PREFACE to the final part: This true story of a 1960's child who is physically, mentally and sexually traumatized by religion reflects, in my opinion, a significant underlying factor for why Donald Trump is headed towards becoming the 45th president of the USA... despite Hillary Clinton having amassed some 2.5 million more votes. Such abuse, rampant within religions, rises to an international public health crisis that critically impacts civilization's capacity to learn, and functionally adapt, from challenges such as those encompased by the Selective Exposure Theory. These and associated, group-reinforced issues can cloak themselves as nationalism, patriotism, "One Nation Under God", "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer" ("One people, one empire, one leader"), and "Make America Great Again" ... never mind "I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created.”
Of course, not every childhood development story from a religious family is as extreme as the one this boy experiences. But in a world where over half of the world’s unprecedented 65. 3 million refugees are children, a significant percentage of them a result of religiously ethnic conflicts, the challenge is globalized, and a clear and present danger. One thing to keep in mind is the fact that any challenge which a species encounters in its evolutionary history potentially becomes grist for the mill of adaptation, and our species is increasingly defining its own evolution in the face of nature. But how does civilization as a whole see the forest of issues like cognitive dissonance -- "the dissonance caused by rational and irrational ideas inhabiting the same space between one’s ears" -- through the anthropogenic trees of brains, developmentally unable to see the challenge, never mind its capacity as an opportunity? Cognitive bias, without the annoying dissonance, may be a tougher nut to both study and crack. But ever more of our social-psychological understandings are becoming more clearly defined and demystified by pure science. Through groundbreaking research via In Vivo Molecular Imaging in humans, the University of Copenhagen's Rigshospital neuroscience department has begun to define precise receptors (and their biochemistry) at the neural synapses, which contribute to hypersensitivity issues and other emotional responses of, for example, PTSD.
Upwards of 4 million of Denmark’s 5.6 million population are either atheist or consider themselves not belonging to a religion. In this country where education all the way to a post-graduate degree is almost considered a fundamental right as a matter of social necessity, and where all forms of child abuse is illegal, one in four youth (24%) between 18 and 29 are seriously concerned about an end of the world scenario with the likes of Donald Trump as president. The answer mostly lies within the hopes of children whose childhoods have not been objectified and molded by enculturated histories of religions’ impacts, but who have been nurtured into knowing the world for what it is, and what it can be.
The scientific fact is that the human brain is uniquely adapted for a lifetime of change, if willing to do the work. In this video of a TED presentation by UC San Francisco professor of neuroscience, Michael M. Merzenich, hammers home, well, just the facts, Ma'am. Unlike the NBC propaganda lie of an LAPD (and American police forces in general) that serves and protects all citizens equally, as projected by the 1960's Joe Friday character of DRAGNET, the facts are coming at us at an exponential rate due to technological advances. Below the story, in the special links section, is another shorter video from the University of Toronto that more graphically describes our primate brain's lifetime neurosynaptic plasticity. This is why appropriate psychotherapy can change adult thinking processes and behavior, exactly like motor functions such as learning to play the piano or speaking a new language.
This story is written in a specific way so as to not potentially trigger PTSD-symptoms among the readers.
Below this final part are scientific and therapeutic help links for further reading.
For Part 1, follow this link
For Part 2, follow this link
He wakes up with a start. The warmth is completely gone, and he feels the instant explosion of fear. The wind pelts his face with snowflakes. A sharp pain calls attention to his toes, so he tries moving them. But they are achingly numb, like his fingers, ears and nose. He looks around and vaguely sees that snow has accumulated on the pine boughs nearby. Everything else is in total darkness, and the only sound is the wind through the trees and the pelting of snow by his burning ears. He slowly reaches a hand up to his head, and though numb, feels the snow in his short, bleach-blond hair. Snow also sticks to his thin sweater and pants. He is wet, and is shivering hard, but can also feel the pangs of hunger and a lot of other aches. For a few minutes he wants to push the soft part under the thumbs by his palm into his eyes, to get all those comforting lights that lead to numbness and perhaps sleep again.
But death scares him.
He has to move, and get down the tree, and figure out what to do. And he knows, from the uncomfortable position he’s in, which way the men with dogs had gone. And then he remembers the spot of light he’d seen before falling asleep. Looking hard through the snow in the wind, he thinks he sees it, but isn’t sure. The snow hitting his eyes stings. A nearby tree in the direction the men shouting his name had gone, and where the light might be, tells him what direction to go, if he can just get down. But every move of his muscles releases a well of painful aches. But this suffering feels insignificant to the indefinable and relentless pain of life at home. Rubbing his hands hard, amidst the shivering, he puts them up under his shirt and under his armpits. He’d learned to do that long ago when locked in a wet basement. And slowly he stretches one leg, then the other, and then begins to step down to the branch below. And to the next, and the next, each step an agony to his numb toes... and fingers trying to grasp. He has to hop a bit from the bottom branch and into a few inches of soft snow, and that sends a shock of pain from his feet up to his head.
He moves one numbingly painful foot after the other, forward to that tree he’d seen from above, and finds another shadowy tree to move towards, just praying to some angel and a bunch of saints all at once that he go in the right direction. He doesn’t want to go home, but he doesn’t want to stay here either. He sinks into snow above is shoes, and feels its bite go up to his lower legs inside his pants and shoes but he doesn’t care. He’s already cold and wet everywhere. It’s not snowing as hard as it had been up in the tree. Having put his hands back up under his sweater and shirt, they slowly get less numb but more painful. With his hands up there, it’s hard not to trip and fall on roots and rocks under the snow. Tree after tree guides him. He’d learned that in some film about Indians that Dad had let him see on TV. Or had that been a Tarzan movie?
Suddenly he sees the light, sort of going in and out of view through trees and snow. His heart leaps with joy, and he moves faster through the wet snowy underbrush towards it. He comes to a break in the forest by a stone fence, but then hears the barking of a dog by what looks like a barn next to a two-story wooden house. Next to it rises a pole upon which shines that light. The barking grows more furious, and he hears the clinking of a chain being stretched. He hurls himself behind the round stones of the fence. The snow here has drifted to over a foot and he gets wetter.
He peeks over the stones but no new lights have come on in the house, and he can’t see the dog. But it is very angry, not at all like those with the men he'd eluded from atop the tree. He so wants to go to that house, but is more afraid of the dog and the people inside the house. They would just take him back to Dad, and then everything would go so bad, like never before. He sees a sort of dip in the snow cutting through the field to the forest, and thinks that might be a road of sorts. Pushing against all kinds of pain and a want to go to sleep, he rises and climbs over the snow-decked rocks and sort of runs to where the dip disappears into the forest. It is a dirt road. Having no idea where it would lead, he follows it through the wet snow. The dog is still barking but from farther away.
Up ahead he sees some more lights. The wind has died down and the snow only lightly falls. It seems it has gotten warmer. And then he comes to a real road, and instantly recognizes it. It’s the one he had crossed the day before, leading down to Saranac. He notices that it hasn’t been plowed and from the tracks in the snow only a couple of cars had recently driven on it. With a heavy heart he walks uphill, back to the horror he’d only just left. The snow is deeper here, and hangs heavy on the bushes in front of the houses here and there. Every few steps he peeks back to make sure no car would come unexpectedly, to catch him in its headlights. Tears begin to fall down his cheeks; he desperately doesn’t want to go back. All his prayers had been in vain.
When he comes to the street, he sneaks by the dreaded St. Joseph’s church and looks at that awful house on the other side. Everything inside is dark and the station wagon is parked in the driveway by the stone retaining wall, and is covered in a layer of snow. Dad is home. No tracks through the sow confirms for him that it had been parked there all night. His heart races. He can’t control the tears. Walking towards the house, he panics.
NO!
So he sneaks into the backyard of his next door neighbor, and the scent of bruised apples calms his racing heart a bit. In the thin light he can see a few snow-decked apples still hanging in the trees. Everybody called him Mr. Greenjeans. His wife had died not so long ago. Very cautiously, keeping his mouth wide open to hear better, he crept into Mr. Greenjeans open shack and slowly closes the door behind him. Here it smells even more of apples, for there are a couple of burlap bags filled with them, and a pile of empty ones. He makes a bed of those bags and sits down. Brushing the snow off his shoes, he unties them and pulls them off. He rubs his aching cold feet through the wet socks, trying real hard to resist the temptation of eating an apple. But he is too hungry and thirsty, and figures nobody will know. He devours two, but in a way that makes very little noise. He lies down, covers himself with the other bags. They smell a bit like railroad ties. Curling himself into a ball, and clutching his painful toes, he begins to rock, desperate to find that place where he can drift into that warm liquid full of lights and shapes, far away from his body. Darkness envelops his mind.
He wakes up with a start, immediately shivering from the wet cold. For a moment he isn’t sure where he is, as if having awakened from a nightmare. But what he sees within the shack from the daylight streaming through the many split boards scares him. His shoes are all scratched, burlap bags lie crumbled around him, and his pants are ripped, wet and dirty. More than anything, he has to go to the bathroom.
He dares not go home, but where? All his prayers, hopes and dreams have been for naught.
Back to the woods? That feels safest, at least for now, until he can figure out a better solution. Can he get there without anyone seeing him?
He puts on his shoes, quietly tidies the burlap bags, hides the cores of the apples he’d eaten, and slowly opens the little door. The sky is blue, and the blanket of snow outside briefly blinds him. The sun hasn’t yet risen. It is Saturday, so he knows there won’t be much traffic. He steps as best he can into the same tracks that he’d made in the middle of the night. Trying to breathe as quietly as possible, desperate to slow down his racing heart, he walks through the little apple orchard, out the driveway, and towards his own house. He looks at it and the car, still snow-decked, in the drive. Nothing stirs up there except for the dripping of melting snow. The large white door overwhelms him with fear.
Back to the woods, he feels again from deep inside.
So he walks slowly down a small street dotted with large wooden houses, towards a field. He knows that on the other side of that field, after a short walk in the woods, he’ll come to a babbling brook. This had been the brook he’d once come across, and which had sparked his imagination to think of finding another one like it, and damming it. That one would be much farther away from Dannemora, and Dad and Mom, and so many others, maybe way past even Lyon Mountain. The only footprints he sees in the melting snow, which he guesses to be about six inches deep, are from cats and birds. Not even cars had yet driven on the road. As he approaches each house, he holds his breath and peeks as best he can with his peripheral vision, to make sure no one sees him through a window. But by the fifth house, he sees a little girl his age look down at him from her window, to then quickly disappear from sight.
He knows he’s been discovered, so he runs as fast as possible on the slippery snow down the hill, comes to the field where the road dead-ends, and runs across it. A couple of snowdrifts slow him down, and he falls once. He simply brushes off the snow and runs into the forest towards the stream. His heart leaps with joy upon hearing it gurgle from beneath the spreading branches of an evergreen bowed with layers of snow. Then he hears it again. The baying of a dog. It’s not an aggressive sound, like he’d heard from the farm after waking up to a snowstorm. This is a whole different sound, far more comforting than even what he’d heard from the dogs with the men shouting his name.
But he mustn’t be found. No way does he want to go back to that awful house, and see or hear or feel Dad or Mom, or any priests except Père Michelle in Montreal, ever again. So he leaps beneath the evergreen branches right next to the singing brook, whose waters dance between snow-covered round stones. Some snow from the branches find their way down the nape of his neck but he doesn’t care about that or that he’s jumped into a pile of snow which the wind had swept up from the other side of the brook.
The dog has grown quiet now. He remembers how proud he’d felt up in the uncomfortable cradle of tree branches, as he’d outwitted all those men and dogs below. He’s done it again. But when he hears a gentle but firm voice call out his name, he panics, takes a deep breath, and plunges his head deep into the snow. Again the instant sensation of snow on his face and down his neck doesn’t bother him. Now he can hear nothing, and he begins to feel numb. The chaos of lights and shapes, no matter how scary at first, feels so warm, safe and comforting.
A very different sensation abruptly brings him back to the cold, and a need to breathe. All the fears come rushing painfully back. But when he feels the warm slow wet licking on the back of his neck and on a cheek, and hot breaths that smell of dog food, he calms down. Slowly he pulls his head out of the snow, and sees the wrinkled brown face framed by floppy long ears of a bloodhound wagging its tail. The dog then turns his head, and the boy looks towards where the dog has turned. A huge man stands there in the snow by the brook. His leather boots reach almost to his knees, and the official-looking coat with leather straps that hold a gun didn’t seem frightening. The man smiles gently and asks, “How are you?” Then he says, “I am so happy you are alive.”
As if taking a cue from the man, the dog comes right up to the boy to lick him all over the face again, comfortably warming everything that felt cold and fearful. And he wraps his arms around the warm dog’s short fur over a surprisingly loose skin. For a brief moment, the little boy of 11 feels no fear about what he knows is waiting for him back at the house... unless he can find a way to give voice to his fears.
And the gentle face beneath the wide brimmed official hat of a New York State Trooper seems to tell the boy that he can freely tell him anything, and he would not be hurt for it. But the years since memory of Dad telling him, with threats of eternal pain as the blows fell thick and fast, to never say anything about home creeps in from so many dark places of fear. The boy looks up to the kind face and says in broken English, “Please sir, I am awfully sorry...”
With that acutely sharp peripheral vision he’d learned to develop so as to observe people without being noticed, he again focuses on the big man’s face. And suddenly sees that his forehead expresses a uniquely honest concern, with eyes scruitinizing him as though that had not been what he’d expected to hear. It almost feels like yet another open invitation to tell the state trooper everything that hurt so much more than the wet numbing cold. But his tongue and vocal chords feel painfully paralyzed like never before, totally unable to utter another word. Indefinable thoughts of a vengeful almighty god and hellish devils, made real by countless moments of a ruthless father he desperately loves, race fiercely through every part of his mind, much faster than his heart is beating. He now shivers violently, and not from the cold. The dog seems to sense this, and licks his face again. And the boy, briefly happy again from a love that feels unconditionally natural, once more wraps his arms around the hound of Dannemora Mountain.
***
The scientific links below will help the reader understand what happened to this child's brain as his primary caregivers (parents, clergy and teachers) physically, mentally, and sexually abused him with religion... and how to find therapeutic help.
Understanding the Effects of Maltreatment on Brain Development (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services)
Abstract: In recent years, there has been a surge of research into early brain development. Neuroimaging technologies, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), provide increased insight about how the brain develops and how early experiences affect that development. One area that has been receiving increasing research attention involves the effects of abuse and neglect on the developing brain, especially during infancy and early childhood. Much of this research is providing biological explanations for what practitioners have long been describing in psychological, emotional, and behavioral terms. There is now scientific evidence of altered brain functioning as a result of early abuse and neglect. This emerging body of knowledge has many implications for the prevention and treatment of child abuse and neglect.
This illustrated, uncomplicated, peer-reviewed paper includes a glossary, and is filled with external links towards help and ongoing research.
Dissociation FAQ’s - International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation
Dissociation is a word that is used to describe the disconnection or lack of connection between things usually associated with each other. Dissociated experiences are not integrated into the usual sense of self, resulting in discontinuities in conscious awareness (Anderson & Alexander, 1996; Frey, 2001; International Society for the Study of Dissociation, 2002; Maldonado, Butler, & Spiegel, 2002; Pascuzzi & Weber, 1997; Rauschenberger & Lynn, 1995; Simeon et al., 2001; Spiegel & Cardeña, 1991; Steinberg et al., 1990, 1993). In severe forms of dissociation, disconnection occurs in the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity, or perception. For example, someone may think about an event that was tremendously upsetting yet have no feelings about it. Clinically, this is termed emotional numbing, one of the hallmarks of post-traumatic stress disorder. Dissociation is a psychological process commonly found in persons seeking mental health treatment (Maldonado et al., 2002).
OUT OF THE FOG - Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD)
Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) is a condition that results from chronic or long-term exposure to emotional trauma over which a victim has little or no control and from which there is little or no hope of escape, such as in cases of domestic emotional, physical or sexual abuse; childhood emotional, physical or sexual abuse; entrapment or kidnapping; slavery or enforced labor; long term imprisonment and torture; repeated violations of personal boundaries; long-term objectification; exposure to gaslighting & false accusations; long-term exposure to inconsistent, push-pull,splitting or alternating raging & hooveringbehaviors; long-term taking care of mentally ill or chronically sick family members; long term exposure to crisis conditions...
Religion Exploits Normal Human Mental Processes
Because the child’s mind is uniquely susceptible to religious ideas, religious indoctrination particularly targets vulnerable young children. Cognitive development before age seven lacks abstract reasoning. Thinking is magical and primitive, black and white. Also, young humans are wired to obey authority because they are dependent on their caregivers just for survival. Much of their brain growth and development has to happen after birth, which means that children are extremely vulnerable to environmental influences in the first few years when neuronal pathways are formed...
Religious Abuse
Religiously-based psychological abuse of children can involve using teachings to subjugate children through fear, or indoctrinating the child in the beliefs of their particular religion whilst suppressing other perspectives. Psychologist Jill Mytton describes this as crushing the child's chance to form a personal morality and belief system; it makes them utterly reliant on their religion and/or parents, and they never learn to reflect critically on information they receive. Similarly, the use of fear and a judgmental environment (such as the concept of Hell) to control the child can be traumatic.
National Center for PTSD - Treating C-PTSD (Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder)
Many traumatic events (e.g., car accidents, natural disasters, etc.) are of time-limited duration. However, in some cases people experience chronic trauma that continues or repeats for months or years at a time. The current PTSD diagnosis often does not fully capture the severe psychological harm that occurs with prolonged, repeated trauma. People who experience chronic trauma often report additional symptoms alongside formal PTSD symptoms, such as changes in their self-concept and the way they adapt to stressful events.
How to Choose a Therapist for Post-Traumatic Stress and Dissociative Conditions - Sidran Institute
One of the primary roles of Sidran Institute’s Help Desk is to assist people who have been traumatized in finding various kinds of help. “Treatment” is usually sought when the behavioral adaptations (usually called “symptoms”) typical of trauma survivors become disabling, interfering with work, home life, recreation, sleep, parenting, and other aspects of daily function. Our aim is not only to help people feel better and function better, but also to help them learn to be informed and empowered consumers in general and consumers of mental health services, in particular. We hope trauma survivors find that taking appropriate and well-considered action to improve one’s life is made a little easier by the information on this page.
This online brochure will help you organize the task of finding a therapist for ongoing treatment...
The process of choosing a helpful therapist takes some time, thought, and focus. If you are currently in a crisis, or are worried that you might hurt or kill yourself... please contact your community’s mental health center, hospital emergency room, or a hotline. Here are some hotline numbers that might be useful:
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK
National Domestic Violence/Child Abuse/Sexual Abuse: 1-800-799-SAFE
National Youth Crisis Hotline: 800-442-HOPE
From the University of Toronto, a graphic and simple representation of how the brain can change the way it thinks and behaves, if willing to do the work based on facts. If you can read this then It's NEVER too late.
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