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The following was written today as a sidebar for the book chapter I am working on: I firmly believe that most serious mental illness genetic combinations are directly tied to the greatest gifts belonging to the gene pool of our species. Like the brilliance or dowdiness of a peacock’s tail acquired directly in response to the quality of the environment the bird lives in (which includes genetic interactions with this environment), all forms of what we now know as ‘mental illness’ are also reproductive fitness indicators that signal the condition of the EARLIEST environment of a human being as represented by and in the quality of mothering received primarily in the first 33 months of life.
I will always believe that my mother’s sensitivities along with her creative and imaginative giftedness, even as it appears in her childhood writing, put her at extremely high risk for developing a serious mental illness in consequence to the neglect, abuse and trauma that she experienced before the age of six years old. I also strongly suspect that had her earliest caregiver environment been safe, secure and anything like adequate she would not have developed Borderline Personality Disorder.
I believe that my mother was what some might call a ‘pre-Borderline’ child, but I draw my net much more tightly. My mother WAS already a Borderline by the time she wrote her stories between the ages of nine and ten. Interestingly after I had found and transcribed my mother’s childhood stories I asked my sister what she thought of them and if she could detect our mother’s mental illness as being already present when she wrote them. It might be directly due to the vast differences in our mother’s treatment of each of us that I know my mother’s Borderline condition is represented in her stories while my sister detected nothing unusual about them. My sister lived in our mother’s white world. I lived in our mother’s black world.
I therefore challenge readers to consider the following short piece my mother wrote in 1935 at the age of nine. Believe me, there was already something WRONG with my mother’s brain-mind expressed in this piece. While the piece is clever there is nothing ordinary about the way my child-mother fixated on the color black. There is no relationship here between black in a crayon box and the absolute blackness of the universe my mother later created for me:
Once there was a black boy who was picking black berries and putting them in his black bowl for his mother to prepare for his black father to eat for his black berry supper but a big black bare came a long and while the black boy was looking he ate all the black berries from the black berries from the[she repeated this] black bowl. The black boy soon filled it up again, so the black bear wasn’t satisfied so he took all the black berries on the bush besides in the bowl [the following was added between the lines] then the boy began to cry then the black bears heart was sofftened and he told the black boy that he was sorry the black boy wiped his tears. The black bear then took the black bowl between his teeth and filled it from a nother black berie bush and gave it to the black boy, and the black boy thanked him and went home and his black father had his black berry supper.
Mildred
Even if my mother wrote this in response to a teacher’s assignment to write about the color ‘black’, while this is an innocent piece it is not naïve – and it should have been. In its simplest form, caught within the tapping rhythm of the words as it is captured at the heart of this piece is a single word that is NOT about the color black: Mother. I can feel my mother at the edge of a vortex that might not have been any larger than a seed when this piece was written. But it is here and it grew and grew and grew until it swallowed up my mother and her life and my childhood. That vortex circling around ‘the mother’ was the beginning of the matrixes that my mother created – creatively created – in her adult Borderline brain-mind.
This story belongs in the context of the others contained in my mother’s composition book that was preserved for over 70 years before it found its way to me. I do not take this to be a coincidence, either. Looking back at the alpha moments of a Borderline’s life in their childhood anyone who knows what they are looking for and looking at would be able to detect, I believe, all the patterns that will in the future become most obvious. In the end, in the omega moments of a Borderline child’s life will be reflected all the tragic suffering of the Borderline child that once was.
READ THE REST OF MY MOTHER’S STORIES HERE:
*MY MOTHER’S CHILDHOOD STORIES WITHOUT COMMENTS
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Stop the Storm 
Linda, sometimes I have difficulty understanding all the info.My brain feels tired and like it has to unscramble a lot of words.That is a lot of material to read and re-read and absorb. I am looking forward to reading your book but I am hoping that for minds like mine you will be able to explain all these things in a easier way.
You are way ahead of me in your insight and findings. I can relate to you on an emotional level but need things broken down in a more simplistic manner.
Hugs!
That will be my daughter’s job – even if we end up with two separate books to do it! Hugs back!!!
okay..re-read over again. I know while I was on my journey of healing (which I will always be on) I always used to journal . I would write out the experiences and how they made me feel and my anger and sadness would come flooding out.I have done this many,many times over the years and never felt that by identifying and giving words to them(on paper) did it give me the sense that I was actually “processing ” any of it so I could heal. I obviously wrote down those stories or situations in order to release some very strong emotions and writing has always been how I did it.
I know I needed (and still do) need to process and intergrate all those experiences but I thought therapy would help. In my personal experiences, it did not. I would go to the pyschologist and pour out my gut and she was very empathatic and could even identify with some of my experiences because she had past issues with her own mother.
I kept asking her “when was I going to start to feel better?” and guess what…it never came! In fact after eight months of not feeling better but worse..I decided to give it up all together .
I am coming to a point of being able to actually SEE the internal universe of my mother. It is a place that existed in a time that was what I can call ‘other worldly’. True, her reality didn’t match ordinary reality — but I lived inside her universe as her captive for 18 years — it WAS real.
What I am saying is that as long as we are trying to place ‘our stories’ on anything like an ‘ordinary world’s grid’ our experience and our stories do not match up because they CAME from within a Borderline’s ‘other-worldly’ world.
I can now not only SEE the world I was trapped in, I can describe it and I can now graph-draw it. Until I could do this I could not possibly find my own story. I learned VERY QUICKLY from what you so tidily called my ‘loopy’ body memory that I could not possibly be safe to write this story in any coherent way unless and until I could create my own GPS to locate myself, orient myself, and track myself in this ‘other world’.
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Maybe in some way this is true for all individuals whose stories were intimately intertwined with especially a Borderline mother.
We are trying to place our stories in a world that did NOT exist for us — or we wouldn’t have the stories to tell that we do have!
Not being able to tell a coherent life story narrative, as I have said so many times before, is what attachment experts refer to as the symptom in adulthood of insecure infant-caregiver attachments.
That is profound! I have known for a long long time that my individual ‘stories’ of abuse, no matter how tragic or impressive (as you have read them) they might be, they mean ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO ME BY THEMSELVES!!
NOTHING!
Every single story I remember, and they are very few and remembered only because of my mother’s litany — is NOTHING more in reality than a DOT ON A GRID. Until I can define the grid — which was entirely built by my mother — so that I can orient myself and those stories as points on that grid I will NOT be able to tell my own story — the whole story. Otherwise I am left with a few archeological remnants of the past that cannot be put back together into an identifiable whole = my childhood.
I still believe it is important to collect/write the stories. I could not do the work I am doing now if I didn’t know what my stories were — and know the order in which those things happened.
But the stories themselves, like individual glistening previous (I meant to write precious) pearls of value because they are a part of ME, need to be put into a necklace, a finished peace (my right brain is having fun here – I meant to write piece) of work. THAT will be the WHOLE story — which will happen once I plot the dots of my stories on the grid of my childhood (the grid my Borderline mother made and I was trapped by/in) and connect the dots. THERE will be the bigger picture, the whole picture! The stories are the parts of the puzzle as they exist individually – for me and probably for you as you have written them.
WE ARE BIGGER THAN OUR STORIES — BIGGER THAN THE STORY MADE BY CONNECTING THE DOTS IN THE INDIVIDUAL STORIES TOGETHER. It is that bigger me that I am locating. It is that bigger me that does this work. It is that bigger me that is IN NO WAY WHATSOEVER STUCK IN ANY OF THOSE ‘LITTLE MEMORY STORIES’ or even in the big story itself.
But it is critically important for me to NOW clearly and forever distinguish my story from my mother’s. That is what I am doing. Primarily, I believe, with a Borderline mother (an abusive one), the life stories of offspring are entangled, enmeshed, tangled, and even at places fused together. The only way I know of to differentiate my story from my mother’s is to get (like I recently wrote RE: truth and lie) into the center of the story — which of course is IN MY BODY!
But I am NOT going to go again for that story, the one that is being told as I connect the dots between my ‘little memory stories’ together with one another, again until I can do so safely — and finding myself staggering and swirling around in my yard in a full blown age 20 month body memory IS NOT SAFE!! No matter how ‘loopy’!
I’m not saying that I am going to prevent body memory from returning when I am ready to go back to the stories-story process. But I am NOT going in that world again without my very new and very sophisticated GPS to use to orient myself in that other world I grew up in!
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So, lots of words, but what I think I am saying in response to you is that you have NOT wasted a moment in the work you have done so far in recording your memories! Now you need to clearly (in my opinion) create yourself a TIMELINE by month and year that you can line those memory-stories up along.
If you have already done this – I can give you a clue about what to do next – but it’s part of the book – if you wish, you know how to get a hold of me directly!!!
btw – I composted not only all of my mother’s papers after I transcribed and digitalized them on computer and blog, I also fed all my journals over the past 30 years to the worms and bugs in the earth, as well. For me that was a step on my journey — but I am in no way DONE with the rest of it! PS – the corn that is growing in the composed soil from all my mother’s papers is green, lush, healthy and gorgeous!
The above is a lot of information for me to absorb and think about. I will need to read it over again to get the gist of what ur saying. Can u summarize all that in a paragragh for me?
Also ,are you suggesting that if someone intervened in your mother’s life at about the age of ten…she would have been able to repair some of the damage that was done and she would have been a different kind of mother?
Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. It’s like being rushed to an emergency room for critical care at that late an age, though — much earlier would have been much better — but BEFORE or RIGHT at the time when she turned ten when she wrote her last story in this collection about the FIRE — there she is lost. She is falling into a pit without a bottom. She ONLY survived from that point forward BECAUSE the BPD option was possible.
I know this is a lot of information — but it’s there for folks to consider now. I have a lot of other writing to do and I need to get things out of the way sometimes so I can get back on track with the rest of the writing!!!!
Here’s a clue — that is SUPPOSED to be developing in the book: If you read my mother’s stories and watch what happens with MOTHER in them, all the way to the end — you can see the progression of her illness
Not the ‘Hallmark card’ version of mother, but the powerful accurate NATURAL and REAL mother — physiological, evolutionarily designed, biological process of being a mother and of MOTHERING — critical for our species (as for all mammals but not as complex as human)
MOTHER is a matrix. matrix — something within or from which something else originates, develops, or takes form related in its word origins to: Latin, female animal used for breeding, parent plant, from matr-, mater
Cognition — the process of thinking — cognition is also a female word, a female process word, a mothering word
Mothers and mothering build the foundation for cognition at the same time the matrix of the mother and mothering relationship from the womb onward through the earliest stages of development is building within offspring THEIR OWN MATRIX of self that is supposed to be healthy in all ways
My mother – follow the MOTHER patterns in her stories — she is NOT simply talking about her mother who failed her, but also the ‘matrix-mother’ of self with brain-mind-thoughts of her own
THAT IS MISSING IN HER END STORY as much as her outer mother is missing
it is no coincidence that BPD is mostly a woman’s disorder — there is a definite connection between the missing-matrix-of-mother-mothering for every BPD from early childhood and the END RESULT of the missing-mother-matrix INSIDE OF THEIR OWN SELF that BPD creates in the changed-brain-mind of a BPD sufferer
I know this is probably adding confusion to confusion, but it’s important to think about. What our mothers give us is for better or worse our own brain-mind-self matrix that is the mother of our thoughts, our feelings, etc for the rest of our life.
A MATRIX disorder would be an excellent way to describe my mother — and in the book I will show how that is true
my mother’s stories provide for an inside look at the matrix-mind of my mother — until it dissolved as certainly as the end of her last story describes. after that she was ‘lost in the mirroring mirrors’ of split-off and projected matrixes within which she trapped and tortured me.
You are fortunate to have these pieces of writing that allow you to get a feel for your mother’s thought processes. All I have are crazy stories she told me like how when she was a child she asked her little brother if he would like some”tea” and gave him her “pee” to drink. That may seem funny to some but to me it sounds off. A little to outrageous for childhood jokes. And then theres the story my cousin told me about when he was in grade school and she was a late teen and how she “punched” the bully in the face. In that story, it shows me that she has no filter..just pure emotional reaction.
When I wrote in the last piece I posted that I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that I ended up with her writings, even her childhood stories that survived for 70 years, I mean that I believe something like ‘divine destiny’ made sure all of this would happen exactly the way that it did so that in the end – if I can do my part of the job correctly – something good and important can come of all the suffering that happened in the past — my mother’s losses and mine included.
These patterns as they tumble down the generations are much, much bigger than the individuals that suffer under the burden of trauma. I believe that when we drop the perspective of individual ‘egos’ what we have left is a presentation on a much bigger level of what humans truly need to form a healthy, happy body-brain in the first place along with how the absence of what we need (along with abuse and neglect added on top) leads directly to the kind of suffering I knew, you knew, your mother knew, my mother knew……
Borderline Personality Disorder remains a mystery on most of its profound levels. The collection of my mother’s writings combined with what I know might be able to provide important links between the suffering grownups pass to their children and how those suffering children ‘handle it’ through trauma altered development that changes them.
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I have written about this before, and here is another opportunity to say this again: The road to healing trauma lies in giving words to its patterns. These patterns exist in the words of ALL the stories we know — those of our parents, of their parents, of our own, and of our children.
People, PLEASE consider writing down every single story you can find and that you can remember!!!!! There is no need to worry about whether or not the story is ‘true’ or whether or not you remember it accurately.
I DO WISH that I had ‘known then what I know now’ when I listened to my mother tell the stories from her childhood, but I remember the bulk of them — and every single one of them is a link in the chain of trauma and abuse that was passed to her and onto me and to my siblings.
Ongoing unresolved trauma that interferes with the ability to parent offspring through safe and secure attachment — and that interferes with our own ability to have safe and secure attachment with our own self and with the world we live in — happens because the INFORMATION contained in traumatic experience has not been processed, valued, understood or ‘made whole’. This making-whole happens when information contained in a traumatic experience comes to make sense IN A BIG WAY so that the species as a whole LEARNS SOMETHING NEW and critically important so that life can continue and these kinds of traumas can (1) be absolutely prevented and avoided in the future, or (2) brand new coping skills can be learned to deal with a future repeat of the trauma ASAP and completely effectively.
The nature of trauma is that it represents A CHALLENGE both to the individual who experiences but more importantly — if we can look at the bigger picture outside the range of individual ‘ego’ — to the survival of our entire species. If we assume that survival is not the only interest of nature, but that survival with ever increasing well-being IS ALSO important, then we can begin to understand that NONE OF WHAT WE KNOW of trauma – past, present, or how it might reappear in the future – is insignificant.
It then becomes each of our job not only to heal from our own individual traumas but also to understand how and why they got in our way in the first place! How THIS happened is that the people around us, most importantly those who caregive the youngest infants and children, were not able to do this job for their own trauma. Because it is the nature of this unresolved trauma NOT TO GO AWAY until someone, somewhere, somehow LEARNS WHAT TRAUMA HAS TO TEACH US, we HAVE to learn from it.
I absolutely consider the existence of my mother’s writings to be a GIFT not only to me but also as I can make them available to serious students of not only trauma itself, but also of unresolved trauma.
When I think about my mother’s earliest writings — even today as I prepare in a few moments to go back to the book-writing — I understand that in its most simple, simple, simple format ALL OF LIFE is about what developmental neuroscientist Dr. Allan N. Schore names as RUPTURE AND REPAIR.
Because these patterns form the basis of mother-infant brain-building interactions from the beginning of life — most especially as they occur on the emotional communication level in the interactions between mother-infant — it is these patterns that build the foundation of the brain and the body. Either there is rupture without repair which builds the ability to regulate emotions (emotional regulation) into the earliest forming right social-emotional brain OR there is rupture without repair WITHOUT adequate repair that builds emotional dysregulation into the body-brain instead.
Unresolved trauma is ABOUT RUPTURE WITHOUT ADEQUATE REPAIR. Learning from trauma is about repairing these ruptures.
Nature does not care that humans can ‘think’ about their life. Nature cares that life continues. Rupture without repair brings death on one level or another. Repairing ruptures brings life.
Write down all the stories you know about anyone close to you who impacted and/or impacts your life. Give those stories form. Give them words. It is healing to do so because what trauma needs to resolve itself is to become processed and integrated and LEARNED FROM. We cannot possibly begin to learn from trauma as human beings if we cannot process the information it gives to us — AND THIS IS CRITICALLY IMPORTANT — WITH BOTH SIDES OF OUR BRAIN.
As I write my book now I continue to be amazed that for all the thousands and thousands of words I have written elsewhere about this whole topic RIGHT NOW — because of the focus of my intent — I am coming to new realizations that astound me, and they are coming to me in various ways. But in the end my intention is that all the realizations form themselves into a coherent pattern IN WORDS — yes, that will take the form of a book.
It seems to be outside of my ‘range of vision’ to understand more comprehensively what nature actually intends to accomplish by so profoundly changing the physiological development of a traumatized infant-child’s body-brain development in ways that hamper the processing of trauma-related information. Because that is exactly what happens.
It seems that these changes are meant to ensure physical survival IN THE SHORT TERM. In our culture in this day and age humans survive LONG PAST what nature has intended. We also do not raise our offspring collectively which is what I believe nature has always intended. But putting all this aside for a moment I want to say this about the condition we are individually left with if we are severe early trauma survivors:
Our right brain hemisphere forms first. It is built on emotional and social information gained thru our earliest infant-caregiver interactions. These interactions either build regulation or dysregulation into our brain circuits. These interactions determine how our brain regions interact with one another — and with our developing self. A mother is literally downloading her brain into her infant through the patterns of interactions (safe and secure or not) that she has with her infant. She is feeding the infant her own self.
If the right brain does not get to develop in an ordinary way, the information our BODY feeds to our awareness through our right brain will not be handled normally, either.
Then comes the left brain, which forms more slowly from birth and takes it giant leap in growth after the first year of life. Our left brain, with its organizational abilities, cannot grow to organize right brain chaos if that’s what the infant was fed in the beginning (most simply put). Organizing experience in the form of language is one of the left brain’s major job. This process and the abilities that go with it are changed and disturbed by early experience — both as they affected the FIRST growth of the right brain and also as they affect the growth of the left brain.
The corpus callosum, the region between the two brain hemispheres in the middle of our head sends information back and forth between our left and right brains (and they are like two separate brains with different jobs to do).
This all means most simply that the most important information trauma has to teach human beings is NOT able to be processed PHYSIOLOGICALLY in normal ways for early abuse and trauma survivors. The perhaps cruel and/or crude way trauma information is then processed by our species is that those ‘informed others’ — those who DID not suffer early trauma and have their body-brain changed as a result — can simply read trauma survivors’ ‘reproductive fitness indicators’ with are ‘communication signals’ about the CONDITION OF THE ENVIRONMENT that created survivors in the first place.
Nature is NOT concerned with the egotistic personal individual – not remotely. Survival of the species as a whole is what matters. If survivors want to try to heal, to improve the quality of their own life and achieve increased well-being, then we have a major job to do!! On all levels!! And this is a job that non early abuse survivors WILL NEVER HAVE TO DO because the foundations of their body-brain development are very different from ours.
So it is WE who have to challenge our selves to learn about what happened to us. We have to learn how to LEARN from and about trauma so that we can find ways to understand it and learn from it — which is how trauma is ALWAYS processed and integrated — both individually and collectively.
In our modern world we certainly can and SHOULD be able to enlist the help of those who do have a more ‘ordinary’ body-brain. Those people’s BODIES know things ours do not. So, we end up WATCHING them — and learning — at the same time they are watching us — and learning.
Because humans have evolved the gift of verbal language abilities it is important to use our words as a part of these educational, learning and healing processes. Write down the stories. A WordPress blog is a perfect place to put them to publish privately or publicly.
Write down all the stories for everyone important to you. If you remember hearing them, write down also the context of the ‘hearing’. Like repeated nightmares, repeated stories that come again and again in the same words ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT ones.
As we transform trauma stories into written words we are using whatever abilities our trauma-changed body-brain has to process information — and it’s the best exercise for our brain! True, any art form of any kind is good, but I am specifically talking about VERBAL processes here because they take place using very specific channels.
If you read my mother’s stories found at the link at the end of this post you will find that every one of them contains elements of forming what is called a Theory of Mind. (google search this term, and then do it again adding into your search terms, ‘child abuse’)
In every one of my mother’s stories the pattern of rupture with and without repair is obvious.
My mother, in what I believe was the burgeoning Borderline frame of ‘mind’ she had to work with, wrote about hurt and forgiveness, about change and change of heart, about resolving conflicts. All of this is about more than ‘just’ redemption, forgiveness, understanding and healing. It IS about the human fundamental requirement-need to REPAIR RUPTURES when they occur in our own self, between others we care about, and in all our relationships.
As you read my mother’s stories in the order they were written you will discover in the last story she wrote that there is nothing left but being lost, seeking the repair and not finding it.
It’s NOT that my Borderline mother didn’t TRY, way back there in her childhood, to heal herself. But she COULD NOT DO IT ALONE. In the end (in her beginning by age 10 when this last story was written) there was no way OUT. Hope ended. The ruptures in my mother’s life coupled with all her attempts to heal those ruptures failed her.
In this end her physiology left her ONLY one avenue to follow into her future: A permanent and fundamental change in the way her self operated in the world that took the pathway of Borderline Personality Disorder.