+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
My severely abusive Borderline mother died over seven years ago, but if she hadn’t, today would be her 84th birthday. Given that without all the troubles my mother caused me through her severe child abuse of me for 18 years there would be no Stop the Storm efforts to understand her and what she did to me as well as what the life long consequences are to me from her abuse, I thought it is fitting that I write a post in recognition of her birthday.
I found an interesting section in my mother’s February 18, 1958 letter she wrote to her mother:
“As you know by now the Valentine Party was a success with JV running it all as usual. I had some explaining to do to John. He wanted to know how come ‘she has all the ideas’. I slaved baking and decorating 40 heart shaped sugar cookies with red and white frosting but she made girl and boy faces on hers and had cute idea of decorating plates.
She’s so bossy and I don’t want a run in with her. Everything has to be JV’s way or else. You could tell her off but she’d ‘fix you’ and is respected and well liked (?) or to steer clear of doing things with her (which I’ll do in future) or to glide along with her and keep tongue in check (which I thought wise to do being new here).
I explained to John [my note: 2nd grade, age 7 – no doubt he received one of my mother’s infamous lectures] and I think he understood – we had a long talk about people – good and bad – etc. Just hope he doesn’t carry story to the kids that I called her “bossy,” He better not but she sure is!
As I said she’s just like Bill’s sister [my note: my father’s sister whom my mother hated and frequently accused me of being like] but I see little of her and I’m not a close neighbor. I bet she bosses the farm, her husband and the help. I think underneath it all she has an inferiority complex which appears the opposite. Right? I’ll tell you more next summer.
I do like her though – a little goes a long ways. Every community needs her type though. She’s to be again in play put on by P.T.A., is treasurer of P.T.A. etc. etc.
She’s full of ideas, enthusiasm and means well though. Is now starting sewing course Mon. nites at College. She’s busy as a bee on farm, does all book-keeping, deliveries etc. + all the others SO I won’t see much of her!!”
See *February 1958 – Mother’s Letters
++++
This is just one snippet from my mother’s letters in which she discusses her ambivalent feelings about this woman, JV, who remained a friend to my mother for nearly 50 years. JV is the woman who found my mother dying in her shabby motel room and got her to the hospital where my mother died in 2002.
My mother did not have the capacity to simply make Valentine sugar cookies and help in my brother’s 2nd grade classroom with his party ‘just because’ she was a mother and loved her son. My mother was robbed of this capacity, I believe through deprivation-traumas in her own early childhood that changed her in her young development into a different sort of person that she could have been if her needs had been met as an infant-child.
I believe someone could have written my mother’s obituary by the time she was five years old because already by that age my mother’s Trauma Altered Development had sent her down an alternative pathway of development that robbed her of her life. Sure, my mother walked around for another 70+ years, but who my mother COULD have been, and SHOULD have been, disappeared very early in her life.
While my mother’s words in her 1958 letter might seem innocuous and ‘ordinary’ upon surface reading, I don’t believe that they are. My mother never had a truly satisfying relationship with a human being in her life. My mother’s insecure attachment disorder was so severe that she NEVER found a way to shut it OFF.
Eighteen years of trauma and abuse I experienced at the hands of my mother from birth could never make me suffer to the point where my complete connection to the world outside of me was severed like hers was. It’s as if my mother got turned inside out by the time she was five years old. Nowhere could she look and not see her own suffering in front of her face, which blocked her from having any meaningful access to or connection with anything outside of herself.
I suspect that my mother’s childhood suffering was so great that it overwhelmed her – and in order to continue living from childhood on she had to make her own suffering invisible to her self. She made awareness of suffering vanish. Once this shift happened, she lost the ability to identify suffering – not only within her self, but within anyone else, either – especially within me.
Suffering. I believe my mother suffered her entire life, though her entire body-nervous system-brain-mind operated continually in desperate ways to make her experience of suffering vanish. If something so innocent and simple, so sweet and caring as making cookies for her 2nd grade son’s classroom Valentine party could present such a challenge to her self worth, concept, and well-being, what chance did she have of being an adequate mother at all? To any of her children, let alone me, the chosen one for the target of her severe abuse?
None. None at all. Even though I am not convinced of the validity of ‘mental illness’, ‘mental disorders,’ ‘diagnostic categories’, etc., I also know that it wasn’t until 1984 that the category of ‘Borderline Personality Disorder’ was even recognized and named according to patterns of being in the world for people on a spectrum to which I believe my mother belonged.
I never knew my mother was not a ‘good mother’. I had no frame of reference to think about how she treated me or about what she did to me. Neither did she. Would anything be different in today’s world if I was born to her today and she was the same and did the same things to me?
I do not know. I post this today in memory of her December 21, 1925 birth as I also wonder, would the same things happen to her today that so harmed her as an infant-child? My mother, whose ashes are spread over our Alaskan mountain homestead, cannot ask these questions.
Adult severe insecure attachment disorders (from their infant-childhood) can create severe empathy disorders. I have no doubt whatsoever that if current neuroscientists had been able to watch the operation of my mother’s brain, the patterns they would have found in the way her brain regions, circuits and pathways operated would have shown as clear as day what was WRONG with my mother.
We don’t need a diagnostic category of mental illness to understand someone like my mother. We need realistic and factual information about how what happened to them when they were very young CHANGED THEM IN THEIR EARLY DEVELOPMENT and made them into the dangerous people they turned into.
But on this day 84 years ago my mother was born a beautiful and perfect infant with needs that were not met well enough so that she suffered too much — more than she could bear — until in desperation trauma itself turned her into somebody else.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER – HERE’S INFORMATION FROM:
Borderline Personality Disorder
| In the Spotlight | More Topics | |
| from Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD There is a common misperception that all people with BPD are violent. This is simply not the case. That said, BPD is associated with an elevated risk of violence because there is a subset of people with BPD who act out with physical aggression– this week learn more about the connection between BPD and violent behavior.
|
|
| In the Spotlight | |
|
||||||||||
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
— NEW: CLICK ON POST, PAGE AND/OR COMMENT TITLE
AND LOOK FOR ‘YOU RATE IT’ STARS AT BOTTOM OF PAGE —
Please feel free to comment directly at the end of this post or on
+++++++
Your Page – Readers’ Responses
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Stop the Storm 
great stuff – I’d like to link you to my site.
best
gekko
Certainly! And thank you!