+SILENT TRUTH – MISSING FROM MY PARENTS’ 29,000 WORDS IN THEIR JUNE 1957 LETTERS

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Having just completed the transcription of the nearly 29,000 words contained in the *JUNE 1957 LETTERS BETWEEN MOTHER AND FATHER I now face the most difficult task of all.  Do I do what I suggest in the title I have found for the collection of my essays if I ever publish them, “Breaking the Silence that Binds,” or do I let the silence of the words NOT written in my parents’ letters remain intact?

First of all, I know about the silence because I was there, and because 53 years later I can feel that silence now.  I know I feel it, because it upsets me.  “How dare I speak about what I know?”  “DARE” is a word my mother frequently used against her children, especially me.  “How DARE you look at me that way?”  “How DARE you – blah – blah – blah…..?”

How DARE I, 53 years later, speak my own truth about what I know about what went on in my family?  Well, do I dare?  Can I dare?  Will I dare?  It’s as if I stand at a silent, invisible boundary line at which I need to summon my courage, my willingness, my commitment to my own self (and to those who suffered abuse within a family similar to mine), and all of my ability to differentiate myself from both of my parents so that I CAN break this binding silence contained within these letters.

“Dive in, Linda.  What is most troubling you?”  I find it hard to think at this moment.  It’s like I am at the center of a powerful vacuum that sucks all my thoughts along with my whole version of my own reality away from me.  How do I begin?  I will simply locate the passages within my mother’s writing that I need to use my voice about.

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I can feel my fear.  I can feel the inner experience of DARING to challenge my mother, even now, all these 53 years later.  Where are my thoughts?  Where are my words?

First, there are seeds of my truth within these words from mother’s June 12, 1957 Wednesday letter to my father:

“Darling I can’t stand being away from you.  I must be with you.  I’ll never let anyone separate us again.  Never, never, not even the Army – oh darling, I love you.

We loved your letter and cards.  Linda didn’t get one – I hope you didn’t forget, I know you wouldn’t.  I gave her mine.  They were so proud and happy.  Come to think of it mornings and afternoons aren’t so bad, but far from good.  But from 4:00 on I am SICK!!  All this I’ve heard of mind over matter, I must put it into practice.  Can I??“

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Second, there are seeds of my truth within these words from my mother’s June 27, 1957 letter:

“Oh darling, my heart never ceases aching for you.  I had ‘the feeling’ this afternoon I should check again to see if there was mail again.  I usually only go in the morning but I had to go again and there was!

It was the letter written before the one I got this morning.  It was written Friday.  It’s funny to read them backwards.  I drove over to the little park in Glendora and let the kids play awhile, took a few impromptu pictures, which I’ll send to you, and read your letter there!  I took one close-up of Linda as she lost her 2nd front tooth today.  Isn’t nature wonderful, right on time?  Tonight the angel will visit her – usually you do that – I know.”

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Finally, the contrast I am going to speak about relates to this in her ‘fun filled’ descriptions in her June 27, 1957 Thursday night letter:

“I wish you could have seen John when he caught his trout!  He was so excited, he swung his line around and caught it in a tree.  Naturally, he had had several bites and near catches before he actually caught one.  It really was priceless!  He jumped up and down and exclaimed.

Cindy was such a ‘patient fisherwoman’ and soon caught a big one.  I took a picture of her holding the line with the fish on it, with the others standing close, admiring it.  J  I surely hope IT comes out!

Linda caught the biggest and is so proud!  We got home at 8:00 P.M. and so will cook them tomorrow!  Grandma will be here then, as I have errands in Pasadena (what a let-down) to do tomorrow.  I know she loves trout and I’m afraid the children might not eat it.

The only one that minded ‘hurting the fish’ was John.  He couldn’t stand to see it bled and naturally I had to get someone else to pull the hook out.  J  I was glad cleaning them was part of the price and I even had her cut the heads off.“

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OK.  Step one is completed.  I have used my net woven of my bravery and determination to snatch this collection of my mother’s words out of her letters, out of the context that she wrote them within, and I have moved them into MY universe – 53 years later.

How telling it is to me that the power of my mother’s severe abuse of me, coupled with my father’s unwillingness to EVER stop her or to even recognize that the abuse was happening, makes it this difficult even today for me to DARE to speak about what I know about my parents’ version of reality.

Now, as I try to locate MY OWN SELF, my own feelings, thoughts, words, perceptions in relationship to my mother’s words, I need to distill this down if I can into my own crystallized words about these letter passages.

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(1)  My mother’s Borderline reality began to take shape from the time she was very, very young.  The neglect, abuse, trauma and malevolent conditions that she was born into influenced the body-brain changes that led to her condition.

(2)  My mother’s Borderline reality was already well in place before she ever met and married my father on June 11, 1949.  They knew one another six months before the marriage took place.

(3)  My the time my oldest brother, John, was born on June 15, 1950 my mother’s Borderline reality had expanded to not only include the existence of her ‘perfect husband’, Bill, but also had grown to include the appearance of this firstborn ‘perfect son’.

(4)  A healthy, balanced relationship between my mother and her mother had been trashed beginning with my mother’s birth.  While I became the victim-pawn within the complex interplay of the disturbances between my mother and her mother, I was not the cause of them.

(5)  Patterns of chronic and severe abuse in a family happen because these patterns both grow into the family dynamics and shape them.  These patterns are especially well-disguised within a Borderline-based brain-nervous system-mind-self focused home.

(6)  These patterns are at the same time NOT detected because their disguise is perfect and because they have shaped every single interaction and transaction that occurs over time between the people that are part of the close family.

When my mother writes to my father in one of her June 27, 1957 letters, “We’re not ordinary people – we’re a close knit family and should never be separated!”  I believe she is recognizing within herself that her entire reality depends upon the ongoing patterns that were not only established within her own Borderline mind when she was a little girl, but also is recognizing that her ongoing reality is completely intertwined with my father’s presence in her life.

(7)  The patterns that formed the fabric of the ongoing interactions within our family worked because they were silent.  The silence of the truth about what was really going on was as completely necessary to maintain ‘reality’s existence’ as was the presence of my father.

(8)  The key point I know about the passages I selected above is that it wasn’t just the presence of my father in my mother’s life that was required for her reality to remain intact.  It was absolutely essential that my father completely understand my mother’s version of reality as it regarded me as the kingpin of her mad illusions.

My mother very effectively, efficiently and expertly manipulated how my father saw me throughout my entire childhood.  My mother had to convince my father of her mother’s love for me so that she could then justify and defend her abuse of me.

The pattern of the dynamics of my mother’s abuse of me with my father’s acceptance if not approval happened over time because:

(a)  My mother could ensure that my father knew she had undying love for him.

(b)  My mother could ensure that my father’s entire life involved his love for her at its center.

(c) My mother could ensure that my father could not understand what she did to me in any way than I ‘abused my mother’ by being such a terrible child.  My mother was ‘put upon’ by a ‘curse child’ – she bore her burdens with glorious magnanimity.  My mother created a pattern of reality that meant my father never questioned her version of the truth.

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In the two first passages I include here from my mother’s writings to my father, I know the truth is invisibly included in her words.  Both of my parents, whether they made the choices consciously or not, DID exactly choose what words they included within their letters.

Although my mother does mention their other three children in her letters, it is exactly and specifically Linda that she draws attention to in terms of her magnanimous ‘good mother’ actions toward me.  In both of these incidents she includes about me in her letter, she directly hooks my father – and his role as my father — into ‘the story’.

(a)  Father evidently ‘forgot’ to send Linda a card.  Magnanimous ‘good mother’ gives me hers.

(b)  Mother makes sure to mention that she took a picture ‘close up’ of just Linda as she hooks in my father by also drawing his attention to his usual role as the lost tooth routine.  Magnanimous ‘good mother’ takes his place and performs his job for him.

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In the third passage I included above a different dynamic is operating (from my point of view).  As mother describes the fishing adventures of her group of children, she does include Linda as one of the group.  This mention, to me, is not one that involves the kind of husband-father-conning-manipulation that she used in the first two passages.  In the fishing scene, she actually ‘forgot’ to separate me from the rest of ‘the pack’.

The problem with this thirdly-mentioned experience is that any time I was ‘accidentally’ left out of my mother’s psychosis regarding me at the same time I was ‘accidentally’ included as a member of the sibling group, I never, never, never knew when to expect my mother’s psychosis to reappear in some random violent extreme outburst against me.

I mention this fact here because these ‘happy Linda as part of the group’ experiences did as much to create major dissociational patterns in my ongoing experience of my life in the world as did the violence.  I never could anticipate ‘which was going to be which’.  I could not predict, I could not prevent, I could not understand any of it.

So when something good actually did happen, when I actually was allowed to be a child, it always happened not because I WAS a child, but happened because mother was in one of her “giddy-happy let’s-do-something-fun isn’t-this-fun” moods that NONE of us could understand.

NOTE:  My mother seems to have some peripheral comprehension of the difficulties her shifts of mental state, mood and attitude had on her children when she described this in the same letter where she talks about the fishing trip:

“Next door to us there’s a beautiful trailer court (I don’t think they allow children).  Mostly, the people seem to be retired.  It really is nice.  They have a lovely swimming pool, shuffle-board etc.  Some of them have their patios fixed so nicely with ferns, tropical plants etc.  We all enjoyed seeing it.  You can’t imagine how much I enjoy the children – they’re truly fun to be with – if no other adults are along.  When we’re alone I treat them more as adults.  We talk and laugh and have fun.  When other adults are there or in the car they’re treated as children and resent it.  I can’t blame them.  It must be hard (Pals and friends one minute and a mere child, the next).“

But it is obvious to me that even as she wrote these words, even as she noticed the process she described here, it doesn’t MEAN ANYTHING TO HER.  My mother remained consistently at the center of her own universe and everything that happened always happened to us with her at this center.

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With the exception of the simple report that I caught the biggest fish and I was proud (she doesn’t’ describe to my father what her reaction to my pride might have been), the other two examples regarding me have nothing to do with Linda.

In both of the other two events mother is the star player.  Father becomes the blind, manipulated hooked-into-my-mother’s-version-of-reality player.  All I am is the actress-prop being used to continue the solidification of the pattern-dynamics that HAD to be protected and maintained in the family even though my father was not physically present in the home.  There could be no lapse of pattern.

My mother had to SHINE.  My father had to see her SHINE.  My father had to stay entranced.  He had to see my mother SHINE as his wife.  He had to see her SHINE as a mother.  And, for the overall, overriding, overarching dynamic of my mother’s psychosis – with me at its center – to continue to operate as my mother’s Borderline madness HAD to have it happen, my father ESPECIALLY had to see my mother SHINE as MY magnanimously good mother.

My mother had to so comprehensively control the pattern-dynamics in her home that when she acted viciously toward me, even her insane, mad violence would be seen by my father as just another aspect of her SHINING ability to be this terribly BAD child’s magnanimous good mother.

To say that ‘my mother as martyr’ was an aspect of the pattern-dynamics of our home is such an understatement it’s almost ridiculous.  At the same time, my grandmother did the ‘martyr thing’ to near perfection.  Adding another bizarre twist, it was a part of my mother’s abuse litany against my father that HE played such an excellent martyr role!

All the while these dynamics were slithering around among the only grown-ups in my child life, it was ME that was being sacrificed.  I was not ‘a martyr’, I was martyred.

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I need to take my word-search detour here for a moment:

MARTYR

Etymology: Middle English, from Old English, from Late Latin, from Greek martyr-, martys witness

Date: before 12th century

1 : a person who voluntarily suffers death as the penalty of witnessing to and refusing to renounce a religion
2 : a person who sacrifices something of great value and especially life itself for the sake of principle
3 : victim; especially : a great or constant sufferer

MARTYRED

Date: before 12th century

1 : to put to death for adhering to a belief, faith, or profession
2 : to inflict agonizing pain on : torture

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As an infant-child I certainly had no ability to volunteer as a martyr.  At the same time, I was accused from birth of being sent as an agent of the devil to kill my mother, I was not given any means of defending myself.  I could not ‘renounce’ the devil!  I had no principle or religion to denounce.  I had been assigned a religion as being ‘the devil’s child’.

Yes, I witnessed.  Yes I sacrificed.  Yes, I greatly and nearly constantly suffered.  But this truth only appears in my parents’ letters by its silence.

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Letters: 

*JUNE 1957 LETTERS BETWEEN MOTHER AND FATHER

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+LINK POSTED HERE TO COMPLETED JUNE 1957 LETTERS BETWEEN MY PARENTS

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I just completed transcribing what exists of the June 1957 letters written between my parents after my father flew to Anchorage, Alaska to start his new job and look for housing so that the rest of his family could join him there:

*JUNE 1957 LETTERS BETWEEN MOTHER AND FATHER

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+ANOTHER ONE OF MY FATHER’S 1957 LETTERS TO MOTHER

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My parents 8th wedding anniversary was the day my father arrived in Anchorage (without my mother).  To my knowledge, the house they were living in when the final move to Alaska began to take place (with my father going up there 2 months ahead of the rest of us), our family was already living in the fourth house since I was born (perhaps it was the 5th).

As I read this next letter of my father’s I am posting here, I wondered about how those first 8 years were for them as a couple.  It was this statement my father makes in his letter that most caught my eye:

“I am proud of the way you’ve gotten along by yourself, and I worship you for the wonderful wife and mother that you are to me (and our children).”

I tend to think that if my father had been married to a woman who was healthy, my father might have been healthy.  As it was, it seems the whole pattern of my parents marriage actually was one of continued disintegration.  That they lasted as a married couple for 37 years before my father finally divorced my mother seems pretty amazing to me.

As I read these 1957 letters that they wrote to one another, I hear the echoes of what many in our culture might consider to be ‘romantic love’.  I think that two people who can compliment one another in relationship is far healthier than when two people seem to complete one another – but I’m not in the mood for commenting at the moment – so, here’s my father’s letter:

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June 24, 1957 – Anchorage, Alaska

[Mother wrote in the top margin of this letter while apart from dad and living the winter in Tucson, Arizona in 1966: – “Sounds so much like now, only it’s 9 years later and tonight I’m bitter, lonely and can’t even write you – I can’t – it’s like an old record playing ‘yes later’ over and over.”]

Dearest Mildred,

Don’t worry any more about my not getting your letters – I got four again today, the latest one postmarked Saturday.  All you need use for an address is:  c/o District Engineer, Anchorage, Alaska.  The box number etc. is the official address but it isn’t needed.  I think by now I’ve received all the mail that you sent to the APO box number in Seattle.

Oh, my Darling, I feel so sorry for all the troubles you’ve gone through.  I know how much has happened to you and how much you’ve had to do all by yourself.  I feel so helpless, as though I was sitting here wasting my time while you have so much to do.  I am proud of the way you’ve gotten along by yourself, and I worship you for the wonderful wife and mother that you are to me (and our children).  This is a trying time we’re gong through right now, and I swear I’ll make it up to you for the rest of our lives.  If you hadn’t been willing to do what you’re doing I never could have come here, so we are truly partners in everything we do.

I know more every day that we’re going to like it here, and on that glorious day when we’re all settled here we’ll both really begin to live again.  I die a little too every day that I spend without you, and I dread the days that lie just ahead.  I could never grow accustomed to living without you – instead it gets worse every single day that we’re apart.  I feel it most of all at night when I turn off the light and go to bed.  I could never sleep well alone again!  When the light’s on I can see where I am and see how alone I am, but when I lie down in the dark I feel that you should be there beside me – and when I’m half-asleep I reach out to hold you close to me.  That horrible empty feeling when my hand finds nothing but the wall – it would be impossible to describe if you didn’t feel it too.  Oh my Mildred, my life is only in you.  I won’t really live again at all until you are in my arms again.

You must take care of yourself and try to live some sort of a “normal” life while you’re there, get into a routine and have your meals on time and get enough sleep.  You do have a big load to carry, their’s [sic] no getting away from that, and you just have to take care of yourself!  I know there doesn’t seem to be anything but trouble and worries and waiting but please try to relax and have at least a little fun this summer.

Before you do any driving though, you’ll have to have a spare tire.  Go to a tire store and get a retread – not a new one – and don’t let them charge you over about $9.00 for the tire and tube.  It sounds like the car needs new spark plugs and a tune-up, go to a garage – George and Murray’s down the Hi-way is good – and have it done and I think the car will run O.K.  Don’t let them sell you an overhaul or anything else.  By the way – I forgot to tell you to use the 25 [cent] oil and regular gas in the car, anything better would spoil it.  J

This afternoon my boss “invited” me to go out and look at the runway paving that I’m working on, and he’s a real “company-man” so we got back too late for me to get to the Beneficial Finance office before they closed.  So I’ll take off in the morning and be there when they open up.  Then, I’ll go right over to the post office and mail it to you.  If it doesn’t get there the same time this does, go back in the afternoon and it might be there then.

I’ll ask you once more, although you may already have answered, what about writing to you at the Motel?

I’ve already written a card to Ben Wright and I’ll write him a letter soon.  Also I’ll send a post-card to all of our friends – although it will be hard not to make them all sound alive (I hope they don’t’ get together and compare them).

I agree emphatically about sending the card back to my mother!  She must have rocks in her head to think she can go right on as though nothing had ever happened  Believe me, I didn’t write to her for her sake – only to get it off my chest so I could forget about it!  [Linda note:  Nobody in the family has any idea what the conflicts were about between my parents and my father’s family.]

I’ll check on the price of the Chevy Station Wagon – just out of curiosity.  It would sure be nice to get it, but that’s another wild idea we’d better forget about – along with my idea of buying a house!  If we can just get settled here without going broke we’ll be doing well – without buying anything more.

I’m glad I’m in time in telling you about the stove.  I know how hard it is to part with our one remaining original appliance, but it would be completely useless here so sell it!  L

I know there was something else I wanted to say but I can’t remember it.  If it comes to me I’ll put a note in with the papers in the morning.

Try to tell the children how I love them and miss being with them, miss hearing their voices and hearing their prayers.  Every time I see a little child it reminds me of them and makes me all the more homesick.  As soon as I get payed [sic] I’ll send everyone a little gift – something Alaskan if I can find something that wasn’t made in Japan.  Good night now, my beloved Mildred, and remember:

[He drew little musical notes all around the edges of this]

‘Till I hold you in my arms,

I will hold you in my heart.

I love you sweetheart, I love you forever and for always, I Love You, Bill

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IN MEMORY OF MY BORDERLINE MOTHER:

Borderline Personality Disorder Symptoms / Diagnosis Treatment Coping
From Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD, your Guide to Borderline Personality Disorder

May is Borderline Personality Disorder Awareness month in the U.S.   What can you do to spread the word about BPD?   Forward this week’s newsletter to someone unfamiliar with the condition — help us educate the public about BPD.

BPD is Not What You Think It Is – Myths About BPD

Borderline personality disorder is a very real and serious mental illness. It is not a “personality problem” or just a set of maladaptive ways of coping with the world.

Fighting Stigma – Stigma and BPD

Perhaps the most important way to fight stigma in your own life is to engage in educating others about BPD. There is evidence that when people learn about the symptoms, causes, and treatments for BPD, their attitudes tend to change.

What is Borderline Personality Disorder?

What exactly is borderline personality disorder? How is BPD different from other disorders? What is the experience of a person with BPD like?

Getting Help for Borderline Personality Disorder

If you have BPD, finding treatment or support can be a confusing and frustrating process. Learn more about how to find the help you need. Finding a mental health professional (e.g., a psychiatrist, psychologist, counselor, or social worker) with whom you feel comfortable can be an important step toward better health.

Must Reads

What is BPD?
Symptoms of BPD
Diagnosis of BPD
Treatment of BPD
Living with BPD

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+MY FATHER’S FIRST LETTER TO MOTHER FROM ALASKA

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I am going to take a shortcut here and refer to a comment posted today to +ONE OF MOTHER’S 1957 LETTERS – INVOLVING MY GRANDMOTHER that relates to what I wanted to post today:

“Your mother manipulated your father by making him the most important person in the world and telling him she could not live without him. Your father was an enabler in allowing your mother to behave the way she did without consequences. Your grandmother seemed to “call” your mom on some of her parenting decisions. Your grandmother “knew” your mom in a way your father never would or could for that matter. If your mother would not have moved away from grandma, she would never have been able to raise her family the way she did. I do not believe your grandmother would have permitted your mom to treat you the way she did. Your mom knew this fact, on some level. Interesting letter.”

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I admit to myself that for all the progress I have made toward understanding my abusive childhood, I still have very little to say about my father’s role as my mother’s enabler and as the co-conspirator to the dynamics within my parents’ home.  One thing I am certain of, however, is that my father was an abused spouse.

I am not going to distract myself by taking the kind of research path I would need to take in order to begin to understand what spousal abuse does to its victim.  My sister remembers the fights during our childhood where mother abused father.  I don’t.  They are in blocked memory storage and that is exactly where I want them to stay.

From my perspective, my own story is too big and to hard to tell, too complicated and awful to allow me much leeway for rambling far off of my path so that I could better understand my father. As a consequence, his place in this world of madness that was my childhood is still vague to me, and unless I live a very long time and run out of other things to do, as far as I am concerned he can remain a foggy figure in a foggy world.  I don’t have it in me to make either HIM clear or to make clear his role in the whole dang mess.

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All I want to do right now is post a letter of his that was among the 1957 letters I transcribed last night.  It wasn’t in its own original envelope, so it surprised me when I found it inside the envelope of another letter from a different time.

This is the very first letter my father wrote to my mother after he left her and us kids in Los Angeles and arrived in Alaska.  I simply present it here as it stands – a stand-alone letter – knowing at the same time that when this letter is taken into context with this entire 2-month letter writing campaign that took place between my parents while they were apart, a reader could begin to see the ‘I better say what Mildred wants me to say when I write to her’ process unfold.

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June 11, 1957 – Anchorage, Alaska

My Dearest Mildred,

I’m writing this letter now because I know you’ll want to know I got here OK.  But I hate to write right now because I wanted to write only cheerful letters, and I’m afraid this one won’t turn out to be very cheerful.  I’m so lonely and blue and depressed right now, I’ve got a lump in my throat and I just feel like H ____ .

Everything is fine as far as the trip up here is concerned, and I’ll tell you about that in a minute, it’s just that feeling I knew would hit me sometime or other.

I’ve given up so much to come here, left so much behind me, and I feel like a little lost child.  I’ll get over it soon, when I get on the job and begin to meet some people, but right now – today – I wish I’d never heard of Alaska.  I don’t know how long it will be before you’re letters catch up with me, and that makes things worse.  I think tomorrow I’ll be able to give you a better address, and then in four or five days after that I’m sure to have a letter.  J

To get back to my trip, I stayed last night at the Olympia in Seattle, then at 6:00 this morning I went to another place where I was picked up by an Army bus and taken to McChord [sp?} Air Force Base near Tacoma.  I got there at 8:15, and at 10:00 I was on the plane and taking off for Alaska (that magic name that I’ve talked about for so long).  It was raining in Washington this morning, although yesterday was a beautiful day; and we climbed rapidly to 19,000 feet.  From there we could look out over the blanket of clouds that covered the earth completely, and it was like that all the way until we hit the coast of Alaska where the clouds disappeared almost completely.

I had a good view of the country all the way from the coast to here, and it was beautiful.  There’s still a lot of snow on the higher mountains south of here, but very little on the ones I can see from here.  The weather here is pretty warm right now, very pleasant.  The trip took 5 ½ hours, but we gained two hours on the clock so it was only 1:30 when we got here.  It’s about 5:30 now, but it’s 8:30 where you are – that makes it seem even farther doesn’t it?  I reported in to the District’s Personnel Office, was sent to the Housing Office, and given a room.  I say room, and that’s about all it is!  A room with a cot, a closet, and a chest of drawers, and a chair, period.  If you ever had any doubts about me wanting to find a place for us to live you can be certain I’ll want to get out of here as soon as I possibly can.

I didn’t talk to anyone about my job yet, I’m to report again at 8:00 tomorrow morning for that.  And as soon as I get oriented on that I’m going to start inquiring about housing.  After I finish this I’ll go look for a place to mail it, and a place to eat supper, then I’m coming back here and go to bed.  It’s been a long day and I’m tired.  Tomorrow I’ll take a bus downtown and look around, and by tomorrow night I should be able to give you a lot more information.

I can imagine how things have been for you, and I’m sorry to burden you with my morose feelings.  But you can do the same with me and we can cheer each other up.

Please be careful of yourself, my darling, you mean everything to me.  I’ve worried so much about you and the children since I left, being so far away from you and out of touch for so long.  And I love you with all my heart and soul, Mildred, I wish I could write it better but you know how much.

I hope the roses got there on time, kiss each one for me and I’ll feel it across the miles.

I wish so much that we could be together, but someday soon we will be and then this will all seem like a dream we had.  Kiss each of the children for Daddy and know that I love you and think of you always, Bill

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+IT MIGHT BE JUST FINE TO RIP THE JUGULAR VEIN OUT OF ‘BORDERLINE’

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What if we really can prevent most so-called mental illnesses?  I think we can – but being silent about the truth is not going to get us there.

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As I dig holes by my fence to plant my bare root roses in, as I sweat the job out in the heat of the desert sun now because I chose to write while it was cooler outside instead of run outside and get to the day’s job immediately, I am thinking – and thinking hard not only with my two brain hemispheres (who each see life differently from one another) but also with my senses, with my emotions, with my body and its memories.

I see an image that has been in my mind since the early days of my Alaskan childhood on the mountain homestead:  When wolves are hungry and they decide they want a giant moose for dinner, all the have to do is gather together as a pack, chase down the moose, assign one wolf to race up front while the rest remain at the rear.  The pack tears out the Achilles tendon of one of the moose’s hind legs followed immediately by the wolf up front tearing out its jugular vein.  Great for the wolves.  Very bad for the moose.

As I think about this process of nature, I think also about how far behind we would all be if nobody had ever been willing to break the conspiracy of silence about cancer.  If speaking about cancer had remained taboo, think about what we would have all lost.  I don’t have to detail it.

Borderline Personality Disorder is as serious a disease as is cancer.  By joining the conspiracy of silence about telling the truth about this disease, I would be removing my efforts from the side of “Let’s get real about this disease and do something about it,” and joining the ranks of the timid.

Along with the near volcanic-sized eruption of new neuroscience facts about the impact of trauma in childhood on the developing body-brain, comes the very real possibility that not only is Borderline Personality Disorder probably nearly completely preventable, but so might be the vast majority of so-called mental illnesses.

Considering the facts, am I willing to remain silent about the truth of my story and demote myself to the ranks of, “Gee, I really have nothing useful to add, but I sure do like to complain about my childhood – thanks for giving me audience?”

I believe IN THE NEAR FUTURE, when all the attachment and the infant-child developmental experts put their heads together, they will come to understand that what we call ‘mental illness’ – no matter which one and under which name we may call it – is a result of a developing infant-child’s immune system response to extreme stress from inadequate caregiving that IS an attack on the body.

This means that although we cannot currently cure ‘mental illness’ there is very possibly a very common sense means to accomplish its prevention:  Adequate parenting.

I would rather put my energy into thinking about how to accomplish the changes that can lead to improved parenting than put my energy into enabling the silence about the causes and consequences of ‘mental illness’ – along with possibilities for its prevention – because of my reluctance to NAME the life-threatening disease of my mother’s (the same one that determined how she died at the end).

So if naming my mother “My Borderline Mother” is the equivalent of tearing out the Achilles tendon of this disease and bringing it down by its jugular vein forever – well, perhaps my Word Warrior self truly is out there with a wolf pack.

Don’t worry – still thinking —— nothing decided yet.

NOTE:  In our language-culture it’s OK to say, “I have cancer” rather than “I am a cancer.”  We need to improve our logic!  We do not = our illnesses.  At the same time, I realize that I cannot think of one aspect of my mother’s life that was not filtered through her illness!

I am finding nothing in the current research literature that even suggests that we are born with a so-called mental illness like we are born with our blood type.  Research is far from being advanced enough to understand the interactions between the influence of environmental factors on how genes manifest.

What is known (in my opinion) is that the same genes that are connected to the greatest gifts of our species are linked to risk factors that can more easily result in ‘mental illness’ if the genes are told early in development that the world is hostile and malevolent place.  Giftedness is ‘expensive’ in genetic terms.  I believe that the more gifted a newborn is (even before birth) the more their eventual well-being is put at risk by inadequate early parenting conditions during the beginning of their body-brain development.

“Mental illness’ is, in my opinion, just a species-wide signal, or means to communicate about the conditions of the world that MADE the individual the way that they turned out.  Looking at my mother, it is obvious that something was very wrong with her childhood environment!  Her early world was malevolent in some significant way that forced her immune system to take a detour in her development – that activated her gifted genes in a different way than they would have been activated in a benevolent world as a response.

++

It is not to the hardy and naturalized native desert plants that I am paying my closest attention to in my yard right now as I dig them wide holes, mix great amendments into their soil and as I place them in line with my soaker irrigation hose.  I am paying this extra special attention to the ‘gifted’ plants, the resplendent plants – my roses.

If I neglect to care for the native plants, they will manage pretty dang well all by themselves.  But if I want the roses to survive, and then bloom their every loving hearts out, I cannot expose them to much of a range of deprivation, now, can I?  Gifted people are no doubt just about this dependent upon extra careful tending during their developmental stages.  I would stake my cotton socks on a bet that this is true!

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+WORD WARRIOR NEWS: “GO IN PEACE, MY MOTHER.”

alchemynow4 Comments

+++++++++++++++++

No reader of the autobiographical writings of my mother, Mildred Ann Cahill Lloyd, is going to be privy to what the readers of this blog already know as the truth about Mildred.  I haven’t quite worked my own self around this new turn of events, my intention to allow my mother to speak to anyone who wishes to hear her words – just in her own words.  But I do suspect that the process I might go through as I prepare her manuscript might be something akin to forgiveness.

I had a strange realization overcome me last week.  That’s exactly how it happened.  I was overcome with a thought that seemed quite unusual and odd to me.  I had no idea how it showed up in my mind.  I tried to track its origins.  I looked backwards at my thinking for the day to see if I could find what this new thought about my mother might have been connected to in my earlier thinking patterns.  Nothing.  I could find not one single lead-in line of thought that put me where I ended up.

Suddenly, out of this nowhere that I could find, I had this thought:  “What if when we get to the other side and meet our Creator, and are faced with the truth of our actions in this lifetime including what we have done that has truly HURT other people – what if our Creator blankets us with forgiveness and washes all our transgressions completely away as if they have never happened — and it’s not enough?”

Suddenly I was crying.  There I was outside with my raggedy dirt covered clothes, wearing mismatched rubber work gloves because each of the other glove in the pair had already disintegrated as I worked in the yard.  There I was, walking across the yard with a 5-gallon dirt smudged plastic bucket full of rocks (I have no wheelbarrow), when this thought hit me like an apple had just fallen from the sky and knocked some unfamiliar new sense into my head.

“What if my mother is on the other side, having been granted complete forgiveness by her God, but is still as sad as a soul can be because, stripped of the physiological changes and sickness of her mortal flesh and bone body, she now understands what she did to me how terribly she hurt me and the rest of her family.  What if she cannot be free, cannot be happy, cannot move on in her new life, without my forgiving her?”

Suddenly at the instant this thought came to me I understood what forgiveness might be for me, what it mean, and what it might be needed for.  The thought was so foreign that I sloughed it off like I might a bug that just appeared on my shoulder.

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But I woke up this morning remembering the trace of something I was dreaming last night that had something to do with thinking very hard about finding exactly the very best thing to do for people I have met in my life that I could never quite stand for something they did – something that I could not stand by them for, something that did not let me stand to have these people in my life.

My sense this morning about this dream is that for all of the people that I have decided I could not stand – not stand what they did, or who they were in my life – I found a way to make what the 12-steppers might call an amend.  Of course in the dream world different rules about who and what is safe or not safe are different.  In the dream I was safe to find my own way to – essentially – forgive them, I guess.

As I awoke this morning I knew I came out of a dream where I was standing with a palette of oil paint colors in my left hand and a 1/2″ paintbrush in my right in front of one of these people’s canvas of a painting they had wanted to complete all of their lives but could not.  In the dream I knew exactly how this person wanted the painting to look, and I was completing it for them – perfectly.

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There is something about this discovery I had last night in conversation with my daughter that contains some element of my forgiveness of my mother.  I guess what struck me hardest on the head last week as the invisible apple clunked me into the realization that God’s forgiveness of our transgressions in this lifetime might NOT BE ENOUGH to remove terrible inner suffering from the people who have hurt others was my awareness of my own understanding that IF this might be true, IF my mother needs my forgiveness to be set free I would find a way to do that for her.

Maybe my act of publishing my mother’s words exactly as she wrote them will not ACTUALLY or REALLY be an act of forgiveness.  Maybe it will not ACTUALLY or REALLY set her free or remove her great sorrow.  I ACTUALLY know nothing about what goes on in the next life.  But for me, in this lifetime, it feels like an act of my forgiveness of her – to me.

It feels like an action on my part related to mercy toward my mother to fulfill a wish of hers she always had to publish her story of her Alaskan homesteading adventures.  Her sickness and her madness stole away from her all of the truest hopes for her lifetime.  Writing and publishing was perhaps, from the outside, one of the least significant of the losses of her life due to her illness.  But I am the one that ended up not only with her writings that survived her death, but with the motivation to transcribe them and to publish them.

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I am still framing in context my relationship both to my mother and to the word she wrote in terms of us both being Word Warriors.  I think about her uncountable acts of aggression toward me while I was powerless, without any weapon, unable to defend myself against her or to escape.

At the same time I think of a conversation I had with a man not too long ago.  I described a scenario to him.  “You are at war with your greatest enemy.  Both of you are expert swordsmen and well armed.  You have both fought your way to the top of a great hill.  Your enemy finally admits defeat, lays his sword at  your feet and stands now powerless against you.  What would you do?”

The man I was talking to replied quite simply, “I would cut off his head.”

I have what could be referred to now as the distinct advantage over my mother.  I am alive in this world with her words at my disposal.  She is dead.  What I do now with my Word Warrior power will determine the fate of my mother’s words.  I  am choosing to set my mother’s story free.

I will not hold my mother’s written words captive.  I will not hold them hostage.  I will not demand a ransom for their freedom.

Because being human involves imagination (that’s the way our brains got made), and because writing is a manifestation of our gifts of imagination, I can say that using the analogy of the image I just presented about the two men in mortal combat, what I will not do is pick up my mother’s Word Warrior sword and chop her head off with it.

In my imagination I am going to use the equivalent of my ‘alchemynow’ powers in regard to my mother’s sword of words.  I am going to transform her sword into a carefully folded elegant rice-paper crane.  All her words are written upon the paper that crane is made from.  I am going to carry that sword across the globe of my mind to the shores of the Ganges River.  I am going to kneel upon the shore, place this crane gently upon the water, say these words, “Mother, I completely and forever forgive you for every hurt you did to me.”

Then I am going to give that little crane a gentle nudge with the tip of my finger to send it out into the current where it can float away.  I will stand to watch it disappear into the distance at the same time I know there is healing for me in letting that crane go free.

Ganges River Dolphin - India’s National Aquatic Animal

This does not mean that I am free of the painful and difficult experience of finishing the process of transcribing these remaining letters.  But this pain is mine, not my mother’s.  For whatever reasons my mother’s body-brain was made in such a way in this lifetime that she could not feel for me what I can feel for her.  The abilities I have are gifts my mother did not have.  I want to use them for good, and I want to use them wisely.

The Ganges is a polluted and wounded river.  My mother was a polluted and wounded woman.  If I think about my mother’s writings as being the river of her words, I am not going to pollute them by adding in my own.   I will simply publish her collection with a blessing:  “Go in peace, my mother.  Go in peace.”

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This comment just in to MY BORDERLINE MOM

chasingfairies

Hi,
It is okay for me if you want to post my comment and also okay if you don’t. Mostly I would like to express my personal feelings about your blog (basically one particular thing).

First, I read your blog on occasion. I am DID and can relate to what you write about. I think you do a wonderful work with your blog and it does help others (at least it helps me).

The thing that bothers me is how you slam your “BORDERLINE” mother. I know everything you went thru was terrible (I have my terrible experiences) but as a BPD mother it really hurts me how you always refer to her as “Borderline Mother” as if all borderline mothers are terrible monsters. I am DID and Borderline and anorexic and . . . . I have 4 outside kids who belong to a 14 yr. old alter who no longer wants them because they are not “babies” any more. I have stepped in and am working really hard to be the best mom I can be. Most of the time my BPD is contained inside (comes with a lot of “inner self-harm” because it does not get released). I do not want that crap released onto these kids.

When other people read your site and are not real familiar with BPD they will assume all BPD moms are out right crazy. Then if they come across my blog and read that I am BPD they will assume I unleash that same crazy stuff onto my kids and I do not. I wish you not refer to your mom as terrible, crazy “Borderline” mom (though I am sure she was). Maybe you could mention she was (is) borderline once or twice and then just refer to her as “crazy, horrible, terrible” instead of slamming the borderline word around when referring to her.

I cringe somewhat when I come to your site, though I like it, because I believe all borderline moms do not behave as such on the outside. I have begged my psychiatrist to remove that label from me but I know I have it. I just hate the way people out there slam it so frequently.

Thanks for listening to me rant! I only wanted to point it out to you. I will still read your site anyway I just do not need to be reminded about how terrible I am.

Thanks,
Haley

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My response:

alchemynow

Dear Haley

I just copied your comment over to the end of the post I just wrote: +WORD WARRIOR NEWS: “GO IN PEACE, MY MOTHER.”

at https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/2010/05/16/word-warrior-news-go-in-peace-my-mother/

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Thank you very much for posting your thoughts and feelings.

When I use these two words in connection to one another, “Borderline mother,” I am always and specifically referring to MY mother. At least that is what I try to do. When I include information on Borderline Personality Disorder I try to do that by referring to expert and professional descriptions and information about the ‘condition’ from the outside.

In reading your response I will make the clearest effort that I can from now on to make even more of an effort to keep these distinctions as clear as I can.

I of course can not tell this for sure, but in reading your words I perceive that you express three things I can see here that my mother never had toward me (and only peripherally demonstrated toward anyone else, including her other 5 children): (1) the ability to self-reflect, (2) the ability to connect consequences with actions, and (3) the ability to experience care, concern and compassion for the well-being of your children.

Without having these three abilities, my mother was a lethal weapon and an extremely dangerous mother.

The shortcomings related to diagnosis of so-called ‘mental health categories’ and the cultural stigmas connected to them is a problem within our society at large: http://www.jwoodphd.com/borderline_personality_disorder.htm and http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/b/borderline_personality_disorder/wiki.htm#wiki_Origin_of_the_term

There is enough neuroscientific research appearing to suggest that before much more time passes, it will be possible to diagnose something akin to what is now called Borderline Personality Disorder far more accurately by watching scans of a person’s brain operating while performing certain specific tasks.

When this time comes, I see that the diagnostic process will be very similar to the ones used now to find and diagnose something as problematic, life threatening and difficult to treat as are breast cancers discovered through mammogram procedures today.

It was not that long ago in the past that ‘having cancer’ was considered as a shameful thing. We are socially removing that stigma.

It was not that long ago in the past that child abuse was also a taboo topic for public discussion.

I make every effort to connect what my mother did to me to the suffering my mother experienced during her formative years that changed her into the terribly abusive mother she became. Nowhere do I EVER say that my mother was a bad or an evil person.

The point you make today is not only an extremely important one, but is one that is appearing at a critically important time in my own writing process. I thank you for this. I will enlist everyone on my end that is involved in the process of preparing my book on the experiences of my childhood to help me consider how best to approach the legitimate and important point you are heart-fully making making here.

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I consider my mother (who was never diagnosed with this disorder first named in 1984) to have been at the severe end of the Borderline Personality Disorder spectrum. My concern so far has been that if a mother as severely abusive as mine was could so completely hide her abuse and so completely manipulate her home environment that nobody on the outside ever suspected the abuse was occurring, how does anyone even today have a chance to intervene and rescue any child living with this kind of abuse?

I consider the entire matter of child abuse to be a life-and-death concern. I would rather not be an inconsiderate ‘bull in a China shop’ and trample all over other people who have been given this diagnosis or help create a stampede of others who would do the same. Yet because I believe that severe Borderline mothers have the physiological constitution that makes them about the most dangerous abusive parents possible, I have as yet not chosen to back off from assigning ‘Borderline’ as a prefix to the term ‘my mother’.

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I make no pretense (at least that I know of) to tell anyone else’s story other than my own. In my most recent process within the past 24 hours, I have even realized that my mother’s own words need to be published without my side of the story being presented at all in connection with my mother’s writings. That is a HUGE step for me because I have always believed that if I could somehow bring the light of the true reality of my mother’s violent, dangerous and consistently abusive nature into the telling of my mother’s story that it might be able to help someone in ‘the public’ rescue a child preyed upon as abusively as I was.

Yet if nobody can ‘read the mind’ of a Borderline, as this article suggests

http://profs.bpdworld.org/articles/The%20Borderline%20Empathy%20Effect.pdf

I will not be able to accomplish what I hoped for, anyway.

I am not yet able to think fully about what you are saying. I obviously retain my own bias in regard to my mother. I know fully that there are readers of this blog who DO have something to say about this topic. Please respond. Put within your comment, as this reader did, your feelings about having your comment published or not – I will of course honor your request. But, your opinion IS NEEDED here! And I thank you again, Haley as I thank other readers for their comments even before they are received.

+++++++++++++++++

+WORD WARRIOR NEWS: SETTING FREE MY MOTHER’S WORDS

alchemynowLeave a comment

++++++++++++++++++++++

I shared a long telephone conversation tonight with my daughter about the writing work I am doing, and between us something has become clear for me regarding the ebook I will soon be ready to publish that will contain my mother’s writings.

I have decided to remove any editorializing I might be tempted to do with my abusive Borderline Mother’s writings and let them hit the road of publishdom intact as she wrote them.  That isn’t an easy thing for me to do.  Yet, given the truth that virtually no one can really understand the mind of a Borderline, I understand that at this point it really does me no good to try to convince anyone about what was really going on between the lines of the words my mother wrote in her diaries and letters.  I am not even going to try.

I know what went on between the lines of her writing.  But if I were to try to tell that truth along with her words, nothing good can come out of that.  A book published with what’s between the lines of her writing would literally have nothing to say.  The words between her lines are invisible, and for now I need to leave things that way.  I need to just let my mother’s voice speak from the grave – 8 years now since the day of her passing – in her own words as she wrote them.

Perhaps by opening my hands and letting go of my efforts to convince anyone of the truth about my mother, and about her life the best of what might come out of my efforts might come about in surprising ways.  If I can’t show anyone, can’t tell anyone, if her madness really was unspeakable (to her!), then I give up.  I simply give up and let go.

It seems strange to me that I can say at this moment that my mother has a right to be heard exactly in her own words with none of mine added except for the smallest amount of clarification concerning physical details of her story that might not be clear to readers.  I am making this choice.  I want to publish all of her writings first time around intact.  That means, as those who have read her letters on the blog know, that the text will be bulky.  This makes ebook (kindle, ipad, etc.) the perfect medium for her work.

The pages can ramble and flow.  Readers can scan and scroll in the ebook format.  No tree will give its life.  I can live with that.

Readers will be able to read her version of her life.  Then I will publish my life.  These two versions of reality will not match, as my readers here certainly know.  I will give no clue to readers of mother’s writings about her Borderline condition or about her abusive nature.  Only at the very end, in an epilogue will I introduce the truth and steer readers toward ‘the rest of the story’.

As I prepare to set my mother’s writings free of me, I prepare to set myself free from her.  She had her story, her version of reality within her Borderline world.  I am free to have my own.  There is no way to build a bridge between her world and mine.  There is no way to translate her words or her reality.  I am not going to try.

I do hope to publish a final volume to these letters.  In that volume I will describe and discuss how divided my mother’s reality was from mine – and from others.  But for now I am OK with this.  In fact, I don’t see that her writings can be published in any other way.

Readers will come to their own conclusions.  My mother’s story, and our family’s story is unique all by itself.  I will let it stand, and do my own writing my way.  (Of course I don’t have any idea now what title mother’s writings will be published under, but that will come).  I just need to finish this transcription job, and get her words off of my table.

++++++++++++++++++++++

+BACK FROM TOWN – TIRED BUT GLAD TO BE HOME

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+++++++++

I’m back from town now (a very little town, very short trip).  I ran into people I know – brought to mind some repeated questions:

“Why do you do this work with your mother’s letters if it hurts you/makes you sick/doesn’t make anything better/when you don’t need to do it?”

I guess suddenly it looks like a sacrifice.  Nothing wrong with making sacrifices.  I believe something in the work I do will help someone else.  So I sacrifice for that.

Also, it is very good to get back here to my very quiet little corner of the world.  I am armed with ice cream, mile and crackers – steer manure, garden soil, sphagnum moss, flower fertilizer – another bag of Portland cement.

I am tired now.  That’s OK.  I added a few little thoughts to my previous post – now, time for a rest.

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+IT’S IN THE BODY: TAKING THE TRAUMA AND THE DRAMA OUT OF RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHERS

alchemynowLeave a comment

+++++++++++++++++++++++

Here’s a quick note:  I just spent 90 minutes in telephone conversation with a friend I’ve had for 30 years.  It was wonderful.  But I wanted to take a minute before I run on into town to write down here something that became very clear during that conversation.

When a person is in close relationship with anyone else – children, spouse, intimate friend – even less close relationships with coworkers and others – there can be patterns that will best be dealt with if we can depersonalize problematic interactions and step back – way back!

Attachment disorders and all so-called ‘mental disorders’ take place within the body.  Changes in patterns of information transmission in the body always show themselves in how the BODY of a person responds to and within their environment.

Our culture is very short on realizing that the MIND is not the problem.  What happens within the body, brain, and nervous system – especially within our stop and go autonomic nervous system (ANS) – which is our calm-connection – stress response (fight, flight, etc) system can determine how a PERSON is because they live in and with their body.

I saw the image of two people taking a pleasant walk down the road of their lives together (in any kind of interaction).  Suddenly, one of the people trip and fall down.  Maybe they didn’t see a stick, a stone, a pothole in their way.

So the other person turns to say something to their partner, a low and behold, nobody is beside them.  This person who has not fallen has to stop, turn, look to find where back there their partner is.  They can walk back to help them.  They can erupt in rage that their partner has abandoned them.

In the worst of trauma drama situations, the falling partner grabs onto the person beside them and takes them on down, too.

We don’t gain objectivity, detachment, or our own clear sense of who we are in the world separate from other people if we don’t understand that what is most often blocking the pathway of someone else – those sticks and stones and troublesome potholes – are

physiologically in the body!  Often our body’s reactions take us completely by surprise – bowling us over, sucking us under, getting us stuck – tripping us and making us fall so we can skin our knees – and maybe not even be able to get up again.

When a person experiences anxiety, depression, eruptive uncontrolled rage and irritability, wide ranges in mood states, shame-based reactions — and so much more — all these changes are happening at the speed of light within the body itself.  I say speed of light because they happen as the electrical signals between the cells happen.

As long as we cut our ‘mind’, ‘brain’ and ‘self’ off from the body that keeps these others alive, we miss our greatest opportunity for removing trauma drama from our lives.  How thrilling is it to realize that ‘it’s just my body’ responding this or that way – ?  I mean this literally.  It is not a thrilling trauma drama reenactment to be able to recognize instantly when something in our body has happened that is affecting us now.  We can simply recognize these changes, understand how they affect us, and begin to be able to gain increasing CONSCIOUS control over our life.

Simply put – nothing could be more complicated.  But it is NOT impossible for us to accomplish as adults (obviously difficult for children).

For adults, it’s important to realize when someone we care about has had or is having one of these mishaps.  No, we didn’t cause it (can’t control it, can’t cure it).  How DO we react?  Get mad, blame self or other, get knocked down with them, get stuck so we can’t get out?  Do we turn around and help, sit down by the side of the road and whistle Dixie while our buddy figures it all out and ‘gets better’?  Do we go back for them, tow them out, or walk on ahead into our own life and leave them far behind?

Tripping on the pathway and falling down takes all kinds of time out of living a good life.  We often find ourselves trying to anticipate what is going to appear ahead to trip our partner so we can perhaps remove the stumble factor for them.  This helps us keep them beside us on OUR walk because that’s what having a relationship is.  Well………  sorry to say, more on this later……. I’m taking myself on a walk now right out the door, into my car, and………

+++++++++++++++++++++++

+UNSPEAKABLE MADNESS: INSIDE A CHILD ABUSING BORDERLINE MOTHER’S MIND

alchemynowLeave a comment

+++++++++++++++++++

Oh, lordy, I see that the entire article Dr. Bruce Perry refers to about Borderline Personality Disorder — in his new book, Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential–and Endangered by Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz  — is available for public viewing online at this link:

The borderline empathy effect: Do high BPD individuals have greater empathic ability? Or are they just more difficult to ‘‘read’’?

By Judith M. Flury, William Ickes, William Schweinle

While I haven’t begun yet to read Perry’s book, I have begun to thumb through it, beginning with a search of his index for information specifically about the Borderline condition as it might relate to my understanding of my abusive mother and what she did to me.

As Perry succinctly summarizes this article he mentions, this study found that Borderlines are very likely to have enough of a ‘social’ right brain to be able to read other peoples social cues-minds, but nobody else can read the Borderline’s – because a Borderline brain is JUST TOO DIFFERENT from normal for anyone with an ordinary mind to comprehend.

Because I am nowhere near ready yet to approach the reading of this article, I will take Perry at his word that both he and these researchers know what they are talking about.  Perry also mentions in his two paragraph presentation of this Borderline mental condition that the “character in the film Fatal Attraction, a movie I don’t intend to ever see, was a Borderline.

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While this ‘weird brain-mind’ information is affirming and confirming to me about what I have experienced, learned and know about my mother and the 18 years of abuse I went through thanks to her advanced Borderline condition, it doesn’t improve how I feel at this moment.

My return to complete the transcription of my mother’s remaining letters has put me on trauma-trigger overload.  I could say I’m like a space shuttle with damaged heat tiles trying to approach reentry back to earth.  At the same time I know that reading my mother’s 1957 (from the time right before my 6th birthday), I also know that I have vowed to myself to complete this job.

Perry’s reference to the ‘different mind’ of the Borderline that ordinary people cannot comprehend (I’d have to read the article above to see if they mention whether or not Borderlines are better equipped to read EACH OTHERS minds) does give credence to my sense as I read my mother’s letters that NOBODY CAN SEE HER MADNESS IN THEM.  “It’s NOT just me,” I can tell myself.  “NOBODY could see the madness of her mind.”

This also confirms that I have found exactly the right title to stick onto the front end of her writings when I publish them:  UNSPEAKABLE MADNESS.  If nobody can comprehend the Borderline mind, then OF COURSE we then correspondingly lack any ability to speak about it.  That’s true for those of us who were raised from birth by an abusive Borderline, and it’s true also for those on the outside who could not see what was happening THEN and are inexplicably (to us) prevented from understanding the depth of our stories when we try to speak about them NOW.

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My mother’s letters are triggering implicit, or body memories that are so impacting my body that I cannot eat or sleep right now.  I have to talk to myself when I step into the shower (I don’t have a bath tub) about being able to tolerate the feel of the water hitting my skin.  The water seems to POUND on the surface of my body.  All the thousands of blows I received as a child are in my body in memory that is very close to the surface right now – way too close.

Until I have finished transcribing these 50 or so remaining letters, I will be in some risky and very uncomfortable limbo danger zone – like out in space without the ability to protect myself completely from the consequences of this work.  My ‘heat tiles’ that will allow me reentry back into my present time and space of my life will be repaired when this job is done, though I will remain bruised and ICKY for some time afterward.

I know this.  I also know that I cannot afford an editor to prepare ALL of her letters for print and publication.  This last job has to be done by ME, even before a single one of her words can be uploaded through Kindle publishing.

But by the time I reach the final reading of her letters for editing I will be able to know that her ACTUAL words I am encountering now in her handwriting, in these envelopes, in these physical, material paper forms that she touched as she created this written record I have to face in the transcription process, will be buried outside in my compost pile for the worms to eat.  I will then be working ‘with a memory outside of a memory’ because her digitalized words on my computer screen are one step more remote to me than are these physical remnants of her life I am confronting right now.

Right now I am unwrapping my mummified mommy in every envelope I touch, every piece of paper I pull out, unfold and begin to read.  The contaminated dust of her mind is still here, preserved in her writings.  The implications for good with this collection as they provide this comprehensive view of a child abusing Borderline mother is profound.

I can do this job, I can complete it because I WILL it so.  My greatest hope is that someone will pay attention to her words as they reflect the mysterious and nearly unknowable-from-the-outside view of am abusive  Borderline brain-mind.

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I am reminded of the well-chosen title of this book about Borderline Personality Disorder:  Lost in the Mirror, 2nd Edition: An Inside Look at Borderline Personality Disorder by Richard A. Moskovitz

Although I haven’t read this book because I do not want to ‘contaminate’ my own thinking, sensing and knowing about my mother and her condition, I recognize the truth in this book’s title.  I think about the value that the collection of my mother’s writings will offer to anyone interested in understanding this ‘unknowable, unseeable, incomprehensible, invisible, undetectable’ kind of human brain-mind we now call Borderline Personality Disorder.

It is my opinion that because most people who suffer from so-called mental illness DID suffer from unsafe and insecure early attachments to their caregivers — and Perry’s book on empathy goes into great detail about how our current society is creating a national condition of ‘relational poverty’ that I see as nearing a national crisis of insecure attachment disorders —  suffered from neglect, maltreatment and abuse on some level.  Those deprivations along with direct malice change the developing body-brain.  They directly change the physiological ability to utilize human empathic abilities.

Our growing national ‘relational poverty’ is creating an increased risk for Borderline conditions within our population.

Any professional who works with ‘mental illness’ (as well as infant-child abuse survivors themselves) must be able to recognize patterns within their infant-child abuse survivor clients that mirror or mimic  Borderline.

My mother’s letters and diaries, I still believe, will provide the most comprehensive published opportunity to actually experience the reality of the Borderline condition as a Borderline sees it within ONE set of their brain-mind mirrors – in my Borderline mother’s words.

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In today’s modern world of electronic communication and cell phone connections, I believe it would be nearly impossible for any survivor of Borderline madness in their childhood to put together the kind of comprehensive, serial pattern of Borderline thinking that my mother’s letter contain.

Although her letters after she arrived in Alaska, written to her own mother who HAD to be one of the main contaminating influences that impacted my mother’s development, it is particularly within this batch of 1957 letters that my mother’s and father’s patterns of relational insecure attachment disorder becomes most clear and apparent.  Facing this picture of my parents in these 1957 letters is the most difficult part of the entire letter transcription process, and is the reason I know I put this part of my job off until the end.

Although Perry’s work and the work of all the attachment experts and developmental neuroscientists are providing valuable and necessary steps in the right direction, naming what is going on within our culture as ‘relational poverty’ still lets us avoid the extremely painful reality of what insecure attachment disorders and their corresponding empathy disorders are DOING to us as human beings:  They are making us suffer in nearly inconceivable and unmentionable ways.  They are HURTING US!  This hurt is rocking ‘n rolling itself right on down the generations.

When the day finally arrives that the experts at last agree, and the public finally understands, that nearly every single malaise that humans experience with other humans is because of INSECURE ATTACHMENT DISORDERS – and that nearly every known so-called ‘mental illness’ comes about directly through the influence of ‘relational poverty’ in early body-brain forming stages of development in INSECURE ATTACHMENT ENVIRONMENTS that builds the insecure attachment right into the body-brain — well, I fully expect to have left this world far behind.

That does not mean that as many people as possible can’t join me way out in front of ‘the envelope’ (of air, like a jet pushes through) and begin to understand NOW, way ahead of the pack, that we all suffer from insecure attachment disorders.

As I work my way through these paper edifices that contain what was wrong with my mother’s body-brain-mind, I know that first SHE made this great contribution by writing her words down and by holding onto these papers for the rest of her life, that I made a contribution in my commitment to paying her words serious attention no matter what the cost is to me personally, and that someone somewhere at sometime is going to read her words and my introduction to them and BEGIN to comprehend how extremely damaging insecure attachment patterns are in the very months and years of a human being’s growth and development as they determine the developmental trajectory of a person’s body and brain.

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The genesis of a Borderline is reflected in my mother’s writings.  Because of this fact, the genesis of an extremely violent infant-child abusing parent is ALSO contained in her writings.  That those of us on the outside – with me being still on the outside, fortunately, because I did not end up with a Borderline condition – are being given the chance to share an insider’s view of a Borderline brain-mind along with my mother by carefully reading her written words as they unfold this large section of her life, is really a miracle with great potential for helping us all understand what can happen when safe and secure infant-child attachment goes so very, very wrong.

Meanwhile, I am going into town to pick up some needed supplies as I take a short recess from hell, and then I will return to my work.

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