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On a much lighter note – gotta love life!! Two true animal stories written on this blog some time ago:
+HITCHING A RIDE WITH KIND STRANGERS
*In Honor of the Grieving Chicken (2003)
Enjoy!
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The fact that I do not want to write this post has nothing to do with the fact that I am writing it anyway because I believe there are some things I need to say to make very clear what my current thinking is about child-abusing people with Borderline Personality Disorder.
I will decide by the time I finish writing here if I am going to post here the second comment made by a BPD reader yesterday. At present I have deleted both of her comments from this blog because I consider the thinking behind her words nonproductive to the purpose of this blog about healing trauma. To me, her words were nothing but toxic. (As I read them it was like I heard my mother’s voice speaking from the grave.)
I will reiterate some things I have posted here before. (1) Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is often misdiagnosed. (2) I believe the neuroscientific technology does exist that could clearly and definitively diagnose this disorder by watching a BPD brain perform relevant tasks. (3) I also believe that diagnosing BPD in this manner presents a conflict of ethical proportions that our current civilizations are not yet ready to sort their way through. (4) Just because nobody chooses to use the current technology to diagnose this disorder does not mean that without it, BPD is always identified correctly.
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Next I will lay out the playing field for human life as I see it. (1) There is only one God. (2) God creates an individual soul out of love at the second human conception occurs. (3) There is no such thing as “choosing” before birth to suffer. (4) I believe that human DNA is a supramemory device. There are people who can probably identify ancestral memory, but that is not the same thing as reincarnation.
For the purposes of what I wish to say about BPD, including my dead mother: (1) Each human soul God creates is good. (2) Under ordinary circumstances humans have free will to choose to do good or to do evil in their lifetime. (3) I do not believe humans are given the right to judge anyone. That is God’s job. (4) Under severe early trauma alterations in human development do occur very early in life. (5) Some people have potential for surviving unbearable pain and trauma in their genetic code, and these combinations can be triggered into action in a little one’s physiological fight to maintain their life. (6) I believe BPD is definitely one of these trauma-triggered genetic survival physiological tactics a little one’s body can take under horrific early conditions of stress and trauma. (7) There are some physiological changes (being knocked unconscious being a most obvious one) that interfere with the expression of the powers of the soul. Severe BPD is one of these physiological changes as it impedes normal rational thinking processes (and other abilities as well).
Among the powers invested to the human soul at this stage of advancement for our species is the power of rational thought. This power resides to a great degree in the more newly evolved cortices of our brain. Early trauma can change development of the body-brain in ways that eliminate anything like ordinary, advanced human-soul abilities to exercise rational thought.
We can call these people ‘mentally ill’ if we want to, but it is important to know that if early relationship trauma in unsafe and insecure attachment environments was responsible for triggering physiological changes to ensure survival, the changes that happen to the formation of the brain are very real. Again, in a BPD brain these changes can be watched as they operate.
Nothing about these conditions makes these people ‘bad people’, but it does make them non-rational. They do not think in ordinary ways. They do not know they do not think in ordinary, rational ways. Everything that a BPD person thinks makes sense to them. But the queasy, eerie, uneasy feeling of ‘ICK’ a person feels when they encounter BPD ‘counter-logic’ is a telling sign that there is no bridge to cross between how an ordinary person thinks and a BPD person thinks.
(I also believe that there is healing for BPD people, but there is no cure. This devastating disease, whose onset is clearly linked to child abuse, can be prevented just as child abuse can be — when our society is willing to take appropriate actions on behalf of all infants and children to ensure they are given what they need when they are little to grow up WELL!)
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Many current psychological practitioners believe that BPD is ‘just’ about emotional dysregulation. Nearly half of our population suffered from some flaws in their early caregiver attachments. This half of us all have some version of what is known as an insecure attachment disorder. This means that on some level everyone within this half has some degree of both emotional dysregulation and an empathy disorder.
Emotional regulatory abilities are directly built into the human social-emotional brain primarily during the most rapid brain growth period of development during the first year of life. If those earliest infant-caregiver interactions contain dysregulation, in effect that inability to adequately regulate emotion will be downloaded into an infant’s forming brain.
More accurately, BPD includes great disturbance in the rational thought processes of higher human functioning. There is no negotiating using ‘common sense’ with a Borderline. Their version of the world, as distorted, twisted and narcissistic as it is — that includes no ability to self reflect, to experience true empathy or genuine compassion, no ability for remorse and a very, very questionable ability to exercise true conscience or consciousness — is, to a Borderline not only the ONLY world there is, but also the only CORRECT world.
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I would say that from now on if any blog reader posts a comment that I read with a growing sense of negativity, dishonesty (blind as it may be), and shaming in their words — coupled with a growing dark feeling in my gut like there are masses of centipedes thriving in their — I will not hesitate to eliminate their words from this blogspace. The readers whose comments will most likely cover the ground I just mentioned will be, without a doubt, Borderline Personality Disorder people.
In a reply I posted: BPD has a purpose: To keep survivors of early abuse alive. The most important way it ensures continued survival for its host is by erasing from the survivor/BPD the ability to both truly feel their own pain (and the pain of others) as it erases the ability to learn anything of any depth about cause and effect.
My mother outran her pain her entire lifetime. It is not that she didn’t suffer, but she had no ability to comprehend that fact.
Being nearly a babe yourself at your young age of 27, you will most likely be able to outrun your pain for a very long time yet to come. Those of us who survived severe abuse, and WHO ARE NOT BORDERLINES do have to feel, acknowledge and continue to learn about what happened to us and how it affects us in our life for the rest of our lives.
Unlike BPD people, we do not have an illness that makes us truly immune to pain so that we can continue to live at the same time we ignore the truths of our lives.
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I cannot go back and retrieve this woman’s first comment in which she stated she is 27, had three children, two of them austitic, that she abused them ‘because she was stressed and emotionally dysregulated’, saw the light and gave the children ‘away’ (not a bad thing, I add), and now is going off to enjoy her life at the spa, etc……. And shame on any child abuse survivor who goes after the truth!
But here is her second BPD comment:
Well I definitely never did anything like what you mentioned your mother did, and I don’t find it acceptable. It did, however, it did happen to me in that severity, along with sexual abuse as well. Yes, what happened was hurtful, but I do not wallow in pain and I no longer inflict guilt on myself about my children because the past is the past. I keep track of them they seem very happy now. I was adopted too and if it had been the right parents, I wouldve been perfectly fine.
My bio brother was adopted at 4 years of age he’s fine. I don’t condone abuse, I kept trying to cope with the boys, I kept trying to be a better mom and and cope with their autism but with no help I couldn’t. I started having crazy thoughts of him dying, I had a nervous breakdown and felt tremendous guilt and sent the kids to safety. Its been a painful year but now its over and I have the right to enjoy life just as anyone else. I have traumas but they are being overcome. I am beautiful inside and out, people
like me. I am a good friend and fun to be around. You all fail to recognize that I did the right thing.
I already unsubscribed from here because I have no more time to sit here reading what judgmental, whiny 60 year olds have to write. That at their age they still have not overcome childhood trauma. How pitiful. You want to spend the rest of your life whining? Go ahead. If you are so passionate about helping abused children, I agree with the cause, go do something about it. Become a social worker, volunteer, don’t just sit here and whine about everything. I was once like you, living in the past, until someone gave me that advice of forgiveness and I took heed and I am finally enjoying life. Good luck to you. Ps I believe in tough love, not pity parties!
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My wise daughter’s reply to me about this comment: “This is sickening. Crazy woman. Ick. Don’t let it influence you at all!!!!”
Please consult the links at this post if you have any questions about the healing power of telling the truth for those of us who do NOT have BPD. (BPDs live because the truth overwhelmed them and their body used this genetic combination to ensure their continued survival anyway. They do not have the physiological ability to literally ‘tell the truth’ – not what happened to them or what happens to others around them now.)
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It is an antithesis of this blog to have had a BPD commenter remark yesterday that when adult infant-child abuse survivors choose to put words to their traumas and speak/write about them that we are feeling sorry for ourselves and ‘whining’.
In response to today’s commenter on the post — *THE DANGERS OF MEMORY RETRIEVAL I posted the following links to older posts written on this blog over time that address the topic of disclosure and the power that naming and giving words to trauma have to heal human beings.
It is the nature of trauma that it will repeat itself in life until the lessons contained in the traumatic experience are heard and learned. Trauma dramas repeated as disrespect, confusion and often as violence in relationships of all kinds — including in child-caregiver relationships — is a sure sign that unresolved trauma is still alive and unwell within the adults in relationship.
We are never too old to apply what we can figure out about the old adage, “Clarity begins at home.” After yesterday’s BPD extremely judgmental and condemning, ridiculing and verbally abusive comment (which I did not post), I realized this about BPD individuals (you can certainly relate to this if your abuser had Borderline Personality Disorder):
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BPD has a purpose: To keep survivors of early abuse alive. The most important way it ensures continued survival for its host is by erasing from the survivor/BPD the ability to both truly feel their own pain (and the pain of others) as it erases the ability to learn anything of any depth about cause and effect.
My mother outran her pain her entire lifetime. It is not that she didn’t suffer, but she had no ability to comprehend that fact.
Being nearly a babe yourself at your young age of 27, you will most likely be able to outrun your pain for a very long time yet to come. Those of us who survived severe abuse, and WHO ARE NOT BORDERLINES do have to feel, acknowledge and continue to learn about what happened to us and how it affects us in our life for the rest of our lives.
Unlike BPD people, we do not have an illness that makes us truly immune to pain so that we can continue to live at the same time we ignore the truths of our lives.
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It serves no good purpose to stop ourselves or anyone else from speaking the truth. Sure, there are times and places when ‘disclosure’ might not be immediately appropriate in a given social situation, but other than that we all need to find ways to give ourselves permission to communicate our truth — be it in spoken or written word, poetry, journal/blog writing, writing and playing and signing music, performing dramas, and through all forms of art creation of which our species has been gifted to be able to perform.
The important point is that we ARTICULATE trauma. As I am finding in my book writing doing so means that I find within every memory of abuse I retained from my childhood my SELF in the middle of those memories, and the GOODNESS I both was and knew at the same time I endured.
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Please check below for some additional relevant posts —
+AVOID THE PRYING EYES OF CREEPY FAMILY: WRITE YOURSELF A PRIVACY-PROTECTED BLOG!!!
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*THE MEANING OF MENDING OUR LIFE STORY
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+THOUGHT SALAD: HAVING ‘THIS’ TO SAY ABOUT ‘THAT’
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+EXCLUSIVE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY OWNED BY SEVERE ABUSE SURVIVORS
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+SECURE AND INSECURE ATTACHMENT AND THE CHILDHOOD NARRATIVE
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+BEING CHEERFUL AND COURAGEOUS IN THE FACE OF A TERRIBLE REALITY
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+HOW DO WE LIVE WELL WHEN WE HAVE TOO MUCH TRAUMA INFORMATION
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+WRITING ABOUT OUR SEVERE EARLY TRAUMAS FROM THE INSIDE OUT
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+WE NEED NEW WORDS TO DIALOG WITH OUR BODY ABOUT TRAUMA
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+MARCHING ON TO VICTORY OVER TRAUMA
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+LINKS TO TODAY’S PAGES ON DISSOCIATION AND DISCLOSURE
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These are some additional older posts on the topic of the ‘adult narrative’ of our life stories:
+SECURE AND INSECURE ATTACHMENT AND THE CHILDHOOD NARRATIVE
*THE MEANING OF MENDING OUR LIFE STORY
+HEALING THE TELLING OF MY LIFE STORY – HEALING MYSELF (from infant-child abuse)
+WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR CHILDHOOD STORY: TRUE FOR THE BORDERLINE, TRUE FOR THE BORDERLINE’S OFFSPRING
+THE WARNING THAT WILL GO WITH THIS BOOK WHEN IT’S FINISHED
+A LONG POST ABOUT TRUTH AND WORDS
+OVERWHELMED BY TRAUMA, OVERWHELMED BY WORDS: LINK TO AN ARTICLE ABOUT TRAUMA DRAMA THAT CAN HELP US
+CREATING A TIMELINE OF OUR EARLIEST LIFE – PUTTING ORDER/ORGANIZATION TO TRAUMA/CHAOS
+WORDS DO NOT MEAN SOCIAL CONNECTION TO ME – THEY ARE OBJECT-TOOLS-WEAPONS
+MY LIVING PHILOSOPHY ABOUT WORDS
+LINKS – PREVERBAL COMMUNICATION and DEVELOPMENT (RISK FACTORS, INFANT ABUSE)
+HOW NICE TO SAY, “BYE! BYE!” TO TRAUMA DRAMA
+LINK TO A WHOPPER OF A TALE ABOUT TELLING OUR TALE
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A note to child abusers who find their way to my blog: If you are someone like my mother was, who herself suffered her entire life from the devastating disease of Borderline Personality Disorder, you will be most uncomfortable here. My words speak the truth rather than perpetrate the lies of those who unfortunately developed their own body-brain in an early atmosphere that robbed them of the capacity to truly know right from wrong.
My mother had no conscience. She did not have the ability to experience remorse. She had no ability to experience life within an ordinary, non-distorted reality. Mother had no powers of self-reflection. She had no power to consider the truth about her actions of oppression, tyranny and terrorism that she committed against the children – especially against me – that she brought into the world. My mother was more dangerous than a rabid dog, and no power in heaven or on earth can silence my words about the truth of what this woman did because she was capable of doing what no sane person could imagine against me.
If it has taken me until the age of 60 to have gained the arsenal of scientific truth about what happened to cause my mother’s illness and about what her actions did to change the entire course of my life, so be it. In recent years our nation’s Center for Disease Control is beginning to document on the broadest scale yet the permanent and irrevocable damage severe stress and trauma during early infant-child development causes survivors. Wrapping the truth about infant-child abuse up with paper made of deceit and half truths and tying this bundle with the ribbon of denial is deadly.
Evil exists in this world. Silence breeds evil. So does doubt. If there is anything a child abuser wants in life it is to have the truth of their evil actions against helpless infants and children buried beneath the deception of lies. Part of how child abusers’ actions remain unnoticed in our society is through the silence of the voices of those who know the truth and either cannot or will not speak it.
The light of truth makes those who live a life of lies (either by choice or without choice, as my mother did), cringe to the core of their being. The power of truth is its exposure of what is true and good and right. Truth does not participate in deception. It does not hide or hide from factual accounts of wrong doing. It does not try to deplete another person’s efforts to discover the truth or to speak it.
The intergenerational transmission of unresolved trauma between people most often within families continues to happen until someone along the line says, “Enough is enough! I want to know what this trauma has to say about life in the past so that we can change our lives in the present to live a life of increasing well-being WITHOUT THE TRAUMA IN IT.”
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I believe it was divine destiny that preserved 70 years of my mother’s words on paper until those words could make their way to me. My mother was robbed by the physiological changes her young body went through in its development in response to severe traumatic stress passed to her by those who were her ‘keepers’. In consequence to these changes she went through, she developed Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), which I believe is one of the most dangerous diseases a mother can have because it allows a mother to directly transmit to one or more of her children even worse traumas than what she herself experienced during her earliest years of life.
I have the ability to discern my mother’s severe illness in her every action. BPD is an illness that invades its host to the core of the molecular operations of every cell in their body – permanently. The distorted filter of information that a BPD body-brain lives with protects the host of BPD from knowing the truth – all truth. My mother’s body told her on an entirely unconscious level that if the truth ever made it into her awareness it would destroy her.
Every action my mother took against me was in her effort to block the truth of her own pain from her awareness. When she rammed my head into a toilet bowl when I was four, when she attacked me with a club intent on killing me when I was ten, when she viciously knocked me down in a giant mud puddle when I was fifteen insisting I crawl around saying over and over again, “I am a pig, I am a pig,” her efforts were to obliterate me as a human being separate from herself so that I could serve her purpose of being her stand-in replacement for her own internalized ‘bad-evil’ self inside her own Borderline hell – so she could escape.
My mother could not afford to let me escape from hell. If I escaped she would then be returned to her own hell – and in her sickness to her that meant obliteration and death. In other words, I spent 18 years with this mother being a non-person, a non-self. Any time any piece of ME appeared within the range of Mother’s perception she renewed and escalated her vicious abuse.
True, my mother was severe Borderline – a psychotic one. Yet the truth about BPD as neuroscientific research can now see on brain scans of the BPD brain in action, is that they have and will forever have a different kind of brain from normal. While there are plenty of adults who perpetrate severe abuse against infants and children, it is my belief that the delusions BPD creates in the brain-mind-selves of its hosts is probably the most dangerous because of the power ALL mothers and earliest caregivers of infant and children have to FORM the brain-mind-self of their offspring.
Borderlines are nearly infinitely able to influence the thought perceptions of others in such a way that their victims can easily fight for their entire lifetime to know the truth about what happened to them at the hands of their tyrannical, terrorist abusers.
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I fully expect that the truthful words on this blog will offend every child-abusing Borderline who finds their way to these pages. Their offense is my surest means of knowing I am doing my work well because the mirror of truth that this blog holds will directly conflict with the deceptions that the BPD disease creates in the body-brain-mind-self of its hosts. I will not, however, allow the toxic contamination of any abuser’s mind stand here unchallenged.
Nor do I in any way blame BPD readers for not being able to comprehend what this blog is about. That BLANKNESS within them is a direct consequence of the terrible disease that someone who could not and did not care for them properly during their most dependent months and years of life triggered in their genetic survival-at-all-costs arsenal of trauma response capacity. The severest of BPD people will walk their entire lifetime over a difficult path trying to negotiate far more than other people will a challenging pathway about what it means to “Cause no harm to self or to others.”
May true beauty surround and heal us all.
See also:
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I just wanted to applaud my grown-up self for finding the willingness to find my way back in time to myself at age 10 so that I could help myself “put the burden down” about some of the things that happened during May and June of 1962. I was becoming worried about myself not having it in me to retrieve those horrific memories of abuse that happened to me during that time.
I found I could not approach those memories at home alone at my computer. I have left my home for a series of days to write in public places where people were around. This time period needed to be written out in a different way. It needed not only to be written in an arena of human activity, it needed to be written by hand, one honest word after another, on paper.
I finished the main text of that writing today and now will take a break at least for tomorrow before I transcribe that writing onto my computer. It struck me today that I literally needed to put that memory down on paper to help myself put the burden of what happened to me down at the same time. That will never be entirely possible, but it is my belief that it is in finding the goodness inside myself during the times abuse was happening to me that will join me in the present with the life in me as a child.
It also struck me today that this piece of writing will probably end up being a book in itself, and probably the first one to come out of this 18-year saga of severe abuse I have to tell my overarching story about. It struck me that this era of middle childhood, smack in the middle of my growing up in Mother’s Borderline madness, covered a crucial time of change and transformation for me that in turn directly triggered a massive response of abuse from Mother.
Looking back I am beginning to understand that given the toxic environment I was growing up in, it could have been predicted that such an outbreak of horrendous violence was going to be triggered and would play itself out. It strikes me that it would very likely be exactly this time frame in an abused child’s life during which identification of abuse might most likely be made.
Whether a child would be helped through that period of time or not matters. I believe a book focused on this segment of my life has much to offer those who are fostering, caring for, and/or adopting a middle childhood aged child who has suffered abuse.
Time will tell how the writing progresses from this point forward, but first….. I need a break as a very wise friend just reminded me! But I just accomplished an important and extremely difficult piece of writing. “Kuddos to me!” And thanks for reading and for caring!
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How does empathy, compassion and altruism interconnect in the human experience toward the end of increasing well-being for all? This link I am including here follows to the best research description I have found about what empathy is and how it is supposed to operate in humans beginning very early in life. Adult attachment experts say that among those of us who suffered from unsafe and insecure caregiver attachments during our first year of life (true for about half of our population) we all have a resulting ‘empathy disorder’ along with some variation of an attachment disorder.
In this article the authors described research among preschoolers that shows how this combination of insecure attachment from early relationship traumas impacts a very young child’s experience with empathy among others. I read this and added my comments four years ago:
Empathy is a power humans have to experience within their body-brain patterns of information processing that allow us to know even without words what another person is feeling. Early experiences of relationships with caregivers who do not have healthy empathy abilities due to their own Trauma Altered Development lack the capacity to share-mirror-resonate with their young offspring. This domino effect will be seen in the young children who will then lack healthy empathy abilities in their own-body brain.
Healthy empathy does not allow for contamination of someone else’s feeling state with our own. There is supposed to be a health-promoting boundary between people so that we know the difference VERY CLEARLY between another’s suffering and our own.
I now recognize that the feelings I have in connection to the people of all ages that are suffering through the effects of the terrible fires in Bastrop County, Texas is NOT coming from a healthy ability to empathize with those people. The fires, which have been burning for days now, are only about 30% contained. Over 550 homes have been burned to cinders, and many pets and livestock animals have been killed. Although there are millions of people suffering on this planet (and the planet is suffering as well), my sister and her family live in that county. Although their home has been spared so far, my heartfelt attention is turned to their neighbors who are suffering.
But what I feel is NOT TRUE EMPATHY. Because of the severe infant-child abuse I suffered while my body-brain was growing and developing I will NEVER be able to experience healthy, true empathy.
It is important for me to realize this, and to realize that experiences of empathy are connected to but different from both the experience of compassion (which is deeply tied into the vagus nerve system and the calm-connection end of the stress response system) and the experience of altruism.
Yes, the development of my vagus nerve, autonomic nervous system and my central nervous system were also altered in their development in response to severe child abuse trauma. But empathy itself begins to form itself directly into the earliest forming right-limbic-social-emotional brain of an infant through its interactions with its earliest caregivers from birth. These patterns are deeply connected to the ability to grow and recognize one’s own self in relationship to other members of its social species – through the presence or absence of true empathy in an infant’s significant others.
There is no magic wand here. What happens to build our earliest body-brain before the age of one determines the later patterning of our experiences for the rest of our lives. Those of us who suffered severe maltreatment and trauma during our earliest years need to be able to recognize that when we become UPSET at injustice and pain of any kind that others are experiencing – what we know of their suffering is contaminated with our own suffering.
That is just a fact.
We can still recognize our compassionate response. We can still obviously act in altruistic ways. But we need to be able to focus on sorting out our emotional reactions to other people’s suffering in ways that safe and securely attached people who will always be experiencing healthy, true empathy will never have to. Our clarity on the emotional boundaries between our self and others will not be innately clear to us. We have to WORK for this clarity! Please read the information at the link I posted above to see how this is true even from the age of preschool.
If early trauma survivors do not do this extra work to honestly find out “Who and what am I feeling my pain for and about?” we are playing in the wrong sandbox. Being honestly concerned for other people’s (and animals’) well-being happens when we can leave our own suffering for our own self out of the picture.
If we don’t do this work we will not be able to tell the difference between our feelings FOR OUR OWN SELF and our feelings for life outside of our own body-self. For severe abuse survivors this will be a lifelong effort.
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These are also some related posts on this blog:
+WHY DID MY SIBLINGS NOT BELIEVE MY ABUSIVE BPD MOTHER?
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+PITY HURTS, COMPASSION HEALS: KNOWING THE DIFFERENCE
*Keltner (2009) chapter on compassion
+GENUINE EMPATHY AND COMPASSION: THE ROLE OF ATTACHMENT AND ‘EFFORTFUL CONTROL’
+LINKS – VAGUS NERVE – ABUSE- HEALING
+CALM THE CRYING BABY — IMMUNE SYSTEM STIMULATES VAGUS NERVE TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT
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It would be nice if I could post nice thoughts. Instead I have jumbles of words that run amuck in my thoughts like too-hungry mosquitoes searching for prey. Prey. Such a small word. Such a necessary word in the world of the natural order of things. But children are not meant to be the prey of grownups. Neither are innocent animals. I mention this because of the past 24-hours of my life that have been entangled with the misdeeds of one of my neighbors who is not really my neighbor at all.
A year and a half ago the family that once lived in the trailer two spots to the east of my house here along the Arizona-Mexico border wall disappeared with their seven children and five adults into Mexico. I recently learned that the mother was deported. Yet like several families in this small unincorporated town of 700 manage to do, rent is paid on their trailer as their ‘official’ address so their children now living in Mexico can walk across the border and attend American schools.
What they do with their life as adults only marginally bothers me. There is nothing I can do so I ignore this situation. (I must add here that I miss those children. They were some of the sweetest, wisest, most intelligent and kind children I have ever met.) Until last night. Until this morning……
For some bad reason the adults in that family choose to keep a white pit bull on a chain heavy enough to pull a semi attached to a light pole beside a dog house beside their empty trailer. One of those children (I imagine) walks over daily to water and feed the dog. But not always and not now. Not on this holiday weekend.
Other neighbors around here and I have spoken together about this dog who is known to bark for long periods of time when she is in desperate need. We combine our efforts to make sure she has water and some kind of food to stave off her misery until someone who owns her shows up again to meet the basest of her needs. We are all justifiably afraid of this dog and cannot go closer to her than the end of her chain. We also all know if we call the Sheriff’s department to complain about this pitiful pit bull they will send animal control down here to shoot her.
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I wasn’t going to write about this. This isn’t ‘nice’, but it dawns on me that this is not a blog much about ‘nice’. It’s about infant and child abuse and the intergenerational transfer of trauma through oppression, terrorism, torture and violence by adults who are NOT able to parent their children. It’s a blog about all those on the outside with the power to intervene and do not. It’s a blog about how to recognize abuse when it is happening to little ones, and about how to stop this abuse.
After barking all night, at daybreak this poor bit bull continued her nonstop barking. I went to see her and found both her water bucket and food dish completely empty. Her ribs are showing. She has been so attacked by bugs she has scratched herself raw and bleeding. I went home and then brought her the only food in my house I thought she would eat, two pounds of frozen hamburger – and turned on the neighbor’s hose to squirt her bucket full of water from a distance. Then I FINALLY called the sheriff’s department and reported this heinous abuse (no water!? and our temps have been in the 90s +), knowing that on Tuesday when animal control officers return to work this dog will no doubt be put down. Whatever her name is, she has NOT stopped her incessant barking.
The topic of cruelty to animals brings to mind that the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is a non-profit animal welfare organization originally founded in England in 1824 to pass laws protecting carriage horses from abuse. The American Society branch was founded in New York in 1866.
The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was founded in 1874 (and incorporated in 1875) as the world’s first child protective agency. It is worth taking a look at the history of the formation of THIS society that came about when a church worker named Etta Wheeler approached the animal cruelty prevention organization regarding the mistreatment of a child called Mary Ellen McCormack, who was being beaten daily by her foster mother who cut her with scissors. (see more history of the case HERE: Case Shined First Light on Abuse of Children )
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As I slept my fitful sleep through the darkness last night with my doors and windows shut against the barking of the neighbor’s dog (shutting out the cool evening breeze always welcomed after a hot desert day), a gruesome scene appeared in my dreams in the passing of the hours: Coyote. Scruffy coat. Dead on the graveled dirt beside the road. Cut in half. Torn and oil-blackened scrap of a tarp thrown over the head half of this poor creature. I could see the end of its muzzle poking out. I looked, sickened, disgusted and horrified. I walked on.
Much later in dream-time I again approached this carcass. The back half lay exactly where I had seen it the first time I walked past it. But this time a paw reached out from under the tarp, gripped into the gravel in front of the head as this severed animal very slowly pulled itself forward.
I woke up. Was my dream literally showing me the ‘half dead’ dog? I went to help her. She is still barking.
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Some neuroscientific experts on human emotions name DISGUST among our primal emotions past our initial startle response along with emotions such as anger, fear, sadness and joy. We have DISGUST for a reason! Disgust is an immediate physiological reaction to danger to self and/or to others. We must not allow a break between disgust and a positive reactions to threat and danger.
SEE notes and posts on this blog:
**DAMASIO ON EMOTION AND FEELING
+SIEGEL – EMOTIONAL REGULATION
Other scientists disagree that disgust in an emotion, but I believe it is a human reactionary experience of great opportunity related deeply to our ability to survive by being able to ‘read’ other people’s facial expressions at nearly the speed of light. If another person’s face communicates DISGUST when they eat something, we know instinctively that toxic poison and death are related to that expression. If we happen to have that same food in our own mouth at the time we see that DISGUST on someone else’s face – we will SPIT our share out!
DISGUST is intimately tied with VOMITING! Disgust is a baseline survival reaction that has kept our species alive on the physical level – and on the social-emotional level it is supposed to work the same way. Disgust, in my thinking, is directly tied into our human body wiring connected to compassion and empathy, as well. These are ALL connected to our stress response system – which has to be considered with ‘calm connection in a safe world’ on the one end and extreme danger on the other.
These are also some related posts on this blog:
+PITY HURTS, COMPASSION HEALS: KNOWING THE DIFFERENCE
*Keltner (2009) chapter on compassion
+GENUINE EMPATHY AND COMPASSION: THE ROLE OF ATTACHMENT AND ‘EFFORTFUL CONTROL’
and these:
+LINKS – VAGUS NERVE – ABUSE- HEALING
+CALM THE CRYING BABY — IMMUNE SYSTEM STIMULATES VAGUS NERVE TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT
+INFANT-CHILD TRAUMA CHANGES THE VAGUS NERVE’S DEVELOPMENT
+VAGUS SOCIAL NERVE – INFLUENCED BY CULTURE
+MY MOTHER’S VAGUS NERVE: THE MAKING OF HER PERFECT BORDERLINE STORM?
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Photograph free compliments of this great site! Public Domain Photos
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I am finding it interesting to see how many days I am taking in avoiding writing a memory for the book that has to be written. My own book writing rule is that I am going in the order of my childhood for the first time in my life. I will not allow myself to skip ahead. I cannot write forward without first writing this age 10 memory that I seem to be doing a very good job avoiding!
An idiom comes to mind, “plumb the depths (of something).” Etymology of the expression is based on plumb line (a cord with a heavy piece of metal attached to it, used to measure the depth of water under a ship).
Well, that certainly seems to apply!
I am thinking about child abuse survivors who find in their adulthood that they (me) seem to have a collection of certain memories. Like dead butterflies pinned through the head to a board, these memories don’t seem to change much over time. Perhaps their colors fade like laundry left too long on the line in blazing Arizona sunshine. But the gist and body of each of these memories remains whole and intact.
Flashbacks common to PTSD are often full of more sensory-related information than a survivor would ever want to know. These are the multiple-dimension memories, not the 2-D flattened faded butterfly pinned to a board kind.
I am talking about trauma-abuse memories. Sweet memories can be a problem if they stir longing and grief of lost happiness, true, but it is the memories of abuse that concern me for they ALWAYS contain unresolved trauma at their core.
This memory that is staring me in the face from when I was 10 is a wide memory if I let it be. It covers a span of at least three weeks’ worth of time. I of course don’t want to spend time NOW reliving these three weeks! And yet I don’t seem able to open my can of proverbial paint and splash out a quick image of this ‘thing’ so I can move on in my writing. This memory must have some unplumbed depths to it that I can’t quite imagine – but know are there.
My experience currently must still be about preparing to ‘deal with’ not only the memory of what happened the end of that May in 1962. It must also be about me preparing myself to deal with myself NOW as I face who I was as a child at that point in my 10th year of life. This is not a memory of something I can gloss over. This is a memory of depth. This makes me think that ALL of the childhood trauma memories we have in our collection have depth to them that we rarely, if ever, find a way to PLUMB.
Yes, we can ‘tell’ them. We can ‘recite’ them. We can mention them. But do we plumb their depths? By not doing so, is that what keeps our power bound up in these memories?
Children do not have the power to truly comprehend what happens to them unless there are caring people around them to help them work their way through their troubles. This is no different from what researchers have discovered about adults who experience trauma – of any kind, at any age. Attachment relationships of quality heal traumas. We know that. But how many of us get to tell anyone, I mean REALLY get to tell anyone, about what happened to us SPECIFICALLY when we were traumatized as children?
I guess I will learn more about this process as I work through preparing to face this age 10 memory of mine. A dear old-time friend of mine called today and asked me to tell her the ‘story’ of this memory. I did describe it to her – and she cracked up! I mean REALLY cracked up! Of course I did, too. How could such an experience be funny? What is it about the very fine line that must define the difference between tragedy and comedy?
“Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion,” I can hear Dolly Parton say to her friends in Steel Magnolias. I didn’t get near the tears today talking to my friend, but we sure did hit the laughter. Was that depth or surface? I do not know. But I will know more once this memory is brought into my book writing soon, very soon.
As it is I know it wouldn’t take very much for me to reach my hand out in space and time to run my fingers over the surface of the table in my memory. “Not yet,” I hear myself say. “Not yet.”
Photograph free compliments of this great site! Public Domain Photos
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At the risk of my siphoning off words into this post that could go into the section of book writing I am working on right now, I want to spill out some words here about making conscious choices in childhood – or in adulthood, for that matter. In light of this topic, I will revise my thinking by refraining my statement: I CHOOSE to spill out these words here.
I don’t actually have any shortage of words. It’s not like I have to go out into the hinterlands and hunt up some more because I have consumed them all already. There are plenty of words to go around, plenty of words to serve my purposes – both on this blog and in my book writing. So what do I fear? I fear I am going to miss something important in my thinking, ‘waste’ an insight, miss an opportunity to state something in the middle of my childhood life story by hiding the thought over here instead of putting it clearly and boldly exactly where that insight belongs: At the point where my inner life changed when I was 10 – yet changed only for a very, very brief period of time.
I will be writing about the single span of perhaps 3 seconds that maybe did change the course of my life from that time when I was 10 forward. But this part I will ‘save’ for the book section I will move from here to there to write today – after I do my 45 minute walk about, after I spend some time exercising all of me at my keyboard practice, after I summon up a different kind of willingness to move forward in my story for the book that I find is VERY different from the willingness I use to write in circles over here on this blog.
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What I am narrowing my focus on, like a gliding bird of prey with its eyes open, talons adjusted to grab and fly with my newest food for thought, is this question:
“At what point is it a natural growth ability of a human being to CONSCIOUSLY make a choice that then follows into a consciously-inspired action?”
Thanks to this book journey I am, the journey that requires of me that I put all the dissociated single BUBBLE memories of my abusive childhood into the best coherent, linear, this-followed-that format I can manage to accomplish, I am learning new insights about my self. Learning about one’s self is NOT easy in the midst of a childhood of violence, oppression, terrorism, loneliness, and trauma survival.
The kind of abusive infant-childhood that I had happened because my mother was a mentally ill psychotic Borderline Personality Disorder woman.
I didn’t know that, of course. Looking back through the filter and lens of my own mind today – using every bit of scientific information I have accumulated in preparation for my task – I realize that my mother probably never once in her life past age five had the ability to clearly and consciously weigh her thoughts, emotions, desires along with those of the children she came to be responsible for raising so that she could exercise true compassion and wisdom in her life.
Making conscious choices is not something we are born able to do. We have to grow a body and brain that THEN has the physiological abilities to come to consciousness.
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I just mention all of this because in my book writing I am about to cross a threshold in my own human development that would have happened sooner or later in one way or another no matter WHAT the experiences of my childhood had been – benevolent or malevolent: On May 13, 1962 I made a conscious decision. I made my first conscious choice.
In my book writing I will (because I can and want to) return directly inside the body of myself at 10 ¾ on that day so that I can re-experience this life-changing moment.
That it happened once, that my choice and decision reaped for me dire consequences, that after this abuse incident that lasted at least three concentrated weeks I have no memory of making such a higher-level conscious choice again until I-don’t-know-when, is another matter. Degrees of wisdom of the decision doesn’t matter. The fact that I had physiologically developed the physiological powers to make a decision of my own – FINALLY – matters more than I know right now. I will know the rest of it when I write it – elsewhere.
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Trauma that passes itself on down the generations in families has great, great power that should NEVER be taken lightly to remove from ‘the contaminated’ victims of repeating traumas the conscious power to recognize these massive trauma-based patterns that continue on down in families.
These patterns appear in trauma drama.
The trauma itself usurps the consciousness of the actors and players in the dramas.
Untangling the icky sticky puppet-string threads that steal people’s free-conscious-choice and decision making away from them is not easily done.
It takes, I believe, a level of conscious choice and dedication to this difficult task for any of us to be able to separate what happened to us through the trauma dramas of our families (and nations) to find OUR OWN CONSCIOUSNESS in the midst of the trauma dramas that seem to run our lives – and often the lives of those we are closest to.
Because my theory for myself states that for every memory of abuse I retained for my self over the span of my lifetime contained something extremely good, and therefore redeeming of ME — as a person separate from all the trauma drama of abuse that was done to me — I am prepared to work toward viewing my age-ten self from this gentle perspective.
No matter how ‘dumb’ my May 13, 1962 decision and choice was, it was an act of creation equal to or surpassing anything else I may have accomplished in my lifetime. For that moment I WAS ALIVE as a human being!! And for the very first CONSCIOUS time.
More than anything that fact triggered such an aftermath of horrific abuse perpetration in my mother that I would have dissociated and forgotten that any of this ever happened – EXCEPT FOR THE FACT that there is something embedded within this experience that is of such value to me that I would not be the person I turned out to be without it.
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Well, it took me five days off of the book writing to get myself started back on the job today. Tomorrow I hope to tackle the really hard memory I am so opposed to invading. In the meantime I went searching for some neuroscientific information about brain development in children during middle childhood, the age I was at the time I was when my resistant memory was created at the end of my 5th grade year in school when I was ten.
I found the Cliff Notes web page has a terrific batch of readable information related not only to the age period I am considering right now, but also as it pertains in its expanded presentation to the entire range of infancy and childhood all the way through the human lifespan.
Here is the link to the Cliff Note pages on what they call DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY.
You will find the following at this Cliff Notes link —
Introduction to Developmental Psychology
Developmental Psychology Research
Conception, Pregnancy, Birth
Physical, Cognitive Development: Age 0–2
Psychosocial Development: Age 0–2
Physical, Cognitive Development: Age 2–6
Psychosocial Development: Age 2–6
Physical, Cognitive Development: Age 7–11
Psychosocial Development: Age 7–11
Physical, Cognitive Development: Age 12+
Psychosocial Development: Age 12–19
Physical, Cognitive Development: 17–45
Psychosocial Development: Age 17–45
Physical, Cognitive Development: 45–65
Psychosocial Development: Age 45–65
Physical, Cognitive Development: 65+
Psychosocial Development: Age 65+
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This site is worth a gander.
Again, it is important to understand that the entire spectrum of human development can be altered by the onset of severe relational trauma from birth onward. Once severe unsafe and insecure attachment conditions communicate the presence of trauma in an infant’s environment all future body-nervous system (including brain) development can be altered in important ways that cannot be reversed once certain Critical Window time periods for development have passed.
In extreme cases such as my Borderline Mother’s was, the earliest traumas of her life came to combine themselves into ever-increasing cascading developmental changes that came to include the triggering of a specific combination of her genetic potential that created her terrible Borderline Personality Disorder condition.
For those of us who survived extremely abusive childhoods without intervention or reprieve some degree of Trauma Altered Development changed the patterns that are optimally presented at the above links. If we simply scan through this information we will be able to detect in our reaction to this information which parts of it have special importance to us — both in terms of the changes that traumas caused in the earliest stages of our abuser’s development and in terms of how our own development changed from the abuse we suffered ourselves.
We cannot learn too much about what happened to us. The good thing is that the alterations in our development that our body was able to make in the face of overwhelming trauma kept us alive. What those changes are and how they change the way we live in our body in the world demands that we learn — on our own because no professional is really going to tell us — how we can identify the changes to us so we can learn to live a better life in spite of them.
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Stop the Storm 
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