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I have not escaped thinking about some information I posted yesterday in two different posts. Some of that information was about Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and some was about the human psychological archetypes. I need to take a minute and tie these two batches of information together from my perspective as a survivor of terrible and long-term infant-child abuse.
Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD says about BPD that ‘splitting’ is ‘very common’ among people with this disorder. She is talking about my mother.
“Splitting is very common in people with borderline personality disorder (BPD), and it leads people with BPD to view others and themselves in “all or nothing” terms. For example, a person with BPD may view one family member as always “good” and another as always “bad.” Or, a person with BPD may see themselves as “good” one minute, but shift to seeing themselves as all “bad” or even evil the next.”
When Joshua David Stone writes in his book, Soul Psychology: How to Clear Negative Emotions and Spiritualize Your Life that
“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.” (page 263)
he is writing about me.
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While the psychologist Carl Jung’s writing about human psychological archetypes is far too complex to describe in this post, it is enough to know that seldom does any human being escape the operation of one or more of these archetypal psychological patterns from operating in their ‘psyche’ at any given moment.
Around the time of our birth is one of ‘those times’ when archetypes are NOT playing their roles across the dramatic expression of our life. Obviously, we have to grow a body-brain before we can DO much of anything. It is during the earliest months and years of our lifetime that we grow and develop the physiological circuitry and pathways in our body-brain that we will use to express our self for the rest of our lifetime.
When Stone talks about this Fair Witness-Observer NON-archetype he is describing a state that I believe we are born into. From that point we develop our body-brain that will eventually be able to express a self along with all the complexities of life that a self is capable of.
Yet, when severe abuse like my mother did to me happens – exactly BECAUSE she had SPLITTING so entrenched within her own physiological body-brain-mind-self – I as her victim did NOT get to develop my own body-brain-mind-self as I would have done had I not been forced to grow up within such an unbelievably toxic environment.
We have all seen film footage from one story or another where someone breaks through a brick wall and finds within it human bones. Dead or alive? Yet I KNOW because I have psychologically been there that growing up with a BPD parent who has no choice but to SPLIT their entire world into insane patterns related to GOOD versus BAD results in our own psychology being sealed behind a massive brick wall.
Brick by insane brick my mother severed my own connection with myself in interaction with the world every step throughout my infant-childhood. As a result I DID NOT get to move off of my born-into condition of being at dead center without any psychological archetypes of my own! I stayed, as I described yesterday, in that place-of-psychological-origin: Being an Observer-Fair Witness which by definition MEANS there are no archetypes present.
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The Wickipedia entry for Carl Jung and archetypes lists the following:
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Jung outlined five main archetypes;
- The Self, the regulating center of the psyche and facilitator of individuation
- The Shadow, the opposite of the ego image, often containing qualities that the ego does not identify with but possesses nonetheless
- The Anima, the feminine image in a man’s psyche; or:
- The Animus, the masculine image in a woman’s psyche
- The Persona, how we present to the world, usually protects the Ego from negative images (acts like a mask)
Although the number of archetypes is limitless, there are a few particularly notable, recurring archetypal images:
- The Child
- The Hero
- The Great Mother
- The Wise old man or Sage
- The Trickster or Fox
- The Devil or Lucifer
- The Scarecrow
- The Mentor
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Yes, there ARE more, and the exist within the human psychological realm like constellations of stars in the sky. They ‘come into being’ when certain human patterns of feeling, thought and action repeat themselves TOGETHER within a psychological constellation that is recognizable enough to be named.
OR – they do not.
I bring this up today in part because I had a very bad sleepless night last night. I could not name exactly what triggered my ‘state of being’ THE ONE WHO CRIES AND DOES NOT SLEEP. Yet I also know that what was triggered resulted in me tumbling into this one of my ‘nameless identities’ that is part of what is called my Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID).
Because my mother had such control over me and my life, I was not allowed to develop ANY identity during the first years of my life. The physiological circuitry and pathways did not develop within me that would have allowed even ONE solitary LINDA to come forth. I was always, consistently and overwhelmingly the CONTAINER for my mother’s BAD split-off self.
The first step as I understand it that a human being takes from birth to becoming a self with identity is to have its FEELING states recognized by its caregivers and mirrored back to it. These early interactions BUILD the circuitry and pathways within the body-brain that allow a fully developed psychologically whole human to develop so that the human archetypal patterns of existence can go out into the world, interact, and form an individual’s life.
When that doesn’t happen, like in my case, something ELSE happens instead – and that something else has at its core the same non-archetype Fair Witness-Observer state that we are born with. I believe that if ‘experts’ took a good, long look the roots of Dissociative Identity Disorder this alternative pattern of ‘being a person’ would become clear.
How this infant-child abuse pattern leads to DID for people who ACTUALLY have separate, definable identities operating is well beyond me to understand. That is NOT my condition. I simply dissolve into a non-identity state that is primarily unnameable EMOTION like I did last night without any clear and definable identity to process it.
My part in the ‘mess’ is to find ways as soon as I can to ‘pull myself out of it’. Much of the abuse and horror of my childhood happened at night (and this is especially true because during the years we lived in Alaska ‘nighttime’ itself has a different meaning because of the extremes in daylight hour shifts). But also because my mother’s insane splitting-related abuse of me happened from the time I was born, when laying down was ALL I could do – the laying down trigger is perhaps the most ancient one I suffer from when something happens that causes me to ‘dissolve-dissociate-disorganize-disorient’.
(This state is also tied for me to the thousands upon thousands of hours of being made to lay in my bed, alone, immobilized and unable to escape or to ‘do’ anything throughout my entire childhood — but suffer and usually — not sleep.)
This is all I want to say about this today. It is not laying down time now, and there are things now that I need to do now in the daylight.
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Stop the Storm 
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