Category: adult attachment disorders

+BIGGER-THAT-LIFE STORIES OF TRAUMA

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I think it’s rare for someone who does not have an abuse history that began at their birth (or even before when traumatic influences affected their life in the womb) to understand why “everyone” can’t move forward in their life leaving abuse and trauma in the past.  Certainly the center for Disease Control’s research on the lifelong problems created for survivors of multiple Adverse Childhood Experiences is helping to dispel the myth that ever being able to escape severe early trauma is possible.

Blissful statements made to survivors that belie the facts about how traumatic stress and the permanent distress it creates especially in babies and toddlers during the most physiological formative stages of life only serve to further hurt these survivors, not help them.

Without the power that the pristine forces of Alaska had to sustain and heal me I would not be able to work my way through the telling of my abuse story.  I know now that even though I lived long enough to escape the cauldron of hell I was raised in, there was no possible way I could simply scoot off into some glorious new future free of the effects my 18 years of traumatic abuse had on me.  Nor was there anyone standing to greet me as I walked from the jet plane that had taken me from Anchorage to Baltimore on my way to Naval boot camp the day of my escape who was interested in debriefing me from the horrific life I had lived up until that moment.

I have always been left to accomplish that task on my own, and here I am 44 years later debriefing myself as I do this writing.  I think about the millions of people who have not been able to get this far.  Those whose sickness inherited from their family was never preserved in any kind of spoken, written or photographic record of any kind.  Their record lies only in their broken heart, the shambled record of their own broken life, in tears, rage — and most clearly of all, in their confusion as they lack any ability to comprehend how what was done to them hurt even the body they live in.

Where are the stories these people deserve to tell?  Given the gift of Mother’s writings and of the pictures she took along the way of my childhood as all this was preserved, I am creating a story to share with others whose lives stretch out behind, within, and ahead of them — broken.

Left without words our trauma stories tell themselves out in the dramatic patterns of trauma reenactments that so few can recognize for what they are.  My mother lived her trauma drama as she sucked her family helplessly into her wake.  Sleep walking.  Sometimes sleep racing her way through the years of my childhood my parents created all the stages our shared drama played itself out on and in.

Without insight.  Truth buried so deeply within Mother about how hurt she had always been as a child that it could not be brought even into her mind.  Anywhere.

The patterns in the cycles of her moves do appear in the words of her writings.  Each of her moves were unconsciously designed to alleviate her hidden pain, frustration, confusion and even her rage that was so big she could not find a way to give it all to me no matter how hard she tried.  She was fed and sustained by the unseen truths of her life as a child that remained out of sight because they had been transformed into lies.

Perhaps if Mildred had remained living in the same place long enough the buried lies about how wonderful her childhood had been would have begun to crawl up through the floorboards making themselves known when they accumulated in corners and cupboards.  Creeping and crawling around under the soles of her feet, shoes on or not, so when she got up to walk from one room to another they would have skittered out and chased her around as she — what?

Ignored them?  Blamed their existence on me?

Move.  Move again fast.  Always moving for one (really) insane reason or another.  Packing and unpacking boxes to make sure the bugs didn’t follow her that way.  Cleaning.  Scrubbing.  Polishing.  Shining.  Ironing out creases in fabrics to make sure not even the eggs — or — heaven forbid — certainly no larvae could exist to grow into the truth buried in the lies that would not stay put when she left them behind.  To move yet again.

Parts of Mildred’s truth always ran on ahead of her, waiting for some other door to be unlocked with yet another clean key.  Would she have cringed, would she have cried or screamed had she realized her truth had even found its way into the words of her letters to be preserved even in those boxes she taped and taped shut?

Hiding them away inside her storage lockers, these truths show themselves to me now long after her death.  I can see them.  I know where they are.  I am not afraid to let them out or to let them live through the minds of all the people who can finally read them.

One story.  One long, complicated and buried story come to life, come to light, somehow in these words.

A blended shared story that lives past Mildred.  That will live past me.  As unambiguously as I can tell it.  Will some parts of the trauma heal itself when the bigger context of the story appears through words?  What can be learned through the voice of trauma that speaks thus loudly for all the children whose suffering lies underground, under pavement, under solid or creaking porches where families have come and gone, beyond the ordinary spectrums of what we like to believe childhood is all about?

Trauma only wants to teach us that beyond all the barriers we might construct to pretend it isn’t there, it really is there.  In our bodies, those who lived it from before a single word had crossed their lips, at that threshold where lies become truth — or the other way around.

Those who suffer and are kept in silence rise again generation after generation.  Somewhere along the lines of time we can choose to stop and listen.  What trauma has to teach cannot be outrun, cannot be abandoned through the ignorant choices of the many who leave the hurt ones to suffer in silence yet again within another generation.

Mildred ran to recover something she lost in her childhood.  She didn’t know that what she yearned for had never actually existed in the first place.  For those of us who have suffered from abuse and trauma since we were born, we are not on a recovery road.  We will never be able to find again what we never had in the first place.

Nay.  Ours is rather an ongoing journey of discovery.  Ours is a creation of a better life, not a recreation.  We do not know ease.  We do not know solace.  Ours has always been a story whose central question has yet to be answered, “What’s the point to any of this?”

We will not know what we need to know, not any of us, until we begin to link our stories together into one that lets us know that what we live is a story bigger than any single life.  Bigger-than-life stories have to be shared and told together.  We must create one big story of infant and child abuse that can no longer be shunned.  No longer ignored or misplaced or misunderstood.

We are a social species.  We are designed this way.

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+’ANGEL’ BOOK CHAPTER 7: Being the child of a broken-in-half mind

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There must be some kind of rhythm for writing this kind of book.  I will feel more relaxed when I find mine.  I fear I will loose my momentum and wander away from my task.  It is a hard one for me.  If I wander away from it I am not at all sure that I would ever come back.  Everything I am writing will need to be worked through again, and then edited.  But I cannot stop for that now.  Here I will share chapter 7 as I wrote it today about being raised by my very sick psychotic extremely abuse Borderline Personality Disorder mother.

Angel chapter 7

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VII.  Being the child of a broken-in-half mind

If I could walk back over the course of my entire childhood from birth along a straightened road where I could clearly see signposts that marked damage done to me in my development by the madness of my mother it would be so much easier for me to understand how I moved through my childhood past those markers in spite of this damage.  I would want the markers to be color coded so I could look for patterns in all the separate areas that were involved.  How close together would these markers be to one another?  Would there be any open spaces between them where I could have been spared cumulative damage in each area marked as “gone wrong?”

A whole line of these markers traveling at least from birth into my middle teen years would tell me that mother kept an unnatural controlling hate-filled eye on where my body was at any given point in time and space.  Her verbal abuse litany, tied as it was as I describe it in Story Without Words, was the from the energy that sustained the matrix of her broken mind took when it came to me.  There were litany segments of words tied to every signpost marker I would find along the road of my childhood.  No part of who I was in the world was left out of her verbal abuse litany.

The comprehensiveness of her psychotic observations of me operated to keep me confined in her hell.  Her madness could not afford to let me out, to let me escape.  The oppressiveness of her psychotic mental arrangement (derangement) was so consistently bizarre that looking back on it now leaves me nearly without any powers to comprehend or understand it.  So I take this one step at a time.

One segment of her litany existed in words such as this:  “I can never let you out of my sight.  You cause trouble wherever you go.”  The contradictory arm of this pattern existed in words she used to isolate and confine me so often during my childhood in bed or in corners.  This segment sounded like this:  “I can’t stand the sight of you.  You make me sick to my stomach.  Get out of my sight.”  These statements usually ended with something like, “Go to bed without your supper.”

In between these two abusive litany segments, as they manifested Mother’s psychotic thoughts, I rarely had room to even move.  The road of my childhood would be cluttered with markers signifying when, how, where, why I simply disappeared from visibility in my family.

I have no doubt that these patterns were not in play in some way from the time I was bor.  Readers of Story Without Words know how I describe this happening on the day of my infant 6-week checkup.  In the words Mildred wrote about having to take her invisible daughter out into the visible world that day, she not only chose to actually write about her dearly loved son Johnny as she made him visible in that piece, but she also described how at the end of that mission newly born me was deposited into invisibility alone on a bed in my grandmother’s bedroom – where my little brother Johnny immediately ran to find me.

While a deeper exploration of how Mildred could vanish baby me from contact with my father and grandmother during my earliest months and years of life belongs in another book not yet written, I mention these patterns here as they would be represented on thousands of markers down the road of my childhood because these isolation events had become so common in Mildred’s treatment of me by my age of nearly 6 when these 1957 letters were written that they formed the nearly unbreachable fence that prevented me from even being a child.

I was the child who wasn’t.  I frequently found my invisible self even within the family’s photographic history.  As an example, Mildred marked the absence of me at play in the wading pool.  Where was I?  Imprisoned in hell.

A very long string of color coded markers from birth would read “No play for Linda.”  I struggle to find my own reality in my childhood because the power of Mildred’s broken mind when it came to my existence spun her reality around me so tightly then that I cannot easily find myself back there now.  Where was I supposed to exist between both not being out of her sight and not being in her sight?  Where was there any space left for me to exist, let alone BE a child – let alone PLAY?

All through my childhood, as my siblings so clearly remember, I was not allowed outside to play with them.  I will have more to say about this fact as I trace myself all the way through Mildred’s letters.  But a big part of the abuse litany segments I heard all the way through the years I lived as the prisoner captive of her psychotic hell originated long before the move to Alaska ever happened. 

Supposedly at some point that must have been even before I turned six years old Mildred said she let me out to play “with other children in the neighborhood” only to find that I “caused so much trouble and commotion” that she could never let me out to play again, never let me out of her sight.  Was I running?  Chasing?  Yelling?  Laughing?  Cops and robbers?

My mind cringes if I try to extricate myself even in thought from Mildred’s reality when it comes to trying to imagine – and here it is – what I could have done as a little girl that so created trouble in the neighborhood that day to deserve (“earn”) the permanent disability to play with other children, even with my own siblings?

Whatever happened (or did not really happen) that day, I was catapulted into a suffocating isolation that lasted throughout the rest of my childhood.  This forced separation from opportunity to play removed from me the greatest social developmental gifts of childhood.  Not only had I been robbed of the chance to learn about being a social creature called human because I was barred from positive adult contact and interactions, I was further prevented from being able to negotiate being human with my peers.

I have thought my way through the profound role play has even from the start of human life.  In a healthy, normal mother-infant safe and secure attachment relationship how vital body-brain building interactions are meant to take place is exactly through play.  I have thought about the fact that when any environment contains severe deprivation and a complete lack of safety and security, when continued existence is massively endangered, there will be no play.

My mother internally lived in that kind of hostile, malevolent world.  This fact created her mental illness and her psychosis regarding me.  There was, therefore, fundamentally no possible way for play to exist either between Mother and me or even anywhere in my own life.  Many of the clear memories I have retained of abuse in my childhood – interestingly – are about how my play was suddenly interrupted by severe abuse.

I remain trapped in her mind within my own mind.  I have no form of reference regarding my inalienable right to be a child.  Even as I write these words I cannot escape the fact that my mind immediately attaches the word “imperfect” to the word “child” every time I try to set myself free.  In fact, it may well be that it is exactly within the space between those two words in combination, “imperfect child,” that the splitting of this atom needs to take place.

I came into this world being the dark half of Mildred.  There was no division, no separation, no split in the atom between her reality and mine.  This was a terrifying fact for me that I had no power to name or to comprehend.  I was stuck there in terror all of the time.

As I wrote in Story Without Words, it may be the complete lack of safety Mildred lived with through the play-years of her own childhood that built this complete lack of safety-to-play into my childhood through her.  In any hostile environment no play will take place until threat-to-life has diminished enough that a renewed sense (fact) of safety returns.

On an intellectual level I marvel at how intricately effective Mildred’s madness was.  As long as she could keep me her captive proxy-bad-self in hell she was safe.  And because she was safe, she shared that arena of safety with all of her other children who then were safe enough to play.

Looking at this entire picture now I see that Mildred’s abuse of me was exactly designed to obliterate me.  I can never describe the blatant horror such a comprehensive brutal madness creates within a little child.  I was powerless to change, or even to recognize these patterns as they were perpetually enforced by Mildred.  If one has never known light does darkness even exist?

Yet being a child saved me.  I had no possible way to know how trapped I was.  Not trapped periodically, or once in a while.  I was born trapped inside the hell of this woman’s mad mind.  I think ahead into this book and see some of my child artwork I will present later.  I DID know in my essence that I was trapped.  In some great chasm of awareness I could not reach I knew what no human being should ever know.  I knew how to exist even though I was not allowed my existence.  (And remember, this began when I was born.  I was not taken as a POW some later time in my adulthood.)

I knew how to live a living death as the unborn born.

As I share with you this writing I am taking you along with me to find truths about my life I have never found before.  I see at this moment how the broken spit-in-half mind of my mother was able to so perfectly combine aspects together into a “one solid thing” related to being human that are meant to exist with a continuum between them.  (A classic Borderline Personality Disorder symptom taken in Mother’s case to its furthest extremes.)

Mildred’s split mind allowed all perfection to be hers in her upper “all-good” universe her mind allowed her to exist within.  All imperfection belonged in hell, hence in me.  My difficulty in splitting apart the atom that is in its essence the “imperfect child” – designated from my birth as being me – may well be the essence of my struggle to free my mind (as Mildred made it) from her mind.

Mildred’s was as perfect of a madness, I most strongly suspect, as could be found in the mind of any human being.  If I can disengage the essence of this perfect madness – of her perfect psychosis – from myself I find that the “perfect-imperfect” split defined nothing to do with me either as a child or as a human being.

This split between perfect mother and imperfect daughter turned my imperfection into perfection itself.  While it defies an ordinary mind’s ability to conceive of the essential, pervasive horror of my 18 year existence, the truth was (and is) that Mildred’s perfect madness made me into a perfectly imperfect being – which is in itself a perfect form of perfection.  Her psychosis created a vacuum with me living my childhood inside of it that had all goodness sucked out of it.

It is, therefore, simply the truth of existence, and therefore of reality as we live it in a physical world of duality as spiritual beings, that I was able to survive Mother.  Her madness kept her alive by creating a perfect universe for herself that contained perfect hope (again as described in Story Without Words).  This break had happened inside of her by the time she reached age eleven (before puberty).

All the parts and pieces of her perfect madness fell into place and clicked together during her delivery of me.  From that time forward her madness made her perfectly safe in a perfectly safe all good world that was overflowing with hope.  She could live there because she then had me as her proxy trapped in her hell that held not only all imperfection, but at the same time held the anti-thesis of hope which IS perfect hopelessness.

Zero hope.  That was the world she created and sustained for me.  Or did she?

In line with my road marker theme here it then becomes a moot point that I was allowed no safety and hence no play.  Hopeless children do not play.  That’s a rule of this kind of broken madness.

So – there I was.  In hell.  Alone.  Trapped.  Suffering perpetually as I was supposed to be doing.  EXCEPT – I DID EXIST (obviously or I would have been dead – that would not have worked in Mildred’s madness).  The madness required that I both exist and not exist at the same time which, miraculously for me, meant that I got to remain alive by default!

 

It probably does take a special kind of extraordinary thinking to make such an impeccably perfect madness comprehensive to ordinary minds.  One of my essential arrows in the quiver I was born with that allowed me to endure and survive was my inner determination and resolve to do so.  Because Mother’s madness required that I remain alive, this arrow was allowed to fly, and it flew straight and far.  She would have had to kill me to stop my arrow from arching its way forward down the road of my childhood from the moment of my birth until I was allowed, finally, to escape her.  It is that same arrow of determination and resolve that leads my pen forward word by word through the writing of my story.

Inside of me, separated as I mentioned from my mother by the sacred membrane we are all born with, I did what I was supposed to do.  I lived.  Although everything viewed about me from the outside as I was defined by Mildred’s psychosis as being perfect imperfect determined my essential hopelessness to change the course of my life, that reality could not cross my sacred membrane to contaminate or toxify me on the inside of who I was/am in any way.  Just as the fetus is protected from certain pathogens because they cannot cross the placental barrier, so too I was protected by this sacred barrier from being essentially harmed by Mildred.

The circumstances of my life, of my existence were – to put it most mildly – nearly as hopeless as they were designed by Mildred’s madness to be.  But because hope exists as an inherent characteristic of the soul, my hope – as unnamed as it was until now – never failed me.

I have moved forward through this writing past any need to concern myself with the splitting oof “imperfect” from myself as a child.  The split between Mildred’s own mind’s conception of the lost relationship connections between “perfect and imperfect” created that whole damn mess in the first place.  That mess was never mine.  It hurt me as I lived through it, but it never had a single solitary thing to do with me.

Such a burden as my childhood was possibly had only one purpose.  If there is some reason why it is necessary and therefore important to understand the depths of breakage possible within the mind of an infant-child who survived what they could not endure, this story describes such a madness.  Nothing about the patterns of my childhood ever allowed me to ask any question about what was happening to me or why.  I was thus spared any effort to answer a question for which I could have found no answer. 

I am not sure there even is a split between the impossible question and its impossible answer.  Perhaps they are a “one thing” together that cannot be broken apart.   If some unfortunate child should split apart such a question/answer they are running the risk of “going mad” just as my child mother did.  I know from Mildred’s childhood stories (in Story Without Words) that she did ask questions.  She did search for answers.

The inconsistencies in Mildred’s life created opportunity for questions to appear in her mind that she instinctively and bravely wrestled with for answers that did not exist.  My childhood was consistently horrible.  Nothing was inconsistent, thus sparing me the risk of ending up with a broken mind.

Had the madness that hurt my child mother been as perfect as the madness that hurt me, I would not be writing this story now.  I am tackling the unwinding of my experience at age 62.  Mildred began trying to unravel her misery while she was yet still a young child.  Really.  What chance did she have to come out of her childhood whole?  None.  Obviously.

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+CAREGIVING IN ADULT ATTACHMENT RELATIONSHIPS

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As I work on writing my current book this morning I remind myself about how impressed I am with the information contained in this series of blog posts on attachment in adult relationships: 

+CAREGIVING IN ADULT ATTACHMENT RELATIONSHIPS

– so here I am recommending a read of this material yet again on this blog!

I no longer hold any hope that I can create a good relationship with a partner in my lifetime.  At age 62, after having been single for nearly 30 years, I still consider this one of the most damaging consequences of my abusive childhood.  Some things are possible, some things are not.  For me, there isn’t enough safe and secure attachment wiring inside of me to cover more than the amazing attachment relationship I have with my three grown children and with a few good friends.

But had anyone given me the kind of information contained in the links this post points to a long, long time ago in my life, I think I could have made a great partner relationship work.  I don’t have the energy or the willingness to try to learn and practice what I would have to at this point in my life.

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+ANGEL: A PART OF CHAPTER 2 – A dimly browning memory

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II.  A dimly browning memory

One part of Mildred’s bizarre psychosis involving me as her chosen child in hell had to do with the fact that in her mind I was a failure at getting and being sick.  It takes a special kind of mental illness for a mother to rage against a child for not getting sick often enough or bad enough as if I evilly intended that these patterns occur.  Mildred had that kind of an illness.

The chronic message given to me in every way she could possibly convey it (and hence to my siblings) was that I was supposed to suffer because I deserved ONLY to suffer (a component of being the devil’s child in hell) while her other upper world all-good children were NEVER supposed to suffer because they did not deserve to.  It certainly never broke Mother’s heart to see me sick. 

I have always held a vague sense of memory that seems to be connected to my having chicken pox.  I am in bed around age 3 to 4 I believe in the Altadena house.  The fact that I “only had six pox” while poor darling Cindy (she never asked for this distinction any more than I asked for mine) later suffered greatly with many chicken pox was brought up to me in Mother’s verbal abuse litany against me throughout the rest of my childhood. 

Mildred was always marching against me with her army of abuse possibilities.  The most important point regarding my health as a child is that no matter what Mildred thought, wished for or said it was a powerful protective factor for me that I was tough, strong, healthy with great stamina and physical resilience.  Had I not been born this way I would not have remained alive.  When it comes to the balance between severe abusive physical trauma in my childhood and frequent periods of forced confinement and isolation, I now understand that those ‘down times’ after Mildred had exhausted herself physically by beating me allowed my body to crash and recuperate.  (The isolation was, of course, far more frequent and prolonged than what I needed for this physical restoration.)

When it comes to the varieties of abuses Mildred had in her arsenal to attack me with, her verbal abuse in regard to my ‘refusal’ to get sick often or badly enough had very minor impact compared to all else I endured.  Because I had never been loved by Mother, and because nobody ever betrayed me by pretending they loved me ‘sometimes’ if I was good enough (as happened to Mildred when she was a child), I was not psychologically damaged by this abuse approach.  I carried such a burden of terror and grief all of the time that no matter how often Mildred used this particular weapon it held no power to make me feel worse than I always did related to my reactions to her abuse of me.

This fact was not a sign of my invulnerability to pain.  It was a sign that there was only so much suffering I could bear.  I had far worse things to worry about and deal with when it came to what Mildred did to me.  It will be seen in Mildred’s future letters and in photographs that I am often outside the family close-closed structure (as in the picture on the cover of this book) and missing entirely from many pictures of happy events. 

It was Mildred’s psychotic permanent and pervasive separation between her adored, cherished, darling other (upper world all-good) children and me as the devil’s child in hell that hurt me.  All these ‘minor’ ways Mildred conveyed her feelings about me were simply facets of a many-sided weapon of Linda destruction.  I was caught with Mildred in a perpetual struggle between her wanting me dead and needing me alive at the same time.   I suffered and endured because I had no choice, yet I was still a child who had to pass through developmental stages over the course of my childhood that I could neither skip nor resist.

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At least five hours have passed since I wrote about my vague sense of a memory that I suspect is connected to my being sick with chicken pox.  My mind keeps returning to this sense.  To this unseen scene.  I am aware that I feel sick.  My body is sick.  I cannot see anything specific or clearly, yet it is as if I have my eyes open in that time and place that were left seeing something then that only appears now as if my own eyes are mirroring back to me a vision of a brownish cast of dimming light in the room connected to two other brown dim rooms.  I am small.  My body is small.

I can see the outline of a window close to where I lay.  A tall window.  A low sill.  Lit with a brighter soft light.  I know the window is at the front of the house to the right of the door if you were coming in.  There are trees out there, grass, a sidewalk, a street.  I have a sense I want my Daddy.  I want him to walk up the sidewalk, come up the sidewalk right now and in the front door.  He does not come.  He isn’t there.

I have a sense something happened suddenly.  Unexpectedly when I was lying in this bed.  Mommy is very mad at me.  She is very big.  She wears an apron.  Her sudden rage hit me like a shock wave rolling all the way through my body but it stuck there and stayed there and has never left that spot I cannot see at all clearly now. 

I was startled.  The startled did not stop.  A shiver on my insides that didn’t stop even when it froze there.  Her attack came screaming at me out of nowhere.  I did not understand.  Something froze in me.  A part of me is stuck there in a world that no longer exists.  Made of thickening browness like almost solid smoke.  A part of me waits.  Nothing moves anymore but my eyes.  My eyes stayed there seeing and my ears hearing – something – where there is nothing left to hear.  Something is scaring me.

My being was invaded with fear and a sense of guilt for something I could not comprehend.  I was paralyzed.  Part of me there now in that brownish dim room memory.  I know where my head was on a pillow.  I know where my feet were and what direction in the room they were facing.  In a bed.  With blankets.  By a window.  Near the front door.  First I was sick and safe and then I was sick and not safe.

A vague sensing memory that makes no sense and probably never will that has something to do with my sister Cindy.  Something to do with me being sick but not sick enough and it is all my fault and all my fault that Cindy gets sick.  Sicker than I do.

I was so deeply confused.  Words.  Her angry words at me that tell no sense to me.  My world.  Turned into nonsense.   I know I am supposed to do something because I did something wrong.  But I don’t know what I did.  I don’t know what I am supposed to do.  This part of me stuck back there in time will probably stay there until I die.

Circumambulating this memory from within as it feels like from without as I write I have an awareness that because I WAS sick, probably with a fever, I felt very strange in my body and thus the world felt strange.  Sickness must have been such an unfamiliar experience for me.  To have my body in a state of weakness.  Of decreased strength and stamina.  I probably knew instinctively even at three or four years old that this increased vulnerability put me even more at risk and in danger.

It also strikes me as I write that perhaps this memory belongs to what I would call a ‘genesis incident’ and is, therefore, a genesis memory.  I remember very clearly and always have even very early experiences that Mildred took as crimes I committed that each proved my guilt around some fatal flaw.  These genesis incidents became segments of repeated memory as they were chanted over and over again, brought up during beatings throughout my childhood.

It may well be that my not being sick enough or often enough, etc. crimes were added to Mildred’s litany exactly at the time my dimming brownish room experience took place.  This may well be the origination point of this litany segment.  Perhaps I am not clear to myself in my memory related to this experience because I was in my sickened, weakened body at that time.

In addition, I would have been fully aware by this age of Mother’s doting on her darling children when they were sick.  It may be that this incident was the first time it was made very clear to me that it was impossible for me to receive the attention and affection my siblings received from Mother when I was sick.  Maybe that is exactly what Mildred’s psychosis wanted me to learn.

While it was impossible for me to feel resentment, jealousy, envy, anger, self-pity, curiosity or wonder connected to my experiences in the world, or to even question what happened to me or why all the way through my childhood, this fact would not have prevented this experience from having a profound impact on me – one I was helpless to understand and one that I have never forgotten.

Any time Mildred’s psychosis was triggered toward me I would instantly be disconnected from any contact with my siblings (a state that often lasted for days or weeks at a time).  At these times I was completely deprived of the nurturance I received by being with them in any way.  By the time I crossed into the ages above three and my brother, John, into his ages above four I know that Mother was increasingly able to corrupt his ability to reach me when I needed him most – and when he needed most to respond to me when I was in greatest need.

Although Mother had absolutely no power to change John’s love for me, she was able to begin to corrupt the sustenance within our relationship.  Because his love had sustained me since my birth, the loss of contact with him when Mildred attacked me (which was frequently) meant that I was separated from the only love and attachment I had ever known.  When I needed him most and he could not come to me, and I know he knew when this was, my brother was in hell.  He has remembered his powerlessness to help or to rescue me with a sense of guilt all of his life.

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It was one of John’s most important protective factors that he had been born the first child, doted upon and nearly worshiped as a son, until he was nearly 14 months old when I was born.  Importantly he was not exposed in the womb to Mother’s super-heightened stress hormones as she attacked me.  Neither, of course, was I.  (Mildred’s ‘problems with me’ didn’t begin until the time of her difficult labor with me, as explained in Story Without Words).  All of my younger siblings experienced Mother’s insane levels of abuse of me in some way from the time they were conceived and from the time they were born.

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Here I am the next morning, sitting outside as the high Arizona desert sun rises.  February 2, 2013.  Pen in hand.  My Family Dollar Store $2 spiral notebook.  Out in my long black down jacket with my morning cup of dark brown coffee lightened with vanilla flavored powdered cream as a treat.  Gift from my daughter who lives 1700 miles away from me.

And with my brown tobacco cigarette.  I know clearly when I smoked my first.  Age 16.  Money dropped into the machine in the Westward Hotel in Anchorage.  Pack of Kools in my hand.  Firm.  Smooth.  Square edges.  Richness.  Open it.  Smoke my first.  This story will grow into my story later in my writings.

I have not been able to walk away and leave behind my need for comfort from this addiction that at age 62 I know is killing me.  I look inside.  I know.  I realize.  Last night when I returned to visit little girl.  Memory related to me.  Frozen with words.  Without comprehension.  Mother raging at me all confused.  Never having fully left that dimly browning room.

I look around as the sunlight creeps among the shadows now.  Bright dashes here and there across the dampened desert soil of my garden.  Brown.  So many shades of brown.  Darkened dead leaves shuffled under climbing rose bushes.  Rotting.  Enrichment of the soil from worm digested compost.

And here sits I.  Alone.  Of course.  Listening to chirping morning birds, soft cooing inner chuckles of doves who seem to know secrets.

Shadows of leaves brown against the light tan paint of this old house I live in.  That plant seems to be a magic plant I’ve never seen elsewhere.  It is growing a trunk below the roofline where the water runs and drips.  A wise plant.  Chose its perfect spot.  It keeps its leaves.  Keeps them green.  Grows up to peek its newest twigs inside my bedroom window.

Smoking comforts me.  So many forces.  Growing up.  Against me.  Memories from childhood.  Yes.  All connected running through tangles of contact between ‘then’ and ‘now’.  Smoke traveling in air.  I set it free from my browning lungs.  Smoke.  Travels.

I think of the pipe of my father.  In the Jeep’s own womb.  Traveling.  Interminably repeated long hours of travel home and out of the valley again.  Crowded, encapsulated.  A family traveling at the speed of Jeep on rough, rough roads.  Together.  Alone.  Through the ever changing wilderness.  Inside with Velvet pipe tobacco smoke.  Outside.  A world so vast.  Free.  Remote and distant.

We.  The pack.  The Lloyd family.  Above question.  Beyond reach.  Linda.  Always threatened.  Always at the center.  At the bottom.  Always there.  There in a world of dimming brown shadows while the light, the natural light, belonged in other people’s lives.

Such a message given to me as a child.  No right to joy or health or even to my life.  “Shame on you for rejecting sickness!”  What power did I have to wish sickness of my siblings and make it happen?  “Set them free, Linda!  Set us all free!  Damn you anyway, you unsick child!”  Yes.  I remember.  I remember well perhaps with every puff I have ever taken from a cigarette.  The single stupid regret of my life.  That I ever started smoking in the first place.  I don’t love myself enough to stop.  I can’t see far enough ahead of me to know if I ever will.

Smoking draws a line between those moments of life when I as the creator of smoke am involved in also creating its freedom and those moments when I see and smell and watch no smoke at all.  As if in an arctic winter cold I open my mouth, exhale, and see no vapor to comfort me because I am alive.  Simply alive.

So many days and days that could never be counted.  Punished.  In bed.  I was not sick.  I was helpless.  I could not rise and say with shouts and screaming, “I am done with you Mother! I am done with you.  I want no more of you forever!”

There would have been a look of shock upon HER face.  I could have watched her.  Startled.  If I could have persisted she would have turned into vaporous tendrils of drifting smoke herself.  Disappearing.  Leaving us behind.  Together.  It would have been so quiet then, a kind of peace we never knew as long as she stayed.  An invader.  The culprit.  The source of turmoil and strange behaviors that most certainly troubled me.

But no.  She remained.  She didn’t even shrink as I grew older.  No bad genie returning to her bottle.  If she would have would have I found the family shovel and buried her then in the browning blackness of Alaska soil?

She is there now.  Ashes.  Gone.  Do I wish her unhappiness?  I hope not.  She came.  She went.  No differently than I, at the end.  It is our own sense of inner peace we’re after.  High or lowly.  Long or short.  In the end.  All a teensy wisp of smoke.  Gone.  Off to some other world where all that’s come before and hangs around with memory traces in our body, in our mind, things that trap and chase.  All gone, too.  From this world.  While the greenish yellow fluffy birds of winter twitter amongst the gray twigs and branches.  Free.  Watching our life and then our disappearance while the sun of a clear day rises.

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+POEM TO SELF: MOUNTAIN BOUND ANGEL

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Mountain Bound Angel

if i took on the task of surviving my childhood

if i took on the task of telling this tale

i could not have survived without that mountain

i was bound for that mountain from the time i was born

once i reached that mountain it became my mother and my father

i walked upon that mountain as if i had found home

i found love

i found that which ONLY had the power to save me

across the valley was the other

mountain bound angel

made of stone snow and ice

alive to me

she kept me alive

like an infant sees in its mother’s face

the image of itself reflected back

each time i looked at the mountain bound angel

across from me

I saw reflected back to me

myself

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+LOST WITHIN A STORY OF MADNESS

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Mildred truly was a madwoman.  I mean her no disrespect (long dead as she is) by saying this.  I am continually astounded as I work toward writing my entire life story by how truly, absolutely and incredibly brilliantly MAD that woman was!

Some part of me fears that if I state the truth as I understand it about the reality of my 18-year childhood of abuse from that woman I will cross a line beyond which no ordinary human mind can follow.  I would not be surprised if that turns out to be the case.  There are madnesses, and then there are MADNESSES that appear upon a million efforts of study to be so vast as to defy human comprehension.

Isn’t that where true madness lies?  Beyond comprehension?

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I am yet again clearing my thinking, writing mental pallet (not palate) – and I mean this skid packed to the moon with tidbits and shards as they existed in Mother’s broken mind — and contaminated this woman’s children’s childhood.  Certainly mine.

I thought I began writing my next book yesterday.  Today I admit I am completely lost, so lost there is no way OUT going forward.  No way at all.  I was going to write the story of my own childhood for the first time in my life, making use of the time line created through the completion of the seven volumes of Mother’s writing to be published in a series titled Mildred’s Mountain.

I thought this would be at least a possible task, given that I have finally laid out the basic history of my childhood in Alaska.  But I made the mistake of peeking backward toward my life from birth to nearly my 6th birthday when the family’s move to Alaska took place.  I thought I could track and find which houses we lived in during those first 5 years of my life.  WRONG!

I could say I have never felt so desperately lost in my life as I have in these past 48 hours, but that’s not true.  I spent the first 18 years of my life under the influence of Mildred’s extensive, nearly perfect madness.

I have found that it is currently a complete impossibility to track where we lived for how long with the moves in between from the time of my birth August 31, 1951 to the day my father left for Alaska June 9, 1957.  I have records in baby books, records of photographs, records written by Mother to correspond to photographs taken during those years.

Why am I surprised to find that NOTHING MAKES SENSE?

There is no order in the record of those years whatsoever!

It astounds me to find that the evidence of the psychotic broken-in-half split mind of Borderline Personality Disorder Mildred consistently inconsistently identifies nearly every house we moved in and out of during those years by two different names?  Sometimes by the corner avenue and sometimes by the same corner’s street – even the two houses have split personalities as does her record of any life we may have managed to live within.

Mildred’s lost mind evidently did not accurately track when they bought which house, either.  I have given up.  All I know is that there were at least five residences during the first five years of my life.  There are missing moves, missing addresses, missing missing missing as if they were sucked into a variety of vortexes (of course not just one) — as if the houses both existed and did not, we lived in them and did not, we moved and we did not.

Adding mayhem to madness, I cannot write this way.  I have long known that even though there are 500,000 words of Mildred’s story approaching publication, I have reserved for the future the body of her diaries written from 1945 up to the Alaska move.  I have always known at some point I will return to these first years of my existence in a body on this earth to write that part of my story based upon the history in that era of Mildred’s diaries.

That time is not now.  Even though I wrote a first shambled chapter for my next book/s Angel on the Mountain yesterday, that I could not finish because the history I was trying to identify of residences and moves prior to Alaska is in such a state of perhaps permanent disarray that this story cannot be repaired (?), and even though I have completed a second chapter — I realize those chapters belong to that OTHER book before the Alaska move took place.

I will save that work, of course, but I must begin again and a different, revised beginning for my next book.  The moving of Mildred was – as I am ever more clearly comprehending – as much a manifestation of her deep, deep mental illness as was her psychotic abuse of me.  I cannot think my way through the history of those pre-Alaska moves because that history was lived but was never accurately written.  I thought I could write it.  At present I accept that I cannot.

I begin again on Angel on the Mountain as I begin for the first time in my life to tell my own self the story of my childhood at the same time I write it for publication.  Unless I get lost yet again….

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+NOTES ON USING ‘ENDURANCE’ BOOK AS A TEXT TO WRITE OUR TRAUMA STORY

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This post follows directly from the one just published:

+RECOMMENDING A BOOK – MUST READ FOR EARLY TRAUMA SURVIVORS

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It seems rather awkward for me to leave that post unfinished, although I have several writing trains of thought roaring at full steam on different tracks in my mind just now.  It is after noon and I have yet to stop thinking long enough to eat a thing although at least I have done my daily 45-minute walk — thinking all the time I did it.

I could present an entire writing course for survivors of early severe neglect, abuse and trauma using the book I mentioned in the above post, ENDURANCE, as the text of that course.  One of the texts, I should say, because the other texts would be the ones survivors would actually write during the course of the – course!

What I have to say here is only sketchy at best.  I am not going to go too far down this track right now because I have something else I need to write FIRST.  At the moment I will say that I could not be more serious in my recommendation that survivors read that book!  HOWEVER, there are some thoughts that need to accompany that reading foray.

First, a blog reader left a comment this morning on my page at the top of this blog that could not possibly have been more timely —

LINDA’S ADOBE PEACE GARDEN

nagelpilz wrote:

First off I want to say terrific blog! I had a quick question which I’d like to ask if you do not mind. I was interested to know how you center yourself and clear your mind prior to writing. I have had a hard time clearing my thoughts in getting my thoughts out. I truly do enjoy writing however it just seems like the first 10 to 15 minutes are lost simply just trying to figure out how to begin. Any ideas or tips? Kudos!

and I responded:

Good morning nagelpilz,

Because you are visiting this blog I would wonder if you have a childhood history of abuse and trauma, and if this is what you wish to write about. If willing, can you let me know so I can focus on my response to you! thanks!!!

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Now, if this reader were in my imagined trauma writing class I would recommend exactly the book, ENDURANCE.  I would NOT suggest watching the movie as a substitute for what I want to do with this textbook, although watching the movie before reading the book (as was suggested to me) is perfectly fine if not outright advantageous.

Buy the book, available on Amazon.com or anywhere else you can find it.  You have to have the book to do this work.

If you have your own blog, have it handy before you begin reading.  If you do not have a blog, think about making one.  If this is not your preferred writing ‘container’, get yourself a good supply of pens and a very good supply of paper – in notebooks or not.

I will give a few suggestions below, but at this moment I will say that you will read this book and STOP immediately every single time you have a thought, impression, feeling, insight, reaction, question, observation — anything inside your own self that appears as you read the book.

Stop reading immediately and begin to write.  You might wish to write down the word or phrase that caught your attention, and also note the page of the book you found it.  Underlining in the book and/or writing notes in the margins is NOT suggested!

Now……

First I will say it’s important to note that the 28 men on that voyage were ADULTS and CHOSE to take off into these hostile, uncharted regions.

Abused infants and children are NOT adults.  We were given no choice.  We had no inner strength or adult powers and skills to help us along when REALLY hard times hit us.

We were being formed as a body-brain-self person BY the horrific experiences we endured at the same time we were having to live through them.

Nobody bought the rights to our story/film before we entered into hell.

Worse than that, unlike the very intrigued, fascinated public who devoured the descriptions of the ENDURANCE adventure — nobody gave a DAMN what we had to say about OUR ‘adventure’.

Nobody told us to write down each day what happened to us and to document it on film.  As Shackleton says in the movie, though I am not sure it is said in this book, if the films of their adventure did not survive they would ‘only have their word’ — against – what?  Doubt?  Disbelief?  Being called liars?

Nobody would have wanted to watch our movie, read our dairies, look at our pictures — now I say, SO WHAT?

Nobody believes our word?  SO WHAT?

I just started a book by Dr. Paul Renn hoping to find some information in there about facts on memory – but I put the book down at the beginning as he introduces DOUBT into any survivor’s mind – or anyone’s mind for that matter – by saying that science doesn’t know enough about memory functions so it’s necessary that we don’t believe childhood trauma memories.  We cannot, Renn says, do anything ‘more’ than say our trauma memories are ‘related’ to our childhoods – not that they are ‘from’ our childhoods.

Toxic stuff, kiddos!

Nobody is going to tell me my trauma memories are not accurate.  Don’t buy that! 

These men also had one another as they together shared their adventures of the greatest difficulty.  I had NO ONE – but that’s a particular part of my story because it was a particular part of my psychotic Borderline Personality Disorder Mother’s patterns of abuse that she had to isolate me alone in her hell while her other adored children lived in a different world.

But I am not sure any early abuse and trauma survivor endures NOT being alone.  Note that as you react to this book in your writing.

If your writing takes off in response to what you are reading in ENDURANCE – go with it.  Don’t worry a bit about if or when you EVER finish reading that book.

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Now, perhaps duplicating a few of the things I just wrote here, I am simply going to add here some notes just as I wrote them last night as I finished reading ENDURANCE.  There is a lot more I could say, but that writing is going along on one of the other tracks I mentioned above….

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Nobody gave me a hero’s welcome when I left home for what I survived.

I wish someone had told me to write it all down at 18 – immediately after I left home.  All of it.  I wonder what I would have recalled then.  It’s important.  Our record of everything we went through.

Nobody could have argued my memories weren’t accurate.  Nobody could have told me to doubt myself.  How dare they?

I should have been applauded then and there when I left.  Commemorated.

Those men were more ordinary than not before they went through what they did – how did they feel when they went back to civilization?  Were they changed?  How was it when they tried to talk to people about what they went through?  Did they have any need for others to appreciate in the deepest sense – what they went through?

Was it an adventure to them?  Was it a trauma?

How massively different to be a little person going through an equivalent.  No choice.  What possible hope?

I was in a different world – never knowing anything different.  No one shared that with me.  Such isolation – a ship alone at sea all alone.  Watching the other world through my eyes – but always having been excluded – never a loved part of that family –

Came out looking like a regular person – I was not.  Never have been.  Burden has always been for me to be a part of some else’s world.  Those men were a part of another world first – either they would survive and return to that world or they would die.

They went through that together – never alone (farts, personalities and all) – I have no shared experience personally with anyone else [except through this blog]

Yet the homesteading was by definition a shared experience in my family even if I was hauled along like a piece of battered luggage –

We shared the moves, changing schools, up and down the mountain, the long commutes – but nobody shared what Mother did to me.

In that suffering – in those attacks, I was all alone.

When times are hardest we’re designed by nature as a social species to endure together through shared experience – to go through good and bad together

No shared experience – we are built ‘alone’ – left alone – then and for our lifetime – the sharing only truly happens in the next world – if we stay a pure soul – and we can’t judge self or others if this is so – so we can be heard by the angels and holy ones [part of my story is that I had an angel on a mountain that witnessed what happened during all the time we were on the homestead]

As I accept other’s ordinary world – I disown my own self – numb, walled off – as I write what comes next I want to let some of that barrier dissolve

Memories.  We have them.  I think many are far more intact (but hidden) than ordinary people can begin to comprehend

Who are they – anyone else – to tell us to doubt ourselves?  Yet another layer of oppression to be told that –

Because we didn’t keep a diary of what happened?  What if we do have that diary – inside of us?  In our memories?

Intact

Extraordinary

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If anyone wants to take on this writing challenge, feel free to comment with questions and processes at the end of this blog post –

I also want to mention an epiphany I had about this ENDURANCE reaction process today:  When Dr. Martin Teicher (many posts on this blog about this work, just put TEICHER into the search bar on this blog and read away) – when Teicher mentions that we are evolutionarily altered in our physiological early development by the changes that trauma causes – and that the problem for us is that we leave our early malevolent world and enter a benevolent one that we are not designed for – that the mismatch between us and the ‘ordinary’ world gives us great troubles – reading ENDURANCE and starting from that point – as it describes horrendous survival and endurance in probably the most hostile physical environment on earth (like the one’s our cave ancestors lived within) – using this ENDURANCE book as our text we can start to understand our self and our experience and to give it WORDS in reaction to malevolent world survival.

This is important because our existence far more closely matches what is portrayed in that book than it does anything in the ‘ordinary’ benevolent world.

Seems to me using this book as our text gives us a far more balanced chance to find and express OUR OWN STORY!

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+RECOMMENDING A BOOK – MUST READ FOR EARLY TRAUMA SURVIVORS

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The Wandering Albatross, Snowy Albatross or White-winged Albatross,[3] Diomedea exulans, is a large seabird from the familyDiomedeidae, which has a circumpolar range in the Southern Ocean.  It was the first species of albatross to be described, and was long considered the same species as the Tristan Albatross and the Antipodean Albatross.  In fact, a few authors still consider them all subspecies of the same species.[4] The SACC has a proposal on the table to split this species,[5] and BirdLife International has already split it.  Together with the Amsterdam Albatross it forms the Wandering Albatross species complex.  The Wandering Albatross is the largest member of the genus Diomedea (the great albatrosses), one of the largest birds in the world, and one of the best known and studied species of bird in the world.

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A photograph of an albatross

WOW!  When I read about one of these I imagined it would look all elegant and graceful – nope!  It looks like a powerhouse!

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They have the widest wingspan of any LIVING bird.  There was once a rival for the title:

Spreading Their Wings to Longest on Record

“The wandering albatross has the largest known wingspan of any living bird, at times reaching nearly 12 feet. But millions of years ago, there was a bird with wings that dwarfed those of the albatross, researchers now report.”

“The newly named species, Pelagornis chilensis, which lived about 5 million to 10 million years ago, had a wingspan of at least 17 feet.”

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Why am I writing about a bird on my trauma healing blog today?

My new absolute MUST-read recommendation for early severe abuse and trauma survivors – especially for those who write or want to write about their life:

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing

Last night I finished reading the copy of this book my friend, Sandy so wisely sent to me as he knew it was important for me in my current trauma writing work.  How right he was, and how much I thank him!

Maybe someday I will write an entire book about my ‘take’ on the ‘Endurance’ and the 1914-1916 survival story of adventure it is about (plus so much more) – but to do so would require that I seek and gain permission to reprint parts of that book.  I don’t have time for that work or the wait right now.  At the moment I am going to write a bit of the text here for educational and informational purposes only – I don’t sell my blog, so here we go.

Click here for information on Ernest Shackleton

Click here for information on PBS NOVA on the Antarctic expedition

The trailer for Shackleton’s movie

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After spending 497 days stranded on ice floes, the 28 members of the crew make it to rocky shores – but none of this is what I want to really mention right now.  It’s this brief passage I must have liked best in the entire book as the safe haven of a shore they have finally found is unreachable as the 6 men in their small boat are forced to continue to traverse the most treacherous sea on earth under the harshest of conditions:

“There was a moment of confusion, then they felt her [their boat, the 22-foot Caird] roll sickeningly to starboard as she fell off into the trough of the sea and they knew instinctively what had happened.

Both Shackleton and Worsley scrambled to their feet and looked forward.  The frayed end of the bow line was dragging through the water.  The lump of ice was gone – and the sea anchor with it.

Shackleton thrust his head below and shouted for the others to get the jib.  They hauled it out, frozen into a rumpled mass.  Crean and McCarthy crept forward over the heavily rolling deck, dragging the sail with them.  The rigging, too, was frozen and had to be beaten into compliance.  But after a long minute or two they got enough ice off the halyards to hoist the jib to the mainmast as a storm trysail.

Slowly, drudgingly, the Caird’s bow once more swung around into the wind, and all of them felt the tension go out of their muscles.

The job of the helmsman now was to hold her as close to the wind as she would go, swinging from one tack to the other.  It required constant vigilance, and it could hardly have been more unpleasant, facing into the breaking seas and the piercing wind….

Shortly after noon, as if from nowhere, a magnificent wandering albatross appeared overhead.  In contrast to the Caird, it soared with an ease and grace that was poetic, riding the gale of winds [80-120 mile per hour winds] on wings that never moved, sometimes dropping to within 10 feet of the boat, then rising almost vertically on the wind, a hundred, two hundred feet, only to plunge downward again in a beautifully effortless sweep.

It was perhaps one of nature’s ironies.  Here was her largest and most incomparable creature capable of flight, whose wingspread exceeded 11 feet from tip to tip, and to whom the most violent storm was meaningless, sent to accompany the Caird, as if in mockery of her painful struggles.”  (above cited book copy, pages 234-235)

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Reading the book I would think such a visitor would be a blessing, not a mockery.  It was blessings like this that enabled me to survive the hell of my abusive childhood.

But I wasn’t there  in this story – and it is a whole HELLUVA story.

I don’t, however, believe that this story of endurance has any edge at all over any survival and endurance story infant-child abusive trauma survivors have to tell.  I also think it’s about time we told our adventure stories –

But more on all of that later………………

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Screwy blog format problems – I am not going to mess with them!  Geeze!

Please see next related post: 

+NOTES ON USING ‘ENDURANCE’ BOOK AS A TEXT TO WRITE OUR TRAUMA STORY

+FOR THE LOVE OF OUR NATION’S CHILDREN, WHAT ARE WE DOING WRONG?

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To get my stories straight — I wrote the commentary that appears below in THIS post before I wrote the post this one follows: 

+WHO CARES? 23.1% of American children fall below the “relative poverty” rate

To clarify, by the time my words had spun themselves out to the end of my commentary I was genuinely concerned that maybe I just woke up this morning with my mean streak showing.  So I decided I better get my facts straight before publishing what is in this post.

My thinking is not off target.  For America to be OK with having nearly 1 in 4 of our children falling so far behind in overall well-being reflects — to me — that our nation has a serious problem with conscience and compassion — if not also with our common sense.

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COMMENTARY:

Everything humans do is about regulating our body chemistry.  Eat.  Drink.  Sleep.  Work.  Play.  Stay warm.  Cool off.  Have friends.  Care about others.  Have others care about us.  Go on holidays.  Relax.

We are physical beings in a body run on body chemistry.  Do we think that because we can think about what we think about that we can decide that our body chemistry — which has to be regulated — is only of the most minor concern to us?

Is it because in our culture our strides in science have been outmatched by commercialism that we can separate ourselves as consumer-beings from ourselves as marvels of biochemical engineering?

My bugaboo this morning has to do with how we think about the one word we use (if we are aware enough to use it at all) so naively in our culture that actually describes how we all got started on our merry road to personal freedom in the first place — and how we stay on it.  That word is ATTACHMENT.

By itself this word seems to be as nearly useless in its use to describe what it actually means as is the word LOVE.  As far as I’m concerned love is a philosophical word that describes a nebulous, ill-defined, amorphous state that carries within it no common or scientific sense at all.  Nobody can actually prove love exists.  It is not a tangible object (although it turns out that through attachment it is a tangible process).  Nobody can agree what love is and the word is used so generally as to be so diluted as a concept that it seems nearly useless.

But in our culture we love to use the word love so we use it as much as we possibly can.  This word love reminds me of the children’s story of the emperor who had no clothes.  If we use the word as if we know what it actually means — and if we use it often enough in every possible context where it might apply, we can include ourselves in the IN crowd.  This makes us feel like more regular people, I suppose.  After all, we can love pancakes.  We can love our car.  We can love a pair of shoes, a movie, our pets, our nation, our mates and our children.

And because love is such a lose-knit word it handily gives us the widest possible net within which we can toss everything that seems to have a value to us.  And then we hold on tight.

It then becomes simple common sense to connect the word love directly to the word ATTACHMENT in our minds.  If we love something or someone then of course we are attached to it – or her – or him.  Our language makes no real distinction between love of animate versus love of inanimate objects, so why bother to think through any further complications regarding attachment, either?

We can learn a new word, attachment, and then simply use it interchangeably with that old world, love.  We can be attached to a shirt, a skirt, a car, a pet, a sports team, a movie star, a community, and to one another.  And of course we all know we can be strongly attached to our ideas about everything from gun to birth control, from religion to politics, and we are of course attached to our habits — and to our babies.

But then there is an entirely different level of consideration possible in thinking about both love and attachment.  This level requires the acceptance of a common round between these words as they might describe what actually matters.  But what fun is it, really, to be bound together on a common level of understanding that rests on factual truths?

As long as we personally attach our own meaning to these words we are free to be individuals, not common blended members of a species who cannot escape the gravity of reality.  How is it possible to be both common and unique/special at the same time?

Who cares to talk about specifics, anyway?  Who wants to know that we don’t escape the fundamental operation of our biochemistry as it is regulated and dysregulated by what/who we love and what/who we are attached to?  Why would we want to know that where attachment and love matters most is exactly where our biochemistry cannot keep us alive without being regulated?

Is it blasphemy to accept the fact that what one human being does with its baby from the time it is conceived and then born directly modulates and directs the biochemistry that builds the nervous system and brain of the baby in direct response to caregiver interactions? 

Is it even criminal to think about the fact that attachment to babies is a BIOCHEMICAL NEUROLOGICAL INTERACTIONAL REGULATORY PROCESS that determines what kind of body, what kind of a nervous system, brain, stress-calm response system and immune system an infant will grow up with and then live with for the rest of its life?

We live in a culture that increasingly provides its population with increasing chemical compounds designed to be consumed to regulate the biochemistry that regulates mood.  Antidepressant consumption alone in our nation should be alerting us to the fact that something is wrong.  Terribly wrong.

We accept that we hold more people in more prisons than does any other wealthy nation.  We have rampant rates of sexual assault, domestic violence, harm to children, extremes of poverty and wealth that are both appalling and insane.  Addictions to alcohol, legal and illegal drugs, to spending, food and sex riddle the fabric of our society.  Our education systems are failing, our health is declining, our local community roots are disintegrating and our families are struggling greatly.  (It is becoming unpopular to talk about divorce/break-up rates, children being raised without both of their parents, or about working families that do NOT have access to high quality day care that babies and children need.)

As a nation we are continuing to build gross dysregulation into our future generations as our youth become unfit even for military duty at the alarming rate of 75%, and we continue to turn our backs on the fact that we are regressing in the quality of our overall well-being — not progressing. (See: 75% of young Americans unfit for Military Duty)

Whatever we are in love with, and whatever we are attached to, it’s not working.

The point of our physiological stress-calm response system is to take our startle response seriously when we need to.  When we experience a state of shock in our body systems it is a sign of health.  We are supposed to notice what is wrong, pay attention and then respond appropriately to a problem — and SOLVE it.

We use words like empathy, compassion, conscience and consciousness as if we know what they mean just like we use love and attachment  (all processes involving biochemical interactions in our body-brain).

Psychopaths do not have a normal startle response, tied to the fact that they do not have a conscience.  Do we as a nation have the ability (a fright-filled thought) to no longer be startled by flaws in our personal and social system to situations that are harmful?  What critical level of distress and trauma must exist in our society before our lethargic narcissism and ignorance gives way to asking the right questions about our choices?

Are we so distracted by the noisy clutter of what occupies our attention that we can no longer respond to the scream of our inner alarm system that should have already alerted us to the fact that all is not well in this nation we live in?

We can do better.

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+WHO CARES? 23.1% of American children fall below the “relative poverty” rate

alchemynow1 Comment

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UICEF  – Innocenti Research Centre – Report Card 10

Measuring Child Poverty:  New league tables of child poverty in the world’s rich countries

May 2012

http://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/rc10_eng.pdf

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“Yet it is arguable that the child poverty rates is one of the most important of all indicators of a society’s health and well-being.  For the here and now, it is a measure of what is happening to some of society’s most vulnerable members.  For the years to come, it is a pointer to the well-being and cohesion of society as a whole.”

In the second of the two tables presented at the above link, this report indicates that as sown in Fig. 1b A league table of relative child poverty, 35 economically advanced countries

USA is second from the BOTTOM heading up only Romania.  But what measurements should be taken?  Which present the most useful accurate picture of the facts?  This report presents an excellent description of the problems connected to measurements of “relative poverty” as this condition creates “the sense of falling so far behind the norms of one’s society as to be at risk of social exclusion.”

23.1% of American children fall below the “relative poverty” rate in our nation. 

In Fig. 5 Child poverty rates by different relative poverty lines, USA remains at the bottom only above Romania using three different poverty lines set at 50%, 40% and/or 60%.  In Fig. 7 The poverty gap, USA is at the very bottom BELOW even Romania.  (The report also notes that there are many invisible children in Romania whose state of existence escape measurement.)

In spite of the variance of measurements being used in the tables presented in this report, it is true that “a greater proportion of the children are allowed to fall significantly below the norms of their societies in the United states than in the Czech Republic.”

“When presented for what it is – an approximate measure not of absolute poverty but of falling so far behind the normal standard of living in the society as to be excluded from the advantages and opportunities that the majority take for granted – the idea of relative child poverty does make intuitive sense.”

In furthering discussion about advantages and disadvantages of choosing poverty measurements, the report states:

“Ideally, the monitoring of child poverty would include its timing and duration as well as its breadth and depth.  The earlier the privation and the longer its duration, the greater the potential impact on the child.  This is true both because of the inherent vulnerability of the earliest years of life and because the longer a family stays poor the harder it may become to maintain essential expenditures (as savings and assets run down, for example, or as borrowing and other sources of help reach their limits).”

“In other words, child poverty should be monitored in three dimensions – asking not only how many children fall below national poverty lines but how far and for how long.”

The Conclusion to this report:

“This report has set out the latest internationally comparable data on child poverty as measured by rates of child deprivation and relative child income poverty.

The two measures are profoundly different in concept.  Both have strengths and weaknesses.  Taken together, they offer two different but complementary measures and offer the best currently available comparative picture of child poverty in the world’s wealthiest nations.

Both measures are also behind the times, and the seriousness of this failing has been exposed by the post-2008 economic downturn.  At this critical moment for low-income families in so many countries, very few have detailed information on the impact the crisis is having on children’s lives.  It may of course be argued that in times of crisis governments have more to worry about than producing statistics.  But without up-to-date information there is little possibility of putting in place policies that use limited resources in cost-effective ways to protect children from the effects of poverty.

Failure to offer this protection brings heavy costs.  The biggest price is paid by individual children whose susceptible years of mental and physical growth are placed at risk.  But societies also pay a heavy price – in lower returns on educational investments, in reduced skills and productivity, in the increased likelihood of unemployment and welfare dependence, I the higher costs of social protection and judicial systems, and in the loss of social cohesion.  In the medium term, these costs must be met in the hard currency of the billions of extra dollars spent in attempting to cope with the wide range of problems associated with high levels of child poverty.  The economic argument, in anything but the shortest term, is therefore heavily on the side of preventing children from falling into poverty in the first place.

Even more important is the argument in principle.  Childhood by its nature, and by its very vulnerability, demands of a civilized society that children should be the first to be protected rather than the last to be considered.  This principle of ‘first call’ for children holds good for governments and nations as well as for the families who bear the primary responsibility for protection.  And because children have only one opportunity to grow and to develop normally, the commitment to protection must be upheld in good times and in bad.  It must be absolute, not contingent.

Nor can this principle of first call be side-stepped by the argument that the protection of children is an individual rather than a social responsibility.  No one can seriously claim that it is the child’s fault if economies turn down or if parents are unemployed or low-paid.  That is why the league tables showing the different degrees of protection provided to at-risk groups should be weighed by politicians, press and public.  A society that fails to support parents in the task of protecting the years of childhood is a society that is failing its most vulnerable.  I is also a society that is storing up intractable social and economic problems for the years immediately ahead.”

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SEE ALSO this GLOBAL report:  Progress for Children:  A report card on adolescents – Number 10, April 2012

Following post – commentary:

+FOR THE LOVE OF OUR NATION’S CHILDREN, WHAT ARE WE DOING WRONG?

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