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I am working today to get my drip irrigation system in perfect working order as our high desert southeastern Arizona summer heat is nearly upon us.  I put the system in last summer – but I am not an expert so I am constantly learning.  I don’t have the money I need to do a professional-quality job, either.  I don’t have adequate pressure regulators.  I do not have timers for the 6 zones of line.  But I can get this system working ‘good enough’ (as the experts call adequate parenting) to do what needs to be done to keep water bills down and the health of the many plants in my yard happy and healthy.

The first concerns in the drip system is to make sure there are no unwanted holes from which water can leak before it ever moves on down the line to where it is needed.  Pressure has to build up inside the line – all the way down the line.  That required pressure eventually forms a balance in the system that keeps water moving along and ending up where it is supposed to be.

I am thinking (in response to a reader’s comments) about how devastating it is to have been raised by anyone with serious Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).  I am thinking how little understood BPD illness really is, how often it is entirely missed in diagnosis, and even how often it is misdiagnosed.

While we allow similar ship-shod approaches to parenting, for example, we don’t want these approaches used when we take our automobile to a mechanic’s shop to have it fixed.  We would be outraged if we opened a box of cereal we bought and found inside nothing but dried peas.

Yet when it comes to the extremely serious consequences of being raised in a malevolent early environment – well, hit’n’miss seems to be OK with almost everyone concerned.

And then we wonder why survivors of early trauma don’t thrive in their lives?  We wonder why these survivors continue to be SAD if not also really really MAD?

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There are leaks all over inside of us if we were tortured, terrified, terrorized, traumatized from the time we were born by a mentally ill BPD parent – especially our mother.  Nothing is working right – and we continue to suffer often feeling like we are hemorrhaging inside, bleeding to death from the core of our being.

How do we begin to find the leaks?  How do we begin to repair the line?

I believe it is important to realize that while a culture might seem to be doing well materially this same culture can itself be bleeding to death at its heart.  We cannot allow ourselves to be fooled into believing cultures are as advanced or sophisticated as they wish to believe that they are.

When it comes to the delicate inner workings of humans who have suffered from the instant they were born (and many even since their conception) — our American culture really does NOT know (1) what is really going on, or (2) what can be done to help people heal.

For all the greed of pharmaceutical companies who pick and choose which parts of which research they wish to focus on in their efforts to create their costly drugs that they can push to ‘the sick ones’, most of what is being done is to place the focus on what is WRONG (supposedly) rather than on what is RIGHT within any ‘labeled and diagnosed’ person.

Nobody wants to admit that mystery abounds.  Nobody wants to admit that the directions we most need to be turning toward for healing have nothing at all to do with either drugs.  Nobody wants to admit that their are conditions within human beings that cannot be healed at all — and I believe for the most part BPD is one such disease.

I won’t say a BPD person can’t improve their quality of life.  But I am saying that perhaps BPD is massively undiagnosed because it is NOT a disease that responds to drugs-as-a-cure-all.  BPD is a terrible disease that has its burgeoning roots in INFANT AND CHILD maltreatment!!

Few want to believe so simple and accurate a truth!

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I am not having any fun trying to tweak and repair this drip irrigation system today.  Yet feeling frustrated and angry, or even hopeless about my task, will not get me to my goal.

I need dedication, perseverance, willingness to tackle a job I don’t REALLY have the skills to do, or the $ resources to do right.  I have to believe in myself.  I have to believe I can DO this!  I have the water running into one of the zones’ lines right now – waiting patiently for the plants along it to receive water — and NO water yet!

Where IS the water going?  If there’s a leak, where is it and why can’t I see it?  How long do I have to wait for the water to appear in drips at the end of this line?  How can I fix this if I can’t figure out what the problem is?

Patience.  I HAVE to be patient!

This is no different a process in many ways than is the process of healing. Nobody will fix this line but me.  Nobody will find my self-healing except me.

I have to work on both tasks with what inner and outer resources I have – and make ‘this’ work – or give up.

In both cases I have to admit that I believe the efforts I make are worth it. I believe all is not hopeless.  I believe I am doing something nobody else has ever done in exactly the same way before.  I believe solutions are not only possible, but are most often found along the way in the journey itself.

I also believe in the case of being a survivor of severe insane abuse by a mad-woman BPD Mother — that it is most likely that what I need I will find out myself and from other survivors who are doing their best to move forward on their own healing path.  There are no magic answers.

I believe that BPD is probably preventable – but that prevention has to happen way before the age of 10.  For those of us who survived a severe BPD mother, what happens for us NEXT?  How do we begin to find the leaks inside of ourselves – one leak at a time – so they can be healed?

We are strong!  We will NOT bleed to death inside our heart-soul-self-core.  That would have happened a long, long, long time ago if it was going to happen at all.  In the moment we need to find PEACEFUL CALM, true peaceful calm, in any way and at any time that we can.

This is – I suspect – our deepest need.  We need to be as gentle and positive and hopeful with our self as we can manage to be!  This gentleness – in thought and in emotion – provides the clearest road to peaceful calm we will ever find.

It’s a hard journey for us.  My mother made sure that peaceful calm was just about the LAST feeling I would ever have during the first 18 years of my life.  It has taken me most of my adult life to even begin to know what peaceful calm even feels like!

I am starving for that feeling — and I am the ONLY person who can find my way to that state of being inside of myself.

I believe it is from that PLACE that my healing happens.  It is from that place that I can find what I need to do the rest of the work that I need to do in my life — as it is the place from which any true joy I can find springs forth.

Yes, peaceful calm is connected to safe and secure attachment patterns within our body-brain – that we never had – but can begin to DISCOVER and CREATE inside our self now.  This is a state that many call a state of grace.  It is my most important goal.

Yes, I realize at this moment – I have to treat MYSELF just as I would treat a little baby I loved with all my heart and soul.  It is SO critically important not to allow a baby to over-escalate in excitement.  This is true going in BOTH directions — toward too much joy — AND — toward too much sadness.

It is a healthy mother’s task to know when her infant is in a TOO MUCH state – the baby MUST be calmed down.  This is so essentially true throughout all of our lives that a state of peaceful calm is the most necessary, most desirable and healthiest state we can aim for in our healing.

See post:

+CALM THE CRYING BABY — IMMUNE SYSTEM STIMULATES VAGUS NERVE TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT

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