THAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED TO ME

There are, I presume, times in everyone's life when they say to themselves, I could have been killed. I'm grateful I wasn't,when my husband and I were with three of our children in the Athens airport, just having arrived off a TWA plane whose destination was Tel Aviv when Palestinian guerrillas threw hand grenades into the crowd in which we were a part. The weather around the country makes one feel unsafe to be anywhere but I live in New England where we have been most fortunate not to have deadly weather in the frequency with which many people in other parts of the country suffer.

In the few months between college and graduate school, I volunteered at the State Women's Reformatory. I listened to reasons most of the women (if not all) were there, because they were without resources, familial, emotional, financial or otherwise to have carried them through life able to make constructive judgments, surround them with people who would help keep them safe, or teach the ways to survive without having to place themselves in such constant jeopardy.

Those first few weeks and months of early life for an infant are so important. We, as a medically technological society have come a long way in learning that human touch, caring, warmth and comfort are so important then to allow for later development of a sound system of self-esteem. "Dr. James W. Prescott has devoted his professional life to being an infant and child advocate. He joined the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) NIH and established and directed the Developmental Behavioral Biology Program from 1966-1980 that studied the biological and social consequences (types) of early nurturing and has learned what types of environment make for a violent or peaceful society.

Prescott has concluded that mother nurturing, and affectional bonding or the lack of it, explains the primary origins of both peaceful-egalitarian or authoritarian-violent cultures. In the late 1970s, the NICHD unlawfully terminated his 17 year federal career, as a scientist administrator by the NICHD, NIH for opposing then NICHD abandonment of its agency responsibility to support research on the causes and consequences of violence against children. Dr. Prescott is a developmental neuropsychologist and a cross cultural psychologist with his doctorate in psychology from McGill University.

He has made available two videos that document impaired brain development and the emotional-behavioral disorders that result from failed bonding in the mother-infant/child relationship that include depression and violence. The first, entitled, The Origins of Love and Violence provides a 13 minute introduction to the central thesis that the mother-infant/child relationship is the essential factor for whether a child becomes loving or violent. Failure of mother-love and bonding results in both a failure to thrive and produces depressed, hostile and angry children who later become vengeful and violent adults

Enormous amounts of primate research have proven that a failure in bonding causes the brain to develop abnormally, both anatomically and neuro-chemically. These effects can be observed as early as infancy as depressed infants and young children." The lack of attachment for many can not be later compensated....the brain mechanisms set up for it are the equivalent of complete atrophy.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) saps people of their ability to trust, feel safe, and even read current situations and people with any accuracy. It seems as though there are constant triggers of memory that tie the traumatic past to the present. Only when the person afflicted with PTSD can be in a position of knowing they need never be in that situation of terror or abuse ever again, will they be completely able to their fears and anxieties once again.