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It strikes me as I ‘recuperate’ from the intense experience of writing my last post that perhaps the greatest possible gift God gave my soul when He created me at my conception was this:  A RELENTLESS DETERMINATION TO BE MYSELF.

Wow!

Any trauma and severe abuse survivor knows the experience of dissociation intimately – if not nearly continuously.

People who are not survivors like we are probably can – and does – take their own experience of self-in-the-world completely for granted.  Early trauma and abuse survivors (my bet) NEVER walk down this pathway.  We never were allowed by our life to do so in the beginning – hence we never will place our feet upon this smooth clear road to saunter our way through the valley dips and modest climbs that life can bring.

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Saunter through life?  How many survivors get to saunter through even one half-hour segment of any given day of their lifetime?

No.  We were born facing nearly insurmountable challenges – and because we are still alive that means hence far we have surmounted them!

We are the extreme athletes, tough, resilient who are MOST relentlessly determined to be our self.

How I exercised this relentless determination through the first 18 years of my life shows up as I grow to know myself very silently.  I tried, I know I tried to speak my truth from the time I was a very, very little girl.  I see the testimony to that fact even in my very first sentences as Mother recorded them in my baby book.

Every time Mother psychotically attacked and brutalized me for something she IMAGINED I had done – inside of myself I knew and have NEVER lost sight of what really happened.  My vision was absolutely intact and clear.

But the more I tried to speak my truth, THE TRUTH to Mother, the worse she abused me.  Yes, by the time I reached my middle childhood I never opened my mouth to let my words sound.  I grew increasingly silent – until the silence belonged to Linda so loudly it drowned out even the silence of the frozen Alaskan wilderness which so often surrounded me.

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I became so silent by the time I was 16 that I no longer even heard my own real voice all the way until I reached 30 – and the first cracks began to appear in the massive walls of silence I had lost myself within.  Looking backward I see that I had not actually lost myself.  I had lost my ability to reach through my own silence to communicate with myself.

All the fractured fragments that severe abuse-created dissociation forms in a survivor’s life do not eradicate the existence of a coherent self.  We just walk a different pathway toward recognizing and finding our own self.

I see in my mind the image of an Eagle’s nest.  Inside myself that nest is my own true home.  Sitting within the safe and secure confines of that magnificent nest I can view a spectacular scene of beauty.  What happened to me is that I so lost sight of this nest I not only could not find it by the time I was 30 — I forgot it had ever existed at all.

Who I am as I sit centered in my own reality which includes my great power of goodness I am in my body in that structurally sound, very well built nest that IS me-being-at-home-in-my-body-self in this world in this lifetime.

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Inside myself from the moment I was conceived my soul made sure that nest was protected and NEVER violated or harmed in any way.  The more trauma I experienced, the more suffering I endured, the more troubles I had, the dimmer and darker the return pathway to that nest – and to my inner self — became.

I KNOW I lived centered in myself until I reached the age of 18.  What I know today is that leaving home and entering a big world I knew nothing about and was completely unprepared to live in (especially leaving Alaska!) so destabilized my ability to recognize myself during my frantic forward movements into growing into adulthood that I simply forgot how to remember who I was and how to return to my own self.

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It was never ‘the call of the wild’ that created chasms in my ability to live within my own nest of my heart-soul.  It was ‘the call of modern civilization’ that overwhelmed my ability to silently be connected within my own self with my self — my self that I had so relentlessly fought to preserve against all odds from my first breath on earth.

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Perhaps it is exactly because the only way I could maintain myself and my connection with myself growing up through horrendous turbulent chaos and violence was in my own inner universe of silence that I find interacting with ‘the world’ so utterly exhausting now.

Simply put, the truth is that at age 60 I am burned out!  How could I not be?  I am not complaining.  I am recognizing my own reality.  My resources have been spent and I have so little in reserve.  Quiet sustains me and does not drain me – even in my lonely hours when I crave a connection with humans that I will never truly acquire in this lifetime.

Peaceful calm eventually might be the only state of being my relentless determination to survive as myself allows me to experience without my feathers being ruffled and so messed up by the disturbing winds of ‘ordinary’ life that so easily threaten to toss me out of my nest.

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What if the only thing I am responsible for in my lifetime is to leave a coherent story of my life behind me when my body dies and my soul moves on through eternity to God’s next world?

I can’t imagine this to be a very big job overall for people who did not experience severe and overwhelming trauma and abuse in their life – especially during their most vulnerable years of infancy and childhood.  But for those of us who happened to be born into families filled with inter-generational horrors of unresolved traumas, our task then becomes nearly as difficult as was the task of enduring and surviving our traumas in the first place.

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As I began my day early before the crisp cutting heat of the sun envelopes this high desert land, as I trimmed off this year’s random wild growth from the single Mesquite tree at the south of my property line so I could feed the new tiny leaves on those nasty thorn-covered twiggy branches to my 5 hens for breakfast, I thought of a very bizarre image told to me in a story 20 years ago by my landlord when I lived in northern Minnesota.

This man had rented out a shack in the north woods for nearly 30 years to a family whose last member in the house had just died.  When, finally after all these years, the house became empty the landlord had entered it to find — to put it most mildly — an untenable mess.

Mess?  A grown man would have to stoop over to cross what should have been a normal threshold into the house and into any room within it.  What must have been 30 years of garbage – and I mean GARBAGE – had accumulated so that it was wall-to-wall over three feet deep.

Attempt to rescue the house or burn it down, that was the question.

The landlord found an unemployed work crew with tough skin who agreed to the job for very little money and the digging began.

Horrors of horrors, and I apologize to sensitive readers, under many layers of stinking trash an entire litter of dead puppies was excavated in one of the bedrooms with dead momma dog included.

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Oh, what horror!  Yes!  Also very, very real.  And as this story came into my thoughts this morning as I trimmed the fresh new yet unwanted growth off of my Mesquite tree I put 2-and-2 together as I understood in words that cleaning up the horrors of an entire infancy and childhood spent in hardships of abuse, neglect, trauma and malevolent treatment amounts to a VERY similar process of cleaning out the trash.

I add the exception here:  I also understand that when it comes to the work of turning our chaotic horror stories of memories from terrible childhoods into a beautiful coherent and organized life story — we ORIENT ourselves and ORGANIZE our story by understanding what we are looking for.

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Imagine that there was a single diamond buried under the accumulation of unimaginable filth and trash in my old landlord’s house.  This diamond being priceless and of HIGHEST value, was worth looking for!

Any trauma survivor reading this post must be willing to take what I am saying on faith if they have never yet realized that what they are doing in their healing work is healing their story which is exactly what heals us.

On faith, believe me that this priceless diamond (or any other gem of great value you might prefer) NEEDS to be found for healing to move toward completion in this lifetime.

What we are searching for is, of course, not a tangible physical object – it is, to my understanding, the essence of who we are, who we have always been and who we will forever be.  We are searching for the perfect purity that IS our SOUL self.

Our soul was, is and will forever be beyond time as we measure time in our material lifetime in our body.  Our SOUL can be found present within every single memory of horror, torture and trauma we can remember the facts about — or not!

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When I look back at every memory my soul chose to keep of my childhood I can now exactly spot the shining pure and perfect me in the middle of each episode of hell that happened due to my madwoman mother’s terrible (misplaced and projected) absolute hatred of me.

THIS perfect gem of ME is the one that belongs in my own coherent story of my life.

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Long term readers of this blog will recognize that when I write about healing our life story to heal our self that I am talking about healing the insecure attachment disorder that was built into us as our body-brain developed in the midst of terrible trauma.

The physiological damage that was done to us through adaptations to the powerful stress hormones our body generated in the midst of trauma are lasting, although they can be somewhat repaired as we do our healing work.

It is to the essence of who we are, and to the inner quality of our understanding of our self in the world, that I am speaking of being able to find and release from all the garbage we might currently have our pure perfect self buried and hidden within.

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I think this morning, for example, of the day when I was almost four (see:  *Age 3 – THE TOILET BOWL) when my mother attacked me under her psychotic delusion that I was attempting to drown my 2-year-old sister in the toilet.  I can clearly remember this trauma from inside my little body as Mother is repeatedly and brutally smashing my head against the inner sides of the white porcelain toilet bowl.  I clearly remember myself at four focusing very hard in spite of my terror and PAIN on trying to figure out how to time my breathing so that I could manage to gasp a breath of air instead of a full mouth of water as Mother violently yanked and shoved my head up and down.

I remember the whole beating that followed until this giant madwoman finally exhausted herself – etc.  I can follow the entire story – I can choose what I look at, how I feel now as I honor the pure little person I was/am that endured and survived that attack.

This was one of thousands of insane brutal attacks Mother perpetrated against me during the 18 years she kept me her captive.

My job, as I see it now that I have made such fantastic progress if ‘figuring this whole thing out’, has always been to go FOR THE GLORY!!  To HELL with the horror!

Literally.  That’s where it came from and that’s where it belongs.

Yes, the entire event happened and the pain and suffering and terror of it was vividly real.  But what is VITAL to me is to let everything go that SUCKS about this experience and ONLY keep as a real part of my life story the perfect pure person at the exact center of that storm.

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Everything good was there in me then as it is now.  My honor and my integrity, my love of and search for beauty, my imagination, my desire to share what I found exquisitely fascinating in the world around me with someone I loved, my ability to KNOW my own truth and to HOLD my own truth self-evident FOREVER, my courage and bravery, my strength and endurance, my patience and my pure intent not to hate, my connection with God and with His angels, my survival instincts that let me choose every millisecond through that horror how best to ‘walk forward’ into my own future as I lived my own life — and SO much more — were ALL there as a part of ME who just happened to be forced to live as a child in hell.

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Because we are each ONLY ultimately responsible before God for our OWN life and for nobody else’s, we are remiss and neglectful if we leave our own self forever trapped within the horror of memories of our lifetime.  It is our task in cases where troubling involvement of trauma from abuse contaminates our ability to ONLY experience the purity of our own self in the midst of whatever was done to us — to realize that all that’s horrible and negative (as I keep saying) belongs to someone else’s life story, NOT TO OURS.

As odd as this might sound, using this toilet bowl example from my own early life, if I choose to continue to keep any of the negative from that experience in my story I am actually STEALING something that is not mine to keep.  The negative belongs to Mother, not to me – not in any way to me.

Even the pain, the terror – which was very real and can return to me if I return to it — actually belonged to Mother who caused it.  She caused me to experience all of it.  This is a very refined sorting-out process we are doing here.  Very particular.  Very refined.  Very specialized surgery!

Violators of the innocent and vulnerable are BOUNDARY violators.  They violated our boundaries.  WE are the only ones who can heal by establishing as we work with our own memory-life-story where the boundary was and is!

If it is BAD in any way, it did not and does not belong to us or to our life story.  Quite simple as we practice this!!  If it is good and pure and wonderful – it is OURS!!

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I know how complicated, seemingly overwhelming and difficult it can be to return to our trauma memories to work our way through them.  In truth this process can be as clear for us as it would be to go into that landlord’s disgusting house overwhelmed with rotten filth — to do the work of finding the perfect gem buried within.

No, not fun.  Yes, a task that we can approach with big-time self-pity if we have to.  But through this work we set our own life story free as we set the record straight.  Doing so heals us.

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Just wish to say, after a wonderful conversation with a very special woman who suffered such horrendous abuse growing up, that I was reminded yet again of how fragmented our own life story becomes from growing up in the midst of horrors, trauma, abuse and chaos.

How is it possible that we can tell our own story from our own conception forward in any kind of orderly, oriented, organized way when our stories are so overwhelming, painful, terrifying, grim, dark and ugly?

The negative parts of my own 18-year child abuse and trauma story – plain and simple – are NOT actually a part of my story AT ALL!  The ugly parts of my childhood did not belong to me.  Oh, finally at age 60, how freeing it is for me to finally be able to clearly understand this.

Yes I suffered.  I endured.  I survived 18 years in hell.  But, as I have mentioned before, as I have studied every memory I have of myself in my childhood what I can see NOW is ME in my own life story.  Me, a beautiful perfect child!!

All the ugliness and horror belonged to the sick, warped, sad, mean, etc. adults that designed, built and sustained the malevolent environment that I had no choice but to reside within.  But their ugliness was NOT mine!  It has NEVER been mine.

Oh how important it is to learn how to see the pure child inside the hell – to be able to strip away, chip away, peel away, pull away all the CRAP from the pure child-us so that nothing REALLY remains but our own beauty.

Get rid of the wreckage.  Unbury our self from the crumbling rubble.  Put the blame and the responsibility for all the bad that happened where it belongs – NOT IN MY YARD!!  Not in my life.  Not in my heart!!  The trauma was never mine – I just had to endure it!

Never mind the mess that is the part of what I used to think of as my child abuse story.  The bad parts of the story belong to my abuser and her enablers.  I am learning how to let the rest blow away in the wind as if it never existed at all as a part of ME — because it never did!

True, this process of sorting out and getting clear and staying clear is nearly a constant process for me.  So be it.  But that’s ‘just’ a consequence of being raised in hell – it is NOT who I am!

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I have been very fortunate to have thus far been spared physical pain in my body in my adulthood.  I guess I must cherish some superstition as I almost feel it’s a jinx even saying this!  For a little while this afternoon, however, I was reminded of the most obvious part of pain – IT HURTS!

Because I am a recluse and spend most of my time outside working on projects in my yard and garden, I rarely do the girlie pretty thing – but today decided to take a break from dull and dirty as I donned a dusky lavender nicely fitting top with fine gathered lacy frills running in lines down the front, painted my nails a sparkling pink, and dug out a summer pair of sandals (purchased with the top at our local thrift store last week).

The shoes began to devour my feet before I had walked 25 paces down a local sidewalk.  By the time I had done my best to prance a bit in my pretty (seems sort of silly now) finery as I visited at the laundromat cafe, bought a tough new pair of $10 work gloves at our local ACE hardware, found a birthday card for my dear daughter whose birthday is next week, and bought a gallon of 2% milk, my feet felt like they were being branded with hot iron along anywhere the brown leather straps crossed the tops of my feet.

OUCH!

Eventually I folded napkins and stuffed them inside the straps to try to protect my skin – knowing that walking in and out of stores barefoot was not such a great idea.  Meanwhile, through all of this, I noticed how this pain felt to me — and more importantly, how I handled the pain.

I COULD ignore the pain at times so completely that I could have sworn I had no feet at all.  Then, WINCE!  BURN!  Searing pain back again – along with another round of being forced to pay attention to how uncomfortable pain is!

It crossed my mind several times as I tried to walk a graceful wobble until I could get home to remove these monster shoes – that given the frequency and severity of beatings I received from my severely mentally ill abusive mother during the first 18 years of my life — there is no POSSIBLE WAY that my body could have been free of very real physical pain very often.

I never, as a rule, think about the physical pain of my childhood.  I seem to be very able to forget the physical pain part of my childhood – which is fine with me!  But today, having very real pain present in my body I noticed through this very small experience that I do have very sophisticated ways to disallow physical pain to exist within my awareness.

Dissociation?  Of course.  Who wants to associate with unstoppable pain if they don’t have to?  I could never have functioned or survived the hell of my childhood if I had not found ways to avoid being focused on the very real pain in my body.  What a price to pay!  Disowning my own body!

What to do with these supposedly cute shoes?  I think I will entomb them within an adobe wall.

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Related Posts:

+SUBSTANCE P – IT’S OUR BODY’S BIOLOGICAL LINK TO FEELING EMOTIONAL AND PHYSICAL PAIN

+OUR PAIN: OUTSIDE THE RANGE OF EMPATHY

+INFANT-CHILD ABUSE, SUBSTANCE P AND A LIFETIME OF SADNESS

+A WORD ON TRAUMA TRIGGERS AND FALLING APART

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Never do I remember having seen a scene in any movie where the viewers’ perspective included a flight over the top of a big city’s skyscrapers.  I notice such shots often in today’s movies and TV shows, but when I had this certain dream right before my 18th birthday in 1969 I had no history with the visual imagery that appeared to me in my sleep one night.

Now, every time I am confronted with an ‘over tall buildings’ camera shot I get chills.  I always remember the dream I had before I left home, before I moved away from Alaska in which I was flying over skyscrapers in the darkness.  The only light in the dream – a dim light – came from the inside of the buildings I flew over.  The skyscrapers had no rooftops.  Every one of them was filled to the top with human bones.

Over these ensuing 40+ years I have often thought about this dream as being a kind of portent of what I was going to find in the world outside the wilderness landscapes of Alaska.  Although I can admit that the dream was a grim one — I also admit that my take on this dream and on the purpose for its existence for me was that it showed me an undeniable truth.

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When I mentioned in my last post that I have recently been censoring my thoughts – and hence my blog writing – I have been avoiding/denying concepts like this one I am going to write about next.

Yesterday I had another dream of mine come to mind, one that I woke from over 20 years ago.  Yesterday I felt that certain CLICK inside of me – suddenly I felt more sure  than I ever have before that I at last understand this dream.

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I am not a mall kind of person.  I am not a shopper except for my need for the barest essentials to maintain my basic needs.  In this dream I found myself inside of a gargantuan mall eating dinner at an Italian restaurant.  I became bored during a very long wait for our food to arrive and left the table to walk around the mall.

After strolling past shop windows, elbowing my way through throngs of shoppers, I made a left turn and entered a wide hallway that was completely empty.  I continued to walk until I passed a long 20 foot tall picture window on my right that had smaller windows along its lower edge.  One of these windows, hinged at its top was pushed open.  I stopped in front of this window to stare in utter fascination at the universe on the other side of the glass.

A lush green forest with gurgling streams, small waterfalls, abundant flowers, animals and radiant people all very healthy, active, full of life and delight talked, danced, worked and played on the other side of this massive glass wall in front of me.  Behind them was a pitch black sky peppered with pure white sparkling stars.  A halo of deep rose light surrounded this brilliant darkness at its edges as a new dawn began to appear.

There I stood.  I could easily have climbed through the open window I stood in front of – but I did not.  For all these years any time this dream has wafted into my thoughts I have wondered why I stayed in that awful, sterile, stale, empty, shallow and meaningless mall world that has NEVER been my own.

Yesterday I knew that it is only as long as I am in this body in this material world at this point in time that marks an evolutionary point of development for the human species that very, very few recognize that I will remain in this mall world.

What a contrast in my dream between the soul-empty mall world I hated and yet did not choose to leave – and the thriving world of beauty on the other side of the wall of glass was connected to the universe of spirit that I found as a child in the Alaskan wilderness, and to a bigger world that I have never lost sight of in my soul.  It seems I live now (still) in a world of people who mostly exist (as Carl Jung described) in their psychological shadow-body-self in a shallow world of material pursuits.

People do not seem able to notice their focus on a material existence does not have to exclude them from full participation in a world of purity and beauty that few seem to recognize even exists.  This will change over time.  A new spiritual world on earth is dawning.  God has put me here – now – for a reason to fulfill a purpose.  I have even so far survived advanced, aggressive cancer – so that I am still here.

But the world that I long to share with others?  For the BIGGEST part – I will have to be patient and wait until it is my time to shed this body and step out of this mall world into another world so perfect it defies words to describe.  Meanwhile I will search for that beauty – as I have since I was a tiny child – here.

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