WARNING – POST MAY TRIGGER TRAUMA MEMORIES FOR THOSE WITH ABUSE HISTORIES

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Because of the way dissociation was built into my brain from birth, I can never address a topic that involves an emotional image head on.  For those of you who have ever played with building blocks with a toddler, we generally place all the blocks close to the child and begin playing from there.  What would happen if we hid all the blocks individually in different places and then told the child to build something out of one particular color, say blue.  Or red.  The child would have to search in every imaginable place it could think of to find any of the blocks, let alone just those of a single particular color.  How well would the game progress for the child?

I have to follow a similar process as I try to know what I might know of forgiveness, or of any other emotional topic.  Children are meant to build one safe, secure, logical experience on top of previous ones as they learn about themselves, about the world, and about themselves in the world.  When other people talk about ‘recovering’ or ‘rebuilding’ themselves through healing they need to realize that there might be nothing straight forward about the process.

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I have an 18 year childhood of bits and pieces of experiences that did not form themselves together in any kind of logical or reasonable way.  That is because there was no logic or reason in the environment I was in as my life happened to me.  The only organizing principle available to me, other than the one my body could orchestrate on the most basic, physiological level, was my mother.  The basis of her organization toward me was her psychosis about me.

I cannot, therefore, travel backward by following an organized, connected, coherent pathway in order to find out anything about myself as I grew and developed into a body and into my life.  It becomes an intricate matching game with the pieces in complete disarrangement and mostly lost.  My strongest memories are, as I’ve mentioned before, those that my mother included in the abuse litany she recited over and over and over again each time that she beat me throughout these 18 years.  One of those very early abuse litany crimes that I had evidently committed happened when I was two years old.

Do I remember this memory because it is mine or because it was placed in my mother’s abuse litany so that over the years the memory was literally pounded into me?  I was two years old, my grandmother had just come to visit us and mother sent me to my bedroom because I had done something ‘bad’.  After this my mother added it to the litany because it proved to her I was willful, obstinate and disobedient — because I pounded my fists on the wall all the down the hallway to my bedroom.

Whether the memory is mine or mine only because of my mother’s repeated resurrections over the years of this event, I do believe that it happened.  I believe at this age of two I was able, still, to feel anger.  I have no memory of the feeling of anger in my childhood except as connected to this memory, or pseudo memory.  Obviously it was thoroughly communicated to me at this time that my feeling angry was not acceptable or allowed.

As I try to face the topic of forgiveness head on I am automatically lost to myself as I try to know what I might know about it.  I cannot track the growth and development of any anger toward my mother past this two year old event, one that I was beaten for many times over in the years that followed.  The dissociational patterns within my mind only allow me to try to snatch what might be related events of my life, an act no easier than it would be to try to snatch bits of dandelion fluff out of a strong wind, hoping I can catch them in the order that they were attached to their flower of origin in the first place.

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The concept that I could think about individual emotions and my experience of them as actual factors of my being alive was not introduced to me until I entered the seven week in-patient treatment program for alcoholism when I was 30 years old.  This is a process that a normal child is exposed to from birth through the mirroring process a mother and other early caregivers surround an infant with.  These early mirroring experiences actually show the infant what it is feeling, and begin to form the early foundation of a connection to being an individual self.

If you imagine conditions that prevent this mirroring process from EVER happening for an infant, and then imagine that this non-mirroring state is maintained consistently throughout an entire childhood, you can perhaps realize how difficult it might be for such a person to ever go back and make things right within themselves.  Early infant reciprocal interactions form the right emotional limbic brain itself, and they establish all the emotional regulatory patterns that will then exist in that brain for the duration of a lifetime.

This is where the insecure attachment disorders first take their root — in the patterns of neuronal firings that are built into an infant and young child’s growing brain.  If a growing individual is exposed only to interactions with adults around them that are completely disorganized and disoriented, that overwhelm the child, that are not one bit reasonable or logical, that are not patterned on ANY information that is actually connected to the inner experience particularly of an infant under one year old, we cannot expect that the resulting operations of such a little one’s brain will ever be either optimal or ‘normal’.

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Because of my mother’s mental illness and psychosis it was impossible for her to ever respond to me as being anything other than a distorted projection of evil coming out of her own damaged mind.  I have pondered and wondered how it was possible, from these very disturbed beginnings (as they continued unabated for 18 years), that I was able to come out on the other end to be as able to negotiate myself around in the world as I did.

Even for all the resiliency factors that I have identified and described in my earlier posts, I still find myself trying to find the answer to this question.  On the one hand, if I remain in the wishful magical thinking state I suspect the magic of some kind of ‘miracle’ that occurred that allowed me to survive as a relatively adequate person.  I still know I am faced with a mystery here, but without resorting to magical wishful thinking I also know that I am missing some kind of important factual information in my considerations.

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During the nearly 30 years that have passed since I was first told that I had feelings, I have passed many times through a state where I think I was far better off before I had that knowledge.  I have come to understand that for some people not ‘being in touch’ with their feelings might be the wisest course a body, brain and mind can ever take.

I say this because I have also come to understand that for those of us with terrible early trauma during our brain formative stages of development, at the same time we experienced these traumas we also experienced the lack of being given adequate abilities and faculties to ever be able to regulate our emotions like ‘normal’ people can.  Building an early forming right brain emotional center is about either having emotional regulation abilities built into this center or not.  We must understand that emotional regulation occurs through very real physiological, neurological operations that ARE the patterns that were built into our brains in the first place.

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I bring this all up as I write today because of those that I asked about their understanding of forgiveness, all of them seem to relate forgiveness in some way to the experience of anger.  In fact, one respondent to my question believes that forgiveness itself is a FEELING.  Nowhere can I see in people’s response to my question do I see that forgiveness is NOT about feelings.  Oh, boy!  I am in trouble now!  I can either give up and turn away from trying to learn something new about forgiveness, or I can apply a whole lot of willpower, courage and focused effort in an attempt to heal something here — in order to learn something new and different about myself and others in relation to being human in this world.

Because of my childhood I can never assume that I have the same background information about anything that other people who are not early abuse survivors have at their disposal.  My building blocks are either missing or so disconnected, dispersed and hidden in unrelated places within me that it takes a whole lot of work to connect them together into a useful construction.

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I do know when I think about it that every single time I was beaten my mother was at the same time screaming at me to say I was ‘sorry’.  Sorry for what?  There was so seldom any rational connection between her beatings and the real world that I did not even know what I had done ‘wrong’ in the first place.  Fortunately or unfortunately there was a part of ME that endured these beatings that evidently was extremely stubborn as I held to some version of an inner integrity that I don’t even now understand.  I refused her request.

In fact, as my siblings used to point out to me in their pleadings to me on my and their behalf, if I would have cried and if I would have said I was sorry her beatings of me might have been less severe.  What was it about ME, as I look back at this today, that prevented me from participating with my mother during these beatings by giving in to her demands?  Why did I not shed the requisite tears and beg desperately for her forgiveness?

Those of you who have experience with severe child abuse through beatings will understand me when I say that there were two kinds of beatings.  During one kind my mother lost control and entered her violent rage state so quickly that she didn’t even take pause long enough to demand that I pull my pants down.  If the origination point of the beating included a ‘slower burn’ that was in fact as cold as ice, the ritualized demand to pull my pants down happened before the physical impact began.

The difference between these two kinds of beatings only had to do with the speed of the actual eruption of her physical blows upon my body.  The force of the beatings and the length of them did not vary.  Once my mother had entered her insane physical violence against me stage, the beatings themselves could literally go on for a long, long time until she had exhausted not only her rage attack but also her physical stamina.  She had a vast reservoir of both.

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It is also important that I point out to you that my choice and decision not to beg her forgiveness, not to say I was sorry, and not to cry was never, to my knowledge, a conscious choice.  It had to therefore originate from some core of will within myself that I was not able to consciously access in my thoughts — not before the beatings, not during, after or between them.  I am left to conclude, therefore, that this ‘battle of wills’ between my mother and my self originated very, very early in my development.  In fact, this ability that I had to defy her in taking over ME is what saved me.

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Looking backward as I write today I see that I am approaching something that is powerful, forceful, amazing, yet at the same time very delicate.  In my attempts to discern what I know about forgiveness I am having to travel back to an age well before two.  For those of you who know what anthropomorphizing in relation to animals means, you will understand me better when I say it is not helpful to go back into early childhood and use any adult idea of what was actually happening on the insides of an infant or a very young child.

The reasons should be obvious to us.  An infant is very much like a young animal at the beginning in that its brain is very primitive simply because not enough time has gone by yet for the advanced human brain to grow and develop.  A fully developed brain would mean that a head would be too big to be born from the mother in the first place.  In addition, nature has designed the rest of a brain’s formation to occur in interaction with its environment, not exclusively without those interactions.  Experience in the world has to be built into our early brains so that the brain is actually effective in surviving within the same world that built it.

So a very key important point is trying to come clear to me as I write at this moment.  Because my mother’s hatred for me was present before I was born as a result of her psychotic break while delivering me that meant she understood I was the devil’s child sent to kill her, there was something within me FROM THE MOMENT OF MY BIRTH, or even before because her break happened while I was still inside of her, that meant the ME that I was and am — KNEW BETTER.

It was therefore never, from that point forward, possible for me to comprehend what she was talking about or beating me for.  That is the closest I can describe to what I experienced during the thousands of beatings — this state of non comprehension.  My refusal to participate in her psychosis the way she probably wanted me to resulted not from my conscious choice not to, but rather was connected to my innate inner point of logic, reason and the most profound knowing that I’d never left from the time of my birth.

I DID NOT know what she was talking about or really why she hated me or what the beatings and abuse were all about.  It was therefore not possible for me to comprehend anything about the abuse.  My mother’s actions toward me were outside of my realm of understanding from the first breath I ever took.

How could such a fact actually be possible?  Yes, this fills me with awe and makes me feel like I am standing at a point witnessing the mystery and the miracle of a genesis.  But as I allow myself to expand my understanding of the possibilities of what still is factual about being human even though science might never be able to explain it, I do include as fact the actual experience I had with my mother as I knew — somehow and most profoundly — from the first breath I ever took — and from the first moment she turned the force and power of her hatred and psychotic mental illness upon me — that she was WRONG.

When we talk about the miracle of healing and of recovery, it is almost mind boggling to me to understand that my personal recovery means that I have to go back to THIS POINT of awareness of knowing I was NOT who and what she said I was, and did NOT do what she said I did and therefore could not possible beg her forgiveness or say I was sorry because I innately KNEW this fact inside of myself.

Nothing she could ever do over a long 18 years could touch me at this core.  Nothing she could ever do, and she tried as hard as she possibly could have, could convince ME she was right and I was wrong.

I can sense as I write this today that it is like there was a sacred fire burning at the center of my being that included in its fuel this piece of knowledge.  That sacred fire at the center of who I was, and who I am, was somehow absolutely protected from harm.  She could not touch it.  She could not touch me.

What also happened, however, is that this fire had to remain within its own circle as I grew a body into this world throughout the horror of all the experiences that I had to experience with my mother.  Every time that part of Linda tried to move out into the world it was devastatingly attacked and had to retreat back into the safe place that my mother could not get to.

Because I was growing up in a malevolent world without safety and security, I could not integrate this inner self into my own life.  The strange part is that even though this hampered me in my development at nearly every turn (my relationship with my 14 month older brother was for my early months of life exempt from her attacks, as was my later relationship with the Alaskan wilderness when I was away from her reach), it also saved me from the betrayal trauma that I believe caused the destruction of my mother’s mind.

My mother, I believe, grew up as any child naturally attempts to grow.  The difference between my mother’s experience and my own is that she had, at times, false security offered to her so that she was in fact fooled into believing that her own self could come out into the world and form attachments of some kind to her early caregivers.

I, on the other hand, was never fooled.  I actually was betrayed at the time of my birth.  The MONSTER was obviously there to greet me at my first breath.  My experience was of a consistent hatred while hers was of an inconsistent conditional love mixed with hatred.

My mother had already entered out into the world before she was severely betrayed by the people who had let her believe that they loved her.  I knew instantly as soon as I ‘woke into the world’ that something was already terribly wrong.  She figured this out too late in her own childhood.  And by the time she did, on some deep level, figure out that she was unsafe in the world, it was too late for her to retreat back into that inner place of protective safety that I was forced to never leave from my start.

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My mother was old enough to already be at a stage of trying to form a Theory of Mind as she tried to figure out how the rules of life impacted her.  She had already experienced conditional love as it coincided with harm to the point that she was ‘tricked’ into believing that she was somehow responsible for actions that meant her attachment figures could not love her because she was wrong, because she was bad.

I believe that her mind became so entangled with this idea that somehow if she could only be good enough those around her would love her (as in that childhood note she found at the time of her mother’s death as I describe in +What I Suspect of My Mother’s Early Childhood), that it ended up becoming the wound around which her psychosis formed that she later projected in its entirety upon me before I was born.  In her psychosis some part of her evidently believed that she was so bad and bad enough that the devil would send an unborn child to kill her in labor.  I took my first breath being the personification of the entirety of her intolerable internalized evil.

This psychosis actively played itself out throughout my entire childhood.  I see an image as I write of the fairy tale ‘poisoned apple’, only this one doesn’t put you to sleep.  It kills you in the depths of your being.

My mother was old enough to eat the poisoned apple during her childhood.  She trusted enough in those around her that she COULD be betrayed.  She was fooled.  Because the poisoned apple was presented to me at birth, well before I was actually old enough to eat it, I never was fooled into believing anyone loved me in the first place.  I was therefore spared the eating of the poisoned apple.  I was spared any further betrayal past my mother’s hatred of me at my first breath.

I could never believe there was anything I could do to change the situation, one way or the other.  I was given an immunity as a result that my mother never had.  That means that while I consciously completely and totally believed by the time I was 17 that I was evil, that I was not human, that I was the devil’s child — and I DID completely believe this without question — that belief only had to do with what had been told to me and beaten into me from the time of my birth.

I can never underestimate the power of the actual experiences I had that formed this understanding into my brain.  But the truth of the matter is that there MUST be more to us than what is built into our brain — and what a long, strange road of suffering I had to take to be able to be one of the people on this earth who can make this statement from the facts of actual experience.

There IS more to us than what our bodies and our brains actually contain.  There WAS a Linda, a self of Linda, present when I was born that had a knowledge, even though it was not verbal or conscious, that stood with its own truth and its own corresponding version of reality, against my mother every single step of the way.

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Tracking this back to the concept of forgiveness I would say at this moment that when we have a choice to forgive or not to forgive we are being given the ability to exercise an option that lies at some fundamental point of our existence as members of our advanced human species.  When I say that I don’t understand it, I mean it.  The issue of forgiveness goes back to a time when I was in the act of being born because that is where the betrayals first began for me.  But I am lucky this is so because unlike my mother I never had to participate in a fundamental betrayal later on, as she did as a child, that might have broken me as my mother’s broke her.