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People with different languages, cultures and religious understanding refer to a Supreme Being by many names, but I most simply rely on this single short word – God.  I believe God creates each individual soul of a person at the moment of conception because God loves each and every person who has ever lived.  I also believe once a soul is created it is sent, like an arrow out of a bow, into a forever future of destiny.  I found this in a book about parenting:  When We Grow Up by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani

“The journey of the soul is a long one, which begins at conception when the ‘spirit encircles the body…in the womb’ [reference].  And while its end is to reflect with faithfulness the light of God, that light being eternal makes the journey endless also.  What a joy therefore to discover companions on the way, to discover that these to whom we were entrusted in the first stages of the journey are moving with us step by step.  Through sunshine to the light of God we go, parents and children both.  And no matter what our age or education, no matter what the differences between us, the soul within us being ageless and cultureless travels onward, conscious only of direction.  Though we are all ultimately alone before our God, we catch the echoes of parallel footsteps continually, and rejoice in the companionship we find between the generations.” (pages 59-60 – I added bold type emphasis)

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As I work for the first time in my 60 year long life to put my memories of my childhood into a sequential line covering those 18 years of abuse, so far I am mainly conscious of one part of my experience AS A CHILD surviving abuse and continuing to endure THAT IS THE SAME as what I experience as an adult:  I always instinctively moved forward.

The soul, which by the way is also genderless although by nature connected to a gendered body in this material world, must have this innate characteristic.  That’s what enduring and surviving seems to be:  Moving forward no matter what.

Humans, as members of a social species, are designed to benefit from companionship.  Our beginning physical journey happens because of the companionship between mother and fetus.  Humans follow a long course of development post-birth.  During these early stages we are absolutely dependent upon caregivers for our life.  We are also dependent on these caregivers to train us in good ways and to provide for our education.

Infant and child abuse is NOT what God and nature intended.  As I locate myself in my memories in the time and place of my childhood experiences I can always see that some part of ME continued forward.  I am only now beginning to be able to recognize that this ME was my SOUL me.

Because my Borderline Personality Disordered mother was SO severely, psychotically ill, she could not – and DID NOT – allow me to take possession of my body, my self, my personality, my self awareness, my ability to choose to be me – in any way if she could prevent it.  I see now that ALL of my mother’s abuse had this single end goal:  To prevent Linda from ever being born as an individual self.

I also now increasingly understand (as I discover this in my book writing and see how these patterns worked) that my mother needed ME to be her stand-in for the evil-bad-child the devil was coming to get.  Her need, and how she met this need, take so-called ‘splitting’ and ‘projection’ to such an extreme level it would be nearly impossible to comprehend the comprehensiveness of HOW she met this need by torturing and traumatizing me if I hadn’t been there in her inner Borderline core of hell.

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At the same time I am tracking how hard Mother had to work to maintain her patterns of obliterating ME as a person-and-as a person separate from her, I see that the physical developmental stages and physiological changes I was destined to go through as a living, developing child, CHALLENGED Mother to work harder and harder and HARDER to make sure I as a person was never born.  This meant that the abuse had to escalate on all levels right along with my growth stages.

The ME that WAS still alive as an individual WAS my soul.  It is very eerie for me to look back, inside, through into myself as a child and recognize my soul.  Personally, it would be very nice if ALL humans were able to pass from their initial pure innocent stages into increasingly more ‘human’ ones of involvement in this material life while at the SAME TIME being able to maintain clear contact with the eternal element of who God created us to be:  Our soul.

But I don’t think – no, I KNOW that what I experienced was extremely, extraordinarily NOT NORMAL.  I therefore was deprived of the opportunity to grow through my childhood in anything like a NORMAL way.  This NORMAL way, at least in mainstream American culture, would have created a rift between my experience of the culturally-all-important EGO SELF and my true SOUL SELF.

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As I worked through the difficult process of identifying what happened to me in my age-10 memory of abuse, I recognized that my EGO self ‘came to’ during the weeks covered by this memory stage of my development.  I awoke as a conscious self – and if I had not acquiesced to Mother’s will at this time, I would not have lived past this age of 10.

So acquiesce I did – and live I did.

I believe that all of the religions God has provided to mankind over the span of our evolution have each served to illuminate the way to keep our two wings of being human in balance and in harmony.  Our spiritual nature and our material (ego-self) nature exist only as we start our soul journey here, but not once our body dies and our soul moves forward into other worlds of God.  Yet our soul has opportunities in this lifetime to grow and to learn because we have free will here – and only here.

If my conscious, thinking choice decision making self had remained awake and alive past this event I experienced of abuse by Mother when I was ten, she would have killed me.

My soul chose.

My soul willed me to keep my body alive.  My conscious self thus had to go back to sleep and stayed asleep for a very long time.

I cannot make any sense of myself in childhood or of myself as an adult without trying to learn what my soul has always known.  If I lived in a culture truly steeped in common knowledge about the truth of the life of the soul my journey would be easier now.  But, no, I live in a culture more than steeped in the hubris of the ego self.

Yet I also know that trauma challenges shallow understandings of life.  When I watched the two movies mentioned in my last posts — +PLEASE. NO MORE WAR – A MOVIE WORTH WATCHING and +”MAKE ART NOT WAR” – ANOTHER GREAT TRUE MOVIE – I can very clearly see stars of these movies are struggling with concerns related to BOTH their soul and their ego-material nature.

Trauma awakens the depth of the soul in ways that I believe only survivors of horrendous traumas can truly comprehend.  Companionship, connection of humans with humans, is the way that the soul and the ego self can put together into one-whole the truth of experiences that MUST be shared with others to be healed.

I also believe that on profound levels the SOUL knows it has the keys to healing at the same time the ego-self knows that it alone does NOT have these keys.  Physiological diseases such as BPD can block the soul’s ability to access the truth of what is needed for healing.  In addition, as these two movies demonstrate, it takes companionship of souls with other souls to move forward with healing on this plane of existence as very real steps of progress are made to enable the WHOLE person to heal.

As a child I had no companionship.  While I was cared for by God and the angels I had no conscious awareness of this fact.  Consciousness was a luxury I did not have.  Yet my soul has always desired to move forward, always forward, and that was and is exactly what I have always done, just as the stars of these two movies did.

BEING alive can happen without consciousness, but I don’t believe that THRIVING while being alive can.  I stayed alive as a child but nothing in my world allowed me to thrive.  Both of the stars of these movies remained alive in the face of massive traumas, but as the movie shows, it was sharing companionship with others that provided the opportunity for both ‘the soul and the ego-self’ to find ways to thrive — which is what healing is all about.

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Tonight brought me yet another (Netflix streaming) moving movie experience of quality.

The Cats of Mirikitani — Blending beauty and humor with tragedy and loss, THE CATS OF MIRIKITANI is an intimate exploration of the lingering wounds of war and the healing power of art. A heart-warming affirmation of humanity that will appeal to all lovers of peace, art, and cats.

Eighty-year-old Jimmy Mirikitani [see article below] survived the trauma of WWII internment camps, Hiroshima, and homelessness by creating art.  But when 9/11 threatens his life on the New York City streets and a local filmmaker brings him to her home, the two embark on a journey to confront Jimmy’s painful past.  An intimate exploration of the lingering wounds of war and the healing powers of friendship and art, this documentary won the Audience Award at its premiere in the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival.

It also won Best Documentary for Durban International Film Festival, The Frida Award for Best New Director at Sun Valley Spiritual Film Festival, Audience Award at Paris Cinema Film Festival, Press Prize for Best Documentary at Femmina International Film Festival, Best Picture Japanese Eyes at Tokyo International Film Festival, Audience Award at Filmfest DC, and Norwegian Peace Film Award at Tromso International Film Festival.

THE FILM IS AVAILABLE FOR VIEWING HERE ON YOUTUBE

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Article HERE – follow this link, reprinted here for educational purposes only:

“Make art not war” is Jimmy Mirikitani’s motto. The 80-year-old artist was born in Sacramento, California, raised in Hiroshima, Japan, traveled the U.S. and even cooked for artist Jackson Pollock. But by 2001, Mirikitani was homeless, living on the streets of New York City. As tourists and shoppers hurried past, Mirikitani sat alone on a windy corner in New York’s SoHo, drawing pictures of whimsical cats, bleak internment camps and the angry red flames of the atomic bomb. When local filmmaker Linda Hattendorf stopped to ask about his art, a friendship—detailed in THE CATS OF MIRIKITANI—began that changed both their lives.

In sunshine, rain and snow, Hattendorf returned to document Mirikitani’s drawings, trying to decipher the stories behind them. The tales spilled out in a jumble. Childhood picnics in Japan, lost citizenship, Pearl Harbor, thousands of Americans imprisoned in WWII desert camps, a boy who loved cats. As winter warmed to spring and summer, Hattendorf started to piece together the puzzle of Mirikitani’s past. One thing is clear from his prolific sidewalk displays: he has survived terrible traumas and is determined to make his history visible through his art.

September 11, 2001 threw Mirikitani once again into a world at war and challenged Hattendorf to move from the role of witness to advocate. During the chaos following the collapse of the World Trade Center, she found herself unable to passively photograph this elderly man coughing in the toxic smoke, and invited him into her small apartment. In this uncharted landscape, the two unlikely roommates navigated the maze of the social welfare system, sought out lost family members and researched the artist’s painful past, finding eerie parallels to events unfolding around them in the present.

Blending beauty and humor with tragedy and loss, THE CATS OF MIRIKITANI is an intimate exploration of the lingering wounds of war and the healing power of art.

Update

In March 2007, THE CATS OF MIRIKITANI Co-Producer/Director Linda Hattendorf reported on what Jimmy Mirikitani has been doing since filming completed:

Jimmy has now been living in his own apartment for more than five years. I still visit him every week; he introduces me to people as his granddaughter. He’s 86 now and still making lots of art. He just had his first one-man show at an exhibition at the Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle. This summer, Masa Yoshikawa and I hope to take Jimmy back to Japan to visit Hiroshima, where he grew up. We’ll try to go there for the Peace Ceremony on August 6. It should be quite a powerful moment for us all.

Read more about Jimmy Mirikitani >>

View a gallery of his artwork >>

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Blending beauty and humor with tragedy and loss, THE CATS OF MIRIKITANI is an intimate exploration of the lingering wounds of war and the healing power of art. A heart-warming affirmation of humanity that will appeal to all lovers of peace, art, and cats.

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Thanks to a blog commenter today for pointing out this excellent online article:  Brain and Development affected after Child Abuse – by Dima — February 17, 2009.  I would like to mention again that these kinds of brain changes are not random, not coincidental, and can most accurately be considered in the context of the work of Dr. Martin Teicher as presented in several posts on this blog:

+Dr. Teicher’s ARTICLE ON TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT

*Notes on Teicher

+AS DR. MARTIN TEICHER STATES — EARLY ABUSE, ALTERED BRAIN DEVELOPMENT AND THE SCARS THAT WON’T HEAL

Teicher’s point is that the changes created in an infant-child’s developing brain (and nervous system) as Dima’s article notes, create an EVOLUTIONARILY ALTERED body.

In addition, this kind of early stress/distress CAN and very often DOES activate genetic combinations of potential designed to ensure survival in the harshest of worlds long enough that the survivor can procreate.  These troublesome genetic expressions very likely would NEVER have been activated if the early environment had been safe and secure.

This article — Brain and Development affected after Child Abuse – is worth a read.  Any concept for future study as mentioned here can be Google searched – add child abuse and brain development together into any online search – the proof of the changes that survivors of child abuse will have to live with IN OUR BODY for the rest of our lifetime will appear in articles that respond to your search.

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I just watched an unforgettable movie that has touched my heart more deeply than any I have ever seen before.  I was not expecting this when I selected this film several days ago and placed it in my Netflix streaming que.  It tells a story of human evil and of human triumph, of war and work for peace, of surviving, of a tragic past turned into a powerful tool for healing.

The Flute Player

PBS broadcast, July 22, 2003

“Arn Chorn-Pond was only a boy when the brutal Khmer Rouge regime overran Cambodia and turned his country into a ghastly land of “killing fields.” While most of Arn’s family, and 90 percent of the country’s musicians, were killed, Arn was kept alive to play propaganda songs on the flute for his captors. Now, after being adopted and living in the United States for 20 years, Arn goes back to Cambodia in The Flute Player, seeking out surviving “master musicians” and facing the dark shadows of his war-torn past. As the film follows Arn on his journey from Lowell, Massachusetts to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, his life is seen through his work in both communities of Cambodians. An extraordinary story of survival, the film is a testament to one man’s ability to transcend tragedy. An Independent Television Service (ITVS) co-presentation.”

This movie can be watched in full HERE at Hulu.com online.

This 60-minute movie does have some graphic pictures of death but can be viewed via YouTube after signing in as an adult viewer.

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From Scholastic News – Music Returns to Cambodia — by Rachel Laskow

“When Arn Chorn-Pond transferred to a prep school in western Massachusetts, nobody knew anything about him. They didn’t know that his family was killed, they didn’t know that he once lived in a jungle, and they didn’t know the frustration and anger he felt when he first came to America. After Chorn-Pond spoke on his campus about his life, he opened many people’s eyes, including fellow classmate Jocelyn Glatzer’s.

In fact, almost 20 years later, Glatzer decided to make a movie about Chorn-Pond’s life called The Flute Player.

“I felt like I knew nothing about Cambodia,” Glatzer said. “Personally, his story shows hope and the beautiful things about his culture.”

The one-hour documentary, which aired on PBS in July, weaves two stories together: Chorn-Pond’s survival in Cambodia and his work today.

When Glatzer was making the film, she had young people in mind. As a child, she found it difficult to learn history just through books. She hopes that when young people watch Arn’s story, they will want to learn more about Cambodia.

Glatzer was also inspired by Arn’s story. “Arn inspired me to think about self-expression and art on a whole other level,” she said. “[During the Khmer Rouge time] Cambodian artists were killed for expressing themselves. As an artist, I have to keep going and give other artists the freedom to express themselves.”

Besides PBS, the documentary has been part of several film festivals and has been shown on college campuses throughout the country. Glatzer has received a positive response from the film’s viewers. Many young Cambodians sent her e-mails. Before they saw the film, they knew only tragedy in Cambodia. Now, they know a lot more about their own culture.

Currently, Glatzer is working with Chorn-Pond to bring educational TV to Cambodia. They just finished filming an episode of Sesame Street, and once they complete enough episodes to wrap up a season, the show will air on Cambodian TV.”

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