The most important work we can do, individually and globally, is the healing and prevention of traumas so that we don't pass them down to future generations. This blog is a working tool to contribute to this good work.
When, in my adulthood, I first heard people using versions of a saying, “The table was turned,” I envisioned in my mind someone being angry and turning a table upside down so that its legs stuck up in the air. It took me a long time before I overcame my embarrassment enough to ask someone what they meant when they said this.
“Oh,” this person said to me. “It’s like four people are sitting playing cards. Each of them has their hand laying on the table top and someone turns the table so that everyone has someone else’s hand and THAT hand, rather than their original one, is what each plays the game through with.”
I mention this today because as I described what I have been thinking about pampered versus not pampered people to someone I am very close to yesterday that person responded to me with, “But the word pampered has such negative connotations!”
In other words, they were expressing a sentiment that would probably be common among those people I would say were raised from birth in a ‘benevolent’ world that I am now calling a pampered one.
I can see where this sentiment could come from. Looking at Webster’s online dictionary for this word I found:
2 a: to treat with extreme or excessive care and attention <pampered their guests> b:gratify, humor <enabled him to pamper his wanderlust — New Yorker>
Well, how about that? I have my sense of the contrast between being pampered and NOT being pampered just about right for what I am intending to describe! Look at the antonyms!
We are not commonly used to using one word to describe in contrast its opposite, but in this case my meaning is extremely clear when I use it to describe how severe infant-abuse survivors experienced their world — yes, when they NEEDED to and SHOULD have been treated exactly the opposite from the way that they actually were.
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How many people among ‘the masses’, however, ever bristle and become concerned and defensive when someone calls someone else ‘mentally ill’, for example?
In contrast, how many of the pampered people are going to bristle and become concerned and defensive when someone calls them pampered?
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We are very comfortable in our society in using definitive explanations for things that rely on a linear black-and-white, either-or pattern of thinking. It’s EASIER than making sure we understand the full meaning of what we are talking about.
It is EASIER to simply say, “I was abused when I was little,” or “I was not abused when I was little” than it is to say “I was not pampered” versus “I was pampered.”
I could continue to accept this simplistic thinking if there weren’t so many drastic and terrible lifelong consequences for survivors of severe infant-child abuse that society THEN feels completely comfortable in blaming and shaming the survivors for.
It is THEN that I want to ‘turn the tables’ so that the pampered would need to play THEIR entire lifetime out living in the reality that severe abuse survivors know with their every breath.
And the survivors? What would we survivors know of living the truly, from-birth pampered life even if someone were to suddenly give us one?
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My case in point if ye be of those who can make this gigantic leap! Nature has mirrored the experience of those whose body was built in ONE kind of world ONE way — and not the other way — permanently.
Pampered-from-birth (‘good enough’) people have a body that knows that reality. Not pampered-from-birth people have a body that knows that reality.
Nature and its ways cares nothing for the individual personal comfort zone of anyone. Nature only TRULY cares that a species does what it needs to do to ‘continue on being’. This entire array of possible body building options that happens in direct response to either the pampered world that raised us or to the not pampered one is — and I am going to the Bigger Picture here — meant to accomplish this ‘continue on being’ by creating bodies that THEMSELVES signal-convey the kind of world that built the person who lives in it.
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So we could turn another table of laid-out card hands here so that Nature received the personalized individual’s perspective on the experience of being alive and the individual people received the hands that clearly expresses what Nature cares about, intends and accomplishes.
How I am in the world, having been raised in a not pampered infant-childhood directly signals to others (who could detect and understand these signals) exactly what the condition of my early world was like — because those conditions built me to be the way that I am.
Jump to the peacock’s tail. A brilliant, resplendent, gorgeous and healthy peacock tail is simply a signal and a sign that the experiences of that bird happened in an environment rich in resources. The tail has nothing PERSONAL to do with the peacock at all!
Another peacock with a pitifully shabby, dull and sickly looking tail is simply signaling to its hoped-for mates that this bird was not pampered in a world of plenty.
Which peacock’s tail is going to attract which kind of mating partner?
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Well, as the ‘superior species’ we don’t like to be pared down to our actual size so that we can not only recognize but also accept that HOW we are in the world (based on the conditions of the world that formed us) does exactly the same thing. HOW we is a signal that expresses the NOT personal reality of THE CONDITIONS OF THE WORLD and actually, as Nature intends, doesn’t have much to do at all with our personal wishes or concerns as individuals.
So again I will say when you read particularly the last paragraphs of Dr. Martin and Fellow’s paper here *SYMTPOMS: 120909 Scan of Teicher’s Research – Trauma Altered Development Paper you are reading a description of the MISMATCH that happens when not pampered people are born into a not pampered world and at the end of their earliest years are hatched out into a pampered one!
The problem is this mismatch. The problems we endure as individual severe early abuse survivors IS THIS MISMATCH.
If pampered people were the only ones who lived in a pampered world — OK. If not pampered people were the only ones who lived in a not pampered world — OK.
How can I say OK to a resource-scarce and traumatizing world? Think about what our species had to go through so that we could be here asking that question. Our species was able to experience pampering ONLY under conditions of plentiful resources. When times were really, really tough, we were able to use an INNER resource that nature has NEVER let us lose: We contain within our very young body the ability to ADAPTIVELY AND FLEXIBLY adjust to the conditions of the world we are born into.
Then we are able to move forward in time in a not pampered body — surviving — continuing on as individual representatives of our species — into a future where resources were better. THEN the future generations could adaptively and flexibly adjust to these more pampered conditions — and babies could grow a body that reflected those improved conditions.
In other words, as I write this, I understand that ‘the tables’ are DESIGNED to turn. Without that ability to adjust and adapt flexibly we would not have had the resilience we needed to survive — not as a species, not as individuals.
We need to understand the bigger picture so that we can depersonalize the facts. Pampered people do not need to take offense when someone points out the truth of the benefits they received from a resource-rich environment from the time they were born.
AND not pampered people need to be FREE to be people who are not condemned and judged for the fact that our body did EXACTLY THE SAME THING that pampered people’s did: Adjusted in development to the conditions of OUR environment — which happened to be a resource-scarce one.
If our proverbial turning table were laden on one side with rich and nutritious food an on the other side tree bark and bugs — and THEN this table were to be turned so that pampered and not pampered people had to consume a diet they were not familiar with — my points here in this post might be a little easier — or tougher — to swallow.
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(Of course, I suppose ALL the female peacocks would go for the prettier tale, and in this example of female selection, who wins? I don’t know…… What I do know is that this version of a mate selection process is about finding who came from the richest world that had the best resources — and who got them.)
It costs money, it’s illegal in at least one state, it uses information that is accessable for free, and people are buying it. One of the iPhone’s best-selling apps in recent weeks is called Offender Locator, an application that gives you the address of all registered sex offenders near you.
Surely, this is a fantastic development in child safety, right? Information that will keep your child safe, sent right to your phone. Unfortunately, like most issues concerning the sex offender registry, the information it provodes is at best not terribly useful, and at worst can be counter-productive to child safety.
How can this be? Answering this question reveals some important truths about child sexual abuse that are often not reported by the media. First of all, the majority of sexual offenses against children do not result in a sex offender getting convicted and registered. Most children don’t disclose their abuse while they are still children, many disclosures don’t result in any legal action, and many attempts at prosecution don’t result in the perpetrator being convicted of a sex crime. This means that an overwhelming percent of sex offenders aren’t registered as such. But what’s wrong with knowing the whereabouts of the ones who are registered? That answer depends on how that knowledge is used and the context it’s used in. Living in close proximity to a sex offender doesn’t necessarily put a child in danger, as sex offenders are very unlikely to kidnap a child. Sex offenders are much more likely to gain access to children in their families or jobs. That means it’s much more important to know if your sister-in-law’s new boyfriend is a registered sex offender than the guy down the street, but how many of us would ever think to use the registry for this?
Keeping children safe from sexual abuse is the responsibility of all of us, but it cannot be accomplished by relying on the database of registered offenders. Parents need to know the facts about child sexual abuse, and they need to be very mindful of situations when one adult is alone with one child. They need to realize that, in almost all cases, children who are sexually abused are abused by someone the parent, child or both turst. Parents need to realize that just because someone “seems nice” or is related to them doesn’t make them safe. This is an overwhelmingly big, dark, complicated realization, but once parents accept that, they can take real, useful actions to keep their kids safe.
Did you grow up in a meteor crater? How safe and secure were you in there?? Were you left alone to try to grow your best body-brain-mind-self while showers of dangerous and life threatening rocks continued to bombard you?
I treated myself to an online search yesterday to try to figure out exactly what the difference is between analogy, metaphor and simile. Which way does my mind work when I go to write and think in terms of images that do not let go of me?
Metaphor: My home of origin was a meteor crater.
Analogy: My home of origin was LIKE a meteor crater?
Simile: This is how I write! A simile happens when a writer goes on and on and on — continuing to use an image to interweave it with words in a long drawn-out thought. That’s me!
Soooooo……
When the infant-child developmental experts write about how a little one’s body-brain changes in response to the stress of trauma, neglect and abuse in a malevolent world — I now translate that fact in my own thinking to this: These little ones ARE NOT THE PAMPERED ONES.
Their home of origin was a meteor crater.
When the experts write about how in a ‘good enough’ safe and secure environment their best body-brain self is formed in a benevolent world, I translate that now to mean — THEY WERE PAMPERED!
At age 59 I am beginning to realize that the ‘conditions’ that trauma built into my body from the start of my life while I tried to exist and grow within a nearly completely non-pampered environment — seem to be getting worse with each passing day. I feel as though I am engulfed in a downward slide — but from where, to where?
As I asked myself (and my body) this question, the image of myself growing up in not only the bottom of a massive meteor crater but also of being bombarded nearly every moment with torrents of meteors continuing to fall on me, I knew that when I say ‘sliding’ I mean the bottom of the pit is SINKING at the same time the edges of the crater are eroding away and crumbling down on top of me.
“Oh, dreadful! Oh, great! After all this time THIS is only as far as I have gotten in this so-called process of recovery?”
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Well, for ME understanding about the meteor crater and how I have always felt in my body, and feel now is a HUGE step of progress! How strange it seems for me to say this — but discovery of REALITY versus swimming around in ignorant denial IS progress!
THIS matters: It took me until I was 29 before anyone ever TOLD me I had been “an abused child.” LORDY!
It has taken me double that number of years (plus) to begin to understand what that REALLY means!
While it certainly is nobody’s contest to stand around and make claims “MY childhood was worse than yours was!” I am now understanding that there are VERY REAL FACTORS that describe what happened to each of us individually during our little years — and these factors group themselves together in such a way that they are actually providing for us descriptive layers of filters.
You know that term — falling through the cracks. Well, imagine that as you are falling through the cracks — down, down, down — you hit another level with cracks that are closer together. Do you fall through those narrower cracks as well?
Down, down, down you go as you examine all these layers of filters that descriptions of infant-childhoods actually create. Down, down, down you fall until — if your mother was truly TRULY unable to provide for you from birth even the most remote aspects of true mother love, you end up falling into a sieve made of the finest mesh — and STILL you continue to fall until you hit — and only THEN discover — what really happened to you.
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I didn’t know this fact. When I was first told “You were an abused child” I thought, “OK. All THOSE people have the answers I need to make myself better.”
I have always thought in terms of those where were abused when they were little and those who were not.
It is NOT that simple. This is NOT a clear black-and-white affair. Degrees of infant-child trauma MATTER — as do the resiliency factors that were ALSO there in our body and in our earliest lives.
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So today I ask, “How big was that meteor crater you were born into? How dangerous to you was the continual stream of meteors that fell upon your little head?”
There is NO SHAME in letting ourselves know the truth. As members of a social species — even though we live in an American culture that pays a whole lot of attention to ‘individuality’ and ‘uniqueness’ of people — being of a social species we ALWAYS feel best when we are more like others than we are different.
Being raised in a meteor hole in a meteor shower that DID NOT mean we were pampered or safe or secure — or even LOVED — means that we grew up (and grew our body-brain-mind-self) in EXCEPTIONAL rather than normal, ordinary or usual conditions.
That what trauma IS — out of the ordinary — extraordinary.
And those conditions CHANGED our development in ways that leave us reeling for the rest of our lives as we TRY to be more and more ‘like everybody else’.
We are NOT like everybody else!
In severely traumatizing childhoods — and I usually count this to be in the 5% category although in my thinking I am coming to realize it well might be 20% of our population who find themselves born into Meteor Craters and ongoing Meteor Showers — we will NEVER be like those others who are in the 80% – 95% of people who received some degree of pampering in their earliest years.
Remember:
Pampering = benevolent world = ‘good enough’ safe and secure
Not pampered = malevolent world = not ‘good enough’ safe and secure
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So when I say I the bottom seems to be falling in the meteor pit I have ALWAYS been in, and the sides are crumbling over my head, I am also saying that for all the ‘self-help’ information that I have found these past 30 years was actually like (analogy!) random, disconnected, irrelevant and misleading bits of ‘facts’ scribbled on tiny pieces of confetti paper, tossed down to me over the edge of my crater into hurricane winds by ‘others’ whose lives exist either on solid ground way above my head or ‘others’ whose lives exist in a little pit MUCH shallower than the one that I know.
Maybe those same ‘others’ who read what I write now will say, “Oh, that is SO NEGATIVE!”
I no longer care a single tiny TWIT what those people think or say. I can’t see them or hear them from where I am ‘down below’.
None of them ever helped me to understand how the extreme abuse I suffered changed my physiological development. None of them even MENTIONED that this was possible, let alone that it happens and HAPPENED to me.
None of them ever told me that it was the ABSENCE of having anyone in my life during all of this trauma that actually provided for me a safe and secure attachment opportunity. THIS MATTERS because in the midst of ANY TRAUMA over a lifetime, it is the presence of safe and secure attachment relationships that HEAL TRAUMA.
In the case of infants and children suffering from horrible traumas, the presence of SOMEONE to safely and securely attach to MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD to that little one’s outcome — PHYSIOLOGICALLY. These safe and secure attachment relationships are ALWAYS the number ONE most important and powerful resiliency factor that mitigates the impact of trauma.
While it might be an unusual and uncomfortable way to look at infant-childhood to say that treating a little one WITH LOVE and caring kindness means that infant is a PAMPERED one — and therefore of the fortunate group — this is true.
Being treated this way was NOT a given for all of us.
So, who was there to pamper you when it mattered most?
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So when I look at my poverty, at my inability today to tolerate stimulation or ‘excitement’, when I feel what it’s like to be alone, to not have a quality partner relationship, to be at a worse than dead-end ‘career wise’, when I struggle through the moments of my life toward WHAT for a future — I do NOT need to blame or shame myself. I simply have to look around me at the vastness of this meteor crater that was built into my little body from the start and ask myself, “What CAN you do today to help yourself feel better?”
There IS always something, though that something be as tiny a little thing as are the spaces in the filters that I have fallen all the way through since the time of my birth. And EVERYTHING that I long for, that I grieve for, EVERYTHING that helps me today — IS A FORM OF SOME KIND OF PAMPERING because PAMPERING is what I completely missed from the start of my life (except for the critical basics of shelter and food, etc.) and for the rest of my life pampering is what I desperately and RIGHTFULLY need.
At the same time I am negotiating within myself HOW it is that nothing I ever experience actually fills up this PIT. I know today, “How could it?” If I can stop the bottom from sinking out from under my feet, if I can stop the continual crumbling of that ‘way up there’ crater rim, I am accomplishing something good.
I also know that it will never be possible for severe infant-child abuse survivors — who were left alone without pampering BY ANYONE and terribly hurt by the ones who were SUPPOSED to take care of us — to know WHO we are in the world until we also realize HOW we are in the world. In order to know for ourselves what we MOST need to know, we have to have the dedication to our own well-being to dare to leave the pack behind us as we search for our OWN truth about what REALLY happened to us — and how that changed us in our body-brain — for our lifetime.
Finally discovering that we were abused infant-children is a critical beginning — but it is ONLY the beginning for some of us. We have a long, long way to travel toward comprehending our reality because the Meteor Crater we were raised in was really, really deep.
“She died of breast cancer. You know she had both her breasts cut off several years ago. But you know Mary. (No, I didn’t know Mary.) She was so messed up on drugs. Always doing something. What a mess. And she kept on saying, “My cancer’s going to come back. I know it’s going to come back.” She invited it back, you know. It did come back. It killed her last week.”
No, I didn’t know Mary, but I guess most in the small town of Bisbee knew Mary. Knew her as a druggie, as a “really messed up woman.”
“Please don’t speak ill of the dead,” I wanted to say to the gathered four people in my friend’s little office when I stopped in to see how things were going there on my way back from an appointment. “Please, don’t speak ill of the dead.”
My heart pleaded, turned to soup, cried for this dead woman I never met. I know too much now. I know the signs, the signs of a truly sad and tormented life. I know where it usually starts, way back at the beginning when these dead bodies were new and little ones, all pure and innocent, so ready for life and so tormented and tortured when still small — so many — they never recover from that.
Mary? She never recovered.
And please, those of you who have never lived through cancer either, don’t tell us “You brought that cancer down on yourself. You thought your cancer back.”
What these people are saying of this dead woman, “Shame on stupid you!! Shame! Shame! How could you be so stupid, so dumb? We are SO MUCH better than you.”
“Please, don’t speak ill of the dead!”
I heard this before from people when another man who lived here blew his brains out. There wasn’t QUITE such a clamber in conversations I heard about him, but still people spoke ill of him — dead. I spoke up for that man.
“Please don’t speak ill of the dead.”
Where is the respect? Where is the love? Where is the compassion for people who suffer, who fall through all the cracks, who try and try and try and try and still cannot hold on any longer.
I think of the Center for Disease Control’s study where they found their subjects with the worst childhoods died 20 years earlier on the average than everyone else.
PLEASE!
DO NOT SPEAK ILL OF THE DEAD!
I hear of the troubles — I can tell the infant-child abuse history — my heart grows so sad. “God help me! May I never speak ill of the dead.”
As I began my re-search over six years ago in my desperate need to find information about how what had happened to me during my abusive childhood was affecting my adult life, I began to find the ‘bits and pieces’ of truth that eventually I was able to fit together into the bigger picture that I live with today.
The more I read about how trauma in infancy-toddlerhood changes development the more hopeless I felt. All I could interpret from the facts I read was DAMAGE! DAMAGE! DAMAGE!
Finally I stumbled over the paper you will find scanned at this link:
The proverbial light went on, and suddenly all thoughts about my being DAMAGED by the severe abuse I experienced from birth turned into thoughts about how I was a CHANGED being!
Yet I still believe that I carry my own internal light into my continued personal study about the topic of abuse-caused early trauma altered development. Although there certainly were years during my own ‘recovery’ attempts that began in 1980 where I bought and swallowed all the various self-help ideas about ‘what was wrong with me’, I now know looking back that while I might have put these thoughts in my mouth and chewed on them — they didn’t taste good and they didn’t taste right.
Something within me knew better — and knew that something very critical was missing from all the ‘recovery’ information I could find. The information I found didn’t feel right deep at my core.
Even though the attachment and developmental neuroscience information that I have most recently studied certainly applies and is a far better fit, I still don’t 100% swallow it?
Why? Because at my core I value myself too much to eat, chew, swallow and digest ANY information that simply tells me I am damaged, changed in such a way that I ended up ‘mentally ill’ or suffering from pathology, or am in any way FLAWED as a being due to the trauma altered development I was FORCED to go through as my body adapted from birth to a malevolent, traumatic and extremely toxic interpersonal world.
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Although my discovery of Dr. Martin Teicher’s writings elevated my re-search to a platform above writings that did nothing but highlight ‘damage’ that happens from infant-child abuse, I still have always known SOMETHING IS STILL MISSING! Even though Teicher seemed to see ‘the bigger picture’, I knew instinctively there is a bigger picture still.
Teicher’s work (and his fellows’) cannot be disputed as it stands, but I don’t believe it goes far enough that it can truly serve those of us who have experienced early trauma altered development through severe abuse so that we ended up with an ‘evolutionarily altered brain’ such as his work describes.
It is NOT ‘just’ our brain that changed. Not in my thinking. It is our ENTIRE BODY. All of it down to our innermost molecule and genetic operation including our entire nervous system and our immune system (I still believe future research will find that it was our immune system that instigated our trauma altered development from the beginning).
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO US AS SURVIVORS TO BE AN ‘EVOLUTIONARILY ALTERED BEING’?
I will NOT buy it that we are ‘mentally ill’ or ‘damaged’ or ‘suffering from pathology’ SIMPLY because we are these beings.
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Most simply put I, as the survivor I am, quite simply NOW live post-childhood in a world that does not belong to me, nor I to it.
Teicher’s paper (as you will find it at the link above) might put in a kingpin for true understanding of who-how we are as survivors, but his information is ONLY the beginning.
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As I write this post following the post immediately preceding this one, I think about the DIFFERENT world I would probably fit into a whole lot better than I do this one.
If I could locate people whose body formed in similar ways that mine did, I could discuss this topic on its most REAL and important level. For starters, my guess is that as a whole we are far less egotistical, self-centered, self-possessed, self-righteous, arrogant, greedy and selfish than are many others who live in ‘that other world’.
We survivors could get together and talk about ‘them’ from our point of view with the information that OUR body tells us and come up with conclusions that very few in ‘that’ world would want to hear — I guarantee it!
If we could escape together from our quarantine in the ‘pathological’ pantry, we could discover our own wisdom — and what I suspect we would find as a group is that we are very closely connected in our experience (and in our body) to our specie’s ancestors — the Most Ancient Ones who lived in a world and during a time when most certainly nobody assumed anyone was ‘safe and secure’ for very long!
THOSE Most Ancient Ones? I feel proud to think that I have developed in such a way that I could share along with them what OUR reality is like.
That we as survivors, and WE as the Most Ancient Ones were NEVER a part of the PAMPERED group does NOT make us damaged, ill or pathological! In fact, people from ‘that’ world might find us downright frightening (Are they envious of us?) in our power, our strength, our resilience, our toughness, our determination, our courage and our endurance. We know things that PAMPERED people are not likely to know in their lifetime — and what WE know is built into our body down to our essential core.
So what if we experience life differently, remember differently, gather different information and process it differently than those who have always lived in ‘that’ world?
Somebody needs to expand their thinking, and I am not at all sure that it is the severe abuse survivors that most need to do this. Every attitude that belittles us, judges us, criticizes us, condemns us and does NOT value, honor and respect not only WHO we are as beings in the world but HOW we are beings in the world is a victim of their own ignorance, bias, stereotyping, prejudice and superstition.
IN FACT, we severe infant-child abuse survivors are probably the closest to being physiological SUPERHEROES as our current generations of humans are ever going to know!
The problem seems to be for me that I can’t find the boat with my own kind on it. I am left feeling pretty darned alone with this information. Those superhero ancestors of ours that were tough enough to endure so that our species is still here are pretty silent these days! But what they knew we know — how to endure the unendurable to the end of our days.
That’s not a trivial project, folks! Infant-child abuse survivors share with our Most Ancient ancestors the most important piece of information any living being can have. In spite of all the distractions one might encounter along life’s way only one single thing matters: Keep moving forward — no matter what!
So, I will no longer take a bite of, put into my mouth (mind), chew on, nor swallow any information about myself (self-help or not) that in any way discounts not only WHO I am, but HOW I am in the world. I will no longer believe that I am flawed, damaged, mentally ill or pathological because I am not like the Pampered People are. I will not try to change myself to be more like them just because they determine that I need to.
I WILL attempt to learn as much as I can about myself so that I can empower myself to be a better me living a better life. The Pampered People can obviously also do what they want to do, but I now understand that what they know, how they know it, what they believe, and how they might judge me has NOTHING to do with me — and it never did.
We survivors are no more pity-able or pathetic than our Most Ancient Ancestors were — and THIS thought does NOT contribute to my sadness — not even one single, tiny bit! Hooray!
As I sit outside in this morning’s sunshine and look at the huge lump of still-drying adobe that marks where the oleanders are entombed, encased and enshrined (and hopefully approaching their death) I have the strangest sense: “Who put that thing there? Were there ever giant oleanders stretched out over this piece of ground, or were they there only in my imagination?”
If I didn’t know what I now know about myself perhaps I wouldn’t even notice how I FEEL today — along with my thoughts in my mind that accompany how I feel. And I sure wouldn’t have any idea in my mind what these thoughts mean and where they come from.
When I write about what the self-help books never told me, when I write about what I was never told about how and why being in a body in this lifetime has always been difficult for me, I am talking about ‘these kinds of things’.
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I woke this morning with a determination that I am NOT going to remain at the dead end ‘nose against the wall’ hope-less state that I found myself in yesterday. I want to move forward. At least during the terror, trauma and deprivation of my 18 year childhood I WAS able to access at least that one idea (although never consciously): “Being alive means that I am moving forward in time, always forward.”
So what does forward mean to me on this glorious, still sunny morning? What thoughts can I access today that might help me keep my terrible underlying-overlying, overwhelming perpetual sadness at bay? What can I tell myself today in my mind that represents something I learned and am able to learn today that did not come from any therapist or self-help book?
Two words appeared in my mind: TRANSITIONAL OBJECTS
So I did a quick Google search, adding ‘child abuse’ along the way. Here are three links I came up with but there are plenty there online for exploration:
“I believe that transitional objects are indeed very important to a child’s emotional development. These objects help the child deal with transitions such as the transition from wakefulness to sleep and transition from being with parents to being with a baby-sitter. Security objects are usually very soft and warm. They can be items such as a blanket, cloth diaper, stuffed animal, or even a favorite pillowcase. Children’s transitional objects are usually something that reminds them of their parents.”
“Children’s attachment to transitional objects is based on unique identity and not the properties or kind of the object. This reasoning is an early and spontaneous example of the same value that adults place of sentimental possessions.”
As you might take a look for yourself in an online search about this topic, notice words like ‘self soothing’, transition between states and experiences, ‘sentimental’ and of course ATTACHMENT.
Who in God’s Green Acres was there for me to BE ATTACHED TO? Certainly NOT my mother — who was the last person on this green and blue earth that ever did anything but traumatize me.
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Looking at Websters online database I see that SENSE and SENTIMENT share the same roots. As I think about how my body formed from birth in a malevolent environment, I know that way before I had the ability to think in literal thoughts my body-self knew without a doubt THROUGH THE SENSES OF MY BODY that I was NOT safe and secure in the world.
So to whom was I EVER going to form a safe and secure attachment to so that any possible physical ‘transitional object’ was going to help me sooth myself?
Nobody.
The conditions of malevolence that my body formed in — as I repeat again — built into the circuitry-wiring-patterns of my brain’s neuronal structures and in my body the ABSENCE of the ability to not only FEEL safe and secure in the world, but also the absence of a PERSON (other than my 14-month-older baby brother) to be safely and securely attached to.
THIS FACT MATTERS!
This fact changes how I am in the world.
When I wake this morning and see that giant lump of drying adobe where the old sprawling oleanders stood a week ago, it is ONLY within my conscious MIND that I can connect not only the fact that the oleanders once existed, that days of work were required to transition those plants into a lump of adobe, but most importantly THAT I, LINDA, MADE THIS CHANGE UPON THE PLANET.
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What is this all about? I lack the ability to FEEL in the circuitry of my body-brain that I had a damn thing to do with the changes that happened in my yard — any of them.
This means to me that my entire home and yard are my CURRENT TRANSITIONAL OBJECTS. I walk around outside and as I physically SEE (with my senses) the changes that have happened there and try to physically form a ‘feeling felt’ connection within my own self NOT ONLY that I am in this body, but AM this body doing the walking — and that I have been ‘here’ all along making these changes.
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When I write about the consequences especially of infant-toddler abuse as they impact development, I am talking about all of these kinds of experiences of having one’s own life experiences.
I encourage readers of this blog to spend some time with a Google search investigating what I am describing using terms such as ‘attachment feeling felt’, and ‘attachment child abuse feeling felt’.
During early infant developmental stages use of transitional objects is connected to not only the ‘feeling felt’ of SELF to others, but also the ‘feeling felt’ the SELF has TO OTHERS. If an infant never is given what it needs to FEEL FELT in the world so that in response it can ALSO feel other people in the world, an entirely different FEELING pattern is built into the infant’s body-brain.
This does NOT mean such survivors are ‘mentally ill’ because we cannot access this very real kind of FEELING information. We never got it built into us in the first place which gave us a CHANGED and DIFFERENT body.
If we are going to search realistically for the structural underpinnings of dissociation, depersonalization and derealization — along with an over or under active stress response system that feeds into depression and posttraumatic stress disorder, we need to be REALISTIC in our thinking — yes, within our mind.
“The mind emerges from the activity of the brain, whose structure and function are directly shaped by interpersonal experience.”
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How our brain is built, along with the body that feeds information to the brain, are directly guided in their fundamental development by the kinds of early caregiver interactions an infant has.
SO, as I try to understand my ACTUAL experience of being a self with a mind in a body in my lifetime in this world, I MUST go back and learn as much as I can about how what happened to me from birth changed how I am in the world.
Yes, I HATE how I am now. There is NOTHING redeeming whatsoever about what was stolen from me! How can I celebrate that I cannot remember in any ‘feeling felt’ way that I was the person who made ALL the changes not only in my yard, but over the course of my entire adult life?
I can’t FEEL myself transitioning along through moments of time unless I TRY to — which is NOT the same thing as actually being able to FEEL something.
My inability to feel connected to my own self in a body in my life of course impacts all of my human relationships, as well. NO PERSON EVER ACTUALLY FEELS REAL TO ME. How could they? The only version of a human being that I can FEEL FELT with is within the range of early development similar to what my baby brother was when I was born. He was the only human being who consistently looked into my eyes, talked with me directly (when he was old enough to have words), touched me gently with love, and recognized my ACTUAL existence.
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Adult Reactive Attachment Disorder. What that means to me is that because the feeling of ‘feeling felt’ and of ‘feeling myself in my own life’ was NOT built into my body-brain, ALL I can do is react to what happens in my life AS THINGS HAPPEN. I can factually remember things (as I could during my childhood) but I could not feel myself as a self having experiences then, and I cannot actually do it now.
Therefore there is no possible way for me to FEEL connected on the most fundamental physiologically-wired way. I have to consciously work toward how I think I imagine experiences MIGHT BE LIKE for nearly all other human beings (the ‘upper 95%) who did not receive the horrendous malevolent treatment I did from birth.
No wonder I fight this sadness! No wonder I have great difficulties when people who are important to me are not within my immediate physical range of experience. I missed the opportunity to experience nearly every single positive early attachment building (body-nervous system-brain-mind-self) experience that would have led to my having an entirely different experience of myself in my life — NOW!
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Because I know every day more clearly how right I am about how trauma changes early development, hence changes the body we live in for the rest of our life — I KNOW there is no self-help book out there that tells us what these changes are, how they affect everything we experience in our life, and what it all means to us.
‘They’ can tell us until we are all blue in the face about this self-help clue/tip or another one, but nobody EVER told me I receive different information in the world, in a different way and process it differently — and because my experience was so ‘unique’ in its severity I might be one of the very, very few ‘lay people’ who could POSSIBLY have come to figure this out!
Yet I don’t believe that even all the attachment experts and developmental neuroscientists have figured out either because they are all divisional in what they know according to which separate Ivory Tower they operate from within.
In my particular case I can fit together what these experts have found out together into a single picture because I LIVE what they describe. I do NOT agree with ANY OF THEM that who and how I am in the world is one single bit PATHOLOGICAL.
I (and other survivors like me) am simply a living example of what a trauma altered development changed being is like and how WE experience life!
How many people can erase the awareness of pain from a bone break with their mind? How many people can make a toothache disappear with their mind? Does our society call these people ‘mentally ill’ because their pain is real and their mind is not doing the trick of changing their condition — for the better?
I almost feel like the fog is clearing that I have lived in blind all of my life. I keep thinking today, “How would my life as an adult turned out differently if anyone had EVER told me along my life’s pathway what I know now more clearly every passing day to be true?
I can feel my terrible, terrible sadness today. I feel weighted by it physically. Moving is difficult as if my being is so heavy. It’s a beautiful clear, sunny, warm, breezy day. I am working outside. I sit in the sun when I want to and gaze south over the Mexican wall at the tall trees over there swaying, at the tall mountain behind them — gorgeous!
I have absolutely NO reason to feel sad in my body today. Yet I am.
This is NOT depression! This is Substance P I bet, telling my body that pain is present — and has been since I was born.
I wish there was some kind of surgery that could be done to remove this sadness. I pay close attention to my body — and to my mind — as this sadness permeates my life. How would I feel if THIS feeling were GONE? Can I make it disappear and vanish WITH MY MIND? Nope.
I live with this sadness, in spite of this sadness — which I believe is at the set point of my nervous system. If someone had told me as a young adult that I would be sad all of my life — and to be aware (beware!) that every single choice and decision I was going to make in my life would be a REACTION to the pain of this sadness — could I have learned a long time ago how to consciously construct my choices and decisions to better insure a LESSENING of this chronic sadness?
I don’t know. I do know the body-brain built during the first year of life forms permanent connections that cannot be changed. It is also true that the cortical ‘higher thinking’ region of our brain is still maturing until age 25-30. Yet it is ALSO true that severe child abuse can make this brain region atrophy early (see Dr. Martin Teicher’s work) so that it never develops ‘on schedule’ or ‘correctly’ at all!
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I would NOT call what I live with a mental illness anymore than I would call a broken bone or a toothache a mental illness. What I feel is equally physiologically present IN MY BODY!
What I am beginning to think, though, is that IF everything I ever do is really in reaction to the pain of sadness — then I have an adult version of a Reactive Attachment Disorder (do a Google search on adult reactive attachment disorder – fascinating reading).
This is, in my thinking, a very real physiological-biological REALITY that has very, very little to do with the MIND. When I read blog comments by readers that use the worn-out terminology all the self-help books preach, I want to SHOUT “IT IS IN OUR BODY!!!” All of the difficulties we experience are NOT IN OUR MIND. Our MIND IS NOT SICK. We live in a trauma changed body from the infant-child abuse we experienced — and how we feel in our body IS THE CONSEQUENCE.
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In my thinking quieting my life and myself as much as possible — a form of eliminating the variables as a scientist would do in an experiment — and then paying the closest attention possible to how my body FEELS and what it tells me I will learn more than any self-help book will ever be able to tell me about ME and my experience.
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I think about a television set that was built in its factory-of-origin so that it over-shows one of the three primary colors ALL of the time unless the watcher manually adjusts the color ranges every time the television is turned on.
Too much red, or yellow, or blue — similar to infant-child abuse survivors whose nervous system was formed under the stress of trauma so that peace and calm is not their set point at center. Instead they have too much anger, too much fear, or too much sadness at center.
I don’t have to question where my center set point lies. I feel it, and it’s my guess that all survivors can detect their set point in one of these three powerful survival-based emotional arenas.
Because our body reacts to what we do (the people we are around for example) we can ‘lift ourselves’ away from our center set point on occasion. But in my thinking we have a body built under so much stress, with so little safety, security, peace, calm and happiness when we were little that we ARE IN THE HOLE.
Just to escape the chronic nature of the emotion that is our center set point requires huge input. We might just escape our central feeling — but to get to PEACE and CALM — and from there to HAPPY? HUGE input is needed!
And we do NOT stay in the peaceful or happy place once we are not in contact with whatever/whomever HELPED us out of our hole temporarily because we are REACTING to external rather than internal conditions.
Again, this is not a ‘mentally ill’ condition. It is body-based in our physiology. Although I am nothing like an expert, I FEEL the truth of what I say.
Adequate early caregiver interactions in a safe and secure environment transmit to the infant’s growing body-nervous system-brain the ability to grow into itself a drastically reduced tendency to REACT to external stimulation and conditions. THAT state, as different as it is from that of severe infant-child abuse survivors, IS IN THEIR BODY-physiology, too!
All the self-help razmahtaz in the world can be confusing jibberish to early abuse survivors, more like dandelion fluff blowing in the wind than it is useful. What happened to us was not in our mind. It affected how our body developed. These trauma changes affected how our body FEELS every moment of our life except when we are reacting to the world around us — which creates temporary feeling changes that do not last.
I don’t HAVE any answers today other than STOP INFANT-CHILD ABUSE because it hurts for a lifetime! And don’t call us ‘mentally ill’ because we FEEL the consequences of this hurt for a lifetime. What we endured built itself into us from the beginning of our lives and guess what? We cannot simply ‘get over it and move on’, ‘put our abusive childhoods in the past’, ‘forget our past’, or magically ‘forgive our abusers’ so that we will be ‘better’ and more like ‘normal people’.
It became very clear to me as I replied to the comments that what I do with my work out in my yard is not only ‘gardening therapy’ for me, it is an expression of myself in an art form: Adobe.
Today completes the basic work on destroying these two oleanders in my yard (see: +MY TOXIC MOTHER AND THE OLEANDER). What interests me about my thinking in response to today’s comments is the similarity I see between this oleander project and my severe infant-child abuse survivorship: While I do not believe in ‘getting over it and moving on’, ‘putting our abusive childhoods in the past’, ‘forgetting our past’, ‘leaving our abusive childhoods behind’, etc., I do believe in positive change.
I am reminded of the posts I wrote some time ago in which I described my realization that my mother as the abuser and my father as her enabler would have deserved a minimum jail sentence each of 14,500 years for what they did to me — and that was figured using the tip of the iceberg and vastly minimizing my mother’s attacks on me over the 18 years of my childhood.
Crimes against a child that could have/should have resulted in 14,500 years of incarceration is NOT something I can even conceive of resolving for myself with ‘forgiveness’.
This does not mean that I simply accept what happened and how I am today as a result of it mildly! Nope! Not this woman!
So, my latest project has been teaching me how I understand that a severe infant-child abuse survivor can emerge from their earliest years being an extremely TOXIC person — or NOT! Nobody is perfect, but my mother didn’t earn her 14,500 year jail term assessment from me by simply being a little bit flawed. Nope!
So — my mother and the metaphor of the deadly poisonous oleander.
I would — and I am serious! Need a bulldozer in this yard to remove the roots of these two hundred year old oleanders — or dynamite. I have no access to either — and I have no possible way to remove those roots.
Parallel: I have no way to remove the damage my mother did to me through her mentally ill devastating abuse of me. The ‘damage’ was built right into my developing body-brain from birth, as I describe so many times on this blog.
But, I can do the best I can to pare all of it down — put boundaries around what was ‘her’ and what was ‘me’ — and most importantly I can CONTAIN and QUARANTINE the toxic poison to minimize what is affecting me ever day — to the best of my ability.
This is, to me most certainly NOT about forgiveness. This is about continuing to survive the best way that I can.
SOOOOOO…… Here are the latest pictures, including one from the previous post showing the start of this project:
Starting to hack down the two oleandersDown to the stumps. All surrounding ground that these plants have polluted is toxic -- I will never be able to grow anything edible in this groundWithout a chainsaw this is as low as I could cut the stumpsOver the fence into 'no man's land' (Mexican American wall/fences behind the pile) - no way does this picture show the extent of the PILE of scrap I threw into QUARANTINE!The most toxic thing I had around to use as a weapon against these plants was LIME -- 50 pounds dumped into the ball of stumps (each), whole mess contained within dried adobe blocks -- and salt thrown on tho I wish I had MOREI felt badly for all the bugs that crawled up out of the soil once the lime was on, so I put these sticks up as bug escape routes -- only the 'smartest' survived, which included spiders but only a few beetlesHere I started covering up stumps with a heavy cement mix of wet adobe mud -- notice the delightfully sickly green the stumps turned with the lime -- YAY!Layers of cement-adobe, sandwiched with slabs of broken cement from the back of the yard over the stumpsEach wet adobe block weighs 50 pounds (35 pounds dry), each block contains nearly 5 gallons of soilEnd of the day today, sunset -- filled UP!I will need to put another layer down the center over the stumps --
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I WILL make something beautiful out of the mess! I hope the height of this will be right for bench around the outside — place to put flower pots down the center — I can plant flowers in this toxic soil — I hope to find the money over time to put up a TALL privacy fence along my neighbor’s chain link — the oleander did give some privacy, but at way too high a price!
And every moment I have worked on this project I have thought about my mother and her toxic abuse. I can’t change what she did to me, but I sure can work to chop it all down to size (perspective-gaining), contain it, quarantine as much toxic parts as possible, and BURY THE HELL out of the mother I have NEVER yet been able to feel ANGER toward. I hope I am moving in that direction – so I can learn what anger has to teach me and move on from THAT — which is possible — and mine to do!
I must admit I am starting a post at the same time I have no clear idea what I am going to say. When these writing and thinking moments happen for me I suspect they are in part a result of the damage done to both of my brain hemispheres during early traumatized development, and due also to the changes that happened to the development of the corpus collosum part of my brain that is supposed to transmit information between my left and right brain regions.
I apologize if my writing process creates posts that are difficult to read because they are not thought out clearly before hand, and are therefore not ‘organized and oriented’ in a straight, linear, usual-coherent manner. I am simply documenting who I am and how I am as a survivor of severe infant-child abuse. How I write and what I write is a reflection of what early trauma did to change both of these vital states — WHO I am AND HOW I am in the world.
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On some level I know I want to talk about the ‘choices’ a newborn infant begins to make in relationship to its earliest caregivers. It is a know fact that an infant can form safe and secure attachment with one or more of its earliest caregivers at the same time it is forming unsafe and insecure attachment with one or more other of its earliest caregivers.
I am thinking about that know fact this morning, especially after having wended my way through yesterday’s long posts about avoidant-dismissive attachment — and in light of all the other posts I have written on this blog about infant attachment patterns and how they form the body-nervous system (NS)-brain-mind-self of a developing infant — that last a lifetime.
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So exactly WHAT does happen, and how is it possible, and what are the long-range physiological consequences for an infant who is abused, maltreated and traumatized by one or more of its earliest caregivers — at the same time it is treated perfectly well by someone else? What kind of BODY does that infant form?
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I began my thoughts this morning thinking about my current job of trying to control and manage the hundred year old oleander bushes in my back yard.
I can't even show you the top of this massive mess it has grown so tall over its unkempt years of existenceThick, twisted, unruly and just plain UGLY!Today will be my 3rd day of oleander attack. I have no chain saw, so working on the lower stump area is difficult to do right or the way I want to
There are two oleander plants in this mess. This one on the south side is the pink bloomer. As I eliminate the growth of this one, I can begin to see the separate clump that is the white bloomer to the north of this one.
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What is the connection between my thoughts and images about this oleander, its condition and human infant attachment patterns?
Let me write the words so I can know…..
It took me two days of attack on this plant before I bothered myself to search online for information about the nature of its toxicity.
I read last night that ALL parts of this plant are poisonous to humans and animals. Consumption of three of its leaves will kill a small child. Not only that, but even the dust around the plant is poisonous. Its leaves can be carefully (and separately) composted and used as mulch, but even that is risky business. It cannot be burned.
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This leads me to think about how I react differently to this plant than I do to all others in my yard. The more information I gain about the poisonous nature of oleanders the more I wish it had never been planted in this yard in the first place. Only dynamite or a bulldozer could possibly remove these two plants and their massive roots.
How would I feel and think about trying to manage these plants if I knew absolutely nothing about their toxicity?
Which makes me think about infants from birth: How does an infant KNOW the difference between its nontoxic earliest caregivers (so that it forms safe and secure attachments with them) and its toxic earliest caregivers (which the infant forms insecure attachments with)?
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Then I think about my own life experience from birth. I think about the pictures I found in my baby book. (see
I realize as I am writing that I have far too many disconnected thoughts related to the topic I am addressing. My left brain hemisphere is jumping up and down in its seat yelling at me, “Pick me! Pick me! I know the answer!”
At the same time my right brain hemisphere is quietly beginning to build its momentum in its own way: “If you don’t listen to me I am going to begin to ROAR, and believe me, you don’t want THAT to happen!”
Interesting. The left brain makes one kind of noise within me at the same time the right brain threatens to hijack my BODY and ALL of my attention if I don’t hear what it has to say.
I have to consciously negotiate how I am going to move forward now. I need the left hemisphere’s ability to order, sequence, organize and verbalize. Yet at the same time it is my right brain that is deeply and fundamentally connected to ALL of my experience as my memory of being alive has accumulated that information in my body’s memories.
Hum…….
How to proceed?
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An infant has no choice about who it is born to. It has no choice either about who its first contact with members of our human species are, or about how those beings treat it. So how can it form a wide variety and range of differing attachment patterns appropriate to how each of these beings treat it and interact with it?
This is not a meaningless topic. These earliest beings are responsible for the building of the entire body-being of the infant that it will use to process its self in its world for the rest of its life.
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And then there is the oleander, the toxic, deadly poisonous overgrown hideous out-of-control oleander that is stretching its branches out in every possible direction from its very old roots that are equally entrenched in the earth where somebody planted it/them.
My right hemisphere knows perfectly well what needs to be said about the difference between safe and toxic interactions based on either on the ‘safe-ability’ or the ‘toxic ability’ of who-what anyone interacts with. But my right hemisphere alone does NOT have the power to sort out what it knows and make that information coherent.
So, left brain, what do YOU know?
Quiet……
Listen to my body because my left brain IS a part of my body….
I am waiting……
Here comes words……..
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From the time an infant is born all of the channels of its being are open to experience.
Depending on the nature of these experiences the infant will respond according to its biological underpinnings.
(My right brain is beginning its roar. It wants some pictures because it thrives on images.)
My first and primary attachment beings -- mother, father, 14-month old brotherNote especially top right picture of my father his his first daughter -- me -- Linda. Note the pride and joy on his age 25 face. I could have safely and securely attached to him -- if Mildred had let me.
Great pictures of Mother Mildred playing the role of the proud and loving mother — of the infant sent by the devil to kill her during her breach birthing.
Left brain: “Perhaps everyone could say that the reason why Grandmother Bea, Uncle Charlie and Aunt Carolyn do not appear in one single picture in your baby book is because the pictures had to be cropped so that they could fit within the pages of your baby book.”
Right brain: “We ALL know this isn’t true. Mildred intentionally, though we do not know whether consciously or not, removed all pictures of everyone — her mother and her brother and his wife — from YOUR book (OUR book) because those people were HER attachment beings and there was — as you well learned over the next 18 years of your life — no POSSIBLE way that YOU could force her to share HER beings with you!”
“The only reason pictures of your father and your brother are in your baby book is that Mildred could not ‘politically’ eliminate them and still appear publicly as the perfect mother she was pretending to be.”
“The truth of Mildred’s loathing of YOU lies in a few of its words, in the spaces within those words and lines, and in what is missing in this book including its ripped out and absent pages. As you and all your siblings know eventually the entire book itself ‘went missing’ as your mother denied that ever existed at all, to be discovered only within her storage-locker belongings after her death.”
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“OK,” I ask both of these brain hemispheres. “And what is your point EXACTLY?”
Left brain: “While it is a given biological fact that an infant can from the time of its birth form attachment patterns in resonance with the attachment patterns that exist within its caregivers, your mother all but eliminated all opportunities for you as an infant to experience any possible attachment with anyone else but her.”
“Your mother controlled all access to the baby that was you as much as was humanly — inhumanly — possible. You therefore experience a very particular universe that you must admit was unique. It is NOT normal for any infant to be sequestered away in a ‘chamber’ beyond the reach of only its mother.”
Right brain: “You need to know (I was interrupted by my neighbor’s daughter knocking on my door to borrow shortening to make the Mayan chocolate her teacher gave her a recipe for. I found an unopened block of yellow butter flavored Crisco for her (after making certain that she really didn’t want butter) and showed her how to measure it, and gave her enough to use again later — along with a Ziploc bag to store it in. What was my thought??? It is gone. I have no earthly clue what my right brain was about to say and I doubt that I ever will know now exactly…. I am disorganized and disoriented — again.)
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I want to say something here that I thought while I was outside before I ever started to write this post.
HEALING
What I believe most leads to our healing
Severe infant abuse survivors need to pay very close and detailed attention to figure out not so much WHO we are (against popular opinion) but HOW we are in the world.
Our ability to know WHO we are has been contaminated by the trauma altered changes in our development that radically changed HOW we are. We live in and with a trauma altered body that receives DIFFERENT information than ‘normals’ do — receives this different information DIFFERENTLY — and processes all of this information DIFFERENTLY, as well.
What I just now experienced is the kind of evidence I can now recognize for myself, and until I became able to KNOW what I now know about HOW I am in the world I could not begin to discover WHO I am.
The girl suddenly knocking at my door came through to me as a shock wave that entirely disrupted my being in the world. My ‘systems’ do not tolerate sudden interruptions and change well. I do not (because my trauma altered body CANNOT) smoothly transition between many types of ongoing experience.
I continually am forced to cope with my own experience as it CHANGES ME during change. I — my own ongoing experience of being a self in the world — is NOT the constant I strongly suspect it is for ‘normal’ people. Changes that happen in the world I live in CHANGE ME.
Who I now am post-girl at the door is NOT the same me that I was pre-girl knocking at the door.
Which now means my direction has changed. I, as a being, have been shifted in the current of life-in-the-world and I cannot RETURN to who-how I was before the knock.
Which now means my thoughts have been altered in such a way that I need to make note again of the Bell Curve I mentioned in a recent post.
This is important to me because I continually struggle with knowing that in many, many ways my experience of abuse from birth was SO MUCH ‘definitely more than others’ experience that I fear what I have to say will mean absolutely NOTHING to other people.
As my mother controlled access of other people to me from my birth, as surely as she controlled their appearance in my baby book, she made as absolutely certain as she possibly could that trauma would change the course of development all aspects of my body would take — thus ensuring in the end that I am essentially ALONE in my experience.
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After ‘the knock’ I returned outside to sit in the cool late fall breeze and stare at the mess of the oleander. “That is your mother,” I heard in my thoughts.
As an infant (and throughout most of the next 18 years) I was left to interact as solely as my mother could arrange with ONLY HER and her malevolent psychosis. I ONLY had the toxic, deadly poisonous out-of-control gigantic oleander to experience my own reality with.
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Coming back to far more ordinary and normal infant experience, those infants will form within their own body-brains a variety of attachment patterns that match the ones that exist within their earliest caregivers.
Research is discovering that WHEN and IF a little person is being treated abusively by someone, but at the same time ALSO DOES have someone to form attachments with that are NOT unsafe, insecure and toxic, many genetic combinations that lead to long term detrimental adult health (including mental health) problems DO NOT GET ACTIVATED.
The kind of MAIN attachment system, secure or some version of insecure attachment system, happens NOT because of ANY limitation within an infant itself. What attachment system primarily builds all aspects of our body-brain-mind-self is DUE TO what kind of beings interacted with us during our most critical earliest developmental stages.
This is, to me, a critically important point!
An infant cannot choose to form a safe and secure attachment with an early caregiver who does not have one!
An infant cannot choose to form an unsafe and insecure attachment with an early caregiver who does not have one!
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Left brain back online: “It seems that your mother instinctively knew this fact. The only way that she — and therefore the dictates of biological development could ensure that you received the MOST of what was toxic to you and the LEAST of what was good for you was to eliminate your contact with other people.”
DAMN! My mother, Mildred was SO GOOD at being SO BAD!
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Nobody wants to talk about what it is like to be placed alone in isolation, in solitary confinement as the prisoner of a monster mother from birth and throughout another 18 years.
I was fortunate at least that mother Mildred had enough grasp on ‘the real world’ to know that on certain occasions she was forced to PRETEND around others that an entirely different (wonderful) reality existed that had Linda in it.
I believe that her efforts to form ‘Linda’s baby book’ in a right and publicly acceptable (and applaud-able) fashion happened because she TRIED to pretend ‘at least this much’ about herself and her daughter – me. But in the end she could not even really pull that effort off — hence the baby book was hidden away while she told ALL of her children that it never existed at all.
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Which leads me off on a side-thinking tangent of something else that came into my mind this morning. All the time I was reading and trying to comprehend and learn from the writings particularly of developmental neuroscientist Dr. Allan Schore, such as Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self/Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self, I struggled with his conclusions that being raised by a ‘frightening mother’ has the same severely detrimental effects as being raised by a ‘frightened mother’.
I KNOW what a frightening mother can do! But a frightened mother — just as damaging? How can this possibly be true – even when one of the world’s top developmental neuroscientists says it’s true?
This morning the awareness finally filtered through to me, after six years of processing information about how severe abuse changes an infant-child’s course of development, I FELT the reality that Schore described.
I mention this now because I believe it is connected to why my mother barred all others from having access to me. She was terrified that others would form an attachment to ME that would then threaten those others attachment to HER. I believe this is also why she did not actually destroy my baby book: She was ACTUALLY terrified of me.
But, going deeper than that….. Thanks to my interviews with my mother’s long term ‘friend’ I learned that long after I had left home, and in her older years my mother’s fixation with ‘the devil coming to get me’ still existed. Not only did the ‘devil come to get her’ through MY being born, an experience that put her dangerously close to death’s door (ME TOO!), but she wrote 666 on her hands and face in her OLDER years to keep the devil from coming to get her.
(What a strange twist of thinking it was that the only safety and security she could invent to keep the terrors of ‘the devil’ from consuming her was to PRETEND through this choice of signaling that she was ‘one of his’ anyway!)
Both hemispheres: “Linda, THAT is terror! That is fear beyond what any human should EVER know. THAT terror was built into your mother, no doubt, by someone who terrified, terrorized and abused her when she was very very young.”
That level of terror was FED TO ME even before I was born. It was fed to me while my mother and I were in labor. It was during THAT time that she-we were dying and struggling for our lives. It was during THAT time that her terror fundamentally broke her regarding me in a way that could not be mended. It was during THAT time that she attached her terror of ‘the devil coming to get me’ to little tiny beautiful perfect newly born ME.
Schore is then correct in saying that a mother who is afraid of her infant causes as much damage as does a mother who forces her infant to be afraid of her.
In my case, I received the DOUBLE poison!
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And, again, I am back to the oleander. There are TWO bushes out there. Both are equally toxic. It didn’t matter in the end if my mother was afraid of me ONLY, or if I as an infant was terrified of my mother ONLY.
In the end, although both directions of terror were fully active, toxic is toxic. Poison is poison.
It doesn’t matter if I am outside working with ONLY one oleander or if I am outside working with TWO or a thousand oleanders. Everything about every oleander is toxic, and to be safe anywhere around an oleander the fact of its deathly toxicity must be kept foremost in mind.
As for me in my yard, I cannot eliminate this species from my yard, but I can take precautions and I CAN force limitations to its existence. It is a fact I cannot remove that plant, just as I cannot remove the developmental changes that my mother forced into my body.
I plan to chop those two oleanders to within an inch of their lives. Then I plan to encircle the whole mess with an adobe wall that reaches high enough that new rapid growth from the bottom will be forced to stretch straight up (rather than sideways). I then plan to completely control the shoots that will clamber to take over my yard.
But even then I will be forced to deal with the continual cuttings that will come off of that plant in the future. I am fortunate to have a span of ‘no man’s land’ between my back fence and the Mexican-American border wall. I throw all that is toxic over that wall where it can rot its way into infinity for all I care and not bother me one single bit.
Dare I only wish that someone had done the same with my poisonous mother? If they HAD done so, I would have been spared a whole lot of trouble!
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NOTE: I just discovered something else out about the oleander. I found a branch lying so low that it grew horizontally out of the main root. Its tip ended up on the ground and grew into the soil along my neighbor’s fence line. Where it did this another oleander was formed!
Oh, great! Intergenerational transmission of toxicity!
I have the hose end laid there with water running to saturate the ground where the offspring grows. I WILL dig that one out and eliminate it!
Stop the Storm 
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