Please follow this link the this story which has been moved over to my Adulthood Stories section of this blog.
Tag: abuse
POWER OF PLAY AND THE MEMORIES OF PLAY
My older brother sent me the link to this site about hope and humanity
http://www.humanmedia.org/catalog/home.php
Full Length Audio Programs as Heard on Public Radio
Satellite Radio • CDs • Online MP3 Audio Downloads
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He had just listened to a program featuring Nancy Carlsson-Paige and told me, “There are some interesting articles there to read. The interview mentioned that Nancy is the mother of actor Matt Damon.”
http://nancycarlsson-paige.org/
“Childhood is dramatically different today than it was just a generation ago, but children still need an environment that encourages healthy play, a sense of security, and strong, loving relationships. Whether you are a parent or teacher, my goal is to help you prepare and succeed in supporting children’s optimal growth in these challenging times.”
– Nancy Carlsson-Paige
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Refer also to this interesting news article on pills and memories. If those of us with horrific childhoods had a choice, would we choose to erase our ‘bad’ memories? Part of what is so significant to me about what I have learned about early abuse and brain formation is that even if specific memories could be erased, the changes that the brain and body had to make to adjust to the conditions of the toxic and threatening, dangerous environment have already been made, and these changes are permanent.
But would elimination of specific toxic memories give us a different degree of peace within ourselves, and hence of a sense of well being?
http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/neuro/memory_drugs_sd.html
My father had brain surgery for a pituitary tumor in 1990 but ‘forgot’ to tell the brain surgeon he had a bleeding disorder. As a result, he suffered massive brain hemorrhaging but survived it. Along with an assortment of substantial deterioration, he lost all his long term memory. He did not remember he had a wife and could not remember why he had divorced her. He could not remember his childhood or his children. He could not remember homesteading or the life time of work he had done as a civil engineer. But he DID know that he couldn’t remember himself in his past and that he had forgotten everything good and bad, and he suffered greatly with this knowledge until his death 10 years later.
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Animals enact genetic memories about how to get along in the world and reinforce behaviors for their offspring through play. Humans have an additional critical brain development layer. As we get older our brains sort out complicated information that we receive from our daily experiences in our dreams during our sleep time. Part of the disruption that occurs for PTSD sufferers happens because the traumatic experiences are so overwhelming that the brain cannot find a use for the experiences and they are not integrated. They often continue to trouble our sleep and our dreams as a result.
I found it fascinating to learn that migrating geese, for example, can go lengthy periods without sleep because they are engaging only in repetitive motor actions and do not have anything new or different happening while they are flying. They therefore don’t need to sleep. Sharks also don’t need to sleep because their repetitive motor actions consume most of their lives, and without new and unusual experiences, their brains have nothing new to process during dreaming states.
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So what does childhood play have in common with dreaming? Children process incoming information during their play in the same way that we process incoming information in our dreams. Because the foundation of our brain’s processing of information that we can later access consciously through thought and with words is first formed in our right brain as wordless images, our species has developed ways of working with these images in ways that do not involve words — including dreaming and playing.
All our processing ‘techniques’ below consciousness still involve efficient transmission of information back and forth across our corpus collosum — the two hemispheres communicate via dense bundles of nerve fibers called the corpus callosum. Early childhood trauma is known to alter the development of both hemispheres, and of the corpus callosum. These alterations interfere with processing of memory and learning, and this interruption shows itself both as problems with dreaming and especially with small children, as problems that appear in play.
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One of the ways that intergenerational unresolved traumas are communicated to future generations is through alterations in play behavior between mother and infant. Dr. Allan Schore’s writings on early brain development so clearly describe the importance of mother-infant play that he makes me think that just watching a mother’s play interactions with her infant would provide enough information alone to be able to detect potential danger — or not — in how that mother handles raising the infant in every way.
When I return to the work of ‘translating’ such research findings into common word usage, I will write posts with more specifics about what the experts are finding about mothers, infants, play and early brain development.
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For now I will just say that once I discovered this research and then looked back over my childhood, I realized that the deprivation I experienced by having play interfered with and removed from my early life had profound consequences both on my brain’s development and on my ability to process the traumas themselves.
I have written about one memory regarding the removal of play from my school experience in first grade: FIRST GRADE — NIGHT ON THE STOOL and of another about playing alone when I was the same age: THE MARBLES
Part of how my mother controlled me from birth was by controlling my ability to play, and as the above memories indicate, she found ways to even control my interaction with peers when I was away from her just as she controlled my interactions with my siblings when I was at home. Childhood play has evolved as a way our species engages in social interactions as members of a social species. Play affects our development from the time we are born, and without play we lose an important aspect of becoming our best selves possible, both in our relationships with ourselves and with one another.
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In addition, we need to realize that the same region of the brain that is exercised during physical play and activity, the cerebellum
and http://www.waiting.com/brainanatomy.html) is the same region of the brain we use to coordinate thoughts when we cognate. Our body’s movement in interaction with our mother’s movements when are within her womb are thus building our capacities to coordinate our thoughts well before the time we are born. Our body’s movements continue to participate in this process during our entire lives.
Interestingly, this word cognate is directly connected to the female – or mother: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1B3RNFA_enUS270US307&defl=en&q=define:cognate&ei=w2cASvP1MJ7etAOM_o3uBQ&sa=X&oi=glossary_definition&ct=title). Mothering is critical to the development of humans inside and out!
A connection between movement and well being in newborns can also be seen in the fact that rocking a premature infant vastly improves their growth
including even their breathing. Is being held and rocked play to a newborn? What happened to us if our mothers couldn’t even do this? What potential monster did we create when we invented bottles for feeding babies? (I believe that this was the monster that began to harm my mother from the moment of her birth, as well as the monster that began harming me. Even monkeys won’t become attached to a propped bottle!)
http://jap.physiology.org/cgi/content/abstract/77/3/1548
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As Nancy Carlsson-Paige proposes (in the link at the start of this post) our culture’s children today are at risk of developing long term socialization disabilities related to their lack of active physical play, and of positive socially interactive play experiences. An area of basic human needs that developed throughout our evolution is being tampered with and neglected, and there will be negative consequences for future generations. Play is a part of the development of well being on crucially important levels.
Realizing this fact has opened a whole new level for me to understand how my mother’s abuse of me affected my development. I believe that as ‘recovering’ survivors taking a thorough inventory of everything we know about our childhood play becomes an important tool to claiming our lives. Play is a dramatic expression of inner experience (and continues to express itself through the ‘trauma dramas’ we enact in adulthood), just as dreams are, during our entire life.
What DO we remember about our childhood play? Play occurs in an arena of safety and security. Therefore our play activities from birth are like litmus paper indicators of the degree of benevolence present in our environment, surrounding not only our caregivers but ourselves as well. In this way knowing our play history can provide us with extremely useful information about our attachment patterns to and within the world at large. Quality play does not indicate a malevolent environment. Lack of it does.
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Thank you for reading — your comments are welcome and appreciated. Linda
+For everything there is a time and a season….
I do not want to do this writing. It makes me scared, ‘crazy’ and miserable. When I walked away from my computer, writing and research mid December 2008, just when I discovered what I was looking for with ‘substance p’ as it connects emotional and physical pain in the body and the brain, I never went back until the first week of April when my sister, C. called me about starting a blog.
During the time I wasn’t writing I was living in a ‘bubble’ I had created that let me feel like I could begin to float on up and away from being so sad all the time. The sadness was still there, but I could sometimes look at it from a distance.
Now that I am writing again I can’t find that bubble, I can’t return to that ‘better’ place. Now I feel like I’m being crushed by a falling mountain, or falling myself into darkness that has no end. I am again surrounded by a sense of forboding and live daily without a sense of well being or hope.
But now that I’m ‘back here’ I don’t know how to escape again. My mind does not allow me easy transition between any kind of ‘states’ of mind or of emotions. I cannot find a middle ground that allows me to write while I’m separated from what I write about, nor can I leave the writing for brief periods of time and separate myself from the reality of who I am based on what I’ve gone through.
I feel caught in the storm. I feel like I am spiraling downward, not upward.My only hope in writing at all has always been that I might write something that will help someone else understand who they are better in the light of anything new I might be able to offer about what happened to me. Yet I have no way of even knowing if that’s possible, let alone know if it’s happening.
The only place I can find for self soothing is to disconnect myself from the writing and leave it alone, hoping I can find a way to make a different bubble. Yet if my greater purpose is to make something useful and beautiful somehow from my life’s experiences, I have to remain at my task.
+FINDING THE CRACK IN MY BORDERLINE MOTHER’S REALITY
At 5:35 pm on Good Friday, March 27, 1964 I was 12 years old and not yet a woman.
Then the great Alaskan earthquake happened on this day at 5:36 pm — the second strongest earthquake on record anywhere on our planet.
http://wcatwc.arh.noaa.gov/64quake.htm
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I could tell you my personal story of the earthquake that day when my menarche happened, but all I want to mention now is that by the end of that three minutes of terrible shaking, I was a woman.
What matters most to me right now is that because of the earthquake, because of my mother’s writing about her personal experience during it, because those pieces of paper she wrote her story on survived for over 40 years and then found their way into my hands after her death in 2002, I now have proof of a critical point regarding Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) — most importantly of my mother’s version of this mental adaptation to early traumas and my assessment of her condition.
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I believe that an abusive borderline parent will do everything in their power to keep the ‘outside world’ from seeing or being able to detect both their broken mental condition and the abuse that is a result of it. This is what makes BPD parents so extremely dangerous to their offspring. Nobody outside of the family is likely to EVER suspect the existence of either the mental illness or the abuse. (Knowing the signs to look for in order to notice in the first place and then to be able to see through the crack in the reality of BPDs will be covered in future posts).
I am not saying that my mother’s mental illness or her abuse of me was invisible to the outside. I am saying that a combination of the fact that nobody cared with the fact that these same people did not know what they were seeing even if they were looking, resulted in a complete absence of intervention for the entire 18 years of my childhood I spent being severely abused by my mother.
It is likely that my father also succumbed to these same factors, although the additional fact of him being my father SHOULD have allowed him the ability to intervene on my behalf in some way. This is a good part of why I am pursuing my writing based on my personal experience. I believe that personality disorders are so pervasive, consistent and insidious that until our present ‘enlightened era’ it has been nearly impossible for those who are on the inside to recognize what is going on, either.
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This is why what I found in my mother’s writings about her earthquake experience is so empowering to me because it confirmed what I intuitively know about her condition and affirmed my assessment on many levels both of the cause of BPD and of the consequences of involvement on any level with a person — especially a mother — who has it.
You can read her story as she wrote it at My Mother’s Alaskan Earthquake Journal Entry.
In the months just prior to receiving my cancer diagnosis I was hard at work sorting and copying into my computer all my mother’s letters, notes and journal entries concerning her homesteading experiences. I will post what I have completed for you to reference, but there remains hundreds of disorganized pages and letters that still need to be included to make the entries complete.
These papers my mother wrote traveled thousands of miles, some of them being stored for up to 30 years in her various storage lockers she kept, and finally found their way to me nearly 50 years after she wrote them. It was in this collection of her papers that I found the stories that she wrote the winter of her 11th birthday. (SEE also: My Mother’s Childhood Stories)
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All the time I was transcribing her writings I was searching for a clue that would show me the truth in her writings that would confirm what I know in my own heart about my mother’s mental illness. Because my mother’s stated intention in writing any of these letters and journals was to eventually write what she referred to as her “Alaskan book,” they were written from the public side of the border wall that allowed her to write under the ‘spell’ of that BPD persona. Because this borderline split between public and private is so fundamentally and profoundly crafted into the altered brain of a borderline it is usually impossible to detect it through their own description of their version of reality.
That is why what I found in her earthquake writing created in me a state of elation! I FOUND it!! I found the hole in her border wall, the crack in her reality. I found the chink in the armor that she had developed as her brain grew in childhood to protect herself from unbearable pain. I found the equivalent of my own Silver Chalice. If I never read another word she wrote I have still successfully completed my mission and my quest.
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I need to take a related diversion, or detour at this moment to make a connection that I believe is vitally crucial to putting severely abusive mothers’ behavior in the social context of the human mythological imagination.
I encountered this ‘myth’ several years ago at the start of my research, Euripides’ Medea, and would like you to find a way to read it if you can. It is contained in this book
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1417908971
though I read it in an earlier printing of this one
Refer to this for historical context surrounding the Trojan War and Jason and Medea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medea
Euripides’ famous retelling of this part of Greek myth in his play about Medea was first performed in 431 B.C., hence this story is a retelling of mythology that is older than 2500 years. My point is that I believe this story is about a particular form of madness and can be seen as very closely related to aspects of what we now know of as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). For whatever reasons the authors of the myth ascribe to her, in the end Medea murders her own children.
Had my mother been able to escape any consequence for her actions, I know she would have murdered me. In fact, this is a point of argument that I hold with the experts’ version of what dissociation is and what it does. I DID NOT dissociate during my mother’s beatings of me. I felt every single one of them because I had to remain absolutely aware and present during all of them as soon as I was old enough to control my body. Her rage usually and quickly escalated to the point that she lost control of herself while she was beating me — in rhythm to her recitation of the litany she had created for me — SEE: Litany from Start to Finish — to avoid the most dangerous falls her beatings caused me or I would have been killed — if possible, killed many times over.
It is evident in Euripides’ play that all the public present knew of Medea’s intent to kill her children because she stated it publicly and yet nobody intervened — not even when they heard the children screaming as she hacked them to death in their home with a massive knife. Yet while many consider that this play refers to abandonment, one of the key symptoms of BPD, it is the ‘lower layer’ related to a mother’s ‘passion’ to kill her child or children that most fascinates me personally.
Because I understand that extreme childhood trauma can cause an evolutionarily altered brain to form, and because I believe that BPD appears as one of the manifestations possible from these changed brains, I also believe that it is the very, very ancient genetic information about surviving in the worst of all possible worlds that triggers this mother-passion to harm her offspring. It is no different an instinctual reaction as one pursued by animals when they kill offspring, abandon entire litters, or choose the most ‘fit’ of the offspring to save while abandoning the others.
This is, I believe, the human basis of the killing Medea did of her children and the attempted killing my mother did to me.
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Now back to the earthquake writings: My proof is contained therein. If you read her writings at My Mother’s Alaskan Earthquake Journal Entry you will find in her story the following — (Words written in the brackets are mine as is the type bolding. Eklunds were neighboring homesteaders on the valley floor whose house my sisters, younger brother and I had been staying at while my parents were in Anchorage during the earthquake):
“Finally Eklund’s house was in sight – from outward appearances all seemed fine. She came running out as we approached. I could see our children were fine. I was so thankful! I hugged and killed [meant kissed no doubt but she wrote killed], each child in turn. We were all together again. I can’t emphasize strongly enough – that this was all that was important. We could always start over again – even though for us, who like so many Alaskans have struggled so long and hard for everything and still have so far to go. We could and would, if necessary, do it again. I’m sure there was absolutely no questioning our minds to that.”
BINGO!
Even if we call this a ” Freudian slip, or parapraxis, an error in speech, memory, or physical action that is believed to be caused by the unconscious mind,” the unmistakable evidence is here in her writings that what I suspect of her mental reality was real.
When I am ready to dig through boxes again, and ready to set up my scanner and do this, I will scan in the actual words as she wrote them with her own hand. I transcribed them into my computer exactly. There is no way, once a person sees her writing, that the two middle letters in ‘killed’ could possibly be construed as being the two middle letters in ‘kissed’.
Finding this hole through which I could see her reality may well be the only tangible vindication I can ever discover that proves my mother was who she did not say she was, particularly as she terrorized me from the moment of my birth as a result of her psychosis.
The only other related confirmations that I have found in her writings appears in the last of her childhood stories (mentioned above) and in her writing of the dream about the dark rainbow and the storm which can be seen at
https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/about-stop-the-stor/
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Drawing the line between the real world and the reality of the world of a borderline becomes nearly impossible particularly for those of us who were abused by one from birth. Not only the trauma is built into the body-brain, but as a result, the version of the borderline mother’s reality is built into the survivor, as well. I know my mother’s is built into me.
These three ‘holes’ that appear in my mother’s writings are thus critically important for me to both possess and to consider as I attempt to face the reality of what happened to me on all the levels that my mother damaged me. I’m not sure that anybody who was not severely abused by a borderline parent can even begin to imagine how important these tangible expressions that illustrate clearly the break in the nearly perfect facade a borderline shows to the public world is — or imagine the terrible confusion such a parent creates in the minds of those she abuses.
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My mother never knew that she meant to write that word KILL, yet there it was where I was able to find it. What a gift this discovery is to me, and perhaps to someone else who reads this post. That word is a direct connection to the ancient genetic potential for survival in a traumatic world that mothers who have been abused themselves CAN form even in this very real current day world. Because the evolutionary throw-back potential can exist in a brain that was traumatized during its development, it is folly for us to remain puzzled on any level when we hear of a mother abusing her children, not even her infants.
We can no longer afford to be puzzled when mothers actually kill their offspring, either. All the evidence that trauma can turn a mother into a killer is in the 2500 year old play about Medea which I am sure only reflects a reality that has been with our species from the time of our beginnings. It was present in my mother’s writings and in her abuse of me.
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I also want to note here that the infliction of self harm and self injury that is common to borderlines did not have to be a part of my mother’s spectrum of behaviors because she made no distinction between herself and me. I was a projection of all that she had been taught to abhor within herself. I was thus an externalized aspect of her mind — a mind that was, in effect, turned inside out because the burden of containing her own reality within herself was potentially too much to bear. She could then heap all kinds of punishments and injuries on me and did not have to self-harm her own body.
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As always, thank you for reading — Your comments are welcome and appreciated. Linda
EARLY TRAUMA BUILDS DISSOCIATION INTO THE BRAIN
Sometimes thinking with a dissociated mind is like trying to carry too many groceries in your hands at one time. It takes an incredible amount of focus and concentration to be able to process information that to others would seem obviously connected and therefore would be easily considered in a fluid, flexible and ‘together’ fashion.
Some of my writing might be difficult for readers to follow because of the disconnected way information presents itself to me in the first place — as well as how it presents itself to me as I try to write coherently. As I mentioned in previous posts, the inability to tell a coherent life story is directly related to how the early developing brain was fed information back in its beginning. If that information was disconnected at its source — meaning in the brain-mind of an infant’s early caregiver — that pattern of disconnectedness, I believe, is directly communicated not only TO the infant, but more importantly is built into the infant’s growing brain.
Most of us today are at least vaguely familiar with the concept of downloading and uploading information on computers. Taken in its most specific and literal meaning, early caregivers are downloading information directly into an infant’s growing brain. The infant’s brain is forming itself according first to how information is being transmitted to it. It is only after the ‘how’ aspects are transmitted that an infant’s brain can begin to process the specifics of ‘what’ is being transmitted.
Information that is not appropriate in the context of the caregiver-infant interaction and is inconsistently transmitted to an infant will be overwhelming. It is in effect not an dissimilar to the way that wrong information being processed wrongly within a computer will crash it. It is not unlike what happens to a car’s transmission if you were driving down the highway at 50 miles per hour and suddenly moved the gear shift to reverse.
A ‘rupture’ without possibility of ‘repair’ is created when any effective ongoing pattern is drastically — and I mean traumatically — interrupted. We don’t usually think of it this way, but what causes these ‘ruptures without possibility of repair’ in a growing infant and young child’s brain is the presentation of the wrong information in the wrong way at the wrong time, and happens because these young one’s have had no opportunity to build a brain with capacity to process this incoming information effectively.
I believe that if maltreatment exists (as I’ve said before) during critical brain developmental stages during infancy and childhood, these ruptures without repair are themselves built right into the circuitry of the resulting brains. Because their we are talking about interactions that occur in interaction with the environment, every single time such a lack of repair happens, after an overwhelming traumatic experience, a ‘dissociation spot’ is created within the brain’s operational patterns that will be carried within such an individual for the rest of their lives. This is one of the actual, physiological ways that trauma is built into a brain-body.
Knowing exactly which environmental triggers will cause these dissociation spots to become obvious in later years is nearly impossible because most of us with severe abuse histories have literally millions and millions of them built into our brains and into our bodies. Every single time one of these dissociation spots were put there, or created in the first place, a physiological body-based response happened with it. This is one of the ways that trauma is physiologically built into a brain-body’s memory. It is literally formed into the actual cells themselves and affects the way that ongoing genetic processes operate.
If the trauma happens early enough and is severe enough, we DO end up with different brains and bodies as a result, as I mentioned in my previous post. We are sensitive to stimuli differently and process information differently. The vital and necessary ability to appraise and sequence information into usable segments that can then later be used in connection to new information is interfered with.
We are different because we are left with a broken string of pearls and a string that cannot be added onto in a normal useful fashion. We are thus left with an incoherent life story based on a disorganized-disoriented, incoherent brain formed by the same kind of disordered attachment from birth. Only some of us can go a good long way down the road of our life before we are faced with the reality of what this means to us. We are left with an armload of groceries dropped on the floor, and we cannot pick them up. Who is there that can or will help us?
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I believe that life operates through a pattern of circles and cycles. Because of this, one can follow any given thought around until it connects to the opposite of itself. I now wish to make the contrasting point to the one I presented in my May 1, 2009 post, “DOES THE GOOD MAKE THE BAD BETTER?” by asking a related question, “How does the bad help us to make our lives better?”
I do not see that there is ever a straight, obvious, easy road that connects the ‘bad’ of our lives to the ‘good’ of our lives. I want to present you with an example of what I am saying. From the earliest times of my life I evidently succeeded relatively well at finding ways to continue on living in spite of not only the abuse I experienced but also in spite of the ways I found to work with what happened to me. Because the traumas were built into my body and my brain on an ongoing basis, I NEVER noticed the adaptations that my brain made to the traumas.
This is a critical point. I ‘continued on being’ as Dr. Allan Schore says of abused infants. I survived, and I have done so through a continuing process that was unrecognized and unknown to me. Things would have remained the same IF I had not had cancer, or more accurately, if the cancer had never been treated and I had not survived it. Because I had treatment, particularly chemotherapy, and because I came out the other end to be who I am today, I can now look back through the windows of that process and say that I have learned something I never could have possibly known otherwise.
To put it most simply, I have learned how I adapted to the traumas because those adaptations have mostly been taken away from me.
There are some things, even those as seemingly insignificant as the one I presented in my April 21, 2009 post “EARTH DAY: In Honor of the Grieving Chicken, ” that one might never be able to imagine or believe unless they are actually experienced. If not for my cancer and its treatment I could never have imagined the adaptative abilities I had actually created in order to survive my abuse that made me believe I had done so ‘normally’.
I now know that my definition of ‘normally’ has to be expanded. My adaptions were normal considering what I experienced, but they were not ‘normal’ in comparison to how other people, whose brains were not formed in, by and for trauma, operate.
I evidently was able to teach myself from birth in some amazing ongoing way how to think and act with a brain that had formed a mind that has millions and millions of dissociation spots built into it. The chemotherapy regime that I underwent disturbed my brain as it interrupted both my memory and how my brain operates in relationship to memory.
I have know of no scientific support for what I know from inside of myself, but I believe what has happened to me post-chemotherapy happened because the part of the brain that processes incoming experience before it is organized for long term memory storage — the hippocampus — the only part of the brain other than the one that processes new smells that continues to build new nerve cells, called neurons — was directly affected by the working aspect of chemotherapy that stops all new cell formation. That’s the same process that made all my hair fall out and made my fingernails stop growing and stopped the ability of the cancer cells to multiply.
Because the chemo stopped the rapid cells from growing in my hippocampus, I could no longer remember the steps I normally take to put on my makeup in the morning. My friend, who also underwent the same chemo treatment, forgot to put her blouse on until she noticed it after she was already in her car to go to work.
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It would take a very caring and astute group of people to realize that an extremely dangerous side affect of chemotherapy — for those of us who formed brains containing dissociation spots from early abuse during brain formation stages — is a deterioration of the brain’s ability to utilize the adaptive processes that it found and learned in order to live relatively well in spite of the affects of the trauma on its development.
The wordless image that came to me in relation to this damage is that of a huge steel post being driven into the gears that run the Big Ben clock in the London Tower.
http://www.parliament.uk/about/history/big_ben.cfm
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While someone could remove the post and repair the clock, the rupture that happened to my ongoing memory processes about how to live an ongoing life in spite of the serious affects that trauma had on my developing brain cannot be repaired. Yes, this sucks!
Yet as a consequence I now know intimately that I DID manage to create incredible patterns to cope with the dissociation of trauma in my brain. I know it now because I can no longer DO IT! I forgot what I learned, what I evidently taught myself from birth, how to do.
So is it a good thing I had cancer and chemotherapy so that I can now understand all of this? Can what I learned as a result be of some valuable use to someone else? I can only hope that it can, because I now understand how crippling massive dissociation is to any ongoing ability to manage one’s being in the world.
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There is another critical piece of information I now know about the link between having undergone severely stressful life events and the development of breast cancer. This research is connected to the ongoing problem of women in Israel developing breast cancer at very high rates.
http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSCOL86917620080828?feedType=RSS&feedName=healthNews
I have been blessed with excellent physical health and stamina all of my life. I justified the fact that I didn’t need to get a mammogram because I did not fit any of the risk factor categories that I knew of. Had anyone ever told me that the stress of severe child abuse increases one’s risk of getting cancer, THAT fact I would have heard and understood. I understand now that early abuse alters the way the immune system develops as well as alters brain development.
In addition, I now understand that anyone who suffered extreme abuse from birth is at an even higher risk of damage to any ongoing well-being they may have carved out of life for themselves because they no doubt have complicating brain factors due to their brains having adjusted to dissociation. They are at risk because any chemotherapy that stops rapid cell division will affect their hippocampus. They are at risk of forgetting everything they ever learned and remembered about how to keep themselves out from under the devastating effects that underlying dissociation would cause them in their ongoing life processes.
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Now it takes very little demand for information processing to “make me drop all the groceries,” and I am now on full disability because of it. Imagine running first in an important race. Suddenly you trip and fall, breaking both your legs. You are hauled by ambulance to the hospital where the legs are set and put in casts. Your leg bones take time to heal. It takes time after this repair for you to get full use of them back again. How likely are you going to be to get back to that same spot on the race track to resume the race and still even be in the running?
None. So I can now say that the me that existed prior to chemotherapy is dead. I cannot go back and get her, either. I had evidently gone through a continuous process throughout my lifetime to adjust to living with the dissociation that trauma had created in my brain. I can no longer remember how I did it.
I know that I am not alone. I am among those on life’s battlefield who have been shot and wounded with thousands of bullets of trauma. Yet we get up again and again and again and struggle forward toward the end of our lives. Do we ever need to question why we suffer?
I had laid out the equivalent of a fragile and vulnerable bread crumb trail in the children’s story of Hansel and Gretel that had allowed me to move from my first breath forward in some kind of ‘associated’ way. By the time I was done with that chemo, that bread crumb trail had vanished and it cannot be replaced. Until chemotherapy I had never known that trail existed in the first place. I know it now because it is gone.
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Thank you for reading. Your comments are welcome and appreciated.
PROFOUND PHYSIOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES OF EXTREME EARLY ABUSE
I stop and look inside of myself as I begin to write this post. Do I want to write about the present? Do I want to write about the past? Chasing fireflies in the darkness, so beautiful, becoming rare. I miss them. They do not live in the desert.
Which words might want to appear here? What story?
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I know that I mentioned this once before in an earlier post, that the inability to tell a coherent life story is one of the key and central indicators that a person has an insecure attachment from early childhood. I think we are often tempted to focus on what we know of our adult relationships. Task masters that we are, we count them like keeping score. Which ones were ‘good’? Which ones failed? Were we hurt? Are we bitter? Could we have ‘done better’?
But what do we really know about those early relationships, the ones that set the stage and formed the patterns that lie in the very fiber of our brain and body? Those, the implicit memories, that guide us obliquely?
Now there’s a word I didn’t expect to pop out of my keyboard when I started writing this post.
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from – Definitions of oblique on the Web:
- any grammatical case other than the nominative
- slanting or inclined in direction or course or position–neither parallel nor perpendicular nor right-angled; “the oblique rays of the winter sun …
- external oblique muscle: a diagonally arranged abdominal muscle on either side of the torso
- devious: indirect in departing from the accepted or proper way; misleading; “used devious means to achieve success”; “gave oblique answers to direct questions”; “oblique political maneuvers”
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webw
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“slanting or inclined in direction or course or position–neither parallel nor perpendicular nor right-angled”
All our experiences, even those that we participate in before we are born, even all those that happen to us before we can hold our head up, roll over or sit by ourselves, dig their way into our growing bodies and form us. If they were formed by experiences that were hazardous to our well-being, these never-to-be-consciously accessed memories can lie there in wait like predators that later steal our lives away from us without us even knowing it.
They ‘slant’ our lives and incline us ‘in direction or course or position’ so that we end up out of kilter and off on a life direction that can often be far different from the one that COULD have been ours if those very early experiences (certainly up to age 2) had been harmonious and balanced. There are consequences if we survived, and our entire life course ends up ‘neither parallel nor perpendicular nor right-angled’.
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Does that make us, the survivors of severe abuse as infants and young children the ‘oblique people?’ When I pay attention, more so now than ever before in my life I would have to say, “Yes, that is very probably so.” I say this at 57 because the trajectory I was sent out upon from the time of my birth has now landed me at this age in a place that I would never have been any more able to anticipate than I was able to anticipate the word ‘oblique’ appearing on this page.
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An image has appeared in my mind, of myself being hungry for a fresh peach. In this image I know they are in season, but I have no peach tree. No one in my town has a peach tree either, so if I want a peach badly enough I will have to go to the market to buy one.
How do I know where the market is if I’ve never been there? Do I simply head off in any old random direction, suggesting to myself that if I travel far enough I will eventually find the market and buy my peach? Probably not. I will probably find someone who knows and ask them for directions. They would probably guide me to a well used road and suggest that I follow it to my ultimate destination — in this case, the peach store.
Troubled brains grow in troubled infancies. My analogy might be trivial but my point is far from trite. If chaos reigned in our early lives while our brains were finishing their human growth and development stages, our adult brains are not likely to be able to effectively participate in reasoned life planning. “What goes in comes out.” We end up being the ones that would have a hard time finding a peach store even if we lived in one.
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We can easily see here how troubled families create troubled offspring ad infinitum, and on down the generations the troubledness goes. I will introduce the information here that our higher thought processes are centered in our cortex which is not completely developed until the age to 25 – 30. Brain development continues through our life span, but no matter what, it is the development of the brain during those first 2 years that ALWAYS matter the most, followed in importance by the mental maturation that builds upon this early development through the age of 6 or 7.
By the age of 7 we have ‘decided’ how we fit into the world around us, and our resulting Theory of Mind that we have created will both lead us and follow us for the rest of our lives. All sorts of changes in the brain happen if those first few years are toxic and harmful. Our brains adjust to this life in a malevolent world, and all our higher level thinking processes will be affected as will our ‘under cover’ operations that unconsciously control our ability to bond to other people, affect what motivates us toward reward, what we avoid, what we are afraid of, what confuses and confounds us.
These altered brains formed through early abuse, I believe, are not designed to participate in a long term future. Our bodies knew if the world was already this terribly bad from the start, it was not likely to change and we cannot truly hope — on a biological or physiological basis — for things to get better. There is no time for wishful thinking in a malevolent world. Survival is not the name of the game, it is the ONLY game in town.
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In some ways this programmed troubled pathway to survival in a terrible world is incredibly efficient. All possible short cuts are designed within the body and the brain to insure that in every future situation the fastest response based on survival learning will be the one chosen by the survivor. On the other hand, because most of us do not move into an adulthood that could ever match the horrors we went through as we developed our brains in the first place, we simply DO NOT MATCH. We are a very bad fit with the rest of the world ‘out there’. (And then we wonder why ALL our relationships are troubled, even the one we try to have with our self?)
This ‘out there’ world did not exist for us as we were harmed, abused, neglected, maltreated in the first place, so we could not build bodies designed to live in this better ‘out there’ world. We were not loved and we were not protected. We have no innate idea what safety and security mean — and for some of us, we never will — because our brains and bodies will not let us.
Although our altered brains and bodies (along with their implicit memories) allowed us to survive our horrors, they do not participate well in a benevolent world. And herein lies a whole new, MAJOR set of troubles.
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To follow my peach craving image, my brain is unable to find its way to the store, no matter how helpful others might be in giving their directions, and no matter how hungry I am for a peach. What if someone offered to put me in their car so they drive me to the store? OK. Maybe that might work — or probably, that is the ONLY alternative that would work. But as adults we are mostly on our own. Nobody is going to drive us through life in their car.
People who had adequate experiences with early caregivers during their brain formation stages do not understand how or why the rest of us, who did not have these benevolent experiences, get so lost in our lives. We don’t understand it, either. We often end up feeling as if there is something terribly wrong with us.
No, on the most practical level, there is nothing ‘wrong’ with us. Just something very, very different.
How could we NOT be different, considering how we started out in this life? The miracle to me is that our human genetic material and all the operations that tell our genes what to do have such a vast array of possible choices that can be made so that a human can continue to survive in a world that does little except threaten immediate extinction — to the body and to the ‘soul’ of the suffering one.
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Everything about how our brain develops takes place flexibly in a situational context. We are influenced by what goes on both on our insides and outside of ourselves. This is the same adjustable, flexible, adaptive process that led our species down four and a half million years of evolution. There is nowhere on the timeline that it stops. I am a result of this process. You are a result of this process. And, again, “What goes in comes out.” We can’t have it any other way. This is the process of survival as a species and as individuals.
Eventually I hope to finish the work of translating into the simplest terms possible some of the information available to us from development neuroscience that shows what I would easily say is 20 different changes a body-brain will make as a result of developing in an environment of severe deprivation and trauma. The one I want to mention now is in relationship to future planning abilities, and only enough to say that the early traumatized brain is not physiologically designed for one of our species’ highest aims — to be able to access what is called ‘future memory.’ (Yes, we have a ‘memory dis-ability.)
The brain and body are designed, through development under certain conditions (malevolent or benevolent), to continually process information through both feed forward and feed backward loops. As we prepared ourselves — biologically — through terrible childhoods to survive in a world in the future, our brains made adaptations that benevolent brains NEVER have to make. Nor can they later make the same kinds of adjustments that our brains and bodies had to make from our start.
We were assured of being at the cutting edge if the world we moved into as adults matched the terror and trauma of the worlds that formed us. We are designed and built to be survival machines. Our cortex forms differently (along with all kinds of other changes), and if abuse is bad enough, actually atrophies long before the usual and optimal timeline for completion of development for the cortex is reached.
As a result, one of the most important luxuries of the benevolently formed brain is stolen from us for the rest of our lives: We cannot participate in the feed forward loop that leads to future memory — future thought and planning. Our brains do not believe the future exists, and if it does, well…… nobody would want to live in the kind of future our brains know from past experience.
Human brains are the most complex forms in our universe, but they are not magical. Even though research shows that our brains are actually formed — under optimal conditions — to process infinity, if our brains were told through early experiences that the world was certain to cause our destruction at any moment, they adjust themselves as efficiently as possible in preparation for this event. All possible roads to survival needed to be maximized and available. There is no future in a doomsday world. Our infanthoods and early childhoods without hope insured that we knew this then and that we would know it for the rest of our lives.
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Early abuse survivors cannot take the obvious road to a better future. That road was never built into our brains at our beginning. While human brains seem to have the ability to process infinity, we have to understand that HOW they do this is different for people who suffered extreme hardship, trauma and deprivation while their brains were forming.
We cannot afford to ignore this fact. We have to begin to understand on a profound level how different a malevolently formed brain is from a benevolently formed brain. While a peach and an orange are both fruits, they differ from one another in substantial ways, just as the brains I am attempting to describe do.
I think we live in a culture that is so used to thinking in terms of mass production. We believe it is somehow wrong to focus on how people are different rather focusing on how we are the same. We find ourselves in a both/and culture that contains a paradox. We value individuality while insisting that everyone has the same opportunities and is equal. Where in our thinking do we have room for consequences and cause and effect?
Just because an abused infant survives to its toddlerhood, and then makes it to its teen years and beyond, does not mean that it has within itself a whole person that somehow miraculously survived to be the same person it would have become if the abuse had never happened. I am not talking about HEALING here. I am talking about very real changes that happened during the development of that person physiologically — on the genetic level, the level of the brain, nervous system and immune system. That means that we do not even end up in the same body when we are adults as a result of having survived extreme early abuse that we would have had if our circumstances had been good ones.
This means that we live in different bodies and we live in a different world — because our perception and the way we process information is different. We were built differently almost as if we came from a different planet. For those of you — and I don’t say this with humor — that have felt yourself to be an alien on this planet — I say take a long honest look at the conditions surrounding your early development. If they were harsh, you are an alien. Being a survivor makes us a different KIND of person in a different kind of body with a different kind of brain.
We are the ones that will never easily find our way down the wide common road to any peach market. Ours is a relentless struggle, often complicated by benevolent-world ideas about how we SHOULD be better at getting along in life. It is time for those of us who KNOW a different world to begin speaking our truth.
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A very clear expose of these kinds of scenarios I am describing is presented by Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz in their book,
I highly recommend this book as a thought expanding opportunity to discover what Dr. Perry knows about this topic of alterations in development for maltreated children.
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Thank you very much for reading this post — your comments are welcome and appreciated. Linda
DOES THE GOOD MAKE THE BAD BETTER?
On the whole, one could never have said that our family valued being lazy. I don’t remember exactly what time we woke up in the summer when we had no reason to leave the homestead, no place particular to go. But neither do I remember that we ever ‘slept in.’
But getting up in time to see a sunrise during on any Alaskan July day was nearly impossible. It seemed like a sunset would happen with a sunrise following so close behind it that nobody ever actually saw one happen. But because of this particular experience that happened the summer before I turned 17, when my mother devised one of her more bizarre punishments of me, I was able to see one of the most gorgeous sunrises of my life.
I don’t remember what instigated this event. I have no idea what I had ‘done wrong’. Maybe I had forgotten to remove all the clothespins from the clothes line. Maybe I had forgotten to wipe the stove top clean after I had done the dishes. Maybe I had ‘wiggled my bottom’ when I walked across the room. Maybe I had slipped and used the word “she’ where my mother could hear me.
It never mattered. Most of the time I had no idea why my mother was mad at me. But on this particular night she decided that I wasn’t ‘fit’ to sleep under the same roof as the rest of the family so I was therefore banished to spend the night in the family’s station wagon. But not just anywhere in the car. I was told to sit in the driver’s seat with my head bent down under the steering wheel.
I was skinny at 16, but my full height of five foot eight and a half inches, so bending down that far down in that position was not comfortable by any means. I suspect that my mother kept my father up all night yelling at him because I know she didn’t sleep. About every half hour she returned to the car to check on me to make sure I was still in my assigned position. Which, of course, to avoid any further wrath from her, I still was.
One must realize that we lived miles from the nearest neighbor (and had no electricity until we purchased a generator that we ran sometimes and no running water). We were ‘out there’ and ‘up there’ on the side of a mountain at the end of the road. Nobody ever saw us. Nobody cared that we were there — certainly nobody cared what happened to me.
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But on this night I summoned all the rebellion I was capable of and in between the times my mother came out to check on me and the time she returned to the house, I sat up! How daring was that! I didn’t get out of the car, but I was able to watch the sun move over the mountain tops when the sun came up far behind the homestead’s mountain. I had never seen anything so beautiful. All shades of pink, peach, rose and red lit up the high floating clouds and then brushed gradually over the mountain as the sun rose.
Sunrises had never been a part of my summer life until this punishment. I always could time it so that I guessed accurately about what time my mother would pop out of the house and stomp over to the car, could time when her fist would pound on the car’s window and her twisted rage filled face would scream at me. And then she would be gone again and I would sit up to be a part, again, of a wondrous process that held me in awe.
This was not a punishment that my siblings were meant to see, so before they awakened my mother came out, released me from my night’s prison and told me to go in and cook the family breakfast. That’s where I was when the others arose and they never knew where I had been while they had been soundly sleeping.
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What a contrast I experienced between the times of my mother’s appearance and her screaming tirades and the sweet stillness of the mountain as it slept through that short night. How could I have survived, relatively intact, the thousands of my mother’s ingenious punishments if I didn’t have that mountain place to feed and sustain me?
I know now that a severely abused child who has no choice but to survive has to have altered and different ways to receive information and to process experiences. When I think back on this experience on some level it makes me literally sick to my stomach — especially knowing my father was in the house and fully aware of what was taking place and did not intervene.
But the punishment also carries within two jewels. One is that I dared to defy my mother by sitting up. The other is that I had implanted in my being a memory that is by itself precious to me — that of being a witness to and a part of an Alaskan summer sunrise as it came over the mountains surrounding me. I could not stop her punishment of me, but I did make use of what options were available to me. I chose to fix beauty and goodness around this abusive incident and I hold the two together inside of me so that one cannot be separated from the other.
And yet this experience is still one that is dissociated from my ongoing life process because there is no way that I could make it ‘fit’ back then when it happened and no way I can make it ‘fit’ now. The only pieces that seem to matter to me are the good parts which I willed myself to keep closer than the experience of the abuse itself. Yes, the experience was traumatic. No, I have never forgotten it, though I do not remember many thousands of other abusive experiences. But I decided even back then that I was going to add my own beauty to the abuse — and that part is MINE.
I need to make it clear here that I do not write about sexual abuse. To my knowledge, that form abuse was not a part of my childhood. I am also NOT saying that anything about the abuse itself was positive. What I am saying is that I find value in being able to own those qualities in me that allowed me to endure all the abusive events and still come out to be a lovely person. I do not have the mental illness that my mother had, and I can never be grateful enough for that fact. ‘Normal’ people never have to think in these terms, but I have to.
One could think that a body (mine) could never have endured even the physical aspects of being beaten from the time I was tiny. Certainly it is critical to understand how a child endures the verbal, psychological and emotional abuse, as well. We did survive because there is something inside of us that allowed that to happen. What THAT was is for me to discover, hold onto and use every day, today included.
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At this point, I would not encourage anyone to go ‘back there’ and hunt around for awful childhood abuse memories. Most of us have more than our share to face and deal with on a daily basis as it is. But I will always ask that others think about how the goodness surrounded the abuse in some way or we would never have survived it at all in the first place. There is something good in each survivor, something precious and I say, holy, that we brought with us through the abuse because it is a part of who we are and nobody could or can take that away from us.
After all, I am the one that remembers what it feels like to be included in the rising sun’s caress of an Alaskan mountainside on the morning of a long summer’s day– not my mother nor my father nor my siblings. I am the one that still feels that sun’s kiss, and I always will.
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Thank you for reading. Your comments are welcome and appreciated. Linda
+BLACK RABBIT
Please see:
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Please follow this link to the story. It has been moved into the section on my childhood stories.
WIDENING OUR PERCEPTION OF IMMUNITY TO INCLUDE ABUSE
My call to others is that we need to expand and widen our considerations of what immunity is, what it does, who it includes, and how it operates.
The abuse that happened to me happened because my mother was not protected against the deprivations caused within her environment. Her body, which in her case refers to her brain-mind, had to make its own adjustments to survive what threatened her because there was nobody around her when she was small that paid adequate attention to her needs. As a result, her malaise was passed onto me through abuse.
It is NOT a stretch of the imagination and therefore a waste of time for us to begin to think about how critical every form of immunity is to our continued survival and well being. Because we now live in an increasingly more complex world it is easy for us to lose track of and sight of what matters the most.
We are a social species. That means that our survival did and does depend on connections between one another. The smallest circle of protection might happen in regards to what threatens us inside our own skin. But our need for immunity, protection and defense does not stop there. We are vulnerable both individually and collectively to all kinds of threats that exist within our environment. For an infant and a young child, if that threat is happening to it as a result of inadequate and harmful care of lack of it, from its immediate caregivers, its immune response team must come from outside of the immediate family.
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When we consider, for example, the current conditions in our global environment that are putting us at risk from swine flu, we can easily see how this expanded immune system from our connected relationship to ever expanding circles of other people affect us. We, of course, try to avoid and prevent contamination using whatever means at our disposal. I don’t personally make surgical masks. I would have to depend on someone else to manufacture, distribute, etc. a mask I might choose to wear. But once I might have that mask attached to my face, do I ever think of all the people that were involved in the chain of protection that made it possible for me to have the mask in the first place?
How about government involvement? That’s a part of a larger circle of protection. But actions taken by that larger circle affect me, too.
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Government attention to threat
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090429/hl_afp/healthfluworld_20090429151820
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?rn=3906861&cl=13217634&ch=4226716&src=news
Use of surgical masks
http://www.newsday.com/news/health/la-sciw-swine-masks28-2009apr28,0,1240748.story
Arizonians worried
http://www.azcentral.com/business/articles/2009/04/29/20090429biz-masks0429.html
Flu spreading, kills US toddler
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090429/ap_on_he_me/med_swine_flu
Knowing the symptoms
http://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/flu-guide/20061101/swine-flu-faq
Officials saying swine flu cannot be contained
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599189431400
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Protection of other members of our species is our responsibility, and one we will not take seriously until we realize and accept the fact that we are all connected and must participate in an immune system process that is much larger than the one we are taught to believe is ONLY important — our own personal one that exists within our own bodies.
This link provides us with an example of how interconnected actions on behalf of at risk children can impact these same children’s immunity — meaning their well being.
http://www.preventchildabuseny.org/promisesforparents.shtml
Protection of little ones always circles back to the well being of the caregivers who take care of them. If a child is being neglected, abused, molested, it is because an opening exists for toxic challenges to REACH that child in the first place. The only protection a child can offer to itself is contained in a very small developing body that is, rather than being able to protect itself, actually developing a body that includes both the trauma experiences themselves and their body’s trauma reactions and responses that are being built into their bodies from the start.
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Isolation from one another puts as all at risk of ‘infection’ from toxic interactions with our environments — wherever those toxins come from. If the circle of protection and immunity is broken, a whole new level of emergency is created. Our efforts always need to aim toward avoiding and preventing traumas from happening in the first place. I do not see a difference between the threat of swine flu infection or threat of ‘infection’ from maltreatment, violence, deprivation or abuse. It takes a healthy, whole, fully connected and operational immune system to address any threat of harm — to us individually and to us collectively.
Attachment on all levels is a protective factor. Risk of harm and extinction for any species corresponds to the degree that healthy attachments within that species are damaged or obliterated. I believe that for our advanced human species it is not only what we might DO that matters, it is also about our awareness and what and who we include or exclude in our thinking.
As we separate ourselves from one another we are creating gaps in our ‘atmosphere’ of protective immunity from all threats of harm. We are ALL a part of one another’s immune system because we are members of a social species. Every living organism defines itself according to its boundaries. Degrees of health and well being operate according to how competently — and that means adequately and successfully — any organism can protect those boundaries.
Because it all boils down to resources, it is the availability of, access to, and utilization of resources that determines the quality of competence any organism has to stay alive. As members of a social species we are each a part of that resource system. We also have to remember that social species has a main continuum of behavior that lets us interact with one another. This is a continuum that contains cooperation at one extreme end and competition on the other.
This is all about the most important operation a living system participates in — control over its environment through manipulation of resources. This is nothing but basic resource management through some form of manipulation. For a social species this operation usually appears in some form of dominance and submission. Who is the most vulnerable to any kind of threat and who is not? Who has access to vital resources and who does not?
At this point in human evolution I suggest that competition will soon become a cancer that will eat up our species from the inside. Cooperation, on the other hand, has the capacity to balance out all the ills our species currently suffers from, and is the immune system reaction that has the ability to heal us. Competition creates a state of war. Cooperation is the state of peace. Where do we see ourselves on this continuum? At what point does our ambivalence become cruelty to somebody else?
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Human boundaries are formed through attachment. The more strong, safe and secure our sense of attachment is — I would add as adults, the wider that circle is — the better our resource of having empathy for one another is. Empathy is what connects us together. What we choose to do in participation with others is another matter.
If our interactions between our genetics and our early caregivers forced us to avoid the experience of emotion, we will correspondingly be unable as adults to access them adequately, understand them, or to take action according to the information they provide to us. We will also not be able to detect the full range of expressions other people use to communicate with us.
And again, experts suggest that all versions of attachment disorders result in a corresponding empathy pathology. I believe this is about the formation of healthy boundaries and all ongoing operations that protect and defend these boundaries. It is possible that humans can form a brain that prevents access even to their own self, and from there, access is denied as a fully functioning member of the species as a whole.
We will always choose what we think is best for ourselves. It will only be to the degree that we expand our perceptions of ourselves that we will realize that we are all in this business of life together. It is therefore our part as members of a species that relies on one another for all levels of immunity that we can offer our individual efforts to the betterment of both our individual selves and our collective community.
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When it comes to something as obvious as threat from what might be a rampant virus, we can all see what that threat IS. Yet it becomes a matter not only of our body’s individual immune response to protect us. It also becomes a matter that involves a wide circle of our connected community. Our protection and defense on all levels always depends on one another.
Protecting infants and children is no different. As one who was NOT well protected from harm from birth, I can say, “Wish you were there!” Assuming, of course, that if you HAD been there you would have acted as a part of a fully functional immune system component and would have made sure, in some way, that the abuse had stopped.
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As always, thank you for reading — your comments are welcome and appreciated.
WHY NOT TO REMEMBER MY MOTHER
PLEASE NOTE THIS WARNING: This post contains triggering material which may be difficult for anyone with a history of trauma and abuse to read. Please either do not read this alone without a support person at your side, or stop reading immediately if you become uncomfortable with yourself as you read it.
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I received the following comment today related to + About this site
“Linda, I did not pick this up in your writing ( which is amazing ). Is your mother still alive and did you ever have an opportunity to confront her or make peace with her.”
My reply was that I would write about this in today’s post. Not an easy task.
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The first image that presents itself in my awareness (from my right brain’s storehouse of wordless images) is one of being in a store shopping for flower and vegetable seeds. I see a well stocked large four-sided display rack that I can turn around in circles so that I can see the entire display.
Suddenly I see that all the packages are ripped open and the seeds are dumped in a pile on the floor. All the seeds are mixed up and it is now my job to sort them all out ‘correctly’ so that they can be resealed in new packages and put back where I found them in the first place.
I know more now about what this image is showing me than I ever could have before. All my memories regarding my mother are sealed into separate ‘packages’ and stored according to my survival brain’s wisdom. They are not linked together in any sort of order based on a timeline according to when these experiences happened in the first place. Never in my childhood was I able to connect them together and it is only with great concentration and effort that I can attempt to do so today.
Every single memory I have of my mother is linked to trauma. To continue with my seed package image, it is like every single package and every single seed is contaminated with poison, and if I touch any of them my brain tells me I could die. In order to “go back there” I have to apply a level of thought that can allow me to do this.
I have to find and put on a ‘safe suit’ of protection that allows me to go back and handle my memories. That safe suit is barely adequate and consists of a mental effort I must make today to understand that there was and is no reason for what happened to me. I use this word, reason, on many levels. My mother’s mind was broken so she had no ability to use reason regarding anything that involved me — ever. She was mentally ill and therefore everything about her was irrational.
Her psychosis regarding me was complete and indissoluble. Because I do not have a mind like hers, even though she influenced nearly every thought that was built into my brain until I was 18, I cannot look into my past from a reasonable or rational place so that I can describe my experience from ‘my side of the fence’. That is probably the final trauma of unresolved trauma. It cannot be translated, on any level, into the realm of reason.
Yet I have to think about reason because it is the only ‘safety suit’ I have. Everything about my relationship with my mother was, from my first breath, about the reason I needed to be hated and continually punished. I was the devil’s child and therefore absolutely evil. My ‘poor’ mother was given the curse of having to be my mother, and therefore she must do the best that she could to ‘deal with me’ and try to accomplish the given, hopeless task of making be ‘better’. She applied herself to her task with vengeance.
In her mind, she had failed miserably in her mission by the time I left home at 18. In her mind that failure was absolute and her belief in that lasted to her final breath.
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In order to ‘stack the deck’ in favor of reason I will mention a few concepts used by experts as they work with people who have posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). (This is a diagnosis which I ‘have’, along with dissociative identity disorder — without the identities, which I will discuss later) and major reoccurring depression.) The term ‘flashbacks’ is used in relation to the unresolved traumas in PTSD. Another term used is ‘flashbulb memories’. What this means is that the experiences of trauma have not been integrated into the ongoing experience of the person who endured them.
This lack of integration happens for many reasons, including the fact that nothing has useful, that can lead to an increased ability to survive future related terrors — by the individual or by the species, has yet been learned as a result of these experiences. When abuse begins from birth, before the infant has any possible capacity to ‘process’ its experiences, the very foundation of memory formation is altered within the forming and developing structure of the brain. Having the traumatic memories ‘stuck together’ in any meaningful fashion is therefore the exception, not the rule.
Memories of the individual experiences are therefore like millions of seeds in a pile on the floor. To even have some of them organized and sorted out into a small group of related experiences — so that they can at least be stored in separate packages — requires extremes of applied effort. To assign them meaning is nearly impossible because they happened in and belong to a malevolent world without cause and effect and without reason or rationality.
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I believe that it takes an extremely creative and intelligent mind to survive experiences like mine and be able to come out on the other end being able to even remotely ‘act normal’. This intelligent mind has to have had opportunities to form some active coping skills that allow this eventual ‘gluing together of the pieces’ in any meaningful way to happen at all. I describe some of the assets that existed for me in my post THE RESILIENCY MYTH.
While the following might be a controversial statement, it is my current assessment of the relationship of ‘mental illness’ to survival. Had I received the potential genetic combination that could have resulted in a mental illness such as my mother had, and if my body could have taken that detour in order to have survived without the self reflective abilities of a mind that was not given this detour, I would have turned out like my mother did. I do not believe that she had a choice because whatever neglect and maltreatment she received during her brain developmental stages triggered the manifestation of her mental illness and there was nothing she could do about it, either.
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Please make no mistake here. I was born in 1951 and raised during an era when child abuse was still not recognized and addressed by our society at large in any meaningful way. In today’s ‘enlightened’ era, there is absolutely NO EXCUSE for outsiders of the family not to know and understand the symptoms a terribly abused child will manifest openly, and no excuse for them not intervening on behalf of the child. Information on this topic will be presented in future posts.
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Because my writing is always a process connected to me and to my life as I write the words, and because I am always learning about myself and how I process information related to my personal experiences, I will share with you what is happening in my mind as I attempt to get closer to telling the truth about the question posed in the reader’s comment: “Is your mother still alive and did you ever have an opportunity to confront her or make peace with her.”
In my brain of brains and mind of minds, yes, my mother IS still alive. I do not have a basis for placing anything to do with my mother on a logical timeline and for keeping it there. The reasonable fact is that she ceased to exist in her body in the spring of 2002. I did not shed a single tear. I’m not sure if any of my five siblings shed one, either.
I lack the ability to accomplish the action of finding every single separate ‘seed’ memory that involves her, facing them face to face, and making any of the equally dissociated Linda’s understand unequivocally that THEIR mother is dead. The image that is in my mind now is that each seed has turned into a dandelion seed, that a powerful wind has come up so that each seed with its attached bit of fluff is now dashing away from me into the blue sky — and yes, to a place of safety for themselves — also leaving me in a place of safety as I sit here and write these words.
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I will make the effort of trying to grab perhaps one of those seeds or a handful of them before they vanish from me today. (By the way, future posts on attachment disorders, particularly about disorganized-disoriented attachment disorders, will describe how the lack of the ability to tell a coherent life story is one of the clearest marker that indicates these attachment disorders exist for a person.)
Moving on in my writing as I work to answer this commenter’s question, I see that I actually have a fistful of seeds grasped in each of my hands. I guess fortunately for me I only confronted my mother once (seeds in my left hand) and disowned her once years later (seeds in my right hand).
Now I tell myself, “It’s OK Linda.” I slowly open my left hand and protect those seeds from being whisked away before I can write the following:
(“Organize your thoughts, Linda. Let the seeds put themselves in order. Believe that there is a beginning and an end to this group of thoughts. Now begin writing.”)
As I mention elsewhere on this blog, I completed 7 weeks of inpatient alcoholism treatment in 1980 and was then sent to ongoing therapy and given antidepressants. I followed every piece of advice anyone gave me about how to ‘recover’ as avidly as a starving bird would hunt for seeds. About a year after my exit from treatment, following the advice of my therapist, I DID call my mother to confront her.
All I knew at that time was that she had not been nice to me while she raised me, and that there was some discrepancy between her treatment of be back then and her treatment of me as a married adult mother of 2, as she sent me cute little cards with lovey-dovey I love yous enclosed. I can return to that phone call with difficulty. Like two powerfully opposing magnets the me in this chair writing attempts to move closer to the me I see standing in the dining room, sunlight streaming in the windows, cream colored phone in my hand, long twisted coiled cord draped around my feet as I stand there talking to my mother.
What happened? I courageously told her that I was not willing to have a phony (no pun intended) loving relationship with her in the present (“Let me try to think here. I got the first part out… Catch that seed, Linda. Hold onto it, look at it….”) — if — (“Come on, Linda, you can do this. I know there’s all kinds of pain here, but you can find the words and not let the pain appear now. Separate them out. Let the words come but not the pain.”) — (“Is that possible?”) (“Yes, trust me it is possible.”) (Here comes the wind. Stop this argument now.) (“Who are you that I should trust a damn thing you are saying”) (Stop this argument NOW.)
IF. Getting back to the IF. IF we can’t talk about the things you did to me while I was growing up. That’s what I said to her.
She instantly switched to her ugly screaming rage filled voice and attacked me as she launched into the litany she had been building for me from birth. SEE: *Litany from Start to Finish. “You were a horrible, terrible, vile child! You tried to kill me when you were born! You deserved everything I ever gave you and even that was not enough! Even your kindergarten teacher agreed with me. She had been teaching for 35 years before you showed up in her class, and she told me you were more trouble and a worse child than any she had ever had in her class.”
Now, this is the GOOD part. As she streamed and screamed through her litany of abuse I moved the phone receiver away from my ear, lifted up right finger and moved it to the telephone and dropped it with a sense of accomplishment, empowerment, finality and pride onto the disconnect button and I hung the receiver up on her in mid word.
I stood stunned for a split second and then experienced a flood of joy. I started hopping up and down, and then began to skip around the house yelling in song, “I did it! I did it! I hung UP ON HER!”
Now the tears are here pushing against my eyes. No, that wasn’t the end of it. I wasn’t ready. It wasn’t time. Within a matter of days she called back with her sweet voice and I apologized, and the phony loving relationship was reinstated and maintained until the spring of 1989. That is when I had a realization (too much for me to write about right now) that allowed me to write her a simple letter thanking her for being the mother that brought me into the world and telling her directly that because of the abusive things she did to me as a child I could no longer have a relationship with her in my lifetime.
She did not respond though she continued to bemoan the curse of being my mother to my siblings for years after that until they one by one quit listening to her. I only saw her once — out of the corner of my eye as if she were a fleeting mirage of the shadow of a ghost — after that in 1990 as she passed through my desperately ill father’s hospital room. (He had finally divorced her by then).
My father died in 2001. I never confronted him. I ignored and avoided him in my adulthood just like he did me in my childhood. I believe that both of my parents had to make internal adjustments that allowed them to ‘go on being’ while having unbearable, overwhelming pain and sadness at their core. I would also say that both of my parents died of a broken heart.
This is all I can write today. I have to do my ‘Linda in today” things. I cannot describe to you right now how she died, either.
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I want to say here that the reason I do this writing is not in hopes of healing myself. I am nearly 58 years old, and things will not get much better for me than they are now. I accept that fact. I write because I now there is value in sharing my experience so that others ‘out there’ with histories related to mine can perhaps see in my words a reflection of their own experience so that they can become empowered to own the fullness of their own traumatic lives. I trust this is possible because I do not write from the top down — not from a place of put-together security based on secure attachment patterns that would create all kinds of benefits those that have them probably don’t recognize.
I write from the bottom up. I write from a place of humiliation, terror, confusion and trauma. I write from an incredible place called ‘the miracle of survival’. I write from what Dr. Teicher of Harvard calls “an evolutionarily altered brain” formed in, by and for existence in a malevolent world.
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But for now I am going to watch my blue parakeet bathe itself in its small dish of drinking water as I think about and then DO the act of finding it a better bathtub. I am going to work on the little hand made paper cross earrings I am figuring out how to make so that I can add them to my inventory of crafts to display and sell at this Saturday’s farmers market in town. They will be pure white with silver glitter. I will eat the last of my homemade banana bread muffins, made from my grandmother’s recipe. I added grated apple, dried currants and lots of walnuts. That’s good for me. That’s where I am going next.
But first, I am going to stand in the wind with my fists open and my palms facing the sky and let all the bits of dandelion fluff, memories of myself and my mother, blow away.
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As always, thank you for visiting this site and for reading this post. Your comments are welcome and appreciated.
Stop the Storm 
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