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I woke so early, 2:30 am, unable to sleep, rising in the cool quiet stillness, in the darkness.  With questions.  Always with questions.  Sometimes it seems I am made of questions.

I was feeling as though I started out at the beginning of my life to end up in what seemed to be the closed end of a maze.  Being able to see behind me that pathway of my life journey.  Seeing how I got to this stuck, lost deadend place.  Not knowing how to get out.

Thinking about the billions of us here.  Those who know nothing but struggle, deprivation and suffering.  Those whose lives seem to be on track.  The ones with confidence, competence, resources available to create a life that suits them.  A life not plagued by lack or by questions.

Sometimes feeling as though the only given at all is the passing of time.  What is the great equalizer among us?  Generation after generation, is receiving a portion — of something — with which we make a life?

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When I was up at our local humble laundromat cafe yesterday I reached for a newspaper lying on a table and read an article.  I don’t follow the news.  Oh, my heavens NO!  I would be overturned myself if I knew even a glimmer of what is going on in this world of ours!

But that article.  North Korea.  Thinking of lopping off a nuclear missile at the U.S. of A.?  And “we.”  Not concerned in our confidence that we could “probably” knock the thing out of the air.

To fall where?

Besides, the article reported, N. Korea is probably not serious.  They need other nations.

So.  There.  We have it.

Well, being born in 1951 I remember the cold war plaguing the adults around me.  I remember bomb shelters.  I remember being instructed by our teachers at school about how we were supposed to drop to the floor to hide under our desk if a nuclear bomb was on its way.  I remember standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes when I was 9 years old, staring out at the snowy Alaskan woods outside the window, looking for Russian soldiers with their guns creeping toward our back door.  I was terrified.

No more?

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What world is this?  Each born at a spot on earth where so many forces shape what is possible in people’s lives.  Billions without sustenance.  Billions in struggle.  Do others wake before dawn wondering what place they have in the changing patterns of human life on this planet?  Asking, “What, oh what, do I have to offer?”

I woke early enough that all life outside my home with the exception of a mournful owl seemed to have stopped its pace — waiting.  Waiting for another cycle of dawn to appear.  I reached for a pen and one of my many spiral notebooks to write my 87-year-old friend who has done much.  Seen much.  Knows much.  And still wakes asking questions about quantum physics even as her back aches and sends her back to bed.

I wrote about this maze of life, about how I was sent out on a trajectory at my birth that seems to have sent me directly here.  How small my life is.  How humble.  At times how frightening as life to me seems to be full of nothing but surprises waiting to happen.

And then, most blessedly, I went to my email and found this comment to my last post – +SORTING THINGS OUT

I’m a new subscriber and I’d just like to say, thank you. Thank you very much for being so brave, trying to sort this out and first of all make the most you can with what you have and also thank you for writing about it. Thank you for being honest about it. It is very hard. From what I’ve read so far, I can say, your honesty and diligence to find the truth is almost unprecedented. I value you. I value what you are doing. Thank you, again and again.

I felt the touch of an angel.

I am not alone.

I am grateful.  I have had hope returned to me.  The deadend dark wall of the maze corner I felt stuck in has vanished.  “I can’t do” has transformed yet again into “I can do.”

Thank you, T.

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The time of life also has its timing.  Timing, when it happens, is perfect.  The timing of the arrival of T’s words was perfect.  When I cannot see forward in the darkness I can wait in trust that a ray of light WILL appear!  Of course, being me, made of questions, I ask next, “Is this true for every one of us?”

Can I simply let my questions be?  Can I be defined in part by questions I feel answers for versus questions I do not?  Can I be more than content, even happy for the fact that as quantum physics seems to say, within the within there really is nothing but a great GREAT Mystery?  That being human is itself defined by what we can never know?

I live while I ponder and I ponder while I live.  I can do other things at the same time.  Get something to eat.  I am hungry.  Wash my dishes.  Wait for the creeping grey light of dawn.  Write a post.  Greet readers.  And thank you all for stopping by this point at this point in time.  Good morning!

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I think of the expression “sorting things out” as being British, but my son used the phrase in an email to me today — so maybe it’s catching on in America.  It’s a good phrase.

Solving problems by sorting things out.  I like that, because once all is said and done that is very often exactly what has happened.  It is very nice to have input from other people during the sorting out process.  Sometimes it is even required.

It has helped me to verbalize my way through my personal “show stoppers” lately.  I hauled my laptop up to our local laundromat cafe today to jump-start my flagging writing.  Once I am in full-flow I am quite content to write at home, but when I am snagged I find the social setting helpful, as it was today.

A friend of mine snapped my entire conflict shut in the nutshell:  “All you need to do, Linda, is write these books.  Just write the story.  It is not yours to worry one bit about what anyone ever thinks of it.  It is your job to write them.”

OK.

Clear enough!  Freedom!

In the end it is the job of whomever edits these, still most hopefully my daughter, to decide what to do with technical concerns like what to include and what to change.  That sorting out job will be hers.  It is not mine.

I really DO like the concept, sorting things out.  It sounds doable, natural, and a peaceful way to get past a complication without being remotely aggressive or antagonistic.  Just sort it out.

OK.

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Today begins the 5th year of this blog’s existence.  I thank every reader whose pathway has crossed its pages, and I thank every commenter who has added their thoughts, feelings and unique perspectives to its posts.

The focus of my research work at this point is into my history as a severe infant-child abuse survivor.  I preferred the work when it wasn’t so self-focused.  I preferred the external research that enabled me to identify scientific facts about how the great distress abused infants and children live through changes the way their physiology develops.  As difficult as those facts were to encounter and to accept, they were simply facts.

I have reversed the direction in which the arrows of my search are flying.  Now it seems I face nothing but obstacles and all of them are of my own making.  Nearly all of them stem from the understandable but horrendously difficult time I have in TRULY valuing anything about myself.

I write in the face of a seemingly endless onslaught of sadness.  I cannot cover up this fact and write the truth.  Nearly all pressures I perceive if I look outside of myself appear to cast a vote to the “Nay” about such work as this having any value.  In a culture that ever coined in the first place, and then remembered such a phrase as “ignorance is bliss,” I find it difficult to continue forward.  The effort can seem equivalent to trying to move a mountain.

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Not only is there great mystery and a nearly impenetrable silence about infant and child abuse in this society but there seems to be an unwillingness to value what adult survivors of it have to say.  Maybe if the voice that spoke of such agony and horrors belonged to a cute little person someone would care.  But I am all grown up.  I have made it “over the hill.”  Why on earth would anything I have to say matter?

Whose voice do I hear speaking those words in my mind?  Do I write in spite of them or because of them?

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Internal work does not come with flashing neon recognition or praises.  It does not come from any place where there was any recognition at all that the suffering ever even happened.  Three little monkeys — see, hear, speak no evil.

I suffered alone.  I write alone.  Sometimes it is difficult to separate those two processes.  The immoveable mountain made of words such as “Let it go and move on with your life” can crush a writer’s words before they have been born.

I close my eyes and look inside.  I see the tear-stained faces of many children among whom I was just one.  Time disappears as no boundary forms between those children who had no voice then and those children who have no voice now.

The significance of why I write begins to come clear to me.  I write because I can.

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Today marks my 5th day without working on my book writing.  I am feeling very discouraged.  Why bother?  Why would my work possibly matter?  To whom?  My circle of supporters is very small, it seems.  Everyone is very busy and highly stressed in their own lives.  This is lonely work.  Will I feel better tomorrow?

My abusive mother’s longest “friend” called me tonight and talked for over an hour.  She is reading Mother’s letters.  Joe Anne is concerned about the really nasty things Mildred wrote about other people who Joe Anne knew — and says to me, “They don’t deserve to have their names connected with the things your mother said about them — most of it completely untrue.”

I feel angry, not at Joe Anne, but at the unfairness of child abuse!  Who among any of those adults who knew my mother ever bothered to care what was happening to that woman’s children?  Why in God’s name (sorry God) should I need to be concerned with anyone else back then — most of them dead — when none of them cared one flying TWIT about the torture that woman did to me for 18 long years?

Joe Anne tells me that because Mother is dead, and because those books will go out with my name on them, that I am the one who is accountable for Mother’s words.  Do I want to hurt people?  Do I want to hurt the children of the people Mother berated and gossiped about?  No, I don’t like to hurt people.  That is not my nature.

Something about this whole mess is really upsetting to me!!!  I am not sure I needed to hear from Joe Anne today, not when I was already feeling discouraged.

Joe Anne thinks everyone should be turned from a name to initials.  What a HUGE job that is going to be!!!  This is an important part of “the back story” about the back side of a severely mentally ill psychotically abusive woman!  Mildred wanted to control what everyone thought of her.  She’s dead.  I have her letters.  I am going to publish them, and then I am going to write a rebuttal in my own words about what my experience was being her targeted for hatred and abuse daughter.

Change everyone else’s names — in case — what?  Mildred did not write of her abuse of me.  That is all hidden.  It was always hidden.  At least it was able to remain hidden because nobody cared enough to notice what was going on in our home.

I have to ask myself, “What do I care about?”  I ask myself whether I would do the amount of work I have done — and the work, the LOTS of work that still needs to be done, if I could ONLY help spare ONE CHILD the kind of suffering I went through.  Is ONE child’s life worth my efforts?  That one child — who will suffer for the rest of their life from the lifelong effects of psychotic abuse from a mother such as mine was if the same everybodys ignore what they see the way they ignored what happened to me.

Is there anything I can say that can help disclose the mental illness in some other abusive mother?

Does anyone CARE?

Does anyone care what a psychotic abusive Borderline Personality Disorder mother can LOOK LIKE to outsiders who are the only hope a child being abused by such a mother has?  What about fathers?  My father did nothing.  Is there anything in this story that might help even ONE FATHER wake up and take action to protect his children from such a woman?

Is there something wrong with me that I do this work?  Why am I not perfectly content to rest within some trivial life doing absolutely nothing to try to help anyone else?

Every day I think about the person I could have been had I not gone through what I did so that now at 61 my body is worn out from the effects of that horrendous traumatic distress.  Along with all the rest of the consequences of having been so abused.  I write and write and write on this blog about the kind of physiological lifelong damage infant and child abuse does to its survivors.  Who cares?

I better go out to the mental/emotional pastures and find my writing steed.  I better mount and ride again — or?

Do I have hopes where I should have none?  Where am I ever going to find someone with the time and expertise to do the editing work on these books that needs to be done?  Is what I am trying to do absolutely and profoundly IMPOSSIBLE? 

How stupid is it to attempt the impossible?  As did any one of us who survived through childhoods in hell that were unsurvivable — we DID do the impossible!  I did the impossible.  Maybe this job I have set myself to do is no different that what I did in the first place:  survive mother, survive my infancy and childhood.  But how tough am I still?  Tough enough?

Tonight I really don’t know.

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I received this quotation in an email this morning from my daughter.  It came to her through a work related source.  The first time I read it I thought, “OK, I can understand this.”  I even sent it on to a friend who is super invested in understanding the complexities of the human shame reaction.

Then I went on to do other things for an hour or so, and this piece nagged at my mind so I went back to read it again.  Here is what my daughter forwarded to me:

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All About Connections – April 5, 2013

“By the time you’re a social worker for 10 years, what you realize is that connection is why we’re here. It’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. This is what it’s all about…. The ability to feel connected, is — neurobiologically, that’s how we’re wired — it’s why we’re here.” This comment comes from Brene Brown in her TedTalk,”The Power of Vulnerability“. Here is a bit more from her remarks:

“So I thought, you know what, I’m going to start with connection. Well, you know that situation where you get an evaluation from your boss, and she tells you 37 things you do really awesome, and one thing — an ‘opportunity for growth?’ And all you can think about is that opportunity for growth, right? Well, apparently this is the way my work went as well, because, when you ask people about love, they tell you abo ut heartbreak. When you ask people about belonging, they’ll tell you their most excruciating experiences of being excluded. And when you ask people about connection, the stories they told me were about disconnection.

“So very quickly… I ran into this unnamed thing that absolutely unraveled connection in a way that I didn’t understand or had never seen…. And it turned out to be shame. And shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection: Is there something about me that, if other people know it or see it, that I won’t be worthy of connection? The things I can tell you about it: it’s universal; we all have it. The only people who don’t experience shame have no capacity for human empathy or connection. No one wants to talk about it, and the less you talk about it the more you have it. What underpinned this shame, this “I’m not good enough,” which we all know that feeling: ‘I’m not thin enough, rich enough, beautiful enough, smart enough, promoted enough.’ The thing that underpinned this was excruciating vulnerability, this idea of, in order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen….

“…Let me tell you what we think about children. They’re hardwired for struggle when they get here.  [ME:  NO NO NO NO!!  THIS IS SO NOT CORRECT!  WHY SO NEGATIVE?]  And when you hold those perfect little babies in your hand, our job is not to say, ‘Look at her, she’s perfect. My job is just to keep her perfect — make sure she makes the tennis team by fifth grade and Yale by seventh grade.’  That’s not our job. Our job is to look and say, ‘You know what? You’re imperfect, and you’re wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.’ That’s our job. Show me a generation of kids raised like that, and we’ll end the problems I think that we see today.”

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OK, that being said….  Now, I admit I am not going to watch the piece I included an active link to that is evidently the source for the above.  I wouldn’t waste my time doing so.  I am responding only to my take of the words forwarded to me. 

I don’t agree.  In fact, I believe the opposite!

Humans are hardwired for struggle if they HAVE to be.  That kind of hardwiring, in my thinking, comes to us ONLY through degrees of unsafe and insecure early attachment when our primary infant caregivers (especially) do not make sure we are well and happy whenever possible (in appropriate ways).

The human opioid systems are well in place within our body before we are born.  This is our FEEL GOOD SYSTEM.  We are designed to FEEL GOOD — NOT BAD!  Our natural opioid systems take care of us just fine if they are not interfered with – and unsafe and insecure early infant attachment relationships interfere BIG TIME!

Humans are designed to be healthy and happy – NOT TO STRUGGLE.  Struggle comes from the very imperfect world we live in — that will change very soon!  Once we decide we want a better world, we will have one.

Meanwhile, each infant born (with a few unfortunate exceptions) is designed to live in a loving, peaceful, cooperative, “connected” world.  We are designed when things go optimally in our earliest development to grow to be (on the physiological level most importantly) FLEXIBLE beings who can adequately and appropriately deal with CHANGE.

Life does include struggle – but being hardwired to flexibly handle changes – even traumatic ones later on in life – is not the same thing in my mind as being “wired for struggle.”  Why take the NEGATIVE position that denies us our birthright to be happy, well – and yes, connected?  We are a social species.  Of course we are wired for connection.  It’s called community.  It’s called attachment.

Only when early relationship trauma changes the way our body develops do we become “hardwired for struggle.”  That is not our natural state.  We are designed to be healthy, happy and socially connected harmonious beings – if we are given what we need during our infancy and childhood to develop optimally.  When early trauma changes development one of the key areas of change is the set point of equilibrium in our body – that is supposed to be set under optimal early conditions – for peaceful calm.

This article is talking about early trauma survivorship and what it does to CHANGE the body from optimal development – and the speaker does not even seem to know it!

SEE these two VERY important online articles by Dr. Allan N. Schore:

EFFECTS OF A SECURE ATTACHMENT RELATIONSHIP ON RIGHT BRAIN DEVELOPMENT, AFFECT REGULATION, AND INFANT MENTAL HEALTH

Attachment and the regulation of the right brain*

And see this one by Dr. Martin H. Teicher:

+Dr. Teicher’s ARTICLE ON TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT

And this:

*Notes on Teicher

And this also by Dr. Martin H. Teicher:

Abuse and Sensitive Periods

And this by Dima:

Brain and Development affected after Child Abuse

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An online search using these terms in combination will yield some fascinating related facts:

–  placental opioid-enhancing factor

–  placenta opioid

–  natural opioids breast milk

–  opioids placenta breastfeeding

–  Scholarly articles for opioids human attachment

–  The brain opioid theory of social attachment:  a review of the evidence – by A.J. Machin1) & R.I.M. Dunbar

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The following posts are just a few on this blog that are related to our internal opioid system – and include information about what goes wrong when there is trauma in an infant’s first attachment relationships that changes how this system operates:

+OUR DISTURBED NATURAL INTERNAL OPIOID (OPIATE) SYSTEM

+FEELING GOOD AND A FULL TOILET TANK

+PANKSEPP ON BRAIN OPIOIDS

+SCHORE ON BRAIN AND NERVOUS SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT

+MY THOUGHTS ON ‘PSYCHOLOGY’ – THE HOGWASH THAT HURTS US

+FASCINATING NOTES ON LIVING WITH TRAUMA

+A COLLECTION OF LINKS ON BODY-BRAIN CHANGES CAUSED BY EARLY INFANT-CHILD ABUSE

+AN OUTLINE – THE SCOTTISH TAKE ON INFANT ABUSE, NEGLECT, TRAUMA AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

+A COMMENTER SENT THIS LINK TO AN IMPORTANT NEW ARTICLE

+A COLLECTION OF POSTS RELATED TO — CALM — AND ABUSE RELATED COMPLICATIONS

+INFANT-CHILD ABUSE: WE NEVER STOP TRYING TO HEAL

+DEGREES-OF-WELL-BEING IS ABOUT SOCIAL HEALTH, NOT “MENTAL” OR “BEHAVIORAL”

+SUBSTANCE P – IT’S OUR BODY’S BIOLOGICAL LINK TO FEELING EMOTIONAL AND PHYSICAL PAIN

*Endocannabinoids, Digestion, Food Intake, Energy Balance

*Endocannabinoid Protection and Regulation

*Endocannabinoid System, Fear and Anxiety

*Endocannabinoids – Fertility, pregnancy, lactation, infants and children

+FACTS ABOUT OUR BODY’S OWN ‘POT’ SYSTEM

++IMMUNE RESPONSE TO MATERNAL SEPARATION

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