What makes it possible for humans to have “basic trust in a benign universe”? This is an idea that Kaethe Weinberg talks about in her book Common Shock. She wrote that “children raised in a “good enough” environment grow up with three assumptions: the Universe is Benevolent, Life is Meaningful, the Self is Worthy. Trauma breaks this basic safety, suddenly the Universe is Malevolent, Life is Meaningless, the Self is Not Worthy.”
This is something I know very well from my own experience. Until I was in my 40’s, I thought I was defective. Somehow I did not seem to know how to navigate the basic issues of life. Then the information about children who grow up in alcoholic families came out. It wasn’t until then that I realized that I had been wounded, not born defective. Later, in my 50’s I understood that I had been traumatized before the age of three. The brains of children younger than three have not matured yet, so if you are traumatized that early, your brain develops under the influence of trauma. This means that you are much more sensitive to things that might appear dangerous but aren’t, and tend to overreact to anything unpleasant. One consequence was that I lived with severe depression until I was in my 50’s. My first attempt at using anti-depressant medication was a disaster, which is the story told in the previous post. Fortunately, with help from a friend, I found someone who really helped me. I was astounded, when Imipramine worked and normalized my brain chemistry, to find that I couldn’t remember ever feeling that way. Having been traumatized as a baby, it was true that I had never known normal brain chemistry.