++++++++++++++++++++++++
I was able to sit in my garden this morning to watch the first sun rays touch the delicate leaves of the Ballerina Rose bush I moved yesterday. “Ah-Ha!” I thought to the rose. “I can tell you will be happy there, and I am glad! No longer will you have to wait too long each morning for that light you so desperately need. You will grow into a beautiful plant now. Just wait until next summer. You will see!”
It was cool last night, though still not quite a hard freeze. There is no breath of wind, and I was able to hear each leaf collapsing off the branch of the old Mulberry tree I hard-pruned last summer. Plink! Click! Clatter! Each single leaf marked its falling with a sound hitting the hard adobe walkways.
Does a falling leaf remember its life growing upon the twigs and branches of a tree each year? Does it remember its falling? Can a leaf remember itself once its eaten by a worm and becomes new soil that in turn can feed the growth of something else?
++
I thought about how hard my day was for me yesterday. I realized how critically important my garden is to me — for a reason I have not until now clarified in words.
My garden is a collective storehouse of my memories.
This helped me to understand more clearly that just as a leaf is not likely to remember itself in its life, I cannot really remember myself in my life, either. My memories are not ‘attached’ to me as I suspect ‘ordinary’ people’s memories are attached. My memories are attached externally to objects and to people.
Semantic memory is a memory for facts, I think always available in their connection to descriptive words.
Autobiographical memory is SUPPOSED to form so that a self is in the middle of the memory — because they were in the middle of the experience of not ONLY the experience as it happened in time — but most importantly they were in the experience of HAVING the experience as it happened.
This is connected to the critical FEELING FELT process that is supposed to happen for an infant as its body-brain is building through interactions it has with its earliest caregivers. The nature of the infant-caregiver interactions are SUPPOSED to mirror back to the infant, reflect back to the infant, and resonate with the infant in such a way that the infant begins — through the experience of FEELING FELT — to know that it has a SELF inside of it that is having the experience of feeling its own self in its own life.
I MISSED THIS STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT, and once this stage was missed and the ‘feeling felt’ neurons did not develop in an ordinary way, I have lacked the ability to FEEL FELT in my body in my own life — for ALL of my life.
++
I thought again this morning about the very first time I encountered a literal awareness of the passage of time. When I was 18, fresh away from home and just out of Naval boot camp, I met a man I fell in love with, had a child by, and eventually married (and soon divorced).
This man had friends with money who lived high on a hill somewhere in the San Francisco Bay area. We went to visit them one day and I saw my first hammock. It was pure white, strong and new looking, hanging in the sun from the branches of two trees that overlooked a vineyard.
Nothing should have been especially noteworthy about my seeing the hammock, and there wasn’t until I returned 2 years later on another visit with my partner and encountered the hammock again.
There is STILL something intangible about my experience of having the experience of encountering this hammock a second time. There it was, the same hammock, but now it was sun rotted, broken and shredded, dirty and in threads half hidden in a growth of weeds.
I remember standing there gazing at the hammock in SHOCK!
It wasn’t the hammock itself that I was responding to so much as it was my very first experience of SEEING the passage of time.
++
As I remember this memory this morning — the hammock as I first saw it, the hammock as I saw it next — and as I remember the stunned sensation that filled me at realizing PHYSICALLY in my body that enough time had passed by since I had first walked upon that spot that the hammock and disintegrated into nothing but a tangled web of broken strings — I realize that this is the clearest example I have in my life of how the passage of the time of me in my life is connected NOT to my own internal experience of myself passing through time but is rather connected to how everything I can notice OUTSIDE of myself passes through time.
++
My memory returns to the second experience I am clearly aware of that again involves a physical object (as if these things have a life of their own — like a leaf) with its own ‘life in and over time’.
When I was 20 and first moved with my little daughter to Fargo, North Dakota I was blessed with the sweetest landlady anyone could every have — Lily. Over the few months that I lived in Lily’s basement apartment I often sat with her at her kitchen table and shared coffee with her and visited.
After many such encounters one day something came into my awareness — again with a sense of shock. There on the lowest shelf of her narrow shelves built into the wall next to her kitchen table was the exact same sand-filled, metal-topped, plaid cloth-bottomed ashtray — that had ALWAYS been returned to sit in that same exact spot.
Thinking about my own inner reaction to my realization that the ashtray ‘resided’ in that spot over time reminds me of something my son said when we were eating burgers at a restaurant when he was three. Well, actually, he was NOT eating his hamburger — a fact that created this specific memory for me.
We were ready to leave and as I looked at my son’s plate with its burger still intact I said to him, “You haven’t even touched your hamburger!”
He replied from his three-year-old’s perception, “Here, momma, I am touching it now,” as he gingerly placed the tip of his right pointer finger on the bun.
“Oh,” I said next. “I guess we’ll just have take it home.”
My son, in his young thinking-processing stage was NOT being sassy when he responded back. “But Momma! We can’t take the hamburger home! It already is home! This is where it lives!”
++
I have a sticky note attached to a infant-child growth chart that is lying here beside my computer. The note is from page 126 of Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self – Hardcover (Apr. 2003) by Allan N. Schore:
At three years of age and beginning at the end of the second year a child “can construct accurate representations of events that endure and are accessible over time.” These are imprinted into the right brain hemisphere as AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY.
++
My son was very much involved in related growth and developmental processes that happen as ‘Theory of Mind’ develops — as he went through them HIS WAY. Eventually, of course, he grew to understand that hamburgers don’t ‘live’ anywhere and don’t have a ‘Theory of Mind’. Hamburgers also don’t have memory — at least not as we usually think of memory.
++
I have a whole collection of sticky notes attached to this growth chart I am looking at. I have been waiting for years to be ready to address them, in all their simply stated accuracy, in my writing. These statements are about critically important inner growth processes that happen from age one to age four. These stages of development are built upon the first foundation of body-brain development that happens from birth to one through early attachment relationships an infant has with its caregivers.
So far I cannot look directly at these next stages of development because I personally know that NOTHING went as it should have in my development up until age one — and therefore all of my future development was altered, as well. I have not wanted to face what all these changes did to me!
Yet I also know that my ability to have ‘ordinary’ experience of having experience with the FEELING FELT in my own body as the experiences happen — and then storing those memories autobiographically — was stolen from me by severe abuse from birth. I was amputated from my own life, separated from it as surely as each leaf I watch plummet to the earth on a windless morning has been amputated from its tree.
++
Identifying specifically HOW I experience my life is hard enough. Finding words to describe it is equally as hard. While I know I am the person who watched those leaves fall this morning, I cannot FEEL it.
As I have worked toward being able to write my own story about my own experience of my severely abusive infant-childhood I have struggled with being able to remember what remembering myself in my first 18 years was REALLY like.
As I do this work I increasingly realize that how I experienced those first 18 years is the same as how I have ALWAYS experienced myself in my life.
Perhaps nature had no better way to assist me in surviving those 18 years of traumatic hell other than to remove from me the ability to truly FEEL myself feeling myself as I went through those experiences.
Instead every experience, as an amputated individual snippet in time, appears to me as if I had remotely WATCHED what happened from a very great distance away (like watching a hammock or an ashtray over time). Today it is becoming even more clear to me that the process I use — have always used — to remember my life is SEMANTIC recall of the facts as they happened and does not involve what ‘ordinary’ people would use as autobiographical memory building and retrieval.
I have always been left outside rather than inside my own life. I believe I lack the neurological underpinnings that would have formed the circuits and pathways inside my body-brain so that I could CONNECT and ASSOCIATE and ATTACH my own self in a ‘feeling felt’ way through time as I live in this body in my lifetime.
On this physiologically-trauma-changed level I ALSO lack those same required neurological pathways and circuits that would enable me to truly feel felt WITH and BY anyone else. I am left wondering what the ‘ordinary’ experience of life is even like for other people — and I truly believe I will never know. Once these emotional-social patterns are built into the body-brain BEFORE THE AGE OF ONE they cannot be changed.
The earliest foundations of body-brain growth and development happened for me in the midst of terrible trauma in such a way that my pathways and circuits were made in a different-than-ordinary way.
As surely as the body of the little girl me in those two pictures I included in my last post look like they were cutout and pasted into a picture of ongoing life of OTHERS that had nothing to do with the reality of my life, I am STILL a cutout-and-pasted-in person in the midst of a stream of life that I experience very, very differently from others.
Yes, I experience feelings. Intensely. But somehow my emotions are disconnected from my memory process in such a way that the literal facts of events are stored (as they are for everyone) separately from the emotions. In my case the emotional of memory (stored by a different process in the body as it is for everyone) is ALWAYS disconnected, unattached and dissociated permanently from my memory recall.
++
In rewinding the ‘movie’ of my thinking process this morning I need to add in the part about going to visit yesterday’s post commenter’s blog and reading what he says there about Dissociative Identity Disorder from his experience and perspective. As I read I found myself being envious of people who can experience the experience of having ANY identity — from inside their own self — at all!
I think about looking at my newly moved rose bush shining away in the sunshine this morning. I can only begin to try to imagine what the rose bush’s experience MIGHT be like. As I look at my newly planted apple tree, also shining away and gently swaying in the emerging morning breeze I can wonder what it MIGHT be like to be that apple tree.
As I remember myself yesterday I try to IMAGINE what it was actually like to be me, to have my feelings and thoughts as I did yesterday, because I cannot FEEL myself in my memory from yesterday any more than I can feel what it might have been like to be anyone else — yesterday.
I document all of this simply because I know I was formed in an extreme environment — yes, like in a perfect storm. My mother was so insanely focused on what she did to me from birth that she was able to effectively beat, terrorize and remove from me all of my own ability to know what it was like to actually be me in my own life in any way except in the exact present moment as it was/is happening. Not only did she cut me off from nearly all human contact other than with her, she also cut me off from my ability to be in contact with my own feeling-felt self in my own life.
I therefore have a version of Dissociative Identity Disorder without any real, stuck-together, feeling felt version of any identity at all. I exist from one moment to the next because I semantically (factually) KNOW that I do — and because I exist to other people. No wonder I responded powerfully to the quip about “If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” when I first heard it shortly after I left home at 18.
I was built to be that tree falling.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Stop the Storm 
You must be logged in to post a comment.