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I need to take a pause from my book writing to clear my thinking palette – oh, that’s palate?  This is nothing that chewing a bit of parsley will fix, that’s all I know.

I am ready to begin writing chapter – 11. Baby Dearest – of the book I am working on now.  I am in, first of all, a rather odd quandary about the title of this book – so I might as well begin my clearing efforts here.

In some ways this must seem like a six-of-one half-a-dozen of the other kind of quandary.  Title?

Story Without Words:  The Invisible Silence of Infant and Child Abuse

or

Story Beyond Words:  The Invisible Silence of Infant and Child Abuse

I go back and forth, forth and back – changing the ‘middle name’ of this book’s title.

I am momentarily at this crossroads as I begin a chapter that is essentially about infant abuse – my own abuse experiences in my infanthood.

Childhood.  There is no spell check warning if I type that word.  There is one if I write infanthood.  Have I invented a word?  I add my word to my ‘dictionary’.  Did I resolve the problem?

I think about the many months I spent reading books and research articles on developmental neuroscience as I discovered with every page I read more and more truth about MY situation as it had existed in me – in my body – in my brain – since I was born.

For all the truth I discovered I still became increasingly aggravated as I went along!  A given researcher would be describing how early attachment relationships build an infant’s brain and nervous system – OK.  Fine.  Fascinating!

All of a sudden the infant was not being spoken of as existing any more.  All of a sudden the author would be writing about child abuse, childhood – while I was left with one of those (Sandy, you know what I mean) terribly queasy feelings that the very expert I was relying upon to give me desperately needed vital information about the truth of what happened to me – was LETTING ME DOWN exactly at the moment I had almost GOTTEN IT!  Gotten the magic gem of truth!

I wore out my pens adding words into texts where they were missing.  (I also wore out pens adding things into index pages that I was stunned to find had not been mentioned.)

I have concluded that there is a cultural taboo in America against even TALKING ABOUT infant abuse.  There’s a taboo against committing infant abuse that has taken away our power to use words to TALK about infant abuse – even to write about infant abuse!

Many of the developmental neuroscientific writers describe what goes wrong at the start of life in earliest attachment relationships – and then – BINGO – all of a sudden they are writing about psychopathologies in adulthood – without admitting the fact that these pathologies are directly connected to INFANT abuse – and are PREVENTABLE in nearly ALL SITUATIONS!

These writers describe infants and then change these infants magically in nearly mid-sentence into children!  It seems to me that not even THEY can tolerate what they know, what they are saying – or what they NEED to say. If developmental neuroscientists and attachment experts can’t even use the words ‘infant abuse’ – what does this say to our culture at large?  Infant abuse does not exist – because we don’t WANT to know it does?

Shaking a baby to death – warnings now given as parents depart hospitals post-birthing:  DON’T SHAKE YOUR BABY!

Well, I could be wrong but all the shaken-to-death baby news I’ve ever heard involves a MAN who has committed this murder.

Of course I am against shaking babies (DUH!).  Of course I am pro informing adults (I guess usually thick headed men) not to shake a baby.

Of course I realize some mothers shake babies, too.  Bad on them, too!

BUT we are culturally missing what I see as a MOST important truth!

Infant abuse happens.  It really, really happens – and very rarely does that abuse KILL the infant.  No, most infant abuse HURTS infants.  It terrorizes them, it tortures them, it makes them suffer in ways that adults don’t (evidently) want to even imagine – though we have evidently made it far enough to be able to imagine SHAKING a baby.

Good for us.

What about the rest of the story?

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Speaking of story – WITHOUT or BEYOND?

Infants don’t have words.  Big DUH on that one, too!  The neglect and abuse of infants, the traumatizing of infants – the suffering of infants – the unsafe and insecure attachment relationship traumas that infants endure far more often than anyone wants to imagine, think about or MENTION – will not be able to be put into words by these suffering infants.  Not even when they grow up.

Are those ‘stories’ that are happening behind the doors of silence, hidden, out of sight out of mind – BEYOND the reach of words?  Or are they WITHOUT words because nobody has given them words yet?

Is use of ‘beyond’ in this context an admission of hopelessness on my part – that it is impossible to every speak of or write of abuse because the actual experience of it FOR ANYONE at ANY AGE lies in a world of ‘being alone’ that cannot be penetrated either from the inside or from the outside?

Does ‘without’ introduce possibility?  Possibility that though horrendous survivor stories of abuse, even from birth, COULD someday be put into words – conveyed in words – comprehended in words?

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Empathy.  True empathy does not happen if the empathic person feels their own pain (say) when in the presence of a suffering person.  True empathy is not designed to make MORE people suffer – not even one more person suffer.  True empathy – healthy empathy – is meant to help the person who is suffering.  True empathy is meant to trigger caregiving behavior in the witness.

Suffering people need people to HELP them.  If the suffering person could help their own self stop the suffering, well, DUH!!  They would do so!

Suffering people need someone to assist them OUT of their suffering in ways they cannot help their self.

So, along with this idea, if I say an abuse experience by a little person exists BEYOND words – that is probably saying that the little person ITSELF does not have the power, the ability, to TELL IN WORDS what is happening to them – or has happened to them.

Assuming there do exist people who CARE – part of that truly empathic caring could be to help a sufferer put words to their experience.  That would mean that a story of an abuse experience (yes, a crime report) – COULD be told if the survivor had assistance in doing so.

Compassion would be the generating IMPULSE for a person who can feel true empathy – to get to work to caregive-HELP!

So – maybe BEYOND words refers to the experience of abuse – suffering -from the inside.  WITHOUT words would refer to the experience of someone else’s abuse – suffering – from the outside.

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I don’t think I like ‘beyond’.  I can recognize that there are things nobody can really describe.  I think about how our species was before we even had spoken language abilities.  Everything anyone experienced THEN would have been beyond words.

But we DID evolve far enough to develop verbal language.  It’s an add-on to drama, pantomime, gesturing, dance, music, art forms of all kinds that don’t involve words themselves.

But our species’ experience was not BEYOND words during the millions of years of our evolution when we simply did not HAVE words.  Those early experiences back then were WITHOUT words, not BEYOND words.

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Which leads me back to my issue with cultural taboos against harming infants – which I have long suspected interferes with our culture’s ability to OWN the fact that YES infant abuse DOES happen – and it is a LOT MORE than shaking a baby to death.  Abusing an infant – changes the way its brain and entire body develop – the way its genetic codes operate and express themselves – the way the nervous systems, the immune system – the way the MIND works — changes that last a lifetime and cause a universe of trouble and problems for survivors – that NOBODY wants to recognize, acknowledge OR talk about!

Thinking about the BPD-good-bad split patterns – certainly on the level of psychosis with my mother.  Culturally so?  Loving infants is GOOD – TRUE.  Abusing/neglecting infants is BAD – TRUE.  But we cannot split our thinking in BPD-ways — so that we deny the bad exists, don’t give it words, don’t stare it in the face, don’t make it stop and go away.

Taboos are against ACTIONS first and foremost.  These taboos – like don’t hurt the baby dearest – are meant to keep everyone safer.

Taboos are not against TALKING and THINKING about problems.  They are not about ignoring truth and therefore taking the stand of supporters of the continuance of abuse.

If we continue to NOT think and talk about things like infant abuse and child abuse – we are WITHOUT words by choice.  And the suffering of the tiny helpless ones will go on and on and on……

We concern ourselves with assaults that don’t kill people, car accidents that don’t kill people, dangers of fires that don’t burn the whole town down.  We have to start giving words to INFANT abuse that does not kill babies.

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A blog comment last night caught my attention.  I have been doing a lot of thinking about the fact that YES I believe my abusive mother suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder.  And, YES, she was psychotic.  Did her psychotic break make her a special kind of Borderline?  Do I have to specify some kind of distinction when I publish between ‘ordinary’ BPD and ‘psychotic’ BPD?

What might the research say?  Here are a few samples…

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From Germany:

It seems that BPD people can suffer from psychotic symptoms without having a psychotic disorder.

I cannot access the full article of this study online, but here is the abstract for –

Borderline personality disorder and psychosis: a review.

By Barnow S, Arens EA, Sieswerda S, Dinu-Biringer R, Spitzer C, Lang S.

Published in – Curr Psychiatry Rep. 2010 Jun;12(3):186-95.

Early views of borderline personality disorder (BPD) were based on the idea that patients with this pathology were “on the border” of psychosis. However, more recent studies have not supported this view, although they have found evidence of a malevolent interpersonal evaluation and a significant proportion of BPD patients showing psychotic symptoms. For example, in one study, 24% of BPD patients reported severe psychotic symptoms and about 75% had dissociative experiences and paranoid ideation.

Thus, we start with an overview regarding the prevalence of psychotic symptoms in BPD patients. Furthermore, we report findings of studies investigating the role of comorbidity (eg, post-traumatic stress disorder) in the severity and frequency of psychotic symptoms in BPD patients. We then present results of genetic and neurobiological studies comparing BPD patients with patients with schizophrenia or nonschizophrenic psychotic disorders. In conclusion, this review reveals that psychotic symptoms in BPD patients may not predict the development of a psychotic disorder but are often permanent and severe and need careful consideration by clinicians. Therefore, adequate diagnosis and treatment of psychotic symptoms in BPD patients is emphasized.

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From the Netherlands:

Psychotic reactivity in borderline personality disorder.

By Glaser JP, Van Os J, Thewissen V, Myin-Germeys I. (The Netherlands)

Published in – Acta Psychiatr Scand. 2010 Feb;121(2):125-34. Epub 2009 Jun 25.

Abstract

OBJECTIVE:

To investigate the stress relatedness and paranoia specificity of psychosis in borderline personality disorder (BPD).

METHOD:

Fifty-six borderline patients, 38 patients with cluster C personality disorder, 81 patients with psychotic disorder and 49 healthy controls were studied with the experience sampling method (a structured diary technique) to assess: i) appraised subjective stress and ii) intensity of psychotic experiences.

RESULTS:

All patient groups experienced significantly more increases in psychotic experiences in relation to daily life stress than healthy controls, borderline patients displaying the strongest reactivity. Borderline patients, moreover, reported significantly more hallucinatory reactivity than healthy controls and subjects with cluster C personality disorder. Paranoid reactivity to daily life stress did not differ between the patient groups.

CONCLUSION:

These results are the first to ecologically validate stress-related psychosis in BPD. However, psychotic reactivity was not limited to expression of paranoia but involved a broader range of psychotic experiences including hallucinations.

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From the United Kingdom:

Experiences of psychosis in borderline personality disorder: A qualitative analysis

By Bob Adams and Teri Sanders

Published in – Journal of Mental Health, August 2011, Vol. 20, No. 4 : Pages 381-391

Background. From clinical work and research it is clear that people suffering from borderline personality disorder (BPD) often complain of psychotic symptoms including hallucinations, yet little is known about how service users experience these symptoms.

Aims. The aim of this study was to examine the experience of psychotic symptoms in people with BPD and to establish how mental health professionals responded to reports of psychotic symptoms.

Method. Seven semi-structured interviews were carried out with service users with BPD who had been known to present with psychotic symptoms. In parallel, medical case notes of these service users were analysed. Results were subjected to qualitative analysis using techniques of grounded theory.

Results. Psychotic symptoms were often long standing and interfered with physical and emotional functioning. There were no clear distinctions from psychotic symptoms described by patients suffering from schizophrenia. Treating doctors had no common language to describe these symptoms. Furthermore, the language that was used had the implication that the symptoms were not real or true and could therefore be perceived as pejorative. [with negative connotations]

Conclusions. It is suggested that the diagnostic category of BPD requires revision to include psychotic symptoms. Terminology such as pseudo- and quasi-psychotic symptoms are confusing and use of these terms should be revised.

Read More: http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/09638237.2011.577846

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Psychotic symptoms in patients with borderline personality disorder: prevalence and clinical management.

By Schroeder K, Fisher HL, Schäfer I.

Curr Opin Psychiatry. 2012 Nov 20. [Epub ahead of print]

Source – Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany bMRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, London, UK.

Abstract

PURPOSE OF REVIEW:

The aim of this article is to review findings on the prevalence, phenomenology and treatment of psychotic features in borderline personality disorder (BPD), and to discuss factors that might be related to their occurrence.

RECENT FINDINGS:

Of patients with BPD about 20-50% report psychotic symptoms. Hallucinations can be similar to those in patients with psychotic disorders in terms of phenomenology, emotional impact, and their persistence over time. Although more research is needed on the exact nature of psychotic phenomena in patients with BPD, terms like pseudo-psychotic or quasi-psychotic are misleading and should be avoided. Childhood trauma might play an important role in the development of psychotic symptoms in patients with BPD, as in other populations. More research is necessary on the role of comorbid disorders, especially posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Atypical antipsychotics seem to be beneficial in some patients; evidence on psychotherapy of psychotic symptoms is sparse.

SUMMARY:

Psychotic symptoms, especially hallucinations, seem to be an important feature of BPD. More research on potential mediators and adequate treatment approaches for psychotic symptoms in BPD is needed, and current diagnostic systems might require revision to emphasise psychotic symptoms.

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Very interesting – USA:

Etiological features of borderline personality related characteristics in a birth cohort of 12-year-old children.

By Belsky DW, Caspi A, Arseneault L, Bleidorn W, Fonagy P, Goodman M, Houts R, Moffitt TE.

Published in – Dev Psychopathol. 2012 Feb;24(1):251-65.

Abstract

It has been reported that borderline personality related characteristics can be observed in children, and that these characteristics are associated with increased risk for the development of borderline personality disorder. It is not clear whether borderline personality related characteristics in children share etiological features with adult borderline personality disorder. We investigated the etiology of borderline personality related characteristics in a longitudinal cohort study of 1,116 pairs of same-sex twins followed from birth through age 12 years.

Borderline personality related characteristics measured at age 12 years were highly heritable, were more common in children who had exhibited poor cognitive function, impulsivity, and more behavioral and emotional problems at age 5 years, and co-occurred with symptoms of conduct disorder, depression, anxiety, and psychosis.

Exposure to harsh treatment in the family environment through age 10 years predicted borderline personality related characteristics at age 12 years. This association showed evidence of environmental mediation and was stronger among children with a family history of psychiatric illness, consistent with diathesis-stress models of borderline etiology. Results indicate that borderline personality related characteristics in children share etiological features with borderline personality disorder in adults and suggest that inherited and environmental risk factors make independent and interactive contributions to borderline etiology.

SUMMARY:

Psychotic symptoms, especially hallucinations, seem to be an important feature of BPD. More research on potential mediators and adequate treatment approaches for psychotic symptoms in BPD is needed, and current diagnostic systems might require revision to emphasise psychotic symptoms.

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From Germany:

Psychotic-like cognitive biases in borderline personality disorder.

By Moritz S, Schilling L, Wingenfeld K, Köther U, Wittekind C, Terfehr K, Spitzer C.

Published in – J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry. 2011 Sep;42(3):349-54. Epub 2011 Mar 23.

Abstract

Whereas a large body of research has linked borderline personality disorder (BPD) with affective rather than psychotic disorders, BPD patients frequently display psychotic and psychosis-prone symptoms, respectively. The present study investigated whether cognitive biases implicated in the pathogenesis of psychotic symptoms, especially delusions, are also evident in BPD.

A total of 20 patients diagnosed with BPD and 20 healthy controls were administered tasks measuring neuropsychological deficits (psychomotor speed, executive functioning) and cognitive biases (e.g., one-sided reasoning, jumping to conclusions, problems with intentionalizing). Whereas BPD patients performed similar to controls on standard neuropsychological tests, they showed markedly increased scores on four out of five subscales of the Cognitive Biases Questionnaire for Psychosis (CBQp) and displayed a one-sided attributional style on the revised Internal, Personal and Situational Attributions Questionnaire (IPSAQ-R) with a marked tendency to attribute events to themselves.

The study awaits replication with larger samples, but we tentatively suggest that the investigation of psychosis-related cognitive biases may prove useful for the understanding and treatment of BPD.

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Due to be published 2013 – the new DSM-V

from Wickipedia:

Personality disorders

Major changes have been proposed in the assessment and diagnosis of personality disorders.^[30] These include a revamped definition of personality disorder and a dimensional rather than a categorical approach based on the severity of dysfunctional personality trait domains (negative emotionality,introversion, antagonism, disinhibition, compulsivity, and schizotypy). In addition, patients would be assessed on how much they match each of six prototypic personality disorder types: antisocial/psychopathic, avoidant,borderline, narcissistic, obsessive-compulsive, and schizotypal with their criteria being derived directly from the dimensional personality trait domains. Some former personality disorders, like histrionic personality disorder, will be submerged under facets of various personality type domains (in this case, the narcissism and histrionism facets of antagonism).

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I wrote this October 2011.  This is an example of the kind of writing I have done for my own book that I cannot force myself to go back to read – let alone edit.  Any comments welcome to this post.  Thanks!

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ONE:  PIG

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“He who puts his trust in God, God will suffice him.  He who fears God, God will send him relief.”

~H.M. Balyuzi, in his book:
Bahá’u’lláh – The King of Glory, p. 138  [amazon.com:  Bahá’u’lláh: The King of Glory by H. M. Balyuzi (Apr 30, 2000)]

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Toes in my tennis shoes.  Tipping harmlessly down into the soft earth pushing my weight a little forward and backward on the swing.  I face the valley far below.  Steep mountainside rises behind my back.  I am sad.  Not because I know I am sad but because it is the state of my existence.  It is July 1966, one month before my 15^th birthday.

This swing set used to be in our yard in southern California.  It was dismantled and shipped to Alaska when I was five, assembled again in our yard under the birch trees beside the creek where we first lived in Eagle River, was taken apart again, moved up to our mountain homestead, assembled again.  Once we had a pet goat tied to this swing set.  Mother wrote in a letter to her mother late on Thursday, October 18, 1962:

Went to market and got home 7:00 P.M. – Bill got home with the kids before me – and met me at the car with – Oh Mom – it’s terrible!
Wolf got off and killed the goat!  He was over it when they got home.  Bill broke down – awful!  Got it by the neck!  Kids upset.  Bill had to bury it and now we get rid of those two dogs!
Enough said – terrible and ruined tonight.

          Felt good today until home and upset over that – now tummy hurts!

I sit on the swing next to where the goat died gushing blood into the earth.  I am staring at the lacerations on my knees.  Bleeding and oozing, pussy, raw and scabbing, I do not feel pain.  I watch the flies, feeling their tiny feet walking around on my open sores.  Faint and delicate, it feels nice, this gentle touch.  I like the company of the flies, more and more flies.  I sit still now, unmoving as the flies gather.

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A few days earlier:

I am in my pajamas lying in bed.  I have been here more than one day.  Gray cloud light seeps around curtains closed across windows Father made after he straightened the curved Jamesway walls.  I am curled up on my right side facing the wall.  My knees hurt.  The palms of my hands hurt.  My body aches with bruises and welts.  Curved slashes in the flesh of my thin wrists and upper arms the shape of Mother’s gouging fingernails are done bleeding.  I have cried so hard for so long my lids are swollen nearly shut.  My cheek, rouged from hard slaps across my face, rests on a pillow sodden with tears.

I am in a top bunk in this room Father built for him and Mother.  Erected stud walls partition this small area for privacy.  In this ever-transforming half-canvas half-wooden strange tent-house we live in I am shut behind its only inside door.  This is my bed.  This is not my room.  Why is my bed in this room?  It happened before that Mother, during one of her longterm punishing rages at me, rearranged furniture of our sleeping areas so she could imprison me alone away from contact with my siblings.

I am isolated now in a leaden body lying motionless except for my eyes that wander over wood grain patterns on the smooth shiny golden plywood wall Mother took such pains to sand and stain and varnish for her room.   Curving trails travel between shapes randomly spaced in the boards.  Empty meaningless questions slide through my soggy mind over and over and over again.  “Are those lips?  Are those eyes?  Why did someone put them there?”  (I had no way of knowing those football shapes were plugs replacing knotholes in the surface of the board.)

At this moment I can all but open the door of that little room, step inside, and turn to reach out my fingertips to tenderly touch the dark brown hair of that wretched girl I was laying in that twilight at nearly 15 years of age.  Today I recognize I was fading away from all hope of my own life.  Yes, my heart tapped in strong and rhythmic beating.  Yes, I was breathing, but so little more.   I had disengaged from struggle.

All the will I had naturally used to stay alive no matter what Mother said or did to me from the moment I was born had been used up.  On this day there was nothing left inside of me I could use to fight for my own life.  I slipped.  I fell.  And then, remote, I floated away without time or shape or form and without desire.

And then I heard words spoken to me as clearly as any I have ever heard by a voice that had no earthly sound.  As these words appeared evenly, calmly with the power of a deathless antidote against the deadly poison that was finally consuming me, I was revived.  These words of my salvation were spoken directly to my soul:  “Linda, it is humanly impossible for you to be as bad as your mother says you are.”

I saw no flashy lights, no apparition, was brushed by no wisp of air left by fluttering wings.  Yet the gift of these few specific words formed a factual platform within my mind upon which I could stand and live.  Had they not come to me in this perfect timing I would now be dead.

I had crossed an invisible threshold before these words came to me that meant I could no longer continue to survive by sheer inbuilt trust in God alone — as I had done from the instant He created my soul when I was conceived.  Blind black inky fear had, of its own bidding, arrived within me at this stage of my development to rupture my ability to continue to endure as an innocent in a state of grace.  Nobody had ever given me any information up to this point that I could have used to make sense out of what Mother had always done to me.  My absolute deficiency of consciousness was no longer sufficient to keep me alive.

What relief I needed at this time was provided in those simple words of truth.  Not only did I need some drop of understanding that it was not possible to be as bad as Mother said I was, but I also desperately needed to know that I was even human at all.  I had been told from my birth that I was NOT human because I was the devil’s child.  That I completely consciously FORGOT that I was human and not the child of the devil by the time I was a senior in high school belongs to the stories within my next book which will cover the years of abuse I experienced past the age of middle childhood.

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Before I continue here I need to tell what I know about what I remember from my severely abusive childhood because there is something very different about what I am going to write next.  On October 3, 1980 I entered a 7-week inpatient treatment program for alcoholism and drug dependency in Minnesota.  A detailed account of those days also belongs to another book.  In spite of the sobriety I had achieved as a result of my first ‘recovery’ efforts, and in spite of following therapy and antidepressant medications, by June 1983 I found myself desperately depressed.

I searched until I found a treatment program designed to specifically address the needs of people with severe child abuse histories.  I left my two girls with their father and moved into a small trailer in the town 130 miles away from my home to enter this three month out-patient program.  Although I had many memories of the abuse I had suffered I knew there were more that I could not recall.  I telephoned my sister two years younger than me, told her that I was working hard in the perfect setting to ‘deal with’ my childhood of abuse and begged her to disclose to me any incidents she remembered that I had forgotten.

What follows is the only memory my sister shared with me.  As she described what happened on this day, as she had witnessed it (she had just had her 13^th birthday) standing in front of the rail on the small landing outside our front door, my own memory of this entire experience flooded back to me with the force of an emotional tidal wave.  Never would I have believed it was possible to so completely NOT remember something this horrible had I not had this experience of remembering exactly such a memory.

Once my sister realized how completely I had forgotten what she had remembered she vowed to never again release to me any other information about our childhood that I had ‘blocked’.  Now, nearly 30 years later, she says she has forgotten anything else herself.  None of my other siblings seem to remember any other details than what I remember on my own, either.

Later in these pages I will discuss what I now know about why I kept only certain memories while forgetting literally thousands of abuse incidents that happened to me.  In this memory I was given back as my sister began to tell me what she remembered is a clear clue to me about how my memory process operates about my abuse history.  While I have always remembered what I call a ‘bubble’ memory about the flies and another separate ‘bubble’ memory about the words I heard in bed that day, it has only been as I write this book that I have come to comprehend that both of those memories are connected to what happened to me that I forgot until I was not-so-subtly reminded.

This memory I am going to recount therefore belongs to a different category of my memory capacity.  This next memory probably resides with those memories of abuse that I might access through a process like hypnosis.  On my own, I believe I forgot this memory (did not choose to remember it as an ongoing part of my current reality) because it holds nothing beautiful or redeeming in it.

Of course ‘beauty’ and ‘redemption’ are relative to one’s reality.  My memory of the flies held the beauty and redemption in how I felt being so gently touched and visited by a company of nature’s tiny creatures who wished me no harm.  Remembering hearing those words of redemption speaks for itself.

There is nothing in this forgotten memory other than the sick evil darkness of unimaginable brutality.  There was nothing newly useful I could gather from that experience.  I knew Mother’s brutality well from the time of my birth.  Brutality I could not escape.  Brutality I could survive.  Yet the full return of my own memory of this experience and the way that return happened for me does hold information of vital value to me now.  I needed to understand that I have chosen — no doubt in my soul – what I remember of my 18 years in hell and what I do not.  I find great power in this knowledge.

I will also take this opportunity to mention I believe strongly that:  (1) Nobody in their right mind would re-enter a brutal memory to re-experience trauma without good reason.  (2)  I have no good reason to ever do this.  (3)  Nobody in their right mind would want to read what it feels like to experience the kind of brutality that infant and child abuse survivors know first hand.

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Here is the now-remembered un-remembered memory to which the previous two memories I have written about belong:

The baby is 19 months old.  His diaper was dirty.  Mother told me to change it, so I did.  Because the diaper was so stinky, before I finished dressing the baby I rolled it up, took it outside and placed it on the wooden pallet to the right of the steps that came down from the front door.  We kept our metal water cans on this pallet.   I had planned to go back to rinse the diaper out.  I forgot about the diaper.  It is very probable that Mother had assigned me other chores.

Sometime later Mother saw the diaper on the pallet on her way to the outhouse.  She bellowed.  She screamed.  She screeched.  “LINDA GET OUT HERE!”  I am sure I had no thought not to obey her.  I went out the door.  Evidently my sister followed me to witness all that happened next.

Once one of Mother’s rages at me was triggered she showed no control or mercy.  She simply became something worse than a wild, rabid, powerful beast.  At this age I was my full height of 5’ 8 ½” and weighed around 110 pounds.  At 5’6” Mother weighed around 170.  I know now that because from my earliest memories I always held my ability to reason intact, though necessary to preserve the integrity of who I was as a self, my reason-ability put me at a terrible disadvantage against the forces of Mother’s irrationality she wielded so forcefully against me.

Screaming at me what a dirty girl I was, how irresponsible and lazy I was, how determined I was to make her life miserable, how I could not be trusted to do the simplest thing, how I defied her, how hard she tried to raise such a difficult daughter, how I could do nothing right – and on and on and on – I was dragged by my hair, by my wrist and arms with the claws of her fingernails dug deeply into my skin, pummeled and slapped and punched and pushed to the edge of a mud puddle in the driveway made wide and deep by this summer’s incessant rains.  I was shoved hard and knocked down into it.

I tried to stand up.  Out came her foot, kicking me back down again hard.

“I’ll tell you when you can stand up!  I’ll tell you when you can get out of that puddle!  You are a PIG!  I want you to crawl around in the middle of that puddle on your hands and knees!  I want to hear you say over and over again “I am a PIG!  I am a PIG!  I am a PIG!” because that is EXACTLY what you are!  A PIG.  A filthy dirty PIG!”

I was wearing shorts.  My palms were imbedded with gravel, cut and bleeding as were my knees.  I kept trying to stand.  She kept punching and kicking me back down.  I kept trying to reach the edge of the puddle to crawl out and away even if she would not let me stand.  (This is very hard, trying now to breathe and write and not cry at the same time.)

While she did not let me stand I did withstand her.  I did NOT recite her evil words!  And I paid a high price for my resistance for as long as she had any strength left in her she kept up her vicious attack.  Eventually she had to wear out.  I knew that always happened sooner or later, though many times her beatings resumed again once she had rested.  This meant that sometimes this pattern went on for days, and even into nights if she felt like dragging me out of my bed by my hair, waking me up with a beating all over again.  In between she banished me alone in silence either into corners or into my bed where I was forced through evil and strange circumstances to rest myself from the terrible trauma of her beatings.

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Not having an ego in a culture where not having an ego is the norm works out fine.  The trouble is for those of us born into ‘western’ civilization, those of us raised in such severely abusive homes of origin that robbed us of the development of an ego are thus at a severe disadvantage.

I cannot help at this moment (after writing my previous post) but come around in my thinking to a re-thinking of what Dr. Martin Teicher’s research group concludes in this article:

+Dr. Teicher’s ARTICLE ON TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT

and with my comments:

*Notes on Teicher

It won’t be the researchers who all were no doubt raised within safe and secure early attachment environments who come to the conclusion I just have this morning.  At the end of Teicher’s article it is mentioned that there is a MISMATCH between those who have suffered physiological developmental changes due to extreme traumatic stress in their early lives and those who have not.

What if being ‘evolutionarily altered’ means for many of us that we did NOT develop an ‘ordinary ego’?

In an older kind of society, call in clan or tribal, no individual survives alone.  Whatever exists of an individual in those contexts can only contribute to GROUP survival at the same time that group survival is enhanced by the continued survival of its individual members.

Those of us who suffered ALONE through seemingly insurmountable early experiences of abuse and trauma NEVER had a chance to negotiate within a benign, benevolent environment the kinds ego-based interactions and transactions that build an ego in the first place.

Never before today have I had occasion – or opportunity – to realize that what matters to humans is not ONLY about the development and retention of a ‘self’.  In cultures where people are placed in competition with one another – which IS the truth in today’s American society no matter what we might wish to believe to the contrary – people NEED an ego.

Those of us who are ‘evolutionarily altered’ because of the severe traumatic stress that changed the development of our body-brain — very likely experience the losing end of a battle for survival in a culture that is NOT invested in the many taking care of either the many – or the few.

While we are obviously alive, have survived, continue to survive – in essence it is THRIVING with a good quality of life, with a good chance of experiencing well-being, that we are missing out on.

This deprivation as I see it at this moment would have far less to do with whether or not we came out of our horrendous early years having a SELF as it would do with not coming out of those early years with a well-formed EGO.

Ego and self are NOT the same thing.  One can have a clear mind, inner integrity, and conscious, reflective awareness without having an ego.

America is an ego-driven culture.  One for all and all for one?  Not that I see.  Not when we freely neglect and sacrifice the well-being of our offspring.

The mismatch that happens as Teicher mentions when those raised in a malevolent early environment end up living their adult life in a world supposedly created by and for those raised in a benevolent world means that those of us who suffered alone in the beginning will most likely suffer alone for the rest of our lives.  We were not created to participate in a free-for-all world of free-trade.  We needed help from others THEN – and we need help from others NOW.

Not because we are weak.  Not because we are inadequate.  We need help because we were created in, by and for a world where EVERYONE in our world needed help – although, of course, nobody admitted this fact.

Now we live in a world where there are lots and lots and lots of people who really don’t need that much help to get along pretty dang well in their lives.  People gave them what they needed in the beginning (‘good enough’) so that they can use their corresponding ego to take care of their own needs.

Those of us raised in an environment of need in the beginning – have needs for the rest of our life that are not recognized by the mainstream culture we live in.  It takes us nearly a lifetime to figure out what our needs really are – let alone to figure out how to get those needs met.

I have pushed myself into a tight corner.  In consequence I have finally clearly defined what I am missing and how that loss is affecting me in ways that matter to me a great deal.

I cannot publish my own books without help.  I don’t have the ego I need to do this work alone.  I am feeling angry about this today.  Angry that it took me this long to even find out that I have been missing one of these culturally-handy ego-things all of my life!  I can’t run out on Black Friday and buy one, either.  Egos aren’t for sale at any price – large or small.

Of course I am very glad I have a self – but a self without an ego puts me at disadvantage in a competition-for-resources society where the bigger the ego the bigger the gain.  I am in a situation where I am dependent on outside people to help me where I cannot help myself.  Can I access that help?  It feels to me that such assistance will come with a price – no matter what – because I live in an ego-driven culture that places a price on everything it can think of.

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Because of my mother’s particular kind of mental illness, I did not exist as a person separate from her.  How did I be a person anyway – in spite of her?  It wasn’t like she let me develop into a part-self – so she could take that part-self away from me.  She never saw ME as a person at all, a fact that might have been my greatest protection from her and from what she did to me.

She never saw ME – so she could not touch ME.  There was no protection for the body that was me, but the ME that lived within that body was invisible to her because of the very psychotic delusions that prevented her from being able to know I WAS NOT SHE!!

Mildred saw things that did not actually exist when she ‘considered’ anything that had to do with me.  She saw things that never happened – beat me for things that never happened – for things I never did.

As I tried to fight my way to writing about my childhood with Mildred yesterday (I was trying to work with this ‘crime’:  *Age 4 – THE BEDSPREAD) I thought about one particular statement from the 43 BPD characteristics mentioned here:

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

(43) — Accuse others of doing things they did not do, having feelings they do not feel, or believing things they do not believe?

Well – DUH Linda!  Start at the beginning!

The devil did not send me to kill her while I was being born.  I was not the devil’s child.

Well – my life went down hill from there!!

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Yesterday I tried to get busy writing some of my ‘crime report’ ‘stories’ to include at the start of “The Demise of Mildred” series.  I got nowhere.  When I look at what happened to me I see HER reality.  Of course I suffered from what Mother did to me – but what matters to me is that inside my own MIND I knew – always – what I had done – what had happened – and nothing the monster could do to me could or did change my reality.

I was hence always doubly beaten and ‘punished’ because to her – I lied.  I would never apologize to her for something I knew I had not done.  I would not admit to something I knew I had not done.  (There is proof in my baby book within my very first spoken sentences as Mildred recorded them that these patterns had been going on before I was old enough to talk.)

There are huge cracks in my memories between what I now see as Mildred’s delusional reality in which (I now realize) she really DID see happen what she accused me of – and my own reality.  While we were literally both in the same physical world – we were not in the same universe, not the same reality.

Because Mildred’s psychotic break regarding me happened as she was giving birth to me I was born into this split world — HERS and MINE.

I paid a great great price for living in my own world.  For some reason I do not comprehend I could not (like I can’t flap my arms and fly) compromise my own self (integrity) I had evidently been born with.  I could not admit that her version of reality is what had actually happened – because I had my own version.

It was not my fault these two realities did not match.  I realized yesterday that it could not have possibly mattered to me if she had beaten me to death.  I had nothing to lose.  Not that I knew of.

But looking back my life WAS my own MIND.  My intact mind that knew what happened in the world I lived in.  Was I defying her?  No.  That was never my intention.  All I knew how to do was to be true to my own self from BIRTH – at way, way, way too young of an age to have ever been ready to face and to cope with such conflicts.

I could not compromise myself.  It was not in me to do so – not even to consider doing so.  I did not ever agree with Mother’s delusional version of reality as she accused me of doing things I didn’t do – because I COULD NOT.

Somehow this fact is very important to me.  How this is translating into my thinking today is that these patterns of horrific abuse tied to being ‘punished’ for things that had not happened, things I did not do – led to my lack of developing what I suppose others do:  An Ego.

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What do other people do with an ego?  What is an ego good for?  What am I missing if I didn’t develop an ego?

I don’t waste time in pondering what loss or benefit not having an ego gives me.  I only care at this moment about one thing!

If this is true – that I don’t have an ego – it explains to me why I cannot go backwards in time (as it seems to me) to reread, rewrite or in any way edit anything I have written in the past.

It seems to me that I would have to have an ego to do this with – that it would be my ego that would stand face to face with the me that does my writing in the first place.

No ego = no editor.  No self-editor.  No ego to give a dang about what I have thought or said or expressed in the past – because I don’t have an ego to be invested WITH or IN my past self.

I am reminded of one of my favorite books within which for the first time I saw my own reality, my own worldview, reflected back at me:

Eskimo Realities by Edmund Snow Carpenter, Eberhard Otto, Fritz Spiess and Jorgen Meldgaard (1973)

Carpenter describes the language and worldview of an arctic people just before ‘white’ contact changed their reality.  He describes how prior to the dollar culture moving in, artists carved the most exquisite forms out of ivory – and when the group moved on these pieces were left along the side of the ‘road’ as if they had no value as objects whatsoever.

They didn’t.

They had no “I” in their culture prior to white contact, no investment whatsoever in what ‘western’ culture so fondly calls an ego.

I leave my writings behind me in the same way.

I would say, “So what?” But if I at the same time feel that any collection of my thoughts is to be published in book form, I struggle with the conflict of lacking the capacity to work with my own words.  I can write things in the moment.  I can add word after word.

But just as I survived the unbelievable hell of my childhood being continually attacked by a psychotic, delusional MAD WOMAN – because I had the capacity to (1) know my own reality, (2) never lose my own reality and, (3) never compromise my own reality – I seem unable to do anything any differently now:  I moved forward in time THEN.  I move forward in time NOW.

Is it an EGO that lets people connect their past to their present to their future in ways that I don’t think I can?  If I want to complete books I better figure this out for myself.  I do not call this ‘healing’.  I can’t ‘heal’ the fact that circumstances of my childhood in hell prevented me from developing anything like an ‘ordinary’ ego.  (If I had to choose between having an intact SELF or having some kind of an EGO – thank you, but SELF works fine for me.)

But if I don’t have this EGO-thing and this loss/absence is preventing me from accomplishing something I want to do – feel destined to do – what are my options?

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I have had another change in my thinking this morning as I prepare to write book one of “The Demise of Mildred” series, in which I need to place what I have so far always thought of as ‘my stories’ about child abuse I experienced at the hands of my mother, Mildred.

What have I been thinking?

These are not STORIES!  What I have to say does not belong to any genre related to stories!

As I mentioned to a blog comment this morning, what I have to say should have been written in police reports.  What I have to say is a description of crimes committed against me.  These are not stories!

Why would I ever feel – why have I felt in the past – that I need to write what I have to say about the truth of what Mildred did to me in some kind of ‘entertainment’ format for any reader, even for myself?

All of a sudden today – TODAY!  I realize how sick my thinking has been, even though I have never before today been aware of it.  I figured out some years ago that the crimes of physical attack and assault Mildred did to me should have earned her a minimum 15,000 year jail sentence.  Yet I still understood that what I might say about these assaults would ‘only’ be a story?

How minimizing is THAT?  How inaccurate!  How ‘inside the abuse’ has my own thinking been all these years!

Just because what I know might exist inside a memory does not mean what I know is ‘a story’.  What I know is a record of crime.

I needed this clarification in my thinking before I begin to present any kind of a record about the truth about Mildred that no reader will see in her own writings – ever.  I know that in order for this book to be created I have to be as clear as I possibly can be about what I expect myself to do – and why I expect myself to do it.

I am my own witness.  As the victim of child abuse crimes I will always be the best witness to what was done to me.  I experienced and I witnessed CRIMES.  Those crimes will only ever be recorded as I record them.  What I will say, then, will be in the form of statements for the record.  There cannot possibly be any ‘entertainment’ value in that kind of writing.

OK – so I have to think about this some more – from my new point of view…..

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What is it about being myself in my body in my life that I don’t like today?  Today – so far – seems to be one of those days when just being myself makes me feel crabby.  At least I can feel grateful I don’t recognize this feeling very often.  I wonder, “What is the source of my irritation at being me today?”

Now, the one word that is stuck in my mind – as irritating as a burr would be stuck under the saddle of a horse, or a pebble inside a person’s shoe — is this one.  OBLIVIOUS.

I can’t say that I understand how this word, ‘oblivious’, could possibly be making me feel so irritated and crabby at myself this morning – except to say that because I think of myself as a ‘writer’, I expect myself to be able to beat words at their own game – at least most of the time!

Struck dumb by a word?  By THIS word?

My main train of thought these past few days is about the silence of child abuse – the silence that surrounds its reality, the silence of the suffering child, the silence even of adult survivors of child abuse – the silence of the society that lets child abuse continue – and on and on and on….

Does our society choose to remain OBLIVIOUS about the reality of child abuse?

Well, I thought I could use this word correctly in this way – until I began to look at the connection between OBLIVIOUS and OBLIVION.

– OBLIVION evidently relates as a ‘measurement’ of degrees of forgetting.

1. : the fact or condition of forgetting or having forgotten;especially : the condition of being oblivious

2. : the condition or state of being forgotten or unknown

– OBLIVIOUS is about not remembering – PLUS

1. : lacking remembrance, memory, or mindful attention

2. : lacking active conscious knowledge or awareness —usually used with of or to

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Strangely, by looking into the root connections to these words another word comes up that I had never heard before –

– LEVIGATE

1.: polish, smooth

2.a : to grind to a fine smooth powder while in moist condition

b : to separate (fine powder) from coarser material by suspending in a liquid

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Do we ‘forget’ (pass into oblivion, become oblivious to) things we have known about in an effort to make smooth a path of life – take out the bumps – ‘make nice’ our lives by leaving things out that don’t fit the picture we wish to have of – whatever – both as individuals and as a collective society?

Is this denial?  A handy kind of forgetting what we do not want to remain consciously aware of — WHY?

If I choose a word related to OBLIVIOUS am I really saying that people know perfectly well what infant-child abuse is, that it exists, know of the damage it causes a survivor for a lifetime – as they choose to conveniently FORGET that they know/forget what they know?

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As a writer I do not often stumble upon – no, trip and fall flat – from words I encounter.  What is it about this word, OBLIVIOUS, that has me stuck in Crabby Ville today?

Never mind this word first appeared in my thoughts with a demand that I place if first in this book I am intent on writing next – as I mentioned in my last post.  This word (Can words talk?) said to me, “I want to be the first word in your book.  And then I want a period to follow me.  Just that. Just this.”

Oblivious.

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Well, what to do when a word becomes so troublesome in its demands it will not let me simply SKIP it and move on?  It won’t let me ignore it.  I have always believed I know (of course) what this word means – but do I?

I am writing this current book as the introduction to the multi-volume series of “The Demise of Mildred” because I know perfectly well that for 18 long years her abuse of me remained (evidently) invisible to anyone who could have stopped it from happening.

Or – nobody cared.  Nobody had any kind of vested interest in looking after my well-being.

This is true for everyone that has ever been abused as a child – true for children (and infants) that are being neglected, abused, traumatized, terrorized NOW.

OBLIVIOUS is an issue!  Nobody is going to see Mildred’s abuse of me in her own writings.  Nobody saw it in real time when it was happening to me.  I can’t change the past, but I am going to do my best to prevent readers from being OBLIVIOUS to Mildred’s abuse as they read her writings.

Or – are we survivors supposed to comply with the status quo, keep our mouths shut – and let the abusers continue to ‘get away with it’?

Of course – this is exactly what we are supposed to do!  Let abuse fade away into oblivion, let everyone remain oblivious to the reality of abuse of innocents within our society that does not, frankly, give a damn.

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OBVIOUS:

Synonyms: clueless, incognizant, innocent, insensible, nescient [not informed about or aware of something], ignorant, unacquainted, unaware, unconscious,uninformed, unknowing, unmindful, unwitting

Antonyms: acquainted, aware, cognizant, conscious,conversant, grounded, informed, knowing, mindful, witting

OBLIVION:

Synonyms: forgetfulness, nirvana, obliviousness

Webster’s does not list antonyms for this word!

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After a very long troubling sleepless night I finally dozed as the fall sun crawled slowly into the sky.  Sometimes writing a book takes doing battle I realized last night.  Who gets epiphanies?  Those who are able to struggle long enough to make it to the place where an epiphany awaits them?  I LIKE epiphanies   I detest the uncomfortable process I seem to always have to go through before I am ready for the next step in my learning-growing-healing process.

Today I find I see what I am doing in my book writing process completely differently that I did yesterday.  It took a combination of being unsure of myself, of what I am doing, of why I am doing it, of how I am doing it — along with timely words coming to me from people in my life.  Why do I so tenaciously cling to the telling of ‘my story’ of abuse which includes the telling of my abusive mother’s story?  Because I am not going to throw out something of highest value – just because my culture says I ought to ‘let it go and move on’.

Today I understand the great difference between a QUEST and a MISSION.

My mother was – quite sickly – on a QUEST her entire life.  Her mental illness gave her ways to divide that which was BAD from that which was GOOD (as I wrote about in my previous post).

Her abuse of me was meant to ‘take care of’ all she could not tolerate inside herself — while her Alaskan homesteading was meant to complete her quest by letting her live in a perfect kingdom where no ‘bad’ either existed – or could reach her.

I think about my writing.  I see today that I am on NO healing quest whatsoever as I shape and reshape words into stories that come from my memories of abuse.  I don’t write to heal!

NO WAY!

I write because I am on a MISSION!

Now, unlike the kind of continual stream-of-thought writing I do on my blog, the troubles I have been having with my book project is that I have to make THOUSANDS of decisions as I do that work that I do not ever have to make as I blog.

It is this decision-making that I don’t like!  I don’t like it because I am unfamiliar with that ‘way’ of writing.

Defining clearly my own difference between being on a quest and being on a mission allows me to now take varying pieces of information to combine them in new ways.

Mildred’s quest was not only for survival.  It was for healing.

All the she knew and all that she did – including her abuse of me and her homesteading – was a part of this healing quest.

I realize most importantly that perhaps the most significant contributing factor to why I was able to raise my three children without continuing the intergenerational pattern of traumatizing them through abuse was exactly this fact:  I left my abusive home of origin intact and autonomous.

Mildred did not break me.  She did not make me sick.  For whatever reasons – I have always had my own self present with me.  I was not, therefore, on any kind of a ‘healing quest’ to solve my own inner troubles through the actions I took toward my children.

Rather, I had a MISSION clearly in my mind, heart and soul as I raised my kids.  I didn’t need to think about this consciously except in an occasional passing thought, “I am not going to raise my children like my parents raised me.  I am going to raise them so that they know clearly WHO they are, as they grow up to LOVE who they are.”

That was it.  My mission was clear and defined.

This does not mean that throughout the stages of my adult life as a survivor of 18 years of terrible child abuse that I have not ‘quested’ for healing – for information – for knowledge and for wisdom about what happened to me and what that means to me.

But today I would question my use of ‘quest’ even in that regard.  I was – truthfully and accurately – on a MISSION to become the best me I can be no matter what happened to me.

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So as it applies to the stages of my book writing I today understand that my mission is to give voice to infant and child abuse through exposing what I can discover about the abuse that happened to me.

The truth about infant and child abuse lies behind the scenes in our society.  It lies in silence.  There is only one way I know of to break this silence – and that is to use my words to SPEAK from behind that wall of silence.

Punch holes in silence.  I am reminded of a dream I had over 30 years ago.  A poet professor I had was in this dream sitting on steps that went over a wall – pondering.  I saw him, stopped to ask him what he was so deeply in thought about.

“This is the wall of silence,” he told me as he gestured to a pitch dark wall stretching to his left and to his right.  The wall was darker than night time.  It blocked out the light of the stars in the sky.

“But,” he told me.  “Look.  Look closely.  There are holes in the wall of silence.”

True enough.  If one looked closely enough there were spots in the wall where the star light shone brightly through.

I awoke hearing my own words I spoke to the poet, “I didn’t KNOW there were holes in silence!”

This was an epiphany to me.  It applies here as I rise to move forward to complete my book writing mission using what this dream taught me.  With the telling of my stories I am punching holes in the silence that keeps the reality of abuse of infants and children flourishing in our culture.

What I know about Mildred also creates holes in this silence.

My mission is to keep to my own path.  Yes, I realize ‘life is short’ but I will never say it is ‘too short’ to keep with us our own stories until we learn from them what we need to, and until we use what we have been through – what we know in consequence – as great tools of power toward the healing and protection of our species.

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