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Thursday, November 20, 2014.  I guess I easily jumped forward 900 years in my last post.  And now backward…..   In the meantime, I have a few post-post observations.

Conflict.  Although there are degrees of conflict I don’t think it is “ordinary” to have such a narrow comfort with conflict.  Any change in the environment, any challenge to an ongoing experience of life can be seen as conflict by the body.  Any shift in attention, anything that demands we might need to alter how we are using available resources to get along in life can be perceived as conflict between self and the wider world.

Any time a person is already challenged — by hunger, thirst, exhaustion, sickness and/or preoccupation with other concerns — and then is met by a new change (challenge) in their experience in the world some kind of a readjustment of attention is required so that a determination can be made about what needs to happen next.  Always threat vs safety is included in these assessments.  Every interaction demands the use of resources — inner and/or outer.

Because early severe trauma survivors live in a body that was built by, in and for a trauma world there is always an overload of sensation biased toward the ongoing need to survive in a malevolent, dangerous, threatening world of deprivation and scarcity.  Hoping to rely on the use of perpetual conscious logic to “trick” the body into “laying off the horn” of an alarm response is not enough to keep many of us from over-reacting in challenging situations when they arrive.  The body uses automatic responses because they are incredibly fast, efficient, and most likely to be effective.  Trying to down-regulate alarm responses so that conscious, very slow and complicated conscious responses can come into play always uses inner resources that might not be easily or quickly replenished.

Resiliency is, then, a multifaceted series of events.  I can imagine that as a severe early trauma survivor living within a body whose physiological development was altered in order to endure and survive those 18 long years, that my inner resources have been depleted over the years of my adulthood and have not been adequately replenished — all through no fault of my own.  This seems to be my experience, and I have little tolerance for conflict of ANY kind.  I see this lack of resources, lack of resource replenishment, and depletion of my tolerance for conflict as being directly connected to the ongoing lifelong negative consequence of severe early trauma from abuse and neglect.

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Escaping the physical abuse when I was 18 did NOT mean I escaped then or ever will escape the long-term harmful effects of my years of early trauma.

NOW when I think about “STOP CHILD ABUSE” I think not even so much about the terrible suffering of the little tiny helpless innocent dependent victims of ongoing early abuse.  I think of its SURVIVORS who are most likely to suffer from consequences of that abuse IN THEIR BODY for their entire lifespan.

It does seem to me looking back over my adulthood that I carried with me some kind of natural immunity to the effects that I am so aware of now.  I could “handle” being around people, for example.  I absolutely took it for granted that “we” were alike.  It NEVER dawned on me that I was “a different kind of person” because of what I had lived through and because of how those experience changed my physiological development.

Again I mention a need for readers to Google “CDC ACE study” to begin to learn about the kind of information beginning to infiltrate understanding about the life-long risk of problems from early traumas.  The term “Trauma Informed Care” is evolving as professionals learn more and more about the extremely high risk early severe trauma survivors carry with them for all kinds of problems during their life.  Being able to understand HOW we are in the world because of our trauma history is part of how we apply this kind of new thinking to our own life.

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What depletes us?  What feeds and sustains us?  What helps to increase our strength — which IS our power to experience a better quality of life in all arenas vital to humans?

It seems as I write this meandering post that I am asking myself a fundamental question:  “What is quality of life?  What does it mean?  Where does it come from?  How much of it is essential to having and maintaining an inner ongoing state of assurance that we are OK in the world?”

I lived all of my life until my youngest child left home when I was 52 years old being primarily concerned and involved with GIVING to other people.  It was not a familiar process for me to think about “What do I need for myself in my life?”  Now that I am older I realize that I would say first of all “I needed not to experience continual horrible abuse and neglect trauma throughout the duration of my childhood from birth so that HOW my body was created did not come to overtax every one of my innate abilities to have a good life.”

Perhaps it is helpful at this point for me to be getting so clear about what the limitations I live with are doing to deplete my quality of life.  But how do I CHANGE things to help myself improve my quality of life in spite of these difficulties?

I know I resigned myself to the horrible conditions of my childhood.  If I had not done that I would have been dead a long, long time ago.  I have no doubt that if I had challenged my abuser (Mother) she would have killed me in her attempts to maintain her delusions.  Neither of us had any other choice back then.

But what does resignation do to me now?

I am willing to bet that I only ask these kinds of questions now because I have lived long enough to do so.

And the answers?  SOME answers?  Time will tell.

++++

Source Naturals Theanine Serene with Relora

• Contains the amino acids L-theanine, to support relaxing brain wave activity
• Contains taurine to ease tension, as well as the calming neurotransmitter GABA
• Features magnesium to support muscle and nerve relaxation
• Contains calming holy basil leaf extract and Relora® to gently soothe away the tension in your body
• 2 tablets daily, or as recommended by your health care professional

++++

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.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are welcome.

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Leave a Comment »

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Wednesday, November 12, 2014.  I left a short comment over on the

Your Page – Readers’ Responses

section of the blog.  However, if I don’t say something here to cover all my bases in trying to provide at least a few words to a commenter today who asked that they not be made “public” I will not sleep well tonight.  It is important for readers to feel safe enough among the pages of this blog to leave their thoughts, perceptions, questions, observations and feelings where other blog readers can see them.

I understand that a first-time commenter might be very hesitant to do so, but when someone mentions specifically that they want to be “heard” at the same time their words cannot be posted here I am left with a quandary.

I am not a professional.  I write from my own life, from my own heart, but all I put in these pages is what I have to offer.  I do not respond privately with blog readers who might very much need help for many reasons.  Among them is my belief that EVERYONE can benefit from what EVERYONE has to say!

Names can be changed when a comment is posted if that helps people feel “safer” to speak here.  I do honor requests not to publish.

The pages of this blog are full of information about what it is like for severe early abuse and neglect survivors who were forced to adapt our physiological development in major ways in order to survive.  Our trauma/abuse is key and central to HOW we are in our body in this world.  But WHO we are is a sacred essence that no abuse can possibly touch or change.

Trauma Altered Development means that our nervous system including our brain, our immune system, our stress-calm response system are all different-from-ordinary.  At the root of our growth from birth if we were harmed and not protected, cared for and loved as we needed to be is a deep sense of being alive in a dangerous world.  We adapted IN OUR BODY to survive under these conditions.

We are, in effect (search Google for “stop the storm teicher article”) evolutionary altered individuals designed by and to survive within a malevolent world so that HOW we are in the world is a mismatch for a more benevolent “benign” world.  We FEEL that difference, and yes, we can be an enigma to ourselves and to everyone else because of this fact.

What we all have, then, is some version of an “insecure attachment disorder” which will intervene between us and those we love, those who love us (our experience of being/feeling loved), and other people.  We get different kinds of information in different ways from ordinary and we respond to this information differently.

While me may FEEL (and be told we are) broken or damaged, the real truth is that we ARE different.  We did not choose to be this way.  We did not choose the circumstances we were forced to grow up with.  Our BODY, however, found its own way to CHOOSE to survive.  And here we are!

Yes, we suffer in incredible ways for our entire lifespan.  (I suggest a Google search for “CDC ACE study pyramid” as an example of what the Centers for Disease Control is discovering about how it is to live with consequences of an extremely difficult infancy and childhood.)  My belief is that the more information we can find and study about how early trauma changes THE BODY in its development the more we will begin to understand our self.  Knowledge IS power!

Anyone who has found their way to this blog is, in my thinking, already an excellent online researcher!  Keep going!  One way to find places to read on this blog is to simply enter search terms on Google that begin with “stop the storm blog” and then include what interests you — “trauma altered development” or “attachment” — is a good start.

There are all kinds of YouTube videos to watch that are very helpful.  Anything you find there done by Dr. Daniel Siegel is excellent, as is anything you find by Dr. Gordon Neufeld.  My great friend and co-researcher Sandy could add a comment to this post with a whole collection of names to find videos on over at dear YouTube!  HINT, Sandy!!)

A reader can also just pick a month from the list at the side of this blog’s main page going all the way back to the first month I began posting in April 2009 and find many, many helpful posts on this blog.  Also check out what’s at some of the tabs at the top of the page, and also go to one of my other blogs connected to this one where information is stored:  Workspace for Stop the Storm at http://workspacestopthestorm.wordpress.com/.

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It may seem to be a mystery how we can be such caring, dedicated and loving parents considering our backgrounds.  One simple statistic is that while 35% of those who were abused in childhood do go on to abuse their own kids, 65% do not.  What factors are involved in these patterns?  I don’t think anyone knows.

But I do know that the horrors of child abuse and neglect trauma NEVER belonged to us.  Those patterns belonged to the people who hurt us.  I have done a lot of work in traveling all the way back through my childhood and I have found within myself child self absolute purity and beauty.  We can find the person we were then and make the connection to who we are now MINUS the horrors of the abuse.  EXCEPT FOR what I mentioned above….

Our physiological development was changed by the terrible stress of the traumas we endured.  We need to know what that means to us, and it is a primary mission of this blog to present information that can help all of us learn about what it means to live in a trauma altered development.  So….  Dig around here and READ READ READ — and don’t forget to leave comments that I am allowed to publish here — for ALL of our development!

++++

Source Naturals Theanine Serene with Relora

• Contains the amino acids L-theanine, to support relaxing brain wave activity
• Contains taurine to ease tension, as well as the calming neurotransmitter GABA
• Features magnesium to support muscle and nerve relaxation
• Contains calming holy basil leaf extract and Relora® to gently soothe away the tension in your body
• 2 tablets daily, or as recommended by your health care professional

++++

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.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are welcome.

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Leave a Comment »

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Tuesday, November 11, 2014.  The snowflakes are moving in.  Tiny warriors of winter.  Each a perfect crystal, literally sent down from above.  They are not naturally my friends, and yet I think about what I heard years ago when I lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico about how the Pueblo People near there so honored what I seem to so detest.

And fear, though the fears are about my own disinclinations.  My own shortcomings.  Flaws.  Basically?  My own bad attitudes!

The Pueblo People have songs.  All Native Americans do, although the elders say that so many of them have been lost over time.  The People’s song I mention has many stanzas that describe all the stages of miracles that take place throughout one cycle of the seasons to make the world ready for the perfect dance of falling snow.

Dancing tiny snowflake warriors.  We are not buried under them yet as I hear Minneapolis already is.  So my more positive take this morning is that if all the billions of people on earth had a chance — took the chance — to all work together toward a good end for us all what could we accomplish?

A lot.  I think about how these uncountable, really, tiny crystals will take over this world for many months to come.  Not only do they fall one at a time, they all fall together.  Right now as I gaze out my one window I see them meandering down.  Being caught separately, one at a time, in a gentle draft, floating sideways, swooping up again before they settle like the tiniest white flames on browning grass tips.

++

I am not quite so afraid of what is coming.  My supplements (mentioned in previous post) have arrived.  The molecules contained in them as they will work with the molecules within me I KNOW have the power to enable me to weather winter without sinking into the troughs of isolating depression that would take me over without them.  I also have, for the rest of the month of November, a chance to go to the open public clay studio in town here with a friend who so kindly picks me up on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and some weekend afternoons.

I haven’t worked with clay since my nearly-30 year old son was the age the grandson I care for weekdays is.  It’s been over a quarter of a century since I tried to center a ball of clay, tried to make something useful if not beautiful arise from it.

I admit I avail myself of the wonders of YouTube videos to replenish my memory about how to do this!  I am also intrigued by the process of the return of my own body memories as I handle the clay.

I found myself thinking last night about how people say no matter how many years of sobriety an alcoholic achieves if they return to drinking the progression of their disease affects them as though they had been drinking all of those years.  I am finding a fascinating similar process with one of my creative loves — sculpting with clay.  I REMEMBER this process right along with my passion for “finding things” in the shapes of the mud.

But I also am finding that I now know MORE about my own interactions with my heart, my mind, my tools, this clay as together I now work VERY TINY bits of clay into magical shapes that, to me, convey the essence of human emotions.  I do not worry about physiological perfections of human forms.  I am NOT making people.  This is EARTH I am working with.

I am very clear now that I love to let the clay speak.  Not only is shaping clay about creating expression in three dimensional space.  It is also about literally marking time.  Every mark I make upon this clay transmits a split-second record not only of me in my life, but in the clay itself as it passes through time within my hands.

Time and space.

I can entertain myself all winter long with my worn out legless tabletop perched in perfect balance along the length of my beat up ironing board in my sewing room.  I live in a shoe-box (I repeat to myself).  It makes sense to me that I am working on very small pieces, many of them no taller than two inches.  I laugh within.  If I were to present a show of my work in an art gallery the entire show could be displayed in exactly that — a shoe-box!!

++

Considering this progression of my love of clay work over this quarter century my hands have been only in touch with adobe mud as a creative outlet (NOT here!), I think about some comments a professor gave to me those years ago:  “You make maquettes.  That’s what Matisse did.  Others were commissioned to turn his work into massive bronze structures.  He worked very small.”

A maquette (French word for scale model, sometimes referred to by the Italian names plastico or modello) is a small scale model or rough draft of an unfinished sculpture. An equivalent term is bozzetto, from the Italian word that means “sketch”.

+

I see this in my work.  I experience the wonders of the human mind — MY mind — as I can imagine in a very living way what my tiny sculptures would look like and FEEL like if ——

I think, “If we lived in a different kind of world, a different kind of culture, that truly valued providing external environments of beauty, mystery and delight, my work could be created LARGE in public spaces.”

There is one I finished yesterday that I will bring to the studio tonight to leave for bisque firing that is of women in motion — and one child, in a ring with a deep open space carved in the center which faces the figures’ backs.  A “real” sculpture of this piece would give people of all sizes and ages a place to climb into.  As humans moved within and around the lines of the sculpture they would become — for their moments of time in space shared with the piece — a living part of this work.

+

There’s another small piece I finished yesterday that was inspired by a dear friend of mine’s life.  His father died when he was two.  My friend has walked a long way through his lifespan without the knowledge of what it would have been like to have shared his life — and therefore his memories — with a father.

There is a little boy nestled on the lap and near the breast of a large, powerful man who looks rather primal.  Rather apelike.  The father’s left arm is very long.  His hand is very large.  I know that in the perception of a little boy should he be wrapped thusly in the arms of such a man would not care one tiny twit about the actual “real” proportions of the person who held him so safely, so securely.  This (to me) is how such a little boy would FEEL.

So protected.  So connected through the love of this man who is himself MADE of earth, grounded upon the earth, wrapped by earth.

+

Yeah, fall oh ye snowflake warriors.  I am preparing to be prepared to endure your collected life upon this earth.

Dare I say “Thank you” for gracing our life with yours as the Pueblo snow song describes?

Almost…..

++++

Source Naturals Theanine Serene with Relora

• Contains the amino acids L-theanine, to support relaxing brain wave activity
• Contains taurine to ease tension, as well as the calming neurotransmitter GABA
• Features magnesium to support muscle and nerve relaxation
• Contains calming holy basil leaf extract and Relora® to gently soothe away the tension in your body
• 2 tablets daily, or as recommended by your health care professional

++++

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.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are welcome.

++++

Leave a Comment »

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Thursday, November 6, 2014.  Very interesting.  I don’t remember ever specifically mentioning a product on this blog.  I only mention the one you will see described at the end of this post because I have had a chance to try it for 48 hours compliments of a dear friend of mine who bought some in town here for $38.40 per bottle to help her get through these very difficult days as she and her family bury their much loved mother who died last week at age 90.

I trust my friend’s wisdom.  I’ve known her for 44 years.  If this product rates high on her shelf of “survive life supplies” then I am quite certain this product is worth a longer trial period for what ails me = MUCH trauma-related chronic ANXIETY!  I see through a vendor who supplies Amazon.com this same product is available for under $18 per bottle online.  Now THAT is a price I can afford on my low budget.

++

I can tell I FEEL different in ways I can’t quite (yet) describe from the short dose of this supplement.  Maybe I can say it seems as if the BODY of the massive traumas built into my body are backing off from ME.  I can almost SEE the great giant dark beast of my chronic anxiety overshadowing these large apartment buildings in this complex here as the distance grows between IT and ME.

Inky thick, heavy, sticky, stinky ICKY blackness.  OUT THERE?  Not IN HERE?

A black fog, although oddly as it is (perhaps?) leaving me (somewhat, although now I have to go some days before I can order and possess my own supply of these supplements to see what happens longer-term) this fog does not seem to be entirely without form.  It is big, billowess, maybe about a hundred feet tall and 45 feet wide.  Not unlike a large dust devil, but not with any intense motion.  It floats in my image, perhaps two to three feet off of the ground.

Although whatever this is of my anxiety seems to have been banished from my body (at least for now), I certainly would not say “there goes ALL my body holds of trauma!” because I know better.  But what burden is THIS “thing” that seems to have sunk itself into me the moment I left my southern home to head to this foreign northern land (of my past)?

++

My dear friend came to visit baby and me this morning.  She comes for 2 hours once a week and takes us OUT of this tiny apartment.  She also brings me three-servings worth of some kind of her healthy excellent home-cooked meals.  Maybe?  Because of this “backing off/out of me” of this darkness today I was able to think about asking her to take me to the grocery store (I am still not able to drive her because of my extreme anxiety) for some food to cook — her way.

An education!  Home I came with carrots, onions, peppers, garlic, yams, sweet potatoes, squash, broccoli, cauliflower, leeks, brussel sprouts, asparagus — all fresh although I could only find organic carrots!

In between writing these words I am cleaning and chopping.  My friend’s secret?  She ROASTS her collection of vegetables tossed with sea salt, black pepper and olive oil for 40 minutes at 400 degrees – beginning with the ones that need the longest cooking time.  I CAN DO THIS!

(I hate to cook and do little of it, a process that began for me when my last child left home in 2004 and I was left to eat alone.  My consumption of Snickers since I came north does not count as healthy!  Now that I have fake teeth I cannot chew raw vegetables although I do juice wheat-grass and frozen green vegetables every day — usually two or three times.)

Once the vegetables are cooked they will be divided up and frozen to be eaten as is or added to whatever dish I might like later on.

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It seems that no post I have written for many months ends up addressing what I want it to.  It seems that huge parts of me linger behind the scenes — or somewhere else — other than where I currently reside with this body of mine.

I certainly woke with a clear title in my thoughts this morning.  What was that title?  Where is that post?  Was all of it too close to my dreams to actually make it across the threshold into THIS waking world?

It was about danger.  About disaster.  About a contrast to a sense of security.  Not specifically safety, as in “safe and secure attachment.”  Just about how a sense of SECURITY in the world seems to be the countermeasure to a sense of DISASTER.

In connection to this some vague part of me was also thinking about how a permanent (in the body) sense of DISASTER makes it impossible to CHOOSE to “feel secure” in one’s life.

Yet what might I be able to do (choose to have present in my life) that would HELP me feel more secure?  Does the presence of the Big Black Cloud of Trauma in the body interfere with being able to make these helpful, healthful choices?  I would say “Yes!”

But it also interests me to note that these thoughts appeared as I was evidently benefiting from this supplement my friend shared with me.  If I had transportation perhaps I’d make it across town to that same store and spend twice what I should be charged for that product.  My friend should be back to see me on Sunday and perhaps I can “borrow” a few more supplements from her to tide me over until mine arrive.

++

I feel a little hopeful at this discovery that would not have come to me if I were not living in Fargo now.  To be here when my friend arrived at the time of the death of her beloved mother.  Now I know something I did not know before.

Never mind it snowed first time of the season yesterday.  The sun is trying to show itself and has at least made all that white stuff go away.  But the days are getting shorter and shorter, the nights darker and darker, the temperatures colder and colder, and days without strong north winds fewer and farther apart.  “The end is drawing nigh” in significant ways.  Unless one can hold on tightly to the knowledge “I will survive.  No matter what.  Or die trying.  Because another spring will come.”

I don’t want that sense of disaster to swallow me up again.  Can I be detached enough to marvel at a change if feeling tone I am probably going to experience if indeed this swirling blackness swallows me up again before I can have my own remedy at hand?  Will I learn something else new through this whole process —  other than how tasty my roasted vegetables taste?

++

I have another friend in town who is picking me up to go with her to an open clay studio several times a week.  We will go again tonight.  Interesting how I can remember how to throw a pot after nearly a quarter of a century away from this process!  That’s encouraging, and this is fun!

I will survive!  No ray of sunshine will enter this one window in the small room I spend my days in with my grandson for another four months.  Time.  It moves on….

++++

Source Naturals Theanine Serene with Relora

• Contains the amino acids L-theanine, to support relaxing brain wave activity
• Contains taurine to ease tension, as well as the calming neurotransmitter GABA
• Features magnesium to support muscle and nerve relaxation
• Contains calming holy basil leaf extract and Relora® to gently soothe away the tension in your body
• 2 tablets daily, or as recommended by your health care professional

++++

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.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are welcome.

++++

Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Sunday, November 2, 2014.  Even though my immediate life is not overtly revolving about trauma I do not feel safe in the world.  The severe trauma I endured for the duration of the first 18 years of my life (from birth) evidently carved such deep and pervasive tracks into my nervous system including my brain that I cannot escape the FEELINGS of trauma.

Certainly what it felt like to be so abused I wasn’t even able to form a clear sense of myself in my own life carried a profound lack of a sense of safety in this world in my BODY that I very seldom escape even for a few moments at a time.  The older I get (I am 63 now) the more aware I am of how complicated life is and how sophisticated the knowledge present in our body is about how to negotiate the split-seconds of our life as we move forward in time.

Being present in moments of extreme trauma that present a threat to ongoing life, which is certainly the experience of little people being greatly harmed especially by those whose task it is to take care of these little people, never goes ignored by the body.  Patterns of extreme reactions within the body to experiences of trauma prevents any ability to “relax into” the future.  Trauma is an IMMEDIATE experience that overrides any other experience or the hope or possibility of any other experience.  Surviving immediate trauma both consumes all available inner resources a little person may have at the same time it pushes the body’s awareness of resources that are lacking toward survival.

Yes, we early trauma survivors DID survive.  We did not do so by magically being able to make ourselves BIG enough to combat the largeness of the traumas that consumed us.  The LACK of having what it takes to make it through traumas that were way too BIG for us to endure built itself right into our body-brain as a PART of the trauma we survived.

The whole great big mess of trauma, of repeated unendurable trauma that we DID endure, all lies as body memory within us even though we rarely have actual conscious memory of any of this.  Our memory built us to be the way we are in the world.

++

I closely watch the stages of development of self that my now 27-month-old grandson is passing through as I care for him weekdays.  I suppose it has been about two months ago now that he had his “AH HA!” experience of recognizing he is a self-within.  The following day he used the words “I” and “me” for the first time and then immediately passed into an obvious stage of being extremely shy.  It seems that at the instant he recognized that HE is a self he also recognized that the world is full of OTHER selves!  He is being helped by everyone who loves him to negotiate what this means for him as a developing person.

Carefully, tenderly, gently, clearly — we help him to negotiate each immediate instant of seemingly quite painful shyness he expresses with his entire being when confronted with other people, even very young children (but not babies).  He does a lot of turning away, facing away and then closing his eyes, peeping through nearly closed eyelids.  Nearly every adult I have seen interact with him in public affirms his feelings with “Sometimes I feel shy, too.”

It is taking the wider world to mirror back to him how to negotiate interactions that don’t, at first encounter, feel remotely safe!

Nobody PUSHES him.  Nobody shames or humiliates or scares him.  And what would happen to a child who crosses this threshold into self and social awareness and who is NOT met by safety within the world?  A child who has NEVER known safety?

++

As I write this I find myself narrowing my range of thought.  Are there really only two main kinds of situations in life?  If so, I would divide them into survival states (fear based on a sense of continual threat to existence) and joy states (happiness based on a sense of safety that allows for calmness), and these are not necessarily compatible.

From watching young children I can see their hesitancy in some situations that seems to come from some innate wisdom within them.  I doubt that young abused children get much of a chance to work their own way through situations that elicit caution within them because the traumatic environment they live within continually overwhelms them.  In my case my body developed a permanent cautionary reaction to life.  I have anxiety and fear all of the time.  That is my body’s natural state.

I am too old to believe any longer that I can “work this out” or “work through this.”  I have to learn to live my life IN SPITE of what my body knows.  I have to “work with this” chronic terror that was so thoroughly built into my body.

In some ways this means that I must have TWO “immediates” going on at the same time.  One variant of my immediate existence comes through my clearly trauma-altered body.  The other kind of immediate experience of myself in my life MUST come through continual efforts to keep myself exquisitely aware in the moment of how terror rules my body so that I can consciously try as hard as I can to experience something ELSE along with and in spite of what my body experiences on an ongoing basis.

I am never far from having distinct opportunities nowadays to practice this very strange dance within myself.  My hive attack that began last September 23rd (as I have explained in earlier posts) is still with me continually.  I am being attacked by my own body, which is something immune systems that have adapted to massive prior traumas are prone to do to us.

My range of what feels safe to me has so diminished since leaving my desert home a year ago that there is very little around me I can find to soothe me.  Certainly the upcoming many months of brutal North Dakota winter offers me no solace at all.  Nor does life in this city, in the confines of this tiny apartment without adequate windows and without a beautiful quiet natural world I can step out my door into, offer me the comfort of sanctuary I left behind me.

Certainly “things could be much worse.”  THIS is what my hives are about as they came in response to the message of how close I came to losing my daughter.  Did my body respond to news of that so-near miss for my daughter with a celebration of her being spared?  Nope!  It responded with its pervasive knowledge, grown into it through 18 years of severe abusive trauma, that life is not EVER really safe.  That is what I learned as my body was growing itself.  My body believes that any immediate sense that life is OK is nothing but an illusion.

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Abusive childhoods collapse the distance a growing child needs to traverse between what feels safe to them and what does not.  We ALWAYS need to be able to traverse this distance to have any quality of life to speak of.  My body took the only shortcut it could find.  It (I) was wired to simply KNOW that nothing is ever truly safe.  How true is this assessment of life?  The answer is of course nothing but relative.

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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.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are welcome.

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Leave a Comment »

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Monday, October 20, 2014.  My dearest friend who I am now 1700 miles away from is suffering.  He finally called me yesterday to tell me the reality of his condition.  No trying to be upbeat and cheery.  The truth is that at 77 following spine surgery he is bedridden and in great pain if he moves.  He cannot walk.  He cannot sit.  And, as he has been emphatically told, he cannot sue his surgeon:  “Did you read the three pages of fine print at the end of the papers you signed before surgery?  You are an old man.  Be patient.”

If good things come to those who wait — what lies in store for someone like this arrogant surgeon who promotes his abilities as a surgeon like he is selling used cars?

My friend is brilliant with a charismatic, powerful personality.  He has worked extremely hard all of his life.  What can he do — NOW?  I was unable to sleep much last night, unable to escape the magnetism of the sadness of his dilemma.

Yet after finally dosing for two hours I woke at dawn resolved to challenge my friend in any possible way that I can.  CHALLENGE him.

Humans are designed to arise to a challenge with all resources at our command.  What resources does my suffering friend have right now?  Well, other than the immense powers he has inside of his personhood he also has ME!  It took me some time before I could “go off the air emotionally” enough that I could tell that my friend shared details of his situation now that he has spared me for months because in his own way he is asking me for help.

I am recommending some things that can improve his quality of life — and by doing so down-regulate the amount of stress/distress he is experiencing.  Those states are not beneficial to his healing.  I told him to ASK for help from members of his large family so that he can get Netflix going and a “t box” set up so he can at least bypass a gazillion inane commercials.

Asking for help  is NOT my friend’s strong suit.

Well, stew about THAT my dear friend!  Get those obstinate juices flowing as you look at the very real bad situation you are in.  Are you willing to go outside what has, thus far, been your comfort levels?  Aging forces most of us to grow “outside” the boxes we have allowed ourselves to be confined within for most of our lives.  “There is a time and a season.”

It’s box-smashing time!

Next I recommended that he send another of his loving family members off to the Saturday Farmers’ Market there in search of a fantastic and gifted Reiki massage therapist and energy worker.  She is from France, has a heavy accent, is a retired RN and does chair massage at market.  I am certain she would come to his home to treat him.

Oh my, red lights will flash “DANGER AHEAD” for my “old fashioned” friend.  I DARE YOU I am basically telling him!  No fear should stop him now from pursuing what can actually HELP him heal.

If he WANTS to heal.

I haven’t challenged him with that question yet.  “Do you want to live or die?”

(As I found out 7+ years ago when I fought advanced, aggressive breast cancer.  Deciding NOT to die is not exactly the same thing as deciding TO LIVE.)

I will wait to see what fuses light and burn with what I wrote to him today.  Boy, I can sure come up with more ideas, if nothing else just so he can turn them down!  I know I want to give him hope — and some sense of power he can orchestrate through his choices.  Grace happens through action.  I will do my best to wake up his will and shake up his Warrior Within.

Just because he is in so much terrible pain he can barely move doesn’t mean he can’t move toward healing in new ways he’s never thought of before and certainly — until now — would never have considered trying.

Want to try some GREEN JUICE?  Want to try reading BOOKS?  There ARE library services and audio books.  Turn off the TV sometimes and listen to MUSIC!  Acupuncture?

My friend, a man of great pride and great accomplishment, needs to let people come visit and sit beside him.  Hard to let people see him in this condition?  OF COURSE, but there is no shame in being — human.

Get over it.

Get over ALL of it.

Get well!

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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.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are welcome.

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Leave a Comment »

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Saturday, October 18, 2014.  I mentioned in a recent post that I was swallowed up whole in a swarm of hives last September 23rd as I read a text message from my daughter that morning about a terrible car accident she drove through unscathed the night before.  My hives are still here.  Still acting up.  Still communicating with me via the largest organ in my body — my skin.

I just had the idea of Google searching “hives chakras stress.”  Very interesting.  As I clicked a bit, also, through the list of links that appeared as additional search avenues on “hives anxiety” at the bottom of the first search page I had to chuckle.  Get control of my anxiety BEFORE a stress appears?  Sure.  OK.  Yeah.  I’ll get right on that!

If I don’t want to drown, stay away from water.

I get it.

But, having experienced very little that wasn’t extremely traumatic from the moment of my birth I had more than my fair share of stress-related alterations confining my developing physiology every step of the way as I grew into this world.  I essentially live in an anxiety (terror) built home-of-a-body.

I am yet again reminded of an article I read and took notes on back in 2007

*Preschooler empathy

The study described clearly shows the alterations in empathy processes that happen with early disturbances in safe and secure attachment for little people.  I endured the horrors of abuse consistently for the first 18 years of my life.  I am an “insecurely attached” individual.  I have a serious “attachment disorder.”  Call it Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD).  Call it an “disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment pattern.”  It no longer matters to me one bit what I or anyone else might “call” the patterns my body-brain uses in its interactions with life in this world.

But I do know I will never have an optimally-operating attachment system OR a concurrent optimally-operating empathetic response system.

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Take a look through the information I posted at the above link.  “Rock-n-Roll” method of being in the world, and I am not talking about music.

I have so much pain, sorrow, suffering (etc.) built into me that I CANNOT escape feeling if I am within “contagion” distance of another human being that I become a living emotional backlash ocean of pained response.  Back to me comes all of my own only-slightly-masked pain.  I set to resonate with another person’s suffering as if there is no tomorrow.  And no yesterday.  Body memories related to suffering from trauma so easily becomes ALL THAT I AM.

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How do I pull back from the edge of that brink once I find myself reacting-responding-resonating so painfully with somebody else’s suffering?  Where are my boundaries that define MY reality as being separate from another’s?  We are all connected.  Reality IS that one person’s pain is SUPPOSED to be another person’s pain.

Humans, as shareholders within a social species, are SUPPOSED to be connected to one another.  We are SUPPOSED to recognize another’s suffering.  We are SUPPOSED to care.  And we are SUPPOSED to ACT APPROPRIATELY in response to another’s suffering so that we can HELP THEM not to suffer any more.

In today’s world, certainly within American culture, the circle is broken in significant ways.

Independent US?

Who are we kidding?

Humans are not supposed to be changed in development through early attachment traumas so that they end up TOO MUCH ALONE — or TOO MUCH TOGETHER.

When I cannot stop my pain, my anxiety – which is pain and a response to the existence of my own pain and pain-in-the-world – when my “boundaries” are breached and I am swamped as in overwhelmed – I am being, as is not uncommonly said, “a part of the problem and not a part of its solution.”

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Emotions and states of being are contagious.  Fear.  Anger.  Happiness.  (Yawning?)

Contagious.

I wonder why it has taken me this long to grasp a very simple fact?  Anxiety is CONTAGIOUS!

It takes an entire bank of resources, known and accessible, to create protection against being consumed by powerful, environmentally-profound levels of emotional cotangents such as anxiety is.

Or?

Well, certainly a very sophisticated body-wash of mobilized hives is not the WORST thing that can happen when “defenses” fail.  But my hives are certainly garnering my attention.  ZAP!  Hot poke at the very peak of my head.  Hot itches, too close to my eyes and flashing up my nostrils?  Flowing like red shadow patterns all over this body I call home-in-this-world.

My body is talking to me.  All “symptoms” talk to us.  We are designed optimally for optimal health.  Anything that comes to us that is NOT about optimal health is a twist of fate for humans.  A twist of consequence.

From what and for what reasons?

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One of the first and most important (to me) facts I uncovered a decade ago when I began to study the physiological responses in development due to early trauma was that someone with an early abuse and neglect history will most likely ALWAYS feel DISTRESSED in response to environmental circumstances that would cause “ordinary” people to feel STRESSED.  There are complicated reasons why this is so and many, many of these reasons are presented elsewhere on this blog.

Yet while I can kind of grasp the difference between STRESSED and DISTRESSED, I am at a stalemate in trying to think of any amped-up word to describe how what I feel of anixety– as a trauma-altered-development (TAD) person — actually IS compared to what “ordinary” people might simply be able to call anxiety (aka stressed).

Is it “disanxiety?”  Could it more accurately be described as DYSanxiety?  Early traumatic stress changes our development so that emotional (and physical) DYSREGULATION is built into us.  Anxiety that we cannot regulate in “usual” ways is a direct manifestation of that dysregulation – rather than regulation – built very early on into our body including into our rapidly early- forming (birth to age one) right limbic (social-emotional) brain hemisphere.

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It all comes down to being able or not able to downsize our discomfort and our experience of discomfort — and/or the discomfort of another person when appropriate (although we cannot literally alter somebody else’s own personal/inner experience of their own comfort/discomfort).

Trauma-built people have a nearly unbelievable, usually extreme disadvantage when it comes to being able to self-soothe.

What happened to us was the antithesis of soothing.

This absolutely DOES NOT mean that we can’t learn (A) when we need to comfort and care about/for our self, and (B) HOW to do this.

I think usually this process must begin with identifying when we are in an extremely uncomfortable state (my hives are doing this for me) and then finding healthy ways to create some kind of distancing for our self from any situation that is distressing us so much that our DYSanxiety is in full play.

We are aiming at a state of peaceful calm.

Most of us who were severely traumatized as infants and children BARELY know what this state feels like.  We have to LEARN how we know what it is, because we DO know!  We would not have remained alive if we had NO experience with this state.

We need to REMEMBER what this state of peaceful calm is and what it feels like.  This kind of knowledge was SUPPOSED to be built into our body as the natural point of rest, of balanced equilibrium for our nervous system-self.  Early trauma survivors DO NOT naturally have peaceful calm at the center of our life experience.

Or of our body.

There are times when we need to unplug from other people in ways that let us go off-the-air emotionally.  Being overwhelmed is not health-producing and is not helpful to anyone.  Survivors of early, devastating early trauma did not get a chance to form safe and secure attachment relationships that would have given us healthy, effective boundaries.  We have to LEARN what these boundaries are and how to utilize and sustain them.

My skin is “supposed” to be my natural boundary-defining limit of my physical body.  Yet Oriental healing processes powerfully recognize the error and limitations of this way of thinking.  We are FAR more than our body!  We are a complex of interacting networks and interfaces of which our skin might appear to be one surface that delineates us as an individual.

At this point I wonder if my body is actually doing a form of acupuncture on itself.  Yes, my body is trying to get my attention.  But more importantly I recognize that is trying to heal me.

I need to calm down and find any way I can to participate in this process.  Off-the-air I go.

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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.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are welcome.

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Leave a Comment »

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Sunday, October 12, 2014.  I find myself for the first time in my adult life that I know of LONGING for the touch of my grandmother’s hand.  Longing for the sound of her voice speaking softly to me of NOTHING that has ANYTHING to do with the crazy abusive life I lived with her daughter, my so-sick mother whose illness made her so hate me.  I want my GRANDMA.

Long dead.  Since June 1971 when I was 19 years old.

Grandmother’s kindness to me could not reach me very often.  Mother did not allow it.  By the time we left Grandmother behind in Los Angeles when we tore off for Alaska when I was five there was very little Grandma could do to ever help or soothe me.  Yet I can imagine why memories of tenderness from her are surrounding me now.  Body memories, as most of our earliest most important memories always are.  Being a grandmother myself has blessings but it also has some very difficult challenges that I cannot write about here.  It has been a difficult week, a difficult day today as I try to sort out what it is I CAN do to live the love I have for my family.

Love is often a “working love.”  It is not passive.  It is not always soft and cushy and easy.  Tough love?  Yes.  Sometimes love IS tough.  Life can be scary without blueprints or road maps.  Insights and instincts.  Courage.  Knowing when to speak (what) and when to keep silent (about what).  How to encourage?  How to support without overwhelming?  How to remain true to self while allowing all others to do the same?

Where to shine the light?  How brightly?  How to help those we love increase their own light?  What do we do with the darkness when it appears?

Trauma on down through the generations.  Trying to spare the youngest, newest, sweetest, most loved?  What do we adults drag around with us that harms them even when we are doing our very, very best not to?

Who can tell the truth?  Who knows the truth?  Who looks farthest down the road searching for how what happens now is going to affect what happens THEN for these little people?

Sometimes life seems so very, very big.  I must feel small right now.  Small enough to fit onto my grandmother’s lap.  Her warm hand nesting against my cheek.  If she were here.  If I were small.  If she could get to me without Mother noticing.  Is Grandmother here near me now?  She COULD be!  She MIGHT be?

Oh, what would I say to her?  What would I want to hear back from her?

“I love you.  I have always loved you.  I will always love you.  No matter what.  I love you.”

But did she fight for me?  As hard as she could — FIGHT FOR ME?

Was she ensnared in a web she could not see, all tangled up, kept far, far from me?

How did that happen — exactly?

How did all that suffering HAPPEN?

Who could have stopped it?  How?  At what point?

How do I do my part now to stop the ripples, the aftermath, from moving one tiny inch into the future of my youngest family people?

What ARE our powers?

What price do I pay for the mistakes of my grandmother?  What price are my dearest grandsons paying for mine?

Oh, forgiveness.  Compassion.  Mercy.

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Daylight is dimming.  Clouds too thick to see the sun.  There is no wind.  Rains today left a sweetest scent in the air I don’t ever want to go away.

There is no wind.  There are no shadows.  Darkness is coming.

There is a natural order to things.  I am always seeking my place in it.  Grandmothered once.  Grandmother now.

Always I want the best.

I want to remember the best always happens in the little things.  Things I might barely notice.  One pure note from a piano key.  Put together with the one before it and the one after it.  A certain pattern.  A certain rhythm.  And there’s a melody.  A song.

I want to listen….

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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.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are welcome.

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