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This must be, first and foremost, a blog about human toughness.  Toughness does not often show itself in people’s lives unless they are challenged by hardships and traumas — REALLY challenged — and mostly does not show itself unless the imbalance of power between those who are hurting little people and the victims of these attacks is so glaring and disgusting that all we are left to compare the experiences to those known by prisoner-of-war and holocaust survivors.

And yet the experiences of trauma and abuse that I know about and write ‘toward’ for survivors are so much worse than what even any adult I mention above could possibly know had they not received severe, horrific levels of malevolent treatment as little people.

I figured it out a long time ago in my personal studies and thinking and healing that being ALONE not only ‘against the world’ but being ALONE against a world so brutal and hopeless no ordinary person could even begin to think about how to survive in such danger and threat, is a critically distinguishing characteristic of severe abuse to little people who have no possible hope of protection or rescue from anyone who gives a hoot about what they are going through (at least while the ‘abuse’ is occurring, which often means a VERY VERY long time).

And so those survivors of severe infant-child who do just that — make it through horrors beyond belief — are amazing people.

Thinking about the bigger picture, I find myself today realizing that even when we can begin to know the truth about what we endured — and begin to understand the profound skills we used to continue to survive — the list of what was done to harm us is often so much longer than is the list of what was done to help us.  (Yes, we are talking directly about risk vs resiliency factors here.)

On a deeper level, we have to make sure our list grows to include the changes that had to happen on the deepest levels of our developing physiology as our rapidly growing little body-nervous system- brain was forced to react to severe trauma ALONE when we were so little-in-the-world.

This list, for most of us, is a long one.  Research firmly and clearly shows us now what these kinds of changes are:  Changes in how brain regions develop and in how they operate; changes in our most critically sensitive nervous system reactions to stress and threat resulting in anxiety disorders of all kinds; changes in our human attachment systems as the govern and direct all interactions we have with other people for our lifetime; changes in the development of our immune system; changes in how our DNA manifests and operates in every cell of our body — to name a few.

On this deep level it can be hard enough to learn to begin to recognize and to understand what these physiological reactions in our development in early deprived and dangerous environments actually are and how these changes affect us — but it is harder to go even deeper still to find the levels inside of us and the ways in which no possible abuse on God’s earth could touch or damage or change us IN ANY WAY.

The unchanged part of us lie so deeply and have been with us so long we would have to be able to go back to look at our SELF from the start of our life.  These areas exist way beyond a time when we had words or any ability to think conscious thoughts.

This does not mean that we cannot FIND these deep, most-important, untouched, unchanged, untampered with, unhurt, pure and strong and clear and GOOD parts of our SELF.

These characteristics, these abilities, these gifts, our innate goodness HAS to be placed on our lists somehow because this is what we USED to find a way to survive in hell — and barring the development during those early developmental stages of serious sickness and illness of the mind and body such as the severe Borderline Personality Disorder that consumed my mother during her own adaptations to trauma of her infancy-childhood — came out of hell as amazingly wonderfully GOOD people.

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The level from which I try to operate in my thinking and in my dissections of adult actions that are evil and inhumanely perpetrated against little people (in particular) might seem to be surrounded by ‘grayness’.

Yet in my thinking based on my belief, based upon my understanding of how Creation operates, nothing that is really true in any religion contradicts what is really true in any science.

If humans wander off-track by misconstruing what is currently ‘known’ about reality, that does not change reality.

In my world there is an Unknowable Essence that will forever remain exactly that – Unknowable.  Through the repeated gift of Manifestations on earth in human form given to humans to guide us toward ever-increasing maturity individually and as a species, we learn about true reality.

True reality is GOODNESS based on the absolute love our Creator has for us.

What appears to be evil happens when GOODNESS is absent.

Therefore, all humans are innately GOOD.  (again, see for broader perspective:  *NO MATTER WHAT – HAVE NO ENEMY)

Given this fact, and as the Writings at the above link discuss, there are three reasons why humans appear to be ‘evil beings’:  Through sickness, ignorance and immaturity.

I know evil.  My mother hated me and in her psychotic mental illness projected onto me the fullness of her evil-perception (from the time of my birthing).  She then was capable of hurting me nearly beyond belief.

This does not make her an evil person.  Mother’s sickness removed from her the power to choose between good and evil actions in anything like a normal, rational way.

True, there are people on this earth who have absolutely no excuse as far as I can see for the evilness of their actions.  God will deal with those people.  My mother was not one of these freely-evil-choosing people.  Mother had lost access to her rational mind.

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Now that I have traveled into this ‘gray zone’ of human thought and understanding where the words of science remain mostly absent and are replaced with untestable words like SOUL, I will say this is exactly where we have to look for the words we need to list on the side of GOODNESS to counterbalance all the nasty stuff that can’t be avoided on the hardship side of a severe infant-child abuse survivor’s life story list.

Yet on this side of goodness that is the reality of who we are because God made us this way — is one word so important that it takes all the real power away from the dark side and leaves us as survivors standing in the light.

NOBLE.

God has made every human being as a NOBLE creature.

Being NOBLE people abused little ones possess an innate dignity that cannot be touched by abuse.

We are independent creatures at our core, in our essence, belonging only in our dependence upon the God Who created us.

Nothing ever touched my mother in her essential nobility.  She retained her innate dignity.  But her sickness buried this GOOD core of Mother as surely as if she was buried inside massive piles of physical rubble.

Nobody noticed what happened to Mother.

Nobody saw the truth for what it was.

With her core noble good essence buried beyond rescue because of the terrible sickness of her body-mind, Mother committed ‘evil’ actions against me that nobody questioned, either.

And I survived what Mother did to me — with my nobility intact.  In my case, I did not develop a terrible sickness that barred my own access to my own inner core GOOD self.

I am forever grateful.

As I look back through the corridors of time, as far back as I can remember, I can now see myself standing in the midst of hell — suffering — but suffering WHOLE.

I am learning to toss aside the rubble of trauma and abuse that was done to me so that increasingly what is left of my history of 18 years of severe abuse is GOOD.  The BAD was — most simply put — UNFORTUNATE.

It is a quantum leap in a change of thinking for me to be able to finally replace the word I have used to long — TRAGIC — with one that is actually more accurate:  UNFORTUNATE.

I no longer wish to consider what happened to me as TRAGIC.  That word and concept belong to the rubble that I am removing.  Under the rubble is the truth — what happened to me was UNFORTUNATE.  It was not BAD in my world because it had no power to change who I essentially AM.

I can go back to see and feel and recognize and know who I essentially am once the rubble is removed and find that who I was THEN is exactly who I am NOW.

What has allowed me to continue to exist through all these 60 years IS TOUGHNESS.  Call it a protective armor held around me that kept me safe under all that rubble so that it could not touch me.  Call it protective armor inside of me as well, that gave the the power to make the right choice for my survival-in-hell every single step of the way.

But being as objective about my situations I have to say that what gave me toughness was FORTUNATE, and this FORTUNATE more than balances out the UNFORTUNATE of what happened to me.

Even though my mother was UNFORTUNATE to not only have to survive her own childhood in hell, but to also end up developing a severe sickness along the way — she was still FORTUNATE enough to SURVIVE — which did eventually mean that I was born at all.

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I wish to find the center hub of my life — which is what essential nobility and goodness is to me — and then follow the pathways of my life all the way back to my beginning, making them as rubble-free as I can.  As I now look back, see that central hub of life that is GOOD — even as I name the truth of what actually happened to me — those descriptions I can provide actually have no more power.  They are in the discarded rubble heap.

I am also learning to recognize that all the trauma-triggered changes in my physical body also belong to the rubble heap.  These changes — PTSD, anxiety, hyper startle response, inability to read human expression in ordinary ways, dissociation, depression in my autonomic nervous system built around abuse that stopped me-froze me dead in my tracks thousands upon thousands of times in my childhood — do not in any way touch the essential noble, good, whole, strong, TOUGH me one single bit.

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This is a long post, I realize.  But to readers who have made it thus far I say KUDDOS to you!  You would not be here reading my final words if you didn’t know EXACTLY what I am talking about:  That only GOODNESS matters in the essential end as we heal.  Goodness is all that is REAL.  We CAN learn to recognize what is rubble and we can discard it.  Yes, this is all WORK.  But it is THE GOOD WORK!

I am not saying that we diminish the greatness of the harms done against us.  I am not advocating minimization or denial.  I don’t think we can make it all the way to the TRUTH unless we accept the rubble that is rubble.  But it is our choice what we do with that rubble once we locate it.

TRASH IT I SAY!

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