++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I received this valuable comment about my blog writing through a ‘personal channel’ yesterday:

“YOUR WRITING IS SO INTELLECTUAL THAT I AM ALMOST OVERWHELMED.  YOU DON’T CONVERSE THAT WAY, I HOPE!”

There have been times in my life when such a comment would have stopped me dead in my tracks and I would not write another single word.

++++

Some time back I wrote a piece where I described the one thing from all the codependency jargon that makes sense to me.  When we find ourselves feeling like we have to explain and/or defend ourselves we are in a codependent stance.

So here I am today considering taking a dose of my own medicine.  What is happening inside of me that makes me feel defensive?  How is my writing tied into my own feelings of inadequacy?  Why is important to me that I please others, that I have something of value that is useful that I can offer to others?  It seems obvious that I am comparing and contrasting myself with those outside of myself – that the operation of assessment and judgment is going on within me.

I suspect that what is both my true underlying and the overriding concern is acceptance, which is an attachment issue.  Do I feel safe and secure enough inside myself to trust that what I write about and how I write is exactly fine with me?  Can I be open to feedback and think about it constructively in terms of what I might need to change to accomplish my goals more successfully?

What might it be in my writing that is either corresponding to Grice’s maxims of rational discourse – or not?  I am really not in conversation here because my approximately 70 readers a day are silent ones.  How confident do I feel inside of myself, how competent do I feel about what I write and how?

++++

When communication is taking place that allows for resonance and mirroring between people (and even between people and animals) there are patterns of ‘rupture and repair’ that guide the flow of discourse.  One person sends out signals and watches for how they are accepted or rejected, and pauses for response.  Patterning within the social-emotional brain govern how our verbal interactions take place between people just as they govern how our nonverbal communication does.

Researchers have found that Grice’s maxims include an accurate enough description of appropriate patterns of verbal communication that they lie at the foundation of all adult attachment research.  These maxims mirror safe and secure social-emotional brain operations as they appear in the behavior of verbal speech.

The response I received yesterday is partly about the differences between spoken and the written communication.  It brings to mind this philosophical riddle that raises questions regarding observation and knowledge of reality:  “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”  The answer to this question is technically “No.”

I first encountered this question shortly after I finished Naval boot camp when I was 18 years old, and it fascinated me.  This was true mostly because I spent the better part of my childhood being bonded not to humans, but to the natural world surrounding me when I could escape from my mother and spend time outside on the mountainside of our Alaskan homestead.  My personal answer to this question has always been “Yes.”  I did not grow up with a social brain that put humans at the center of reality.

In the natural world all of existence is in intimate relationship with all of its members.  Everything is included.  Nothing is excluded.  Perhaps it was because I was excluded as a member of my family that being in the natural world meant so much to me.  I was included in that world and there was nothing my mother could do to change either that fact or my experience of it.

I met both of the requirements for complete acceptance and inclusion in the natural world:  (1) I was alive, and (2) I was there.  I didn’t need words.  I didn’t even need thoughts.  I simply needed to be in a body, to BE a body present WITH every possible part of life around me.  With the exception of one time, never were there any people in that natural world with me.

++++

On that one day, the summer after I graduated from high school but had still not reached my August 31^st 18^th birthday, a boy from my brother’s class (a year ahead of me) walked up the mountain to see me.  I had no idea why.  To my knowledge he had never noticed me before.  We had never spoken.  But this boy put forth a lot of effort to find me way up there on the mountain.

He did not arrive by car.  He walked.  How far I don’t know.

When this boy unexpectedly knocked on our door, I greeted him and went outside to visit.  It was a glorious mid-summer Alaskan afternoon.  The sky was that deep blue that I always called ‘postcard blue’.  There was no wind.  It was warm.  Wildflowers bloomed across the hillsides.  Tall emerald green grasses covered the fields.

Only on this day, with this boy, for the first and only time did I feel present in that natural world I loved with another person.  For perhaps two hours we walked the land.  I showed him the beauty that surrounded our home.  There was no physical contact as we sat at the top of the steep ravine that led down to the roaring tumbling creek.  After a time, this boy simply said good-bye and left.

I have never known why he came to see me, and I remain curious.  What I do know is that as soon as he was out of sight around the first bend of our road heading down the mountain, my mother attacked me like she had never done before.  You would have to imagine what it would be like to be attacked by a full grown rabid grizzly bear to begin to understand what that beating was like.  Only my mother included her words.

Up and down the length of our house she dragged, shoved, pushed and hurled me as she pounded my body and face with anything she could grab for hours.  I had seen my mother in her rages against me all of my life, but never had I seen her this angry.  I did not understand any of it.  Not that I had ever understood her attacks, but the power of this one put me into an inner state of shock it took me many years to even partially recover from.

It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I came to understand that her entire violent and vicious rage against me that afternoon had been grounded in sexual fantasies within her mind about what had gone on between myself and that boy as soon as we crossed out of sight through the tall grass over to the edge of the ravine where she could not see us.  For many years one phrase that she had screamed at me hurt me as if I had been slashed head to toe with a razor sharp butcher knife:  “You are no better than a snake in the grass!  You are not fit to be a mother!  I hope God never sees fit to give you children!”

++++

Now if I return to the comment at the top of this post, I would say that if I were actually facing someone in person how I would tell the story about that summer afternoon might be different than how I write it.  It is certainly not a topic that would come up in ordinary conversation.  At present I cannot imagine a time, a situation, a place or a person that I would ever tell the entire story to on the deepest level.  And this would be only one of thousands and thousands of brutally violent and violating ‘encounters’ I had with my mother from the time I was born.

When it comes to Grice’s maxims I know that it is not humanly possible to follow those rules for rational discourse when attempting to talk about, or write about, severe experiences of trauma that happened to me in my childhood.  The rules for discourse require that an order be followed through a definable pattern that makes sense to the two (or more) people that are conversing TOGETHER.

Together means that there is an empathetic resonance happening between the people engaged in conversation.  Take another look at Grice’s maxims:

Maxim of Quantity:

1. Make your contribution to the conversation as informative as necessary.
2. Do not make your contribution to the conversation more informative than necessary.
Maxim of Quality:

1. Do not say what you believe to be false.
2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
Maxim of Relevance:

Be relevant (i.e., say things related to the current topic of the conversation).
Maxim of Manner:

1. Avoid obscurity of expression.
2. Avoid ambiguity.
3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary wordiness).
4. Be orderly.

This is NOT how I can verbalize my childhood.  Not in words, not in conversation and not in my writing.

These maxims apply to considered and considerate conversation.  It would not be considerate of me – toward me or to my readers – to delve into minute, graphic detail about the actual experiences of abuse I suffered from my mother.  To do so would overwhelm all of us – especially me!

Maybe if I only had ten or twenty or fifty or a hundred violent and violating experiences of abuse in my childhood I would have been able by now at 58 to converse ‘rationally’ with myself or with anyone else about the exact nature of those experiences.  Maybe if I had less than a thousand of them I could ‘tell the coherent story’ of my childhood.

As it is, my entire way of being in the world happens because I do not access the overwhelming memories of overwhelming childhood trauma I experienced.  I would be a fool to ever believe that these traumas can be integrated into who I am in the world in any better way than they already are.  Integrated trauma means that something useful has been learned from the experience that can facilitate a better chance of surviving a similar related trauma in the future.  The only thing to learn from the kind of terrible isolation and abuse I suffered during the 18 years my mother could hurt me was that child abuse survival has a high price, and that it SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN AT ALL.

++++

I have upped the ante in what I think about, talk about, and write regarding my personal history of severe infant-child abuse.  Literal detailed disclosure of the specifics on separate incidents is NOT my concern.  Understanding what happened to me as a consequence of what my mother did to me is my concern.  This understanding has to be accomplished consciously, and therefore involves an intellectual process.

My mother’s abuse of me forced my body-brain-mind-self to change and adjust its development so that the actual body-brain-mind-self I am left to live my life with and AS is NOT the same one that I would have had should the abuse never have occurred.  These changes are not minor.  They are not insignificant.  And all of the fundamental changes my body-brain-mind-self had to make are permanent on the physiological level.

Time cannot run backward.  I cannot return to being a newborn infant so that I might receive different information from my caregiving environment that would give me an entirely different body-brain-mind-self through my developmental stages.  And just as I cannot RETURN to my infant-childhood for a better chance of developing a different body in a better world, neither can I TURN to any single professional expert source or resource for the information I most need in order to understand exactly how what my mother did to me changed me, and what that means.

Neither am I going to be content with a little piece of an answer, handed to me as a toothpick that relates to a much bigger living tree of information about who and how I really am in this world.  I realize that I join the ranks of those other people who also had extremely abusive infant-childhoods.  None of us have ever really been told the truth about how profoundly our human development was changed so that we could survive what was happening to us.

We will discover this truth within our own self, and as we do so and begin to use the words that matter most to describe the changes we experienced as a result of our abuse, we will be giving birth to our own intellectual property on the topic.   This intellectual property belongs to us because we have this information inside of us.  It is who we are because it is who we had to become to survive.  We are finding new words and new ways to tell our stories about what really happened to us.

++++

Maybe I am on a mythological quest to find this grand tree of knowledge that will give me the answers I need.  I guarantee if it ever falls I want to be among the first to hear the sound of its falling.  I find glimpses of its existence in the direction much seemingly unrelated research is going, and in its findings.  I had intended to present two specific examples in today’s post, but I have run out of………..

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++