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I often ponder the combination of information about safe and secure infant attachment (and the opposite).  Pondering means I still wonder about how these patterns work — and don’t work — according to how ‘nature’ designed them for mammalian survival.  In the simplest of patterns I can actually WATCH (because human behavior is SO complicated!) I notice my two grown cats.

Each of them is let out for the night.  They go off and do their cat thing, and in the morning they return.  But the gold tiger female, Goldilocks, nearly always returns hours before her brother, Hunter, does.  I don’t think she even goes very far afield.  He probably does.

Neither Goldilocks nor my dog settle in on the mornings that Hunter comes home late like he did this morning.  They pace around, sit by the door at attention, or scamper the reaches of our yard searching for him until he arrives.  Then, as was the pattern today, they greet him gladly once he’s safely home.  All eat their breakfast, and then the cat-rest of the day begins.

I have an old sheet spread over my blankets on my bed.  No matter how much I wash it within moments of cat-sleeping upon it it is dingy again.  I also don’t ‘make’ my bed in any sense of the word.  I plump up my blankets in inviting piles under this sheet because if I don’t the cats don’t like it there.  Then they go wander around the house and sleep in whatever location they decide is more inviting than a correctly smoothed out bed thus dragging dirt and cat hair all over the house!

So up both cats hopped onto their daytime domicile this morning once all had eaten his breakfast.  I had watched his entire string of actions from the moment he appeared at the screen door meowing softly to be let in.  SUPER AWARE and HYPER-VIGILANT at first, he startled at every tiny sound.  This is how he survives his nightly travels, I know.

Yet after a few moments of being indoors he settles down.  His entire body language shifts to that of being an indoor cat.  Once on the bed both cats luxuriously stretch out to their LONG full length, doze for a few moments and then disappear into deep long sleep for the rest of the day.

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SO – obviously they feel safe in the house, but it is not I that is providing them protection.  It must be the total environment of these four walls with entry barred by windows, doors and their screens that lets these cats know they have nothing to fear.  The end result is that in safety they REST.

This intertwining (as I still see it) pattern of safety, protection and relaxation-rest still leaves me with some confusion about how they all operate together.  As an abused infant-child I NEVER had a ‘place’ to go where I felt as safe within a parameter of protection as my cats do.  I obviously found ways to rest in spite of this fact.

I have talked to battle-worn war survivors who express how sleeping on an active battlefield happens differently than otherwise.  Some of these altered patterns might never leave a war veteran for the rest of their lifetime.  Being able to sleep at the same time one is hyper-alert is possible, but I believe there is a high cost to the well-being of body and self if this is the chronic pattern of one’s life.

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My point?  I don’t have a clue.  As I say this topic is still swirling and unclear to me.  I cannot view this from the ‘outside’ as if I ever knew in my body from my birth what resting in safety and security ever meant.  So, I guess I still can’t figure this out even now!

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I am going to pause for a moment here long enough to say how proud I am of myself for having just completed my 5764 word response to Question #2 of the 19 questions my daughter is sending me, one at a time, to answer for the book of my life story we are writing.  OH MY GAWD!  Is about all I can say about the intense experience I went through in composing this response.

Now I come up for air, float luxuriously around on my back for a bit until I dive back down beginning tomorrow morning with my ponderings about answering Question #3.  Our process is that I wait a required four full days (96 hours) from the time I receive a next question from my daughter until I write one single letter of one single word of my response.  That will put the beginning of writing my response for #3 on next Saturday morning.

I thank all blog visitors for their patience in waiting for much of anything new to appear in writing on this blog.  I am absolutely NOT – except in a few very specific and rare cases – going to write a single word here about what is going on THERE- there being book!

All I can say about THERE – is this:  “OH, WHAT A STORY!”

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While I will be keeping the writing I am doing for ‘the book’ off of this blog, I encountered something this morning that belongs to both ‘places’.  During my sleep last night I must have processed something that focused into words as soon as I woke up.  In essence:

What I have repeatedly said on this blog, that I don’t believe the issue of ‘forgiveness’ applies to my abusive childhood but INFORMED COMPASSION does is incorrect.  Today I know something more and different.

I still believe that informed compassion applies to my mother, who was the insane abuser and also a SICK SICK woman.  I therefore seek knowledge and understanding about her condition as I increasingly realize that she was incapable of free choice in the matter of how she treated me.

Today, however, I realize that INFORMED COMPASSION cannot possibly apply to my father ‘the accomplice’.  No matter how hard I have tried to find ways to put him on ‘equal’ grounds with my mother, I cannot.  While I can justifiably explain what happened to my mother, I can’t with my father.  When I try that approach I realize today all I am doing is offering excuses for his part in the horror of my childhood.

Therefore, I see now for the first time in my entire life that FORGIVENESS is what I would need to make my own peace about my father’s role in my infant-childhood of trauma and terror.  Nope!  Informed compassion won’t do for him.

This tells me (told to myself by myself) that I will now have to open a new door in my life to learn what the heck forgiveness actually is and how I can move in that direction in my feelings for the man, now dead, who was my father.  In some ways I say, “DARN IT!  I liked the informed compassion idea much better!”

Why?  Because I am more familiar with it and because it absolutely DOES apply to my mother.  My father, on the other hand, I believe did have the ability to choose.  Maybe he never knew that he did, but I can find no way to let him off the ‘free choice and free will’ hook.

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As I begin the writing of my response to Question #2 that my daughter has asked me toward the completion of our book, and as I contemplate the 17 more questions that follow, I realize how desperately I have always needed someone to ask me these questions — and to LISTEN to my response.

I realize how desperately I needed this to happen all the way along through the first 18 years of my unbelievably abusive infant-childhood.  There was no hope during those years, but what a change in the course of my entire adult life it would have made if anyone had cared enough to ask and truly listen from the time I left home at 18.

If there is one single action that ‘the public’ can take on behalf of severely abused children and of we adult survivors it would be to listen wholeheartedly to our stories.  What happens instead is that NOBODY listens.  That means that NOBODY cares enough to believe us.  Always (and we can watch it on their faces) ‘the public’ is running their own inner dialogue that is saying, “Who do you think  you are to believe you had an early life any worse than the rest of us had?  Let me me prove my point by telling you about mine.”

End of story.  Always happens.  End of our story as we remain locked within our self as we have always been because of the horrors we experienced – most often from the time we were born – and that we survived in a world that ‘the public’ cannot begin to imagine.

Would people behave this same way were they to encounter Nazi concentration camp survivors’ stories?

I will no longer let ‘the public’ off the proverbial hook by saying, “That’s OK.”  There’s NOTHING OK ABOUT IT!

If you EVER encounter a person who tells you, “I had a severely abusive childhood,” or “My childhood was hell,” or any version thereof – please believe them and put your self aside with one single intent:  To care enough to LISTEN to what such a person has to say.

In this way you will become a part of the solution to child abuse rather than a part of the problem.

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+CALL FOR GUEST WRITERS HERE!! PLEASE CONSIDER….

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OK, so I am choosing not to let this turn of the seasons that has brought us all to another American Mother’s Day pass without saying something about my own mother.  I can’t say I am happy at doing so, but here I am.

I believe that I wrote recently in a post about what my daughter and her husband finally remembered about what made their little dog, Who Who, perpetually wish to destroy all children.  A gathering in their home, a friend’s five-year-old daughter alone in the kitchen with the dog, a sudden screech of pain from puppy followed by the menacing snarl of a wolf (all from this then 2 1/2 –year-old Pomeranian-Chihuahua mix small dog).

Of course the child denied hurting the dog.  Nobody every knew what she did.  But the dog, being a very smart animal, decided at the instant  she suffered pain at the hands of this child that forevermore she would simply do everything in her power to vanquish children of ANY age from her universe.

Of course this pattern only worked as clearly as it did because Who Who has always been a cherished pet raised without abuse of any kind until that moment.  If she HAD been previously abused, abused from birth, how would she be any different than she is now.  After all, it’s only possible to HATE children so much – and this dog appears to be maxed out in her defensive hate just as she is.  (She nipped my grandson, hence her new home with grandma.)

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I don’t see my mother’s hatred of me as operating much differently than I see it in this dog.  True, my mother in her human body was SUPPOSED to operate differently, but she didn’t.  She didn’t, I believe, because she was operating on the level of physiological reaction only and had no choice any more than this dog does.

(Not that I ever did anything to hurt my mother, even though she was convinced I tried to kill her when I was being born.  But SOME people had hurt my mother when she was very little and what she did to me was caused by this early harm.)

Trying to think up reasons why a mother such as mine was could continually do what she did to me for 18 years is actually ridiculous.  She was simply so changed in her physiological development in reaction to the traumas of her own earliest years that what was left of her was an ANIMAL rather than a HUMAN being.

It would have been as impossible for anyone to have reasoned my mother out of how she felt/thought of me and acted toward me as it would be to change this dog of mine.  Considering that our species has the distinction in all of Creation to have BOTH animal and a higher-order spiritual side to us, it is when early trauma changes a body that the animal side takes over that potential for the kind of insane abuse my mother rendered toward me becomes not only possible, but as likely as it is for a dog like Who Who to ‘decide’ in an unconscious instant that destroying children is preferable for her own survival rather than to act any differently.

To think any differently about my mother would be to anthropomorphize her.  Sorry, big word – but the right one:

: to attribute human form or personality to

: to attribute human form or personality to things not human

My mother was NOT fully human – certainly not a ‘modern’ evolved human being.  She was a trauma-changed, evolutionarily altered VERSION of a human being.  This is NOT the same as having modern human abilities.

Do I PITY my dead mother?  Yes, I do.  I do not believe that she ever knew during the 18 long years I lived in her home that what she did to me was wrong.  Not once.  Not for an instant.  Never.  She did not have the capacity to know that any more than Who Who does – or ever will.

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S.T.E.P. Parenting Program – CHECK IT OUT HERE!

AND please think about this:

+CALL FOR GUEST WRITERS HERE!! PLEASE CONSIDER….

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My daughter has now sent me Question #2 to respond to for our book.  I woke this morning with the fear that during my book writing process I will not be able to write for this blog.  How will I maintain Stop the Storm if I can’t write here?  Responding to commenters is a separate writing adventure.  I know I can do that.  But writing here?  Now what?

I have mentioned before that I have identified that I have found ways to continually deplete the reservoir that holds ‘my story’ both by writing posts here and by talking to people I am close to when I need to.  This process I have agreed with myself – and my daughter – to participate in so that an actual book can come out at the end of it will NOT allow me to continue to do either of these two things while the book is being written.

In time perhaps I can find a way to keep my writing processes completely sequestered and closed off from one another, but I don’t know how to do that yet.  The simplest solution that I could hope for is that with this invitation to this blog’s readers to write some posts of their own that I can post here the gap that will continue to exist in my blog-writing-posting patterns will not be so worrisome to me over the next 3 to 5 months while I answer the 19 questions my daughter will be asking of me for this book.

The only way I can think of for readers to post their writings here is for any who wish to to send me a comment anywhere on this blog that lets me clearly know you are offering your writing for a post.  I can then email the commenter back privately and they can send a word document back to me as an email attachment that I will then post.

This means that guest posts cannot contain complicated formatting that I cannot reproduce here.  Any photograph would have to come as an attachment also with instructions about where I should put it in the guest post once I have received it here.

The other option is for readers to create introductions to their own blog posts that can be sent to me in the same way I just mentioned that includes the active links to their own blog posts.

I hope readers will think about the possibilities I mention.  It is very clear to me today that ‘there is only so much of me’ and that ‘so much of me’ is going to be channeled into the answering of the 19 questions — first and foremost.

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My brain is very busy with a very rapidly running mind-chatter this morning that I haven’t experienced since I started this blog because I have freely allowed myself to use the blog to STOP IT.  I had a therapist one time describe these kinds of rapid overlapping and tumbling thought patterns as being ‘thought racing’, which they tied to depression.  This is so much more than that!!

But at this point for my writing to be productive towards the creation of an actual book I have to work with myself differently or no book will ever be written.

So, those of you who might be able to help me, this blog and readers out over these next 3 to 5 months — please think about what I mention here!  Much appreciation and thanks to you ALL!  I KNOW you have much to say — !!

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Today I completed my response to Question #1 of the 19 questions my daughter has designed for me to answer for the book about my story that she and I are writing.  I will take the rest of today off and she will send me #2 tomorrow.  I will then spend the following four days – 96 hours – letting myself inwardly prepare to respond to that question.

So far I am much impressed with how things went writing #1’s response, though there were agonizing moments during the process in which I thought, “I will not survive the writing of this book.  It will kill me.”

Perhaps that will prove to be true, but I do not care.  I will do whatever it takes over the next 3 – 5 months to complete my part of this mother-daughter writing project.

One surprising reward so far is that in contemplating in writing my #1 response (after spending my first 4 days dutifully NOT writing it) my brain recombined information in the answer that truly amazed me.  I asked myself how it was possible that I had never before SEEN what appeared to me so clearly as I wrote my response.

I have a friend who tells me that no doubt every single thing that has happened to me prior to this time along with all the hard work I have done in researching from the inside out, has fully prepared me for what I am doing now.  After my experience with #1 – I believe it.

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