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­­­­A Shaman Daughter

Ninth Thought

Saturday, May 17, 2008

Dr. Sam Vankin (I think that’s how it’s spelled) writing online about narcissistic personality disorder, uses the term “functional empathy” and that made me think about the empathy pathologies and the empathy disorders.  It made me think of “earned secure attachment,” that there’s probably something one could call “functional attachment” just as easily.

Looking at myself from the attachment perspective, disorganized and disoriented, I don’t have “normal” empathy.  Thinking about this counselor I am scheduled to see at SEABHS – I don’t even like the high pitched nasal voice he has.  I don’t like him.  I don’t trust him, and from the children’s Reactive Attachment Disorder perspective, I can’t do therapy with him because I don’t CARE about him.

It all ties in with the monkeys with the brain damage who find themselves and stick together in their compounds.  It ties in with the “no grooming behavior” that I have.  I simply don’t care.

So the mystery might be, how did I care enough about my children to form even a functional attachment with them?

I was also thinking about “bad manners” which is something easier for females to cope with.  It’s bad manners to kill people, and coupled with our different physiology, women aren’t likely to be the ones that pick up the guns and head off to butcher the innocent.  But I’m not likely to first sit on a piece of cake that I want to eat, either.  That wouldn’t be “functional,” and certainly not good manners.

So I could be polite and “people please” this therapist, but I don’t want to.  I don’t buy what he thinks he’s selling – PTSD treatment of “systemized desensitization.”  Where exactly does he think this process should begin?  With my first breath?  My first cry, my first scream?

I don’t have the same brain that he has.  It’s a different matter if you want to treat trauma that is layered on top of a properly formed brain from the start.  And it is a totally different situation with me.  I know that, and I know they don’t know it.

Set ups for failure.  Ludicrous, preposterous, useless, misleading waste of time and resources.

Just like Scott Peck and Vankin say, people don’t want to accept that there’s “evil” in the world, and they practice what Vankin  notes (as does Bateman on BPD) magical thinking.  It is magical thinking not to equally accept that there are “broken” things that cannot be altered, changed or fixed.

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This brings em to a point where I would talk about those of us with an altered brain from a sociological rather than from a psychological point of view/perspective.  Like the grouped primates, we are a culture, nearly a species of our own.  Our brains were formed in a different, altered (malevolent) world, and they are formed to operate in that world.  Some sort, any sort, of “well meaning” hit-or-miss attempt to “fix” or “make better” this reality needs to be recognized for exactly what it is – pitiful!

So how do I think this makes us “medicine people” or shamans?  That we are like an antidote for extreme trauma survival?  That we contain something within us that has grown and developed that allowed us to survive?  Do I think “ordinaries” have this capacity?  It is NOT the same thing to survive a trauma with a brain that formed in a benevolent world.

I suppose that is what Mumford is trained to work with.  Normal people whose brained are differently formed, and were so before whatever trauma hit them LATER ON.

They are, then, residents of the benevolent world who accidentally fell, at some point, into our malevolent world.  They are immigrants, we are the citizens.  This is a sociological reality, a physiological one, a REAL and not magical reality.  Mumford’s job would then be to restore these benevolent folks back to their normal state so that they can move back to their own country and resume their lives.

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This is making me think of what Vankin also says, that narcissists create and operate in their own “pathological space.”  That is a sociological concept when I think that established mental health systems, as if they were cultures of their own, operate within a given set of principles, what they consider to be facts, which is in reality a consortium of individuals operating within a pathological space – this of course being from my point of view, not being a citizen of their culture or world or reality.

Narcissists are not likely to learn anything that is not of comfort to them and that does not support their world view.  They are in love with their own reflection, and by golly, we should all love it as they do.  It IS their reality, never mind that it is false, one-sided and short sighted – as well as exclusive and wrong (as they try to force it down our throats).  Who died and made them gods and goddesses?

Heresy I speak, outright blatant heresy!  I could be burned at the stake for my understandings!

All learning, understanding, cultural agreements ARE physiological brain realities, part of the brain’s physical structure, but when things are so different as they brain is forming that an entirely altered brain structure results, we have to back off and look at the huge bigger picture.  Ignorance is NOT bliss, it is dangerous.

This metaphor that I am using is no less massive or significant than the major metaphors contained in language humans use to talk about themselves in the world in BIG and significant ways.  They are not trite or mythological, and they cannot be ignored.  Unless one wants to remain an ignorant bigot in a most brazen way.  You of the benevolent world cannot make me your clone.  It is far far too late.  You would have had to start the moment I was born, or very shortly thereafter.

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Monday, May 19, 2008

Strange yesterday I had the thought, could see it, that when my disability is approved I would go back to Bemidji or Cass Lake.  That’s the first in nearly 13 years since leaving Blackduck with Mel that such a glimmer has come to me.  It seems to be tied to Gabby’s Cathy who is no longer in this world, tied to putting a pre-parenting curriculum together for Leech Lake.  It seems that I am not “supposed” to die here.  And I am missing my children terribly.  If I had the money – and the strength – I would go up there to visit them now.  But I am so so tired.

I discovered Dr. Scaer’s work online yesterday tying PTSD, dissociation, kindling and whiplash together.  Somehow that seemed like a “last piece.”  I searched “systematic desensitization dissociation” in reaction to SEABHS in Sierra Vista’s insistence that this technique is what I need, etc.

But I can feel the “black hole” inside of me and know nothing is really going to make a difference right now.  I know they would give me medication for this sadness, for this “depression” but it is so hard for me to accept that there isn’t another way to live with it, to transform it permanently into something else, something better.

I have been so tired today!

How is it possible to be self sustaining?  ER doesn’t need me.  I need him.  Cindy is having dinner in Seattle with Sharon right now.  I can’t be there.  I miss my girls.  I can’t be there.  Why don’t I find comfort just hanging out with people, like over at the Y, but they drove me nuts today, like chaos, like chattering, like yapping of dogs, like I can’t handle the frequencies generated by just ordinary people, so I don’t find comfort among or with them.  It all seems so strange.  What is the meaning of any of it?

It is probably not a good thing to envy the dead.  I can’t even say this with certainty, that it is unequivocally NOT a good thing.  I am not at all convinced that this cancer was not meant to BE the end of my life.  Just because people who love me said it wasn’t doesn’t make it so.

Maybe it is easy for me to envy the dead because I am not truly among the living.

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Saturday, May 24, 2008

How do we find the medicine in the difficulties of our lives?

How do I not curse the lifetime that I fell in love with this man more than I would curse this same lifetime where my mother was my mother?  Time has passed and I am no longer under her cursedness, but I carry within my own heart this difficulty in loving a man who does not want to be with me – and who I am not able to be with even if he were to desire it – due to the shortcomings of my own brain and mind.

My cell phone is shut in my car, out of my house, so I don’t wait with baited breath, breathless breath for his call that he said he would make to me today.  Not so a single moment’s phone call will ever begin to make up for all the time he leaves me alone, basically, the rest of my life.

I do not want to hate, but I can feel that tinge coming over me, maybe like a film over the eyes, one over my heart, and it scares me should it overtake me.  Even a little bit overtake me, I do not want to hate.

As if a banished cell phone could keep that from happening.  But, then again, it is part of my different brain that does not allow me to turn down the volume, to regulate the intensity of my feelings including my passions, my losses, my disillusionments, my disappointments.  They are like blazing fires, no matter how gloriously beautiful the day around me is.  I see two birds sitting side by side on a naked branch, in perfect comfort and harmony.  And I want to be spending the time, this time of my life just like those two birds, just being with this man I love who does not love me.

Is it because I have suffered in such a hell that I was able to recognize such a heaven when it came to me?   Yet what if it is true that he has some karma to finish with “her” and there is no choice but for me to maintain the best I can until it is all finished, and I mean ALL?  Or maybe it is that she has karma to finish with him.  I do not know.  Of course.  The medicine for me would be to be absolutely happy and at peace no matter what.

He didn’t call me anyway.  I am trying so hard not to hate him for not loving me.

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Sunday, May 25, 2008

But I do know that no matter what might be wrong with me or my life, the one thing that matters I have done right.  I immediately recognized Baha’u’llah the instant I heard of Him.  I don’t know how or why that happened, but I am most grateful for that greatest gift that will carry over into the next life.

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Sunday, June 01, 2008

I need to get back to writing the book, commenting on Dr. Scaer

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*Age 57 – Dec. 2007 – July 2008 – (A Shaman Daughter Pages)

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