Tag: borderline mother

+ALL OF ME. I DON’T HAVE ‘A CHILD WITHIN’

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In the words of Alice Miller

— Articulating the child’s authentic voice —

from

Pictures of a Childhood: Sixty-Six Watercolors and an Essay by Alice Miller

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“Only when I make room for the voice of the child within me do I feel myself to be truly genuine and creative.  I use every means now at my disposal…to help this child to find the appropriate way of expressing herself and to be understood.”  (Page 17)

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“Those who take a stand in today’s world on behalf of workers, women, or even mistreated animals will find a group to represent them, but someone who becomes a strong advocate for the child and opposes the lies society has tolerated in the guise of child-rearing practices will stand alone.  This situation is difficult to understand, especially when we consider that we were once all children ourselves.  I can explain it only by suggesting that unequivocal advocacy of the child represents a threat to most adults.  For when it becomes possible for children to speak out and confront us with their experiences, which were once ours as well, we become painfully aware of the loss of our own powers of perception, our sensibilities, feelings, and memories.  Only if the child is forced to be silent are we able to deny our pain, and we can again believe what we were told a children:  that it was necessary, valuable, and right for us to make the emotional sacrifices demanded of us in the name of traditional child-rearing.  As a consequence of the adult’s arrogant attitude toward the child’s feelings, the child is trained to be accommodating, but his or her true voice is silenced.  Another arrogant and blind adult is the result.

Is it not senseless, then, to let children speak, to help them to become articulate in an arrogant adult world as long as there is so little hope of their being listened to by adults and when the danger exists that their authentic voice will be silenced as soon as it it heard?  I do not believe it is senseless; it is essential to let their voices, the voices of those who have been afflicted by silence, speak if we hope to prevent the total disappearance of the springs of knowledge and creativity concealed in every childhood.  In this regard, the published reports by former victims of child abuse will be particularly beneficial in exposing the distortion of the truth so widespread in many areas of our life.”  (pages 18-19)

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JUST FOR FUN – LISTEN HERE

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In my own words:

Blasphemy!  I do not have a “child within me.”  There is only ME within ME.  I am today totally the full sum of every experience I have ever had.  The memory I have of them, consciously or not, and the impact they had on me are all contained within this body that is ME — right here, right now.

Because I have suffered from dissociation since I was born into a malevolent world of abuse, chaos and madness, I cannot afford to pretend there are any more stray parts of me floating around ‘somewhere’ than there already — legitimately — are.  And there certainly isn’t ‘one in there’ I would ever care to name ‘the child within me’.  How silly is that idea?

I believe we do ourselves a great disservice in suggesting that we have some ‘alien’ life force or form within us that we might even begin to think about as our ‘child within’.  We have all integrated our experiences since conception into our bodies, including our brain.  What is the purpose of denying this fact?

If cohesiveness and coherency are the goal that any of us with less than an optimal safe and secure infancy-childhood might be aiming toward, what good does it do us to pretend that some magical, mysterious part of us is supposedly missing from the action of our living, breathing body at exactly this present moment in time?

Not only does the concept of an ‘inner child’ or a ‘child within’ feel demeaning, disrespectful and dishonoring of who I AM as a person no matter what hell I have survived in my lifetime, it also seems blatantly ridiculous.  It’s just too Twilight Zonish for me.  It’s too Alice in Wonderlandish, too Through the Looking Glass weird to me.  I spent the first 18 years of my life in the Twilight Zone.  I don’t need another split second of it now.  No way.

Let those with the luxury to afford to buy this myth — well, buy it.  Not gonna be me….  I work hard to give myself permission to be the whole of who I am, the one who has followed THIS life path from the moment of my conception to this instant in time — there is no possible way I left any part of myself behind, and I know it.  I am.  I am, most grandly, wholly ME — even if the whole of me exists as a thousand dissociated parts, they are MY ADULT parts.

The great thing is to find moments I can actually have fun being ALL OF ME!

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*Age 58 – October 28, 2009 – Dollar store paint, crayon and marker images

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+JUST A LINK TO A LITTLE “HAPPY” AND A LITTLE “BREATHER” TECHNIQUES

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Here’s a link to a couple of ‘feel good’ tips that caught my eye!  It’s a cool and very wet and gray day here today after last night’s wind.  Excellent to have the moisture, but we desert rats always miss the sunshine!  Thought these ideas might help….

HIT YOUR ZOOM BUTTON TO SEE THESE BETTER!

**Happy Tips and “Take A Breather”

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*Age 21 – Photograph of Me in 1973

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+LIVING IN THE ACCEPTANCE ZONE: WAS THE REAL ME PRESENT AND ACCOUNTED FOR?

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I question the whole 12-step requirement for ‘acceptance.’  I think we can accept ourselves into terribly destructive and unhappy situations, while we all the time blame ourselves if we DARE to whimper or question our lives.  In 1981 the antidepressants I was given (and took) just further erased Linda from the scene of my life.  I was quiet, complacent, and busy trying so hard to BE good and to DO good…..

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I have to say, never in the 10 years I’ve lived down here in the Arizona high desert right on the Mexico line have I ever heard such furious wind gusts as are appearing and disappearing around here tonight.  They come barreling through like they are on rails, intent on taking the house roof with them, and then they are — GONE — and an eerie silence fills my ears.  No big deal, I’m sure.  The power hasn’t even flickered.  I am SO GLAD I no longer live up north with those winters — like my kids in Fargo do!  In 1981 I just accepted living in a place with harsh and long winters — not any more!

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I had just turned 30 when this part of my journals were written in 1981-1982.  I post the writings here just in case there’s something from my “recovery” past that might be of use to someone going through the new stages — or even the later ones — of their own recovery.  There’s nothing spectacular here.  Just one woman, still young, living a humble life, trying to grow, always hoping…..but was I really even there?

My antidepressants have kicked in by this time, and I am zoning along doing what I (and everybody around me) thinks is best.  It really didn’t matter if I was REALLY there in the show or not!  Nobody, myself included, knew the difference.

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*Age 30 Journal – Sept. through Dec. 1981

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Excerpts:

September 7, 1981

“Got in touch with a lot of pain and loneliness and realized on a deep level for the first time that is what my “wild” feeling is.”

I used to think about this feeling when it came over me as being like the wind — only a wind that blew right through the outline-shape of who I was in my body.  I knew I had felt it in Alaska, most remembered in the wilderness — hence my name for it, my “wild” feeling.

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Recovery in families often begins with one single person.  In my case, following my entry and completion of treatment both my husband and his cousin both began recovery for alcoholism.

In that process I entered treatment again out-patient as the spouse of Leo when he began his treatment.  Minnesota treatment models for addiction focus on it being a “family disease.”

I noted on October 1, 1981:

“Afraid to look at myself.  I am self-centered to the max and would control everyone around me if I could and yet Lief [therapist] said tonight a lot of anger comes from me not being willing to take the risks I need to get my needs met.  I’m not sure I even know what my needs are.  Everything seems complicated – feels confusing.”

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October 24, 1981

Oh, and then there were the sex problems……never a good sign!

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November 17, 1981

“Sometimes I feel as though I were haunted by things from my past.  Not as many as before, but just a general feeling like the “real me” is not all here.  Maybe it is the “real me” that haunts me, or the “ideal me” that will never be.”

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November 19, 1981

“Spent an hour reading to the girls tonight and read old Raggedy Ann book from Mom’s and my childhood.  Also Kay saw film about menstruation in school today.  She felt good and so did I that she can talk with me.  She said she used to think her mom was mean because I wouldn’t let her go to the store, etc. but now she sees we can talk where many of her friends can’t talk to their moms.  Thank you God for helping and healing.”

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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:

+HOW DO WE BUILD A LIFE WHEN WE DO NOT KNOW WHO WE ARE?

alchemynow4 Comments

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Sometimes we can go back and pick up the pieces of ourselves we left behind back somewhere in our lives.  In my journal entries right before my 30th birthday I can see one of those clear threads — and threads is an appropriate word!   As a child of a severely abusive Borderline mother, I have found myself a clue about who I am from my own writings half a lifetime ago……

I used to spin and weave back then.  I love it, but I made a decision to pack it all up and walk away.  Today I realized I want very badly to let that part of ME back into my life — and 29 years later I am going to find a way to do it.  I deserve it.

People who do not have to become dissociated from their own self through severe child abuse have, in my thinking, a chance to build a life that reflects who they truly are.  Those of us who were so severely abused that our selves never got to grow in the first place, can have an unbelievably difficult time living a life that is connected to our SELF.  Weaving and spinning was directly connected to ME, and I know that because, even looking back ‘then’, I can FEEL it.

How is it for others who have come from childhoods similar to mine?  Do we all need to pay very close attention on a physical, feeling level to those little clues we might come across that let us know which things in our life truly matter to us?  I tried to ‘reason’ my way through life.  From the time I went into ‘recovery’ onward I have worked to understand that my feelings not only matter, they are critical to letting me know WHO I am.

It can be hard to give ourselves permission to follow up on those clues.  If others are at all like me, I created a whole life of responsibility without knowing who the person was (ME) that was actually creating that life.  It was like I was living in a dream life I had built the best I knew how to, but it was not a healthy one for ME, and it was not built from the center of who I am because I had no idea who I was.  Does that make any sense to anyone out there?

*Age 29 – Journal Entries – Trying to Orient and Organize A Lost Self

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Try this for fun:

Myer Briggs personality type

http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp

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Borderline Personality Disorder

“…[they] often engage in destructive behaviors not because they intend to hurt you, but because their suffering is so intense they feel they have no other way to survive.”
In the Spotlight | More Topics |
from Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD
I’ve gotten quite a few questions about the connection between lying and BPD. Lying is not one of the symptom criteria for BPD, but loved ones report that they see a connection between lying and BPD and that this is one of the most difficult behaviors to deal with.
In the Spotlight
Lying and BPD – Is There a Connection?
There isn’t a lot of good research on a possible connection between BPD and lying. However, the fact that BPD is associated with shame and impulsivity may set you up for a tendency to tell lies.
More Topics
Readers Respond: Do You Tell Lies?
This is probably a silly question, because of course everyone lies sometimes. But do you find you tell lies more than other people? What triggers your lying? What do you lie about? Do you agree that there is a connection between BPD and lying, or do you think this is just part of the stigma of BPD?
Will I Have BPD Forever?
At one time, experts did believe that BPD was a life sentence; they thought that BPD was not likely to respond to treatment and that BPD was always chronic and lifelong. Turns out the experts were wrong!

About.com

Borderline Personality Disorder

In the Spotlight | More Topics |

from Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD
I’ve gotten quite a few questions about the connection between lying and BPD. Lying is not one of the symptom criteria for BPD, but loved ones report that they see a connection between lying and BPD and that this is one of the most difficult behaviors to deal with.

In the Spotlight

Lying and BPD – Is There a Connection?
There isn’t a lot of good research on a possible connection between BPD and lying. However, the fact that BPD is associated with shame and impulsivity may set you up for a tendency to tell lies.

More Topics

Readers Respond: Do You Tell Lies?
This is probably a silly question, because of course everyone lies sometimes. But do you find you tell lies more than other people? What triggers your lying? What do you lie about? Do you agree that there is a connection between BPD and lying, or do you think this is just part of the stigma of BPD?

Will I Have BPD Forever?
At one time, experts did believe that BPD was a life sentence; they thought that BPD was not likely to respond to treatment and that BPD was always chronic and lifelong. Turns out the experts were wrong!

+WHEN BEING LOST IS NORMAL – My Age 29 Journal Continued….

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In continuing to look at my journal writings from half my lifetime ago when I was 29, I don’t see in them the one word I wish I had been able to say back then that I can say now:  I was lost.  Completely, utterly, totally and absolutely lost.  Lost to myself.  Lost to my life.  Lost IN life, and I didn’t even know it.

The rest of the month of March 1981 following my return from my 30-day bus trip is covered here (link below), along with the month of April.  These writings cover the period of time when I was assessed for depression, ‘diagnosed and given my first prescription for antidepressants.  I feel dismayed to see that my therapist ‘dropped’ me as soon as the medications ‘seemed’ to be taking effect.  Like I didn’t have a lifetime of trouble to talk about with her?

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How much of ordinary people’s lives could best be described as accidental?  I can see that I was trying to apply what I now know is called Mind Sight.  I was trying hard to understand myself in my own life, but I was blind.  I didn’t have anything to compare myself to.  I didn’t know I didn’t really have a self, had never had a self, not even the self that was supposed to form by the time I was two years old.  I was a blind woman stumbling down the path of my life just as I had been doing from the moment I walked out the door of my home of origin.

All I knew how to do was to go forward.  That is how I survived my insane and abusive childhood.  I had simply continued to live, breathing in, breathing out, putting one foot in front of the other and moving forward — without mind sight or fore sight, into my own future.  If I bumped into something on the road and tripped, I caught my balance, stood up straight again, and marched on.  There was nobody there to tell me life could be any different.  Nobody had ever told me that my life could be anything different than an accident.

What is worse, being lost and not knowing it, or being lost and knowing it?  I had stumbled along blindly making choices when they had to be made until I had myself completely blocked into a corner and I believed it was my life.  If everyone else thought that taking pills was all I needed to be ‘better’, then I was willing to go along with the ‘program’.  I didn’t know there was anything else I could do.

Having a life, any kind of life, was better than having no life at all.  That’s all I knew.  I kept on trying.  I kept walking forward.  My life had been built out of pieces and parts, bits and pieces, like trying to turn a pile of sawdust into a good, strong, wholesome board.  The very simplest thing anybody could do was call it depression and give me some pills to ‘fix’ me.

The hardest thing somebody could have done was to help me go all the way back to the beginning so that I could see what had gone so terribly wrong in my childhood and how it affected me with every breath I took.  Perhaps then I could have become strong enough and clear enough to understand that the whole darn pile of pieces was not a ME at all.  It was just an attempt born of desperation to create a life when I really had nothing to go on.  As things were, I saw no other choice but to try to make a better me so that I could make the most out of a life I simply wandered around lost in.

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*Age 29 – Beginning March 1981 Journal After 30-Day Bus Trip

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+”ROW, ROW, ROW MY BOAT…” – What Can I Learn from My Age 29 Water Dream?

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I am thinking about this dream posted yesterday:

March 11, 1981 Wednesday

I had a strange dream last night.  I was in a room with someone and we were looking out a window across a valley when suddenly what appeared to be the sea a great distance away began to rise.  It just rose like the water level in a glass when liquid is being poured in.  This mass of water came very fast and flooded everything and soon completely swallowed the building we were in.  The person in the room ran out the door and I could hear them getting carried away, but the door shut and no water came in the room.  I wondered why the pressure of the water did not cave in the walls and then realized they must have been built strong enough for such a happening as this.

I struggled inside with the knowledge it was inevitable that I would have to face that water and my death, wondering how it would feel and knowing others were experiencing it.  I decided to wait in my room as I knew there was enough oxygen to last awhile, and that’s what I did.

from journal entry found at: *Age 29 – Greyhound bus trip started February 17, 1981 – Journal entries

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Looking again at the dream I included with yesterday’s postings, I think about the fact that nearly 60% of the human body is water.  I think about how everything we have ever experienced is stored as memory inside our body, most of which will never be accessible to our conscious mind.

I think about my childhood, and about how for all my mother’s writings I have transcribed, not one single thing I have found in them triggered any conscious memory retrieval of anything new that I don’t already know about (which is a pitifully small part of what happened to me).  Most of my life seems to be gone.  Missing.

Does that happen for everyone, traumatized or not, that we do not remember consciously very much of our lives at all?  It makes me wonder, “What’s the point of any of it if that is the true reality of our experience here on earth during our lifetime?”

One of my dear friends in town here told me on Friday that she has a friend who has a friend in Bisbee who has refrigerator boxes in the rooms on the second floor of her house that contain diaries and journals that were written by members of her family as far back as the sixteen-hundreds!  I try to imagine that!  Neither this woman nor her only brother ever had any children.  My friend figures that arrangements must have been made for those journals to go to somebody in the family when this woman dies.

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Very few people write hard copy letters anymore to one another.  How many people write today only online or on their computers?  What is becoming of the paper trail of our own simple writings that record the experiences of our lives?  Who will be able to read them 50 or 100 years from now?  Where will all these words, and the memories they contain, go to?

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When I think today about my ‘flooding’ dream, I know it is related to the kind of obliteration that would happen to so many of us, especially with severe trauma and abuse histories, should we ever have to know what our body remembers and we have no words or conscious thoughts for.  I see myself today, 29 years after I had that dream and wrote about it, as having lived most of my life inside a tiny little room of consciousness because what I have really experienced would be too dangerous and overwhelming to remember.  Was that dream about an ocean of tears?  Does it describe how ‘defense mechanisms’ keep us alive and are within us for a very good reason?

Yet my 29-year-old intention on taking that 30-day bus trip was in part to find some part of my missing self.  I met myself meeting my adult sister whom I hadn’t seen since our shared terrible childhood.  Yet in all my writings, I never could I say that I loved her.  That is so sad.  So much of my being has always been tied up inside that vast ocean that has had to stay at bay so I wouldn’t have to drown.

What survival-based part of me ever decided what needed to remain in that dangerous ocean and what I could know as I sat ‘protected and defended’ in my tiny room of consciousness?  Do I even now have to simply remain content with the fact that most of my life is known by and in my body, without the rest of me remembering consciously, and that is enough?  Is this something I never had a conscious choice over because my body wanted me to stay alive and so it took over the chore of deciding what I should know and what I shouldn’t?

I think about that dream now, and I don’t believe anything has ever changed.  I don’t think there’s any way my conscious mind could begin to make sense out of what happened to me for 18 years.  Yet it seems nearly everything else that has happened in my life — except for the big and obvious pieces of my adulthood, somehow also found their way into that vast ocean ‘out there’.

Yet at the same time I know that I will never be immune from feeling what is in all that ‘water’.  I think about the hippopotamus who has two completely different sets of ears.  When it sits with its head partly in the water, partly out, it can hear what’s going on in the air above the water with one set of ears while it listens at the same time to what is going on in the water with its other set of ears.

Can I be more like the hippo?  What a concept!  But it might be a useful one to me to help me find ways to tap into what my body knows about me and my life, like art does.  I really know I can still trust the wisdom of my body.  It kept me alive through 18 years of hell, and we are a pretty fine team even today.  How I handle my ‘little room’ of safety, security and salvation is something for me to think about.

It wasn’t an accident that out of 30 years’ worth of journals in my pile that I randomly picked the one I did last night.  There’s something important here for me to learn about being myself in my own life.  Why don’t I have a grand old boat, anyway?  Do I have to remain afraid of my own personal ocean?  (Oh, I wish I could afford to go visit the real one!)

What can I learn if I find myself two sets of ears so I can listen both above and below to hear my own life song, like hearing my own blood rushing when I put a sea shell up to my ear and hear the ocean waves roaring?  Oh, how ancient are the mysteries of the sea.

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