Tag: bpd

+DID ZERO MERCY IN MY CHILDHOOD SAVE ME?

alchemynow2 Comments

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I checked in with myself this morning to see how I am feeling in comparison to how I felt yesterday morning.  I found that I am OK.  I feel proud of myself that I instantly recognized yesterday what I was feeling and how I arrived at that ‘grim reaper’ state.  I feel proud that I was able to escape that feeling state through my process of recognition and choice so that today I am free of it’s grip and can live now being happier.

I am thinking this morning about all the baby plants my sister so sweetly and carefully dug up and transported from her property in north Texas to mine here in southeastern Arizona.  I need to find a place to plant them into the ground, a task that’s made harder because of the two months of dryness and increasing heat that all life faces here in the cycle of seasons that lead up to the coming of our hoped for July monsoon rains.  Nothing I plant will live without daily watering, and the more plants I have to take care of the more time I have to spend watering them.

And as I puzzled about my unfinished landscaping projects and thought about where I can temporarily make this spring’s garden arranged carefully around the watering range of the two 50 foot soaker hoses I picked up yesterday, three words popped into my mind as if they were displayed in the air in front of my face:  Scrambling for Mercy.

Immediately following this odd mental display I saw in my mind three images appear as if they were pearls connected on a string.  I saw:

– Twenty children at a party excitedly and very noisily taking their turns at being blindfolded.  With a stout stick in their hands, they wildly swing at a brightly colored piñata that’s tied to a rope swung over a tree limb.  The free end of the rope is yanked up and down so the piñata spins and leaps through the air until finally some lucky child makes solid impact.  As candy pieces spill though the air, all of the children scramble in and grab as much as they can of prized loot.

–  Next I see a similar interaction between children and candy.  In the excitement of watching a holiday parade children stand on sidewalk curbs, poised on their toes, bent at the waist like sprint racers at the starting line, waiting for someone to heave candy into the air so they can all scramble again for their prized loot.

– Next I see some imaginary setting that involves coins being tossed into a group of children or adults, and another scene where paper money is thrown into the air as people race and scramble to grab it.

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I have to look closely at the mental gymnastics my right and left brain are doing right now to see how any of these thoughts actually fit together.  What information is passing back and forth between my insightful right brain and my linear left brain that is trying to make sense out of any possible connection between how I feel, what I am preparing to do with my day, and these thoughts about ‘scrambling for mercy’?

First, I want to know more about this word MERCY.  As I’ve mentioned before it is our right brain that knows about a word’s life – its connection into history, action and multiple meaning.

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MERCY

Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French merci, from Medieval Latin merced-, merces, from Latin, price paid, wages, from merc-, merx merchandise

Date: 13th century

1 a : compassion or forbearance shown especially to an offender or to one subject to one’s power; also : lenient or compassionate treatment <begged for mercy> b : imprisonment rather than death imposed as penalty for first-degree murder
2 a : a blessing that is an act of divine favor or compassion b : a fortunate circumstance <it was a mercy they found her before she froze>
3 : compassionate treatment of those in distress <works of mercy among the poor>

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Well, look at this!  My right brain instinctively and intuitively KNEW that the image of scrambling for MERCY as if it was candy or money were right on target.  My left brain is still waiting for more information…….

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As I peer behind the curtain of my thinking this morning, I know that I started with my appreciation that NOW I understand when the ‘grim reaper’ feeling takes over my life, when the vast storehouse in my body of trauma-related memory-feelings steals away all awareness of anything different, I have ways to process this experience because I understand it.

As I wrote in yesterday’s post, I can always try to avoid being overwhelmed by my trauma memory-feeling state.  I can recognize it when I ‘blow it’ and miss my opportunities to avoid its being triggered.  Once it does get triggered, I now have information about how to settle my body memory down so that the feeling becomes quiet again.  Once I find ways to ground myself in my body in my present moment, and once the terrible (very real) body-based trauma memory feeling states can be lulled back to sleep again, I can participate in all kinds of different ways in my present day life like I never could before.

My left brain is happier now that it can see the ‘before and after’ connections in my thinking right now.  Before the ‘scrambling for mercy’ thought-image appeared, on some level I was thinking about the uniqueness of my perspective on everything I think and write about.

I did not ‘scramble for mercy’ yesterday in a panic to make that terrible ‘grim reaper’ feeling that had overwhelmed me go away.  I have practical understandings about trauma triggering today, and I have increasing practical experience in how to live better when it happens.  Once I understood this today, I also understood that not once in my extremely abusive childhood did I ever have a glimmer that mercy existed.   I could not possibly have begged for something I did not know existed, nor could I scramble for it.

That might be a rather unique fact that others with severe infant-child abuse histories might not share.  I can’t say that this realization about finding better ways to endure today and about having to find these ways within our own self because no mercy ever existed for us and was not available to be scrambled after, begged for, waited for, expected or anticipated, or ever granted at all.

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I am not going hunting for some earlier root-word connection (back to before the 12th century) for this word MERCY, though it puzzles me I don’t easily see this word’s clear footprints leading back into its past.  How are the meanings of MERCY as they connect to compassion also connected to merchandise transactions?

I have often said that traumatic conditions in a malevolent early environment signal a growing body to prepare for either plenty or scarcity of resources.  The trauma-altered changes that are required during development to help ensure survival then signal to others the conditions of the world a person was made in.

Nature, on its own, has no more interest in anthropomorphizing human experience than it does in anthropomorphizing the experience of a stone.  In this word MERCY, in its history and in its connotations, I suspect that we can find the cold, hard practicality of nature being reflected in human language origins and uses.

There was no mercy in my childhood because my mother did not have enough resources in her childhood as she developed to end up with the resource of mercy to give it to me – EVER.

I am surprised at this moment to realize that I have been led to discover a connection between what I have always said about a major difference between my mother’s early experiences as they led to her demise and mine.  Even though the abuse she did to me was probably far more severe than what was done to her, mine did not damage me in the same way.

When a parent wields MERCY over a child and hands it out manipulatively and meanly, as was done to my mother, an entirely different developmental growth pattern is followed than when MERCY does not EVER exist at all.

We can talk about this in terms of ‘conditional’ love, but it has nothing to do with love.

In the root origins of our word MERCY there are connections to prices being paid, wages and merchandise.  These are concepts directly tied to commodities (resources).  When MERCY is given and taken away viciously, maliciously, conditionally and unreasonably, does the child who has been made dependent in their emotional survival on parental actions come to understand that people, too, are no more than commodities (objects)?

My left brain makes a very clear connection here:  My mother’s father was a successful stock broker before the crash of 1929.  Did he so think about life in terms of ‘commodities’ that he infected his emotional relationships with the same kind of thinking that he applied to his profession?

Was his wife, and were his children nothing more than commodities?

This now leads me to a new thought I have never had before:  To what extent was the damage done to my mother in her earliest formative years accomplished not only by her mother but also by her father through processes like these I am just now thinking about?

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In the Absence of Mercy

I have mentioned this before and here it is again:  My life as an infant-child was simple.  Even though it was full of horror, suffering, trauma and abuse, it was simple.  I wasn’t treated like a commodity.  I wasn’t even treated as a human being.  I was always, consistently and permanently just ONE thing:  the devil’s child.

I didn’t ever deserve mercy.  Mercy was not in my mother’s world toward me.  I represented the part of my mother’s ‘badness’ (she projected en masse out on me) that kept my mother as a child from receiving the mercy she so desperately wanted – and needed.

I have never wanted or needed mercy.  For some reason after my trauma-memory-triggering of the ‘grim reaper’ reality flooded me yesterday, and as I found my own way out of that state so that I am OK today, I realize this.  For me, mercy has nothing to do with it because the experience of mercy never built my body, nervous system, brain, mind or relationship between self and others in the first place.  Unlike what happened to my mother, nobody ever involved the commodity of mercy in their transactions with me for my first 18 years.

At the same time I can say at this moment that it’s very strange that the zero-mercy of my childhood very well saved me from turning out like my mother did, I can say, “How cool is that!”

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+A REFRESHER ON ATTACHMENT AND RESILIENCY

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In writing about attachment as the patterns present in the narration of one’s life story reflect the patterns of secure or insecure attachments, I just came again across this book:

A User’s Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain by John J. Ratey (I am referencing from the Vintage 2001 edition)

with this important statement:

“”Some stress makes us tougher in the face of future adversity.  There is even research that shows that exposure to reasonable challenges during childhood alters the balance of brain chemicals so that children are able to respond better to stress later in life.”  (page 365)

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This statement, of course, brings questions to mind for those of us who certainly NEVER experienced anything like ‘reasonable challenges’ during our abusive infant-childhoods.  If ‘reasonable challenges’ during childhood can alter ‘the balance of brain chemicals’, imagine what happened to us!!

But, to move to what Ratey covers next  — which includes a description of how important secure attachments are to children — perhaps most significantly for children who do NOT have safe and secure attachments with their primary caregivers.  Ratey also mentions the importance of secure attachment in adulthood:

“Houston psychologist Emmy Werner found evidence for this when she studied the offspring of chronically poor, alcoholic, and abusive parents to understand how failure was passed from one generation to the next.  To her surprise, one-third of the children ended up leading more productive lives than their parents.

“Many social scientists now suggest that while we must continue to study children who fail, there may be much more to learn from children who succeed despite adversity.  Such children, researchers find, are not simply born that way.

“The presence of a variety of positive influences in their lives often makes the difference between a child who fails and one who thrives.  The implications are profound; parents, teachers, volunteers, peers, and all those who are in contact with children can create a pathway to resiliency.

“Werner later studied women who overcame adversity in their adult lives.  She found that several factors made the difference:  at least one person who gave them unconditional love and acceptance; a sense of faith in themselves; the willingness to seek support; and finally, hope.”  (page 365)

See also by Emmy Werner:  Resilience: A Universal Capacity

Related posts:

*RESILIENCY – WHY I’M ALIVE – NOT A MYSTERY

+ATTACHMENT – HOW WE ARE WHO WE ARE

A search of this blog on RESILIENCY HERE for more related posts

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resiliency.chap1.id

A search of this blog on RESILIENCY HERE for more related posts

+’DIS-ASSOCIATION’ BETWEEN RIGHT-LEFT BRAIN HEMISPHERES AND DISMISSIVE-AVOIDANT INSECURE ATTACHMENT DISORDERS

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Dr. Daniel Siegel, in his book The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (2001), describes how “dis-associated hemispheric processing” between our left and right human brain regions each contribute to differently as he describes in what he calls a “laterality-attachment hypothesis.”  This hypothesis seems to be particularly related to what attachment experts refer to as ‘dismissive-avoidant’ insecure attachment disorders (one I suspect my father had and ‘got’ from his depressed mother).

In this post I am presenting some of Siegel’s creative and thought provoking ideas on the subject:

“Patterns of representations differ markedly between the left and right halves of the brain.  An important distinction, often underrecognized within the fields of clinical psychiatry and psychology, is the distinction between the modes of representation within the two hemispheres of the brain.  The left hemisphere has been described as having a logical “interpreter” function that uses syllogistic reasoning to deduce cause-effect relationships from the representational data it has available to it.  The right hemisphere specializes in the representation of context and of mentalizing capacities.  It is therefore uniquely capable of registering and expressing affective facial expressions, developing a “theory of mind,” registering and regulating the state of the body, and having autobiographical representations.

“How are these bilateral processes relevant to relationships?  Communication is crucial in establishing neural connections early in life and involves the sharing of energy and information.  Levels of arousal (energy) and mental representations (information) are very different on each side of the brain.  The sharing of arousal and representations from one brain to another — the essence of connecting minds — will thus differ between the hemispheres.  One can propose, in fact, that the right brain perceives the output of the right brain of another person, whereas the left brain perceives the left brain’s output.

“In intimate, emotional relationships, such as friendship, romance, parent-child pairs, psychotherapy, and teacher-student dyads, what does this look like?  The left brain sends out language-based, logical, sequential interpreting statements that attempt to make sense of things [in a particular way].  The left brain receives these messages, decodes the linguistic representations, and tries to make sense out of these newly arrived digital symbols.  At the same time, the right brain is sending nonverbal messages via facial expressions, gestures, prosody [the music of speech], and tone of voice, which are perceived by the other’s [sic] right brain.  OK.  So what?

“The “what” of it is that the right brain takes this information and uses its social perceptions of nonverbal communication to engage directly in a few very important processes.

— It creates an image of the other’s [sic] mind (“mindsight”).

— It regulates bodily response while at the same time registering the somatic [body-based] markers of shifts in bodily state.

— It creates autobiographical representations within memory.

— It appraises the meaning of these events and directly affects the degree of arousal, thus creating primary emotional responses.  Intense and primary emotional states are therefore likely to be mediated via the right hemisphere.”

“When we examine these findings alongside the independent set of data from attachment research, certain patterns are suggested.  The early affect attunement and alignment of mental states can be seen as a mutually regulated hemisphere-to-hemisphere coordination between child and parent.  In this view, we can propose that avoidant attachment involves a serious lack of this form of communication between the right hemispheres of child and parent.  The extension of this finding to laterality research raises the possibility that the left hemisphere serves as the dominant mediator of communication between an avoidant child and a dismissing parent.

“In support of this perspective, it turns out that in 1989, [attachment experts] Main and Hesse examined exactly this hypothesis in two large-scale samples of Berkeley undergraduates, each of whom were asked about their degree of right (or left) handedness, as a rough approximation of brain dominance….  At the same time, Main and Hesse had devised a set of self-report items that they considered indicative of a “dismissing” state of mind.  Although this type of scale was not ultimately able to predict AAI [Adult Attachment Interview] classifications [of attachment styles] statistically, and therefore these findings were never published, in keeping with the hypothesis both studies found that the degree of right handedness was significantly correlated with elevated scores of the scale for “dismissing” state of mind.

“Further extensions of these ideas to relationships allow us to look more deeply into why certain couples may be “unable to communicate” with any emotional satisfaction.  When we know about the different languages of the right and left hemispheres, it is possible to make hypotheses  about why interactions may be frustrating:  Individuals may not know how to understand the particular language being expressed by their significant others.  If we then integrate past attachment history in understanding the pattern of these difficulties, it is possible to create a framework of understanding that can help the partners in such relationships escape their well-worn ruts.   [My note:  I would think parents, as well, would benefit so that the intergenerational transmission of dismissive-avoidant insecure attachment patterns could be eliminated.]

“If this laterality-attachment hypothesis is correct, then a logical implication would be that any experiences that help to develop the processing abilities of each hemisphere and/or the integrated activities of the two hemispheres may improve certain individuals’ internal and interpersonal lives.  Such movement toward more coordinated interhemispheric functioning would be quite welcomed by many people (especially the lonely and frustrated spouses [and I would say infant-children0 of dismissing individuals).

“The developmental and experiential histories that have led to a lack of integration of the functioning of the two hemispheres may leave individuals vulnerable to emotional and social problems.  Unresolved trauma and grief, histories of emotional neglect, and restrictive adaptations may each represent some form of constriction in the flow of information processing between the hemispheres.  This proposal of the central role of the dis-associated hemispheric processing in emotional disturbances is supported by the finding that insecure attachments in childhood may establish a vulnerability to psychological dysfunction.

“Emotional relationships that enhance the development of each hemisphere and its unrestricted integration with the activity of the other can thus be proposed to be likely to foster the development of psychological well-being.  In this way, a secure attachment can be seen as a developmental relationship that provides for an integration of functioning of the two hemispheres, both between child and caregiver and within the child’s own brain.

“At the most basic level, right-hemisphere-to-right-hemisphere communication can be seen within the affectively attuned communications that allow for primary emotional states to be shared via nonverbal signals. Left-hemisphere-to-left-hemisphere alignment can be seen in shared attention to objects in the world.  Reflective dialogues, in which language is used to focus attention on the mental states of others (including the two members of the dyad), may foster bilateral integration between the two hemispheres of both child and parent.  The resilience of secure attachments can thus be proposed as founded in part in the bilateral integration that these relationships foster.”  (pages 205-207 – all bold type is mine)

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+TRAUMA AND DISAPPOINTMENT – POINTING TO OUR TRAUMA WOUNDS

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All trauma is upsetting.  That’s what trauma does.  It upsets the status quo.  That’s what trauma is.  It’s an upset.  By its very nature, trauma involves disappointment.

The more an organism is prepared with resources to ‘cope’ with trauma the better off they are because this means they can ‘get over’ the trauma and get back to a state of status quo faster.  Without enough of the right kind of resources, the slower a return to the state of status quo becomes.  Or, without enough of the right kind of resources, a return to a state of status quo is impossible.

Available resources are directly tied to a very real state of safety and security in the world.  Having enough of the right resources means that we can achieve a return to the desired state of safety and security relatively quickly and easily.

Survivors of severe early infant-childhood abuse trauma had things happen to them in their lives way before they had the inner or outer resources to effect a return to a state of safety and security – because if they’d had an environment filled with the plenty of safety and security in the first place the traumas of abuse would not have happened to them in the first place.

That’s what an insecure attachment ‘disorder’ actually is.  The state not only of trauma but of scarcity and depletion of inner and outer resources, which creates unsafe and insecure status in and to the world, built itself right into the growing body-brain-mind-self from the start.

This means that the necessary status quo state of safety, security and calm connection is missing.  The normal physiological state for early abuse trauma survivors never was a status quo state of well-being.  Because this calm, safe, secure state is missing in our very body itself, survivors of early abuse trauma can struggle the rest of their lives just trying to figure out what this GOOD status quo state even feels like.

From there we have to figure out how to GET THERE from HERE – HERE being our trauma-built state of inner disequilibrium.

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Dr. Diana Fosha is one of the most hopeful and positive experts within the field of trauma, attachment and healing that I have encountered.  Here’s a link to one of her 2002 articles that I highly recommend, written primarily for professionals working with traumatized clients.  Because so few of us have access to any therapy at all, let alone to effective therapy with truly competent trauma experts, what Fosha says in this article is important for we survivors to know on our own:

TRAUMA REVEALS THE ROOTS OF RESILIENCE

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Here is the link to her book:  The Transforming Power of Affect : A Model for Accelerated Change by Diana Fosha (Hardcover – May 5, 2000)

I haven’t had the opportunity to read it myself, but I include it here because it is the feelings related to trauma that tend to trap me in some other place than a calm center of connected well-being.

Sometimes it seems as though all the powerful abuse trauma-related emotions that were going on within my body from the time I was born, that were not identified, recognized, differentiated, named or understood, just sat there within the cells of my body waiting.  Well, not only did they wait for a time they could make their presence known, they expanded and multiplied astronomically until they broke through the numbness and the blankness of all of my dissociation to become the ‘animals’, the rampaging beasts they often seem to me to be within me today because I did not grow up with a body-brain-mind-self that was able to recognize them as friends and allies.

Rather my reactions to life, with all the trauma triggers that are built into me, often disrupt my ongoing equilibrium – what little of it I can manage to find for myself.  My reactions to trauma triggers stimulate emotions that are not integrated together in a modulated, right-limbic-social-emotional brain built with stability, safety and security within it.  This region of my brain along with the rest of my brain and all the nervous system components that it is connected to, was not built with ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’ regulatory abilities within it.

Where my experiences within my environment should have been able to hook themselves together in ongoing ASSOCIATED patterns of being, they were instead created in DISSOCIATIONAL patterns that are often profoundly disorganizing and disorienting to me today.  Often the best I can do is try to identify these patterns so that I can find the ‘willy-nilly’ way things were connected together inside of me and try to piece them together differently in more orderly, organized and oriented ways.

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Here is another book, again one I haven’t yet read but that looks vitally promising:

Sweet Sorrow: Love, Loss and Attachment In Human Life – Paperback (June 2009) by Alan B. Eppel

“In this volume the author proposes that it is the interplay of love and loss that lies at the epicentre of the human story. Support for this proposal is taken from neuroscience, art and psychoanalysis. It will also introduce the reader to important ideas and findings from Attachment Theory. An exploration of the relationship between love and loss can lead us to some understanding of the meaning of our lives. It shows how love and loss are inextricably bound at the centre of human experience, and form the essential dynamic of the human struggle.”

“Alan B. Eppel has been a practicing psychiatrist over the past thirty years and currently is director of Community Psychiatric Services at St. Joseph’s Hospital, Hamilton, Ontario, and an associate clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.”

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I mention this book in connection with the topic of my last post, +MY FOGGY POST ABOUT DISAPPOINTMENT AS A TRAUMA TRIGGER, because the state of feeling disappointed is for me a very real experience of being in a state of disorganization and disorientation in my body in the world.

Expectations are a required ‘food’ for our brain as it works to combine information we have about our self in the world in an integrated way.  Our body-brain-mind-self processes life through ongoing feedforward and feedbackward information loops that take into account everything we know about our self in the world – IN TIME.

I complained in my last post about the invisibility of the root word origins for the word ‘disappointment’ in our English language.  Thinking about it more clearly today, I realize that just as individual people begin very early in their lives (hopefully) to recognize, identify, discriminate between, name and manage all the different emotional experiences we are capable of, so must the words that name these emotional states of being also go through some kind of growth process themselves.

‘Disappoint’ is a word related both to ‘appoint’ and to ‘point’.  Our right brain is our imaginal link to experience and contains within it a veritable ocean of potential meaning.  As we use words the two hemispheres of our brain pass information back and forth between them – sort of like pouring water from one glass to another until a level of balanced equality exists between the two containers – as we seek to gain understanding about our own self in our experience of our life.

I believe that ‘disappointment’ is intimately connected with overwhelming heartbreak.  As our brain-being tries to get along in life, we orient and organize our self IN TIME by using information as reference POINTS.  In fact, without reference points, we cannot orient and organize ourselves at all.

These reference POINTS IN TIME exist in us where associations have been successfully and satisfactorily made.  Those of us whose body-brains were formed within abusive traumatic early environments suffered far more dissociations in our experiences than we did associations, and are therefore suffering from a scarcity of these required reference points in time.

What could our inner self compass possibly find as reference points in a world of madness, abuse and trauma?  How could we establish our self with any stability in a dangerous world of chaos?  What could I point to as a KNOWN, as a dependable GIVEN in the world as I grew up?

I knew really only one thing as a given and one thing only:  I was terribly BAD and not only deserved everything that my mother did to me, not only earned everything she did to me, but I evidently liked and wanted her to do what she did to me because I CHOSE TO REMAIN BAD.  According to my mother, she magnanimously offered to me every possible (saint-given) opportunity to change my ways, and I never made the right choice.  I chose to defy her efforts with every breath I took.

How could I possibly use any information I got from that environment to find a stable inner or outer POINT of reference in the world?  What was the POINT in my even trying, though I DID try as hard as I possibly could to BE GOOD, not knowing I was absolutely and fundamentally and permanently being set up to fail?  After all, according to my mother, being born ‘the devil’s child’ did not even get me started off in life at the starting point of even being a human being in the first place.

Did I ever reach the POINT as a child of not trying?  No.  Did I ever surrender or give up?  No.  I didn’t see that I ever had a choice.  I just formed my entire being around the information I was given and kept on going.

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It is not a stretch of reality to consider ‘disappointment’ within the context of its right-brain meanings.  It involves every aspect of ‘point’ we can think of with our left brain.  We really come into this world as a single one-dimensional POINT in time and space.  From there we are supposed to be able to grow and blossom and bear fruit in our lifetime.  Some of us are born to parents who seem completely intent on stomping the life out of that little tiny point that is us from the moment we are born.  What we do, then, is survive IN SPITE of our parents.

That is the primary POINT of life – to stay alive in it.

When we experience our emotions and reactions in the present, the POINT of origin of our emotions lies in our body as it was formed way back there.  A pinhole-sized point of light continues to expand over distance and time.  The older we get, the more complex life becomes, the wider becomes the range of influence that our emotions can have in our life.

When severe trauma of abuse forms a person, the expanding rays of light from the early origin point of emotions suffers from distortion.  We then live with those distortions unless and until we can bring healing to all the wounded places within us – a job of a lifetime.

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Looking at Webster’s:

POINT

Date 13th century

Etymology: Middle English, partly from Anglo-French, prick, dot, moment, from Latin punctum, from neuter of punctus, past participle of pungere to prick; partly from Anglo-French pointe sharp end, from Vulgar Latin *puncta, from Latin, feminine of punctus, past participle — more at pungent

And tracing connections back through

PUNGENT

Etymology: Latin pungent-, pungens, present participle of pungere to prick, sting; akin to Latin pugnus fist, pugnare to fight, Greek pygmē fist

Date: 1597

1 : sharply painful…..

and through the synonyms to ‘pungent’ to

PUNGENT implies a sharp, stinging, or biting quality especially of odors <a cheese with a pungent odor> POIGNANT suggests something is sharply or piercingly effective in stirring one’s emotions <felt a poignant sense of loss — applies to what keenly or sharply affects one’s sensitivities <a poignant documentary on the homeless>

POIGNANT

Etymology: Middle English poynaunt, from Anglo-French poinant, poignant, present participle of poindre to prick, sting, from Latin pungere — more at pungent

Date: 14th century

1 : pungently pervasive <a poignant perfume>
2 a (1) : painfully affecting the feelings : piercing (2) : deeply affecting : touching b : designed to make an impression : cutting <poignant satire>
3 a : pleasurably stimulating b : being to the point : apt

synonyms see pungent, moving

STING

Etymology: Middle English, from Old English stingan; akin to Old Norse stinga to sting and probably to Greek stachys spike of grain, stochos target, aim

Date: before 12th century

Here I begin to see and feel the ‘image in the word’ as it relates to the origins of disappoint – sticking one’s self with a dry, sharp spike of rustling, life sustaining grain

PRICK

Etymology: Middle English prikke, from Old English prica; akin to Middle Dutch pric prick

Date: before 12th century

1 : a mark or shallow hole made by a pointed instrument
2 a : a pointed instrument or weapon b : a sharp projecting organ or part
3 : an instance of pricking or the sensation of being pricked: as a : a nagging or sharp feeling of remorse, regret, or sorrow

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And of course, looking from the angle of Latin pungere – related to the origins of ‘poignant’ I see this connection:

PUNCTURE

Etymology: Middle English, from Latin punctura, from punctus, past participle of pungere

Date: 14th century

1 : an act of puncturing
2 : a hole, wound, or perforation made by puncturing
3 : a minute depression

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Our abusers punctured us full of holes.  Full of wounds, we continued onward.  Every time we were physically, emotionally, mentally hurt, our chance for building an ongoing safe and secure, organized, oriented attachment with our self in the world was ruptured and not repaired.  Every time we were hurt in any way, deprived, terrorized, terrified, we suffered from a disappointment based on how things are MEANT to be in the world for little ones who are completely dependent on their early caregivers.

How possible would it be to empty the ocean with a sieve?

First we were ‘poked full of holes’, wounded nearly beyond belief by the same people who were supposed to love us, cherish us, protect us, provide for us, defend us, and help us become integrated ‘associated’ people.  Then we are supposed to take our punctured selves out into the world and NOT be disappointed?

Maybe every single time I recognize the state of disappointment in myself I can learn to identify how that disappointment POINTS to my wounds.  From there, maybe I can begin to find ways to exercise my resilience to repair them.

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+MY FOGGY POST ABOUT DISAPPOINTMENT AS A TRAUMA TRIGGER

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I’ve been doing pretty good these past few days.  I think I got spoiled.  Today was a crasher.  My word for my mood, or state of emotional being is FUNK.  I’m trying to sort out how I got here today thinking that maybe it will help me get out of this dark grey-blue-black mood, or feeling state.

So far, I can think of at least ten things that happened today that I reacted to with disappointment.  That’s one sure thing I know about myself:  I do not handle disappointment very well at all.  I also know that disappointment IS a feeling I felt as an abused child – often.  My mother was an expert at setting me up and then knocking me down.  She took sadistic pleasure in my innocent hope knowing she could shatter it in a heartbeat – which she always did.

Because I WAS a child, I could not out-guess her.  I walked blindly into her traps over and over and over again.  I was unsuspecting.  Part of how all this operated, I know, was because of the dissociated states I slipped into between all the violent attacks, that state where time always seemed suspended as if it didn’t exist at all.  My mother’s forced isolation did this to me, also.  Nothing made sense.  I could predict nothing, anticipate nothing.  But, unfortunately for me I still believed my mother when she said something good was going to happen, even though every time she took it away.  (see **FAMILY TIME – by Brother (1965) for my baby brother’s experience with my mother about this.)

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Main Entry: dis·ap·point·ment

Date: 1604

1 : the act or an instance of disappointing : the state or emotion of being disappointed
2 : one that disappoints <he’s a disappointment to his parents>

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Why in 1604 did this word suddenly appear in the English language?  Why does Webster’s not include any reference to this word’s roots?  Elsewhere I found a reference that the root is in ‘appoint’.  Somewhere else I read online it’s in ‘point’.  It all seems very confusing to me.

I think when I experience disappointment in my life it ALWAYS acts as a trauma trigger for me.  ALWAYS.

That means when something disappointments me NOW in my life, all the ick attached to disappointment in my 18 year abusive childhood comes plowing right on through and catches up with me every single time.

I don’t know how to NOT let this happen.

I didn’t catch the warning signs this morning when I encountered my first disappointment.  Looking back, I see that my disappointment was connected FIRST to a feeling of being surprised.  I had hoped to buy 3 (cheap) climbing roses bushes today at our local Alco store.  I looked at my bank balance online.  It was far lower than I had expected, and it ruled out flowers along with just about anything else until the 3rd of next month when my next disability check shows up in the account.

So, I EXPECTED the balance to be higher.  I was SURPRISED when it wasn’t.  Then I was disappointed not only that I’m about broke (again), but also that there will be no roses or anything else.  Then I was disappointed because I couldn’t have lunch today as I usually do with my woman friend.  I NEED that social contact.

I was swept up in the twisting snake of down-the-emotional-drain and didn’t catch it – in time.  On the day went.  No major disaster, just a series of expectations, hopes, surprises, and disappointments.

They pile up, and then knock me down.  Flat.

Now, how exactly do I pick myself up again?

Is there some way I can avoid this crash in the future?

How can I expand my “Window of Tolerance” for disappointment?

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One big disappointment of my life right now is that I’ve been working on this blog for a year now, and I am not one single word closer to being able to put together and publish a book than I was before I started writing here.  I see publishing a worthwhile and SELLING book as my ONLY hope out of my poverty.  It’s a big disappointment.

If I tell myself that it doesn’t matter if there’s ever a book, that it only matters if I can write something that might make sense to someone – and there’s nothing wrong with FREE info – then I’m better, but that has to be processed for me on some kind of ‘spiritual’ level having to do with my ‘purpose in life’ and ‘my mission’ in being alive.  I have no idea, most of the time.  I just TRY…..

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It was too hot today to work outside on my adobe-making project.  That was disappointing.  All-in-all, my disappointment ALWAYS cycles around to my difficulty in not being angry at my self.  GEE, I sure don’t have to wonder how that pattern came to be!  Every single time my mother punished me with intentional disappointment, I was blamed for it.  It was ALWAYS my fault because I was bad, because I wanted to be bad, because I wanted to ruin my mother’s life.

I am going to quit writing – enough said.  I imagine there are plenty of readers who know exactly what I am TRYING to say.  I am going to watch my NetFlix streaming Australian TV series, “McLeod’s Daughters,” which I am enjoying.  I could see myself living that life.  I would have loved it.

Or, as that other great movie puts it”  “Never give up!  Never surrender!”

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+LINKS TO NOTE ON CONVERSATION WITH MY SISTER

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Mother believed I was not human, was the devil’s child who could do no right.  My sister two years younger than me was picked by mother as God’s child who could do no wrong–

*Notes from a conversation with my (1953) sister

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+THE TOPIC OF TEASING: TOO HARD TO CONSIDER?

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When I turned the next page after the chapter on laughter in Keltner’s book my first reaction was aversion.  This isn’t the aversion of disgust I would feel if someone handed me a white china plate with a serving of dog turds in the center of it.  It’s more the aversion I would feel to continuing down a path once I saw a large diamond back rattler stretched across it.  It’s like the aversion I would feel should I be asked to step up on stage to join a chorus line of showgirls scantily dressed and overly plumed in Las Vegas, or should I be asked to sing the national anthem from the center of a pro football stadium in front of thousands.

That’s a strong negative reaction to the single word that appears at the top of Dr. Dacher Keltner’s 2009 book’s (Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life) next page as the heading for his next chapter:  Teasing.

I am experiencing the ‘freeze, hide and flee’ half of the fight/flight stress reaction.  There’s no ‘fight’ for me here except for the fight I am experiencing inside my self about facing my fears by plowing through a topic that obviously makes me feel completely uncomfortable.  I am presented with a challenge here to which I respond with feelings of incompetence and un-confidence.  I KNOW I am an unequipped gladiator in the arena of normal human teasing.

It is only because of my commitment to reading Keltner’s entire book and to learning about my self as the severe infant-child abuse survivor that I am that I marshal my courage and willingness to pay attention both to the information that Keltner presents and to my own difficulties with it.  I know from my experience of aversion to the topic that there is something important here I need to understand.  I know from the start both that I am not going to like what I find here, and that what I find will reflect a truth about how the severe abuse I experienced from birth changed me into someone who is different from the person I could have become had this severe abuse not happened to me.

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Because my experience of severe infant-child abuse contained very specific, unusual, uncommon and unique patterns, I have found myself falling through nearly every single crack in the ‘psychological’ theories about how child abuse can affect adult survivors.  Because my abuse began at birth, I have had to learn that ‘recovery’ of abilities I supposedly ‘used to have’ before severe trauma happened to me is not possible.  My journey of healing is mostly about what I can uncover and discover connected to what was done to me rather than to recover anything.

I have to connect-the-dots of the information I uncover and discover about being myself in the world in far different ways than non-early severe infant-child abuse survivors might get to.  I cannot take for granted even the most basic facts about what it means to be a member of our social human species.  This is mostly true because my mother didn’t just use one massive club of abuse against me from the time I was born.  She had a second massive club that she wielded over me equally:  extreme social isolation.  Being bludgeoned from birth and for the next 18 years by one of these clubs would have all but obliterated me.  Being attacked on all fronts by a combination of the two clubs has made me into a person who very nearly fits the description of a nonsocial species of one.

I am left having to uncover and discover more of what is uniquely different about me from others than what is similar or the same.  Yet I was born a member of a social species.  Everything that is different for me happens according to categories of experience that I share with all others.  It’s just that within each of these categories of possibilities about what it means to be human and what it feels like to be human, I experience patterns of being-in-the-world that are different for me than for nearly all others.

As I encountered my aversion to Keltner’s chapter heading on teasing it didn’t take me very long in scanning the next pages to understand that the topic of teasing is about one of these socially-human categories.  Although Keltner does not make the obvious connection between teasing and attachment patterns, I do.  In fact, the connection is more than glaringly obvious to me.

I suggest that a clear appraisal of our competency of interactions within the arena of teasing activity can show us the kind of social brain we have.. At the same time this appraisal can tell us about the kinds of infant-child interactions we had with our earliest caregivers while the foundation of our emotional-social brain was built from the time of our birth.

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At the same time that I now want to turn to Keltner’s actual presentation of information on teasing, I am experiencing one of my own inner reactions I wrote about earlier in the week.  I hear that warning:  “Do not enter.  Past this point all angels fear to tread.”  I realize that if I cross this line, move past this point, I am at risk for inviting in The Furies.

At the same time I realize there is a second sign posted beside the first.  This one reads, “You cannot get there from here.”  I don’t even have time to consider what this second sign means before I notice a third one that reads, “What is true for most others is absolutely not true for you.”  Oh!  And a fourth sign!  “If you choose to follow down this pathway you must understand that none of what you will find here can be taken personally.  Whatever you are missing in regard to teasing did not come about through any fault of your own.”

If the presence of all those signs aren’t warning enough that I better consider carefully what I am going to choose to do next, I see a flash of yellow through the trees and underbrush just around a curve of the pathway ahead of me.  I walk toward it and see yellow crime scene plastic ribbons strung across the pathway and wound around the bushes on both sides of the pathway into the forest as far as I can see.  At the same time I see a gleaming silver pair of giant scissors lying on the ground in the center of the path right in front of the tape.

I am standing here thinking about this carefully.  What might the repercussions be for me if I pick up these scissors, snap through that yellow tape and continue forward down this pathway?  What might the ramifications be of gaining conscious knowledge about something my body already knows but has no words to describe?  Would I rather be skinned alive than uncover what I am going to discover about myself in this body-brain in this lifetime should I carefully read this chapter?

Believe me, readers.  This is turning into a really long pause here…….  There are more than a few parts of myself I have to consult with before I can make this decision.

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One thing I know today from the information Keltner presents in his book on this topic.  True teasing in the human social arena is NOT about aggression.  If there is aggression present, it is not teasing.  There is not supposed to be anything terrible — ‘terror able’ — about teasing.   Obviously, for me, there was in my “Something Wicked This Way Comes” version of a childhood.

I should not be surprised, given the continual reign of my mother’s verbal abuse of me (included within her unending repertoire of violence), that her so-called teasing was extremely vicious, hurtful and WRONG — from the time I was born.

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+IN THE PRESENCE OF LAUGHTER WE ARE SAFE, SECURE AND FREE

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The wind is back at dawn today, roaring around my house like a drunken clan of Cyclops giants.  The tall pine in my neighbor’s yard is dancing a wild, frenzied jig in fast motion.  The wind is trying to rip the leaves off the plum tree before they even come out.  The giants are bellowing at me down the water heater chimney in the corner of my kitchen.

The sky grows lighter with the sound of birds perched in the twigs of the quince tree above their pan of water outside my kitchen window.  The light is all gray today.  It seems to be within the clouds across the sky, even in all directions, masking the outlines of the mountains, yet here and there in the west the clouds are outlined with the faintest tints of peach, ecru and tan.

It looks like a day to stay indoors.  My cold has thickened and settled, making me feel feverish and queasy.  Sneezing, I watch droplets of rain appear on the outside of my window.  I am grateful for this roof and these walls of shelter (thinking about my study last weekend about the precuneus part of the brain and its connection to our human sense of shelter and to the self).  Protection for the body of the self and for the self of the self.

I am not so tough that I can’t appreciate these advantages I have being only one of billions who have so much less to keep them protected from so much more.  Without these protecting walls of shelter around me right now, without this sturdy roof, without some source of heat, I would experience this coming day differently.  It strikes me as I read a little more of Dr. Dacher Keltner’s 2009 book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, about laughter that the presence or absence of laughter seems to correspond to the nature of the protection we have inside our self for our self.

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Keltner and his colleague, George Bonanno, designed a long-term study to examine how laughter operated among 45 adults who were grieving for the loss of a much loved spouse who had died within the previous six months.  Here again Keltner does not include any assessment of previous traumas, child abuse or maltreatment, or to degrees of secure or insecure attachment.  By not collecting this information from his participants, he missed the opportunity to learn about how the presence or absence of laughter during a time of personal storms is directly connected to the nature of the sheltering protection a person has for their self.

Yes, he found that laughter appears as a resiliency factor in human grieving.  Yes, laughter appears to be a ‘fitness factor’ that corresponds to the ability to transcend one’s losses so they can flexibly resolve their traumas and move on into the next stages of life.  But I resist the intimation his writings leave with is readers, that there is plainly something innately superior about those who can laugh in the midst of their grief compared to those who cannot so easily access laughter’s power to heal.

My bet is that those who entered into the rooms of Keltner’s experimental laboratory to complete his interviews and have their most minute reactions critically examined brought with them the condition of the shelter of their self built within them through critical developmental stages of their infancy and childhood.  Those who were early traumatized were most likely to have soggy cardboard boxes to live in, if that.  Those who benefited during their development by being given good strong walls and a good strong roof, doors that sealed out the storms and tight, solidly placed windows of course had the corresponding ability to access their laughter within.

What did Keltner and Bonanno find among their 45 participants?

“Measures of laughter (and smiling) predicted reduced grief as assessed at six, fourteen, and twenty-five months postloss.  Duchenne laughter while talking about their deceased spouses were less anxious and depressed, and more engaged in their daily living, for the next two years.  Just as important, people who showed more anger were observed to be experiencing more anxiety, depression, and disengagement from daily living for the next two years.”  (page 142

These researchers continued to study how these grief-triggered reactions appeared in the body of their subjects and observed the following:

“…George and I went on a search for further evidence in support of the benefits of laughter.  Why did laughing while talking about the deceased partner relate to increased personal adjustment?  What we observed were findings very much in keeping with the laughter as vacation hypothesis.  Our first analysis looked at how bereaved individuals’ experience of distress tracked one physiological index of arousal – elevated heart rate.  The bereaved individuals who laughed showed similar heart rate arousal as those who did not laugh.  But whereas our nonlaughers’ feelings of distress closely tracked increases in their heart rate, our laughers’ feelings of distress were decoupled from this physiological index of stress.  Metaphorically, laughers were taking a vacation from the stress of their partners’ deaths, freed from the tension of stress-related physiology.

“We then transcribed their conversations and identified exactly what the bereaved participants were talking about when they laughed.  Here again, data suggest that laughter is not a sign of denial of trauma, as widely assumed, but an indicator of a shift toward a new perspective enabled by the imagination.  We coded participants’ references to several existential themes related to bereavement – loss, yearning, injustice, uncertainty.  We also coded for insight words that reflect a shift in perspective, phrases like “I see” or “from this perspective” or “looking back.”  Our participants who laughed were most likely to be talking about the injustice of death – the unfair termination of life, the difficulties of raising a family alone, the loss of intimacy – but they engaged in this discourse with perspective-shifting clauses.  Laughter was part of these individuals’ shift in viewing the death of their spouses.  It was a portal into a new understanding of their lives.  A laugh is a lightning bolt of wisdom, a moment in which the individual steps back and gains a broader perspective upon their lives and the human condition.

“Finally, our data speak to the social benefits of laughter.  Our bereaved individuals who laughed reported better relations with a current significant other.  They more readily engaged in new intimate relations.”  (pages 143-144)

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I believe that Keltner and Bonanno missed the most important fact that it wasn’t the presence or absence of laughter itself that mattered most in their study.  It was the presence or absence of a safe and secure attachment system, built into these individuals through the nature of their earliest caregiver interactions during their body-brain developmental stages, that either enabled laughter to exist as the resiliency factor it is, or did not.

Laughter is obviously connected to the benefits this research describes.  Yes, it does have the power to modulate the physiological stress response in the body.  Yes it indicates “a shift toward a new perspective enabled by the imagination” because it is a signal of fitness that reflects the conditions of the environment an individual was formed in, by and for.  Yes, laughter is included in autobiographical narratives when it appears in “perspective-shifting clauses” that are part of the telling of a coherent, continuous life story that is most likely to happen for a safe and securely attached-from-birth person.

Transitioning between contrasting mental states, processing information in insightful ways, being able to obtain shifts in perspective, having a “portal into a new understanding” of one’s life, having the capacity to experience “a lightning bolt of wisdom, a moment in which the individual steps back and gains a broader perspective upon their lives and the human condition” all are possible because of safe and secure attachment patterns built into a person’s body-nervous system-brain-mind-self from the start of one’s life.

And of course having these abilities, which stem from a safe and securely built body-brain, means that such a person will have the capacity also to report “better relations with a current significant other” and will be able to “more readily” engage “in new intimate relations.”

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This research is describing the differences between those who have and those who do not have the insurance-policy benefits of safe and secure attachment built into their early developing body-brain.  The presence or absence of laughter is the internal and external signal that clearly indicates the nature of a person’s attachment system.  Our attachment system is itself a signifier of the quality of the world that built each of us in our beginnings.

Our attachment system is about the quality of the protective structure within us that contains our self.  If I had to try to recover from this cold I have outside in the cold wind and rain of today, rather than trying to recover within the adequate home I have that keeps those stormy elements away from me, I would not be likely to recover as well, as quickly, or maybe even at all.  That’s just plain common sense.

So why do we continue to so stubbornly refuse to accept that the conditions of our inward attachment system that directly formed the who and how we are in this world don’t have an equally powerful influence on how we respond to and recover from the trials and tribulations, the storms that happen to us along the pathway of our lives?

If the presence of laughter signifies the existence of a safe and secure inner protective structure for the self, and its absence signifies that this inner protective structure is not safe and secure enough, then I know more about the meaning of laughter in my own life and in the lives of others.  Just as I would want to improve the physical structure of my dwelling if the rain was pouring in the roof and my siding was blowing off, I want to improve the structure surrounding my self.

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It is with this new “light of understanding” about the powerful signifier laughter is of the conditions of my inner shelter that I will share with you something that made me laugh so hard yesterday my sides literally hurt.  I haven’t laughed like that for a long, long time.

Our rural town weekly newspaper always includes a page called “The Police Beat” where the past week’s 911 calls are presented to the public.  I happen to live in this unincorporated outskirt town of 700 people that I found mentioned in the news yesterday.  I was trying to read this entire piece from start to finish over the telephone to my daughter last evening without laughing.  I couldn’t do it:

Jan. 7 –

“A Naco woman reported a large green half snake half something else was in her bathroom.  By the time deputies arrived, the creature was gone.

Of all the descriptions Keltner has presented (above) about laughter, it is his mention of how laughter is “an indicator of a shift toward a new perspective enabled by the imagination” that most caught my attention.  I thought to myself, “Hey!  I can do THAT!”

Reading this report from the sheriff’s call yesterday captivated my imagination.  The words in that report created for me a playground for my imagination – as I suspect it will yours.  Now, thanks to reading Keltner’s book combined with my own insights, I understand more than ever before the critical place that laughter has as a signifier of human well-being.

I will pay ever more close attention to finding the large and often very small places that humor, smiles and laughter might be hidden around me in my life – even if they are hidden in the words of a paper about something that first appeared in someone else’s bathroom – and then did not.  Now I understand more clearly that my attachment system, my home of my self in the world, will be better off for every instant of genuine laughter I can find.

Human laughter, older than words, might well be the most important language we have.  It tells the stories of the better side of life.  In laughter we share both the oldest and best of who we are and what we know.  In the presence of genuine laughter we are most present in the present because in its embrace we are most completely safe, secure and free.

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+NOT INVITING IN THE FURIES

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What I did to myself by writing yesterday’s post was not kind, or gentle, or wise.  Of course I didn’t know at the time that I was putting myself through the clear paces that the part of May Sarton’s poem I posted the other day describes.  Yesterday I innocently invited in The Furies and it has taken 24 hours for the angels, who are also “never far away” to help me reestablish some kind of inner balance.

I am fortunate today that yesterday’s nasty storm seems to have abated.  Today I have what May Sarton mentioned in her poem:

“It is the light that matters,
The light of understanding.
Who has ever reached it
Who has not met the furies again and again:
Who has reached it without
Those sudden acts of grace?

-From “The Angels And The Furies”

I have received comments over time about my writing from several people whose opinions I highly value and appreciate.  They have told me that most of the time my writing is too intellectual, too detached, distant, remote and objective, too sparse of emotion and personal detail.  Well, I can promise you now that “the light that matters, the light of understanding” that I had to suffer through yesterday to GET now clearly tells me that this is just the way I am going to write – because it is all I can afford.

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I might have just as well stood on the thick ice of a raging frozen river yesterday with a lit stick of dynamite in my hands that I used to blow a whole in that ice so that I could crash through it and get swept down that river, under the ice, unable to escape.

I became overwhelmed by sorrow and sadness and spent the rest of my day and night fighting to overcome it.  I did that to myself, and it was not pretty.  I had dumped myself back into a survival mode where I was fighting, absolutely alone, for my life.  My “light of understanding” commitment to myself today is that I don’t care what anyone else says, wants or needs, I will never do that to myself again.  I cannot afford to.

Only those who suffered from the worst-case kinds of terrible infant-child abuse, particularly by their mother from birth can ever begin to understand the devastating power such a FURY has to obliterate a tiny developing self.  Every single possible avenue we could find to survive – because there was no possible way to escape – became a part of the very body-brain we live with.  Yesterday, without realizing it, I violated my own self-protective measures and caused myself the experience of remembering a part of my overwhelming pain.  I will not do that again – Duh!

There is no place within myself that I can return safely to any part of my childhood other than to my experiences with the mountain land of Alaska itself.  Every single other part of my infant-childhood is connected to absolute, fundamental misery.  I learned yesterday that I have needs in the present in order to ever begin to write about the emotions of my experience that I DO NOT HAVE around me in my life today.

First of all, I am sick.  I have a nasty cold, the likes of which I have not suffered for well over 20 years.  My body is the single continuous fortitude of protection I have counted on to carry me through my life from the moment I was born.  I am – quite obviously – at my weakest when my immune system reacts to a physical sickness attack.

Secondly, I am thousands of miles away from my family and my closest friends.  I do not have a therapist.  I cannot afford one and I couldn’t find one competent or capable enough to help me now, anyway.  I choose not to take psychotropic medications, which is usually OK unless I take stupid steps that overwhelm the systems I have in place within myself to keep me in a place of reasonable balance.

I do not have a support system close to me.  I do not have a safety net.  When I took my own steps yesterday to invite The Furies in I did so with good intentions, but I made a big mistake.  By the time I figured this out yesterday, I had crashed through the ice and was gone.  The simplest piece of information I now have as a result of my miserable experience yesterday is that next time I am writing and the words “going where Angels fear to tread” I am going to turn around and run as fast as I possibly can in the other direction!  I received that warning yesterday, and I kept on going.

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Several hours after I posted yesterday I knew exactly the point in my writing yesterday where my lit stick of dynamite exploded and little dissociated me flew to pieces and disappeared into the ice-covered raging river.  I am taking a risk even at this moment by going back and retrieving the phrase that shows where the “perfect storm” was born.  I hear the angels’ warning.  I tell them, “Only these few words.  I hear you.  I am being extra careful.”  I am determined to prove my own point.  Some of readers might have noticed this, anyway.

This was the fulcrum point.  It came in my description of how those that love me loved me during my experience with cancer:

“Until I felt what I did last Friday I had no idea how the people who loved me felt as they all traveled thousands of miles, one after the other, to support me and to care for me and to love me as I went through the grueling chemotherapy and eventual surgery that would allow me to remain in their lives.”

I clearly did not think and therefore did not say that these loved ones helped me to REMAIN IN MY OWN LIFE.  I said they helped me to remain in theirs.

Enough said.  You get my point.  I don’t want to invite some giant auger to fall out of the sky on top of my head today to take me down, down, down, down…..

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I am wiser today, even though my cold still has my body in its grip.  I am back up here on the surface of the world where I belong.  I will do things today like rest when I need to, clean the kitchen table off, maybe wash my kitchen floor until it shines in the infrequent moments the sun breaks through the high clouds.

I have “the light of understanding” that I can fully give myself permission to write what I can write the way I can write it.  Yesterday I put myself into the problem of my childhood, not the solution.  I most want to work at understanding what happened to my mother that made her into the monster she was.  I want to understand how the millions of separate, individual terrorizingly brutal encounters I had with her changed me in my development.  I want to make informed connections about the conditions of infant-children that lead to either their increased or decreased well-being throughout their life spans.

If there are in the future people who want to be close with me to support me with their love so that I can enter a space safely and securely in order to ‘go back’ to the emotion and details of my childhood (any more than I already have), it is only THEN that a different level of my writing can appear on this blog.

In the meantime, I am going to let the angels surround me up, down, side to side.  I will take precautions to keep myself in the present and not travel into that dangerous fog as I did yesterday.  Hell is too short, brief, simple and inadequate of a word to even begin to describe the conditions of a severely abused infant-child’s experience is like.  There truly are no words to express or to explain that kind of trauma.  Trying to put those experiences into words can be an extremely dangerous occupation, one that I am not willingly going to participate in again.

Please refer to my previous writings about the dangers of DISCLOSURE.  I need to heed my own words.  Nobody else can do it for me.  I am still fragile today, raw and shaky.  I will go now and do what needs to be done:  BE GOOD TO ME.

As Sarton wrote:

“Able to bless and forgive
Ourselves.
This is what is asked of us.”

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Still brings a smile — watch this video!

TIGER MOTHER ADOPTS PIGLETS

And, MORE TO THE STORY with MORE PICTURES

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+FANTASTIC PBS FREE ONLINE DOCUMENTARY ON THE EVOLUTION OF OUR UNIQUELY HUMAN MIND

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This is a real treat, and FREE!

PBS Documentary – The Mind’s Big Bang – evolution of our mind – from the first time we made BEADS for personal ornamentation.  Cool!  We found decoration that reflected social relationships — tools, technology and social identity.  AND, we began to build on the knowledge of the older, wiser ones among us.

This film also clearly describes the development of Theory of Mind, which allows us to be — sneaky!  It talks about the evolution of language….two thirds of all our talking is about GOSSIP!

There’s a free toolbar you can download that open’s up a universe!!

NOTE:  The theory of Mind developmental stage that is formed between ages 4 – 5 is where I believe my mother’s Borderline mind went permanently astray!  Also, you can do other things on your computer as this documentary plays if you want to!  What a deal!  Be sure to control the size of the image by clicking that little square at the end of the slider-bar under the picture.

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Please feel free to comment directly at the end of this post or on

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Your Page – Readers’ Responses

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