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I witnessed some very interesting things about people over the past few days since last Friday’s fiasco regarding the troubles of my neighbor girl (see those posts).  The biggest issues I ended up encountering had to do with people’s attitudes toward children in general, and toward hitting (spanking?) children in particular.

I very quickly learned that whether or not children should be protected by law from being physically assaulted by grownups is NOT a topic open to nearly anyone’s rational thinking abilities.  Talk about a HOT TOPIC!  Because I believe nothing much positive can be accomplished through animosity, aggressive disagreement, arguing, heated passions in strong opposition and defense — I now know there are very few (too few for me to find) adults who I can even begin to talk with about the subject of protecting children from assault by all adults.

And, yes, I define any physical act of violence and aggression by big people against little people to be wrong.  And, yes, I believe children need to be protected against actions of violence and aggression by adults BY LAW.

I quickly discovered that the kinds of changes I would like to see in America to enact fundamental protections for our little people will not happen in my lifetime.  We are NOT much of a civilized society when it comes to thinking about what the CHILDREN need.  We appear to be far more concerned with what ADULTS WANT based on their beliefs about ADULT rights.

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Any conversation I tried to have with adults in order to explore this topic instantly turned HOSTILE!

Even worse than this I found that adults cannot hear themselves on the topic.  I think it would be easier and more accepted in this nation to remove adults’ rights to vote than to protect children from adult ‘rights’ to HIT them whenever an adult (so-called parents, teachers and caregivers) WANT to hit a child — for some fantastical believe in the legitimacy of violence by BIG people against little ones.

The underlying emotional ocean from which the right-to-hit children comes from appeared to me to be FEAR OF CHILDREN!  In this fear-based attitude toward children these adults I tried to converse with intelligently about the needs and rights of children, often openly stated that children lie, manipulate, and cannot be believed or trusted.

I had to rein in my own thoughts and feelings in response as I saw that these undercurrents run very, very close in truth and honesty to hatred of children.

Children – not to be believed?

ARE CHILDREN THE ENEMIES OF ADULTS?

Apparently so.

If I stretch to find a more innocuous perceptual position from which to view what the adults I talked to were saying, the most naive stand I can take is that adults in America’s trained-monkey consumerist materialist culture KNOW that their children belong to them as POSSESSIONS.

Children are not, to these (in my personal opinion) ignorant and misguided adults, really people at all!  They are — in truth — as judged by the rage-filled attitudes of these adults, inherently CRIMINALS in need of PUNISHMENT.

Are adults afraid of the innocence of children?  Are they afraid of the free-wheeling creative thought of children?  Are they afraid of the PEOPLE that children actually ARE?

Do these adults wish to unconditionally reserve the right to BULLY children by wielding POWER over these children as threat, terrorism and  trauma?  What adult among us desires to be WHACKED with physical force — that is supposedly ONLY a SPANKING deserved — for — WHAT?  Deserved for being ALIVE?

Great.  We as a nation are giving birth to our own enemies?

We have a long, long ways to go.  I try to be positive.  I try to look at “how far we’ve come” in attitudes toward the needs and rights of children.  I try to say “we are buds who will blossom sooner or later.”

Yet if people cannot converse rationally about an issue so important to children as the right and need not to be hurt, betrayed and physically HIT (assaulted) by big people without any power of their own to HIT the adults back in self defense — how is anyone who NEEDS to learn something new about who children are and what they need to grow peacefully into a peaceful, safe, secure and happy world — going to happen?  HOW exactly are we ever as a nation, as a species, going to grow, change and improve?

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If you don’t think passing a law nationally to criminalize ‘spanking’ in America is a HOT topic, try speaking with ten people in support of such a law.  You will be shocked, sickened, ashamed, dismayed.  But don’t defend your ideas.  There will be a fight – it will not be a pretty situation — or a productive one.  But it will be enlightening.

See:  State by State — United States statutes as they pertain to spanking and child abuse

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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April 10, 2012 – Adobe Peace Garden in its budding for this new season — it is slightly overcast today – and I don’t know how to change any settings on this camera I have now – not sure this one has the best color — the here’s the garden nearly read to BLOOM!

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OK – Reactive Attachment Disorder – take THIS

Steve Winwood – ROLL WITH IT

Time for some DANCING!  We deserve to dance in freedom!

Sabrina — I will dance for you until you are free to dance for YOURSELF!

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I must clarify:  Empathy and compassion are not the same thing!  The simplest way I can think of to describe the difference between these is that empathy is a physiological reaction and process through which compassion manifests itself in intent and then through action.  Empathy involves a mutual sharing of information between people.

Both processes heavily rely on physiological pathways in the nervous system and brain – but the empathy response is PRIMARILY an automatic instantaneous PHYSICAL response, while compassion — I believe — is a quality of the soul that can be fostered far more easily than empathy disorders can be ‘corrected’.  Compassion is what we DO with the information our empathy gives to us.  The health of our attachment system determines how well (healthily, appropriately) our empathy abilities operate.

Healthy empathy is designed to let one person receive accurate and clear information about the internal state of another person.  It is in no way (in my opinion) supposed to involve the NEEDS of the receiver in any way.  Clear empathy is about THE OTHER PERSON.

It is through appropriate and clear empathy – along with love, compassion and appropriate response — that an infant’s caregiver builds both safe and secure attachment circuitry into the emotional-social rapidly growing right brain of an infant, and also into its rapidly growing and developing nervous systems (Central Nervous System and Autonomic Nervous System).

In infant-caregiver interactions this is called MIRRORING.  The caregiver is supposed to resonate with the ‘feeling states’ of an infant and MIRROR these back to the infant without caregiver contamination in the information being sent back and received by the infant.

Again, as I have said so often, the information needed to understand the truth about attachment – and empathy – is here:

+BEING A PHYSICAL BEING IN AN IMPERFECT WORLD

Again, PLEASE also see:

*Preschooler empathy

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The entire scenario with Sabrina (see posts listed below) would have gone entirely differently if I did not have the most severe type of insecure attachment disorder and resulting empathy disorder that I received as my body-brain was built from birth in an unsafe and insecure, inadequate, traumatizing, abusive environment.

My own needs, feelings, memories, etc. would NOT have been triggered.  I would not have dissolved (become disoriented-disorganized) in any way by Sabrina’s condition.  I would have been able to respond entirely appropriately in the situation.

Most certainly I would have been able to lock Sabrina into my house and refused to let her out at least until her mother provided me the telephone number of Sabrina’s probation officer – so that I could give it to Sabrina.  This is what Sabrina needed!!

My compassion cannot result in the most appropriate actions I COULD take because of what I just wrote in bold type.

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This post follows these ones:

+WHO WILL HELP MY NEIGHBOR GIRL? SUCH CRIPPLING DESPAIR…..

+MY MOSAIC OF REACTION TO BEING FACED WITH……..

+”WHY SHOULD I CARE? IT’S NOT MY CHILD!”

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As things stand I am completely in need of reestablishing my own self-organization and self-orientation as a result of my own terrible LONG history of traumatic abuse having been triggered.

Every piece of furniture in my house came to me used.  All of my ‘table chairs’ but one have duct tape repairs to them.  On my one ‘best’ chair I will keep a flowering plant, a vase of fresh flowers, a plant of some kind — for a long long time to come.

NOBODY will be allowed to sit in this chair.  This chair is now SABRINA’S CHAIR.  It is the chair in which that suffering troubled child sat as she pleaded for protection, safety, help.

If anyone asks about this chair, I will certainly tell them its story.

Abused children live in war zones.  They are not equipped to fight back against those who are harming them.  They cannot win against a society who does not honor and help them – but instead is protecting their abusers.

This chair is now a memorial space for suffering I cannot stop.  The issues represented by Sabrina’s Chair are those around which my entire life centers.

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Not law yet but HOPEFULLY!!

CANADA – Senators approve anti-spanking bill

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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If every single person who has the capacity to care about the well-being of children had a child walk into their yard, into their home, in the state of complete meltdown despair, terror, sorrow, hopelessness – and need – that I did two days ago (see post links below) – perhaps some needed changes on behalf of suffering children would REALLY begin to happen.

I challenge everyone to imagine how such a scenario would play itself out for you, for any battered child who came for your help, any differently than this has happened for Sabrina — and for me.

The law is completely on the side of battering parents – it is NOT on the side of infants and children, no matter what we want to pretend differently to ourselves about the TRUTH!  Again, see:  State by State — United States statutes as they pertaining to spanking and child abuse

We still legally sanction, condone and support parental bullying, terrorism and assault against infants and children – no matter what we might wish to comfort ourselves by believing to the contrary.

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Please take a look at the information in this post:

*Preschooler empathy

It is important to understand that as with the information about ‘kindling’ that I popped into my last post, insecure attachments create empathy disorders that can NEVER really be repaired.

People like to throw around words like ‘plasticity’ and ‘resiliency’ as if those words have any real meaning in a real conversation about what matters to children who are terrorized and traumatized by hatred, stupidity and abuse.  THEY DON’T — !!

I see the image of a cake in my mind — all prettily frosted and ready to be eaten.  Oops!  A cake built in terror and trauma?  Let’s pretend we can just FIX it down the road in a child’s/person’s life.

NOPE!

All we can learn about healing ‘later on’ – is like baking a secondary cake.  You cannot put these two cakes together as one.  You cannot bake a second ‘better’ or ‘right’ cake later on, down the road once the damage to a growing child’s body and brain has been done in an insecure and unsafe world — and pretend that things are now OK!!

Sabrina will NEVER be OK as if she had been treated with tender love, care, respect during these developmental years she is concluding now.

Sabrina will spend the rest of her LIFE suffering consequences from the wounding harm that has been done to her and is continuing to be done to her.

Please take a few minutes to read the above link and to THINK about what it is saying – and what the implications are for anyone who has not had a safe and secure attachment environment during their earliest years — which is true for at least half of our population to one degree or another.

We can celebrate our little holidays and pretend we are individually happy while we ignore the plight of suffering infants and children if we want to.  Go right ahead.  Who is to care?

The pain of children does not stop on holidays.

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following these posts:

+WHO WILL HELP MY NEIGHBOR GIRL? SUCH CRIPPLING DESPAIR…..

+MY MOSAIC OF REACTION TO BEING FACED WITH……..

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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It is frequently reported that when ‘tests’ come into our lives their benefit is that they can make us spiritually stronger — depending on how we approach the test.  Trial by fire – to purify steel.  Trial by pressure – to purify coal.  Whatever!  Nothing enjoyable about this — except the slight hope that I might be a changed and better person after my proverbial inner boat stops — sinking!!

I am, since yesterday’s fiasco as posted here –

+WHO WILL HELP MY NEIGHBOR GIRL? SUCH CRIPPLING DESPAIR…..

in the midst of a ‘test’.  How useful this information might be to somebody else I cannot tell.  It might be helpful to me to write something here about what I am experiencing more than 24 hours after the encounter written about in this post mentioned above.

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I can write intelligently about the experience of trauma from child abuse – sometimes.  But not right now.  Having that sobbing terrified young woman walk into my yard yesterday to ask me for help has rocked my emotions so intensely that I could be ashamed of myself — if I didn’t know that what I am going through is what I am going through — because I need to.

Dr. Allan N. Schore describes in his writings that everyone who ends up with an insecure attachment disorder ALSO has an empathy disorder.  This is what – most simply put — I am experiencing.  I am unable to separate my own feelings that come from being severely abused from birth to age 18 by my psychotic insane mother from what I witnessed yesterday as this child, Sabrina, came to me for help that I could not provide.

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Empathy difficulties start VERY YOUNG with children who do not have safe and secure attachments (since birth) with their earliest caregivers.  SEE:  *Preschooler empathy

I went to work at my friend’s laundromat and cafe today.  I have never in my whole life experienced the degree of HOT anger about child abuse as I have today.  I talked to my wise friend off and on all day about the need to remove extreme emotions (and ways how to do this) so that the TRUTH of what is going on can be found.

I scrubbed with meticulous and very energetic effort every washing machine and drier in the laundromat today.  I scrubbed every dish and pot and pan in the cafe.  I HAVE calmed down, but what I experienced today surprised me.

NEVER have I allowed myself to be angry at my mother for what she did to me.  Oh, I work at informed compassion toward her.  I work at forgiving her.  I work at everything I can think of to make the intensity of my own feelings vanish as if they never exist.

I was never angry at Mother during all those years she force fed me terror and trauma.  I rationally insist to myself that any anger I might feel has no value to anyone.  “Righteous indignation” against wrongs that breach sane and right conduct — well, that I can condone.  But not the truth of how angry I have been today.

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I lived numb for the first half of my life.  Then I sought ‘help’ toward healing, and gradually my numbness has dwindled away.  Tonight I WANT IT BACK!

My Posttraumatic Stress was activated yesterday beyond anything I have experienced before — ALL OF IT!

When I finally tracked down the deputy today that I spoke with regarding this abused child yesterday — I asked him if the scenario would have played itself out differently for this child if I had called 911 rather than their dispatcher.  I was told NO – it is completely legal for parents to ‘spank’ their children in Arizona as long as the ‘spanking’ is not done in anger.

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The mother of Sabrina immediately packed her children in her vehicle and headed over the border into Mexico yesterday where Sabrina will never be able to call 911 for help as the deputy told her to do yesterday ‘should violence happen’.

I feel like a spinning top.

In full motion.

I feel as though a bomb has exploded with me at the center of it.

I have lost my equilibrium — and no matter how much I pray — there is no magic bullet appearing to ‘fix’ me right now — let alone the child whose fate I have no control over.

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Lest I try to bombard myself with shame over my inability to recuperate from my own severe traumatic reaction to a beautiful child’s severe trauma, I swing over for a moment to read something like this about the very real KINDLING I am experiencing right now (and this is ‘the tip of the iceberg’):

Subcortical Brain Structures, Stress, Emotions, and Mental Illness

Winifred Gallagher explains kindling in an article in The Atlantic Monthly, “How We Become What We Are” (September 1994). Gallagher writes:

“Over time, repeated stressful experiences can literally, not just figuratively, alter the nervous systems of the temperamentally vulnerable. Animal research has shown that when a rat is given a small shock, it shows no marked reaction; when exposed to such stressors for five consecutive days, it shows signs of the stress response; when exposed for seven or eight days, the rat has a seizure, and thereafter this ‘kindled’ animal will seize with little or no provocation. Experiments of this kind are of course not done with people, but Philip Gold and other neuroscientists now think that in human beings, too, by triggering a cascade of chemical reactions, serious chronic stress, particularly in early life, causes changes in the way genes within a brain cell function, permanently altering the neuron’s biology. Because they require a particular type of input to turn on or off, only some of a neuron’s thousands of genes, each of which is involved in some aspect of cellular structure or communication, are activated at any given moment. When a temperamentally vulnerable person is constantly bombarded with upsetting stimuli, Gold says, the genes that get turned on are those involved in the cellular components of the stress response.”

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I may be the only person Sabrina has ever encountered who BELIEVES her and LOVES her!  Did she understand this from the so-short time she was able to be at my house yesterday before the horrible witch came to drag her back to her lair-of-hell?

But, Sabrina is NOT the main issue right now.  My own recovery – and what I can learn and heal about myself right now – is my main issue.  On Monday I will find Sabrina’s probation officer – and do what I can working CALMLY with that channel on Sabrina’s behalf.

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I just spoke with Ramona, my daughter, and found myself telling her that 99.99999999999999999% of what I went through as a child will not be known by anyone in this lifetime — except by someone like this child who knows – because she is living a similar reality.  This is the first time in my life I have been faced with a mirror of my young self in the depths of such crisis.

I found a spiritual writing recently that talks about how people who leave this world with their soul pure will be met in the next world by the Concourse on High.  This Concourse is made up of every pure soul who has passed on throughout all human time.  They will listen to everything we have to tell them about what we have gone through in this lifetime.  I want to be a pure soul when I leave here.  I want to have this conversation in the next world.

This is the ultimate goal of all I do to heal myself in this lifetime, and of all the spiritual growth I hope I am doing here.  I do not wish for my soul to be contaminated by any emotion, thought, reaction or action that depletes me where it matters to me most.

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So my despairing anger I felt when I discovered today that it’s OK for parents in Arizona to ‘HIT’ (bully and terrorize) their children — and then when I searched online and found this is just as legal in every state in our nation — cannot sit in my heart and turn rancid.

SEE –

From the EDUCATIONAL website –

KIDJACKED:  To seize control of a child, by use of force

Spanking Laws

State by State — United States statutes as they pertaining to spanking and child abuse

I have a lot of letting go to do in the next few days.  As I told my laundromat friend today, this is BIG for me.  This experience is changing me.  I will never be the same person again once I have processed the depths of what having Sabrina walk into my yard yesterday has triggered for me.

I pray for that child.  Anyone reading these posts about her who can, please pray for this child, too.  There is too much I don’t understand about the big picture.  I have to believe that prayer helps us all.

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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Two hours ago a neighbor girl who turned 17 a month ago came to me for help.  I will call her Salina.  She was sobbing, her eyes puffy and red with crying.  I tore off my gardening gloves and ushered Salina into my home as I patiently listened through such sad tears to the story this young woman had to tell. I have known this girl since I moved here when Salina was ten.  She is one of the sweetest girls I have ever known — and she is being pushed to the absolute edge of what she can stand to tolerate in her home and from her mother.  Because I am and will always be an advocate for the children, I believe what Salina told me. She came asking me to help her locate a telephone number for her probation officer.  She says her mother has the number and mother says Salina has it.  OBVIOUSLY Salina does NOT have this number! Salina was in a fight last December than put her ‘in trouble with the law’.  I am hoping that there will at least be some kind of advocacy for Salina through this channel. This child is exhausted.  Tired of trying to win against her mother who gave birth to this daughter at age 16.  (There are six other children in the family.) Salina wants to go to jail.  What kind of home life does a child have who desires escape that badly?  She told me she did run away once.  To her grandmother’s house, “But that didn’t work out.  My mother told all kinds of lies about me.” Salina says at that time she reported abuse to Child Protective Services (CPS).  She showed them photographs of her bruises.  CPS still did not believe her.  They told her if she has a roof over her head and food to eat she should consider herself lucky.  Basically, they told her to shut up and be happy with her situation. “I can’t stay there any more.  I can’t stand it there any more.  I need someone to please help me,” Salina pleadingly sobbed to me. I sat the child down, gave her water, a box of kleenex – and tried to get her help. I called the Sheriff’s office, spoke with a Deputy – who called Salina’s mother who was not home when Salina came to my house.  I asked, and was told under no circumstances could I keep the child safe and protected in my home.  The deputy warned the mother not to hit her child.  He told the child to call 911 if she was hit.  What are the chances her mother would hand her the phone, I wonder? Of course the mother sent clouds of dust swirling as she tore into her yard with her SUV.  She stormed over to my house to get her daughter.  “What are you doing with my daughter?” she screamed at me. With one ear I heard the mother.  With the other ear I heard the child.  Salina’s mother stood LIKE MY MOTHER WOULD HAVE — looking and sounding exactly like my mother as she shouted at her daughter past my garden gate to come home immediately. After the deputy had called her, Salina’s mother had called her other children – who supposedly had reported to her that Salina had ‘tried to choke’ her 8-year-old sister. Salina bravely tried to stand up for herself, “I did not!  They are all lying!  You told them to lie about me.”  Her mother insisted all the children told her they had seen this happen.  Through her tears Salina tried to tell her mother three of the five siblings weren’t even in the house.  Her mother did not listen. Again, I absolutely believe Salina.  I believe the younger children were emotionally blackmailed, emotionally bludgeoned into making up this story against their sister to ‘please’ their mother — upon whom they are desperately dependent. This depleted, beautiful breaking-apart child had no choice — and through her tears so thick she could barely see the ground to avoid sharp stones she most reluctantly and fearfully followed her mother back across the parking lot.  Salina had left home barefoot – terrified of her mother (who had threatened to hit her when she returned home) and seeking only a number to call her probation officer — ANYONE who would take her away from her misery at home.  (The deputy could not access that number.  Did he try?) Yes.  I saw myself at that age.  I felt the desperate pain and the hopeless despair, the absolute inability to fight and win any battle for self – ever. Today I clearly saw how trauma-rules apply even now — for a different child — and for me who would do anything to help her — as I find there is nothing more I can do.  Something is terribly wrong two trailers to the east of me.  Terribly, terribly wrong — and terribly wrong with a world that does not care. This child was a refugee seeking asylum.  I know this with the certainty with which I know my name.  I am not willing to be arrested to prove this point.  So, who will prove it?  When?  How?

I will track down and speak with that probation officer on Monday.

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I don’t EVER wonder ‘how they got this way’:

More Than 50% of Women on Parole or Probation Have Mental Illness 

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I could not ask Salina about this today – she was already far too upset — but I sure wish I could have —

Important info:

Spotlight on Child Sex Abuse: Minimizing the Risk to Children

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Click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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I am doing some study of a book that has traveled into my hands from the library of a woman who recently died of old age.  She gifted her library to her friends, and even though I did not know this woman one of the people she gifted with this book had a duplicate copy – so now I also have one for my own!

The copy I have is the 1974 first edition of this:

Closer Than Your Life Vein: An Insight into the Wonders of Spiritual Fulfillment by Henry A. Weil

I have to say it will take me many hours of study to begin to comprehend what is being said by the author in this book.  Yet even this fact intrigues me.  I realize that there was probably nothing normal in my childhood.  Everything I experienced as a child throughout the first 18 years of my life was colored by Mother’s severe mental illness and by her severe abuse of me that was a result of her illness.

So much of what children learn comes from both how they are treated and by how they see those around them treat other people.  I am wondering today if most of what I learned about how to be a human being came from watching how my mother and my father treated my siblings.  I was the chosen child for abuse and hatred.  My siblings were spared as they had different parents – in all reality – than I did.

I never envied my siblings.  My abuse began when I was born.  I was literally BORN to my ‘station’ in life.  I never knew anything different.  I did not have any information available to me that would have let me know that what was happening to me was wrong or abusive.  What happened to me was simply my reality.

Most of what could happen positively in the world of humans I watched as if I was watching a movie — as I watched my mother (especially) interact with her other children.  The OTHER mother, my mother, was an entirely different person than was the mother my siblings had.  Even now as I track back what I know of humans I am mostly at a loss for how people (even myself) think, make choices, feel, act and change.

This little book I am studying addresses these aspects of being human, yet it is written as most books like this are, for people who did not grow up in hell instead of home like I did.

At least I know now that I was raised in what could best be called an alternative universe.  I understand that much of what feels like ‘depersonalization’ and ‘derealization’ that experts ‘associate’ with ‘dissociation’ exist in my experience of reality because I now live in a world so vastly different from the one I left at age 18 that it seems nearly impossible to connect these extremely different worlds.

I have never found an author who writes about the experience of abused and traumatized children who suffered from massive doses of being isolated.  I doubt now that I will ever find such writings.  I am on my own in trying to comprehend what the forced isolation Mother did to me — did to me.  No book I have ever read about ‘being human’ speaks of what isolation does to a little person.  I was not formally ‘a wild child’ or ‘a closet child’.

For anything like ‘normal’ I did get to watch my siblings grow up in their universe which was so different from mine.  But I guess at least this benefit allows me room to stretch in my efforts to understand something about where most people ‘come from’.

I most fortunately did physically escape my childhood in hell when I was 18.  It did not kill me.  But it sure left me with a whole lot of unanswered questions that no one I have ever met has answers for — unless I seek for my answers in a spiritual direction.  It is not surprising I guess to find that most often that is the direction I turn to in my studies about what being a human being even is.

For most ‘ordinary’ infant-children direct experience with human monsters is the exception.  In the experience of severely abused infant-children, direct experience with ‘sane people’ hardly exists at all — or the little people would be rescued – and spared.

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