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Tuesday, December 22, 2015.  I feel I need to apologize for writing so few posts during these months of my tenure up north here in North Dakota, but I also know no apology is needed.  There are simply times and seasons of life.  At least now we have passed in this hemisphere into the time of growing day length.  I am happy for that although several months of winter still lie waiting ahead.

This winter has been very warm.  That is a good thing.  Yet it may also be a bad thing.  I am not one who knows about such things.  I am a wonderer.  (A wanderer, too, I must admit.)

I am into my third year away from my adopted Arizona-Mexican border land that was so kind to me for fourteen years.  I still have no real idea what lies ahead for me in my life.  Will I return there next September after my lease here is up?  Time.  It will tell.

Meanwhile I continue to battle with the noise from the apartment above me that is so unsettling to my so-sound-sensitive ears.  Things seem to be better – most of the time – and I have not yet had to call the police with a noise complaint as the apartment managers suggested that I do on November 9^th.  It is not the children’s fault up there who are not put to bed before midnight and who are allowed to sleep until noon.

I have contacted Head Start to see if they will send me some information I can anonymously slip under the door up there.  It has been suggested that if a time approaches when my own well-being means a noise complaint must be made that I call social services first.  I don’t want to do that, either.

I do pray for myself – and for that family up there – and for the world – and for EVERYTHING!  Which brings me to the point of mentioning what has inspired me to finally attempt to place a few words on the blog this evening.

Someone on my Facebook feed posted this quote.  “Star of the West” was an early magazine published in the United States.  I don’t know how to access those to see if I could find the volume the following appeared in.

What I do know as a very high ACE score, terrible child abuse survivor for the first 18 years of my life, is that trauma seriously impacted every stage of my early development so that now I am a Trauma Altered Development person (my friend calls this being a tadpole).

This means that my nervous system/brain, stress response system, immune system, etc. is different – entirely different – than would have been the case if someone had intervened, stopped that abuse, rescued me and my siblings from our severely mentally ill psychotic mother.

This means – in regard to this quote I am posting – that very often it is impossible – IMPOSSIBLE for me – and for many ‘tadpoles’ like me – to “simply” change our “mood.”  We experience our life differently than other people do through absolutely NO FAULT of our own!!!

In my older age I am experiencing cumulative effects of the traumas in my life and am now “on disability” for them.  I cannot simply “forget the past” and “be OK.”  I cannot will myself to “be happy.”  I work every moment of my existence to endure – and endure some more – and endure….

Some moments and hours, some days, are better and easier than others are.  Being down south, as readers mostly know, was very much better for me than is being up here in an apartment, in a city, in this climate, etc.  I can’t get out to see friends, work in my garden, more etc!!!!!

So – here is the quote!!  This is what I do in every way I possibly can.  It includes why I came back up here, so that I could help my daughter and my little grandsons in any way that I can, especially now at this juncture in the family’s lifespan.

But – still – there is NOTHING easy about my life right now.  True, “things could be much worse,” but knowing that is no panacea for tadpole people!  THIS helps my heart!!  THIS feels realistic to me and within the realm of possibility!!

And – at this “holiday season” there can be many complications for people and for families!  I thought these words might be helpful to people who might be struggling with extra difficulties – realize they are NOT ALONE!!!!!  We care!!!

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“Be not the slave of your moods, but their master.  But if you are so angry, so depressed and so sore that your spirit cannot find deliverance and peace even in prayer, then quickly go and give some pleasure to someone lowly, or to a guilty or innocent sufferer!  Sacrifice yourself, your talent, your time, your rest to another, to one who has to bear a heavier burden than you – and your unhappy mood will dissolve into a blessed, contented submission to God.” –

By Abdu’l-Baha, in Star of the West (sometime prior to 1921), a Baha’i publication

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Certainly an ongoing and repeating process!!

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

Story Without Words:  How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  A daring book – for daring readers – about a really tough subject.

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Leave a Comment »

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Tags: adult attachment disorders, adult reactive attachment disorder, anxiety disorders,borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, brain development, child abuse,depression,derealization, disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorder, empathy, infant abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factors, PTSD, resiliency, resiliency factors, risk factors, shame

 

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Wednesday, November 24, 2015.

I cannot kill these pansies

Little bit of life

That they are

+

As winter’s cold and darkness

Settles outside my door

+

I hauled them inside

In their five gallon plastic buckets

After I left them out there

Long enough to freeze

Several times

+

Their blossoms have given up

Yet not their buds

And not the emerald green of their leaves

And certainly not their tenacious roots

+

I MUST love them

I MUST care for them

I MUST

I will

It is a part of who I am

+

April through November they have blessed me with their beauty

They did not ask for life

They do not crave death

Theirs is a certain kind of bravery

Courage to the end

+

And these earthworms

Are they as silent as they seem?

+

What, my dear, can I give to them

Remnants from a summer garden confined

Gathered in a gelatinous mass

Having seeped themselves down through and out of the bottom holes of these buckets onto the plastic beneath them

Only to have found no real possibility of escape?

+

Do they live?

Are they dead?

+

I bury them again in now warm so-black bucket dirt

I can wait

We will see

+

I must apologize

I am so sorry for my own confusions

My uncertainties

+

I, too, share this life and death cusp

With all of you

+

This seek for safety

This holding on to life

This approach to death

To transformation

First

+

O worms!  I feed you water soaked cardboard and bits of paper for a winter in these buckets

In this apartment

Stashed so cleverly in a spare corner

On my kitchen floor

+

Unlike my species

If there is even one of you left alive

You will reproduce.

More.

+

I

Would be glad

For that.

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Note:  I cannot create my chosen spacing here without using “+” as markers

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

Story Without Words:  How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  A daring book – for daring readers – about a really tough subject.

++++

Leave a Comment »

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Tags: adult attachment disorders, adult reactive attachment disorder, anxiety disorders,borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, brain development, child abuse,depression,derealization, disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorder, empathy, infant abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factors, PTSD, resiliency, resiliency factors, risk factors, shame

 

 

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Tuesday, November 24, 2015.  These few words came to me last Sunday at a time when the horrible stomping romping wall and ceiling shaking so threatening my peace from the apartment above me had abated for a time.  For the past two years I had neighbors up there who were quiet adult men.  I NEVER in ten billion years would have renewed my year’s lease if THIS family had been up there.

I really do NOT know how I can endure and survive a long North Dakota winter being trapped in here with them up there.  I am losing entire nights of sleep.  Scary.  Hard.  Very, very disturbing having people up there with no pattern to their life I can detect, little children romping hard until 2 am….

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Right on the surface of the glass

Looking inward

Looking outward

That’s where our psychology will be

+

Where on a spectrum does light become sound and sound become light

To humans?

+

There is a quiet there – at these places.  In these spaces.  A kind of pause – the quiet both before and within the storm.

Calmness.

Life, though, is never easy.

+

There is a pause

Where darkness turns into light

(and the other way around).

+

When a flying bird’s wing beats downward

That point just before the wing

Turns up again

There is an instant of

Perfect peace.

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

Story Without Words:  How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.

++++

Leave a Comment »

++++

Tags: adult attachment disorders, adult reactive attachment disorder, anxiety disorders,borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, brain development, child abuse,depression,derealization, disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorder, empathy, infant abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factors, PTSD, resiliency, resiliency factors, risk factors, shame

 

 

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Wednesday, November 17, 2015.  I remember those days, weeks, months, years when never did a blog post topic come into my thoughts that I didn’t simply write and post it.  Those times seem to me now to have been part of a different lifetime.

I could sit at my funky old desk with my laptop gazing at brilliant blue skies, across the range of my adobe flower gardens, past the tall rusted Mexican-American border fence at the topmost peaks of San Jose Mountain in Mexico, and write.

I could think.  I could ponder.  I could feel and sense and I could write.

I was living in an environment that fed, nurtured and sustained me.  Fargo, North Dakota?  Nope.  Winter is coming, etc.  Simply put, “Too much darkness.”  Working to remain positive is, well, A LOT OF WORK for me here.  A great deal of work.

There doesn’t seem much of me left over to write with (or from),

This, too, shall pass.  Everything does.  Sooner or later.

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So, (a) when given a situation with a lot of depletion going on and not much for restoration, (b) how does one FEEL?

I KNOW everyone goes through (a), but the older I get (I am 64 now) and the more American society changes, the more I see that it is certainly not true that everyone experiences (b).  At least not that they know about.  Not that they are forced to accept or ‘deal with’.

There are many, MANY ways not only NOT to feel, but in tandem with not feeling their own reality people DO NOT FEEL other people’s feelings, either.

Bye bye EMPATHY!

And WHERE on earth are we as human beings without EMPATHY?

Oh, shake, quiver and quake!

Answer?

In trouble.

++

If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

If a feeling is a response to life itself and nobody FEELS it, does that feeling exist?

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The word “void” comes to mind here.

Without the information that our feelings give to us about being alive in this world as members of a profoundly social species, are we creating voids all around us without even noticing?

Do we then expect other people to simply ignore the fact that these void-living (absence of feelings/empathy) people CANNOT truly be reached or communicated with?

OR TRUSTED – in the deepest safely and securely attached sort of way (so that we do not feel all alone in a nor-really safe world)?

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“Knock knock.”

“Nobody is here.”

Nobody is an island?  You bet that they are in current American society.

They certainly are.

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I know that I am a dreamer.  I am always looking for and in some way hoping for a world that probably does not exist.  A friend told me the other day that he heard that humans are only capable of truly attuning to another person about 30% of the time.  That’s why, as developmental neuroscientist Dr. Allan N. Schore describes, the process of “rupture with or without repair” is so central to the processes of being human.  Of being alive.

But we must care enough and be able to NOTICE when a rupture occurs so that it can even be repaired.  And we have to know how to sort out the causes of ruptures and learn how to orchestrate repairs.

Yes, in my dreamer world I believe that humans are BORN (given good enough uterine conditions of earliest life) to DO all of these things.  But I also see, with great concern and sadness, that an increasing number of mothers in America are perfectly fine with bringing their children into the world and then abandoning them into the care of strangers.

The building of all of the essential structures within a human’s body-brain to process feelings and then to be able to live with true, healthy empathy, is a job that nature has always given to mothers of infants.  This is a vast area that I will not address specifically here except to say that on the one hand we have Autism Spectrum Disorders where social and emotional information which includes the empathetic processes is not a part of those people’s reality.

And then on the other hand we are fine with having larger and larger numbers of people who are placed into the care of “professional” childcare providers who have to intimate investment in using attuned empathy to communicate with these little ones – so that the end result – seems to me – is our current building of a nation where empathy is nearly entirely missing.

What do I think about all of this?  One word:  Uh-oh!

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I do note that those who endured and survived horrific early life filled with trauma, we have had to learn about empathy through different channels.  Those of us who HAVE done this were, for whatever reasons, highly motivated to do so.  I have HUGE concerns that with the proliferation of infants and young children now being abandoned for most of their waking life by their mothers (essentially) – nobody is going to even notice — what is going so wrong OR what is missing:  Feelings and Empathy.

These are processes that I believe are essential to being fully human.

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

Story Without Words:  How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.

++++

Leave a Comment »

++++

Tags: adult attachment disorders, adult reactive attachment disorder, anxiety disorders,borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, brain development, child abuse,depression,derealization, disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorder, empathy, infant abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factors, PTSD, resiliency, resiliency factors, risk factors, shame