Every one of us begins life as a unique individual. Through our early interactions with our caregiving environment we “come down into the world” as James Hillman describes in his book “The Soul’s Code.”
I believe that if an infant’s caregiving interactions are of a malevolent kind, an individual’s ability to grown down into the world is interfered with. This interference will be reflected in the changes the body and brain are forced to make in adjustment to a malevolent world. Of all the consequences that originate through these adjustments, the one I want to write about today has to do with integration.
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A person learns from infancy how to integrate their self within their environment. This all happens through the ‘rupture and repair’ patterns that are established within an infant’s body, nervous system and brain through its interactions with its first caregivers. Because I believe that hope is an innate hard-wired physiological ability available to us from birth, the potential for a lack of hope resulting in hopeless despair and disappointment also exists within us from birth.
If an infant’s early caregiver interactions are adequate and appropriate, hope thus becomes intertwined with this ‘coming down into the world’, or coming to live in a body in this world. If an infant’s experiences result from inadequate and inappropriate early caregiver experiences, hopeless despair and disappointment will grow into an infant’s body as this body grows into the world.
In cases such as mine, when the pattern of early caregiver interactions occurs within the context of severe mental illness, not only will the inadequate and inappropriate nature of the infant’s experiences change the way it grows on all levels, but there will be introduced an additional, complicating factor — the insanity of the mental illness itself.
Mental illness is a manifestation of brain operations that are occurring outside the range of ‘normal’. The ability to use the brain as it has evolved to operate in ‘best case’ scenarios has been removed and has been replaced with alternative operational patterns — most usually in response to its early formational environment of deprivation and malevolence. In these cases REASON no longer operates correctly. Someone whose brain operates like my mother’s did will not have the ability to think reasonably on any level. They therefore live in a world of their own creation, a reality that is entirely processed through a brain that has not formed to operate correctly.
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I can only speak for myself about how my reality formed through my interactions with my mother from birth. There was no possibility of my being able to discern reasonable patterns of cause and effect as my brain developed. It is only because of the many resiliency factors that also influenced me in childhood (see previous post on resiliency) that I managed to form a brain that has a reasonable sense of cause and effect built into it. One of the most important resiliency factors that I have to consider is that I evidently did not have the same kind of mental illness genetic combinations available to me to use in order to survive the overwhelming pain of my own childhood that my mother had.
My mother’s irrational control over my developing mind was, however, nearly as pervasive as it was chronic. She shared in common all of the techniques used by the Chinese in the early 50s to control the minds of prisoners — and she did this to me from birth until I left home at 18. As a result I will never be able to fully gain control of my own mind away from her brain and mind forming influence. She made sure that her irrationality became a part of me and she was supremely successful.
But she could never actually control ME, the me that I was from conception, the me that did the interacting with her from the start of my ‘growing down into the world’. Unfortunately that ME was prevented from integrating properly into a body in this world. She filled so much of the space and time that should have been MINE that there was precious little left over during that 18 years for me to have experiences that were not in some way influenced by her and her mental illness.
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I write about this today in order to point out a single important aspect of how my early patterns shaped how I am in the world today. Because my mother constantly pointed out to me through her actions and through her words that I was evil, not human, the devil’s child and BAD, I grew up absolutely believing her. Through this process the ME that endured these experiences evidently learned that all of the world outside of my influence must be a perfect place.
That fact made logical, reasonable sense in my growing mind. If Linda was so bad that anyone involved with me had to suffer as from a ‘curse’, then anyone whose life I did not touch must have a perfect life.
I call this today my “Utopian Complex’, and there will evidently never be a logical, rational or reasonable way that I can alter this fundamental belief that I have about myself in relationship to the world outside of my sphere of ‘influence’. As a result, I still fundamentally believe that the world ‘out there’ is a perfect place and if it isn’t, it sure should be. In my logically illogical mind, there is absolutely no excuse for the world not to be perfect outside the range of my own personal influence.
This, to me, is an example of how having a brain formed under the conditions presented by my mentally ill mother’s brain-mind gave me a version of what infant brain development specialists call the infant’s ‘unsolvable paradox’. These researchers know that severely maltreated infants know on a profound level that they have to ‘go on being’ in a world that is so dangerous that possibility is not possible.
This is the consequence of a brain-mind-body that is overwhelmed by traumas outside the possibility of addressing through any known coping ability an infant has. The paradox is formed deeply within the brain-mind simply by the fact that the infant (myself included) DID survive what was impossible to survive.
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Because I was told from the moment I was born that I caused nothing but trouble and was the cause of all the troubles in my family, and that their world would be perfect if I wasn’t in it, I simply applied logic in an incremental fashion to include my relationship with the entire world outside of myself. I understand today that my version of building the unsolvable paradox into my being as I grew down into my body and into the world is certainly not the worst that I could have done.
But it only happened THIS way because of the consistent and pervasive psychosis my mother suffered from in relation to me from my first breath. Infant’s crave consistency and I have to say my mother certainly provided me with that! My understanding of cause and effect did not grow to apply to me on an ongoing personal level, but was rather accomplished on the level of the grand scheme of ‘Linda versus the world’.
This world was of course represented by my mother as my brain-mind formed, and because she formed her own brain-mind so completely into my developing one, and because I cannot extricate her from my brain-mind, I am simply left with the understanding that the world has no reason to be less than perfect if I haven’t personally done something to harm it.
I doubt that I can communicate to you that this ‘reality’ is not a ‘maybe’ to me. In the essence of my relationship to being in this world at all, it is fact.
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Of course the other side of this double-edged sword, the other part of this paradox that formed itself into me is that it is a bad thing that I am in the world at all, and especially that it is hopeless for Linda to have a good life because Linda is in it. Talk about a no-win predicament! I cannot both live a life and not be in it at the same time! This is, to me, the end result of being so told I was bad and that chance of becoming good was so hopeless and impossible, that I simply excluded myself from my own life.
This may be a difficult thought to follow because it is NOT based on reasonable logic as a ‘normal’ brain would understand it. But I suspect that dissociation within my brain is directly connected to having been forced to live a life for 18 years from birth without ME being allowed to be in it. Each separate experience of my childhood simply happened, but I had no ongoing sense that I was a part of those experiences or any ongoing sense that they happened to me.
It was similar to “If a tree falls in a forest and there’s nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound?” And if the answer to that question is “No” once, then it is always so. From the first time I dissociated myself from the ongoing experiences of the traumas that were my childhood I was being forced to live a life without ME in it. If it happens once or happens a million times, the result are the same: A disconnection from a meaningful fluid ongoing experience of being alive in a body in the world.
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I know I experience what attachment experts call a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder. This kind of attachment disorder, I believe, has dissociation so built into it that the person’s ongoing life cannot be separated from it — ever. It results from ongoing experiences from birth that were not based on logical, rational cause and effect processes and through an absence of adequately resolved patterns of rupture and repair.
In my case true hope ‘floated’ so far away from my own personal experience of life that it ‘landed’ at the unreachable interface of where I can imagine the ‘world’ as being separate from myself. Every infant grows into its brain a conception of where its boundaries are, of what lies on its own insides compared to what lies on its outsides. If the early interactions an infant has as it forms these mental boundaries are based on irrationality, the boundaries themselves will not form normally.
In a normal brain, all ongoing experiences are connected together to form a ‘coherent life story’ with the person being the one living the life. I can only artificially construct my own life story from the millions of disconnected pieces that lie alone, separated and isolated, somewhere in my memory. And yet this fact is just one of the small pieces that I believe reflects the kind of damage that results from severe early malevolent abuse.
I will never know if someone’s intervention on my behalf, that could have resulted at least in a different pathway for me through the rest of my childhood, would have left me with less devastating damage. I believe that it would have. Removal would have prevented my mother from being able to consistently build her ‘case’ against me (and into my own brain-mind) over the many, many years she had control over me. I was not given the opportunity to experience myself outside the reach of her terribly distorted mind.
Stop the Storm 
Do you think your mother knew the difference between right and wrong?
This is both a difficult and a simple question to answer. I just talked to my sister about it, and she couldn’t really answer it at all. I expected at some point in my writing to encounter within myself the concept of ‘evil’, yet still find that that time has never come to me — yet, at least.
If I go with my simplest answer, which is probably the most truthful one, I have to say no, she didn’t, nor did she have a brain built to process that information ‘normally’. I think the direction her brain-mind was forced to take in adaptation to her early environment and in order for her to survive it in spite of her pain and the damage that was done to her — removed from her the ability to know the difference between right and wrong.
It strikes me as I write these words how terribly sad, beyond words, this fact is. What I understand about my mother’s condition, probably severe borderline, is that such a break happened in her mind between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ that she could not tolerate holding these two conflicting states of being within herself. Her kind of mental illness meant that she had no boundaries between the insides of her mind and the world outside of herself. She, in effect, wore her mind on the outside. This means that everything that happened — to her — was processed as if it occurred in a mirrored reflection of her own mind. I was very simply the absolute projection of all her own intolerable ‘badness’ that she could not keep within her own mind. I was an active figment of her imagination, to put it most simply.
I remember the stage my children went through as they learned to talk, and then never stopped talking. I remember teaching them that they could hold some of their thoughts quietly within their own minds. They could do this because they could tolerate it. My mother could not hold her own supposed badness inside of herself. Sadly, because of the way her brain operated (and neuroscience imaging techniques can now actually watch how differently a borderline’s brain operates from a normal one), nobody could have told my mother that this is what was happening.
So while she upheld the rules of society as she saw them, they were external rules only. We were taught them all. But they were completely disconnected somehow in her brain from how she treated me. Nobody could imagine such a reality should we not know people actually have these kinds of brains. They are that illogical, irrational and unreasonable. They are fundamentally miswired. At some point during their early formative developmental stages their brains were literally overwhelmed — I believe, by pain.
I believe that being given possession of my mother’s childhood stories is one of the greatest gifts of my life — and if we study them they hold a key that can show us the genesis point of a broken mind, the origin of severe mental illness — as hidden as this key seems to us on the outside of such a mind’s operations. I see her stories were riddled with concern about right and wrong — and the last sentence of her story about Mischievous Bear holds a big part of the secret — the split that happens in a borderline brain between good and bad. Such a split means that in their minds the connection between the two is actually broken and cannot be repaired.
In these child stories my mother was trying to come to terms with right and wrong, good and bad, accountability. By the time we get to her last story it becomes clear, to me, that she has lost her way. What she needed she did not receive. She needed adults in her life to pay attention, to help her form a working Theory of Mind, to help her heal from the mortal wounds that had already been inflicted upon her psyche. Nobody was there for her at the time these mortal wounds could have been cared for so that the break would not have had to happen. Because she was left absolutely alone (I believe) to try to understand herself in a world that had harmed her, her genetic code gave her an option for survival that she was forced to take. Mental illness kept her body alive but her mind was gone. Her connection to herself was broken and her reality correspondingly changed.
She was both telling and showing the world as she wrote these stories around her 11th birthday what her inner world was like. I believe that as we read the end of her last story we are actually participating in the reality of the break that happened in her brain-mind as a child. We are watching the tragedy occur, and it fills me with the greatest sorrow to know that by the end of this story she had lost her own way home. She lost her ‘working brain’ and lost her connection to the ability to reason in the way we might recognize it in a better brain.
I believe that because my mother was already a gifted writer as a child that she was able to put down these words, to give a voice to her inner experience of trying to understand right and wrong, good and bad. Perhaps it is always at this point where the connection between right and wrong is absolutely broken that a mind is broken as a result. I don’t believe anything more could have been asked of my child mother, asked of any one of us. I do not fault her for losing her battle. The consequence was all the tragedy of her life, my childhood with her included.
Please take a look at these stories. They actually tell us all we need to know: My Mother’s Childhood Stories under the page heading The Power of Story (I’m sorry I have no way to make these active links while writing in this comment section). What came to be is that she acted out her stories in her adulthood and never knew it was happening.