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Monday, February 10, 2014.  It was into the waters of Prince William Sound in Alaska that my brother took me on his boat last June when he brought me up to visit him.  See these posts from June:

+SOME SCENES FROM MY RECENT ALASKA VISIT

+WHAT WAS OUR FAMILY ALASKA HOMESTEAD FROM THE AIR – REST OF MY ALASKA VISIT PICTURES

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Sometimes I wish I knew more about the way thoughts are connected within me.  A friend wrote in response to last night’s post, “I know the kind of loneliness you’re talking about.”  An entire inner chain of images, thoughts and feelings appeared to me because I realized I had NO IDEA that the post he referred to – +LESSONS FROM MY JEWELRY BOX – was even ABOUT loneliness!  I trust my friend absolutely so his response bore the weight that instigated an avalanche of connections for me – that I can only barely track.

How I feel (am) this afternoon seems to be more like dreaming than waking.  I don’t expect my dreams (what few I remember any more) to make any kind of sense.  But I DO expect myself to make sense in this world of waking!  How did my friend’s comment to last night’s post trigger an instant connection to my trip north to Prince William Sound (the site of the massive earthquake I note below during which at age 12 I experienced my menarche)?

My brother took me to the base of a calving glacier last June.  I will always believe the smell at the base of a calving glacier is the sweetest, purest one on earth.  How is purity tied together in my wondrous right brain that has such information connections not only to and through my body and its memories but also to what my soul knows and wants to tell me?

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This is all further connected to something that came through of me/to me while in phone conversation with a dear friend this weekend.  I was describing the weavings I have been creating:  “When they are all finished they feel like butterfly wings in my hands.”

Butterfly Wings.

There is another part of my history-magical connected to butterfly wings.  I have no idea where on this blog I have written about the white butterflies I saw on our Alaskan mountain homestead flutter around me as I sat on the earth, on the land – deeply, deeply wounded child that I was!  I always saw them in the same place, a place where a wonderful lemony tasting little plant grew.  The butterflies were smallish.  Some had purple,  some blue, or red, or orange…..  delicate painted edging on their wings that looked to me as if someone had carefully painted them with the tiny tip of a paintbrush from a watercolor box.

Just as I wrote those words a small connection appeared to me.  Because of the severe trauma of my childhood I could not wonder about life.  My mother was not only insanely abusive to me – I know now she was psychotic in her mental illness.  That fact removed sanity from the main part of my life so I never wondered why ANYTHING.  But I DID experience an appreciation of those white butterflies fluttering light as air around me.  “Who painted their wings?”  I knew painting the edges of butterfly wings like that would certainly be something I would love to do!

While I was speaking to my friend about my weavings I thought perhaps “Butterfly Wings” (Butterfly Wing Creations?  Designs?) belongs somehow in the name of my craftwork endeavors if I choose to have a name.  Not that I need or want a business – but I may be able to see weavings and my sewn bags this summer at craft shows with my daughter (and ironically, sharing a booth also with my ex).

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All of these connections are somehow connected to an aching stiffness at the base of my skull today.  I strongly sense this sensation is tied to a body memory related to being very small and having Mother grip me in her abusive powerfully forceful and painful way to shove me forward further into her rage – at me for….???? 

I don’t want to know what the memory is.  I don’t need to know.  I do know it is somehow connected to these connections!!  As I write this post that tension in my neck is subsiding – just as I suspected it would.

Her illness put her on the side of the horrible.  I was – and still am if I give myself permission to accept this – on the side of the beautiful and pure.  The innocent – still – in many ways.  We all are.

I would rather, if I could, spend all my waking hours sitting in a little dinghy as near as I could get to a calving glacier in Prince William Sound for as long as I live than do anything else “just for me.”

But I can’t do that as lonely as I am for the absolute wilderness I have loved from the instant I met it.  Without my attachment with the land I could not have survived all that happened to me – none of which I deserved. 

Meanwhile — there are connections.  They are like mysterious ripples interlacing and interlocking with one another in ways I do not comprehend.  I am grateful for them.  They are gifts to me.  They are a part of my life force.  Without them I could not continue being.

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1964 Alaska earthquake

The 1964 Alaskan earthquake, also known as the Great Alaskan Earthquake, the Portage Earthquake and the Good Friday Earthquake, was a megathrust earthquake that began at 5:36 P.M. AST on Good Friday, March 27, 1964.^[2] Across south-central Alaska, ground fissures, collapsing structures, and tsunamis resulting from the earthquake caused about 139 deaths.^[3]

Lasting nearly three minutes, it was the most powerful recorded earthquake in U.S. and North American history, and the second most powerful ever measured by seismograph.^[4] It had a moment magnitude of 9.2, making it the second largest earthquake in recorded history^[2][5]—the largest being the 1960 Valdivia earthquake in Chile.^[4]

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono – what a gift and thank you Ben!

Click here to view or purchase:  A STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read free for Amazon Prime customers.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are WELCOME and appreciated!

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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Sunday, February 9, 2014.  I thought I would write a rare humorous post.  Kind of like the man I mentioned in my last post who wrote a “happier song.”  My mood has passed.  By the time I rebooted this old computer that was acting too sluggish to write a thing, realized I was hungry so fixed a bowl of organic apple pieces, cheese and crackers, I sit here now having wiped a few more tears realizing that all I have to write about it what I always do:  Just my life.

True, my version of a jewelry box is an upside-down Avon box lid.  True, what I have thrown in there in tangled heap and dirty mess would not fit in the only jewelry box I have ever owned (and certainly still do not own) – a jewelry box that was precious to me as a child with its tiny ballerina dancer who popped up in front of her mirror all tutued and fancy.  I could wind up the music box, which in the era of my childhood made a quality sound as it pinged out “I Could Have Danced All Night,” so I could feel for a few more moments like a fairy princess.  After all, Mother gave me that jewelry box.  I believed this gift meant she loved me.

I have never in my life made a show of cleaning all of my jewelry until today.  I own nothing fancy, most of it coming from thrift stores over these past many years that, as I think about it, all adds up to the fact that I am getting old at 62 to not only have so many earrings and slender chains with baubles on them but to have accumulated so many memories of stages of my life that belong to each piece.

This collection spent the past seven years hanging from a piece of lace thumbtacked to the back of the bathroom door of the house I just moved out of last October 12th.  There are many that never moved from the first place on the lace I stuck them during those years.  My “professional” earrings, the ones I bought during and after graduate school when hope for a new and better life radiated from me all of the time.  Thanks for my trauma-related disabilities there is no more professional me to wear them.  What do I do with those earrings now?

The lovely seed-beaded earrings I made when I still had excellent vision over 20 years ago.  The images of turtles that came from a significant era of my life I never write about (and probably won’t).  That era has past.  Those memories are of times that were precious, of betrayals that ended in danger to myself and more significantly – and nearly tragically – to my children.

When the move out of my house down south was in full motion I did not take the time to carefully pack my loaded piece of lace or any of my hanging necklaces.  I threw them in a box, accumulated desert dust and all.  It feels important to me that I literally straighten out that mess.  I look forward to what I expect to find:  A reflected new small space within me of calm and glisten as each chain, each bead sparkles from my attention now.  A sense of order as each piece again takes a home for itself on a new piece of lace on a new wall in my new life.

I wasn’t prepared for the wave of razor pure sadness that sent tears down my cheeks as I handled a pair of earrings made of cheap metal and turquoise glass beads.  I like this pair although I haven’t had time to wear them since my Mexican neighbor, Antonio, placed them in my palm one night after he knocked on my Arizona door to bum yet another cigarette.  He learned well not to come asking me for things after dark unless he brought me something in trade.  A hot biscuit from his wife’s oven.  Some peaches from his tree.  A pair of earrings.

It makes me cry to write this.  I lived, as many readers know, right on the Mexican-American border fence line in the high desert in a rented house in the middle of a trailer park filled with people from Mexico who had nothing to speak of except a whole lot of love for one another.  I did not say goodbye to any but the one neighbor who appeared as my friend and I were pulling away in the U-Haul truck.  She came to say goodbye to me.

I miss my people down there.  I miss the children who grew from ages of 3 to 10, from 7 to 14.  Children whose lives I shared in so many ways over those years as they were my friends.  They helped me garden.  We did lots of art projects.  We made Playdo.  The very first day I moved into that house I hired a group of those children to pick up all the nails and screws in my driveway.  I kept those nails.  I hung all of my pictures in this apartment with those nails.  I am grieving for that home while I live now in this one 2000 miles north.

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I have never been so aware before as I will be from now on how every piece of jewelry I own and wear, be it so humble, contains such memories of the passing of my life.  I did not say goodbye when I left that little town because a huge part of me did not want to leave.  Could not really believe I WAS leaving. 

I could not face that loss.  It is hard for me now to face that loss — no matter how much I have gained here with my family — a loss is a loss.  (I have lost my appetite in this frigid place, trapped like a living bug in amber within this tiny apartment with day and night and day and night of sub-sub-zero weather outside.  I have lost my muscle tone.  I have become weaker than I have ever been in my life.  I need to come back from that.  I am teaching myself to eat again.  To remember to eat.  That seems so strange to me.  Yet — so human.)

I must live my life with my heart open.  I can no longer find any shortcuts.  No ways to close my feelings off from the flow of my life — at least not for very long.  I want to be in my little home down there.  I want to walk out my door, out my garden gate, across the gravel parking lot to Antonio and his family’s home.  I want to walk up their rough wooden steps to their trailer door, knock and be called to enter.

I want to tell them — not goodbye.

I want to tell them what I never said:  “I love you.  Having you in my life has blessed me so much.  I did not tell you goodbye.  I am sorry.  Please forgive me.”

I would hug them each.  I would cry.

I am crying now.

I guess I just skipped all the rest and went for the tears.  Or they have come for me.

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono – what a gift and thank you Ben!

Click here to view or purchase:  A STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read free for Amazon Prime customers.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are WELCOME and appreciated!

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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 Saturday, February 8, 2014.  Very sweet.  Very humble.  Very kind people.  But no drums tonight.  This was a fundraising chili dinner in the basement of a local smallish Lutheran church that is sahred between congretations, used in the evenings by the Tri-City Haitian Church.  A man did play guitar.  Songs he sang that he wrote.  Songs with care.  With a message.

After he sang three songs he commented that sometimes people tell him his songs are too sad.  So he sang one of the upbeat ones he wrote:  Someday I Want to Know What It Feels Like to Be Happy.

I know what a refugee might feel and mean who would write and sing such a perfect song.

All his lyrics and melodies were haunting – and good.  Very thoughtful.  Very heartfelt.

I could not tell from the crowd of all ages who comes to the church versus who was there to support the fundraising with the dinner.  But I asked.  I and my girls are welcome to attend regular services beginning 4 pm on Sundays.  I have no car.  How to get there?

Not sure.  Not sure of too many things except that this venture-adventure was far from a flop or a failure.  It was WONDERFUL doing something with my girls and little grandson.  I am so grateful they took me and enjoyed being there, too.  It was wonderful seeing so many beautiful youth in attendance.  SOMEWHERE there are drums.  They just were not there tonight.

I will go again.  I know I will go there again.  These seem like exactly the kind of people who will not be bothered by what my soul knows:  I have a gift.  The drum beats are in my hands. 

My daughter has offered her house as a place the drums can be played if need be outside of “church times.”  I cannot play in this apartment.

Time will tell.  So far I am pleased with myself that I have followed my simple dream – so far!!  How this will all play itself out – I do not know.  But I am hopeful.  And next time I go in those doors I will probably just experience a little anxiety rather than trepidation as I felt today! 

This is progress!

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono – what a gift and thank you Ben!

Click here to view or purchase:  A STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read free for Amazon Prime customers.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are WELCOME and appreciated!

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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Saturday, February 8, 2014.  I want to write this post quickly before the words that belong to it vanish like a mirage in the desert.  It is not always easy to FIND the words I need to express myself and it is not always easy to hold onto them long enough to express them, either!

I find myself thinking about a time years ago when I asked a professional waitress how on earth she managed to swing through a crowded room delivering full cups of coffee without spilling a drop.  “Simple,” she replied.  “I never look at what I am carrying.  If I do that – what I am carrying spills itself.”

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My word for today is

trepidation

“a nervous or fearful feeling of uncertain agitation“

This is a word that came into Modern English rather late.  The “early” words arrived before the 12th century.  Usually I search around for the origins of these kinds of newer words looking for the more ancient imagery in their word relationships.  Today – because I am PRESSED to trap my words in a post before they disappear to me – I will settle for this:

Origin of TREPIDATION

Latin trepidation-, trepidatio, from trepidare to tremble, from trepidus agitated; probably akin to Old English thrafian to urge, push, Greek trapein to press grapes

First Known Use: 1605

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As I have written elsewhere on the blog I have learned from the work of neuroscientist Dr. Allan N. Shore (and others like him) that early trauma especially during the first year of life in unsafe and insecure attachment relationship environments CHANGES the set point, the middle balance point of our developing nervous system so that it is NOT (and really never can/will be) resting at peaceful calm.  Our set point is something else – and very, very often it is TERROR that resides there.

Once a person responds to any kind of “challenge” in their environment their nervous system is supposed to return to a set point “of balanced equilibrium” that is at rest.  Not so for us….

Today what I want to say is that the older I get the smaller my world is getting and the less tolerance I have for ANYTHING good or bad that would intensify my emotional state.  I am simply exhausted!  Or so it seems to me.

It is very common for anyone with PTSD related difficulties in their body to increasingly narrow their world to control stimulation.  Quieter world = quieter nervous system/brain.

But what about something positive in my world?  Something I desire, hope for and WANT to do?

Same thing.

As I have written before I LOVE DRUMMING!  I have nobody to drum with!

In Fargo, ND (where I recently established myself) there is a Haitian refugee church that is tonight offering a public performance of their drumming that I imagine follows the style shown in this YouTube video:

BOTH of my beautiful grown daughters are attending this 5:30 pm performance with me today along with my 18-month-old grandson.  And I am TERRIFIED!  Filled to the BRIM with TREPIDATION!!

I don’t have to ask myself WHY????

I can no longer mask my true state of being through expert dissociation that kept me functioning pretty darn smoothly while I raised my children.  I am different now – left vulnerable to experiencing exactly how I am inside!!

I could probably list 100 reasons why I am afraid today — but all I am going to do here is say — “Be determined, Linda and be BRAVE!  GO!!”

I am the wrong age, the wrong gender, the wrong culture, ‘race’. the wrong religion to be able to actually DRUM with ANYONE!!  Yet my heart and the depths of my soul WANT to drum with SOMEONE!!  At least tonight we can go LISTEN!! 

My first step is to go bravely where I have not gone before accompanied by the two people (well, 3 counting the short one) I trust most in the universe!  I won’t even give space to thoughts about what disaster I think COULD happen tonight!

Just saying — surviving can be an EFFORT!!  CAN BE?  IS!!!!!

Stay tuned.  I will report upon this adventure — after I LIVE IT!!

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono – what a gift and thank you Ben!

Click here to view or purchase:  A STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read free for Amazon Prime customers.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are WELCOME and appreciated!

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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Tuesday, February 4, 2014.  When it comes to considerations of PTSD and the hippocampusthat is a part of our brain’s memory-processing paraphernalia, I suspect we are putting the memory cart before the memory horse if we assume that the risk for developing PTSD in the first place is tied to “something different about” the hippocampus of such people UNLESS we know and consider the presence or absence of early trauma in that person caused by early abuse and neglect (and even of trauma-related distress in the mother while carrying her child).

WHEW!  That was a long sentence which brings me to my morning’s thoughts that my dissociation, as it is connected to my nearly continual sense that NOTHING FEELS REAL to me on an ongoing basis, is probably connected to how my hippocampus was trauma altered in its development even from the time of my birth due to abuse from my psychotically mentally ill mother.

Dissociation is also tied to the sense of “depersonalization” just as it is to “derealization.”  For me this depersonalization aspect applies not only to my own sense of “not feeling real” but also to the sense that other people “don’t feel real” to me, either.

That’s a HELLUVA way to go through one’s life!

These facts are part of what fuels my passion that infant and child abuse MUST STOP!!  In my case I especially believe it was the INFANT abuse I suffered during the very important rapid growth and developmental stages of my RIGHT LIMBIC (emotional-social) brain region – of which the hippocampus is a part – that has resulted in this perpetual sense I have of NOTHING actually FEELING real to me.

Here I am spending at least 10 hours every weekday caring for my perfect, precious little grandson – WHO DOES NOT FEEL REAL TO ME!!  Here I am living near my nearly age-4 grandson, my two precious daughters – and THEY don’t feel real and I don’t feel real WITH THEM.

WHAT IS THIS state, ANYWAY?

Yes, it could be simply called a never-ending state of numbness.  But I am NOT numb on the inside where I fully feel the grief and anger I have about being forced to live my life with this condition that neither I nor anyone else can EVER FIX!  I was BUILT THIS WAY within an early environment of horrendous traumatic neglect and abuse. 

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I am not motivated at this point in my life to spend the hours of my life racing around the internet reading the latest research about nervous system and brain development as I was around the turn of this marvelous century we are now living in.  It would take not only state-of-the-art research but research that is both cutting-edge and “pushing the envelope” to answer the kinds of questions I ask as a survivor of early severe trauma.

I would want to know at what infant developmental stages and by what processes does our brain learn the difference between living beings and inanimate objects.  If an infant is not treated as a human being by someone who is not ACTING like a human being how are we supposed to know that HUMANITY exists with ourselves a part of it?

I want to know exactly WHEN the present moment becomes a PAST moment.  I want to know how fast this exchange happens along with how fast does our brain circuitry work to keep up with it?  I am asking, “When does the present moment become the past IN MEMORY and through what processes?”

I ask because this sense of derealization and of depersonalization is probably happening at that pace.  We are left without there being any time in our present moments to LIVE the felt experience of ourselves and others before our present becomes our past in memory form that is continually being tampered with by the changes trauma created in our brain’s development – and therefore with the way we are left experiencing our lives.

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I do believe that SOUL is involved and that the soul itself has powers of memory that must far surpass anything we will ever discover about the human physiologically-based memory processes.  Our soul will remember everything about our lives when we are in the next world without any physical body at all.  Not only will we (I believe) be held accountable to God for our every thought, feeling and action we accomplished in our physical lifetime but we will also be given spiritual understanding about the entire ball of wax!

That leaves me knowing one thing:  I can only do the best that I can do at every instant of my current life.  I need not feel guilty, ashamed or in any way responsible for the way my experience has been altered through my development under extreme traumatic stress in an unnatural and truly chaotic, bizarre and insane environment for the first 18 years of my life.

I can’t TELL this beautiful baby that I cannot FEEL him when he is laying in my arms or when I hold him close against me in the warmest hug possible!  I don’t even have the words to think about let alone really communicate to anyone else what I am trying to describe!

If the words do not yet exist in neurophysiological language I am certainly not going to be able to find them in the only language that might work – in poetry!

If I were going to try to say what “this is like” for me I would have to say that living in a body that was forced to develop itself within a nightmare world nearly beyond imagination has been left to live in a dream-like world that DOES NOT FEEL real in many important and meaningful ways no matter how I might work to wake up from that dream state.  I will NOT fully wake up – paradoxically – until I am in the next world with no body at all!

I do NOT believe that even the most well-meaning people who work to stop infant and child abuse fully GET IT about what happens to us for the rest of our lives as survivors.  We are condemned to live – DOOMED to live – for our entire life in a body that was CHANGED and made DIFFERENT in response to having to survive what was NOT SURVIVABLE!

As very little people we had to “go on being” in a world that paradoxically did everything possible to prevent us from doing so.  There is a severe price paid for being able to survive that kind of paradox.  It is the researchers who are devoting their entire professional life to trying to determine what that price is that I most admire and respect.

We survivors need to know what those people have to say!!

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono – what a gift and thank you Ben!

Click here to view or purchase:  A STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read free for Amazon Prime customers.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are WELCOME and appreciated!

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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Sunday, February 2, 2014.  In light of a mention by a commenter to my last post of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder I can only say that I will never live long enough to “recover” from the adaptations my body had to go through to survive the trauma I experienced from birth and for the next 18 years of my life that I suffered from severe abuse.

I instinctively defend against those who suggest that the “self-regulation” that was lost to me due to the trauma I experienced as my early physiological development was altered can ever be restored to me.  It is not possible.  I can gain useful information.  I can learn to gain increasing conscious control over how I experience life in my body.  But I cannot get back again (“re-cover”) what I never was able to acquire in a safe and secure early attachment environment in the first place.

Should I have nothing else to do in this lifetime but backtrack in some attempt to repair what cannot be repaired I would still be doing very little other than chasing my own invisible tail that “professionals” might suggest that I have – which I don’t have – so for me the “point” is a useless one!  I don’t care what “diagnostic label” anyone might wish to use to describe how I ended up living in an entirely different kind of body than I would have if I had not been exposed to the horrific trauma that I was for all those years. 

Yes, I do agree that gaining “understanding” of how a trauma changed body works is helpful.  But to intimate that those trauma changes can be undone is – ridiculous – and therefore dangerous in its misleading deception.

Yes, “PTSD is a radical shift from normal self-regulation to being trapped in a constant state of alarm.”  I might find momentary ways to avert the complete recognition that ALARM is my normal, ordinary state of being, but that is so far a cry from accepting as fact that I can make that ALARM state retreat into near nonexistence that I no longer accept that a state of “non-ALARM” is even a possibility for me to reach. 

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I have not studied Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD).  At this point in my life I consider only what I find of what I need to know as it is written directly within the texts of the neuroscientists themselves.  When I read even a few words about C-PTSD, even on an appearing reputable site, my inner self-defender will not let me continue reading.  I am now personally gifted with knowing what personally relates to me – and therefore APPLIES to me – and what would be helpful versus what would be NOT helpful and in fact would be harmful to me.

I am NOT speaking for or about ANYONE ELSE here.  I am talking about myself, and as I mentioned in my previous post I am very much isolated in the kind of trauma I experienced.  For example, I do not believe these words:  “Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a psychological injury.”

I know myself well enough by now at age 62 to know that what I suffer from is due to PHYSIOLOGICAL changes in the very construction of my nervous system-brain, in my “calm-stress response system,” even in my immune system due to severe trauma during the earliest very rapid stages of my development.  Certainly because the severity of the abuse I suffered never let up and lasted for 18 long years nearly all – if not ALL – of my later development was altered by the trauma in very complex ways.

I do not consider ANY of my difficulties to be “psychological” and I bristle and turn away from ANY so-called “psychologically-minded” professional who would claim to know me better than I know myself.  I have a well-honed inner truth detector that works for me.  I know when words ring true and when they don’t.  I do not compromise myself.  I owe no professional courtesy.  I do not NEED in any way to prove myself “right” nor do I need to prove anyone “wrong.”

I simply know what is true for me.

I absolutely encourage EVERYONE to find out what is true for them.  I speak only for myself — with a few cautions to others if they seem to apply.

Yes, I can agree with the whole list of what can “do this” to a person.  But if there is no rock solid trail of facts available about anyone’s earliest life going all the back to the health of their life in the womb of their mother nobody has enough information to complete the picture of what might CAUSE something called C-PTSD.  They therefore have no real clue how to “fix it” or even if it is possible to “fix it” in most circumstances where it might be found.

When something is put forth by any person or group of people as being THE TRUTH – and there is even ONE exception to that “truth” – no truth AS THE TRUTH exists in such a claim.  Researchers refer to “an acceptable margin of error.”  When I am a member of that margin I don’t buy what’s being touted no matter WHO is selling it.

Psychology as a field of study has, in my thinking, so joined forces both with the Western Medical Model and with the pharmaceutical industries that I remain skeptical of any truth supposedly discovered in the arena within which all of these “schools” operate.  Having a PART of the truth is not the same thing as having THE TRUTH – which by definition would require that ALL of the truth is known.

Nobody at this point in the evolution of humanity can claim to know all of the truth.  We only know what has been discovered thus far, and even those discoveries are colored by the societal belief system of those making their claims.  There are biases in “science.”  Those biases create blind-spots that those of us who have been physiologically changed in our development by severe early trauma need to work to pay attention to.

In my universe any time someone uses the term “psychological” to describe the great difficulties we work with as we continue to survive given all that has happened to us even within our very body we live in I heed my own inner alert warning system that tells me I am being judged as being somehow “damaged” and inferior to the person(s) using that term “against me.”

My truth is that I am DIFFERENT than those people are.  The changes that happened in our development make perfect sense.  Without them we would be dead.  It’s that simple.  It is the MISMATCH that we experience as survivors physiologically formed in a malevolent environment between HOW we are in a more benevolent world versus how those who were physiologically formed in a benign environment are in this world that creates the complications we live with.

Any “psychological” information that we may discover on our own or that is given to us by anyone else that does not begin with a thorough presentation of these facts is not honoring us with the truth of what we most need to know.

As one blog reader has so clearly put it, “We fly with a different flock.”  We are not (for the most part and I do recognize some exceptions, my mother being one of them) sick people.  We are changed.  We are different.  We are complicated beyond ordinary due to what we have lived through and continue to live with. 

Our lives have been very difficult and they continue to be very difficult.  We have the right to receive factual information that will help us understand ourselves and one another better.  But more than anything we have to trust our own inner guidance system.  If anything we encounter along our healing journey makes us feel in ANY WAY bad about ourselves there is truth missing.

Honor yourself.  Listen to yourself.  Trust yourself.  Never stop asking questions!  Never give your inner power to anyone!

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono – what a gift and thank you Ben!

Click here to view or purchase:  A STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read free for Amazon Prime customers.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are WELCOME and appreciated!

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment

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Friday, January 31, 2014.  I don’t know how my younger sister spells the term she coined for ‘it is finished’.  It’s either ‘tute fini’ or ‘toot fini’.  Hard to tell but my guess is it’s the latter.  It’s funnier that way even though many times events that can be lumped into that ‘toot fini’ category are not necessarily remotely funny.  Today is a ‘toot fini’ day for me.  I could say “fine with that” if I even knew why on earth THIS day and its events – that are TOTALLY unrelated to me – are bothering me at all!

I am a great one for saying that trauma repeats itself until the lessons contained within it are learned so that ‘mistakes’ related to it don’t happen again.

It’s not necessarily that the exact same trauma will repeat itself.  It doesn’t even mean that a ‘like’ trauma will repeat itself.  It can ‘just’ mean that inside of a person the FEELING STATES directly tied to the first trauma are repeating.  Sometimes that happens when a ‘trauma trigger’ arrives upon the scene of our lives that sets things deep within us to jumping around – or even those that lie close to the surface – because feelings are awakened so that patterns related to the trauma resonate – again.

Like a tuning fork the ‘sound’ of another woman today becoming my ex-husband’s 2nd ex-wife are reverberating inside of me.  This is ENTIRELY illogical and as far as I can tell are entirely unproductive!  Why should his 2nd ‘toot fini’ and HER 1st ‘toot fini’ awaken MY old ‘toot fini’ with this man?

It was 29 years ago this week that Joe ‘toot finied’ me so he could ‘formally’ date the woman he had been chasing after (and she chasing him) for 3 years prior without my knowledge.  A helpful neighbor in the small town I was living in at the time was kind enough (!!??) to telephone me the day before Joe’s 1st divorce went through as he ‘toot finied’ me to tell me of the 3-year history between those two.  “In case you don’t know….” she had said.  No, I did not know.

How I feel right now has nothing to do with a desire to pile up mistakes he made to see how his pile matches up with mistakes I made.  Or does it?

A part of me is asking Joe in my mind, “Was it worth it?”

I have realized since I happened to return to this area after all these years to reside here while this pair’s ‘toot fini’ occurred today that I never thought about any of that past at the time enough to figure out that those 3 revolving-door years directly coincided with the time I sought intensive and very difficult treatment for the first time to try to recover from the horrific abuse I had experienced as a child.  I was literally fighting for my life at that time.

Joe came to joint therapy sessions with me.  WHY?  He was at that time already hot after another woman – or hot with her.  The DECEPTION is what is getting me now!  I trusted Joe at that time and during those hard, hard months of treatment.  He was my husband.  Who else beside my therapists at that out-patient clinic was I supposed to trust?

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It is way easier said than done to discover the lessons that trauma needs to teach us.  I have no desire or any intention of ever getting involved with another man again.  I am learning that although I never spent any time thinking about it over these past years I did assume all of the ‘badness’ upon myself that led to that divorce.  At least I now carry only my 50% share as I mentioned in a post a few weeks back.

A spiteful part of myself with cute little horns and a pointy tail is “tee-heeing” at both of those two.  Do I normally rejoice in other people’s suffering?  “Not I.” 

So this must not be a normal time for me!

Once this day passes and takes its ‘toot fini’ with it I expect that I will move on — again — just as surely as those two are doing. 

I do strongly suspect that if I did not happen to know that ‘her’ mental illness of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) made that marriage an impossible affair in the end that I would not have the share of reverberations within me that are hearing the echoes of what happened between my father (another ‘nice guy’) and my mother that I do.  Was Joe swooped off his feet by her charms the way Father was by Mother’s — all to DISASTROUS ends – ESPECIALLY for me?

In other words….  As I write these words I hear my own question:   “Was I painfully struck again in my life by BPD where I was vulnerable through the impact this disease had on another man important to me?”

It seems that I was.

So while I was all snotty-nosed on the floor in therapy sessions pounding the depths of my pain out on pillows from my horrendous abusive childhood BPD was smoothly eating the entrails out of my marriage without my awareness just as it ate the entrails out of my infancy and childhood?

It seems that it was.

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I guess I am rather dismayed at myself that never once in the past 29 years since that neighbor woman called me the day before Joe’s divorce of me went through did I ever do the simple 3-year math to easily figure out what I see now.  No matter if BPD was involved or not in that charmed pair I was still being majorly betrayed at a time when I could not have been more vulnerable.  I know what that time in therapy was like for me — and so did Joe.  The fact that he said NOTHING and kept pretending he was on my side through that time — well…..

How did I MISS THAT piece of math?

Is this only coming clear to me now because I happen to know she is BPD?  I wish that I didn’t know — but families tend to garner information that sooner or later appears whether you want it to or not.

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Tick tick tock your way past me ole toot fini day!!   Be toot finied with me!!  I want nothing to do with ANY OF THIS!  So let go of me and be off with you!!!  That damage was done to me a long, long time ago.  I have not carried anger over any of this for all of these years and I do not want it now.

What is it I need to be learning here?

I will possibly be the last one to know.

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono – what a gift and thank you Ben!

Click here to view or purchase:  A STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read free for Amazon Prime customers.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are WELCOME and appreciated!

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment

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Wednesday, January 29, 2014.  I search for answers and solutions in every direction I can think of as I try to make it through this life.  While I don’t especially recommend an astrological angle for anyone else on their journey I have found that when I have come to the most difficult junctures of my adult life some kind of astrological investigation of my chart – which I consider to be “an energy map” of my life – offers me some solace because it gives me WORDS and CONCEPTS I can use to inform my conscious thinking.

Years ago a very knowledgeable astrologer, Zane, pointed out the great “hole” in my chart that exists in the 4^th house of my chart.  In astrological terms this whole exists in the form of a T-square with a missing piece in Capricorn in my 4^th house. 

It is considered that such a missing piece in such a placement can dominate one’s experience of life as it motivates great effort to constructively and positively resolve the conflicts and problems existing in this kind of “energy map.”  Some of the most powerful contributions to the world have been made by people who have found a way to free their life force from this kind of restraint.

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This morning I found this:

The Imum Coeli and the Fourth House

The fourth house represents the most private, hidden area of your psyche, the opposite of your public image and the face you show the world. It is also concerned with all the things that you bring with you from your past; your roots, your family history and your home. Here, the search for knowledge which began in the third house ends and we come home to ourselves, settle down and reconnect with the well-springs of our being. The IC, or Imum Coeli, which lies opposite the chart’s Midheaven, is also often found here. Whatever Zodiac sign you may have here in your personal chart, the fourth house always corresponds to Cancer and the Moon as well.

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I have never tried to understand that term, “Imum Coeli” before today.  I still don’t understand it but I do understand that I am struggling greatly at this point in my life as the harshness of winter seems to be pushing against the essence of who I am with great force.  Due to the frigid conditions outside of my door I am LITERALLY “locked” within my apartment.  Having left my home far behind me this apartment feels no more home to me than a parking spot.

Yet I KNEW I CHOSE to make this move and that upon doing so I was going to face head-on every aspect of this difficult and complicated placement situation in my being.  It lies so near my core I cannot separate how I FEEL from who I am.

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The words Zane gave me years ago about this situation underlying myself in my life were:

“Capricorn, especially in a conflict within, is about REASONS TO KEEP THE SEED ALIVE.”

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I have been forced to live with great sadness, grief and “depression” all of my life directly due to the 18 years of severe abuse I suffered from birth.  I have stopped working on my books as I place my child history within the context of my psychotic abusive mother’s words because I COULD NOT at this time of my life pull myself through her description of me in her letters to my grandmother because I can SEE the depression – the great overwhelming SADNESS in myself as a child her treatment of me directly CAUSED!!!

In a very strange way my entire childhood and my entire life pattern is reflected in my astrological chart – the map of me is as specific as would be a GPS guidance system of travel in the material plane on this planet.

WHY???

I do NOT believe in reincarnation or in karma.

I do believe that God has reasons why our life exists in certain  ways and that the answers our soul needs about things that have happened to us – especially as very little people who hurt us – will be revealed to us in our future life of eternity that DOES NOT include our returning to this physical world.

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In the home of my body where I live severe abuse has left me living in emotional agony most of the time.  This is the truth.  I live my life not only WITH this legacy built into my body but IN SPITE of it – the best that I can.

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To discover a scientific background for what I am describing to two online simple searches and take a look at what comes up:  (1) genes child abuse depression, and (2) genes child abuse suicide.

In both cases research has shown that severe early abuse can trigger genes for these problems that would not have been triggered if the early trauma had not happened.  Even more significantly the research shows that having ANY SAFE AND SECURE ATTACHMENT RELATIONSHIP WITH A CONSISTENTLY AVAILABLE ADULT is the main modulating factor for the interplay between early severe trauma and genetic potentials.

There is much more information available – on this blog and elsewhere on the internet about these facts.  Without the warmth of the southeastern Arizona desert, its glorious blue skies, the multicolored hues of its landscape, the sculptural structure of mountains and unique vegetation I have chosen to place myself within a physical environment that is the antithesis of what my increased well-being required except for one overwhelmingly powerful factor:  I AM IN THE PRESENCE OF FAMILY and able to make a positive impact in the early life of the developmental stages of my two young grandsons.

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A few days ago I followed my astrological-related investigations into words that can help me structure my experience in ways that I can relate to right now into a site that gave me the following regarding a hole in a chart concerning a T-square in Capricorn.  This is greatly connected for me to concerns related to –

“accomplishments and tangible, material expressions of identity.”

The abuse I suffered left me struggling with Dissociation Identity Disorder – without IDENTITIES.

Had I not found a way to give into the horrendous force Mother put upon me through abuse to disappear as an individual person with my own self, my own identity – I have absolutely no doubt that she would have killed me in her psychotic will to keep me NOTHING BUT a projection of her own perceived “evil” self.

Nobody was there to help me – but me.

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I do not like to write about these deeper concerns of my survival that I live with daily.  I don’t like to experience them, either!

I have “made things” all of my life.  It wasn’t until I found and read those words about identity itself being connected to this process that I realized this is a “To be or not to be” concern for me – very literally.

I MAKE therefore I am.

I am therefore I MAKE.

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Some of the making processes I have undertaken have been very large and involved moving the earth itself – by hand – in buckets.  I built an adobe addition on my landlady’s house in Taos and walked away.  I built a massive gorgeous adobe garden in Arizona and walked away from it.  I make – I give away – I share – and I do not make money because THAT part of the making process has so far eluded me (except for the brief time I sold my sewn bags in Arizona last summer which was very fun and positive for me – and SO RARE an opportunity).

Once upon a time I even traveled far to achieve a master’s degree in art therapy specifically because it is the PROCESS of making that matters most to me, not any product per se.

I have had times when all I could do was beg bags of rags from thrift stores for free so I could crochet heavy rugs which I used or gave away.  95% of what I hauled the 2000 miles on this move north – thanks to the greatest generosity of my family who covered the costs – was STUFF to MAKE STUFF out of.

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I would not consider publishing any book that does not have my daughter’s name clearly involved to reflect her work.  I do not want the money, either, unless there turns out to be quite a lot of it down the road – which I doubt considering the difficulty of the subject I write about.  (Meanwhile I struggle along in poverty on disability fixed income.)

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It is scary to live on the edge of this precipice.  It is humbling to write a post such as this one about my experience.  I do not desire “the moon.”  I just want to feel OK!  It is vital for me to know that it is not “my fault” that I achieve that OK status so very very VERY seldom.  The reasons for my struggles are due to trauma changes to my developing physiology from the time I was born.

What kind of SENSE can I MAKE out of this kind of suffering that severe early abuse and neglect survivors cope with all of their lives?

It was ALL unnecessary and it was ALL preventable!  Stop the abuse and neglect of infants and children and this suffering will stop!  Not for those of us whose body has already been trauma changed but for the FUTURE of those destined for this kind of suffering if nobody intervenes to prevent it.

Yes, it appears from any reading of my astrological mapping that I was destined for exactly what I have and do experience in this lifetime.  The inner pressure that is contained in “the reasons to keep the seed” of ME alive is about making something out of all of this!  I have to focus on my hopes that something I know and attempt to express can help someone else.

I know not what else to do and know no other way to be.  For all of my struggles I still AM ME.  The seed of me IS still alive.  I intend to keep it that way.  Will I ever sprout into a world of well-being?  Will I ever put roots down in the soil of just being OK?  I don’t know.  That future still awaits me.

What I do know is that every moment I can spend with my family right now is worth more to me at present than anything else I can think of.  That does not mean that right here at home in the center of me that there isn’t a whole lot of other stuff going on that is far from pleasant.  I never stop trying to learn what that means.

Thank you for reading!

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono – what a gift and thank you Ben!

Click here to view or purchase:  A STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read free for Amazon Prime customers.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are WELCOME and appreciated!

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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Tuesday, January 28, 2014.  Given the nature of my life and work it isn’t hard for me to find metaphors around me that give me pause to think.  The idea that our life is like a tapestry is a common image.  Yet because I now have a loom to warp I begin any thoughts I might have about that tapestry right at the beginning. 

Not only do I have to warp my loom if I want to weave a single thing upon it but I am working from that point forward with yarn I have spun from the stinky mess of raw sheep fleece.  From that point, in the drab place I have landed myself in, I now weave simply to bring more color into my life.

All seemed to be going relaxingly well this past weekend as I again measured off my warp –

And went through the careful process of threading each thread in order through the rigid heddle and winding this warp onto my loom.  Suddenly right at the very end I discovered a very near disaster!  I had threaded my heddle upside-down!

True, I am one of the few who can tell what I mean to show in this picture!  Clue:  What you see on the right side is my work to correct all that is wrong on the left side of the heddle here!

That little notch at the bottom of the heddle was at the TOP when I carefully threaded this thing.  WRONG!  With no possibility of actually weaving a thing on this loom without correcting my error I set to work….

carefully pulling each thread out and threading it in again correctly!

All fine and good but yes, irritating!  I will not be making that mistake again!

Of course this whole process gave me time to think about what happens to the lives of infants and children who suffer from trauma in their earliest attachment caregiver relationships so that the “warp” of their nervous system and brain is set WAY off track from optimal in development from the start of their lives!

How are we supposed to weave a great super-duper tapestry of life on a warp that was all messed up from the very beginning?

I could straighten my mess out here.  But straightening out my life from the mess my psychotically abusive mother made of me for the first 18 years of my life?

NOT EAZY-PEAZY, I assure you!  And in many significant ways – IMPOSSIBLE!

Our nervous system and brain have a very particular exacting process of development that does not sit well with the interruptions early trauma creates!  An extremely high price is paid by the survivor of early infant and child abuse and neglect.  The developmental neuroscientists can now name the changes our development endures one step at a time in early trauma environments.

I can think of no simpler way to put it than — OUR WARP IS MESSED UP!

I mean — MESSED UP!  And in ways that cannot simply be corrected.  The best many of us can hope to achieve is a thorough understanding of what traumas we endured, at what age going all the way back, often to our womb life and the health of our mother.  Who hurt us?  Who was NOT there to help us, who WAS there to help us, and most importantly — How did the trauma we experienced change our development all the way down to how our genes manifest themselves?

Then we look at the raw material — what GOOD things, what resiliency factors were inside of us and available to us that let us weave the very best tapestry of ourselves in our lives that we possibly could?

Most importantly — we have NOT GIVEN UP!!  Not once!  Not ever!

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I thought I had achieved a great stage of progress in my healing years back when I was able to know inside of myself that my entire infancy-childhood was life in a holocaust environment.  These last few days I have “revised my forecast.” 

I was a Prisoner of War.  A POW.  Whatever horrors my mother carried within her from her own traumatic childhood turned her inside out so that her hell was externalized in such a way she could PUT ME IN THERE instead of herself.  Yes, that was not only mentally ill of her but psychotically so!

18 years from birth forward – a POW of Mother’s war.  No wonder I hate trauma that runs down the generations and lands on the innocent and helpless little ones!

Just saying….

I came out of all that doing the best I can to make my life beautiful in any way I can — from the inside out — messed up warp and all.

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono – what a gift and thank you Ben!

Click here to view or purchase:  A STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read free for Amazon Prime customers.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are WELCOME and appreciated!

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Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

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