Tag: bonding

+IT’S IN THE BODY: TAKING THE TRAUMA AND THE DRAMA OUT OF RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHERS

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Here’s a quick note:  I just spent 90 minutes in telephone conversation with a friend I’ve had for 30 years.  It was wonderful.  But I wanted to take a minute before I run on into town to write down here something that became very clear during that conversation.

When a person is in close relationship with anyone else – children, spouse, intimate friend – even less close relationships with coworkers and others – there can be patterns that will best be dealt with if we can depersonalize problematic interactions and step back – way back!

Attachment disorders and all so-called ‘mental disorders’ take place within the body.  Changes in patterns of information transmission in the body always show themselves in how the BODY of a person responds to and within their environment.

Our culture is very short on realizing that the MIND is not the problem.  What happens within the body, brain, and nervous system – especially within our stop and go autonomic nervous system (ANS) – which is our calm-connection – stress response (fight, flight, etc) system can determine how a PERSON is because they live in and with their body.

I saw the image of two people taking a pleasant walk down the road of their lives together (in any kind of interaction).  Suddenly, one of the people trip and fall down.  Maybe they didn’t see a stick, a stone, a pothole in their way.

So the other person turns to say something to their partner, a low and behold, nobody is beside them.  This person who has not fallen has to stop, turn, look to find where back there their partner is.  They can walk back to help them.  They can erupt in rage that their partner has abandoned them.

In the worst of trauma drama situations, the falling partner grabs onto the person beside them and takes them on down, too.

We don’t gain objectivity, detachment, or our own clear sense of who we are in the world separate from other people if we don’t understand that what is most often blocking the pathway of someone else – those sticks and stones and troublesome potholes – are

physiologically in the body!  Often our body’s reactions take us completely by surprise – bowling us over, sucking us under, getting us stuck – tripping us and making us fall so we can skin our knees – and maybe not even be able to get up again.

When a person experiences anxiety, depression, eruptive uncontrolled rage and irritability, wide ranges in mood states, shame-based reactions — and so much more — all these changes are happening at the speed of light within the body itself.  I say speed of light because they happen as the electrical signals between the cells happen.

As long as we cut our ‘mind’, ‘brain’ and ‘self’ off from the body that keeps these others alive, we miss our greatest opportunity for removing trauma drama from our lives.  How thrilling is it to realize that ‘it’s just my body’ responding this or that way – ?  I mean this literally.  It is not a thrilling trauma drama reenactment to be able to recognize instantly when something in our body has happened that is affecting us now.  We can simply recognize these changes, understand how they affect us, and begin to be able to gain increasing CONSCIOUS control over our life.

Simply put – nothing could be more complicated.  But it is NOT impossible for us to accomplish as adults (obviously difficult for children).

For adults, it’s important to realize when someone we care about has had or is having one of these mishaps.  No, we didn’t cause it (can’t control it, can’t cure it).  How DO we react?  Get mad, blame self or other, get knocked down with them, get stuck so we can’t get out?  Do we turn around and help, sit down by the side of the road and whistle Dixie while our buddy figures it all out and ‘gets better’?  Do we go back for them, tow them out, or walk on ahead into our own life and leave them far behind?

Tripping on the pathway and falling down takes all kinds of time out of living a good life.  We often find ourselves trying to anticipate what is going to appear ahead to trip our partner so we can perhaps remove the stumble factor for them.  This helps us keep them beside us on OUR walk because that’s what having a relationship is.  Well………  sorry to say, more on this later……. I’m taking myself on a walk now right out the door, into my car, and………

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+UNSPEAKABLE MADNESS: INSIDE A CHILD ABUSING BORDERLINE MOTHER’S MIND

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Oh, lordy, I see that the entire article Dr. Bruce Perry refers to about Borderline Personality Disorder — in his new book, Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential–and Endangered by Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz  — is available for public viewing online at this link:

The borderline empathy effect: Do high BPD individuals have greater empathic ability? Or are they just more difficult to ‘‘read’’?

By Judith M. Flury, William Ickes, William Schweinle

While I haven’t begun yet to read Perry’s book, I have begun to thumb through it, beginning with a search of his index for information specifically about the Borderline condition as it might relate to my understanding of my abusive mother and what she did to me.

As Perry succinctly summarizes this article he mentions, this study found that Borderlines are very likely to have enough of a ‘social’ right brain to be able to read other peoples social cues-minds, but nobody else can read the Borderline’s – because a Borderline brain is JUST TOO DIFFERENT from normal for anyone with an ordinary mind to comprehend.

Because I am nowhere near ready yet to approach the reading of this article, I will take Perry at his word that both he and these researchers know what they are talking about.  Perry also mentions in his two paragraph presentation of this Borderline mental condition that the “character in the film Fatal Attraction, a movie I don’t intend to ever see, was a Borderline.

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While this ‘weird brain-mind’ information is affirming and confirming to me about what I have experienced, learned and know about my mother and the 18 years of abuse I went through thanks to her advanced Borderline condition, it doesn’t improve how I feel at this moment.

My return to complete the transcription of my mother’s remaining letters has put me on trauma-trigger overload.  I could say I’m like a space shuttle with damaged heat tiles trying to approach reentry back to earth.  At the same time I know that reading my mother’s 1957 (from the time right before my 6th birthday), I also know that I have vowed to myself to complete this job.

Perry’s reference to the ‘different mind’ of the Borderline that ordinary people cannot comprehend (I’d have to read the article above to see if they mention whether or not Borderlines are better equipped to read EACH OTHERS minds) does give credence to my sense as I read my mother’s letters that NOBODY CAN SEE HER MADNESS IN THEM.  “It’s NOT just me,” I can tell myself.  “NOBODY could see the madness of her mind.”

This also confirms that I have found exactly the right title to stick onto the front end of her writings when I publish them:  UNSPEAKABLE MADNESS.  If nobody can comprehend the Borderline mind, then OF COURSE we then correspondingly lack any ability to speak about it.  That’s true for those of us who were raised from birth by an abusive Borderline, and it’s true also for those on the outside who could not see what was happening THEN and are inexplicably (to us) prevented from understanding the depth of our stories when we try to speak about them NOW.

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My mother’s letters are triggering implicit, or body memories that are so impacting my body that I cannot eat or sleep right now.  I have to talk to myself when I step into the shower (I don’t have a bath tub) about being able to tolerate the feel of the water hitting my skin.  The water seems to POUND on the surface of my body.  All the thousands of blows I received as a child are in my body in memory that is very close to the surface right now – way too close.

Until I have finished transcribing these 50 or so remaining letters, I will be in some risky and very uncomfortable limbo danger zone – like out in space without the ability to protect myself completely from the consequences of this work.  My ‘heat tiles’ that will allow me reentry back into my present time and space of my life will be repaired when this job is done, though I will remain bruised and ICKY for some time afterward.

I know this.  I also know that I cannot afford an editor to prepare ALL of her letters for print and publication.  This last job has to be done by ME, even before a single one of her words can be uploaded through Kindle publishing.

But by the time I reach the final reading of her letters for editing I will be able to know that her ACTUAL words I am encountering now in her handwriting, in these envelopes, in these physical, material paper forms that she touched as she created this written record I have to face in the transcription process, will be buried outside in my compost pile for the worms to eat.  I will then be working ‘with a memory outside of a memory’ because her digitalized words on my computer screen are one step more remote to me than are these physical remnants of her life I am confronting right now.

Right now I am unwrapping my mummified mommy in every envelope I touch, every piece of paper I pull out, unfold and begin to read.  The contaminated dust of her mind is still here, preserved in her writings.  The implications for good with this collection as they provide this comprehensive view of a child abusing Borderline mother is profound.

I can do this job, I can complete it because I WILL it so.  My greatest hope is that someone will pay attention to her words as they reflect the mysterious and nearly unknowable-from-the-outside view of am abusive  Borderline brain-mind.

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I am reminded of the well-chosen title of this book about Borderline Personality Disorder:  Lost in the Mirror, 2nd Edition: An Inside Look at Borderline Personality Disorder by Richard A. Moskovitz

Although I haven’t read this book because I do not want to ‘contaminate’ my own thinking, sensing and knowing about my mother and her condition, I recognize the truth in this book’s title.  I think about the value that the collection of my mother’s writings will offer to anyone interested in understanding this ‘unknowable, unseeable, incomprehensible, invisible, undetectable’ kind of human brain-mind we now call Borderline Personality Disorder.

It is my opinion that because most people who suffer from so-called mental illness DID suffer from unsafe and insecure early attachments to their caregivers — and Perry’s book on empathy goes into great detail about how our current society is creating a national condition of ‘relational poverty’ that I see as nearing a national crisis of insecure attachment disorders —  suffered from neglect, maltreatment and abuse on some level.  Those deprivations along with direct malice change the developing body-brain.  They directly change the physiological ability to utilize human empathic abilities.

Our growing national ‘relational poverty’ is creating an increased risk for Borderline conditions within our population.

Any professional who works with ‘mental illness’ (as well as infant-child abuse survivors themselves) must be able to recognize patterns within their infant-child abuse survivor clients that mirror or mimic  Borderline.

My mother’s letters and diaries, I still believe, will provide the most comprehensive published opportunity to actually experience the reality of the Borderline condition as a Borderline sees it within ONE set of their brain-mind mirrors – in my Borderline mother’s words.

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In today’s modern world of electronic communication and cell phone connections, I believe it would be nearly impossible for any survivor of Borderline madness in their childhood to put together the kind of comprehensive, serial pattern of Borderline thinking that my mother’s letter contain.

Although her letters after she arrived in Alaska, written to her own mother who HAD to be one of the main contaminating influences that impacted my mother’s development, it is particularly within this batch of 1957 letters that my mother’s and father’s patterns of relational insecure attachment disorder becomes most clear and apparent.  Facing this picture of my parents in these 1957 letters is the most difficult part of the entire letter transcription process, and is the reason I know I put this part of my job off until the end.

Although Perry’s work and the work of all the attachment experts and developmental neuroscientists are providing valuable and necessary steps in the right direction, naming what is going on within our culture as ‘relational poverty’ still lets us avoid the extremely painful reality of what insecure attachment disorders and their corresponding empathy disorders are DOING to us as human beings:  They are making us suffer in nearly inconceivable and unmentionable ways.  They are HURTING US!  This hurt is rocking ‘n rolling itself right on down the generations.

When the day finally arrives that the experts at last agree, and the public finally understands, that nearly every single malaise that humans experience with other humans is because of INSECURE ATTACHMENT DISORDERS – and that nearly every known so-called ‘mental illness’ comes about directly through the influence of ‘relational poverty’ in early body-brain forming stages of development in INSECURE ATTACHMENT ENVIRONMENTS that builds the insecure attachment right into the body-brain — well, I fully expect to have left this world far behind.

That does not mean that as many people as possible can’t join me way out in front of ‘the envelope’ (of air, like a jet pushes through) and begin to understand NOW, way ahead of the pack, that we all suffer from insecure attachment disorders.

As I work my way through these paper edifices that contain what was wrong with my mother’s body-brain-mind, I know that first SHE made this great contribution by writing her words down and by holding onto these papers for the rest of her life, that I made a contribution in my commitment to paying her words serious attention no matter what the cost is to me personally, and that someone somewhere at sometime is going to read her words and my introduction to them and BEGIN to comprehend how extremely damaging insecure attachment patterns are in the very months and years of a human being’s growth and development as they determine the developmental trajectory of a person’s body and brain.

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The genesis of a Borderline is reflected in my mother’s writings.  Because of this fact, the genesis of an extremely violent infant-child abusing parent is ALSO contained in her writings.  That those of us on the outside – with me being still on the outside, fortunately, because I did not end up with a Borderline condition – are being given the chance to share an insider’s view of a Borderline brain-mind along with my mother by carefully reading her written words as they unfold this large section of her life, is really a miracle with great potential for helping us all understand what can happen when safe and secure infant-child attachment goes so very, very wrong.

Meanwhile, I am going into town to pick up some needed supplies as I take a short recess from hell, and then I will return to my work.

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+ONE OF MOTHER’S 1957 LETTERS – INVOLVING MY GRANDMOTHER

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I can’t imagine that anyone who studies Borderline Personality Disorder can begin to understand a Borderline without trying to find out as much information as possible about a Borderline’s mother and about their mother-daughter relationship.  If possible, as with my mother’s case, an inclusion of the grandmother of the Borderline in the case history would also be important.

Because my mother’s grandmother came to live in their household when my mother was 5 and HER mother divorced, my great grandmother was probably another powerfully negative (if not outright abusive) influence within my mother’s childhood.

It has taken me five years to get very near the bottom of the pile of my mother’s letters as I have worked to transcribe them.  I have had to remove myself from her writings at times and then force myself back to the job again.  I am back at the job, as I recently mentioned.

While there remains a small batch of assorted letters from the 1960s left for me to transcribe, it is this large collection of letters from the summer of 1957 that I have put off for last – and avoided.  My father left my mother and his four children (ages nearly 2, nearly 4, nearly 6 (me) and my brother who turned 7) behind in Los Angeles while he went on to his new job in Anchorage, Alaska – and to look for housing so that we could join him.

The letters flowed between them daily.  My mother often wrote 2 or 3 letters to him per day.  My father left on June 11, 1957 and by June 13th my mother writes as if he had been gone a life time.  (The rest of us joined dad on the 1st of August.)

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I am sharing this one letter right now that my mother wrote about her feelings related to her mother’s ‘interference’ in mother’s parenting, and actually says what I always have suspected to be true, that one of the reasons (a MAJOR reason) my mother wanted to go to Alaska was to get away from her mother’s interference.

I really doubt that any reader of the collection of my mother’s writing will ever be able to see the twisted mind – even a wisp of it or a glance of a glimmer of it – in my mother’s words.  In this letter my mother is showing her classic Borderline self – at the same time she succeeds in hiding it.

My mother would not allow her mother to rescue me.  True, my mother is referring to an incident here that involved my grandmother and my brother John – but it is a pattern that happened continually with me, not occasionally.  It is important for me to affirm this for myself because the only two people in my life that could have ‘interfered’ with my mother’s abuse of me were my father or my grandmother.

My mother describes in this letter the dynamics – not healthy ones between herself and her mother – that operated throughout my childhood to prevent my grandmother from being able to help me.  Tonight as I transcribed this letter I saw more clearly than ever how impossible my mother’s relationship with her own mother was, and had always been.

Her statements about her mother in this letter follow a whole string of them within these 1957 summer letters, such as this one in her June 13th letter to dad:

“It breaks my heart but I just had to spank Cindy – it’s 10:30 p.m and she won’t go to sleep!!!  I feel so sorry for them and Grandma does not help things.  Please Bill, don’t let me be like her and expect perfection in little children.“

I see a receding succession of roaring fire alarms going off down the corridor of time straight back to my mother’s childhood in that statement about expecting “perfection in little children” (as my mother DID expect it of all her children).  I hear the echo of the stories my mother repeated over and over to us as we grew up about how this was true in her own childhood.  NOW if I heard her tell those stories I could tell her she was abused.  But of course I couldn’t when I was a child and heard her tales.

These letters traveling back and forth between my mother and father are so strange for me to read.  All I can see in my mother’s is her disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder.  She seems to have entirely organized-oriented herself around my father and in his absence suffered great distress and duress.  She could not self-sooth herself without him.

I will post the link to all of these letters when I have finished transcribing them.  As they are read in order the pattern of their attachment blares back at me throughout these many years since they were written.  Somehow my mother was PERFECT at keeping the shadow of her ‘humanity’ alive in her words while completely disguising the violent monster.  The monster doesn’t show in her letters, but I can feel the monster between her lines.

It makes me think of driving down a highway, seeing a tree looming on the horizon, watching it grow as it’s approached, watching it diminish once it has been passed by.  That’s like the invisible monster hiding between the lines in my mother’s letters.  Even as that tree shrinks in size until it seems to be gone – we know it is still there.  It is still big.  We just can no longer see it because we have moved as its viewers, not because the tree went anywhere other than where it always is.

The monster was always in my mother.  How she maneuvered and manipulated our home’s environment so that nobody SAW the monster but its victims still  amazes me.  At the same time, I believe my grandmother DID see the monster – and my mother could not tolerate it.  She had to make grandma ‘go away’, and the only way she could truly do that was to leave her mother in Los Angeles as she moved the rest of us to Alaska.

Mother made her mother ‘go away’ as surely as we make a tree ‘go away’ as we drive on past it and leave it to shrink into invisibility over the horizon behind us.  Once that had happened, there was no hope for me.  When my connection with my grandmother vanished, when the only safe and secure person in the universe disappeared that I could TRY to attach to, the monster in my mother became invisible to my grandmother.  My mother HAD TO MAKE THAT HAPPEN.  I was getting old enough that hiding the monster from my grandmother was becoming increasingly difficult for my mother to do.

I loved my grandmother.  She was my only hope.  My mother made her disappear.

That my grandmother was part of the problem, I didn’t understand.  My grandmother certainly helped to MAKE the monster my mother was from the start.

But read this letter.  See how insidiously mother hid the truth about what was really going on (the important parts, the dangerous-to-Linda parts) as she kept the invisible monster invisible on the invisibility  side of her Borderline, between the lines of her written words, cunningly twisted in her justifications.

After all my time in trying to find a way to describe how my mother operated in some hope that I could help prevent from happening to another child the absolute holocaust of a childhood I had with my mother – I am so very close to giving up.  It seems impossible.  Any child caught in the deceiving world of a Borderline such as my mother was probably has no chance of being helped or saved – NONE WHATSOEVER!

I did endure in hell.  I survived.  I did not become a Borderline like my mother.  Maybe that’s the best it can ever get under these kinds of conditions.  Maybe sometimes there are too many monsters in the mirror that can turn sideways just exactly right and disappear so nobody else can see them and you can’t even see them to show them to someone else – and nobody, not anybody believes you when you tell them the monster is real.

Maybe that’s the way it was for my mother when she was a little girl.  Her mother was a monster the same way my mother was a monster.  Only my mother put that information somewhere where not even she could really see it in the end (though some of that conflict IS in this letter).  That put me in the middle between them, just as it put me being the projection of everything my grandmother hated about my mother when my mother was little – like I was little when this letter was being written.

How does any abused child know what’s going on between the big people, what happened down the generations that leads to their abuse?  How can a child recognize the lies?  How can they think about them, who do they tell, who would believe them when the lies are so much bigger and older than the children can even begin to imagine?

I still can’t SHOW anyone what I know about my mother.  It’s as if it were a dream.  “You were just dreaming, Linda.  It wasn’t real.  What you say happened didn’t happen.  You imagined it all.  You are making it all up.  Why are you doing that?”

The Borderline abusive mother IS in this letter!  I can see her!

My father and mother were so entangled in their mutual dependency on one another my mother could not afford for my father to see the monster – and he couldn’t afford to see it, either.  Maybe she had him so mesmerized by her madness that he never stood a chance against her.

Recipe for disaster….. that’s what I know as the principal victim target of my mother’s violent abusive madness.  What my mother writes is simply on one side of her Borderline wall.  What’s on the other side she keeps secret and hidden, even from herself – and in this letter, also from my father.

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June 19, 1957 post mark

Darling Bill,

What a day I have had – what a time I have had since you left my dearest.  I need you, I need you.  Don’t ever leave me again – I can’t stand being parted from you – find a place soon, soon, soon!  Just to be together again.  Have you investigated those apartments – they were supposed to be close enough to the base so we wouldn’t need a car!

I wish with all my heart – soul you were here with me now.  I’ve never needed you as much.  I’ve never in all my life felt so alone.

Yet, I wanted to be alone – I just sent Mother home with all her blankets and she was boiling – I don’t mean because it’s so hot out either!

She comes over tired – all full of her hectic day and I am also tired and neither of us cheer each other up.  I miss you so terribly and she can’t understand that – she says she can.  “Well, I should hope so after all you’re used to him after 8 years.”  Bill, I’ve been sidetracking comments until I can’t stand it any longer!  Yet, Bill I’m frightened to death to be alone – I long to be close to you, Oh darling, when I write to you my ‘whole being’ cries to you.

Mother, I think, is dissappointed [sic] !  She thought we’d have fun together and I’m a wet rag.  I only want YOU.  It’s all I live for, all I think about!  I feel as if I was torn away from you and will ache until I am put together again.  [Linda note:  Father has been gone 8 days – it was their choice that he start work in Alaska and find housing so the family could join him.]

If she had loved her husband it would be different but she’s truly a ‘spinster’ now and it irritates me and my complete love for you irritates her.

We enjoy each other occassionally [sic] but to have my mother come every night when I ache for you – I can’t stand it.  Darling, darling, darling.

I haven’t written many things about ‘Mom’ in the letter because I have been trying so darned hard and she has been going way out of her way for me.  I tried staying one night alone and it wasn’t too bad, I did sleep.  I went out to call her the next night not to come and no body [sic] answered.  At 6:00 she appearred [sic] and has been coming every night since.

She was here from noon Saturday until Monday morning.  Too much!!!!!  [multiple underlines]  Several times she has over ridden my discipline, pouted or grimaced and I ignored it until Sunday at the park.

It was only a little thing but important to me.  I can’t have her ‘butting in’, which she doesn’t hesitate to do!!

We had sandwiches!  John ate ½ and I gave him another.  He didn’t want it and I insisted saying he couldn’t play on an empty stomach.  Grandma had promised ice creams.  When the time came, I got up and noticed he had gone around in back of the tree and thrown the sandwich away.  I said he couldn’t have the ice cream then as he didn’t etc. etc.   Grandma pouted, stormed, said I wasn’t fair etc. etc. and I told her “It was none of her business.”  I had been wanting to for ages.  He didn’t get ice cream then but later I got him some after a talk.  Right or wrong I can’t be interfered with – perhaps parents make mistakes but they’re not as important as the children not having confidence in us!

Well, today has been bad anyway but I have managed fine (this darn pen) I didn’t want a red refill and it doesn’t work right anyways.  I can hardly write with it.  Please pardon.  Most maddening when I have so much to say!

It was another beautiful day but we didn’t get a letter.  I know you can’t write everday [sic] but I am so anxious to know if you like it or not.  We’ve had so much trouble and I still don’t know how you like the D – place!

Well, we decided to go to the beach!  More of that later.  We were almost set when John complained of his foot hurting.  It had swollen up this morning and I had gone up to get Epsom salts but realized we couldn’t go anywhere now!

Yesterday while getting I the pool, on the grass, in the backyard, he stepped on a thorn.  It was pulled out and I put lots of tincture of Methyolate on it – all over – thinking of you.

By 11:00 today it was pink, blue and red and purple and very swollen.  He couldn’t even get a slipper on.  The doctor said to soak it, which we did almost all afternoon!  By 5:00 it was still bad so I took him to the doctor before I had only inquired, and he gave him a shot of penicillin and told me to come back in the morning.  He can’t walk on it and I am quite worried.  Could blood-poisoning set in?  The doctor said all the poison is centered in that one area now and he doesn’t want it spreading.  I will let you know tomorrow.

As soon as Mother came, after supper tonight and we had a very pleasant one too – She was concerned and does love us but she has to try to manage.  Anyways, she said it was as she says, the children don’t mind.  It was due to that indirectly they were told to go out back and sit on the cot until I cam out and got off but my heavens I had already explained that as a lesson, but they’re children and I don’t want her lecturing them.

After they were in bed and asleep 10:00 again (this house is like an oven until then – it’s been well over 100 all day!)  Sharon was still awake.  Last night Grandma excused her and the neighbors etc. [Linda note:  I think she’s saying the neighbors wouldn’t like the 2-hear-old’s crying) so I took her up and rocked her well tonight I spanked!

When I cam out I told her I didn’t care if she did cry I can’t rock her every night.  She said “I never interfere.”  I said something about the day and the children.  Well, one thing led to another and I told her I thought it best I stay alone nights now and that she does interfere and always has.  And it was one reason I was going to Alaska!  I told her very quietly and calmly and did not lose my temper.  [bold type is mine]

I told her I was grown and had 4 children and it wasn’t good for them to know I was afraid to stay alone and that it isn’t good for any of us to have her over every night.

Well, naturally you know the answers!  “So I’m being put out, am I.  I am soft but not that soft to come back again after that.”

Bill I’ve had so much lately that I told her I couldn’t argue but I thanked her and told her I’d see her tomorrow.  I have an appointment with Cartwright which I can’t keep if she won’t baby-sit.  Why can’t we just discuss things.  She can’t be criticized.

Really, darling even the times I’ve tried to talk to the children – she says “Now, listen to Grandma – – – – – and starts in too.”  Several times I’ve said nicely it’s easier for just me to tell them etc. and she sulks.

I know, as I said before, she’s dissappointed [sic] in me and rubs it in that you haven’t written you liked it [in Alaska] and what a mistake we’ve made and why did we want to go there anyways etc.

What with all the troubles I’ve had, mother and not knowing from you I don’t know!

I’m so cheerful every day but something new happens every day!

Poor Johnny.

Poor Grandma too.  I couldn’t talk to her and she left in a huff.  I kept on knitting.  She probably won’t speak to me tomorrow and I am frightened.  I need you, you, you, you.

Write me, advise me.  I am so lonely.  The days aren’t bad because I am used to having you at work but the nights – are terrible!

Poor Grandma can’t take you place.  I feel so sorry but I told her I’ve had to talk to her about this many times before and she swears she doesn’t ever interfere and always tells me how well I do!  (Sometimes she does) but also is plenty quick to criticize them too if they’re naughty until I do then she jumps in.  Grandma is nice to visit with sometime.

I want to live with you.  How can I wait?  God guide me and give me strength I need it so!  My darling husband I love you!  Mildred

Late.  I find it so hard to stop writing and there are so many things I have left unsaid – business things – but I will write them tomorrow.  I just made myself an iced tea and told myself that there are thousands of women alone tonight – this D. pen!  All over this [can’t read word].  Some of them probably widowed, working during the day and lonely at night.

Yes, what is it I tell the children and have told myself recently?  “One has to do with out to appreciate and place yourself in other’s position in order to understand more fully what others go through.”  I do have you.  We’re temporarily separated but you’re waiting for me – I am lucky!!  I am not widowed, my husband is not at war, but we’re separated and it’s so hard, my dearest.

I wish I could really talk to Mother and make her understand that I love her dearly but I am grown up and have 4 children and I must be let alone to bring them up as I see fit.  She can’t understand my love for my husband, I know.  It deeply upsets me.  I pray tonight for so many things.  Perhaps God can make her understand!

John awakened a few minutes ago.  He says the pain is so bad.  Darling, I get so afraid without you and I pray for guidance and strength.  I have relied on yours so much!  I gave him aspirin and will take him early to the doctor.  His foot is so puffed and unnatural looking.  I don’t like it at all!

It’s past midnight and I must try to get some rest.  I sleep on the bumpy hard couch and my life is frugal too – in it’s own way.

I love you dearly and live for your letters.  I need them until I have you.

I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

I kissed John for you and he says “I miss my Daddy – I love him so.”  We all miss you, my sweetheart!

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Blog will be available on the Kindle Store in 48-72 hours

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+WORD WARRIOR NEWS: PRESENTING MY CURRENT 8 WORKING BOOK TITLES

alchemynow2 Comments

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This post includes a copy of the working paper about the 8 books I am currently preparing for publication (you asked for them, here they come – to the best of my ability).  It lists their working titles along with a list of information to include in my BIG BANG BOOK that everything else I ever write is pointing toward.  (I just sent this paper off to my family and friends as fyi.)

I plan to dedicate as high a portion of the profits (above what’s needed to moderately improve my own well-being and my children’s) to the non-profits I mentioned in my earlier post, +WHAT WORD WARRIORS SAY – A BOOK BEING BORN.

I know that money needs to be generated in creative ways to build up the required capitol to afford to pay for at least the first 500 softcover copies (about $3330-$3600).

I am eager to get these projects completed – thank you again to each and every one of this blog’s readers who have affirmed my writing, my work, and my potential.  I am becoming increasingly concerned about not having done what I bet I came into this life to do before (if/when) the advanced-aggressive breast cancer comes back to snatch me.

Along with formalizing information categories into book-size sections so that I can apply for a block of 10 ISBNs (same price for ten as for one), I am forcing myself to finish transcribing my mother’s writings.  I intend to publish them with the titles listed below (barring anyone’s title-changing input) ASAP on Kindle.  I am not sure they will ever appear in hard copy.  They are voluminous and I want them accessible to people without having to cut them apart.

As I can afford it – with money from the Kindle sales if they show up – I will be able to afford a simple and efficient website that will allow for people to pay, download and print their own pdf copy of my mother’s writings if they want to.

I believe that if anyone is truly interested in how a severe Borderline’s brain might work from the outside looking in, especially a severely abusive one, my mother’s writings are a gift to the world toward this end.  Because the Borderline parent can be extremely dangerous to her offspring, and because the Borderline condition even by definition can be extremely difficult for ANYONE to detect, gaining insight into the workings of the Borderline mind has great potential for helping to understand how severe child abuse can happen as it improves all of our potential to both prevent child abuse and to intervene effectively in cases where the abusing parent is a Borderline like my mother.

I believe interested readers of my mother’s words will have to make a commitment to follow her life’s trajectory over time as it unfolds itself in her writing.  Perhaps one of the reasons the abusive Borderline is so difficult to detect is that they are the masters of illusion-delusion.  Magic happens for professionals when they can create the perfect distraction for their audience.  I believe my mother also created so many distractions within herself over time with her constant MOVING in particular, that her magic show simply spilled itself out her front door, into the street, and across the parking lot (like the ‘Porridge Pot’ overflowing in a children’s book).

If conditional so-called love and the withholding of affection, approval along with manipulations of give-and-take ‘mercy’ – in other words, deception, lies and betrayal contribute to Borderline Personality Disorder, maybe the deception builds itself into the BPD changed brain in such a way that it just grows and grows and grows……  (like a cancer).

Someone would have had to notice from a distance, and would have had to care enough to follow the porridge path of my mother’s mad illusions all the way back – inside our home – to the pot itself:  how my mother’s trauma-changed Borderline brain was working inside her skull to produce such masses of bizarre thoughts, behaviors and dangerous actions toward her offspring – that nobody – EVER – noticed.

Well, I better get back to work!! tyl

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The Devil’s Child: How 18 years of abuse by my mother did not make me like her

(I don’t like “at the hands of “) ———  need your take on this?

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360 Degrees of Change for Survivors of Difficult Childhoods


(with or without subtitle?)

This title is meant to include degrees related to the range of abuse that can happen, the range of resiliency and risk factors as they work to balance reactions to trauma, the range of dis-ability resulting, as well as the degrees of healing possible.

This book breaks down the scientific information (including attachment) in terms of a Native American format (told to readers or not?) – a circle of 360 degrees – idea that simply reading the book will create changes in people whether they actually realize what those changes are or not.

I do not want to use a calendar based concept – want this to be familiar enough from the 12-step recovery inspiration and daily reminder books – but different without ANY religious intonations.

I don’t want any ‘brain’ disruptions to happen due to ‘OH NO!  I missed March 3rd!  NOW what do I do?”  They need implicit permission to read as slowly or quickly as is comfortable, and to skip around.

Also, don’t want to identify the ‘age patterns’ below specifically, this is to organize my thinking – living with consequences of abuse WILL last a life time.  Either we recognize how abuse might have changed our physiological development or we don’t.

I am creating the subject area breaks (as per below) like they might happen over a natural lifespan, but the idea of this book is that healing happens in its own time and major healing can happen in an instant.  Every time ‘the circle’ is completed (like moving in a spiral) new perspectives are gained, new insights.  The Native elders talk about how we go through these cycles daily – and also go through them every time we are dealing with any particular problem –

I believe that even if ONE significant point (degree? – how do I connect these two ideas?  ‘degree’ and ‘point of fact’?) happens for one person, not only will their life be changed for the better but the changes in one can and probably WILL affect the many.

The Medicine Wheel actually follows ‘natural’ patterns of seasonal change as well as our human developmental life ‘segments’.  (large type underlined below is my ‘section name’)

(1) EAST (air – color yellow – spring – mind) – birth, new beginnings, childhood = ATTACHMENT (0-20)

(2) SOUTH (earth – color red – summer – body) – young adulthood, learning and practicing by ‘doing the work’ – BIOCHANGES (20-40)

(3) WEST (water – color black – fall – emotions) – our more maturing years includes introspection, self-reflection, pondering- SURVIVORSHIP (40-60)

(4)NORTH (fire – color white – winter – healing and wisdom) – our grandparent years, helping the younger generations with our wisdom – DISCLOSURE (60-80 — completes the circle so that 80 is right there with death and birth, oldest and youngest together)

My ‘sorting’ of thoughts related to these – I have around 400 points-degrees-separate pieces of information – haven’t tried sorting into these categories yet – might need to adjust my thinking, certainly need to work it through (after I have mother’s writings on Kindle) – if I keep these categories, need to NOT contaminate one with info too related specifically to a different one, need to keep them as clear as 4-seasons in Fargo are

PROCESS OF MAKING THE UNKNOWN AND THE INVISIBLE – KNOWN AND VISIBLE – THESE THINGS DON’T BENEFIT US BY REMAINING MYSTERIES!  ALL the other writings must point to this one – it’s the peak of the fireworks display!  I will need to be greatly in-spired to do this right, each of the 360 degrees need two paragraphs with a catchy title!  (just made me smile – the first one that popped into my mind as I wrote this was “the mom and pop store’ for the sperm and the egg process!)

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1st half of the book is more distant, objective and ‘technical’ – inoculate readers to get them ready for the emotional reactions they will have 2nd half

(1) – ATTACHMENT – beginning at the beginning with the involvement of our ‘feel good’ body chemicals as they orchestrate attachment of sperm and egg, zygote attachment to uterus, in placenta and breast milk, connecting attachment with food and social contact in our approach/avoid patterns of life – rupture/repair– etc – all about attachment – what it is, how it forms, clearly and without ‘malice’ describe the possible attachment disorders as they are ‘given’ by parents to children, etc. – and the growing brain – origin of self firm by two – brain tracks to consciousness and conscience – introducing terminology of development:  critical windows of development, windows of tolerance, mirroring, hemisphere growth, feeling felt, theory of mind, magical thinking (tied to denial later on) – being sent off-trajectory – built by good or bad world to represent the conditions of that world to others of our species (starts in womb) – ‘hatching’ and foundation of exploration connected to shame and dissociation in nervous-system and brain –

(2) – BIOCHANGES – all the known possible ‘invisible’ changes that can happen – nervous system, vagus system, stress-calm response system, immune system – clear description of environment-genetic interactions – phenotypes and genotypes – epigenetics – how these forces affect what our cells are going every millisecond of our life time – placing our self in context of evolution, genetic memory in our DNA – changes for a malevolent world –  how we COULD have been different – stuck with memories we cannot even recall that influence our entire lifetime (explain developmental process of memory ability) – what dissociation might be caused by – how stess fries memory region (hippocampus) brain cells for both victim and perp – describing ‘limbic kindling’, emotional dysregulation, inability to self-sooth, no trust region of brain – itty bitty left brain happy center – what brain plasticity really means – describing, say, how completely different from normal a borderline’s brain is – what’s coming down the road in terms of brain research, how that will change ‘mental illness’ categories – resting brain state, consciousness and involvement of the self in brain – how many of these changes (I believe science will show) mimic (and shown to cause in some) emotional limbic kinding/seizures, autistic-symptoms, bi-polar etc – changes in social brain at same time in emotional brain connected to stress-calm response – involvement of internal steroid system – cannabinoid and opioid systems – substance P (pain hormone) – (provide a brain term word glossary – cluster the tech brain terms together – some might skip them or come back) – book has to increase vocabulary so we can include new info in our thinking) –

PREPARING READERS TO LOOK (PERHAPS WITH SORROW, SHOCK AND DISMAY – ALONG WITH DAWNING INSIGHT) at what happens in our survivorship when we don’t have the info already presented in this first half of book as we ACTUALLY entered into our life past childhood) –

2nd half of the book is up close and personal – heading toward transformation – ‘break the bone and set it right’ – opening up realizations (and closed pussy wounds) for new healing

(3) – SURVIVORSHIP – entering our adult life with wrong information, no information – unprepared and wounded and not knowing it – making major decisions while our cortex is completing growth – having no clue what is really wrong, trying to ‘recover’ and gain understanding while most critical info we need is missing – what it’s like to live in a ‘good’ world while we were formed in a ‘bad’ world – trauma drama, etc – looking around and comparing how we are doing with others – measurements of success in our culture, impossible standards, not knowing why we fail, make mistakes, can’t keep up, can’t plan for the future – asking the questions = introspection, preparing for getting the answers – how attachment works ‘invisibly’ in our relationships and parenting – what it’s LIKE living with dissociation – contamination of present with intergenerational unresolved trauma – passing on abuse and attachment disorders and can’t control, don’t understand – stuck in bad relationships – nothing but rocky road if we try to look backwards – no tools (no road grader) to smooth things out – spiritual issues (stemming from attachment disorders) – having no words even to think about what happened (no info) – oh, and NO CHILD WITHIN or ADULT CHILD! – struggle with sensory overload and don’t know why – going to war already ‘broken’ – stuck in peritrauma – too hot, too cold – buying ‘diagnosis’ – drugs – nobody talks about what REALLY happened, taboos, conspiracy of silence – feeling isolated and alone – screwed up feel good feel bad reward system biochem – tracing all back to attachment-designed physiology in the body – trying to hatch into adulthood without secure outer or inner foundation – shutting off attachment needs to experience caregiving system correctly – taking some of what we can find (AA, parenting classes, etc) and using it best we can, always feeling something is missing
(4) –DISCLOSURE – getting real about how what was done to us changed us – need the right information and get it (of course MUCH from this little book) – disclosure is about letting our own self know what happened and about ‘telling’ someone else – gaining the WORDS – knowing how to keep our self safe – not hunting for memories, etc. – comes full circle to growth in infancy, learning to TALK about our story – understanding emotional dysregulation personally – clearing the pathway of obstacles, increasing the ‘coherency’ of our vision of our life, etc – passing our healing changes on to others – being able to clear ‘the wreckage of the past’ (as 12-steppers say) about how our changes hurt others – making new, better, healed connections all the way around in self, body, relationships – gaining informed compassion and coming to terms with what was done to us (and our version of forgiveness) – turning our dis-abilities into gifts by recognizing how changes saved us – recognizing how they affected our choices and decisions so we can LEARN to do it differently while living ‘within our means’ (what is truly POSSIBLE for us considering the changes – knowing our weaknesses and strengths, knowing how to get help, where, limitations within our CULTURE on getting what we need versus NOT and not taking that lack personally – pushing for social change – connecting the circle from victim to survivor to helping victims (prevent, intercede) – reach out and connect to others – discuss healing of attachment (‘earned secure’ versus my term ‘borrowed’) – breaking taboos in breaking the silence that binds (just found a book title for my collection of essays!) –

HAS TO include reading list and resource links along with complete (I wish LEGAL disclaimer – maybe I can find one to copy)

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I could do

360 Degrees of Change for Survivors of Difficult Survivors:

Study Guide, Workbook and Exercises

Maybe will be generated at same time I am pulling the book together, that would be good – could apply for the ISBN for it

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For Mother’s writings:

Unspeakable Madness:  No Word in Our Borderline Mother’s Writings about Her Reign of Terror

Book One: Pre-Alaska diaries and letters

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Unspeakable Madness:  No Word in Our Borderline Mother’s Writings about Her Reign of Terror

Book Two: Alaskan homesteading era diaries and letters

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Unspeakable Madness:  The Making of an Abusive Borderline Mother –

Her Childhood Stories and Background with Commentary

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My adult survivor book:

Disowning Mother:

Travels of a Child Abuse Survivor from Empty Wraith to Empowered Warrior

This works for me – I know what I mean here!

And, I HAVE traveled, all of my life – and my process is directly mirrored in my travels – could organize the material, even, by geographical settings

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and last, if I ever pull this together:

Breaking the Silence that Binds:

A Collection of Essays by a Severe Infant-Child Abuse Survivor

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+BORN AS A COMPONENT OF A BORDERLINE MOTHER’S MIND-LIE

alchemynow4 Comments

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How I remembered what memories I do have that are written in my childhood stories was affected-infected by the obsession my mother had with ‘telling the truth’.  Her perception of every experience involving me including those she added to ‘her abuse litany’ involved somehow involved a deception and a lie.  Because she continued to repeat these perception-lies verbally every time she ‘punished’ (beat) me for the rest of the years of my childhood, not only were her versions of the events kept alive, but also mine because my version and her version simply never matched.

How was it that I, a child that had never been affirmed by my mother as ever existing at all as a human being but rather as a nonhuman child of the devil, could so clearly KNOW the truth (my truth) about what had ACTUALLY happened every single time my mother repeated her attacks on me through the years because of my supposed transgressions that existed only within her distorted mind?

It is affirming to me at this moment to recognize that as far back as I can remember my own memory of what actually happened for each of her twisted abuse litany versions of my actions was carried forward in time within my own mind-self intact.  Nothing my mother ever said or did to me changed the truth of what I knew.  I find comfort in realizing that obviously Linda WAS present.  I WAS there as a glimmer of a reflection of a self within my own experience of my own life.

I was the one being viciously verbally and physically attacked without having any possible way of avoiding, escaping, preventing or of understanding what was happening to me.  But I WAS there, in my body, having my life experiences.  I had them.  I knew what they were.  I knew the truth of what actually happened, and I remembered the experiences intact – every single one of them – in spite of how my mother twisted the facts and in spite of what she did to me along with twisting the reality of the facts.

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At this moment I am also detecting where one of my biggest problems originated.  As the brain-mind-self grows and develops, a person’s memory abilities are supposed to expand and become more complex and advanced.  When I say I had no ability to THINK about myself in my life in any kind of self-reflective, awareness-based way for the 18 years of my childhood, what I realize I am actually saying is that within the horrific abusive environment I was developing within, I could only go so far in my development and no further.

There is something called ‘semantic memory’ which is a term that “refers to the memory of meanings, understandings, and other concept-based knowledge unrelated to specific experiences.”  Tied to the development of semantic memory abilities is a following stage of memory development called ‘episodic memory’, a term refers to “the memory of autobiographical events (times, places, associated emotions, and other contextual knowledge) that can be explicitly (consciously – which is versus ‘implicit’ memory that is unconscious and exists in the body but is not accessible to the brain-mind) stated.”  Not only did I not develop this remembering ability at the appropriate age, but I have only with effort been able to exercise it in my adult life.

As memory abilities develop in the body-brain from birth, they form what I think of as links in a memory chain.  The next stage of memory ability development I should have been able to obtain was nearly completely obliterated by my mother’s abuse of me.  ‘Autobiographical memory‘, is not a simple process.  It is meant to allow us to connect our self from the inside out not only with the experiences of our life as we have them, but also involves being able to experience our experience (having a self to remember having an experience).  Then, we are supposed to be able to remember our experience of our self having had the experience.

We can refer to the end result of the abuse my mother did to me ‘dissociation’, but what I know is that her abuse interfered with my brain’s development, including the development of memory abilities.  I had a deadly predator in pursuit of me throughout the 18 years of my childhood.  I never had the luxury to pause for the length of time it would have taken to consolidate my memory of my life or of myself living it.  I certainly was never allowed to pause long enough to form the ability to remember myself having an experience, or to remember myself remembering having experiences.

The reality of my abusive childhood resulted in such profoundly altered brain development that I simply managed to escape my childhood with the memories of my own reality that were directly tied to the incidents my mother repeated over the years in her abuse litany.  Even then, it was only because I had been able to develop some version of semantic memory abilities so that I could not only recognize certain literal facts in the world, I could remember the details of my experiences that were directly associated with these remembered facts.

My mother always had an altered version regarding the facts than I did.  I did not think in terms like “My mother is lying” so that I could have evolved further into thinking about “Why is my mother lying?” or “What is wrong with my mother?” or “Gee, I am so angry at my mother for lying.””  I simply knew for a semantic fact that what had actually happened on each abuse litany-included occasion factually happened as they did in fact happen.

The truly strange addition to this entire pattern was my mother’s insistence on every occasion that I was lying to her if I tried to contradict her version by daring to assert myself and tell her the facts.  I never thought of these facts as real, or as being something so abstract as ‘the truth’.  I learned very young as a child, certainly by the age of six, that not only could I not ‘make things right’ by trying to tell my mother the simple facts of what happened, but my trying to do further fueled her rage like pouring gasoline on a roaring fire.

But – and this is extremely important to me – I always remembered the facts of every event she ever attacked me for the way things actually happened.  Every single time my mother viciously attacked me, verbally and/or physically for one of these events (or for her later recalling of these events), I COULD NOT LET GO OF THE FACTS as I knew them to be.

I did not recall the facts with emotion.  I did not recall them with any sense whatsoever that either the original experience of the experience belonged to me, or that the facts of the experience were a part of me or of my life.  Facts were facts.  They existed like physical objects exist in space and time.  They were literal realities and were nearly as physically tangible in my mind as any object can be.

These fact-objects only reappeared to me when my mother brought them up again and again over the span of my childhood.  They had nothing to do with me that I knew of.  I just simply and clearly recognized them as if they were a fork or a spoon or an automobile.  Although I can be grateful that at least physical objects existed for me with words attached to them, and can be equally grateful that at least I retained the facts-as-objects with names for each incident my mother kept remembering for me, I cannot be grateful for the fact that objects and object-facts had some existence in the world while I, as a human being did not.

All I was, all I knew, and all I continued to be for 18 years was a one single fact-object:  I was the devil’s child.

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How a person begins from infancy to recognize and develop their individual self is dependent upon their ability to be seen, heard and responded to by others in their environment.  This begins with the earliest primary caregiver, usually the mother, being able to recognize the needs of her infant when they are expressed, mirror back to the infant its own emotional states, and appropriately respond both to the infant’s emotions and to its needs.

Thinking this through is a strenuous exercise for my mind.  From the first instants in my infancy that I should have been having my own self recognized and responded to appropriately as my brain-mind-self was forming in relationship to the world through the interactions my mother was having with me, I was fed the opposite of the truth about who I was in the world.

My mother could never respond back to me by mirroring my own existence, my own emotional states, my own needs and desires because I was ALWAYS invisible to her from the moment I was born.  She could not reflect ME back to ME because all she ever saw when it came to me was her own projected reflection of badness that her mind had split away from itself and cast onto and into me.

I did not exist.  No infant can exist to itself fully and automatically from the time it is born.  Everyone requires this mirroring of the self back to it for the identification of self to be made.  Now that I understand how the nature of caregiver-infant mirroring interactions actually physiologically determines how an infant’s brain and nervous system develops makes my effort to understand what happened to me because of my mother’s madness even more scary.  I understand how profoundly her disturbed mind affected the development of everything about me from the ground on up.

The truth is that everything that ever happened between my mother and I was based on a lie.  Because I was at ground zero, because I not only existed at the center of the lie but actually WAS the lie my mother’s deranged mind created, I never had a chance or a way to gain an alternative perspective about what was happening to me.

When I say I spent 18 years being the center of my mother’s psychosis and being the target of her hatred, rage and abuse, I mean this as a literal fact.  I WAS the target and nothing else but a target.

That target came into the world not as a human being, but as the spawn of the devil who tried to kill my mother while I was being born – because the devil sent me on a mission to do just that.  I was raised knowing not only that I was owned by the devil, that I belonged to the devil, that I was not human, but also that the devil had given me the power to ‘take’ my mother’s other children ‘to the devil’.

The last time I heard my mother verbalize her unwavering beliefs about me was on the telephone when I was 30.  She launched into her abuse litany in our conversation as if a switch had been flipped on.  The words she used in her litany were always the same.  They would defy belief it I didn’t have the continued ability to recognize facts when I encounter them.

What I never had in my entire life until the moment in that conversation when I was 30 — as these exact familiar words yet again spewed out of her mouth and into my ear through my telephone’s receiver, “The devil sent you to kill me while you were being born and because I survived, you have been nothing but a curse upon my life ever since” – was the ability to do what I did on this day.  I suddenly recognized the lie in the span of a heartbeat and just as quickly in the next heartbeat my finger flicked through the air as I pushed the phone button that hung up on her.

In that span of a heartbeat, for the first time in my life, I caught a glimpse of a glimmer that my mind existed separately from my mother’s.  It took that long, 30 years, to begin a process of differentiating my own self in my own mind from the mind of my mother that should have started when I was born.

Before this instant there had never been a boundary formed between my mother and myself so that I could have been on one side – busy developing my own self in my own brain-mind – while she was on her side of the boundary dealing with her self within her own brain-mind.  I was included as a part of her mind from the time of her difficult and near-death labor with me.  I was nothing but her mental projection of ‘evil’ before I took my first breath.

I was a captured and encapsulated part of my mother and could not escape.  I was not allowed to form a self to escape with even if escape had been an option.  And that option did not really appear for me until I was already 30 years old, 12 years after I had walked out my mother’s front door into my adulthood.

I believe my mother suffered from just about the most severe case of Borderline Personality Disorder possible, and she forced me to share the turmoil of her mental experience with her as if I was an incorporated part of her self.  She kept me on the psychotic side of her Borderline mind for my entire 18-year childhood and for the rest of her life from the time of my birthing.  I was not born free.  In fact, until I somehow managed to step across the line out of her Borderline lie and into my own reality during that telephone conversation, I had not been born as a human being at all.

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+NO REAL CHOICE: WE HAVE TO UNDERSTAND OUR DEVELOPMENTAL CHANGES FROM INFANT-CHILD ABUSE – NOW!

alchemynow1 Comment

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Trouble.  I have thousands of memories that involve this word.  All of these memories are stored in my body even if my brain cannot let me know what they all are consciously.  My mother, in her common verbal attacks on me, frequently used this word in versions of sentences such as these:  “Linda, you are nothing but trouble.  Trouble should be your middle name.  You have been nothing but trouble from the moment you were born.  You are more trouble than all the other children put together.  You are the cause of all the trouble in my marriage to Bill.  You are the cause of all of the trouble in this family.  Trouble, trouble, trouble, that’s all that you are.  You are more trouble than you are worth.  (Usually followed by some version of, “I hate you!  I wish you had never been born.”

But this word, trouble, as it applies to the developmental brain changes I suffered because of the abuse my mother did to me takes on a new meaning nearly beyond imagining when I discover information – again and again – about the truth of how child abuse changes, if not ruins, a person for a lifetime.  The only true weapon we have to fight in our own defense is to begin to read and understand how what happened to us changed us in ways that matter most.

I am in the process of writing a completely different and separate post at this moment, but I had to start this one so that I can include something I just found that is extremely important.  On the other post I am examining how my ability to remember was interfered with by my mother’s constant abuse.

Please take a look at what I just found on the effects of infant-child abuse and trauma on brain development on the web site of The Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence.

I found on this site an extremely impressive list of articles on the topic written by leading experts in the field of infant-child brain development and the consequences of child abuse.  There is a list of articles here with abstracts.  Finding them brings me mixed feelings.  At the same time I am thrilled that this work is being done, that the effects of trauma on brain development are being discovered, that the information is becoming increasingly available to the public – I also feel profoundly sad that I, along with so many others, experienced the kind of traumas during our early development that changed the development of our brain and hence changed our lives.

I will NEVER be able to repeat this fact enough:  What my mother did to me during any individual attack against me is NOT what matters to me now.  What matters is that those attacks changed my body-brain development in ways that these authors describe.

I present the following here as an example of the impact of abuse on development, and as a sample of the quality and range of information available on the web site of  The Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence.

Ito, Y., Teicher, M. H., Glod, C. A., and Ackerman, E. (1998). Preliminary evidence for aberrant cortical development in abused children: a quantitative EEG study. J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neuroscience, 10(3), 298-307.

The objectives of this study were to investigate cortical development and hemispheric asymmetry in abused children. Fifteen hospitalized children (mean age 10.7 +/- 2.5 years) with severe physical or sexual abuse and 15 normal children (10.1 +/- 3.1 years) were studied with quantitative EEG. Abused children had higher levels of left hemisphere coherence and a reversed asymmetry, with left hemisphere coherence significantly exceeding right hemisphere coherence. Left hemisphere coherence decreased more rapidly across electrode distance in normal subjects, suggesting that increased left coherence in abused patients stemmed from a deficit in left cortical differentiation. These findings support the hypothesis that early severe abuse may have a deleterious effect on brain development.

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Perry, B. D. (1994). Neurobiological Sequelae of Childhood Trauma: Post traumatic Stress Disorders in Children. In Catecholamine Function in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: Emerging Concepts (M Murburg, Ed.) American Psychiatric Press, Washington, DC, 253-276.

Abstract: The present chapter will review childhood PTSD with specific focus on neurobiological sequelae of childhood trauma and present some preliminary evidence of altered functioning of brainstem catecholamine systems in childhood PTSD. In specific, it is hypothesized that the abnormal patterns of catecholamine activity associated with prolonged ‘alarm reactions’ induced by traumatic events during infancy and childhood can result in altered development of the central nervous system (CNS). Furthermore, it is hypothesized that this altered development includes a ‘dysregulated’ brainstem which in turn results in a host of signs and symptoms related to abnormal brainstem functioning, including altered cardiovascular regulation, affective lability, behavioral impulsivity, increased anxiety, increased startle response and sleep abnormalities. Finally, early life experience is discussed, in context of childhood trauma, as an ‘expresser of genetic predispositions.

Perry, B. D. (1996). Neurodevelopmental Adaptations to Violence: How Children Survive the Intragenerational Vortex of Violence. In Violence and Childhood Trauma: Understanding and Responding to the Effects of Violence on Young Children. Cleveland, Ohio: Gund Foundation Publishers, pp.67-80.

Perry, B. D. (1997). Incubated in Terror: Neurodevelopmental Factors in the “Cycle of Violence.” In J. Osofsky (Ed.). Children, Youth and Violence: The Search for Solutions . (pp. 124-148). New York: Guilford Press.
How violence alters the brain and nervous system of the developing child.

NOTE:  Perry is the one whose new book I just ordered:  Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential–and Endangered

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Schore, A. N. (2001). The Effects of a Secure Attachment Relationship on Right Brain Development, Affect Regulation, and Infant Mental Health. Infant Journal of Mental Health, 22, 7-66.

Abstract: Over the last ten years the basic knowledge of brain structure and function has vastly expanded, and its incorporation into the developmental sciences is now allowing for more complex and heuristic models of human infancy. In a continuation of this effort, in this two part work I integrate current interdisciplinary data from attachment studies on dyadic affective communications, neuroscience on the early developing right brain, psychophysiology on stress systems, and psychiatry on psychopathogenesis in order to provide a deeper understanding of the psychoneurobiological mechanisms that underlie infant mental health.

In this paper I detail the neurobiology of a secure attachment, an exemplar of adaptive infant mental health, and focus upon the primary caregiver’s psychobiological regulation of the infant’s maturing limbic system, the brain areas specialized for adapting to a rapidly changing environment. The infant’s early developing right hemisphere has deep connections into the limbic and autonomic nervous systems and is dominant for the human stress response, and in this manner the attachment relationship facilitates the expansion of the child’s coping capacities. This model suggests that adaptive infant mental health can be fundamentally defined as the earliest expression of flexible strategies for coping with the novelty and stress that is inherent in human interactions. This efficient right brain function is a resilience factor for optimal development over the later stages of the life cycle.

Schore, A. N. (2001). The Effects of Early Relational Trauma on Right Brain Development, Affect Regulation, and Infant Mental Health. Infant Journal of Mental Health, 22, 201-269.

Abstract: A primary interest of the field of infant mental health is in the early conditions that place infants at risk for less than optimal development. The fundamental problem of what constitutes normal and abnormal development is now a focus of developmental psychology, infant psychiatry, and developmental neuroscience. In the second part of this sequential work, I present interdisciplinary data to more deeply forge the theoretical links between severe attachment failures, impairments of the early development of the right brain’s stress coping systems, and maladaptive infant mental health.

In the following I offer thoughts on the negative impact of traumatic attachments on brain development and infant mental health, the neurobiology of infant trauma, the neuropsychology of a disorganized / disoriented attachment pattern associated with abuse and neglect, trauma-induced impairments of a regulatory system in the orbitofrontal cortex, the links between orbitofrontal dysfunction and a predisposition to posttraumatic stress disorders, the neurobiology of the dissociative defense, the etiology of dissociation and body-mind psychopathology, the effects of early relational trauma on enduring right hemispheric function, and some implications for models of early intervention. These findings suggest direct connections between traumatic attachment, inefficient right brain regulatory functions, and both maladaptive infant and adult mental health.

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This information is shocking.  It cannot be denied and it cannot be ignored!  If you have any suspicion or factual knowledge (even as it exists solely as a body-based reaction to this topic) you NEED TO begin to read and understand what these researchers have discovered!  PLEASE!  Study this information for yourself, for your family, and for your global human community!  Click on this link:  The Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence.

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+WRITING ABOUT WORDLESS TERROR IN A CONTAMINATED CHILDHOOD

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I am about to set my feet upon a path today that I will at times lay upon as if I am dying, at times crawl upon, at times slink along, and hopefully at times march along strongly as I try this week to prepare a manuscript of my childhood stories to send to an editor I am blessed to have found who is willing to help pull together this first book on my childhood.

There is bound to be some spill-over as I fight out this battle over words to describe what happened to me in enough detail to convince readers of two things:  I am telling the truth and it matters.

In order to tell this truth I have to use words, and because words were used from the time I was born as viscous and deadly weapons by my mother, all words that I consider and use to tell my story are contaminated by definition.

At this moment as I prepare myself for this week ahead I am afraid.  I can use logic all I want to tell myself that “It’s OK.  You are all grown up.  You survived what was done to you by your mother.  She can’t reach you.  She can’t touch you.  She is dead dead dead.”

But I cannot do this work without going “back there” into the 18 years of hell I spent being inhuman, being evil, being The Devil’s Child sent as a curse upon my mother’s life.  With all the information I now have about how broken my mother was, about how the neglect, maltreatment, abuse, lack of love and acceptance, lack of WHATEVER coupled with WHATEVER dark and toxic forces that shaped my mother’s genetic constitution to permanently remove her from the universe of sanity and reason – I see at this moment no way to take this factual information into my past with me so I can be two places at the same time – here – and there.

It might help to wrap myself tightly within a sort of invisibility cloak as I travel back there to retrieve some version of MY childhood story.  The fabric of this cloak is woven of threads made up of the awareness that I only have to do this once.  One time only.  THIS one time only.

But in order for this journey to be a ‘one time’, I am aware that I have to do it right.  I need protection.  I need a gas mask.  I need a suit to keep my mother’s contamination of my childhood, her contamination of me as her growing daughter off of my skin, out of my airways.

My mind wants to KNOW what the title of this book is as if having the title shuts Pandora’s Box forever with the scary, awful stuff inside.  I don’t WANT to jump inside that box and wrestle again with the demons that infected and overwhelmed, in fact consumed and BECAME the mind of my mother.  I cannot tell my story without being there with her madness because WHO and WHAT she believed me to be WAS the darkness within her.

Only I didn’t know it.  How could I have known it?  From the first breath I ever took on this earth I was already guilty of being a murderess.  “The Devil sent you to kill me while you were being born.”  That being the beginning of my life, the beginning of my relationship with my mother, being just the BEGINNING of her verbal attacks, nothing ever got any better.

My infancy and childhood with my mother happened within a thick, gooey, sticky, slurpy poisonous stew of malevolent darkness.  Sometimes this stew was volcano hot.  Sometimes it was glacial cold.  My mother had all the power in the universe to keep me a hidden captive underneath its scummy, putrefying crust.

But I stop myself here.  I have the power to CHOOSE the words I will put in this book of my infancy-childhood.  I will encounter words that suck me into that horrible place.  I do not want those words.  I am hopeful that I can JUST do my best to tell what few stories I have about what few memories I have and let THAT be THAT.

As I work to write staying on MY path I will need to watch carefully for the defining edges of it so that I don’t fall into the infernos of my mother’s madness.  My mind did not form itself for the first 18 years of my life having any idea at all where the boundary line was between my own self and my own mind – and my mother’s.  Because she was a severe (though undiagnosed) Borderline, the borders of the universes that separated us did not exist.

My childhood was contaminated.  I was born contaminated.  There really is no story to tell.  There is a description of profound contamination that has more in common with being born out of my mother’s womb into a deadly radioactive environment – that exploded while she was in labor with me.

The truth of what happened to me, even of what happened to my mother IS beyond words.  The core of trauma that shaped her and hence shaped me does not exist where words are.  In fact, this trauma acted itself out beyond the range of anyone’s detection as if what cannot be named does not exist.  It is time to name it.

The so-called stories of my childhood?  They are no more about the reality of what happened to me than is my cat’s lose hair stuck to the cushion where she sleeps ACTUALLY my cat.  (Great line for the book’s intro, by the way.)

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I think about my piano keyboard right now, and imagine that there are notes that are so high and so low that they don’t actually exist on the keyboard because they lie outside the range of human ability to detect them.

My life with my mother was like that.  What actually happened DID happen because NOBODY detected the ‘notes’ my mother was playing for me.  It is my challenge as a writer to transpose the experience of being raised as my mother’s inhuman, evil devil’s child into a range of notes-words that CAN be heard by others.

Because in the reality of my childhood with my mother words were contaminated weapons, I have to chose words now carefully and run them through a filter so that they can be cleaned and detoxified, decontaminated and made safe for human consumption.

What happened to me from the moment I was born and continued over the next 18 years of my childhood happened ‘under the cloak of darkness’.  My mother was able to effectively construct and maintain two worlds.  One of these worlds on one side of her Borderline was designed to deceive the public.  On the other side of her Borderline was the world that she designed, constructed and maintained JUST FOR ME as her evilness projection.

It is evidently my job to transpose what happened to me on the darkest side of her Borderline into language that can be understood by ‘the public’.  I ask two questions:

(1)  Is it possible write about wordless terror?

(2)  Is it possible to write of this terror beautifully?

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In other words, it is time for both me and my newly found writing assistant to become WORD WARRIORS.

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+MY BORROWED SECURE ATTACHMENT WITH MY KIDS

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OK, here it is.  After spending some time outdoors now digging dirt, mixing mud and adding three more adobe blocks into my terraced walkway, I now have the third thought that follows these last two posts:

+IN THE EPIC OF MY ABUSIVE CHILDHOOD THE MOUNTAIN RAISED MY SOUL

+PUKING IN THE HIGH CHAIR: PATTERNS OF RUPTURE AND REPAIR BEFORE THE AGE OF ONE

How in the universe did I even begin to now how to appropriately interact with my own children?  After all, my mother would have reacted with an escalating, violent, terrifying and completely inappropriate and abusive fit of rage if I had done at nine months of age what my daughter did.

What do I see as being one of the major differences between my mother and myself?

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First of all, I consider it rather efficient of myself that I can make a statement here that I believe contradicts what the ‘attachment experts’ might say.  While they may claim that I had some nebulous ‘earned secure’ attachment with my children, I completely disagree.  The efficiency stems from the fact that I have not read what these experts say about this so-called (desirable) ‘earned secure attachment’, nor do I intend to waste my time doing so.

The basis of my disagreement with these ‘experts’ is that my body in-formation tells me that in cases such as mine is, they are wrong.  Because I suffered such extreme and severe, chronic abuse from the time I was born, I don’t think there would have been any human way to EARN a secure attachment ability with my children.

For one thing, I was pregnant within six months of leaving my abusive home of origin.  There is no possible way that I could have had enough meaningful or instructive attachment experiences in that short about of time to even begin to learn something different from what I KNEW the moment I stepped on that jetliner and headed off to boot camp.

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Secondly, I object to this concept of ‘earned secure attachment‘ on principle.  As I become increasingly clear about what likely happened in my mother’s infant-childhood that ruined her and made her into the mad monster she became as my mother, I consider the concept of ‘earn‘ to be as inappropriate term to apply to parent-infant/child interactions as I consider the concept of ‘mercy‘ to be.  Both concepts are tied even in the words themselves to the idea that love is a marketable item.

I do not believe that MERCY belongs in a happy, healthy, loving parent-offspring relationship.  There is nothing my children could EVER have possibly been able to do in their childhood that could have possibly required me to respond to them with mercy.  I don’t even think there is anything they can do as adults that would even implicate this concept.

As I described in last week’s post, +DID ZERO MERCY IN MY CHILDHOOD SAVE ME? it appears extremely likely that the non-human interactions regarding ‘mercy’ being given and withheld in my mother’s early years broke her.  No child should ever be told in words or in actions that “If you were only good enough you would be given my mercy – and I would love you.”

If ‘mercy’ has to be given to repair a rupture in a relationship between a parent and offspring, there is no love present.  The infant-child is not being treated as a human being, but rather as a commodity-object.

The terrible holes my mother received as wounds in her forming self and in her relationship with others specifically prepared her to eventually — unconsciously and completely – split off the two parts of herself that had been involved in commodity-mercy interactions with her early caregivers.  I became the ‘devil’s child’ projection of Mildred who could not receive mercy.  My sister became the ‘god’s child’ projection of Mildred, the one who was innately deserving of mercy – and got it.

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Should, in my mind, any ‘expert’ to suggest that I had an ‘earned secure attachment’ with my children disgusts me because this term and the thinking behind it belong to the cultural values and actions that made my mother nuts in the first place.  No more could I ‘earn’ attachment with my own children than could my mother ‘earn’ attachment with her parents.

WRONG CONCEPT!

That leaves me with MY concept, which was first connected to what I knew and could do – in my body-self – with my own children.  Because

(1)  nobody ever offered me mercy in any transaction involving rupture and repair in my childhood –

(2)  because I was not ever tricked in believing that I could possibly repair what was wrong between me and my mother- the rupture existed as a third entity, a fact of my childhood

(3)  because it was clear from my first breath I was permanently evil and damned

(4)  unlike my mother when she was little, because there was no mercy, no hope, no trick, no illusion – because I was not human and was by nature and design the child of the devil, I was free to skip the earning-mercy mix-up completely

What I believe I was able to create with my children was/is a

BORROWED SECURE ATTACHMENT

This means to me that because I did not end up with a brain that could not operate without splitting out the good and bad and projecting it onto my children, I could simply ALLOW what happens naturally to happen!

Because my children were born with perfectly perfect safe and secure attaching abilities, all I had to do was follow their natural lead.  I say borrowed because I could not then and never can repair the developmental changes that happened inside of me through my mother’s severe abuse of me from birth.  I COULD let my children attach to me.  I COULD respond to them in accordance to their attachment potential and not interfere with their natural process.

Even though I do not believe I have inbuilt attachment circuits that allow me to FEEL attachment myself, I did not have the kind of interferences that my mother had built into her that prevented, distorted and annihilated her ability to experience attachment with me.

My term ‘borrowed secure attachment’ makes it very clear to me that the natural and healthy ability to attach is NOT within me – it is within my children.  I cannot say ‘allowed secure attachment’ because my relationship with them (or with anyone else) no longer (past my infancy-very early childhood) has the potential to change or alter the permanent (and trauma-changed) nervous system-brain circuitry that was built into me as it exists WITHOUT the ability to personally experience anything but a marginal and fleeting sensation of what safe and secure attachment to humans feels like.

I can live with this.  I have all my life.  What matters to me is that I did not make my children to be like I am – any more than my mother succeeded in making me like she was.  Perhaps because I ended up with a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment pattern, I was free to organize and orient myself as a mother around my children’s inborn ability to attach securely.

My mother, on the other hand, had no choice but to organize and or orient herself around her Borderline ‘splitting-projection’ that left no room for me to form the inner circuitry that would have allowed me to attach to human beings.  I did attach to the mountain which at least enabled ,e to retain some attachment circuits/abilities.  Evidently this was enough to allow me to allow my children to form HUMAN attachment circuitry as humans are BORN to do.

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Did I show my baby daughter MERCY when I didn’t respond inappropriately to her making herself puke for attention in her high chair?  No, I did not.  In my thinking, any parent-child relationship that includes ANY TRANSACTIONS INVOLVING MERCY holds the seeds — if not the actuality — of abuse.

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+PUKING IN THE HIGH CHAIR: PATTERNS OF RUPTURE AND REPAIR BEFORE THE AGE OF ONE

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Now I am having ‘second thoughts’ related to the post I just finished:  +IN THE EPIC OF MY ABUSIVE CHILDHOOD THE MOUNTAIN RAISED MY SOUL

In light of my thinking about the book title for my collection of childhood stories as they relate to the absence of mercy, I am wondering about SHAME transactions as they relate to human attachment interactional patterns of rupture and repair.

As Dr. Allan Schore writes, an infant’s nervous system has not developed itself enough prior to the age of one for shame to be physiologically experienced.  The timing of the nervous system’s development that DOES allow for the experience of shame corresponds with an infant’s physical development that allows it to ‘hatch’ from its caregiver’s lap.

As an infant begins to explore the wider world, and as it returns to its caregiver, the experience of rupture and repair with the caregiver take on a bigger purpose.  If the infant returns to a caregiver that does not express joy, the infant’s nervous system will ‘crash’ in the autonomic nervous system’s STOP reaction – which is the first experience of shame.

At this age the infant is beginning to be an active participant in the repair-of-the-rupture process.  If the infant returns to a caregiver that is NOT joyful at the return-reunion-attempt to repair a ‘rupture’ caused by the infant’s distancing itself physically from its caregiver, the TWO (infant and caregiver) can now begin to actively negotiate what needs to happen for the joy-filled repair of the rupture to happen.

Schore is very clear that prior to the age of one it is almost entirely up to the caregiver to repair ruptures in the safe and secure attachment pattern with an infant.  That is because prior to age one it will always be the responsibility of the caregiver to accomplish repair because the infant is not fully equipped to begin to do this on their own.  The parent is building rupture and repair patterns into the physiology of the infant’s growing body-nervous system-brain so that in time the infant can internalize actions that lead to needed repair.

Schore states that whomever initiated the rupture is BEST able to repair it, and needs to be the one that initiates it.

I think of an example from my own early mothering experience that happened when I was just 20 and my first born was 9 months old.  Being quite astute and very smart, she had figured something out to do that would guarantee her LOTS of attention!

As soon as I finished feeding my daughter in her high chair, and turned away from her to carry her dishes to the sink, I would hear her throwing up.  Oh, the POOR BABY!  “Oh, honey, WHAT’S WRONG!”  Over I would go to her, and you can imagine the scene that followed in my concern for her obvious lack of well-being!

That worked until the moment one day that I happened to catch what she was doing out of the corner of my eye as I turned toward the sink.  She had figured out how to stick her finger down her throat and MAKE herself throw up!

OK.  End of that game!  I did not get mad at her.  I did not SHAME her.  I did not punish her.  I simply began to completely ignore her.  Of course I had to continue to clean her and the mess up a few times afterward, but I gave her ZERO reinforcing attention for the ‘trick’ and she soon ceased it completely forever.

At nine months of age, my daughter’s nervous system had not developed enough for her to be able to handle or process a shaming interaction.  Of course I had not neuroscience information to tell me that.  I knew it intuitively and acted appropriately.  While I could say that SHE was the one that initiated ‘rupture’ that needed repair, it was appropriate and necessary that I as her caregiver handle this situation appropriately – and safely and securely.  As she grew into a bigger body-brain that had the capacity to negotiate rupture and repair, of course she became increasingly responsible for her own actions.

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This all ties back into what I just posted about the rupture and repair attachment-related experiences I had as a child with our mountain homestead.  There was NEVER any shame-based transaction about those patterns of rupture and repair.  Whether we stayed, left or returned had nothing to do with me.

Of course in my universe that was a very good thing, but that also left me with no safe and secure experience growing up with healthy, stable, sensible, or even reasonable patterning of how to repair ruptures in human attachment relationships.  BIG PROBLEM for me on some fundamental levels of how my body-brain developed.  As a consequence, I continue to struggle to work my way around the complexities of human relationships and I always will.

Because I didn’t CAUSE the patterns of rupture in my attachment relationship with the mountain, I didn’t gain any experience in PERSONALLY either initiating or accomplishing repair.  But I did gain experience both in safe and secure attachment (love) to the mountain and experience in the rupture-repair patterning process.  What got left out was ME being an active agent in the whole process.

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+IN THE EPIC OF MY ABUSIVE CHILDHOOD THE MOUNTAIN RAISED MY SOUL

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I have been doing a lot of pondering about my writing over these past few days.  It seems that it’s the same $250 to apply for ISBN numbers if for one or ten book titles.  I believe I can publish the first title simply on Amazon.com’s Kindle and hopefully generate some capital to publish in print.

I know of two people in town whose cancer is back.  If doing this writing, and publishing it is connected to my life’s mission, I am becoming less and less comfortable with putting this off.

So, that’s about it for the moment.  I am preparing to spend my Mother’s Day outside working some more on my yard projects.  That means I will also be continuing to think about all of this.  What I wanted to mention here today is that I am thinking about a title for a collection of essays at some point that will be directly about the ‘rupture and repair’ aspects of attachment.

That thinking brought me face-to-face with a thought I’ve never considered in this light before.  While I’ve suspected for a long time is that my attachment to Alaska and to our mountain homestead kept alive and exercised my body-brain’s attachment-related circuitry (so that I could later form at least a skeleton of attachment with people in my life).

What struck me this morning is that our pattern of moving up and down the mountain, on and off of the homestead, was probably VERY helpful to me.  While our family was off of the mountain homestead, I grieved for it.  I had such a powerful emotional connection with that place that I thought I would die if I could not go back to it.

As soon as I could read it, this book became my personal bible because it contained what I saw as the story of my childhood:  Heidi by Johanna Spyri, Scott McKowen.

Even though I never had the thoughts, feelings or words to consider anything about the abuse I endured, I DID understand love for the land and for the place that was home to my soul.

But this morning it came to me that because of the coming and going I was able to expand the operation of my body-brain-mind-self’s attachment related circuitry specifically BECAUSE of these continual patterns of ‘rupture and repair’ that our family’s moves created.

These patterns of rupture and repair – of being there, of leaving there, of my sadness of grief in my absence from the mountain, of my hopes in returning, of my deepest fears that we might not, and my joyful bliss when we did return,  all led to exercising my attachment circuitry so that it could grow into a part of me.  Certainly no HUMAN relationship offered me that opportunity!

As I think about these processes and about my new discovery, I am understanding that it isn’t JUST having safe and secure attachment to people that matters.  In the absence of any safe and secure attachment to humans, children can substitute attachment to pets and to place.  If I were to find the simplest words to describe my relationship with our family’s homestead and the place of that mountain valley, I would say:

“I was at home there in the soul of the world.”

Leaving that place and returning to it allowed me to grow myself as I grew into attachment to something outside of myself.  The whole process became a part of me so that when I finally had to leave that place for good, I took with me the good of that place and my relationship with it.

Had we simply found the land and stayed there without interruption, the rupture and repair patterns that form the bedrock of safe and secure attachment would not have built themselves into me.  Otherwise, as is the reality of unsafe and insecure attachment patterns, I would have been left with nothing but rupture without repair in my life because I would have taken for granted my relationship with that mountain place.

And I experienced the experience of ‘feeling felt’ in seeing my own heart reflected back to me in the story of Heidi.  Of course, this fictional character had human relationships of love.  But as the story makes very clear, it was not a permanent absence from these people she was attached to that mattered most.  It was clear in the story that it was THE MOUNTAIN that was her life.  Being taken away from the mountain (rupture) and not being able to return (for repair) made her sick.  She was dying so the adults brought her back home – and she thrived.

I’m not sure that there has ever been a child alive who could have known the essential truth within that book the way that I did.  My parallel story of rupture and return to that mountain DID save my life.  I am sure of it.  And through that ‘salvation’ I received I was able to raise my children with as much love as I can muster and without abuse.

Being able to experience the kind of love I had for the homestead AND being able to experience the kind of longing I felt in my absence from it AND being able to experience reunion like a securely attached one-year-old infant will feel when it returns to the safety of its loving mother’s lap is a major part of how I am who I am today.  In the epic of my childhood with my mother, whatever took her to that most sacred place enabled me to survive her abuse with a dignity, magnanimity and goodness that I don’t think I would have otherwise known.

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