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Monday, October 20, 2014.  My dearest friend who I am now 1700 miles away from is suffering.  He finally called me yesterday to tell me the reality of his condition.  No trying to be upbeat and cheery.  The truth is that at 77 following spine surgery he is bedridden and in great pain if he moves.  He cannot walk.  He cannot sit.  And, as he has been emphatically told, he cannot sue his surgeon:  “Did you read the three pages of fine print at the end of the papers you signed before surgery?  You are an old man.  Be patient.”

If good things come to those who wait — what lies in store for someone like this arrogant surgeon who promotes his abilities as a surgeon like he is selling used cars?

My friend is brilliant with a charismatic, powerful personality.  He has worked extremely hard all of his life.  What can he do — NOW?  I was unable to sleep much last night, unable to escape the magnetism of the sadness of his dilemma.

Yet after finally dosing for two hours I woke at dawn resolved to challenge my friend in any possible way that I can.  CHALLENGE him.

Humans are designed to arise to a challenge with all resources at our command.  What resources does my suffering friend have right now?  Well, other than the immense powers he has inside of his personhood he also has ME!  It took me some time before I could “go off the air emotionally” enough that I could tell that my friend shared details of his situation now that he has spared me for months because in his own way he is asking me for help.

I am recommending some things that can improve his quality of life — and by doing so down-regulate the amount of stress/distress he is experiencing.  Those states are not beneficial to his healing.  I told him to ASK for help from members of his large family so that he can get Netflix going and a “t box” set up so he can at least bypass a gazillion inane commercials.

Asking for help  is NOT my friend’s strong suit.

Well, stew about THAT my dear friend!  Get those obstinate juices flowing as you look at the very real bad situation you are in.  Are you willing to go outside what has, thus far, been your comfort levels?  Aging forces most of us to grow “outside” the boxes we have allowed ourselves to be confined within for most of our lives.  “There is a time and a season.”

It’s box-smashing time!

Next I recommended that he send another of his loving family members off to the Saturday Farmers’ Market there in search of a fantastic and gifted Reiki massage therapist and energy worker.  She is from France, has a heavy accent, is a retired RN and does chair massage at market.  I am certain she would come to his home to treat him.

Oh my, red lights will flash “DANGER AHEAD” for my “old fashioned” friend.  I DARE YOU I am basically telling him!  No fear should stop him now from pursuing what can actually HELP him heal.

If he WANTS to heal.

I haven’t challenged him with that question yet.  “Do you want to live or die?”

(As I found out 7+ years ago when I fought advanced, aggressive breast cancer.  Deciding NOT to die is not exactly the same thing as deciding TO LIVE.)

I will wait to see what fuses light and burn with what I wrote to him today.  Boy, I can sure come up with more ideas, if nothing else just so he can turn them down!  I know I want to give him hope — and some sense of power he can orchestrate through his choices.  Grace happens through action.  I will do my best to wake up his will and shake up his Warrior Within.

Just because he is in so much terrible pain he can barely move doesn’t mean he can’t move toward healing in new ways he’s never thought of before and certainly — until now — would never have considered trying.

Want to try some GREEN JUICE?  Want to try reading BOOKS?  There ARE library services and audio books.  Turn off the TV sometimes and listen to MUSIC!  Acupuncture?

My friend, a man of great pride and great accomplishment, needs to let people come visit and sit beside him.  Hard to let people see him in this condition?  OF COURSE, but there is no shame in being — human.

Get over it.

Get over ALL of it.

Get well!

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

Story Without Words:  How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are welcome.

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Leave a Comment »

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Saturday, October 18, 2014.  I mentioned in a recent post that I was swallowed up whole in a swarm of hives last September 23rd as I read a text message from my daughter that morning about a terrible car accident she drove through unscathed the night before.  My hives are still here.  Still acting up.  Still communicating with me via the largest organ in my body — my skin.

I just had the idea of Google searching “hives chakras stress.”  Very interesting.  As I clicked a bit, also, through the list of links that appeared as additional search avenues on “hives anxiety” at the bottom of the first search page I had to chuckle.  Get control of my anxiety BEFORE a stress appears?  Sure.  OK.  Yeah.  I’ll get right on that!

If I don’t want to drown, stay away from water.

I get it.

But, having experienced very little that wasn’t extremely traumatic from the moment of my birth I had more than my fair share of stress-related alterations confining my developing physiology every step of the way as I grew into this world.  I essentially live in an anxiety (terror) built home-of-a-body.

I am yet again reminded of an article I read and took notes on back in 2007

*Preschooler empathy

The study described clearly shows the alterations in empathy processes that happen with early disturbances in safe and secure attachment for little people.  I endured the horrors of abuse consistently for the first 18 years of my life.  I am an “insecurely attached” individual.  I have a serious “attachment disorder.”  Call it Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD).  Call it an “disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment pattern.”  It no longer matters to me one bit what I or anyone else might “call” the patterns my body-brain uses in its interactions with life in this world.

But I do know I will never have an optimally-operating attachment system OR a concurrent optimally-operating empathetic response system.

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Take a look through the information I posted at the above link.  “Rock-n-Roll” method of being in the world, and I am not talking about music.

I have so much pain, sorrow, suffering (etc.) built into me that I CANNOT escape feeling if I am within “contagion” distance of another human being that I become a living emotional backlash ocean of pained response.  Back to me comes all of my own only-slightly-masked pain.  I set to resonate with another person’s suffering as if there is no tomorrow.  And no yesterday.  Body memories related to suffering from trauma so easily becomes ALL THAT I AM.

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How do I pull back from the edge of that brink once I find myself reacting-responding-resonating so painfully with somebody else’s suffering?  Where are my boundaries that define MY reality as being separate from another’s?  We are all connected.  Reality IS that one person’s pain is SUPPOSED to be another person’s pain.

Humans, as shareholders within a social species, are SUPPOSED to be connected to one another.  We are SUPPOSED to recognize another’s suffering.  We are SUPPOSED to care.  And we are SUPPOSED to ACT APPROPRIATELY in response to another’s suffering so that we can HELP THEM not to suffer any more.

In today’s world, certainly within American culture, the circle is broken in significant ways.

Independent US?

Who are we kidding?

Humans are not supposed to be changed in development through early attachment traumas so that they end up TOO MUCH ALONE — or TOO MUCH TOGETHER.

When I cannot stop my pain, my anxiety – which is pain and a response to the existence of my own pain and pain-in-the-world – when my “boundaries” are breached and I am swamped as in overwhelmed – I am being, as is not uncommonly said, “a part of the problem and not a part of its solution.”

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Emotions and states of being are contagious.  Fear.  Anger.  Happiness.  (Yawning?)

Contagious.

I wonder why it has taken me this long to grasp a very simple fact?  Anxiety is CONTAGIOUS!

It takes an entire bank of resources, known and accessible, to create protection against being consumed by powerful, environmentally-profound levels of emotional cotangents such as anxiety is.

Or?

Well, certainly a very sophisticated body-wash of mobilized hives is not the WORST thing that can happen when “defenses” fail.  But my hives are certainly garnering my attention.  ZAP!  Hot poke at the very peak of my head.  Hot itches, too close to my eyes and flashing up my nostrils?  Flowing like red shadow patterns all over this body I call home-in-this-world.

My body is talking to me.  All “symptoms” talk to us.  We are designed optimally for optimal health.  Anything that comes to us that is NOT about optimal health is a twist of fate for humans.  A twist of consequence.

From what and for what reasons?

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One of the first and most important (to me) facts I uncovered a decade ago when I began to study the physiological responses in development due to early trauma was that someone with an early abuse and neglect history will most likely ALWAYS feel DISTRESSED in response to environmental circumstances that would cause “ordinary” people to feel STRESSED.  There are complicated reasons why this is so and many, many of these reasons are presented elsewhere on this blog.

Yet while I can kind of grasp the difference between STRESSED and DISTRESSED, I am at a stalemate in trying to think of any amped-up word to describe how what I feel of anixety– as a trauma-altered-development (TAD) person — actually IS compared to what “ordinary” people might simply be able to call anxiety (aka stressed).

Is it “disanxiety?”  Could it more accurately be described as DYSanxiety?  Early traumatic stress changes our development so that emotional (and physical) DYSREGULATION is built into us.  Anxiety that we cannot regulate in “usual” ways is a direct manifestation of that dysregulation – rather than regulation – built very early on into our body including into our rapidly early- forming (birth to age one) right limbic (social-emotional) brain hemisphere.

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It all comes down to being able or not able to downsize our discomfort and our experience of discomfort — and/or the discomfort of another person when appropriate (although we cannot literally alter somebody else’s own personal/inner experience of their own comfort/discomfort).

Trauma-built people have a nearly unbelievable, usually extreme disadvantage when it comes to being able to self-soothe.

What happened to us was the antithesis of soothing.

This absolutely DOES NOT mean that we can’t learn (A) when we need to comfort and care about/for our self, and (B) HOW to do this.

I think usually this process must begin with identifying when we are in an extremely uncomfortable state (my hives are doing this for me) and then finding healthy ways to create some kind of distancing for our self from any situation that is distressing us so much that our DYSanxiety is in full play.

We are aiming at a state of peaceful calm.

Most of us who were severely traumatized as infants and children BARELY know what this state feels like.  We have to LEARN how we know what it is, because we DO know!  We would not have remained alive if we had NO experience with this state.

We need to REMEMBER what this state of peaceful calm is and what it feels like.  This kind of knowledge was SUPPOSED to be built into our body as the natural point of rest, of balanced equilibrium for our nervous system-self.  Early trauma survivors DO NOT naturally have peaceful calm at the center of our life experience.

Or of our body.

There are times when we need to unplug from other people in ways that let us go off-the-air emotionally.  Being overwhelmed is not health-producing and is not helpful to anyone.  Survivors of early, devastating early trauma did not get a chance to form safe and secure attachment relationships that would have given us healthy, effective boundaries.  We have to LEARN what these boundaries are and how to utilize and sustain them.

My skin is “supposed” to be my natural boundary-defining limit of my physical body.  Yet Oriental healing processes powerfully recognize the error and limitations of this way of thinking.  We are FAR more than our body!  We are a complex of interacting networks and interfaces of which our skin might appear to be one surface that delineates us as an individual.

At this point I wonder if my body is actually doing a form of acupuncture on itself.  Yes, my body is trying to get my attention.  But more importantly I recognize that is trying to heal me.

I need to calm down and find any way I can to participate in this process.  Off-the-air I go.

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

Story Without Words:  How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are welcome.

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Leave a Comment »

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Sunday, October 12, 2014.  I find myself for the first time in my adult life that I know of LONGING for the touch of my grandmother’s hand.  Longing for the sound of her voice speaking softly to me of NOTHING that has ANYTHING to do with the crazy abusive life I lived with her daughter, my so-sick mother whose illness made her so hate me.  I want my GRANDMA.

Long dead.  Since June 1971 when I was 19 years old.

Grandmother’s kindness to me could not reach me very often.  Mother did not allow it.  By the time we left Grandmother behind in Los Angeles when we tore off for Alaska when I was five there was very little Grandma could do to ever help or soothe me.  Yet I can imagine why memories of tenderness from her are surrounding me now.  Body memories, as most of our earliest most important memories always are.  Being a grandmother myself has blessings but it also has some very difficult challenges that I cannot write about here.  It has been a difficult week, a difficult day today as I try to sort out what it is I CAN do to live the love I have for my family.

Love is often a “working love.”  It is not passive.  It is not always soft and cushy and easy.  Tough love?  Yes.  Sometimes love IS tough.  Life can be scary without blueprints or road maps.  Insights and instincts.  Courage.  Knowing when to speak (what) and when to keep silent (about what).  How to encourage?  How to support without overwhelming?  How to remain true to self while allowing all others to do the same?

Where to shine the light?  How brightly?  How to help those we love increase their own light?  What do we do with the darkness when it appears?

Trauma on down through the generations.  Trying to spare the youngest, newest, sweetest, most loved?  What do we adults drag around with us that harms them even when we are doing our very, very best not to?

Who can tell the truth?  Who knows the truth?  Who looks farthest down the road searching for how what happens now is going to affect what happens THEN for these little people?

Sometimes life seems so very, very big.  I must feel small right now.  Small enough to fit onto my grandmother’s lap.  Her warm hand nesting against my cheek.  If she were here.  If I were small.  If she could get to me without Mother noticing.  Is Grandmother here near me now?  She COULD be!  She MIGHT be?

Oh, what would I say to her?  What would I want to hear back from her?

“I love you.  I have always loved you.  I will always love you.  No matter what.  I love you.”

But did she fight for me?  As hard as she could — FIGHT FOR ME?

Was she ensnared in a web she could not see, all tangled up, kept far, far from me?

How did that happen — exactly?

How did all that suffering HAPPEN?

Who could have stopped it?  How?  At what point?

How do I do my part now to stop the ripples, the aftermath, from moving one tiny inch into the future of my youngest family people?

What ARE our powers?

What price do I pay for the mistakes of my grandmother?  What price are my dearest grandsons paying for mine?

Oh, forgiveness.  Compassion.  Mercy.

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Daylight is dimming.  Clouds too thick to see the sun.  There is no wind.  Rains today left a sweetest scent in the air I don’t ever want to go away.

There is no wind.  There are no shadows.  Darkness is coming.

There is a natural order to things.  I am always seeking my place in it.  Grandmothered once.  Grandmother now.

Always I want the best.

I want to remember the best always happens in the little things.  Things I might barely notice.  One pure note from a piano key.  Put together with the one before it and the one after it.  A certain pattern.  A certain rhythm.  And there’s a melody.  A song.

I want to listen….

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

Story Without Words:  How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are welcome.

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Leave a Comment »

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Tuesday, October 7, 2014.  I am being haunted by a trauma that both exists and does not exist.  I evidently don’t know how to tell the difference.  As I now decide to write a post about this I realize that I am dealing with the difference between a minefield and a different kind of mine.  One that holds something of value.  Something desirable.  Something useful.

One of the significant problems with traumas is that while I continue to believe they hang around after their actual occurrence in time and space in large part because they contain information we need to know and make use of for the future.  Learning from the past in order to create a safer, better future is a good reason to mine the minefield of a trauma.  At this point in my thinking, then, my two images begin to merge and overlap.

There is always far greater danger for people who have been, as Dr. Bruce Perry suggests it, SENSITIZED by trauma.  We are the people with the long-term lingering and often overwhelming difficulties caused by how previous traumas altered our physiological make-up.

Perry also describes the far more desirable and advantageous response to trauma of increasing our TOLERANCE so that we can flexibly and positively respond to past and present traumas without being sideswiped or overrun by them when they happen or later as we heal from them and/or ever face another trauma that resonates with our past experience.

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I cannot deny that my extreme sensitization to trauma — because I suffered so much of it and because it began as my body was developing in this world post-birth — is hyper-active now.

I woke Tuesday two weeks ago to find the following text from my dear daughter waiting for me on my phone.  She had left late evening on Monday the 22nd in a fleet car from the university where she works, driven by her research assistant Lori*, to get an early morning head-start on arriving at a Tuesday morning conference on Spirit Lake Reservation.  They were 35 miles east of their night’s motel destination at Devil’s Lake when the unthinkable occurred as they drove through the pitch blackness of a moonless middle-of-nowhere west on a remote North Dakota (speed limit 65 mph, high quality two-lane paved) highway.

1:27 am September 23 – “Part of a major multicar accident on highway 2 on way to devils lake.  we are OK but there were fatalities.  Waited 3 hours for tow truck.  Now taking us to DL and will get car tomorrow so can go home.  Feeling very grateful, but sad.  No more travel in the dark for us.  Love you xoxox”

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Man Killed, 3 Children Hurt When Car Hits Moose on North Dakota Highway

Fort Totten man killed, 3 children injured when car hits moose

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I pause in my writing at this point to consider a decision I will make here.  If I choose to protect readers of this post from exposure to horrifying facts about what happened in this accident I will write very little if anything past these words.

If I choose to give myself permission to write whatever comes to me past this point I risk exposing readers to TMI – Too Much Information.

Hummmmm……  Fork in my blog post road.  What path will I take?

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

Story Without Words:  How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are welcome.

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Leave a Comment »

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Next post:

+ROADS TRAVELED – PART 2 (a read “at own risk” warning attached)

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