To Feel Safe or Not To Feel Safe, That Is The Question

Chapter 32

For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety.

~ Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD from The Body Keeps The Score

According to adoption records, I was born at 1:50 a.m. in early December 1965 in Weyburn, SK. The delivery was normal, and conditions at birth were good. I was a premature baby of thirty-eight weeks and weighed only 4 lbs 13.5 oz.

I moved into foster care at the end of December. I was described as a healthy, happy baby who was easy to care for. I loved baths, was a sound sleeper, loved to be talked to, had a beautiful smile, and was a content baby.

From the information in the adoption records, I can reasonably conclude that I was fortunate to be placed in a safe and loving foster home where I was well taken care of in the first few months of my life.

I went to my adoptive family the following May. My mom was an attentive and loving stay-at-home mom, so lucky for me, the first seven years of my life were safe and secure. Once my mom started working, which was when I was in Grade 2, that was the end of having a secure base that was easily accessible.

Feeling safe as a child is crucial to our well-being. As Bessel Van Der Kolk states in The Body Keeps The Score:

               Children whose parents are reliable sources of comfort and strength have a lifetime advantage – a kind of buffer against the worst that fate can hand them.

               John Bowlby [English psychiatrist] realized that children are captivated by faces and voices and are exquisitely sensitive to facial expression, posture, tone of voice, physiological changes, tempo of movement and incipient action.

He goes on to state:

               Children are also programmed to choose one particular adult (or at most a few) with whom their natural communication system develops. This creates the primary attachment bond. The more responsive the adult is to the child, the deeper the attachment and the more likely the child will develop healthy ways of responding to the people around him.

What about prior to birth? In Childhood Disrupted, author Donna Jackson Nakazawa references Robin Karr-Morse, a family therapist and author of Ghosts from the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence.

               Once the brain has become hypervigilant to danger, it is more easily triggered: the amygdala stays on high alert to assess what’s coming next. And whenever it detects danger signals in the baby’s environment, that little brain quickly goes into a heightened state of vigilance.

               This process can begin prenatally. “It’s common for women in pregnancy to be stressed, but to be extremely stressed chronically, where the mother’s HPA axis is already chronically on fight or flight, means that the baby is growing in an environment that is bathing in far too much cortisol,” she explains. “And that can have a tremendous influence on the nervous system of the fetus, so that the baby, from birth, might be susceptible or hypervigilant or vulnerable to any form of stimulation, because their nervous system is set on high.”

I have no way of knowing if my nervous system was programmed to be on high alert, but I can reasonably assume, after reading the court documents surrounding my adoption and through discussions with my half-sister, that my biological mother didn’t lead a stress-free life. The question then becomes, does the nervous system reprogram if the stress is removed and a safe, secure base established? I certainly think it’s possible.

Reflecting on my childhood now, I know that because my mom was my secure base, that made the abandonment and betrayal I experienced at ten when she left me in the Shriner’s Hospital in Winnipeg and went back to Regina that much more intense. If you haven’t read that part of my story, you can do so here. In my ten-year-old brain, my mom leaving me in the care of an institution was a silent message that I was no longer worthy of her love.

What I didn’t recognize the first time I worked through my childhood trauma was the attachment bond I created with medical personnel as a child and teenager. After all, I lived in the hospital for months at a time. Nurses took the place of my mother. Additionally, the hospital was the only place where I was genuinely accepted for who I was. No one made fun of me for the way I walked. No one teased me, called me a Weeble Wobble, or singled me out for being different, and no one faked their feelings toward me, and I never felt pitied either.

Most hospital staff never forced me to do anything. Except for one nurse and one physiotherapist, I was always treated with compassion, understanding, and respect. All the heads of the departments I interacted with – Mary, the head nurse in orthopedics at the Pasqua Hospital, and Lorna, the head of physio at Wascana - and my surgeons - took a great deal of time to educate me. As I gained strength after each surgery, I was encouraged to be independent. I wasn’t criticized or berated when I couldn’t do something like I was at home and in school.

Overall, if I were to make a chart of safe versus unsafe, the hospital would score more on the safe side. I didn’t learn for many years after the initial twelve surgeries that some may not have been necessary, and that was only when I started studying biomechanics, and that information only became available in the last few years. That’s the thing about science. Facts change when new information becomes available. There are no absolutes.

Over the last three years, it became crystal clear to me that the people who created safety for me as a child – the medical establishment - were now completely unsafe, untrustworthy, and unethical, which represented a huge problem for me. If my hips were to fail to the point where I needed surgery, where would I go? The medical system’s insistence on forced gene therapy meant I couldn’t go into the hospital without taking a lawyer and an informed medical advocate with me, and the odds of that happening were slim to none. I was forced to face the probability of having to take my own life rather than allowing them to kill me slowly with a poison jab.

In My Choice, Professor Julie Ponesse dedicates an entire chapter to the question of ethics in the pandemic response. She was fired for not wanting to participate in the vaccine trials. She writes:

               According to Harvard professor of medicine and former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, Arnold Seymour Relman, “The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research.” The regulatory climate in the US was certainly primed for another instance of regulatory capture of exactly the sort we are seeing the the COVID-19 vaccination mandates. And it is not clear that corporate entities, our public health officials or the media have provided sufficient evidence to show that the non-sterilizing COVID-19 vaccines reach the threshold of ethical justification in order for them to be mandated.

The same thing happened to Professor of Psychiatry Dr. Aaron Kheriaty. He also served as a Director of Medical Ethics and was very vocal about the unethical nature of the mandates. You can find more information about Dr. Kheriaty here.  Dr. Ponesse’s book, My Choice: The Ethical Case Against COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates, can be purchased here.

The collective willingness of the medical establishment to be blindly obedient to the pharmaceutical industry and thereby inflicting harm on people is a betrayal to the general public. People died unnecessarily because fear imprisoned the elderly, someone decided that inexpensive medications used for over 50 years were no longer reliable, and the new gene therapy shots that were going to save the world actually harmed people.

Colleen Brandse: Vaccine Injured Nurse Discusses Her Vaccine Injury | Toronto Day 3 | National Citizens Inquiry

I didn’t know why the response to the pandemic triggered me so badly even a few weeks ago, but today, I understand a little more. I relived the abandonment and betrayal I experienced all those years ago as a ten-year-old when my mom chose to obey my dad, even though she knew it wasn’t the right thing to do. That was the link. I was triggered because just as my mom was too afraid to stand up to my dad and stay with me in Winnipeg, people in the current medical system were too scared to stand up to the almighty pharma industry, even though many knew that forcing people to take part in an experiment was unethical.

I never trusted politicians, so their unethical and immoral behavior didn’t trigger me. What enraged me was their abuse of power.

 Whenever I saw a video or read a news report where someone snitched on a neighbor for having people over for Christmas or when a retail employee felt they had the right to become violent with someone because they weren’t wearing a mask – that sent me into a rage and made me afraid to go into a store without a mask. If I was physically capable of looking after myself, I would never have worn one, but physically, I’m weak. I can’t run away or fight. I am literally trapped in my body because I still have not regained the strength I had previous to the last round of surgeries. Being physically vulnerable creates fear, and fear allows tyrants to control you.

I had to buy food, so I muzzled myself so I could get groceries. I hated every millisecond of being forced to wear one, and I resented the people who forced me to wear it. I tried to be compassionate about it by telling myself their fears were similar to a child scared of the dark. I didn’t resent nightlights, so why resent the people forcing me to wear a mask? But being forced to wear a mask/muzzle triggered my rape trauma. Even though I could occasionally be compassionate for the people scared of catching a cold, I was mostly resentful.

I could care less about going to movies, eating out, or traveling, so not being able to do those activities because I refused to vaccinate didn’t bother me.

I get that people need to trust systems and institutions, and that creates a willingness to be blind to their corruption. In Blind To Betrayal, Dr. Jennifer Freyd writes:

               When citizens are afraid, they are more dependent on their leaders and thus more at risk of remaining blind to the leaders’ lies and betrayals. Indeed, oppressors may encourage the ignorance of the oppressed in many ways.

Professor Freyd also explains:

               One of the most perplexing aspects of our shared social world relates to our ability to ignore the injustice, oppression, treachery, and betrayal that are all around us.

Indeed.

At this moment, I honestly don’t know if I will ever be able to genuinely forgive people for their behavior during the pandemic. The fact that so many people were willing to live in a segregated society and snitch on their neighbors….how do you trust people willing to do that?

As for the medical establishment - I don’t even know what it would take for me to trust a doctor enough that I would seek treatment. At this point, I wouldn’t trust them to help me with a hangnail, let alone something life-threatening. Of course, there are several doctors who had their licenses taken away for not going along with the pandemic nonsense. I’d trust them with my life, but they can’t work in hospitals, so…..

I intellectually understand why people did what they did, but my trust in people as a whole, as thin as it was before, is pretty much non-existent now, and that’s sad.