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In writing here this morning before I return to work on manuscript #4 for “The Demise of Mildred” I am collecting some thoughts that, quite frankly, I don’t know where to put in this book which is being written in a series.  It might be that the thoughts I have this morning will need to be placed in an earlier volume.  Perhaps they will need to be put into the series introduction.  It frustrates me to have an insight come to me at this stage of my writing that I wish had appeared much earlier!  Oh, well – now to think this all through a little bit more.

“When opportunity knocks.”  Is this an idiom?  A cliche?

At the end of one of Mildred’s letters I worked through yesterday she wrote about the combination of thrilling highs and heart wrenching lows she is experiencing as she first moves up to her Alaskan wilderness mountain homestead, “I know I can’t have my cake and eat it too.”

Those are her words that evidently triggered a whole chain of thoughts for me that I don’t know what to do with at this moment.

I have tried hard thus far in these volumes to explain and describe to readers what I mean when I mention “Mildred’s BPD-matrix litany of words.”

Long, long ago I identified that it WAS an abuse litany that Mother created as it concerned me.  The launch point of this abuse litany was her delivery of breech-me as she suffered a psychotic break, believing that the devil sent me to kill her.  It didn’t help that I was born alive and that she made it through this delivery alive, as well.  All that meant was that the second addition was made to her litany:  “You are the devil’s child sent as a curse upon my life.”

I was NEVER human to Mother.

I deeply – and finally – now understand how her psychosis operated as she abused me from my birth until I was expunged from the family home when I was 18.

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Yes, if I were to be gentler and more supportive of myself I would let myself know that I am working deep within a pitch dark mine that was my severely mentally ill mother’s mind as it expressed in the hundreds of thousands of her words left somehow with me when she died in 2003.  I would let myself understand that I am doing a darn good job at finding absolute gems of truth about Borderline Personality Disorder as I examine this one massive case study of Mother.

No, I am always having to battle my way forward through what I DO NOT YET KNOW as I write my own version of Mother within her words.

I so rapidly shove what I discover behind me as I move forward in this book writing process because it is always what I DON’T KNOW that I am searching for.  Thus, when an insight like the one I have now appears out of order (as I see it) and too far down the line from where I think I SHOULD have been able to see it — I am very frustrated.

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Mildred’s verbal litany, as I have discovered in writing “The Demise of Mildred” series did NOT ONLY apply to me.  Mildred had a litany of words for everything!  These litany words appear in segments as phrases that are repeated over and over again in her writings as they were in her life.  Watching which segments appear in which context in which combination allows me to see patterns of her illness — and thus, see her BPD-mind at work.

I so far believe that Mildred lost her ability very early in her life to grow and develop a healthy self.  Instead her disorder replaced her self.  Instead of a ‘real’ self she was consumed by and trapped within what I call her BPD-matrix mind.

As I move forward in my forensic biographical work on Mildred I have come to understand that her BPD operated in EVERY SINGLE aspect of her life.  There was no part of Mildred that was not influenced by her mental illness.  Why was that so hard for me to see?

And why, then, did it surprise me that she had a litany of words for EVERY part of her existence – not ‘just’ for me?

And, how to I explain what her litany WAS?  Let alone her BPD-matrix that was all Mildred had of a mind?

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So, back in full circle, I think about idioms, sayings, expressions, metaphors, cliches that I suspect have infiltrated and have been created within every language spoken within every culture on earth.

Some are so mundane we would not question them:  moving lock stock and barrel; a stitch in time saves nine; a penny saved is a penny earned; it’s raining cats and dogs; you have me over a barrel; make hay while the sun shines.

Others appear obtuse because they were generated in an older era:  make no bones about it; grease my palm; a chip on your shoulder; can’t cut the mustard.

There are over 7,000 idioms used in English explained in The Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms.  But we all know they exist.  We have all used them ‘at one time or another’.  What has struck me this morning is that these segments, these phrases are actually patterns of a language litany of words that hold no sinister meaning within their particular combination of words.

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I postulated to my daughter the other day that I would not be surprised if in the future when Borderline Personality Disorder is far more understood, that  it will be found that one of its underlying components is a language processing disorder.  I would also postulate that as researchers work to determine some of the major abuse-related common origin points for this disorder that they will find that verbal abuse is perhaps the MAIN shared early abuse for people who develop BPD.

Researchers have already found that of all abuses done to children it is verbal abuse that outruns them all – combined – in its power to change the brain development of little people within traumatic environments.

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Meanwhile, “back at the ranch” if not out here “in the back 40” I think about BPD-Mildred’s matrix replacement for a mind.  Mildred spoke in her own matrix-generated idiom litany segments because she THOUGHT in them.  The more important a concern was to Mildred’s BPD-matrix, the longer its corresponding litany became and the more likely that part of her overall BPD-matrix litany was to appear — over and over again.

Because Mildred needed to separate her upper ‘heaven’ world from her lower ‘hell’ world, her matrix litany of me as her proxy in hell was MASSIVE!!

At the same time it was Mildred’s matrix search for ‘the perfect kingdom’, for ‘the perfect home’, for ‘heaven on earth’, for Shangri la, that fed her Alaskan homesteading obsession.  Homesteading and Alaska were described in an ever-growing corresponding litany of word phrases/segments.

People don’t CHANT idioms – not normally, anyway.  BPD-matrix litany phrases – at least for Mildred – became mantras that both described and had the power to motivate her life, her actions.  A BPD-matrix mind is a closed system.  Mantra-litany repetitions are not, therefore, subject to moderation or modulation once they are formed.

I suspect that much of the power for harm that comes from verbal abuse to children is that the phrases used, the segments of a litany of abuse, are not said JUST one time.  Oh, no!  How many times, for example, does a verbally abused child (or any adult who is in an abusive relationship) hear something repeated over and over again like, “I hate you!  I curse the day you were born!  I wish you were dead!  I wish you had never been born!  You are so STUPID!”

And on and on and on such abuse litany word segments go – over and over and over again.

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Even though, as I mentioned, I identified Mother’s abuse litany of me years ago, it is only as I write these book manuscripts now that I understand that her BPD-matrix mind THOUGHT in litany patterns of words.  That is how her mind worked.

This explains to me why it is impossible to ‘reason’ with a BPD-matrix mind.  Because the matrix exists as a replacement for a healthy self, it is an entirely closed system in which nobody or no important thing (in Mildred’s case, a thing like a home, a house, her belongings, her children, her mountain, etc.) ONLY existed as a BPD-matrix THOUGHT.

Which also explains to me that even though it is often said that borderlines ‘fear abandonment’ – this so-called pattern has NOTHING whatsoever to do with actual people!  A BPD-matrix mind has NO PEOPLE in it.  It has IDEAS – only.  In order for such a matrix to provide ‘order and orientation’ of ongoing experience for a BPD person in the world, the matrix must have what it needs to function.

Having ‘people’ in particular ‘places’ within a BPD-matrix mind is essential for it to function.  ‘Fear of abandonment’ is an outsider’s way of describing the great quaking that such a matrix mind will undergo if one of it’s ‘thought-ideas’ (say, a person) is removed from its functional place in the matrix.

This also explains to me why BPD people cannot accept responsibility or blame.  A BPD-matrix ‘sorts’ things out – anything ‘bad’ simply cannot exist in the upper matrix and hence is banished to the invisibility of the lower part of the matrix.  (I see the matrix in 2-D as a diamond shape; in 3-D as two pyramids, one extending upwards from a platform base, the other downward.)

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On and on this forensic biographical study of my severely abusive BPD mother Mildred goes, complete with my study of her litany.

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I just added this thought into a comment:

I realize that I am working with the patterns I see that are particular to my own BPD Mother. I KNOW she suffered a psychotic break while she was birthing me, probably under the influence of the drug ‘twilight sleep’ that I most strongly suspect she was given during labor.

I cannot generalize to BPD in any way what I am coming to understand about Mildred.

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“Mandate with suffering.”  Not like saying “hamburger with fries.”  Yet having written the story presented in my last post I have a need to look more closely than ever before at ‘forgiveness’, a word that I don’t really understand.

That doesn’t matter, evidently.  I will learn.  Meanwhile, those who have suffered greatly through abuse know this mandate that comes with such suffering.  Either our memories eat us alive – or we find our way to forgive.

Because working with Mildred’s own story as she presents it in her writings spares me the worst of the worst that I will face should I move on to finish my own childhood story once I have published the volumes of “The Demise of Mildred.”  I sure got a taste today of what my own story telling might do to me – I continue to need to be very, very careful of how I handle my memories of severe child abuse.  So be it.

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This story appears in the context of Mildred’s 1958 letters about the early days of the Alaskan homesteading saga:

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Comment:

I cannot sit here inside my own skin working on this book any longer without pausing here to describe something of the underbelly this story never shows.  Did anyone outside of our family ever see the other side of Mildred?  Could anyone outside of our family have detected the truth of what allowed Mildred to continue living her mad, mad BPD-matrix upper life as she preserved it in these letters?

There is an entirely different story not being told here because it exists preserved in silence between the letters of the words, between the words, between the lines of the words that appear in her writings here.  While it has been my hope, my intention and my goal to protect my own story from appearing in “The Demise of Mildred” epic, at this moment I will speak of a clear memory of myself as the sole prisoner inside Mildred’s lower BPD-matrix pyramid of hell during these weeks Mildred writes about here.

‘Silence is golden’ when it serves the needs of a BPD-matrix such as the one that consumed Mildred.  Yet silence is deadly poison to helpless, innocent children who have been made a victim of such devastating madness.  While being 7 1/2 during this period of time Mildred is writing about on school mornings I was being hauled with my age-8 1/2 brother out of this trailer in early morning to be driven with Father into Anchorage to go to school — down the barely passable miles of the Jeep road Mildred describes, then down the miles of the maintained Eagle River Road, then down the miles of paved highway from Eagle River to Anchorage.  I was dropped at a babysitter’s until it was time for school to start in the morning, walking to school, spending a long day trying to learn what second graders do along with classmates who lived their regular lives while we were being dragged through our parents’ nightmare.   I then walked after school to be cared for again by this babysitter until Father finished his day’s work at the office — to then be transported all the way back to the trailer deep in this wilderness valley.

This would have been ENOUGH to so tax small children that there could hardly be anything left of them to be children with.  But there’s more.  There’s more in the silence of the story that Mildred is not telling here.  Within the context of this silence, within this time span of my childhood, there is more I wish to tell you now.  To do this I become as a female half-bull half-human Minotaur.  Lowering my head with massive horns I storm back through the labyrinth of time to retrieve the memory of being the little girl my mother so savagely devoured within the darkest reaches of her inhumanly diseased BPD-matrix mind in any way that she could.

I find myself asking our after school babysitter if I can go outside to play.   Yes.  I dress in my jacket and slide my new shoes into my plastic boots.  As soon as I walk out of the Panoramic View apartment building my babysitter lived in I am drawn as if by a magnet to the edge of the massive puddle spring thaw has made out of melting snow in the center of the open area of the “L” this complex of three huge buildings forms.

I see my feet as I begin walking so slowly around the edge of this puddle of brown water clockwise.  I can’t see what color my boots are. I feel my feet crunching through patches of slushy snow.  I hear the change in sound as I cross wet patches of brown flattened grass.  I am being so careful to keep my feet far away from the water but as I walk around and around I spiral ever closer and closer.

Finally I stop.  I turn.  My boots are facing the edge.  I inch and inch forward until I can tap the water into little splashes, splashes, splashes.  Into the water my boots go.  Slowly.  A little deeper.  A little deeper.  A little further into the water and my boot heels leave the shore.  Here I made the most glorious discovery of my childhood life so far!

Down into the water I push a foot – and – BOING!  When I stop pushing UP pops my foot with a magical feeling of so-nearly flying all I want is MORE!  This is where I commit the fatal crime of forgetting not to be a child.  With pure delight I BOING!  BOING my way this way and that way out toward the heart of this puddle.  Far too far into the water I play until in one instant my feet feel icy coldness wetness flood through my socks.

I cannot say what happened next.  Did I freeze in recognizing terror at that instant?  Did I barely notice the coldness of my feet as I continued to PLAY and PLAY?  At what point did I stop and return my sogging feet to my babysitter’s door, open it and walk into the warmth?

Even if I could somehow know the relationship between the part of this experience I do remember and the part of this experience I don’t remember, I would NOT want to know.  I don’t want to know when or how Mildred found out I had gotten my new shoes wet by playing in a puddle.  What I do know is that after she came to pick John and I up from the sitter’s, she was in a her lower BPD-matrix hell full rage at me as soon as she got far enough away from the babysitter’s door.

She was already pounding me with her fists, screaming at me about being such a horrible child I got my new shoes wet as she dragged me out to the parking lot where Father sat in the idling Jeep Willies station wagon.  She stopped part way there to remove my shoes and boots raging, “You don’t deserve to wear anything on your feet, you UNGRATEFUL CHILD!”

Yanking open the Jeep door she violently stuffed me into a tight fetal position with my knees and forehead on the cold wet floor of the back seat behind her husband as Cindy hurried in terror to scoot from the window to the middle of the seat as scared John clamored in on the other side.

I don’t write this without tears, but I am working hard to keep them balled within the knot of my stomach while my elbows are frozen tightly against my rib cage.  I tap out these words on my keyboard.  During all of the long hours driving back to the trailer along the pavement from Anchorage to the turn in Eagle River onto the maintained dirt road, down down to the narrowing start of the rugged and nearly impassable Jeep trail, Mildred raged at me as she turned around over the edge of the front seat to beat me with her fists.  Her little 3-year-old cowered beside her on the front seat while Cindy and John witnessed this horror in the back.

Finally near the place on the Jeep road we eventually named ‘Mud Lake’ Mildred turned her entire body around, put her knees on her seat and launched over it to grab my hair with one fist, jerk my head upward as she slapped my face again and again as hard as she could.  She is screaming, “I hate you!  You are no better than a dog!  Even a dog would know better than you not to get its feet wet!”

I see a flash of thick dark branches.  I hear them squealing along the side of the Jeep as we crawl past.  I am there.  Cold.  Curled on the floor behind my father’s seat being as small as I possibly can.  My spine hurts.  My shoulders hurt.  Now my face is hurting, too.  I can feel the warmth of my father coming through the back of his seat.  He is driving.  Driving.  Driving….

Such stories as this you will never know about by reading Mildred’s words.  As I return now to the presentation of Mildred’s writings I mention that temporarily I leave behind the subject of ‘forgiveness’, one I will not sidestep when it is time to write my own account of my infancy and childhood.  For now I work again as best I can to separate our two stories.

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I finished the first 24 chapters that belong to volume one (or part one, haven’t decided yet) of “The Demise of Mildred” series, and sent the manuscript up to my daughter for her professional edit.

I woke at 2:30 this morning unable to return to sleep with volume two (part two?) working in my mind.  Today I finished 7 chapters of this segment for this second book and began the 8th.

Today I hit a realm of truth about the abuse I experienced for the first 18 years of my life that has rocked me deeply.  Time for some no-brainer netflix movie watching.  I cannot cope any more with touching hell, because that is exactly what my so-sick Borderline Personality Disorder mother did to me – she put me in her hell in place of herself – and kept me there.

“The Demise of Mildred” series is going to be dedicated to all survivors of infant and child abuse committed against them by a BPD parent, especially their mother.  I am not sure there is any worse abuse on earth that what these twisted up minds can commit.  It is the terrible matrix of madness that BPD creates and replaces the self of its ‘holder’ with that – at least in my case with my mother – so distorts everything in existence that there is no sanctuary left except within the hand of God – who held onto my soul.

Although this work is the hardest I have ever done or will ever do in my life on this earth – other than the work it took me to survive Mother for the first 18 years of my life — I am committed to completing this 4-5 part/volume series ASAP.  If – and I hope this will happen – readers find these books and begin to see their experience as a survivor of severe infant-child abuse by a BPD mother in them – and if these readers are finding comfort, solace, information, inspiration — whatever might be helpful and useful to them — then I want to make sure they have access to ALL the volumes of the books ASAP.

This task is and will take a lot out of me, but I believe this is my destiny.  Too much is unknown about infant and child abuse as it is, but there is more vacuum than assistance available for those of us who have endured and survived the kind of abuse I did from a BPD mother.

Tonight I now rest.  Tomorrow – back at it.

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Mildred wrote to her husband, June 26, 1957:  “…the terrible loneliness for you follows me everywhere I go.  There’s no escape from it.” — Mildred is being pursued by her terrible loneliness with no escape.  This kind of loneliness was a predator.  Mildred had been its prey since her birth.  Yes, she had survived.  She was alive.  But at what price?  How many people among us are chased through their entire life by this kind of loneliness?

My parents:  Two lost selves, too lost selves a-spin alone together in a universe that makes no sense to either one of them.  Both born unwanted and unloved, mis-loved mal-loved babies.  Both raised in an early world without the warmth-glue of love that allows a self to be born into the world in wholeness.

The truth in the words my parents are speaking to one another is profound.  Their truth is no less true for being in BPD-matrix litany code.  There are secrets to the heart that continue to exist as long as the body that holds it remains alive.  It is the complete lack of conscious awareness of their meaning and of their source that reflects my parents nearly complete brokenness.  And NOBODY NOTICED!

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I just finished the first draft of this first book containing 24 chapters –

The Demise of Mildred:  A forensic biography of my severely abusive Borderline Personality Disorder Mother

Part One:  

Suburbia to Alaska – My parents’ love letters, summer 1957

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These links are to posts from May 2009 – a long time ago in blog time!  I have reposted these links several times – and do so again today – because I believe they give information that is among the most important I have ever read.

This is information about insecure attachment disorders.  These links contain information related to the work of Nancy Collins of the Department of Psychology, University of California in Santa Barbara.

citation:

Collins, N. L., Ford, M. B., Guichard, A. C., & Feeney, B. C. (2006). Responding to need in intimate relationships: Normative processes and individual differences. In M. Mikulincer & G. Goodman (Eds.), Dynamics of romantic love: Attachment, caregiving, and sex. New York: Guilford.  (pages 149-189)

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part One

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Two

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Three

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Four

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Five

*COLLINS ON RESPONDING TO NEED – Part Six

**Attachment Styles and Caregiving from Collins Article

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