The Dark Side of Mildred’s Mountain series – Angel book 2 beginning with the POP!  Goes Alaska letters – chapter 13

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13.  Isolation complete

Having the core of my developmental experiences under the influence of Mother’s psychotic abuse deprived me of opportunities to learn concepts that would have been in place within my mind under far more ordinary circumstances by the time I left home.  Significant portions of the timespan of my 18-year childhood were occupied ONLY with enduring trauma.  During these times I did not have opportunities to learn and assimilate into my mental framework (a) an ordinary sense of the passage of time, (b) an ordinary sense of the constancy of objects within space over time, or (c) any sense of my continuous self passing through the time of my own life.  (These aspects will be further described in the next chapter.)

My experience of being the sole captive of Mother’s devil child hell psychosis uniquely robbed me of any chance to incorporate these essential, normally foundational aspects of being human into my consciousness during childhood.  Because I endured and survived long enough to escape Mother’s psychotic hell at 18 – and did so with my mental capacities intact – it was then only a matter of time before I encountered what I could call “slam-dunk” opportunities in my young adulthood that gave me what I needed to wake up within me key awarenesses that children spared chronic, long-term psychotic abuse learn far earlier than I was able to learn them.

It is important to realize, however, that because I learned these concepts so late in my life they were not built into the circuitry of my brain and nervous system in ordinary ways – and never will be.  Because this is my book within which I am conveying my own specific reality I can simply say that within me lies an experiential foundation that was formed through a tripart process.  The interplay between who I was allowed to me as the all-bad figment of Mildred’s psychotic mind as she trapped me as her replacement in hell and who I was as a young human being separate from her – as both Mother and I existed in the real world of time and space and were not entirely separable from societal influences – gave me three distinct arenas of experience.

The connection between these three arenas was extremely limited by the design of Mildred’s mental illness and the influence it was allowed to have on me.  I can most clearly describe the three separated kinds of life I had in this way:

1.  Ordinary child:  Mildred’s psychosis did not have the power to prevent me from being a visible (real) child.  Although she had great control over me most of the time, there WERE times in my childhood when I was able to step into the flow of ordinary childhood outside the range of direct abuse.  As I described in Story Without Words, I can see how the visibility-invisibility dynamic operated in my childhood as early as my six week infant checkup as Mildred wrote about it.  While Mother began “vanishing” me very early in my life she could not REALLY make me disappear.  I had human contact, as limited and controlled in every way as Mother could manage. 

I had some access to my grandmother until I was nearly six at which time Mildred was forced to separate us by moving me to Alaska.  I attended school and through what I believe was a miracle designed by God I was allowed to spend time in Brownie Scouts.  I was a member of a family and could not be entirely extricated by Mother from that ongoing life; although as the family photograph collection indicates there were many times I was absent from their experiences.

2.  Closet child:  During the times when Mildred was most highly under the influence of the brutality of her psychosis I was frequently, and for often very lengthy periods of time, isolated and confined.  Mildred’s imprisonment of me in her hell thusly often took place literally in physical space (bed, corners, inside the house with her while my siblings played outside, etc. as this book will describe). 

In addition, tied to the fact that her psychosis identified me as being the devil’s child, Mildred believed I had the power to “take” my siblings to hell (to “ruin” them as in “one bad apple spoils the bunch” as she told her children).  Very often my siblings were forbidden to look at me or to speak to me from the time we were very small children.  This kind of social isolation for a child is hell all by itself.  Mother also prevented me from playing with other children including my siblings.

One bizarre aspect of her psychotic abuse of me is that she closely watched me all of the time except when it suited her otherwise (as in “Get out of my sight.  I can’t stand the sight of you” as she banished me to my bed or to a corner).  She had this kind of “evil eye” on me when I was outside on the driveway that led to the “story” (crime report) I wrote about in chapter 11. 

The intricacies of these patterns of Mother confining me within the “closet” of HER mind-space played themselves out throughout my childhood.  I consider the fact that Mother was able to pollute the mind of my father, to some extent of my grandmother and my siblings, even of my teachers so that her version of my “badness” became their version of me, to be one of the radiating consequences of Mildred’s powers to keep me inside her “closet” (hell) as she shrunk to near extinction (but not quite) my own personal space in which I could exist as a person separate from Mother at all.

Receiving the sole focus of Mildred’s all-bad psychosis meant that her great violence and brutality (verbally and physically) toward me was in itself a profound isolating factor in my childhood.  Nobody in our family ever had a question about who I uniquely was to Mother.  No child could have suffered the attacks that I did without feeling completely cut off from all human contact.  There is nothing on earth that can equal that state of isolation.

Isolation surrounded me everywhere I went.  Had one single person ever looked at me with compassion they would have known my suffering.  Had one single person reached out to make genuine contact with me perhaps my isolation would have been broken.  Nobody ever did.  My isolation remained complete.

3.  Wild child:  Our family’s move to Alaska powerfully and effectively tipped the balance of my intact survival of Mildred’s psychotic abuse in my favor.  When it came to enlarging the arena of “my own closet” outside of Mildred’s penetrating reach into my mind through her ability to influence and control my experience, Mildred lost the war the moment I stepped onto the soil of Alaska.

I credit the divine destiny of God’s intention to give me exactly what I needed to stay alive with my mind clear as the truest reason why our family moved to Alaska.  Once the homestead came into my life my success at survival was assured.  There was nothing easy or simple about the way I made use of the healing powers of the wilderness to stay alive. 

Being a child of the wilderness is where my own nature as a human being grew and thrived no matter what Mildred did to me.  In the wilderness all boundaries that could have confined me within a closet in my mind disappeared.  In the wilderness I was never alone because I was always free.

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Due to the comprehensiveness of Mother’s psychosis about me as it led to her chronic, severe and nearly continual interference with my ongoing experience of being a child (self) from birth, I was never able to develop normal or ordinary socialization abilities.  I mean this literally:  I do not have the physiological ability (capacity) to alter the way my brain cannot process social (human) signals through facial expressions, voice or even through spoken language in ordinary ways.  Through my studies I have come to understand that I process social information in ways more similar to how people with Asperger’s Syndrome do than in ways ordinary people do.

Yet I was born with the capacity to have developed fully in all ordinary ways.  What happened to me was a tragedy beyond measure.  I have developed in unique ways as a result of what I have been through.  I often suffer from the awareness of how different I actually am from ordinary people which leaves me not only FEELING alone but also BEING essentially alone.

Although I shared childhood with siblings Mildred kept them on the all-good track in her psychotic split mind while she kept me on her all-bad track.  There were vast unequivocal differences between these two tracks.  Only in the most general ways were these tracks connected to one another.  As I describe in the next chapter I was formed in, by and for a culture of one.  When it comes to being in society with humans I am essentially alone except for a few rare people with whom I feel connected.  Yet even with them there is an understanding that our relationship is exceptional and will never be ordinary.

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