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Nurture and protection of the children should be the primary roles of every family and society. In this day and age it is more and more important to be open minded and take responsibility and not just for our own.
| "Never were rights of man so disregarded as in the case of the child.” Maria Montessori |
While still living in the Netherlands I used to work for a nationwide organisation against child abuse. Lecturing in hospitals, schools as well as organisations like the Rotary or women's organisations. I travelled a lot in these days and noticed that even professionals had a tendency to think that these things were more prevalent in the so-called “backward’ and lesser educated rural areas than in the more intellectual circles of the inner cities of Amsterdam or the Hague where they themselves had their homes. And vice versa: when invited by the women’s group in the village where I lived, I was told that they expected city-people to treat their children far worse, because in the rural areas where everybody knows everybody, social control would help prevent atrocities. Both points of view made sense but what struck me in these discussions went much deeper than the right or wrong of these statements.
What was underlying was another phenomenon: a difficulty to accept uncomfortable truths about our own environment and culture. On the one hand that is a blessing since it helps us cope with things we may not (yet) be able to deal with but it is also a curse because we lose so much precious time in the shadow of our own shame and fear. Traumatic events do take time to heal and in many a case there will always be some scars left. But unless we are prepared to move beyond them, they may preoccupy the rest of our lives and that of our children.
| "Almost everything we do is insignificant but it is very important that we do it." Mahatma Gandhi |
With the nervous and immune systems chemically linked, our emotions naturally affect the whole body. But in order to express and resolve emotions such as grief and anger we need to feel safe. Unfortunately safety is often the one thing that an abused child will have a hard time finding. Research done by the American National Institute of Mental Health found that sexually abused people who have been unable to express their emotions about the abuse often end up with such high levels of adrenalin that the neurons in areas crucial for memory and thinking are affected to such an extent that normal development– especially the development of the left hemisphere of the brain - is hampered.
These studies put into place what I intuitively had come to know just by working with severely traumatised clients. There was a tendency to not remember! Not merely the facts about the abuse – but in general. Even simple, unthreatening events that had just occurred in their adult lives disappeared. They often experienced that as “weird” and felt they were less reliable than other people. Which was another valid reason for them not to trust their environment – including their therapist – because they feared to be too susceptible to suggestion.
| "Every exit is an entry somewhere." Tom Stoppard |
One of the advantages of the Listening Training as a method to recover from childhood trauma and stress, is that recovery can take place without having ‘to go there again’. There is no one telling you what may or may not have happened, no one analysing or probing into the past. There is just the music – just an unbiased Mozart - and you.
This training based on the neuro physiology of the listening process offers a relatively quick and gracious way of accessing the subconscious and restore what needs to be restored. By retrieving those literally lost frequencies of your youth, you will experience what the lack of a harmonious childhood did to you. And from then on - enjoy the difference!
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