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While I was in art therapy graduate school our main professor pounded into us how important it is when working with art images to STICK WITH THE IMAGE.  That’s what we were told to do over and over and over again.

Sticking to the image does not allow for wandering off into any line of thought that is not directly connected to EXACTLY what a person can ‘point to’ in the image itself.

Images appear in all kinds of forms, in all kinds of ways, other than in paintings and drawings, collages, etc.

Images, as the appear from deep within human beings, exist in story, poetry, drama, music, dance…..

Yet all images convey information that most of us are not able to detect.  It takes a silencing of what we might think we know about ANYTHING other than what the image contains, what the image conveys, in order to learn from these images.

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I am reminding myself of this today because I just wandered off the trail from considering what actually exists in the story within the letters I am working in as I continue to write my forensic biography of my abusive BPD mother.

I left the story, left that IMAGE, as I wandered here:

++SCHORE ON DEVELOPMENT OF RIGHT BRAIN

The kind of information contained at this link is what I MOST WANT readers to comprehend.  I worked my way through Dr. Schore’s writings before I discovered

+Dr. Teicher’s ARTICLE ON TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT

In all the development neuroscientific studying that I did prior to finding what’s in this Teicher article, all I found were descriptions of brokenness for early traumatic attachment survivors.

First one part of the brain, then another part of the brain — all of them being damaged and changed — so that all we survivors end up living the rest of our lives in a body with a brain that will NEVER be the same as what we deserved – and were not given.

Finally with Teicher I heard that all of these changes happen for a reason. Although I think I know the bigger picture even more than these researchers because these changes happened to Mother, happened to me — without the information I gained from my studies I would never have learned what I needed to know:  The TRUTH about both myself and about my mother.

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Yet the information at this Schore link is so important to me that I could not be living right now without it.  Yet it is also so complicated that I can find no way to convey it to ‘the suffering public’.

I remind myself that the task in front of me is to stick to the story I am working with, stick to THAT image — I have to let go of my deepest deepest wishes that everyone that NEEDS to know the information at both of these links will GET IT!

I need to let go of my deepest sense that it somehow my job to make the information at these links understandable to people.  Today all I can do is present these two links and BEG readers to follow the links and read what is there.

As you read my ‘working notes’ among Schore’s so important information, realize that I then moved on to Teicher – and have never felt truly hopeless or helpless since.

There is a way for all of us to understand what the patterns of changes that happened to us in our physiological development in response to severe early failure of our infant-mother (primarily) attachment relationships — mean to us.  We ARE changed.  Who does that make us to be?

We will never understand ourselves until we understand what Schore and Teicher are saying.  Yet I wonder if I am living — really — several generations too early.  Maybe it’s not time for humanity to know these facts about these processes.  Maybe we aren’t mature enough yet to make the kinds of changes that MUST be made so that every born infant has exactly a fair chance to life a happy, healthy life because they were given what they needed from the instant of their conception — to do so.

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