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There must be a post that needs to be written this morning that goes along with this title that is resounding within my mind this morning:  ‘False starts and blind inner promises’.  In thinking about the comment made to yesterday’s post about the beauty of tree burls and how as severe early abuse survivors we cannot grow our first early twigs out into the world because we are in continual danger of being attacked, and about how tree burls ARE formed in response to threats in the environment so that the growing tree must form scar tissue into itself – I am also thinking about how I feel ‘at dead center’ here in my home now, and in my yard.  I can only venture out once in a great while and when I do returning home within two or three hours seems to be essential for me to regain any calm equilibrium inside of myself.

I haven’t met my first grandchild yet who was born last March 11th.  I have three grown children all living in Fargo, North Dakota.  They want me to come up to visit them this summer, but the truth is that I cannot find a Linda who can make that journey.  I am not strong enough.  I don’t feel well enough.  Now they are talking about flying down to see me.

This all leads me to thinking about how at 58 years old, as a direct result of all the trauma I survived during the first 18 formative years of my life, I don’t so much not ‘have a leg to stand on’ as I ‘don’t have a limb to go out on’.  Yes, this also brings to mind ‘Rock-a-bye Baby’ and what happens ‘when the bough breaks’.

I knew about all of the rest of my ‘knowing’ about the implications contained in yesterday’s tree burl post, but I didn’t want to think about it and I didn’t want to write it.  I didn’t want to ‘be negative’ at the same time I didn’t want to be realistic.  I just wanted to END with the beautiful part and not acknowledge the serious ramifications and implications of growing a body-brain-mind-self in such a malevolent environment that most of who I had the potential to become was never able to branch out into the world and grow strong and true.

Being all bound up with my gifts, talents, strengths and abilities, with most of my potential hidden within the inside of me – rather than being expressed and formed and extended out into the ‘bigger world’ is a reflection of the physiological changes that happened to me as I tried to grow and development within the horribly toxic, threatening and truly dangerous world my mother created for me in my infant-childhood.

BUT I went off into that ‘bigger world’ at age 18 without having one single clue about what I had been through or about what had happened to me.  This is where the title for this post appears.  I have lived a life of ‘false starts’ and ‘blind inner promises’ because I had determination, a powerful will to do what it took to survive, to always move forward, to always do the best that I could as I organized my whole life on my most fundamental levels around trying to provide the best care I could for my children.

I was running blind.

I need to go outside this morning and trim the suckers that are growing in great masses at the base of my Pomegranate tree.  When my brother was here in April we completely decked the suckers, but they only came back as fast as they possibly could.  They grow thick and green like a thicket from the underground roots, but they are weak and wild and will not be productive as they crowd out the fruit-bearing branches and suck water and nutrients from the rest of the tree.

I had the thought in contrast to the tree burl image that in so many ways, being as blind as I was when I left home, that I simply set off into whatever direction I saw in front of me as I made decisions about my life and went off and ‘did things’.  Things could certainly have been far worse then they were, but now at age 58 most of what I have done appears to me now to be little more than a ‘false start’ like these tree’s suckers.

I had ‘blind hopes’ because I had no idea about who I was or what I wanted in my life.  I didn’t know what was possible, what was realistic, what motivated me, what I was searching for.  I could not miraculously form good strong fruit-bearing branches upon the tree-that-is-me at age 18.  I did not know about dissociation.  I did not understand that I could create branches in my life by going off in disconnected directions, spending the time of my life and my life force while I THOUGHT I knew what I was doing — but didn’t.

I don’t have a life history now of having continued to build a strong foundation of roots in my life, connected to a good strong self-trunk with wide healthy branches out there soaking in sunlight so I can celebrate my participation in my OWN ongoing life.

I have been burning up my inner resources all of my life and never knew it until now.  The amount of inner resources it took to endure and survive my childhood alone were probably equal to what a safe and securely attached person would use over the span of their entire lifetime.  When I tell my children now that I am ‘too tired to travel’ I know I mean exactly that:  I am resource-less rather than resource-full like my inner bank account is empty.

This, to me, is the long-term consequence that appears in so-called clinical terms as Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that has all its own ‘suckers’ within me (depression, dissociation) that siphon off my strength.

Nobody stopped me at the threshold where I left my ‘childhood’ and crossed into my ‘adulthood’ and helped me take inventory of where I was coming from, how I had been formed, what I had endured, what had done to me, what I had to take with me and what I had left over after surviving hell itself.  Nobody then helped me to realize where and how I had to heal before I could move forward.

The major branches that I SHOULD have formed as a growing and developing self in a body were nearly ALL turned within.  I entered adulthood chasing after what I thought was a life as the life that had formed me chased after me – because it was all still inside of me.

While I am thankful I found resources to raise my children so that they are stable and able to continue to grow good, strong branches of self into their world and into their future, I have to say that my ability to take care of myself has been very limited.  Today even the chirping of birds can ‘irritate my nerves’ as I live and breath too close to the edge of continual sensory overload.  The world seems too busy, too fast, too loud, too noisy, too demanding, too stimulating — and far more than I can easily handle.

I live in a rural area.  Yet knowing that even the sound of a crinkling plastic bag irritates my senses as I remove a slice of bread lets me know that the body I formed growing up from birth in an environment of continual threat of harm and of harm itself is very real and has its own very real limitations that I was able to somehow ‘outrun’ during most of my adult life.  But I cannot do it now.

When we think about stopping child abuse, awareness of this kind of damage that child abuse often causes is what needs to motivate us.  There is long term physiological cost to surviving malevolent childhoods.  Yes, we are beautiful — but our ability to form a body-self that can grow our beauty out into the world with joy and wellness has been greatly injured by all the early wounds we have received.

No, I don’t want to have to say this.  No, I don’t want to have to know this.  No, I don’t want to have to live with these long term consequences that changed the physiology of this body I have to live in for my entire life.  But when any of us think that ‘infant-child abuse is a serious matter’, these changes, along with the difficulties and life-loss they create, are a great part of what we HAVE TO consider.

At the same time survivors of severe abuse deserve to know the degree of harm that was done to them so that they can more fully understand how their development and their entire life has been affected.  There is no magic band-aid to FIX the changes that happened to our body.  But there is information about these changes, how they affect us and how we can live better with the help of this wisdom.

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