nature, nurture

I remembered reading somewhere that experience can impact genetic structure as much as the genetic hand we're dealt can affect life experience. From an article that supports this view (bold mine):

Experiences that trigger gene expression range from our environment (including the air we breathe, the food we eat, and how we are loved and held etc.) to the molecules in our body (hormones, pepetides, neuro-chemicals and more). For example the environment will include touch and eye contact, both of which are linked to specific sequences of gene expression. What’s most important, is what your baby feels emotionally: the turning on and off of cascades of gene expression begins within seconds of receiving psychological signals and may continue for hours, days, weeks – or even a lifetime.
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When your baby feels loving kindness and caring, certain genes are expressed that actually assist the production of new brain cells and wiring between groups of cells that allows a positive outlook. Love in infancy inclines us to feel love, and to be loving, in adulthood.

Other specific genes are triggered in times of stress and anxiety. The experience of stress can turn off the interleukin-2 gene. This begins a cascade of events and has numerous results including reduced functioning of the immune system, which leaves a person more vulnerable to infections. Positive psychosocial experience, on the other hand, can turn on the interleukin-2 gene within an hour or two, to facilitate molecular communication, healing and health. Emotionally supportive experiences within a loving group (the family) optimise immune function.

Excessive psychological stress may lead to numerous changes in gene expression that effect many body systems. In a state of stress several hormones including cortisol are released. These can reset genes that govern body rhythms and also disrupt the behaviour many body organs, including the heart, liver or kidney, and to disturb blood pressure, sleep-wake cycles or digestive rhythms. You see this in action when your baby feels 'separation distress'.

Bingo. Nurturing and attachment matters, no matter how many parents try to argue otherwise. It's not about 'blame' - it's the fact that all babies are hard-wired to be directly influenced and literally shaped by the people who spend the most time caring for them, usually their parents, and especially the mother. The person who spends hours, days, weeks, months in intimate, close bodily contact with this infant, gazing into her eyes (or not), responding to her needs (or not), has an absolutely huge impact on what kind of person this child turns out to be, and how well she's able to manage in the world. Literally, these early experiences program the child's brain, teaching her (or not teaching her, as the case may be) to recognize verbal and non-verbal signals from her environment, and respond appropriately.

Garbage in, garbage out, as they used to say.

From another linked article in the series:

Your baby is driven by his limbic brain, which is separate from the intellectual brain and is the seat of emotions. The limbic brain is functioning, sensitive and taking part in every brain process even before birth, and it ensures your baby has seven basic drives. These drives are common to all humans. You have them, your baby has them, your mother has them. We all do. They are present before birth. They drive us every second of our lives.

Separation anxiety
Anger (rage)
Fear
The urge to bond
The drive to care for and nurture another
Playfulness
The drive to explore

Each one of these drives plays an important role - to urge your baby to form relationships and keep close to his parents or carers.

To feel is to be alive

Feeling emotions is a sense as important to us as vision, hearing or touch. Each emotion tells us how we need to act so that we will survive and thrive. For your baby, whose brain and body are immature, the emotions are strong and send powerful messages, but he is limited in his capacity to meet his own needs. He needs you to meet his needs. He needs you, or another primary carer, with him, so he can learn how to deal with his strong feelings.

Neuroscience has shown that the key to safety, as well as to growth, is to be in relationship. It is of vital importance to feel loved, listened to and understood. For brain regulation and growth, and for the development of a sense of self, your baby needs to feel felt: there is a measurable impact on the limbic brain in relationship. Your baby needs to know that his feelings are acknowledged and accepted. He needs to feel loved: for who he is, rather than for what he does.

When your baby feels alone for too long , he goes into a state of separation distress - one of the emotional urges. This important emotion drives him to cry so that he can be connected once again. No wonder - science has shown that your baby needs you for survival, and the sensation of distress at being separated , and the behaviour this triggers, helps to ensure he gets what he needs.

Babies who are in a prolonged state of separation distress show a wide range of negative effects. A baby has extreme difficulty in dealing with such an intense and extended forceful emotion. The brain, in an attempt to cope and maintain equilibrium, triggers changes throughout body and brain that lead to a kind of 'shut-down'. The measurable effects include disruption of temperature regulation, an increase in pain sensations, levels of stress hormones rising by up to 10 times their normal levels, compromising of the immune system and disruption of normal sleep. This is also known as 'protest-despair' - the response that's very common when a baby is left to cry and eventually becomes too exhausted to continue crying, or simply gives up.

The impact of prolonged or repeated separation despair on the brain includes patterning of neural networks that relate to the experience of separation. Whatever pattern is reinforced is likely to persist and will determine future behaviour. Having experienced extreme or repeated stress, neural networksin the limbic brain, including the amygdala (the seat of fear), function in a way that inclines a baby to reach a state of high anxiety more rapidly than normal. There is also a reduced ability to trust and to feel safe.

High levels of exposure to stress hormones including cortisol and adrenalin actually predispose body cells (including cells in the brain, the gut, the muscles and so on) to react quickly to stress in the future. In adulthood, the patterns of neural networking, and the sensitivity of body cells, persist. The grown-up baby may still be more anxious than usual.

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Also, from a discussion group on complex PTSD and bullying, a commenter had the following to say (I'm copying huge chunks of it to preserve it, just in case something happens to the forum):

Our problem is that we are too rational for our own good, and we expose the lies and stupidity and fiction of the world with our every move and breath. That is why we are hated, told we are wrong and broken and crazy, that we must not trust our senses.

Rules are for equals. Authority is a master/slave relationship. We can have rules without authority. You are right to be angry when someone tries to control you like a slave for their own gain.
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Authority is the exact opposite of rules.
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RE: DSM

It is crap. Absolute crap. It has nothing to do with science or helping people, and everything to do with the petty political agendae of the medical associations (aka unelected and quasi-governmental arms of the state) governments, and pharma companies. For instance, every psychiatrist knows that the effect of antidepressants is mostly due to placebo effect. If they cured you, then they couldn't keep billing you or your insurance company, could they?

A meta-analysis of nineteen nineteen double-blind antidepressant trials published in the American Psychological Association's online publication, Prevention and Treatment (Guy Sapirstein PhD of Westwood Lodge Hospital, Needham, MA, co-author) in 1998 caused an uproar in professional circles when it was revealed that the placebo effect accounted for a mind-boggling 75 percent of an antidepressant's result - any antidepressant, you name it.

Four years later, the July 2002 Prevention and Treatment published another study by Dr Kirsch that analyzed the FDA database of 47 placebo-controlled short-term clinical trials involving the six most widely prescribed antidepressants approved between 1987 and 1999. These included "file drawer" studies, ie trials that failed but were usually never published.

What Dr Kirsch and his colleagues found was that 80 percent of the medication response in the combined drug groups was duplicated in the placebo groups, and that the mean difference between the drug and placebo was a "clinically insignificant" two points on both the 17-item and 21-item Hamilton Depression Scale, regardless of the size of the drug dose. The placebo factor ranged from a high of 89 percent for the Prozac response, according to the study, and a low of 69 percent for the Paxil response. In four trials, the placebo equaled or achieved marginally better results than the drug. In the nine expert commentaries published with the study, none of the commentators disputed the study's main findings.

[url=http://www.mcmanweb.com/article-18.htm]Source[/i]

ADHD, PTSD, AS, Nonverbal Learning Disability, these are all just fictional constructs we use to organize various traits and symptoms which cluster together. In other words, diseases which can be defined into and out of existence on someone's subjective say-so. Homosexuality was in earlier editions of the DSM.
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Teachers HATE children. Doctors HATE sick people. Guidance counselors HATE success, or they wouldn't be fakkin guidance counselors. The only difference between them and the people that shoot up public places is degree - "I used to be weak, now I am the one who gets to abuse power."

Life's losers boss us around for their own gain.

They falsely define our problems,
give us fake solutions to problems they caused in the first place, invalidate our senses and belittle our wonderment,
put us on pedestals and vent their rage on us
when we fail to perform to those unrealistic standards.

Never underestimate the lengths that insecure people will go to to tear you down.

Never forget that the insecure are the ones in charge.

Never forget that sometimes to survive, we need to learn to blend in and be faceless.

Never forget that all you have for sure is you,
and your wonderful, gorgeous mind.

That last line is incredibly powerful for me, like a blessing of some kind, a gift - a forgiveness, or release, from the shame for all the ways in which I've never managed to live up to the impossibilities that were expected and demanded of me.

More from his next comment in the thread:

What happened to you was so unjust. It was wrong. It was not abusive simply for the physical aspect, it was abusive because it was all based around a lie, the lie that the poisoner is the healer, that the man who hates you is the man who loves you, a lie you were forced to believe for the sake of survival.

No wonder you felt as you did. You'd be weird if you didn't. You've been trained in a brutal, Pavlovian manner that your thoughts are not yours to have, that certain ones are allowed and not allowed. In law, there are two concepts, called "mens rea" and "actus reus", or guilty thoughts and guilty acts; both must be present for there to be a crime.

Your anger and pain is righteous.

There is no such thing as a bad emotion. We have them for a reason. I know its especially hard for women to express anger without guilt due to social conditioning, but if you can immerse yourself in your anger and channel it to useful ends, you've got it 90% licked.

It doesn't really matter who he's speaking to in these comments - the words themselves are so powerfully healing (for me, at least), an acceptance of the pain and rage, fear and fury, all tangled together, that we get caught up in when someone we have no choice but to 'love' (such as a parent) abuses, or fails to use properly, that position of absolute power. It doesn't matter whether said parent understands or acknowledges their power; that power exists regardless of the parents' ability to grasp just how much influence they wield over their developing child's mind, heart, and soul.

Being a parent is the ultimate responsibility.