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I have spent a lot of time wondering how I would ever be able to write a book about my abusive childhood if I can’t, won’t or don’t ‘go back there’ to remember how I FELT inside during those 18 years of severe trauma. After my experience yesterday of trying to manage being in a medically over-stimulating and challenging appointment environment — as I wrote about in my last post — +DURESS AND DISSOCIATION — I am beginning to understand that how I felt yesterday and how I tried to describe my experience in my post is EXACTLY how I felt during most of my childhood.
When the words ‘information machine’ appeared in that post, and as I thought about it since then, what I am beginning to understand is that the regions of my brain that process semantic-factual information never became integrated with the parts of my brain that process emotional, social or autobiographical ‘feeling felt’ information.
The ‘information machine’ child COULD and DID go to school and learned complicated bits of facts about the world I live in. These facts were connected to facts I began to learn about the factual environment around me from the time I was born. I was able to become oriented in the world of physical objects and information about them as if I had a separate brain from my OTHER brain — the one that was built in terror and chaos from a time well before I even had words.
As I spoke with my daughter last night about what happened yesterday the word BOMBARDED appeared to me almost as an overarching umbrella description of how my experience of being alive in a body in the world feels to me at those times the ‘information machine’ becomes overwhelmed. Never until my experience with aggressive cancer and its treatment starting July 2007 did I ever have to experience what it feels like in my adulthood to experience what I evidently nearly ALWAYS felt during my infant-childhood.
The ‘information processing machine’ part of me continued to grow as I grew during my first 18 years because it was invisible and was something my mother could seldom outright attack as she DID attack every other part of me as I grew up. No other expression of LINDA as an individual being-person-identity was allowed to even appear, let alone grow, develop, express herself, become visible, or flourish.
After the extreme duress that cancer and its treatment caused me it has seemed that some important ‘functional-in-this-world’ part of me was erased. When I need ‘her’ to be HERE to process the factual nonemotional, nonsocial information that being a human being in a human world involves, she is no longer available.
The ‘information machine’ operated more like the Tin Woman than a human being, and did NOT process emotional information (that is physiologically intertwined with social information in our early forming right limbic brain). The part of our brain that handles “Just the facts, Ma’am” does NOT need emotional information.
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These brain operations evidently CAN be dissociated from one another. Not even mentioning what I experienced of my mother’s abuse from birth, even by the age I was in these stories there is no way ‘factual information’ had a place in my experience of trauma and abuse such as these. My mother’s insane abuse had nothing to do with ME or with reality — I could ‘make sense’ out of nothing she did to me — the FACTS — and MY reality — meant nothing.
+MY 6-WEEK NEWBORN CHECKUP – THE MONSTER WAS BORN WHEN I WAS
see also on my mother and the devil: +WORD WARRIOR NEWS: MY BROKEN, BROKEN, BROKEN MOTHER
*Age 5 – SHARON AND THE FIRE ANTS
*AGE 6 – FIRST GRADE — NIGHT ON THE STOOL
*AGE 8 – MY BLACK RABBIT, PETER
*Age 9 – JOHN and the CHERRY TREE
*Age 10 – THE SHAMPOO LIE AND RUNNING AWAY
*Age 13 – DIRTY DIAPER AND PEPPLES IN MY KNEES
*Age 14 – Gardening and the Sabotage
*Age 15 – FORCED TO WATCH AN ALASKAN SUNRISE
see also for background information:
++SCHORE ON DEVLOPMENT OF RIGHT BRAIN
***Notes on Siegel’s writings
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Stop the Storm 