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OK, here it is.  After spending some time outdoors now digging dirt, mixing mud and adding three more adobe blocks into my terraced walkway, I now have the third thought that follows these last two posts:

+IN THE EPIC OF MY ABUSIVE CHILDHOOD THE MOUNTAIN RAISED MY SOUL

+PUKING IN THE HIGH CHAIR: PATTERNS OF RUPTURE AND REPAIR BEFORE THE AGE OF ONE

How in the universe did I even begin to now how to appropriately interact with my own children?  After all, my mother would have reacted with an escalating, violent, terrifying and completely inappropriate and abusive fit of rage if I had done at nine months of age what my daughter did.

What do I see as being one of the major differences between my mother and myself?

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First of all, I consider it rather efficient of myself that I can make a statement here that I believe contradicts what the ‘attachment experts’ might say.  While they may claim that I had some nebulous ‘earned secure’ attachment with my children, I completely disagree.  The efficiency stems from the fact that I have not read what these experts say about this so-called (desirable) ‘earned secure attachment’, nor do I intend to waste my time doing so.

The basis of my disagreement with these ‘experts’ is that my body in-formation tells me that in cases such as mine is, they are wrong.  Because I suffered such extreme and severe, chronic abuse from the time I was born, I don’t think there would have been any human way to EARN a secure attachment ability with my children.

For one thing, I was pregnant within six months of leaving my abusive home of origin.  There is no possible way that I could have had enough meaningful or instructive attachment experiences in that short about of time to even begin to learn something different from what I KNEW the moment I stepped on that jetliner and headed off to boot camp.

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Secondly, I object to this concept of ‘earned secure attachment‘ on principle.  As I become increasingly clear about what likely happened in my mother’s infant-childhood that ruined her and made her into the mad monster she became as my mother, I consider the concept of ‘earn‘ to be as inappropriate term to apply to parent-infant/child interactions as I consider the concept of ‘mercy‘ to be.  Both concepts are tied even in the words themselves to the idea that love is a marketable item.

I do not believe that MERCY belongs in a happy, healthy, loving parent-offspring relationship.  There is nothing my children could EVER have possibly been able to do in their childhood that could have possibly required me to respond to them with mercy.  I don’t even think there is anything they can do as adults that would even implicate this concept.

As I described in last week’s post, +DID ZERO MERCY IN MY CHILDHOOD SAVE ME? it appears extremely likely that the non-human interactions regarding ‘mercy’ being given and withheld in my mother’s early years broke her.  No child should ever be told in words or in actions that “If you were only good enough you would be given my mercy – and I would love you.”

If ‘mercy’ has to be given to repair a rupture in a relationship between a parent and offspring, there is no love present.  The infant-child is not being treated as a human being, but rather as a commodity-object.

The terrible holes my mother received as wounds in her forming self and in her relationship with others specifically prepared her to eventually — unconsciously and completely – split off the two parts of herself that had been involved in commodity-mercy interactions with her early caregivers.  I became the ‘devil’s child’ projection of Mildred who could not receive mercy.  My sister became the ‘god’s child’ projection of Mildred, the one who was innately deserving of mercy – and got it.

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Should, in my mind, any ‘expert’ to suggest that I had an ‘earned secure attachment’ with my children disgusts me because this term and the thinking behind it belong to the cultural values and actions that made my mother nuts in the first place.  No more could I ‘earn’ attachment with my own children than could my mother ‘earn’ attachment with her parents.

WRONG CONCEPT!

That leaves me with MY concept, which was first connected to what I knew and could do – in my body-self – with my own children.  Because

(1)  nobody ever offered me mercy in any transaction involving rupture and repair in my childhood –

(2)  because I was not ever tricked in believing that I could possibly repair what was wrong between me and my mother- the rupture existed as a third entity, a fact of my childhood

(3)  because it was clear from my first breath I was permanently evil and damned

(4)  unlike my mother when she was little, because there was no mercy, no hope, no trick, no illusion – because I was not human and was by nature and design the child of the devil, I was free to skip the earning-mercy mix-up completely

What I believe I was able to create with my children was/is a

BORROWED SECURE ATTACHMENT

This means to me that because I did not end up with a brain that could not operate without splitting out the good and bad and projecting it onto my children, I could simply ALLOW what happens naturally to happen!

Because my children were born with perfectly perfect safe and secure attaching abilities, all I had to do was follow their natural lead.  I say borrowed because I could not then and never can repair the developmental changes that happened inside of me through my mother’s severe abuse of me from birth.  I COULD let my children attach to me.  I COULD respond to them in accordance to their attachment potential and not interfere with their natural process.

Even though I do not believe I have inbuilt attachment circuits that allow me to FEEL attachment myself, I did not have the kind of interferences that my mother had built into her that prevented, distorted and annihilated her ability to experience attachment with me.

My term ‘borrowed secure attachment’ makes it very clear to me that the natural and healthy ability to attach is NOT within me – it is within my children.  I cannot say ‘allowed secure attachment’ because my relationship with them (or with anyone else) no longer (past my infancy-very early childhood) has the potential to change or alter the permanent (and trauma-changed) nervous system-brain circuitry that was built into me as it exists WITHOUT the ability to personally experience anything but a marginal and fleeting sensation of what safe and secure attachment to humans feels like.

I can live with this.  I have all my life.  What matters to me is that I did not make my children to be like I am – any more than my mother succeeded in making me like she was.  Perhaps because I ended up with a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment pattern, I was free to organize and orient myself as a mother around my children’s inborn ability to attach securely.

My mother, on the other hand, had no choice but to organize and or orient herself around her Borderline ‘splitting-projection’ that left no room for me to form the inner circuitry that would have allowed me to attach to human beings.  I did attach to the mountain which at least enabled ,e to retain some attachment circuits/abilities.  Evidently this was enough to allow me to allow my children to form HUMAN attachment circuitry as humans are BORN to do.

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Did I show my baby daughter MERCY when I didn’t respond inappropriately to her making herself puke for attention in her high chair?  No, I did not.  In my thinking, any parent-child relationship that includes ANY TRANSACTIONS INVOLVING MERCY holds the seeds — if not the actuality — of abuse.

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