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I started watching the movie, Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire last night and finished it today.  This post is not about the movie itself although there’s plenty TO say about it – and plenty that HAS been said.  This post is about my personal reaction to it.

My horrendous infant-child abuse history does not include incest or any other overt sexual abuse that I know of.  My history does include an insanely abusive mother.

I make no effort to alter my reactions to this movie from the way I first wrote them down.  They appear in three parts:  Comment, Description and Comment.

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COMMENT:

Precious:  “Someday I’m going to be normal.”

I had zero concept or normal, no idea how strange I was because my life was so strange.  I had no idea of how strange my life was.

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Brutal

Brutality

A world no one outside can imagine

There is nowhere to go but forward through it all – one instant at a time.

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No point of reference outside of the home.  No possible reality check

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Twisted mentality

No way to know what is true.  No possible way.

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Hate

Being hated

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Being brave

Not the same thing as courage

It’s trying, continuing on

Trying

Because there’s no other option and no other choice

Brave

When things are hard

Being strong and tough

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Precious:  “Sometimes I wish I were dead.”

I never got to that point.  I never knew it existed.

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I had advantages.  Being white.  A working Dad.  Good health.  No sexual abuse.

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No possibility of fighting back.

Zero.  A reality.  A fact of the situation.

Not the same thing as being a “victim”

When we react as a part of the reality of our environment, that’s not US – our self travels with us through all kinds of situations.

A situation can be victimizing – that does not make us a victim or mean we are one.

We can’t invent the wheel all by ourselves growing up.  We need help from someone for comparison –in this way, we are born as a blank slate.  If we’re isolated enough we can’t somehow magically know there are alternatives.

That’s what deprivation does.  It limits what we can conceive of.

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Who gives us a chance?

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Who can we tell our truth to?

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So many obstacles.

I never imagined.  No ability to fantasize.  That’s a pretty big thing to have stolen from me.  Even being powerless otherwise, the power to imagine is something.

I was forced into a literal world.  One time in 2^nd grade mother left us with a baby sitter at the apartment building in Anchorage that we had recently moved out of.  I actually took the liberty – naturally – to involve myself with play with my siblings and with the other children present.

We made a hospital with a blanket draped over a card table.  I was sick.  I was drinking water from a soda bottle in the pretend hospital when my mother arrived back from her plastic-selling party.

Twisted my reality.  Why was I pretending to be a baby and why was I drinking from a baby bottle?

“No mother.  It was a soda bottle.  It was pretend medicine.”

No.  It was a baby bottle and for the next eleven years this incident, added to my mother’s abuse litany, proved that I did not want to grow up.  That I wanted to remain a baby.  And, of course, that I was a liar.

This is my only memory of myself DARING to imagine, to fantasize.  It is one of thousands of incidents where my mother distorted, overwhelmed and devoured my reality and then used her distortions to brutalize me over and over and over and over……. Again.

She distorted everything – hurt me (damaged me) that she distorted the reality I lived in and hence MY reality.

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I never wanted anything different.

I didn’t know it was even possible.

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DESCRIPTION:

Before the break came in the wall that confined this girl in her world of hell, her entire life was ‘small’ and it had made her ‘small’.

A severely abusive home-life removes nearly all opportunities for discovery about the self and the world.

A confinement box.

A cage.

Captured.

Captivated by the madness.

A captive of it.

A prisoner of war.

It makes self-based reactions and actions all but impossible.

The ability to fantasize and imagine is a sign a self exists, but it’s not enough.  It doesn’t indicate a self is present as a whole entity.  The fact that I lacked even this rudimentary skill simply means that during my childhood I never even ‘made it that far’.  Not even in my imagination could I escape ‘the box’.  The ability to fantasize and imagine is tied to an early ‘play stage’ of pretend – a stage of HATCHING related to exploration.

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Simple human kindness has to be present somehow, somewhere, in order for a self to recognize that it is human – that the self even exists at all, let alone that the self is a human being.

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If one can imagine-fantasize from within the barely cracked ‘egg’, this ability, because it exists, can be exercised once escape happens.

But nothing is ever going to be able to let all the blank places fill in where early development was missed, interfered with and aborted.

These blank spots are missing links in the chain of development.  A loved and properly parented child will express itself through an integration of self and the world in ongoing, continuous action and interaction.  When this chain is missing (and in pieces), when it is broken, those unintegrated fragments exist as dissociations in the continuity of a self in the world.

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I think of a wooden plank boardwalk.  Experiences that come from a developing child-self being able to interact successfully with the world (with power) create solid planks.

As these planks are naturally created and laid in place, an entire continuous (and contiguous)  walk way is built in an ongoing way.

When an abuser introjects their madness (and meanness) into a child’s life – which is always inappropriate – the child misses out on laying a solid plank down.

Even when a child does the very best that they can do to ‘handle’ these abusive encounters, the board they are forced to add onto their continuously expanding (lengthening) boardwalk will still be in effect a rotten one.  It will be faulty and unsubstantial because the ratio of their own self influence in the encounter compared to the overwhelming influence that the abuser contributed makes it so.

In extremely abusive childhoods when no adequate early caregiver is present that helps the child to lay substantial solid boards into their growing boardwalk, there can be sections that are empty.

These gaps create problems that are permanent and last for a lifetime.  When attachment experts state that the inability to follow Grice’s Maxims in the telling of a coherent life story is the primary symptom of an insecure attachment disorder, they are describing what is missing.   They are pointing to the broken sections of a person’s life-experience boardwalk where past opportunities to connect one’s own self to the world have been ruptured and never repaired.

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Because most extremely abusive parents traveled through their own infant-childhoods and into their adulthood with one of these completely faulty boardwalks themselves, one way or the other they are stealing the life force of their children and are, in effect, robbing boards from their children’s boardwalk and adding them in some fashion to their own.  Every time a caregiver abusively overwhelms an infant-child they are preventing that child from being able to lay down their own self-motivated and self-involved (appropriately) next step in development.  Every time these abusive transactions occur some variation away from healthy, normal and substantial is taking place.

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Now, to get a truer picture of how severe early abuse affects the ongoing life of an infant-child, we need to comprehend that survivors are at the same time being given such a challenging walk through life that their boardwalk will never lay upon anything like level ground.

The world underneath them is being mined away by the abuse.  They, and their ability to live a happy life of appropriate well-being is being undermined.  What should have been their boardwalk becomes a suspension bridge spanning dangerous ravines and abysses.  Their walk through life has always been dangerous.  Their connection to stable ground and to a sense of safety and security has always been inadequate, faulty, and precarious.

What could have become ‘a walk in the park’ has been changed into a blindfolded awkward stumbling waltz over completely unseen and unprepared for hostile territory on a flimsy, shaky, faultily tethered fragile bridge constructed of rotten boards and wide gaping holes.

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All the while this reality is happening for infant-child severe abuse and trauma survivors, those we encounter anticipate that we are just the same as they are.  We are expected to be the same; act the same, feel the same, think the same, know the same information about the world and about ourselves in it – in the same way – that non-early traumatized people do.  “Ain’t possible.”

If we pay attention to how we feel, we know we are aliens in an alien world.  We are like Precious, sitting like an alien stone in the back of her beloved math class, wishing she was animated and normal while having no real clue about how different she is or why.

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On the far extreme, unlike this movie girl, I was incapable of even conceiving of what normal was – or even that it existed.  I had no way of comparing either myself or my experience to anyone or anything.  The ability to have that awareness was a missing board in my boardwalk.

In fact, given what we are shown in this film about the inside of Precious’ life, I would guess that even this glimmer of awareness about normal only happened because the writer of this story took the literary option of giving it to this character.

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COMMENT:

Hope.

Precious:  “I think them was in a tunnel.  And in that tunnel maybe the only light they had was inside of them.  And then long after they escape that tunnel they still shining for everybody else.”

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Encountering our past in our present

Can be like falling into dark holes of the soul

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Finally, she cries.  Finally she shows the pain.  Finally, she feels her pain.  Finally she cannot separate herself from it.  And right here when the doubt for surviving breaks through comes, “I’m too tired……”

A crisis of the soul:  What is love?  Who loves me?

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Sick sick sick mothers

In a sick world where murky is too good a word.

Where right and wrong have to come from the outside

Because there is no hope of any REASON on the inside – where hate remains insanely justified.

The ONLY reason-able thing to do is to turn and walk away

To claim our OWN life

Separate from the madness (like separating an egg yolk from its white)

We are fortunate when things finally get this clear and normal no longer matters –

WE DO!

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See also:  “Precious” and the Oscars

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