The enormous importance of the parenting and care taking style and of not exposing children to stress...

A quick blogposting in the morning, spontaneously thinking loudly.

Read the article ”How Childhood Trauma Can Cause Adult Obesity”.

Reducing the stress, already for the not born baby and by treating it with the greatest respect during its whole childhood (and understanding its "inadequate" reactions), is of enormous importance, not only for the individual and her/his future life and life quality, but also for the society and the world.

With other words we have to treat the children with love, genuine love, and if we can't genuinely love we should be willing to explore why; if it has with us or in fact with the child to do. Maybe what the child is triggering in us.

But if you became stressed and didn't get what you needed early I think you can recover later, with a lot of work though, and recover if your painful experiences aren't/haven't been played down. And by that adults recognize what is actually painful, thus needed to be repressed and/or played down, experiences that are still remaining in the body with all what that means, for the individual and her/his environment wherever this person is in the society.

And this has nothing to do with forgiveness. Even if forgiveness probably can feel good for the moment, because what you are ding when you are forgiving is to deny (more or less) what was done and how painful and even harmful and not right it actually was (meeting evil with evil doesn't solve anything, not even when it comes to a parent meeting a small child's evilness with punishments).

See what Alice Miller has written about this with forgiveness, for instance in "Decepetion Kills Love."

Also see the preface to Alice Miller's book "From Rage to Courage."

And it's crucial how we meet children who have already become traumatized and who are stressed (maybe showing it in hyperactivity) later on. That we are willing to listen to them and not expose them for even more stress and pressure. I'm very critical to the current school politics and they who are responsible for it (and oher politics) in the Swedish government today. See David Korten being shocked that countries like Sweden are on their way of copying his home country USA when it comes to economic politics (causing increasing inequality with everything that follows in the footsteps of this).

And what is hyperactivity about? What is ADHD etc. actually?

The article points out that a child being exposed to another parenting style than her mother's (father's or parents') changes her/his future parenting style. So a child born to a neglectful parent who is raised by a caring caretaker becomes a caring caretaker for her/his children later.

The article also refers to research showing that early stress causes a lot of health troubles of different kinds. Troubles that could become avoided.

I think those (we) could be healed to different degrees if they (we) were allowed to admit to the things we have been exposed and were allowed to call early (and later) experiences in question.

Also read the blogposting (my translation of the heading of the posting from Norwegian to English, but the text in the posting is in English) "Adverse Childhood Experiences and Psychosis."

The Societal Denial...

the ACE-pyramid.

We have all been exposed more or less, if not physically or sexually (but more often than we can or want to recall to physical abuse and maybe even to sexual?) so emotionally, to childhood abuse... The reason for the silence I think, to the Wall of Silence. The ones speaking about those issues easily becomes surrounded by silence... And what we as grown up regard as pretty harmless events can have had another effect on the small child, who had to suppress the emotions which would have been adequate. This insensitiveness (and tendency to belittle and minimize, which the Dutch therapist Ingeborg Bosch for instance calls a defence, the False Power Defence, in this case I guess Denial of Needs) follow us to adult life if we don't get an opportunity to meet anyone who can help us to feel what would have been adequate.

The results of abuse on children are not only psychological, but also somatic... See what the ACE-study has found for instance. It's strange that this study's findings hasn't become more known and spoken about here and there, in the news for instance.

Someone said that it's easer to break a leg than the soul, seeing to the environment's reaction. But what we all have in common as human beings is the fact we can all be humiliated... It has nothing to do with innate strength or weakness I think.

Of course those with more in their "back-packs" from earliest in life are more vulnerable to later violations and abuse, and are "weaker".

Also see Center for Disease Control and Prevention - DCD. And the Norwegian physician Anna-Luise Kirkengen and what she has written. For instance the books "Inscribed Bodies - Health Impact of Sexual Abuse" and "How Abused Children Become Unhealthy Adults". Here an excerpt in English of the latter book (January 15: I hope it's the right link to the excerpt now].

I believe that speaking loudly about those things, inform about all knowledge there exists, to narrate your story (in a secure environment) can mean a lot, even for those most harmed, and maybe even be enough for the less harmed. And gain the whole society. I don't believe in sweeping those things under the rug.

Earlier blogposts on narrating Freyd on narrating, Kirkengen on narrating, and the blogpost "Narratives".