision or female genital mutilation,  people who are taught that war brings glory, that nationalist history justifies the wars that were won because they are a form of 'progress', and those parents who are happy for their children to enlist in military combat groups - all of these characteristics can be said to be cultural, rather than personal).

The biological basis of these realities would be invisible to parents who did not know this. There are time parents do not understand their child's behaviour, and it may have causation outside their awareness.

These dynamics would be invisible to the people about their own behaviour, which they would normalise - cultures where beating and slapping children  is permitted, and is passed from generation to generation, and the adults will say 'Well, i was a bit wild, and I need that to show me to calm down!" is an example.

There are dynamics that ordinary people have no control over. Parents cannot be blamed for the stresses of poverty, war, abuse in their own lives, and in truth and all humility,  most parents are decent, loving people who want to do the best, and they often are stymied by the burden of social stressors.

Cycles of learned behaviour and chronic stress.

Behaviours emerging as a result of that socially mediated damage would be misread as the child's bad character, leading to a further compounding of the issues for both parent and child.

The very concept of Oppositional Defiance Disorder, as a diagnosis,is an obvious deliberate error in that regard, an act of unimaginable cruelty.

History

This has been happening to children in this hierarchically violent culture for thousands of years, and we have not 'adapted' to it, to that stressed situation, traumatised environment.

We are all just coping with it - adaptation to a pathology such as depression, or the desire to rape, murder, wield vast power is impossible. and utterly illogical in bio-logic terms...

Every war causes massive brain damage across the population who endure it, and that damage, being unresolved, perpetuates a stream of behavioural pathology that will inevitably feed back into the background of violence in that society. This is how the psychology of a hierarchically violent system develops.


So, the state of constant stress not a natural optimal physiological health state, it's certainly not psychologically healthy.

That children and the distressed are held responsible by society, that it is they who have something wrong with them which needs to be fixed is a huge issue.

And this is where the Religious, the Ideological and the Authoritarian exerts so much force that adversely impacts the lives of children - there is no escape ( 'no child left behind') and this, of course, causes even more damage.

Blame the child who is stabbing another on the street.

Punish this damaged child. Demand he or she 'fits in'. Do not ask what happened to this child that his or her behaviour has become so distorted.

Label the difficult child.

Provide no recognition of the child's lived experience and the kind of social setting he or she was born into, and how that afflicted the child.

An example from recent history.

The Conservative and Unionist Party and the Liberal Democrats started to close down "Kids Company", an organisation that pioneered 'trauma informed care' in front line support for seriously at risk children, for over 13 years, with 6,000 active cases of at risk children on their books at the time of closure.

Let me clarify, Kids Company reached out to the most at risk children, on the edge of total breakdown, children with no place left to go, abandoned, left to their own devices.

These are the kinds of children who are targeted by criminals for grooming into their networks, and to counter this, to offer hope they developed a trauma informed approach rather than a regulatory, sanction based approach. In providing an emotionally, non judgemental safe space as the starting point for building a relationship, Kids Company helped thousands of children that Council and State provided services could not or would not deal with.

They were funded by Government funding, a total of £48 million of 13 years. 
They were funded to reach the most disturbed, wounded children who were clearly not accessing standard services State and Council Services.

They supported many thousands of children who would have been ignored until they became casualties, addicts, prostitutes, petty dealers, petty thieves or committed suicide, or just coped in psychological agony for the rest of their lives.

Kids Company was funded almost entirely by Government grant.

They tended to spend every penny, and had very little 'reserves'.

They had a staff of 650, ran 11 full time centres across London and had centres in Bristol and other cities. Kids Company spent everything on ensuring the children's immediate needs were being met, without being judgemental or using sanction reward dynamics.

It was because these 'reserves' were not maintained in sufficient value that they drew attention from Government auditors post 2010, when the Conservative and Lib Dem Coalition took office.

There was a considerable campaign of media allegations of abuse, misuse of cash, failures in duty of care and accusations that they just fed money to criminal children, allegations which have never been substantiated.

In November 2015, the Public Accounts Committee described the organisation as a failed "13 year experiment" and criticised both the Labour and Conservative governments for continuing to give public money to a private charity against civil service advice.

In 2019, 5 years later we see knife crime, youth gangsters behaviour escalating. We see other front line services becoming underfunded, understaffed with complementary services being much more difficult to access and co-ordinate, all the time whilst being privatised - 'low wages leads to better economic efficiency.'

Is there a connection?

The 'standing army' of youth offenders under 'care' runs to about 100,000 children, on average, over the past 50 years.

That tells me that the institutional denial of violence in our society is impacting children's lives within this society and that this is driving much of peoples material distress - this is a very stressful and harsh society.

I can easily extrapolate and imagine the lived experience of this  dynamic across an entire population over time leading to very, very cruel traditions.

Good news -

1. We can help people to recover, because we know that the brain is plastic, it's elastic, it's a constantly growing organ. Optimal healing requires the person who is suffering feels psychologically and materially safe.

One cannot recover when one is insecure, frightened, impoverished, and it is obvious that healing and recovery is less likely where any chronic stress is induced by external demands.

The cure for homelessness is to give the person a clean home, and to support them rebuilding relationships in their lives..

People in distress need kindness, they need material and emotional support more than they need prescribed diagnostic treatment protocols, mote than they need sanctions, regulatory systems and judgemental judicial approaches.

If we  to do the job correctly, as the biology  indicates, then we can help most people.

And for those who are unable to recover, those who are, for whatever reason too broken, then with a trauma informed approach we can care for them with greater compassion and understanding.

2. We can prevent this from happening in the first place, by giving all parents the time and support to chill with and bond/attach to their children in the biologically optimal manner. Supporting parenting more completely, especially during the first four years, will have a huge impact on life long health.

This will have a grounded healthful impact on society, and will save significant amounts of state resources into the future, and it will revolutionise Health Care Systems and Education systems




Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

The Heart Brain and Biological Self Empathy.

The Human Heart is a organic biological wi-fi router, designed to help you 'get' the content of the world around you.

It generates a large Electro-magnetic field, which interacts with Electro-magnetic fields of all that is around oneself. It is connected by organic fibre optic to the Amygdala, at the core of the brain.

Signals from the heart arrive for processing in the brain even before signals that come via the eyes.

The brain, amongst other things, models what is perceived and helps in the articulation of this so that what is perceived can be expressed and worked with.

However if the flow of information is disrupted, such that it is reversed, and the mind, subject as it is in this society to conditioning and conformity, the essential information from the heart can be lost, distorted or otherwise missed.

Google 'heart-brain coherence' for more information on this that YOU can utilise to nurture yourself. Rather than direct you to a specific page, I urge you to follow your own learning path, and discover for yourself what is true about all this.



Kindest regards

Corneilius

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





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Conditioning, the plastic brain and effective change.....

For many years I have watched, initially within myself, then with others, how the conditioning we experience blurs our abilities to co-operate, to seek truthfully and honestly for understanding; I have watched as we 'debate' and exclude rather than share and explore; I have watched as we repeat the basic thoughts we have been most deeply conditioned to think with - such as the man/woman divide based on difference, the misunderstanding of the very nature and depth of Power Relationships because we have adapted to those Power Relationships in early early childhood....

I have watched and seen within myself how fear based rigid thinking undermines my accurate sensing of the world.

I am watching that now in others. I see how it is used in marketing, propaganda and I say this - it works, and it works because those who have not been able to see the fullness of conditioning, of their own conditioning, react in predictible ways that are written deep into their neurology, their physiology by that conditioning.

Informing each other is crucial...

1. Genetics is proven to have very little to do with psychology or character - it's all about how the child is treated - unless we know this and understand it we will repeat it, again and again, and again.....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bi6x-4aNmM

2. There are no genetic female/male psychologies - it's all down to conditioning, and how we learn to relate... the brains of baby boys and baby girls are more or less identical...

http://www.thestar.com/atkinsonseries/atkinson2009/article/720004--part-4-newborn-brains-are-similar-so-nurture-makes-the-difference

3. Adverse childhood experiences are absolutely linked to emergent health issues in later life, linked to the emergence of addiction (from shopping to self-medicating), linked to obesity across all Society - most illnesses are pathologies that are the symptoms of abuse, trauma and adverse conditioning and are the results of the imposition of the systems or conditions we are taught or forced to accept and live within...

http://www.cdc.gov/ace/outcomes.htm

5. Neurology is NOT SET IN STONE - our brains, indeed our very nature, is responsive, plastic - but we are conditioned by fear to become reactive, rigid....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FugrcVhi2tg

http://www.eheart.com/cesarean/babies.html - the facts as to the awareness of babies, in utero and at birth and early infancy... and how they are affected by the mothers environment.

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Collapse can to be seen in these terms - the collapse of the mind-set and psychology we have been infected with,not the collapse of Society or basic structures that support life.

As we free ourselves from our conditioning by Power (and that requires 100% ruthless self honesty, as much as honesty with others - we must know our own experience in some detail) Power has less access to our psyches....

As we refuse to replace one set of conditioning with another, we free ourelves - Jones, Icke, and all the other fear makers, those who  promote fear as the way of change or reason for change are part of that conditioning, whether they are aware of it or not.

Long term planning was the key to the success of the hunter gatherer societies...... daily action was taken with the long term in mind... remember that the hunter gatherer society was the most successful mode of human existence in terms of stability, health and psychological well being... what are the qualities of that way of life that made it so?

What are the keys for such effective long term planning? 

My take is that the key that matters most is empathy, biological empathy, that is to say the ability to 'read' the signals that come from the environment accurately and to be able to utilise that information appropriately.

I and many others are making the connections between conditioning and the kind of behaviour which is the outcome of conditioning which reveals the roots of evil and the with that the understanding that human nature is not evil, (live backwards) that in fact our ...biology tends towards empathy as the basis for long term sustainablity of a society living within the natural habitat.

It is the disruption of the natural child-mother bonding processes (which build the neorology of empathy) that is absolutely key ....... hierarchy, power relationships, rigid gender roles all emerge from that lack of empathy because that resultant lack of empathy cuts one off from the ability to FEEL the world, to 'read' the signals of the environment in ways that lead to appropriate life nurturant behaviour, and that is a form of isolation and of course generates fear, and that fear then conditions the next generation.

The fear generates the perceived need to control others..

One can observe this procees by tracing the child-rearing practices of Civilisation and comparing them to the child nurturing practices of the natural societies.
 

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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





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The Heart and accurate percepttion!

The core of our 'power' or inteeligence is in our ability to cognitively preceive or observe what is happening around us through our heart. The heart has a nucleus of brain cells, linked directly to the brain, and experimants in percpetion have proven that the heart 'sees' before the brain does.

The heart is a 'device' that 'gets' whether something is appropriate or not, no confusion. This is the best way to describe the accuracy of nature, for all creatures have a similar percetive quality. Those who have been disconnected from that perception are those who experience confusion.

The system of Compulsory State Education is designed to thwart that accurate perception. The teaching of 'romantics' in literature is part of that process. The heart is 'sentimentalised' and then compared to the 'rationale' of science, and of course in terms of 'profit and loss' is found wanting.

Thus pop songs, sloppy movies and novels focus on attachment rather than unconditional positive regard (which is what love is) and so the youth, and others, are misdirected. That is why Mills and Boon exists, and is at the core of much of what is called New Age. The same dynamic exists in 'evangelism', and it's similars.

The core of thinking independently revolves around generating thought from within, not in rehashing the thoughts of others. The heart starts the process, the brain follows it through to it's logical conclusion.

I have a song on the heart, which I will be uploading very soon.



Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's your gift to universe



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