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As I look back from my current age of 59 not at WHO I was immediately after I physically left the severely abusive home I grew up in for my first 18 years, I realize that there WAS no conscious me.  I have to look back at HOW I was at this time of my life.

HOW I was meant that I was unconscious of having a self or of being a self at all.  I have no memory of my ever self-reflecting or of my ever reflecting backwards on my first 18 years of terrible abuse and traumatic experiences.

WHAT I was also comes to mind:  I was a BODY moving through space.  That’s it.  I moved, like an empty puppet responding to this ‘freedom’ I found outside of my insanely abusive mother’s reach.  In fact, that’s all I really had ever been – A WHAT.

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I left home as I entered Navy boot camp and at the same time entered a universe that knew nothing about me but what they witnessed of what my empty-puppet body did.

A strange image comes to mind as I write this.  I was and had always been from the moment of my birth a FIRST RESPONDER.  That’s what I had always done because that was all that I was ever allowed to do – to RESPOND immediately to stimulation that came AT me, most of it in extremely traumatic, abusive and violent form, from the outside world my body just happened to have been born into.

Nobody responded FIRST to me, a pattern that is ‘natural’ and required for a human infant to begin to form its body-brain-mind-self in the world.  I was born into a chaotic, traumatic and extremely REACTIVE environment that was controlled by my abusive mother.

There had never been a place, space, time or opportunity for Linda to be Linda except for moments I stole from the spaces in between my mother’s attacks of me.  Linda grew, developed and evolved as a LEFTOVER – formed within whatever little spaces there were for me to stretch out into – in those cracks between my mother’s attacks.

The only reason there ever were actual spaces between my mother’s attacks is that she had other responsibilities to take care of her home and her other children.  Besides, sometimes she just got tired, physically tired from her rage at me and had to take a rest.  During these times she most often secluded me in my bed or in a corner until she could ‘get back’ to actively abusing me again.

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So because I had to FIRSTLY respond to my mother, I didn’t get to put myself first in my own life.  As a result, I left home having no single clue that I was a person at all.  This fact, probably more than any other single consequence of my abusive childhood impacted my parenting history with my firstborn as it had the most amazing effect on how I treated her (and my next two children).

I didn’t have a self in the beginning at age 19 when my oldest was born.  Without a self, there was ‘nobody here’ to interfere with the self expression and development of my baby.  My instinctive first response to being a mother always was – and I mean instinctive because I was completely unconscious of this fact – was to do nothing as a mother that could possibly interfere with the self-development of my children.

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Perhaps because I had been built entirely, body-brain-mind, as a FIRST RESPONDER to my reactive delusional abusive mother I was able to make very good use of my abilities as a first responder to respond FIRST to the unique individual people my children were each born as.

It just so happens that THIS pattern, responding FIRST to the infant-child as its own person, is exactly what an infant needs to develop its own self fully on all levels as it grows its own body-brain-mind-self.

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Perhaps this is the actual root of what I term for myself as Borrowed Secure Attachment.  (I cannot personally relate to what attachment experts refer to as ‘Earned Secure Attachment’.)   As an untampered-with individual new being, all infants are born with the ability to form safe and secure attachments with their caregivers.  Left ‘hands-off’ except to be a First Responder to the INFANT itself, the infant’s natural abilities to attach will guide the relationship its earliest caregiver has with it.

Infants give the signals, all the signals needed to let its caregiver know not only WHAT it needs when there is a need, but also at the same time the infant is signaling its caregiver, “Hey, here I am!  This self-being-grown in here needs this, is sending you this signal – and by-the-way, thank you for responding to ME first!”

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Putting the infant-as-an-individual-self FIRST just happens to be what correct caregiving is all about.  Correct infant-child caregiving is NOT about the little one meeting the attachment needs of its caregivers – although doing so is often a natural SECONDARY benefit of being a parent.

Who the infant is and what the infant needs is a great parent’s FIRST concern.

And by hook and by crook – the patterns my mother created inside of me by her never responding to ME FIRST and always by responding to HER FIRST just happened to leave me with a completely wide open road inside of myself to do things pretty much RIGHT with my own children.

As Dr. Peter Fonagy suggests, there are transgenerational patterns of attachment.  I was a LUCKY one!  Because my mother’s insane abuse was so persistent and pervasive my own attachment brain-body wiring was basically left untouched!!

(Experts report that the ability to attach securely lies in the INFANT-CHILD as it reacts differently to different attachment patterns of different caregivers.)

True, I ended up with completely messed up insecure attachment patterns myself – but I was at the same time – and strangely for the same reasons – able to allow my own children to utilize the attachment-wiring-operation potential for secure attachment that they were BORN WITH.

My mother OVERWHELMED me so completely that there was nothing BUILT into me for human attachment wiring that could have (or did) enable me to overwhelm my own children.

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I call what I was able to allow to happen with my own children BORROWED secure attachment because the entire amazing, marvelous, naturally-determine ability to attach came from THEM, not from me.  I had not been built from birth with anything within myself that could have interfered with what my children were born to do naturally – and perfectly.

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I believe that our culture has a very important task of trying to elucidate what factors contribute to the average statistic that ONLY 35% of parents who were abused as children go on to abuse their own children while 65% DO NOT go on to abuse their own children.  True, the offspring of the 35% suffer terribly.  But what happens – and I mean really happens – in the cases of the 65%?

I am, most blessedly, among the 35% of nonabusing parents.  Considering the fact that my entire childhood was about NOTHING but abuse and trauma, and considering the fact that I was not allowed to form ONE SINGLE safe and secure attachment with anyone, HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?

I don’t believe in magic.  There is a very real physiological pattern within my own body that was built into me in the midst of severe abusive trauma for the first 18 years of my life that worked extremely well FOR MY OWN CHILDREN.

Even though I have a reactive disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment pattern MYSELF I did not pass it on to my children because I operated as a parent in an appropriate caregiving mode.

Attachment experts suggest that someone who has an insecure attachment pattern does not have what it takes in their own ‘wiring’ to have it easily – or naturally – turned ‘off’ so that their caregiving system can operate correctly.  I suggest that in cases such as mine where there never was an opportunity to EVER feel safe and securely attached to humans I simply had a blank slate in the ‘take care of me’ department.

I had never been able to DO ANYTHING to get my own attachment needs met.  I did not have a ‘take care of me’ repertoire on any level.  My mother, on the other hand, was the extreme opposite as she consumed EVERYTHING from me.  I was born to TAKE CARE OF HER with everything I had.

It was my job as my mother’s child from my birth to do one thing and one thing only – to BE the complete object of her displaced-projected personal BADNESS.  My mother’s NEED to make me this object of her projection CONSUMED everything about me to the point that when I left home at age 18 to enter ‘the real world’ no Linda existed other than as a First Responder (‘reactive’) – in totality – to the needs of someone outside else.

My children (as strange as this is as I write it) simply replaced my MOTHER as I FIRST RESPONDED no longer to her, but in replacement, to my own children.  Because I had never done anything but take care of my abusive mother’s needs, I must have been exquisitely prepared to take care of my own children’s needs – as those needs existed NOT IN ME – but as with my mother – as those needs existed outside of me and within my children.

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Once born a caregiver (as an infant-child recipient of complete insane abuse), always a caregiver?

NOTE:  One HUGE miracle to me is that I never once became involved with any abusive ADULT!  Because I didn’t, I haven’t spent any time wondering why not.

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