+MY MOTHER’S WORDS ABOUT ‘THE ALASKA DREAM’

May 31, 2010 alchemynowLeave a comment

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It still baffles me that my mother wrote her letters and impressions about Alaska ALWAYS planning to write a book about her experiences and hauled them all with her throughout all her MANY moves and wanderings for 45 years – yet she dated nearly nothing. I found these two separate pieces of her writing and decided to include them with her early writings right after she reached Alaska.

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August 5, 1957

[Linda note: This is undated – this is approximate date placement, written on my father’s old Los Angeles letterhead paper]

From where do dreams come and can one trace the beginning of a dream to its origin? Perhaps some can, we can’t. Bill says he had wanted to go to Alaska for as long as he can remember. I only know I was not content to remain in California for the rest of my life – it did not answer my needs or the [sic] of our family. Bill felt the same way – neither of us had come to California from our choice and both had remained because it had seemed impossible to do otherwise. – I’m afraid we were drifting along discontented, but not enough so to up and do something about it, so we dreamed. We had both always wanted to travel and even now we still have a dream of traveling over Europe and seeing more of the world we live in. Perhaps this dream will be fulfilled someday too!

But Bill transferred the idea of his dream to me and it became my dream only after I found out what Alaska was truly like. [The following is also written on this paper:]

Bill: [nothing written after his name]

Me Over-emphasis on materialistic living – using juvenile restlessness

Not enough space for growing children [washed out ink/word] themselves – room for boys to hike and explore and discover the wonders of nature.

Such a long distance to travel in order to enjoy winter and summer sports

“A way of life”

Children want to feel a part of their family in play as well as work, they like to feel necessary – more opportunity for this in a new growing land

possible date August 5, 1957

[Linda note: This is also undated but perhaps belongs with these last comments. The words are written in pencil on a restaurant placemat.]

It wasn’t until the other day that I was certain of my own reasons for wanting to go to Alaska. How many times I have tried to weight the pros and cons but all the while there was some intangible

[Linda note: last word is crossed out, sentence is not finished, on the lower half of placemat is written the following:]

Up until now it had been a dream of which to dream never knowing whether the dream would become a certainty and not even knowing for sure if we perhaps just wanted it to remain a dream. Everyone must have something of which to dream – was our dream of going to Alaska – only that.

Today we [sentence not completed, this is all that’s on this side of the folded-in-fourths placemat. On the other side is her bright red lipstick ‘kiss’ mark with the following words written in ink:]

“What greater happiness can come to a family than the arrival of a baby! Surely it’s a sign that God has blessed the marriage. A baby is God’s masterpiece, a wonderful creation of his infinite mind. He has said, “Suffer little children to come unto me; for of such is the kingdom of heaven”…No baby can ever be far from the throne of God, the Source of all life, of all Creation.” – From the writings of Norman Vincent Peal

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+WORD WARRIOR NEWS: THE TITLE I’VE CHOSEN FOR MY MOTHER’S BOOK

May 31, 2010May 31, 2010 alchemynowLeave a comment

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Perhaps I should feel honored that I had such a central and starring role as a player in the trauma drama that was my Borderline mother’s life. She was, of course, not only the Leading Lady but the writer, producer and director of this trauma drama. It is a significant problem being raised as the daughter of my mother that because I was born into my role from before the first breath of my lifetime, there was no possible way I could know that I was in a trauma drama at all!

My mother believed this drama was real and I had no choice but to believe this fantastic lie right along with her.

My guess is in severe Borderline Personality Disorder cases like my mother’s was one of the biggest problems for those whose lives are intimately intertwined with such a mother is that her Borderline constantly shifted. For all the thousands of hours I have spent researching her ‘condition’ in her letters and writings I still have a nearly impossible task of pinpointing exactly where her Borderline actually was.

Her Borderline did not allow her to define other people (her children and mate included) as being individual and autonomous people separate from her. ALL of us were HER CAPTIVES. We were FORCED to play our assigned part in the never-ending trauma drama she enveloped everyone within.

Her children were her Prisoners of War. For all the shady shifting of her Borderline mind, that fact remained consistent along with one other: Her nearly constant moving created the shifts between the scenes of her drama.

I suspect that just as my mother projected her own mind-psyche out onto the members of her family so that we were all assigned ‘parts to play’ as characters that we could not escape from, her psyche externalized itself in her continual moving around. The overall primary theme of my mother’s trauma drama seemed to be a ‘search for a home in heaven’.

The secondary theme that involved me as the irredeemable child of the devil was tied to her primary theme of ‘looking for a home in heaven’ – because if all the BAD in her life could be eliminated, ‘heaven’ would appear. That all that BAD actually existed within her own mind as she then projected it onto me was simply the WAY the play unfolded.

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So, I have decided that I will most likely title the book of my mother’s writings,

“The Many Moves of Mildred: Her Alaskan Homesteading Tale in Letters“

or “Mildred’s Many Moves”

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My mother’s physical moves from location to location provide the most obvious single clue that something was terribly wrong ON THE INSIDE of my mother. The moving around cannot be ignored or rationally explained even though within the family the ‘explanations’ were always built right into the pattern of the moves as they happened. Nobody could or did ever question her moves – we had no power to do so.

The far less obvious ‘mental moves’ of Mildred are of course much harder to detect because the Borderline that could define what these ‘other moves’ actually were as they were happening constantly moved itself!

I suspect that for every physical move my mother ever made a corresponding shift, no matter how subtle, within her mood and mental state happened along with it. My mother used moving to regulate her emotions because she lacked the resilient capacity to flexibly adapt, respond, change and ‘move things around’ within her own self. My mother’s moving was a pattern of dissociating from one ‘place’ to another ‘place’ – externally with an internal echo.

From my point of view, my mother’s life story is probably one of the most profound examples of how an early-forming unsafe and insecure attachment disorder can rob a human being of the ability to EVER feel truly safe or secure. My mother completely lacked the healthy sense of ‘being at home within’ in a safe and secure way. As a consequence, the theme of her trauma drama that WAS her life demanded of her that she constantly, constantly, constantly QUEST for her ‘safe and secure home in heaven’ outside of herself.

My mother followed this pattern – alone once her husband divorced her and her children were out of her life – until her lonely dying day in that last pathetic, shabby, run-down, ugly Anchorage, Alaska motel room.

I personally know, even if I do not say a single other word about my mother’s severe ‘mental illness’ within the text of the main body of her own writings, that the title I am assigning to ‘her book’ contains the truth about HOW my mother was in the world because she lacked the capacity to truly be a WHO. That title describes her Mercurial madness as she blindly followed an invisible Hermes from place to place to place.

No matter what people might think as they read my mother’s writings, even without my saying one single word to alert readers to the TRUTH about what living with my mother was actually like, my mother’s life was a terrible, terrible tragedy. From my point of view, my mother didn’t DIE in her infancy and childhood. She was never actually even born.

And for all the thousands and thousands of words contained in her writings, not one of them names the infant-child abuse, neglect and maltreatment that stole her life away from her as it turned her into a roaring, violent, TERRORIST CAPTOR of a mother.

This is the reason I have chosen the word ‘tale’ rather than ‘story’ for her title. What is NOT in my mother’s words, or perhaps what barely glimmers a few times here and there, is the true story of her life: There was early damage done to my mother that meant she never reached any healing no matter how unconsciously and desperately she chased after it.

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This post follows the previous three from earlier today:

(1) +OWNING THE BURDENS CREATED BY CHILD ABUSE

(2) +TRAUMA AND ABUSE SURVIVORS: TROUBLE WHEN WE ARE ALONE WITH OUR PATIENCE TOO LONG

(3) +TRAUMA WILL NOT SHUT UP UNTIL SOMEBODY LISTENS (TRAUMA DRAMAS SHOUT MOST LOUDLY)

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+TRAUMA WILL NOT SHUT UP UNTIL SOMEBODY LISTENS (TRAUMA DRAMAS SHOUT MOST LOUDLY)

May 31, 2010 alchemynowLeave a comment

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While individual survivors of abuse and trauma might remain in their suspended-animation state of patient (silent) endurance that allowed them to survive their trauma(s) in the first place, TRAUMA itself is NEVER silent.

In today’s world where survivors patiently remain suffering ‘patients’ wounded and damaged by abuse and trauma while the non-survivors go live a happier life with more well-being, TRAUMA itself spreads it loud and messy signals all over the place through patterns that we can most clearly name – Trauma Dramas.

Because our species had all kinds of ways to communicate well before we obtained our verbal abilities (about 140,000 years ago) we still have these very ancient preverbal and nonverbal communication abilities built within us. Trauma acts itself out in survivors’ lives until somebody, somewhere LISTENS to the messages that trauma contains within it.

We seem to have lost our ability to track the ‘un-verbal’ ways trauma continues to communicate its presence and its message to and among us. My mother, who never in her lifetime could NAME the fact that she was wounded as a child, could never TALK about her abuse and trauma and had no WORDS she could use simply continued to patiently carry the burden of surviving her trauma throughout her lifetime.

But I promise you trauma spread its presence around through my mother’s life in everything she ever did. If anyone had been able to read trauma’s signals and actually listened to her ‘un-verbal’ messages, something different could have happened in her life and in her family’s.

If we can train ourselves to recognize when trauma is communicating through the ancient human avenue of DRAMATIC reenactments, and what the trauma drama is SAYING, we have a pretty good chance of STOPPING the STORM of the intergenerational transmission of traumas that continue to act themselves out because they have something important to say and will NOT shut up until somebody listens and learns.

Infant-child abuse is clearly one of these trauma drama reenactments – and this abuse will NOT stop until somebody listens and learns what the trauma within and behind the drama has to tell us. (Clue: I’ve stated what this message is on this blog MANY TIMES!)

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This is the third post in today’s series about patiently enduring trauma (including trauma from abuse).

(1) +OWNING THE BURDENS CREATED BY CHILD ABUSE

(2) +TRAUMA AND ABUSE SURVIVORS: TROUBLE WHEN WE ARE ALONE WITH OUR PATIENCE TOO LONG

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+TRAUMA AND ABUSE SURVIVORS: TROUBLE WHEN WE ARE ALONE WITH OUR PATIENCE TOO LONG

May 31, 2010 alchemynowLeave a comment

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In following my previous post, +OWNING THE BURDENS CREATED BY CHILD ABUSE, I find myself thinking about the ancient history of human beings and about how trauma was probably ‘handled back then’. Everyone is placed equally under the same burden while in the midst of the peritrauma of a traumatic experience. One way or the other we all participate in one of the only two options as we ‘patiently’ carry the burden that the trauma creates:

(1) We endure the trauma and come out of the experience alive

(2) Or we don’t

But way back in the time of our earlier origins I seriously doubt that we had to patiently carry the burden of traumatic experiences very much past the actual experience of the trauma itself. Even before humans had spoken language abilities (prior to about 140,000 years ago) we had ways to communicate our experiences to others. We used facial expressions, gestures, pantomimes, dances and song-music.

‘Back then’ we had no cultural or social reason to postpone our expression of our experience any longer than would have been absolutely essential to ‘the patient survivorship’ of the traumas themselves. Past that point, communicating about trauma HAD to happen so that others could know what we encountered, faced and survived. Everyone reaped a benefit from LEARNING about trauma and how to survive it.

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For a long time I have suspected that when trauma survivors cannot learn anything useful from a traumatic experience that will help them and others to avoid a similar trauma in the future or learn something to help better ensure survival of a similar trauma if/when it happens again, we suffer from long term ‘damage’ related to anxiety (i.e. depression, panic, phobias, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), etc.)

In essence, then, no matter what traumatized us – no matter what we patiently endured and survived because there was no alternative – if we cannot express the experience of trauma to our self and to others we are condemned to be FOREVER patient. If ‘being patient’ means all of the things that I just described in relation to the word itself in my last post, then being forever forced to remain in a state of suspended animation regarding trauma means that being patient too long makes us ALSO have to be ‘patients’ too long.

Being wounded without reprieve or hope of healing keeps us in the state of ‘patient-hood’. Only most often the ‘patience’ that keeps us being a ‘patient’ is never factually recognized or described. We simply keep bearing-carrying our burden of suffering – as it destroys us and our lives.

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Again I would say that enduring specific traumas allows those survivors to know the FACTS – in all their minute details – in a way that nonsurvivors of particular traumas will never know. BUT IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN THAT WAY unless the survivor had the chance, the opportunity, the possibility to absolutely and as nearly completely as possible communicate to others ALL OF THE INFORMATION RELATED TO THE TRAUMA.

How could our species have learned to better prepare for the un-preparable (the hidden dangers in the world we had never experienced before) if we were not able to learn SOMETHING from every trauma that every single person ever experienced?

I imagine way back in our early beginnings – a tribe, a group of people who depended upon one another for their shared and mutual survival, PATIENTLY taking the time – however much time it TOOK – both for a trauma survivor to express what had happened and for the non-trauma survivors to completely UNDERSTAND what the trauma survivor had gone through.

Humans did not win the hominid survival prize because we impatiently ignored traumas. We did not survive because we ignored what trauma survivors had to communicate about their experience. Along with the SHARING of the facts and details related to trauma experiences, EVERYONE shared the PATIENCE – EVERYONE shared the burdens created by knowing that ‘trauma is out there’ waiting to kill us. Learning from trauma to better ensure continued survival for everyone was everyone’s concern.

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Not so with most kinds of abuse humans suffer at one another’s hands today. Not true for abuse and malevolent treatment suffered by infants and children. Survivors SURVIVE exactly because of their PATIENCE. This patience IS the act and the process of enduring trauma in the first place. That we continue to suffer from and with the burdens created by abuse happens because this state of being patient goes on far, far, far too long.

Trauma has to be shared. Something useful is SUPPOSED to be learned by traumas by everyone.

I believe that trauma caused by caregiver abuse of infants and children IS NOT NATURAL. I believe it is always caused in concert with so-called ‘mental illness’. I’m not going into detail here about this now, but I do want to mention that the state of patience that infant-child abuse survivors were FORCED into in the beginning is often carried forward through their entire lifespan. When this happens the ‘patient little one’ has become the ‘sick patient’ and will stay in that state (usually deteriorating) for the rest of their lifespan IF THE TRAUMA IS NOT SHARED.

I don’t think there is an alternative. I think our human species evolved this way. We cannot find another way out of or around the long term harm that unresolved trauma causes us. There is no healing alternative because we ARE members of a species that was made this way: Trauma is NOT meant to be carried patiently ALONE any longer than the amount of time it takes to patiently endure and survive the ACTIVE experience of trauma – as it is actually happening

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+OWNING THE BURDENS CREATED BY CHILD ABUSE

May 31, 2010May 31, 2010 alchemynowLeave a comment

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I’ve been thinking about my mother all morning as I worked out in the heat adding onto my adobe walkway. I am trying to define my feelings about her and about her life. I thought about ‘pity’, ‘compassion’ and ‘regret’. I can’t become clear about my feelings or define them until I understand more about what these three words actually mean in our language.

I have always shied away from using the word ‘pity’ even in my thinking because, to me, the word has a tinge of a self-righteousness, a stance and perspective that I consider to be connected to a personal shortcoming rather than to an asset. I looked this word up online and Webster’s defines the word this way:

PITY

Etymology: Middle English pite, from Anglo-French pité, from Latin pietat-, pietas piety, pity, from pius pious

Date: 13th century

1 a : sympathetic sorrow for one suffering, distressed, or unhappy b : capacity to feel pity
2 : something to be regretted <it’s a pity you can’t go>

synonyms pity, compassion, commiseration, condolence, sympathy

With this clarification I can tell that my concern about taking a ‘self-righteous’ perspective IS tied to how I feel about ‘piety’ and ‘pious’ in general. I don’t like either of those words for some reason I can’t quite grasp. Yet words by themselves do not contain either negative or positive. What is it about this word that causes me to want to shudder and run?

PIOUS

Etymology: Middle English, from Latin pius

Date: 15th century

1 a : marked by or showing reverence for deity and devotion to divine worship b : marked by conspicuous religiosity <a hypocrite—a thing all pious words and uncharitable deeds — Charles Reade>
2 : sacred or devotional as distinct from the profane or secular : religious <a pious opinion>
3 : showing loyal reverence for a person or thing : dutiful
4 a : marked by sham or hypocrisy b : marked by self-conscious virtue : virtuous
5 : deserving commendation : worthy <a pious effort>

The word ‘pious’ is a young word in our English language, and no doubt directly entered our cultural awareness through the influence of ‘the church’. Knowing my mother’s focal obsession with ‘good versus evil’ was also tied in some vague yet powerful way with ideas contained in Christian religion does not make me eager to embrace this concept.

Yet while the definition of ‘pity’ does coincide with the thoughts I have been having about my mother and her life today, it is not a word that ‘rings true’ to me about how I feel in response to her and her life today. So I will look further into this synonym for ‘pity’:

COMPASSION

Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French or Late Latin; Anglo-French, from Late Latin compassion-, compassio, from compati to sympathize, from Latin com- + pati to bear, suffer — more at patient

Date: 14th century

: sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it

synonyms see pity

This word, ‘patient’ did come into my thoughts as I sloshed wet mud into my adobe mold this morning. I don’t know which way this word is connected to compassion – as a suffering ‘patient’ or as one who needs to ‘be more patient’?

When this word appeared in my thoughts it was connected to my thinking that nobody who has not suffered infant and/or child abuse can EVER really have a clue what ‘it’ is. Most people in our culture have some sort of understanding about what ‘child abuse’ is, and yet if anyone had ever asked my mother or my father if there was ‘child abuse’ going on in their home they would have said “NO!” If anyone had asked my mother’s mother if ‘child abuse’ ever happened to my mother, she would have also said “NO!”

My thinking about how ‘everyone’ assumes that they know what child abuse is at the same time that those who are committing child abuse are mostly NOT EVER going to accept the reality of the abuse they commit led me to the word ‘patient’.

The ONLY way the truth about what child abuse IS will be really KNOWN is if the public LISTENS to what infant-child abuse survivors have to say. Yet there’s even a very big problem with THIS approach. Just as child abuse perpetrators are not likely to NAME or OWN the abuse they commit against children, MANY, MANY infant abuse and child abuse survivors are not going to NAME what happened to them, either.

My mother certainly NEVER used ‘child abuse’ in her description of what happened to her in her infancy and childhood. Do we think if we don’t NAME infant and ‘child abuse’ that IT NEVER REALLY HAPPENED?

This line of thinking led me again to the word ‘patient’ in terms of how ‘patient’ the public needs to be in supportive and affirming ways so that those who have OBVIOUSLY suffered greatly from ‘child abuse’ can be encouraged to KNOW the reality of what happened to them in their childhood, and to speak about it!

Now I wonder about someone who is sick, injured, wounded and is a ‘patient’. What does this word actually mean?

PATIENT

Adjective

Etymology: Middle English pacient, from Anglo-French, from Latin patient-, patiens, from present participle of pati to suffer; perhaps akin to Greek pēma suffering

Date: 14th century

1 : bearing pains or trials calmly or without complaint
2 : manifesting forbearance under provocation or strain
3 : not hasty or impetuous
4 : steadfast despite opposition, difficulty, or adversity
5 a : able or willing to bear —used with of b : susceptible, admitting <patient of one interpretation

Noun

Date: 14th century

1 a : an individual awaiting or under medical care and treatment b : the recipient of any of various personal services
2 : one that is acted upon

WOW! How many ‘child abuse’ survivors had any choice BUT to bear the pains and trials of their lives ‘calmly’ and ‘without complaint’? Did we have any choice other than to ‘manifest forbearance under provocation and strain’? We could not act hastily or impetuously in any way that would have altered the course of our abusive childhoods. We could not speed our childhood up like fast-forwarding a movie so that we could escape our abuse any sooner.

We had no choice but to be ‘steadfast despite opposition, difficulty and adversity’. We HAD TO BE ABLE AND WILLING TO BEAR our suffering from what was done to us. The alterative would have been death. And, yes, we were turned into ‘patients awaiting care’. We were wounded, hurt and suffering from the ways that those who had power over us ‘acted upon us’ – in the opposite of a healing way. And we sure were not ‘recipients of any personal services’ that would have helped us.

This topic is obviously ABOUT suffering:

SUFFER

Etymology: Middle English suffren, from Anglo-French suffrir, from Vulgar Latin *sufferire, from Latin sufferre, from sub- up + ferre to bear — more at sub-, bear

Date: 13th century

Which goes directly to what we had to ‘bear’:

BEAR

Etymology: Middle English beren to carry, bring forth, from Old English beran; akin to Old High German beran to carry, Latin ferre, Greek pherein

Date: before 12th century

There’s the old word – ‘bear’ – literally in its roots connected to carrying. And that IS what we did. As I have mentioned over time the afflictions caused to us by infant and child abuse actually built themselves into our body as we grew and developed and changed us.

But what I am thinking about today is the difference between silently carrying what happened to us – often while we don’t even KNOW the truth ourselves about the infant and child abuse we suffered – versus KNOWING the truth, having words for the truth so that we can, as survivors think thoughts in words and communicate our truth about our abuse to others and to our perpetrators if appropriate.

If I think about my mother and her life in terms of ‘patient’, she was patient until her dying breath. She bore and carried what had happened to her as an infant-child and to my knowledge NEVER was able to KNOW the truth. This kind of continued patience, a pattern set up early, early in life, does not help a person to heal. It helps them to become an increasingly ‘sick’ and suffering patient who cannot ask for or receive the healing help they most need to ‘get better’.

As hard as it might sometimes be for me to understand that what my mother did to me was caused by what was done to her, I want to understand that all my mother truly knew in her lifetime was suffering. Her suffering increased with every breath she ever took, and led to her terrible suffering at death. As for me, I would rather ‘suffer while I bear the burden of compassion for my mother’ than not.

My personal mission is to KNOW what happened to both her and me – to give this knowledge words – and to encourage every single person who suffers from infant abuse and child abuse and the burden this abuse creates to speak their truth while the rest of us patiently listen.

This process, to me, is where ‘child abuse’ prevention begins.

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REGRET

Etymology: Middle English regretten, from Anglo-French regreter, from re- + -greter (perhaps of Germanic origin; akin to Old Norse grāta to weep) — more at greet

Date: 14th century

transitive verb 1 a : to mourn the loss or death of b : to miss very much
2 : to be very sorry for <regrets his mistakes>intransitive verb : to experience regret

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+DISSOCIATIVE IDENTITY DISORDER HAPPENS FOR FAMILIES!

May 30, 2010May 31, 2010 alchemynowLeave a comment

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I went outside to work on my adobe landscaping project after I finished my last post, but here I am back again to capture my next sequence of thoughts: A family can have a Dissociative Identity Disorder just like an individual person can.

Duh! That makes perfect sense to me now that I noticed this! I was thinking outside that if good ‘ole Newton had had to rely on a piece of a seed falling out of an ant’s mouth and hitting the ground to come up with his theory about gravity rather than relying on an apple falling off of the branch of a tree, maybe none of us today would quite understand what keeps us stuck into our shoes other than our laces (or velcro).

It’s no less true that the same forces that bring an ant’s lost scrap of food down to earth is the same force that dropped the apple, but without being able to witness a process within the format of a bigger picture, things can be easy to miss.

My story, my mother’s story, my family’s story is an extreme one. Therefore it perhaps offers the opportunity to discover something that might happen within many families but is just as easy to miss as the ant’s dropped fleck.

Anyone who ends up in adulthood with an insecure attachment disorder due to inadequate good caregiver interactions from birth forward during critical stages of development simply ‘catches the ball’ that was passed to it by its caregivers and carries that ball forward.

It makes sense to me to say that NOBODY who suffers from major dissociational problems in their adult life could help but ‘catch’ those dissociational patterns from their parents just like offspring can catch AIDS or any of us can catch a contagious disease.

Therefore, if we consider Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) within the larger context, we will know without a doubt that the dis-order came from being raised in a family that ALSO had Dissociative Identity Disorder.

In a culture hep on believing that everyone is born ‘equal’ and therefore equally autonomous, we need to remember that being a fully healthy autonomous person ONLY happens if adequate safe and secure attachment interactions were available to build a truly healthy autonomous body-nervous system-brain-mind-self from the start of life.

It the safe and secure attachment requirements were not met a fully healthy and autonomous person will not be the end result. Lack of autonomy goes right along with an insecure attachment disorder because they are essentially the exact same thing.

Without the development of autonomy (for reasons just stated) an individual will NOT have a stable, healthy, balanced, fully formed and benevolently functioning IDENTITY.

Humans are not designed in the biological factory of life to hatch from an egg. We are designed to manifest our genetic potential interactively with the environment we are born into and formed by. Ours is an adaptive, flexible, and highly purposeful design. This design is the reason our species is still here.

Our developmental process – which continues to happen during every millisecond of our lifetime in our body as our genetic code continues to form us – happens through feedforward and feedbackward information loops. If a major piece of information we receive and process is about a malevolent environment, we have no choice in our beginnings but to form our body in adaptation to these malevolent conditions.

That my mother was formed within an environment that was not benevolent enough and was too malevolent so that she formed an insecure attachment disorder meant that she was destined — without intervention or healing — to pass it onto her offspring. Her attachment disorder included major dissociation due to the malevolent environment she was formed in.

My father also suffered from certain conditions from his birth that created his body-brain-mind-self to be less than autonomous, which made him a perfect match for my mother. They meshed, enmeshed, and became ‘one person’ as their summer 1957 letters so clearly describe. They formed a secondary identity based on their mutual interdependence on one another BECAUSE they lacked true safe and secure attachment within their own self.

This secondary identity could ASSUME the ‘outfits’ (like a wardrobe of clothing) of identity from external environmental influences that were NOT representative of WHO each of these persons COULD HAVE BEEN if they each had been raised within a safe and securely attached early environment or of who they actually were (or could have been).

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This led me to thinking about what a challenge healing and positive change can be for a family just like it can be for an individual. If the family is made up of insecurely attached people who have no fully formed healthy autonomous identity as separate individuals, the family will have a secondary identity that might as well BE not only the family but the individuals within it.

Family Dissociative Identity Disorder would mean that whatever systems are operating within the family, whatever patterns, actually ARE the family because there is no other autonomous identity present. It would be not only extremely disorganizing and disorienting for a family to attempt to alter their family DID but also could be a nearly impossible goal if the autonomy of the individual members is not IMPROVED first.

This means to me that addressing the patterns of individual people’s insecure attachment within a family becomes the only reasonable first step that will be effective. Every other change that is attempted will actually be just a continuation of ‘let’s assume another identity like a new suit of clothes’ patterns and will actually build up and add to the DID problems rather than offer the start of a solution.

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If I am correct, and in looking at the extreme picture of my family I think that I am, any so-called therapy or treatment offered to any member of a family that does not address the lack of autonomy that an unsafe and insecure attachment as the body-brain formed FIRST is actually supporting the Dissociative Identity Disorder of the family because it is feeding it.

Trying to insert ‘recovery’ into a family as if it is an outfit they can add to their repertoire of ‘things to wear’ is NOT addressing the core problem of the insecure attachment patterns within every family members body-brain that WILL be there to some extent. The only alternative for any individual family member’s health and well-being happens ONLY if and when there is some safe and securely attached (and attachable-to) person in their life. This is the number ONE resiliency factor.

Outside people (external resources) trying to assist a family to heal are not being representatives of safe and secure attachment if they are feeding the DID within the family rather than offering autonomous support based on the core facts of what caused a family to become so ‘sick’ in the first place and what will truly help them to heal.

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From Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD, your Guide to Borderline Personality Disorder Have trouble articulating who you are, or what you like? Do you find yourself conforming to whatever others in your current setting want you to be, with no real anchor? This week, learn more about identity issues in BPD.

Who Am I? BPD and Identity
Plenty of people without BPD struggle with identity issues, too. But people with BPD often have a very profound lack of sense of self.

Finding Meaning – The First Steps Toward Identity
If you struggle with your identity, you may wonder if there is anything you can do to “find yourself.” There are some things that can help you down the path– finding meaningful moments in your life can get you there.

Does Impulsive Behavior Interfere With Identity Formation?
Some clinicians believe that people with BPD struggle with identity issues because their behavior is so impulsive they have trouble defining “who they are” through their behaviors (which can be erratic and unpredictable). Learn more about impulsive behavior in BPD.

For Family and Friends of Individuals with BPD
Does someone you care about have BPD? BPD can affect all types of relationships, including friends, family members, and romantic partners. Learn more about how BPD may be affecting your relationship, how to cope when a loved one has BPD, and how you can help.

Must Reads

	What is BPD?
	Symptoms of BPD
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+FOOLED BY AN ABUSIVE BORDERLINE? – MY MOTHER’S EXPERT DISTORTION OF REALITY

April 2, 2010September 23, 2011 alchemynow20 Comments

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+MY ABUSIVE BPD MOTHER LOST HER WINGS – AND NEVER GREW UP

How expert are you at being able to detect the twisted reality presented by a severely abusive Borderline? The clues to the truth do not lie with the Borderline, they exist within the empathic abilities of outside observers to know the truth from a lie. This ability to know true reality from the lies of a deceptive reality so marginally exits within an abusive Borderline that I would say it does not exist at all.

For example:

Brain Scans Clarify Borderline Personality Disorder

By Rick Nauert PhD

Using real-time brain imaging, a team of researchers have discovered that patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) are physically unable to regulate emotion.

The findings, by Harold W. Koenigsberg, MD, professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine suggest individuals with BPD are unable to activate neurological networks that would help to control feelings. READ ARTICLE HERE

(NOTE: In later posts I will write about my father’s participation in my mother’s distorted reality. I believe he had an avoidant-dismissive insecure attachment that meant his brain could regulate emotion to the extreme — but not in a normal way. His brain, which could overly activate ‘neurological networks’ that helped him overly control his feelings, was the perfect compliment to my mother’s Borderline brain.)

WHAT HAPPENS WITHIN THE BORDERLINE BRAIN?

Perhaps the most important piece of information those of us who were severely abused and traumatized by a Borderline Personality Disordered mother need to understand is that our mothers had/have a completely different kind of brain. These severe Borderline brains are expertly created through completely natural (and possible) processes of distortions in early childhood that in the end make the brain differences most difficult to detect unless and until we know what we are looking at when we consider the Borderline behaviors that manifest themselves as a result of early brain developmental changes.

We also need to understand that as a consequence of early traumatizing experiences a Borderline’s entire nervous system development (the brain is ‘just’ one component of the Central Nervous System) were changed and altered as well. This means that my mothers Autonomic Nervous System, which regulates both stress-defense responses through its ‘GO’ sympathetic arm and the connecting, compassionate, caregiving and seeking responses through the calming arm of the ‘STOP’ parasympathetic branch (think ‘pair-a-brakes’) were changes, as well.

I now understand that everything about who and how my severe Borderline mother was in the world was different from ‘normal’. What is harder to understand is why it took me so long to figure this out, and why nobody – not one single person including my father and grandmother – was able to detect the incredibly severe, consistent, perpetual, and horrible trauma and abuse my mother perpetrated against me for 18 long years.

What makes an abusive Borderline mother’s violence and horrible treatment of her offspring (most often, I suspect, of a ‘chosen child’) so nearly impossible to detect?

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I am presenting here a letter my mother wrote to her mother just prior to the first visit to Alaska to see us that my grandmother made after we left Alaska in August 1957 a month before my sixth birthday.

The distortion in my mother’s thinking about me that really shows how subtle and pervasive her psychosis was is present in this letter as I describe it in my comments within the text. My mother’s Borderline reality, and her psychosis regarding me (age six at the time this letter was written) would be impossible for an outside reader to detect.

The same processes that make her psychosis (and the abuse it engendered toward me) impossible to detect are the same ones, I suggest, that made her abuse of me undetectable to others all during the 18 years of terrible suffering my mother caused me. If readers think ‘undetectable deadly toxins’ as they read this, perhaps they will be able to twist their own thinking back to a normal-reality perspective as the proceed through the following words.

The biggest problem contact with a severe Borderline psychosis creates is that people with Borderline brains are so complete in their distortions of reality. They spin such a believable story, weave such a believable lie, that nobody but the most trained observers can possibly begin to detect the deceptions the psychosis contains. When a person encounters a Borderline such as my mother was, all rules of human decency are suspended, and the outsider does not have a clue – not a single solitary clue – that these rules have been changed. Everyone outside of the Borderline’s skin becomes instantaneously consumed within the distorted reality.

I can say here that I don’t give a solitary damn myself about anything I write here. My concern is for those poor, pitiful, unbelievably tortured other people who grew up being the victim of a twisted Borderline’s reality – and with all those helpless, powerless suffering children who are trying to endure a Borderline parent’s torture at this present moment in time.

I know what I am talking about here. My mother was probably among the best of the best of the best of abusive Borderlines. Her web of deceptions was as impeccable as it was sinister and destructive. And it was invisible, evidently, to all but her single chosen prey – me – and my poor siblings who had to live within the darkened home she controlled and ruined.

Because I was born into my mother’s hate-filled psychosis – and I mean this literally because the core of the psychosis formed during her labor with me – I had no possible way to begin to understand that my mother’s reality was not real. The discoveries of REAL reality I uncover as I work with her 50-year-old-letters only come to me because I have found a way to take a safe stance as I read them. That safe stance is ONLY possible now because I have enough information, finally, about Borderline brain changes to detect the clues that show me the presence of my mother’s invisible psychosis when I encounter them.

I am able to make the invisible visible. There is no action more empowering for a severe early infant-child abuse survivor than this. As you read the following you will be a part of experiencing this process in action. Turn up the volume of your sensitivities here – turn it WAY up. The truth contained in the deceptions of an abusive Borderline’s lies – that create the reality they BELIEVE – are so subtle as to actually exist exactly at that BORDERLINE the name of their disorder suggests.

The BORDERLINE appears, like a line drawn in invisible ink, exactly at the place where the observer can detect THEIR OWN INTERNAL EMOTIONAL CLUES that a deception of such grand proportions actually exists that it seems beyond belief. It is at this BORDERLINE where what does not possibly seem believable is in fact BELIEVABLE that the expert Borderline brain’s creation of distorted reality becomes no longer invisible.

A Borderline such as my mother was does not possess within the operation of their brain or entire nervous system-body the capacity to detect the deceptions that form their reality.

The detection of the deceptions can ONLY come from those aware observers from the outside who have the capacity to – actually – experience the near outer-limits of EMPATHIC ability. Observers have to know their own self, be able to sense with exquisite, accurate sensitivity what they are themselves feeling – within their own body – as they interact with an expert, professional Borderline like my mother was.

My mother’s Borderline deception-reality was NOT ACCURATE, but it was profoundly presented as such, as it is in this letter. The clues to the truth do not lie here within my mother’s words. They lie within the body-brain-mind of the outsiders who read them.

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An example of the pervasively subtle psychosis my mother had about me — along with my comments. My grandmother was soon to come for her first visit since we had left Los Angeles and moved to Alaska in August of 1957 a month before my sixth birthday:

June 4, 1958

Dear Mother,

Imagine – 10 more days and you’ll be here!! Does it seem possible? Yesterday morning I looked at the calendar and was amazed to see that the happy day falls one week from this Saturday. But then I became concerned. It’s the best day for you to come but also the day I planned John’s party for the boys.

This is going to be a business letter as I’ll see you to chat in no time at all now. I do feel he needs a party. I wrote you about his shyness and Jo Anne’s remarks etc. and I’ve had quite a time overcoming this.

Then this summer I knew he had to have boys to play with and yet he didn’t want to go to Vanovers. They’re big boys for their age, bossy and dominating – like her and he’s too young to understand their talk and sarcasm – and far too sweet and sensitive. I knew he needed self-confidence this summer.

Well, I encouraged him to go to Headlows who I found out that they have 3 girls and one boy – perfect match? He’s a darling boy6 and John and he hit it off from the first.

Then another boy Johnny Johnson moved to the hill. His Mom owns the Department store at the shopping center. She’s nice and so is he – I like the Headlow boy better but they’re both nice.

Now yesterday Gerry Vanover came over but he’s loud, bossy etc. but I was nice and John was happy but still prefers others.

Now his party will be perfect. He needs it and I’ve promised. I want it late afternoon and a BBQ – hot dogs and rolls so it won’t interfere with your arriving except this: it will be an all boy party out doors and I don’t want the girls here. [She drew a little sketch for invitations that ‘John can draw’ showing person at BBQ.]

So last nite Bill and I talked it over and arrived at the conclusion if it suits you. At first I was afraid it would be too much for you to arrive midst a child’s party but you could rest indoors. Your plane is due to arrive around noon – give or take one hour! We’ll take girls over to Le Verne’s house. Her mom takes care of children anyway and I adore Le Verne. I’ll talk it up to girls – give them new color books and some ‘party food’. They’ve never been to her house and they’ll enjoy it.

I’d rather we all met you but plane could be one hour late or early so this way Bill and John will meet you – OK? And I’ll wait home. We’ll take you sight seeing Sunday and have family party Sunday too.

You’ll be here for that and meet boys too! Then after party we’ll all go get girls!!

Oh Mom, I get so excited! I’ve missed you so! Won’t it be wonderful? I’m working like mad to get house all clean, waxed and fixed so we won’t have a thing to do.

Bible School starts 9^th through 20^th and 3 older ones will go so you can rest and we’ll visit first week – only Sharon will be home. Even she knows you’re coming and talks about it constantly.

Now does this plan meet with your approval. I could go too if I was sure plane wouldn’t be late – we’ll see. I’ll have his party at 3:00 – 7:00 or could be 4:00 – 7:00. I’ll have house clean and food ready, potato salad, cake, etc. He’ll be in 7^th heaven and deserves it. Will give him our gifts on Sunday.

Now I haven’t asked Le Verne yet. Let me know your reaction right away!!

We’re planning lots of things to do on week-ends and Bill is going to buy a jeep truck today – good buy, only $600 and he needs it to get back to homestead – then I’ll have the car!!

First week relax. 2^nd week-end trip to Girdwood Road and Portage Glacier and visit gold mines and pan for gold!!! This is road will connect with our Eagle River Road when put through. [Linda note: 2010, the road was never ‘put through’.] We’ve never been to these places but have saved them for when you get here!!

Next week = you and I and children to Palmer and Valley. Nice ride, paved road and we’ll take picnic and visit Rusty Dow – a character and painter. I want to get some for art shop. Fun? Bill’s been to Palmer so we’ll go during week.

Week-end trip and stay over night – to Homer, Alaska. Colorful, interesting beautiful scenery but rough, dirt road and long trip but FUN. Another week-end to Seward. A long day trip and picnic!!

Evening – Fire Lake Lodge and Spring Creek Lodge for dinner at nearby places. Chart Room in town at Hotel. Music Festival in Anchorage. We’re going first Monday to visit gift shops with Alaska Woodcrafts – Mr. Bockstahler’s new wife – you’ll like her. We want ideas and you’ll enjoy it.

So much to do and see. Weather is coolish in 60s and 70s – I think you’ll need sweaters and blouses with sleeves. Nights are light and cool!

We have beds all planned. Children go to bed as usual and when we all turn in – we transfer Cindy to cot in John’s and Linda’s room and you sleep in Sharon’s room on folding bed. It’s full size and comfortable – roll-a-way OK? There that’s settled!

I’m not planning on having neighbors over – you and I will visit them! I want to enjoy your visit and not plan parties OK?

One Saturday or Sunday we’ll drive in to see country back in but no need to hike

Remember, I wrote you I was to be Brownie Leader’s Assistant – sounds funny. I hate not to keep my promises (like a Good Brownie) and had hoped to do it with Linda but I got so worried. Kathy P. was to watch children. She’s nice but just turned 14 and a flitter budget. I got worried and this morning wrote a note saying I couldn’t help. I feel terrible but better!! Creek has risen so it’s not recognizable as same gentle stream. It’s overflowed and is fast, dangerous and deep. They never go there without us but might. At night you can hear water rushing even in house. The rapids and current is so strong – a child could never stand up and would be washed to river immediately. Makes me shudder!! I couldn’t leave Cindy and Sharon with her. I told her I could help after 14^th. She’s expecting and wanted me to take troop while she had baby in July. Also I’d be gone 4 hours and that adds up in baby sitting $ and I don’t trust neighbors. What a worrier I am!!

[Linda note 2010: Doesn’t surprise me she would find major reasons not to do something with me – and not to admit that she hated doing anything with me. I am really surprised she let me go – but having there would NOT have been good for me at all, either, of course. Her tone here is completely different than when she just wrote about doing a birthday party for John, even though at least here she is not ‘slamming’ me directly (at least).

My mother very rarely writes such a single long paragraph, either – confirming my suspicion that her unconscious would in no way allow her to participate as a loving mother in anything that had to do with me. Very cunning, sounds so legitimate.

Another side to this is that no doubt it SEEMED like something a GOOD mother would do, help with a Brownie troop. I putting together her Borderline public façade, her public persona, being seen as THIS KIND of mother would have been a good thing – like a prop in her pretend mother play.

Yet at the same time my mother lacked the capacity to ever concern herself, truly, with someone else’s needs. It became apparent to my mother that this would not have been a pretend activity. She would REALLY have had to take over this troop, REALLY and actually HELP, do something real outside of her own kingdom, her own range of control and influence. She knew she would not have been allowed to be her own true controlling self in this outside environment. The light of day would have shown up both her true intentions (that she did not see or comprehend) and her actions.

In addition, she certainly would not have been allowed to act toward me as she always did. She would not have been able to control and overrun me in the public setting of a Brownie troop group. At the same time, if she were away from her home, she could not have controlled what happened there, either. That faintly, perhaps, her precious doll-baby-children MIGHT have gone too near the creek and MIGHT have been endangered was NOT a concern for her children’s safety. It was a concern based on her obsession that her children were not only her possessions; they were extended parts of her self – her mind, her psyche and her sickness.

It is never the sign of a healthy, normal safe and secure parent-child attachment when the truth that lies within the attachment is that the parent’s deep psychological needs are involved in ‘getting met’ in the relationship. When this happens it is an activated parental insecure attachment disorder that is operating. When this happens, true caregiving for others is not possible. My mother was, as my sister recently noted, her children’s and her husband’s ‘puppet master’. She could not be in true relationship with anyone, not even with her own self.

These altered patterns of relationship are so subtle, at least within a very disturbed Borderline, that they are nearly impossible to detect unless the observer KNOWS what they are looking at. Because I have spent the past six years carefully observing my mother’s thinking and behavior as it appeared in her letters, all constructed with few exceptions for an outside ‘public’ audience that I can begin to notice where the deceptions in her thinking appear.

Even though my mother was purportedly writing to her mother privately, these letters, preserved as they have been for over 50 years, were written by my mother with the intention that someday they would be used to write ‘an Alaskan book’. On those very few occasions where I can see, touch, taste, smell my mother’s distorted thinking within these letters, I cannot ignore what I know. This small description of why my mother suddenly could concoct a completely believable (to her or to anyone else) reason why she could not assist as a Brownie scout leader in a troop with her daughter in it is one of those times I can see how pervasive her psychosis truly was.

My mother mentioned the creek to her mother in a letter written the day before this letter was, and she mentions nothing risky or sinister about it: “The creek is full and deep now as glacier and snow melts.” But the presence of too much water in the creek gave her the perfect alibi when she needed it. I don’t for one instant believe any of her children, especially Cindy who was extremely responsible as she approached 5 years of age, especially with John in the house when my mother was gone as he approached 9 years of age, would ever have gone near this creek alone – nor let sister Sharon approaching age 3. That my mother is saying she could not trust a 14-year-old sitter to watch her children safely is hog wash. Just plain Borderline-psychosis-constructed nonsense.

A Borderline does not have the capacity to conceive either of self or of others in a normal way. Everyone outside of my mother was an extension of herself, a living prop in her drama-play at life. That she – and everyone else – did not see or know what was going on in our home, in her life, or in her psyche did not take away from the fact that her psychosis touched and influenced everything she ever did.

My mother evidently somehow decided for this one year of my young life that it served her purposes to let me participate in Brownies. I have no reason to believe that this one experience would have been her single exception to her rule of making Linda’s life perpetually miserable. Somehow my being a Brownie made my mother look good in the public eye. This was my only childhood experience that let me get away from her influence and be around something meaningful and positive, and to interact as a child (age 6 here) with adults who treated me as the child I was.

For anyone reading these words who doubts the accuracy of what I am describing here in regard to my mother’s sickness, let me mention that one of the hallmarks of the Borderline mother is that NOBODY is supposed to ever detect the presence of the abuse these mothers so expertly enact upon a child. A Borderline like my mother was is an absolute professional at deception.

Part of the reason why deception like is being presented her in my mother’s account is so effective is that it comes from a completely constructed invisible, unconscious reality that exists BECAUSE the ‘owner’s’ psyche is completely contaminated by their disease. This pervasive contamination is like a highly effective contagion. It contaminates the growing mind’s of such a parent’s children, and it contaminates the psyche (unconsciously) of everyone who comes in contact with a professional-psychotic Borderline.

I encourage any reader who disagrees with my hard-earned ability to decipher my mother’s mental mess to take a look at how this kind of deception, so carefully constructed that it legitimizes whatever the Borderline mother turns her thinking toward no matter how insane, how out-of-touch with actual reality it might be. If you doubt me here, you believe my mother’s version of reality.

It is for the same reason you might doubt me (and my reality) while believing my mother’s lies that nobody ever detected the 18 years of severe abuse my mother perpetrated against me. My mother was very, very, very good at what she did – creating an alternate reality based upon her distorted brain’s operation that seemed to make sense to everyone, her own self included.

I am the only one alive who knows the truth about how this Linda-being-a-Brownie scout chapter of this story progressed, and more importantly, how it ended. Our family moved out of the Log House by the end of the summer of 1958, eventually into an apartment in Anchorage for the winter, and back to the Log House in 1959 by which time the homesteading saga consumed our lives in earnest. By fall 1959 I was back in Brownies, and had sold the essential Brownie Scout Cookies.

The afternoon I collected the money for the cookie sales, put it into a Milk Dud box, and then had it all fall out through the faulty bottom of the box without my noticing this was happening, before I returned home, marked the ending of this story with unspeakable, and unbelievable distortion and violence. My mother accused me of stealing the money, and because after hours in the evening twilight of retracing my every step through the neighborhood of Eagle River searching for the fallen coins I could not find them, I was accused of being a thief and a liar and was beaten afterwards severely – not once, but every time my mother brought up my ‘crime’ until I left home at 18. ]

Now John for first time is old enough to come and go and is so good about coming back in one hour – etc.

Children need me at home and I can spread myself too thin.

I trust you and Bill in day time and Le Verne at night and 3^rd choice days.

Golly so much to write. I only earned 1.75 imagine – Sunday! People looked but didn’t buy. Tell you more later!!

Children still asleep. I’ve been writing this in bed. Got Bill’s breakfast and got back in. They sleep late mornings til 9:00 or 10:00! So you’ll rest too – of course Bible School starts at 9:30 so will have to get them up early.

Guess what? Methodist bought Briggs new 30,000 house for the new parson for the new full time Methodist Chugiak Minister. Now what do you think of that and new church to be built!!

Mrs. Pottle wants me to help with tea for him Sunday? Probably will take children here if improves as never get to [words washed out here] visit both while you’re here. Must close! Love, Mildred. PS. Can hardly wait – you know me.