Tag: borderline mother

+THESE 1983 – 1984 WRITINGS LED TO TODAY’S EARLIER POST….

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I just spoke with a dear friend I’ve known for 30 years.   She suggested that I think about how the animals and bugs and plants and rocks exist on this earth.  Then think about this:  “Life is empty and meaningless and it doesn’t mean anything that it’s empty and meaningless.”

Then I can think about how humans add meaning because we can think.  That means that it’s all made up.  My friend’s suggestion is about how I might as well make up something I like for a life.  She’ll call me on Sunday to check in with me and see how I am doing in my new meaningless life!

I have to take a break from here until Monday while I try this out!  Have a great weekend!

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Nothing about being raised and abused from birth and for the next 18 years by my incredibly mean, psychotic borderline mother has made my living in this world easy.

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December 28, 1983

“Coming alive is a tenuous, delicate, natural thing.”

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As can be seen in my post from earlier today, I have lost my tolerance for facing myself in my age 31 and 32 year old journals.  I am including the link here for those writings I have transcribed so far.  What follows in those journals are the kinds of desperate questions about myself and my life that led to today’s post +THE POWER OF JOURNALING – ASKING A QUESTION THAT HAS AN ANSWER

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LINK FOR LATEST JOURNALS TRANSCRIBED:

*Ages 31 – 32 – August 13, 1983 through January 22, 1984 Journal

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+THE POWER OF JOURNALING – ASKING A QUESTION THAT HAS AN ANSWER

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I am in a battle with myself over whether or not there is any value to myself or to anyone else in my reading and transcribing my quarter of a century old journals.  Part of me wants to burn them all.  I think about how to contain the fire I could make of them so no smoldering ashes would escape and float away to light some part of this dry high desert landscape around me on fire.

Maybe I could tear them all into tiny pieces and soak them in water and then cook them into papier mache mash and make something beautiful out of them.  Maybe I could tear them up and dig them into the damp earth of my composting pile where I know the hungering masses of worms and slugs there would chew them up gladly and digest them into soil.

Maybe I could box them all up and take them camping when my sister comes next month to visit.  We could burn them more safely in the contained campground fire pit, have a little releasing ceremony and let all the words that record what all the versions of Linda talked about for 25 years vanish as if they had never been.

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What is the value of this journaling process that so many therapists (and others) seem so fond of recommending?  We could just as well write our words on an area of flat dirt and then sweep them away when we are finished.  We could just as well write them with chalk on slate or with grease pencil on a mirror or a piece of glass, and erase them as soon as they no longer hold any meaning to us.

Who are we telling the intimate details of our lives to as we sit alone and tarry over our silent words so studiously copied as if we are creating lessons for ourselves out of nothing but the contents of our minds?

Does journaling help us tolerate our hard times, I would say ‘better’, but I really mean ‘tolerate them at all’?

Or does the writing simply contain the passage of time as we transition through all the changes that happen to us along the way of our lifetime, both outside of us and within?

Does journaling help us to think more clearly?  Do we create a dialog with our self because we are so alone there is no other person alive we can trust enough to pass ourselves on to?

What is it about writing the words our souls tell us in hidden places between two covers of a journal that helps us or heals us?  And in today’s world where keyboards replace ink or lead, our words simply join some cyber network, taking their place in simultaneous land where they enter themselves into an invisible cue, waiting for whom to go back and read them?

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Or do those of us who write do so simply because we are writers?  Could we find a writing gene somewhere in our constitution if we knew where to look for it?  Do we write because we care about certain things in a particular way that non-writers can’t even imagine?

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That would be all fine and worthy if I could SEE what matters about the process of journaling for me in the end.  What I am finding instead is that the same concerns I wrote about 25 years ago are really right here inside of me today if I let them be.  Questions.  I asked thousands of questions on those pages that I had no answers for.

I recorded my inner conflicts and turmoil and suffering.  I recorded how it felt to be so lost from myself and others that I could only ask the questions themselves and could never find any answers, no matter how committed I was to finding them.  The answers were intangible.  They were invisible.

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My journals portray my journey, each word on a line in the order I could see them.  Writing was my way of trying to organize and orient myself in my body in my life.

Time has moved forward.  My children grew up, left home intact, and have orchestrated their own lives free from trauma.  Because I was their mother, far from perfect but ‘good enough’, their journey will always remain connected to mine but not central.

In the meantime my journals reveal all the turbulence, all the missteps and attempts I have made to catch up to a Linda who was living a life that never has been coherent or integrated or cohesive or well planned.  I know now that I was always trying to make sense of myself in my life even though I was missing all the most important pieces.

I mistakenly thought I could create an ordinary life without knowing the extreme, long term abuse I suffered from birth and for the 18 years of my childhood had changed the way my body-brain developed, and had therefore changed me.

Not only was the development of my right and left brain hemispheres changed, and the corpus callosum that connects them and transmits information between the two changed, but also the development of my higher level thinking cortex part of my brain was changed, as well.

I have avoided writing about the development of my ‘executive cortex’.  When I am ready to do so I will have to consider how child abuse deprived me of an ‘ordinary’ ability to process information about the future and affected all my choice and decision making abilities.

Normal, ordinary brains that form without a history of severe abuse and trauma continue to grow all the way through the teen and early adult years.  A normal, ordinary cortex does not finish its development until somewhere between ages 25 and 30.  A severely abused and traumatized child’s cortex atrophies early and never finishes its development to become normal and ordinary.

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Nobody was there to stop me just as I crossed the threshold out of my parents’ home and into my own life when I was 18 to tell me that what I had just endured of a childhood was hell, wrong, and extremely hurtful to me.  Nobody explained to me that the trauma I had suffered from birth had so changed the way I had to grow and develop so I could survive it that it meant I now have a different brain that works fine in terrible, toxic, malevolent, threatening, dangerous and self-obliterating conditions but was not designed like an ordinary brain to work well in an ordinary, benevolent world.

Maybe nobody told me this in 1969 when I left home because nobody knew it.  Certainly if all the infant and child development experts didn’t know these basic facts, if the human brain development neuroscientists and physiologists didn’t know, I need not blame myself for not knowing this critical information about my chances for achieving any quality of well-being in an ‘ordinary’ life, either.

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So what exists in the last 25 years of my journals in their piles on the shelves beside my computer desk is a simple chronicling of one severe child abuse survivor’s disorganized, disoriented incoherent life story about how the changes my body and brain had to make so that I could survive the hell of my childhood could not possibly have prepared me to live any kind of an ordinary life.

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I look up above me right now as I sit here outside my door writing in the high desert gentle sunlight of this early November 2009 morning and watch the wispy tendrils of clouds drifting, white against the distant blue sky, and I know that’s the same sky that caps the lives of everyone living below it.  At the same time I know there are two kinds of people on this planet, plain and simple, no matter where they plant their feet on this grand planet earth.

There are those whose early caregivers loved them and cared for them appropriately when they were an infant-child the way human evolution has dictated in order for an ordinary-functioning brain to grow and develop.  They provided safe and secure attachment for their offspring.

And then there are the rest of us who were not loved, who were treated malevolently by our early caregivers.  The traumatizing circumstances of our early environments demanded of our growing early body-brain that we change and adapt or we die.

There are degrees of change just as there are degrees of trauma, but because I know so clearly what the circumstances of my infancy and childhood were as a result of my mother’s psychotic break when I was born and because of her severe mental illness, I no longer have to ask the thousands of questions I used to ask in my  journals without being able to find any answers.

There remains only one single answer that matters to me now.  It’s the same answer for every one of those questions I have been asking all of my adult life as I tried to make myself into a ‘better’ and a different more ordinary person who could then live a more ordinary life of ordinary well-being.

The reason I cannot become an ‘ordinary’ person is because I have an ‘extra-ordinary’ brain that had to grow, develop and form under the ‘extra-ordinary’ circumstances of severe trauma and abuse that was my infant-child environment.  My trauma-changed-body and brain does not receive ‘ordinary’ information from the environment in ‘ordinary’ ways.  It does not process information in ‘ordinary’ ways, either.  There is very little about severe-abuse-and-trauma-survivor Linda that is ‘ordinary’ or can EVER be ‘ordinary’.  Just because I look ordinary on the outside tells me nothing about how I am different on the inside.

If I continue to ignore what I now know about being a changed-by-severe early abuse and trauma person, I will condemn myself to the continued struggle of asking questions forever that I will never find the answers for.

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I realize now that all my journal writings up until this point in time have created a chronicle of my journey through adulthood with a changed body and brain, and what this has been like for me.  Continued research is now chronicling the life long changes severe abuse creates for its survivors on a much larger scale.  The outcomes appear extremely bleak and grim for survivors.  We have to put the facts together and realize that the very foundation in our body and brain has been changed, and these changes give us a changed life outcome.

It is not possible for us to escape the consequences of what was done to us until we begin to understand how we changed and how those changes continue to affect EVERYTHING about us and our lives.

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For those of us who journal, we will see in our own words how exploring ourselves in our life will change as we begin to include this vital information in our thinking.  Just because everyone else has remained ignorant of the changed body and brain because of early trauma and abuse survival information, does not mean we have to remain ignorant of the facts ourselves.  We owe it to ourselves not to continue archaic patterns of thinking about ourselves in the world.

In fact, those of us who experience this ‘extra-ordinary’ reality are the REAL experts.  We know, down to our last cell in our body, what being changed by child abuse and trauma did to us.  We know our truth.  Now we have to empower ourselves to know what we have known all along.

Together we can define what living in a trauma-changed body is like.  On this planet earth, under this arching blue sky, we have to begin to understand that what humanity’s right arm might know about being ‘ordinary’ is balanced by what humanity’s left arm knows about not ever being allowed to both be ‘ordinary’ and remain alive.  We can no longer afford to let ‘ordinary’ condemn us to a lifetime of suffering because of who we are – different from ordinary.

We can join together to learn how to end the suffering of all of us.  A reality of privilege can no longer remain the standard we measure survival against.  If what happened to us had happened to ‘them’, they would have been changed just as we were or they would have died.  That is the reality of being human in an imperfect world.  What happens – and happened – to infants and children that causes these changes must become the primary concern for all of us.

Otherwise we will continue to ask all the wrong questions for which there are no answers.  We need to ask the right question, “How does severe early trauma and abuse change developing humans into ‘extra-ordinary’ beings, and how do those changes affect them for the rest of their lives?”  This IS a question we can find the answer to when we are willing to consider the truth – both individually and as a species.

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PS.  What will I do with my old journals?  I still do not know.

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+History of Childhood Maltreatment Linked to Higher Rates of Poverty

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The following study confirms what common sense would tell us:

“Adults who were physically abused, sexually abused, or severely neglected as children were significantly more likely to be unemployed, living below the poverty line, and using social services than people without a history of childhood maltreatment.”

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IMPORTANT INFORMATION FROM:

Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog

 
History of Childhood Maltreatment Linked to Higher Rates of Poverty

Posted: 05 Nov 2009 02:18 PM PST

 

The long-term impacts of childhood maltreatment include higher rates of unemployment, poverty, and use of social services in adulthood, according to a new study by David Zielinski, Ph.D., of the National Institute for Mental Health. Research has shown that negative early life experiences can adversely affect a person’s physical and mental health in adulthood. Zielinski evaluated data on childhood maltreatment and socioeconomic well-being from the National Comorbidity Survey.

Adults who were physically abused, sexually abused, or severely neglected as children were significantly more likely to be unemployed, living below the poverty line, and using social services than people without a history of childhood maltreatment. Having experienced more than one type of maltreatment increased these risks further. Maltreatment was also linked to lower rates of health care coverage and greater use of social services such as Medicaid, especially among adults who had experienced childhood sexual abuse.

In the first comprehensive study of the long-term socioeconomic effects of abuse and neglect, Zielinski shows that childhood maltreatment carries significant costs to the individual and to society. Not only does the public share the burden in supporting maltreatment-related social services, but also those related to unemployment insurance, poverty-based public assistance, and publicly funded health insurance. Other societal impacts include the loss in employment productivity and tax revenues, from federal and state income taxes as well as state and local sales taxes.

Previous research has shown low socioeconomic status to be a risk factor for the perpetration of child abuse and neglect. Additional research has found that parents who were maltreated as children are more likely to abuse and neglect their own children than those without a history of maltreatment. Targeted assistance for maltreatment victims may help break this cycle. For example, Zielinski suggests that enhanced access to job training and job counseling programs may be especially helpful for victims of physical abuse or multiple types of maltreatment, who were most likely to be unemployed among those who had experienced maltreatment.

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+DISSOCIATION: PRESERVING A SELF IN HIDING

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We are born with the capacity to learn about who we are, and to remember ourselves throughout our many and varied experiences.  This is meant to happen as we grow from birth being cared for by loving caregivers, people who give us care consistently over time.

It is natural that caregivers understand an infant is not them, but is somebody else, a separate unique individual.  They communicate this knowledge by everything they say and do with the infant.

These patterns of interaction are building the infant’s growing brain.  Humans are designed from birth to be able to see their own separate and unique self as it is mirrored back and reflected to them by their caregivers, who are their attachment humans.

If a parent such as my mother was lacks the capacity to understand that her infant is NOT her, she will overwhelm her infant with information from herself that has absolutely no relevance to her infant’s developing connection with itself.  The infant will miss the critical interactions with its caregiver that are meant to feedback to it information about its own self.

If the infant has access to additional caregivers who are themselves of healthy brain-mind-self, the infant can get at least some of the feedback about its own self from them, and this information will be critical to the infant’s brain-mind-self growth and development.

Without access to other appropriate (secure attachment) caregivers, the infant’s brain-mind-self will not develop in an ordinary way.  Its body will of course continue to develop, but the self of the infant-child cannot possibly find its way into being a cohesive, integrated, clear and affirmed self-hood.

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Whatever the break was that happened within my mother’s brain-mind-self, it had consumed her by the time I took my first tiny breath into my body in this world in my lifetime.  She was prevented from ever looking at me and being able to allow my individual self to be born.  She could only see some split-off part of herself in me that she hated and wanted to destroy.

Her mental illness (I believe psychotic borderline) left no room for Linda to be present in my body or in my life.  All I could do was remain buried alive, hidden from her view, protected only by the miracle of life that demands that people remain intact, separate from one another.

In the meantime all the trauma she caused me from birth built my brain, the only one I have to use to get along in this world.  That my brain could not include clear and definable connections to my own selfhood HAD to be the result of my mother being not only my primary caregiver, but with the exception of early contact with my 14-month-old brother and very occasional exposure to my father or grandmother, she was my sole caregiver.

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I can try to describe every resiliency factor I can think of that probably contributed to me being able to survive my childhood with my mother so that I appeared on the adult end of my life to be mostly intact and ‘ordinary’.  At the same time, however, I have to include my dissociational abilities as being the most important resiliency factor I have.

The real me I was born as could remain hidden and protected from my mother where she could not reach me.  At the same time the self of me could not come out into the world to play, grow, learn and live.  My self could not be recognized, could not express myself.  My needs were not met except as they invisibly allowed me to continue to exist without my mother ever being able to stop me except by killing my body (which I helped her not to do).

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Evidently I was born strong.  But who and where and how the essential me is in the world still remains extremely difficult for me to detect.  I can sit here writing on this pad at this moment in time with this pen in my hand and hope I am at this moment able to open a clear, true pathway that allows the real me, the hidden-away-from-my-mean-mother me, to speak these words.

It’s like I have to keep the deep, pure waters within myself perfectly still without a single small ripple in order for the real me to appear in my life.  I do not believe this is the way ordinary people have to engage their self.  Life is busy.  It is full of stimulation and changes.  One’s self is supposed to be able to maintain its integrity in spite of external (distracting) factors.

It is only when the environment I am in is quiet, peaceful, safe and predictable that I can experience my core self.  Once anything hits my inner still pool and causes a ripple, my inner me vanishes and I cannot reach her.

When a disturbance happens, a frantic feeling that translates into anxiety follows, as professionals call this state along with the host of other labels they insist on using to describe what my fragile connection to my own true self looks like or seems like from the inside of me.

I am left having to be so careful – so full of care concerning my self in this world — now at 58, because nobody was there in the beginning to do it for me.  I can think about my connection to my self in today’s world as being like a frequently ‘dropped call’.  When life challenges me, the resulting disturbance inside of me causes a ‘call lost’ reaction.  Then some version of Linda has to keep on going, the best way that it-I can until circumstances change and complete calm around and within me returns.

Believe me, this is a hard, hard way to be in this world.

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This is a duplicate of *Age 58 – November 5, 2009 – A hard way to be in the world

written for my adult story pages on dissociation

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+DISSOCIATION IS ORDINARY AND NORMAL WHEN OUR CHILDHOODS ARE NOT

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Breaking free from denial (magical wishful childhood thinking) about our histories of child abuse is essential at some point for any recovery to be initiated.  In these next journal pages I began my attempt at that process.

This section of my age 31 journal covers my entry into trauma and addiction treatment.  My childhood experience of severe trauma was recognized and validated in this treatment process, but evidently once therapy began in earnest I was expected to turn my journal writing into my therapists and I complied.  I have no record of that treatment process.  The treatment center closed when the owner died about 10 years ago and evidently all records were destroyed.

From my 2009 perspective of today, I suggest that very few, if any severe child abuse survivors made it through their childhood without dissociating.  I now understand that even though I did not dissociate during the incidents of abuse I experienced for 18 years, I did dissociate BETWEEN them.  This means, as I have said before, that my experience of my own childhood is in dissociated fragments.  What I know now is that “as it was in the beginning, so shall it forever be.”

I do not believe there is any way to ‘heal’ myself from this fact.  It is just as important, however,  for me to recognize the dissociation built within me as it is to recognize the horrors and traumas that caused it from the time of my birth.  No therapist I have ever had helped me to understand what dissociation truly is, how it affected my childhood development and how it affects me today.

And as I begin to understand these aspects of myself now, I also am coming to understand that I am NOT BROKEN, I am simply different from ‘ordinary’ people as a result of having survived extraordinarily traumatic childhood experiences that changed me during my critical stages of child development.  In my case, I do not see dissociation as the proverbial and supposed ‘defense mechanism’ professionals seem fond of naming it.

My dissociation is not ‘psychological’ in any Freudian sense.  There is simply more than one way to ‘be’ in the world because there is more than one kind of world to ‘be’ in.  How our body-brain-mind-self gets made in the first place is a result of which kind of world we were living in while our development took place.

My dissociation happened because the separate incidents of horrible trauma that happened to me as an infant-child made no sense.  There was therefore no way for my brain to ‘associate’ them together.  The only pattern present was unpredictable, violent, scary insane chaos and nobody’s brain can build itself in any ‘ordinary’ way under these kinds of malevolent circumstances.

I was not, of course, even remotely aware of my dissociation as I wrote the June pages of my 1983 journal.  I simply recorded what I thought I remembered from my childhood, but even this was a significant step.  I had never done it before.  In the end, it is not the details of the traumas themselves that I may or may not remember (over 90% of them I’m sure I never will remember consciously) that matter.  It is how my growing body had to adapt and change as a result of experiencing these traumas that matters to me now.

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*Age 31 – Journal Starting June 10 to 27, 1983

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I do not wish to leave the information contained in these links behind as I continue with my posting.  Please consider them for your study:

+SUNFLOWER, SELF, DISSOCIATON AND THE SEEDS OF LOST MEMORIES

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I have had the image of sunflowers (in relation to the self and dissociation) in my mind for days now, so I guess I need to go ahead and write what I am thinking so  my thoughts can move off to something else.

Under ordinary conditions an infant is born into this lifetime with the potential to create a wonderful whole and healthy self.  All its experiences are integrated and stored at its center as they grow to fruition during a lifetime.

When severe trauma in a malevolent environment surrounds an infant-child, and dissociation has to take over the job of handling the memory of traumatic experiences, all this person’s ‘seed memories’ will not be central at the center of the flower of self.  The self will not be able to organize and orient itself in the ordinary way.  Instead, many or most of the seeds of experience will be missing, not connected and integrated at the center of self.

Perhaps it’s like the birds steal all the seeds away.  Perhaps it is like the seeds are simply missing, or scattered somewhere so we cannot find them.

seeds - sunflower
How can a self form right if trauma steals all the seeds of our memories?

Yet our trauma memories and reactions can pop up, unanticipated, unexpected, any time they are triggered.  We cannot control this.  It makes life hard.  It makes us different.  We cannot search for and find all our lost memories, all the lost parts of our self and put all the seeds back in our center where an  ‘ordinary’ person’s seed-memories have been stored all along — even if we want to.  And some part of our self flies away or gets lost with each disappearing part of our history.

Yet we are the same as everyone else.  We are all STILL sunflowers, even if our self is a different kind of self.  We are still beautiful, turning to follow the sun as we stand with everyone else in the field of life.

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sunflower
Sunflower -- I am thinking of the sunflower as an image of a self -- Photo courtesy PDPhoto.org
sunflower-sunset
Lots of sunflowers, lots of people in the field of life

Sunflower as the image of self, all the seeds organized as a part of the flower, in the center, memories of our expriences -- unless - - - -

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IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER:

Borderline Personality Disorder

In the Spotlight | More Topics |

from Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD
BPD is a disorder that is often misunderstood and frequently stigmatized. Do you dread telling people about your diagnosis? Are you tired of trying to correct the myths about BPD that are out there? This week’s newsletter is for you!

In the Spotlight
The Stigma of BPD
The general public today is as afraid or more afraid of people with mental illness than they were decades ago. And people with BPD are among the most highly stigmatized groups.
More Topics
BPD Mythology – Help Challenge These Myths!
Borderline personality disorder is a very real and serious mental illness. It is not a “personality problem” or just a set of maladaptive ways of coping with the world.
Should You Tell Others Your Diagnosis?
Lots of you report that you’re afraid to tell other people about your BPD diagnosis. When is it safe to tell? Here are some guidelines…

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+PETER PANELLA AND ALL MY LOST GIRLS – AGE 31 JOURNALS, THE NEXT STEPS

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Nine months.  That’s the length of time this next of my age 31 journal entries covers.  This would be the same length of time it takes for a baby to travel from conception to birth.

It seems strange to me that over a quarter of a century later I cannot begin to be objective about myself, my story, or my process as contained in these writings.  I still distance myself from myself, and can give myself total permission to do this distancing now because THAT was a different Linda, in a different set of circumstances at a different place in a different time.  I also continue to distance myself from myself because I have no other choice:  I was made that way.

It strikes me how remote I have always been from myself in my life except for the very NEAR past and the in-the-moment experiences I have as each moment of my life unfolds into the future.  It seems that my past carries me, not that I carry it.  It is too vast, too painful and in too many pieces.

I cannot think of a story that could be more closely like the reversal of the ordinary Peter Pan and the Lost Boys story than mine is in these pages.  What would that story look like if the sexes of all the characters were reversed?  I would be Peter Panella with my Lost Girls.   My mother would be the Wicked Captainella Hook.  Marlin (name changed) in my story would be the male reversal-same character of Tinker Belle!  Leo (named changed)  would be the ever-devoted, right thinking and well-intentioned Wendy.

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In the nine month period of time that elapses in the pages here, I left my husband and my children in ‘their’ home and rented a ‘Room of My Own‘.  I completed my BA college degree.

It has never until this moment struck me that the trials and tribulations of a recovery-from-abuse journey happens in its own story version of a Trauma Drama.  If we had never experienced the trauma of abuse in the first place, there would never be a need for this Recovery Trauma Drama story to ever happen, either.

As Peter Panella in my story, all the Lost Girls were part of my self.  There was a dissociated me not only for every developmental stage of childhood I had missed going through ‘normally’, but also hundreds and hundreds more of them that had each experienced some horror caused by my mother along each step of the way.  Each Lost Girl holds her piece of my memory along with the experience of having her experience of her experience of trauma.  In this way each one of them holds her own consciousness about what the Main Me, Linda, cannot remember except through the emotions held within the body that all of us share.

Nobody ever told me that these unintegrated shards of my existence could not magically become part of some magical WHOLE PERSON named Linda.  Nobody ever told me that what I was really accomplishing in my recovery journey was the recognition, identification, and naming of all these separate dissociated Lost Girl pieces of my self.  Nobody ever told me that they were NEVER going to become anything else.

Nobody told me my brain-mind-self had formed from the beginning of my life under so much trauma that continued for 18 years that I will NEVER be able to obtain or create a single-self-entity that resembles the one that ordinary-childhood people are created with.  Nobody told me that as a consequence of my childhood I was made into a different sort of person.

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In these journal writings I am describing a catching-up-to-Linda-at-31 process that was going on at the same time I was beginning to identify the trauma and the individual pieces of me that it had created.  I tried to accomplish an exploration and solidification of self that should have automatically and naturally happened throughout my childhood and young adulthood years — and didn’t.

Every single step I took in my journey included some confrontation and encounter with my profound woundedness.  The 18 years of abuse I endured had affected — and infected — me so profoundly and pervasively that I could not find anything but a shell of Linda, packed full to overflowing with pain, confusion, and the defenses that had enabled me to survive.

By the time these journal entries end I had found my way to the only place, both internally and externally, possible for me to go to next:  Another treatment center.  This one was designed specifically to address both severe trauma and addiction.  I remained apart from both my husband and children, now 130 miles away, and walked through the next doorway of my trauma drama recovery story.  The steps that I took to get to this next doorway are described here:

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*Age 31 Journal – Sept. 1982 thru June 10, 1983

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EXCERPTS:

January 19, 1983

“What do I see as my boundary problem with Leo?

My mother = my conscious

Her right and wrongs = mine

Leo’s rights and wrongs = my rights and wrongs

I use Leo:  the whole part of me that would love Linda isn’t there and Leo is that part of me that loves me

Doesn’t feel healthy

My mother is the part of Linda that hates Linda

Kathy [therapist] says:  “In some ways what you’re talking about is pretty profound.””

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January 26, 1983

“Talked to the girls tonight about my moving out for awhile.  Kathy [therapist] says it should be for at least 6 weeks.”

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February 8, 1983 Tuesday 11 PM

“Had class tonight on child abuse issues.  Sue told her story.  Makes me think about my unvisited “cave” where I’ve hidden all my childhood issues.  Wonder when I’ll get in there and poke around.”

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February 24, 1983

From notes on Rollo May talk, “Creativity as Significant Form”

“Without anxiety = heightened sensitivity, there’s no creative person.”

“Creativity:  The divine madness.  The anxiety of being lost leads to creativity.”

“The pause is not nothing.  Listen to the silence.  Technology calls pauses depressions.  PAUSING – the kind of aloneness of a creative person.”

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March 4, 1983

“Well, it’s 9:15 PM and at last I’m here in my room.  Made the move.”

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March 13, 1983

“(I’m losing tears again).”

“I’m creating a safe place here for myself to be with myself, and, finally, cry.”

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March 22, 1983

“I don’t want to die – I don’t want to be dead.  I want to live.”

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March 23, 1983

“I feel angry tonight.  Very lonely, too.  In that lonely place nobody else can come to.  Maybe lonely for myself.”

++

March 28, 1983

“There’s a point where you go numb and you have to choose not to feel any more in order to survive.”

“I used to think my mother was “just” an overly critical perfectionist.”

++

April 2, 1983

“7 PM – I’m in Glyndon now [visiting].  Leo and girls are at Larry and Echo’s.  The house is very neat and clean.  It’s my home, and yet I also feel like I don’t have a home.  Alienated – That’s how I feel.  From people, my family, pets, home, even my body and myself.  I feel sad, like I want to cry, but I can’t.”

“I feel hopeless like I got made wrong and I can’t get fixed.  My body is healed of the childhood wounds, bruises; but inside I haven’t healed yet – I don’t even know if I’ve started yet.  I don’t have the option of getting high to forget this all like I used to.”

2009 note: I know now, finally, that I didn’t get made ‘wrong’, I got made different.  I could not have survived my abuse if I hadn’t adapted and adjusted in every possible way that I could.  Fortunately, our human species has that ability — to adapt in order to survive.  I also know now that I could not possibly re-make myself into the same kind of person I would have been if the abuse had never happened to me.

++

June 9, 1983

“There’s someone inside wanting to get out and not knowing how.”

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NEWS FROM:

Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog
Recent Surge in Recession RunawaysPosted: 30 Oct 2009 02:46 AM PDTThe intersection between the recession and family stress may be causing an increase in runaway kids and teens, according to a recent article in the New York Times.   Job loss, foreclosures, and poverty have added to the stresses at home which have been trickling down and effecting teens.  Reporter Ian Urbina recently spent time with teen runaways in Medford, Oregon.  He learned the desperate measures they take in order to survive everyday rather than return home.  Most runaways aren’t even reported missing by their guardians, and if they are reported to the local police, most times they don’t make it into the national database.  Without national recognition, it is very hard for police to identify and return these runaways.  Police claim that runaways are not a top priority because most of the time they do not want to be found or returned home.  Unfortunately of the 267 runaways reported nationwide 58 of them were found dead.  “These kids might as well be invisible if they aren’t in National crime information center (N.C.I.C.),” said Ernie Allen, the director of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.  While federal officials are expecting a rise in homelessness this year, most social programs aid homeless families, not unaccompanied youth.   At the same time, many financially troubled states have severely cut social services, leaving little to no help for homeless runaways.  This presents a significant challenge for society, as runaway children are more likely to become homeless adults who are forced to live a life of crime.For information please visit the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth, The National Coalition for the Homeless, and The National Child Traumatic Stress Network.

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+TODAY’S ARTWORK – A BORDERLINE MOTHER’S DAUGHTER –

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*Age 58 – Artwork October 29, 2009

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I could wonder if my spontaneous, quick art work images will ever come out innocuous instead of intense and unsettling, but then I would be contradicting myself.  When I write about not believing images come from any invisible ‘inner child’, I am at the same time very aware of how people could interpret this kind of creative process I am doing as being related to having an experience with such an invisible entity.

3 102909
From today's artwork link - Borderline Mother

What I know about how my child abuse altered brain operates helps me to understand my artistic process in a different way.  Particularly because my Borderline mother’s abuse of me began when I was born, neither of the hemispheres of my brain nor the way they operate together developed in an ‘ordinary’ way.  All of us have access to an unending storehouse of images.  The biggest problem is trying to get around our left brain’s inner critic, as  Betty Edwards describes in her excellent books about drawing.

Perhaps because of the affects my early abuse had on my developing brain, I have an almost literal switch I can flip, or a door I can simply open, that turns my left brain critic off and allows my creativity to escape.  I don’t believe my left and right brain hemispheres ever developed an ‘ordinary’ working partnership with one another, so I-Linda am learning that I can tell them what to do.  I can tell my left brain to just get out of the way, making an art image is not its concern.

There is no reason for any of us to worry about how we make our images, what they contain, or even what they look like.  To me, the important part of the process is simply to trust ourselves with the process of creating a representation of any image our right brain passes ‘out’ to us.  As humans, we have a clear inner sense of imagery.  What I really suspect is going on is that, as Alice Miller considers in her book I mentioned in yesterday’s post, Pictures of a Childhood: Sixty-Six Watercolors and an Essay, is that being an adult in our ‘modern culture’ makes us afraid of the image making process because we are afraid of what we will see.

Images cannot hurt us.  Giving them tangible visibility will not hurt us.  Most likely we will be helped, not harmed.  If we ‘give birth’ to an image that is intense or unsettling, all we have to do is put it away somewhere and keep it for as long as it takes for us to be able to be able to tolerate our own images so that we can witness our own expression.

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Every image has something powerful to say.  Because we are often raised, particularly those of us with severe child abuse histories, unable to stand in our own power as individual selves, it is often the experience of the power of creating itself that feels frightening to us.  Making art is a personal-power-enhancing process that belongs to all of us.  It is very simple.  We simply have to give ourselves permission and that whole world of making art is ours.

I am working with dollar store art supplies.  I use larger 5″ by 8″ index cards.  These ones happened to be included in a metal file box designed for that sized card I bought at the thrift store to save my childhood-related photographs in once they have been scanned and posted.  I like that size, though any size will do.  One advantage of choosing a size to begin an art image exploration series is that the limitation of size becomes a freeing factor because it does not need to be renegotiated as a choice every time a person begins to work.  I also have glue and colored paper, cheap paint, markers and crayons.  I am wishing for some oil pastels, but I don’t have any and that lack is NOT going to stop me.

I am, of course, encouraging every single one of my readers to get themselves some basic art materials and something to put them on, and go to work playing with their own image making process.  You will be amazed at the process and the results.  Show your images, keep them, hide them, post them.  One thing I strongly recommend is that on the back of whatever you make, always put the full date and the sequence number of the piece for the date you make them.  I can — and probably will at some point — explain why this matters.

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If I wanted to ‘work with’ my own images as an art therapist, I would have my work cut out for me.  They seem simple, they produce themselves quickly, but each one holds a universe all its own of ‘in-form-ation’.  I’m not at all concerned with that right now.  I only want to make them as a part of my commitment to myself to allow my self to ‘speak’.  I am eager to discover what this process has to teach me — both the process of making and the art images themselves.

But I do not wish to fly too close to the sun.  I have no intention of overwhelming myself by being too brazen about ‘digging out the truth’.  Whatever I do or don’t do, the truth already exists.  I simply need to get strong enough to visit it.

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Don’t miss this

Traumatic Childhood Can Reduce Life Expectancy

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+THE GLIMMER OF BEGINNING TO KNOW WHO I AM

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I was feeling better in this section of my journal that ends on my ‘Golden Birthday’ of turning 31 on the 31st of August, 1982.  I was beginning to take form as a person, becoming less hollow and less like a ghost-girl in my own life.

I think the successful definite steps forward I had made by working through some very difficult school work bolstered me.  My feet might have still been mired in the unknown of my past, my ‘true self’ was still missing in action, but the woman I was becoming had begun to find some sunshine for herself.  The vigorous exercise workout I was doing made me physically strong and began to anchor me into my body.  I was gaining a sense of self-confidence for the first time in my life.

I now had nearly two years ‘clean and sober’ (from nonprescription drugs), had a sponsor and faithfully attended at least one AA meeting every week.  I also attended a weekly woman’s growth and support group through the local mental health center.

Part of my transformation was coming through my ‘discovery’ of so-called ‘feminism’ as I began to understand that women experience their lives very differently than men do.  I believe I was for the first time beginning to collect for myself a sense of my own personal empowerment.

*Age 30 – Journal from May 1982 through August 1982

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May 22, 1982

“Things OK in the water bed – Leo is keeping to himself.  I think he’s afraid to touch me – sometimes I’d like to be touched; not sexually — just touched.”

++

We could not get anything larger than a double bed up our little stairs, so the king size water bed was the only solution we could think of.  Well……

++

I knew inside on some level there was something ‘wrong’.  I really knew.   I found this in one of my little poems on this date —

“Do I have a personality

When there’s no one here but me?”

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June 9, 1982

“Perhaps calcium now

Will help calm me down

But I don’t feel like myself

My spirit feels larger

Than my body

Like a wad of bread dough

Or play dough

Yellow”

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June 16, 1982

“Decided I may try writing an autobiography –”

++

I record a 2009 note with this journal entry about two statements made, on two occasions by two different people — that changed the course of my life — because I heard them and I knew they were true.

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June 26, 1982

“Been cleaning – sorting clothes in closets and dressers all day.  Felt real depressed yesterday – [Doctor] decided to up the Imipramine to the 150 mg.  I was taken off of Desipramine – slow the thoughts down – don’t handle being alone very well.”

I could not handle letting my own inner reality surface — not yet, anyway.  I can sense my insecure attachment disorder here, like an invisible electric current running inside a live wire.

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July 2, 1982

“I’m feeling my wild feeling, and walked down the “trail” to an old grain wagon parked in the grasses.  The sun is still above the horizon, and it is hot.  Clouds below the sun will soon swallow it.

Wind is rustling the trees, and I am reminded of the homestead – the trees on the mountainside and the river on the valley floor.

I’d like to be that wind – free – from thought.”

++

“Oceans lie where we can always find them.  Why can’t I?”

++

“And as I write, capturing time,

I can reread, and see my past

In my present.”

++++

August 3, 1982

“Now

I’m a spider

Expertly spinning

My thoughts

Into miraculous

Flowing webs

When I’m depressed

I’m a fly

Tangled

Frightened

Captured

By these same

Silken

Threads”

++

I just had a 2009 thought as I read this.  I wasn’t only unaware of HOW to feel, I did not know HOW to think, either (not about anything personal).  I did not grow up in my insanely abusive childhood being able to think.  ‘Ordinary’ childhoods, without a need for continual and nearly constant dissociation, no doubt allow children to grow up THINKING, and to grow into their thoughts.  I never had that opportunity to get familiar with my own thoughts, to practice being a person WITH thoughts.  No wonder ‘thinking’ felt so foreign, uncomfortable and dangerous to me!

(Also glad to see at least I was still doing some spinning and weaving at this time.)

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AND A GIFT OF INFORMATION FROM:

Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog

 
Making Kids a Priority

 

Posted: 29 Oct 2009 10:57 AM PDT

Guest post by Michelle Gross, Project/Public Policy Manager, Prevent Child Abuse New York

In this recession, working families are struggling to meet their children’s basic needs. Five out of six children in low-income families have at least one adult who works.   These families are struggling to keep a roof over their heads, food on the table, and gas in the car so they can get to work. The stress of these difficult financial times takes the heaviest toll on at-risk families. More than ever before, programs that support families, like home visiting, parenting education, family resource centers, fatherhood and kinship support, and child advocacy centers play a pivotal role in ensuring a stable and more prosperous future.

Yet, these services continue to be in danger of funding cuts. New York’s families’ health and well-being rests on the voices of advocates like you.  As we prepare for the New York State Budget proposal for 2010-11, we must be vigilant in continuing to contact our state government representatives, from the governor to the legislature, and even locally. Regularly updating your elected officials on your program’s successes helps to reinforce the important role it plays in supporting families. Every voice counts, and it is up to us to speak for those who cannot. It can be daunting to contact your representative, but your advocacy can make the difference between a program funding cut and a program funding expansion. Here are a few tips on calling your elected official’s office:

  • When calling, you will likely reach a staff member rather than your representative directly. Staff             members can be just as influential as the legislator themselves.
  • Be sure to tell the staff member your name and where you live. It’s important that they know you are a constituent.
  • Inform the staffer of the reason for your call. It can  be as simple as saying that you’d like to make sure the program does not get cut in the state budget.
  • Tell the staffer why the program is important and what difference it has made in your life or the lives of those around you.
  • Thank the staffer for their time and ask for a follow  up if you feel its necessary.
  • Always follow up a phone call with a letter restating your call.
  • Call again in a month just to check in, and ask others to call on behalf of the program. Persistence is key in advocacy!

Again, remember that what you have to say matters. As Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.  Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Children’s needs, long overlooked, should receive the highest priority during critical discussions leading to cuts in the New York State Budget. Far too few services are available at a time when demand is increasing greatly. We encourage our legislators to support programs that work, and to support families through this fiscal crisis.

For more information about Prevent Chils Abuse New York’s Advocacy Programs, please visit our website: http://preventchildabuseny.org/advocacy.shtml
Traumatic Childhood Can Reduce Life Expectancy

 

Posted: 29 Oct 2009 08:27 AM PDT

A difficult childhood reduces life expectancy by up to 20 years according to a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The study found that participants who were exposed to more then five different types of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) were over 50 percent more likely to die during the 10-year period of the study. On the other hand, people who reported fewer than six ACEs did not have a statistically increased risk of death compared with the control group.

Listen to a podcast Adversce Childhood Experiences and the Risk of Premature Mortality.

To explore the effect that childhood trauma could have on life span, Kaiser Permanente mailed questionnaires to adults who were 18 years and older, and who had visited the Kaiser clinic in San Diego from 1995 to 1997. Overall, the study subjects were middle-class and had good health coverage. Of those surveyed, 75 percent were white, 11 percent Latino, 7 percent Asian, and 5 percent African-American. They’re educated: 75 percent attended college and 40 percent have a basic or higher college education. When they filled out the questionnaire, their average age was 57. Most of them had jobs. Half were women, half were men.

The participants were asked about their exposure to eight categories of abuse or dysfunction based on previous Kaiser studies. One third of the 17,337 participants who replied to the questionnaires had an ACE score of zero, meaning they had not been exposed to any of the eight types of abuse or household dysfunction. The majority of the remaining responders registered a score of between one and four, whereas about 8 percent of the scoring participants were rated five, and roughly three percent, six to eight.

During the next decade, the study authors, kept records of which of the 17,337 participants passed away by matching identifying information such as Social Security numbers from the questionnaire with data from the National Death Index. In total 1,539 of the participants died during the follow-up period. When the increased number of deaths in those subjects with an ACE score of six or greater was compared with the control group, their mortality risk was 1.5 times higher than for people whose childhoods had been free of all eight types of abuse. They lost about 20 years from their lives, living to 60.6 years on average, whereas the average age of death for the control group was 79.1.

It is unclear why the authors saw more death ages during the 10-year period only for the group with an ACE score of six or greater. Previous studies by these authors found that the risk of chronic illnesses, such as heart disease, lung disease and cancer, was greater only for people with these high ACE scores. In contrast, the risk of substance abuse and suicide increased stepwise from low to high scores. The authors found that ACE-related health risks, namely mental illness, social problems and prescription medication use, accounted for about 30 percent of the 50 percent greater risk of death seen in this population. “As would be expected, the documented ACE-related conditions among participants appear to account for some, although not all, of the increased risk of premature death observed in the current study,” wrote David Brown, an epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and lead author of the study.

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

+MISSING IN ACTION: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE SELF OF LINDA?

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I went ‘Missing In Action’ in the combat zone of my childhood with my severe Borderline mother from the moment I was born.  That I was still MIA at age 30 should not surprise me as I continue  my forensic autobiographical search for whatever happened to the self of Linda — even half my lifetime ago:

*Age 30 – Journal from January 1982 through April 1982

Here are a few snippets from the journal:

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January 19, 1982

“I was never socialized or given any experience as I grew up in getting along in this “real world.”  I was practiced in being extremely obedient, being isolated.”

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2009:  For most of my life all I was able to do in any of my thinking regarding the reality of the abuse in my 18 years of childhood was to make observations as if I was a mechanical reporter, as per the above.  I never understood the implications or the ramifications.  We take for granted that we are supposed to KNOW things even though nobody ever TOLD us.  I completely lacked any basis for comparing my life to an ‘ordinary’ childhood, even when I was 30 years old.

I’ve always had a sort of “vacancy” feeling.  Nothing about my childhood connected to anything in this “real world.”  It was as if I was hatched out of an egg the day I landed at boot camp at 18.  There was nothing to do with or about what had happened to me before that time.  Everyone was busy with their own lives, lived in their realities, and did not care about one person who appeared in their lives — at any time — that person being me with my past history that nobody cared about, either.  I was either going to ‘make it’ on my own, or not at all, just as it had been in my childhood.

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January 26, 1982

“Received a beautiful cream sweater and a blue skirt from Mom today.  It feels good that she loves me and I need to write thanks and love.”

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2009:  Classic example of my continued delusions about being the daughter of the mother who tormented and abused me for 18 years.  Except for very limited in-school contacts, my childhood consisted of fear, abuse and dissociation.  My internal state was a void, a vacuum.  I lived the days of my life no differently than an android would.  Once I went through treatment and stopped self-medicating myself with pot, the medication was simply switched to prescription antidepressants.  The same purpose was served.  “Zombie juiced.”  Just keep Linda doing what Linda does because she knows nothing different.

My life could have been far worse.  I was safe.  I lived with a reasonable, kind man.  The people in my life were reasonable.  I thought what I was doing was reasonable.  I tried to parent my daughters the best that I could, and certainly I did not abuse them.  But how can an empty hollow shell of a person be a ‘good enough’ parent to children?  I can only believe that with kindness and the best love I could give them, the life force and personality of my children carried them forward as they grew up — but perhaps more like growing plants would than children who lacked a securely-attached mother.

This is where professionals coin the term “earned secure attachment.”  But I KNOW it wasn’t as good as the ‘real thing’.  How could it be, to be raised by a mother who does not have her self intact?

Yet I can see that with my disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder I was able to organize and orient myself around a life as portrayed in my journals.  But it was a hollow life.  I was a hollow person.  I did not know what questions to ask anybody about what was ‘wrong’ with me, and nobody offered me the information I needed to understand what was REALLY going on with lost-soul Linda.

How I could I know that what I DO is not who I AM?  Now I would see that what I do is like a reflection of who I am, like light rays from the sun are reflected in a mirror.  I had no sun, no self — not that I knew or knew of, anyway.  Today I’m not sure I’m much better – but I do know the difference.  I can FEEL it, especially now that my children are gone from home.

Humans are not designed to organize and orient themselves around external factors of any kind.  We can, of course, organize and orient how we spend our TIME around external factors, but not our SELF!  Without a clear, strong, healthy sense of a non-dissociated self, I have been left all my life with a nearly unbearable sadness at my center.  That sadness is what the doctor was medicating with those antidepressants, and that I used to medicate with nonprescription drugs.

Is there another way for those of us who have such histories of terrible abuse of one kind or another to MEET, GREET and FEEL our true inner self — a process that is supposed to be firmly in place before we are two years old?

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April 6, 1982

“I don’t question myself all the time anymore on what I’m doing and am much better at getting through days and doing what needs to be done and what I want to do.

I’ll have to watch this as meds change and be sure it’s not something that is really affected by the depression.

My head feels clear and I like that.”

++

The doctor was decreasing my antidepressants, and that concerned me.  He was talking about taking me off them completely by summer for a ‘drug holiday’.

Why did I believe that questioning “myself all the time…on what I’m doing” was a BAD thing?  I had a lot of questioning that needed to be done — a life time of questioning!!  Did I need stasis or did I need to make real and legitimate changes in my life?  Nobody supported me in asking the questions, or in trying to discover who I was or what I needed.  People did support me when I was ‘nice’ and did not rock the proverbial boat.

Obviously, I believed that I liked myself better that way — why would I want to FEEL FEELINGS and learn the truth about myself?  Yet, there was a Linda in there somewhere, hiding in the shadows of my life, who needed to peek herself out and begin to ask questions about her self in the world.  I needed answers.  It has taken me a very long time to begin to get some.

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April 21, 1982

I found a poem-story of my daughter’s father and her birth written on this date here in this journal.  I wonder what I meant by

“I had a child to catch

my man”

I sure don’t remember that being the case at the time!  It’s a whole story I have yet to tell, the story of being pregnant and giving birth and what followed.  But this poem is an introduction.

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I do not wish to leave the information contained in these links behind as I continue with my posting.  Please consider them for your study: