Year: 2010

+A TURTLE CAN’T STAY ON ITS BACK — AND LIVE

alchemynow4 Comments

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There is probably little else so disturbing, disorienting and disorganizing to a turtle or a tortoise than being flipped over onto its back.  It struggles and struggles to turn itself back over because if it stays on its back it dies.

It has taken me many disoriented and disorganized days to at last have this helpful image appear to me.  I have been feeling badly, on my way down from worse to ‘more worse’ and today realized that I absolutely had to figure out how to right myself because this downhill slide — well — SUCKS!

My anxiety level escalated right along with my disorientation and disorganization, and trying to understand what started all of this has taken some time.  Of course I know it all REALLY STARTED when I was born to my insane Borderline mother who knew nothing else to do with me than to batter and abuse me.

Thinking about this upside-down turtle image, I see how its disorientation and disorganization happens at the same time its anxiety level skyrockets as it tries everything in its power to right itself to save its own life.  I have been in some version of that state since the time I was born.  Every time my mother attacked me she in effect flipped me upside-down, creating within my growing body-nervous system-brain-mind-self a state of extreme anxiety (which actually never had time to leave me between attacks, either, because they were so frequent).

I don’t believe there is a way anyone can come out of their earliest childhood with a disoriented-disorganized insecure attachment to the world (and self) without the corresponding massive alteration to their nervous system-brain-body that is later named a so-called ‘anxiety disorder.  My dissociation, my major depression, my complex posttraumatic stress disorder are ALL anxiety-related complications from the severe and long-term infant-child abuse I suffered for 18 years.

What does this all mean to me RIGHT NOW?

I spent two weeks doing my friend a favor and babysitting the very quiet little office that she cares for otherwise.  There should have been nothing to upset me to the degree it did.  Yet at the end of those two weeks which ended last Thursday I could not find any place within myself that wasn’t fully anxious, disoriented and disorganized.  I am still not wholly ‘repaired’ inside from that experience — and the whole (vibrating) mess that is inside of me can also so upset me that everything just continues to get worse and worse until I find a way to stop this spinning while remaining right-side-up.

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While I was in art therapy graduate school 20 years ago I had a series of thoughts come to me — and these thoughts returned to me today.  Back then I drew a circle, like a compass, and in each of the four directions I placed a word:

East – MAKE

South – USE

West – FIX

North – BREAK

As I thought about it, it seemed that at any given time all of us are ‘doing’ one of those four things.  Then I thought about some people seem to be more oriented in their approach to the world in one of those four directions.

Because I have felt so flipped-on-my-back disoriented, disorganized and anxious lately I had to find something that could help me feel BETTER.  My body-self was created in, by and for such traumatic conditions that GOOD or BEST are almost foreign concepts to me.  When I am really off-kilter, just finding ways to feel BETTER rather than WORSE is about all I can manage.

Today I began to simply concentrate and focus on choices I can make right now while being very conscious about which of these four directions my actions are a part of.

We have had lots and lots of rain during our monsoon season this summer, such a blessing.  The weeds are unable to offer resistance no matter how big they have grown so I went out and pulled bunches of them up by their roots this morning — fixing my yard.

I then realized that if I want to go have pizza tomorrow evening for my birthday (59th) I HAD to finally fix my headlamps.  I had tried before and couldn’t budge the screws.  No doubt the passenger side light is the original on my ’78 El Camino.  But someone told me to get a can of PB Blaster to loosen the screws and it worked.  I did it.  I can drive in the dark now for the first time in four months.  Only problem now is I dropped one of those rusty little screws in the dirt and for the life of me can’t find it.  I hope it stays away from my tire and vice verso.

Then I began to clean my freezer and my refrigerator, fixing those too.  I repotted a little houseplant someone me gave last week, fixing that.  In spite of how crappy I might feel, I know that I can find little things, little tiny things that I can do that I can consciously connect to one of these four aspects of LIVING — as it contrasts to spinning down into a destructive cycle that has been familiar to me all of my life and can easily overwhelm my present if I am not very, very careful.

As I make my choices, direct my attention and energy, and accomplish even the smallest of tasks, if I connect what I am doing to one of the four directions of human activities I feel like I am turning these terrible BLUES around in a better direction.  And as I do this I can recognize that I am orienting myself and organizing myself around the things that I do to help things be better — both in my environment and within myself — one little action at a time.

(All of this is about the history of RUPTURES with or without REPAIR — and is what makes the difference between safe and secure attachment or unsafe and insecure attachment to and in the world.)

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+WHAT ARE WE MISSING?

alchemynow2 Comments

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Today’s response to this part of a comment made to this post, +THE JOY OF SAYING ‘NOPE’ TO OPRAH

‘We do have much in common, and I don’t feel understood…ever.’

Replies:

Morning! Even for those with known childhood sexual abuse histories (I don’t have), I believe much of ‘what’s wrong’ happened way, way earlier — and is not recognized as contributing to so much of ‘what’s wrong’.

Those earlier ‘troubles’ underlie all of the later ‘troubles’ but in looking at our whole life, our whole story, our whole set of traumas, our whole resultant difficulties, we aren’t ‘taught’ how to pick all this mess apart so that we can begin to more clearly identify all the separate ‘parts’ that contribute to this ‘whole’.

We are left trying to remain intact and ‘functional’, trying to remain on our own two feet while STILL in the midst of the ongoing tornado-storm that is in our body because it was put there, built right into it, as we grew and developed.

Part of why I mention this in response to your comment is that from birth our early caregivers build our body-brain (including our emotional and social brain-self) through a process related to ‘feeling understood’. MIRRORING, REFLECTING BACK, and RESONATING are three extremely important processes that must happen — in safe and secure earliest attachment relationship-interactions — so that we can grow up with what we need.

When those three things don’t happen for us from the time we are born, and especially in our first year of life, we don’t even end up with a body-brain-mind-self that has a real CLUE what it feels like for someone to understand us — to mirror, reflect, and resonate with us so that we can FEEL FELT.

Feeling felt is actually a ‘technical term’ for what we experience when we feel understood. Add onto these complications the fact that all infant-child abuse survivors have had things happen to them that are far, far, far past what most safe and securely attached (and nonabused) people can imagine, let alone empathize with!!

As I begin to UNDERSTAND all of what I am describing I also begin to understand that the most important person who I need to UNDERSTAND me is — ME! Yes, that can be a lonely, lonely ‘place’ to be in, but all that went so wrong in our early life REALLY does to hurt us is prevent our own strong, clear, happy, safe, securely attached individual, autonomous OWN SELF from forming. We are robbed of our own self, and that, to me, is the biggest hurt, the deepest wound, and the most important one for us to heal.

As we begin to more clearly understand the nature of our hurts, we are fine tuning our own reception abilities in terms of being able to look around us and visually begin to SEE these same early abuse survivor patterns in other people. We begin to recognize them not only in our self, but in others. Then we begin to see how MANY people did not have what they needed in safe, safe, SAFE — and secure attachment environments. These people are changed just as we are, to different degrees — and it is the quality and nature of the SAFE AND SECURE attachments that any of us have with ANYONE in our earliest years that fights back against any and all harm that was done to us THEN so that we have stronger inner resources NOW.

and

There are two pieces of information I need to add to my previous reply. Dissociation that was built into us through early trauma and abuse most often includes ‘depersonalization’ and ‘derealization’. Part of what makes this happen is that our early brain didn’t form patterns of ‘repair’ to go along in a reasonable and healthy way with the overwhelming patterns of ‘RUPTURE’ that the deprivations and traumas of our early lives created.

This means that dissociation — or patterns of all these ruptures without corresponding (and necessary) repair just leaves us with lots of holes in the fabric of our social-emotional brain processing — all the way through our nervous system. When we feel ‘depersonalization’ and ‘derealization’ as parts of dissociation, we are feeling those holes. Anything we can learn about recognizing these patterns when we feel them — and recognizing how TODAY to help ourselves gain REPAIR for the ruptures (triggers) that send us off on the dissociation pathway, the better off we will be.

The second point I need to mention is that ALL RELATIONSHIPS in our present life that are safe and secure attachments are important to our well-being. But along with this comes the fact that not even we, our self, have what it takes to REALLY be able to experience true empathy. We are not as good as we might think we are at mirroring other people back to their self, reflecting back to them or with resonating with ANYONE else as we COULD have been if someone had done that repairing-of-ruptures for us as our body-brain grew early in our lives.

I think of it as a ‘numb zone’ that pops right in between me and other people — and it is tied to these two arms of dissociation I mentioned (depersonalization and derealization). Our intentions can be the best in the world, but as Dr. Allan Schore says, everyone with an insecure attachment disorder has an empathy disorder, as well.

So if we are surrounded by people even as well intentioned to empathize as we are, yet they also have an insecure attachment disorder, they (as are we) are prevented RIGHT WITHIN OUR PHYSIOLOGY from being able to truly offer back ‘understanding’.

I will also say that many people are motivated toward the helping professions that also come from similar backgrounds as their clients do. If a therapist does not understand patterns of secure and insecure attachment chances are not good that they have made REAL progress in healing themselves in the ways that really matter. That means that they also have empathy disorders — and are probably least likely of all to know or admit this fact.

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It strikes me as I think about these words I just wrote that I am describing a PARADOX!

Being able to truly understand another person, IF it involves the process of empathy, does not require that the listener have a history of any kind of early caregiver-infant relationship trauma.  In fact, it is the fact that those of us who DID experience unsafe and insecure very early trauma had our empathy abilities tampered with that means we are the LAST people to really be good at empathy!

Being good at empathy, really healthily good at it requires that the listener did not have their empathy abilities tampered with (and changed as a result of early relationship trauma).  True, we survivors can learn what empathy actually IS and can learn to practice true empathy — but we will always be like immigrants, never natural empathy-ability citizens.

There’s lots more I can say about this — but it is saved for some other day…..

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+THOUGHTS – INCLUDING DISMISSIVE-AVOIDANT INSECURE ATTACHMENT DISORDER

alchemynow2 Comments

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Before I remove myself from my writing again for this upcoming week during which I will again go sit in the office of my friend to cover for her while she is on vacation, I want to say a few more things.

First, as I wrote my previous post I hit the ‘level of truth’ for myself for the first time in my life where I could make the connection inside of myself that allowed me to honestly and truthfully say, “I love my mother.”  That is not an insignificant step for me, and is one I will be able to appreciate as a useful tool when it is time for me to go ‘back there’ to retrieve my childhood abuse story.

The next comment I want to make has to do with my childhood stories as I have already written them (available here with some digging around through the links:  +DEVIL’S CHILD – My Childhood.)  As I just told my daughter in our telephone conversation, my ‘stories’ are nothing more than dissociated, discontinuous vignettes that exist not unlike letters of the alphabet or individual musical notes that have yet to be composed into a cohesive whole.

My mother’s insecure attachment disorder showed up in her incoherent life.  She could not tell a coherent life narrative, and she gave this disability to me.  My main motivation for spending the years that I did transcribing and ordering my mother’s papers was to create a linear time line that I needed to begin to place my own childhood experiences in a linear line, also.

The other comment I wanted to write concerns my father.  At least NOW I know I have hit the point within my own self where I am clear how I love my mother.  I love her as I described in my previous post.  But I have not reached that level with my father.

When it comes to thinking about, describing and feeling emotions, I always have a sideline running in the background concerning my father.  I think about the dismissive-avoidant insecure attachment disorder patterns as researchers are now being able to actually see them operate through visually watching the brains of such people.

Researchers can watch how some brains create in effect a firewall that leaves actual emotions as they ARE triggered in the body completely out of conscious awareness.  Researchers can see the emotion being experienced in the brain AND at the same time be screened from a person so that they do not know they are even there — AT ALL.  The brain is consuming massive amounts of energy during this screening process, and these ‘brain-holders’ never know it.

There are specific early caregiver-to-infant interactions that create these brains from birth to age one.  These changed brains are intimately connected to the changed nervous system and body of their ‘holders’.  Being cared for by unresponsive, unemotional, cold, depressed and ‘blank-faced’ caregivers are some of the ways these dismissive-avoidant brains are created in infants from the beginning.

These same infants, had they been interacted with by securely attached and appropriate-adequate early caregivers would have developed entirely different brains.  My father was an unwanted infant born to an unwilling and depressed mother, raised by his teenage sister primarily who was not caring or nurturing.  In the end, my father’s dismissive-avoidant insecurely attached brain worked very well on his behalf as he could NOT FEEL — did not HAVE to feel — and hence could ignore what he NEEDED to pay attention to and react to appropriately.

I have an important person I care deeply about who I believe also has a dismissive-avoidant insecure attachment disorder, and I can see how easily this pattern fits with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  Very nicely indeed.  The fact is that people who fit into this range can most often manage to get along just fine — but have extremely limited (if any) ability to FEEL and therefore to CARE how others feel, either.  It would be easy to call them ‘intimacy disabled’.

Sometimes given the intensity of my emotions and my difficulties with them, I find myself tempted to envy these people for their cool, unemotional detachment.  I then remind myself that to miss out on FEELING is to miss out on the entire color range of being alive.  I also remind myself of the dangers of living without feelings — they have a purpose just as our physical body needs to feel its way through life, and to NOT be able to feel puts a person dangerously close (in my mind) to being ‘sociopathic’ — and therefore dangerous!  It is not a good thing to NEED anything from these people.

And it is a sure thing that any infant born to its earliest caregiver with a dismissive-avoidant insecure attachment is going to have that same brain downloaded into their own forming brain — UNLESS there is another strong influence by another early caregiver who is safely and securely attached and therefore has a brain that operates with feelings included.

*Note:  People with the other insecure attachment disorders of preoccupied and disorganized-disoriented tend to be attracted to those with dismissive-avoidant because they know these people will not overwhelm them emotionally.

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+WORDS SPOKEN WITH THE POWER TO CHANGE ME

alchemynow7 Comments

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The first thought I have as I turn around and begin to look back over the span of my adulthood (which covers 40 years now) is, “If I had only known THEN what I know now……”  I don’t say this about anything trivial, ordinary or mundane.  I say this about something I see as being so important that if I HAD somehow had the information I have now, the entire course of my adult life would have gone differently.

There are two brilliantly lit spots in my adult history, and they both appeared within months of each other when I was nearing 30 years old.  The first one happened when my 4-year-younger sister took a bus from Edmonton, Canada to visit me in Minnesota.  She was hugely pregnant, and I can still see her resting on my humble living room couch, her head tipped back a little as I came through the doorway into the room.

“You know, Linda,” she said to me, “if you aren’t very very angry for the things Mother did to you while you were growing up there’s something very very wrong with you.”

Talk about a dead-stopper, that was it.  I’m sure my eyes popped wide open, my mouth too.  I had not one single word to speak back to her.  I just stared.  Yet on the inside something happened to me.  She opened a crack in my carefully crafted adult reality that had never been there before.  I didn’t recognize what happened at the time, but her simple statement itself changed the course of my life.

Those changes have been gradual, but I can name that moment as the one that moved something inside of me I didn’t even know was there.

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The second brilliantly lit moment in my adulthood happened about a month after my sister’s comment.  An older Native American friend of our family named Larry had stopped in for dinner with his wife.  After we had eaten, after everyone else had left the table and he and I were sitting there alone together,  Larry looked straight into my eyes across the plate cluttered table and simply said, “Linda, you aren’t the person you want everyone to think you are, are you?”

Again I was absolutely stunned.  To tell you the truth, I had no conscious idea what he was talking about, and nearly 30 years later I STILL don’t!  Did I ask him what he meant?  No.  But here again he stuck some kind of a gigantic crowbar into the crack my sister had opened up inside of me and pried that crack wide open — somehow.

I have never forgotten his words.  I remember them exactly, and I remember myself receiving his words in stunned silence, just as I had received the words my baby sister had spoken to me just as simply.

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I would say right now that both of these statements were straight ones, perhaps the most-straight statements I have ever heard in my lifetime.  These were words of truth and accuracy that shot straight into the center of ME, and never in my lifetime will I lose my appreciation and awe for the power these words had to help straighten out the course of ME in my lifetime.

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I had one similar experience during the long 18 year course of my severely abusive childhood, only this time the words came from an unknown source and I heard them inside of my own self.  I must have been about 13 or 14 when I heard them spoken.  I had been punished severely, beaten, berated, and banished — for what THAT time I do not remember.

What I do remember was lying in bed in the middle of the day.  Being put to bed was a punishment even worse than being put into a corner, both of which consumed massive segments of my childhood.  I know I had been crying, and looking back I know my pain was so deep it consumed me.  My eyes were open, and I was staring at my mother’s carefully varnished plywood wall.  I remember the wandering, curving grain of the wood and the curved ‘eye’ and ‘lip’ shapes embedded here and there.  (I had no idea as a child what these were for, and only found out as an adult that they were ‘plugs’ put into plywood to repair spots where twigs had grown into the tree.)

All of a sudden I heard a voice like none I had ever heard before.  It spoke clearly, but seemed to come from far, far away as it calmly stated, “Linda, it is not humanly possible for anyone to be as bad as your mother says you are.”

That was it.

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Many Indigenous People use a term for The Great Mystery to describe all things deeply spiritual that cannot be talked about in any other way.  I would include all three of these statements in that category, even though I know two of them crossed the lips of real human beings.  But the source of these words, the meaning of these words, the timing of when these words reached me, and what they all touched deep inside of me belongs in my mind to The Great Mystery.

As I consider the words that appeared to me in that tear stained, sorrow-filled bed when I was still a child, I think about my mad, mean mother.  I think about some invisible ‘line’ that divided her from me and me from her, as I ask a question that has no answer in this lifetime.

“Why was I gifted with those words that saved me from becoming like my mother?  Why did it happen that no words were given to my mother anywhere along the span of her lifetime that could have just as equally saved her?”

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I feel like I am standing at the edge of a great, horror-filled and very dark abyss as I write now.  I am going to take a step off of firm ground out into thin air, trusting there is something solid I can trust will hold me up even though I can’t see it.  As I take this step, I look down, and I see two people falling into that inky blackness.  One is my mother, the other is myself as a child.

I hear again that voice and those words that came to me that day in my bed of despair, and I see that they caught me and stopped my fall as surely as if they had spun a net to catch me.  I see that there were no words to break my mother’s fall, none that she could possibly have heard anyway, and she continues to fall.  Fall, fall, fall, to the moment of her death.

What I heard in those words as a child is not what I now see as their full meaning.  As a child I needed to be told that I could not possibly be as bad as my mother said I was.  I now see the other part, the ‘humanly possible’ part.  To be told in this way at this particular time that I was HUMAN at all is what MOST saved me, though back then it was having the limit set on how bad I could NOT be that I somehow heard.

Back then I must have instinctively swallowed the whole spoonful of saving elixir contained in the whole statement.  If I had stopped to say to whomever spoke those words, “They are meaningless to me because I am not even human, therefore there is no limit to how bad I am,” I do not believe I would be alive today — and certainly not alive without the madness that consumed my mother.

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As strange as it might be to think this way, I believe the hardest part of letting go of my perpetrator, my terrible and terrifying abuser, my mother, is not that I hate her.  It is not that I don’t forgive her.  The hardest part is coming to terms with the fact that I could not then, cannot now, can NEVER save her.  I cannot save her from her falling.  And more than anything else I can possibly think of, this lets me know that in my heart of hearts — if I ever question this, and I do — I loved my mother then — and I still do.

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Now, getting back to firm ground I turn away from the edge of that wicked abyss and walk away, walk away, walk away, walk away.  I do not run because the pull of it, the gravity of it echoes, echoes, echoes.  Which leads me to the point I wanted to make at the beginning of this post.

What I know now that I didn’t know as a child, didn’t know through the first 40 years of my adulthood is that this abyss exists.  It is very real.  It is at the center of my natural life because its existence was at the center of my mother’s life when she brought me into this world, and every interaction I ever had with her, most clearly all of them for the first 18 years of my life, happened as SHE was falling through the horrible blackness of that pit and as she did everything in her power to take me down there with her.

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I can come up now from this writing so far and take a gulp of sweet fresh air, gaze out my window at the clear blue sky, listen to my parakeet chirp away at some foreign bird it hears perched on a tree branch.  And as I come back to this present world I bring back three words like they are the plug at the end of a long electric power cord of truth — and insert these three words into the history of my past as I know it.

The three words:  Insecure Attachment Disorder.

Not having some way to anchor ourselves safely and securely in the world our body lives in means that we are falling, falling, falling  into an inner world of terror and darkness without end.  Those are the words I now have to describe what I did not know even existed — as an essence of my life — as a child or as an adult person who heard the three statements I mention here.

As I look back on my entire life, including my adulthood past, I now know that this dark bottomless pit has always been with me.  It’s force, its gravity, its existence?  I have felt it, felt it in my body, and never knew its name.

As I look back on my adulthood I can see the patterns.  Over and over and over again — for every major decision I have made in my life, I was FEELING that great open pit, and I ran from it.  I didn’t walk, I RAN as fast and as hard as I could not knowing I could not escape its pull even though I seemed to be able to avoid it.

I did not.

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I met men.  I had sex.  I fell in and out of love.  I did drugs.  I drank heavily.  I had babies and cared for them.  I married and divorced and married and divorced.  I traveled.  I moved from one end of this great country to the other.  I wandered.  I found homes, made homes, took them apart and moved on.  I wandered by the crashing ocean side, I wandered by the lakes and through the forests and over fields.  I planted, I reaped, I preserved food.  I bought things and sold them and gave them away.  I tried studies, read books, went through treatments.  I tried jobs, a career, did art, made things — and gave them away as well.

Now?  I mostly sit still, and I write, and I learn to read and play music.  And now?  I am naming that hole, that inky dark pit that I live with — right here, right now.

I am beginning to comprehend that the more I struggle the more powerful the pull that black pit has upon me — because it has its tendrils built right into every cell in my body.  I can’t change that, but I can change what I know and what I do.

I no longer wish to fly off in one direction or another every time some dissociated fragment of myself is triggered by some event in life that blindsides me and makes me lose my poise and balance as I have during the days of my past.

I am intent on learning what this black pit is and how it operates.  I will run from it no more, nor will I let its influence determine my reactions within my own life.  At present I believe I am making some progress.  I can hear its tone — its single roaring tone.  I believe when all is said and done it only has ONE TONE, one main feeling that it sets to resonating within my body.

That tone?  I call it inconsolable despair.

There.  That’s not so hard!  I can learn to recognize that tone when it starts resonating within all the cells of my body, and begins to crawl around within the neurons of my brain.  Inconsolable despair.

Sure, it would be nice if I didn’t know what that tone was, and didn’t know what it feels like.  But I believe every mammal is born with it, and perhaps other kinds of species as well.  It is this, the existence of this inconsolable despair that motivates life to seek all that it needs to continue its existence.

I can thank my daughter who is such a fantastic mother for describing to me how her newly born (now five months old) son wakes from deep and peaceful slumber EXPRESSING this feeling.  There is nothing that has happened to him in his present lifetime that would explain where this feeling state comes from for him — except that he was born with it.

Most appropriately, everyone around that new little person rushes to his rescue when he wakes up crying, sobbing his sounds for his feeling of inconsolable despair.  That is as nature intends.  His needs are always met through safe and secure attachment patterns and my hope is that over time as his body grows, his nervous system and brain grows, his mind and his self that maybe he can gain so many good ways to solve that eternal problem that he will never have to feel it again.

But for those of us who DO still feel it, I think it’s helpful, no, downright empowering to know what this feeling is and where it comes from so that we can find the best ways possible to offer our own self healthy consolation that can dim — even though it might never be able to extinguish — our deeply felt feelings of inconsolable despair when they threaten to overwhelm us.

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So in response to my old friend Larry’s comment about the person I am, if I can keep from running off into some dissociated life pattern, if I can remain here true to my present task of learning not only WHO I am but most importantly HOW I am in my body in this lifetime, perhaps someday I will understand what he was telling me that day because I still have to say his words simply still remain a part of The Great Mystery.

Larry left this world a long time ago, and perhaps at this moment he is looking at me and smiling — or — shaking his head in puzzlement that I still don’t know what he meant.

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+OH WHAT A NEW FOUND JOY!

alchemynowLeave a comment

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Since I began my break (perhaps strike) from writing a few days ago, I have been spending lots of time learning to read music and to play ‘piano’ on my amazing 88-key keyboard I bought a few months ago.  What an education!  My admiration for piano players is increasing with every moment I spend engrossed in my pleasurable task!

What joy there must be in actually being able to PLAY this instrument!  I can only begin to imagine what that would be like.  I learned the ditty for naming the lines on the treble clef when I was in third grade – and that was IT for my musical education.  So I am at the beginning.

What I was thinking about today as I begin to combine notes for some of the pieces of music I am trying to understand and play is how hard it is for me to decipher the individual sound of notes once two keys are played simultaneously.  I imagine people with trained ears can pick the two separate notes out easily, but I sure can’t.  What I hear is a brand new THIRD NOTE!

It made me think about feelings, and about how hard it is to decipher them when we are actually experiencing more than one of them at the same time!  Then we have the equivalent of the THIRD NOTE — something new and different that vibrates our body in a way we might not be able to describe.  How can we  pick the feelings apart when they happen this way?

I don’t have an answer to my own question.  I am having way too much fun healing my body-brain with sound at this point.  I love the waltzes and the lullabies!  Oh, how wonderful and amazing this is!  And learning to play these notes off the page, I feel like I am touching the fingertips, the hearts and the minds of the people who had these songs come to them and who wrote them down — a direct communication like nothing I have ever experienced before.

So as I went back to the blog here to look for the verbal abuse and music related posts I found what follows here – lots!  Perhaps there’s something useful among all these words — but for now, I’d rather do the music!!!

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+VERBAL ABUSE – CAN I HEAL MY INFANT MUSICAL BRAIN?

+POWER OF SOUND FOR HEALING OUR NERVOUS SYSTEM-BRAIN

+SOME MORE INFO ON MUSIC, VOICE AND THE BRAIN

+THE ‘TERROR-ABLE’ CONSEQUENCES OF INFANT-CHILDHOOD VERBAL ABUSE

+THE TOPIC OF TEASING: TOO HARD TO CONSIDER?

+A LONG, THOUGHTFUL LOOK AT VERBAL ABUSE AS MALIGNANT TEASING

+SECURE AND INSECURE ATTACHMENT AND THE CHILDHOOD NARRATIVE

+CHILD ABUSE: IN THE ABSENCE OF THE PRESENCE OF GOODNESS

+LINKS TO TODAY’S PAGES ON DISSOCIATION AND DISCLOSURE

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+MY JOURNEY BACKWARD IN TIME (WITH SNACKS)

alchemynowLeave a comment

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As long as I am rolling along through the topic of roads today, I might as well write about another experience with ‘road problems’.  Because I seem to be rapidly getting older, I have to say “many years ago” I was working as an art therapist with a caseload of severely traumatized children.  On this winter’s day I had to travel a long way to reach a home-based session with a foster child.  Getting there on time was my greatest concern.

At that time I was driving a monster 3/4 ton Chevy van.  Not a lot of weight for traction in that beast.  I headed across a flat land wide dirt road, and I must add, a wash-boarded one.  Any readers with experience in country living will know what that means.  Somehow very mysterious physics comes into play when enough round tires travel down certain dirt roads so that entire long series of patterns appear on the surface that look exactly like what they are named after — a wash board.

“Oh, great,” I was thinking to myself as I looked at my watch and realized that the time I had taken just to FIND this road had bitten a considerable chunk out of the remaining time I had to get to my appointment on time.  The wind had swept all the snow off of the road and into the ditches, hence providing me with a dry straight-of-way — and I took off down it flying.

Well, ALMOST flying.  Before I felt myself heading into a full blown spin off the road I noticed the cut-off trunks of some poor dead trees sticking their weathered tips out of the vast snowbanks I was now going to meet up with up close and personal.  Off we went (van and I), landing with a serious tilt in deep snow with the passenger side wheels nearly in the air.  Stopped with the van’s underside gas tank directly poised to land squarely on top of those tree tips.

Not a comely position for professional-lady me in my stockings and nicely pleated wool skirt.  “How exactly am I supposed to climb out of this beast?”  I didn’t have time to answer my own question when I felt the van beginning to move.  Gravity was having its pull, and down on top of those sharpened stakes my poor gas tank was headed.

Of course I pulled a “Linda.”  Nobody there to hear me but the van I was speaking to, I didn’t empty my verbal arsenal politely.  “Don’t you F—– DARE!” I commanded of that van firmly.  The tilting stopped.  “Good van!  Very good van!”

I managed to push the driver’s door nearly straight into the air to open it, climbed out stocking legs akimbo, plowed my way out of the snowbanked ditch onto the dry dirt road, and took off marching in the direction of my client’s house my heels clapping along with each stride as if I had planned my arrival to go like that.

Yes, a wisely slow driving farmer stopped and picked me up, delivering me to his neighbor’s house where my appointment waited.  I must have looked a riotous sight, me and my blaze red half sunk van.

Beside the obvious moral of this story, the hidden one for me today is that there are times when we are intent on ‘learning’ from our abusive past that it is not wise to barrel our way through our journey along that road as if there is no possible danger.  I had thought on that day if I just drove fast enough I could skip right over all the millions of tiny ruts, taking the high road over the washboard safely.  Not so.

What all of this means to me in real terms today, at this moment, is that I am approaching a return to my traumatic infant-childhood to retrieve my story very slowly and cautiously.  I find that to move in that direction means that I have to first traverse backward through my adulthood.  Along that road I can already see patterns that I never noticed before.

That is what growing means, I guess.  As I continue to grow in my own way, my perspective is continually changing with new added insights.  Things are not looking the same on my backward journey as I thought they might.  This is like I am playing my life backward toward the moment I will walk back into my home of origin in reverse of when I walked out of it at age 18.

What amazes me most about my adult life is that I have stayed as safe as I have.  That doesn’t mean my journey has been easy, but I did not fall for abusive men — at least I never saw that side of them.  I did not fall for anyone who abused my children, either.  I am extremely grateful for this miracle!

Beyond that, I have a little brightly colored kerchief filled with yummy snacks tied to a stick balanced upon my shoulder as I whistle some version of ‘Dixie’ as I pace myself for my long journey of return back to my childhood so I can see what I can see and learn what I can learn — and feel what I can feel — and. . . . . .

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+THE JOY OF SAYING ‘NOPE’ TO OPRAH

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“Well, tickle me pink!”  I have no idea what the history of that cliche is, but it comes to mind as I entertain myself with a little humor, Linda style.  I give myself full permission to access anything that I can use to prepare for my next task — and to accomplish it — with great success!

I have (literally) a hell of a story to tell.  I am not alone in this.  Anyone who has suffered abuse in life has the same kind of story to tell, but it is those of us who were raised from birth (and perhaps from conception) within the earliest possible truly malevolent environments that have the worst stories to tell.

Not that there is some sort of new-fangled “GONG” show especially for people who want to march up to some television stage and compete for “Who has the very worst infant-child abuse story to tell” kind of prize.  But there ARE critical differences in the long term consequences of differing kinds of early abuse.

A week or so ago during my conversation with my friend I was having lunch with the topic of Oprah came up.  “Oh,” my friend said.  “I heard that now Oprah passed 50 she has decided to let her abusers go.”

“Well, I’ll be horn swaggled,” I think to myself.  Not THE great and powerful Oprah?  Such a public example of the “should do” for all other infant-child abuse survivors.

I’ve never been an Oprah fan.  That could be because I am not a personal fan of either television or magazines.  But in the last week that I have been sitting in an office taking care of its business so my friend could take her vacation I have honed my anti-Oprah insights.

Now, I can in part thank my daughter for this.  She is a very busy professional woman with a marriage and new baby to tend to.  She hasn’t much time left over for one of her simple pleasures:  Making gorgeous, creative, stunningly artistic switchplate covers out of collage.  So I am taking advantage of the quiet time I have at the office to cut apart magazines and prepare a delicious palette of tiny images for my daughter to work with should she ever find the time to sit down and make some of her designs.

In this process I found a pile of ‘used’ Oprah magazines at our local thrift store.  This is the first time I have ever opened one of those magazines — and quite frankly what I found inside appalled me though it did not surprise me.  For all the rumors in the wind I have heard about the ‘do good’ doings of this most-rich woman in America’s spotlight I found nothing in that magazine but continued promotion of the ‘be gorgeous’ make believe woman image in VERY expensive advertising.

Putting aside what I might think about anyone who devotes an entire magazine to their self, and putting aside what I think of anyone with that kind of money who doesn’t avidly reinvest it on the level of ‘who truly needs what for a better life’ down at the bottom of America’s society, I have to be honest and tell you that my motivation for writing a hell of a book with my hell of a childhood story of abuse in it is entirely (self) motivated by my not being responded to on Oprah’s website when I left two separate emails mentioning my story.

No response then, no response ever as far as I am concerned.  I can’t think of anything more delightful than for me to actually write a bestseller that attracts someone of Oprah’s staff, who then invites me onto the Oprah show — so that I can utter back one word and one word only:  Nope.

Now maybe if they were holding my grandson hostage I MIGHT not say “Nope,” but as that’s unlikely I am quite certain there is nothing, absolutely nothing on this blue and green earth of ours that could drag me anywhere near that woman.

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My point being — I can guarantee that no matter what abuse of what kind Oprah experienced during her childhood years, someone loved her — and someone from the instant she was born provided her with safe and secure attachment.

And I WILL be the one to say this:  That is all that really matters.

Without having safe and secure earliest caregiver interactions nobody’s body-nervous system-brain can grow a safe and secure attachment pattern in it.  Without these patterns, there is nothing EVER to be done about truly leaving one’s abuser(s) in the past.  The changes (the damage) is IN THE BODY of early abuse survivors because it was built in during development.

Now, I honestly don’t care one bit what Oprah’s abuse history is.  But I will bet everything I own (inventory sight unseen for any takers) that someone was there to help Oprah’s body-brain-mind-self form correctly during the first year (ESPECIALLY!) of her life.  Once that happens, every other trauma a person experiences for the rest of their lifetime will be processed in a different way than it will be by those whose earliest experiences were not safe and secure — with SOMEBODY.

On top of conception to birth, birth to age one, we have to consider next what happens to age two, and then through age five.  All of these experiences are building the body-nervous system-brain — step by step, foundation stone upon foundation stone.  I am not saying that childhood sexual abuse is not devastating, but processing the experience (any and ALL experience) is very different between those who had safe and secure earliest caregiver interactions and those who did not.

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Out of curiosity I did try to locate the cost of placing an advertisement in “O” for my book.  As far as I can tell the least expensive ad placement is well over $50,000.  Signed.  Sealed.  Delivered.  The answer to O-Oprah is “Nope.”

My ‘bone to pick’ with the O-Oprah Empire has to do with my concerns that NOT acknowledging the existence of resiliency factors of all kinds during early infant-child development depletes the truth of any claims for so-called ‘recovery’ – no matter who makes them.  All RISK factors are always balanced by RESILIENCY factors — not by magic, not by magical thinking, and not by the power of persuasion or suggestion by anyone who is a member of the Magic Kingdom — and I don’t mean Disney’s.

As long as our society does not acknowledge risk and resiliency factors equally, we will not come to the truth about how early infant-child abuse changes physiological development so that early abuse can create very different kinds of body-brains.  The HAVES don’t have to be grateful for what they DID receive on the resiliency side of their existence at the same time they can maintain and perpetrate the MYTH that ‘everyone can be as I am, do as I do’.

NOPE!

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+EARLY ABUSE BUILT US A BODY DESIGNED FOR THE LONG, HARD HAUL THROUGH LIFE

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Having just mentioned metaphors as being useful ways the brain (particularly the right brain) has to consider and process information, I remembered this picture I just discovered yesterday.

My mother took this picture around 1960 during our family’s early Alaskan homesteading years.

Written on the back of the photograph: “See the mud spattering up — it is dark here in the woods and picture doesn’t show up the MUCK [underlined]”

Most of these photographs survived a major fire in the 1980s so the white area in the lower picture is a result of that damage.  I never knew this picture existed until yesterday, and I found it a useful addition to my metaphor thinking about how early trauma changes the development of an infant-child’s body-nervous system-brain.

What those of us with serious insecure attachment ‘disorders’ experience — as related to the physiological changes that complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) causes, is a body that cannot turn off it’s fight-flight-flee-freeze stress response.

When I think of this, I ‘hear’ the low growl of a hard-working machine trying to get us through life in a world that our body was designed to believe would ALWAYS be a dangerous one to our survival.

I know this growl because I heard it growing up on the side of an Alaskan mountain after I was seven as tractors often were heard working hard to either build roads or to repair them.

What our mountainside had was a ‘mountain marsh’ caused by water that ran underground but near to the soil surface.  Once the intricate network of tree and shrub roots that held the soil in place were cut through for road building, the mountainside continually oozed its water — creating in winter massive living glaciers that filled the roads and crawled down the mountain.

In break-up the glaciers melted and created deep ruts that were actually mountain creeks as the water ran down the easiest pathways it could find headed toward the valley below.  Except in the dead of winter, the common denominator for the entire road nightmare was MUD — what my mother is calling here MUCK.

Horrific infant-childhoods tell a little one’s growing and developing body to prepare for a lifetime of the worst.  We only have this one time in our life to grow some of the most profoundly important parts of our body.  Once our adaptations to an early malevolent environment take place, they cannot be undone ‘down the road’ or ‘later on’.  We live with them.

So, in effect I have a body-nervous system built in and designed for a very hard road through life — for one not unlike the road my father was trying to crawl over with his tractor in this picture.

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Another picture I have scanned from this era of my childhood comes to mind, and it represents another metaphor of high risk for severe child abuse survivors — that of BEING STUCK along the way.

I really have the advantage of knowing first hand what stuck looks like!

Always running in low working gear, always trying to negotiate a tough, rough road through life, always prepared for the worst, always at risk for danger, frequently getting stuck and needing to find our way out again — all these experiences are part of severe infant-child abuse survivorship.

All these ways of being in the world are built into our body, and all of it consumes vast amount of our inner resources and life force throughout our lifespan.  If we wonder as adults why we can’t reach some pie-in-the-sky level of so-called ‘recovery’ so that we can be more like other people who had entirely different, benevolent early years that gave them a different body entirely, think about all of this.

I’m not saying that improvements can’t be made for us in our lives toward increased well-being — but first, we need to KNOW what happened to us where it matters most.

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+WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN GROWING – OR WE WOULDN’T BE HERE NOW

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It stuck me this morning that maybe what I have always thought of as ‘healing’ really is something else, and that something else is growth.  Maybe it doesn’t even matter what I call it, just so I continue to experience it!  But if I think in terms of growth rather than healing, an entirely different set of images comes to mind — and a whole different set of metaphors, as well.

I have a little plant growing in a Styrofoam cup that my sister started from its seed and brought over to me a few months ago.  I have it right by my kitchen sink so I can keep my eye on it and notice when it is too dry and begins to wilt so that I can take good care of it.

This is a Mexican Bird of Paradise plant, but we won’t know which variety it is until it lives long enough to bloom.  Is it the hardier (for my altitude and climate) yellow one, or is it the more warmth-oriented red one?  I hope for red, but either way I admire that my sister was able to get this seed to sprout in the first place because doing so requires some special treatment.

I don’t know what actions my sister actually took, but I have heard that the seed must be pounded to crack its shell.  It is a desert native, so on its own the species has provided its offspring with some way to make it forward in the world.  I am just glad to have this little plant, and today I am going to move it into a bigger container, but I will still keep it where I won’t be likely to ignore its needs.

As I watch the little stems bud and lengthen I think about this healing vs growth idea of mine.  That plant isn’t healing, at least I wouldn’t name its process that.  I would say it is growing.  And as it grows I certainly cannot predict the shape it takes.  It’s growing in its own way although of course it depends on me to give it what it needs to do so.

Perhaps every single thing I have done in my life, and certainly as I try to ‘heal’ from the terrible trauma of 18 years of severe abuse from my mother as I grew a body-brain, was not and is not about healing.  Maybe it was simply about growing — then and now.

Somehow as I think about this growing angle rather than a healing one I feel less pressure to do ‘it’ right!  Certainly this little plant I am watching doesn’t care if it grows right or not.  It just does what it naturally does — and grows!  If it didn’t grow, it would die.  That’s a simplicity I can understand.

I have intuitively always found today’s emphasis on ‘recovery’ impossible to swallow.  Now I know that due to the circumstances of my early abusive environment that changed how my body-brain-mind-self developed I have nothing to go back and get — nothing to ‘recover’ unless I go all the way back to my body as it grew within my mother’s womb and try to find something back THERE that wasn’t permanently altered by my trauma-influenced development during all the stages after my birth.

I’m not going to be able to ever ‘go back there’ and recover any sense of being a safe and securely attached person in the world.  I didn’t get to grow and develop any safe and secure attachment patterns or circuitry into my body from the start.  As I recognize how my experiences changed my very body forever, I am also recognizing the patterns of my life that happened to the largest extent because my development WAS so changed in a malevolent environment of trauma.

Yes, I survived.  And yes, I have looked at what I do now as ‘healing’.  But I am beginning to think that I might just want to throw that word out completely as ‘not relevant’.  What I am doing is what everyone does who is breathing their way from one past moment, through a present one, and hopefully into a future.  I am growing.  Simply growing.

As I begin to think in this new way I understand that my growth is not always predictable.  I am often surprised by what ‘comes up’.  My new little leaf here, my new little root tip there, my branches extending off in this direction or that one.  Learning how to not only watch my own growth happen, but to begin to understand that I ONLY have to be willing to let it happen frees me to appreciate all the interesting twists and turns I have always taken along the way — throughout my life — from the moment I was born.

Looking at my life in terms of growth rather than healing might also change how I look at ‘surviving’.  Perhaps all that my survival really has been from the beginning is my growth.  I just continued to grow from the time I was born through horrific experiences in a very nasty environment.  Somehow I had and found what I needed to do my growing in spite of all of it!

I am free to anticipate all the interesting and clever ways my growth takes place each day.  And because I am my own little plant, I don’t have to compare myself to anyone else’s growth process, either.  If I can see and appreciate that what I needed for my continued growth was there for me from the start of my life, I can more easily appreciate that whatever I need to continue my growing is also right here, right now for me today.

Some good soil, a little water, just the right amount of sunlight, a little darkness at night, no weeds to crowd me out and nobody to trample on my little sprouting branches and I am all set to go.  If healing happens while I am busy growing, that’s OK with me.

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I suspect I need to pause to notice all this because I am preparing to go back into the past of my horrible childhood to retrieve my own story — so that I can write it.  I need to remember that I am never actually going backwards.  Growth is a forward affair.  No matter what crap I may encounter as I remember myself in my childhood, I know that all it can do is act as good fertilizer for the growth I am doing today.

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+LINK ON ‘KILLER’ BRAINS

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My sister just sent this link to me – check it out!

A Neuroscientist Uncovers A Dark Secret

by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

AND

On The Scale Of Evil, Where Do Murderers Rate?

A forensic psychologist has come up with a 22-point scale to rate evil, complete with examples of murderers from the 20th century.

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