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I decided to take a breather-break from my work with my mother’s ‘story’ last evening and watch something through my Netflix account. My current ongoing distraction is in watching the “Little House on the Prairie” series, but last night I wanted to watch something with a little more substance. So I turned to my computer’s Netflix screen and picked the first movie that appeared there: “Mockingbird Don’t Sing.”
I don’t recommend watching this dramatized version of a true child abuse story to anyone who is not feeling strong of heart and solidly grounded regarding the consideration of severe child abuse. This movie’s portrayal of horrific child abuse and its aftermath will haunt you.
Personally, I don’t know what I think about the story, its facts, its dramatization, or of my experience of watching it. I am currently deeply immersed in my mother’s account of the years of her life from 1958 forward as she stepped into The Alaskan Homesteading Myth and dragged her family in with her.
Over these past six or so years that I have worked to transcribe my mother’s unsorted letters and various scraps of writing – that she wrote 50 years ago with the intention of ‘making a book’ from her experiences (an act that she never accomplished) – I have devoted my dedicated effort to placing my mother’s writings in their linear order over the span of months and years that they were written.
I began tackling the scrambled up mess of her papers by picking one out of the boxes they arrived in when they entered my life upon my mother’s 2002 death, unfolding the creased paper her words were written on, and entering the ‘stories’ contained within into my computer. At first there were so many of them I could not begin to sort the letters FIRST by year, month or date. I simply created a Word document file and ‘named’ it according to the postmark on each letter’s envelope.
I encountered many letters that had no date indication with them at all. I had to wait until I had the growing body of my mother’s ‘story’ already sorted into my computer files before I could begin to place the ‘blank date’ letters into the story’s context. Although I finished the actual transcription process days ago, I am currently deeply involved in my return to all the letters as I initially transcribed them, and in this process trying to fine tune placement of important letters in the story that still seem to be slightly out of order.
When I encounter one of these important letters I can spend an hour or two trying to determine exactly where in the story-line this piece of writing actually fits in. I can’t ditch these letters. I will not leave them in a misplaced position if I can help it because each letter contains such a critical segment of the actual story not only of my mother’s progress of her own life throughout these time spans, but also the story of my and my sibling’s childhood.
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My having switched over last night from this difficult work I am doing to watching the movie, “Mockingbird Don’t Sing,” didn’t do me much of a favor. I simply added a parallel track in my feeling-thinking experience with the horrors that can envelope helpless children and change their lives forever.
The story the movie conveys makes the story of my own terribly abusive childhood pale nearly into invisibility in comparison. Maybe I needed this jolt. Maybe by allowing this OTHER child abuse reality to appear alongside my mother’s account of her life during this portion of my childhood years actually gives me a perspective and accompanying strength that I need as I do this solitary work of creating a readable version of this portion of my severely abusive, mentally ill mother’s life.
Anyone who chooses to watch “Mockingbird Don’t Sing” is going to be confronted with the destructive power of undiagnosed, unrecognized, untreated severely abusive parental mental illness. The movie gives no hope – no illusion of hope – no suggestion of hope. It is, like my mother’s story will be once I have it published, nothing more than a chronicle of one tiny segment of what IS possible for human adults to do to human infants and children.
My story and the story portrayed in this movie are horror stories of the most disturbing kind. Yet a joint reality exists within them both: If one happens upon the version of the facts as they might exist within the reality of the mentally ill abusing adult, one will encounter an intact system of logic that created and sustained the abuse from its beginnings.
It is my encounter last night with the mental illness logic connected to this movie’s portrayal of severe child abuse that most disturbs me. Partly this is true because ‘insane logic’ along with the power to hold the victimized child within its unbreakable web followed the movie child out of her madhouse ‘home’ of earlier childhood right on into the bigger world once she was removed.
In other words, hope for freedom to be her own free and freed best-self-possible was not an option for this movie child. There is a hair’s-breadth line here: Not only was their no hope for freedom, there was no FREEDOM itself. Once HOPE and FREEDOM are both removed from a child (person) there is nothing left but continued abuse – no matter what it is called by the perpetrators.
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Longterm readers of this blog might be able to understand what I am saying when I say that my searching and writing process regarding my mother’s words runs parallel to what the Independent filmmakers accomplished when they put together the movie version of the child’s life portrayed in “Mockingbird Don’t Sing.” Both the account of my own severely abusive infant-childhood and this film happen within the format of being a CHRONICLE. As I have mentioned in my previous posts on the subject, a chronicle happens when facts of a ‘story’ are presented without analysis or interpretation.
Yet the absence of analysis or interpretation leaves outsiders to the experience of the events pertaining to the ‘abuse story’ without any preset or given solid platform that might feel ‘safe and secure enough’ to allow anything like the full impact of the victim’s experience to enter their awareness. If this ‘solid platform’ is not presented within the chronicle, it has to exist within the outside viewer, or it will not exist at all.
Because at the very most only about half our current population grew up from birth within a healthy caregiving environment that allowed them to build a safe and secure attachment pattern within their developing body-brain to start with, it will be ONLY this approximate half, with their inwardly built safe and secure attachment, that will be able to begin to comprehend how WRONG and how HARMFUL any infant-child abuse was to any victim. The victims themselves (to some degree anyone who did NOT experience safe and secure infant-child attachment themselves) are left without solid footing when they try to consider the actual loss and damage that infant-child abuse causes.
It seems strange even to my self as I write these words that what I am saying is that all of us who did not have a safe and secure infancy-childhood have been robbed of the perspective we need that would allow us to begin to comprehend the extent of the damage the LACK of safe and secure early attachments cause us. Our LACK is so built into our body-brain from the beginnings of our life that we do something most might consider to be a GOOD thing when we consider not only our own abuse history, but also as we might attempt to consider somebody else’s: Victims have a depth of EMPATHY with other victims that nonvictims will NEVER have.
It is within this realm, this arena of co-empathy that victimized infant-children have with one another as survivors that in effect POLLUTES our ability to objectively consider or understand the reality of ALL abuse – our own and others.
This means that there are INSIDERS and OUTSIDERS regarding abuse, and most certainly regarding early infant-child abuse. INSIDERS will empathize with other survivors. OUTSIDERS will not. INSIDERS will know from within the very cells of their body what another person’s abuse story is all about. OUTSIDERS will never know.
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Those people who were raised from birth in environments of early safe and secure attachment with their caregivers were not formed as human beings with the HOPE for freedom to be their self. They were formed with the FREEDOM itself built right into their developing body-brain.
Those of us who were raised in severe infant-child abuse environments had neither the HOPE for freedom to be our own self NOR the FREEDOM itself. This kind of abusive reality deprives the victim-survivor of the ability to experience objectivity concerning the reality of abuse itself. These victimized survivors will be left with the burden of having true EMPATHY for abuse survivor’s experience for the rest of our lifetime.
This means to me that not only can I NOT be objective when I consider a child’s experience as presented in the movie, “Mockingbird Don’t Sing.” It means I cannot achieve objectivity (without inner empathy) for my OWN ‘story’. Most importantly at this moment in time, it also means I cannot obtain an objective, non-empathetic platform to consider my mother’s experience from, either.
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The image comes to me as I write these words of dancers and a dance. Those of us who know abuse from inside our body have danced the dance. We will never be objective onlookers (like people watching a parade) who can witness the performance of any presentation of the dance we were forced to dance without the echoes being triggered on our insides about what dancing this dance actually feels like.
As hard as it is for me to intellectually understand at this point, as I work with my mother’s written account of the segment of her life captured within her words, I will never be FREE to know JUST my side of the story unless I continue to pursue my own inner struggle to do so. It is only now as I work on ‘the next level’ with my mother’s words that I am beginning to see the context, the bigger picture, the whole contaminated sequence of events in my own childhood as they were put into place not so much by ‘my mother’, but by my mother’s all-pervasive mental illness.
My struggle with her words now means that I am sucked nearly completely under the death-inducing quicksand of her version of reality – very similar to how I was sucked under and into it without hope of escape or escape itself during the entirety of my infant-childhood. The process is exponentially complicated by the fact that in order for me to extricate myself from the experience of being both the victim and the survivor of my mother’s abuse I would have to be able to separate my own self from my own experience within her madness – at the same time I separate my self from her experience that created the hell of my infant-childhood.
At present I am empathizing with my own self both as the victim and as the survivor of my mother’s madness and abuse AT THE SAME TIME I am empathizing with MY MOTHER. According to the words I have just written in this post, I am evidently hoping to achieve something that might well be impossible. I WANT to reach a point of objectivity where empathy itself will END so that I can be an OUTSIDE viewer rather than being the INSIDE participant dancer that I always WAS – and probably will always BE – because THOSE experience built my body-brain at the same time they built themselves INTO my body-brain.
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So, I ask myself, “Why, Linda, are you torturing yourself by doing this work? What do you think you might be accomplishing? What are you hoping for?”
Like any other serious and deadly illness that affects our human species, severe abuse of infants and children (my best guess is) has a source. If the source can be identified more and more clearly, perhaps ‘cure’ can at the same time be progressively identified. The kind of severe abuse that I am focusing on cannot be understood by studying ‘something else’. The understanding must come from examining the ACTUAL illness itself – as directly as possible – from the inside.
I was not left without verbal language ability as was the victim in “Mockingbird Don’t Sing.” The uniqueness (and irony) of my particular situation is that I have now contained within my computer a fairly large body of my severe abuse perpetrator’s OWN words that cover a span of time during which I was her victim. I do not underestimate the potential for good that this situation presents.
As I work with her words I am beginning to see how my mother’s mental illness operated in her thinking, feeling and actions during this time span within the larger context of her life beyond what she did to me. At the same time that the disorganized-disoriented ongoing chaos of her mind prevents anything more than a few sporadic periods of (possible) clarity and lucidity to appear in her life chronicle, some hope for identifying the repeated patterns of her mental illness just MIGHT appear to me if I work at my job with her words carefully enough.
There is no doubt in my mind that these repeated patterns within the overall chaos that I am identifying within my mother’s chronicle are rooted and fundamentally grounded and anchored into her severe insecure attachment disorder. Rather than assuming I am finding symptoms and signs of her ‘mental illness’, no matter what it might be named, I am convinced that it was her insecure attachment disorder itself that dictated ALL the patterns of her life, not ‘just’ her severe and chronic abuse of me.
What this means to me, working as I am within the storm itself, dancing within the dance that was the pattern and form of my own childhood, is that if some outsider COULD have named my mother’s so-called ‘mental illness’ that label would have been naming the SYMPTOMS of her insecure attachment disorder. Her insecure attachment disorder – I believe – was the central and primary SOURCE of her malaise – on the physiological level where the changes began to happen to her certainly AT LEAST from the time that she was born.
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What my mother’s intentions actually were as she recorded her life upon the pieces of paper that found their way into my hands 50 years later no longer matter. The BOOK she had intended to write was never written. The BOOK I intend to publish that includes all of her words will be missing whatever editorship she would probably have done to her own words if she had been the one to publish them. Because her words exist as she wrote them, I take them to be more of a message stuffed into an invisible bottle and thrown into the sea of these 50 years of time that have passed since she wrote her words down.
In that passage of time the only thing that really matters to me is that ‘insecure attachment disorders’ have been ‘discovered’, named and classified. Yes, in this period of time the diagnostic category of Borderline Personality Disorder has also been formally ‘discovered’, named and classified. I am most uniquely able to recognize, identify and name my mother’s disoriented-disorganized insecure attachment disorder because as I ‘see’ it appear in patterns within her writing this same insecure attachment ‘disorder’ resonates within me.
This ‘special’ insider ability that I have to empathize not only with my own self but also with my mother will, if I can do this job right, allow me to chart the patterns of the SOURCE of my mother’s difficulties (including her abuse of me) – her insecure attachment disorder itself that eventually constellated itself into clear enough patterns that COULD have been called ‘mental illness’.
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Unlike the victim-survivor in the movie, “Mockingbird Don’t Sing,” I do have words. As I work to disentangle my mother’s version of reality from my own, I intend to find my own and use them. Once I have ‘organized and oriented’ the nearly completely shattered, fragmented, disorganized and disoriented collection of my mother’s words as she left them as she passed out of her life into as coherent a narrative-chronicle as I possibly can, I will be free to create my own version of THIS story under my own title, “Unspeakable Madness.”
In the process of THIS project, it will only be then that my own individualized verbal dance will begin. It is my hope of freedom for today that when I reach that point the words I will use will have meaning – because they will fundamentally be dead-on accurate and true.
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BY THE WAY: ON EMPATHY
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/07/01/midmorning1/
Conventional wisdom has long held that humans are by nature materialistic and self-interested. But scholar and writer Jeremy Rifkin argues in his new book that science is forcing us to rethink this notion, and that the growth of human empathy could help solve the problems that confront the world.
Guests
- Jeremy Rifkin: Author of “The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis.” He is president of the Foundation on Economic Trends.
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