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This entire blog is being hosted by a singled-out severe abuse survivor of a severe Borderline Personality Disorder mother. As that survivor, who lived from the first breath I took until the day 18 years long years later that I was expunged (escaped) my home of origin, Mother targeted her abuse on me of the six children she gave birth to.
I am working on writing my childhood story. Most abused children of Borderlines mothers are being given an Insecure Attachment Disorder at the same time they are being abused. The only way this is prevented is if there is one other primary caregiver that can and does provide safe and secure attachment relationship opportunities during PRIMARILY the first two years of life. I BARELY had these ‘other’ attachment experiences. The primary one was with my brother who was 13 1/2 months old when I was born.
Every person — and that’s easily about half of our population — who did not experience safe and secure attachment with their earliest caregivers during their most critical early body-brain developmental stages before the age of two does have some version of an Insecure Attachment Disorder. (There is a wealth of information on the net and on this blog about ‘attachment’. Google search “stop the storm” attachment” and “stop the storm trauma altered development” for some background on this topic.)
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In reply to the fantastic comments that are coming in on the topic of child abusing Borderline parents I want to share here the bottom line discovery I was forced to make in order to begin to work my way through my own 18 years of child abuse as the singled-out target of my severe Borderline mother.
As said many times on this blog, the number one symptom of all Insecure Attachment Disorders is the inability of a survivor to tell a coherent narrative of their life story.
While I have written snippets and vignettes of abuse incidents that happened to me, I am actually tackling the impossible by working now to force a linear-based coherency upon my insanely abusive dissociated infant-childhood.
I immediately realized as I began my book-writing that I needed to find the structure under my Borderline mother’s treatment of me — and underneath the entire series of repeating patterns of ‘mad’ behavior that formed her tragic, tragic life (and death in 2002).
I found this structure. I have been ‘blessed’ with material to work with that is among the worst of the worst — to be ‘bettered’ only by a story in which the Borderline mother butchered her children. Because those dead offspring can tell no tale at all, what I know is probably the next best thing.
Because I inherited — quite accidentally on my mother’s part but I believe with full intent by ‘destiny’ — all of my mother’s surviving papers and photographs, my book will include my abusive Borderline mother’s words along with my own. What I am doing is separating myself and my story from my mother — who had only one Borderline when it came to me.
Because I have ordered and carefully transcribed Mother’s own words I have the rare opportunity of being able to track the patterns of her madness not only in what I can remember about what happened to me, but I also have the patterns of Mother’s mind as recorded in her own words going back nearly 70 years with her childhood stories.
Those patterns, when examined with meticulous and compassionate care have revealed to me a very well defined grid upon which her madness was constructed. I have created my own GPS that allows me to locate myself in space and time on that grid — so I can, in effect, ‘take a look around’.
Yes, her Borderline world was strange, bizarre and foreign, but it was not without order and organization. What her illness did as it entirely changed the way her body-brain developed during her early critical growth stages in her own environment of malevolent maltreatment, was to find an extremely creative and affective antidote to the most severe form of Insecure Attachment Disorder there is: Disorganized-Disoriented Insecure Attachment Disorder.
Her trauma altered developmental pathway included the activation (I believe) of a very specific combination of genetic potential for survival that I do not believe would have been activated had she not suffered extreme traumatic stress in her early development birth to two, and then through the age of five. (Her disorder is fully operational in her age 9 and 10 childhood stories.)
Neuroscientists now have the technological ability to watch a Borderline brain in operation — in fact, I fully believe the disorder can be accurately and immediately diagnosed from these scans.
Any attempt those of us want to make from the outside must understand that we are not able to ‘understand’ a Borderline — especially an abusive one — using any knowledge that does not take into account that their brains and their nervous system DOES NOT OPERATE in an ordinary or normal way.
Not to consider this fact actually makes the rest of us nuts.
To a Borderline such as my mother was, her universe was perfectly ordered and structured. I now have a solid, though rudimentary understanding, of what her grid looked like and how her universe operated. If I had not been able to learn this piece of information there is no chance in the known universe that I could begin to orient and organize my OWN SELF as the recipient of continual and severe, chronic abuse I received from Borderline Mother.
I am not sure I want to write much – yet – about what this grid was like and why it was formed the way that it was. I will say that the visual image of what operated on this grid occurs as pyramid structures that are actually matrices that govern the way Mother’s Borderline realities operated.
Each of the pyramid matrix ‘forms’ have four base points. The fifth point entailed a verbal litany — verbal abuse — that fed the energy through the matrix systems.
The pyramid matrix that an abusing-one-child Borderline uses, I believe, can be tracked of course to earliest trauma in the Borderline’s childhood. These matrix pyramidal patterns upon the pattern of the Borderline grid make perfect sense once we on the outside let go of how WE think and begin to understand we are looking at a universe that is of a completely different kind.
A Borderline universe of realities does make perfect sense inside of them. Their inner structure has its own strictly adhered to rules that govern it. We can discover what these rules are and then use a GPS with an orientation that allows we survivors of their severe abuse to keep track of our own self in the present as we travel back in time to find the story that ran through our own self in an abusive Borderline’s world.
In my book writing I am now days away from my 9th birthday……
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In response to this post:
+FANTASTIC COMMENTS COMING IN ON ABUSING BORDERLINE PARENTS
which contains the link to comments at the end of this post:
+#1 SYMPTOM OF BPD = CANNOT PARENT CORRECTLY
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Stop the Storm 
Your grandmother was a psychologist. Early childhood if I remember correctly. She would have had an awful lot of knowlege of how the growing brain functioned and processed information. Perhaps your mother was simply replaying what was done to her. I remember a comment by her that her brother would “hurt” her if she didn’t do what he wanted. I wondered what that was exactly.
You are welcome for the link. Hope it helps.
Grandmother received her masters in 1918 – nothing was then known about ‘neuroscience’ – strange twisted damaged and damaging relationship between ma and g-ma — g-ma was a career guidance counselor…
Linda,
Have you studied the “structures” that mind control victims have installed to control them? They are very similar to what you are describing and are an integral part of the dissociation process……
This is sort of a jumping off point if you haven’t studied this before.
http://lynnsart.net/library/government-documents/
Not saying your mother was a victim of MKULTRA, but the mechanisms are similar in my opinion.
Well, I bet this all leads in a dark direction!
Thanks, and I forwarded this to my daughter. I cannot examine external thought while I work on this stage of the book writing.
I began my deep investigative research into what was ‘wrong’ with me about 8 years ago now, and started with my long-standing history of reading memoirs of people who had been POWs and/or captives during the communist takeover of China.
When I went back to those readings and followed the thread of my own thoughts I found that Mother used every single mind control tool the ‘professionals’ did.
I came to the conclusion that the ‘playing board’ of the human mind has parameters and patterns of functioning that are common to us all. There would be, therefore, only so many effective ways to manipulate those patterns of functioning.
That my mother instinctively knew all those ways and used them on me didn’t/doesn’t surprise me.
I have to go backwards in my book-writing (I realized yesterday) and put into the text something along these lines because in my linear examination of my childhood I now know where ‘this’ belongs and where ‘this’ started (as far as I know!).
Shortly after an abuse ‘incident’ was added to Mother’s litany when I was 7 that was another ‘proof’ that I didn’t want to grow up and that I wanted to remain a ‘baby’ — Mother began this completely bizarre and extremely effective mind-control technique.
Especially during the months of time our family was dragging ourselves on foot up (and then down in the morning) the horrible mountain road to our homestead, thus contributing to my great exhaustion after a long day at school in between, there were times when my sleep was profoundly deep. If Mother came to ‘examine’ me while I was sleeping (she examined me with her Evil Eye every opportunity she could for 18 years), and found me sleeping on my back with both of my arms raised up beside my head, she would grab my hair and drag me off my bed from this sound sleep as she beat me for ‘sleeping like a baby – you want to be a baby, etc.). She would be fully launched into her pattern of abuse litany recital that brought her verbal abuse rhythm into the pounding of her blows.
As I say, there is something profoundly ‘different’ about the mind of a severe Borderline abusive parent! I won’t read anything anyone has written about anything until my own life story narrative is coherent and complete!
That also includes, by the way, the new book I reserved before print and bought that is still in its box:
The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology) [Hardcover]
by Stephen W. Porges
I will get to it when I can — but not now — yet I thank you greatly for the link!!
It gave me hope for accomplishing this book writing to completion to realize as I posted this that I am six months away from being half way through my childhood in my explorations today. Once I cover material up to my age 9 1/2 I will be half way through exactly and on the down hill slide.
In addition, perhaps the simplest way I know of to think about a severely abusive Borderline – especially one that abuses one child of several — is to picture a chess game.
The Borderline brain does use a ‘board’ like the rest of us do (for example). The ranges of what a human brain consists of and how it operates are this board.
However, a Borderline such as my mother was, rearranges the entire game. On the board, the borderlines separating the spaces on the board are changed. The identity of the pieces on the board are changed, and nearly all the rules for how the game can be (must be) played are changed as well.
When considering a Borderline’s mental grid and the pyramidal matrices that operate on this grid — we have to stretch our own thinking out of the range of ordinary into the range of — like it or not — of the extraordinary.
That is the power that early traumatic stress can have on an infant-child’s earliest trajectories of body-brain-mind-self development. I firmly believe that while Borderline Personality Disorder is not curable, it is manageable — and most importantly — IT IS PREVENTABLE! (This does not mean to me that Borderlines such as my mother was are ever safe to parent their own children without serious intervention and continual monitoring.)