Month: October 2011

+TRAUMA SURVIVORS: OUR TENSILE STRENGTH

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Two words suddenly popped into my mind while I was washing my dishes this morning.  POP!  There they were:  TENSILE STRENGTH.

TENSILE by itself concerns 1: capable of tension 2: of, relating to, or involving tension, and is a word most often used as a metallurgy term, such as the tensile strength of steel cable.

Looking at this definition at Webster’s online I also found:  TENSILE STRENGTH: the greatest longitudinal stress a substance can bear without tearing apart and ULTIMATE TENSIL STRENGTH, which has no definition of its own other than “tensile strength” itself – being a combination of words, I guess, that appears blatantly obvious in meaning!

So, how about infant and child abuse survivors (and survivors of other severe traumas)?  This is what WE have always had – one degree or another (depending on the degree of stress/distress we were/are under) of tensile strength and of ultimate tensile strength when needed!  But there has been a price for most of us to pay to continue down the road of living.  Given way too much trauma/stress/distress/tension/pressure to bear often from the time we were very tiny, adjustments had to be made inside our body-brain as it developed.  I refer to this as the experience of Trauma Altered Development (TAD).

Here are some posts on this blog on TAD:

+TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT (TAD) – A NEW DESCRIPTIVE CONCEPT

+Dr. Teicher’s ARTICLE ON TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT

+THE GOOD-BAD INFO ABOUT TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT FROM CHILD ABUSE TRAUMA

+A LIFE COMPLICATED BY TRAUMA-ALTERED DEVELOPMENT (CHILD ABUSE RELATED)

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Many of the physiological changes that happen inside the body-brain of a traumatized infant-child, most often through early attachment caregiver relationships that are unsafe and insecure, take place at the weakest points, the most vulnerable ones, where the traumas have created too much pressure on the ‘system’ of the little one.

There is another branch of information on the TAD tree of knowledge:  Allostatic Load.

Here are some links to posts on this blog that illumine what allostatic load is and how it is related to RESLIENCY FACTORS and to RISK FACTORS that influence how trauma survivors endure:

*Allostasis and Allostatic Load

*Chapter 4b – Risk – allostatic load

RELATED ARTICLES:

Allostasis and Allostatic Load: Implications for Neuropsychopharmacology

Bruce S. McEwen, Ph.D.

(Click on his name for most current info on his work – he is a brain researcher who heads a neuroendocrinology lab at New York’s Rockefeller University)

Among the useful concepts I found as I began to study about allostasis and allostatic load a few years ago was Dr. Bruce S. McEwen’s discussion of a human continuum variation in terms of our basic constitution that has some of us on one end with a body McEwen refers to as “DOVE-like” on one end and those who are more “HAWK-like on the other end – with an entire range in the middle.”  Doves are naturally more sensitive (most simply put) and hawks are more aggressive (read article HERE).

Much of our DOVE or HAWK nature is genetic, but it is important to understand that even in the womb the mother’s stress level is communicating to her unborn the conditions of the environment which in turn can alter how DOVE- or HAWK-like genes manifest in the body being formed.  Vasopressin and oxytocin are both involved.  See also:   The End of Stress As We Know It by Bruce S. McEwen (Oct 16, 2002)

Blog posts here:

+ARE YOU A ‘SENSITIVE?’

WELL-BEING

The new thoughts that are beginning to filter into my writing-learning process have to do with widening my perception of ‘all things related to surviving traumas’ to include consequences of surviving early infant-child abuse trauma not only on the physiological level and the psychological level, but also how severe trauma affects the relationship between a child and its soul.

In order for a human soul to be able to fully express the wonders of its full potential in this world it needs to be able to work with a HEALTHY human body.  When early trauma causes Trauma Altered Development as a consequence of too high of an allostatic load on the developing infant-child, very often sickness invades the body in one way or another.   Consequences of a sick body that blocked the expression of my mother’s soul in her lifetime so that what we call ‘evil’ erupted from her is, to me, but one small example.

(This blog post is simply meant to present some information for further investigation to those readers who find the topic helpful.)

Research on Allostatic Load HERE

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+GREAT CLEAR-EYED MOVIE ON THE SUBJECT OF FORGIVENESS

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Forgiveness.  What is it? 

This link HERE will take you to the page where you can take the FORGIVENESS QUIZ – How Forgiving Are You?

(read more HERE)

I just watched another movie on Netflix (streaming):  The Power of Forgiveness.  If you click on this title it takes you to the official movie website which includes such info as —

“THE POWER of FORGIVENESS explores recent research into the psychological and physical effects of forgiveness on individuals and within relationships under a wide variety of conditions and translates it into a popular, accessible documentary film for national public television. This includes feature stories on the Amish, the 9/11 tragedy and peace-building in Northern Ireland, along with interviews with renowned Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, best-selling authors Thomas Moore and Marianne Williamson and others. The film also explores the role forgiveness holds in various faiths traditions. It provides an honest look at the intensity of anger and grief that human nature is heir to. We see in the film that there are transgressions people find themselves unwilling or unable to forgive. Through character-driven stories the film shows the role forgiveness can play in alleviating anger and grief and the physical, mental and spiritual benefits that come with it.

Forgiveness and Justice

Dr Everett (“Ev”) Worthington is a professor of psychology who has published over 20 books on forgiveness, marriage, and family topics. But his experience with forgiveness comes not just from study and research. He’s had some first-hand experience with forgiveness.

On a New Year’s Eve about ten years ago someone broke into his mother’s house. An attempted theft turned into a brutal murder when his mother fought back. A suspect was captured who volunteered details no one could have known who wasn’t at the scene. But because of “some issues with the evidence,” a jury wouldn’t indict.

Within six months of her murder Ev and his two siblings forgave the person who killed their mother. He admits that he had a lot of professional preparation. .He had studied forgiveness scientifically and therapeutically for years before the incident. But ultimately he felt that they were able to forgive because by doing so they were honoring the values their mother had tried to instill in them.

He tries to teach his students today that forgiveness is not something that comes after justice has been accomplished. Indeed, he never got justice. But he firmly believes that forgiveness and justice can work hand in hand.”

HERE IS A PAGE OF FORGIVENESS OUTREACH TOOLS – including –

The material collected here is designed to encourage individuals, families and communities of all kinds to use The POWER of FORGIVENESS as a focus for reflection and discussion. The film provides an honest look at the intensity of anger and grief that human nature is heir to.  It is essentially seven short stories about forgiveness and an examination of the role forgiveness can play in alleviating anger and grief. It shows the physical, mental and spiritual benefits that come with forgiveness.

We have included simple tips for conversation leaders, links to specially commissioned articles with discussion questions to help promote fuller engagement with the issues raised in the film, and a PDF-formatted mini-poster to build awareness of the broadcast and to promote your conversations.

Articles

THIS PAGE – click here – IS FULL OF ALL KINDS OF FORGIVENESS RESOURCE INFO!!

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Movie review: ‘The Power of Forgiveness’

Finding the space between human and divine

by Maureen M. Hart November 28, 2007

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This movie is worth watching for anyone who knows about troubles that traumas can cause.  I will watch it again – maybe several more times (I can listen to it like radio, too).  Forgiveness is a mystery to me.  There was NO forgiveness in my home of origin.  I learned nothing about it.  Instead, I learned about its opposite.

Even for all the viewpoints presented in the film the mystery for me was not removed from the topic.  If readers would comment to this post if they watch the movie – I would most sincerely like that.

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+UNITING AGAIN

alchemynow2 Comments

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I never intended to be writing a series of posts, but that appears to be what I am doing.  I have too much work to do to remain in this place of being stuck for very long.  I mentioned the word “crossroad” in my earlier post today.  What I am finding to be more accurate is that I am at a “Y” in my writing0learning-healing-growing road of life, not a crossroad.

Yes, I am retracing my steps.  I realize this is what my whole book-story writing process is all about.  Today I am recognizing that I have followed my own life back from age 11 (where I am ‘stuck’ presently in my book writing) back to my age three shortly before my fourth birthday.  Although this story has been rewritten for the book, the incident that I am at this moment finding to me exactly where the fork in the “Y” of my life took place as I recorded it earlier on this blog:  *Age 3 – THE TOILET BOWL

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Only if I had slowed this far down in my writing-retracing process could I have FINALLY seen this critically important point.

Every time I have ever had this memory return to me I remember the few seconds that took place after Mother finished her outraged assault on little me, threw me down against the iron of the bathtub, and stormed out of the room.

Always I have had a sense that ‘angels were present’.

Always I have had a sense of something within me ‘leaving’ or ‘parting ways’ with me.

Today as I begin ever so slowly to move forward again inside of myself with my book-writing journey I realize I could not move any further ahead into my story when I was eleven without first being able to discover what happened to me at the juncture of this toilet bowl abuse incident.

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Somehow, and I don’t yet have the ‘correct’ words to describe this, the extremely traumatic life I had lived as Mother’s abused child up until those few seconds just mentioned above, my ‘worldly self’ and my ‘soul self’ were on the same track — as they should have been.

Had I been in anything like a safe and secure attachment environment my ‘self’ and my ‘soul’ would have continued their journey together as one growing entity — one entity in wholeness proceeding to develop, mature and grow up through my entire infancy and childhood to become a whole and healthy adult.

I was not safe.

Not at all safe.

I suspect that as humanity becomes more spiritually mature (such is our destined evolution as a species) adults, most certainly parents and teachers, will be able to clearly understand how all aspect of a little person is maturing at the same time.  Our culture does not agree on spiritual matters at this time in our history, so it is up to each of us individually to become clear inside of our own self what relationship we maintain with our soul and with our Creator — and with all the other souls around us.

What I needed to know NOW is that up until this age-3 toilet bowl tragedy I was still whole.  After this tragedy my self as I lived in my body had to make it forward because this self-soul AVAILABLE connection (for my own growth and development) was forced through severe abuse to be severed.  (As I said, no words to describe this yet.)

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As I wrote my age-10 memory of another massive abuse attack on me I realized something critically important is contained in my memory about this time — because something important happened.  I know what that is now.  Today I realize another level to that ‘story’ is the fact that for the first time since ‘the toilet bowl’ I was able to experience a connection with my soul.  Yet again, however, Mother’s sickness and resulting abuse forced my growing ‘material self’ to part ways yet again with my ‘soul self’.

I want to make clear that my soul did not GO anywhere.  The available access that I could have been forging between these two wings of my existence on this earth was interrupted and wounded.

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This also lets me look ahead to other parts of my story I know happened that are connected to this ‘theme’, most importantly the vision I will probably rewrite for the book, but that exists currently on the blog at this link:  *Age 15 – MY ‘VISION’ – ALONE NAKED IN THE WOODS SINGING

Everything I discover now for the rest of my retracing-book-writing will be affected now that I found that spot at the “Y” of my childhood road so that I can now invite both sides of me (material and spiritual) to the dialog that needs to happen between them so that I can find the truth about myself in my childhood — and write it.

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Previous related post (with links to others included):  +”WE BOTH KNOW….” SAYS MY SOUL-SELF TO MY WORLDLY-SELF

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+”WE BOTH KNOW….” SAYS MY SOUL-SELF TO MY WORLDLY-SELF

alchemynow3 Comments

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“Knock!  Knock!”

“Who’s there?”

“It is I,” said my soul.  “It is I standing here knocking on your new-self-being born.  It is I who will not leave you alone now any more than I have ever left you alone throughout all those torturous years you were confined within your mother’s hell.”

“I hear you knocking.  But I can’t see you.”

“Do not worry.  I will not abandon you.  Neither will I leave you alone to follow your material self into oblivion.  I have too much invested in your life to lose you now.  God says the same thing, but it will always be your choice to pay attention – or not.”

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I wandered in tight corkscrew circles of oblivion from the moment in the evening of October 3, 1969 when my father brought me to the Anchorage International Airport and saw me to that plane.  Bound for Naval boot camp outside of Bainbridge, Maryland, I went because I had no thoughts of my own at 18 and one month.  Being shoved from the nest was the best thing, of course, that had ever happened to me.  I did not complain.  I left.  Just like I was told to do.

My soul was trying to wake me up even in boot camp.  Each of us 64 women in that Company were assigned ‘watch’ shifts, to sit with the ‘real’ Navy Wave throughout different hours, keeping guard.  On my very first shift I spent the first night listening intently with great interest, curiosity, and yes, hope, to the ‘real’ watch woman as she described the Mormon faith she had been raised in.

The start of my searching.  Unfortunately not many weeks passed after boot camp before I was exposed to alcohol and street drugs.  I used them all for searching.  I used relationships for searching.  I used books for searching.  I was a SELF starving to be born at the same time I was a soul.  I did not know any part of myself.  Nothing in my life would have made self knowledge possible.  Not the knowledge of the reality of my self.  Not the knowledge of how to go about knowing the reality of my self (dual:  soul-spirit AND self-material).

It took 22 months after I left home before my soul managed to guide me through tribulations I could not have imagined to an odd situation in Sacramento, California months after I had been discharged from the Navy for becoming pregnant.  In September 1971 I met a man there.  Out of his mouth one night came all the words my soul wanted the REST of me to hear – because I believe my soul was BORN knowing that Christ had returned “as a thief in the night,” and that He was calling His “people by a new name.”  I instantly knew this Truth.  I instantly knew I was one of these ‘people’:  Always had been, always would be, always will be.

No matter what avenues I pursued in my searching, there was no separation between the search and the finding.   But even having found what my soul wanted me to know I did not truly know that what I found was LOVE.  It has taken me another 40 years of continual searching along the entire pathway of my adult life to get me to this point TODAY where I can, for the first time in my life, actually recognize that LOVE is the only TRUE reality.  Everything that has appeared to me otherwise has been but a shadow, and like all abused infants and children, I know a great deal about what lies in shadow.

I did not, however, have a clue about what LOVE is.  I learn that with every breath I take because my soul most deeply desires that I figure LOVE out in this lifetime.

As I look back through the charred, blackened corridors of my 18 year infant-childhood of abuse I see that my soul guided and protected me all the way through it.  I would not have survived otherwise.  The problem, then, was that my soul rightly needed me to find my awake conscious OTHER self, the self that should have been awakening into my life from the moment of my birth – and was not allowed to do so – and did not begin to do so until after I left home at 18.

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When I began the task several months ago of writing my entire 18-year infant-childhood abuse story I did not anticipate the weight of the burden I would be faced with.  The burden of gaining a fuller awareness of the burden I survived as a child as I write has combined with the burden I feel today as I try to actually write the story.

I know I am at a crossroads.  I will either find my way to complete this writing or I will not.

Because I am so stuck under the weight of this combined burden as I work to write what happened to me when I was 10 and 11, I know the answer I am seeking so I can move forward must lie exactly in the reality of what I was experiencing at that middle childhood point in my life.

What I know so far is that clearly my independent CONSCIOUS material-world self woke up for the first time.  I also know that when this happened my mother reacted to my awakening self so harshly that if I had NOT gone back to sleep, she would without any doubt have killed me.

The gossamer lines of the story I am seeking, and seeking to tell, that lie deeply within the experiences I am writing about – invisible and as powerful as those gossamer lines are – tell that my soul was there when I had to make that choice, “Will I keep my awake self awake and let my mother kill me, or will I go back to sleep for as long as it takes so that my body can stay alive?”

True, I made that choice wisely, but I cannot escape the truth that I did make a choice.  My choice at 10 years old was a life and death choice.  I have managed to write, finally, about the circumstances during those days as I remember them well.

The gossamer threads of the story are harder to tell.  It is taking me days turning into weeks to begin to comprehend that as I chose to live, as I chose as an individual self to go back to sleep so deeply that Mother could not detect any signs that I was alive, could only have happened one way.

True, today I recognize that God created my soul when I was conceived out of His love for me.  I also today, this very moment, am recognizing that God created my soul with the power and ability to carry me through the 18-year hell of my childhood intact so that I could wake up the other part of me – my independent conscious worldly-self, when and as it was finally safe to do so.  God gave me my soul to do His job of ensuring my survival.  Both of my self-parts cooperated so that I did, indeed, stay alive against all odds.

I am sitting here writing this realizing that as a bird with my two wings – one of my soul self and one of my material self – I am more fully awakened as a whole self than I have ever been in my 60-year life.   I can find a way to tell my story in words but only by accepting the reality that both of these two parts of my self know what I experienced in different ways.  My survival depended on me being able to move through the abuse I survived as a split person – as a soul-self and a deeply sleeping unconscious world-self.

To pick up the gossamer threads of this story I am telling I need to unfold both of my wings, strengthen them, test them out as I learn to fly through my personhood being able to know what both parts of me remember.  My soul reads with my physical eyes Holy Words about retracing my steps as the “banished and faithful friend,” I have always been from the moment God created both my body and my soul.

It was never right that I was banished as a human being from living my life in my own body, but that is exactly what my mother (who most probably suffered from severe Borderline Personality Disorder with psychosis), in her devastating disease, forced me to do:  Be banished from my own self.  But Mother never touched my soul.  God and the angels – and in fact also my own soul – NEVER allowed that to happen.  It is now time in my life for my soul-self and my worldly-self to befriend one another as consciously as we possibly can so the banishment of my self with my self and from my own life can finally end.

By age 10 it is clear to me that I had to agree to this multilevel banishment in order to survive.  It has taken me another 50 years of journeying to begin to be ready to end it.  That, perhaps more than anything, is what writing my story of my abusive childhood is helping me to do – end the banishment that was forced upon me as my only option to continued survival by my mother through her escalated reign of terror against me during those last two weeks of May in 1962.

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POSTED AT:  GOD LOVE

*RETRACING MY STEPS AS THE “BANISHED AND FAITHFUL FRIEND”

*THE FOOD OF MY SOUL – “THINE HEART IS MY TREASURY…”

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SEE ALSO posts from yesterday:  +INFANT-CHILD VERBAL ABUSE – WOUNDS TO THE MUSIC/LANGUAGE BRAIN

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+INFANT-CHILD VERBAL ABUSE – WOUNDS TO THE MUSIC/LANGUAGE BRAIN

alchemynow1 Comment

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It strikes me after writing my last post that I am mirroring in my choice of music I am working on today – Maná’s song – El Chaman – that I am fascinated now not only with learning the SOUND but also the UN-SOUND that makes up music.  I want to learn how to play (and read it on the music sheet) the PAUSES that make up the music by defining its beat.

This mirrors my inner growing awareness of my own need to STOP everything I have been doing in some way so that I can learn something entirely new – and if need be, change directions.

I hope to be able to move onto this – Maná’s song – Tú tienes lo que quiero  –– very soon.  I have the music now for all the songs listed to the right of these videos.  I only listen to Spanish music.  I love the beat – and I love that I hear the language as sound because I know nothing about this language.  Nor do I wish to.

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I realize this might seem like a strange combination of terms for a Google search, but I am recommending them:  “child abuse verbal prosody language brain”

Infants and children who received VERBAL abuse – along with all kinds of other forms of maltreatment and traumas – have difficulties with this:

Affective prosody, the nonlinguistic aspect of language conveys emotions and attitudes during discourse. There is a neurological basis of affective prosodic comprehension – and it is vastly affected during early preverbal brain-body developmental stages through exposure to VERBAL ABUSE.

Check out this article online:

Right Hemisphere Unconscious Childhood Memories

From: The Right Brain & the Unconscious (Plenum).
by Rhawn Joseph, Ph.D.

LIMBIC LANGUAGE

Over the course of our evolutionary development, prior to the acquisition of complex speaking patterns, communication was no doubt subserved via body language, gesture, facial expression, and in particular via emotional sounds and mimicry. Language has not always been temporal sequential or the dominant domain of the left half of the brain.

RIGHT HEMISPHERE MELODIC-EMOTIONAL LANGUAGE AXIS

Although left brain speech eventually becomes preeminent in the expression of verbal thoughts and ideas, the right hemisphere is dominant for melodic and emotional speech, perception, and expression . The right hemisphere remains dominant in the ability to discern and impart meaning, context, sincerity, and emotional intent to all that is communicated.

In fact, as demonstrated by Eliot Ross, Kenneth Heilman, Don Tucker, B.E. Shapiro, M. Danly and others, there is one area within the right hemisphere which mediates the ability to vocally express melody and emotion, which is located in the right frontal region; there is yet another region in the right temporal and temporal-parietal area which subserves the capacity to hear these as well as environmental sounds. (Click on article title – important!)

I better get back to my keyboard practice!  I have a lot to heal!

Previous posts today:

+CHILD ABUSE STORIES – HOW TO WRITE WITHOUT WORDS?

+MYSTERY OF THE SELF-OBLIVIOUS-SELF

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Humans only recently in our long evolution — 140,000 years ago — experienced activation of the FOXP2 gene that allowed us to develop verbal language.  Google search:  “human language foxp2”

See also:  +LEARNING TO TOLERATE THE ANXIETY BUILT INTO MUSIC

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+CHILD ABUSE STORIES – HOW TO WRITE WITHOUT WORDS?

alchemynow2 Comments

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Dare I say I am due for a special miracle, one I can state and define — and request?  I want to be able to write my part of the book about my childhood — with my daughter.  I am completely stuck, so it seems.  I ran out of words for experiences that had no words in the first place — and so it seems, have no words now.  It is really tough to write stories and a book without words.

I fear I lack the writing talent I need to tell my own story.  I am disappointed.  Perhaps I am too impatient.  Perhaps this is as an organic process just like growing up was inside of my body during all those 18 years of hellish abuse.

My goal was to have my rough draft part of this writing about my childhood done by October.  It is October.  I am half way through it.  That’s all.  I ran out of steam.  My writing motor broke.  I am stalled.  I am resistant.  Stubbornly so.  How well do I really want to know myself?  I fear not well enough to accomplish this task.

Yet in this ‘stopping’ I wrote about in my last post (+MYSTERY OF THE SELF-OBLIVIOUS-SELF) there would be a natural slowing down state.  I don’t have air bags on my heart.  Perhaps I am moving ahead this slow because there are great dangers in even going near my own self — my own memory — my own experiences — to look for my own story.  I felt this the other night, lying in bed that night.  “I remember this body when it was small.  I remember living in this body when I was young.  This body remembers.”

I fear I have left that young body abandoned with what it knows, what I know, alone.  Perhaps I parked it in some foreign airport lot, lost the ticket, never having gone back to find out what my story was and is all about.  “Who the hell cares?”

That’s the same voice I hear as I continue to battle my way to a new freedom with my fingers on my keyboard.  Continually I hear that voice, and that voice has all kinds of words — none of them helpful.  None of them nice.  All of them scathing and condemning, shaming, humiliating.  Now, THOSE words are life-stopping words!  I push past them in my learning to read music and to play keyboard.

Mostly I can do that because the gift of the perfect piano teacher showed up in my life.  On a piece of paper, on a bulletin board at our local food co-op, there was his name and number.  $12 per hour.  Comes to my house.  One of the sweetest souls I have ever met — full of music, full of kindness, full of hope, full of a perfect willingness to allow me to follow my own pathway at 60 years old into this new fountain of play.

Fingers dripping with the magic from that fountain of learning, invisible nectar, my fingers are getting faster.  On both hands.  Important with keyboard!

I am waiting for the magic moment that will come along with my magic fingers — the moment when my physical ears and the ears of who I truly am — the ears of my soul self can BOTH hear the sounds coming out of this instrument.  Verbal abuse, terrible verbal abuse from the moment I was born washed away from me my ability to hear with both of my sets of ears.

My brain did not form itself with kindnesses attached to sound.

That is also a very long story, and I am not going to worry about finding any words to tell it.  THIS story is in the music.  This music, note upon note — coming into the light of making sense to me on the page and making sound for me on the keyboard.  I am thrilled.

Perhaps there is some special kind of healing going on with the music that is unlocking a door inside of me.  Maybe this music will show me where that door even is, for I do not know that I have ever seen it — that door, to my own Secret Garden.  Maybe I am getting ready to let myself find that door, to stand in front of it — at a full stop — before I begin to open it.

There are secrets in the music.  There are secrets inside of me.  What happened to me might not YET have words for the telling — but it would be MY way to tell it first in sound.  A writer without words is a butterfly without wings.  I will let you know how I grow some.

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+MYSTERY OF THE SELF-OBLIVIOUS-SELF

alchemynow2 Comments

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Maybe it’s an ‘aging’ thing now that I am 60 that such a thought as I just had would enter my mind.  “I hate writing so much about myself.  I sound so self-centered!  But the truth is that I always hope something I write will mean exactly the same thing — and a good thing at that — after I am dead and gone.”

Dead and gone.  Yet have I yet truly lived?  Have I spent my entire adulthood trying to ‘be something’ or to ‘be someone’ in somebody else’s eyes (including, perhaps strangely, even in my own eyes)?

Do I have a clue who I really am?  How can I be 60 and not?  Is such a thing possible, that I could walk around on this earth for my lifetime, sleeping in between, and NOT know who I am?

Because early relationship trauma so changed the way I formed during my most formative first 18 years of life (especially 0-2), I truthfully just barely know what a human being is.  I will never have the ‘inside scoop’ on being a social member of my social species.  I am more closely autistic in my right-social-emotional brain regarding ‘all things social’ than I am to ordinary-normal.

So if I simply objectively include myself inside the circle of ‘human’ I could see my overall disadvantages looming over me.  I have far more reasons NOT to know who I am than the other way around.

But I am also thinking about getting stopped on the road in this little town a week ago for ‘sliding’ through a stop sign I consciously THOUGHT I had stopped at — good enough!  Only a deputy was parked right in front of me on the roadside.  I saw him.  So I made EXTRA sure I ALMOST stopped!

I am thinking about that now.  What if I have to COMPLETELY STOP ‘trying’ to be myself before I can begin to know who I truly am?

Completely stopped, like I need to do as I slide around this nearly-always-empty-road town I live in.  Completely stop.  What might that mean?

Can I erase from my consideration all thoughts about what I SHOULD be in other people’s eyes?  My severely mentally ill abusive Borderline mother kept her eye on me as much as she could my entire childhood.  I suppose I instinctively KNEW I was ‘in her eye’.  (When I got into high school she forced me to sit in the center of the back car seat so she could train her rear view mirror directly on my face — she would stare at me, hate-glare at me — turn her evil eye on me any time she wanted while she was driving. SPOOKY — and I could not escape!)

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In part I am thinking all of this because of my living alone and preferring my life that way.  Really, I can’t imagine my life with someone else in MY home!  I don’t enjoy running around looking for a society-fix, either.  I have a few good friends — but the hardest lesson I am learning is that they love me for who I am — even though I really have very little clue WHO that ME is — let alone why they would value me in their lives.

I think this has everything to do with my not having the ability to trust humans.  So I try to practice FAITH in people, instead.  Faith, to me, is about believing when I have no actual proof – although I work to recognize the proof people give me that they care.  It is all a very long story, and is all about how severe abuse created an insecure attachment body-brain for me from birth.

But these trauma changes to my physical development are about HOW I am in my body in the world — NOT about WHO I am.

So I thought, “Maybe part of my need to be alone is about the stopping thing.  Stopping being ‘somebody’ in other people’s eyes.  Maybe if I can completely stop the ways I have always related to myself — as I TRY to be myself — I will actually come to know who I ACTUALLY am!”

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Yet I also know that ‘derealization’ and ‘depersonalization’ are aspects of dissociation — a big part of how my body operates in the world as a result of being formed in trauma.  These states of being are related to being robbed of the FEELING state of FEELING one’s self alive in one’s own body in one’s own life.  It’s all mostly a mystery to me……………………

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+THE END OF TRAUMA DRAMA – MAKING OUR OWN LEGITIMATE MESSES

alchemynow2 Comments

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I know someone who is now leaving a 20-year relationship with an alcoholic who has made past attempts at sobriety but who is not ‘cutting the mustard’ — and probably never will.  Hearing about this last night no doubt stimulated the dream I remembered when I awoke this morning.

Dreaming about a house often means this symbol is reflecting one’s life — or life in general as it might apply to somebody else.  I recognized even as I woke up in my dream as I was having it last night what was going on.  The house I dreamt was massive.  As such dream houses can be, it was filled with twists and turns, nooks and crannies, room after room after room.  I was responsible for the whole thing.  Which was fine, as the house reflected my life as I might generalize it to somebody else’s.

All fine and good, but everywhere I went in the dream there was a mess.  Flooded rooms, piles of broken objects, rooms full of useless junk — mess after mess after mess.  And there I was spending my entire dream time cleaning messes up.  Until it dawned on me NOT ONE of these messes was mine.  I had not made one of them.  They ALL belonged to somebody else.

That’s when dawn awakened me in my dream in a stroke of insight.  “What am I doing here?  Why do I let these people into my house (life)?  Why am I spending my time cleaning all these messes up when I have NOTHING to do with making them?”

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So I quit.  I quit cleaning up — and immediately quit dreaming!

As soon as I woke up in real time I knew what had triggered this dream.  I knew the actions this person I heard about is taking are designed to free her life of someone else’s messes.  Clear as day.

I also recognized that now that I am 60 I do not have those kinds of messes anywhere in my life, nor will I let them in.  They will not accumulate.  I am not trapped by them in any way.  What a good sense of freedom I have this morning, of being proud of myself considering my traumatic past that I was able to walk into this life I have today — one that is not all cleaned up!  It is clean because I let nobody into my life that can mess mine up in the first place!

Who wants to live their life being a slave to someone else’s trauma drama?  True, my life is not perfect if perfect is measured by material success or even perfect physical health.  True, I suffer from consequences in my physical body that are the direct result of forming my body in the first place for the first 18 years of my life in conditions of a holocaust.

True, there have been times in my life long ago when I didn’t know any better.  I had to follow my instincts to always move forward in my life toward growth and healing so that I could walk my way out of my own messes.  Those times were hard.  They were fraught with emotional chaos.  I could see nothing clearly.  But eventually I found my way increasingly out of the darkness I was born into — that was so dark I had no idea such a thing as light even existed — into the life I live today that is free from every mess except the one piled up in one of my closets.

And even that mess, I realized yesterday in conversation with a friend, is a reflection of something good.  It is there because I am going into my 6th year of living in this house.  Moving continually has never let me keep anything anywhere I have lived in one place long enough for it to need to be cleaned in its own right.  It is a GOOD thing I have a messy closet!

Albeit I am afraid of the Brown Recluse spider in Arizona that thrives in any undisturbed place — and is a TERRIBLY dangerous creature.  I am afraid to clean the depths of my closet.  But that fear is a real one — and the mess in that closet is a legitimate one.  And it is MY mess, and my mess only!  I made it all by myself, and however I end up cleaning it up — I will do that all by myself, as well.

And it is for SURE that I will find NO skeletons in any closet of mine.

Clarity is a precious commodity!

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