Month: May 2009

+FINDING THE CRACK IN MY BORDERLINE MOTHER’S REALITY

alchemynow3 Comments

At 5:35 pm on Good Friday, March 27, 1964 I was 12 years old and not yet a woman.

Then the great Alaskan earthquake happened on this day at 5:36 pm — the second strongest earthquake on record anywhere on our planet.

http://images.google.com/images?q=1964+alaska+earthquake&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3RNFA_enUS270US307&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=Eyz-SfPnA5ectAOtoaDWAQ&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&resnum=4&ct=title

http://wcatwc.arh.noaa.gov/64quake.htm

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I could tell you my personal story of the earthquake that day when my menarche happened, but all I want to mention now is that by the end of that three minutes of terrible shaking, I was a woman.

What matters most to me right now is that because of the earthquake, because of my mother’s writing about her personal experience during it, because those pieces of paper she wrote her story on survived for over 40 years and then found their way into my hands after her death in 2002, I now have proof of a critical point regarding Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) — most importantly of my mother’s version of this mental adaptation to early traumas and my assessment of her condition.

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I believe that an abusive borderline parent will do everything in their power to keep the ‘outside world’ from seeing or being able to detect both their broken mental condition and the abuse that is a result of it.  This is what makes BPD parents so extremely dangerous to their offspring.  Nobody outside of the family is likely to EVER suspect the existence of either the mental illness or the abuse.  (Knowing the signs to look for in order to notice in the first place and then to be able to see through the crack in the reality of BPDs will be covered in future posts).

I am not saying that my mother’s mental illness or her abuse of me was invisible to the outside.  I am saying that a combination of the fact that nobody cared with the fact that these same people did not know what they were seeing even if they were looking, resulted in a complete absence of intervention for the entire 18 years of my childhood I spent being severely abused by my mother.

It is likely that my father also succumbed to these same factors, although the additional fact of him being my father SHOULD have allowed him the ability to intervene on my behalf in some way.  This is a good part of why I am pursuing my writing based on my personal experience.  I believe that personality disorders are so pervasive, consistent and insidious that until our present ‘enlightened era’ it has been nearly impossible for those who are on the inside to recognize what is going on, either.

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This is why what I found in my mother’s writings about her earthquake experience is so empowering to me because it confirmed what I intuitively know about her condition and affirmed my assessment on many levels both of the cause of BPD and of the consequences of involvement on any level with a person — especially a mother — who has it.

You can read her story as she wrote it at My Mother’s Alaskan Earthquake Journal Entry.

In the months just prior to receiving my cancer diagnosis I was hard at work sorting and copying into my computer all my mother’s letters, notes and journal entries concerning her homesteading experiences.  I will post what I have completed for you to reference, but there remains hundreds of disorganized pages and letters that still need to be included to make the entries complete.

These papers my mother wrote traveled thousands of miles, some of them being stored for up to 30 years in her various storage lockers she kept, and finally found their way to me nearly 50 years after she wrote them.  It was in this collection of her papers that I found the stories that she wrote the winter of her 11th birthday.  (SEE also:   My Mother’s Childhood Stories)

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All the time I was transcribing her writings I was searching for a clue that would show me the truth in her writings that would confirm what I know in my own heart about my mother’s mental illness.  Because my mother’s stated intention in writing any of these letters and journals was to eventually write what she referred to as her “Alaskan book,” they were written from the public side of the border wall that allowed her to write under the ‘spell’ of that BPD persona.  Because this borderline split between public and private is so fundamentally and profoundly crafted into the altered brain of a borderline it is usually impossible to detect it through their own description of their version of reality.

That is why what I found in her earthquake writing created in me a state of elation!  I FOUND it!!  I found the hole in her border wall, the crack in her reality.  I found the chink in the armor that she had developed as her brain grew in childhood to protect herself from unbearable pain.  I found the equivalent of my own Silver Chalice.  If I never read another word she wrote I have still successfully completed my mission and my quest.

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I need to take a related diversion, or detour at this moment to make a connection that I believe is vitally crucial to putting severely abusive mothers’ behavior in the social context of the human mythological imagination.

I encountered this ‘myth’ several years ago at the start of my research, Euripides’ Medea, and would like you to find a way to read it if you can.  It is contained in this book

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1417908971

though I read it in an earlier printing of this one

http://www.amazon.com/Greek-Drama-Bantam-Classics-Moses/dp/0553212214/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1241397818&sr=1-1

Refer to this for historical context surrounding the Trojan War and Jason and Medea:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medea

Euripides’ famous retelling of this part of Greek myth in his play about Medea was first performed in 431 B.C., hence this story is a retelling of mythology that is older than 2500 years.  My point is that I believe this story is about a particular form of madness and can be seen as very closely related to aspects of what we now know of as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).  For whatever reasons the authors of the myth ascribe to her, in the end Medea murders her own children.

Had my mother been able to escape any consequence for her actions, I know she would have murdered me. In fact, this is a point of argument that I hold with the experts’ version of what dissociation is and what it does.  I DID NOT dissociate during my mother’s beatings of me.  I felt every single one of them because I had to remain absolutely aware and present during all of them as soon as I was old enough to control my body.  Her rage usually and quickly escalated to the point that she lost control of herself while she was beating me — in rhythm to her recitation of the litany she had created for me — SEE:  Litany from Start to Finish — to avoid the most dangerous falls her beatings caused me or I would have been killed — if possible, killed many times over.

It is evident in Euripides’ play that all the public present knew of Medea’s intent to kill her children because she stated it publicly and yet nobody intervened — not even when they heard the children screaming as she hacked them to death in their home with a massive knife.  Yet while many consider that this play refers to abandonment, one of the key symptoms of BPD, it is the ‘lower layer’ related to a mother’s ‘passion’ to kill her child or children that most fascinates me personally.

Because I understand that extreme childhood trauma can cause an evolutionarily altered brain to form, and because I believe that BPD appears as one of the manifestations possible from these changed brains, I also believe that it is the very, very ancient genetic information about surviving in the worst of all possible worlds that triggers this mother-passion to harm her offspring.  It is no different an instinctual reaction as one pursued by animals when they kill offspring, abandon entire litters, or choose the most ‘fit’ of the offspring to save while abandoning the others.

This is, I believe, the human basis of the killing Medea did of her children and the attempted killing my mother did to me.

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Now back to the earthquake writings:  My proof is contained therein.  If you read her writings at My Mother’s Alaskan Earthquake Journal Entry you will find in her story the following — (Words written in the brackets are mine as is the type bolding.  Eklunds were neighboring homesteaders on the valley floor whose house my sisters, younger brother and I had been staying at while my parents were in Anchorage during the earthquake):

“Finally Eklund’s house was in sight – from outward appearances all seemed fine.  She came running out as we approached.  I could see our children were fine.  I was so thankful!  I hugged and killed [meant kissed no doubt but she wrote killed], each child in turn.  We were all together again.  I can’t emphasize strongly enough – that this was all that was important.  We could always start over again – even though for us, who like so many Alaskans have struggled so long and hard for everything and still have so far to go.  We could and would, if necessary, do it again.  I’m sure there was absolutely no questioning our minds to that.”

BINGO!

Even if we call this a ” Freudian slip, or parapraxis,  an error in speech, memory, or physical action that is believed to be caused by the unconscious mind,” the unmistakable evidence is here in her writings that what I suspect of her mental reality was real.

When I am ready to dig through boxes again, and ready to set up my scanner and do this, I will scan in the actual words as she wrote them with her own hand.  I transcribed them into my computer exactly.  There is no way, once a person sees her writing, that the two middle letters in ‘killed’ could possibly be construed as being the two middle letters in ‘kissed’.

Finding this hole through which I could see her reality may well be the only tangible vindication I can ever discover that proves my mother was who she did not say she was, particularly as she terrorized me from the moment of my birth as a result of her psychosis.

The only other related confirmations that I have found in her writings appears in the last of her childhood stories (mentioned above) and in her writing of the dream about the dark rainbow and the storm which can be seen at

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/about-stop-the-stor/

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Drawing the line between the real world and the reality of the world of a borderline becomes nearly impossible particularly for those of us who were abused by one from birth.   Not only the trauma is built into the body-brain, but as a result, the version of the borderline mother’s reality is built into the survivor, as well.  I know my mother’s is built into me.

These three ‘holes’ that appear in my mother’s writings are thus critically important for me to both possess and to consider as I attempt to face the reality of what happened to me on all the levels that my mother damaged me.  I’m not sure that anybody who was not severely abused by a borderline parent can even begin to imagine how important these tangible expressions that illustrate clearly the break in the nearly perfect facade a borderline shows to the public world is — or imagine the terrible confusion such a parent creates in the minds of those she abuses.

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My mother never knew that she meant to write that word KILL, yet there it was where I was able to find it.  What a gift this discovery is to me, and perhaps to someone else who reads this post.  That word is a direct connection to the ancient genetic potential for survival in a traumatic world that mothers who have been abused themselves CAN form even in this very real current day world.  Because the evolutionary throw-back potential can exist in a brain that was traumatized during its development, it is folly for us to remain puzzled on any level when we hear of a mother abusing her children, not even her infants.

We can no longer afford to be puzzled when mothers actually kill their offspring, either.  All the evidence that trauma can turn a mother into a killer is in the 2500 year old play about Medea which I am sure only reflects a reality that has been with our species from the time of our beginnings.  It was present in my mother’s writings and in her abuse of me.

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I also want to note here that the infliction of self harm and self injury that is common to borderlines did not have to be a part of my mother’s spectrum of behaviors because she made no distinction between herself and me.  I was a projection of all that she had been taught to abhor within herself.  I was thus an externalized aspect of her mind — a mind that was, in effect, turned inside out because the burden of containing her own reality within herself was potentially too much to bear.  She could then heap all kinds of punishments and injuries on me and did not have to self-harm her own body.

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As always, thank you for reading — Your comments are welcome and appreciated.  Linda

EARLY TRAUMA BUILDS DISSOCIATION INTO THE BRAIN

alchemynow9 Comments

Sometimes thinking with a dissociated mind is like trying to carry too many groceries in your hands at one time.  It takes an incredible amount of focus and concentration to be able to process information that to others would seem obviously connected and therefore would be easily considered in a fluid, flexible and ‘together’ fashion.

Some of my writing might be difficult for readers to follow because of the disconnected way information presents itself to me in the first place — as well as how it presents itself to me as I try to write coherently.  As I mentioned in previous posts, the inability to tell a coherent life story is directly related to how the early developing brain was fed information back in its beginning.  If that information was disconnected at its source — meaning in the brain-mind of an infant’s early caregiver — that pattern of disconnectedness, I believe, is directly communicated not only TO the infant, but more importantly is built into the infant’s growing brain.

Most of us today are at least vaguely familiar with the concept of downloading and uploading information on computers.  Taken in its most specific and literal meaning, early caregivers are downloading information directly into an infant’s growing brain.  The infant’s brain is forming itself according first to how information is being transmitted to it.  It is only after the ‘how’ aspects are transmitted that an infant’s brain can begin to process the specifics of ‘what’ is being transmitted.

Information that is not appropriate in the context of the caregiver-infant interaction and is inconsistently transmitted to an infant will be overwhelming.  It is in effect not an dissimilar to the way that wrong information being processed wrongly within a computer will crash it.  It is not unlike what happens to a car’s transmission if you were driving down the highway at 50 miles per hour and suddenly moved the gear shift to reverse.

A ‘rupture’ without possibility of ‘repair’ is created when any effective ongoing pattern is drastically — and I mean traumatically — interrupted.  We don’t usually think of it this way, but what causes these ‘ruptures without possibility of repair’ in a growing infant and young child’s brain is the presentation of the wrong information in the wrong way at the wrong time, and happens because these young one’s have had no opportunity to build a brain with capacity to process this incoming information effectively.

I believe that if maltreatment exists (as I’ve said before) during critical brain developmental stages during infancy and childhood, these ruptures without repair are themselves built right into the circuitry of the resulting brains.  Because their we are talking about interactions that occur in interaction with the environment, every single time such a lack of repair happens, after an overwhelming traumatic experience,  a ‘dissociation spot’ is created within the brain’s operational patterns that will be carried within such an individual for the rest of their lives.  This is one of the actual, physiological ways that trauma is built into a brain-body.

Knowing exactly which environmental triggers will cause these dissociation spots to become obvious in later years is nearly impossible because most of us with severe abuse histories have literally millions and millions of them built into our brains and into our bodies.   Every single time one of these dissociation spots were put there, or created in the first place, a physiological body-based response happened with it.   This is one of the ways that trauma is physiologically built into a brain-body’s memory.  It is literally formed into the actual cells themselves and affects the way that ongoing genetic processes operate.

If the trauma happens early enough and is severe enough, we DO end up with different brains and bodies as a result, as I mentioned in my previous post.  We are sensitive to stimuli differently and process information differently.  The vital and necessary ability to appraise and sequence information into usable segments that can then later be used in connection to new information is interfered with.

We are different because we are left with a broken string of pearls and a string that cannot be added onto in a normal useful fashion.  We are thus left with an incoherent life story based on a disorganized-disoriented, incoherent brain formed by the same kind of disordered attachment from birth.  Only some of us can go a good long way down the road of our life before we are faced with the reality of what this means to us.  We are left with an armload of groceries dropped on the floor, and we cannot pick them up.  Who is there that can or will help us?

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I believe that life operates through a pattern of circles and cycles.  Because of this, one can follow any given thought around until it connects to the opposite of itself.  I now wish to make the contrasting point to the one I presented in my May 1, 2009 post, “DOES THE GOOD MAKE THE BAD BETTER?” by asking a related question, “How does the bad help us to make our lives better?”

I do not see that there is ever a straight, obvious, easy road that connects the ‘bad’ of our lives to the ‘good’ of our lives.  I want to present you with an example of what I am saying.  From the earliest times of my life I evidently succeeded relatively well at finding ways to continue on living in spite of not only the abuse I experienced but also in spite of the ways I found to work with what happened to me.  Because the traumas were built into my body and my brain on an ongoing basis, I NEVER noticed the adaptations that my brain made to the traumas.

This is a critical point.  I ‘continued on being’ as Dr. Allan Schore says of abused infants.  I survived, and I have done so through a continuing process that was unrecognized and unknown to me.  Things would have remained the same IF I had not had cancer, or more accurately, if the cancer had never been treated and I had not survived it.  Because I had treatment, particularly chemotherapy, and because I came out the other end to be who I am today, I can now look back through the windows of that process and say that I have learned something I never could have possibly known otherwise.

To put it most simply, I have learned how I adapted to the traumas because those adaptations have mostly been taken away from me.

There are some things, even those as seemingly insignificant as the one I presented in my April 21, 2009 post “EARTH DAY: In Honor of the Grieving Chicken, ” that one might never be able to imagine or believe unless they are actually experienced.  If not for my cancer and its treatment I could never have imagined the adaptative abilities I had actually created in order to survive my abuse that made me believe I had done so ‘normally’.

I now know that my definition of ‘normally’ has to be expanded.  My adaptions were normal considering what I experienced, but they were not ‘normal’ in comparison to how other people, whose brains were not formed in, by and for trauma, operate.

I evidently was able to teach myself from birth in some amazing ongoing way how to think and act with a brain that had formed a mind that has millions and millions of dissociation spots built into it.  The chemotherapy regime that I underwent disturbed my brain as it interrupted both my memory and how my brain operates in relationship to memory.

I have know of no scientific support for what I know from inside of myself, but I believe what has happened to me post-chemotherapy happened because the part of the brain that processes incoming experience before it is organized for long term memory storage — the hippocampus — the only part of the brain other than the one that processes new smells that continues to build new nerve cells, called neurons — was directly affected by the working aspect of chemotherapy that stops all new cell formation.  That’s the same process that made all my hair fall out and made my fingernails stop growing and stopped the ability of the cancer cells to multiply.

Because the chemo stopped the rapid cells from growing in my hippocampus, I could no longer remember the steps I normally take to put on my makeup in the morning.  My friend, who also underwent the same chemo treatment, forgot to put her blouse on until she noticed it after she was already in her car to go to work.

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It would take a very caring and astute group of people to realize that an extremely dangerous side affect of chemotherapy — for those of us who formed brains containing dissociation spots from early abuse during brain formation stages — is a deterioration of the brain’s ability to utilize the adaptive processes that it found and learned in order to live relatively well in spite of the affects of the trauma on its development.

The wordless image that came to me in relation to this damage is that of a huge steel post being driven into the gears that run the Big Ben clock in the London Tower.

http://www.parliament.uk/about/history/big_ben.cfm

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While someone could remove the post and repair the clock, the rupture that happened to my ongoing memory processes about how to live an ongoing life in spite of the serious affects that trauma had on my developing brain cannot be repaired.  Yes, this sucks!

Yet as a consequence I now know intimately that I DID manage to create incredible patterns to cope with the dissociation of trauma in my brain.  I know it now because I can no longer DO IT!  I forgot what I learned, what I evidently taught myself from birth, how to do.

So is it a good thing I had cancer and chemotherapy so that I can now understand all of this?  Can what I learned as a result be of some valuable use to someone else?  I can only hope that it can, because I now understand how crippling massive dissociation is to any ongoing ability to manage one’s being in the world.

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There is another critical piece of information I now know about the link between having undergone severely stressful life events and the development of breast cancer.  This research is connected to the ongoing problem of women in Israel developing breast cancer at very high rates.

http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSCOL86917620080828?feedType=RSS&feedName=healthNews

http://www.christiantoday.com/article/stress.may.mean.greater.risk.of.breast.cancer.study.suggests/21418.htm

I have been blessed with excellent physical health and stamina all of my life.  I justified the fact that I didn’t need to get a mammogram because I did not fit any of the risk factor categories that I knew of.  Had anyone ever told me that the stress of severe child abuse increases one’s risk of getting cancer, THAT fact I would have heard and understood.  I understand now that early abuse alters the way the immune system develops as well as alters brain development.

In addition, I now understand that anyone who suffered extreme abuse from birth is at an even higher risk of damage to any ongoing well-being they may have carved out of life for themselves because they no doubt have complicating brain factors due to their brains having adjusted to dissociation.  They are at risk because any chemotherapy that stops rapid cell division will affect their hippocampus.  They are at risk of forgetting everything they ever learned and remembered about how to keep themselves out from under the devastating effects that underlying dissociation  would cause them in their ongoing life processes.

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Now it takes very little demand for information processing to “make me drop all the groceries,” and I am now on full disability because of it.  Imagine running first in an important race.  Suddenly you trip and fall, breaking both your legs.  You are hauled by ambulance to the hospital where the legs are set and put in casts.  Your leg bones take time to heal.  It takes time after this repair for you to get full use of them back again.  How likely are you going to be to get back to that same spot on the race track to resume the race and still even be in the running?

None.  So I can now say that the me that existed prior to chemotherapy is dead.  I cannot go back and get her, either.  I had evidently gone through a continuous process throughout my lifetime to adjust to living with the dissociation that trauma had created in my brain.  I can no longer remember how I did it.

I know that I am not alone.  I am among those on life’s battlefield who have been shot and wounded with thousands of bullets of trauma.  Yet we get up again and again and again and struggle forward toward the end of our lives.  Do we ever need to question why we suffer?

I had laid out the equivalent of a fragile and vulnerable bread crumb trail in the children’s story of Hansel and Gretel that had allowed me to move from my first breath forward in some kind of ‘associated’ way.  By the time I was done with that chemo, that bread crumb trail had vanished and it cannot be replaced.  Until chemotherapy I had never known that trail existed in the first place.  I know it now because it is gone.

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Thank you for reading.  Your comments are welcome and appreciated.

 

PROFOUND PHYSIOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES OF EXTREME EARLY ABUSE

alchemynowLeave a comment

I stop and look inside of myself as I begin to write this post.  Do I want to write about the present?  Do I want to write about the past?  Chasing fireflies in the darkness, so beautiful, becoming rare.  I miss them.  They do not live in the desert.

Which words might want to appear here?  What story?

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I know that I mentioned this once before in an earlier post, that the inability to tell a coherent life story is one of the key and central indicators that a person has an insecure attachment from early childhood.  I think we are often tempted to focus on what we know of our adult relationships.  Task masters that we are, we count them like keeping score.  Which ones were ‘good’?  Which ones failed?  Were we hurt?  Are we bitter?  Could we have ‘done better’?

But what do we really know about those early relationships, the ones that set the stage and formed the patterns that lie in the very fiber of our brain and body?  Those, the implicit memories, that guide us obliquely?

Now there’s a word I didn’t expect to pop out of my keyboard when I started writing this post.

………………………………..

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1B3RNFA_enUS270US307&defl=en&q=define:oblique&ei=UtT7Se3dC56utAOH-MDzAQ&sa=X&oi=glossary_definition&ct=title

from – Definitions of oblique on the Web:

  • any grammatical case other than the nominative
  • slanting or inclined in direction or course or position–neither parallel nor perpendicular nor right-angled; “the oblique rays of the winter sun …
  • external oblique muscle: a diagonally arranged abdominal muscle on either side of the torso
  • devious: indirect in departing from the accepted or proper way; misleading; “used devious means to achieve success”; “gave oblique answers to direct questions”; “oblique political maneuvers”
    wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webw

…………………………….

“slanting or inclined in direction or course or position–neither parallel nor perpendicular nor right-angled”

All our experiences, even those that we participate in before we are born, even all those that happen to us before we can hold our head up, roll over or sit by ourselves, dig their way into our growing bodies and form us.  If they were formed by experiences that were hazardous to our well-being, these never-to-be-consciously accessed memories can lie there in wait like predators that later steal our lives away from us without us even knowing it.

They ‘slant’ our lives and incline us ‘in direction or course or position’ so that we end up out of kilter and off on a life direction that can often be far different from the one that COULD have been ours if those very early experiences (certainly up to age 2) had been harmonious and balanced.  There are consequences if we survived, and our entire life course ends up ‘neither parallel nor perpendicular nor right-angled’.

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Does that make us, the survivors of severe abuse as infants and young children the ‘oblique people?’  When I pay attention, more so now than ever before in my life I would have to say, “Yes, that is very probably so.”  I say this at 57 because the trajectory I was sent out upon from the time of my birth has now landed me at this age in a place that I would never have been any more able to anticipate than I was able to anticipate the word ‘oblique’ appearing on this page.

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An image has appeared in my mind, of myself being hungry for a fresh peach.  In this image I know they are in season, but I have no peach tree.  No one in my town has a peach tree either, so if I want a peach badly enough I will have to go to the market to buy one.

How do I know where the market is if I’ve never been there?  Do I simply head off in any old random direction, suggesting to myself that if I travel far enough I will eventually find the market and buy my peach?  Probably not.  I will probably find someone who knows and ask them for directions.  They would probably guide me to a well used road and suggest that I follow it to my ultimate destination — in this case, the peach store.

Troubled brains grow in troubled infancies.  My analogy might be trivial but my point is far from trite.  If chaos reigned in our early lives while our brains were finishing their human growth and development stages, our adult brains are not likely to be able to effectively participate in reasoned life planning.   “What goes in comes out.”  We end up being the ones that would have a hard time finding a peach store even if we lived in one.

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We can easily see here how troubled families create troubled offspring ad infinitum, and on down the generations the troubledness goes.  I will introduce the information here that our higher thought processes are centered in our cortex which is not completely developed until the age to 25 – 30.  Brain development continues through our life span, but no matter what, it is the development of the brain during those first 2 years that ALWAYS matter the most, followed in importance by the mental maturation that builds upon this early development through the age of 6 or 7.

By the age of 7 we have ‘decided’ how we fit into the world around us, and our resulting Theory of Mind that we have created will both lead us and follow us for the rest of our lives.  All sorts of changes in the brain happen if those first few years are toxic and harmful.  Our brains adjust to this life in a malevolent world, and all our higher level thinking processes will be affected as will our ‘under cover’ operations that unconsciously control our ability to bond to other people, affect what motivates us toward reward, what we avoid, what we are afraid of, what confuses and confounds us.

These altered brains formed through early abuse, I believe, are not designed to participate in a long term future.  Our bodies knew if the world was already this terribly bad from the start, it was not likely to change and we cannot truly hope — on a biological or physiological basis — for things to get better.  There is no time for wishful thinking in a malevolent world.  Survival is not the name of the game, it is the ONLY game in town.

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In some ways this programmed troubled pathway to survival in a terrible world is incredibly efficient.  All possible short cuts are designed within the body and the brain to insure that in every future situation the fastest response based on survival learning will be the one chosen by the survivor.  On the other hand, because most of us do not move into an adulthood that could ever match the horrors we went through as we developed our brains in the first place, we simply DO NOT MATCH.  We are a very bad fit with the rest of the world ‘out there’.  (And then we wonder why ALL our relationships are troubled, even the one we try to have with our self?)

This ‘out there’ world did not exist for us as we were harmed, abused, neglected, maltreated in the first place, so we could not build bodies designed to live in this better ‘out there’ world.  We were not loved and we were not protected.  We have no innate idea what safety and security mean — and for some of us, we never will  — because our brains and bodies will not let us.

Although our altered brains and bodies (along with their implicit memories) allowed us to survive our horrors, they do not participate well in a benevolent world.  And herein lies a whole new, MAJOR set of troubles.

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To follow my peach craving image, my brain is unable to find its way to the store, no matter how helpful others might be in giving their directions, and no matter how hungry I am for a peach.  What if someone offered to put me in their car so they drive me to the store?  OK.  Maybe that might work — or probably, that is the ONLY alternative that would work.  But as adults we are mostly on our own.  Nobody is going to drive us through life in their car.

People who had adequate experiences with early caregivers during their brain formation stages do not understand how or why the rest of us, who did not have these benevolent experiences, get so lost in our lives.  We don’t understand it, either.  We often end up feeling as if there is something terribly wrong with us.

No, on the most practical level, there is nothing ‘wrong’ with us.  Just something very, very different.

How could we NOT be different, considering how we started out in this life?  The miracle to me is that our human genetic material and all the operations that tell our genes what to do have such a vast array of possible choices that can be made so that a human can continue to survive in a world that does little except threaten immediate extinction — to the body and to the ‘soul’ of the suffering one.

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Everything about how our brain develops takes place flexibly in a situational context.  We are influenced by what goes on both on our insides and outside of ourselves.  This is the same adjustable, flexible, adaptive process that led our species down four and a half million years of evolution.  There is nowhere on the timeline that it stops.  I am a result of this process.  You are a result of this process.  And, again, “What goes in comes out.”  We can’t have it any other way.  This is the process of survival as a species and as individuals.

Eventually I hope to finish the work of translating into the simplest terms possible some of the information available to us from development neuroscience that shows what I would easily say is 20 different changes a body-brain will make as a result of developing in an environment of severe deprivation and trauma.  The one I want to mention now is in relationship to future planning abilities, and only enough to say that the early traumatized brain is not physiologically designed for one of our species’ highest aims — to be able to access what is called ‘future memory.’  (Yes, we have a ‘memory dis-ability.)

The brain and body are designed, through development under certain conditions (malevolent or benevolent), to continually process information through both feed forward and feed backward loops.  As we prepared ourselves — biologically — through terrible childhoods to survive in a world in the future, our brains made adaptations that benevolent brains NEVER have to make.  Nor can they later make the same kinds of adjustments that our brains and bodies had to make from our start.

We were assured of being at the cutting edge if the world we moved into as  adults matched the terror and trauma of the worlds that formed us.  We are designed and built to be survival machines.  Our cortex forms differently (along with all kinds of other changes), and if abuse is bad enough, actually atrophies long before the usual and optimal timeline for completion of development for the cortex is reached.

As a result, one of the most important luxuries of the benevolently formed brain is stolen from us for the rest of our lives:  We cannot participate in the feed forward loop that leads to future memory — future thought and planning.  Our brains do not believe the future exists, and if it does, well……  nobody would want to live in the kind of future our brains know from past experience.

Human brains are the most complex forms in our universe, but they are not magical.  Even though research shows that our brains are actually formed — under optimal conditions — to process infinity, if our brains were told through early experiences that the world was certain to cause our destruction at any moment, they adjust themselves as efficiently as possible in preparation for this event.   All possible roads to survival needed to be maximized and available.  There is no future in a doomsday world.  Our infanthoods and early childhoods without hope insured that we knew this then and that we would know it for the rest of our lives.

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Early abuse survivors cannot take the obvious road to a better future.  That road was never built into our brains at our beginning.  While human brains seem to have the ability to process infinity, we have to understand that HOW they do this is different for people who suffered extreme hardship, trauma and deprivation while their brains were forming.

We cannot afford to ignore this fact.  We have to begin to understand on a profound level how different a malevolently formed brain is from a benevolently formed brain.  While a peach and an orange are both fruits, they differ from one another in substantial ways, just as the brains I am attempting to describe do.

I think we live in a culture that is so used to thinking in terms of mass production.  We believe it is somehow wrong to focus on how people are different rather focusing on how we are the same.  We find ourselves in a both/and culture that contains a paradox.  We value individuality while insisting that everyone has the same opportunities and is equal.  Where in our thinking do we have room for consequences and cause and effect?

Just because an abused infant survives to its toddlerhood, and then makes it to its teen years and beyond, does not mean that it has within itself a whole person that somehow miraculously survived to be the same person it would have become if the abuse had never happened.  I am not talking about HEALING here.  I am talking about very real changes that happened during the development of that person physiologically — on the genetic level, the level of the brain, nervous system and immune system.  That means that we do not even end up in the same body when we are adults as a result of having survived extreme early abuse that we would have had if our circumstances had been good ones.

This means that we live in different bodies and we live in a different world — because our perception and the way we process information is different.  We were built differently almost as if we came from a different planet.  For those of you — and I don’t say this with humor — that have felt yourself to be an alien on this planet — I say take a long honest look at the conditions surrounding your early development.  If they were harsh, you are an alien.  Being a survivor makes us a different KIND of person in a different kind of body with a different kind of brain.

We are the ones that will never easily find our way down the wide common road to any peach market.  Ours is a relentless struggle, often complicated by benevolent-world ideas about how we SHOULD be better at getting along in life.  It is time for those of us who KNOW a different world to begin speaking our truth.

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A very clear expose of these kinds of scenarios I am describing  is presented by Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz in their book,

The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook–What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=boy+raised+dog&x=0&y=0

I highly recommend this book as a thought expanding opportunity to discover what Dr. Perry knows about this topic of alterations in development for maltreated children.

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Thank you very much for reading this post — your comments are welcome and appreciated.  Linda

DOES THE GOOD MAKE THE BAD BETTER?

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On the whole, one could never have said that our family valued being lazy.  I don’t remember exactly what time we woke up in the summer when we had no reason to leave the homestead, no place particular to go.  But neither do I remember that we ever ‘slept in.’

But getting up in time to see a sunrise during on any Alaskan July day was nearly impossible.  It seemed like a sunset would happen with a sunrise following so close behind it that nobody ever actually saw one happen.  But because of this particular experience that happened  the summer before I turned 17, when my mother devised one of her more bizarre  punishments of me, I was able to see one of the most gorgeous sunrises of my life.

I don’t remember what instigated this event.  I have no idea what I had ‘done wrong’.  Maybe I had forgotten to remove all the clothespins from the clothes line.  Maybe I had forgotten to wipe the stove top clean after I had done the dishes.  Maybe I had ‘wiggled my bottom’ when I walked across the room.  Maybe I had slipped and used the word “she’ where my mother could hear me.

It never mattered.  Most of the time I had no idea why my mother was mad at me.  But on this particular night she decided that I wasn’t ‘fit’ to sleep under the same roof as the rest of the family so I was therefore banished to spend the night in the family’s station wagon.  But not just anywhere in the car.  I was told to sit in the driver’s seat with my head bent down under the steering wheel.

I was skinny at 16, but my full height of five foot eight and a half inches, so bending down that far down in that position was not comfortable by any means.  I suspect that my mother kept my father up all night yelling at him because I know she didn’t sleep.  About every half hour she returned to the car to check on me to make sure I was still in my assigned position.  Which, of course, to avoid any further wrath from her, I still was.

One must realize that we lived miles from the nearest neighbor (and had no electricity until we purchased a generator that we ran sometimes and no running water).  We were ‘out there’ and ‘up there’ on the side of a mountain at the end of the road.  Nobody ever saw us.  Nobody cared that we were there — certainly nobody cared what happened to me.

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But on this night I summoned all the rebellion I was capable of and in between the times my mother came out to check on me and the time she returned to the house, I sat up!  How daring was that!  I didn’t get out of the car,  but I was able to watch the sun move over the mountain tops when the sun came up far behind the homestead’s mountain.  I had never seen anything so beautiful.  All shades of pink, peach, rose and red lit up the high floating clouds and then brushed gradually over the mountain as the sun rose.

Sunrises had never been a part of my summer life until this punishment.  I always could time it so that I guessed accurately about what time my mother would pop out of the house and stomp over to the car, could time when her fist would pound on the car’s window and her twisted rage filled face would scream at me.  And then she would be gone again and I would sit up to be a part, again, of a wondrous process that held me in awe.

This was not a punishment that my siblings were meant to see, so before they awakened my mother came out, released me from my night’s prison and told me to go in and cook the family breakfast.  That’s where I was when the others arose and they never knew where I had been while they had been soundly sleeping.

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What a contrast I experienced between the times of my mother’s appearance and her screaming tirades and the sweet stillness of the mountain as it slept through that short night.  How could I have survived, relatively intact, the thousands of my mother’s ingenious punishments if I didn’t have that mountain place to feed and sustain me?

I know now that a severely abused child who has no choice but to survive has to have altered and different ways to receive information and to process experiences.  When I think back on this experience on some level it makes me literally sick to my stomach — especially knowing my father was in the house and fully aware of what was taking place and did not intervene.

But the punishment also carries within two jewels.  One is that I dared to defy my mother by sitting up.  The other is that I had implanted in my being a memory that is by itself precious to me — that of being a witness to and a part of an Alaskan summer sunrise as it came over the mountains surrounding me.  I could not stop her punishment of me, but I did make use of what options were available to me.  I chose to fix beauty and goodness around this abusive incident and I hold the two together inside of me so that one cannot be separated from the other.

And yet this experience is still one that is dissociated from my ongoing life process because there is no way that I could make it ‘fit’ back then when it happened and no way I can make it ‘fit’ now.  The only pieces that seem to matter to me are the good parts which I willed myself to keep closer than the experience of the abuse itself.  Yes, the experience was traumatic.  No, I have never forgotten it, though I do not remember many thousands of other abusive experiences.  But I decided even back then that I was going to add my own beauty to the abuse — and that part is MINE.

I need to make it clear here that I do not write about sexual abuse.  To my knowledge, that form abuse was not a part of my childhood.  I am also NOT saying that anything about the abuse itself was positive.  What I am saying is that I find value in being able to own those qualities in me that allowed me to endure all the abusive events and still come out to be a lovely person.  I do not have the mental illness that my mother had, and I can never be grateful enough for that fact.  ‘Normal’ people never have to think in these terms, but I have to.

One could think that a body (mine) could never have endured even the physical aspects of being beaten from the time I was tiny.  Certainly it is critical to understand how a child endures the verbal, psychological and emotional abuse, as well.  We did survive because there is something inside of us that allowed that to happen.  What THAT was is for me to discover, hold onto and use every day, today included.

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At this point, I would not encourage anyone to go ‘back there’ and hunt around for awful childhood abuse memories.  Most of us have more than our share to face and deal with on a daily basis as it is.  But I will always ask that others think about how the goodness surrounded the abuse in some way or we would never have survived it at all in the first place.  There is something good in each survivor, something precious and I say, holy, that we brought with us through the abuse because it is a part of who we are and nobody could or can take that away from us.

After all, I am the one that remembers what it feels like to be included in the rising sun’s caress of an Alaskan mountainside on the morning of a long summer’s day– not my mother nor my father nor my siblings.  I am the one that still feels that sun’s kiss, and I always will.

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Thank you for reading.  Your comments are welcome and appreciated.  Linda