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If I were a more-healed person I would today be able to upgrade what concerns me.  However, what I am experiencing right now is first and foremost evidently of a deeply personal nature.  (Darn it!)

I do not know exactly what the triggers are and have been that are contributing to this very high anxiety ‘state’ that I am in.  The birth of my 2nd grandson?  I don’t know.  The changes in what will so entirely occupy the energies of my daughter after this birth — and with a husband, full time demanding occupation from which she has only 6 weeks off, the combining of her needs with mothering a 2-year-old?

And I as her mother, and grandmother?  I WANT to be nothing but affirming and supporting to my daughter.  I want to ‘caregive’ to her – but I know enough about what the research says, that those of us severely traumatized, abused, neglected – so unsafely and insecurely attached to ANYONE during our early years have insecure attachment patterns in our body-brain that mean our own attachment system — demanding that our own attachment needs FEEL unmet — does not turn itself off in ordinary ways.  And when an insecure attachment pattern cannot turn OFF appropriately — neither — then — can our caregiving system be turned ON.

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I am in the middle of completely cleaning my house before I travel north in a month to see my family.  I am moving things around, changing things – shifting all the patterns inside the dwelling that I live in.  This is very hard work for me.  There is nobody here to help me move the furniture.  There is nobody here but ME to do this job — period.  It’s a job I am not enjoying!

Yet at the same time it seems that something MAJOR is changing itself around inside of my SELF.  This is the HARD WORK!

I feel blind.  I cannot see what it is that needs changing.  I cannot tell how I am carrying this task out.  I can’t find what inner resources I could find and use in myself to make this job easier — or in the end more successful.

So – I am left now carrying on this house cleaning — literally inside and outside of myself — one teensy weensy step at a time.  I have to trust that what I am doing will all come together in the end and ‘things’ will be more beautiful, more perfect.

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Ah.  That word.  PERFECT.  There is HUGE TROUBLE brewing, no BOILING and turning into stormy steam inside of me around the concept of a ‘perfect world’.

Connected to PERFECT are two other words that I need to deeply explore within myself:  JUSTICE and FAIRNESS.

This triad — I cannot pull these three concepts apart from one another at the same time I cannot even say on what level I have any idea what any of these words actually MEAN.

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All I know now is that from the start of my life as an abused infant and child I was ALWAYS told that all problems in my mother’s life, in my father’s life, in the life of my entire family were MY FAULT.

In essence this message was always tied to the fact (to Mother) that my being born ‘spoiled her life’, spoiled everything.

I was TOLD in every conceivable way that what was WRONG in the world (which in our sick family consisted ONLY of what happened within our sick family) – was my fault.

Somehow – as I start with the knowns as tools for this deep cleaning and sorting I am doing — I grew up ALWAYS believing this because I had no possible way to get any kind of idea that this was not TRUTH.

Part of what so thoroughly impacted how I grew to see the world and my not-place in it was that Mother frequently removed me from her ongoing life and the life of my family by isolating me, by banishing me, by confining me, by vanishing me.

This aspect of Mother’s insane abuse of me began when I was born and I ‘disappeared’ inside a bedroom within my crib behind a closed door.  It progressed into days running into weeks of being stood in corners, confined to my bed — progressing to being locked in a shed, stuffed for a night bent over under our car’s steering wheel in my teens – BIG ETC. here!

My only concern at the moment with any of this is that I always knew a PERFECT LIFE was going on while I WAS NOT IN IT.  I can see this in the family pictures — everyone else having a wonderful time doing this, doing that — I am not in the pictures.  Often if I do appear in the pictures I am way off to the side, physically separated by distance, by clear body language, from the body of my family.

So, my absolute deepest desire to have the world be a perfect place — is it only because THEN I COULD LIVE IN IT MYSELF?  If the world were perfect – Linda would then be ALLOWED to live in it?

I don’t want to admit that this small and self-centered ‘motive’ is behind the frequent reactionary anger/rage/irritation I feel when I am confronted  with ‘things’ in our society that seem WRONG to me and that seem illogical, that do not seem RIGHT and do not make sense.

I could make a long list of what I consider to be unjust in the world.  I see the world deteriorating on so many, many IMPORTANT and trivial levels.

But I do NOT wish to feel disharmony, resentment, self-righteousness, condemning, judgmental, or any other ‘negative’ feeling inside of ME when I detect injustice and/or unfairness in the world.  I cannot be a part of the solution at the same time I am carrying negativity that is a part of the problem within me.

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People talk about ‘trauma triggers’ as if they are items one could list on paper like making a shopping list — that clearly.  When severe abuse starts at birth and things never get any better as a child/teen — and in my case — being ALIVE, just BEING HERE — is a trauma trigger!

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I guess the neat and clean and tidy and organized, etc. patterns that I am working to create here as I (as my friend calls it) ‘reconfigure’ my outer dwelling place is being mirrored on my insides.  I have not made any significant progress on either task yet — but I am determined.  I am willing.  I will be hopeful and patient.  I will pray for assistance and for forgiveness for the flaws inside of me — no matter how they GOT there — find a way to disappear.

I do not underestimate the difficulty of my task – especially my inner one. I don’t have a firm foundation of balance inside of me from my beginning of life that set me off in the right direction.

I do understand that there is some kind of miracle that I live with — that I could go through such unbelievable hell for 18 years — and still even begin to think that there COULD be such a thing as a perfect world!  Why do I care so much that beauty and goodness, truth, justice, fairness prevail over chaos, stupidity, sickness and darkness?

At present I cannot separate what I know, what I feel, what I believe, what I need to change — all the complex inner states inside of me — enough to simply, instantly magic-wand-CHANGE how I feel and how I react.  I don’t know the easy way to become different than how I am right now.

All I know is that I have work to do.  So I will go do it.  I don’t want to live feeling and reacting the way I am now.  I want to be BETTER!!  NEVER perfect – just better.

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I have what feels to me to be an important post to write.  It feels too important, so important that even thoughts about trying to write this post feel too intense for me to find what I need inside of me to write it.

As I sit outside penning on paper these words (a process I rarely use these days of computer keyboard speed) I realize I have lines of words to say that are not tangled up with one another but rather seem to coexist in a kind of hierarchy in time and space.

In other words

What I wish to say is alive in me, a living part of me.  Multi-faceted.  Multi-dimensional.  All are a “one thing” as a whole.

It seems that to write I would have to break this whole apart.  Crumble it into pieces in my hands so I could then find a way to pull what IS whole — through into a different world — this world — where the pieces would take the shape of words.

Mere words.

Inconsequential — words.

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In some ways I would rather just know this wholeness exists in me — just the way it is.  Do I fear that if I tamper with it I will break it?

I tell myself, “Linda, if this is whole and right and true, you cannot break it.”

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I wrote two emails to my daughter this morning about breastfeeding.  She gave birth to a beautiful healthy son last Friday.  Today — right about now — they are leaving the hospital and going home.

(They live 1,700 miles away.  I will travel there in about a month to visit.)

I wrote to her about a perfect world where the best possible actually exists for a newly born human being.  My daughter and her son are in that world right now.  From here everything in that newborn’s life moves forward as he interacts with the world outside his mother’s womb — the only world he has ever known — until three days ago.

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It is here as I write that words disappear.  I exist in this body with a feeling I don’t want to try to describe to myself — or to anyone else.

Time seems to stretch backward to the beginnings of our species.  Time reaches forward far, far, far into the future of how we will become.

At every single point along this line a baby is being born to its mother.

In this world that I wish only to be aware of at this moment, every perfect baby is being born to a mother who takes care of her child perfectly.

At this moment I know this is possible.  It has always been possible.  If we look at the best of our past, the best of our present as we anticipate the best of our future we know that within our nature we exactly know what best is.  We have been designed this way.

All that impedes, interferes with and interrupts the best that we are designed to experience from the moment we are conceived — and born — means that some form of trauma is present.

Humans are designed to be flexible, to respond to minor disturbances that always happen to us in this material world, and to adapt.  Change is life.

There is a range of wisdom for us here where what is truly ‘not best’ can be easily recognized so that in a world where best is accepted as real, ‘not best’ can be prevented.

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As soon as I contemplate what ‘not best’ can do to us I see what really is “a fall from grace.”

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A newborn held close in its healthy mother’s loving arms — yes — perfectly — is in a state of perfect contentment that exists beyond time, yet in it.  It exists in a world beyond words.

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Every human being deserves to know what this feels like because we need to.  I personally never experienced anything close to this with my very sick Borderline Personality Disorder (abusive) mother.  Yet I find in these moments I know what this state is because I know my grandson feels this with his mother.  Nothing I could think of would make me feel more deeply happy.

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What’s worse than being lost in one’s life?  Being lost and not even knowing it.

I think back across the span of my lifetime — now looking especially at my adulthood — and realize I have ALWAYS been lost.  Mostly I look at my own children to see what NOT being lost is like.  That’s a miracle to me.  How could I as their mother have managed to raise three wonderful children who are not lost in their lives in the slightest (they range in age from 27 to 41)?

The main thing I accomplished during my whole 18 year abusive childhood was to keep on breathing, keep on getting up when I was knocked down (which was often), and to keep putting my one foot in front of the other as I managed to continue to move forward in time.

I never knew I was lost because I had nothing to compare my state of being to.  Being lost seems to me to be an extremely personal experience.  Never could I compare my insides to anyone else’s insides.  And even if I could have I would have had no idea what I was looking FOR or AT.

I haven’t spent time in my adulthood (nor did I in my childhood) longing for what I did not have.  My problem is that I never knew I had a right to set my own course from any deep inner place that was connected to WHO I AM.

What did I want?

Mostly I operated automatically and on instinct –  flying blind.

While I knew I did not want to raise my children the way I was – as I raised them in the OPPOSITE way to how I was raised — I never knew from the start that I had a choice to have children or not.  I never knew that I had a right to intentionally set the course of my life.  I never knew it was OK for Linda to want anything for Linda.

I didn’t even know enough to know I didn’t want to be lost.

Most of my life has been a wandering life, not because I wanted to wander – wander around lost – but because I had no other option.  I COULD not make any different choices than the ones that I made.

Do I regret those decisions?  Not for the most part.  What bothers me now is seeing young women, especially unmarried pregnant ones, who I KNOW are as lost as I was at their age, lost as I have always been.

I wish I could ‘help’ them but I cannot think of any way to do so — because I know this kind of lost — the kind that comes from troubled, traumatic and unstable childhoods that creates a kind of fog within which a person cannot see how lost they truly are.  In fact, they have no idea they are lost at all because they have nothing to compare it to.

What does NOT being lost look like?

I can see ‘not lost’ in other people now besides in my children – but it is my children I care most about, and the children they bring into the world. That they are doing well is most important to me.

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Is the intergenerational transmission of unresolved trauma REALLY about this being so lost and not knowing it?  Does all the trauma drama that follows draw its sustenance from the lostness that can swallow a person up sometimes from before they are even born?

If anything else other than survival happened along the way for me in my childhood it was really a surprise.  It was not the pattern of my life.  What clues did I possibly have about who I was, what I needed, what I wanted, what I had to offer to the world, how to make friends, how to settle down, how to have a life of my own that did not center around being a mother?

Even though I have lived in this same area for the past 12 years, I am still often wandering in my heart and mind.  If I had the money in my life I would be able to travel to see the people I love that live a long ways from me.  I would be able to travel to the places that I also miss.  I would have many more options if I had money – but being poor because I cannot make it out there in the ‘real world’ leaves me – well, lost and mostly alone.

I don’t want other young women who had a very rough start to end up like this!!

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My good guess is that many of the readers who find their way to this blog have had/or still do have deep and lasting relationships of some kind with people who frequently or chronically display behaviors that could be considered classically part of or related to Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).

Although I doubt this statement can be found on a grand scale to describe people who abuse infants and children, I believe that Borderline Personality Disorder as well as the entire spectrum of personality disorders contain what I call classical NPD ‘symptoms’.  This is part of what makes these people so difficult if not impossible to depend on to sustain our very real human attachment needs.

In contradiction to what might be thought of as ‘self-love’, NPD is about such a person not having a clear strong self at all, which prevents them from having a relationship with their own true self or empathy with others.

A NPD person seems – when push comes to shove – when they feel threatened at their core, which can happen occasionally, frequently or nearly all of the time – to so completely put their own self first that this mistake could be made, “Oh my heavens this person loves their self so much nobody else exists at all in their universe.”

There is far more to their story, one which always includes failed early significant relationships and deep wounding during early stages of the development of self.

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For reference:

Echo and Narcissus – The Myth

Wickipedia’s short version of what happened to Narcissus

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I have no real hopes of being able to explain here what I mean – in part because I will not use examples from those I am close to and therefore I will not be able to present details of the many, many times I have seen NPD in action.

So be it.  I have an ‘alternative route’ explanation in an image that came to me this week to make my point in a moment here.

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I am not so interested in exploring the depths of mythology or the ‘official’ NPD psychiatric diagnosis as I am in learning from within my own experience of being connected to and emotionally involved with people who seem to me to display NPD attitudes and actions.

My own ‘alternative route’ that I discovered relates to a toy that I had for all three of my children.  (If this ebay picture has timed out by the time you read this post, simply do another Google search for its terms and you will be lead to a different one.)

Please click here to see the image I will refer to next:

Playskool Wooden Toy Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe

By the time I had my second child in 1975 I was already becoming very sensitive to the harsh and to me often abusive words contained in many old children’s stories and nursery rhymes.  So I simply changed them for my kids.

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe – She had so many children she didn’t know what to do – She fed them some broth without any bread, (I changed ‘whipped’ to) kissed them all soundly and sent them to bed.

My point is the image that came clear to me inside my (right) brain-mind this week.  People without NPD components to the way they operate in the world have LOTS of entry places to match the people around them in their lives.  In the case of this SHOE, windows are access points right along with doors – each being shaped and sized for the ‘person’ who is entering the structure.

If I liken in my own mind a ‘house’ to ‘a person’s heart’ I would say that in my encounters with NPD people I can now see they have ONE and ONLY ONE entryway into their ‘house’ – the one that has their OWN shape to it – and none other.

If anyone else has a desire, a need, a want, a wish to be in interaction with a NPD person, they better figure out how to enter that person’s reality through that one and ONLY doorway.  In this process we really must leave any part of our own true existence completely out of the picture.  There is no doorway or entryway into a NPD world that takes the necessary shape of another person to let them inside.

Everything in a NPD universe exists from this person’s single-point view of what they can bear to experience of the entire world – that can for them ONLY come in a shape that can fit through their one entryway.

Simply click on the shoe image above and consider how a triangle or a circle or an oval shape is going to fit, say, through a single NPD square doorway?

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We might try forever to reshape our self – reframe our self – so we can fit through a one-shape ONLY entrance to a NPD world that is not OUR shape.  This is, yes, a nearly complete failure of a healthy empathy process for NPD people.

At the same time I understand this I also understand that just as this NPD empathy failure is directly connected to their insecure attachment patterns formed that formed their body-brain at a very early infant-toddler age – so too are the empathy-ability disruptions  that everyone with an insecure attachment disorder lives with (at least half of our population) formed in this same way.

In fact, I doubt it is common for a person with a safe and secure attachment pattern to seek or maintain – want or bother with – any long-term relationship with a NPD person.  Early abuse and neglect survivors might be so familiar with and so accustomed to the truly bizarre interactions that happen with NPD people on a regular basis that we try to take them completely in stride.

We also might with wisdom realize that while we are deeply connected to/with a NPD person that we are not going to leave them or throw them out of our life.

What then?

I believe it is a continual learning process about how not to expect the impossible from NPD people.  I do not believe they have a choice in the way they relate to the world – even if they were to take some ‘trained monkey’ approach to TRYING to NOT be NPD with their dealings with the world.

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If I were not a survivor myself of 18 years in infancy and childhood with a severely mentally ill abusive mother, I doubt I would have fallen for anything like a NPD distorted version of relationship.  I bet I would have known the truth in my gut in all cases where I encountered a person who society might simply label as ‘selfish’, ‘self-centered’, ‘egotistical’.

The problem is much bigger than this, and very illusive.

NPD people will never be able to experience multi-faceted relationships with people.  They exist on a one-way street where all traffic must come directly AT them.  I believe the limitations to human interaction that are a part of them have to do with protection against threat.  If you only have ONE entryway – and if you make it so that you completely SHAPE this entryway according to what you understand and can tolerate – and if you seal off any other POSSIBLE way into your reality – well, there you have supreme protection over a deeply wounded self.

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So now I am beginning to learn how to reframe (rephrase) most of my interactions with NPD people so that what I am bringing into this relationship SEEMS totally non-threatening to the NPD person.  This is a translation process that fully acknowledges the reality of the limitations of the person I care about.

What good does it do me to knock my head against the wall of a NPD fortress trying to find or to make a way that FITS ME to get inside the NPD universe?

What good has it done me to feel rejected, abandoned, hurt, disappointed, confused and/or angry that this reality is absolute for a NPD person?

None.

So if I am going to remain connected to the NPD people in my life it is time for me to be realistic myself.  Either I translate everything that might be (unconsciously) threatening to a NPD person – make it palatable, yes, not unlike a parent bird chewing up food for its baby and then spitting it into its offspring’s mouth – and pass this through their one-self-shape-perception doorway (through which nobody else really can fit anyway) – or I walk away.

My feeling misused, misunderstood, taken for granted, let down, unappreciated, disappointed, rejected/abandoned, etc. is of no use whatsoever.  (I am not talking about any kind of ABUSE here – if that is happening in relationship – GET OUT!)

The one-door ‘wooden shoe’ is the way a NPD person’s body-brain was formed very early in their life through unsafe and insecure attachment relationships.  They cannot be FIXED by us no matter how much we love them.

To find my own straight path, to recognize and honor my own ‘shape’ is as essential as it has always been difficult for me given my extreme infant-child abuse history.  But as I near age 61 I realize I CAN still remain in relationship with NPD people – if I choose to – without trying to create with them a reality that simply does not exist – because it cannot.

I think to maintain relationship with NPD people one must become very wise.  I see that the self of these people really is locked inside their one-doorway shoe starving to death.  “Pass in the narcissistic supply that keeps me alive” is their unending, consistent, perpetual mantra.  These people cannot consistently depend on any relationship even if they want to.  It is not a part of their makeup to do so.

I am not saying that NPD people cannot LOVE other people.  It is my experience that they do so deeply and permanently – but love is itself nearly intolerably painful for them.  Love hurts!

These people do not have the tools to negotiate their way in relationships fairly, so they simply do not try to negotiate (and I do not include game-playing to get what they want as negotiation).  They simply recognize the only-one doorway and leave it that way – throughout their entire lifetime.

The trap for me has been that I am only now gaining the clarity of this helpful image for myself at the same time I am beginning to deeply understand that I have been trying to reshape myself to fit through my NPD people’s doorway.  This is impossible and harmful and hurtful to me.

“You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip.”  Those of us who allow other people to be in our life as they BE THEIR OWN SELF, as we allow them to have their OWN shaped doorway to come and go through, are extremely fortunate although we probably take our abilities completely for granted.  Yet we are at risk for lots of troubles (trauma dramas) if we blindly expect NPD people to be able to do this as we can.

They cannot.

In essence I suppose these people are hidden away hiding!  Hiding IS one of the survival-stress-response modes useful at times to retain life in dangerous situations.  But if one’s life has ALWAYS been in this state?  It is probably best under this circumstance to completely block it from awareness and move on.  This does not mean the rest of us need to block it from ours.  (And it does not mean it is our task to try to change them, either!)

We are always completely free – with our eyes and our hearts completely open – to take care of our own self while we love these people exactly the way they are.

(NOTE:  I am writing here about NPD relationship of people ‘of age’ — not children!)

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Today’s news of the terrible shooting tragedy in Colorado:

12 killed, 50 wounded at Aurora movie theater

By Ryan Parker, Kurtis A. Lee and Jordan Steffen
The Denver Post

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The American public seems to prefer remaining ignorant of the impact of formational experiences during the very earliest months and years of life.  What kind, we all best ask, of early childhood experiences did the movie theater shooter REALLY HAVE?  Does anyone know?  Will anyone ask?  Suddenly, in this one particular case – do we suddenly CARE what most likely went so wrong in this shooter’s infancy and childhood?

While our society ignores the power of early experiences to shape a person for life – we at the same time put ourselves at risk – PERIOD.

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In my July 15, 2012 post – +THOUSANDS OF GEESE AND THREE BOOKS

I stressed the importance of reading what Dr. Allan Schore has to say about what goes right and what goes wrong in building human beings – and why.

Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self by Allan N. Schore (Apr 2003)

I just randomly opened this book to a sticky note I placed on page 297-8 some years ago as I studied Schore’s writings.  (I am going to put – …. – where most of the names of the studies are listed in this very brief example of the relevance of all of Schore’s work (“developmentally acquired sociopathy).”– if you wish to have the names of the researchers that I am currently omitting, just post your request in the comment section to this post – or FIND THE BOOK and study it!)

“The recent studies of Blair and his colleagues demonstrated that boys with psychopathic tendencies, as young as 9 years, show impairments in processing fearful and sad (but not aggressive) faces….and orbitofrontal dysfunction….  As mentioned, this prefrontal cortex is centrally involved in the individual’s appraisal of the safety or danger of interactive contexts.  Early traumatic experiences bias this system toward insecurity and aggression, and this negatively tinged perceptual bias powerfully influences the way in which a male, abused early in childhood, would see the world during moments of stress.  A growing literature demonstrates that neglected children have difficulty in recognizing emotion in faces, and that physically abused children display a response bias for angry facial expressions….

“Developmental research also reveals that “hostile attributional biases” among aggressive boys are specifically exacerbated under conditions of threat to the self.  Dodge and Somberg (1987) suggested that early experiences of physical abuse, exposure to aggressive models, and insecure attachments lead a child to develop memory structures that contain a hostile world schema and an aggressive response repertoire.  Later, when the child is presented with provocative stimuli, such as peer teasing and humiliation, these structures lead him to attend to hostile cues and to engage in aggressive behavior.  These dynamics characterize “early onset antisocial youth,” which spans 7 through 11 years [of age]….

“Multiple psychological changes are seen in adolescence, a time in the life span when the commission of violence is highest….  The brain undergoes a significant reorganization during this period.  Adolescence is second only to the neonatal period in terms of both rapid biophyschosocial growth as well as changing environmental characteristics and demands.  After a relatively long period of slowed growth during early childhood, the adolescent brain undergoes extensive repruning and a prominent developmental transformation.  It has been suggested that the reorganization of the amygdala and prefrontal limbic areas that innervate the hypothalamus and modulate emotional reactivity drive the reorganization of the adolescent brain (Spear, 2000).  Notice that these systems are the same ones involved in aggression and its regulation.

“Although adolescence can be being [sic] potentially growth enhancing for certain personalities, for others with developmentally overly pruned cortical-subcortical circuits, this stage of the life span can be emotionally overwhelming and disorganizing.  A brain that in infancy had to chronically shift into hypometabolic  survival modes had little energy available for growth, and a repruning of already developmentally thinned-down cortical-subcortical connections exposes earlier forming regulatory deficits.  This would be particularly so for type D personalities (identified on the Adult Attachment Interview as “unresolved/disorganized”) who show inefficient capacities for regulating rage states.  Excessive pruning is thought to be a primary mechanism in other “neurodevelopmental” disorders, where large reductions in frontal connectivity are associated with emergence of circuit pathology that mediates dysfunctional symptoms….

“In other words, early structural defects of aggression regulation circuits would become even more apparent during this stressful transitional period.  In support of this principle, neurological damage of the orbitofrontal cortex in the first year-and-a-half results, in adolescence, in a syndrome that resembles psychopathy…., and infants who experience perinatal complications show orbitofrontal dysfunction in adolescence….  Psychiatrid diagnoses of sociopathy are also first made at this time.  The “frontal lobe maturational lag” ofjuvenile delinquents…thus reflects…a “long-term sequelae of prefrontal cortex damage acquired in early childhood”…that results in “a failure to ever develop specific cognitive and behavioral competencies,” and what Bechara and colleagues (2001) term “a developmentally hypo-functioning ventromedial cortex” )p.388).  A “developmentally hypo-functioning ventromedial cortex” thus underlies a “developmentally acquired sociopathy.”  [bold type, underlining and italics is mine for emphasis here]

(Interestingly, the section of Schore’s book immediately following the above words is this:  BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISOSRDER AND AFFECTIVE-IMPULSIVE VERSUS ANTISOCIAL PERSONALITY DISORDER AND PREDATORY-STALKING AGGRESSION.)

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While a reader might need to quickly do online searches to clarify the meaning of some of the technical words in this quote above, the gist is very very clear and understandable.

Again, the best thing we can do as society members would be to READ Dr. Allan Schore’s books!  In them the mysteries are solved about how things like this Colorado shooting CAN and DO happen.  The kind of changes to development Schore describes LAST FOR A LIFETIME!

And they CAN be prevented with adequate and appropriate early infant-child care!

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News at 2:47 pm

Aurora mass shooting suspect applied to UA graduate program in 2011

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I have found a series of YouTube video recordings of a spiritual conference held some time ago in Alaska.  I am most grateful for the availability of this series online – and for the spiritual food listening to it is providing to me.  I have some new and interesting – and very helpful – thoughts to carry around with me on this very special day.

One of my daughters is today going through the last day of her pregnancy – they live 1700 miles away – and part of me is very sad I cannot be there with her while she brings her 2nd little body into this world.  I will be traveling up there 5 weeks after his birth.  My trip is planned to happen within the pattern of her leave off of work and her husband’s paternity leave so that Grandma can at least care for the newborn two or three weeks after my daughter has to return to work.

Today I am noticing very clearly how I think and feel ‘in combination’.  No event in our lives happens in a vacuum.  Every strand of every experience carries from the past, through the present moment, into the future.  Even though I feel sad I cannot be with my daughter and her family right now I am working hard at ALLOWING far more positive thoughts, and therefore positive feelings, to flow along with me today – yes – along WITH this sadness.

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The Baha’i speaker in this series of conference talks (there are eleven of them, I am listening to #4 today) much has been said about how the next world where human will does not exist so that ONLY God’s Will does means that we will carry nothing negative with us into that perfectly positive world.  Yes, I guess we will remember what we experienced in this world.  We will recognize souls who have been important to us in the next world – but it will not be possible for negativity to exist in that next world.

That is giving me thinking room today to practice ‘positive thinking’ in an expanded way.  While I am certainly aware of many painful facts about things that have happened in my life, including so many not-so-wise choices I have made myself, if I can increasingly carry around with me as positive a perspective as I can — well — this process will evidently grow and strengthen my soul.

There are millions and millions of positive things I can pay attention to in my life – even in my past life, including my 18-year childhood that was so ugly and painful.  The fact I feel sadness I cannot be with my daughter RIGHT NOW is not a negative aspect of who I am.  I am sad because of the great love I have for my children, for my grandchildren – and because I am human and because I am alive.

I am looking for ways to learn about how sadness is NOT a negative experience after all.  Maybe I need to learn new words to converse with myself about what I do feel.  At the same time I know that even up until I was 30 years old I had no idea what a feeling even was!

But I chose to learn.  I chose to feel.

Long ago ‘helpers’ along my journey toward increasing wholeness told me that abuse survivors mostly block all their ‘negative’ feelings – but as we do this we also are blocking our ability to feel the ‘positive’ feelings.  There are infinite treasures in our life.  Understanding that our soul does have feelings that act as signals about how we are experiencing our life lets me know that – again – I am so much more than this trauma-changed body I live in.  I can CHOOSE to expand my experience of my life through EXERCISE and PRACTICE!

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My daughter is healthy and as far as we know so is the little new one who will be born tomorrow into this learning ground we call earthly life.

My daughter is happy, in a marriage that is stable, parenting with her husband children that were PLANNED for and WANTED.  None of the trauma drama of my own past has been transferred to my daughter – through the grace of God and through education, practice and some hard work toward better choices.

I have MUCH to celebrate – as I believe we all do – if we can turn around in a full circle as we allow our focus to include all the very real blessings (no matter what we call them) that flood every second of our life.

But we have to CHOOSE to expand our self so that the positive can become not AS REAL as whatever hardship we know — but so the positive can increasingly become ALL THAT IS REAL in our life.

I am not talking about magic here.  I am not talking about blissful ‘new age’ philosophy or about denial.  It may be that as severe early trauma survivors that the incredible negative experiences we have gone through has biased us toward our suffering.  We ARE more than that.  LIFE is more than that.

There is certainly no shame or self-blame in being aware that we often carry with us – well, MOSTLY can be more accurate for severe early trauma survivors — great suffering that is hard to ‘see’ and ‘feel’ around.  But we are tough and wise people, we survivors.  We can honor the full circle of our experience on earth – which includes SO MUCH GOODNESS that our suffering can fade into the background many times a day — enough so that for precious moments we can forget that the ‘negative’ has any place in our ongoing moments.

At least this is what I am working toward understanding and experiencing because I CAN, because I WANT TO, and because this choice is better than any other alternative I can think of.

This earthly plane of existence which is a testing and training ground for our souls is a plane of duality.  OF COURSE the positive and the negative exist here!  That is what being alive in a material body in a material, physical universe is all about.  But we can increasingly strengthen the ability of our soul to understand that just as positive and goodness is all that exists in the next world we will go to when we leave this physical plane, this same positive exists for us here.

Most thankfully!

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Some readers of this blog might remember some posts I wrote several months ago as I went to a massage therapist – with hopes of making some kind of hoped-for progress toward – what?  I was disappointed, of course, although I do not regret the experience or the money those two sessions cost.

But today I am thinking about some of the imagery that appeared to me in those 2 sessions about being face-to-face with a massive, impassable bramble bush.  Today I realize that for severe abuse survivors who have experienced permanent and major physiological alterations to our development due to severe abuse, neglect and trauma during especially our earliest months of life when we were growing and developing our brain, our nervous system, our immune system, our stress-calm response system — NOTHING we experience about being alive in the world matches what ‘ordinary’ people experience.

At this moment I am thinking that my life has mostly been about learning to thrive in any way I can IN SPITE of that bramble bush.  I am always learning how to seek and find treasures that nobody else would probably think are remotely important, let alone valuable, right there inside that bramble bush.

This is not a wrong or a bad thing.  All the wishing in the world will not change what we experienced and what those experiences did to make our lives extremely difficult in ways non-early abuse, neglect and trauma survivors will never know or even be able to begin to imagine.

Lately as I watch movies in which ‘killing’ or ‘being killed’ is always portrayed as a disastrous thing I find thoughts wander into my thoughts sometimes that there is also situations in which remaining alive sure seems a worse fate than to NOT be alive.  Yet life is a struggle on many levels for many humans, not just early trauma survivors.  What is actually (to me) most important is being able to identify and to USE what many call either ‘resiliency factors’ or ‘protective factors’.

Survivors have gifts that brought us forward through our horrible childhoods.  Our problem is that in the presence of our bramble bush challenges we often do not understand that we need to identify what IS and WAS good in our lives – has always been good and right in our lives – or – putting it starkly – we would be dead!

Never mind there are times when we might think being dead would be better than to remain alive with our suffering.  Those aspects of our bramble bush existence are just a part of our experience – NOT ALL OF IT.

I do absolutely believe that every single one of us had something we loved when we were little.  Many of us, most sadly, did not have a human being who loved us.  That did not mean that we didn’t love SOMEONE, didn’t love a pet, didn’t love beauty, didn’t love music, or some aspect of nature that we noticed – and that for even the briefest of seconds put us into a time-space where we experienced a glimmer of joy.

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One of the most important of my protective factors certainly was Alaska and our homesteading time on ‘our’ mountain.  I still don’t believe I would have survived had our family not left the hideous horrors of Los Angeles for the pure wilderness that I loved from the first breath of its air I inhaled right before my 6th birthday.

I was also gifted with an insatiable hunger for locating beauty in the world around me – usually in the smallest of details.  I did have crayons.  Crazy Mother encouraged all of us to use art supplies.  They were not always forbidden to me.

Something beautiful and good was available (and still is) for every single one of us that is directly connected to what I call soul – our essential self that will live forever and that no abuser can ever touch.  I am not remotely into the ‘saved’ or ‘damnation’ kind of perspective on soul.  I am far too realistic for that kind of vague double-speak that does not contribute to my desperately needed sense of some kind of peace and well-being and hope and connection to the immeasurable grace and goodness that most survivors have to search very hard to find in their early lives.

Survivors might in the beginning need to break through denial to find out what actually happened to us.  But this is only a part of our story.  If we don’t go back into our own self, into our own memories that we have chosen to keep, to find our own shining child self inside the hell we know of so clearly — we will simply feel more miserable than we have to today.

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I am not being arrogant in any way when I say I know what it’s like to grow up being abused, terrified, traumatized by a psychotic madwoman in hell for 18 years.  I know.  But as far as I can tell it is not possible for us to still be alive without a WHOLE LOT OF GOODNESS having been present around us then and now.

In some ways I have a very Dr. Spock logical brain.  What I am saying is simply LOGICAL common sense to me.  I am going on 61 in August.  I have worked very very very very hard to learn about myself what I now know.  And I now know that I can go back through the corridors of my life now – walking – no STRIDING with confidence all the way back – because I have cleared out all the garbage of my childhood that really belonged to all the adults in my family (as I have written about on this blog).

This work was hard.  But what I refused to let the abuse of my life take from me was my RIGHT to HAVE my own self in my own life — however I experience that self.  I don’t buy the crap that was not mine.

If I could remember what I titled those earlier posts I would put links to them here – but I don’t have a clue.  I know there are readers that go back through the growing list of archival posts at the right side of this home page.  Every reader will have some kind of reaction inside of their own self to everything I say – and it is in THOSE REACTIONS that your own truth lies.

We have suffered gloom – but we are never gloom ourselves.

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Yesterday I spent a wonderful day with a dear friend of mine who understands me probably better than anyone else outside of my dear family that I have ever known.  Yet in spite of the glory of my day yesterday – I often noticed that on some level I felt as if I had just cried for hours and hours and hours…..

Many of you know that feeling — what it feels like to have cried so long and so hard you never thought the crying would stop.  What you feel like AFTER that – it’s a kind of hangover that for severe early abuse, neglect and trauma survivors NEVER REALLY GOES AWAY.

After many years of educating myself about my ‘condition’ I nearly always recognize now that negative emotional states as I feel them in the present have nothing really to do with what is going on in the present.  My body was built out of these kinds of feeling states – and they remain a part of me on the physiological level.

BUT – as with yesterday – I could carry on – as it were – ‘two conversations’ with myself at the same time.  One was of the glorious loving friendship sharing adventure day that WAS my day yesterday.  The other was a very gentle and kind recognition of the deep, deep what I now call PERENNIAL sadness that is so much a part of my body.

All I really had to do was to HONOR that due to the complexities of my entire life, I live a complex life – I am a complex person – and part of me can be very happy and relaxed AT THE SAME TIME another part of me is barely above the surface of such deep and terrible REAL sadness.

I HAVE cried – especially as a child – for many many many thousands of hours.  Uncensored, genuine, appropriate, tears and tears and tears because I WAS HURT!

I honor that reality in myself – but I wish to experience in my present life ANOTHER REALITY as well.  If I end up feeling BOTH realities at the same time – so be it.

But I WILL NOT let the sadness – or any other strong survival-related emotion – steal from me what joy I can tap into NOW as I live the best life I can.

Not perfect – not fair – not…… whatever we can add into and onto this list.

BUT – there is MORE to life and far more to us.  We have a choice at every moment, not that any of us can make this choice perfectly, to find something good and true and right and beautiful NOW.

As we do this we can increasingly understand that we have ALWAYS done this — even through all of the terrible times of trauma in the past.  We have ALWAYS been able to find joy somewhere, somehow.

As children we did this automatically and instinctively.  As adults we most often need to make a choice to continue to do what we did so well as children — continue to live our own life of goodness no matter WHAT else was going on at times during our life that was so hurtful to us.

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I fell into the trap during my 2 massage sessions that today right now I am getting myself out of.  The therapist wanted me to find a way around the bramble bush that appeared to me – to make it go away – to escape it – whatever…….

No.  I honor that bramble bush – and it is my personal and very special task to examine my relationship with that bramble bush – my way.  This is a kind of making-peace with all of me, all of my life, that lets me at times live more than one life at the same time.  I see nothing wrong with this — being happy AND sad at the same time!!  The sadness does not need to be gone in order for me to – at the same time – be experiencing joy at the same time.

Perhaps this I am looking into a different meaning of wholeness…..

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A HUGE part of the quandary I create for myself is my (so far) inability to peacefully accept that I was born into exactly this time period, into this particular segment of the evolution of the species I am a member of.  Yet I also understand that if every person was entirely content to remain aware of only that which is known and practiced by our species nobody would dream, nobody would hope, nobody would even be able to GUESS that there IS A BETTER WAY – not just for a selected few of us, but for all of us.

Given that my right brain hemisphere remains the most dominate for me over the two brain hemispheres we have been blessed with as humans, I now draw on a very clear, very sensual, and very relevant image that seems to have rested within my awareness this morning.

One of my most glorious series of childhood memories is of the wild Canadian geese, the Honkers, as they migrated south in the season of Alaska’s fall.  While I know they also migrated north in the spring, that flight pattern evidently did not exist directly over our homestead mountain.

I didn’t, as a child and teen, wait for this event to happen.  I didn’t think ahead that way.  But every time this happened my innermost essence stopped to pay the closest attention that I could to what was happening during these most special moments in time.

Always it began with my first hearing – like a remembered glimmer of a shimmer – of the faintest whispers of the sound of these grand birds announcing their coming from the north with their calls.   I stopped in the yard and breathlessly waited as the sound of the honking became louder and louder and LOUDER.

Suddenly high above the outline of the highest mountain peaks behind our homestead the first goose appeared against a brilliant blue sky, followed in formation by thousands of birds.

They flew fast.  They flew with instinctual determination.  They flew without err, taking a period of some minutes for the end of the back, final, wide end of this gigantic “V” to appear over the mountain’s ridge.

My heart danced with fundamental delight THEN at the sound and the sight of these birds, just as it does now in my memory.

I know things as an adult that of course I did not know when I was that young.  I know that the strongest bird always flies at the front of the “V”, that the shape of the pattern itself allows maximum distance to be covered at maximum speed with the least amount of effort possible.  Wingtip to wingtip the bodies placed this way allow the wind to flow like invisible gossamer silk on down the entire length of the “V.”

I know that no matter how powerful, how fit, how superior any lead bird started out to be, it is mortal.  It will tire.  It will expend itself for the good of the entire flock until it eventually and naturally, without question or shame, gives up its heroic and vital place in the flock and falls, falls, falls not DOWN but BACK to the tail-end of this fascinating, dignified, impressive, most memorable gathering of birds in flight.

And – then this job falls to the next most powerful bird in the lineup – and on they all travel south over many mountains, over many thousands of miles.

I also know that migrating birds are designed to be able to travel incredible lengths of time, as well, without needing to sleep.  I know this can happen for the same reason sharks don’t sleep:  There is nothing, absolutely NOTHING unusual happening that their brains would need to process.  “No sleep necessary or required.”

On they go.  Year after year, season after season – the constant from my perspective was ME, the one watching, the one with feet planted upon the earth covering the great stone of the mountain while the migrating “V” stretched itself across the Eagle River Valley as their lead goose vanished over the crest of the mountain ridge on the other side.

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About 15 years after I had left home, left Alaska, I had a dream that I lived near a far northern village in Alaska.  Only there was a city there, lots of people residing therein.

One day I was outside in the dream and I heard clearly the faintest sound of a  thundering flock of Canadian honkers migrating south.  I knew their flight path would cross over the ground slightly outside the collection of buildings that defined the edge of this city.  I stood in awe watching – and then I saw the miracle!

These thousands of geese were flying not in their common “V” pattern.  They were approaching from far to the north in the shape of a perfect 5-pointed star!

I gasped in amazement, turned and raced to the city, running through throngs of people going about their late afternoon routines – as I yelled at them as loudly as I could, “Come!  Come see this!!  The geese are coming, and they are flying in the shape of a perfect 5-pointed star.”

Nobody – absolutely NOBODY – cared!!!!

I knew I had to give up trying to find anyone to come with me.  If I didn’t return NOW to watch them I would miss what I knew was perhaps the greatest miracle I would ever be a part of.

So I did.  Alone I watched this massive formation of some of the most impressive birds God has seen to create flew exactly over my head as they disappeared to the south.

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It’s a common and familiar saying that “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.”  Perhaps no matter the size of a migrating flock of birds their travel is limited by the pace of the weakest birds flying.

At this juncture in time that God chose to pop me into in the river’s flow of the life of my flock of humanity, there still seems to be a great many weak links.  Someone like Dr. Allan Schore, as reflected in his writing, is a ‘pinnacle’ human being – a leader of the “V” of humanity traveling forward at its crippled yet still moving pace.

It is my belief that if everyone who has any concerns whatsoever about the well-being of humans and how that well-being is either created in great degrees or all but destroyed by the quality of human attachments – READ and studied these three books I post links to below – 99.9% of our questions about what goes RIGHT with humans and what goes WRONG – and why – and how we can prevent the WRONG and improve on the RIGHT – can be clearly understood.

We would all then be strengthened to be a leader of our flock in every and any way possible as needed.

Read and study – difficult BOOKS?  No?  Let’s all just play helpless victim.  Let’s all just act plain lazy and stupid.

After all, what does any of this actually matter?

And then there’s also compassion, patience and wisdom…….

Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self/Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self (two-volume set) by Allan N. Schore (Apr 2003)

I doubt there is a better book on the planet for understanding attachment and its critical role in building human beings from their foundation forward!!

The Attachment Connection: Parenting a Secure and Confident Child Using the Science of Attachment Theory by Ruth Newton PhD and Allan Schore PhD (Jun 1, 2008)

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If this is the snake that is wandering around in my yard, I better be scared of it!

Mohave Rattlesnake

Picture here

For a reason researchers do not yet understand this ALWAYS deadly snake is far more deadly in the county I live in than any other snake in Arizona.

Read here

One of my young neighbor boys spotted the snake last weekend inside the chicken coop – that would have been the same snake – no doubt – that I evidently saw (kind of without seeing it) today (see previous post:  +DISSOCIATION? DEHYDRATION? DID I REALLY JUST SEE A SNAKE?).

Last weekend I looked online and could not find a picture that matched the snake in the chicken coop.  We watched it exit the coop moving south into the narrow stretch of weeds between my back fence and the American-Mexican border fence.  I hoped the snake had stopped for a few moments in the coop and moved on.  Perhaps it has not.  Perhaps it has moved into my garden.  Perhaps I better WAKE UP LINDA!!

This snake is very, very dangerous.

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I met a local man named Leo at the Laundromat café this week and I have his telephone number.  He catches snakes, ‘milks’ them for their venom, and sends the vials to the University of Arizona where they develop anti-venom.  He receives $500 per vial.  I think I better call him tomorrow for a chat.

When I described the snake that was wandering through the chicken coop to Leo he immediately told me it was a Mojave.  How could he know that quickly from my very rough verbal-visual sketch?  Did I closely examine the head and markings of this snake in my yard today?  No, as I described in my last post, I most certainly did not.  Some part of me evidently saw the snake, ‘telepathically’ greeted it with respect, and let it go its way without paying a single bit of attention to where it was going – as I trivially heeded a stupid centipede.

“No way to go, Linda!”

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Since writing my last post I have had thoughts now and then about the terrible traumas of my childhood of unbelievable abuse.  I was NEVER safe, and yet remaining consciously in a state of hyperalert-hypervigilance awaiting Mother’s next attack was impossible.

Because of the psychotic break Mother had while birthing me, there was never a time during the 18 years I lived with my parents from the moment of my birth that abuse or the threat of abuse was not a very real presence for me.  But because I was a child I somehow was able to FORGET the constant danger I was in – in between many of Mother’s attacks.  They always came out of the blue anyway.  I never knew when exactly she was going to attack me.  I was nearly always taken by complete surprise.  How did I manage to live that way?

Somehow I must have developed some kind of coping skills to survive her.  Today’s experience with what I now see is most likely an extremely dangerous snake brings these issues into immediate focus for me.  I did see that snake today – even though some part of me is in denial that the snake was real, that I really saw that snake, that it was less than two feet away from me – and that it most likely is the most dangerous snake by far of any in Arizona.

My inner self somehow had made some kind of peace with the close proximity and presence of that snake today.  Some part of me simply said, “Hello!” and then completely turned away as if that snake did not exist.  I made the same kind of ‘peace’ with the presence of that snake as I did with the presence of my mother.

I made the snake go away.  In between the thousands of brutal attacks against me – physical and verbal – how was I able to make Mother disappear?  Go away?

I had to become able to vanish-banish Mother any time I possibly could do so or I would not have been able to both survive her and grow up as a child at the same time.  A more dangerous creature than she was could hardly have been found by any child.  I HAD to make some kind of space within which I COULD ENDURE and survive – a space into which Mother could not really enter.  I think this happened automatically – naturally in this so-unnatural condition I was forced to remain in for those 18 very long years in Mother’s hell.

That Mother COULD attack out of the blue without warning at any given instant of time is not really one bit different than knowing an indomitable killer snake is slithering around in my yard and can and probably will make its appearance ANYWHERE at ANY TIME – when I least expect it to.

How does a person – especially a little child – protect itself from such overwhelming ever-present horrible deadly danger?

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I see now I need to call Leo about this snake.  I am most grateful that I met him this week.  Because the Mohaves are far less common here than the Diamondback rattlesnakes are, Leo is always looking to find a Mohave to milk for its venom – and then release the snake safely into the wild.  I truly hope he will willingly come down here to investigate.  I truly hope he is knowledgeable enough to know exactly not only where to look for this snake ‘of mine’ but most importantly how to FIND IT.

I do not wish to live with this continual threat of death this close to my door – within my peaceful garden.  As beautiful as this snake may be, it can and under the wrong circumstances will kill me.

I want it gone.  I want the threat GONE – and dissociating from this danger as I did so smoothly and instinctively and effectively this afternoon IS NOT the way for me to handle this.  This snake is NOT my friend – any more than my mother was a mother!

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The topic of this post gives me a most unsettled feeling – as it should.  I am reminded to remind myself that I am not always the best at being able to keep myself safe in the world.  Yet having to trust my well-being to ‘dumb luck’ also makes me feel most unsettled.  As it should.

Let’s see.  How can I most simply describe what in the world I am talking about?

Start here:  I made the 26-mile round trip out to a feed store today – spent $121 on a 6-month stock of chicken scratch, minerals, laying crumble – also ‘meat as first ingredient’ cat food, great dog bones for the pup along with two 120 pound bales of alfalfa.  I needed this feed run taken care of before my upcoming 3,400-mile round trip up north to see soon-to-arrive new grandson and family.  I do not want the man who will take care of my house, garden and animals to run short during the 3-4 weeks I am gone.

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Not too exciting.  Made the trip fine in my ’78 old worn El Camino.  Next comes the job of how to store the feed away from rodents and rain.

Note:  It really really rained yesterday!  Our yearly high desert monsoon has been off to a very slow start, but yesterday’s rain was the real thing.  Thus, our normal humidity of 5-7% jumped today to 35-50%.  Is this the culprit for my unsettled feelings?

I am used to working outside in the heat, often the 100 degree-plus heat — working hard – but today at 88 – sweating like nobody here is used to, dripping like a personal carry-around shower — was I dehydrating out there as I moved in hard-work mode around the yard cleaning out 5-gallon plastic storage pails, hauling the 40-50 pound bags around……

This storage job included emptying a large 35-gallon blue plastic garbage pail I used for soaking cardboard before adding it to the compost bins.  I plan to break the alfalfa bales apart and store the hay in these blue wonders.

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And here is where this small strange (to me) story really began…..

I tipped the blue pail that had spent a year sitting in one corner of the yard to the side — and there skittered for cover a rather large centipede.  I DO NOT LIKE those critters!!!  They give me the WILLIES!!!

And — my dissociational brain………?

Looking back – what exactly was going on at this pail tipping centipede spotting split second of my life?

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Dissociation, I believe, ALWAYS involves a distortion in one’s perception of the ongoing experience of time.

Time can slow down, speed up, seemingly stop completely — and, most uncomfortably, dissociation can create the experience of being in two ‘places in time’ at the same time.  Or, as when depersonalization-derealization hop into the picture of the experience – it can seem as if we cease to exist in time at all — and/or that things are going on of which we are not really a part of — as if we are aside from, apart from, outside of – space and time.

Severe early abuse and trauma creates alternative brain states and ways of processing information during critical early windows of infant-child development.  Duh!  HUGE “OF COURSE” to this one!

How do we survivors experience our life through our different body-brain?

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Back to the tipped blue large tipped pail under which this centipede had evidently been happily living its life.  Back to me staring at this critter who at this second had to decide itself exactly what it was going to do next in its state of surprise ——

And me?

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Now, I have to jump ahead about an hour of hard work later – large sacks of feed emptied into their clean white 5-gallon buckets and stored – etc. – me having stopped several times to consume large glasses of water mixed with powdered red G2 — sweating like I am SO not used to — now stopping to sit for a moment in the shade, take a break, smoke a cigarette — and…….

What NOW at this moment jumped into my thoughts was this – “Did I really see a snake just recently since I returned from the feed store?  Am I remembering a dream that I saw a snake?  Did I make this up because of the picture of the small bright green snake half coiled hanging off a tree branch staring down that hummingbird in mid-hover that I viewed last eve when a facebook friend posted it?”

Into my mental imagery brain slowly came the image of the snake that I MIGHT have seen or not seen – along with a dimly creeping creepy memory that I DID see this snake not long ago – in MY yard – that it was about two feet from my feet, that it had stopped in mid slither because I was there, that it was not coiled — along with a ‘memory’ of its size — not large, stretched about 18″ – not real fat, a young snake —

And here came my backwash of “What it is like to live with an unusual dissociational brain.”

I ‘remembered’ in this memory that did not feel like a memory of seeing a snake that did not feel like seeing a snake – that felt like it had happened in a dream – that felt like it had happened to somebody else – somebody whose memories I HAVE????

It took me at least 5 minutes of concentrated thought as I sat on my work-break in the chair to ‘remember’ – realize – where I MIGHT have REALLY seen that snake.

Over there beside the big blue garbage pail…..

“Linda, you have to go back over there – retrace your steps – stand exactly where you were when you MIGHT have seen that snake RIGHT NEXT to where you saw the centipede at EXACTLY the same moment…..”

So I walked over there – and yes – this really WAS a memory – how STRANGE!!

What part of my desert-dwelling brain would have CHOSEN as a consequence of HOPEFULLY assessing RISK to attend to — associate my attention and entire focus — on a CENTIPEDE rather than on a SNAKE???

I KNOW and clearly remember watching the centipede squiggle on the ground while I thought about whether or not it would ‘attack’ me – or even head up my ankle – what would happen if I tried to stomp it as it tried to ……. whatever it would try — my thoughts including an assessment of how fast it could move, how fast my foot could move, how much weight I carry – how soft might the ground be — knowing how DIFFICULT it is to step on and squash and KILL a hard-crusted ugly old centipede….

meanwhile – in this place of all kinds of venomous snakes….

WHAT ABOUT THE SNAKE????

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As I again stood at the spot where maybe memory and real memory coincided – part of me ‘knows’ though cannot CLEARLY own the memory that some dissociated part of me made an instantaneous assessment at the split-second I was in range of both these creatures that the SNAKE was not a threat — I did not see rattles on its tail, though young rattlers of that size might have only ONE rattle, very difficult to notice – young rattlers being aggressive and extremely deadly should they strike because they have to learning about how to and why to control the amount of venom they eject ——–

DID I assess the danger of the snake?  How can I be sure when this entire ‘experience’ feels so surreal and remote from me?

Was there a snake right there?

What part of me decided a relatively UGLY but in comparison to a poisonous snake not one bit dangerous centipede needed ALL my concentration??  Did I accurately assess the risk the snake may or may not have offered?

I do not know.

I did not again look back at the snake.  Nope.  The centipede had all of my associated attention.

I thought about whether or not I would/could kill that creepy centipede as I watched it disappear into a crack in the dry earth where the blue pail had stood – as my brain slowly pondered in its altered state of time and space, “Can a centipede dig itself trenches in the earth?  Tunnels in the earth?”  As some other part of me snapped in response, “Obviously they can, Linda!  Who do you think dug that hole for that centipede to escape into?  You sure didn’t!”

In that slowly moving time I even had time to remember all kinds of memories of times I have had chickens – times I watched them attack centipedes – their favorite food – as they race and dart and chase around while every one of them finally gets a snippet size snack of centipede.  I had time to wish I had a chicken right by me right at that instant?  (And the snake?  Who was paying attention to the snake?  Not me!)

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Great.  How can I trust myself to keep myself safe in a snake zone like this desert is – if…….. ??

Well, I am still here.  I was not attacked by either of these creatures – both of which had no wish to be bothered by me in the first place.

But what about next time?

I do wonder….  I also surprise myself that when push came to shove I would dislike a centipede more than a snake – and, again, what kind of snake was that?

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And I STILL do not FEEL LIKE I really saw that (real?) snake, even though I could draw the exact position ‘that snake’ seems to have been in, and I can point out exactly where on the ground I ‘seem’ to have ‘maybe’ seen a snake because I ‘seem’ to remember seeing one….

Very unsettling way to live…..

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+KILLER SNAKE. KILLER MOTHER. EVIDENTLY I HAVE THE MAGICAL ABILITY TO MAKE KILLER THINGS ‘DISAPPEAR’

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