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I am trying to think about an emotional experience I had the other day so that I can write about it. At the same time I realize I cannot think about it separately from writing about it. If my words don’t follow themselves across a page they disappear like lemmings over a cliff into oblivion. Partly this is true because I am in an inner battle with ambiguity. If I write this piece most of the ambiguity will vanish. But because of the 18 years of abuse I suffered from my severe Borderline mother, her brain patterns were built into me, and it’s a known fact that Borderlines DO NOT LIKE ambiguity as A. J. Mahari describes:
“Borderlines have not learned how to relate in healthy ways. Borderlines have not experienced the world as loving, fair or trustworthy place. Borderline ambiguity is born from the two-faced damage of the betrayal of a parent, both parents and or one’s primary care-givers.”
What I experienced the other day that I MAYBE want to understand has to do with the fact that not once in the 18 years of my childhood did I ever feel loved by either my mother or by my father. I have written before that one of the main reasons I believe I did not turn out just like my mother is that nobody ever betrayed me the way my child-mother was betrayed.
Nobody ever loved me. Nobody pretended to love me. I was not exposed to what were the devastating effects of the conditional love my grandparents used to manipulate my mother and destroy her brain-mind. I was just plain hated without hope of reprieve. Yet at the same time the underlying lack of awareness of what it feels like not to be truly loved affects me just as it affected my mother. The love circuitry from safe and secure attachment with early caregivers was not built correctly into either my mother’s or my own early forming body-brain-mind-self – or later forming one, either.
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My inner battle with ambiguity today is about whether or not I want to face some of what this means to and for me. Am I better off not knowing what an examination of my last week’s experience can show me about who and how I am in the world? Is it helpful for me to follow my own thoughts in my writing to some more unambiguous place where I will be out of this thick enveloping fog of not knowing what this experience has to teach me?
I both want to know at the same time I don’t want to know. Do I stay right here in this murky ambiguous place or do I choose to take a step in my next thoughts toward the light of clarity? At the same time I ask myself this question I understand that right here is a place where I can differentiate my own self from my mother. I can make this choice. My mother could not.
This does not mean that taking this step toward differentiation from my mother’s brain-mind as she formed herself into mine is easy. This does not mean that stepping toward the light of conscious reflection and illumination, toward understanding of the truth is easy. It just means that for me, unlike for my mother, taking this step is possible.
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Unlike what Leigh Eric Schmidt, the Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America at Harvard Divinity School might say, I do not believe it is possible for humans to have any experience of themselves in the world that does not directly involve their brain’s processing of information. The 18 years of severe abuse I suffered from my mother built the brain I now have to use to try to understand all of my experiences of myself in my life. Today’s excursion into exploring my last week’s experience is no exception.
Nearly all of the associational processes that went on behind the closed doors of my mother’s mind happened completely outside the range of her consciousness attention. My mother was a dangerous, violently explosive madwoman. Growing up, I knew about her violence but I did not know about her madness. How could I? It had greeted me with the first breath I ever took in this world and it continued unabated throughout all my developmental stages until I was 18.
As a result of the free rein (and free reign) my mother had in her home to do anything she wanted to, there was always only one single pattern for me. She erupted, hurt me, and I suffered. All that suffering built me as it built itself into me, and it was never accompanied by any experience of love.
As a young infant-child grows into its body-brain-mind-self, it is supposed to be helped to differentiate experience. It is supposed to learn that it exists as a separate entity, and it is supposed to form not only its own stable self, but also a clear stable connection to this self. All of this process is negotiated through the experience of emotion. Emotions have to become ever more clearly differentiated from one another so that the self can have access to its own information about being in the world.
I did not go through ANY of these differentiation stages of development normally. My mother overwhelmed me from the moment I was born. Because my mother did not succeed at physically killing me, she did not succeed at completely obliterating me. But she did very successfully limit my options of experience down to one. She made me suffer.
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My mother overwhelmed me with the scourge of her hatred of who she imagined me to be at every step of my infant-childhood that she possibly could. I see the image of someone continually trying to dump a thousand gallons of gasoline into a tiny little perfume bottle. My mother effectively did this to me for 18 long years. I did not escape unscathed.
There were dire consequences of my survival, most of which I will never know. However, the experience I had last week dropped into the middle of one of them. I was blindsided by my own emotional blindness. Can I grab the lantern of my best intentions and spark within it the blazing light of my willingness to learn? Am I willing to go back into the depths of that enveloping fog of sorrow (in my body and in my brain) and take some part of myself back out into clarity? Is there some new in-sight here for me that is mine and that I really can’t do without?
Yes. To all these questions I choose to answer “Yes.” I will walk past these grasping, numbing shadows of doubt. I will shed this burden of “Shame on you, Linda, for not being a better woman than you are.” I will not be afraid of my tears. I will not be afraid that what I will say here or what I will find here will make those who love me, love me any less.
It is not my fault that my mother cut my wings off so that I cannot ever fly in the prosocial world that most others seem to me to take so for granted. “So take your scrawny little bird legs and hop on with this, Linda. You can do it. I know that you can. Go where the angles might fear to tread and know that as you go, they will go with you.”
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Last August I was given the gift of being able to reconnect with one of our closest Alaskan homesteading neighbors in my childhood. I haven’t heard her voice. I haven’t seen her. We correspond via email.
Against all rational logic, I love her. Our connection means a great, great deal to me. This woman, now 83, lives well over a thousand miles away from me. I do not have her telephone number. While I know she is very busy taking care of herself, her husband, her household and preparing to leave their home to move into an addition her son is building on his house for her, when I hadn’t received an email from her from last Monday to last Friday, I felt like a bomb went off inside of me.
It’s easy to say that given what I know about my unsafe and insecure attachment patterns in my body-brain that of course I would be upset. Yet ‘of course’ doesn’t give me enough information to understand what I felt. I became terrified that she was either gravely ill or had died. I believed on some level of my being that she had been called home through the veil to help the 100,000 Haitian earthquake victims cross over to the next world. Nothing I could find to tell myself would sooth the depths of my growing sorrow.
I have been much blessed in my lifetime that none of my three children have been threatened by sickness or harm. My siblings are all safe and well. Even though I continue to grieve for the loss of the man I am in love with from my life, never before last Friday did I feel the depths of that kind of sorrow and fear that someone I loved was in trouble and there was nothing I could do about it.
Most fortunately I had the telephone number of my friend’s son in Alaska. Through him I was finally able to find out that his mother was just fine. Never before, either, had I felt that powerful sense of gratitude and relief at hearing this good news.
Now, I suspect that if I had a normally-formed prosocial body and brain I would have been able to take all of this in stride and gone on with my life. But thanks to the consequences of my mother’s abuse this didn’t happen. This experience touched the depths of my attachment woundedness in ways I could not understand. I had felt something new in a way I had never felt it before.
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Most of the normal prosocial emotional differentiation circuits and their corresponding connection to people I care about in my life are missing in my brain. This experience I am describing opened up a circuit for me that I don’t believe ever existed before. The mystery of my experience with these emotions led me to ask my daughter two days later after I had expressed to her how I had felt, “Is that something like all of you felt when you found out I had cancer?”
My daughter paused, and answered, “Yes, mother. That’s how we felt.”
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What can I say through my tears as I write now that can help me understand what this means to me? First, I feel terribly sad for my children and for others who love me that it is so nearly impossible for me to comprehend, let alone feel on an emotional level, what it feels like to be loved. I have to absolve myself of any responsibility for this fact. It is not my intention to hurt anyone by depriving them of the fullness of the experience of sharing their love for me. At the same time I am grateful that they both love me, and can experience the fullest spectrum of attachment feelings toward me.
That I cannot participate equally with them in the depths of these life-love experiences is not my fault. Until I felt what I did last Friday I had no idea how the people who loved me felt as they all traveled thousands of miles, one after the other, to support me and to care for me and to love me as I went through the grueling chemotherapy and eventual surgery that would allow me to remain in their lives. I know they all love me. They show me they all love me. I believe they mean what they say. But it is nearly impossible for me to FEEL their love inside my own body-brain-mind-self because those circuits were never built inside of me during the first 18 years of my life from the time of my birth.
At the same time I realize that I am now perhaps a fraction of an inch closer to knowing what it FEELS like to be loved, at age 58 I also realize that my emotional blindness is not likely to ever be completely removed from me in my lifetime. I also understand that part of the pattern of attachment I feel to this homesteading neighbor comes from body memories I have of interactions with her in my childhood that were positive, and were among the very few truly kind and genuine, warm adult interactions I ever had in those miserable 18 years.
Yet I cannot consciously remember this woman. She has generously sent me photographs of her and her husband from those long-past years, and they help me a great deal as I try to connect the unconscious memories of my childhood to the present day facts of what a wonderful woman this homesteading neighbor truly is.
At the same time I realize I will always struggle with allowing myself to form deep affectionate bonds with other people. To love is to risk. I believe that although my mother was able to steal from me the physiological foundations of what it feels like to BE LOVED, she did not remove from me my own ability to deeply love others. The powers to give love seem to me to operate differently than do the powers of being able to feel love from others.
Of course I don’t know this to be true and I probably never will know for sure. I imagine my brain to be similar in some ways to the autistic brain given the severe conditions of harm and deprivation in my infant-childhood that interfered with my emotional-social brain’s development. There is on one in my life who truly loves me that does not also know about my childhood. They do not have to question their love for me. They do not have to wonder or guess or doubt. And they don’t love me any less because I do.
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ON BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER:
Stop the Storm 