Category: Alaska Homesteading

+IN THE (BIG ENOUGH) ABSENCE OF LOVE

alchemynow30 Comments

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The sun has set but it’s not dark yet.  The air is cooling with the nearing of fall in this 5000 ft elevation high desert small Mexican-American town where I live.  My old house sits right in the middle of the 10 trailers in this park on the border line.

There are at least fifteen children between the ages of 6 and 12 who live in this park out having a noisy joy-filled game of basketball.  Their hoop stands on the edge of the tarred street on its plastic base with crumbled cement blocks holding it down, pole at a little angle, but the backboard and hoop are at least stable enough that they can play and play and play.

It warms my heart to hear them.  It’s part of what I love about this humble place I live.  Everyone here is poor financially – but socially these children are loved – and they can play.

I know none of them probably remember and never think about the day months ago I took my wire cutters and a bunch of wire coat hangars with me to resurrect that basketball outfit the best that I could so at least the backboard didn’t flop all the way down when the pole stood up.  Until I did the repair the whole thing leaned pathetically against an old abandoned car in the nearby parking lot where it had been for months since a strong February wind had toppled it down.

I never played with free abandon as a child.  Abuse prevented that.  I have never played with free abandon as an adult, either.  That ability seems to have been removed from me by my experiences of severe trauma in this world.

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This leads me to my other comment.  I told a dear male friend of mine very clearly today – I felt he needed to know and that even at his age of 75 it is only now that, through 12 years of deep friendship with me, he is finally able to hear me and have a clue what I mean.

I told him, “I do not have the ability in me to EVER believe anyone loves me.  I don’t believe anyone when they tell me.  Even my children and my siblings understand this about me.  This is what happened to me by what was done to me when I was a child.”

He responded, “Your children know this?”

“Yes.”

I am not quite certain how to even express the depth of what I mean when I say this.  I have written here before that I lack the ability to ‘feel felt’ (Google search those terms).  From there I also lack the ability to FEEL what it feels like to be loved.  Knowing this fact, how COULD I believe someone loves me when I can’t ever FEEL that?

Then I got to thinking about my use of the world ‘believe’.  Do I mean I cannot TRUST anyone who tells me in any way that they love me?  Of course I never got trust built into me beginning before I was 2 months old – which is certainly the age an infant is when they begin to build trust or not-trust into their growing body-brain.

My mother was a dangerous predator to me from the moment I was born. No possibility of trust there.

I could trust my 14-month older brother.  He loved me.  But……

I have often also said that I suspect it was my attachment within the Alaskan wilderness and on our mountain homestead that allowed me to build enough love-attachment circuitry into myself that, along with the love my baby brother gave me, enabled me to love my children, to love those others I love.

But in thinking about this – my ‘relationship’ and my ‘attachment’ with the wilderness was NOT a give or take thing.  It was a ‘oneness’ thing, a ‘one-thing’ thing.  I had no separation between myself and the wholeness of the wilderness environment I loved with my entire being.

(See – *Age 15 – MY ‘VISION’ – ALONE NAKED IN THE WOODS SINGING)

But how can I ever trust what I cannot FEEL?

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I mention this in part because in considering what a terrible whiny abusive pathetic manipulative severely mentally ill human my mother was — even as a severe Borderline Personality Disorder human — underneath all the changes her body-brain went through in the midst of the neglect, abuse and trauma of her early years — in the end she DID NOT probably have the ability to feel loved, either.

But in her case her entire mental-illness-created reality conspired to permanently bar her from knowing this consciously.

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Over and over again we can ‘ask’ people for affirmation that they love us because we cannot FEEL what it feels like to be loved.  We can ask clearly in words and discuss our condition – as I was able to do today with my friend.

But most people probably are not consciously aware of this great, great wound that happened to them during the first months of life — in unsafe and insecure attachment conditions.  I believe the inability to FEEL LOVED is what broke my mother and drove her mad.

This is what the farthest end of the continuum of Trauma Altered Development, caused by failure of safe and secure early attachment primarily to the MOTHER, does to a person.  This is what happens to ‘evolutionarily altered’ people as Dr. Teicher describes:  They cannot FEEL WHAT IF FEELS LIKE TO BE LOVED.  That inability is built into their (my) body.

In cases like my mother’s, the patterns of her entire life, her reality, as spawned, created and perpetuated by her locked-in mental illness, in the end drove everyone away from her.  She was not so much, then, in desperate need of BEING LOVED.  She was desperate because she NEEDED to be loved — and never could FEEL LOVED — without knowing this consciously – EVER.

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In considering the 43 points in this post

+DID MY MOTHER SUFFER FROM BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER (BPD)? (this is eerie)

I think about this one, and about how it is worded –

(5) – Have a hard time recalling someone’s love for them when they’re not around?

Feeling this way DOES NOT make a person Borderline!  Feeling this way happens because of very or completely failed early attachment – mostly with the mother – during the earliest months of life.  That these kinds of malevolent environments usually guarantee that all kinds of neglect and trauma and abuse remain in the little one’s life just adds ‘insult to injury’.

How can we ‘recall’ that a person loves us when we lack the physiological ability to FEEL loved in our body – fundamentally and permanently?

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Does my friend really comprehend the reality and the tragedy of what I expressed so matter-of-factly to him today?

If not, this will come up again.  It has to.  Talking about this, naming it, verbalizing it, communicating it as a fact — like a person would say “I can’t hear you because I am deaf” or “I cannot see you because I am blind” is the ONLY way I can think of to keep the tendency of communicating the needs that underlie this state — as they stem from the physiological inability to FEEL LOVED —  from creating repeating and very troublesome trauma drama in a person’s life.

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+FIRST LANGUAGE

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I have mentioned this previously – something people who work with horses call ‘looking with soft eyes’.  I wrote this post while sitting outside this morning and simply copy it now into a post.  This was written with ‘soft eyes’ – meaning that I did not look directly at the topic I wrote about, but rather softened my inner gaze in such a way that some kind of inner truth of mine could appear in the following words – or so I hope!

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It is possible for an infant to be born into a universe where ‘seldom is heard’ a word that sounds to an infant like a word most would recognize as being a human one.

What is a human word, anyway?

I can add one single letter to that word and PRESTO!  Most will instantly know what I am talking about — as the word human becomes humane.

Ah-Ha!  Mystery solved?

Human language uses words themselves as if they exist as entities of substance that are real to us because when we know some particular language we recognize those words because we know the MEANING of them.

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We all know or can clearly imagine how different and difficult language use becomes when people are forced to communicate when the words of one another’s spoken language is equally foreign to each person.

Assuming the subject matter is important enough that these people are forced to continue trying to communicate, what happens?  All the usually less obvious elements of language come into blatant play — exaggerated facial expressions, extremes of tone, rhythm, prosody (the music of language), gesturing and body movements.  These instantly cease from being the hidden aspects of language as they become the only means possible for conveying, for SIGNALING from one person to another what is being said — beyond words.

This kind of communication is our human older way of communicating.  We knew this language well earlier than 140,000 years ago when our species began to use words in the first place.  And we knew this kind of communication as our FIRST communication within the womb of our mother right through our birth and on into the first months and years of our life.  Once we learn to share word language these other aspects of language usually seem to fade so far into the background we rarely detect them consciously at all.

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There are links below to blog posts here about verbal abuse and why it is so damaging to both the direct target of the attacks and to those infants and children who are forced to overhear it.  Verbal abuse changes the way the brain, nervous system and body form during our earliest most important critical stages of physiological growth and development.

Those of us born into a universe filled with trauma, terrorism and vicious tyranny had our communication needs virtually unmet.  No matter what literal ‘language in words’ we eventually learned to speak and to understand, the underlying patterns of signalling back and forth between people did not develop normally within us.  We are, therefore, at a permanent disadvantage because the language we do know is not fundamentally connected to a language most people on earth actually know.

(While there is much suffering and trauma on this earth it is specifically the most permanently damaging trauma a mother can cause her infant from conception to age two — which includes her failure to protect her infant from harm from others for whatever reasons that I am talking about here.   A mother’s state of health and well-being is determined to the largest extent by the conditions of societal forces which influence/d her.  She in turn communicates societal conditions to her infant.)

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While it is of course true that everyone has their own unique experiences since conception, most people’s early experiences fall within the boundaries of ‘ordinary’.  Trauma is by definition outside the range of ‘ordinary’.  It is the continual repeated experience while very young of developing as a person — which absolutely includes how we develop ALL the patterns of language use — in the midst of ongoing trauma, terror and tyranny that creates some permanent disconnections and altered connections related to our ability to express our self and to comprehend other people’s language.

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More ‘ordinarily created’ people will usually expect that early trauma survivors are ALSO ordinary people.  Yet I suspect on fundamental levels we all know that when survivors are in communication there IS something very different going on.  We are, in effect, shouting across a great divide — and much of what is not literally carried in words, AS words, never gets transmitted across the vast space that exists between our worlds.

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On the most basic and obvious level we can detect that these missed-communication connections are happening because we feel LONELY.  We are fundamentally alone!  That’s what our traumatic, terrorizing, tyrannical early experiences were all about in the first place.  Yes, there we were in a monstrous world without the safety and security of humane attachments.

Yes, we survived, but there has been a price to pay for doing so on every level of our being.

My newest grandson is now four weeks old.  Although I won’t physically meet him for another ten days when I travel 1700 miles north from where I live, I know my daughter.  She is ably, with absolute love, attending to her newborn’s every signal of communication — and she is responding in understanding to meet his needs.

These human and humane patterns of communication are building the entire body-brain of my newest grandson as his entire body-brain-self responds to the safe and secure attachment he has not only with his mother, but also with the entire universe he has been born into.  What he is experiencing now will determine how he lives the rest of his life because he is building the only body-brain he has to live in and with as long as he’s on this earth.

He is learning the language of his world.  He will share this language with all human beings around the globe that are being formed in a healthy, safe and secure attachment early universe.

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I am one example of being a being formed in an ‘opposite’ universe where extreme mental illness and psychotic abuse was present in my mother toward me from the instant I took my first breath.  I can recognize what a different experience from mine my grandson’s journey through life is and will be.

He will live among a gathering of people for whom ordinary communication can happen because his entire formation as a person is preparing him to be a fully MODERN member of his species.

People like me, however, are formally related in our physiology to those of our species who were formed in a hostile universe where threat and danger ruled the world.  We are among those people Dr. Martin Teicher and his Harvard research group refer to as being ‘evolutionarily altered’.  (see link below)

We belong to the ‘old ways’ of our species.  My grandsons both belong to the ‘new ways’ of our species.  The most critically important determining factor that sends a newly born person off in their development in one direction or the other is the degree of health and total well-being of its MOTHER.

No matter who else is involved with the early care of an infant during its first two years of life (early critical developmental years) — it remains a mother’s primary ability to forge and to guarantee the safe and secure attachment of her infant TO HER that matters most.

For mothers such as my daughter is, who will be returning to full-time employment when her baby is six weeks old, making sure her son continues to be in safe and secure attachment communication and care while she is away from him becomes an extension of her own role in her infant’s life.  The mother-infant attachment always remains primary, and it is a terrific job to ensure that an infant’s fullest needs are met.

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Those of us born into a malevolent world just plain missed safe and secure attachment to our mother and hence to the world.  Our development was forced to turn in the obvious direction I have just described.

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It is beyond the scope of this post to discuss how I, as my daughter’s mother, was able to make certain that her early needs were met in such a way as to enable and allow her to become the most excellent mother that she is.  The simplest description of how this happened is this:

Every instant of my early life I was forced to live, grow and develop in reaction to my insanely abusive mother.  Yet at the same time I never left my own central core of my self.  My core self did not wander away to become lost, no matter what Mother did to me.

In some way I was protected by the frequency and severity of her abuse.  I continually had to react to her – from birth – while at the same time I was always busy finding a way to not only survive but to return ‘up right’ – no matter what Mother did to ‘tip me over’.

In truth only two things happened for me within my early environment of extreme trauma (that did last the first 18 years of my life):  Mother ‘abused’ me AND I reacted.

However, every time I reacted to endure and survive what Mother did to me – as an integral part of my life process there was ALWAYS a point in time when I returned to my own inner core state of central balance — MY OWN SELF.  From there I was always forced yet AGAIN to endure another trauma – to react to survive it – and to again return to my own central core self-state as part of this ongoing cyclic process.

This pattern of reacting and responding to external sources of ‘stimulation’ and my return to self-center meant that when my children were born I was exquisitely built in such a way that I could react-respond to the signals they sent out to me.

In essence I had been built from birth to react-respond not to what I had accumulated of a complicated self, but rather to react-respond to external sources from a clear core place of self inside ME — to OTHERS.

I had always been forced from birth to react-respond adequately and appropriately to the ‘lead’ of my mother.  I had no choice if I was going to remain alive.

The process was FOR ME identical.  Once my children were born I was able to react-respond adequately and appropriately to the signals sent to me by my children.  My children led the way – I was able to allow them to do what they did naturally – attach to me.

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Human beings are designed to adapt to the context of the world they are born into (all the way down to how our DNA manifests and operates).  Our language abilities (and dis-abilities) are built into us by our interactions within and with this context.

In closing I will mention a phrase whose meaning few people are prepared to understand:

“There is more than one way to skin a cat!”

Say, WHAT?

No matter what visions of meaning and intent this statement might trigger in readers, because of my unique exposure to being raised as a child of Alaskan mountainside homesteading parents I know the meaning of these particular words because I know their context.

The people (always men as far as I knew) who ‘skinned’ the surface of Alaska’s virgin earth as they cleared timber, forged roads and created homesteaders’ fields drove massive Caterpillar tractors (with treads).  These men were known as ‘cat skinners’.

The deep thundering, throbbing, pulsating roaring growl of these ‘cats’ at their grinding, crunching, crushing work echoed through the valley and across the mountains of our home.  However, when the cats became silent it was often the case that the cat skinner was looking for ‘another way to skin the cat’.  No matter what obstacle appeared the skinners were always confident that a way could be found to solve the problem and to finish the job right.

I grew up in such a context.  No matter what obstacles arose in my life as a child I found my own way past them ‘to get the job done right’.  I knew no other choice.

No matter what kind of a world a person was born into I doubt anyone can ask for more than this.

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*SYMTPOMS: 120909 Scan of Teicher’s Research – Trauma Altered Development Paper

VERBAL ABUSE LINKS HERE:

+LINKS – PREVERBAL COMMUNICATION and DEVELOPMENT (RISK FACTORS, INFANT ABUSE)

+SOME PRIMARY LINKS ON INFANT VERBAL ABUSE

+A LONG, THOUGHTFUL LOOK AT VERBAL ABUSE AS MALIGNANT TEASING

+WORDS DO NOT MEAN SOCIAL CONNECTION TO ME – THEY ARE OBJECT-TOOLS-WEAPONS

+SCIENCE ON THE SIDE OF MUSIC THERAPY

+SOME MORE INFO ON MUSIC, VOICE AND THE BRAIN

+THE ‘TERROR-ABLE’ CONSEQUENCES OF INFANT-CHILDHOOD VERBAL ABUSE

+HOP! HOP! THE BLOG FROG’S PICK OF PAST POSTS

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+NO REAL CHOICE: WE HAVE TO UNDERSTAND OUR DEVELOPMENTAL CHANGES FROM INFANT-CHILD ABUSE – NOW!

+SCHORE ON BRAIN AND NERVOUS SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT

++SCHORE ON DEVELOPMENT OF RIGHT BRAIN

*Attachment Simplified – Still More Complicated Information Including ‘Feeling Felt’ and ‘Healing in Solitude’

+SIEGEL ON DEVELOPING CHILD’S BRAIN – ATTACHMENT

**DAMASIO ON CONSCIOUSNESS

**DAMASIO ON CORE CONSCIOUSNESS

+WHAT SETS ASIDE A BORDERLINE PARENT’S CHILD ABUSE AS ‘DIFFERENT’?

+BORN AS A COMPONENT OF A BORDERLINE MOTHER’S MIND-LIE

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+ABUSE AND TRAUMA SURVIVORS: AMONG THE LESS DELUDED?

alchemynow1 Comment

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As I wrote in response to one of the fantastic comments to posts that arrived on this blog today, I woke this morning feeling blue.  The comments so greatly relieved the weight of my ‘blueness’ – partly, of course, because of the gentle integrity and dignity, of the honesty, openness and wisdom contained in the commenters’ words – but also because responding to their words greatly helped me to see in part what is going on with me on this rich and beautiful day.

In writing about Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) AND Disorganized-Disoriented (DD) Insecure Attachment Disorder I am drawing my lines of thought very close to the source of how I experience the world.

I so DID NOT experience anything from birth onward and through the next of my 18 abusive years of childhood that could have allowed me to BE safe and secure in the world I could not, therefore, build within my developing body-brain any of the ‘usual’ kinds of circuitry and pathways that would let me know NOW that I am safe and secure in the world.

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Here briefly I will mention another tangent thread of discussion that has originated on facebook with a friend there concerning alterations in our environment that this friend believes are contributing to the fact that research shows that at least 71% of American suffer from troubles stemming from chronic sleep problems.

This friend believes these difficulties are greatly influenced by “endocrine disruptors” polluting our environment.

I was then reminded of an awareness given to me both by the dream I recently had and posted about and from my ponderings of it:

+LAST NIGHT’S UNUSUAL DREAM

The dream (as I believe I mentioned in a comment to that post) seemed to speak of a time perhaps 10,000 years in the future – when the earth IS HEALED!

The contrast between the pervasive awareness of total pure HEALTH of the earth in every way was obvious to me in the dream in contrast to the ‘invisible sickness’ of the planet now that we are so familiar with, so used to, so acceptant of – that we do not see the sickness that permeates every corner and cell of life here on earth now — including US!

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Then I think about the RAD and DD insecurely attached severe early abuse survivors – and I am then drawn to conclude (a bit radically, perhaps) that we are perhaps among the HEALTHIEST people on earth because we are more closely experiencing the TRUTH of what is really happening on this earth right now.

We KNOW the sickness!  And it both contributed to the adjustments our body had to make on every level to survive hell – and built itself into our body through our responses to extreme traumatic stress.  (All I say also applies to anyone who has suffered from traumas well beyond what ‘ordinary’ people have.)

We do not delude ourselves because we CANNOT!  We do not participate in the ‘group delusion’ that all is simply OK in the world – that all could be safely and securely attached to life here on earth if they simply chose to be!

We do not pretend.  We are not phony.  We live every millisecond of our life knowing that there are many things about living on earth that are terribly, terribly wrong.

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Part of the mix-up that leaves we survivors so troubled as we try to get by in a deluded sick world is that we KNOW and remember in our body itself that there is much to be done by EVERYONE on this earth to heal it — and that includes everything about human social community.  We ARE a social species.

What happened to me and to you happened not only because there was an opening for someone to attack us — but mostly it happened because there was NOBODY there to protect us!

If we think realistically – being a social species MEANS by definition that we are all responsible and accountable for everything that happens to everyone (all life here) – because we CAN be.

Or not.

Depending on what we choose.

Now, I found myself referring to general public as stupid yesterday.  I correct myself.  Not stupid.  Consistently and pervasively IGNORANT is more accurate.  There is no cure for what ails us personally, socially or globally BUT education – and from there, we need the will and the volition to ACT to better everything we possibly can.

We as a species were never created to be passive.  We have great potential.  We have an obligation to become accountable for all that lies within the range of what our potential can and does accomplish – both good and bad. We will wake up, one way or another, ALL OF US, at some point in time and know this.  Then what will we do?

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While I might awaken feeling blue on the day after our first seasonal rain because I have lost the organizing and orienting ability to take my power tools outside to do some more work on my building projects in my yard – which keep me grounded and focused and allow me to stay on the outskirts of my own personal huge and hugely dark troubling clouds that have surrounded me from the first breath I took in this world — I am also free to comprehend that this entire planet is suffering – I am not alone nor are other severe early abuse survivors alone when it comes to wrestling with the consequences of trauma.

It’s just that we are not fooled.  We are not deluded.  There IS MUCH wrong in the world.  I am not saying to drown in the sickness – I am saying that perhaps our well-honed and undeniable awareness that it exists just might put us among the less illusion-that-the-world-is-healthy polluted members of our species.

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+CHAOS AND BUTTERFLIES: WHAT BROKE MY BPD MOTHER?

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There is no known answer for my question, “What made Mother a Borderline?”  Yet I still ask this question because I believe the answer DOES exist.

I have lived long enough now at age 60 to be able to say Mother’s abuse of me took place during less than one-third of my lifespan.  But for those who have been severely traumatized by outrageous abuse, we know that 18 years of being terrorized daily is a LONG long time.

My Mother’s specific psychosis regarding me as the devil’s child happened during her labor with me.  Her Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) existed, I believe, a long time before that day in August of 1951.

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NOTE:  WordPress introduced a formatting error here (below) that I cannot correct – hence the all-BOLD type!

+MY MOTHER’S CHILDHOOD STORIES

I believe as I have said many times before that the signs of Mother’s later terrible BPD disease already existed by the time she was ten years old and writing the stories at this link.

I have also said many times that during Mother’s stage of what is called ‘Theory of Mind (TOM)’ development, life had already overwhelmed her.

Mother was very actively engaged as she wrote her stories in understanding how minds worked – and how people (or animals, or towels!) acted in response to what was known about the world.  In fact, her stories describe multiple and complex layers and levels of interactions involving TOM.

So much of how/who people are in the world seems to be taken so much for granted.  And yet when things go as terribly wrong as they did for Mother, it can prove a fertile field of understanding about BPD to investigate closely how her mind was already showing signs of deep trouble in her childhood.

Mother was presented with too much complex information – and presented with both traumatic information and erroneous explanations as her writing in my last post presents.  Nobody was honest in Mother’s childhood.  How could she develop a TOM that included honesty at her own young age?

Check out this video on Chaos Theory and the Butterfly Effect

Who is to say what broke Mother?  No, life is NOT linear.  Yet while I cannot know what broke Mother – and turned her into a raging abusive monster – I know it happened because of events that happened before she wrote her stories – long before I was born.

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+SOLILOQUY – WHEN WORDS FAIL ME

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A friend on Facebook kindly posted this to me this morning.  Somewhere in all these following words is a kernel of truth I am having a very difficult time grasping and articulating in my book writing.  This difficulty has brought me to my proverbial knees.  I doubt Emerson’s talent ever allowed him to become overwhelmed by words.  But, then, much of what overwhelms me is that my reality when I was so small was so hurtful — AND overwhelming.  Trying to find the grown-up ‘place’ inside to write of these things is not an easy task.

(Related to post and comments here:  *Age 15 – MY ‘VISION’ – ALONE NAKED IN THE WOODS SINGING)

I am grateful for my Friend who posted this for me this morning:

“”Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and particle of God.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson”

My soliloquy in response:

I know that feeling. I was that eye-ball until I left home at 18. It’s too strange, though, to never have had any egotism in the first place because it was not possible through abuse — but your words here comfort me. They really do. That was me THEN “I am nothing” but it was so ‘not normal’ –

Just like a camera lens, that is what I identify about myself looking backward

An infant is born that way, full of potential for interactions with humans and life — This is exactly where I am ‘stuck’ right now – for all the memories I have always kept of being attacked, the 1st one in the crib, the first terrible beating when I was 20 months old — the potential for attack constant — as I have looked back into MYSELF — I — ME myself and I — was in this state Emerson described at my core every time it happened. I am at a loss at present to ‘talk’ about this – so have no idea how my book of the 1st ten years of my life (the other 8 being left for another one) can truly be written to communicate this fact.

I knew at my core nothing that happened to me had anything to do with me. At my core I was not emotionally involved. Yes, I physically suffered. Yes I was sad and hurting and scared. It is all very strange

In human terms it is a crime past words to remove from a human being, from a child, the right to develop the opportunity to make one’s own choice and decision to RETURN to this state.

Yet now, at 60, I have in the end achieved this end nonetheless! But I have different memories of how I got here, and a whole lot of questions. In the end I can see what happened to me only as a gift beyond mention, beyond words — because it is beyond most human comprehension and I can think only of words related to spirituality to describe it.

Once my parents moved us to Alaska when I was 5, once they found the mountain homestead, I was placed in the womb of the world in that wilderness, and in my remote places I thrived. Yet building a bridge and crossing it into this ‘regular’ world has never happened ‘rightly’ – strains of autism is all I know of to suggest the actual changes in body-brain physiology that occur to a developing infant-child as a result of not being allowed to ‘grow into the world’ as Thomas Moore describes in his book “Care of the Soul”

Coming into the world backwards – it was my breech birthing that triggered the whole mess in Mother’s mind as she believed she was dying and the devil was coming to get her, in the form of me. Backwards into the world I came and slid those first 18 years. I believe most normal adults know being human and fake remembrance of the world of origins. The rest of us abused from birth spend our lives faking our feelings and belief that we know what being human is.

I was thus enabled to witness the signs of God reflected in all of His creation — I just missed the part of being able to see those signs reflected in the most important of His creations — humankind.

Where I first began to witness the perfections in humankind was in the mirrors of my own children.

Now, the challenge: To learn to witness those signs reflected in my own self and in every other human being……

Difficult, having first witnessed the depths of evil in those who raised me.

From my earliest memories until I left home at 18 I knew 3 things. Two of these I knew without words and therefore without thought: The natural world was TRUE and it was PERFECT. I observed both unequivocally. The third I knew on that level PLUS I knew it with words and therefore in thought: It was greatly BEAUTIFUL. I was able, therefore, by the time I was very small able to see that beauty in many places besides ‘out in nature’.

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Answers to many questions – found at this post: 

+HOP! HOP! THE BLOG FROG’S PICK OF PAST POSTS

I need to return to the book writing!!  Lots to read at this link above in the meantime!!!!

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+CHILD ABUSE SURVIVORS CAN’T NATURALLY KNOW WHOSE PAIN IS WHOSE

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How does empathy, compassion and altruism interconnect in the human experience toward the end of increasing well-being for all?  This link I am including here follows to the best research description I have found about what empathy is and how it is supposed to operate in humans beginning very early in life.  Adult attachment experts say that among those of us who suffered from unsafe and insecure caregiver attachments during our first year of life (true for about half of our population) we all have a resulting ‘empathy disorder’ along with some variation of an attachment disorder.

In this article the authors described research among preschoolers that shows how this combination of insecure attachment from early relationship traumas impacts a very young child’s experience with empathy among others.  I read this and added my comments four years ago:

*Empathy preschoolers

Empathy is a power humans have to experience within their body-brain patterns of information processing that allow us to know even without words what another person is feeling.  Early experiences of relationships with caregivers who do not have healthy empathy abilities due to their own Trauma Altered Development lack the capacity to share-mirror-resonate with their young offspring.  This domino effect will be seen in the young children who will then lack healthy empathy abilities in their own-body brain.

Healthy empathy does not allow for contamination of someone else’s feeling state with our own.  There is supposed to be a health-promoting boundary between people so that we know the difference VERY CLEARLY between another’s suffering and our own.

I now recognize that the feelings I have in connection to the people of all ages that are suffering through the effects of the terrible fires in Bastrop County, Texas is NOT coming from a healthy ability to empathize with those people.  The fires, which have been burning for days now, are only about 30% contained.  Over 550 homes have been burned to cinders, and many pets and livestock animals have been killed.  Although there are millions of people suffering on this planet (and the planet is suffering as well), my sister and her family live in that county.  Although their home has been spared so far, my heartfelt attention is turned to their neighbors who are suffering.

But what I feel is NOT TRUE EMPATHY.  Because of the severe infant-child abuse I suffered while my body-brain was growing and developing I will NEVER be able to experience healthy, true empathy.

It is important for me to realize this, and to realize that experiences of empathy are connected to but different from both the experience of compassion (which is deeply tied into the vagus nerve system and the calm-connection end of the stress response system) and the experience of altruism.

Yes, the development of my vagus nerve, autonomic nervous system and my central nervous system were also altered in their development in response to severe child abuse trauma.  But empathy itself begins to form itself directly into the earliest forming right-limbic-social-emotional brain of an infant through its interactions with its earliest caregivers from birth.  These patterns are deeply connected to the ability to grow and recognize one’s own self in relationship to other members of its social species – through the presence or absence of true empathy in an infant’s significant others.

There is no magic wand here.  What happens to build our earliest body-brain before the age of one determines the later patterning of our experiences for the rest of our lives.  Those of us who suffered severe maltreatment and trauma during our earliest years need to be able to recognize that when we become UPSET at injustice and pain of any kind that others are experiencing – what we know of their suffering is contaminated with our own suffering.

That is just a fact.

We can still recognize our compassionate response.  We can still obviously act in altruistic ways.  But we need to be able to focus on sorting out our emotional reactions to other people’s suffering in ways that safe and securely attached people who will always be experiencing healthy, true empathy will never have to.  Our clarity on the emotional boundaries between our self and others will not be innately clear to us.  We have to WORK for this clarity!  Please read the information at the link I posted above to see how this is true even from the age of preschool.

If early trauma survivors do not do this extra work to honestly find out “Who and what am I feeling my pain for and about?” we are playing in the wrong sandbox.  Being honestly concerned for other people’s (and animals’) well-being happens when we can leave our own suffering for our own self out of the picture.

If we don’t do this work we will not be able to tell the difference between our feelings FOR OUR OWN SELF and our feelings for life outside of our own body-self.  For severe abuse survivors this will be a lifelong effort.

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These are also some related posts on this blog:

+WHY DID MY SIBLINGS NOT BELIEVE MY ABUSIVE BPD MOTHER?

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+PITY HURTS, COMPASSION HEALS: KNOWING THE DIFFERENCE

*Keltner (2009) chapter on compassion

+GENUINE EMPATHY AND COMPASSION: THE ROLE OF ATTACHMENT AND ‘EFFORTFUL CONTROL’

+LINKS – VAGUS NERVE – ABUSE- HEALING

+CALM THE CRYING BABY — IMMUNE SYSTEM STIMULATES VAGUS NERVE TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT

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+WHAT HEALED ME: AS FATHER MADE THE HOMESTEAD FIELDS

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Oh, how I remember my father perched on the bouncing seat of his small yellow Oliver OC-3 caterpillar tractor, pushing and pulling levers as he cleared the first of our Alaskan mountainside homestead fields closest to our canvas Jamesway hut.  Never idling, the motor varied in tone, pushing and heaving, shoving ahead of its flat blade living growth with earth attached that turned and churned and rolled into long heaping lines of windrows along the edges and down the center of the newly bared fields.

I played joyfully, climbing on them as they grew, exploring caves hollowed under tree trunks and branches and tangles of roots holding the earth together in gigantic clump bridges over my head.  I found winding hallways, rooms and chambers I could crawl around in, sometimes sit in, and sometimes stand in, inside earth herself.

So sticky sweet the rich dark smell of that damp earth!  It consumed me, entering the pores of my skin, becoming a part of my blood, my flesh and my bones.  I tasted it.  I breathed in the scent of that pure earth and exhaled it out again.  I grew as I tasted it, not a taste from outside of me, but an inner taste as if my own insides had those same hallowed hollow spaces dripping with this black living earthy smell.

Before these days I had never experienced the rapture of a mother’s kind embrace.  Now I was as a newly born infant again.  I had no resistance to the ecstasy of this welcoming earth being offered to me.  As I played there was no past or future; only a continuing blissful present filled with sensual exploration and dirty delights.  Not a giddy joy with a beginning, middle or end.  No, this was eternal.  I was given and I received a permanent sense of rightful belonging.  Not transitory.  Not anything that could be removed from me by distance in time or space or that could evaporate or wash off or out of me.

Although of course I had no words to use back then in thoughts about this.  To me I smelled, tasted, touched and was touched by the essential source of life and love.  Over fifty years later I can feel the effects of this pure joy.  Climbing inside those freshly sculpted windrows changed me forever and healed me like few ever get to – or need to be.

Could a child, who was loved and happy before such an opportunity for transformation took place, ever feel that sustaining power of earth and respond to it as I did?  Could a child never as lost as I was ever feel so found?  I was being born in my play during those days when I was seven.  I was old enough to remember.  This vast goodness has never let me go and will not until the day my body returns again to that sweet, sweet smell of earth.

Sad at seven - the mountain healed me in ways that did not show

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+THE U.N. ON GLOBAL REPORTING — CHILD RIGHTS VIOLATIONS

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Child Rights at the Human Rights Council

Latest developments

Complaints Mechanism

The Council adopted the final draft Optional Protocol on a communications procedure for children’s rights violations. The new protocol will enable the Committee on the Rights of the Child to examine communications from children and their representatives alleging violations of their rights.

For further information on the adoption, together with NGOs’ response and what it means for children’s rights:


Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

In a groundbreaking achievement for upholding the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the United Nations Human Rights Council (the Council) passed a resolution on human rights violations based on sexual orientation and gender identity. (L9/rev1).

It is the first UN resolution ever to bring specific focus to human rights violations based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and affirms the universality of human rights, as well as drawing on concerns about acts of violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

International Service for Human Rights (ISHR) said the commitment of the Human Rights Council sends an important signal of support to human rights defenders working on these issues, and recognises the legitimacy of their work.

What next?

A study, to be completed by December 2011, will both document discriminatory laws, practises and acts of violence against individuals all over the world based on their sexual orientation and gender identity, and assess how international human rights law could be used to end violence and related human rights violations based on sexual orientation gender identity.

Based on the study, a panel discussion will take place during the 19th session of the Council.


Business and Human Rights

On 16 June, the Council endorsed a new set of Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights designed to provide – for the first time – a global standard for preventing and addressing the risk of adverse impacts on human rights linked to business activity.

NGO criticism

The Guiding Principles were criticised by many NGOs, with Arvind Ganesan, business and human rights director at Human Rights Watch, saying: “In effect, the council endorsed the status quo: a world where companies are encouraged, but not obliged, to respect human rights. Guidance isn’t enough – we need a mechanism to scrutinize how companies and governments apply these principles.”

CRIN also criticised the Guiding Principles, lamenting the absence of children’s rights. “We cannot see how the adopted Principles are consonant with the ‘special attention’ envisioned for children in the Special Representative’s mandate”, CRIN stated.

“Given this failure, we now call on those responsible for monitoring and implementing the Principles to revisit the issue of business and children’s rights and ensure that the newly adopted Principles in practice genuinely respect children’s rights, fully address children’s unique vulnerability, and provide thorough and thoughtful direction on the subject of business and children’s rights to States and business enterprises alike.”

What next?

A Working Group will be established, consisting of five independent experts with a balanced geographical representation. The experts, who will take on the role for a period of three years, will be appointed at the 18th session of the Human Rights Council in September.

READ MORE HERE

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+DO YOU KNOW THIS FEELING?

alchemynow8 Comments

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On this feeling

Far Far Away

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I suppose when it comes upon humans (in American culture) we call it depression or sadness or loneliness.

Because I began to know it when I was born I know it is very old — primary — ancient.

Nature thrives on this feeling — not needing humans (as we do as members of a social species).

Humans fear this feeling.  Being alone as we evolved meant death.

Huddle together

Use fire — keep it away

Wide empty spaces know it

Whirling strong winds know it

Wolves know it and sing it and humans run away

Group together in towns and cities

Humans want to forget this feeling exists — or ever did.

I was formed in it.  Trapped in it.  Lost in it as if lost in the twilight of time itself.

I always hope someone will find me there — not to rescue me.  Just to make contact that I can feel.

Sometimes I meet people and I feel contacted, connected.  Something happens and I know this was a mirage, not real — and it is gone again.

This feeling has a sound

Far Far Away — like feeling creation, infinity as it is happening.

All things and no things combined.

It comes with every snow flake falling.

Do you know this sound?

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+EARLY ABUSE BUILT US A BODY DESIGNED FOR THE LONG, HARD HAUL THROUGH LIFE

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Having just mentioned metaphors as being useful ways the brain (particularly the right brain) has to consider and process information, I remembered this picture I just discovered yesterday.

My mother took this picture around 1960 during our family’s early Alaskan homesteading years.

Written on the back of the photograph: “See the mud spattering up — it is dark here in the woods and picture doesn’t show up the MUCK [underlined]”

Most of these photographs survived a major fire in the 1980s so the white area in the lower picture is a result of that damage.  I never knew this picture existed until yesterday, and I found it a useful addition to my metaphor thinking about how early trauma changes the development of an infant-child’s body-nervous system-brain.

What those of us with serious insecure attachment ‘disorders’ experience — as related to the physiological changes that complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) causes, is a body that cannot turn off it’s fight-flight-flee-freeze stress response.

When I think of this, I ‘hear’ the low growl of a hard-working machine trying to get us through life in a world that our body was designed to believe would ALWAYS be a dangerous one to our survival.

I know this growl because I heard it growing up on the side of an Alaskan mountain after I was seven as tractors often were heard working hard to either build roads or to repair them.

What our mountainside had was a ‘mountain marsh’ caused by water that ran underground but near to the soil surface.  Once the intricate network of tree and shrub roots that held the soil in place were cut through for road building, the mountainside continually oozed its water — creating in winter massive living glaciers that filled the roads and crawled down the mountain.

In break-up the glaciers melted and created deep ruts that were actually mountain creeks as the water ran down the easiest pathways it could find headed toward the valley below.  Except in the dead of winter, the common denominator for the entire road nightmare was MUD — what my mother is calling here MUCK.

Horrific infant-childhoods tell a little one’s growing and developing body to prepare for a lifetime of the worst.  We only have this one time in our life to grow some of the most profoundly important parts of our body.  Once our adaptations to an early malevolent environment take place, they cannot be undone ‘down the road’ or ‘later on’.  We live with them.

So, in effect I have a body-nervous system built in and designed for a very hard road through life — for one not unlike the road my father was trying to crawl over with his tractor in this picture.

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Another picture I have scanned from this era of my childhood comes to mind, and it represents another metaphor of high risk for severe child abuse survivors — that of BEING STUCK along the way.

I really have the advantage of knowing first hand what stuck looks like!

Always running in low working gear, always trying to negotiate a tough, rough road through life, always prepared for the worst, always at risk for danger, frequently getting stuck and needing to find our way out again — all these experiences are part of severe infant-child abuse survivorship.

All these ways of being in the world are built into our body, and all of it consumes vast amount of our inner resources and life force throughout our lifespan.  If we wonder as adults why we can’t reach some pie-in-the-sky level of so-called ‘recovery’ so that we can be more like other people who had entirely different, benevolent early years that gave them a different body entirely, think about all of this.

I’m not saying that improvements can’t be made for us in our lives toward increased well-being — but first, we need to KNOW what happened to us where it matters most.

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