Category: Borderline Personality Disorder

+THE JOY OF SAYING ‘NOPE’ TO OPRAH

alchemynow13 Comments

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“Well, tickle me pink!”  I have no idea what the history of that cliche is, but it comes to mind as I entertain myself with a little humor, Linda style.  I give myself full permission to access anything that I can use to prepare for my next task — and to accomplish it — with great success!

I have (literally) a hell of a story to tell.  I am not alone in this.  Anyone who has suffered abuse in life has the same kind of story to tell, but it is those of us who were raised from birth (and perhaps from conception) within the earliest possible truly malevolent environments that have the worst stories to tell.

Not that there is some sort of new-fangled “GONG” show especially for people who want to march up to some television stage and compete for “Who has the very worst infant-child abuse story to tell” kind of prize.  But there ARE critical differences in the long term consequences of differing kinds of early abuse.

A week or so ago during my conversation with my friend I was having lunch with the topic of Oprah came up.  “Oh,” my friend said.  “I heard that now Oprah passed 50 she has decided to let her abusers go.”

“Well, I’ll be horn swaggled,” I think to myself.  Not THE great and powerful Oprah?  Such a public example of the “should do” for all other infant-child abuse survivors.

I’ve never been an Oprah fan.  That could be because I am not a personal fan of either television or magazines.  But in the last week that I have been sitting in an office taking care of its business so my friend could take her vacation I have honed my anti-Oprah insights.

Now, I can in part thank my daughter for this.  She is a very busy professional woman with a marriage and new baby to tend to.  She hasn’t much time left over for one of her simple pleasures:  Making gorgeous, creative, stunningly artistic switchplate covers out of collage.  So I am taking advantage of the quiet time I have at the office to cut apart magazines and prepare a delicious palette of tiny images for my daughter to work with should she ever find the time to sit down and make some of her designs.

In this process I found a pile of ‘used’ Oprah magazines at our local thrift store.  This is the first time I have ever opened one of those magazines — and quite frankly what I found inside appalled me though it did not surprise me.  For all the rumors in the wind I have heard about the ‘do good’ doings of this most-rich woman in America’s spotlight I found nothing in that magazine but continued promotion of the ‘be gorgeous’ make believe woman image in VERY expensive advertising.

Putting aside what I might think about anyone who devotes an entire magazine to their self, and putting aside what I think of anyone with that kind of money who doesn’t avidly reinvest it on the level of ‘who truly needs what for a better life’ down at the bottom of America’s society, I have to be honest and tell you that my motivation for writing a hell of a book with my hell of a childhood story of abuse in it is entirely (self) motivated by my not being responded to on Oprah’s website when I left two separate emails mentioning my story.

No response then, no response ever as far as I am concerned.  I can’t think of anything more delightful than for me to actually write a bestseller that attracts someone of Oprah’s staff, who then invites me onto the Oprah show — so that I can utter back one word and one word only:  Nope.

Now maybe if they were holding my grandson hostage I MIGHT not say “Nope,” but as that’s unlikely I am quite certain there is nothing, absolutely nothing on this blue and green earth of ours that could drag me anywhere near that woman.

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My point being — I can guarantee that no matter what abuse of what kind Oprah experienced during her childhood years, someone loved her — and someone from the instant she was born provided her with safe and secure attachment.

And I WILL be the one to say this:  That is all that really matters.

Without having safe and secure earliest caregiver interactions nobody’s body-nervous system-brain can grow a safe and secure attachment pattern in it.  Without these patterns, there is nothing EVER to be done about truly leaving one’s abuser(s) in the past.  The changes (the damage) is IN THE BODY of early abuse survivors because it was built in during development.

Now, I honestly don’t care one bit what Oprah’s abuse history is.  But I will bet everything I own (inventory sight unseen for any takers) that someone was there to help Oprah’s body-brain-mind-self form correctly during the first year (ESPECIALLY!) of her life.  Once that happens, every other trauma a person experiences for the rest of their lifetime will be processed in a different way than it will be by those whose earliest experiences were not safe and secure — with SOMEBODY.

On top of conception to birth, birth to age one, we have to consider next what happens to age two, and then through age five.  All of these experiences are building the body-nervous system-brain — step by step, foundation stone upon foundation stone.  I am not saying that childhood sexual abuse is not devastating, but processing the experience (any and ALL experience) is very different between those who had safe and secure earliest caregiver interactions and those who did not.

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Out of curiosity I did try to locate the cost of placing an advertisement in “O” for my book.  As far as I can tell the least expensive ad placement is well over $50,000.  Signed.  Sealed.  Delivered.  The answer to O-Oprah is “Nope.”

My ‘bone to pick’ with the O-Oprah Empire has to do with my concerns that NOT acknowledging the existence of resiliency factors of all kinds during early infant-child development depletes the truth of any claims for so-called ‘recovery’ – no matter who makes them.  All RISK factors are always balanced by RESILIENCY factors — not by magic, not by magical thinking, and not by the power of persuasion or suggestion by anyone who is a member of the Magic Kingdom — and I don’t mean Disney’s.

As long as our society does not acknowledge risk and resiliency factors equally, we will not come to the truth about how early infant-child abuse changes physiological development so that early abuse can create very different kinds of body-brains.  The HAVES don’t have to be grateful for what they DID receive on the resiliency side of their existence at the same time they can maintain and perpetrate the MYTH that ‘everyone can be as I am, do as I do’.

NOPE!

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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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+WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN GROWING – OR WE WOULDN’T BE HERE NOW

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It stuck me this morning that maybe what I have always thought of as ‘healing’ really is something else, and that something else is growth.  Maybe it doesn’t even matter what I call it, just so I continue to experience it!  But if I think in terms of growth rather than healing, an entirely different set of images comes to mind — and a whole different set of metaphors, as well.

I have a little plant growing in a Styrofoam cup that my sister started from its seed and brought over to me a few months ago.  I have it right by my kitchen sink so I can keep my eye on it and notice when it is too dry and begins to wilt so that I can take good care of it.

This is a Mexican Bird of Paradise plant, but we won’t know which variety it is until it lives long enough to bloom.  Is it the hardier (for my altitude and climate) yellow one, or is it the more warmth-oriented red one?  I hope for red, but either way I admire that my sister was able to get this seed to sprout in the first place because doing so requires some special treatment.

I don’t know what actions my sister actually took, but I have heard that the seed must be pounded to crack its shell.  It is a desert native, so on its own the species has provided its offspring with some way to make it forward in the world.  I am just glad to have this little plant, and today I am going to move it into a bigger container, but I will still keep it where I won’t be likely to ignore its needs.

As I watch the little stems bud and lengthen I think about this healing vs growth idea of mine.  That plant isn’t healing, at least I wouldn’t name its process that.  I would say it is growing.  And as it grows I certainly cannot predict the shape it takes.  It’s growing in its own way although of course it depends on me to give it what it needs to do so.

Perhaps every single thing I have done in my life, and certainly as I try to ‘heal’ from the terrible trauma of 18 years of severe abuse from my mother as I grew a body-brain, was not and is not about healing.  Maybe it was simply about growing — then and now.

Somehow as I think about this growing angle rather than a healing one I feel less pressure to do ‘it’ right!  Certainly this little plant I am watching doesn’t care if it grows right or not.  It just does what it naturally does — and grows!  If it didn’t grow, it would die.  That’s a simplicity I can understand.

I have intuitively always found today’s emphasis on ‘recovery’ impossible to swallow.  Now I know that due to the circumstances of my early abusive environment that changed how my body-brain-mind-self developed I have nothing to go back and get — nothing to ‘recover’ unless I go all the way back to my body as it grew within my mother’s womb and try to find something back THERE that wasn’t permanently altered by my trauma-influenced development during all the stages after my birth.

I’m not going to be able to ever ‘go back there’ and recover any sense of being a safe and securely attached person in the world.  I didn’t get to grow and develop any safe and secure attachment patterns or circuitry into my body from the start.  As I recognize how my experiences changed my very body forever, I am also recognizing the patterns of my life that happened to the largest extent because my development WAS so changed in a malevolent environment of trauma.

Yes, I survived.  And yes, I have looked at what I do now as ‘healing’.  But I am beginning to think that I might just want to throw that word out completely as ‘not relevant’.  What I am doing is what everyone does who is breathing their way from one past moment, through a present one, and hopefully into a future.  I am growing.  Simply growing.

As I begin to think in this new way I understand that my growth is not always predictable.  I am often surprised by what ‘comes up’.  My new little leaf here, my new little root tip there, my branches extending off in this direction or that one.  Learning how to not only watch my own growth happen, but to begin to understand that I ONLY have to be willing to let it happen frees me to appreciate all the interesting twists and turns I have always taken along the way — throughout my life — from the moment I was born.

Looking at my life in terms of growth rather than healing might also change how I look at ‘surviving’.  Perhaps all that my survival really has been from the beginning is my growth.  I just continued to grow from the time I was born through horrific experiences in a very nasty environment.  Somehow I had and found what I needed to do my growing in spite of all of it!

I am free to anticipate all the interesting and clever ways my growth takes place each day.  And because I am my own little plant, I don’t have to compare myself to anyone else’s growth process, either.  If I can see and appreciate that what I needed for my continued growth was there for me from the start of my life, I can more easily appreciate that whatever I need to continue my growing is also right here, right now for me today.

Some good soil, a little water, just the right amount of sunlight, a little darkness at night, no weeds to crowd me out and nobody to trample on my little sprouting branches and I am all set to go.  If healing happens while I am busy growing, that’s OK with me.

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I suspect I need to pause to notice all this because I am preparing to go back into the past of my horrible childhood to retrieve my own story — so that I can write it.  I need to remember that I am never actually going backwards.  Growth is a forward affair.  No matter what crap I may encounter as I remember myself in my childhood, I know that all it can do is act as good fertilizer for the growth I am doing today.

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+LINK ON ‘KILLER’ BRAINS

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My sister just sent this link to me – check it out!

A Neuroscientist Uncovers A Dark Secret

by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

AND

On The Scale Of Evil, Where Do Murderers Rate?

A forensic psychologist has come up with a 22-point scale to rate evil, complete with examples of murderers from the 20th century.

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+ALWAYS LEARNING HOW TO LIVE WITH ‘THIS FEELING’

alchemynow2 Comments

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Sometimes when severe infant-child abuse survivors feel crappy, the reason why we feel the way we do — along with what we are actually feeling — might surprise us.  I have ‘this feeling’ often, and now that I better know where it comes from, why I have it, and what it actually IS I find living my life a little easier.  Sometimes.  The trick for me is to recognize ‘this feeling’ when I am having it — so that I can name it specifically for what it is and not for what it is not.

Humans have potential to experience a wide array of feelings, and MOST of them are actually not entirely pleasant.  Why might this be so?  I figure it’s because our actual survival far more depends on our ability to find ways to take care of ourselves so that these unpleasant feelings either shrink or disappear — at least temporarily — than it does on our being outright giddy with glee (my term of choice at the moment for all we might call our feel-good feelings).

If we happen to get caught with our hand in the flames, our jerking it out doesn’t so much make us immediately giddy with glee as it does STOP the pain.  That’s a good thing.  Much of what I suspect we humans do is geared toward stopping pain (thus enhancing our survival).  Nothing wrong with that, and nothing to surprise us here.  Not really.

If life on this planet had always been a giddy party-for-all free-for-all, full of plenty, full of safety and security, a NICE place to survive in we would no doubt be sharing our current breathing space with members of at least SOME of the other 18-plus other hominid species that vanished trying to do what our species did:  Remain flexible and adaptable enough to stay alive.

So while it must sure be nice to have a big fat left-brain happy center, all full of early-formed happy neurons that can be relied on to add humor and a more pleasant focus on life than severe infant-child abuse survivors managed to hold onto in the midst of the tragedy and terror of their body-brain formative years, it’s not anybody’s happy left-brain neuron center that most guarantees they are going to survive if the time ever comes to put their survival to the absolute test.

I have to remember all of this on days that often come to me when I feel far from giddily gleeful.  It’s not ONLY that my early forming left-brain happy center had only sporadic Kodak Moment opportunities for happiness that contributes to my difficulties in staying buoyant today.  It’s not ONLY that fear and sorrow, terror and confusion — and all the rest of my survival-connected emotions got an Olympic sized workout from the time I was born that increases my difficulties in experiencing joy.

What did the most damage was the fact that the malevolent, dangerous, abusive, unsafe and insecure world that I spent the first 18 years of my life trying to grow up in was the fact that all the abuse I experienced happened because both my mother and my father ALSO grew up in unsafe and insecure worlds.  This gave them — and in turn gave me — an ‘insecure attachment disorder’.

What that means to me now is that severe abuse, tied into severe attachment disorders (for both the perpetrators and then for their offspring), left me with an attachment system that CANNOT TURN ITSELF OFF!

THAT is what I am actually feeling on most days that I might otherwise be tempted to describe what I feel in some other survival-based emotional terms.  It isn’t anger or resentment or bitterness or despair or hopelessness or helplessness or fear of the future that gets to those of us who suffered in and survived the kinds of infant-childhoods this blog is dedicated to.  It isn’t boredom or loneliness or even often hunger or thirst or some other physical depletion that we feel.  It isn’t grief or sorrow or depression.  It isn’t isolation or confusion or longing we feel.

What we most often feel does not even have any more of a name in our culture than what I call it here.  What we feel when we do not feel ‘happy’ and can’t seem to find our way even to peaceful calmness (which as I have said is SUPPOSED to be the middle set point for our nervous system and for severe early abuse survivors is NOT) — is the very real physiological body-based FEELING of having an active insecure attachment system THAT CAN’T BE TURNED OFF.

Certainly sometimes we know what it feels like not to have this feeling.  Some use addictions or chemicals from the drug store or addictions to everything from gambling to work to sex to over spending or over eating or relationships (or even as my mother did by abusing someone else and by her constant moving).  What I am describing ACTUALLY is that LOST feeling I mentioned several posts back.  It is the feeling we are born with that motivates us to express our needs in such a way that someone comes and takes care of us (or does not).

Our feel-good and feel-bad chemicals in our body are all tied into this attachment system we have been either fortunate enough to have had built right in safe enough infant-childhoods — or unfortunate enough not to.  It is those of us in the latter group — way way way way over in this latter group — who are left with the same insecure attachment patterns that built our entire body-nervous system-brain-immune system-mind-self from the start back in those truly malevolent earliest years.

Early abuse survivors are left with circuitry in our body that operates differently than does the attachment circuitry built into people who had safe and secure-enough infant-childhoods.  There’s no way around this fact.  What nobody ever told me, what nobody ever tells ANY of us is that THEY have a secure attachment system that can be turned off.  Our insecure attachment system was built to KNOW we will never be safe — and ON is (to our trauma-formed body) BEST.

There are times as a severe abuse survivor that I have been distracted from the experience of having to FEEL my forever turned on insecure attachment system.  Fortunately.  Those distractions include the 35 years I spent mothering children in my home before they reached their own adulthood.  Those distractions really are the story of my adult life.  But the older I have gotten the more difficult it has become for me to find ways to distract myself from feeling WHAT I FEEL LIKE — really feel like — feels like!!  This is all a direct consequence not only of the hell of abuse I was formed in and by throughout my infant-childhood — but is also a direct consequence of the fact that I survived it so that I am still alive to have feelings today (and to write about them).

Typing into the search box on this blog ‘insecure attachment’ will bring up many, many pages on the topic.  I am mentioning it again today because I periodically have to remind myself of how real my insecure attachment ‘disorder’ is — because there are days when I feel it in my body so strongly it is difficult to feel anything else.  Then I have to remind myself it isn’t because I am a flawed person, that there’s something wrong with me, that I ‘should’ be doing something better or differently than I already am.

On days like today I am just face-to-face with myself as a trauma-formed person with a body who will feel that reality for the rest of my life.  At the same time I know that has to be just fine with me because the only escape from it will be my death — that’s a reality.  But I have survived this far and will keep on keepin’ on because that, after all, is what every living member of our species does best.

But I am always in the market to find new tricks for backing off this unpleasant survival-based feeling so that it doesn’t overwhelm me.  Some days that becomes my nearly full-time job.  At the same time I wonder if it isn’t those of us who survived intolerable infant-childhoods of abuse and deprivation — and pay the price for our survival every day that we have to live with ‘this feeling’ that our insecure attachment ‘disorder’ creates in our body — who really have the greatest right to celebrate that we are — in fact — that we are still here and we are AMAZING!

*NOTE:  In dismissive-avoidant insecure attachment disorders (which I believe was the kind my father had) the brain actually creates its own distractions against emotions so that the brain keeps the person from even being aware that they are having a feeling in the first place.

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+MAKING FACES IN THE MIRROR (WITH SOUND EFFECTS)

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I am not convinced that by their nature either resentment or bitterness are ‘bad’ things.  They are simply parts of the natural human experience.  I do, however, think that being STUCK in any state is a problem.  Life itself is a constantly changing event, and if we can’t change in flexible ways along with the changes life brings us — well — THAT can mean trouble.

So perhaps if whining bitterness was to become seasoned with a little growling resentment — or growling resentment could become mixed with a little whining bitterness — a person stuck at either end of this ‘stop-go’ nervous system continuum could budge enough to get a start toward healing change.

If bitterness is too close to the despairing giving up end of the stress response, and if resentment is too close to the forever-in-the-wanting-to-fight state, then a move off of dead-center STUCK would be a positive one no matter which way the move took place!

So to get the bowling ball of mood states rolling again, I suspect that if growling resenters took a little time in front of a mirror and practiced turning their scowl into a pout, and whining bitter people took a little time in front of a mirror to practice turning their pout into a grimace — and both need to add the sound effects along the way — and throw in a heaping spoonful of good humor — well — what can I say?

A bowling ball stuck half way down the lane isn’t much fun to play with, and when we get ourselves stuck in these fighting or despairing places and can’t get ourselves out of them — trying SOMETHING is better than doing nothing at all.  Otherwise we can eat up our lifespan either waiting to fight our invisible foes so we can beat them and win — or waiting for some magical event to change the past for us into something better than what it was.

Making faces at ourselves in the mirror while we growl or whine ourselves off of an unhappy dead-center might just free us up enough to find something more pleasant to do with our time!  Never know until you try it!

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+BEEN ABUSED? PATTERNS OF RUPTURE WITH OR WITHOUT REPAIR

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Another important piece of information about resentment and bitterness!  Safe and secure, appropriate, adequate (does NOT need to be perfect) parenting and early infant-child caregiving IS SUPPOSED TO include LOTS of practice with what is called RUPTURE AND REPAIR.

Parents who were not parented correctly are most likely to not recognize the opportunities life gives us through its patterns of RUPTURE to ‘learn’ how to REPAIR them.  All these patterns — adequate or not — build out nervous systems-brain-body-mind-self from the beginning of our life.

Done well, CALM and CONNECTION is the middle set point for our nervous system-brain-mind.  This happens when every rupture is met with an opportunity for repair.  The entire feel good-feel bad chemical system in our body is tied into these systems and is built by these patterns.

When an infant cries and has its needs met appropriately in a safe and secure environment, calm connection builds the center point.  Crying represents a rupture, having needs met is the repair.

We never leave these patterns behind.  All our lives we negotiate what we want and need with the environment, most often with other human beings.  We bump into one another in all sorts of ways, but a well built nervous system-brain-mind-self has all sorts of feedback loops built into it including REMORSE and EMPATHY to let us know what works and what doesn’t — to increase calm and connection for everyone.

Severe child abusers like my mother did not have the right kind of patterns built into them from early on, and as their developing body-brain adjusted – like in my mother’s case, the vagus nerve system was also affected and the ability for empathy and remorse was removed from her.

In our adult years when resentment and bitterness begin to solidify and ‘control’ our ability to respond – decreasing our calm and connection and our sense of well-being — we can bet our body-brain-nervous system-mind-self was built with LOTS OF RUPTURES that did not have adequate or appropriate repair.

My mother could beat me and beat me, etc. and NEVER, not one single time, feel remorse.  She offered NOTHING toward helping me build patterns of repair into my body.  These ruptures without repair ARE what dissociation is all about – plus!

A short post here — but important!  Healing means we recognize the patterns of rupture without repair from the time of our birth and name them for what they are.  Then, if resentment and bitterness are present – and again, they are IN OUR BODY, in our stress-calm response system — we can learn NOW how to live well with these patterns and to find ways to improve and change them!

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+STEPPING TOWARD HEALING – WHAT OUR BODY KNOWS

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I believe that child abusing parents ALWAYS have an insecure attachment disorder.  I also believe that it is most likely that either in the parent/s, in their parents, or in their grandparents alcoholism and/or drug addiction almost always exists.

I also believe that if adults struggle with either/or resentful bitterness or bitter resentment there is a very good reason why — and that reason nearly always rests firmly on an unsafe and insecure attachment platform in childhood that very likely contained abuse.

In light of the comment and reply included yesterday on the subject of hurt and bitterness, I simply wanted to make these points because I believe at least in the beginning of healing work from an abusive childhood that Al-Anon’s 12-step program (or any other relevant 12-step support group) has a LOT of solid help and information to offer.  I recommend it highly and suggest a weekly meeting and connection with a good sponsor.  If you go, attend at least six meetings before making a decision about your continued commitment — and before you try another meeting to adjust your ‘fit’.

I also know that healing is certainly possible for many people without these ‘meetings’, and that attendance does not have to be a lifetime affair (no matter what any meeting person might tell you).  But or those of us from abusive and nutty families, with and without the chemical (and other) addictions, we have a lot to learn about life that we didn’t learn when we needed it growing up.

I also know that nobody has all the answers!

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I also wanted to mention that I couldn’t continue thinking about bitterness and resentment today without beginning to get mingled ‘sense’ information for myself about what my BODY knows about them.  I therefore speak ONLY for myself – and encourage others to listen to their own body-talk to get their own information.

To me, resentment has a nasty oily kind of smell to it, while bitterness has a metallic sulfuric kind of smell.  Resentment has a sound like a low sustained growl, while bitterness has a sound (to me) that is high pitched, obnoxious and a whole lot like whining.

To me, resentment has a dark, dried blood red-brown-maroon color to it, while bitterness is a sick yellow-green tinged with black.

Resentment (to me) is tied to the fight stress response — and involves a continual sustained state of WANTING to find a way to fight back.  This is a nervous system response tied NOT to resignation, but to a search for competence and confidence to right a wrong.  (The nature of the wrong needs to be examined as does one’s reaction to it.)

Bitterness (to me) is tied also to the stress response system in the body, but it lies more toward the ‘giving up’ end or resignation and lost hopelessness.  It lies very close to despair — and will stay exactly STUCK there until a person can identify all the complicating feelings and factors that contribute to the LOSS and grieving, the sadness and despair that has sapped away rather than restored or built up one’s will to FIGHT.

What child abuse survivors with insecure attachment disorders DO NOT HAVE is (as I have said so many times) a balanced calm and connected, safe and securely attached MIDDLE SET point for their brain and nervous system.  From very early, early in life this middle point — set by abuse to be somewhere OTHER than where nature would best want it — that lies too far either toward aggression-fight or toward giving up.

We are human.  We live in a body.  Resentment and bitterness are anchored in our body as is everything else about us as long as we are alive.  I believe it is helpful to think in terms of color, smells, sounds — all the information our body knows about whatever concerns us.  We can explore this information and learn a LOT about our self, our woundedness, our reactions to our hurts, as well as begin to find our own clues about what to do next to improve our well-being.

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+I BROOK NO BITTERNESS

alchemynowLeave a comment

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Comment and replies on the topic of bitterness – your thoughts and feelings?

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/feeling-bitter-bitterness-as-a-state-of-mind-a-state-of-being-no-thanks/#comment-1958

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+FROM A LETTER

alchemynowLeave a comment

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Excerpt from today’s letter to my 83-year-old friend, our Alaskan homesteading neighbor, who was hated by her mother from birth though never physically abused – and who spent most of her childhood hunting, trapping and hiking in the Washington wilderness with her Native American father —

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It makes me wonder how I will ever be able to tell my own childhood story.  I will have to return to a place and a way of being in the world that was so unlike where I am today in ‘ordinary’ American life and thinking.

I think my dreaming last night was a part of it.  How I thought (and mostly didn’t) as a child seems surreal to me today, but it was ordinary to me then.  I didn’t know anything else, had no other perspective, no input from anyone.

And how I was and what I knew was so different from my siblings.  Most importantly, how I was changed the way I suffered.  Part of me says that I have no business even pretending I can write of myself in my childhood for others to read if I cannot remember how my world was to me back then.

It makes me wish I had written ‘the story’ when I left home at 18 – not 40 years later.  And part of me is afraid if I go back to who and how I was then that I will ‘lose it’ now and not be able to ‘come back’.  I heed those inner warnings.  I have to be very, very careful because I was all alone THEN, and to tell ‘the story’ I have to be able to be in both places at the same time – or very closely to one another — there-then and here-now.

I would have to time-travel — At this moment I examine within myself what the purpose of this would be – what do I have to offer because of how uniquely and nearly absolutely ALONE I was as a child — in my mind-controlled thoughts and self — etc.

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I know this is getting long, but I feel ‘safe’ writing you these things.  Fortunately, my children don’t know what I am talking about.  Neither do my siblings.  I know nobody who knows what this alone I am talking about actually is – and is like – ‘cept perhaps somehow — you — though you had your father and other family — but your creative, poetic mind can S-T-R-E-T-C-H somehow — hey, I have faith in YOU!

I began to think about the underpinnings of what might be important to others about my story if I can tell it.  My daughter tells me that at times her little much-loved son wakes from a sound sleep crying alligator tears and obviously in complete despair and deep sorrow.

I put this together with a statement both of my parents made in those Mildred-pre-Alaska letters.  The first one Bill wrote upon arriving in Alaska, he said, “I feel like a little lost boy.”  I don’t think he would have described his state that way if he hadn’t exactly known what it felt like to be a ‘little lost boy’.

Interesting sideline – sis just found my father’s birth certificate (sadly without time of birth so can’t do astro report on him).  It reports that at the time of his birth he was his mother’s 4th live birth, and there had been one dead child before him.  We had never heard this, no idea of ‘the story’ behind it — but had heard all our childhood that Bill was absolutely an unwanted, unloved child.  (Set him up for the storm of Mildred – that plus his father being an alcoholic).

Mildred writes in her pre-Alaska letters – she moves from the motel they were in when Bill went to AK, goes on and on about the cute little house she is moving us into, how it will be perfect to wait in, how she can make a temporary home there — and 2 weeks later as she unpacks and makes her ‘doll house’ she writes Bill that as soon as she gets the house all set up and done, all cozy, she will feel LOST — and there at 2 weeks in that house she is planning to move out 2 weeks later (which she did).

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So yesterday my mind put these two streams of thinking together — and I thought, “What if we all enter this world from birth feeling and being LOST unless someone loves us enough to take that feeling-state away from us?”

I add this into my thinking mix:  Not long after my youngest girl first learned to talk she talked about things I knew she had been thinking about and experiencing from way before she had words.  One of them:  Every time we were in our car out driving anywhere, she was nearly inconsolable in her concern and sadness for everyone else she saw driving around because she was absolutely convinced that ALL of them were LOST.

It didn’t matter what we said to her as we tried to tell her just like we knew where our home was and could find our way back there, so too did all these other people know where their home was and could find their way back.

I was 24, didn’t ever realize she may have been talking about a much deeper and more profound sense of LOST — like the one I am contemplating now.  She was three then – and knew something!!

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So what if this feeling LOST is something we are even physiologically born with – and in safe and secure, loving attachment early environments our body forms this knowledge as it grows — or in opposite cases, the opposite?

I also have thought about why now, after 10 years, ER would walk across my threshold.  Because he feels lost? — And what lost people need is to feel FOUND.

I think about both my parents’ early life — neither loved, neither wanted, and in my mother’s case, severely neglected and abused — both of them had deep undercurrents of feeling LOST and never FOUND.

And in my case, I was so LOST, that when our family FOUND the mountain, I found myself there!  The wilderness is just that because HUMANS have not invaded it.  No matter we were the humans invading that wilderness — at the start I knew that ‘place’ of wilderness, and we MET each other, the wilderness and me.  There really were no humans in my world, either — so I understood the mountain in that way — in that wilderness I FOUND myself more than I had ever done before.  (Most fortunately!)

I think the same thing happened for M, who had since being a little girl FOUND herself in the woods and New England countryside (Joe Anne even talked about that re:  M).

It is becoming clear to me that M’s moving was an addiction — as was her beating-abusing-terrorizing me.  Then yesterday my thoughts went to maybe all addictions (and it is true that they all use the same neurochemistry built into the human body designed for human-social attachments) is just that.

When we feel LOST we grab whatever we are addicted to and it helps us feel FOUND.  Then I realized yesterday if this is true, then depression would not be so much about sorrow and sadness and hopelessness as I have thought — it would be most deeply about feeling LOST and not being able to be or feel FOUND.

Then I realized that even if the experts say we have only five primal-primary emotions of happy, sad, mad, scared and disgust (a gag-reflex emotion designed by evolution to prevent us from ingesting poison) — maybe there is a sixth — LOST.

All this thinking while I am ‘taking a break’ and trying not to think at all – or write — just this to you!!  But I am allowing whatever learning and changes to happen within myself that might prepare me for the writing ahead.

What if people could find it useful to identify within their self exactly what feeling LOST feels like, so they can name it, and then consciously make choices about what they do to make their self feel FOUND?

What if we all share this continuum between feeling-being LOST and feeling-being FOUND?

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I feel FOUND as an adult as a part of the human sphere more than I ever could of as a child.  I fear losing this sense if I go back there to when I was a child and so LOST.  Once we left my grandmother behind in LA right before my 6th birthday, I never felt FOUND again — until we FOUND the mountain.

Yet even in LA the degree of FOUND I had with my grandmother was interfered with both my Gma’s limitations (that let her ruin my mother) and my mother’s interference with Gma’s affections.

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More than anything I wish I could go back to that wilderness – and there I would FIND myself – my true, real, deepest self — which was the person I was all through my childhood.  Now that I am civilized and live in civilization — I HAVE changed.  Because we are members of a social species, this dichotomy has always been part of our nature.  At what point do we become differentiated not only from the natural world, but also as our own self separate from others around us?

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All I know right now is that I have a commitment and obligation for the next two weeks to stand in for my friend, Sharon as she goes on vacation to be in that little office for her – and cannot afford to let myself follow my own thoughts toward my writing.  The Y, used to be the YWCA, is a solid nice building in old B where they rent for $200 per month rooms – 20 of them – to low income adults.  Will tell you more someday.

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fun listen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0N5nHy48vE