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September 30, 2012

To my dear siblings:

Hello with love to each of you.  I am writing this morning regarding my plans to epublish Mother’s writings this winter with a print-on-demand option.  If I were to choose a title today it would be, “The Demise of Mildred:  A Profile of My Severely Abusive Mother.”

Due to the massive bulk of the material I have transcribed and because of the complexity of this epic tale I anticipate a minimum of two volumes will be needed.  One volume will obviously be devoted to Mother’s Alaskan experiences as she described them in her diaries and letters to her mother.  The other volume will contain what exists of her childhood stories, her age-19 diary, short pieces written by her mother, and my memories of the stories Mother often repeated of her childhood, as well as whatever is provided to me about the circumstances of her life and mental illness as she approached the end of her life.

I welcome any writings in the form of support from my siblings for the legitimacy of this writing work.  I don’t believe that emotional forays into the past are necessary, although such would certainly be included if written.

I am especially in need of information about what happened in the family after I left home October 3, 1969.  Thanks to the detailed telephone interviews that Jo Ann V. has so generously provided I do have access to some of this information from her point of view.  I also have a series of memories and observations that Dorothy P. has provided, as well.

I need the dates of Mother and Father’s separation and the history of their divorce.  A description as anyone would care to provide about continued patterns of interactions with Mother up unto her death would also be useful, as would a description of what is known about the conditions Mother created for herself as she neared the end of her life.

Ramona has offered to do the final professional editing of these books.  Any editing she suggests of whatever you write will, of course, be sent to you at that time for your approval.

My suggestion would be that any of you who care to respond to this request simply open an email to me — and write.  Please trust that whatever comes to you while doing so is exactly what needs to be said.  I have learned over the many years now that I have been working on my ‘story project’ that I can absolutely trust the words that appear while I am in the mode of addressing this vast topic of what happened to Mother to make her do what she did to me.

It is my intention to include in these initial publications as little of my personal assessments and observations about my personal story as I possibly can.  I have — almost mysteriously so — the greatest compassion for our Mother.  I hope to describe in these volumes what happened to her early in her life to turn her into the very sick monster she became.  At this point I believe I know very, very clearly how Mother’s earliest experiences conspired in a very particular way to contribute to the very particular patterns of her severe abuse of me.  I wish to reserve  my expression of this information for inclusion in my own telling of my own story.

I desire that every single possible detail about Mother be printed before I publish my own writings.  This will free me from every having to answer a single question from readers about the contributions of Mother’s past to my story.  Mother could not identify during her entire lifespan that I was actually a human person separate from her, separate from her madness.  It is therefore an essential part of my being able to tell my own story freely that I — NOW — delineate myself clearly from her.

Steve, I thank you for the writings you have already provided to me.  Any further detailed specifics about the time-line history of events post 1969 would be very helpful.

I also want to mention here for general knowledge that I would prefer that Mother’s brother be dead before I publish anything.  From what I can tell he is just as likely to outlive me as not.  I have very strong suspicions about what happened to him in his earliest months and years of life (and afterwards) that created in him a pattern of abusing his sister.  How much of this part of the story I will be able to write remains at this moment a great unknown to me.  I welcome any insights from anyone.  Ideally I would be able to contact him for his ‘side of the story’, but such contact does not appear remotely wise.

Which reminds me — Dave, I would very much appreciate receiving from you an email attachment of the photographs you were able to take of Mother’s houses she lived in growing up in Boston, along with their addresses.

I remain stifled in my publishing efforts by the inadequacies of my computer and software.  I have currently no possible way to repair photographs of the homesteading era.  If push should come to shove, I will publish the pictures as they exist, flaws and all.  This is certainly an overall epistle of ‘flawed’ if ever there was one.  (A mention:  I have sorted the ‘family slide collection’, keeping about one-third of them.  The remainder are in Sharon’s safe keeping.)

Because I know you all have very full and busy lives I will not be making this request again.  If you have questions, please email me!  I thank you all!

With great love, your big sis Linda

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Everything I have been going through for the past month has been processed by me with clear awareness of how my disabilities caused by the way infant-child abuse changed my development impacts on a continual basis how I can – and cannot – live my life.  In a nutshell — this sucks!

Other than the big obvious, that I am completely exhausted by my travels north and back again, I was met with a nasty complication once I reached my home – my sanctuary.  The woman who so kindly and competently took care of my home, my garden and my animals had to sadly report to me that the second night after I left my neighbors’ dogs scrambled over the fence and brutally mangled and killed 3 of my 5 hens.

This woman did not actually witness these dogs – a German shepherd and a pit-bull — kill the chickens.  Neither she nor I will lie so that charges could be brought against the owners of these two dogs.  However, on another day these two dogs were in the yard again.  The shepherd was intent on killing my small dog.  Both dogs came tearing around the corner of the house.  My caretaker was knocked down by the big dog – yet she managed to scream at the dog loud enough it turned tail and ran, jumping back over the five foot chain link fence in the back that my yard shares with its owner.

The wire of my coop is also mangled in two places.  I spoke with both owners.  The immediate neighbor to my west, owner of the shepherd, laughed.  The next neighbor over, owner of the pit bull, at least sincerely apologized.  My caretaker had also watched the pit bull snatch a cat on the street out of the air as it tried to escape over a brick wall and tear it to pieces.

Neither dog was in its owner’s yard on Wednesday when I got home, and neither dog has been seen since.  Nobody has offered restitution to me.  All of this has been very very upsetting to me.

But what bothers me most is that because of the disabilities I in consequence of having been severely abused from my birth until I left home at age 18, I don’t have the ability to stick up for myself.  I really, really don’t.

I have no idea what the ‘right’ thing to do is.  I spoke with the county dog catcher who assured me that because the dogs were witnessed being in my yard that charges could be pressed for this, for the shepherd knocking my caretaker over and for that dog trying to kill my dog.

I can’t press charges.  My anxiety will not allow me to do this.  I could NEVER guarantee that my troubles with dissociation would not completely sabotage any effort I could make to be ‘reasonable’ while enduring the stress of dealing with a court situation.

I have nobody to do this for me.  I can’t follow through and stick up for myself.  I have NO IDEA how to do so, and NO ABILITY to do so even with an option such as pressing charges.

I miss my chickens.  I imagine the horror of their undeserved vicious death.  The two hens left are still stunned.  They are not happy.  My sanctuary has been violated.  I did not need this, not one bit.

And I DO expect people to be NICE!  I don’t understand myself why this is so.  How could I, a person who experienced the horrors of such intense and constant abuse for the first 18 years of my life EVER believe that people are supposed to be nice?

I blame and shame myself for being angry at my neighbors.  “How could you, Linda?  You are never supposed to be angry!!  You are supposed to be NICE!  You are supposed to forgive.”  I guess I think I am supposed to excuse the behavior of mean people.

Obviously, I am all tangled up.  I do believe that people who were raised in good-enough infant-childhoods have the inner resources to deal with such things in far better ways than I can even imagine.  All I can really do is suffer through whatever my reactive reactions are until enough time eventually goes by that this entire experience becomes history.

This sucks.  But at least the dogs appear to have permanently gone away.  I have not seen them since my return.  My guess is that they ran out to the desert and became dinner themselves for some coyote gang.  Or terrorized a ranch and got themselves shot.  “YAY” for small blessings!

I can barely give myself permission to be angry at these blood thirsty dogs!  There are just too many things to think about, too many angles — and I can’t even get ONE OF THEM RIGHT!

My neighbors have always let these dogs run.  I knew that.  I just didn’t ever guess things would get this bad.

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I have had my need to respond to a commenter (at this link:  EARLY TRAUMA BUILDS DISSOCIATION INTO THE BRAIN) who wrote while I was up north visiting my children, and realize that I do not have the motivation or the inclination to go into great depth in my response even though I am now back home in Arizona.  I am exhausted in MANY significant ways.

So for now this information will have to do because it has appeared over and over again in my thoughts since I read the blog comment.

First, there is this link on ‘Remembering the Self’.  It contains information and my working notes on —

Remembering the self

Includes mirror neurons

Dissociation

Empathy

Theory of Mind

Rules

Self

*Chapter 1-Remb self

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A series of other previous posts related to my personal research also comes up.  I am hoping blog readers will find some interesting and useful information here to think about today in these working notes:

*Siegel – early left brain development

*Chapter 2 – on neurological consequences of early trauma

*Chapter 5 – Attachment cannabinoid system

*Siegel – Emotions and states of mind (attachment)

+SIEGEL ON MINDS CREATE MINDS

+RISK, STRESS AND DISTRESS

*Chapter 4 child adverse experience

*Chapter 2 Learning

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In essence the thoughtful information that is in the back of my mind regarding the questions the blog commenter asked me about center on research that may or may not actually be referenced in these post links.

Humans were finally able to access and develop our verbal language skills and abilities at some very recent time point in our evolution BECAUSE language could ‘borrow’ the massive left brain abilities we had ALREADY strongly and competently evolved to accomplish our actions through a sequence of activities.

I believe ‘dissociation’ is greatly about a breach in the sequencing patterns related to altered formation of our left brain through early and severe abuse and trauma.

I picture a little one going down the road of their own life – desperately trying to develop into an individual person — in an environment rampant with insanity and abuse.  Every time an inappropriate traumatic response from adults in its earliest attachment environment sideswipe a child, dissociation HAS to occur.  The ongoing development of self-related experience in SEQUENCE is interrupted – which affects a little one in all areas related to ongoing experience of self in the world.

I am not going to take time to search around today in my own study notes or in anyone else’s research to document this next strong suspicion I have about dissociation, either.  I have too many things currently that I need to attend to.

Our brain DOES NOT actually allow for multitasking.  There is a bottleneck in our brain’s operation that allows for one thing and ONLY one thing to be processed at a time.

This bottleneck region/operation is supposed to be supremely fast and exquisitely efficient in its ability to get information through the bottleneck so the next action/activity can move through for us.

I strongly suspect that severe trauma and abuse during critical stages of early body-brain development detrimentally impact how this bottleneck operates.  Perhaps it is something like, “What’s in the cue gets interrupted and cannot be processed in cue as it is supposed to.”

I don’t know.

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Dissociation for someone like me, traumatically abused from birth, is a CONTINUAL threat to my ongoing experience of myself in the world.  That I DO know!

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It would be impossible to say that throwing out the Spanish dancers – and their related compatriots – is anything like a pleasant part of my trip up north here to see my children and grandchildren.  Nope!  NOTHING enjoyable about what occupies me this morning except for my hope and expectation that once THIS job is completed, I will feel better (somehow).

“Direct thy busy movements toward God…”

Now that I discovered this statement I can use it as a tool to help myself carve out a better life as I move around in time and space.  Believe me when I say, “I have a LOT of busy movements!”

I would otherwise feel entirely disheartened and condemning of myself this morning.

Four-plus years ago as I was coming along in my healing out of the terrible sickness in every cell of my body from having participated in a heavy-duty chemotherapy regime that DID eradicate the aggressive breast cancer cells that were taking charge of my body so that I am still here to notice all of this five years later……

I kept myself busy with small glimmerings of hope for the future by experimenting with making things out of laminated cloth.  I made earrings, tree ornaments (including the many, many Spanish dancers and an impressive collection of cats), wall plaque (thingies) – etc. – which I sent up north to my daughter to sell at some craft shows she attends.

I am now dealing with the aftermath — and as I tear apart each and every carefully created and bagged and priced little emblem of my busy movements — I try to remember it IS NOT MY FAULT my crafty creative attempts failed.  I was not responsible for the fact that the materials available for me to work with did NOT, well, WORK!

Layering fabric together with double-sided iron-on interfacing, then sealing surfaces with Modge Podge and/or varnish to make then stiff and durable (so I could carefully cut, clip and shape the individual separate images) – well, it ALL remained essentially sticky – so everything now has bonded with its paper label, with parts of itself, etc.  A disappointing, frustrating, aggravating FAILURE!!

It accomplishes nothing for me to continue to burden my daughter with these failed items – now I am removing and trashing everything but the little plastic bags the items were so carefully placed into with high hopes of — selling — and making at least a little bit of money — which we ALL need more of in this family!!

I am left, it seems, back exactly where I started all those years ago — and what do I have to show for this??

OK.  So if directing my busy movements toward God matters — then it is my effort, and most of all my INTENTIONS toward goodness that I offer as some kind of gift back to the One Who made me that truly matters, and not the material results no matter how successful OR how flawed these turned out to be.

What a concept!!!  I need this concept right now because there are literally HUNDREDS of various little material objects created as a result of my busy movements that I am still dismantling this morning.  I could throw the entire hopeless mess into the trash — but NOPE!  By golly, I am going to rescue these clear little bags — why?

No doubt so I can make something else in the future with my busy movements — and — Tell me again, how and when does this process end?

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