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It gives me great comfort this morning as my thinking moves forward along the lines established in my previous two posts and in my reply to the comment included with the first of these two posts to find pages coming up in my Google search directly connected to the words “archetype fair witness.”

I never thought about it before these last days as I finished the process of organizing and transcribing my mother’s writings that in some – still seemingly bizarre way — I WAS BORN TO BE MY MOTHER’S FAIR WITNESS.

For all the billions of moments I spent as a child during my 18 years of suffering abuse from this woman, I was at the same time being her witness.

Is that something that happens as a PART of being an abused victim?  Are we at the same time we suffer the abuse being the witness to our perpetrator’s OTHER SIDE?  Do we come, as a direct result, to know our perpetrator’s truest reality (in their body-brain in this lifetime)?

According to this author of this book – I might be right on track:

Soul Psychology: How to Clear Negative Emotions and Spiritualize Your Life by Joshua David Stone

It would be logical and reasonable to accept that I was, along with the mountain and the homestead, an embodiment of what my mother needed for her healing.

I was the projection of ‘badness’ for my mother.  I was badness personified.  Hell, literally, of a place to spend one’s infant-childhood!

Yet because 99.99% of what my mother saw in me, what she blamed me for, what she ‘punished’ me for, had NOTHING whatsoever to DO WITH ME, I WAS the ‘fair witness’ of her literalized OWN suffering from inside her own SELF that she dissociated from herself and associated with me.

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“The true self-realized being uses this archetype as its main theme but is not identified with it; such a self-realized being lives in a state of consciousness as the Fair Witness or Observer, free of all archetypes.”

From  Joshua David Stone in Soul Psychology: How to Clear Negative Emotions and Spiritualize Your Life, Page 263

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When, such in cases like mine, a human being is born into particularly a mother’s malevolent world of ‘disturbed psychology’, the tiny growing and developing person JUST BARELY MIGHT be able to develop its own self as a separate being from its abuser.  ANYTHING and EVERYTHING else that happens to that little one belongs to the perpetrator and NOT to its own self.

This means for ME that I spent the majority of my infant-childhood NOT being my own self.  For ALL of the time my mother was verbally, psychologically, spiritually, and physically abusing me I was DOING one thing:  Enduring her abuse so I could survive.  During ALL of THIS time, I was in that ‘non-archetypal’ place that I believe we are born into as new and innocent beings that meant I was ONLY being my mother’s ‘fair witness’.

If there had been some other pattern to my relationship with my mother that would have meant at least SOME OF THE TIME I got to be myself, then perhaps I could have moved off of that point of being at dead center as a nonbeing observer of my mother’s madness.  Perhaps then I could have wondered about what was happening to me.  Perhaps then I could have been envious or jealous of the treatment she showed her other ‘darling’ children.  Perhaps I could have THOUGHT for myself.  Perhaps I could have not only FELT the abuse but been able to associate, connect, and string together all the associations belonging to my ongoing experience of myself in my own life – abuse included.

But I couldn’t do any of that.  I never got the chance to.  It is only now at age 58 that I am discovering this NEW information for myself about how being such a victim of such terrible abuse happened AT THE SAME time I was my mother’s primary, intimate WITNESS-observer.

Being at that ‘place’ of what Stone is describing as ‘being without an archetype’ might be fine and good for a person who has been allowed and able to develop and individual clear and strong healthy self from the start.  To ‘get back to’ that place, or to re-achieve that degree of detached non-participation in one’s life might be a goal towards so-called higher spiritual living for SOME.

But for those of us who endured and survived our infant-childhood while being the victim of our caregiver’s UNSPEAKABLE MADNESS this entire process is as reversed NOW during the times of our healing as it was reversed ‘back then’ in the times of our being so hurt and wounded.

I have to find my own choices to BE or NOT to be my mother’s Fair Witness!

As I discover this new level of deep choice, I am beginning to define my own self NOW as I needed to back there from the time I was born.

So if anyone wants to benefit from the experience of actually being able to converse in the here and now with a person who KNOWS what it is like and feels like to be a Fair Witness, talk to a severe infant-child abuse survivor.

During the time we were being overwhelmed by someone’s abuse of us, we were LIVING life as a Fair Witness-Observer being.    Yes, I believe this does mean that all abuse survivors carry the double-sided injury of being not only the victim of the trauma of abuse itself, but also of being a WITNESS ABUSE survivor on the grandest of scales.

In the end, it might be that having our power of CHOICE removed from us is what hurts survivors the most.  I can’t even say, “I want my power of choice back so that I can choose whether or not I want to be my mother’s Fair Witness.”  I never had this choice from the first of my life.  I am only seeing right now what I missed – and when I get this choice, AS I find within myself what this choice IS and how I can make it – I am moving off of this dead center of being a non-person who was the Witness-Target of my mother’s mean madness.

At the same time, these new insights are helping me to realize how FAIR I have ALWAYS been as I consider what my mother (and my father) did to me.  NOW I want the conscious choice to be FAIR or NOT!  I own that ability to be fair or not to be fair!  It was stolen from me at the start of my lie, at the moment of my birth.  So IF I say, “I want my ability to choose to be a remote-viewing observer of my mother’s abusive madness or NOT to be RETURNED to me,” I am saying that I am claiming what must be a Universal Human Right.  This right was mine from within my mother’s womb!    It is that far back that I have to re-turn to re-claim it!!  Look out!  Here I come!

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