Tag: child abuse prevention

+I WILL FORGET THE ANGELS’ PRESENCE NO MORE

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Wise are the mysterious promptings of the heart that sometimes cause us to make new connections in our thoughts, to say things to those we care deeply about, to finally find our own courage to stand by what we know as our own personal truth, and to let ourselves leap into the feared unknown so that we can find hope for ourselves and for others that we never knew existed before.

I have a nearly 20-year-old cassette tape Walkman with headphones that I use while I do my 45 minute near-daily jog.  I only have two tapes that work in the player.  I have tried all kinds of other ones, but I have decided that the bands that move the tape must be geared only to the exact weight of these two tapes — and nothing else.  One is a Chet Atkins tape that is obnoxious to listen to — hard as that is for me to believe!  The music is clipped and fakey to me, no matter how great the talent recorded on it.

The other one is a Stevie Nicks tape, The Wild Heart.  I have listened to that tape throughout my jogs so many times I can’t count them.  Yet suddenly yesterday, on my 59th birthday, there was one line from one song that leaped out not only into my ears, but into my heart, mind and soul so loudly that all other sounds on the tape completely disappeared.  I can’t even say at this moment (until I do today’s jog and hear the song again) what the name of the song even is — but here is the line:

“I BLAME THE ANGELS!”

At that moment something changed inside of me — the greatest birthday present I could ever have been given.  I can’t name or describe the change exactly, but I can feel it.  For the first time in my life I can feel, sense and almost physically see that all the supposed empty space around me, around all of us here on this earth is filled not only with air — but also with angels!

There are actually so many of them that I don’t know how they fly around without bumping into one another!  I guess they have their own version of traffic control, because “Oh, my GOLLY!  There’s a whole LOT of them!”

And each of them is here to help all of us.

Well, I humbly must admit that I have to wonder how it could have taken me all the way through time to my 59th birthday to reconnect to something I so absolutely knew as a child on that mountain I had no question.  I will try to scan in a photograph that my sister just sent to me that will (again, and hopefully more clearly) introduce you to the Angel on the Mountain that was my closest friend and companion during my abusive childhood.

(Give me a moment here.  I have to dig through this pile of photographs for the one I am thinking of.)

I first met this angel when I was 7. She was more real to me than anything else in my life, and she was my Companion and my Comfort.

This angel was a Presence in my life. There was in feeling no distance between us. While I could see her visually across the valley and over there perched on her mountain peak, I felt bonded to her.

This angel heard everything I ever said to her, but mostly in my misery I had no words, yet I knew she ALWAYS knew exactly who I was and what I felt.  I knew she always watched over me and never left ‘my side’ — and never would.

I hope you can detect her up there.  In my senses she was alive — and every time I looked up at her I was in a different spot, never exactly in the same one twice, so her shape changed subtly with my movements as if she, too, could move — though of course I never THOUGHT about these things.

I can look at this photograph my mother took probably in 1959 and there on the left in the back, at the end of the mountain range across from our Alaskan homestead where this picture was taken, I can see that angel up there as clear as day!

Her head is turned slightly to her right, and as a child I knew without ever thinking of it that she was looking at me, that she could see me just as clearly as I could see her.  Her wings spread out to her left and right, her dress cascades down the mountaintop below her.  In the summer she appeared as she does here.  In the winter she donned her winter dress, her halo turned whiter and her wings grew in vastness along the top of the mountain’s crest.

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Yesterday as I loudly heard the words of Stevie’s song, “I blame the angels,” it was like a veil was torn away that has kept me from feeling the presence of angels like I was able to with THAT Angel on the Mountain when I was small and so terribly hurting.  I never knew I created that veil after I ‘grew up’.  In fact, I have shrouded my entire feeling experience of my childhood under this same (or similar) veils.

These veils, or shrouds, have buffered me from the emotional memory reality of my childhood suffering, as well as from most of the dissociated specific facts of my childhood memories.  I had to not only endure and survive my childhood, I ALSO had to endure and survive my adulthood!

Part of how I did that was to cast over my first 18 years of life a sort of cloak that not so much made it invisible as it did dim and obscure it from my awareness as I made my childhood so out-of-focus and obscure (like having a blindness, a terrible ‘vision’) that I could direct my attention elsewhere (at my adulthood).

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The way my thinking works, all of this I am writing about seems closely connected to an experience I had within hours after my double mastectomy surgery in December of 2007.  Nobody had told me prior to surgery what they told me afterward, and perhaps in part because of this I experienced the following:

I was given IV morphine for the first 20 or so hours after surgery.  During that time I did one very important activity — I stretched!  I sat up in bed, raised my arms as high over my head as I possibly could, and I stretched.  I continued to move my arms in this wide stretch in all directions — yes as I think of it, not unlike a butterfly might stretch its wings when it first exits its cocoon (or a new angel).  And as I instinctively performed this stretch without thought or intention, I could hear and feel (though there was no pain) a strange ripping, crackling, snapping inside my shoulders, across my chest and back.

I thought nothing of this until hours later when the surgeon stopped into my room and mentioned that many women experience a limitation in their range of motion due to this surgery.  As she verbally described what this limitation would be like I naturally raised my arms and searched for this limitation within myself.

It wasn’t there.

I had broken through whatever that kind of limitation could have been even before anyone had told me of its possible existence.

I mention this now because in my thought connections I realize that I am again experiencing a related kind of ripping through limitation.  Whatever veil-shroud I naturally created to obscure the pain, horror and reality of my infant-childhood of trauma and abuse  — because I HAD to do it to survive my adulthood — ALSO numbed my ability to experience my ‘Angel Love’.

Some part of that veil was ripped away yesterday on my birthday as I jogged around listening to Stevie Nicks wake up and hone in her musical echos, my ‘angel senses’.

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I realize now as I write that I am tired of words.  As a child, back there within that veiled and shrouded world of trauma and trouble, I had very little use for words, and I certainly did not use them to think with.  I was fully capable of thinking without words.  In that state of being, I could simply BE with that angel, a fact that at this moment helps me know a broader sense of Shakespeare’s statement, “To be or not to be.  That is the question.”

That is not an itty bitty personalized reality.  It is as big as the creation all of us are a part of.  I know myself well enough now to know I don’t think in terms of ‘faith’, and not even in terms of ‘belief’, either.

I didn’t have ‘faith’ in my intimate interrelationship with that Angel on the Mountain.  I didn’t have ‘belief’ in her unending and absolute love for me.  Both she and I were simply BE-ING.  We existed.  We were.

As I continue to stumble forward at this moment in my world of words I also know now that I can thank the fact that our family had no indoor bathroom for much of the assistance I received from my relationship with the presence of that Angel.  Sooner or later, no matter what punishment my mother was at the moment engaged in regarding me, I had to use the outhouse.

Those moments I walked out the door of our strange canvas-covered abode into the open air of the wilderness I was both in those moments NOT in my mother’s presence at the same time I WAS in the presence of that Angel as if she and I existed together in an entirely different universe than the one my mother existed in.

Most of my childhood my beaten body and my broken heart bled tears.  During the brief intermissions in abuse created by my having to go outside the ‘house’ into the air of wilderness freedom I was automatically blessed by the presence of that ever-present Angel on the Mountain who I understood without question knew everything about me and compassionately cared.

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Yesterday I was reawakened to what that feels like not only to be so loved by an Angel but to be able to receive that love as naturally as I receive air.  THAT angel was situated on THAT mountaintop and never left it (although her love felt like a physical presence as she expanded herself all the way across that valley to wrap me in it).  What I received for my birthday gift yesterday is not only the reawakened sense and knowledge of what that love FEELS like, but also the knowledge that there are angels EVERYWHERE that are all full of that same love for humanity.

I have no desire to complicate this gift with thoughts about ‘proof’ or ‘religion’.  These angels seem to be as much a part of this creation I am a part of as everything else is.  They simply ‘BE’.  I have greatly missed knowing this.  No matter what else I have had to ‘forget’ about my childhood, I will forget the existence and presence of these loving, compassionate, caring angels no more — hopefully forever.

(I swear!  I feel as though I am walking through ANGEL SOUP now and they don’t mind a bit!)

(The song lyric is from Stevie Nicks’ song “Wild Heart,” and literally is “Blame it on the angels.”)

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CLICK HERE – TALKING ABOUT THE POWER OF LOVE

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+SEVERE EARLY ABUSE SURVIVORS: LEARNING TO READ, IT’S MORE THAN YOU THINK

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This is my 59th birthday post today.  I am deadly (life-ly) serious about this!  Learning how to read?  YES!  What is different about US and why-how it matters:  We severe infant-child abuse survivors, with our trauma-changed body-brain-mind-self, life in a different world because we were made in, by and for a different (malevolent rather than benign-benevolent) world.  I am going to present two very short articles from “O” – The Oprah Magazine that I pulled out while I was searching for little images to cut out for my daughter to use in her light switch collage project.

Because I am a severe, severe infant-child abuse survivor, and because I was FORCED to go searching for the truth nearly seven years ago when my youngest child left home (my serious disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder trigger), I have LEARNED A LOT.  It is the purpose of my blog writing, and my greatest hope that somehow what I share in everything I write can benefit the suffering FEW (overall and in perspective) of us that are severe early abuse survivors.

Yet at the same time I mention and take seriously that ONLY a recognizable half of our current population is seen by researchers to have had a safe and secure enough early attachment environment (good-enough benevolent) to NOT have ended up with some degree-version of an insecure attachment disorder that affected every single aspect both of their early growth and development and therefore how they experience and live their life.

What I see happening — and what will continue to happen for the roughly 10% + of US – the severe early neglect and abuse survivors — is that not only did our early traumatic environment change our development, including the way our genetic code manifests and operates — we are DISSED (disrespected) in every possible way from that early point forward.

We NEED information.  We need to understand the platform that we stand on within our physiology — our body-nervous system-brain-immune system-mind-self AS IT TRULY EXISTS.  We need to STOP the disempowering (life force leakage) that continues to happen for us because we live in a society that has not yet recognized the power that early infant-childhood deprivation and abuse in a malevolent environment has to  CHANGE  development and create lifelong complications for us in everything we face.

These two little articles present me with an opportunity to elucidate what the ‘gibberish’ I am talking about!

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Without further explanation, please read these (right-click on image and choose ‘open in new tab or window’,  and on page it brings up, use ZOOM from your toolbar View button if you need to):

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Those of you readers who have followed this blog for a period of time can probably already know what I am going to say.  In the first article we are reading about how MOSTLY safe and securely attached people are likely to experience ’empty nest’.  Nobody ever tells us that we early abuse survivors are NEVER GOING TO HAVE A CHANCE to experience what is being touted here as not only POSSIBLE, but within the realm of NORMAL.

No, for the abuse survivors I am talking to and about, we fit into the ‘tainted’ category of “Oh well, what else can be expected of THESE PEOPLE?  They were already flawed, already depressed.  Let’s just ignore them (after we DISS them) and go on with our happy, well-adjusted lives!”

Yes, ‘already depressed’ people are going to experience MEGA difficulties when their primary attachments are disrupted, altered and perhaps nearly evaporated.  They are also the likely ones NOT to have good partner relationships that would help support then through these transitional passages in adult life.

We MUST begin to understand the insecure attachment ‘disorders’ and the changes they created in our genetic code expression (that’s how abuse activates most depression genes in the first place) so that we can all get on with the business of recognizing that if we choose to ACCEPT the existence of early infant-child abuse, we are choosing to punish those survivors with our societal arrogance and ignorance.

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The same pattern exists in this second article about “Smoking & the Blues.”

“Oh, those ‘mentally ill’ and those ‘depressed’ (flawed) individuals….”

MOST of so-called mental illness, and I would guess a whole lot of ‘depression’ is directly tied in its origin and its continued existence to early infant-child abuse, neglect, maltreatment and trauma that so changed the little one’s early growth and development that these ‘mental illnesses’ had no choice but to manifest.  Those ‘mental illnesses’ go hand-in-hand with what our body had to do to adjust enough within our malevolent early environment to survive at ALL!

Again and again and again I will mention — it is of HIGHEST value and importance to begin to KNOW the truth about subjects like these two high-in-the-sky-apple-pie articles are ACTUALLY — and in an undistorted REAL world talking about (in other words, in a word without childish denial and magical thinking).  What you will find when you do a Google search using just these three simple terms for your search means more to me than anything that has ever been discussed in connection with “O”:

CDC ACE STUDY

No kidding!  Take a look, a refresher if you have done so before and follow those links that show up there!  (And I would suggest a serious study of this information for all attached to the ‘O-Empire’.)  When I point the proverbial “GET REAL!” finger at Oprah and all she represents — as clearly demonstrated by the angle of these two articles and the slanted information they present — we have to KNOW OUR OWN TRUTH AND OUR OWN REALITY.

The CDC’s (Center for Disease Control) ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) Study is ongoing and is finally carrying enough absolute WEIGHT to begin to displace the biases, the stereotypes, the prejudices, the ignorance and the PARTICIPATION MYSTIQUE that our society continues to wrap around so-called ‘mental illnesses’ at the same time our society will not recognize with grateful appreciation, humility and even SHAME what the HAVES were given in their earliest infant-child caregiver interaction environments in CONTRAST to what the HAVE NOTS were not given!

The kinds of changes that we were forced to make in our physiological development to endure and survive within our deprived malevolent early world DO NOT GO AWAY.  The contribute to, exacerbate, and CAUSE the difficulties for us over the duration of our lifespan that the CDC ACE Study recognizes — and these ridiculous “O” – Oprah articles DO NOT!

WHO IS READING AND WEEPING NOW!  It’s our time to empower ourselves to know who we are and how we are in the world WAS NEVER OUR CHOICE!  We have long ago paid the price for our survival or we wouldn’t even be here with our complicated body and our complicated life.

At the same time, “Society around us — WAKE UP!  Get real!  And be grateful you never suffered as we have!  Get with it!  Blaming and shaming victim-survivors is so PASSE!”

(These are the same kinds of processes described regarding autism in my previous post.  We need to add early abuse and neglect to the array of possible toxins and realize that nearly ALL so-called ‘mental illnesses’ are included in the kinds of consequences that originate from interactions with ‘malevolent’ and toxic early environments during early human developmental stages from conception onward.)

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+RESEARCH: EPIDEMIC OF AUTISM AMONG YOUNG

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Is it abuse to pollute the growing and developing body-brain of our young?  This article on childhood autism increases came into my email box through a group I belong to — looks to me like one of the ‘classic’ windows for epigentic forces to alter genetic expression which may then possibly move forward through the generations affecting not only current offspring, but bringing the genetic responses and changes forward into the future.

What do we consider ‘acceptable risks’ and ‘acceptable losses’?  Take a look:

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-barrie-nd/child-autism-epidemic-fir_b_696179.html

Child Autism Epidemic Firmly Linked to Environment

Stephen Barrie, ND

Author, medical researcher, entrepreneur

Autism among U.S. children has reached epidemic proportion. And it’s getting worse by the year.

Since the ’70’s, there has been a 60-fold increase in American children with autism. Currently one in every 100 U.S. children and one in every 58 boys are being diagnosed with autism. That’s over 2.6 percent of all male children in America. The number of autistic children expected to reach adulthood in the next 10 years along with their caregivers will exceed the population of Rhode Island and cost an estimated $27 billion in additional care beyond the almost $60 billion being spent on current autism-related costs. (1,2)

Under the specter of an autism epidemic sweeping America, Senator Barbara Boxer (CA) convened hearings last week on the “State of Research on Potential Environmental Health Factors with Autism.” (3)

The result?

Experts agree that the primary explanation for the dramatic increase in autism is toxic environmental exposure and gene-environment interactions. New research shows that even low-dose, multiple toxic and infectious exposures may be a key factor to the onset of autism.

One expert, Dr. Linda Birnbaum, Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health, testified that “Research supported by NIEH has clearly shown that it is not just genetics that causes neuro-developmental disorders such as autism but rather the interplay of both genes and the environment”.

Dr. Birnbaum also stated that NIEH has uncovered information on the role that early environmental exposures play in the development of a broad spectrum of childhood disorders, including not only autism but also ADHD, and other learning disorders.

Another expert, Dr. Paul Anastas, the U.S.Environmental Protection Agency’s assistant administrator, told the subcommittee that children are especially susceptible to the effects of chemicals in the environment because they eat, drink and breathe in more for their body weight than adults. They absorb a greater proportion of many chemicals in the environment than adults, and due to hand to mouth behaviors, young children tend to have higher exposures to contaminants, such as pollutants in the surrounding air and dust, deposited from lead paint, tobacco smoke, cleaning products, pesticides and other chemicals. (4,5)

We already know that prenatal and early childhood exposures to chemicals such as methyl mercury (commonly found in fish and some vaccines), lead (in paints), PCBs (in plastics such as baby bottles and food storage containers) and arsenic (in the air) can affect development of the nervous system and lead to developmental disability. (6,7,8)

Also, the developing brain and nervous system can be disrupted by much lower levels of environmental exposures than would affect adults. (9,10,11) You can read about the current levels of exposure in the just released CDC’s National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals, a frightening document.

Dr. Isaac Pessah, Director of the UC Davis Center for Children’s Environmental Health, testified that many of the molecular and cellular systems associated with autism are the same ones that are the target of environmental chemicals currently of concern to human health because of their widespread use. He spoke of a critical need to identify which chemicals in the environment influence the same biological pathways that are effected in autism. Dr. Pessah said that limiting exposure to these chemicals is the only way to mitigate or prevent autism in susceptible individuals.

Increasingly, evidence links even chronic, low-level exposure to industrial pollutants to many of the most prevalent and disabling learning and behavioral problems in children.

Professor Bruce Lanphear Ph.D, of the Child & Family Research Institute, Simon Fraser University, reported that some of the most widely dispersed environmental toxicants, even at very low levels are risk factors for the “new morbidities” of childhood — both intellectual and behavioral impairments such as autism. Indeed, there is often no apparent threshold — in some cases the effects appear to be greater at the lowest levels of exposure. (12) Emerging evidence shows that a whole host of new environmental chemicals such as Bisphenol A, (the protective inner lining in tin cans and baby bottles) PBDEs, pesticides, phthalates and airborne pollutants are all associated with intellectual deficits or behavioral problems in children. (13,14,15)

Just prior to the Senate hearing, several important research papers were published that further documented the relationship between environmental toxins and autism:

• A study in India correlated the increased body burdens of lead and mercury with the severity of children’s autism — the more severe the autism, the higher concentrations of heavy metals were found in their bodies. (16)
• An exhaustive scientific literature search just completed in August shows that the link between autism and toxic exposures in infants is supported by current published research. (17)

My own recent study of a large autistic clinical database shows that children with autism had elevated levels in their bodies of several chemicals known to be neurotoxic. The children have genetic variations, which interfere with the proper detoxification of those chemicals. With over 2,000 patients in the database, my paper is one of the largest studies to show that environmental factors interacting with associated genetic components may be contributing to the causation of autism.

Development of the human nervous system begins in the womb and extends throughout childhood. During these periods of rapid development, the brain is vulnerable to some environmental exposures, which may have the potential to disrupt the chemical signals that organize development. Even small changes can have potentially major consequences for brain structure and function. Thus, even brief adverse exposure at these vulnerable stages can have lasting effects on brain function throughout life.

My report showed on average the amount of lead and mercury in the children’s blood was 50 percent higher than normal. Their genetic changes (SNPs) were related to what is called Phase I and Phase II detoxification — specifically the CYP and GST family of genes. This defect reduced the children’s ability to remove excess toxins from their bodies.

These autistic children also had a several fold higher level of bad gut bacteria and reduced levels of beneficial gut bacteria. Bad gut bacteria can produce neurotoxic amines and cause a “leaky gut” which allows toxic substances to more easily enter the circulatory system (see my previous Huffington Post entry “The Keys to Maintaining a Healthy Gut“).

You may read the full clinical study here:http://personalizedmedicine.posterous.com/environmental-factors-contributing-to-the-ons#

We as a society have a toxic chemical addiction, which we need to kick now. We need to be better informed consumers — choosing chemically free foods, products and environments, affecting change with our wallets.

Here are some Toxic Exposure Avoidance Tips for All of Us — And Especially For Pregnant Women. Start taking them, right now:

  1. Avoid eating foods that may contain high levels of toxic chemicals
  2. While fish are a good source of protein and omega-3 fatty acids, some contain high levels of mercury. Tuna, Cod and Mahi Mahi are ones to avoid. Wild salmon is a good healthy choice.
  3. Consume organic foods and drinks as much as possible.
  4. Use glass containers instead of plastic to store left over foods and drinks.
  5. Reduce our purchase of foods in cans as the can lining contains high levels of Bisphenol A (an endocrine disrupter linked to increased rates of cancer and abnormal behavior in children).
  6. Limit exposure to toxic household chemicals, pesticides and cleaning supplies. Look for natural alternatives.
  7. Install HEPA and carbon filter air purifiers in bedrooms to insure a healthy toxin free nights rest.

Exposure to toxic chemicals by pregnant women, fetuses and children has a high probability of causing autism and other neuro-developmental disorders and learning disabilities in those whose genetic profile expresses in a reduced ability to detoxify these chemicals. This is not “fringe” science; it’s fact.

The time for action is now. We must reduce our exposure to toxic chemicals for ourselves, for our children’s sake and for future generations.

We have a responsibility to protect those who cannot protect themselves. We cannot afford to be incurious, indifferent or uninformed when the price of inattention is disability and heartache — an overwhelming emotional and financial burden to families and society.

Ask for help: Tell your government that we must lessen our exposure to these chemicals. For the future of all Americans. Email or call your own representatives. Senator Boxer can be reached at: senator@boxer.senate.gov.
References

(1) Autism Society of America (ASA). 2003. Facts and statistics. Available: http://www.autism-society.org/

(2) Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfate. 2005 PA Autism Census Project: Final Report; Oct 2009

(3) US Senate Subcommittee on Environment and Public Works. Aug 2010

(4) National Research Council. 1993. Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children. National Academy of Sciences Press, Washington, DC.

(5) U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). 2005 Guidance on selecting age groups for monitoring and assessing childhood exposures to environmental contaminants. National Center for Environmental Assessment, Washington, DC; EPA/630/P-03/003F

(6) Wasserman GA, Liu X, Parvez F, Ahsan H, Factor-Litvak P, Kline J, van Geen A, Slavkovich V, Loiacono NJ, Levy D, Cheng Z, Graziano JH. 2007. Water arsenic exposure and intellectual function in 6-year-old children in Araihazar, Bangladesh. Environ Health Perspect. 115(2):285-9

(7) Landrigan PJ, Whitworth RH, Baloh RW, Barthel WF, Staehling NW, Rosenblum BF. 1975. Neuropsychological dysfunction in children with chronic low-level lead absorption. Lancet 1:708-712

(8) Rogan WJ, Ware JH. 2003. Exposure to lead in children – how low is low enough? N Engl J Med. 348:1515-1516

(9)(ATSDR). 2007. Toxicological profile for Lead. Atlanta, GA: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service. http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/ToxProfiles/tp13-c3.pdf

(10) Grandjean P, and Landrigan PJ. 2006. Developmental neurotoxicity of industrial chemicals. Lancet.;368(9553):2167-78.

(11) Jett DA, Kuhlmann AC, Farmer SJ, Guilarte TR.1997. Age-dependent effects of developmental lead exposure on performance in the Morris water maze. Pharmacol Biochem Behav.57(1-2):271-9

(12) Canfield RL, Henderson CR, Cory-Slechta DA, Cox C, Jusko TA, Lanphear BP. Intellectual impairment in children with blood lead concentrations below 10 micrograms per deciliter. N Engl J Med 2003;348:1517-1526

(13) Eskenazi B, Marks AR, Bradman A, et al. Organophosphate pesticide exposure and neurodevelopment in young Mexican-American children. Environ Health Perspect 2007;115:792-798

(14) Herbstman JB, Sjödin A, Kurzon M, et al. Prenatal exposure to PBDEs and neuro-development. Environ Health Perspect 2010;118:712-719

(15) Braun JM, Froehlich TE, Daniels JL, et al. Association of environmental toxicants and conduct disorder in U.S. children: NHANES 2001-2004. Environ Health Perspect 2008;116:956-962

(16) Priya MD. Level of Trace Elements (Copper, Zinc, Magnesium
and Selenium) and Toxic Elements (Lead and Mercury)
in the Hair and Nail of Children with Autism. Biol Trace Elem Res
DOI 10.1007/s12011-010-8766-2

(17) DeSoto MC. Sorting out the spinning of autism: heavy metals and the
question of incidence. Acta Neurobiol Exp 2010, 70: 165-176

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+WHAT ARE WE MISSING?

alchemynow2 Comments

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Today’s response to this part of a comment made to this post, +THE JOY OF SAYING ‘NOPE’ TO OPRAH

‘We do have much in common, and I don’t feel understood…ever.’

Replies:

Morning! Even for those with known childhood sexual abuse histories (I don’t have), I believe much of ‘what’s wrong’ happened way, way earlier — and is not recognized as contributing to so much of ‘what’s wrong’.

Those earlier ‘troubles’ underlie all of the later ‘troubles’ but in looking at our whole life, our whole story, our whole set of traumas, our whole resultant difficulties, we aren’t ‘taught’ how to pick all this mess apart so that we can begin to more clearly identify all the separate ‘parts’ that contribute to this ‘whole’.

We are left trying to remain intact and ‘functional’, trying to remain on our own two feet while STILL in the midst of the ongoing tornado-storm that is in our body because it was put there, built right into it, as we grew and developed.

Part of why I mention this in response to your comment is that from birth our early caregivers build our body-brain (including our emotional and social brain-self) through a process related to ‘feeling understood’. MIRRORING, REFLECTING BACK, and RESONATING are three extremely important processes that must happen — in safe and secure earliest attachment relationship-interactions — so that we can grow up with what we need.

When those three things don’t happen for us from the time we are born, and especially in our first year of life, we don’t even end up with a body-brain-mind-self that has a real CLUE what it feels like for someone to understand us — to mirror, reflect, and resonate with us so that we can FEEL FELT.

Feeling felt is actually a ‘technical term’ for what we experience when we feel understood. Add onto these complications the fact that all infant-child abuse survivors have had things happen to them that are far, far, far past what most safe and securely attached (and nonabused) people can imagine, let alone empathize with!!

As I begin to UNDERSTAND all of what I am describing I also begin to understand that the most important person who I need to UNDERSTAND me is — ME! Yes, that can be a lonely, lonely ‘place’ to be in, but all that went so wrong in our early life REALLY does to hurt us is prevent our own strong, clear, happy, safe, securely attached individual, autonomous OWN SELF from forming. We are robbed of our own self, and that, to me, is the biggest hurt, the deepest wound, and the most important one for us to heal.

As we begin to more clearly understand the nature of our hurts, we are fine tuning our own reception abilities in terms of being able to look around us and visually begin to SEE these same early abuse survivor patterns in other people. We begin to recognize them not only in our self, but in others. Then we begin to see how MANY people did not have what they needed in safe, safe, SAFE — and secure attachment environments. These people are changed just as we are, to different degrees — and it is the quality and nature of the SAFE AND SECURE attachments that any of us have with ANYONE in our earliest years that fights back against any and all harm that was done to us THEN so that we have stronger inner resources NOW.

and

There are two pieces of information I need to add to my previous reply. Dissociation that was built into us through early trauma and abuse most often includes ‘depersonalization’ and ‘derealization’. Part of what makes this happen is that our early brain didn’t form patterns of ‘repair’ to go along in a reasonable and healthy way with the overwhelming patterns of ‘RUPTURE’ that the deprivations and traumas of our early lives created.

This means that dissociation — or patterns of all these ruptures without corresponding (and necessary) repair just leaves us with lots of holes in the fabric of our social-emotional brain processing — all the way through our nervous system. When we feel ‘depersonalization’ and ‘derealization’ as parts of dissociation, we are feeling those holes. Anything we can learn about recognizing these patterns when we feel them — and recognizing how TODAY to help ourselves gain REPAIR for the ruptures (triggers) that send us off on the dissociation pathway, the better off we will be.

The second point I need to mention is that ALL RELATIONSHIPS in our present life that are safe and secure attachments are important to our well-being. But along with this comes the fact that not even we, our self, have what it takes to REALLY be able to experience true empathy. We are not as good as we might think we are at mirroring other people back to their self, reflecting back to them or with resonating with ANYONE else as we COULD have been if someone had done that repairing-of-ruptures for us as our body-brain grew early in our lives.

I think of it as a ‘numb zone’ that pops right in between me and other people — and it is tied to these two arms of dissociation I mentioned (depersonalization and derealization). Our intentions can be the best in the world, but as Dr. Allan Schore says, everyone with an insecure attachment disorder has an empathy disorder, as well.

So if we are surrounded by people even as well intentioned to empathize as we are, yet they also have an insecure attachment disorder, they (as are we) are prevented RIGHT WITHIN OUR PHYSIOLOGY from being able to truly offer back ‘understanding’.

I will also say that many people are motivated toward the helping professions that also come from similar backgrounds as their clients do. If a therapist does not understand patterns of secure and insecure attachment chances are not good that they have made REAL progress in healing themselves in the ways that really matter. That means that they also have empathy disorders — and are probably least likely of all to know or admit this fact.

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It strikes me as I think about these words I just wrote that I am describing a PARADOX!

Being able to truly understand another person, IF it involves the process of empathy, does not require that the listener have a history of any kind of early caregiver-infant relationship trauma.  In fact, it is the fact that those of us who DID experience unsafe and insecure very early trauma had our empathy abilities tampered with that means we are the LAST people to really be good at empathy!

Being good at empathy, really healthily good at it requires that the listener did not have their empathy abilities tampered with (and changed as a result of early relationship trauma).  True, we survivors can learn what empathy actually IS and can learn to practice true empathy — but we will always be like immigrants, never natural empathy-ability citizens.

There’s lots more I can say about this — but it is saved for some other day…..

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+WORDS SPOKEN WITH THE POWER TO CHANGE ME

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The first thought I have as I turn around and begin to look back over the span of my adulthood (which covers 40 years now) is, “If I had only known THEN what I know now……”  I don’t say this about anything trivial, ordinary or mundane.  I say this about something I see as being so important that if I HAD somehow had the information I have now, the entire course of my adult life would have gone differently.

There are two brilliantly lit spots in my adult history, and they both appeared within months of each other when I was nearing 30 years old.  The first one happened when my 4-year-younger sister took a bus from Edmonton, Canada to visit me in Minnesota.  She was hugely pregnant, and I can still see her resting on my humble living room couch, her head tipped back a little as I came through the doorway into the room.

“You know, Linda,” she said to me, “if you aren’t very very angry for the things Mother did to you while you were growing up there’s something very very wrong with you.”

Talk about a dead-stopper, that was it.  I’m sure my eyes popped wide open, my mouth too.  I had not one single word to speak back to her.  I just stared.  Yet on the inside something happened to me.  She opened a crack in my carefully crafted adult reality that had never been there before.  I didn’t recognize what happened at the time, but her simple statement itself changed the course of my life.

Those changes have been gradual, but I can name that moment as the one that moved something inside of me I didn’t even know was there.

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The second brilliantly lit moment in my adulthood happened about a month after my sister’s comment.  An older Native American friend of our family named Larry had stopped in for dinner with his wife.  After we had eaten, after everyone else had left the table and he and I were sitting there alone together,  Larry looked straight into my eyes across the plate cluttered table and simply said, “Linda, you aren’t the person you want everyone to think you are, are you?”

Again I was absolutely stunned.  To tell you the truth, I had no conscious idea what he was talking about, and nearly 30 years later I STILL don’t!  Did I ask him what he meant?  No.  But here again he stuck some kind of a gigantic crowbar into the crack my sister had opened up inside of me and pried that crack wide open — somehow.

I have never forgotten his words.  I remember them exactly, and I remember myself receiving his words in stunned silence, just as I had received the words my baby sister had spoken to me just as simply.

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I would say right now that both of these statements were straight ones, perhaps the most-straight statements I have ever heard in my lifetime.  These were words of truth and accuracy that shot straight into the center of ME, and never in my lifetime will I lose my appreciation and awe for the power these words had to help straighten out the course of ME in my lifetime.

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I had one similar experience during the long 18 year course of my severely abusive childhood, only this time the words came from an unknown source and I heard them inside of my own self.  I must have been about 13 or 14 when I heard them spoken.  I had been punished severely, beaten, berated, and banished — for what THAT time I do not remember.

What I do remember was lying in bed in the middle of the day.  Being put to bed was a punishment even worse than being put into a corner, both of which consumed massive segments of my childhood.  I know I had been crying, and looking back I know my pain was so deep it consumed me.  My eyes were open, and I was staring at my mother’s carefully varnished plywood wall.  I remember the wandering, curving grain of the wood and the curved ‘eye’ and ‘lip’ shapes embedded here and there.  (I had no idea as a child what these were for, and only found out as an adult that they were ‘plugs’ put into plywood to repair spots where twigs had grown into the tree.)

All of a sudden I heard a voice like none I had ever heard before.  It spoke clearly, but seemed to come from far, far away as it calmly stated, “Linda, it is not humanly possible for anyone to be as bad as your mother says you are.”

That was it.

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Many Indigenous People use a term for The Great Mystery to describe all things deeply spiritual that cannot be talked about in any other way.  I would include all three of these statements in that category, even though I know two of them crossed the lips of real human beings.  But the source of these words, the meaning of these words, the timing of when these words reached me, and what they all touched deep inside of me belongs in my mind to The Great Mystery.

As I consider the words that appeared to me in that tear stained, sorrow-filled bed when I was still a child, I think about my mad, mean mother.  I think about some invisible ‘line’ that divided her from me and me from her, as I ask a question that has no answer in this lifetime.

“Why was I gifted with those words that saved me from becoming like my mother?  Why did it happen that no words were given to my mother anywhere along the span of her lifetime that could have just as equally saved her?”

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I feel like I am standing at the edge of a great, horror-filled and very dark abyss as I write now.  I am going to take a step off of firm ground out into thin air, trusting there is something solid I can trust will hold me up even though I can’t see it.  As I take this step, I look down, and I see two people falling into that inky blackness.  One is my mother, the other is myself as a child.

I hear again that voice and those words that came to me that day in my bed of despair, and I see that they caught me and stopped my fall as surely as if they had spun a net to catch me.  I see that there were no words to break my mother’s fall, none that she could possibly have heard anyway, and she continues to fall.  Fall, fall, fall, to the moment of her death.

What I heard in those words as a child is not what I now see as their full meaning.  As a child I needed to be told that I could not possibly be as bad as my mother said I was.  I now see the other part, the ‘humanly possible’ part.  To be told in this way at this particular time that I was HUMAN at all is what MOST saved me, though back then it was having the limit set on how bad I could NOT be that I somehow heard.

Back then I must have instinctively swallowed the whole spoonful of saving elixir contained in the whole statement.  If I had stopped to say to whomever spoke those words, “They are meaningless to me because I am not even human, therefore there is no limit to how bad I am,” I do not believe I would be alive today — and certainly not alive without the madness that consumed my mother.

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As strange as it might be to think this way, I believe the hardest part of letting go of my perpetrator, my terrible and terrifying abuser, my mother, is not that I hate her.  It is not that I don’t forgive her.  The hardest part is coming to terms with the fact that I could not then, cannot now, can NEVER save her.  I cannot save her from her falling.  And more than anything else I can possibly think of, this lets me know that in my heart of hearts — if I ever question this, and I do — I loved my mother then — and I still do.

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Now, getting back to firm ground I turn away from the edge of that wicked abyss and walk away, walk away, walk away, walk away.  I do not run because the pull of it, the gravity of it echoes, echoes, echoes.  Which leads me to the point I wanted to make at the beginning of this post.

What I know now that I didn’t know as a child, didn’t know through the first 40 years of my adulthood is that this abyss exists.  It is very real.  It is at the center of my natural life because its existence was at the center of my mother’s life when she brought me into this world, and every interaction I ever had with her, most clearly all of them for the first 18 years of my life, happened as SHE was falling through the horrible blackness of that pit and as she did everything in her power to take me down there with her.

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I can come up now from this writing so far and take a gulp of sweet fresh air, gaze out my window at the clear blue sky, listen to my parakeet chirp away at some foreign bird it hears perched on a tree branch.  And as I come back to this present world I bring back three words like they are the plug at the end of a long electric power cord of truth — and insert these three words into the history of my past as I know it.

The three words:  Insecure Attachment Disorder.

Not having some way to anchor ourselves safely and securely in the world our body lives in means that we are falling, falling, falling  into an inner world of terror and darkness without end.  Those are the words I now have to describe what I did not know even existed — as an essence of my life — as a child or as an adult person who heard the three statements I mention here.

As I look back on my entire life, including my adulthood past, I now know that this dark bottomless pit has always been with me.  It’s force, its gravity, its existence?  I have felt it, felt it in my body, and never knew its name.

As I look back on my adulthood I can see the patterns.  Over and over and over again — for every major decision I have made in my life, I was FEELING that great open pit, and I ran from it.  I didn’t walk, I RAN as fast and as hard as I could not knowing I could not escape its pull even though I seemed to be able to avoid it.

I did not.

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I met men.  I had sex.  I fell in and out of love.  I did drugs.  I drank heavily.  I had babies and cared for them.  I married and divorced and married and divorced.  I traveled.  I moved from one end of this great country to the other.  I wandered.  I found homes, made homes, took them apart and moved on.  I wandered by the crashing ocean side, I wandered by the lakes and through the forests and over fields.  I planted, I reaped, I preserved food.  I bought things and sold them and gave them away.  I tried studies, read books, went through treatments.  I tried jobs, a career, did art, made things — and gave them away as well.

Now?  I mostly sit still, and I write, and I learn to read and play music.  And now?  I am naming that hole, that inky dark pit that I live with — right here, right now.

I am beginning to comprehend that the more I struggle the more powerful the pull that black pit has upon me — because it has its tendrils built right into every cell in my body.  I can’t change that, but I can change what I know and what I do.

I no longer wish to fly off in one direction or another every time some dissociated fragment of myself is triggered by some event in life that blindsides me and makes me lose my poise and balance as I have during the days of my past.

I am intent on learning what this black pit is and how it operates.  I will run from it no more, nor will I let its influence determine my reactions within my own life.  At present I believe I am making some progress.  I can hear its tone — its single roaring tone.  I believe when all is said and done it only has ONE TONE, one main feeling that it sets to resonating within my body.

That tone?  I call it inconsolable despair.

There.  That’s not so hard!  I can learn to recognize that tone when it starts resonating within all the cells of my body, and begins to crawl around within the neurons of my brain.  Inconsolable despair.

Sure, it would be nice if I didn’t know what that tone was, and didn’t know what it feels like.  But I believe every mammal is born with it, and perhaps other kinds of species as well.  It is this, the existence of this inconsolable despair that motivates life to seek all that it needs to continue its existence.

I can thank my daughter who is such a fantastic mother for describing to me how her newly born (now five months old) son wakes from deep and peaceful slumber EXPRESSING this feeling.  There is nothing that has happened to him in his present lifetime that would explain where this feeling state comes from for him — except that he was born with it.

Most appropriately, everyone around that new little person rushes to his rescue when he wakes up crying, sobbing his sounds for his feeling of inconsolable despair.  That is as nature intends.  His needs are always met through safe and secure attachment patterns and my hope is that over time as his body grows, his nervous system and brain grows, his mind and his self that maybe he can gain so many good ways to solve that eternal problem that he will never have to feel it again.

But for those of us who DO still feel it, I think it’s helpful, no, downright empowering to know what this feeling is and where it comes from so that we can find the best ways possible to offer our own self healthy consolation that can dim — even though it might never be able to extinguish — our deeply felt feelings of inconsolable despair when they threaten to overwhelm us.

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So in response to my old friend Larry’s comment about the person I am, if I can keep from running off into some dissociated life pattern, if I can remain here true to my present task of learning not only WHO I am but most importantly HOW I am in my body in this lifetime, perhaps someday I will understand what he was telling me that day because I still have to say his words simply still remain a part of The Great Mystery.

Larry left this world a long time ago, and perhaps at this moment he is looking at me and smiling — or — shaking his head in puzzlement that I still don’t know what he meant.

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+MY JOURNEY BACKWARD IN TIME (WITH SNACKS)

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As long as I am rolling along through the topic of roads today, I might as well write about another experience with ‘road problems’.  Because I seem to be rapidly getting older, I have to say “many years ago” I was working as an art therapist with a caseload of severely traumatized children.  On this winter’s day I had to travel a long way to reach a home-based session with a foster child.  Getting there on time was my greatest concern.

At that time I was driving a monster 3/4 ton Chevy van.  Not a lot of weight for traction in that beast.  I headed across a flat land wide dirt road, and I must add, a wash-boarded one.  Any readers with experience in country living will know what that means.  Somehow very mysterious physics comes into play when enough round tires travel down certain dirt roads so that entire long series of patterns appear on the surface that look exactly like what they are named after — a wash board.

“Oh, great,” I was thinking to myself as I looked at my watch and realized that the time I had taken just to FIND this road had bitten a considerable chunk out of the remaining time I had to get to my appointment on time.  The wind had swept all the snow off of the road and into the ditches, hence providing me with a dry straight-of-way — and I took off down it flying.

Well, ALMOST flying.  Before I felt myself heading into a full blown spin off the road I noticed the cut-off trunks of some poor dead trees sticking their weathered tips out of the vast snowbanks I was now going to meet up with up close and personal.  Off we went (van and I), landing with a serious tilt in deep snow with the passenger side wheels nearly in the air.  Stopped with the van’s underside gas tank directly poised to land squarely on top of those tree tips.

Not a comely position for professional-lady me in my stockings and nicely pleated wool skirt.  “How exactly am I supposed to climb out of this beast?”  I didn’t have time to answer my own question when I felt the van beginning to move.  Gravity was having its pull, and down on top of those sharpened stakes my poor gas tank was headed.

Of course I pulled a “Linda.”  Nobody there to hear me but the van I was speaking to, I didn’t empty my verbal arsenal politely.  “Don’t you F—– DARE!” I commanded of that van firmly.  The tilting stopped.  “Good van!  Very good van!”

I managed to push the driver’s door nearly straight into the air to open it, climbed out stocking legs akimbo, plowed my way out of the snowbanked ditch onto the dry dirt road, and took off marching in the direction of my client’s house my heels clapping along with each stride as if I had planned my arrival to go like that.

Yes, a wisely slow driving farmer stopped and picked me up, delivering me to his neighbor’s house where my appointment waited.  I must have looked a riotous sight, me and my blaze red half sunk van.

Beside the obvious moral of this story, the hidden one for me today is that there are times when we are intent on ‘learning’ from our abusive past that it is not wise to barrel our way through our journey along that road as if there is no possible danger.  I had thought on that day if I just drove fast enough I could skip right over all the millions of tiny ruts, taking the high road over the washboard safely.  Not so.

What all of this means to me in real terms today, at this moment, is that I am approaching a return to my traumatic infant-childhood to retrieve my story very slowly and cautiously.  I find that to move in that direction means that I have to first traverse backward through my adulthood.  Along that road I can already see patterns that I never noticed before.

That is what growing means, I guess.  As I continue to grow in my own way, my perspective is continually changing with new added insights.  Things are not looking the same on my backward journey as I thought they might.  This is like I am playing my life backward toward the moment I will walk back into my home of origin in reverse of when I walked out of it at age 18.

What amazes me most about my adult life is that I have stayed as safe as I have.  That doesn’t mean my journey has been easy, but I did not fall for abusive men — at least I never saw that side of them.  I did not fall for anyone who abused my children, either.  I am extremely grateful for this miracle!

Beyond that, I have a little brightly colored kerchief filled with yummy snacks tied to a stick balanced upon my shoulder as I whistle some version of ‘Dixie’ as I pace myself for my long journey of return back to my childhood so I can see what I can see and learn what I can learn — and feel what I can feel — and. . . . . .

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+ALWAYS LEARNING HOW TO LIVE WITH ‘THIS FEELING’

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Sometimes when severe infant-child abuse survivors feel crappy, the reason why we feel the way we do — along with what we are actually feeling — might surprise us.  I have ‘this feeling’ often, and now that I better know where it comes from, why I have it, and what it actually IS I find living my life a little easier.  Sometimes.  The trick for me is to recognize ‘this feeling’ when I am having it — so that I can name it specifically for what it is and not for what it is not.

Humans have potential to experience a wide array of feelings, and MOST of them are actually not entirely pleasant.  Why might this be so?  I figure it’s because our actual survival far more depends on our ability to find ways to take care of ourselves so that these unpleasant feelings either shrink or disappear — at least temporarily — than it does on our being outright giddy with glee (my term of choice at the moment for all we might call our feel-good feelings).

If we happen to get caught with our hand in the flames, our jerking it out doesn’t so much make us immediately giddy with glee as it does STOP the pain.  That’s a good thing.  Much of what I suspect we humans do is geared toward stopping pain (thus enhancing our survival).  Nothing wrong with that, and nothing to surprise us here.  Not really.

If life on this planet had always been a giddy party-for-all free-for-all, full of plenty, full of safety and security, a NICE place to survive in we would no doubt be sharing our current breathing space with members of at least SOME of the other 18-plus other hominid species that vanished trying to do what our species did:  Remain flexible and adaptable enough to stay alive.

So while it must sure be nice to have a big fat left-brain happy center, all full of early-formed happy neurons that can be relied on to add humor and a more pleasant focus on life than severe infant-child abuse survivors managed to hold onto in the midst of the tragedy and terror of their body-brain formative years, it’s not anybody’s happy left-brain neuron center that most guarantees they are going to survive if the time ever comes to put their survival to the absolute test.

I have to remember all of this on days that often come to me when I feel far from giddily gleeful.  It’s not ONLY that my early forming left-brain happy center had only sporadic Kodak Moment opportunities for happiness that contributes to my difficulties in staying buoyant today.  It’s not ONLY that fear and sorrow, terror and confusion — and all the rest of my survival-connected emotions got an Olympic sized workout from the time I was born that increases my difficulties in experiencing joy.

What did the most damage was the fact that the malevolent, dangerous, abusive, unsafe and insecure world that I spent the first 18 years of my life trying to grow up in was the fact that all the abuse I experienced happened because both my mother and my father ALSO grew up in unsafe and insecure worlds.  This gave them — and in turn gave me — an ‘insecure attachment disorder’.

What that means to me now is that severe abuse, tied into severe attachment disorders (for both the perpetrators and then for their offspring), left me with an attachment system that CANNOT TURN ITSELF OFF!

THAT is what I am actually feeling on most days that I might otherwise be tempted to describe what I feel in some other survival-based emotional terms.  It isn’t anger or resentment or bitterness or despair or hopelessness or helplessness or fear of the future that gets to those of us who suffered in and survived the kinds of infant-childhoods this blog is dedicated to.  It isn’t boredom or loneliness or even often hunger or thirst or some other physical depletion that we feel.  It isn’t grief or sorrow or depression.  It isn’t isolation or confusion or longing we feel.

What we most often feel does not even have any more of a name in our culture than what I call it here.  What we feel when we do not feel ‘happy’ and can’t seem to find our way even to peaceful calmness (which as I have said is SUPPOSED to be the middle set point for our nervous system and for severe early abuse survivors is NOT) — is the very real physiological body-based FEELING of having an active insecure attachment system THAT CAN’T BE TURNED OFF.

Certainly sometimes we know what it feels like not to have this feeling.  Some use addictions or chemicals from the drug store or addictions to everything from gambling to work to sex to over spending or over eating or relationships (or even as my mother did by abusing someone else and by her constant moving).  What I am describing ACTUALLY is that LOST feeling I mentioned several posts back.  It is the feeling we are born with that motivates us to express our needs in such a way that someone comes and takes care of us (or does not).

Our feel-good and feel-bad chemicals in our body are all tied into this attachment system we have been either fortunate enough to have had built right in safe enough infant-childhoods — or unfortunate enough not to.  It is those of us in the latter group — way way way way over in this latter group — who are left with the same insecure attachment patterns that built our entire body-nervous system-brain-immune system-mind-self from the start back in those truly malevolent earliest years.

Early abuse survivors are left with circuitry in our body that operates differently than does the attachment circuitry built into people who had safe and secure-enough infant-childhoods.  There’s no way around this fact.  What nobody ever told me, what nobody ever tells ANY of us is that THEY have a secure attachment system that can be turned off.  Our insecure attachment system was built to KNOW we will never be safe — and ON is (to our trauma-formed body) BEST.

There are times as a severe abuse survivor that I have been distracted from the experience of having to FEEL my forever turned on insecure attachment system.  Fortunately.  Those distractions include the 35 years I spent mothering children in my home before they reached their own adulthood.  Those distractions really are the story of my adult life.  But the older I have gotten the more difficult it has become for me to find ways to distract myself from feeling WHAT I FEEL LIKE — really feel like — feels like!!  This is all a direct consequence not only of the hell of abuse I was formed in and by throughout my infant-childhood — but is also a direct consequence of the fact that I survived it so that I am still alive to have feelings today (and to write about them).

Typing into the search box on this blog ‘insecure attachment’ will bring up many, many pages on the topic.  I am mentioning it again today because I periodically have to remind myself of how real my insecure attachment ‘disorder’ is — because there are days when I feel it in my body so strongly it is difficult to feel anything else.  Then I have to remind myself it isn’t because I am a flawed person, that there’s something wrong with me, that I ‘should’ be doing something better or differently than I already am.

On days like today I am just face-to-face with myself as a trauma-formed person with a body who will feel that reality for the rest of my life.  At the same time I know that has to be just fine with me because the only escape from it will be my death — that’s a reality.  But I have survived this far and will keep on keepin’ on because that, after all, is what every living member of our species does best.

But I am always in the market to find new tricks for backing off this unpleasant survival-based feeling so that it doesn’t overwhelm me.  Some days that becomes my nearly full-time job.  At the same time I wonder if it isn’t those of us who survived intolerable infant-childhoods of abuse and deprivation — and pay the price for our survival every day that we have to live with ‘this feeling’ that our insecure attachment ‘disorder’ creates in our body — who really have the greatest right to celebrate that we are — in fact — that we are still here and we are AMAZING!

*NOTE:  In dismissive-avoidant insecure attachment disorders (which I believe was the kind my father had) the brain actually creates its own distractions against emotions so that the brain keeps the person from even being aware that they are having a feeling in the first place.

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+MAKING FACES IN THE MIRROR (WITH SOUND EFFECTS)

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I am not convinced that by their nature either resentment or bitterness are ‘bad’ things.  They are simply parts of the natural human experience.  I do, however, think that being STUCK in any state is a problem.  Life itself is a constantly changing event, and if we can’t change in flexible ways along with the changes life brings us — well — THAT can mean trouble.

So perhaps if whining bitterness was to become seasoned with a little growling resentment — or growling resentment could become mixed with a little whining bitterness — a person stuck at either end of this ‘stop-go’ nervous system continuum could budge enough to get a start toward healing change.

If bitterness is too close to the despairing giving up end of the stress response, and if resentment is too close to the forever-in-the-wanting-to-fight state, then a move off of dead-center STUCK would be a positive one no matter which way the move took place!

So to get the bowling ball of mood states rolling again, I suspect that if growling resenters took a little time in front of a mirror and practiced turning their scowl into a pout, and whining bitter people took a little time in front of a mirror to practice turning their pout into a grimace — and both need to add the sound effects along the way — and throw in a heaping spoonful of good humor — well — what can I say?

A bowling ball stuck half way down the lane isn’t much fun to play with, and when we get ourselves stuck in these fighting or despairing places and can’t get ourselves out of them — trying SOMETHING is better than doing nothing at all.  Otherwise we can eat up our lifespan either waiting to fight our invisible foes so we can beat them and win — or waiting for some magical event to change the past for us into something better than what it was.

Making faces at ourselves in the mirror while we growl or whine ourselves off of an unhappy dead-center might just free us up enough to find something more pleasant to do with our time!  Never know until you try it!

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+DOES MY BODY BELONG TO A DANCER?

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A few years ago I stumbled upon this 2005 Israeli research study on the genetics of dancers.  I am working toward adding another component to my exercise right now because this isn’t the season (due to monsoon rains) that lets me go do my hard work building adobes outside.  I want to do more than my 45 minute job, so I have decided to start adding time at home dancing.

I remember when I was 18 and had just entered the big wide world having existed both my home of origin and the next step of boot camp.  When I landed at the Naval base in San Diego for my further training, I discovered the enlisted club there had a live band and a dance floor.  I don’t remember how many nights a week the band played.  But I do remember that when they did play, I was there from the first note they played to the last one.  I danced.  I loved it.  I never danced with anyone.  I didn’t even notice if anyone was there.  It must have been very few people because I basically had that dance floor to myself.

If I remember the Israeli dance research correctly, the defined a performing dancer as one who danced ten hours a week.  I want to see if I can work up to that.  I want to reawaken my dancing self.

I was thinking about this because I am alive.  My mother did not kill me.  She did not take my life, though there certainly times she would have it I hadn’t become so proficient and competent at receiving her beatings I could not avoid so as to protect my head, etc. to avoid being killed.  So, she did not take my body from me.

She took my hope, my trust, my safety, my security, my peace, my happiness, my curiosity, my ability to wonder or to fight back – etc.  But here I am with my body, and if my body actually belongs to a dancer, well, then……. I want to find out.

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+DISSOCIATION: THINKING THROUGH SOME IMPLICATIONS

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I just took a break and did my jogging — plus — which I will get to in my next post.  But before I move THAT far forward, I want to think through some implications that are dawning on me know from my last post:  +DISSOCIATION: MY MOTHER’S AND MY OWN STORY SHARE IT.  What if I think about the the paper, the snake skin and the snake as I described in that post as if I am thinking about myself in relation to my mother.

First, my guess is that human newborns are programmed from birth to ANTICIPATE being loved.  That means that I was born to be loved and to love.  I was born to expect the best.  Mother was naturally safe to me and someone to ‘reach for’.  I would say natural “unless proven otherwise,” but it took a whole lot of convincing for me to actually understand my mother was not safe.  Yet my baby book record of my before-age-two sentence, “I didn’t mean to,” lets me know I was certainly afraid of her attacks already by that age.

Our species would not have survived very long if our inherited patterns were to destroy the offspring rather than to promote their well-being.  So, it would have been completely in alliance with nature for me NOT to expect harm from my mother.  I would naturally have seen her as being more like the beautiful piece of paper than to see her as a deadly viper.  That was my natural state.

It took me a very, very, very, very long time from the time I was born to be able to begin to anticipate my mother’s attacks.  Actually, because I could NEVER predict what was going to ‘set her off’ to turn her from being like the beautiful paper into the coiled viper who attacked me, it was impossible for me to anticipate her changes before they happened.

Neither could I ALWAYS live in that state of awareness of the viper.  So, as I went along just being natural me in my body, and as she interjected her madness upon me without warning or provocation, I simply had to switch into a dissociated state when she did!  It was like I ‘forgot’ the viper existed unless I was under direct attack.  As a result nearly all of my abuse memories are ‘somewhere else’.  This might be related to why I was almost always taken completely by surprise by her every new attack on me — as if it was the first time it had ever happened.

Rarely did I see her transformation taking place, like I could see the one that happened as I watched my brain let that harmless piece of paper, transform into a harmless snake skin, and then into a full-bodied very living and very deadly snake.  My mother offered me no transitions and no transitional states — which is essential for a well-balanced and well-adapted brain, mind and self to form.

If I knew how, I could set this line to music:  “There was a whole lotta switchin’ goin’ on.”

My mother lacked transitional states.  She rapidly and drastically just – switched.  Did SHE know she was doing this?  I don’t know.  Did she have a choice?  Could she have stopped herself?  I doubt I will ever be able to figure out what was going on inside of her — but inside of me?  Perhaps I always expected the best and got the worst.

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