Re: Eleven Days until Christmas. Guess what some STUPID ASS does...
Posted: Sun Dec 16, 2012 5:30 pm
If it will help, I find that I am willing to stipulate that I am a form of SA. I leave it to others to decide whether the meaning of SA is such that SA is an abbreviation for the two words in ALL CAPS in the name of this thread, and I leave to others to decide whether I am an SA in that sense. I make no such judgment or determination.
And yet, if SA is an abbreviation for those two ALL CAPS words, who am I to say that I am not an SA?
The notion that people only use 10% of their brain capacity was originally based on electroencephalograph measurements, the most refined of which may have been the Quantitative Electroencephalography (QEEG) approach that developed once digital computer technology developed enough to make such things practical. I had a QEEG done circa 1990, using a system that had a 386DX20 for its processor, so I was told. The 386DX16 was regarded around that time as a minicomputer on a chip.
I have the original printout of that QEEG test, the psychiatrist who requested it decided that I was able to make useful sense of it better than he could; so he kept a monochrome photocopy for his records. For most folks, thinking happens mainly in the frontal lobes and the back of the brain is ordinarily rather quiet in comparison. MY QEEG came back noted as, to summarize, "markedly abnormal" because of extreme "spatial incoherence" and because most of my brain activity was in the back regions of my brain.
The frontal areas are associated with declarative brain activity (thinking in words and thinking in pictures) and the back areas of the brain are normally unconscious in socially-normal people and are where procedural brain activity is located, so I understand from my study of human neurophysiology. So what?
I find that I never learned to think in words or in pictures; the way I experience thinking has not changed since before I was born, and my conscious thinking process is procedural, not declarative. I had reported this to the psychiatrist with whom I was working to complete about five years of very intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and that psychiatrist kept informing me that my findings about my thought process had to be delusional because no one can think as I said I do. However, when the results of that QEEG arrived and the psychiatrist and I came to a shared understanding of their significance, that psychiatrist agreed that I had consistently and accurately reported my findings regarding my actual thought process experiences.
There is a little thing worth noting about my QEEG results, and it is simply this: I apparently use 100% of my brain all the time. By that, I certainly do not suggest that every neuron in my brain is firing continuously; rather I mean that no part of my brain is fully inaccessible to some aspect of conscious awareness. I have never had the experience of wondering why I did something that I had done. I am readily able to explain any aspect of my life in detail so formidable (and perhaps distressing) to other people as to have earned the medical diagnostic label of being hyperverbal.
The structure of my "mind" is akin to the original personality structure of a newborn infant, as described by William Ronald Dodds Fairbairn, MB, ChB, MD, in his Object Relations Theory of the Personality:
In response to many requests I have prepared the following briefsynopsis ofthe theoretical views I have expounded over the
last twenty years (see References; Fairbairn 1952a, 1952b, 1954, 1955, 1956a, 1956b, 1957, 1958, Guntrip 1961).
1. An ego is present from birth.
2. Libido is a function of the ego.
3. There is no death instinct; and aggression is a reaction to frustration or deprivation.
4. Since libido is a function of the ego and aggression is a reaction to frustration or deprivation, there is no such thing as an
'id'.
5. The ego, and therefore libido, is fundamentally object-seeking.
6. The earliest and original form of anxiety, as experienced by the child, is separation-auxiety.
7. Internalization of the object is a defensive measure originally adopted by the child to deal with his original object (the
mother and her breast) in so far as it is unsatisfying.
8. Internalization of the object is not just a product of a phantasy of incorporating the object orally, but is a distinct
psychological process.
9. Two aspects of the internalized object, viz. its exciting and its frustrating aspects, are split off from the main core of the
object and repressed by the ego.
10. Thus there come to be constituted two repressed internal objects, viz. the exciting (or libidinal) object and the rejecting
(or antilibidinal) object.
II. The main core of the internalized object, which is not repressed, is described as the ideal object or ego-ideal.
12. Owing to the fact that the exciting (libidinal) and rejecting (antilibidinal) objects are both cathected by the original ego,
these objects carry into repression with them parts of the ego by which they are cathected, leaving the central core
of the ego (cenh'al ego) unrepressed, but acting as the agent of repression.
13. The resulting internal situation is one in which the original ego is split into three egos-a central (conscious) ego attached
to the ideal object (ego-ideal), a repressed libidinal ego attached to the exciting (or libidinal) object, and a repressed
antilibidinal ego attached to the rejecting (or antilibidinal) object
14. This internal situation represents a basic schizoid position which is more fundamental than the depressive position
described by Melanie Klein.
15. The antilibidinal ego, in virtue of its attachment to the rejecting (antilibidinal) object, adopts an uncompromisingly hostile
attitude to the libidinal ego, and thus has the effect of powerfully reinforcing the repression of the libidinal ego by
the central ego.
16. What Freud described as the 'superego' is really a complex structure comprising (a) the ideal object or ego-ideal, (b) the
antilibidinal ego, and (c) the rejecting (or antilibidinal) object.
17. These considerations form the basis of a theory of the personality conceived in terms of object-relations, in contrast to
one conceived in terms of instincts and their vicissitudes.
Fairbairn, W.R.D.: Synopsis of an object-relations theory of the personality. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis.
44:224-225, 1963.
Please note that Fairbairn observed that the ego is present at birth and is not the result of socialization processes, and, furthermore, please note that Fairbairn describes ego-splitting in terms of a basic schizoid position.
Because I have never observed the happening of an avoidable mistake or the happening of an avoidable accident, it is my lifelong experience that the common belief that people make avoidable mistakes or have avoidable accidents is some sort of delusion, not a delusion from a social convention position, but a delusion from a neurological position. My understanding of mistakes and accidents is simple, so simple that a newborn baby might be able to grasp it, albeit not in words.
If an accident is avoidable, the evidence of its being avoidable is its having been avoided. If an accident is unavoidable, the evidence of its having been unavoidable is its having not been avoided and therefore having happened. Therefore, the only accidents that ever happen are the unavoidable ones; the avoidable accidents never happen and no one know what they were because they never were. Same for mistakes.
Thereupon, teaching a child to believe that the child made an avoidable mistake or had an avoidable accident is teaching the child to be deceived and dishonest regarding how the process of learning works. For a child to believe that an avoidable mistake was made or an avoidable accident happened, the child has to disconnect conscious awareness from awareness of how learning actually works, this disconnection is, in Fairbairn's Object Relations Theory of the Personality, named repression. I am more likely to name it trauma-generated dissociation.
In my view, teaching a child to believe that the child made an avoidable mistake or had an avoidable accident is so severely damaging in a neurological sense as to render the child who achieves the infant=child transition at the level of a discontinuity between early infancy and after-transition childhood so severe a form of dissociation as to render what appears to me to be a vast majority of people so unaware of their actual infancy as to form a stark amnesia for the inborn truthfulness of a newborn child.
That stark amnesia reminds me of the finding of Benjamin Libet, to the effect that, for socially normal (went through the infant-child discontinuity) people consciously unaware of their actual decision-making process, such that Libet's finding that about half a second elapses between when a person makes a decision and when the person becomes consciously aware of the decision already made, with the traumatic dissociation having the result that conscious awareness of a decision follows the making of the decision, so that conscious awareness plays no part in the making of seemingly consciously-made decisions.
Libet's work has been replicated many times without experimental refutation. Question that? Check the relevant literature for yourself.
From Libet,
You are driving along in your car at 30 mph on a city street. Suddenly a young boy steps into the street in front of your car, chasing a ball. You slam your foot on the brake pedal, to bring the car to a screeching halt. Were you consciously aware of the event before stepping on the brake? Or was that an unconscious action that you became aware of after you hit the brakes?
Our experimental evidence, described in Chapter 2, showed that activations in the sensory cortex have to proceed for about 500 msec to produce awareness of a sensory signal. When the duration of the liminal stimulus to the sensory cortex was reduced below that threshold[ndash]such as to 400 msec or even 450 msec[ndash]no sensory awareness was reported. The subjects reported, "I felt nothing." A similar situation was reported for trains of stimulus pulses applied to the specific ascending sensory pathway to the brain; this is the fast pathway from the medulla to cerebral cortex.
In spite of this presumed delay in the actual awareness of the boy and the ball for up to 500 msec, you are capable of slamming on the brake in about 150 msec or less after the boy appeared (see Fig. 3.1). Amazingly, your delayed awareness can be automatically but subjectively antedated or referred back in time, so you would report seeing the boy immediately (see Chapter 2, "Antedating of Delayed Sensory Experience").
In my work, the 500 msec delay of Libet's work is the result of the trauma of accepting the cultural fiction of avoidable mistakes and avoidable accidents through brain-shattering, often terrifying coercion that generates socially and personally devastating dissociation for want of any other practical way to avoid exposing the deception inherent in believing that avoidable mistakes happen or avoidable accidents are happen.
I have known people who murdered others and who reported, "I don't know why I did it," and I knew the murdered people before they were murdered.
When I was seven and in second grade in Eureka, California, my teacher could get all the other boys in her class to confess to having lied. She was unable to get me to so confess, and, perhaps deeming me to be incorrigible, sent me to the principal's office where I was paddled. The principal also could not get me to confess, and paddled me until the stark terror of the paddling drove me into an agitated catatonic state, which the principal mistook for my having learned the lesson.
The first day that happened, when I got home after school, I told my parents what had happened, they were greatly upset and comforted me and talked with me about their concerns regarding what happened and what they and I might be able to do to stop that abuse. At bedtime, I went to bed as I had the previous night and every night before, but, as I started to drift off to sleep, I found myself screaming at the top of my lungs in utter terror. My parents quickly came to my bedroom and hugged and comforted me and talked with me.
They told me that they were concerned that, if I continued to scream that way, neighbors might hear my screams, might call the police, and the police might believe that my parents, and not the school, were abusing me. They asked me if there was something else I could do other than screaming. I thought for a few moments, and put my right thumb in my mouth for contact comfort and began to throw my head from side to side as hard and as fast as I could, until I had released all the neurological tension (stored trauma) that I had acquired that day at school. Then I readily fell asleep.
From the time I was paddled and went agitated catatonic until I shook all the stored trauma from my body just before I went to sleep, I was in a neurological state known as a thwarted freeze discharge (see Robert Scaer, M.D., "The Trauma Spectrum," W. W. Norton, 2005, especially Chapter 3).
My life circumstances have brought me to the threshold of the infant-child discontinuity at least hundreds of times, without ever taking me across that threshold.
However, in my relationships with people who were unable to not cross that threshold, I have learned much about the nature of life when a person's brain has been held in a thwarted freeze discharge condition for most of a lifetime. Dr. Scaer wrote about this condition:
From Robert C. Scaer, M.D., P.C., “The Trauma Spectrum,” W.W. Norton, New York - London, 2005, page 58, used with written permission from W.W. Norton:
Trauma As Imprisonment of the Mind
In Chapter 1, I defined the mind as “a perceptual experience, generated by a complex set of synapses, neurons, and neurochemical states, determined by genes, instincts, and experience, that is capable of developing and directing novel behavior.” In the brain of the trauma victim, the synapses, neurons, and neurochemicals have been substantially altered by the effects of a unique life experience. Not surprisingly, the perceptual experience that constitutes the mind has been equally altered. This alteration more than anything else is a corruption of procedural memory, that part of our intrinsic memory that is most involved in acquisition of survival skills. We depend on learned cues in our environment to distinguish positive versus negative survival-based information. If we have not learned to distinguish between these types of cues, we lose our edge in the survival game. In trauma, cues to an event that is over and done with are stored in procedural memory as if the event had never been completed.
Trauma thus represents a time-based corruption of learning. The brain in trauma has lost its ability to distinguish past from present, and as a result it cannot adapt to the future. This confusion of time further immobilizes the trauma victim, who still remains immobilized by a thwarted freeze discharge. Procedural memory is bombarded by environmental and internal cues that represent old, unresolved threat. Declarative memory is assaulted by intrusive thoughts, memories, and dreams that repetitively warn the person of potential danger. Furthermore, the constant activation of brain circuitry related to threat alters and suppresses structure and function in the verbal and thinking brain. Trauma indeed is a state of imprisonment.
In my work, the time-corrupted learning that is imprisonment of the mind in the work of neurologist Robert C. Scaer is the same neurological phenomenon as the about 500 msec delay from stimulus to awareness in Libet's work.
When I observe someone castigating a person who acts out during a severe shattering-coercion-induced traumatized state of the form of a psychotic break, I wonder to what extent the castigator is similar to the castigated.
During my psychiatric inpatient years, there were new patients brought by the police after having failed in an attempt to murder people (such as, perhaps, by intentional vehicular homicide) but the murder attempt failed so severely that the only person to suffer observable harm was the person who intended to murder others, and the patients were so overtly psychotic after the failed murder attempt that the police took the patients to a psychiatric hospital instead of to jail.
My work regarding society and trauma is not of hypotheticals; rather, it of actual, tangibly-lived human experience, and my life circumstances appear to have allowed me to garner sufficient understanding of biology and other fields of scientific inquiry that I may be able to understand the causality of events like that of Newtown, CT, yesterday, as well, or perhaps better than, anyone else.
Were I to attempt to identify the greatest evil in the universe, I would likely find regarding life as an adversarial process to be a tragically superb candidate for the greatest of all possible evil.
Until people are able to accurately learn and understand what hurts children, child abuse and its consequences will be impossible to stop, if only because abused children have a biological proclivity to become parents who abuse children...
What greater tragedy can there ever be than condemning an abused child for having been abused?
Child abuse, in the form of the infant-child transition, has been an aspect of the human condition for many thousands of years. No person now living was born before the infant-child transition became a traditional social convention. No person now living had anything to do with the invention of the infant-child transition; it happened thousands of years before any now-living person was born.
If I am wrong about any of the above, please demonstrate how I am wrong.
Perhaps it can be shown that I really am an SA.
And yet, if SA is an abbreviation for those two ALL CAPS words, who am I to say that I am not an SA?
The notion that people only use 10% of their brain capacity was originally based on electroencephalograph measurements, the most refined of which may have been the Quantitative Electroencephalography (QEEG) approach that developed once digital computer technology developed enough to make such things practical. I had a QEEG done circa 1990, using a system that had a 386DX20 for its processor, so I was told. The 386DX16 was regarded around that time as a minicomputer on a chip.
I have the original printout of that QEEG test, the psychiatrist who requested it decided that I was able to make useful sense of it better than he could; so he kept a monochrome photocopy for his records. For most folks, thinking happens mainly in the frontal lobes and the back of the brain is ordinarily rather quiet in comparison. MY QEEG came back noted as, to summarize, "markedly abnormal" because of extreme "spatial incoherence" and because most of my brain activity was in the back regions of my brain.
The frontal areas are associated with declarative brain activity (thinking in words and thinking in pictures) and the back areas of the brain are normally unconscious in socially-normal people and are where procedural brain activity is located, so I understand from my study of human neurophysiology. So what?
I find that I never learned to think in words or in pictures; the way I experience thinking has not changed since before I was born, and my conscious thinking process is procedural, not declarative. I had reported this to the psychiatrist with whom I was working to complete about five years of very intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and that psychiatrist kept informing me that my findings about my thought process had to be delusional because no one can think as I said I do. However, when the results of that QEEG arrived and the psychiatrist and I came to a shared understanding of their significance, that psychiatrist agreed that I had consistently and accurately reported my findings regarding my actual thought process experiences.
There is a little thing worth noting about my QEEG results, and it is simply this: I apparently use 100% of my brain all the time. By that, I certainly do not suggest that every neuron in my brain is firing continuously; rather I mean that no part of my brain is fully inaccessible to some aspect of conscious awareness. I have never had the experience of wondering why I did something that I had done. I am readily able to explain any aspect of my life in detail so formidable (and perhaps distressing) to other people as to have earned the medical diagnostic label of being hyperverbal.
The structure of my "mind" is akin to the original personality structure of a newborn infant, as described by William Ronald Dodds Fairbairn, MB, ChB, MD, in his Object Relations Theory of the Personality:
In response to many requests I have prepared the following briefsynopsis ofthe theoretical views I have expounded over the
last twenty years (see References; Fairbairn 1952a, 1952b, 1954, 1955, 1956a, 1956b, 1957, 1958, Guntrip 1961).
1. An ego is present from birth.
2. Libido is a function of the ego.
3. There is no death instinct; and aggression is a reaction to frustration or deprivation.
4. Since libido is a function of the ego and aggression is a reaction to frustration or deprivation, there is no such thing as an
'id'.
5. The ego, and therefore libido, is fundamentally object-seeking.
6. The earliest and original form of anxiety, as experienced by the child, is separation-auxiety.
7. Internalization of the object is a defensive measure originally adopted by the child to deal with his original object (the
mother and her breast) in so far as it is unsatisfying.
8. Internalization of the object is not just a product of a phantasy of incorporating the object orally, but is a distinct
psychological process.
9. Two aspects of the internalized object, viz. its exciting and its frustrating aspects, are split off from the main core of the
object and repressed by the ego.
10. Thus there come to be constituted two repressed internal objects, viz. the exciting (or libidinal) object and the rejecting
(or antilibidinal) object.
II. The main core of the internalized object, which is not repressed, is described as the ideal object or ego-ideal.
12. Owing to the fact that the exciting (libidinal) and rejecting (antilibidinal) objects are both cathected by the original ego,
these objects carry into repression with them parts of the ego by which they are cathected, leaving the central core
of the ego (cenh'al ego) unrepressed, but acting as the agent of repression.
13. The resulting internal situation is one in which the original ego is split into three egos-a central (conscious) ego attached
to the ideal object (ego-ideal), a repressed libidinal ego attached to the exciting (or libidinal) object, and a repressed
antilibidinal ego attached to the rejecting (or antilibidinal) object
14. This internal situation represents a basic schizoid position which is more fundamental than the depressive position
described by Melanie Klein.
15. The antilibidinal ego, in virtue of its attachment to the rejecting (antilibidinal) object, adopts an uncompromisingly hostile
attitude to the libidinal ego, and thus has the effect of powerfully reinforcing the repression of the libidinal ego by
the central ego.
16. What Freud described as the 'superego' is really a complex structure comprising (a) the ideal object or ego-ideal, (b) the
antilibidinal ego, and (c) the rejecting (or antilibidinal) object.
17. These considerations form the basis of a theory of the personality conceived in terms of object-relations, in contrast to
one conceived in terms of instincts and their vicissitudes.
Fairbairn, W.R.D.: Synopsis of an object-relations theory of the personality. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis.
44:224-225, 1963.
Please note that Fairbairn observed that the ego is present at birth and is not the result of socialization processes, and, furthermore, please note that Fairbairn describes ego-splitting in terms of a basic schizoid position.
Because I have never observed the happening of an avoidable mistake or the happening of an avoidable accident, it is my lifelong experience that the common belief that people make avoidable mistakes or have avoidable accidents is some sort of delusion, not a delusion from a social convention position, but a delusion from a neurological position. My understanding of mistakes and accidents is simple, so simple that a newborn baby might be able to grasp it, albeit not in words.
If an accident is avoidable, the evidence of its being avoidable is its having been avoided. If an accident is unavoidable, the evidence of its having been unavoidable is its having not been avoided and therefore having happened. Therefore, the only accidents that ever happen are the unavoidable ones; the avoidable accidents never happen and no one know what they were because they never were. Same for mistakes.
Thereupon, teaching a child to believe that the child made an avoidable mistake or had an avoidable accident is teaching the child to be deceived and dishonest regarding how the process of learning works. For a child to believe that an avoidable mistake was made or an avoidable accident happened, the child has to disconnect conscious awareness from awareness of how learning actually works, this disconnection is, in Fairbairn's Object Relations Theory of the Personality, named repression. I am more likely to name it trauma-generated dissociation.
In my view, teaching a child to believe that the child made an avoidable mistake or had an avoidable accident is so severely damaging in a neurological sense as to render the child who achieves the infant=child transition at the level of a discontinuity between early infancy and after-transition childhood so severe a form of dissociation as to render what appears to me to be a vast majority of people so unaware of their actual infancy as to form a stark amnesia for the inborn truthfulness of a newborn child.
That stark amnesia reminds me of the finding of Benjamin Libet, to the effect that, for socially normal (went through the infant-child discontinuity) people consciously unaware of their actual decision-making process, such that Libet's finding that about half a second elapses between when a person makes a decision and when the person becomes consciously aware of the decision already made, with the traumatic dissociation having the result that conscious awareness of a decision follows the making of the decision, so that conscious awareness plays no part in the making of seemingly consciously-made decisions.
Libet's work has been replicated many times without experimental refutation. Question that? Check the relevant literature for yourself.
From Libet,
pages 90-91janekane (imported) wrote: Sun Dec 16, 2012 10:53 am Mind Time : The Temporal Factor in Consciousness, Harvard University Press, 2004,
You are driving along in your car at 30 mph on a city street. Suddenly a young boy steps into the street in front of your car, chasing a ball. You slam your foot on the brake pedal, to bring the car to a screeching halt. Were you consciously aware of the event before stepping on the brake? Or was that an unconscious action that you became aware of after you hit the brakes?
Our experimental evidence, described in Chapter 2, showed that activations in the sensory cortex have to proceed for about 500 msec to produce awareness of a sensory signal. When the duration of the liminal stimulus to the sensory cortex was reduced below that threshold[ndash]such as to 400 msec or even 450 msec[ndash]no sensory awareness was reported. The subjects reported, "I felt nothing." A similar situation was reported for trains of stimulus pulses applied to the specific ascending sensory pathway to the brain; this is the fast pathway from the medulla to cerebral cortex.
In spite of this presumed delay in the actual awareness of the boy and the ball for up to 500 msec, you are capable of slamming on the brake in about 150 msec or less after the boy appeared (see Fig. 3.1). Amazingly, your delayed awareness can be automatically but subjectively antedated or referred back in time, so you would report seeing the boy immediately (see Chapter 2, "Antedating of Delayed Sensory Experience").
In my work, the 500 msec delay of Libet's work is the result of the trauma of accepting the cultural fiction of avoidable mistakes and avoidable accidents through brain-shattering, often terrifying coercion that generates socially and personally devastating dissociation for want of any other practical way to avoid exposing the deception inherent in believing that avoidable mistakes happen or avoidable accidents are happen.
I have known people who murdered others and who reported, "I don't know why I did it," and I knew the murdered people before they were murdered.
When I was seven and in second grade in Eureka, California, my teacher could get all the other boys in her class to confess to having lied. She was unable to get me to so confess, and, perhaps deeming me to be incorrigible, sent me to the principal's office where I was paddled. The principal also could not get me to confess, and paddled me until the stark terror of the paddling drove me into an agitated catatonic state, which the principal mistook for my having learned the lesson.
The first day that happened, when I got home after school, I told my parents what had happened, they were greatly upset and comforted me and talked with me about their concerns regarding what happened and what they and I might be able to do to stop that abuse. At bedtime, I went to bed as I had the previous night and every night before, but, as I started to drift off to sleep, I found myself screaming at the top of my lungs in utter terror. My parents quickly came to my bedroom and hugged and comforted me and talked with me.
They told me that they were concerned that, if I continued to scream that way, neighbors might hear my screams, might call the police, and the police might believe that my parents, and not the school, were abusing me. They asked me if there was something else I could do other than screaming. I thought for a few moments, and put my right thumb in my mouth for contact comfort and began to throw my head from side to side as hard and as fast as I could, until I had released all the neurological tension (stored trauma) that I had acquired that day at school. Then I readily fell asleep.
From the time I was paddled and went agitated catatonic until I shook all the stored trauma from my body just before I went to sleep, I was in a neurological state known as a thwarted freeze discharge (see Robert Scaer, M.D., "The Trauma Spectrum," W. W. Norton, 2005, especially Chapter 3).
My life circumstances have brought me to the threshold of the infant-child discontinuity at least hundreds of times, without ever taking me across that threshold.
However, in my relationships with people who were unable to not cross that threshold, I have learned much about the nature of life when a person's brain has been held in a thwarted freeze discharge condition for most of a lifetime. Dr. Scaer wrote about this condition:
From Robert C. Scaer, M.D., P.C., “The Trauma Spectrum,” W.W. Norton, New York - London, 2005, page 58, used with written permission from W.W. Norton:
Trauma As Imprisonment of the Mind
In Chapter 1, I defined the mind as “a perceptual experience, generated by a complex set of synapses, neurons, and neurochemical states, determined by genes, instincts, and experience, that is capable of developing and directing novel behavior.” In the brain of the trauma victim, the synapses, neurons, and neurochemicals have been substantially altered by the effects of a unique life experience. Not surprisingly, the perceptual experience that constitutes the mind has been equally altered. This alteration more than anything else is a corruption of procedural memory, that part of our intrinsic memory that is most involved in acquisition of survival skills. We depend on learned cues in our environment to distinguish positive versus negative survival-based information. If we have not learned to distinguish between these types of cues, we lose our edge in the survival game. In trauma, cues to an event that is over and done with are stored in procedural memory as if the event had never been completed.
Trauma thus represents a time-based corruption of learning. The brain in trauma has lost its ability to distinguish past from present, and as a result it cannot adapt to the future. This confusion of time further immobilizes the trauma victim, who still remains immobilized by a thwarted freeze discharge. Procedural memory is bombarded by environmental and internal cues that represent old, unresolved threat. Declarative memory is assaulted by intrusive thoughts, memories, and dreams that repetitively warn the person of potential danger. Furthermore, the constant activation of brain circuitry related to threat alters and suppresses structure and function in the verbal and thinking brain. Trauma indeed is a state of imprisonment.
In my work, the time-corrupted learning that is imprisonment of the mind in the work of neurologist Robert C. Scaer is the same neurological phenomenon as the about 500 msec delay from stimulus to awareness in Libet's work.
When I observe someone castigating a person who acts out during a severe shattering-coercion-induced traumatized state of the form of a psychotic break, I wonder to what extent the castigator is similar to the castigated.
During my psychiatric inpatient years, there were new patients brought by the police after having failed in an attempt to murder people (such as, perhaps, by intentional vehicular homicide) but the murder attempt failed so severely that the only person to suffer observable harm was the person who intended to murder others, and the patients were so overtly psychotic after the failed murder attempt that the police took the patients to a psychiatric hospital instead of to jail.
My work regarding society and trauma is not of hypotheticals; rather, it of actual, tangibly-lived human experience, and my life circumstances appear to have allowed me to garner sufficient understanding of biology and other fields of scientific inquiry that I may be able to understand the causality of events like that of Newtown, CT, yesterday, as well, or perhaps better than, anyone else.
Were I to attempt to identify the greatest evil in the universe, I would likely find regarding life as an adversarial process to be a tragically superb candidate for the greatest of all possible evil.
Until people are able to accurately learn and understand what hurts children, child abuse and its consequences will be impossible to stop, if only because abused children have a biological proclivity to become parents who abuse children...
What greater tragedy can there ever be than condemning an abused child for having been abused?
Child abuse, in the form of the infant-child transition, has been an aspect of the human condition for many thousands of years. No person now living was born before the infant-child transition became a traditional social convention. No person now living had anything to do with the invention of the infant-child transition; it happened thousands of years before any now-living person was born.
If I am wrong about any of the above, please demonstrate how I am wrong.
Perhaps it can be shown that I really am an SA.