++++

Friday, January 24, 2014.  It takes great crimes against an INFANT for the ability to feel loved to be prevented from developing within that infant’s nervous system and brain.

My guess is that there are few people on earth who can recognize the truth of what I am saying.  I would have to talk with some autistic people to see how they relate to the condition of FEELING what it feels like to be loved by other people.

But I was NOT born autistic.  Not even close.  My ability to feel what it feels like to be loved was given to me through psychotic abuse nearly IN THE COMPLETE ABSENCE OF ANY ADULT POSITIVE ATTACHMENT in my life.  The book mentioned at the end of this post discusses what love was available to me — and there was SOME or I would not be alive. 

But what little love was given to me starting in infancy was NOT enough to build consistent stable neurological circuits into my body brain that would allow me to know what it feels like to be loved except when I am in the IMMEDIATE physical presence of my “attachment” people.

Infants are supposed to progress out of that stage of dependency on the physical presence of their positive attachment people very early in life.  I did not have a chance to grow OUT of it because I never had the chance to grow INTO and THROUGH it.

Why I was chosen to be one of those few people is not something I will understand in this lifetime, but being one of those people gives me a very unique perspective from which to write about the concerns of infant and child abuse.

Do I WANT to have this perspective?  NO!  If I had sounded that NO with every breath of my lifetime it would not be enough to convey the tragedy of this state of being.

++

I do not think my condition is connected in its difficulty to not being able to TRUST those who claim to love me.  The problem is that the damage done to me happened before TRUST ever developed.  There simply was so little love given to me from my first breath that I could not FEEL what being loved ever felt like (with the exceptions as written in Story Without Words).

If an infant never feels loved in the first place trust is a moot point.  A non-issue.  It doesn’t matter because trust originates within the INFANT as it connects the infant to its attachment environment.  No love = no attachment = no trust = a no brainer!

++

Is there infant abuse and neglect so severe – in the absence of other adult or even older child caregiver attachment relationships – that can remove from an infant the ability to feel what it feels like to be loved?

Yes.

I know this for a fact.

I live this way.

++

This is the hardest aspect of myself in the world for me to articulate.

I know what it feels like to be loved when I am in the physical presence of someone who loves me.  For all the complicated terminology that attachment experts use to describe the development of the neurobiological underpinnings within the body that process attachment-related information I only know that evidently I have no way to REMEMBER what being loved feels like very long after the person who loves me leaves my presence.

Because I have been an adult for a long time I have learned to use my intellect to buffer me during the “apart” times.  When my daughter could no longer come to Arizona at least once a year to physically see me I could no longer generate the FEELING of her love for me.  I began to starve to death inside for that feeling.

So I moved here.

Other people who loved me also stopped coming to see me.

This continued to my increased starvation.

I lost a very close friendship with a man I have loved since 2000.

This also contributed to my increased starvation for being in the physical presence of someone who loves me.

So I moved here.

++

These thoughts came rushing through an opening in my heart last night as I posted those few last pictures of my Arizona home and as I looked around me at where I am now.

I have used my ability to connect to beauty around me to buffer the absence of the feeling of being loved all of my life from as far back as I can remember.  This ability was given to me as a part of my heritage of self when I was born.

There is some kind of counterbalancing process that goes on deep within me between the sustenance I find from PLACE and the sustenance I gain from being with the people I love (YES I do love!) and who love me.  This counterbalance is currently upset.

This is my view out the sliding glass door of my living room facing west.  There is only one other small window, also facing west, in the bedroom.  This is the cat tail area.  These are probably the ONLY apartments in the city of Fargo that exist with this kind of space between buildings.  I am MOST fortunate to have found this place – BUT!!!!!

To my left looking out – the building to my south that faces north.

 Building to my right is in the north facing south.

My yard.

My yard shoveled – an 8′ x 8′ cement slab.  Food for the wild rabbits in the pan.  It is snowing again already and another blizzard will be here by tonight.

Of all the beautiful places that exist on this planet – I am not living in one of those physical places.

It is the LOVE in and of my family that has brought me here.  How long will I stay here?  My lease runs until December 1, 2014.  How much longer after that can I survive here?  Where would I go if I leave?  How could I keep my heart from not breaking from missing my family?  How can I keep my heart from hurting from what is to me such a lack of natural beauty around me?

++

MY POINT:  Because of my severely altered attachment development through horrible abuse from birth I have had removed from me the ability to modulate feelings that operate on a continuum of SOME KIND for everyone who at least had SOMEONE to sustain them with love while their body was growing into this world.

I therefore have to process myself in this world in very painful ways.  I am at an inner point in my life where it is impossible for me to any  longer negotiate my feelings with my intellect.  I came to both a wonderful spot – family wise – and a spot that was horrible for me 30 and 40 years ago – a spot that I fought to escape with everything I had within me.

I do not like to complain!  Neither do I deny my reality.  I write on this blog about what my reality IS – so here I am writing exactly THAT!!  I have an insecure attachment disorder – to the MAX!

DAMN IT!

Just saying….

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono – what a gift and thank you Ben!

A STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read free for Amazon Prime customers.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are WELCOME and appreciated!

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Thursday, January 23, 2014.  I took my old camera for the first time tonight since my move.  Perhaps tomorrow I will take some pictures of the view out of one of the two windows (both facing west) that I have in my entire home now.  Those of you who have been following the blog for a while – and have seen the pictures posted at the top of this page under LINDA’S ADOBE PEACE GARDEN will recognize the place that WAS my Arizona home in these pictures.

The last I saw my pink rose blooming coming in my front Arizona gate.

I mostly feel now leaving this place that I will never again truly have another HOME while I remain on this earth. 

++

My VERY favorite creature in the garden – a mother Praying Mantis who laid her cocoon on the south side of my hanging metal butterfly to protect from north wind in the winter.  OH HOW I MISS those skies, those clouds, those mountains!!!!

You can see the new cocoon here.  It soon solidified in a cement hard protective casing for those babies.

I wrote the story last spring about being blessed with being able to watch new Praying Mantis emerge from one of these cocoons.  Something I will never forget!

I fostered an environment in my flower garden that hosted hundreds of these amazing beneficial insects.  I wanted to take these pictures with me!  Here is the first I am seeing them.

Isn’t she exquisite!!  They change colors over time depending upon where they are living and feeding.

Now briefly my latest project thanks to the generous Christmas gift from my baby sister – a table loom which I can use without baby fingers getting tangled in my work.  Loom is not shown here as I am preparing a new warp for it

The warp is commercial wool – nearly 7 yards long here at 170 threads across – lots of thread that has to be very carefully handled from measuring/winding here all the way to a “dressed” warped loom – and this is a SMALL warp.

I just finished this one in handspun purple with heavy parts done from cut up old chenille sweaters.

Handspun weft (going across)

This is from raw fleece that was washed, carded, dyed and spun on a very special spinning wheel designed specifically for heavier textured yarn – which I love to work with.

I think I am inventing a technique!  And the fleece is dyed in the oven before it is spun – sometimes spun without carding if it is a nice enough fleece because I also LOVE the variegation in the finished product – here in close up.

Sideways – with a who-knows-what on the lower left there!

This weft is all handspun natural sheep colors and LOVELY.  It was so relaxing to just throw the shuttle full of yarn first left, then right, then left….  That I just kept going as I changed colors (different fleece origins) – and now I have this long piece I have no idea what I will do with!

These pieces were handwashed in hot water with Ivory dish soap after they were taken  off the loom – then air dried.  After I took these pictures I ironed these and brushed them with a natural bristle brush – gently – to bring out some soft fuzz on them.  Speaking of FUZZ –

++

+

+

+

Why these are coming up sideways from the way I took the picture I don’t know – and now too tired to figure out how to tip this.  These are fun wall hangings about 9 by 17 inches not including fringes.  They are meant to show off the beauty of natural sheep fleece that was spun very loosely for just this purpose.  (Oh, there’s one of my heavy crocheted rugs there under the kid table – they cover all the carpet in this apartment.)

These may go toward the “rewards” for the

http://www.kickstarter.com/ 

campaign we plan to put together for what is needed to move forward with our books — a topic for another post — but check this site out if you’ve never visited it before!

++

And finally – I left my hens with the tenants I found for my Arizona home once I knew my rental days there were over last October – who I hear LOVE their new home, the hens, my two cats and the fantastic garden they inherited along with their house!

++++

I really CANNOT imagine how people LIVE without a faith in God.  I have been blessed evidently from birth with the gift of never doubting what sustained me then and sustains me now.  To me my life would have been impossible for me to endure then and now if I did not understand that God has all of

THIS

already well figured out!!

All the comings and goings, the losses and changes of life — TOO MUCH GRIEF!

It would have all been TOO MUCH for me a long time ago if I did not believe I have help here – and a purpose for being here and a reason for being guided to take on even some really tough times – like these ones are for me now.  I have faith I was supposed to move here – although obviously I struggle with the whole thing ’cause it was POVERTY that kept me from visiting here and keeping my home………………….

Well, I cannot write another word or I will just erase everything I just wrote in this section – and ……

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono – what a gift and thank you Ben!

A STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read free for Amazon Prime customers.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are WELCOME and appreciated!

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Thursday, January 23, 2014.  I am thinking this morning about the interface between how well – or not – we can operate in our ongoing life as severe early trauma survivors when there are many distractions continually interrupting us.  I have often thought about how my mother’s psychotic abuse of me from birth continually did exactly that:  Distracted me as she continually interrupted my self experiencing myself in my own life by the horrors of her abuse.  I have concluded that this process greatly influenced how my entire physiology developed and is at the center of my Trauma Altered Development (TAD).

TAD people have altered nervous and stress response systems that have been forced to live in and adapt to hazardous environments.  We either respond TOO SOON with TOO MUCH INTENSITY to even what would be totally minor stimulations to other people or we operate at the other end of the continuum and MISS cues from the environment entirely that should alert us to DANGER!  We can respond from both ends of this continuum at different times depending upon many variables and/or be so physiologically altered that we feel the stress/distress of DANGER nearly all of the time.

Yesterday I was feeling as if I were living on a very narrow tightrope-highwire stretched over a massive abyss or a raging inferno.  It can take TAD people so much energy and focus to work toward feeling OK and balanced that there seems to be nothing left of us to ENJOY life or to feel we can tackle anything else that needs to be done or that we want to accomplish.

I am reminded again of what came to me over 6 years ago at the moment I received my advanced aggressive breast cancer diagnosis.  How I felt THEN at that moment – and how I imagine nearly everyone at that kind of moment feels – is how I truly felt ALL of the time during the first 12 years of my life.  (As I matured past that point into my later teens even though I was still suffering the same insane abuse I had always known my larger BODY gave me huge additional resources to use to cope with it.)

Now, how did I survive THAT – and I don’t mean the cancer!!!  How did ANY OF US survive the horrors of our early life?  In many ways we survived because our BODY knew how to change its early development to keep us alive.

We suffer in many ways the rest of our life not so much from the specific this-n-thats of the individual horrors we endured but rather from what the continual INTERRUPTIONS that DISTRACTED us from our experience of being our own young self trying to do what young ones are supposed to do — become our own self as we live our own ongoing experience with our self in it — did to us!

A cancer diagnosis threatens ongoing life.  It therefore threatens the individual’s sense of their self in their own life – in the present and in the future! 

We lived with this kind of threat all of our young life and it is often nearly impossible to wrestle our own experience of self in our life AWAY from the very body we live in because it has been formed to take care of us in a threatening environment it was TAUGHT to adapt to and form-reform itself to survive in.  What our body learned about how to keep us alive is built into it!

++

Now when too many other things – both around me and within me – interrupt and distract me I can barely focus enough to think – to write – to do ANYTHING.  I think many people assess these kinds of experiences as being depression — but I do not give in that easily to a POP idea of what is going on for me in my life.

I need to evaluate how SERIOUS my current distractions are that are interrupting my well-being.  I am ten thousand times more isolated here than I ever was down south.  Yes, I see my rushing distracted over-stretched daughter a few moments a day when she picks up baby and for a few more minutes on the weekends when we race around shopping for life essentials.  But there is no TIME for relaxed time together. 

I won’t go into the details of being unable to drive, being trapped in a small apartment with a 40 below F windchill outside in the barren flatness of a winter in a city I detest, not knowing anyone except two people who said they were thrilled I was coming back here and have not in 3 months come to see me — of my poverty, lack of computer power to do the next stages of work for the existing 9 book manuscripts, the continual interruptions of my precious 1 1/2-year-old grandson I WANT to care for 5 days per week, etc. etc.

I have to tell myself that just as I say it was not the specifics of the abuse I suffered for 18 years(head bashed in toilet bowl at 4, locked in shed at 15, etc.) that truly matters to me now; it is also not true that it is the conditions of my physical environment now that matters to me so much as ——  WHAT?

The WHAT is the way trauma altered the early development of my body itself as those changes affect how it – and I – respond to change and to stress every moment I am alive.

How DO I overcome — and I mean marshal myself AWAY from the way my body is taking me through life — the disadvantages of being in hyper-survival mode all of the time so that I can make different choices about myself in my life on an ongoing moment-to-moment basis?

 I can give myself permission to validate exactly how I feel at any given moment.  I can honor the fact that there are reasons within my BODY that I feel what I do and suffer from the limitations (“disabilities”) that I do that are as real as anything in this lifetime is for anyone.  These are NOT disaster-ridden aspects of who I am in this life as they often feel to me to be.

I can give myself permission to expand my thinking about possibilities for a happier next moment and a happier life.  I can give myself room to breathe, room to imagine, room to explore options, room to entertain possible solutions to the problems I live with.  I can realize THESE choices I can make open up an infinite array of hope — as hard as this might be at any moment for me to realize and to DO.

I can use distractions and interruptions to my benefit as I seek to counterbalance the lifelong effects that early trauma implanted within me.  I can practice STEERING my SELF through my life rather than letting my body always do the responding for me as it wants to. 

This is response-ability.  The ability for me to respond to my life as I WANT to to the best of my ability.  But right now all that I SAY is very TOUGH for me to put into practice.  I am labeling this segment of my life journey as being among the top ten most difficult ones of my adult life, including facing and fighting that cancer.

Yet while I will not deny or underestimate this fact I also know that something as simple as putting food out for the cutest wild cottontail rabbits that run around here battling for their life in this terribly cold weather brings me rays of happiness.  And I still need to keep myself open to the appearance of beauty in this harsh place.

Yesterday I stepped outside my “prison” door for a moment and there in the southern sky I saw two huge brilliant rings around the sun so low in the sky.  The circles arched high through ice crystals against the blue sky with brilliant rainbow “sun dogs” to the left and right of the sun on the inner ring and directly above the sun on the outer ring.

This was one of the most impressive natural displays of wonder and beauty I have ever seen – and among the most unique ones.  I stood with my face uplifted to gaze at this while my face was being blasted by whipping snow.  I barely blinked (so there!). 

Although this vision only lasted another minute from the time I stepped outside before all but the two horizontal sun dogs vanished I will never forget it.  I felt as if I was being recognized, affirmed, even honored and guided by the natural world I so love.

Yes, I said thank you.  Humbly but also with renewed inner strength.  I am not alone.  This was a wonderful interruption and distraction in my day yesterday – and is one that I will carry within me to accomplish the same spirit-lifting I so need whenever I remember that sight.

I am a part of the circles of life – no doubt about it – so are you!

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  It may still be undergoing a few changes you can take a peek inside at this link:

A STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read free for Amazon Prime customers.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are WELCOME and appreciated!

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Wednesday, January 22, 2014.  I had to chuckle when my daughter Ramona emailed me last night that her effort to put our first book up on Amazon.com Kindle’s page for a preview ONLY somehow put the manuscript straight to publish.  So we ACCIDENTALLY published our first book!!

Here it is!

A STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It is listing for $2.99 and can be read free for Amazon Prime customers.  Those of you who follow the blog here – please do NOT feel sorry for me as you read this!  You all know how tough I am!!

Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are WELCOME!

THANK YOU to my daughter Ramona for editing this and for publishing it!  I could not have done that on my own.  We added “A” (at least I think we did!) to the tile because there was another book already published with our first choice of Story Without Words.  The cover was going to be revised somewhat – but here it is – I guess because it was TIME!!!

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Tuesday, January 21, 2014.  I know no other way to tether my thoughts down other than to write them down.  I am eternally grateful to WordPress for providing me this free blog space in which to do that. 

Yesterday I watched the wind swirl snow around in tendrils of drifts and movements of snow that looked like the dirt pillars from dust devils so common during certain seasons in the high desert I recently left behind me.  Because these big brick block apartment buildings are situated to face one another in a square with open space between the ones in each of the four directions so that they face the small cat tail area in the center the wind plays around here in ways that only allow me to determine the actual direction wind is coming from by watching the smoke rising above each building from their massive heating systems.  (Windchill temperatures here are currently -30 degrees below zero F.)

Memories work like that I think.  There is no reason for any collection of memories to arrange themselves in anything like proper order all by themselves.  I don’t think they belong anywhere.  They are creative avenues to help us place ourselves within the experience of our life.

++

Around the time I recently arrived back here in Fargo last fall I used my fearlessness to attend a public gathering my family was present at to face a selection of my own memories from the last time I spoke with my ex-husband (“Joe”) nearly 28 years ago.  I had to – one way or the other – find a way to make myself as comfortable in as possible for the sake of my children and grandchildren with this man who is a central part of their lives.

At this gathering was a man who was as foreign to me as any stranger could be.  Except that he wasn’t SUPPOSED to be a stranger.  Evidently I certainly knew him from at least 32 years ago at a stage of my married life. 

“You don’t remember me, do you?” 

Nope.  Not a chance.

Where did those memories go?

++

The subject came up again last Sunday when I had the conversation with my ex I mentioned in my last post.  I was reminded again that there are some things about my being a trauma changed person in my physiology – which of course shows up in billions of ways as I live my life though I don’t often actually consciously detect them – that I cannot explain to anyone else. 

The truth is that this is not actually ANYONE else.  It’s just so unbelievably rare to find anyone who cares enough to spend the time listening to me as we negotiate the distance between my life reality and theirs that those people might just as well not exist at all.

On Sunday my ex commented that just as “You don’t look the same” this man doesn’t look the same, either.

That is so NOT the important point to me!  I evaporated that man from my reality.  In my world it does not exist that I EVER met him before.  In my world (filled with amazing powers of dissociation that it is) I can change my reality.  If there are people within those memories I can easily change the part they played in my life.

This is an ongoing process that is only challenged on those occasions when I encounter some of those people.  A little over a year ago I wrote about re-meeting a woman when I was visiting up here who took herself out of my life 30 years ago.  We had been best friends for a long time (since 1970) but when I really needed her as I realized that my ex and I were headed pell-mell for divorce, and when I drove the 100 miles to tell her this, she simply walked away from me saying, “Go back to your husband where you belong.”

We did not speak for those 30 years.  I did not see her.  Yet in my memory I replaced the fact that she and I had – each with our babies under the age of two – shared the rental of a small house up here in 1972-73,  In my reality and in my memory after she and I “broke up” I replaced her in any memory of the time I spent in that small house with her older sister.  I had NO MEMORY and still really don’t of the fact that her sister lived nowhere around here at that time and certainly NOT with me and my baby.

Fascinating, yet troubling – if it mattered much – which it doesn’t.  It would take a skill and knowledge of a process I do not possess for me to be able to return to periods of time where dissociation took over my memory process to correct (change) memories.

++

Why did I evaporate that man I met again at that gathering?  Was it the fact that I think he sided with my ex come divorce time as did everyone we jointly knew?  My ex told me Sunday that this man had had “feelings” for me.  Oh YUCK!!! 

Whatever happened he evidently meant absolutely nothing to me and with a Rod Sterling Twilight Zone candor I simply erased him.

Can I tell my ex what I MEAN when I say, “I don’t remember him?”  Not a chance.  My erasing that man was so through that should I even be shown a picture from way back when of he and I standing together I WOULD NOT remember him.

++

What does any of this mean for trauma survivors who are trying to heal from their past?  What memories do we carry that are accurate versus not accurate?  How much of this is the same for non-traumatized people?

Are we supposed to question everything we know about our past simply because we have been faced with the fact that we certainly can change our memories?

++

I am reminded of words written by Dr. Allan N. Schore in one of his extremely dense and scientific book about early severe trauma and how it changes physiological development of the nervous system and brain.  It is a relatively COMMON situation that in the midst of ongoing trauma the stress hormones present in anyone’s body at that time so “heat up” the new neurons being formed to process those ongoing memories that the neurons are fried.  There will never be a trace of the factual events of such an event under these circumstances.  Yet because body memory and emotional memory are processed in different ways entirely they WILL exist.

++

I have another recent encounter with memory-making that seemed rather trite until the swirls of wind stirring my memory processes return to pick up this experience and blow it back into my thoughts.

At the family gathering this past Christmas Eve (at which my ex was present) the present opening went on rather willy-nilly.  I had not been at a Christmas with my girls for nearly 30 years.  Once my ex and I split up he had the girls for holidays.

What was my stress level on this eve?  I won’t pretend to guess.  I do know that I was given a total value of $350 in various gift cards.  They were in a cute small gift bag.  Joe gave me a tin of his fantastic peanut brittle and some of the glorious flower photograph cards he creates out of love for his garden.  There were other items – but what matters is that as far as I knew NONE of these items made it from my daughter’s house to my apartment later that night.

A three day family panic set in as everyone searched for what disappeared.  Now, in my memory I remember holding the shallow rectangular tin of candy while I carefully placed it AT THE BOTTOM of something it exactly fit size and shape wise.  A box?  A bag?  I could NOT remember!

I can STILL remember making this movement of placing the tin down into the bottom of something.  I remember putting the flower cards, the gift cards, a set of two knives — all in this same container.  I worked and worked to remember “What did I place those things inside?”

In the end after much searching my son-in-law called me to ask, “Is there any chance you put those things inside the box with the wood block and big knife set?  There was a lot of room in that box.”

“Hold on a minute” I told him as I pulled the box out from under my kitchen table where it had been since the eve.  Yes, there placed at the exact angle of the knife holder block and flush against it SIDEWAYS was that tin.  The gift card bag and everything else was there carefully packed into the remaining space in that box.

++

False memories?  I choose not to worry about this at all.  I just maintain a very respectful and flexible approach to myself in my life.  It was NOT important for me to remember a single thing about “that man.”  It evidently WAS important to me to enjoy the sensation of me placing that tin into a space that exactly held it as if the object and space had been brought into existence just for one another, just for that moment!

Why clutter up, muss up, mess up memories of a happy time living with a woman I liked in that little house by keeping a roommate in the memory who later greatly hurt me, betrayed me and abandoned me (in my world thinking)?  Zip-Zap!  GONE!

Cool, I think, although yes, a BIT troubling!

I am being given opportunities to learn more about how I survived 18 years of the most pervasive, invasive, consistent and continual HORRIFIC abuse in my early life.  I suspect my memory processes somehow protected me from being broken by it all.  I moved forward in my life and did not accumulate awareness of the horrors I went through because, after all, who was there to give a damn or to help me?

NOBODY!

JUST ME!

My way of getting through hell was creative, effective and pretty darn positive!  That my way has evidently followed right along with me into my adulthood and through it is not surprising even though it is somewhat unsettling because I want to know — where is my CHOICE ability when it comes to remembering myself in my life?

I think it is automatic, physiological and immediate in my ongoing life that some part of me unconsciously is selecting how I am going to filter and store most of what I experience.  I do not seem to carry grudges, resentments or regrets.  I had 18 years of nearly the best practice possible at not doing that.  If I had not found another way to live my life the horror of my 18 years’ of experience would have left me no space whatsoever to continue living my ongoing life.

I suspect I would have gone completely mad – as Mother did – or I would have died.

Evidently I am very, very good at what I do.  I am a survivor.  I am an expert at all processes that have enabled me not only to do that but to also survive with bitterness.

++

Whenever my writings are published as they include my early trauma memories I stand behind everything I say about everything I remember.  I have most fortunately five siblings who stand behind me 100%.  When it comes to memory processes none of us are really unique.  We are all humans and our processes share the same foundation.  That severely traumatized early abuse survivors had to maximize all possibilities of memory processes is not surprising.  That those same patterns of memory are present throughout our lives makes perfect sense to me.

In the end I believe what Baha’u’llah, founder of the Baha’i Faith says.  In the next world we will clearly remember everything about our lives here on earth.  We will each be held accountable for our own part in our lives.  We will be told how everything fit together here. 

Forgiveness?  HUGE!  Judging others in this life?  Not huge!

That does not mean that I need to clutter up my memory channels into my own past by accumulating and holding onto memories involving people who in some way have (really) peripherally hurt me.

I am OK with that – just so I don’t lose track of the gifts those people have truly given me along the way.

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Monday, January 20, 2014.  I can think of other titles for this post.  One could have been PULLING MY MATRIARCH TRUMP CARD – FOR THE FIRST TIME.  Another could have been FINDING A FEARLESSNESS I DIDN’T KNOW I HAD.  The list could go on but I guess those remaining words will find their way into the body of this post rather than at the top of it.

Maybe my own message within this post is tied to stopping the intergenerational flow of the effects of trauma and traumatic stress by identifying and naming “mental illnesses” that appear in families through births and through marriages.  There are all kinds of other ways to think about families, but this morning I am considering myself and my own family especially because of the intense interactions I faced yesterday.

I have the highest regard, respect, admiration and compassion for my ex-husband who I will refer to as Joe.  Returning to this town I am again in his presence occasionally during family interactions.  He and I had a rough marriage ending 28 years ago this month.  He married the woman he was involved with – without my knowledge – for 3 years prior to our divorce.

Now he is trying to divorce her 25 years later having finally reached a point where he can no longer bear dealing with her (diagnosed) Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).  I can tell he deeply loves her and yes, that hurts – BUT.  And now is one of those times when BUT becomes a mighty and a very big word.

++

My heart goes out entirely to ANYONE having or coping with BPD.  It is the disease that caused my mother to severely abuse me from the moment of my birth until I left home at 18.  It is the disease that infiltrated my father’s fragile psyche and allowed him to allow her to do what she did to me.  In the end this disease killed both of my parents.  I know its horror and I know its power — and sorry folks!  I know how hopeless it can be to treat it, to cure it or to stop its deadly progression over the life-course of a person who has it.

As I approach the publication of the books that are connected to this blog and its topics I need to toughen up.  I need to become extremely realistic about the kind of NASTY feedback from the BPD “community” that I am likely to receive.  So perhaps what I found myself being compelled to do yesterday was simply a powerful exercise in that direction.

++

I was able to talk with Joe yesterday for 2 hours about what I know about BPD.  As the matriarch of my family which includes Joe’s two grown daughters and very young grandsons I found myself opening my heart and mind to including HIS current wife in MY family thinking.

How odd, really, is that?

Joe has been engaged with his wife for years now trying to finish a divorce.  Anyone who knows something about BPD can imagine the hell of that process and it is none of my business — EXCEPT for the fact that this point hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks yesterday. 

If my girls’ father does not end his marriage with his BPD wife, and should he EVER suffer from a serious medical condition while he is married to her my girls’ — and Joe — will have hell to pay.  I am basing this fear upon what I saw happening when my father came out of pituitary tumor surgery in 1990 wrapped tightly in a straight-jacket and out of his mind from a massive brain hemorrhage during surgery. 

Had my father not divorced his BPD wife three years prior all of his 6 children would have been powerless to avert the emotional mayhem and crazy decision-making about his future that Mother would have trapped us all within.  As it was, because they were divorced, the hospital itself placed a restraining order and mother which prevented her from coming near Father or any of us.  We were able to get Father out of Alaska to the best brain trauma rehabilitation treatment he could receive in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

If my father had not divorced Mother what would have happened during those terrible and extremely stressful and distressful times?  Father NEVER recovered from that surgery and lived another ten years under the loving supervision of one of my sisters.  Would the 6 of us have been forced to find an attorney while Father was tied to his intensive care hospital bed to prove Mother mentally ill and incompetent to make decisions regarding Father’s future?

What kind of HELL would THAT have been?

So it seemed clear to me yesterday after all these years of history that I pull out my matriarch trump card for the first time in my life and USE it.

++

Joe has invested much time in learning everything he can about BPD.  He is continually faced with close friends who are on his side and hate to see him having such a hard time and who wish to support him fully make statements about his wife that profoundly reflect an absence of understanding about mental illness, especially about BPD.

I affirmed yesterday what I know Joe knows:  His wife is NOT present in her life any more than my mother was present in hers.  I have learned so much about my history of abuse and about BPD in the 28 years that have passed since Joe and I last had conversations — and I told him what happened to his ex-in-laws during the marriage he and I shared for a decade.  It’s a tragic, horrible story. 

I told him about the abuse I suffered.  Oh but that I had had SOME tiny clue about who I was based on what had happened to me while Joe and I were married!

++

Did I want to protect his wife?  How strange.  Yes, I did.  I also, leaving ALL of my emotions out of the entire conversation except for one “tiny time,” confronted him with the fact that his wife is very likely to get worse and that when she tells him she fears she will become a bag lady if he does not support her post-marriage — HER FEAR IS VERY VERY REAL!!!

Joe’s response to me at that point was understandable:  “Oh!  I so DID NOT want to hear that!!” 

Tough!

It is the truth.  What part of me has any possible business in attempting to protect JOE?  I am doing that.  I feel it inside me.  I want him to DO THE RIGHT THING according to his conscience so that whatever happens next for him and his wife HE has no regrets.

My father did that.  I asked him shortly after he divorced Mother after 37 years of miserable marriage why he had not done that sooner.  He told me that he married her for life.  My ex feels a similar way now in some way tied to how he feels about what happened between he and I.

Father did have the means to support Mother even after his death.  Mother also got the homestead and Father took the debt.  She of course sold the land and squandered the money.  My point was that she still died destitute and suffered greatly.  I see no end-of-life for a severe BPD person that does not include suffering.

What is the “right way” for him to complete a divorce process that his wife has dragged on for years while finding a way to get her husband to even assume the debt for her attorney fees?

I have no idea and it is not my business.  I was called within, however, to give my ex the facts about what happened in my family, facts that were not available to me in any way while he and I were married.  I found myself relying upon a kind of powerful freedom of fear yesterday that allowed me to walk right — and rightly — through this time that WAS extremely difficult for me.

I thought about that fearlessness.  I was no doubt BORN with that capacity.  It has not left me!  When times get really hard — which described the entire first 18 years of my life — I seem to have a kind of fearlessness cloak that I can wrap around my entire being so that I can walk through what I KNOW could wipe out a person who does not have that gift.

I was given that gift so that I COULD make it through my life.  I used that gift yesterday on behalf of my family with in some nearly bizarre way now includes my daughters’ stepmother whom they detest, the 2nd wife of a man I have always loved.  I am, however, FIRST WIFE and mother of Joe’s kids.  I AM the matriarch and I guess part of why I moved back that 2000 miles from my HOME in the high Arizona desert to this HINTERLAND I detest (truth!) was exactly because life called me here so I could use both of these gifts. 

A matriarch without fearlessness is a true force to be reckoned with!  I guess that could have been another title for this blog post!

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Saturday, January 18, 2014.  No other person can be there except me.  Just me.  The center of my life is a spot within which only I reside.  Everyone has such a spot.  It’s like a reserved parking place we never leave until our body dies.

Sometimes I don’t have enough words to talk about this place.  Sometimes I have too many.  Occasionally I feel I have the right ones.  I really like those times when words favor me and I struggle at those times when they don’t.

Sometimes words crowd me and I don’t have room to breathe and only a little bit of space within which I can think.  Think reflectively, I mean.  Thoughts that fly over, by, around me like a jet plane at full speed are too close by me and not one bit helpful as I try to find out who I am at any given moment. 

What do I want?  What do I need?  How did I get THIS way at THIS time in THIS place?  What does it all mean and how much of my experience of being alive am I actually sharing with other human beings?

After all, I can’t be THAT original.  Or am I?

What is this loneliness I feel and why does it keep coming back to me?

Am I living my life rightly?  How do I know — one way or the other?  What could I, should I have done differently?  Is differently required of me now?  What does THAT mean?  What would differently look life, or have looked like at any past moment of my life?

How much of who I am and how I am in my life has ever been under my control?  How can I tell what was and is “just destiny” versus opportunities for choosing how all of this plays itself out?

How do my destinies interplay and interconnect with the destinies of other people in this world?  How did they play out with those who were once here in a body and now are gone?  (Where did they go, anyway, and what is their reality like now?)

If I could find my way back, way back, to how I was before I even knew what a feeling or an emotion even WAS — would I turn around and go there?  What is the use, the purpose of FEELING so damn much without having a clue how to rein in or CHANGE those feelings?  Why do I seem forced to ride them out as they take on MY life as if it were their own?

++

In the end I always arrive at the same conclusion:  I am here on assignment.  One assignment after another one. 

“Stay out of the minefields.  Stay out of the swamps.  You can choose where in the current you want to be but you cannot change the current or avoid it or escape it.”

Everything happens for a reason.  There are lessons to be learned.

++

I believe there will come a time I will understand “all of this” but it will not be in this lifetime and it will not be without the help of souls very much advanced in their evolution.  In the meantime this is again a period of my life requiring great patience of myself toward myself.

At the end of my 50+ hour week of caring for baby last night as he left with his daddy I thought, “Now would be a wonderful time to meetup with friends for something fun to do.  Now would be a great time to contact my support network.  Wait!  I have neither one and I have no single clue how to change that fact.”

Roads covered with ice and snow I cannot drive upon.  A blistering cold that rides the wind.  Knowing nobody who has me in mind as a choice to spend a Friday night with.  That’s OK.  It has to be.  I will wait.  I always have the work to do of getting to know myself better.

Does that matter?  What does that even mean?

I return to the warping of the new rigid heddle table loom I bought with the gift money sent to me by my youngest sister.  It has been too many years for me to remember how to do this job with confidence and finesse.  I am careful.  I move slowly through each step consulting books written by experts before me.

I must complete this step the best that I can because once warped the loom can be filled with weft threads of wool I have spun and dyed myself.  I want to make something beautiful.  Something useful.

This is a solitary task that I must do by myself.  Yet this process pleases me.  This kind of work is evidently a consistent part of who I am in this lifetime.

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

 

++++

Friday, January 17, 2014.  While the information I went online to find this morning applies to all children in general I am seeking it in line with two particular areas of concern:  (1) How does this information apply to children who have been exposed to unrelenting patterns of abusive trauma perpetrated against them by their early primary attachment figures?  (2) What happens to the development of young children who spend 9 – 10 hours of their 5-day week in the challenging daycare environment?

I woke thinking of two particular words that I am using in my search:  distraction and stimulation.  My thinking involves questions about what age and stage of development do children reach that allows them to engage in self-entertainment without the direct interaction of someone else be it an adult or peer.

Unlike sibling home environments daycare centers group many children together of the same or very close to the same ages.  Unless a parent were to give birth to or adopt a “potfull” of children who are crossing the same developmental thresholds at the same time a home setting of siblings provides entirely different patterns of interaction between children

If I imagine even a glimmer of what close tribal or clan life might include or did include I would imagine that groups of peer age children probably did find one another to pursue play and interaction time.

I also think of the families I shared a life next to for seven years on the American side of the Mexican border.  Those families never left children alone to play.  Very large families which included many cousins did a great share of the infant and young child care.  Very often without any toys present they entertained themselves and one another entirely within a social network that included many ages of children and continual access to caring adults – parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and neighbors — all of the time.

Are daycare centers reproducing versions of the “same old wheel” or has our society invented something entirely new and different in the lives of so many if not the majority of our nation’s children today?

I would opt for the latter suggestion.  Primary attachment people are available only at the smallest numbers of daycare centers.  Do trained professional caregivers of young children adequately replace the interactions between young children and the adults in their early lives?  Does continual interaction primarily with peers of their same or very similar developmental ages – which does not include interaction with very young or older children in their “group” – change the course of development for daycare children?

What is the level of dedication to funded serious research that explores the entire range of consequence for the developmental range of children whose bulk of early waking years takes place in daycare settings?  Is high quality unbiased longitudinal research being done that could present the true picture of the costs of daycare as those prices are being paid by children who do not have the “usual” opportunity to interact within environments that were far more typical of our human evolution?

It seems very typical for adults who basically are among the “haves” in America to immediately support daycare as “the best option” for children from “have not” families and for children who are in neglectful and/or abusive or otherwise “deprived” homes.  I have not yet heard these suggestions followed by “What could and MUST BE be done to improve the family life of these children so this sad scenario could be changed?”

It seems to be a very topsy-turvy if not top heavy logic is being used to unequivocally support the OKness of daycare.  If America did not consistently appear in UNICEF yearly research among the world’s top 29 richest countries at the bottom when it comes to the horrific and growing gap concerning the well-being of children in our nation between the “haves” and the “have nots” I MIGHT be open to listening to “have” people support their daycare thinking with such an argument.  What kind and quality of daycare are the families of “have not” children able to access

As it is I have no reason to believe that any single layer of our society is yet willing to include the well-being of ALL children in their reasoning about what is “good” for ANY child on a blanket-level.

++

At the same time I suspect that what used to be the national fairly wide gap between what was considered parents’ concerns in the home in their raising of children and public concern for children once they entered the school system at age 5 is very close to disappearing entirely.  The current national obsession with preparing very young children for “school readiness” is, in my opinion, leading us astray as we can justify in our thinking that “After all, daycare TEACHES my child to be ready for school.”

At the same time the burden being placed upon very young children to supposedly learn information that is entirely irrelevant to them in their young lives such as counting, colors, the entire alphabet etc. before they start public school is happening at the same time these children are being made to sacrifice many other critical stages of their development THAT DO MATTER!  Nature has made them matter!!

++

When I consider the important information Dr. Martin Teicher and his Harvard research group have concluded about how a child raised in a stressful environment ends up with a brain that does not match that of a child raised without that stress I cannot help but broaden my thinking about what “maltreatment” of children can include. 

How do we KNOW that daycare is safe?  How do we know that those experiences are not creating STRESS in children that will change their physiological development in the same way STRESS from maltreatment does?

How do we know that we are not creating a wide, wide area of “mismatch” (see last paragraphs of Teicher article) between environments of daycare versus non-daycare raised children that is on the negative rather than the positive end of social adjustment?

It seems to be unpopular to even ask questions about the impact of daycare on young infants and children.  I am not judging or condemning anyone, but I do believe the risks are here.  We have introduced a “social system” on the youngest, most vulnerable segment of our society without asking them what they think or feel about what is happening in their lives.

Can we ask them?  Are they telling us?  Can they tell us when they have known nothing different?  Will “daycare” in some way be eventually recognized as one of the “Adverse Childhood Experiences” that the Centers for Disease Control are researching to discover links to lifelong negative consequences?  If there is even a risk that daycare is harmful to the nervous system, brain, body of children due to the stress it creates, etc. shouldn’t we ask the serious RIGHT questions sooner than later?

++

If nothing else daycare centers seem to me to provide a complete overload of incoming information without in any way being able to provide alone quiet calm time for children to process and integrate that information along the way.  What is that reality doing to the development of young nervous systems and brains?  How will developmental changes affect these children for the rest of their lives?

This is just ONE area of concern.  What are the rest of them?  Just asking….

++++

Preschool and Primary Grades —

 Meeting the Sensory Needs of Young Children

Children differ in their ability to process and respond to information from the environment while engaging in activities. For example, one child may have difficulty sitting still during group time; another may move little during free play outside. They react in different ways because they in­tegrate the information obtained through their senses from the environment differently. Most children process their daily experiences and regulate their responses with ease. But when a child is consistently having difficulty main­taining a level emotional state or engaging appropriately in activities, the child may be overstimulated (environ­ment provides more stimulation than the child can handle through sensory integration) or understimulated (environ­ment does not provide enough stimulation for the child). Teachers can use an understanding of sensory processing to meet the child’s unique needs. CLICK ON TITLE ABOVE TO READ MORE

++++ 

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Thursday, January 16, 2014.  I SO WISH this body of information was available in book form but so far it isn’t —

Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

By Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate M.D.

A dear friend let me listen to his copy of the expensive version available in dvd format.  If you do an online search for Dr. Gordon Neufeld you will discover a vast body of important attachment-related information that points to the many flaws in current attitudes toward caring for children as well as extremely helpful and hopeful information guiding concerned people on “how to fix it!”

++

I bring this up this morning because I am holding my breath on one of the approaches I am determined to retain (for now) in how I am caring for my 18-month old grandson.  I am FEEDING HIM!  My daughter, I can tell, is not enthusiastic about my determination to retain what Dr. Neufeld calls “being alpha over food.”

From a practical standpoint living in this small apartment I don’t want to deal with the mess of rapidly discarded food from the table that flies through expert baby flings anywhere but into his mouth.  I do not want to deal with an extra carpet of smashed cracker crumbs and lose cereal all over my floors.  I don’t want to argue about any of this.  I don’t want to spend one split second worrying about whether or not this little one is getting enough of the right kind of food down his gullet.  In his LONG day away from his home and parents and brother — as is true Dr. Neufeld points out for so many little people in today’s world — my grandson’s reliance upon me to be alpha over his food is going to HELP and NOT harm him, although my daughter questions this. 

Doesn’t he need to “practice” feeding himself?

Why?

We know perfectly well he CAN get his food into his mouth in a coordinated manner — when he wants to.  I am not convinced that when the food goes airborne that it has anything to do with being full or with not liking a certain taste.  I think the risk is that other emotions related to stress in his life just appear in that arena out-of-place as they literally “mess up” our shared life.

Dr. Neufeld describes how forcing our little ones to become self-sufficient and independent when they are TOO YOUNG is interfering with their ability to live in a safe and secure world provided for them by their attachment adults.  Littles MUST be dependent and NOT alpha during the stages when that is what nature intends for them.

One part of the problem is that if little people can not experience their dependent state appropriately and feel their dependency feelings in safety Dr. Neufeld says that they will cease to grow their compassion circuits (my short version of his very detailed accounts of these processes). 

When it comes to food it is through the toddler years especially that caregiving adults can maintain their “safety and trust” alpha powers over young children.  Having understood my version of what Neufeld is saying (and being unable to pick up a book and flip to those pages) I am flying by instinct.  I watched my grandson who is OF COURSE able to hold his bottle while being rocked before his morning nap LET GO of his bottle yesterday.  Every time he has done that in the past I have taken that action as he hands the bottle to me to mean he is finished with the portion he wants to consume.

Yesterday I tried an experiment.  I held the bottle and touched its nipple to his lips — he relaxed and drank the rest of it.  It made me think of when I breastfed my own children, the 3rd until he was 26 months. 

The breast is not something little ones are responsible for holding to their lips.  The amount of relaxation they can feel is then much greater than it is when they have to hold their own bottle.  Certainly as old as my grandson is none of this is about independency or manual skills.  It is about dependency in a safe and secure attachment environment with his alpha people!

It is about being dependent at an age when it is appropriate and NECESSARY for his development — at those times when encouraging that dependency is NOT interfering with the rest of his growth process.  We do NOT need to worry about that!

I do not wish to do battle with a young child or to overrun their developing self.  I think there is a line of pretty perfect balance that can be SENSED by a caregiver — a kind of tipping point that can be felt and then acted upon regarding the natural need for dependency that will allow infants and children to grow into optimal health all through their developmental stages.  I am sensitive to the feelings within my grandson at the same time I am sensitive to the feelings within myself.

If mealtimes are stressful it is up to me to find the effective pathways of least resistance.  Eating is not gametime.  It is not fight time.  It is time — in a shared social context — to participate in the ancient task of consuming nutrients to sustain a body. 

Consuming food has always been a social-system related process for our social species.  When we — as we – break that link between self and others regarding our food patterns in a profound way we are replacing the comfort of social connection with the supposed “comfort” of the food we consume. 

It is pretty obvious where THOSE patterns are getting us as a nation.  Is it as obvious where most of them came from?

++

With maybe one hour of chaotic exhausted family time when everyone gets home during the week who has time to cook a good balanced nutritious meal — let alone to eat one?  Without THAT food available baby cannot eat right, either.

I don’t cook anymore and baby won’t patiently chew up my salads.  I don’t have the food at my apartment to cook for his family and my talent has evaporated, anyway.  Jar food is what I am asking for on my end for now — and NOT the kind stuffed with pasta and rice (which I accidentally picked out the other day while shopping with my daughter ’cause I was after the cutest animal pictures on the Gerber lids – which make great toys!).  Just vegetables and meat and a bit of fruit. 

Baby can be picky.  One day he loves bananas.  The next day they are stimulus for face-scrunching head-turning howling exercises.  No thanks!  Same with fresh apples.

++

Baby just arrived for the day.  Strapped into his little booster chair I sang him songs and spoonfed him very soupy sweet potatoes from a jar.  He made it 3/4s through and then suddenly – DONE!!  Well, he is all tidy and satisfied, down and off carrying new Pamper diapers around in each hand because ELMO-MO-MO is on them as he heads toward his plastic handheld mirror toy.  Seeing himself in that mirror literally cracks him up with giggles!

Oh that he can feel that way about himself for the rest of his life!!

++

NOTE:  Any time I write a post like this I am reminded of the currents of thought I have about what it was and is like for infant and early childhood abuse survivors.  Many received NOTHING of what we needed and in fact received the OPPOSITE.  I marvel at “HOW did we survive?”

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment

++++

++++

Wednesday, January 15, 2014.  When I pay attention the interrelatedness of life makes perfect sense and fascinates me.  Life as I notice it does not unfold in a linear fashion but rather as an organic “one thing” that includes surprises along the way.  SHAME can very often be an instinctive and automatic response to something that crosses our path that involves some kind of social risk.  Social risks open a door to surprises we might not feel competent to handle.  Then what?

A few moments ago I responded back to an email a dear and very knowledgable friend sent me today that included mention of SHAME and relationships.  He and I have both studied the writings of developmental neuroscientist Dr. Allan N. Schore who clearly describes the inception of the shame reaction at around age one that can only begin to operate once an infant’s central nervous system has matured in its development far enough to let shame happen.

Schore describes the purposes of shame and what happens when early attachment relationship failings turn shame in the direction of toxicity that is most often then compounded by failings within the infant’s entire attachment environment.

It is not my point in this post to delineate specific details surrounding a discussion of shame other than to say it is tied to the “hide” and “freeze” response stage of the stress response system.

I want to mention a dream I woke from when my alarm went off this morning.  I know I dream often but rarely remember dreams any more.  When one is kind enough to leave me a trailing of its imagery I am very grateful — and very interested in what the dream might “be about.”

In this dream I was among a group of about 12 very nice people.  We were all walking along a road carrying small items that were personally significant to us in a variety of containers.  Carved and embellished wooden boxes, well-crafted baskets and other containers held our various objects.

Suddenly (and this kind of turn of events is always significant in dreams) we were overtaken by a BLOCK OF ICE as we and all of our objects were frozen within it.  The ice was crystal clear so that we could watch what happened next.  Our block was lifted by a crane onto a semi-trailer and we were hauled to “a place of thawing.”

Somehow, the way dreams operate, myself and all the people were free from the ice chunk as soon as we arrived at this place which itself did not appear to be anyplace especially unique.  We visited as we waited and we each took an interest in whose special belongs were unthawing next.

Nothing was damaged, nor were we harmed in any way.  Our items were not even wet as they became freed.  As my alarm woke me the last woman’s objects were nearly ready to pick up.  I remember that they sat atop a wooden stool (like I sit on here as I write with my computer above the reach of eager baby fingers).  I do not remember what any object was!

++

It was not until I was responding to my friend’s email that mentioned shame to which I mentioned in return something about the “hide” and “freeze” response each being connected to our inner need to feign death to stay alive and to keep ourselves safe from threat and attack.  I think we do this with our talents, too.  My present considerations about the upcoming publication of the first book in our series, Story Without Words, and my thinking about creating a new blog and steering book readers even further in my direction was probably connected to this dream.

I find it fascinating that I was among friends who all experienced the same event that I did.  Together we had no fear at all about what was happening and perhaps it was this companionship (within an “attachment village”) that prevented any harm from coming to our favored belongings, as well.

I think healthy shame gives us wisdom about keeping ourselves safe, about our limits and boundaries, about the possible intentions/actions toward us of other people (a “Theory of Mind” (TOM) concern) and about the timing of the ventures we take on in our life.  Shame in its true sense is about negotiating social relationships with others so that they work best for all concerned.  Shame is something to pay attention to but it need not be something that keeps us stuck in life patterns that do not serve our best interests.

We can recognize it when we feel it, examine what triggered it, decide what we want to do next as we find a way to move on in our life rather than letting a part of us atrophy and die along the way.

++

All of this enticed my mind to connect to a movie I watched that described the purpose of two stages of our dreaming.  I am not yet reconnected to Netflix so I cannot say specifically which stage was which — one being pre-REM and the other being REM — one allowing us to integrate experiences we have already had and the other allowing us to practice for the future.

Because dreams do not distinguish themselves separately from one another I imagine a dream like mine left me with a sense of wholeness because I was doing both jobs at once!

++++

NOTES:

I highly recommend (available streaming on Netflix) this NOVA program – What are Dreams?

Watching this show was the first I learned that there are two different kinds of dreaming that happen during two different stages of sleep – and depression (and probably all other anxiety difficulties) seriously interferes with both of them.

++

An informative website about the general stages of dreaming:

How Dreams Work

by Lee Ann Obringer

++

I came upon this dream website in September 2010 and thought it might be helpful to anyone, especially severe trauma and abuse survivors, for gaining new information that can assist in our healing work:

North of Eden – Dreams Illuminate the Soul

About Archetypal Dreamwork

Every dream has an intention.

Every dream has a plan.

Every dream wants to lead you back to your heart, your core, your essence, the very fiber of your real being-ness. We forget our real being-ness. We forget our pure child hearts.

We forget who we are.

Every dream wants to lead us back to the soul within that remembers who we are.

 ++++

Some of my notes on the writings of Dr. Daniel Siegel here popped up in connection to this post (in some mysterious way) – SHAME – as a state of mind

++++
Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++