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I tell myself to put my fingers on this keyboard and make them move.  “Speech is silver.  Silence is golden.”  I choose to go for the silver.  I was forced for the first 18 years of my life to be as silent as a child can be.  Silence will not heal me.

Writing is all tangled up today with what I choose to write about.  Having a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment MEANS that having access to one single, integrated, cohesive, coherent Linda is extremely difficult.  I will not admit defeat and say it is impossible.  I am coming to understand, and believe, that using my words – putting them together in lines across the page – will help me become more organized, oriented, integrated, cohesive and coherent.  So here goes…..

I am thinking a jumble of thoughts, all tied into very old and continual thoughts about myself in my body in my life since my beginning.  I was not allowed to be a person.  My mother interfered with my normal, ordinary development every single step of my development.  I have paid a price for her terrible abuse of me.  The biggest one is that I didn’t so much as LOSE my self, I didn’t get one in the first place.

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So I have to imagine what it would be like to have one of those illusive organized, oriented, integrated, cohesive and coherent selves.  How do all these aspects of such a strong, clear, healthy self operate in time and space, which is what I guess being in a body in a life, in the world is all about?

Today, I want to know the difference between having goals, destination and purpose and having hopes, dreams and wishes.

I want to know because it seems to be I wouldn’t have to question these things the way I do now if I HAD any real idea what they mean.

My mother interfered with my development regarding everything, so why wouldn’t I expect that having a clear sense of goals, destination, purpose, hopes, dreams and wishes would be a part of what I am missing?

She never hesitated to control and abuse me in any way that she could.  Her abuse included confining me in space and time beginning when I was very, very small.  She withheld food, prevented me from even going to the bathroom when I got older.  She woke me from sound sleep to beat me, or didn’t let me sleep.  When I got older she forced me to overeat.  I could go on and on, but this isn’t what I want to say right now.  Not being free to be a growing child, not being safe or allowed to play greatly harmed my development in every single way.

What I want to say is that great sense of loss and grief I feel is tied as much to my loss of access to my inner needs, wants, desires, ability to have intentions, and the ability to find ways to know what brought me happiness as a person and what gave me pleasure.  I didn’t grow up knowing much of anything except how to survive my mother’s torture and abuse.

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This thinking is tied to what I believe about people like me with disorganized-disorganized insecure attachment.  I believe I organized and oriented myself around being a mother for the 35 years I had children under 18 in my care.  Today it seems that I used the goal of caring for them as well as I could, the destination I saw for them in the future as leaving home well and happy people, my purpose in life of being their mother, to organize and orient my self in the world.  My hopes, dreams and wishes were tied up in that whole process.

Having them grow up and leave was wonderful.  Yet I was left again being the disorganized-disoriented insecurely attached-to-my-own-self and the world just as I had always been for the first 18 years of my life.

Without the strange and complicated relationship I formed after they left again leaves me feeling inwardly desperate, destitute, lost and confused – again disorganized and disoriented.

I was able to obtain the goals for my education, but the process was extremely confused, and in the end I am still lost.  I can ‘make things’ with my hands, but even being able to use the ‘goal-destination-purpose’ and ‘hopes-dreams-wishes’ thinking only lasts for short periods of time and nothing about me seems connected and tied together.

I want to understand how the brain-mind changes that I have continue to cause me great difficulties in these areas.  Somehow I sense that COMMITMENT has always been a key and central piece of anything I have ever accomplished.  If I say I hope to write, that writing is tied to my dreams and wishes, how do I connect that to my goals, my destination, my purpose?

Because my right brain, left brain, corpus callosum that connects them together, and my higher executive function cortex did not form in an ordinary fashion and instead will suffer from severe trauma influence for the rest of my life, I cannot simply accept that I am going to ‘naturally’ find a solution to my dilemmas.  I have to continue to focus my will toward the goal of better understanding how all these changes – that result in what I am naturally missing – connect to my overall feelings of hopeless sadness in my life.

How does changed me find my self in time and space so that I don’t constantly know that I don’t ‘fit in’, am lost, and want to ‘leave here’?

I don’t know yet, but I wanted to say I am working on these things.  Today.  I continually have to try to learn how to create my self in time and space because this process was completely interrupted for me growing up with such abuse.  I have a trauma bond with myself that makes it hard for me to get through life feeling whole and successful.  There is a rupture between my self and myself and the world I am constantly trying to find ways to repair.

I have to start with the little things, and writing here is one of them.  Now, I will go eat breakfast as I move my self forward in the time and space that is today.

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It strikes me after putting the above words into their order that the most important word in the whole piece is PLAY.  I was not allowed to play, and as many of my childhood memories show, my mother had an uncanny ability to turn whatever childhood play thoughts or actions I had into something painful for me.

Beginning with playful interactions between infants and their early caregivers, and moving all the way through childhood, play is nature’s way of building an organized and oriented self in the world.  I suffered terribly from the lack of play and from interruption of play every step of my development because of my mother’s abuse.

My sister just gave me a simple example of how play interacts with a growing brain-mind-self regarding hopes, desires and wishes on the one hand, and goals, direction toward a destination and purpose on the other.

She took her granddaughters to a fund raiser bake sale today.  The seven year old bought muffins and a specially formed little bundt cake with a hole in its center.  On the way home she ate the muffins but carefully protected and saved the cake.  At the urging of grandma and her 10 year old sister she finally, shyly told them her PLANS for her special cake.

She wanted to take it home, fill the center with pudding, put a candle on it, and have a birthday party with her Barbie dolls.  This, of course, is what she was allowed to go home and immediately accomplish.  Even her sister, who thinks she’s too grown up to play Barbies, came to the party.  Through each step in her process she was building another healthy, happy aspect of her brain-mind-self.  Severely abused children are very often deprived SO MANY or ALL TIMES of this kind of experience — and this kind of loss is big part of what happened to change us.

I see that everything I am thinking about this morning is simply contained in that pattern of child play.  Play is how children learn to be social (after their infant brain forms through early mirroring caregiving).  Play can involve rules, or not.  Child play does allow the brain not only to build its happy-joy center, but also all the other brain patterns and circuits I am beginning to understand as they in-form our lives.

The arenas of damage my mother orchestrated against me were many and devastating, but today it is particularly the damage done to me by her abuse of my play drive and abilities that has harmed me immeasurably in my adulthood.

Today I also realize that the absence of my sadness that being with my boyfriend gave me was directly tied into play.  He was my playmate.  That is a big part of the joy and happiness I felt when I was with him.  I didn’t know this until today.  I have no built-in experience of play-joy from childhood.  I didn’t even recognize my happy feelings with him were directly connected to play.  My playmate doesn’t want to play any more.  Certainly that gives me great sadness.

What can I learn about play at 58?  How can I begin to understand that a lot of the sadness I feel stems from never having play in my childhood?  My siblings played together, and they all remember my part in their play – by my absence from all of it!

That especially the lack of play in my childhood (coupled with the rest of the terrible abuse) directly created my adult brain-mind-self’s great difficulty with the ability to dream, wish, hope or to plan, have a goal, a sense of direction, a destination for myself in my life, or a sense of purpose — in-forms my sense of grief, loss, and feeling lost like I don’t belong ‘here’ — is not a small piece of information.

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