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The following was written today as a sidebar for the book chapter I am working on:  I firmly believe that most serious mental illness genetic combinations are directly tied to the greatest gifts belonging to the gene pool of our species.  Like the brilliance or dowdiness of a peacock’s tail acquired directly in response to the quality of the environment the bird lives in (which includes genetic interactions with this environment), all forms of what we now know as ‘mental illness’ are also reproductive fitness indicators that signal the condition of the EARLIEST environment of a human being as represented by and in the quality of mothering received primarily in the first 33 months of life.

I will always believe that my mother’s sensitivities along with her creative and imaginative giftedness, even as it appears in her childhood writing, put her at extremely high risk for developing a serious mental illness in consequence to the neglect, abuse and trauma that she experienced before the age of six years old.  I also strongly suspect that had her earliest caregiver environment been safe, secure and anything like adequate she would not have developed Borderline Personality Disorder.

I believe that my mother was what some might call a ‘pre-Borderline’ child, but I draw my net much more tightly.  My mother WAS already a Borderline by the time she wrote her stories between the ages of nine and ten.  Interestingly after I had found and transcribed my mother’s childhood stories I asked my sister what she thought of them and if she could detect our mother’s mental illness as being already present when she wrote them.  It might be directly due to the vast differences in our mother’s treatment of each of us that I know my mother’s Borderline condition is represented in her stories while my sister detected nothing unusual about them.  My sister lived in our mother’s white world.  I lived in our mother’s black world.

I therefore challenge readers to consider the following short piece my mother wrote in 1935 at the age of nine.  Believe me, there was already something WRONG with my mother’s brain-mind expressed in this piece.  While the piece is clever there is nothing ordinary about the way my child-mother fixated on the color black.  There is no relationship here between black in a crayon box and the absolute blackness of the universe my mother later created for me:

Once there was a black boy who was picking black berries and putting them in his black bowl for his mother to prepare for his black father to eat for his black berry supper but a big black bare came a long and while the black boy was looking he ate all the black berries from the black berries from the[she repeated this]  black bowl. The black boy soon filled it up again, so the black bear wasn’t satisfied so he took all the black berries on the bush besides in the bowl [the following was added between the lines] then the boy began to cry then the black bears heart was sofftened and he told the black boy that he was sorry the black boy wiped his tears. The black bear then took the black bowl between his teeth and filled it from a nother black berie bush and gave it to the black boy, and the black boy thanked him and went home and his black father had his black berry supper.

Mildred

Even if my mother wrote this in response to a teacher’s assignment to write about the color ‘black’, while this is an innocent piece it is not naïve – and it should have been.  In its simplest form, caught within the tapping rhythm of the words as it is captured at the heart of this piece is a single word that is NOT about the color black:  Mother.  I can feel my mother at the edge of a vortex that might not have been any larger than a seed when this piece was written.  But it is here and it grew and grew and grew until it swallowed up my mother and her life and my childhood.  That vortex circling around ‘the mother’ was the beginning of the matrixes that my mother created – creatively created – in her adult Borderline brain-mind.

This story belongs in the context of the others contained in my mother’s composition book that was preserved for over 70 years before it found its way to me.  I do not take this to be a coincidence, either.  Looking back at the alpha moments of a Borderline’s life in their childhood anyone who knows what they are looking for and looking at would be able to detect, I believe, all the patterns that will in the future become most obvious.  In the end, in the omega moments of a Borderline child’s life will be reflected all the tragic suffering of the Borderline child that once was.

READ THE REST OF MY MOTHER’S STORIES HERE:

*MY MOTHER’S CHILDHOOD STORIES WITHOUT COMMENTS

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Possibly the most useful service my book can provide is to illustrate what is probably the WORST symptom of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD):  The inability of a BPD mother to adequately and appropriately mother her own offspring.  This #1 symptom can very easily and possibly usually DOES lead to a BPD mother neglecting and/or abusing her children FROM BIRTH.

I realize this might be a controversial conclusion that I will be making in my book, but given the profound damage a severe BPD mother can cause her children including SUFFERING nearly beyond belief these possibilities HAVE to be faced by a society who — by their own blissful ignorance — is harboring these mothers.

I fully believe that the Trauma Altered Development that a BPD suffered in their own earliest and most important stages of body-brain growth happens to improve a BPD survivor’s chances of survival to childbearing age.  If this is true then there is ONLY ONE WAY to intercept the patterns of neglect and abuse that these same BPD survivors can inflict on the children that nature has enabled them to live long enough to produce.

This ONLY WAY is for the people who surround a BPD mother and her children HAVE to intervene on behalf of the children.  These trauma-caused changes have been included within human DNA potential from our earliest beginnings to ensure survival of a species that needed all the offspring it could produce.  That is obviously NOT still the case, but BPD survivors do continue not only to produce offspring but to also live long enough themselves to torment, torture and traumatize their own children.

Without intervention and treatment I do not believe that the most severely abusive Borderline parents have ANY CONSCIOUS CHOICE not to — on an unconscious and physiologically-programmed level – to be in direct competition for survival resources with these same offspring they have created.  In the ‘olden days’ this simply related to a mother’s ‘natural mammalian right’ to kill offspring within an environment that was so malevolent and deprived that enough resources simply DID NOT exist to support ‘them all’ and ensure survival – mother included.

Of course in today’s world all these physiological survival-of-the-species patterns are worse than obsolete.  They are abominations.  These are the same patterns, I believe, that are at the core of the Medea story I mentioned in my earlier post today where this mother hacked her own children apart with a gigantic butcher knife.  ‘The public’ and the father were given fair warning that this was exactly what Medea was going to do – and they did nothing to prevent the tragedy — not even while the butchering was happening as ‘society’ stood around outside the house listening to the screaming of the babies.  These are the same patterns that operated on the deepest, most hidden levels within my mother’s interactions with me — and within the society that allowed them to happen at all.

If we are a more highly evolved species, then we need to act that way.  Allowing these kinds of mothers to abuse and neglect their offspring IS A SOCIAL PROBLEM and only within this bigger picture will the solution to these problems be found.  Again, neither these BPD mothers nor their offspring can resolve these difficulties alone.  The physiological forces at work are very powerful, very ancient, and very, very dangerous to infants and children.

Previous posts today:

+THE WARNING THAT WILL GO WITH THIS BOOK WHEN IT’S FINISHED

+’BORDERLINE’ – TREATABLE BUT NOT CURABLE – FROM CHILDHOOD

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I want to write a few comments while I am thinking about ‘the pre-Borderline child’ and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) as I come to increasingly identify the operation of the disorder within my severely abusive mother.

First of all I would NEVER agree that the diagnostic ‘name’ for this disorder be changed in any way at the current time of scientific understanding except as follows:  Just as ‘Multiple Personality Disorder’ has been renamed ‘Dissociative Identity Disorder’ (DID), I do believe that with BPD it is not ‘personality’ that is the concern but rather profound disturbances with ‘identity’.  (i.e., my mother did not know the difference between herself and her children, especially me — nor did she have the physiological capacity to do so)

While I see no way for BPD to operate without dissociation, these two disorders would currently require separate ‘names’, though I believe that BPD would be more accurately described if it were known as Borderline Identity Disorder (BID).

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Secondly, concerning ‘diagnosis’ of Borderline at any age and a future name-change:  I believe that scientific ability already exists to accurately SEE the Borderline condition by watching the operation of a Borderline brain as it operates in distinctly identifiable ways that are different from the way a normal brain operates while performing specific tasks.

Our current society will have to face significant ‘ethical’ concerns before we are willing to accept this as fact.  Yet I see being able to watch someone’s brain operate during scans so as to ‘diagnose’ conditions is in no way different than the ways scans are currently used to SEE all kinds of other physiological problems.

BPD IS as real a PHYSIOLOGICAL problem as is any other diagnosable disease.  As long as our society denies this fact we will remain in the Dark Ages regarding the actual and factual conditions that we refer to as ‘mental illness’.

“This is not rocket science!”  Given the advances in technology anyone who cares to look can identify BPD by watching the way the brain operates differently than normal while engaged in certain tasks.

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Now, thirdly, I have found absolutely no reason not to believe that the BPD doesn’t exist as a so-called pre-Borderline condition in childhood.  Therefore, accurate diagnosis of this condition can also be made during childhood through brain scans.

If this is the case then the nomenclature of ‘pre-Borderline’ is inaccurate.

Even if this is true, I am still led fourthly to ask myself whether or not I believe that a ‘pre-Borderline’ condition within a child under the age of 12 could be effectively treated.

I have a two-part response — yes and no!

I believe in the future it will become very clear that not only can BPD be identified through watching the operation of the brain, and that these same altered brain operation patterns will appear in childhood, but that these alterations CANNOT BE REVERSED.  In other words, once enough of the wrong kinds of experiences have happened conception through (I believe) age seven, the genetic combinations that create these altered brain patterns of operation will have been permanently built into a BPD survivor’s entire body including their brain.

This is no different than the accurate diagnosis of any other life-threatening ‘disease’ in childhood (or in adulthood) that is treatable and manageable although it is not curable.

The distinct benefit of identifying BPD during childhood is that the long-term consequences of these changed patterns can be ameliorated to a large extent.  Especially because all operations of the adult higher cortex are built upon the earliest brain formation platforms, and because the higher cortical areas of the brain do not complete their full maturation until around age 25-30, any EARLIER intervention and treatment of the BPD condition can have (in my opinion) profound positive effects on the further development of the higher cortical abilities.  (See for example:  +MOTHERING WARMTH = SMARTER PEOPLE)

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Once early trauma changes the course of development for a child so that the genetic combinations that lead to BPD have been triggered (for child survivors who HAVE these genes), I do not believe the condition of BPD itself can ever be ‘undone’.  At the same time I believe that BPD can nearly be eliminated from society as a condition through the elimination of infant-child abuse and neglect from our society (including most importantly severe stress and trauma from conception to age 2 — and through age 7).

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This post is about the book my daughter and I are writing that will contain the story of my severely abusive infancy and childhood with a Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) mother.  If I were to suggest one single story to read as a precursor to the book I am working on, it would be Medea, an ancient Greek tragedy written by Euripides, based upon the myth of Jason and Medea and first produced in 431 BC.  This story is about (I am certain) a Borderline mother.

I also have no doubt that in the future researchers will confirm that BPD is a condition that happens as early infant-child abuse, trauma, neglect and maltreatment ACTIVATES particular genetic combinations that in the end lead to BPD in adults at the same time these processes of infant-caregiver unsafe and insecure malevolent attachment relationships deeply disturb a suffering child’s development so that a pre-Borderline condition ALWAYS exists during the childhood developmental stages of such a survivor.  This pre-Borderline condition could be identified before the age of 12 if society knew what to look for and what was being looked at.

I am not a ‘professional expert’ but I am a researcher in my own right because I am a survivor of a severely abusive 18-year infancy-childhood with a Borderline mother.

I can only write my story by finding MY story as it exists separately from my mother’s story.  This might seem like a stupid statement to anyone who does not have first-hand experience of being raised by a Borderline mother (or father).  As I explain in my book writing our two stories are so entangled, enmeshed, twisted and at times so fused together that it would be impossible for me to tell the difference between the two stories without the very clear understanding that I have developed over YEARS of research in my adulthood that my mother’s story is a LIE and therefore is EVIL while my story is the TRUTH and therefore is GOOD.

This is NOT a simple intellectually-based process. The ONLY way I can find my own story separate from my mother’s is to FEEL my story inside my own body.

I am blessed in my work to have in my possession many of my mother’s writings that came into my hands after her death in 2002.  I believe her writings exist as a part of what I imagine to be a divinely mandated higher purpose.  How my mother’s words, my words, and my daughter’s words interact and interrelate with each other will be a part of the power of this book once it is completed.

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In the meantime, and on this present day as I prepare myself yet again to dive back into my book-related writing tomorrow morning in my response to Question #5 of the 19 questions my daughter is ‘feeding me’ so that this story can be born, I am thinking about that one most important word:  POWER.

There is true POWER in the truth.  Because my story lies in the TRUTH of what I experienced being raised by a severely disturbed and severely ABUSIVE Borderline mother, if I do my task to the best of my ability there will be the POWER of TRUTH in this book.

I struggle continually within myself about the potential impact this power of truth might well have on those who read this book.  Of course I desire that this impact be ONLY positive, but at the same time I fear that this book MIGHT cause damage.

As I write my story I exclude from my entire consideration the existence of any other audience other than one single person – ME.  As I write, probably for the first time in my life, I am most valuing myself, the one who endured what I describe, the one that NOBODY cared about or paid attention to – let alone listened to – for the duration of time this story covers.

BUT, not ONLY that:  I am realizing that this book might serve in the end an extraordinary purpose.  It might well be THE ONLY book of its kind in existence that survivors of abuse such as mine can feel within their own body the absolute truth of what I am saying because my words will resonate with what these readers know in their own body.

This might simply mean that FINALLY fellow survivors can hand this book to people they know and love and say:  “When I say I had an abusive childhood, this is what I am talking about!  Read this story and you will begin to understand what my reality was and is like.”

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BUT, it is also not my intention in any way to BREAK someone else.  The thought of this happening to any survivor who reads my book scares the bejabbers out of me!

If survivors like me read this book and FEEL their own truth resonating in response to my own words a state of EMERGENCY can very easily be created because the EMERGENCE of body memory tied to the truth has great and intense POWER.

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I am thinking about what the ‘attachment experts’ say about the inability of someone who had unsafe and insecure earliest infant-caregiver interactions to tell a coherent narrative story of their ENTIRE life – not just of their earliest years.

This blog is full of related information about this fact.  Google search ‘stopthestorm attachment’ and you will see what I mean.

THERE IS A REASON WHY THIS IS SO!

In fact, there really is a NATURAL LAW behind why this is so.

In some power-full ways I am breaking this natural law by FORCING my story into a coherent form.  I WILL TELL MY STORY!

While I can sit here and intellectually believe this is a ‘good thing’, I am not entirely sure it is.  Here I can rely on one thing and one thing only:  FAITH.

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There is a purpose for dissociation.  There is a LIFE preserving reason why heavy-duty traumas can so often end up in the ‘forgotten zone’.  The experience of overwhelming trauma is EXACTLY THAT:  OVERWHELMING.  Natural law and physiological common sense have all kinds of ways to keep human beings alive through overwhelming trauma.  These survival abilities work in combination with one another in very physiologically WISE ways – for a purpose:  To maintain the integrity of the person who survives.

(And yes, I believe everything my mother did to me was in the end about preserving the integrity of her existence.  Without integrity as I am stating the concept, all life falls apart in the disintegration of death.)

This having been said, the only direction I can move in my thinking about myself, my story, this book is to say that I have to believe, trust and have faith in a fact that I do not know is a fact.  I have to have FAITH that it is.

I have to trust and believe that it is NOW time for our culture, for society to begin to raise their awareness about WHAT infant-child abuse IS and what it is LIKE for those who endure it for ALL OF US – those who have endured it and survived right along with those who have not.

What happened to me happened because NOBODY wished to know the truth.  It happened because EVERYBODY believed the lie.

There is incredible POWER in exposing lies, but it is NOT an easy or comfortable experience to recognize lies by being confronted by the truth if doing so CHANGES anyone’s ongoing ‘normal’ experience and understanding.

The intergenerational – no, it’s the INTRAgenerational — transmission of unresolved trauma is NOT going to stop until humans can learn what the trauma has to say.  Reading a story such as mine simply puts people face-to-face not with ME, not with my parents, but with unresolved trauma itself.

As this happens all human compassion and empathy ‘body circuits’ have to come into play.  What is INSIDE of people has to connect to what others experience – even if those others are babies and little tiny innocent people.

This being said, it seems to me that it is our society’s WINDOW OF EMOTIONAL TOLERANCE that needs to grow and expand in this process, not JUST awareness and consciousness of the ‘problem’ of infant-child abuse.   This is an individual and a collective process.

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Until I complete the writing process I am engaged in so that my story is finally told from the beginning to the end as best as I can find that story, I cannot honestly say, “I know what I am talking about.”  I am going back and literally ‘re-membering’ myself IN WORDS as a being entirely separate from my mother.

As I do this I am creating a ‘psychological profile of a criminal mind’ – my mother’s.  I cannot find and tell my own story without at the same time doing the same thing for my father.  But THEIRS IS NOT THE STORY I AM TELLING.  I am telling my own.

I am nearly one-fourth of the way through my writing process.  At this point I am finding that I have to revise some of my thoughts that I have held to be true up to this point.  I thought in the beginning that it would be of use to other survivors to be able to read a ‘template’ of ‘how to tell your incoherent infant-childhood abuse narrative coherently’.

Now I am saying, “DON’T do what I am doing!  It is dangerous.  It is risky.  Not for viewers to try at home!”

NOW, here is the qualifier:  “Don’t do this ALONE!”  In fact, I don’t suggest that ANYONE read this book ALONE!

BEING ALONE is the core experience of early abuse survivorship.  BEING ALONE is what allowed the abuse to happen in the first place, and I mean BEING ALONE without anyone else who cared a single DAMN!

All stories about abuse of any kind are COLLECTIVE stories because we are members of a SOCIAL species whether we like it or not!  The only hope for healing infant-child abuse is to ‘join up with one another in absolute true caring’.

I could NEVER write my story such as I am writing it now without my daughter’s involvement in this process.  She, in turn, is not even going to be able to read what I write without having her own circle of true caring around her (our writing-rules are that she not read a word I am writing until I have answered all 19 questions).

So – this is the point where I can let go of my concerns about the impact and potential consequences of this book.  NOBODY, and I mean NOBODY should read it ALONE without having firmly and clearly in place a circle of truly caring people around them!

It is only the truly caring circle of people who can heal trauma’s ongoing devastating effects.  ONLY!

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