Prince Harry and Intergenerational Trauma

A short note on Prince Harry and his comments about intergenerational trauma, his family, the Royal Family as an Institution and the media response to his comments.

"I don't think we should be pointing the finger or blaming anybody, but certainly when it comes to parenting, if I've experienced some form of pain or suffering because of the pain or suffering that perhaps my father or my parents had suffered, I'm going to make sure I break that cycle so that I don't pass it on, basically.

It's a lot of genetic pain and suffering that gets passed on.

I started to piece it together and go 'okay, so this is where he went to school, this is what happened, I know this about his life, I also know that is connected to his parents so that means he's treated me the way he was treated, so how can I change that for my own kids?"

I think Harry is doing us all a service. I think as a parent he is being honest. I think he is taking his responsibility to his children's future seriously, thoughtfully, compassionately. I think he is taking his responsibility as a public voice seriously too. I think his compassion is real.

And it's not just about Harry, nor is it about his family (which he did not choose). It is about all of us. Do not let media narratives distract you.

Harry, Meghan and Archie : photo credit, Press Association.

Imagine the changes in social policy that might emerge if trauma informed approaches percolated into the deliberations within Parliament and our NHS, our schools, our Police Forces and our Prison systems, into how we resolve homelessness and much else besides. 

There is so much work to be done.

Harry is using his voice, his public presence and status to give some public space to the awareness that intergenerational trauma is a social and material dynamic that is very real, has profound effects on all of us as people and it has an effect on our culture.

Whilst he discusses this in very personal terms, and whilst his discussion relates to and involves members of his own family there is another element which is much more important - the element of this that is for the whole population to consider.

What does intergenerational trauma mean for us, in our lives, in our family lines, our communities?

Would we or could we do things differently if we were trauma informed?

"I argued then that the study of psychological trauma is an inherently political enterprise because it calls attention to the experience of oppressed people. I predicted that our field would continue to be beset by controversy, no matter how solid its empirical foundation, because the same historical forces that in the past have consigned major discoveries to oblivion continue to operate in the world. I argued, finally, that only an ongoing connection with a global political movement for human rights could ultimately sustain our ability to speak about unspeakable things." ~ Judith Herman in Trauma and Recovery

I think that as a society, as a culture and as individuals and families, we all could benefit to some degree to look at whether or not intergenerational trauma has played a role in our lives, in the lives of our families and perhaps become more aware of the possibility that it has, and that as such, more compassion and understanding can grow that leads to less trauma effects as we grow into the future.

I would say too that in my opinion, those in the media who took Harry's words on this to be an attack on his family or an attack on a much loved institution are wrong to assume that position - they are not doing either any service by castigating Harry so.

I have written a bit about intergenerational trauma previously, and it is a subject I have spent some time looking into from a personal perspective and as a societal dynamic.

Unresolved trauma has a way of playing out in our lives, families and communities, and in the history of nations and ethnic histories. What remains unresolved continues to create distortion in behaviour.

Topically as I write, this weekend the Israeli State's 75 year mistreatment of Palestinian  people comes to mind. The impact of the invention of  Institutional legalised Racism as a tool to divide European and African indentured workers in the British Colonies of the Americas which was the precursor to legalised slavery of Africans comes to mind. The trauma associated with Misogyny is ever present.

The political violence perpetrated by violent governments against citizens seeking accountable democratic governance, in Colombia and Myanmar, and in so many other places comes to mind.

Libya, Syria and Yemen. Northern Ireland. We see the effects of intergenerational trauma writ large.

The football hooliganism last night, of some Rangers and Celtic 'fans' in Glasgow's centre contrasts with the peaceful protest that blocked a hostile environment deportation of asylum seekers, refugees from a traumatised land. 

These are all societal level dynamics that afflict so many lives, and because the dynamics of intergenerational trauma remain unresolved, they persist.

It doesn't have to be that way. Cycles of adverse behaviour can be ended.

We can do this.

Thank you, Harry, for lending your voice to this story.



Kindest regards 

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

Bullies, Power and the child-mother bonding attachment.

When we study the evolution of the human neuro-endocrine system and how it functions we discover something.

Egalitarian life was generally peaceful,  beautiful, healthy, grounded in solid attachment and mature affective state self regulation which reduced incidence of lost tempers and general violence

.

This will trigger some people within a culture where self regulation is dysregulated more often than not.

Social Behavioural Characteristics of different cultures.

 

source : www.violence.de

Societal Social Behavioural Characteristics.

Different modes of society exist, ranging from egalitarian collectives to hierarchies of power. 

Egalitarian behaviour is healthy. 

Hierarchy behaviour is unhealthy.

People bully because they learn to bully

People demonstrate love because they learn to love.

Unhealthy behaviour is not a biological norm.

Healthy behaviour is a biological norm.

That is why egalitarian cultures exist, and have always existed.  

Biology would not create a species designed to be unhealthy.

Healthy peoeple do not abuse their power disparity over others, especially not over their own children, family, partners... they will use that power disparity to nurture, care for and protect, to demonstrate healthy bonding and love as a lived experneice.

Bullies always seek as much control over the bullied as possible, to the point that it is unhealthy for both bully and the bullied.

In cultures where socio-econimic status is thing, wealth gives a person more material power to than other persons who have no wealth.  A man with a sword and a man with a stick.

Vast wealth creates a much larger power disparity. A president commands an Army, and a civilian living in the pathway of the war that army is prosecuting is utterly powerless, and must flee.

This is not healthy behaviour.

Great Wealth as an institutional agency controls populations.

States, Dictators, Kings and Queens, Presidents and Prime Ministers have access to material power - through the institutions they dominate and through alliances with Oligarchy. It is access to those that allows them to transmit and project their 'power', without them they are ordinary folk, impotent in the face of immense power.

The ordinary citizen is rendered utterly powerless by the structure.

The power disparity is close to that of parent and infant.

All of this control is to remain in a powerful position, to maitain the power disparity - it's a fractal of existential insecurity.

If I do let go it will all fall to pieces, and they will eat me alive.

The person or Institution is unwilling, unable to let go of that material capability to exercise power to retain power. Thus they resist all attempts at healing, they resist all attempts to confront their abuses, they cover up, mask, deflect, distract...

Unhealthy behaviour is not a biological norm.

Or put it the other way.

Healthy behaviour is the biological norm.

That is not to say that disease does not exist.

Which begs the question.

Why do or how do some people learn to become bullies?

Before we go on i want to place two scientifically proven understandings before you, that are uncontested, incontrovertible data.

- disrupted child-mother bonding is more common in communities that are traumatised or subjected to chronic stress, and in cultures that are violent hierarchies than it is in healthy egalitarian communities.

- example - Trump, his infancy and childhood, plus the culture of his fathers corrupt businessm within the culture of U.S. which is a hierarchy of power and violence. He is someone who is unable to regulate his emotional outbursts.

- example - The vast majority of people in prison for violent crime have experienced childhood trauma, abuse that was never resolved.

These are people whose ability or willingness to control their emotional states is profoundly damaged.

Angry, violent, abusive, manipualtive, traumatised people.

And there are many more who are not in prison, whose damage goes 'un-noticed' and yet it is the object and subject of humour in sit-coms, rom-coms, heroic war movies and there is enough of low level loss of self regulation to generate a psychotherapy industrial complex that deals with the results of the psycho-marketing industrial complex that manipulates that loss of self regulation.

Self Regulation of Emotional State.

Living in the real world, a human organism has to be able to master his or her emotional states - for example, climbing a tree to access something entails taking the risk of the climb. That risk is something to be feared, yet one needs to control the fear to do the climb safely. It's not fearlessnes, it's the ability to self regulate the emotional state in order to get things done, to avoid falling.

Allan N. Schore is an American psychologist and researcher in the field of neuropsychology. His research has focused on affective neuroscience, neuropsychiatry, trauma theory, developmental psychology, attachment theory, pediatrics, infant mental health, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and behavioral biology

What he is presenting in the video below is an over view of the scientific learning and clinical experience of the past 40 years, in this field, which is  telling us more about how human neonates and babies and infants and toddlers develop emotional self regulation, sense of self and other social keys in the first 1000 days of life, starting at conception.

In the language of neurobiology, enodcrinology, epigenetics, nurtition, physiological and psychological development as it relates to mother-child

So yes, starting from conception.

What happens at the biological level?
 
We see now that the human brain is designed to be organised by how the person (a developing foetus is a person) experiences being alive. 

Environment and experience plays a major role in brain development, more so than genetics alone.

“The brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us (frontal cortex) is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortext from genes.” 

― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
 
The epigenetics  (the way that portions of the parents genes are switched on or off or disrupted by their lived experience) of the parents lived experience is passed through to the child, through genetic transmission. So even without any direct experience, the child carries markers of the changed genetic coding of their parents lived experience prior to conception.

At the same time, the lived experience of the mother is the ennvironment within which the foetus and the new brain develops, given those conditions which of course vary from mother to mother, from culture to culture.  Both develop within a cultural environment, that affects both child and parent.

Thus we see that brain development being elastic, that fluidity gives the developing human brain the widest scope for learning. There is very little in behaviour that is 'programmed', most of our behaviour is learned. We write the pathways of experience as we go. Experience programs us, yet not all is hard wired, it can be modulated, attenuated.
 
Because the human brain never stops learning or growing.

Think of it as a small brain growing inside the mother, relating to the mothers brain. Learning all the time. Developing all the time. Everyday in the womb becoming ready for the next stage, which is not a from scratch state. Hearing starts at 18 weeks, which means that listening starts soon after. That is to say paying attention to the sound, with a focus.

The sounds of the mothers body, the sounds of life close by, a washing machine, a waterfall, thunder, laughter, crying... someone inside is listening, a little person is learning, developing, reacting and responding.

A baby in the womb can be soothed, as much as the baby can be disturbed. The baby can respond to the mother. A biological conversation, in the language of hormone cascades, neurological pathways plays between both mother and child.

The new-born babies recognises the mothers voice, and those of close family members, the new born feels everything any adult would feel, yet has no language. Communication is by empathy, connectedness, skin to skin.

The caring of the mother initiates further emotional development  of the child as a separate autonomous being, and her care sustains that development for as long as it takes the child to mature, healthfully. This is the bioligical mandate for healthy development.

There are key experiential inter-relational dynamics between mother and baby, and later on between any care giver and child, that are essential to nurture the development of the child's emotional maturity, at the earliest stage possible.

Biologically this makes sense. As a thought experiment, try to imagine a group living on an ice flow, or in a desert, or a rain forest having to move about with a few children throwing tantrums, screaming in rage, running off in all directions, refusing to co-operate?

It doesn't happen in healthy communities.

So here is Allan Schore, and he puts it so much clearer than I could...

Alice Miller

In 1986, Alice Miller published "For your own good :The Roots of Violence in Child Rearing"

In this work she traced the childhood of Hitler, and the childhoods of other well known 'cases' - a serial killer (Jurgen Bartsch) and a heroin addict (Christiane F) and looked at the cultural background in Europe at that time, and the history of child punishment.

She examined the early childhoods of these three subjects, and drew correlations and causative lines from those, put into the wider social material context of Christian Europe as a war like culture, where traditional parenting was authoritarian, and adult to child sanction or punishment was the norm.

Miller looked at the history of Parenting as transmitted in books, from old and ancient manuscripts to the printed press and traced a line of instruction, from Sparta (spare the rod, spoil the child)  to Vienna (Frued, and the Oedipus Complex) in 1880s, to middle class parenting books in the 1930s.

The traditional view was based around the concept of breaking the wilfulness of the child - that child willfulness was seen as the gate through which the Devil or Evil or Badness could enter and corrupt the child, and it was the parents Christian responsibility to make sure that never happened because such people could disrupt the established order. Society demanded that the parent dominate the child's will, and 'rear' the child, 'raise' the child to be a good citizen.

This is a culture where Christianity is ubiquitous, and the vast majority truly believe and are influenced by the Christian psyche.

Thus for them, to fail to 'raise' the child to be a good Christian would put the entire social order out of balance.

Freud's betrayal.

Freud, for what ever reasons, placed the dangerous element within what he assumed was the child's innate lust or competition for the opposite sex parent. It was a quality of the child. A biological norm.

He made that up, obviously. He had no science or meaningfully observed and measured data, it was merely his plagiarism of Greek Mythology projected onto a crime no one was willing to acknowledge, not even he himself, in spite of the little evidence that he did have. That crime was upper middle class  fathers sexually exploiting their own daughters.

His client base was the daughters of upper middle class families, who came to his psycho-therapy sessions and told their stories. They told him what they had experienced.

When Freud presented a paper on this, his contemporaries rejected it, and him, outright.

Freud retreated, and wrote a new  paper, which is known as The Aetiology of Hysteria, in which he put the 'blame' on the child...

Freud was doing what his culture told him to do. Loyalty, fit in, do not disturb the established order.

He followed orders. Creatively.

Alice Miller argued that the way a culture treats the children feeds into the willingness across a population to 'follow' Authoritarian leaders, not least because the unresolved anger, pain and dispair of lived experience that remains unresolved generates a pressure that is intense albeit largely unconscious, and bullies, those who seek to exercise power over others know how to tap into that to manipulate a significant part of the population, enough to control the majority...

Within this the vast majority peaople remain basically decent, albeit prone to being manipulated by demagogues.

Then a significant percentage will become bullies, at what ever

Brexit, and the age divide, the parenting divide reflects this dynamic in part.

A generation raised in War and traditional Christian values vs a generation raised in relative peace and secular values grounded in Human Rights.

It's a part of the dynamic, not it's whole.

Blaming the victim is a core aspect of the division to conquer dynamic.

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.

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

----

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.