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I remember as a little girl living in the Los Angeles area being in the car when my parents passed road construction projects where steam rollers were being used.  I was fascinated by them, and even though of course I didn’t know it, it is very possible that my imagination recognized the metaphor contained within the actions of this monstrous piece of machinery that was designed specifically to roll over and completely flatten anything within its path.

My Mother the Steam Roller.  That’s just ONE of the things my mother was very good at:  flattening the life out of anyone in her way.  She flattened me, and I must have been aware of how effective my mother was at flattening my grandmother any time my grandmother tried in any way to say something or do something ‘nice’ for or about me.

Actually it never mattered WHO it was who might have tried to cross my mother.  My mother was a predatory fighter and could with ease flatten anyone within her family just like she was this piece of equipment — a steam roller.

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I will need to spend quite a bit of time eventually with the letter I posted last evening in +”GRANDMOTHER GETS A NEW CAR” – AND . . . . . because it contains so much information about my mother and her relationships with family.  From the stories my mother repeatedly told about how mean both her mother and her brother were to her in her childhood, I can see both of them also as if they were steam rollers who steam rolled right over my mother.  She was not empowered to fight back against them when she was young (even all the way into her teens).

But what a way to live.  What a way to CONTINUE to live, always being at war with those a person is supposed to feel most safe and secure with, most loved and cherished and cared about by.  I found myself thinking as I dug my way through the transcription of my mother’s words last night, “Is EVERYONE’S family like mine?  Does everyone have patterns of insecure attachment, of trouble and pain, sorrow and suffering, of war and inner emotional blackmail, hostage-taking, kidnapping of the soul, brutalization of the imagination, blocking and distortion of gifts and talents, destruction of relationships that my entire family and its history seems to have contained within it?

That led me to wondering how many people read on this blog with the words, “That could have happened in my family” ringing in their thoughts?  Different times, different participants, different versions of trauma drama, but trauma drama and terribly insecure human-to-human attachments just the same.

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It might seem like an odd connection, but this information is not randomly dragged into this post.  If you Google search for the terms ‘Israel genetics dance’ you will find some amazing research about the new discoveries about how there IS a genetic link between ‘professional dancers’ and their genes evidently related to this very ancient human activity –DANCE.

I mention this in connection with my mother’s letter I posted last night because I wish I could discover research about genetics and drama like I accidentally discovered the research about genetics and dance.  If there truly IS a genetic ‘loading’ for dramatic abilities just as there is for dancing, then I would suspect that my mother, as the amazing trauma drama specialist that she was, had those genes.

After all, human expression through gesture and sound, movement and pantomime, and reenactment of experience belongs to our species way back to our ancient beginnings – way back to before we had the ability to speak to one another with anything like a word.  Stories were transmitted, told, expressed, conveyed in all kinds of ways without words, and today we STILL watch this happen or participate in these trauma dramas if we happen to have been born into a family where the WORDS expressing the truth about trauma resounded in their empty silence.

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This leads me to the important insight that came to me last night about the trauma drama reenactment patterns in my mother’s life as they operated around her nearly continual moving around.  I have noted before that I think my mother projected ‘imaginary friends’ and ‘the imaginary enemy (me)’ onto her children.  She resonated with her infants as being her play baby dolls.  But what I didn’t GET until last night as I transcribed the letter I posted is that IN HER MOVING SHE WAS PLAYING HOUSE.

I had a “Duh, Linda!” moment!  Of COURSE that’s what she was doing.  I only SAW this last night because I was working my way through a collection of letters I had saved separately in a ziplock bag throughout the years that I have been ordering and organizing my mother’s collection of writings.  As I’ve mentioned before, it strikes me as being so unbelievably strange that all the while my mother wrote these letters over the years she ALWAYS intended to ‘put them into a book’.  Yet NEVER did she actually DATE a single one of them!

Often she put the day of the week on the letter, and most letters are at least contained in an original envelope with a post mark.  But this ziplock bag collection contained letters and parts of letters that had NO indication of date for me to work with.  I had to wait until the entire body of my mother’s letters was put into the best order I could make of them before I could add these letters into the newly coherent story I am forming of my mother’s words (and of her offspring’s childhood).

So, the letter that I posted last night was one of these ‘floating’ letters.  As I added it into the main body of the sort-of-coherent story of my mother’s life contained in her letters, I was FINALLY able to GET IT.

If you were to read through this collection of letters as I have transcribed them thus far (and there still might be missing letters to add into these files), you will see the pattern of my mother’s playing-house-by-constant-moving-around that I am talking about:

• *JUNE 1957 LETTERS BETWEEN MOTHER AND FATHER
• *JULY 1957 LETTERS BETWEEN MOTHER AND FATHER
• *August 1957 Mother’s letters to her mother
• *September 1957 Mother’s letters to her mother
• *October 1957 Mother’s letters to her mother
• *November 1957 Mother’s letters to her mother

While I am not going back at this moment for the exact late June-early July letters where she begins to tell my father that she is moving herself and four children out of the one-room motel living situation into a rental house that she found in Glendora, you will see those letters as they describe her ‘playing house psychosis’.

She describes how she can NOW make a temporary cozy home (meaning safe and secure for herself) in that rented house.  But it doesn’t take long after she’s managed to accomplish the MOVE itself into that house that her whole fantasy begins to disintegrate, crumble and fall apart.  As this begins to happen my mother summons – as she ALWAYS did no matter WHAT household move trauma drama she was enacting – all the supposedly LOGICALLY BASED reasons why she HAS to make the move.

As readers it is time to take our stand and begin to understand that my mother’s madness was NEVER about logical reason.  My mother was not reason-able.  At least in this letter I posted of hers last night she is able to plead with and beg my father to help her.  Most often she so completely disguised her ‘mission’ that she fooled even my supposedly ‘reason-able’ father to move right along with her.

Because (even though I lived through 18 years of moving with my parents) I ONLY saw the pattern last night of the Fairy Tale nature of my mother’s PLAYING HOUSE with her imaginary friends, enemies (which came to include members of her family and other people other than just me), and doll babies exactly as I dropped this very important letter I was transcribing into its ‘coherency slot’ within her story I can finally say, “I get the whole picture.”

Human beings are born with the genetic capability to use our specie’s dramatic imagination in the process of becoming people who live within a massive web of drama that includes all of life.  We are supposed to develop a stable-self-core that allows us to make good sense of the constant interactions that are going on as we are forming within our earliest caregiver-attachment environments.

When these interactions, when our earliest body-brain forming attachment environment is malevolent, the nature of trauma drama begins to form itself into the patterns of our body-brain – and therefore into the life we live.  We can ‘clinicalize’ and ‘sanitize’ and ‘legitimize’ how we choose to talk about the end results of forming a body-brain-self-life within malevolent early environments, but in the end we are simply being prepared in a trauma-drama world to live a trauma-drama reenactment life – UNTIL WE LEARN THE LESSONS THE TRAUMA IS TRYING TO TEACH OUR ENTIRE SPECIES, not ‘just’ the individual members who ‘play the parts’ in this great drama that is the ongoing life of our species.

A trauma drama life is not a coherent one if the lessons contained within the drama itself are never learned.  It is only as we learn these lessons that words can begin to dissipate the vague fog of illusion that envelope the ongoing dramas themselves.

My very young mother, already as an infant being neglected if not also abused, was left isolated and all alone in a world with her dolls and her story books to try to figure out what SHE and her life – as well as that of other people – meant and how it all fit together.  Yet when I think about how in our specie’s ancient beginnings there were no warnings about keeping children away from the ongoing reenactments of trauma drama that the other members of our ‘family’ and ‘tribe’ were demonstrating, I realize that there is no corresponding magical line within the human brain-psyche that says ‘this dramatic reenactment belongs to childhood’ and ‘this dramatic reenactment belongs to adulthood’.

All the story telling and story acting belongs to the same mythic imagination that IS human life.  The psychologist Carl Jung might have divided the main characters in human drama into what he called archetypes, but in the end all the individual parts that CAN be played by humans in human drama simply either act themselves out in ongoing dramas OR are talked about in ongoing stories.

The evolutionary advantage for our entire species is the same one that operates for us each as individuals:  Trauma has something to teach us.  If the lessons are not learned they will continue to act themselves out until somebody ‘gets it’.  The GETTING of the lessons of trauma happen when we get to the more evolutionary advanced level of being able to USE WORDS to convey to our own self and to others what the traumas ARE and what they are teaching us.

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In the case of my mother – as I am now quite convinced is the case for every single human being – the MAIN theme of every drama and story of our life is about how safe and secure the world is for us to be living in.  The ongoing drama-story of our life IS about degrees of safe and secure attachment in the world – or degrees of its opposite.  The kicker is, though, that the messages are NEVER JUST meant either for the individual people who endured and survived traumas, or even for the immediate peer generation that individual is a part of.

The messages of degrees of trauma, of degrees of safe and secure attachment to and within the world are telling about the STATE OF THE WORLD, the condition of the external environment because it is THAT state of the world that the future generations are going to be left to survive in and better know something about.

We have to learn how to ‘read’ trauma and the dramatic reenactments trauma creates when it remains unresolved.  In its unresolved state the critical information about continued survival of the individual AND the species to which it belongs is NOT being understood.  Without learning something from trauma about survival the trauma will simply continue to be included in the patterns of life itself as these patterns repeat themselves like persistent and obvious nightmares until somebody pays attention.

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Nobody looked from the outside (or from the inside) at the patterns of trauma drama that unfolded within my family of origin and recognized what was going on.  Nobody said, “Gee, that family moves around too much, what’s wrong?”  Nobody said, “Gee, those children are not happy, what’s wrong?”  Nobody said, “Boy, that one little girl named Linda is the absolute picture of being lost, frightened and forlorn, what’s wrong?”

Nobody pierced through the smokescreen illusion of make-believe justification for all of the abuse, all of the moves, all of the madness that WAS the trauma-drama reenactment that WAS our family’s life.  Did any of it matter?  Did it matter that lives were being flattened within my family?  Did it matter that potential for joy, health, self-directed expression of talent and potential for a lifetime of well-being had been destroyed and continued to be destroyed within the horrible trauma drama reenactment that WAS our family?

No, evidently it didn’t matter.  Nobody saw any reason to pay attention, ask any questions, become involved, find a way to STOP what was going on.  It evidently wasn’t anyone else’s business.

But if we think we want to help prevent and STOP infant and child abuse we will have to cross that imaginary line between giving a damn and not giving a damn about the messages that trauma drama reenactments continue to convey within child-abusing — within ANY abusing — environments.  We have to allow ourselves to understand that the messages contained in these traumatic dramas are for ALL of us, not only for those who are captive within them.

The messages trauma conveys are ALWAYS about the degrees of safety, security and well-being that exist in the whole world, and are NOT SIMPLY messages about the conditions within any single family.  The human drama, the good and the bad of it, involve and belong to every member of our species.  Trauma itself is like a steam roller smashing the joy and well-being out of every member of every generation that remains in its path until somebody, somewhere, at some time FINALLY notices, pays attention and reads the signals contained within the trauma drama reenactments that tell us all what is WRONG in the world so that we can ALL do something to make what is WRONG in the world we all share  – well, quite simply, RIGHT.

This healing will not happen unless and until we find and use WORDS to think about and to talk about what needs to be changed to end as many traumas as we can so that we can make everyone’s world a safer and more secure place to be throughout everyone’s life span.  Is this too much to hope for, too much to ask for?

Nope.

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