Category: Trauma and Its Consequences

I do not believe that there is any more important action to be taken in this lifetime than the healing of the effects of trauma — both individually and globally.

+INSIGHTS ON MY MOTHER FROM HER LONG TIME ‘FRIEND’

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From the second telephone interview with Joe Anne Vanover, by Linda Ann Lloyd Danielson, August 7, 2010

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“Did you hear about how your mother died?  At the end of Mildred’s life she was living in a miserable, miserable place off of Cordova in Anchorage in one unpleasant room with a bed, a curtain over the window, a little shelving and cabinets to put stuff in, I think a chair, with a shared bathroom and kitchen – cheap room.

I am remembering why I had gone in there.  She wanted something.  I had seen her a month before and had agreed to meet her to go someplace to eat.  She needed to go to the store, and when I got there she was on the floor and couldn’t get up.  I called 911 that time but when they got there they said they could not take her as long as she was coherent and clean even if she couldn’t get up.

So I had seen her on the floor before, and I helped her up and went and got her some stuff.  I went back the day after to check on her and she wasn’t there.  I asked others who lived there where she was and they said she had knocked on her door and asked for someone to help her get up.  When they opened the door and found her another boarder called the paramedics who took her.  Her room was a mess.  She had been using newspaper for toilet paper and there were feces all over.

She had a strangulated bowel so that feces was backing out of her mouth.  I went over to the hospital and found her in one of the emergency room’s cubicles.  She would not agree to surgery.  She WOULD NOT let the hospital call her sons and had kept telling the hospital personnel that Joe Anne would be there to see her.  She was glad to see me.  I left the cubicle and called your brothers anyway and the boys came right over.  They were very kind.  They asked me if I would back them for institutionalizing your mother after surgery and I said yes.

With her boys there she agreed to surgery, but she died under the prep.  The anesthesiologist was devastated.  He had never lost anyone before, but Mildred had so abused her body for so long it was not his fault, and I told him so.  The boys went to collect her stuff.”  Died January 28, 2003

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I have no idea where Mildred’s money went.  [Bill’s retirement gave her $3000 per month to live on.]

Years before she started starving herself for four days at a time.  Mildred said she needed to practice so she would know if something happened she could live that far, for that long and survive for four days without food.  I would find out and then take her out to eat and she would overeat, gorge herself because she would be starved.

She had no idea – she loved her kids but not you, obviously, but the others until they got old enough they could question her.  She had no idea how to go about being a family or a mother.

[I asked her what she thought about Mildred’s mother.]  My impressions on your grandmother was that she was very businesslike.  One year when she came up to Alaska she did testing on both of my boys [related to their schoolwork].  She was not unfriendly, but not real friendly.  I think she was a very weird lady.  What she did to Mildred was horrid because Mildred did not know how to love.

[During the homesteading years] Mildred would work out these fantasies.  One time she told me she had built a fire down by the creek [where Bill filled our water cans for our drinking water] and pretended she was an Indian princess, washing clothes. [My thoughts are growing about early infant-child damage to my mother as it involved her imagination, ‘pretend play’ that never moved through the Theory of Mind developmental stages required to differentiate ‘true reality’ from ‘pretend reality’.  Remember that I include the operation of DENIAL past the childhood stage of pretend play as being a reversion back to that stage of childhood thinking.]

Mildred had never been loved.  She had been told her dad was dead when he was alive all those years.   Her mother did her such disservice.  All of your family is very smart – but her mother drained out of her everything that would have let her know how to be happy.

Her mother didn’t want her to be happy.

When your father had his stroke, Mildred was extremely concerned he get the best of treatment.  [This was long after their divorce.]  I never heard her say a hateful word about Bill.

Your mother had the most fascinating ability to take any place and fix it up and make it look homey and nice.  That’s why it was such a shocker at the end.  It was terrible!  I knew she was sick, it was terrible, just terrible.  She wouldn’t take help from your brothers, from anyone, I am one of the few people.  [Joe Anne expressed regret repeatedly that she didn’t force someone to intervene on Mildred’s behalf.  I believe Joe Anne did all that was humanly possible considering my mother’s insistent and belligerent refusal to have contact with family, or with anyone else other than Joe Anne at the end of her life.]

I have great compassion for Mildred because I have had wonderful life, loving parents, a great family, a good life.  I have been in the same house since 1951.

The year before she died I knew she hadn’t been anywhere for a long time and I took her to Hatcher Pass.  She loved it and it gave me much pleasure.  Your brothers were so kind as to give us the pictures we took that day.

Underneath she felt really sorry for herself.  She expected more of everything, wanted more of everything, yet had no idea how to achieve it, how to have a family.

Her brother Charles was mean to her.  Underneath I don’t think Mildred was sure about anything .

One time [long after I had left home and after their divorce, when my youngest son was a teenager] Mildred got $20,000 from some relative.  She bought a horse, hired guy to do stuff on homestead, didn’t know how to manage money.

Your mother was probably attracted to Bill because he was kind, quiet and gentle and a heck of a worker – times he worked away from home because it saved his sanity.

I think she was afraid all of her life.  For years she had a set of pearl suitcases, and kept her things in them and took them everywhere with her.

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I remember when I first met your mother, when your family first came to Alaska.  I would go over to see her right after you older ones got on the school bus in the morning.  The house would be perfect, too perfect, that always amazed me.  I never understood that.  And when I would go over your little sister [Sharon, just turned two] would always climb up in my lap and just sit there.  I never understood why she did that, either.

Your mother used to tell me that she would have you girls and nightgowns and she’d have your father brush you girls’ hair.  She never said Bill did anything, but I took it she was setting him up to do something.  The way she told the story about having him do it and how much he enjoyed it, she was wanting to see what would happen, what he would do.  Took it, even then, she was trying to provoke something.  [No matter what our mother said about our father molesting his daughters from the time we were very young, even babies, Joe Anne adamantly said, “It was not true.  Your father never, never, never could have done such a thing.  He didn’t.]

I knew your dad had a temper, but I never saw it.

I remember one time when your family was homesteading your mother told me she had taken dirty clothes down by the creek where your father got water.  She said she had built herself a camp fire, and had pretended she was an Indian princess living there in a camp, washing her clothes.  [Joe Anne expressed amazement and puzzlement at this, that she never understood this, but I didn’t write down her exact words.  I will ask her again later.]

Toward the end Bill could hardly stand her.  Their divorce?  She egged him on.  I think she wanted the divorce.  When everything went down in the 80s she had the money. she could have bought a condo.  Back before your brother started his bookstore, when he was selling real estate, your mother had money and he tried to get Mildred to buy something, like a condo.  She would not consider it.  Your brothers used to invite her for holidays, to dinners, but at the last minute she would say she couldn’t go, say it’s too difficult.

But Mildred used to really worry about your brother Steve that he would never make it.  She really enjoyed you brother Dave’s two girls.

Mildred used to tell me that the only time remember happy when she was growing up was when she was walking out in the woods.  She told me how much time she spent walking – that’s where she found her comfort.  [I think that’s why she liked Alaska so much, it reminded her of that.]

She told me she was very uncomfortable in high school, but after, when she went to work in a hospital, she really enjoyed it and had a good time.  [I mentioned to Joe Anne my memories from my mother’s stories that she wanted to study theatre and go on stage, and her Bostonian mother and grandmother told her, “NO!  Only whores and harlots are in the theater.”  Nursing was THEIR choice, not my mother’s though Joe Anne said that Mildred enjoyed the nursing.]

All her life she was thwarted on what she wanted.  She didn’t know how to get it.  She had a terrible, terrible crush on her shrink, such a crush on him, it was pitiful, pitiful.  {I asked Joe Anne if she believed the ‘shrink’ ever responded back to my mother inappropriately and Joe Anne said, “No.”

Much later, when she was living on Government Hill she invited me over.  At first it was empty and she slept on a mat on floor.  I called paramedics but they wouldn’t’ take her.  The she got the bug and fixed it up like a doll house and asked me to come over to meet this Guatemalan she liked.  He wanted to marry her.  I went up there, and met them.  He had worked on a crab fishing boat but he was getting too old.  I couldn’t believe it.  Her actions were wanton –  I don’t know if she was aware of how sitting, posturing, what she was saying.  I talked to her afterward.  I told her he won’t marry you, unless he thinks you have money or he wants to bring a family into the country.  I was totally amazed, aghast, it was so out of character for her.  She was like a teenager trying to entice a boy she wants and would do anything to get.

After the divorce she used to go to dances.

[Now this statement for difficult for Joe Anne to tell me, and I am glad she felt ‘safe’ enough with me to do so.  It is an important one.]  I felt sorry for her.  She was so squirrelly.  I had never met anyone like your mother.  I never knew what to make of her.  She fascinated me, but to me she was like a bug I had on in a pin.  I have felt guilty for feeling this way.  But she was beyond anything you could imagine.  I liked to watch her.  I felt terribly sorry for what she was doing to herself.

[I reminded Joe Anne that if she ever directly confronted Mildred on what she saw and M didn’t like it, M would not only ignore here, but would disappear – sometimes for years.  As far as the ‘bug on a pin’ image, I realized last night as I talked to my daughter that it really was my mother’s mental illness that Joe Anne nailed on the head of a pin — which is what I wish COULD happen to the icky, nasty, invasive, consuming kind of mental illness my mother had!  I think inside herself Joe Anne DID care for the WOMAN, the individual person my mother was.  It is no small testimonial to the importance that Joe Anne played in my mother’s life that it was Joe Anne she knew was coming at the end of her life, was Joe Anne that my mother was glad to see.]

[I noted another comment I will ask her about again:  When Mildred, her mother and grandmother were driving across country from Boston to Los Angeles in 1945 when she was 19, they ran out of money for gas in Nevada and had to sell Mildred’s pink record player which made my mother very sad.  Joe Anne said my mother never got over this.  Considering that the family sold or left behind them many ‘nice’ possessions for this move, this record player (I seem to remember when Joe Anne mentioned this that it was a gramophone) would have been one of only a very few most important and prized possessions that they were able to fit into the car as they traveled.  I suspect even this experience fits into my mother’s ‘psychosis’ and continual moving, and is tied to her losing any sense of a safe and secure attachment connection with her entire childhood life ‘back East’.  I believe as I carefully examine the words that survived about my mother’s story, that this move was just about the worst thing that could have happened to her in her ‘condition’.  In insecure attachment disorder terms, Mildred’s record player was probably a ‘transitional object’ connecting her with her past attachments – not in itself a ‘bad’ thing.  But according to Joe Anne, my mother never got over losing this object.]

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I didn’t stay glued to my computer during this interview when it seemed to slip into conversation, so much of what Joe Anne said over the span of these two hours did not get recorded.  I am not worried because I know there will more interview-conversations in the future.  Joe Anne (widowed) is about as opposite from my mother as she could be.  She is in her mid-80s, busy, active, involved with family, entertains guests, has lots of friends, has a large and beautifully kept home she cares for herself, lots of lush plants and flowers both inside and out, travels, is close to her children, and is healthy and very, very happy.

She believes that part of what kept my mother in touch with Joe Anne for 45 years was that Mildred believed that Joe Anne the kind of ‘family’ and ‘home’ that Mildred imagined for herself, yet never had any idea how to ‘get’.

+URGING INFORMED COMPASSION FOR OUR ABUSERS – AND LINK TO MY BABY BOOK

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There.  I did it.  I scanned my baby book, and now knowing that task needed to be done will not be keeping sleep away from me tonight.  But ahead of the link to it that I will post below I want to say something extremely important.

I have mentioned JV here on this blog before.  She knew my mother for 45 years and now in her mid 80s this life long Alaskan is giving information in telephone interviews about what her experiences were with Mildred over all those years.  Today I called JV to check in with her about the four volumes of my mother’s writings in ‘Hope for a Mountain’.  The first two volumes have been printed by an also mid 80s homesteading neighbor named Dorothy, who DID NOT end up wanting to read them.  She sent them on to JV.

How ‘up close and personal’ does any severe infant-child abuse survivor feel they want to be with their abuser?  Personally, my entire process of healing now involves getting as close as I can to understanding my mother.  I want to share something here that is part of the interview information Joann gave me today.  In fact, as soon as she picked up her phone and found out it was me calling, this is what she told me:

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“Did you hear about how your mother died?  At the end of Mildred’s life she was living in a miserable, miserable place off of Cordova in Anchorage in one unpleasant room with a bed, a curtain over the window, a little shelving and cabinets to put stuff in, I think a chair, with a shared bathroom and kitchen – cheap room.

I am remembering why I had gone in there.  She wanted something.  I had seen her a month before and had agreed to meet her to go someplace to eat.  She needed to go to the store, and when I got there she was on the floor and couldn’t get up.  I called 911 that time but when they got there they said they could not take her as long as she was coherent and clean even if she couldn’t get up.

So I had seen her on the floor before, and I helped her up and went and got her some stuff.  I went back the day after to check on her and she wasn’t there.  I asked others who lived there where she was and they said she had knocked on her door and asked for someone to help her get up.  When they opened the door and found her another boarder called the paramedics who took her.  Her room was a mess.  She had been using newspaper for toilet paper and there were feces all over.

She had a strangulated bowel so that feces was backing out of her mouth.  I went over to the hospital and found her in one of the emergency room’s cubicles.  She would not agree to surgery.  She WOULD NOT let the hospital call her sons and had kept telling the hospital personnel that Joann would be there to see her.  She was glad to see me.  I left the cubicle and called your brothers anyway and the boys came right over.  They were very kind.  They asked me if I would back them for institutionalizing your mother after surgery and I said yes.

With her boys there she agreed to surgery, but she died under the prep.  The anesthesiologist was devastated.  He had never lost anyone before, but Mildred had so abused her body for so long it was not his fault, and I told him so.  The boys went to collect her stuff.

I have no idea where Mildred’s money went.”  [Bill’s retirement gave her $3000 per month to live on.]  I just had my mother’s death date confirmed.  She did not die in 2002, but rather died January 27, 2003.

from an August 7, 2010 telephone interview with Joann Vanover

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So here in this post I am including information about the beginning of my life of 18 years of suffering at the hands of my mentally ill, disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disordered mother — at the same time I tell you of my mother’s ending.

What matters to me is that nowhere within me, not in the tiniest molecular corner of a single cell in my body, not in any corner of my heart or mind that I know of, did I hear this first detailed description of the end of Mildred’s life in January 2003 and feel, “The monster got what she deserved.”

She did not.  Her life, her mothering, her death was a horrific tragedy.  No human being deserves the life she had.  No, no child deserves to be unwanted, unloved, neglected, abused, mistreated or traumatized — but that not only includes ME, it included my mother.

NOTE:  My mother’s twisted intestines, an extremely painful condition, would have been corrected through a surgical procedure had Mildred sought medical attention when the problem originated.  My mother’s words to the medical staff attending her in the emergency room were, “I just want to be left alone,” repeated over and over again.  Those are the same words she had told the other boarders who had called 911 for her against her wishes, but she was too weak  to get her way.

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*SCAN OF MY ‘NONEXISTENT’ BABY BOOK

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+WHAT MATTERS MOST – NOT THE ABUSE, BUT WHAT IT DID TO US IN OUR BODY

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The Ripple Effect, and how we are all connected and related — I so thank this morning’s commenter for his words!  I was brought back circle at this critical juncture in my work to remembering what this is all about!

I had just been sitting with my morning coffee in my backyard under my gangling tree thinking with self pity, “I can’t do this work!  I don’t want to allow my thoughts to even turn in its direction!  I want to find something meaningless to do, and spend my days dawdling.  NO!  I won’t go ‘back there’ for my truth or my story!  I will not ever turn my eyes again upon the words my mother wrote!”  I could have just as well imagined myself in Calgon’s “Take me away” commercials!

Then I came inside and sat down at my computer screen, and there was the PLEASE MODERATE COMMENT email — and here I am.

When I wrote my last post, +REMEMBERING WHAT REALLY MATTERS ABOUT ALL OF THIS, what I am most reminding myself is that AGAIN I KNOW that it isn’t the thousands of individual beatings my mother did to me, it isn’t the forced isolation and confinements, it isn’t the continual and effective verbal erosion of my entire sense of self (let alone my esteem, worth, concept, etc.) that mattered.

It wasn’t having my mother bash my head in the toilet when I was four that matters.  It wasn’t being chased across our wilderness mountain fields by her brandishing a log intent on killing when I was ten me that matters.   It wasn’t even that she never called me “darling.”  It wasn’t that she prevented me from playing.  It wasn’t ANY of this that mattered, over the entire 18 year span that she so brutally abused me that matters MOST to me, or that lies as the motivation behind the work I have done and have yet to do.

WHAT MATTERS is that during the moments running into hours running into days, then weeks, then months of my VERY EARLIEST time on earth that matter to me most — that hurt me the most.  Her madness, complete with her psychosis, prevented her from interacting with me in a resonating, Linda-mirroring way that would have reflected back to me my own self in my own emotions as I was expressing my own inner needs.

The social-emotional dysregulation built into her own infant brain by malevolent and neglectful caregiver-infant interactions were directly downloaded into MY FORMING AND DEVELOPING infant brain — along with all the patterns of severe dissociation that affected her.

From these earliest beginnings not only was my brain development completely altered away from ‘optimal’ and ‘normal’, so too was the development of my entire nervous system and my immune system.

I don’t think I have mentioned it here, but both of my sisters who were able to be included in the massive 50,000 ‘subject’ Sister Study after I was diagnosed three years ago with my advanced, aggressive breast cancer receive a thorough assessment once a year.  This year my sister told me for the very first time this study has included a HUGE number of questions about these sisters’ earliest years PRIOR to the age of 6.

My sister who told me this and I celebrated this addition of these questions to the once-a-year survey the Study requires.  My guess is that it is that the study is accessing financial support now from the Center for Disease Control who no doubt finally mandates that this information be gathered in all studies that use their resources.

(Do a blog search on this site for ACE study and for Center for Disease Control)

ALL aspects of a traumatized and neglected, abused and maltreated infant-young child’s development are affected and CHANGED — and that is what matters to me of ALL the horrendous treatment that my mother did to me.

In the end it doesn’t matter one single HOOT what we ‘name’ any of this.  What matters is this rock bottom truth.  It isn’t even degrees of secure versus insecure attachment that matter.  It isn’t what we might call mental illness that matters.  What matters most are the very concrete and very real ACTUAL interactions an infant prior to the age of one year old has with its primary caregivers AS THE BRAIN, THE NERVOUS SYSTEM INCLUDING THE STRESS RESPONSE AND VAGUS NERVE SYSTEM, AND THE IMMUNE SYSTEM IS BEING BUILT.  These earliest interactions determine how our genetic DNA information will manifest in our body.  It will tell the machinery that tells our DNA what to do — what to do!!

These earliest interactions are feeding into the infant as it grows and develops information about the state of the world — be it benevolent or be it malevolent — that will last for the rest of that grown up infant’s life time.  Once these earliest trauma-affected changes have happened, down the road we will see patterns that we name as insecure attachment disorder, mental illness, etc.

We need to name it for what it is:  Trauma Altered Development.  We need to know what these changes are, how they affect us, and what we can do to moderate, modulate and live better with these changes — that can NEVER BE REVERSED.

As I summon the courage and willingness I need to plow ahead in the creation of the text of my own horrific childhood of abuse, I must not lose track of the importance of what I am saying in this post.  THIS is all that really matters.  It is what lies at the core for all of us who did not receive the benefits of early caregiver interactions in a safe and secure, LOVING world that would have let us build our best body possible — not for a continued life of trauma, abuse, turmoil, scarcity, deprivation, pain, suffering and misery — but for a world of safety, security and plenty.

The fact that we were resilient enough to stay alive has given us the chance to learn for ourselves as survivors what this MATTERS MOST actually means and what we can do about it.

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+REMEMBERING WHAT REALLY MATTERS ABOUT ALL OF THIS

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COMMENT today made at Your Page – Readers… :  I wanted to talk to someone who had been through what Dr. Daniel J. Siegel said in “The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are” about windows of tolerance and an INTERNAL SENSE OF EXPLOSION. This happened to me so I want to talk to someone who has had the same experience. Your blog has illuminated my life THANK YOU! I don’t want to miss the answer if it is a post on this site (checked the notification box below) because I don’t know how to navigate blogs, I’m a newbie. If they have a blog or something, please tell me how to connect to their site. You can send them my email address or if they will allow it I can email them. Thanks for all of your help!

REPLY:  Good Morning! This might sound strange, but I also want to say “Congratulations!” and that I am proud of you!

The kind of information Dr. Siegel and other researchers are shedding on the subject of the human experience is finally the truth that those of us with ‘unfortunate’ beginnings in our lives absolutely NEED TO KNOW!

If you are reading Siegel’s book you mention, I hope you are highlighting and underlining, writing in all margins, and have your own notebook at your side to write in as you read. You can do a Google search any time you find something like “Windows of Tolerance” and begin to follow the links that pop up.

Dr. Siegel’s website is THE MINDSIGHT INSTITUTE at http://www.mindsightinstitute.com/

If you Google ‘Siegel mindsight’ you will find many links to follow, and among them might be a blog – I don’t know.

I can tell from your question that something went wrong during the first two years of your life. Siegel has written another book in which he has done his best to simplify the information he presents in “The Developing Mind,” and if you haven’t come across it, here’s the link on Amazon for it:

Parenting From the Inside Out by Daniel J. Siegel and Mary Hartzell (Paperback – Apr 22, 2004) at

http://www.amazon.com/Parenting-Inside-Out-Daniel-Siegel/dp/1585422959/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281113146&sr=1-1

Siegel has also authored a series of extremely informative books that can be found on this Amazon.com link, though I haven’t read them all I would recommend anything he has written:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=siegel+parenting&x=0&y=0&ih=14_1_0_0_1_0_0_0_0_1.97_110&fsc=-1

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In the smallest nutshell I can put this vital information into, I would say that when the interactions between a newborn infant and its primary caregiver (nature has dictated MOTHER – though most often there are multiple earliest caregivers) cannot happen in the most safe and secure environment possible, so that the caregiver can exactly and appropriately respond to the signals the infant is sending out and resonate with the infant, mirror the infant’s state back to it appropriately and correctly, the infant cannot possibly develop itself in the best way possible.

An infant’s primary caregiver is literally ‘downloading’ its brain into its infant. As all these books describe, it is the RIGHT brain that develops first through these interactions. Our right brain, according to how these early interactions actually went, either can regulate and control emotions ‘properly’ or will be built in ‘traumatic’ infancies NOT to regulate and control emotions. Then we have problems with emotional DYSREGULATION, which is where the description of windows of tolerance fits in (along with a whole lot of other things: ability to smoothly transition between emotional-mental states, the ability to self-sooth or ‘down-regulate’ emotional intensity (yes, like a car’s gas pedal and brake system) — etc.)

This entire right brain development is NOT ONLY about emotional regulation abilities. This same right brain develops through SOCIAL interactions and is, in fact, our SOCIAL brain as well as our emotional one. All these complexities are tied through our earliest experiences with our primary caregivers into the development of our entire nervous system (of which the brain is a part of), our autonomic nervous system (and vagus nerve system) which is our STOP and GO part of our body that governs our stress-anxiety (fight flight, freeze) response AND our calm and connection system, as well as the development of our entire immune system and the development of how our very DNA manifests itself (which changes in early stressful environments).

Because you have found Siegel’s work, I strongly suspect you (as I am) fit into the category of less-than-best earliest caregiver interactions. This has affected how we grew and developed — and who we are today.

I am going to give you here a link to an article written by Dr. Allan N. Schore. His books can be found also on Amazon.com, but believe me, he is NOT easy to read though his work contains the absolute truth about how this entire human development process is affected by early caregiver-infant interactions:

On Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=schore+self&x=0&y=0&ih=9_0_2_0_0_0_0_0_0_1.102_525&fsc=-1

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AND HERE IS Dr. SCHORE’S EXTREMELY IMPORTANT ONLINE ARTICLE – which I recommend you read ASAP:

http://www.allanschore.com/pdf/SchoreDP97.pdf

and here:

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

http://www.atlc.org/members/resources/schore1.pdf

This article is absolutely fascinating, and provides the foundational information (including drawings) that all the other developmental neuroscientists are ultimately referring to.

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As if this isn’t already a BUNCH of information, here’s what a search of this blog for “Teicher” leads to:

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/?s=teicher

His work, (search Google for Martin Teicher child abuse) concludes that given enough ‘trouble’ during early developmental years, it is possible that an entirely different brain forms from the one that would have formed in a safe and secure “good enough” early attachment environment — and he and his Harvard researchers call these trauma altered development brains, “evolutionarily altered.” I extend his thoughts to include an entirely different BODY as a whole.

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To address your mention of “an INTERNAL SENSE OF EXPLOSION” I would say that an experience of this nature, and one that led you to this blog and to Dr. Siegel’s work, is a piece of the puzzle whose bigger picture is included in all this information I have provided you links for. This ‘sense of explosion’ is probably NOT happening in a body-brain-mind-self whose earliest body-brain (especially right brain) needs were met ESPECIALLY birth to age one. It is an experience of emotional-physiological intensity that (in my thinking) missed its chance to be regulated BEFORE it reached this state because those abilities were NOT built into the body-brain adequately in the first place – as all these researchers describe. AGAIN, read the Schore online article!!

When an infant’s earliest caregiver interactions do NOT build the right brain and its related physiology within an OPTIMAL infant developmental environment, the SET POINT for the entire body-brain will not be set at CALM. That is the GOAL, and any of us who did not get what we needed for this to happen have the center point for our entire physiology SET somewhere else — like the timing on a car, perhaps. Homeostasis, or a state of ‘balanced equilibrium’ is supposed to be where our nervous system-stress response system comes to rest. That point is CALM — not over or under amped! If we didn’t get our internal balance point set at CALM before we were one year old, we will struggle the rest of our lives to balance-regulate our emotional-physiological state.

Lots of info. Include ‘child abuse’ even if you do not believe you suffered it in your Google searches for information along with ‘brain development’. As you read what comes up I think you will be amazed at how this ‘new picture’ describes the basis of our adult difficulties all the way around! Please stop by here again with any comments you would like to make, and have a wonderful new learning experience! Linda

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+HEALING THE TINIEST DOLL AT THE CENTER

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Have you ever seen a Russian nesting doll?   All the various doll sets I have ever seen were hand painted — and most I saw in Alaska as a child were hand carved as well.  Here’s an example of a set!

All these little dolls fit inside one another

When I finished my morning’s post I headed into town to have lunch with my friend.  On the way I had some thoughts come to me that might actually be my ‘working hypothesis’ for this next stage of my writing.  As my thoughts played themselves out in my mind, this image of the Russian nesting dolls followed.

The process I am going to describe here might be the same for everyone, but for those with severe trauma and abuse histories we might have what seems like a perpetual series of nesting dolls within us!  (Well, once we begin our healing journey we will certainly never lack for something to do!)

OK.  Here’s how it might go.  Humans experience their lives in patterns.  Patterns are what I am now looking for in my mother’s writings.  Her patterns of life, as they appeared in her trauma dramas, I believe hold a key to something I WANT TO KNOW.

TRAUMA DRAMA = the outside Big Doll

Inside the doll of TRAUMA DRAMA  = another doll = a PATTERN

Inside the doll of a PATTERN = another doll = a SECRET

Inside the doll of a SECRET = another doll  = PAIN

Inside the doll of PAIN = another doll = a WOUND

Inside the doll of a WOUND = another doll = a LIE

When I look right now at everything I know, everything I think I know, everything I guess about my child abuse story and everything I wonder about and guess about my mother (and my father, and my grandmother, etc.) I at this moment feel like I can only SEE the outside Big Doll.

I will be looking for the patterns, within the patterns for the secrets, within the secrets for the pain, inside the pain for the wound, and inside the wound, the LIE.  It is the lie acted out in trauma and abuse, especially for the tiniest growing humans that cause the most severe wounds.

What will lead me through this journey is the truth as I can literally, physically feel it in my body.  We, as human beings living in our bodies for our lifespan FEEL all of what I just described.  And yet detecting where the injury is so that we can truly begin to heal the core of our wound PROBABLY means that at the heart of every trauma drama that acts out abuse and trauma lies — a LIE.

So as I spot the trauma drama, the patterns within them, the secrets that are at the heart of the patterns, the pain at the heart of the secrets, the wounds at the heart of the pain, and the lies at the center of the wounds, I will be simply taking apart stories that were the human drama of the humans that lived them, using whatever information I can find, just like I would take apart a Russian nesting doll.

I believe that there are some lies that are absolutely toxic to infants and children.  They cause a distress reaction within the actual immune system in the body that then makes adjustments to little developing body-brains so that at the end what is left are repeating trauma drama patterns that hold within them all that we cannot DIRECTLY see or know — until we dismantle and gently go after the lies that lie within.

If I am even close to accurate with my Russian nesting doll hypothesis, I should be able to spot the kill-joy lies at the heart of the stories that I am working with — including my own.  After all that dedication, willingness, prayer, and work — perhaps I will have some idea about what it takes to heal that little tiniest wounded perfect doll at the center — so he/she can get well.

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+AS THAT BEAST COWERS, KILL IT

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Here I am this morning at my computer viewing a blank blog page upon which I will dump out words.  I don’t know which words, so the only thing I can do is keep on typing until the words appear here.

I feel alone in this job I am doing with my book’s writing right now.  I feel alone because I am alone.  Mine is a lonely story.

The fact that I wish to write my lonely story so well that it captures the attention, the imagination, the hearts and thoughts of as wide a public as possible reminds me of the word ‘hubris’, a word that came into English in 1884 from the Greek and means ‘exaggerated pride or self-confidence’.

I am afraid of hubris.  Right now this fear stands exactly in front of me and in my way.  It stops me ‘dead in my tracks’, removes my words from me, and will in itself guarantee hubris is exactly where my writing will end up unless I can give myself permission to know that I have value, my story has value, my words have value, and that this work that I am doing is blessed in ways I cannot mortally comprehend.

Somewhere between hubris and my fear of it lies a wide open pathway that is mine to follow.  This pathway is as clearly laid out before me, free of weeds and obstacles and as easy to stroll along, skip over or run along as is the adobe walkway I have been constructing in my own backyard.  Yes, there are a few hardy weeds that have popped their new tiny leaves out of the adobe bricks to appear where I don’t want them now that our monsoon rains have come.

But I can simply snip them off with my fingernails and they will all disappear never to trouble me again.  And it is only I who can make my fears about my work, what I am writing, and what the end result is going to be go away just as easily.

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It is the ‘nature of the beast’ of severe infant-child abuse and the mental illness that spawns and perpetrates it that silence reign.  This beast requires a particular kind of silence.  I believe that the only way this beast remains alive, and carries itself in the dis-eased form it manifests itself in down through the generations is because the silence it needs to duplicate itself is extremely difficult to break.

Difficult and impossible are not the same thing.  It is as if the beast itself is challenging me at this moment, daring me to break the silence that maintains its very existence.  It thunders.  It roars.  It bares its gigantic and terrifying fangs at me.  It shakes its shaggy mammoth-sized head at me in rage.  But thanks to the author, L. Frank Baum, I have the pitiful antihero, The Wizard of Oz, to remember as I meet my own fear of hubris, vanquish it and move on.

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I could end my morning’s verbal sputterings right here, but I am not going to.  I am going to turn around right now and stare that beast right in its eyes.  “Don’t you threaten ME with extinction, you horrible, putrefying, nasty, deceitful LIAR!  I have seen your kind before, and you mean NOTHING to me.  DO YOU HEAR ME?  Are you PAYING ATTENTION?  You STINK!  You are forever rotting, forever condemned to exist in the darkness where human fear feeds you three meals a day and lots of snacks.  Well, I don’t care if you starve to DEATH yourself!  I will no longer heed YOUR lies!  In fact, I will no longer heed you AT ALL!  You are nothing to me.  Nothing.  Because that IS what you are, like it or not.  NOTHING!”

My, that felt good!  Not only has the flimsy immaterial curtain vaporized behind which this invisible beast lurks and groans, but the beast itself has disappeared, though I am not fooled into believing its going is forever.

That beast has resided itself, all tucked in, warm and cozy, amidst every one of my mother’s words I have confronted, do confront, and will confront as I shred apart the lie that fed her life and so harmed me not only as an infant-child, but harmed the me that writes these words, that breathes this air, that has determination to finish a job I began in this world before I left my mother’s belly.

“I WILL NAME YOU!”  I shout out with my soul in the directions that beast has fled to.  “And if I am going to HATE, it is YOUR existence I will shoot my hatred after.  And hear me, oh Beast of Human Misery!  You have stolen away the joy from enough lives in my ancestral pool!  You will no longer chaw your carnivorous teeth upon my family’s generations.  Me thinks you have already stolen more than your fill, and guess what?  Not only am I going to vanquish you, not only am I going to do my best to take back from you the joy, health and well-being that you have raked from my family and carried away into your darkness, I am going to make you pay with your life!  I am going to break this very silence you require for your survival.  And if you happen to be so stupid that you don’t believe me — well — just cower away in your hidden cracks and WATCH ME DO IT — while you still can!”

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+NOW I AM READY TO DO WHAT I WANT

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I am now ‘going in for the kill’.  The entire process of ordering and transcribing my mother’s writings has been to the largest extent so that I can do what I want to do NOW with her words and within the text-context of the story-line I now have for the very disorganized, very disoriented, very disorderly (no matter how many times M waxed the floors and washed the curtains) childhood I had.

I am beginning with the first volume of HOPE FOR A MOUNTAIN and will work my way through to the end of the fourth volume.  I have no ‘plan’.  I have absolutely no idea what will ‘come up’ or ‘be triggered’ along the way — but this — NOW — is MY journey.

What I am aiming at with MILDRED’S MOUNTAIN is money.  Plain and simple.  What else I wanted out of that extensive body of work was the hard DATA — such as it exists — about my mother according to whichever version of her self wrote all those words.  This hard data will be there for anyone who wants to question what I HAVE TO SAY – that work I have accomplished is my ‘research’ – scientific, no, but thorough and comprehensive as I — and fate — could make it.

I am digging for my own gold now in that dark, dark mine of my childhood.

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+WORD WARRIOR NEWS: LINK TO ‘MILDRED’S MOUNTAIN’

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I need to find proof readers to help with the next stage for this manuscript, but the main work on the abbreviated version of my mother’s Alaskan homesteading tale is finished — for now:

*Mildred’s Mountain: A Bare-Bones True Alaskan Homesteading Tale

at this link if the above doesn’t work:

http://hopeforamountain.wordpress.com/mildreds-mountain-a-bare-bones-true-alaskan-homesteading-tale/

This is a large file, so may take a bit longer to load on your screen.  Comments welcome.

PART ONE:  TRANSITIONS

(1)  The Mask Is Slipping

(2)  A House to Put Our Home In

(3)  A Bit of Heaven in the Woods

(4)  I’ll Live Where I Please

PART TWO:  THE LAND HAS BEEN FOUND

(5)  Go Ahead and I’ll Follow

(6)  I Don’t Want to Back Down Now

(7)  Maybe Someday It Will All Seem Funny

PART THREE:  THOSE CRAZY PEOPLE LIVING ON THAT LONELY MOUNTAIN

(8)  I See So Little of My Husband Now

(9)  If I Had a Nursery

(10)  We Belong On Our Land for All Time

(11)  It’s Really an Almost HOLY Feeling

(12)  Have You Ever Had Mountain Fever?

PART FOUR:  I’VE REROLLED MY SLEEVES – AND FULL STEAM AHEAD

(13)  Treat of Hot Rolls and Celery

(14)  In Love with This Crazy Land

(15)  A Road and a Darn Good One

(16)  Gone At It All In the Worst Way

PART FIVE:  THE DAM HAS BROKEN AND THE FLOOD IS LOOSE

(17)  Nobody Can Push Me Away from Our Homestead

(18)  One Step Forward and Ten Backward

(19)  We Can’t Stand the Thought of Shifting

(20)  At This Point I Wish We Could Sell the Homestead

PART SIX:  IF WE CAN’T STAY WE WILL LEAVE.  SIMPLE AS THAT.

(21)  I Want a Home But Where!

(22)  I Need to Be Part of the World

(23) 160 Acres of Alaska Belongs to You and Me

(Appendix A)  Mildred’s Story of the March 27, 1964 Great Alaskan Earthquake

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+WORD WARRIOR NEWS: WORK ON SINGLE VOLUME PREFACE

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My daughter and my little grandson came for a visit and left last week.  Yes, it was wonderful beyond words to see them.  Since then I am deeply involved and invested in paring down the four existing volumes of my mother’s writings (in Hope for a Mountain) into a single manageable volume containing her Alaskan homesteading story, Mildred’s Mountain.

I am including here the work-in-progress I am doing on the preface for this book.

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It is important to realize that this story takes place in the years just following the ‘modernization’ of America and in the post WWII era of our nation’s history.  Mildred’s dreams for obtaining land under the requirements of the great Homesteading Act that settled our nation’s frontiers were met by the complications of working with limited financial resources.  Mildred, who was 31 with a family of four children under the age of seven when she moved to Alaska, had been raised in Boston and moved with her mother at age nineteen to Los Angeles.  She had never spent a birthday or a holiday away from her mother and had never even been on a camping trip in her life when the homesteading began.

Mildred and Bill had been married eight years to the day Bill arrived in Alaska ahead of his family to begin his new job and attempt to secure housing so that his family could join him.  They had moved out of their home, sold it, and lived in a single motel room in the Los Angeles area for two weeks before Bill left.  It was another stress filled six weeks before Mildred and the four children reached Alaska.

The family was suffering from great financial indebtedness and strain before the move had even been contemplated, a situation that never improved throughout the duration of their homesteading years.  Living in a time before credit cards, the Lloyd family debt had been accumulated by buying on ‘time payments’, borrowing money from high interest rate finance companies, and through borrowing money from Mildred’s mother.

In spite of the obvious differences concerning available means of communication during the time these letters were written, the financial woes of the Lloyd family can strike a resonating chord even among family’s struggling to raise their children in today’s world.  Continual medical bills that were not covered by insurance and the eventual nearly constant repair of vehicles involved in the homesteading process contributed to the family’s inability to budget or save ahead enough money to ever meet unforeseen financial difficulties when they arose.

As Mildred’s story explains, the fight with the mountain as it actively destroyed efforts to create an accessible road to the homestead meant that large sums of money repeatedly invested in road building created an additional major financial burden that was never overcome during all the years the homestead consumed Mildred’s life.  Perhaps if the Lloyds had arrived in the Anchorage-Eagle River area during earlier years when far more accessible land was available for homesteading, Mildred would have chosen a less challenging spot for her dream to play itself out.  Yet considering Mildred’s great difficulty in living near (and with) people and her deep desire for pristine land and its silent privacy, even if homesteading acreage had been available ‘lower down’ and ‘closer in’, I as her daughter personally believe that much of what constituted the drama of the Lloyd family’s saga would have happened anyway – and probably exactly in the spot it did.

Mildred had always intuitively valued and appreciated the kind of healing that the full powers of the untrammeled, unpolluted and untamed land itself has always been able to provide for those who know what they have found even if they do not fully understand what they need.  Mildred did not have an easy childhood, yet from a very young age had been exposed to the wonders of the natural world through summer visits to her relatives’ homes in the New England countryside where she had found a peace that cannot be reproduced in any artificial way.

The fact, in my opinion, that so much of Mildred’s inner woundedness lay forever cast beyond her realm of conscious awareness meant that for all the healing powers that the mountain she loved held for her, the ‘contamination’ she had within her own self prevented her from ever making the kind of progress toward a better life on that mountain she hoped for no matter how much she dreamed and worked for it.  What was left for her was the struggle, the perpetual struggle to obtain what she deeply knew she somehow needed but could never describe.

The process of homesteading under the requirements of America’s Homesteading Act was a challenge to everyone who ever picked up that yoke and placed themselves and their family within it.  The only true tools and weapons a homesteader has are those that lie within them.  Mildred’s battle was never for the land.  Hers was a battle between herself and ‘the world’ that began with her birth in 1925 and ended with her death in 2002.

Perhaps it is because of the contrast between Mildred’s inner struggles and those few moments of stunning joy, peace and absolute love for ‘the land’ of Alaska and of her mountain that Mildred described in her writings that we can begin to understand and appreciate the difference between land that is tamed by civilization and land that is not.  Although Mildred never saw the building of a cabin or the creation of her dream house on the homestead, never saw a well or a cesspool dug there, never saw the coming of electric poles, and never found a way to live a life of peaceful health and happiness anywhere on this earth, let alone up on her mountain, her story still portrays the human willingness to place one foot in front of the other upon virgin soil to claim it as one’s own.

In my mind Mildred’s greatest accomplishment was not, with the help of her husband, in fulfilling the requirements to gain title to 160 acres of an Alaskan mountainside.  It was not the civilizing of that piece of land that was of consequence.  What mattered is that Mildred had the ability to allow the land to touch her heart in ways that nothing else in her lifetime possibly could.  The land itself met her where, when and as she met it in return during those glistening moments when nothing else mattered.  At those moments this pure place had the power to civilize her.

It is not my intention to analyze or to interpret Mildred’s words in this book.  I present these pages as a synopsis of her much longer story as it is published intact in the four volumes of HOPE FOR A MOUNTAIN.  These books present the narrative and chronicle of my mother’s story as it was contained within the papers that were left to me upon her 2002 death.

I will say here, however, that my mother had, unknown to anyone during the years covered in these volumes, severe undiagnosed mental illness.  Her children’s assessment today is that Mildred probably suffered from and was tormented by Borderline Personality Disorder that stemmed from a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder from the time of her birth.  Mildred’s own words completely leave out any direct reference to the severity of the crimes of child abuse that she committed, and my discussion of these problems are reserved for two following books.  In UNSPEAKABLE MADNESS I will present selections from Mildred’s writings that I believe do pertain to her mental illness.  In the book, THE DEVIL’S CHILD I present my own stories about being Mildred’s severely abused daughter.

So when I say that the land of Alaska, of the Eagle River valley, and of Mildred’s Mountain had the power to touch my mother’s heart, and that my mother had the ability to experience the healing Alaska provided for her, I mean this statement in a profound way.  For all the flaws my mother possessed and even with the mental illness that possessed her, I believe it was her extraordinary desire to experience inner peace that led Mildred to her mountain in the first place, and led her back to it again and again and again in spite of all obstacles.

That she could not recognize her woundedness, either its existence or its source, did not prevent her from realizing the experience of healing from the land on those moments when it actually happened.  That she could not incorporate this healing (or any other) into herself in any permanent way was the tragedy of her life.  Yet Mildred still had an incredible adventure.  She homesteaded a piece of wilderness with her family high on an Alaskan mountainside and called it home.

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+MY WORRY

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My dear friend, Dorothy, old homesteading neighbor in Alaska, is printing herself off my mother’s writings from the blog.  Her printer is now complaining, no idea what pages it hasn’t printed, no page numbers when it is printed that way.  Her computer says it has printed 566 pages – so far.   I would have just sent her the files from my computer, at least they have page numbers!

We are grateful for any financial savings on our end, and JV who granted us an interview (another old time Alaskan who knew my mother well) – wants to read M’s writings – so Dorothy is willing to send her printed copy over to JV — but

MY WORRY!

What if one of those big winds blows through like my mother described in her Dark Rainbow Dream (I see in my letters, btw, it was probably partly based on the big February 1959 blow in Anchorage) — and all the pages Dorothy has printed simply return themselves back to the state (just about exactly!) where they all were six years ago when my mother’s papers ended up on my doorstep!

Hard not to smile.  What an image.  What an irony.  And, well. . . . .

What’s that they say about the hallmark of insecure attachment disorders?  Oh, yes, “The inability to tell a coherent narrative of one’s life story.”  In my book, that’s what page numbers are for!  (We hope.)  My mother had a life without dates and page numbers.

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