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In the over one thousand posts I have written for this blog I have never once chosen to use the word ‘psychology’ until today.  I address topics related to survivorship of severe infant-childhood trauma, abuse, neglect, maltreatment and the lifelong physiological consequences survivors live with. I use the word today carefully and with reservations.

Because it is estimated that only about 50% of our population receives the infant experience of optimal safe and secure attachment to their earliest caregivers — especially to their mother — I know this means that the other half of our population grows a body-brain conception to age two (the most critical stages of our development happen during our first 33 months of life) that has built into it some version of an insecure attachment disorder.

People with ANY attachment system built into their body-brain that is less than the optimal safe and secure pattern experience changes in their physiological development.  Until our so-called experts decide to unanimously recognize, accept and understand this fact I do not believe much of any use at all is included in the so-called ‘field of psychology’.

The operations of the Central Nervous System (CNS) (which includes the brain), of the Autonomic Nervous system (ANS) (which includes the so-called stress response), and the vagal nervous system that process all the information used by both the CNS/brain and ANS are centrally and fundamentally determined by our earliest attachment relationships during these first 33 months of our life.

Whatever we or anyone else might observe about our ‘psychology’ is secondary to what is ACTUALLY happening within our body.  What happens in our body is determined by how our early attachment relationships TOLD our body to form.  This, to me, makes the ‘field of psychology’ a peripheral study that is rarely accurate because the construction and operation of a person’s attachment system is very, very, very (if ever) included in any ‘psychological’ discussion.

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I know that the word ‘psychology’ rests in its origins upon Psyche who appeared in myth.  Psyche as a word itself originally described ‘the breath’ of life.

Today I am specifically thinking about my own book writing process about my severely abusive infant-childhood that has mysteriously come to a complete halt.  I have been patiently, prayerfully and hopefully been waiting for a solution to my ‘freezing’ problem.  I suspect that a piece of the answer I have been waiting for appeared last evening as I wrote an email to a friend of mine who was also a neighbor to my family back in the Alaskan valley where my parents homesteaded.

Suddenly as I wrote to my friend the image of the mythological figure Medusa appeared in my mind.  While it might be easy for me to know that this Medusa and her snake hair would be a reference to my severely mentally ill (probably Borderline Personality Disorder with psychotic features) abusive mother, I took another step in my awareness to be able to expand what I remember of the Medusa myth into my current writing-block situation.

As soon as a clear mythological (dramatic) allusion appears in thought, be it from the old myths of any culture or from ‘fairy tales’, I know (as Jung suggested) that some important reference has appeared from the underlying ‘psychic’ (the unconscious levels of human Psyche as per ‘psychology’) that can offer important information about ‘what is really going on’.

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As I began working my way through the first rough draft of my book toward the finalized second draft I hit a stone wall and came to a DEAD stop.  I have been immobilized.  In fact, as the Medusa myth reference would suggest, I have been TURNED INTO STONE.

Is it possible that as I worked to tell the truth about my terrible life with Mother — as I searched to apply my own rules of inner integrity toward telling the WHOLE truth — that I made a choice I have never made before?

Did I choose to no longer view the experiences I am writing about as reflections in the ‘safety’ of a mirror and instead choose to turn and for the first time in my 60-year life to face the truth where my Medusa mother stands directly at the center of all of it?

If turning to face Medusa I have been turned into stone — I know this has happened at a PSYCHOLOGICAL level.  Knowing what is ‘psychological’ versus what is physiological lets a person find very real solutions based on the facts of their life.  Ordinary ‘psychological’ speculation does NOT reveal facts.  It reveals guesses.

How do I know today that I have shown myself a new ‘organization’ of facts related to what has stopped me dead in my book-writing process?

I know because I can FEEL the truth of what I ‘was shown’ (probably by my right brain hemisphere’s sophisticated ability to communicate in IMAGES).  The inner constellation of information related to the myth of Medusa as it connects to what has happened to me as I turned one final time to each story I have written in unfinished draft form of the terrible abuse I experienced (and remember), now gives me something to consciously work with and through.

I have renewed hope that I can write this book!

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I would say the number one reason I suffered for those 18 years was not because my mother was insanely abusive to me — and therefore ‘deserves’ all the blame.  I would say the number one reason I suffered is because nobody STOPPED MOTHER.

NOBODY saw Mother for ‘what’ she was (and therefore for ‘who’ she was).

NOBODY looked directly at Mother or her actions.  NOBODY stood up to Mother.  NOBODY questioned her.  NOBODY stopped her.

EVERYONE (including my father and grandmother) only saw some reflection of Mother in a mirror — a reflection that was imagined and was a complete LIE!

I, as the survivor of her targeted severe abuse, have also never looked at Mother straight on, either.

I have never been able to TOLERATE looking at the TRUTH about what that woman did to me!

I am asking myself — for the integrity of this book and for my own integrity — to look at MOTHER as I look at the absolute truth of what I experienced — for the first time in my life —

And yes, I was completely unprepared for this ‘being turned into frozen stone’!

I was completely unprepared for being stopped dead in my writing tracks as I came so close — SO CLOSE — to telling this truth the best that I can.

Every infant-child is on a quest-full journey from birth, through their earliest years, into adulthood.  I was no exception.  How could I have been?  If nobody in the Medusa myth had quested or journeyed or traveled anywhere near Medusa nobody would have been at risk of being turned into stone if they looked at her instead of her mirrored image (in the myth seen in a magical metal shield).

But a myth is exactly that, no matter how deeply connected to human ‘psychological’ reality in the deep unconscious it might be.

I do not wish to succumb to remaining frozen-as-stone at this point in my life — or in my writing.  And yet it will take me some amount of time now (undetermined) to CHANGE my own ‘psychology’ so that I can get back to work!!  I do need to drop the mirror (denial, dissociation, forgetting) from my line of vision to tell the truth in my book.

Yes, I am ‘going where angels fear to tread’ but I know this task if possible or I would not feel impassioned to do it.  Passion is at the core of the Psyche-Eros myth — linked inseparably to wisdom and willingness.  And that myth is far more of a primary one than the myth about Medusa and her stupid, ugly, stone-turning-into head full of snakes!

I can do this.  I can stare Medusa down.

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I always feel lucky/blessed when there is a task to do that requires tools — that I actually possess.  For all the many, many moves in my adult life that have required that I pare down my belongings to a small core of things, it is always my minimal clothing, my warmest blankets, and my collection of tools that I have tried to hold onto.

Because I seem to have been born with an attraction to working with my hands, my small collection of tools relate to craft work, kitchen work and yard work.  I do often find that I don’t have QUITE the right tool for the job, but so far I have always found that if I am creative and determined enough I can do what I need/intend to do.

This morning I am thinking about my inner tool box.  Of course these inner tools are harder to name and discover than those tangible ones of wood and steel.  I think about this depression that I know I have directly because of the 18 years of debilitating infant-child abuse I suffered.  Mother’s was a comprehensive abuse toward me.  She left no possible stone unturned when it came to imprisoning me inside her OWN terrible world of hell.

Mother eroded me continually from the time I was born.  It happens that as I sort through the collection of family slides that contain the snippets of the history of my family of origin I am remembering within my body as well as within my conscious mind how different my reality was from that of my siblings.  My own inner message is that there are acceptable thoughts about this whole situation I can think about (very few of them, really) and a million thoughts I am not ‘supposed’ to think.

There is nobody here with me to monitor or control or even suggest to me which thoughts are to be sorted into which category.  I do all of this myself.  I think about how my lifelong struggle with deep depression caused by horrendous early abuse while my body-brain was forming is as much about the depression ‘that I got’ as it is about other critically important positive aspects of being alive as a human that I did NOT get.

All five of my other siblings received from Mother a sense of being special.  True, Mother didn’t possess the capacity to understand that any of her children were separate beings from her own self so that she was actually projecting GOODNESS onto my siblings just as she projected her hopeless, condemnable evil badness onto me.  But I don’t think as little people any of us knew Mother was projecting her own crap onto her children — be it good or bad.

My siblings PLEASED Mother.  I DISPLEASED Mother — no matter how desperately from the core of my being I tried not to.  Mother accepted my siblings.  Mother rejected (condemned) me.

Mother’s condemnation of me was continual and pervasive.  Her praising, ‘loving’ acceptance and pleasure with my siblings was equally as continual and pervasive.  Mother took ‘favoritism’ to a level unimagined by anyone who has not been unfortunate enough to be at the mercy of a severely ill, psychotic Borderline Personality Disorder mother.

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Where I got sadness, pain, sorrow, hopeless despair, desperation, terror, confusion and panic built into my body-brain through abusive trauma my siblings received hope, confidence, competence, play, special freedoms — my siblings had a different mother, a different father and a different childhood than I did.

I wouldn’t care at all except that what can be named ‘depression’ in my body is as much about what I grew up missing being built into my body-brain as it is about deep pain and sorrow that I don’t see ever going away in this lifetime (I am 60).  I am missing PRIDE I realized today.  For anything positive I have ever done/accomplished I might have felt a tiny passing tinge of pride in myself, but that passing sense had nothing inside of me to STICK to, to add onto, to build itself around.

I have no sense within me that I can find of any sense of ENTITLEMENT.

I look at the slide pictures of attention, affection, adoration and GLADNESS, of joy for their presence in her life that Mother felt for my five siblings.  Mother never felt those feelings for me from the moment I was born her special ‘condemned to hell evil devil’s child’.  I fought for my life, for my existence as a being separate from her with every breath I ever took.

I cannot erase that history or what it did to me physiologically as I continued to grow up in that world of hell made especially for me.

I cannot receive some kind of surgical implant that would instill inside of me any sense of entitlement that leads to a sense of confidence, competence, or full blown pride in myself or in anything I do.

These things I observe nearly like a complete outsider to my own reality of existence.  I do not allow myself to let emotions/feelings attach themselves to what I see as facts about myself in the world.  I do wonder, though, how life is for other people — including my siblings — who received love as little people that allowed them to acquire certain kinds of essential tools within their body-brain that – to me – allow them to follow along some different track through life that I can barely begin to imagine.

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I see the image in my mind that comes from memories of times I have stood barefoot on the sandy shore of an ocean as the sea water laps over my feet while it sucks sand out from under me and I sink, sink, sink — always sinking without any sense of solid rock or solid earth underneath me.

But I have other thoughts that circle around in my mind in a swirling kaleidoscopic pattern connected to all of these important issues involving my life in this body in this world.  I believe in God and I don’t think any of my siblings do.  I can’t stop my thoughts that somehow these patterns are all connected.

Is there something about my particular depth of suffering from birth-to-age-18, about my being disallowed from gaining a sense of entitlement of affection and affirmation by rights, that left me not only battling ‘depression’ (and its host of complications) but that also left me with some peculiar form of humility that has enabled me to keep my life on this material plane in a clear focus of perspective that my siblings completely missed?

Would I competently and confidently and pridefully be waltzing through my life oblivious to a different level of reality that excludes some deep level of humility that might be its opposite had I been removed from my parents at birth and raised in a so-called normal, healthy, happy, loving home?

Did I stay in touch within my soul as I grew up suffering so that I did not forget the spiritual reality that over all is a God that runs this entire show down here on earth — not I — not we humans?

As I sit outside watching the morning sun bring into full color the world I live in today I see God inside and out of everything.  I see life here as it possesses an essential, inner ability to reflect the rays of the Creator.  I sense that my abilities to manipulate anything having to do with my life — or any other life on this plane — also comes from this same Creator.

I don’t know how to live a blatant, emblazoned life of “I can do anything I want to and I have the perfect right to do it because I am me and I am special that way” and I never have.  I wonder, “Where is the balance in all of this?”  Where is the spiritual health that I believe humans are designed to best function with that allows for knowing both personal self-worth and our dependence for EVERYTHING on a loving God that created and maintains all of life in a state of mercy and grace?

I converse with myself about whether or not I would trade the awareness of human life’s dependence upon God for a limited and truly pitifully minuscule blind assumption that God does not exist at all.  Fortunately, being able to make that choice between a perhaps spiritually based deep humility and an oblivious sense of my own powerfulness seems to have been removed from me before I was ever born.

Perhaps I possess a multitude of spiritual tools that I use every instant of my life that are just not as glaring and glitzy as others’ gifts of self confidence leading to a complete disbelief in the Great Mystery some name God.

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It comes to me this morning as I watch the pale clouded sky begin to brighten with a new day’s light that any anger I might feel is not a problem.  My anger is a good sign, a sign that I have not given up the good fight against wrongful actions done by others that hurt me.  Along with my anger about what hurt me comes my anger at a society that truthfully does not place a high value on infants and children and people and other living beings.  We live in a sick materialistic mostly non-spiritual culture that is NOT healthy enough to care about what is truly important.

What I choose to do with and about my anger matters to me.  Recognizing that I am angry is my first step.  I was thinking about a rose thorn embedded in my right pointer finger.  I have been ignoring it since efforts to remove it have thus far failed.  This spot on my finger has turned into what I know could be called an ‘angry wound’.  (As small and inconsequential as this injury is, it at least allowed me to recognize a bigger picture.)

Survivors of human-caused abusive traumas are often left with angry wounds.  In the case of infant-child abuse, society contributes to the abuse by not caring enough to notice when it happens, not caring enough to adequately intervene, and by not caring enough as a society to provide the MEDICINE that is needed to help heal the angry wounds carried by survivors.

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I turned to my first aid kit this morning for a home remedy salve made for me by a New Mexican sheep rancher’s wife 15 years ago.  The salve is on my finger now, held in place by a simple item known as a band aid.  It isn’t the band aid that is going to draw the infection out of my injury.  It is this stinky medicine that will both draw the infection and the thorn itself to the surface so that my finger can heal.

I am reminded that I live now in the same uncaring society that allowed those 18 years of severe abuse to happen to me in the first place.  This sick society has not changed.  This is the same society that contributed its share to the injuries from the abuse I suffered in the first place.  It is the same sick society that does not provide for trauma abuse survivors the kind of care toward healing that would be required to heal these deep angry wounds.  I – and most other survivors — are left as alone in trying to heal our deep wounds as we were left alone to survive them in the first place.

I work to turn my anger at injustice into understanding based on truth and fact.  I work to ground my reality in the bigger picture of an evolving humanity that is still a long way from its maturity.  I will bide my time in this lifetime, but I will not live long enough to see the dawning of a truly healthy, spiritual united humanity that understands under God that we are to love and care for one another and for all life as if well-being for all is what truly matters.

In the bigger picture none of us actually live in our body on this earth for very long, and when our soul’s connection with this material world is severed and when our soul then travels to the infinite other worlds of Creation, all will be held accountable to God.  I am no more an exception to this fact that my abusive mother was.  Through her sickness Mother contributed a great deal of harm.  I am grateful that I do not have her sickness.  I can choose to contribute something good.  And if part of that goodness involves anger against actions that are evil and hurt innocents, so be it.

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Work went along smoothly on the slides once my friend came out today to help me.  We certainly did not get through all of them this time around, but at least I could stomach the job for 2 or 3 hours.

Now I will have to continue this task alone.  I feel bleak.  And I feel ANGRY as I visually take in just a little more information about what such a terribly painful childhood can look like when snippets of it are captured on film through the eye of the camera held by Mother, my abuser.

I do not grant myself permission to feel anger about what happened to me, and I never have.

A long time ago when I sought my first outside assistance for my troubles as an adult (31 years ago when I was 29), I was told that depression was ‘anger turned inward’.  I know now that was an extremely simplistic statement, but it at least is a start at recognizing that anger and sadness are linked to one another.

I see picture after picture of group shots of my siblings happy together with me left out of the picture.  I see entire rolls of film devoted to birthday celebrations for them.  I tell myself on some level that none of what happened to me MATTERS!  If it didn’t matter to anyone else, why should it matter to me?

Such a sense of unreality comes if I begin to know my own truth.  It seems much ‘better’ to try to simply accept somebody else’s version of what happened during those 18 years with a vicious mad woman for a mother.  Forget about Linda.  Forget about everything except the fact that I survived.  Isn’t that all that matters?  That all six of us siblings survived?

How nice it would have been if someone had told me anywhere along the way that the aftermath of that kind of childhood trauma would affect every single decision I made in my blindness leaving that hell of a home of origin.  EVERY decision, every thought and feeling I had about myself and about others.  How nice it would have been if someone would have told me that I was fundamentally and absolutely sculpted as a human being by that abuse.

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As my friend and I worked through jumbled piles of slides today I was struck many times by the stories those slides reflect.  Can I somehow reach a platform of objectivity that will allow me to truthfully tell the stories WITHOUT my having to be engaged emotionally with their content as I write them?

And if I do experience emotions as I do this work, can I allow myself to feel angry?  I see reminders of the pampered affections and attentions given to my other siblings while I was hidden away somewhere isolated and abused.  How do I think I stood the same chance as they had/have for a happy fulfilled life given all the favoritism shown to them against all the tortured horror shown to me for 18 long years?

No, life is NOT fair.  My whole life could have been a whole lot worse — but so what?  And not only my life, but, yes, the lives of my siblings could have been a whole lot BETTER!  It is all done.  It is all in the past.  Or is it?

That abuse began the instant I was born.  It’s not like there was EVER a moment Mother’s psychotic belief in my hopeless evilness didn’t color every moment of my life in those 18 years.  If the abuse had started when I was two, even, I would not carry the traumatic changes that early stress created in my physiology that I suffer from today.

So – if it does no good to talk about ‘it’ — all we survivors from infant-childhoods in hell should just be good boys and girls and keep our mouths shut?  How is anyone going to learn a thing about what abuse feels like so that as a society we care enough to STOP IT if nobody speaks the truth?

Ignoring infant-child abuse lets it continue.  It is the mute inner silence of myself during those first 18 years and my own mute inner silence about so much of that abuse now that angers me most.  The message from our culture is that if nobody else cares about child abuse, then the victim better not dare to care, either.  We are to pretend it never happened, that it doesn’t happen, that it does not damage a survivor in critical ways for the rest of their lifespan, and that infant-child abuse doesn’t really happen NOW.

I will NOT pretend it never happened, and I will NOT pretend it isn’t happening to thousands upon thousands of infants and children today.

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Post from earlier today:  +ON THE SLIM CHANCE I WILL FEEL BETTER

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Today a friend is coming to help me with a project that needs to be done for many reasons.  This is a task that I cannot do alone, also for many reasons.  I am wondering at this moment how I will feel once this afternoon has passed and all these family history slides are sorted, titled, dated and organized.

This friend of mine is very jovial, pleasant and happy.  I hope that with his help this task that daunts me will not seem so ugly or so overwhelming.  In so many ways at this point in my life I wish all memory of the first 18 years of my life spent under the constant stress of abuse by my mother could be completely erased.  I no longer want any trace of it — not even a memory of the Alaskan homesteading experience.  I want it ALL gone!

I made it so close to completing the writing of my childhood story up to my age 10 1/2.  I completed the first rough draft.  I was totally unprepared for what happened to me as I began to edit this draft for the second – and nearly final – one.  I find I cannot do it!!

This collection of slides that lie in a disordered heap under a sheet on the table in my front room contains the visual record of the story of my childhood — minus the abuse, of course, which only appears in traces by my absence from so many photographs of my siblings.  The abuse I suffered also appears in my body language and placement in relation to the rest of my family in many pictures I do at least show up in.

In many ways I feel I got left holding the ‘bag’, and it’s a BIG one!  Being the child ‘chosen’ as the target of Mother’s insane abuse left me with nobody to share my experience with.  I still feel that way.  The numbers of children who suffer the kind of infant-child abuse I did is so small our stories are recording in books like “Sybil” and “Mommy Dearest.”

We have freak stories to tell.  And as I work to tell mine I feel again as I did as a child — absolutely alone in a reality that exists to NOBODY ELSE.

I ask God every day to show me any point at all in my proceeding forward with my writing task.  Today my friend and I will at least make progress in ordering the disorganized mess this pile of slides IS as these pictures portray the mess that is the history of the Lloyd family — especially my history.

I never chose my childhood.  I never chose my position or role in my family of origin.  In some ways I am enraged I did the suffering that allowed my siblings to get off ‘Scott free’ — other than the fact that they witnessed what was done to me — as they went right on playing (as kids SHOULD be able to do).  Other than the fact also, to be fair, that our mother was an advanced Borderline Personality Disorder mad woman which made all of our lives nuts.  But because I did the suffering for everyone else my other five siblings escaped the unnameable torture that was MY childhood.

Who cares?

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A most important sign of health for any living organism is its ability to flexibly adapt to the changes and chances that it encounters within its internal and external environment.  Now as I find myself forced by the nature of my learning-growing process to take an extended break of unknown length from my book writing efforts I realize that I need to adapt myself to the overall ‘plan’ of what I wish to accomplish.  I am choosing to now read an important book I preordered a few months ago even before its publication but decided to leave alone until my first book was completed.

I THOUGHT I had more than enough background information from my studies about how infant and child abuse changes early body-brain development.  Given the massive amount of proof that exists about how early infant-caregiver attachment relationships (conception to age two) determine the ‘kind of body-brain’ everyone ends up spending their lifetime living in/with, I been hoping that there wasn’t anything new I had to understand before I could form my own conclusions about how the attachment and developmental neuroscience information applied to what happened to me as a terribly abused child during the first 18 years of my life.

I realized yesterday that I was wrong.  I AM missing what is probably the most important information I can access about the WHOLE picture of the subjects I seek to understand and to write about.

So I am now reading this important book:

The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology) by Stephen W. Porges (Apr 25, 2011)

This is anything but an easy read, but as I work my way through its pages this first time around without taking notes or trying to write any deciphering comments about its contents I am noticing IN MY BODY how different I feel reading this book than how I felt when I read all the other important complex scientific literature that describes what trauma – especially the trauma of early abuse, neglect and overall maltreatment caused by a breakdown of attachment relationships for infants and children – does to change how a body-brain develops.   Yet I also know I could not possibly understand what I am reading now if I had not done my homework prior to reading this book.

In looking through the bibliography of Porges’ book I see all the researchers’ names I am familiar with – plus a whole lot more.  Yet unlike the pages of books I have read before now, the pages of Porges’ book are filled with his OWN words!  Very little of the ink of this book is devoted to referencing the (yes, important) work of author scientists.  Porges’ book is filled with his own critically important theory that he has spent his professional lifetime developing.

What I FEEL as I begin to read this book is excited, hopeful anticipation.  I FEEL that this man has ‘found it’.  Found what?  The truth about the whole picture of what makes humans tick in good health and what makes humans sick in bad health.  All of this is tied to how our earliest caregiver interactions directly affected how our physiology had to change or not change in order to adapt to the degrees of benevolence or malevolence that existed in our early universe.

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I have no confidence in my competence at this early stage in my study of Porges’ ideas to even begin to explain them to myself let alone to anyone else.  The simplest mental picture I have gleaned so far from this book is that Porges’ is completely RIGHT as he describes that humans do not have a ‘simple stress response system’.  We have complex interrelated and bidirectional interactive systems that each accomplish a special part of the task of keeping us alive and healthy.

I am beginning to suspect that what Porges is saying is that the vagal nerve ‘bundles’ in our body are ‘divided’ into three parts.  The original part of our vagal nerve system exists in reptiles.  The rest of the bundles evolved as mammals found ways to exist in a world run by reptiles, with the pinnacle reaches of our vagal nerve systems lying within the special and very highly evolved capacity humans have to SOCIALLY ENGAGE.

The other two bundles (my word, mind you) are part of our ‘stop and go’ Autonomic Nervous System (ANS).  The Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) is our GO branch leading to fight and flight responses when needed.  The Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS) is our STOP branch that is geared to a freeze response to danger. (I remember ‘para-‘ ‘like a ‘pair of brakes’.)

Homeostasis, or the state of actively and harmoniously maintaining comfortable balance between the SNS and the PNS then allows our Social Engagement System (my capitalization) to operate with optimal interactions between ourselves and other members of our species.

If a person DOES NOT FEEL safe and secure within their body in the world the Social Engagement System does not engage optimally.  Something else will be going on – IN THE BODY – as attempts to cope with threat to life OR actual terrible danger consume the attention and energy of the individual.

Porges is explaining in detail how the BODY on an ancient, unconscious (primitive) level automatically and VERY QUICKLY receives and processes information from the environment about what is safe and what is not — and then responds.  Porges’ began his book by clearly stating that when a little person starts life in unsafe and insecure attachment-relationship environments the process of development in these malevolent conditions will CHANGE how the body perceives danger versus safety.

The body will very often chronically ‘miscue’ so that what is dangerous is perceived as safe – and what is safe is perceived as dangerous!  The BODY will react accordingly – in spite of these mix-ups in automatic and extremely fast ways!

(NOTE:  I ‘think’ Porges is saying that we have three interacting ‘systems’ that operate through their own vagal nerve bundle networks.  (1) the SNS that kicks in when we perceive risk-threat and then fight or flee, (2) the PNS that kicks in when actual, very real present DANGER leaves us no option but to freeze-feign death, and then (3) social engagement system in which we can only fully participate during times we are not perceiving threat or experiencing very real danger.)

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Porges is also describing how we can more clearly define what stress even is by finding ways to assess the physiological state of a person’s body on an ongoing basis BEFORE any new stressing event happens.  He is talking, then, about risk and resiliency factors as they exist in a person’s body that was made in direct interaction with either an early safe or unsafe human world.

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I have a long way to go before I will feel at all assured that I understand what Porges is saying, but my sense of his work is that he is COMPLETELY RIGHT.  Porges has answers that no other researcher has discovered about how social engagement patterns form in humans through the quality of our early attachments and about how they work – optimally or ‘pathologically’.  I cannot ignore what is within these pages if I wish to come to my own accurate/truthful conclusions about the significance of my own story of severe early trauma.

I also have high hopes that Porges’ work will suggest solutions for healing!

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It is still hard for me to exactly track the magic of what happened to me growing up within a home of hell.  But something special DID happen to me or I would not find within myself a light that shines today.  That I can also see that light shining in others (when I am able to look around me honestly) is also perhaps the biggest miracle of my life.

I don’t think I would know what I do today about this light if I hadn’t gone back into my memories of trauma and abuse that was the first 18 years of my life to try to write my story.  As I followed the trail I have walked from as far back as I can know and remember every time I looked at ME — deep inside of ME where the person that I am was living her own life in spite of all odds against me — there I was SHINING!!

Somehow I was protected against accumulating veils of illusion that would have fed themselves with hatred, resentment, self pity or even deep confusion about who I am as a soul created by God.  On this day of Thanksgiving 2011 I cannot keep my thoughts away from God.  But this version of God that I think about is all inclusive of all that is good no matter the culture, no matter the religion, no matter if there is among the people so many who choose not to believe in God at all.

As I look back at myself as a suffering battered child I cannot find inside of me any thoughts about God other than my abiding, unquestioning understanding that God existed.  I did have thoughts about a massive angel I saw sitting at the top of a mountain peak across the valley from our Alaskan homestead.  She was my only friend.  She was my gateway to all I knew about mercy and grace, about companionship, company, caring, concern — INVESTMENT in me — that I mattered, that I existed at all.

I am most grateful in my life today at age 60 for the fact that NOTHING that has ever happened to me closed the door of my heart from being able to recognize that God exists.  This is my most great gift.  Yet just as I seem to lack the ability to deny the existence of The Great Mystery of all pervading love of a Creator Who has chosen the human species of all that live in all the worlds of Creation to love Him back, I also evidently lack the ability to imagine what my life would be like if this door of awareness had somehow been closed within me.

I am blessed to know that there is only one Creator, and that all religions on earth that have ever been each originated from this Source.  I know that the essential messages of all religions share the same goodness.  I know that whatever bad our species perpetrates comes from our ignorance, sickness and/or bad choices.

I know this Creator continues to lovingly guide humanity forward into every moment of the future.  I know the destiny of our species is to unite as the one family we are.  I know that until we recognize the purpose of our existence our species will continue to suffer.  We will not be able to adequately care for each other or our planet until we unite.  This unity will be both the sign of our maturity as a species and the fruit God intends for our evolution.

Humans can argue and bicker about what is real and what is not real until the proverbial cows come home.  We are a species, evidently, chock full of bickerers.  WOW!  That’s something to be proud of?  How mature, acting like a bunch of squabbling hens!

What on earth would happen to us if we turn a new corner and choose to find what we can all agree upon?

Doesn’t suit us?

And self-destruction and destruction of our planet’s web of life does?

We chose to name ourselves as a species Homo Sapien Sapien because we THINK we are The Wise Ones.  Well, today is Thanksgiving in the United States, a celebration of the sharing of the harvest.  Harvests come when seeds are planted and tended that grow into food we can share and benefit from eating.

As a species it is time for us to GROW UP!!  The seeds of our potential for goodness will spring forth in spite of all the efforts going on around us to tear things apart rather than to build them up to let life flourish.

I am glad I missed the indoctrination of ignorance as a child.  I was too busy surviving terrible ongoing abuse to buy into the fallacies that capture the imaginations of so many people on the side of the darkness of ignorance.  My soul evidently knew in the face of my insane mad monster of a mother’s abuse from the moment I was born that there was a clear difference between the light of truth and the darkness of lies.  I was fortunate to be able to stand on the side of truth against that darkness.

That I am able to articulate now that no matter what we name that Great Mystery all goodness comes shining from that Source while all darkness comes from its absence is the greatest miracle of my life.  And if it meant I had to endure every single instant of the terrible pain and suffering I went through for the first 18 years of my life so that I could retain intact this knowledge my soul was created knowing at the instant of my conception — then I say now I am grateful for that abuse.

For all the abuse that was done to me, my mother could never touch or break my soul.  Beyond this great gift is the fact that nothing else in this materialistic world has been able to dissuade my soul from knowing Truth, either.  Somehow I must have been born not to bicker!  I have been too busy surviving on every level of my being to waste a single precious moment of my life arguing in a field of lies.

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++MY CHILDHOOD STORIES

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It is certainly my hope as I sit down to write this post that the wide array of thoughts going through my mind this morning will naturally arrange themselves into some kind of meaningful order through this writing process.  Down here in the Arizona high desert the temperature is going up to 74° today and I want to be outside rather than in here at this keyboard.  So, on with this story, whatever it turns out to be!

On the topmost surface I am thinking about severe infant-abuse survivors’ frequent aftermath experience of dissociation especially as this experience involves what is often referred to as ‘depersonalization’ and ‘derealization.  It is not with hopes of intimidating, overwhelming or scaring readers who have these experiences that I suggest a quick read of a blog’s pages on the subject I discovered online at HealthBoard‘s website.  I want to talk about what might well be a very positive side to these dissociation experiences.

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Before I do I want to mention another trail of thoughts I have this morning that I know are somehow related to what I wish to say here in this post.  Those of you who follow this blog know that I am finally at age 60 taking piano lessons (learning to read, write and play music – in that order at the same time).  I am participating in a form of music therapy with myself, which happens to now involve my piano teacher as my art therapist – an entirely new experience for him.

Dissociation is a constant experience as I work with this music.  I know it is deeply tied inside my body-brain to the abuse I suffered from birth that included maniacal screaming verbal abuse from my mother so early that I had no way to grow my brain and hearing/listening abilities without incorporating dissociation into how I process information related to SOUND.

My physical ears can obviously hear what I play, but I guess the best way I can say this is that I am very aware that my soul-self is NOT LISTENING and therefore is not hearing what I play.

The best way I know of so far to explain this experience is to relate it driving a distance in a car, and suddenly realizing one has crossed quite a distance without being PRESENT – a frequent but still somewhat scary experience.

At those times it is obvious one’s mind is occupied ‘elsewhere’.  As I work with the music most of some important part of me is occupied elsewhere.  It is a big goal of mine to find a way to bring all of myself into the present moment so I can experience the music as a WHOLE THING.

OK, now for the past three nights I have had long dreams in which music is presented to me in manuscript form.  Sometimes the music appears and I can hear it, play it, sing it.  At other times, as in my dream last night, I am writing the music but I cannot hear the music ‘into the future’.  I only hear the music as it appears on note at a time and I write it down.

Well, I also have one of my rare colds.  Although not severe, it does wake me up in the middle of the night with coughing.  I tried hard last night to ignore the coughing so that I could remain in the dream working with the music.  I knew if I woke all the way up to go get some cough syrup I would lose the dream.  Eventually this is what happened.

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Now, this morning I sat outside in the sunshine and read some words of spiritual inspiration.  Today’s reading included a mention that every single soul has its own ‘particular aspiration.”  What is my soul’s ‘particular aspiration’?  Do I know?  Can I find out?  How?

Here comes my thoughts about what might be a positive side to dissociation-depersonalization-derealization……

As I take a much needed break from my book writing about the first 10 ½ years of my childhood’s severe abuse I am thinking a lot about what my SOUL knew from the time I was born in spite of and during the terrible abuse I suffered.

I always include what I read in the book, Care of the Soul : A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life by Thomas Moore, when I think about the impact my abusive childhood had on me on the level that truly matters most.  Moore writes about how the period of our earliest years is the time during which our SOUL and our material SELF really get to bond with one another, with the world, and with the process of being alive in a physical body in this material world.

They grow together ‘down into the world’ as Moore puts it.  Or, in cases like mine – do NOT have the opportunity to follow any of these patterns normally.

As I look at myself from my earliest experiences I now understand that there really were two separate ‘mes’.  One watched and knew the truth about everything and did NOT become emotionally involved.  The other me suffered terribly, as I had to during horrible, horrible abuse.

In ordinary cases most people DO get to join their soul to their earthly self in ‘natural ways’.  The risk as this happens, however, is that in our sick lost errant material world most people can completely lose track of their soul-self.

So those of us who suffered severe early abuse (and did not end up with a physiologically-based mental illness such as my mother did with Borderline Personality Disorder which blocks the expression of the soul and nearly all ability to recognize the truth) probably have a distinct advantage in that our soul-self probably DOES make itself known – and DOES SO DURING THOSE INSTANCES WE ARE EXPERIENCING DISSOCIATION-DEPERSONALIZATION-DEREALIZATION.

Many, many times during any given day I experience these aspects of dissociation.  It is most obvious to me now as I work with the music.  My so-called Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) includes a hyper startle response to nearly all sounds, and the ‘calming down’ of this startle response is NOT happening in my response to the wave-length note sounds of the keyboard (except evidently in my dreams).

Yet what is happening when I stand at the kitchen sink washing dishes and suddenly see the hand that holds the wet sponge is separate from me – and seemingly very far away and in a different world than the me is that looks at the hand holding the sponge?

What is happening as I reach down to pet my furry dog and instantly both the hand touching the warm fur and the dog itself are suddenly in a different world than is the me that intended to pet the dog and is in fact DOING that petting?

Can I learn now to pay very close attention like I have never paid before to what is actually happening during these probably hundreds of times a day I experience this dissociation so that I can learn to see/feel/know if my SOUL is ‘a one part’ and my physical ego-self yet another part present in these experiences?

Can ‘we’ learn to dialog across these vast distances?  Can we communicate ‘across the veil’ that divides us seemingly in time and space?

I don’t know yet, but I aim to find out.  I might well possess a valuable and unique opportunity to get to know both wings of my self as I live in this body in this material world — my earthly and my soul self!  Maybe not being able to ‘grow down’ into my body in this world due to extreme infant-child abuse gave me this gift that ‘ordinary’ people are not likely to have.  Perhaps……

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In 1980 when I was 29 years old I entered a 7-week in-patient treatment program in Minnesota where I lived for my addictions – primarily to pot which I now realize I depended upon to self medicate my depression along with all the problems my 18 year infant-childhood of abuse had caused me that I knew nothing about.  Today I am thinking about one ‘tool’ for clients to use to improve our lives that this state-of-the-art treatment program introduced:  The Johari Window.

I have been thinking a lot lately about human ‘defense mechanisms’ that everyone uses to keep on going in their lives IN SPITE of painful realities within them that seem to need to be kept hidden and unknown for survival to continue.  I have been wondering – hopefully without too much ego of my own – how it is that I can so often see not only people’s defense mechanisms in action but also see the hurts underneath that are so barely disguised they look to me like the proverbial ‘elephant in the living room’.

I find interactions with defensive people very difficult — it just seems to me that if we all could negotiate THE TRUTH with ourselves and with the help of one another everything would work out so much better!

For all the work I have done in putting together the first rough draft for a first book on my abusive childhood up to around age 10 ½ I am left with one main understanding about myself – true for as far back as I can connect with myself as a child around the age of two, true for myself now as an adult:  I have always had the ability to recognize the truth.

Some part of me from the time I was very small knew my own truth with absolute clarity in the face of the terrible abuse that my mother did to me at the same time she created massive lies about Linda – who I was, what I did, etc.  There I am as I find myself inside of memory after memory, there I am – the little person holding so firmly to my own truth that nothing on earth could shake it from me.  Of course I had no POWER over what Mother did to me.  But I did have the power to know inside of myself what was true FOR ME and what was NOT TRUE.

I was too young to UNDERSTAND what was happening to me.  I used every human power my body possessed to survive the horrors of what was done to me, but I did not possess the power to make any sense out of myself in the world.  That power began to awaken within me when I went through that treatment program to gain sobriety at the same time and for the FIRST time I began to recognize that what had been done to me for 18 years had even happened at all – and that it was ABUSE.

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The Johari Window returns to me as a useful concept for recovery from ANYTHING humans endure –including abuse and addictions of all kinds – because it involves a method of learning how to recognize our TRUTH.  If you click on THIS LINK you will see the picture that explains this process very clearly.

It explains how human beings separate off (dissociate) parts of the truth about themselves from their own awareness and how we can grow and heal by paying attention to how truth-hiding and truth-seeking operate in our lives.  Here is a description of how the quadrant-expanding process can operate as it helps us to see what we share with ourselves, share with other people, hide from ourselves – and the secrets that we all keep together:

Open: Adjectives that are selected by both the participant and his or her peers are placed into the Open quadrant. This quadrant represents traits of the subjects that both they and their peers are aware of.

Hidden: Adjectives selected only by subjects, but not by any of their peers, are placed into the Hidden quadrant, representing information about them their peers are unaware of. It is then up to the subject to disclose this information or not.

Blind Spot: Adjectives that are not selected by subjects but only by their peers are placed into the Blind Spot quadrant. These represent information that the subject is not aware of, but others are, and they can decide whether and how to inform the individual about these “blind spots“.

Unknown: Adjectives that were not selected by either subjects or their peers remain in the Unknown quadrant, representing the participant’s behaviors or motives that were not recognized by anyone participating. This may be because they do not apply or because there is collective ignorance of the existence of these traits.

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My personal bias is that health in self and health in relationships is directly proportional to the truth we know about ourselves – as we become stronger and more able to wisely share with others this truth.  Defensiveness is always about protecting the truth so that un-truth ends up being what we live with.  The bottom line of what kept my mother and our family so dangerously, painfully sick and abusive is that there was no truth.  There were lies instead that were acted upon as if they were the truth.

This process started for my mother during her own overwhelmingly abusive and pain-filled, inadequate childhood.  My mother’s developing body-brain changed in ways that then prevented her mind from ever discovering the truth in her lifetime.  Her entire disease (most probably severe Borderline Personality Disorder) kept her alive by keeping the truth permanently hidden from her.

I believe active addictions operate in the same way, but I also believe that there is an ability in most addicts/alcoholics to find ways to see and handle the truth.  I do not believe that true sobriety or recovery or healing will occur unless the truth is found and allowed to grow into a Tree of Life for that person.

I also have a personal bias that entry into a solid 12-Step recovery group is a necessity for this kind of major change – to turn from a life built upon buried-hidden truth into a life that allows the truth to become THE CORE of a person’s life – to happen.

“Putting the cork in the bottle” or stopping the use of drugs is NOT recovery.  It is the doorway into recovery.  Recovery is a spiritual activity, as the 12-Step programs try so hard to introduce and support.

All addictions use the same physiological body-brain chemicals as safe and secure attachment systems in the body-brain are MEANT to use.  Because so many in active addiction processes suffered terribly as little children these chemical pathways have gone WAY off track.  Twelve-Step programs offer a forum for insecurely attached wounded people to perhaps for the first time in their lives learn to live as HONEST, truth-seeking and truth-aware members of society.  Healing then can begin on ALL levels of a person’s existence.

People can argue forever about what works and what does not work to help people quit using whatever drugs (alcohol is a drug, also) that they want to.  I am simply expressing my personal opinion.  I will also say that I do disagree with one of the commonly held beliefs about addictions and 12-Step recovery group attendance.

I DO believe that some people, given at least ten years of solid dedication to attending at least one good meeting a week (at least one meeting a day for the first 90 days), working the 12-Steps continually, and utilizing the wisdom and assistance of a sponsor with MUCH quality sobriety/clean time can eventually ease away from the strictest adherence to the program itself and do just fine IF they have the commitment to TRUTH in their lives that is needed for sobriety/clean time to be continued.

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See also:  *UNDERSTANDING AND TRUTH

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It is time for me to remind myself of something I wish I had known a long, long, long, long time ago:  Except in the very best of circumstances in my life I AM ALWAYS HURTING!!

Especially as the winter sets in (even though I live way south now), as the temperatures drop, as the light fades a little more each day, and as the holiday season approaches — I MUST remember this fact.

I have written many times in the past upon this blog about the neurochemical often referred to as Substance P that communicates physical AND emotional pain signals to the brain.

IT IS CRITICAL TO UNDERSTAND THAT THE BRAIN HAS NO WAY TO DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL PAIN ON THE BOTTOM LEVEL!  Pain HURTS!!  Physical pain hurts.  Emotional pain hurts!

What matters most to me is the knowledge that when I feel chronic emotional pain IT IS NOT MY FAULT.  I do not believe I was born ‘this way’.  Chronic severe infant-child abuse did this to me.

There are situations and circumstances that alleviate my pain for periods of time.  These periods of reprieve are always temporary because the pain is chronic.  Today I remember this feeling has always been with me for as long as I can remember.  When I feel ‘down’ I need to separate the pain from MYSELF.  I am NOT my pain.

Some days are just harder than others.  Today knowing where this pain comes from so that I don’t have to ‘blame’ myself or what’s happening to me in my present life for the bulk of this sadness helps me to put the pain into perspective.  I remember to be wise, kind, gentle, positive, hopeful, patient and compassionate with myself — and realistic about what I expect of myself.

Infant-child abuse hurts — for a lifetime.

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Some related posts:

+A WORD ON TRAUMA TRIGGERS AND FALLING APART

+INFANT-CHILD ABUSE, SUBSTANCE P AND A LIFETIME OF SADNESS

+SUBSTANCE P – IT’S OUR BODY’S BIOLOGICAL LINK TO FEELING EMOTIONAL AND PHYSICAL PAIN

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Also Helpful – CLICK HERE

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