Recent interesting and useful readings
A. Articles from Janina Fisher’s site
‘We don’t survive trauma as a result of conscious decision-making. At the moment of life threat, humans automatically rely upon survival instincts. Our five senses pick up the signs of imminent danger, causing the brain to “turn on” the adrenaline stress response system. As we prepare to fight or flee, heart rate and respiration speed oxygen to muscle tissue, and the “thinking brain,” our frontal cortex, is inhibited to increase response time. We are in “survival mode,” in our “animal brains.” Later, we may pay a price for these instinctive responses: we have ‘made it’ without bearing witness to our own experience’ (Janina Fisher, from http://www.janinafisher.com/tmodel.php)
Retraining the Brain: Harnessing Neuroplasticity (http://www.janinafisher.com/pdfs/neuralplasticity.pdf)
B. Books
The Girls that Went Away: The Hidden Story of Women who Surrended Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler
It involves the revelation of the secret history of the 1.5 million women who surrendered children for adoption in the several decades before Roe v. Wade. The book is based on Fessler’s interviews, which bring to life these women’s voices and the attitudes of the time. Fessler brings to the fore an overlooked history of single women in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies.
In 2002, Fessler, who is an adoptee herself, travelled around the country interviewing women who were willing to speak publicly about why they relinquished their babies. She researched records and the political and social climate of the time and she uncovered a story of three decades of women who under enormous social and family pressure, were coerced or outright forced to give their babies up for adoption. Fessler describes the position in which these women found themselves, as they were often shunned by family and friends, evicted from schools, sent away to maternity homes to have their children alone, and often treated with contempt by doctors, nurses, and clergy.
C. Extracts from books
‘Each of us needs periods in which our minds can focus inwardly. Solitude is an essential experience for the mind to organize its own processes and create an internal state of resonance. In such a state, the self is able to alter its constraints by directly reducing the input from interactions with others’ (Dan Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are)
