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Has there ever been a time since the moment I was born when I wasn’t lost?  I don’t think so.  (Maybe I didn’t even find my way to my right mother!)

I just found a piece of paper lying face down on the floor by my computer chair.  I was looking for something to write a telephone number down on so I could order some yarn so I can warp my loom.  I tore the bottom off of this paper and used it.  This is what was on the top half:

January 14, 1988

The years go by.

I want a dream

a vision

something I can live by

Art Therapy

living in Albuquerque

Yet if I’m empty inside — then what?

It’s so easy to forget what I’m doing and why.

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This must have fallen out of something in my pile of journals.  The cats love to tumble around and must have knocked it loose.  I feel disheartened reading this, realizing this was written just after I made the decision to apply for art therapy graduate school.

Whenever I have stopped to think back at that stage of my life, I have always ‘remembered’ that I knew what I was doing then, or certainly that I didn’t know what I know now about how lost I’ve been all of my life.  I didn’t know I felt lost — even then — even after making such a big decision for my life and my future.  Or so I thought….

This paper shows otherwise.  It makes me MAD and SAD to see this lostness I still feel now WAS with me back then — yet why would I think it would not have been?  Has any decision I’ve ever made in my life ever moved me off of my dead center spot of being lost?

What have I been thinking these past 21 years?  That I have only been lost some of the time?  That I have ever had a reprieve?  True, I had hope then that led me to move with my children from northern Minnesota to New Mexico by fall 1988 and complete graduate school (1990) to become a nationally registered art therapist.  But what good did that effort do me?

I guess I better scoot back from my keyboard.  My tears might short circuit it.  Then where would I be?  It surprises me how quickly the tears came once I began to write this.  It’s a good thing I have a soon-to-be delicious organic chocolate cake (mix from our local food co-op) baking itself in my oven; I hear the egg timer ticking.

Tick, tick, tick.  There go the years of my life.  I would not be this lost if I had not had my mother for a mother.  I wouldn’t even be this lost if she had at least let me PLAY — at all — in my childhood.  What a strange realization.  What a true one.

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I was going to make the following easier to read, but just don’t have it in me right now.  There’s a lot of information here — even just for scan reading.  I know it is about my dissociated mother, who was a professional at making me her dissociated daughter!  It’s about everyone’s mother who was borderline or otherwise dissociated, including depressed.

Maternal dissociation is directly connected to a mother’s inability to play with her infant, a critical participatory activity between mother and infant that builds the right limbic emotional social brain and conditions the infant’s nervous system.

My mother was so sick that her inability to be playful with me she ended up so abusing me that she interrupted my play-brain-growth by preventing my play and by distorting my attempts to be a child throughout my entire childhood.

When a mother dissociates (especially in rage) while in interaction with her young infant the infant’s developing brain-mind essentially ‘falls through its own cracks’.  Dissociation is, I firmly believe, directly communicated from the mother’s brain and nervous system to the infant as it grows and develops its own brain and nervous system.  The long term consequence of this harmful degree of dissociation is being lost in one’s own life.

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You will need to know this before you take a look at the link below:

Dissociation in mothers affects how the nervous system in her infant develops.

The ANS, or autonomic nervous system has two branches, or arms.

One arm is the sympathetic branch, or the GO part of our ANS.

The other arm is the parasympathetic branch, or the STOP part of our ANS.  I remember which is which by thinking ‘pair a brakes’ for ‘para’ — STOP.

Dissociation in the mother is communicated to the infant and destabilizes the ‘ordinary’ development of the infant’s ANS.  The information below relates to maternal dissociation:

+SCHORE ON BRAIN AND NERVOUS SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT