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Another important reply to comment on: +IN THE WORDS OF A BORDERLINE CHILD: MY MOTHER’S STORIES

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

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