Posted on 07/06/2009 5:20:33 PM PDT by Albion Wilde
The prevailing view among parents, the general public and mental health professionals that infants as young as six months old "do not remember" traumatic events that happen to them or to their loved ones has recently been disproved, a professor of infant mental health said at a Jerusalem conference on Sunday....
[snip] ... Most professionals and parents have pooh-poohed this idea because infants and young toddlers do not have the verbal ability to describe the trauma, but it nevertheless is stored in their brains, she asserted....
[snip]... People are wrong to assume that when traumatized infants grow up and don't speak about it, they weren't influenced by it. Therapists often start their relationship with traumatized parents and children with [the] mistaken idea that if the child did not discuss it, they should not bring it up, the California psychiatrist said.
[snip]... Among the negative behaviors caused by traumatic events in children are temper tantrums, developmental delays, regression, unsociability and violence. However, the good news is.......
(Excerpt) Read more at newsmax.com ...
I think that is one of the tenets of Dianetics/Scientology. But they say the trauma of being born is the big one you have to pay them to fix for ya.
This will give the anti-circumcision crowd some ammo.
Ping — I noticed that you folks had posted a thread with a “child abuse” or similar keyword. If this article is useful to your activism on behalf of child safety, please ping it out to others.
Reason enough for many to reject the idea; however, this research appears more bona fide. I have also read studies showing that infants experience much greater pain than doctors typically give enough analgesics for, including circumcision and other surgical procedures performed on neonates.
I believe our brain is hard-wired to record everything; we will need to account for every moment when we stand before judgment. Events of this type can also be healed in the proper setting, if the memories are not suppressed.
When our son was 2 ½ he had a serious accident. Last week the accident came up in a conversation and he still remembers it, twenty years later.
But are they remembered as they happened or in the distorted view of an infant?
Traumatic memory is not just stored in the brain, i.e., limbic system, but traumatic energy mobilized during threat - fight, flight, freeze - is also commonly stuck in connective tissue throughout the entire body.
This is why psychology alone is never enough to overcome most traumatic events.
I'd wager that successfully overcoming trauma is 70% physiological renegotiation and 30% psychological retooling.
Feeling safe again in your body after a major trauma involves re-orientating yourself with your own organs, particularly your skin. Trauma causes one's physical boundaries to become blurred and the sufferer forgets or cannot distinguish where their own skin begins and ends.
Best book on all this, IMO, is The Body Remembers by Babette Rothschild.
Bunk. I don’t remember a single traumatic event from my infancy.
I was born in a birthing home - within 24 hours I was taken home. When I was 2 days old I was a ‘blue baby’. Dad was not home so mom called a relative and he came and rushed me to the hospital about 1/2 hour away. Of course all this information has been told to me by my mom and dad. I still do remember the sensation of not being able to breathe. Nothing else, except the relief experienced as well - evidently when they put me in an incubator.
My first thought as well.
That’s the first time I ever heard of connective tissue having memory.
Thank you for the ping..
A 6 month old cannot verbalise but what it has seen cannot be erased.
The info is stored i believe and effects the childs life and mental growth.
This is true..I remember the Titanic sinking...even though I was born in 1962.
I think it would be more like post-traumatic stress disorder -- a fear response in the body when certain triggers are present. For example, if a toddler had seen a shooting, loud noises could raise his or her anxiety, adrenaline, and cortisol levels, and he or she might have flashes of memory, but mainly a feeling of fear and panic, sweating, heavy breathing, etc, plus fear of situations in which the triggers might be present... such as a child rape victim having big issues with intimacy... IMO
I hope he has worked through it and recovered. Memory can be a blessing or a curse. It sounds like he feels safe with you -- good job, Mom.
Our son was two and a half months old when my mother (his grandmother) died. He remembers the color of the casket and some of the decor of the funeral home as well as the dark sunglasses his nanny wore as she held him in her arms during the wake. We found this out only a few years ago, completely to our surprise. He is in his late twenties now.
That's the best story they can come up with??
Maybe you did’nt have one?
Yes, each as an INDIVIDUAL will stand before Him
There is no “collective” group to hide behind.
Since the 60’s the COLLECTIVE mentality has been promoted. They SHUN the INDIVIDUAL. It shows up in our schools.
The physical recovery was quick, we were blessed with a great plastic surgeon. The mental part took longer ~ for almost a year he had nightmares; woke up screaming and running down the hall. Those nights he got to spend the rest of the night in bed with Dad & Mom.
Seems unlikely. lol
All my life I’ve had a memory of falling out of a window a short distance, seeing the face brick of a building go past my eyes, getting scratched, landing in soft, tilled black dirt. I could describe this in some detail—the weather, the scratching of bush branches, etc. When I would ask about this my parents would laugh and tell me I was imagining it, such a thing never happened to me. But very late in her life my mother confessed that when I was 9 months old I had fallen out of a first-floor window and landed in a flower bed. We had moved from that house, and away from a part of the US that had black dirt, before I was a year old, so I wasn’t just imagining it.
I can remember my Grandpa telling me he was dying at 3 yo. It completely freaked me out because I knew it meant he was gong away as my other Grandpa had died when I was 2.5 yo. My DM freaked out when I told her how I remembered that day when I ran into the house sobbing.
Yes, that is true. That is the basis of the Rolfing technique, a deep-tissue massage that tears loose those knots in the myofascial membrane between layers of muscle and tendons. (You can see this type of clear membrane when you separate the layers of a chicken breast before cooking.) When a person receives a shock or injury, the brain releases stress chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol. They tighten up those connective tissues, some of which never really loosen up again without extensive body work. In Rolfing, when the therapist rubs out a painful spot, sometimes there will be a flash of memory of what you were doing when that injury took place -- sometimes long-suppressed or forgotten incidents. When I had it done, I had an accumulation of sport and dance injuries, a couple of car accidents, repetition motion from work, and some family drama. It helped enormously, especially with whiplash pain that had persisted nearly 20 years and that no amount of chiropractic had fixed.
Best book on all this, IMO, is The Body Remembers by Babette Rothschild.
Thank you so much for this recommendation, and the link.
If you read the article, this researcher was presenting to an audience in Israel, who with their children had undergone bombings and terror incidents. It may be that you had a comparatively peaceful childhood.
I think all one has to do is to observe babies. They are data-gathering monsters! As a former chaplain with a lot of hours in pediatrics and as the guy who "pulled" my daughter and got to look into her eyes before I knew whether she was my daughter or my son, I'd say kids are storing data at least from the moment of birth.
I know a 3-week old kid who is having open heart surgery tomorrow. I don't think that's going to be trivial in his psychological development.
That's an amazing story. I also was operated on during my first 2 days of life; but I have no conscious memories of it. I have remained a wimp, though, and am afraid of doctors. I do remember chunks of the tonsillectomy event at age 2-1/2, especially when my Sunday School teacher came to the house afterwards with a wonderful toy for me.
During a time in my adult life when I had been "let down" by significant people, I kept remembering a certain wallpaper design, and feeling both abandoned and caged up. I described the wallpaper to my mother, and she recalled it was the church nursery from 40 years prior, when I was a newborn, and that I had been laid in a crib next to the wall while they went to the service. So my guess is that it was the first experience of feeling abandoned.
(Now, if everyone is away and I feel the need for company, there is FR...)
See post 27 for more about that, and another link.
Terrific example!
Of course, children who are profoundly traumatized, like those poor children who are sexually abused, or children who undergo war bombings in the vicinity, may not be able to remember consciously, but they may have PTSD symptoms.
Seems unlikely. lol
I don't think it is necessary for the memory to be visual and complete. As described above, when there has been a significant trauma, such as witnessing a murder or being raped in childhood, the body's unconscious "fight or flight" hormones may be easily activated or may remain on high alert, the person may startle easily in certain situations, or may be irrational about some things without knowing why.
But logically, most people who grow up in a relatively civilized atmosphere can and do survive childhood without deep trauma.
It's great that you were supportive and not dismissive. That certainly helped the healing.
Pretty lame, huh? That was the old-school way of trying to make bad things go away. We had a flagrant incidence of marital infidelity on our family tree several generations back. A great-great uncle disappeared for many months to go stay with another woman. When he came back, he and his wife told their children he had had amnesia and couldn't remember where he lived! One of his daughters repeated this story in all innocence, claiming to believe it until the day she died in her 90s, but if the above research is true, she was in denial, and the abandonment and shame of it were too great to admit to herself.
My father knew nothing about it and my mother was embarrassed that she had lost track of me long enough that I was able to do something so dangerous. Once she told the original lie it was hard to back out. No harm done, really, but you know how these family things are. I also remember my first swimming lessons at 18 months--initially traumatic and then fun.
Isn't that something? Maybe she was trying to "help" you forget it, or maybe guilt made her deny it. The old-timers thought they were doing children a favor by pretending, and as the article points out, most of them genuinely believed that children don't remember. Yours is a great example of an early memory. I'm glad your mother finally did affirm what you knew to be true.
That is true -- up until age 6, the rate of growth of all human systems is greater than at any other time of life.
I know a 3-week old kid who is having open heart surgery tomorrow. I don't think that's going to be trivial in his psychological development.
Blessings on your friends' baby. May God guide the hands of his surgeons and all the helpers around him, and bring him safely through.
"DM" -- dear mother? That's a touching story. I'm glad you had them for awhile. They must have been very meaningful to you, seeing how much you grieved their loss.
No offense intended, but I’m not a psychiatrist. I just say smart-alecky things on the internets.
None taken; but as you can see, when the topic has to do with child abuse, I don't relate with humor.
People say that getting a circumcision is not painful, but when I got mine, I couldn’t walk for a year!
I should have said somatic memory.
LOL
OK; now THAT's funny.
Thank you, I’m here all week.
Yes DM is dear Mom. Yes I was the first grand daughter on one side and the first child of their only daughter on the other so I had a special spot in the world. I saw both sides often. My Mother’s father was there everyday. He was having a very painful day the day he told me that,he was dying of cancer and by the time they had found it it had spread to his lymp nodes. I still have dreams of seeing both of them but I don’t “see” them I only hear them, it’s odd.
That's another whole thread (whether we really connect with the dear departed), but what a blessing!
I wasn't aware that a traumatic event would necessarily be related to child abuse. I can assure you that I was not attempting to make light of child abuse. I'm not that kind of girl.
Bless you, Albion. I met the parents when I was taking the Blessed Sacrament to the hospital. They asked me to communicate to our clergy and we got the kid splashed a week ago. Grandma was there too. We all wept a little, and I gave him a miraculous medal.
So I haven’t heard anything and I’m on the edge of my chair. The hope is that all the cardiac issues can be healed in one operation. I ope to know somehting tomorrow, but as a mere “extraordinary Eucharistic minister” I have no claim to intrude. But they ain’t gonna stop me from praying!
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