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A Shaman Daughter

Twelfth thought

Thursday, June 26, 2008

We don’t know that there isn’t a spiritual force called a soul that is with an infant from conception.  Talking to Joyce today she helped me be able to think about my soul as a force that operated to help form my brain and my mind at the same time that my mother was forming it and influencing it.

Joyce and I talked about how the force of destruction, the Destructor or the Destroyer is something separate from anger.  It is past anger, something else entirely.  Joyce calls hers the Dark Angel.  She suspects that what my mother turned on my violently from my birth was not the rage I have always thought it was, but instead it was her Dark Angel, the Destroyer force.

It is heavy stuff to think about.  Very intense.

So if I were to think that anger is natural, like sorrow and fear – and hence not evil, but good in that it serves a natural purpose, and that the Destructor Destroyer is something else, and my problem is that I cannot tell the difference, raised as I was by an insane Destroyer mother

Then I cannot tell good from evil.  Not in my mother, myself or in others.

The researchers talk about an infant’s early ability to tell the truth (in my earlier writings though I forget the exact phrasing) – I guess it is the knowledge of who is trustworthy and who is not – very early they can make this distinction.  It is an early forming anti-con ability.  Is this related?

If so, then the ability to tell good from evil, the trustworthy from the untrustworthy, must come much earlier than the ability to tell right from wrong.  They are not necessary the same thing.

++

before work writing:

The scary thing is that I suspect I have dissociated from the whole reality of me and ER.  That’s not freedom.  It’s something else, a monster with fear at it’s heart.  Like why I could not talk to Leo [my ex-husband] when I saw him at the park in Fargo 2 summers ago.  With PTSD and dissociation, nothing truly gets finished.

It seems like a peculiar form of forgetting – like it all happened to somebody else, or it never happened at all.  (This is about the nature of reality in a way…)

It’s like the monster knows it can’t deal with the things normally so why try and why bother?  To try to sort this situation out with ER now would put me at risk because I can’t negotiate conflict – and would end up either dissociating anyway or get sent off in a tangent in the wrong direction trying to figure things out as they would pop up.  I guess because I don’t trust him OR myself.  (Maybe like the old cameras where you could only focus perhaps on the foreground and lose the background into blurriness, or vice versa.  This is related to the inability to prioritize, to decide what has meaning and how much compared to something else.  It’s like flying blind, or trying to fly by instinct.  But when there’s another person involved, there’s way too many variables and I can’t figure my own priorities out let alone understand them or theirs.)  I would have to trust that he truly cares – and right now I don’t believe that he does.

++

In adult child stuff they talk about guessing what normal is – the point of this book is to speak to those of us who will never know what normal is because we do not have that ability, no matter what.  This is our very real dis-ability.  We weren’t made under normal conditions and our brain/NS is not normal.

This distinction is part of the sorting/matching process I was writing about yesterday in tenth thought.

++

I think there’s an “it doesn’t really matter enough” component to dissociator’s reality – let floating bubbles float – perhaps impossible to integrate all the divisions of separated experiences anyway, and it uses a lot of energy resources.  If I reach for one bubble I can’t hold onto it while I reach for another one, the first just floats away.

Makes me think of attachment and object relations, when the person is gone they are really GONE as in cease to exist – we can’t feel them – and I ask, “How is this related to dissociation?”

++

With ER, he might have just set the price too high – more than seeing him is worth, more than I can afford.

++

But we are no different from others in that we still have a life to life; choices are always made that affect us and others whether or not we can make these choices and decisions the way a more modern, benevolent-formed brain can.

Conscious choice is harder for us because of our wiring.  We need to know our limitations and how they affect us.

We need to know when automatic pilot takes over, like my dream last night when I could not control my car in any way and it headed off the road, landing in a ditch full of freezing water up to the edge of the windows so that I could not open the doors.  I had to climb out the window into the freezing water, but there were others on the road to help me.  (It was at a crossroads)

We need a compass, words to live by or a guiding light, and a plan to follow

We have fewer, if any, degrees of freedom in pressure or in crisis situations.  We need calm and predictability around us because our center point was never formed at calm inside of us.  Our set point is not where it should be, nor does our NS switch work the same.  Our emotional and reactionary thermostat and what triggers us is different from others.  We are both incredibly tough survivors and incredibly fragile and vulnerable (there isn’t much middle ground – not enough middle ground).  Life’s unpredictabilities pose a much greater risk to us (again, no zone between being stressed which instantaneously turns into distress).  Huge disappointments regarding hope, expectation and our investments of caring are especially dangerous areas.

++

thinking about flash points, flash bulb memories of experiences.  Like Friday where great dismay triggered my switch into (super noisy) chaos.

I’m most fortunate that the pain is missing this time (the cold freezing water?) – perhaps anger is more self protective and useful?

++

We cannot keep our self in our body/lives/mind – like trying to hold the sunlight within the confines of a glass jar.  It didn’t happen at the right time in the right way so that we are integrated, and maybe PDs it partially happened and the jar broke into a million pieces but held together like with safety glass, but thereafter they have to see the world through this broken glass and their vision is distorted as is their personality and reality.

Their world was partly safe and then they suffered a great ultimate betrayal (I think), perhaps the greatest wound to the soul is betrayal, like a mortal wound to the flesh would be.

++

more thoughts on the Destroyer and the Destroyed, our continued destruction is in dissociation (chaos, disorganization, disorientation).  Here we look at differences between male (destroy in home but also out in bigger arena) and women (whose influence is mostly in intimate relationships and in the home)

what’s the antonym of intimate?

++

hide from the Destroyer = freeze

overpowered by the Destroyer = freeze

are they different freezes?

++

Then hen I went out to go to work I checked the fluid in my car, or tried to because there wasn’t any, poured out when I put it in, ended up having to see ER at the shop which was nice of him, put stops leak in there, seems to be working, gave new meaning to my dream where my poor car that I know I drove hot yesterday was letting me know it needed to be cooled by water.  Strange thing was that tho it’s a new radiator, right before I bought the car, the shroud was lose with a staple in it and the staple poked the hle in the radiator.

++

Written at work:

Maybe it’s times like these when I cannot tolerate ER being mad at me that I am in actuality feeling the Destroyed within me, like an open would, a raw nerve, this pain travels directly there

We look for Destroyer matches – they are replaceable to us

It’s the fear that has me now – the power I give him over me – I hate this part, the fear part, tied to all of my attachment issues.

Total contamination, overlay and interplay of the past and the present.  Out-of-control oscillations and vacillations between the big 3’ pain, fear and anger without a center point for the needle at calm, we are always bouncing around between these Big 3.  External is contaminating my internal, which connects to past contaminating the present because there are no boundaries between them and they are intermingled, intertwined.

++

This is excruciatingly difficult – like a super accelerated version of doing major surgery on myself while part of the process is about awareness and consciousness, so there can’t be anesthesia.  I don’t want what might be the 4^th zone, which is numbness.

++

In confusion we cannot prioritize or see our options to make choices or decisions.  Everything is always hectic, always distressed, cannot determine what is real and what isn’t’, can’t deescalate.

++

According to today’s discussion with Joyce, who says I have a strong mind and my mother died not, my soul had an influence from the inside of me on the formation of my brain along with the force that was my mother’s treatment of me from the outside.

This is NOT something the researchers can discuss, they can’t verify it, and do not consider the soul or a spiritual reality.  I suppose this is like what Jered told me at age 7, that in the womb we’ve already decided to BE good or bad and that nothing in this lifetime will change that, and that we talk to the angels all the time we are in the womb.

I suppose those angels could be both the dark angels and the bright ones.

Mother, then, tried to form me to the image of the dark Destroyer.  I still don’t get all of this, but I am trying hard to trust the process.  I don’t know how much more time I will be on this earth…I want to get this book right, or at least get my ideas in here so that hopefully Ramona teamed with Cindy can write it should I pass from this world before it is completed.  I am not wasting time, that’s for sure.

++

Then I have to add that I called ER after work and decided he would let me know if he was mad or wanted to see me or not.  I unfortunately do not know if he read my letter yet, but tomorrow he has a doctor’s appt in Tucson.

But he was nice, invited me out on the road with him for an in town job, but I was so quiet and bathed in a sad light.  I thought about being able to be with him at the very end of his life should he need me to take care of him when things get really grim.  I would do that with care and concern like he was my newly born child.  But all this was with a heaviness in my heart.  If he did get the letter, he didn’t mention it.  But before we got back to Naco he gave me a heads up that she was supposed to come get a chair that was sitting at the shop and needed to go across the line to the upholster’s.  So that’s how he’s getting that done now.  He said if she had picked up the chair I could come in and stay for awhile.  But she hadn’t.

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Saturday, June 28, 2008

Yesterday I vowed to myself not to write, to give my mind a rest.  I had to tone down the acceleration process in my thoughts, and their intensity and direction.

This morning I am thinking about dissociation and conscience, and wondering how they are related and connected.

I am using for example how I think I can tone down all my feelings toward ER and this situation if I don’t see him, because seeing him makes him real, makes the situation real, makes my feelings real.  But if I discontinue seeing him, I might be able to dissociate from the entire mess, put it in one of those bubbles and send it floating somewhere where I do not have to pay it any attention.

Dissociation HAS to be, in part at least, about attention.  When I hit the maelstrom place a week ago, there was no attention left over, it was all sucked into the middle of the storm.

If one creates a scenario in one state, even commits a crime of some sort against another (or self) and then can dissociate from it, then where is the issue of conscience?  If one is experiencing an intense overlay, intermingling, contamination of a past trauma in the present, that experience itself is probably occurring in just one dissociative state.  When it passes, or is over, then another entirely different state occurs.

If I begin to think of my mother’s violet actions as occurring in contaminated past-present states, and at times when she was projecting entirely her inner reality of those dissociated states onto me, and the destroyer was in full possession of the events, of her, and therefore putting me in the middle of them, then perhaps the issue of conscience becomes such a silly part of the picture that it should not be considered at ll, for remorse might not happen in the middle of these things so much as in the aftermath – when the nervous system has either transitioned into an entirely different state, or has abruptly switched into one.

I suspect that most of what happens in a dissociated state is not in consciousness.  I would think that conscience requires consciousness.  This is probably more than a brainstem-on-up affair.  It probably requires some action in the higher functioning areas of the brain that are generally, as far as I can understand it, bypassed completely in a trauma, amygdala response pattern.

++

Another connection between dissociation and conscience might be that not only is attention altered in a dissociative state, but so too is caring, or the assigning of value and meaning to whatever is involved in the dissociative transaction.  If dissociation is a sort of suspended state, even one in which the past and present are overlaid and intermingled and contaminated, there is no way that value, meaning and therefore caring could be operating in the present when in fact no clear present even exists during a “flashback,” “flash bulb” event.  (And here I would also add, like my comfort nosebleed example, that these flashback states are not always about violence and obvious deprivation).

They are not always obviously about what is appalling, though the appalling nature of the essence of the transaction, I bet, can always be found if one looks deeply enough.

If one cannot differentiate past from present, then how can they make the distinction between what is to be approached and what is to be avoided?

++

This also has to be about shady and lost boundaries, for we even have to have boundaries between our thoughts, areas of pause and silence, for thoughts to exist as such at all.

In a dissociative state the boundaries vanish and disorientation and disorganization abound.  (I can’t write this stuff out long hand today, it comes and is lost too fast.  Nor can I wait a moment or two to come and enter my thoughts because they vanish in the mean time, and all associated thoughts down the trail that could be, are lost along with them).

The boundaries that we form from birth about what to approach and what to avoid must be in place clearly for conscience to operate.  Maybe like snow blindness when one cannot distinguish the horizon from sky and earth, we crash and burn.  In a state of dis/dis we have no up or down, we are in the psychic soup, like in the underworld where up is down and vice versa.  No in and out, no me and you, no past and present.  How can there be conscience in this state?  That would only exist when the fog cleared and one could get their bearings.  Only when there are solid shapes and forms and objects around us, and then it requires the further sophistication of knowing which of these are alive and which aren’t so that we can make DECISIONS on how to respond.  In dissociation there is literally no time (peritrauma altered time), so no time for any of the rest of this advanced activity.

If there is nothing solid around it, a bat’s sonar doesn’t work because there’s nothing for it to hit and bounce back from.  If we are blind, we cannot see what light is doing, being absorbed or being reflected in and about the physical world outside a person.

++

It’s not that nothing is happening in a dissociative state.  I think it’s more that everything is happening. It’s overwhelming, disorienting, chaos (where all possible options exist).  There’s no timeline to orient ourselves to.  There are no boundaries between us and what is happening to and in and around us.  Maybe it’s like being consumed by the trauma, or more accurately, subsumed by it.  It’s so much bigger than we are, we are powerless and helpless to fight or struggle against it.  It is sheer experience, like joining with the light in a lightning strike, not watching it or forming opinions to it or having reactions to it – like being the lightning, not separate from it, no boundaries between us and it.

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So dissociating might be like passing in and out of time warps, time zones.  And, again, I say this is NOT like spacing out while you are driving or standing in some line waiting, bored out of you mind so that you mind wanders and you don’t know where it went, therefore don’t know where YOU went – which can be disorienting – gives you a tiny glimpse of what it’s like – like the difference between facing a doctor who opens their mouth and tells you that you have cancer vs a doctor opening their mouth and telling you that you have the hiccups.)

Even the pace of time changes, like warp speed or slow motion, and you have no control of it at all.  You are happening with it, like being a lightning bolt.

Maybe being in awe is a bit like a dissociative state – watching a sunset or the fireworks, where nothing around you seems to exist, not even yourself as the watcher.  Merging, maybe a bit like Flow?  Yet here I would think a person is control of these states and experiences, they can come and go from them, at least go from them when they choose.  And they are pleasant, not appalling.  You are in the state, the state doesn’t have you in the same way as dissociation.

++

I do think that it is one of the hallmarks of this kind of evolutionarily primitive brain that we are far more susceptible to emotional discomfort and unpredictability because we are not demarcated and separated from our environment in the same way that a modern brain is.  We are more one with our environment, not separated from it.  If more people had these brains perhaps we could not abuse the environment itself as easily because we could fell it?  In the ancient days we could communicate with the world we were a part of in much more intimate ways and it could talk to us like my car did in the dream the other day when it told me it was hot and needed to be cooled with water.  And we in the old days paid close attention to all the communications and messages from the “outside” world because our very survival as a species depended upon it.  We had a different array of degrees of freedom.

Talking on the phone with Anne right now made me realize that only in the natural world do I feel calm and at peace and safe (though I have had that experience being with ER when all else was shut out).  It seems that even in every room in my house I am a different person.  I do not have the degrees of self-integration that I think others do.  I am extremely sensitive to my environment and if something changes in it, it changes me.

++

On the other hand, because I am so attached to ER, when I can’t be with him I feel like a piece of myself is missing.  Again, this is a major “me, not me” issue.  It is about boundaries in the brain that determine what is me and what is not me which then determines the nature of the interaction and relationship between inner and outer.

My mother did not know I was not her, ER does not really know I am not him.  I don’t really know that he is not me.  I want to say that I don’t have the same problem as a PD person, but how can I say I am different if this is true?  Because I know I cannot manipulate him, and that he has certain “inalienable rights” as a separate entity which then determine how I would treat him?  Or is that only true because he is so remote from me?

Which all has to do with the basic animal drive to manipulate and control the environment, to have competencies and active coping skills to do so.  But what exactly is the environment (boundaries) between what is us and what is not?

ER does not have to be physically with me.  He just has to know that I am missing him and that I care – and that matters only if he “happens” to think of me at all when I am not with him.

++

This also makes me think of “being attuned” and resonance, as they speak of (in my earlier writings).  This is not the same thing (I don’t think) as mirroring, especially with the new information on mirror neurons to specify what this process is exactly in the brain.

This also has to do with the rupture and repair thing somehow.

++

This is a strange out-of-the-blue thought:  Was ER as a child aware of his mother’s missing him, or at least BELIEVE that she was tortured by missing him and longing for him, and then somehow believe that he was the one responsible for causing her this grief?  I have no idea where this thought came from just now or why.  I just record it, as I do much of what is included in these writings.

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Sunday, June 29, 2008

PTSD and I suspect other dissociative disorders put us in unstable orbits in our lives, at least it is so for me.  My consistencies are probably rigid; if not, inconsistency would rule my life.  I cannot predict how I will feel because I don’t have a consistent, coherent, connected history to rely upon so that I can in turn rely upon the same kind of reactions or choices in similar circumstances in the future as to those in the past.  In some ways, everything is constantly different in me and around me.  It does take huge amounts of energy to adjust to changes no matter what they are.

That’s why they say RAD children require such calmness and consistency in their environments.  It is the same thing when we grow up because the calmness and consistency is not on the inside and has to be created and reinforced from the outside.  Perhaps we are different from PD people in that we do not even hold individuals in our lives in a consistent pattern, either.  PD people externalize parts of themselves and project those parts onto others on the outside.  If my mother is any example of this, her projection was carved into stone and absolutely consistent over time.  I don’t think there is the same sense of internal shifting sands that dissociatives have.  Without consistency inside, everything in and out is constantly shifting for us and nothing is solid.  We live with chaos.  That is the disorganized, disoriented internal reality.

To us, the world is continually arbitrary.  There is nothing rock solid inside to change if a change needs to happen, either.  That requires priority skills, also, to know what “solid form” (even an idea) needs what part of it changed to make it work right.  Ours is far too haphazard.

Without “object constancy,” far too little is actually in the “known” category.  Way too much is in the unknown-can’t be depended or counted upon “what if” category, which in turn creates vast reservoirs of anxiety within us.  A secure attachment and its ensuing instillation with a person of an internal secure base, as well as the possession of an external secure base, reverberates with consequences throughout a person’s entire being, and therefore throughout their entire lifetime.

I don’t know yet, but perhaps the mirror neuron system has something to do with mirroring security and/or insecurity.  How resilient are the mirror neurons and their systems?  Would it help to be that specific so that interventions can be razor-laser sharply effective?  What good are haphazard interventions in healing a haphazard survival system?  I might add, that this originates in brains constructed in malevolent conditions, not benevolent ones.  For neuroscientific infant brain development purposes, we might be able to specifically define exactly what the difference is between those two realities, and therefore can understand both the benefits and liabilities of both – assuming that not even a benevolent brain is perfect – just better suited to survive and thrive in a benevolent world.  After all, reproductive success is all that our evolution is really concerned about.

++

Being on shaky ground internally, on shifting sands, means that we cannot trust our observations, our conclusions about things, our perceptions, our thoughts, our emotions.  We have no bedrock.  We also have fewer illusions, perhaps, because we have seen what trauma is and does.  Again, its like getting the diagnosis from your doctor that you have cancer.  Nobody is immune, but most carry an illusion of immunity and impunity from the malevolent world – a sort of wishful or magical thinking, I suppose.

++

Our brains were formed knowing we were at threat and risk of imminent extinction.  We knew not only that we were alone and that no help was out there, but many of us also knew that the very person who was most supposed to be on our side was in fact our mortal enemy instead.

++

If a prior history of dissociating is a central and key element in putting someone at risk for later development of PTSD, it seems crucial to me to look at that area of common ground.  When the experts say that it is the intergenerational transmission of unresolved trauma that is the risk factor for later perpetration of abuse, again an understanding of PTSD and dissociation is key and central.

It seems to me that there is probably also a link between dissociation and all the empathy disorders that are connected to anything less than having a secure attachment history and pattern.  And because insecure attachment is linked to most mental disorders, here again an understanding of dissociation as it relates to the comprehensive picture is also crucial.

++

I knew in some vague way that a study of dissociation connected to my own experience was somehow of central importance.  I also discovered that references to it were vague, felt inaccurate, and seemed to be nonspecific and therefore not helpful.  When I found that the disorganized/disoriented insecure attachment style was brushed off of the table and swept under the carpet, I understood that this style and dissociation were no doubt intimately and significantly connected.  I think I was – and am – correct.

At the center of all of it is probably how we store and process memory, and is related to the brain’s perception of time, with consequent alterations in processing of these two connected processes tying in with how unresolved trauma and unfinished trauma cycles interfere with processing of time and memory.  This is still vague to me, but relevant.

When a trauma cycle is uncompleted, time suspension occurs with the freeze response.  We are frozen in time.  Time and timing are central to the brain, related to its rhythms.  If memory is not operating in a benevolent way, there is no coherency (no coherent life story).  Past events are not connected properly; the past contaminates the present (as per preoccupied adult attachment style) and trauma dramas/reenactments ensue.

Timing also has to do with synchronization, as does resonance and mirroring say between mother and infant.  Rupture and repair is about breaks in the flow, the synchronization, and without repair after ruptures (classic PTSD situation) there is no harmony or ability to resume – as per the captivated animals that do not survive reintroduction into the wild if they do not complete the trauma cycle, i.e. go through the trembling stage of unthawing the frozen suspended animation part of the freeze cycle, and pick up where they left off.

I am thinking as I write of the need for the military to include a dissociation measurement preenlistment.  If they don’t, they are exposing those with a history of dissociation to a certain future of PTSD should they send these people into combat.  To me it is looking for a predisposition to an allergy.

How many of these dissociation measurement tools exist, and how reliable and (gee, I just had this word and it vanished on my way to the keyboard) oh, valid, are they?

If they are accurate, they can predict risk for PTSD, and I suggest that they will also predict at risk for abusing children – I would also suggest that they use an attachment scale, but the interview itself is impossible if the person giving it isn’t specially trained and an expert – thus making whole scale measurement of attachment styles cumbersome, expensive and impossible.

++

Coherency is also about cause and effect, and predictability.  Trauma is not “of” that world.  An infant brain created in peritrauma knows that unpredictability and no cause and effect are the norm, not the other way around.  This is a major point in and of itself.

While cause and effect and unpredictability are tied to competence (using active coping skills), I don’t think the concept of helplessness, no matter how true it may be, has the same relevance when considering those of us abused from birth because helplessness is so a given in the equation it is not a variable.  I can’t even say that it ceased to be a variable.  Maybe it is true that it just never exists at all.  Helplessness implies an alternative.  We had no alternative – other than the innate, instinctual, very limited and nearly inconsequential natural reactions of a newly born infant – crying, for example.  We never got to take off down that road in the first place, the road of predictability and cause and effect.

++

Whatever I discover looking from my insides and from my own life and experience, I have to be able to match on the outside with the findings of the experts – every step of the way.  This would still not make my version the “truth,” it would, however, provide a platform of accuracy regarding malevolence and the developing infant brain, brain alternatives, the reality and consequence of dissociation, disorganized/insecure (RAD) attachment styles in adults, empathy pathologies, information on rupture, repair, timing, etc.

++

Dissociation is not the freeze response itself.  Not always, anyway.  I think dissociation happens when the freeze response in the body is not able to finish itself out in the nature of the trauma cycle.  I think what I would call dissociation for myself at this point might appear sometimes as a freeze response on the outside, and might at times feel like a total blank spot on the inside, but I think more often it is the disorganized/disoriented confusion and chaos I have described.  It is an out-of-synch experience with what is going on on the outside, what I am in the midst of.  It is a time where priorities are lost, cause and effect are lost, choice is lost, connection with my surroundings is lost and with myself.  No continuity, a break, a snap, like breaking a raw strand of spaghetti, “snap.”

I do believe these are bifurcation points that others have the flexibility and degrees of freedom to flow through.  Ours is a rigid structure with fewer options, fewer options of how we react and how we respond.  We do not know what is happening now, what is expected of us now, and the past rushes in like a massive log jam that will, in the very next nanosecond, break the damn.  We cannot transition smoothly – chaos, again, being when all possible options exist at the same time.

Again, it is the kind of experience one might endure at the instant a cancer diagnosis is given, only it happens to us most of the time.

++++

I might have all the information I need to write this first book, leaving the rest to “directions for further discovery and research.”

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Sometimes it’s like my words prove to me that I exist.  I write them out and they mirror me back to me as I pass along through time.  They are like something that keeps the disconnected, dissociated realities in check, keep them together and in some sort of flow line…..  I just wrote this to ER:

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Dear ER –

There are a lot more important things at stake here besides the dog – precious as he is.  I am worried half to death about you and being forced to be invisible to you is harder than ever before.  Right up there, I imagine, with being buried or skinned alive or being burned at the stake.  Because while you are with her I am still alive over here, cut off and missing you and worrying like my heart will break.  And I am terrified that just as you shut me out of your living you will shut me out of your dying.  I care too much, ER.  I am scared and helpless.

I thought I saw you alone in the red truck by Dairy Queen Friday around 2 and thought you were back to work.  [So I called you.]  I was worried and wanted to know how you were and what the doctor said.  Well, my mistake.  I got shot down and then I gave up and went home and shut the whole world out and went to sleep.  I knew seeing you for a pitiful 5 minutes would have been worse than not seeing you at all.  I’m not the one that matters to you.  I’m the one over the barrel with no idea what to do.

I still love you no matter what,

Linda

(even if that doesn’t matter to you)

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Even though I often have trouble under stress with verbal exchanges, I would be lost without words – especially the written words.  In some way it’s like I know I exist because I have words, and what I say is what I say, nobody else.  They are like centering agents.

I possess them, I made them, I own them, perhaps like Freudian “turds in the toilet.”  But hopefully with more importance and influence!  So maybe written words are my identifiers, the saviors and signifiers of my identity, of my existence.  “I write, therefore I am.  I wrote, therefore I existed at all.”

++

I suspect that in some significant way those of us who survived malevolent creation hold within us the essential kernel of the seed of our species.  We have inside of us what it would take to help repopulate the world.  To nature, that is all that matters.  Maybe this is especially true for those of us who did not overtly harm our own children (we could not help but covertly do so in some manner).

Yet my theory also is that the extremely primitive-made brains in turn are the extreme warriors, whether we want or like to admit it or not – the ones I previously have written about that kill the enemy (and of course we don’t really know in this day and age who that enemy is – in the primitive times it was very clear), get supplies, and spread their seed.  Unfortunately, too, there are female primitive brains who kill the offspring, or all but the strongest.  The primitive brain is made for a malevolent world where threat of doom is immanent, and only the very strongest survive – or no offspring at all if the brain perceives that the threat is that extensive.  Only the ones who could have future offspring ASAP when things got a little better would survive the very worst of times.  Not the very old or the very young.

As I write this I can see that this might be related not only to a fight response, but to a flight response:  run through these hardest times as fast as possible, i.e. create an end to them as fast as possible which is really the same thing.

In today’s world we see rape, murder, brutal crimes, theft, child abuse as a bad thing.  But the primitive brain evidently does not.  This is competition for survival time in a malevolent world without resources.  We have to realize and remember that these brains were created in a malevolent world where the infant/child was under attack (usually from the primary caregiver – and neglected by the same), and was absolutely alone.  There is no cooperation with these brains.  Not an option.

The thunders are here, have to shut down the computer.

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and I never quite know what is real.  Is there really anything between ER and me?  I do not want to pursue him.  If I mean anything to him he can let me know.

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

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