Tag: child abuse prevention

+MY MOTHER’S AND MY OWN PATTERNS OF ‘HOPE FOR A MOUNTAIN’

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I need to write this morning – some aftermath thoughts from last few intensely focused hard-work days on those volumes!  I am thinking about ‘articulation’, how I need to articulate in written form.  Is that the same thing as needing to write?  Did my mother NEED to write?

Just the sheer ‘volume’ of the words I have tackled in this process with my mother’s writings is staggering.  At the same time I know all the writings did not survive (most fortunately from my point of view!).  Yet how many people really would have had the desire and the motivation to chronicle even such a story as dragging your family to the hinterlands of Alaska to homestead?

Do we today not notice our desire to articulate, express our self and communicate because advances in technology let us do it now with imperceptible ease?

On all the levels within my own self that are being affected as a result of this process I am involved with, some breach the surface in different ways at different stages.  Right now as my mother’s words are nearly exactly in linear place along the line of time that covers her story — and at the same time covers my childhood — I realize that in very serious and comprehensive ways I was never allowed to ‘grow up’.

In some distant, remote and very, very LATE ways I am going through some of that process now.  As I record in digital form the tales that my mother tells I find there are points when I actually feel stunned to realize how OLD I was, and how OLD my siblings were when some of the events Mildred describes occurred.  Because of the severe abuse I never got to ‘leave something behind’ as I grew up.  The same ‘crimes’ that I had been ‘guilty’ of committing starting with my birth were attached to the history of the child who was Linda so that they dragged right along with me like an unending series of cannonballs attached to my body, mind, soul and self.

I was never allowed to outgrow anything, and looking at the ‘story’ now as I proof its complete text, I see that the invisible parts of the story my mother did not record are as present to me as I work with the span of time that was my childhood as are the memories of what she DID record.  That long, long, long terrible chain of connected cannonballs is still here – because all those things were beat into me over and over and over and over again — until I simply ‘left home’.

There never was a transition from being an infant to a toddler, to a young child, to a prepubescent, to an adolescent and then into a young woman.  I was never given ‘privileges’ that advanced along with my expanding age range.  I was never complimented, encouraged, recognized for any growing ability to do anything — except to be increasingly beaten for the ever-longer list of crimes my mother always remembered as being who LINDA was.

I am not sure that I can articulate this.  According to my mother’s disturbed and distorted sense of the passage of time, and because that was all tied up with her ‘splitting’ and projection of evil-badness onto me, I not only had to remain in a continual state of peritrauma (in the midst of ongoing trauma) but looking at this time line now, my mother remained in that state herself.  Nothing ever changed, nothing ever got better, nothing was ever examined as useless or harmful and then discarded.  Nothing was ever learned from the consequences of repeated patterns of mistakes that she made (made together with my father).

I suspect on an underlying and as yet unexamined level, I believe that an extremely young-early-formed force literally dragged my mother forward in her life.  It seems strange to me, but what I name that force —  that both dragged her forward at the same time it beckoned her so that she blindly followed it (and yes, this feels like a sinister force because it was so ‘sick’) — is HOPE.

I am not talking about healthy hope here.  I am talking about hope that is supposed to form itself right into a newborn’s growing brain structure and operation, into a newly forming body and nervous system.  I am talking about hope for life that keeps a human being alive (any creature) at all costs.

The fulfillment of HOPE is what a safe and secure attachment provides for us.  (I’ll write more of this in the future.)

For now I will just say that I had no hope as a child.  It was all but murdered by my mother (and father).  Without that hope, and in the presence of great harm, there was no chance for me to be celebrated into my growing-up life.  Hope did not sit within me as my friend and guiding light.  And without hope, time did not exist.  I did not exist as a separate HUMAN BEING moving forward through the growth and developmental stages of my childhood.

What this means at this moment is that I do not recognize myself as being increasingly older, in a bigger body, having made significant advancements in my childhood.  I read my mother’s ‘story’ from some remote, depersonalized, disembodied viewer’s point of view — because I DID NOT exist as a person as I went through my childhood.

None of my siblings did either, really.  We were my mother’s props.  All her children started out as cute baby dolls (except me – but she could at least tolerate me better when I was tiny and could not express being-a-real-person).  She kept having babies (doll babies) as long as she could.  She had no idea what a child was.

So how does a prop (object-projection) look at itself as having a feeling-felt autobiographical history over time?

It is not as easy as some people might imagine it to be to go back over a story that was one’s childhood and snatch out the truth — like it is all passing by on a conveyor belt and you can pick out the GOOD and ignore the BAD and let it slide right on by.

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My mother’s severe, chronic and terrible abuse of me killed my hope as a child except for one solitary, amazing, grand, majestic and perfect thing.  I HOPED for that mountain.

When severe infant-child abuse keeps a developing human being in a permanent state of peritrauma (the trauma never stops), the trauma becomes an integral part of their physiology.  It cannot be ‘picked’ off of the assembly line and tossed away.  It has built itself into the molecular operation of the entire body-brain of the survivor.

In my case, the existence of that mountain and our existence ON it and WITH it had such a positive effect on me that my capacity to HOPE remained pure, untarnished, untainted, uncontaminated and helpful to me.  In fact, it saved my life.  My hope capacity had simply remained dormant and was waiting within me with all its powers until I met Alaska and that mountain.

I am naming these volumes of my mother’s writings “Hope for a Mountain” because the same thing happened to her.  But there was one critically important difference between how that “Hope for a Mountain” operated for my mother and how it operated (and still operates within my physiology) for me.

My mother’s capacity to hope was contaminated in her infant-childhood.  That fact will become clear when I reach the stage of being able to write “Unspeakable Madness.”

The entire multi-volume story of my mother’s is about contaminated hope.  My story with that mountain is a story about UNCONTAMINATED hope.

I could sit in awe of the miracle of human resiliency that it is, that the experience of HOPE was still possible for me as a child by the time that mountain became a part of my life, and the life of my family.  Yet at this point AWE will get me nowhere.  Perhaps admiration for my own little self?  No, that won’t do anything for me (yet) either.

Water naturally flows downhill.  Pure hope naturally exists.

When water is prevented through some aberration of its natural inclination from flowing downhill, we have a thwarted natural process — and/or a contaminated one.

At this moment as I try to articulate for myself that as I ‘watch’ my mother’s story that covers a span of my childhood, I am seeing that her hatred of me (who I was to HER) prevented me from moving, or flowing forward, through the stages of my childhood.  To her, I was still all the horrible ‘things’ that I had always been (and the pattern is there in her writings – and I intend to bring them forth clearly in “Unspeakable Madness”).

I simply had the capacity to hope from the time I was born.  My capacity for hope was not allowed to ‘come forth’ into the world – or even into the operation of my physiology much past the most basic levels of hope for water, food, sleep or use of a toilet (all of which was interfered with at times by my mother’s abuse).

My mother’s infant-childhood patterns, I believe, were very different from my own.  That also belongs in another, separate body of my writings.  BETRAYED hope, CONTAMINATED hope.  That was my mother’s early experience.

That’s far different from having no hope fulfillment at all.

Yet because the capacity to have HOPE is evidently one of humans’ most powerful resiliency factors, once I ‘accidentally wandered’ through a young life course (being put there by my parents) to a PLACE where my HOPE could flow — well — it would be hard to find an example in anyone’s childhood experience where HOPE could have been more pure, powerful and REAL than it was for me.

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My mother DID feel it too.  I think we were equally in love with that mountain.  In that love both of our powers to experience PURE HOPE were equal.  HOPE is a shared human experience — and we WERE both human.

But my mother could not STAY there.  She never realized the reality of her own NEEDS that her being on that mountain met.  Everything my mother had hoped for since she was born ‘came true’ when she was on that mountain.  But she didn’t KNOW that.

Her hope for that mountain was a hope for the healing of her soul, her mind, her personality, her childhood woundedness that she could never ARTICULATE no matter how many words she scribbled on her thousands of papers.  And like water through a sieve, her hope disappeared with every breath she ever inhaled and exhaled on that mountain.  She, herself was the sieve at the same time she had an insatiable thirst for the ‘waters’ of pure hope’s fulfillment.

By the time I was six and a half the mountain took form in our family even before I had ever seen it.  The hope my mother had, and my father had for that mountain and for their homesteaded 160 acre piece of it, was the most healing force that ever flowed through our family.  But that’s just it:  It flowed right on through like transfused blood would flow through someone’s gaping-open mortal wound.

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I, however, was not an open ‘hope sieve’.  The relationship I had between that ‘place’ and my ‘self’ — well — it worked!  The hope and love and my experience with the land flowed into me entirely and it fed me, sustained me, helped me, fed me, healed me and allowed me to grow new brain and body and mind and soul connections inside my growing self that, in the end, not only kept me alive but let me ‘grow up’ in a good way.

As I write this post, as I am articulating what is inside of me, and therefore what IS ME at this moment, I have to say that I don’t believe it is possible to separate these four aspects of being here on this planet:  Life, the Life Force, Love, and Hope.  I believe they all exist together and are in reality the exact same thing.

Every single one of us has all four of these aspects operating or we would be dead.  The problem with my mother was that they were ‘all mixed up’ (a term she used many, many times in her writings) because her experience in life had been contaminated by attachment trauma.

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As counter-intuitive as this might seem, I suspect that it was exactly because of the moving my mother did up and down the mountain and off and on the homestead that was like the high-powered fertilizer that nourished my own power to hope.  Like Heidi in the story book, my very life force was invested in BEING ON THAT MOUNTAIN.  With every move our family did on and off the mountain, my life force ebbed and waned at the same time my safe and secure attachment body-brain connections grew and grew and grew.

WHY?  Because our attachment physiology, which forms the core of how our body-nervous system-brain-mind operates in our body, has to be exercised through PATTERNS OF RUPTURE AND REPAIR.  As long as we returned at some point to the mountain so that I could repair the rupture I had when we were away from it, I was fine.

Believe me, I was allowed to PRACTICE growing my hope body-brain circuitry.  Leave the mountain – hope for a return – return – hope fulfilled.  Leave the mountain – hope for a return – return – hope fulfilled.  Over and over again (as you can see by reading the volumes I have provided the links to).

But the passage of time itself only existed to me within this particular attachment relationship that I had with that mountain and the wilderness the homestead was a part of.  Time in the natural world exists primarily through patterns of rainfall and snowfall, patterns of wind, patterns of freezing and thawing, of new plant life, bearing blossoms and fruit, seasonal death and rebirth, yearly growth of bushes and trees.   These passages of time were not marked for me in any personal autobiographical-Gee!Whiz!-this-is-me-growing-into-adulthood way.  They simply happened.

When I titled Chapter 7 in Volume One, “Little Pieces of This Rock,” I was certainly talking about my own self as being a piece of that mountain.  In some ways I believe we all were exactly that.  The time of my childhood thus more closely matched the time of an unfurling fern, or the time of a coming wind down the valley flipping each leaf over in succession until the mountainsides turned silver instead of green with its approach, or the time of the movement of the snow line up and down through the seasons high above the mountains’ timber line, or the time it took from my hearing the first faint calls from a massive V of migrating geese until I watched them glide far above the mountain peaks until the sight and the sound of them vanished — until the time they passed over again going in the opposite direction.

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This writing I have done this morning has allowed me to articulate a profound level upon which I stand in relation to this ‘story’ of my mother’s.  I have articulated how my experience with hope fed, sustained and healed me — in permanent ways.

My mother’s experience with the feeding, sustaining and healing powers of the mountain and of her relationship with it continually appeared and then vaporized over and over and over and over again.  She had no way to step aside from the grownup body she was living in that had already formed itself within an environment that gave her shattered hope experiences and betrayed ones.

My mother was taken (at least during summers) to ‘the country’ when she was growing up.  Love of the natural world was a part of her life — but she was RAISED in the city and I know the powers of the land did not have a chance to form and heal her on the levels that it did for me, nor did those experiences have the power to counteract all the other attachment trauma and suffering she experienced as a child within her home.  (This is a major theme in her story I will focus on in “Unspeakable Madness.”)

But her ‘buried psyche’ recognized through resonating love for the natural world those experiences of her childhood as being directly connected to her experiences with the LAND of Alaska.  But she could not consciously understand what all of this MEANT so that she could use her Alaska experiences with the land to CHANGE HERSELF into a more healed person.

Her deep connection with the wilderness did sustain her, but she could not sustain her healthy, healing hope.  Yes, there were all the details of being an adult and of being a parent that presented all the obstacles she describes in her writings.  But the Mildred that COULD have been present to face those obstacles — and here I must say IN THE PRESENT moments of her life — was all tangled up in trauma-altered developmental ways that nobody ever understood.

That she happened to hate me and torture me for the eighteen years of my childhood because all I could ever be to her was an ‘evil figment of her imagination’, was just one piece of the story of my mother’s life that she writes about (or I should say, DOES NOT WRITE ABOUT) in this collection of her words I am working with.

The bigger picture of her life was HERS alone, and the ability to sustain healthy, uncontaminated  hope was barely, barely a part of it.

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+MILDRED’S WRITINGS – WHAT ‘STUDY GROUP’ QUESTIONS DO THEY PRESENT?

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I do want to add one thing here before I lose this little piece of pink-pad paper that I scrawled these notes down on last night after I completed the major edit-proof of the second volume of Mildred’s writings I just posted links to.  I know there are some important levels to my mother’s story – some that are obvious and some that are not.  Each of these levels can contribute something to the overall study of human nature, and I believe each of them is worthy of ‘book study group’ investigation.

The history of the roles of women is a big theme behind all womens’ lives, but especially so for my mother who was born (1925) into a family with a professional (and soon divorced – 1930) mother.  My mother was the product of one of the first kinds of ‘broken homes’ that have since swept America.

What were the limitations imposed on my mother as a result of her choice to be a ‘housewife’ and ‘homemaker’ rather than a ‘career woman’?  What does it mean to ‘have a home’ and ‘to make a home’?

Mildred’s story also contains a powerful example of America’s obsession with WEIGHT as well as with America’s obsession with MONEY (including the consequence of sickness and the costs of medical attention).  I can write a series of ‘study group’ questions about these concerns, as well.  Another important thread is the topic of parenting and the developmental stages of children (and their rights) — which I believe is closely tied to the topic of love for the land itself:  What is our personal feeling relationship with this glorious planet we live on?  (Yes, my mother could love that mountain and its valley at the same time she could commit terrible acts of harm against a child.  What went so wrong?)

What ‘used to happen’ to womens’ talents and gifts – and now?  What did it mean to be a brilliant woman?  An educated one?  What about choices for women to marry or not, bear children or not, ‘wear the pants in the family’ or not?  What has it always meant to girls and women when the ‘boys’ in the family were so cherished – spoiled – favored – and not the girls?  How do male relations influence the development of girls?

Of course the history of American pioneer women relates to this story.  Although my mother asserts that her husband ‘was behind’ the move to Alaska and the homesteading itself, I don’t believe he was.  How many women actually were behind their family’s immigrations and pioneering efforts — rather than the men?  And thus changed the course of history?

What do we value?  What do we want?  What do we hope and dream for?  What are the obstacles we face, and what do we do about them?  What are ALL our resources – how do we identify them, expand them, control them and use them?   How do we plan for the future?  How do we learn from our mistakes — and what do we learn?  How do we incorporate the changes that ‘growing through a lifespan’ gives to us – no matter what?

What is the truth, the REAL truth about our closest relationships?  What is the truth about how we were raised as children and about how our parents treat us as adults?  What do we, particularly as women, believe about friendships with women?  Who supports us in our greatest hours of need?

What have we learned from our ‘culture’ – particularly from the culture of our families ‘back then’ as immigrants to this great nation who brought with them their cultures-of-origin?  How does our ‘social standing’ affect how we see ourselves and others?  How does our culture, including our stereotypes and prejudices limit us?  How do we OUTGROW ideas and beliefs that are not helpful to well-being?

What do we disclose about our ‘personal’ and ‘intimate’ life?  How do we decide what to ‘expose’ and what to bury away and keep hidden at all costs?  This invisible ‘boundary’ and ‘borderline’ dividing the two has changed rapidly in recent American history.  What do these changes mean to us all?  (My mother would have died of rage and mortification and  made sure I left this world with her if she had ever known what I (her despised daughter, especially) was going to do with her ‘private’ words!  Yet the law states when a person dies (and she IS dead 2002) their rights to any words they leave behind dies with them.)

The unrecognized mental illness, of course, completely taints my mother’s story at the same time that her severe child abusing actions are omitted.  After I completed my efforts last night these ‘study group’ questions immediately popped into my mind and then out onto this little piece of pink paper:

What is mental illness?

Where does it come from?

Who gets it?

How do we recognize it?

What can be done about it?

Is it a doomsday sentence?

Does it make a person ‘flawed’ or ‘bad’?

Will it get better?

How does it affect the people we love and who love us?

Is there hope for new choice, change and healing?

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Once I have completed all four of these volumes, the bigger picture of my mother, Mildred, and of her life’s many different patterns will emerge.  Those intermixing threads will then be identified and examined individually and as they intermingle with one another.

I do not believe that what we so blithely refer to as ‘bad genes’ that ’cause mental illness’ operate in a vacuum.  A combination of powerful early developmental forces combine their influence to send a tiny growing child off on a trajectory that can END UP being extremely problematic.  My mother’s Alaskan homesteading story is a case study as well as an historical document about one single women — who, yes, dared to go where only a small handful of ‘modern women’ chose to go.

What, on all its multiple levels, can we learn from her story?  I personally have yet to find out.

AND most importantly, how do we recognize child abusing parents and protect their children?

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NOTE:  Any blog readers that wish to, please post comments including ‘study group’ topic suggestions (and questions for them) at the end of the volumes of my mother’s writings at these links I present (or at the end of this post):

*HOPE FOR A MOUNTAIN: MILDRED’S ALASKAN HOMESTEADING TALE – VOLUME ONE – BEGINNING A DREAM

*HOPE FOR A MOUNTAIN: MILDRED’S ALASKAN HOMESTEADING TALE – VOLUME TWO – LIVING FOR THE LAND


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+MY MOTHER’S NAME IN WICKIPEDIA – NEED TO WRITE HER AN ARTICLE THERE

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Interesting, my daughter just sent me this from Wickipedia:

“Mildred Ann Cahill (1925-2002) Alaskan homesteader”

My mother’s rich, rich brother isn’t listed there.  Click on link, interesting info on origins of Irish name, “Cahill.”  They make no note in this entry of her married name, “Lloyd” here.

Does make me realize that I don’t think my mother spells her own middle name in her writings, and we don’t have her birth certificate so I don’t know if the “e” is attached to her middle name or not — from this Wickipedia info, I guess NOT!

I probably need to have someone who knows computer code help me post a page on Mildred on Wickipedia before the books are published (I can’t do it, I don’t know coding).  Once the four volumes are completed I will have my family help me with that project!

These chapter headings I chose from her words are worthy of ‘homesteading history’ exploration — as is the entire story itself:

*HOPE FOR A MOUNTAIN: MILDRED’S ALASKAN HOMESTEADING TALE – VOLUME TWO – LIVING FOR THE LAND

PART ONE:  IT WILL WORK OUT ONE MOVE AT A TIME

ONE             Bill Will File on the Land Tomorrow

TWO            On a Merry Chase from Morn to Morn – and I’m Not Kidding

THREE        I’ll Homestead In Summertime, thank you!

FOUR          Oh How, Oh How Will I Ever Manage??

FIVE            We’re Both So Upset and Yet Determined

SIX               I’ll Give Up Anything for Our Homestead

PART TWO:  SUCH BEAUTY FOR INSPIRATION AND PEACE THAT CAN’T BE FOUND IN TODAY’S CIVILIZATION

SEVEN           Little Pieces of This Rock

EIGHT           Stick To My Land Here Like Glue

NINE              How Much Of a Beating Can We Take?

TEN                We Belong On Our Land for All Time

ELEVEN        It’s Really an Almost HOLY Feeling

TWELVE       Homesteaders Even In Alaska Are Becoming Extinct

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I am now going to take a much needed ‘vacation’ before I tackle the formation of the ‘final files’ for the other two volumes of her writings and get ready for my family coming to visit — and to get ready!!!

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See also:

*HOPE FOR A MOUNTAIN: MILDRED’S ALASKAN HOMESTEADING TALE – VOLUME ONE – BEGINNING A DREAM

PART ONE:  WAITING AND THE LOVE LETTERS

ONE               Don’t Ever Leave Me Again (14)

TWO              Find Me a House So I Can Come Home (49)

THREE          If You Care About Me and Our Future (73)

FOUR            Fear of Sand in the New Car (108)

FIVE              The Worst Is Over With (140)

PART TWO:  ARRIVING NORTH AND SETTLING IN

SIX                  So Keen on Alaska (172)

SEVEN          No Hicks Here (197)

EIGHT            Now That the Trees Are Bare (235)

NINE              He Will Do the Winter Driving (262)

TEN                All Mean Well I Guess (As Women Can) (297)

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+THE IN-TENSE JOB OF EDITING-PROOFING MY ABUSIVE MOTHER’S LETTERS

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Oh my, I have to say, what an intense process this is — doing what is nearing the final edit-proofs of my mother’s writings!  I have worked for ten hours today on the second volume and have only made it through 130 of the over 300 pages it contains!

I know this about myself, that I have an almost ‘strange’ ability to focus on work I am doing at times.  I suspect strongly that this ability is tied to my dissociation (as odd as that might seem).  The level of focus it is taking me to work my way through this edit-proofing process is astounding even me!  I am ‘up for air’ right now.  Or rather, I am nearly off to sleep at this hour (1:00 in the morning my time now).

I believe this effort will literally ‘pay off’ — and hopefully soon.  I received my first compliment from my sister today, who followed the link to Volume One I sent her today, and reported that she couldn’t leave ‘the story’ until she finished it.  It took her four hours — and she is an extremely fast reader.

Part of what is tricky about this process I am engaged in — said if I leave completely out of the picture WHO my mother was and WHAT she did to me — is that my mother wrote in a literary format that is becoming obsolete in today’s world.  My mother ‘speaks’ over and over and over again in the body of this text of her words that she ‘wants to write’ — while at the same time being completely engrossed in her act of writing!

Yet I sense that her form of letter writing lies as some sort of ‘mongrel cross’ between the actual ‘literary tradition’ and the ‘oral nonliteray tradition’.  Yet because her writing is being carefully crafted to fit a published book format — at the same time that I am attempting to preserve THE literary voice she uses to transmit information (most often to her mother) — I have to pay close attention not ONLY to the words she writes, but also to the pauses, the spaces, her nearly flamboyant and chronic use of dashes, her omission of punctuation — so that in the end readers will be able to follow the story Mildred is telling without falling through the ‘gaps’ that are as much a part of her writing style as are the words themselves.

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This process I am engaged in is, to put it mildly, quite BIZARRE!  I am polishing, if not honing my mother’s ability to present a complete facade of herself as being a ‘one kind of woman’ at the exclusion of the ‘other kind of woman’ that my mother was essentially extremely capable of being.  Right now I cannot think about ‘any of that’ because this job I am currently doing would be an impossible task for me to complete.

Maybe I have to ‘go to’ some dissociated and disconnected ‘place’ while I do this job that has more in common with the ‘dissociated and disconnected place’ my mother was able to ‘go to’ while she WROTE these words!  That could be an eerie and unsettling awareness if I let it breach my quasi-professional ‘role’ I have myself in right now.

Partly what concerns me, and I mean this as in ‘involves me’, is that a STORY (according to some very professional International Storytellers I was honored to converse with once upon a time) exists in its OWN RIGHT separate from its teller.

I have written about this before on my blog, how I see the history of our species’ story contained in our DNA itself, how I see genetic memory as being the living of a living story that is so ancient, and so much larger than any single separate entity that calls herself-himself human.

I am — most essentially — pursuing a course of action that I have chosen.  I am being the Fair Witness to this STORY that my mother is telling.  It is HER VERSION of this STORY that is in her words.  Yet Mildred’s husband and all of her children, along with fellow homesteaders, acquaintances (Mildred could not form friendships), and random strangers all had some part in this story.

Storytellers in the oral nonliterate tradition will speak about the requisite involvement of ‘audience’ with ‘story’.  Both the living audience and the living story combine to FORM a living work of art — in time — in space.  I am actively involved with the telling of this story so that it can become a story an audience can participate with.

Horror of Horrors, how can this be?  I certainly know my mother was vilely violent, a child abusing maniac, a dangerous, MEAN and awful mother.  I certainly also know she is not presenting THIS part of herself in this story!  No real surprise there to me any longer — though it greatly amazed and puzzled me for a long time during ‘my process’ with Mildred’s written words.

But because I have chosen my Fair Witness role, and because I have chosen to create the narrative chronicle of the shards and fragments of my mother’s writings as her completely disorganized papers came to me originally after her death, and because I am choosing not to analyze or interpret ANYTHING she says (there will be probably close to 800,000 words here in these four volumes – my guess), all I need to do is FOCUS and DO THIS WORK.

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The image that just came to me as I wrote these last words was of taking a piece of paper and some crayon or pencil — something — and finding a pattern, laying the paper on top of it, and rubbing, rubbing, rubbing — until the image becomes clear on the paper.  No, the evil genie is not going to appear through this rubbing process.  Just an image.  Just a story.  Just a version of a story, seen through my mother’s particular keyhole.  It is her perspective, and my job I have assigned myself is to rub this story, polish it, bring it forth as crystal-clearly as possible — so that THIS story, this strangely-NOT-the-mother-I-knew-wrote-this-story – story — will appear.

The next image that comes to me is of a clean room, like the ones they use at Intel, where nobody can go in THOSE rooms.  If they do, they wear suits, or they work with strange gizmos in their hands through glass.  Because I know that my mother’s story IS CONTAMINATED.  It has to be deadly toxic – somewhere — because she was.

But I leave all that alone right now.  I work with her words as if I never met this person before in my entire lifetime.  And on some strange, twisted, yet very real level, I probably never did meet THIS woman, who wrote THESE words in this story I plan to just plain publish!

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*HOPE FOR A MOUNTAIN: MILDRED’S ALASKAN HOMESTEADING TALE – VOLUME ONE – BEGINNING A DREAM

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+WORD WARRIOR NEWS: THE MIRACLE OF AN INTERVIEW IS COMING UP THIS SATURDAY

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It seems like such an amazing ‘gift’ that the most significant eye witness to 45 years of my mother’s life will be doing an interview with my very smart and savvy daughter this coming Saturday.  It seems like such a gift because IT IS such a gift!  My daughter will be the ‘fair witness’ to JV’s account.

JV knows things – lots of things.  I spoke with her briefly yesterday to let her know that my daughter is willing to interview her — and to listen to all that JV has to say about my mother.  JV seemed very relieved that she would not be trying to say what she wants to and needs to say to ME.

I also asked JV if she wants to read my mother’s letters, and she does — ALL OF THEM — including the letters written back and forth between my parents in the summer of 1957 while my father went to Alaska ahead of his family and mother and kids stayed in Los Angeles.  I am hard at work on a ‘proof’ of those letters now.  JV will do the interview, we will print of all the letters and send them to Alaska for her to read (and very hopefully to make notes on), and then probably have a second interview with her afterward.

I was dismayed to realize after my ‘edit-proof’ on letters from August 1, 1957 when Mildred arrived in Alaska until the following March 31, 1958 that those 8 months of letters fill over 150 pages!  Lots more work to do here, so best get to it!!!

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+OUR RIGHT TO QUANTUM HEALING – ALLOWING THE MIRACLES TO HAPPEN

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I have heard it said that such a thing exists as QUANTUM HEALING.  I am not going to bother searching around online for all kinds of information about this miracle.  I believe it exists, and I believe we can all access it.  I also believe I am smack in the middle of such a process now.

Perhaps because it is in my nature to force positive change when I think I need it within myself, and perhaps especially now at this point in my life where I literally feel I have an important job and mission to accomplish that can contribute something good and useful to understanding what severe infant-child abuse looks like – from within and from without – and perhaps because I also personally feel I am under a time pressure to outrun the cancer that has visited my body so that I can complete this job before I ‘move on’ from this world — I do not wish to ‘mamby-pamby’ my way through or around any obstacle that appears in my pathway.

I am blessed with the resources that I need at this point in my life that help me not to get sidetracked, bogged down or waylaid in my efforts.  I just spoke to my ONLY real friend in town here about the work I am doing (she has known the entire process).  She wisely suggested that I ask my daughter to do the telephone interview about my mother with JV, my mother’s long-term Alaskan friend.  I am too emotionally involved, and too emotional.

As I spoke with my friend about the kinds of ‘things’ about my mother that JV has to tell, I suffered through wave after wave of ‘goosebump attacks’.  I also dissolved into sorrowful tears.  The recognition and experience of the deep, deep sorrow and sadness happens because I profoundly recognize what a terrible, terrible tragedy this story truly is that I am ‘in line’ for telling.

It is, however, my nearly unending sadness over the suffering of my mother that prevents me from wanting to complete this upcoming interview with my mother’s friend.  It is the suffering of my mother that will interfere with my ability to allow JV to say what she needs to tell me.  As my friend pointed out today, if I ever once ‘fell into’ the tears that I did today as I talked to her while I talked with JV next Saturday, she has no doubt that JV will not wish to continue to tell me the truths that she knows about my mother.

The wise solution presented this morning by my friend would allow my very compassionate, intelligent, invested but objective, extremely fast typing, sensitive daughter to complete this telephone interview with JV.  I will ask my daughter this evening, find out her response, and then call JV and ask for her permission to do ‘things’ this brilliantly safe and effective way.

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So, given this presenting obstacle, the ‘rules’ of quantum healing dictate that a better alternative exists.  It is my job to utilize my resources to find exactly where these obstacles are, and to find more resources to find my way around them.

I have also come to realize that when we consider the quality and nature of the darkness that can infiltrate a human beings body-brain-mind-self — an my mother was infiltrated by this darkness through trauma as a developing infant-child — it could be said that conditions DO exist in the world involving the potential for harm that seem beyond where any ‘rational’ human can pursue, follow, explore or ‘know’.  The degree of infant-child abuse that my mother was perfectly capable of perpetrating falls within this sphere and realm.

After the dream I had a few days ago that clearly alerted me of the powers of spiritual assistance, protection, guidance and healing that do exist right along with the darkness, I am experiencing my journey of working with my mother’s story for publication differently.

There is a saying, “Going where angels fear to tread.”  Only through the appearance of this dream I wrote about a few days ago did I gain a very real understanding (and again, I am not Catholic) that the archangel Michael, or St. Michael – San Miguel — exists, and that he is not afraid of ANYTHING on this earth.  There is no darkness, no realm of horror or of human deprivation and suffering that can possibly prevent this angel from assisting people to understand and to heal from.

In addition, the ‘guardians of the gates’, or Cherubs – Cherubim that were also referenced in my dream are also allies for this good work of trying to understand the powerful, and yes dark, roots of trauma, abuse, neglect and malevolent treatment of infants and children that can lead to deeply disturbing changes in development that can create infant-child abusing people like my mother was.

In my own very human way this entire ‘job’ or ‘mission’ that I am pursuing is big, big, big, bigger than I am.  The fact that I cry from the center of my soul for the pain and suffering MY MOTHER experienced in her lifetime would be mystifying to me if I did not understand that these pictures are so much bigger than any of us who experience them personally.

My mother did not, for instance, CHOOSE of her own free will to pick up a broom and bash my little girl head and body with it.  Something else — call it ‘impulsivity’ or ’emotional dysregulation’ certainly contributed to her thousands of acts of violence.  But the picture is SO MUCH BIGGER.  It came down the generations — and for a reason.  That this ‘reason’ is so difficult to detect within a story of lack of reason doesn’t mean that finding the reason is impossible — or that it isn’t critically important.

In my own process of moving forward I have to accept changes in my course as they present them.  Now I see that I have to create a ‘homesteading process’ and a ‘historical homesteading story’ separately from the book that is the chronicle of my mothers disturbed — and very disturbing — madness.

I am preparing myself to recognize this fact, that I cannot create a ‘one volume’ that can accomplish what I hoped it could.  At the same time, the expose of my mother’s potential for terrible child abuse is paramount.  I have nothing for anyone to sue me for.  I will change the names of every ‘character’ my mother writes about to protect the privacy of the innocent (even though, as my last post mentions, I have to walk past my own ‘bitterness’ to do this).

What LINDA wants is not what is important here if what I want is not a part of the bigger picture of the good that come out of my work with my mother’s words.  Gaining clarity.  That’s what I am after.  And because St. Michael is there to fight the war of light against darkness, as a very real spiritual entity (and who am I to argue this fact?), nothing short of my own physical annihilation prior to my completing this task will stop me.

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In case there are readers who are unfamiliar with my ‘story’, here are some links to read (warning:  may trigger):

*Age 3 – THE TOILET BOWL

*Age 5 – THE BUBBLE GUM

*AGE 6 – FIRST GRADE — NIGHT ON THE STOOL

*Age 9 – BLOODY NOSE

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+ANGER, RAGE, BITTERNESS, RESENTMENT — TELLING US RIGHT FROM WRONG

alchemynowLeave a comment

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I woke up this morning feeling very clear about something in my life around which the giant black-winged bird of bitterness circles, like a creature sure of its prey.  This is good.  It allows me to further explore some of the parameters of this ‘state of being’ named bitterness from the inside rather just from without.

Bitterness.  A personal HOTSPOT!  This reminds me of what I heard during the ten year period of my life from 1980 – 1990 when I attended weekly 12-step meetings:  Resentments kill.

As I look around today at my inner deadly wound that could feed a great swell of bitterness (and of resentment) inside of me today I see that these two states of being must be intimately connected one to the other.

Somehow I had some profound inner certainties arise when I ‘went through treatment’ in 1980, but most of what my inner self knew was not confirmed within the confines of the 12-step meetings I attended.  I was brand new to any form of recovery, and was the first person in the long line of my family and ancestry to do so.  Yet when I encountered the 12-steps that demanded me to understand that I could be ‘restored to sanity’ — I knew fundamentally that I had no experience with ‘sanity’ in my life and had never, ever had the chance to explore its blessings.

‘Recovery’ people around me told me I was ‘resisting’ recovery as I questioned from the insides of myself what made sense about this ‘new way of life’ that was being presented to me and what did not.  “You are rationalizing,” they told me.  “You are intellectualizing,” they told me.

When I tried to do my first ‘4th step’ in treatment and tried to do it right, I tried to write about my ‘resentments’.  Instantly, as soon as I set my recovery-minded pen to paper I encountered an insanely abusive experience of my 9th grade high school self — and my little ‘recovery ship’ blew itself right out of the water.

And there was nobody around me to help me understand the insanely abusive childhood I had lived for 18 years.  There was nobody there — oddly and actually enough — to help me work with the TRUTH that was supposedly at the heart of these 12-step recovery programs.

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On my own, and from within my body, my mind, my self and within my heart of hearts I DID know something important that I used within my own healing.  I knew that every single time I feel ANGER, and every single time I might bump up against or crash into something that could be named RESENTMENT, what I was-am truthfully encountering is the line as I KNOW it between right and wrong.  Every time ‘anger’ or ‘resentment’ appears within me — and as I can see today, the risk for ‘bitterness’ as well, I know that something I HIGHLY VALUE has been touched upon so that I have another extremely important piece of information about who and how I am in the world.

I value RIGHT.  I know the difference between right and WRONG.  Whenever a WRONG has been committed somewhere, my inner alarm of anger, rage, resentment, and/or bitterness goes off.  Instantly and loudly!

What I do with the information about right and wrong is up to me.  Swirling around in the topsy-turvy inner world of anger, rage, resentment and bitterness helps no one RIGHT a WRONG that has been committed.

Ultimately this entire topic, to me, is about this one single thing:  If we as individuals have a strong and powerfully clear inner sense of RIGHT versus WRONG — we can be at very high risk of suffering the consequences of ‘holding onto’ the emotional states encountering breaches of RIGHT versus WRONG will alert us to.  If I cannot give myself permission to identify for my thinking-acting-choosing self something related to a WRONG that I identify, no hope for contributing something to make the world a better place – even if that ‘world’ is simply my own little tiny piece of it.

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Interestingly (to me) the shaky platform of possible resentment and bitterness for me today has to do with something very important to me:  The work I am doing with my mother’s words so that I can publish a complete EXPOSE of the inner world of my mother that NOBODY ELSE seemed to detect outside of our family.

As I work with her words, and as I mentioned in recent posts, discover that words she wrote about her feelings and attitudes of other ADULTS in her life 50 years ago still have the power to unsettle, upset and possibly hurt those living people IF I publish my mother’s words as she wrote them.

I find that this MAKES ME MAD!  These ‘public’ people who today would take a stand to protect their own self from the hurt of my mother’s 50-year-old words are the exact same people WHO NEVER SAW MY MOTHER’S TRUE — TERRIBLY ABUSIVE — OTHER SELF during those years that I especially (and also my siblings) most needed SOMEONE TO HELP US!!!

My intent on publishing this biography – or expose of a monster — is to a large extent to help everyone possible outside a severely abusive parent’s home begin to understand more and more about how much terror, trauma and suffering for infants and children can be going on BEHIND THE NICEY-NICE PUBLIC FACADE of someone as ‘charmingly persuasive’ as my mother was.

That I NOW, after 18 years of unbelievable torture and abuse have to WORRY about the FEELINGS of those same people who did NOT SEE WHAT MY MOTHER WAS CAPABLE OF, or did see, and felt they had no way to intervene on my or my siblings’ behalf, MAKES ME FEROCIOUSLY ANGRY!!

This is UNFAIR, UNJUST and just plain WRONG!  Or is it?  Not according to the law — the same system of law, I might add, who should have arrested my mother (and my father) and charged them with the crimes of assuault, battery, abuse, terror and torture and sentenced them — an imprisoned them both for no less than

14,500 years!

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What this situation is doing for me right now is bringing up right in front of my face what the choice-point feels like — in the present moment — between LEARNING something when a serious breach of RIGHT and WRONG – injustice, lack of fairness — appears, or letting it continue to perpetuate the old wounds so that bitterness and resentment can throw me off of my own good life track.

This brings me to mentioning something that belongs in this discussion at the same time that it is an extremely difficult point for severe infant-child abusers to identify and tackle:  Irony, ambivalence and paradox.

These three states of mind were missing within the body-brain-mind-self of our abusers — especially if our abusers were Borderline Personality Disorder people!

This fact leaves us with the whole giant mess of WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG!!  Without having been given protection or reprieve — at the same time we did not get any version of a handle on how to HANDLE ironic, ambivalent and paradoxical conditions in our lives!!

What I am describing above about having to ‘protect’ the feelings, privacy and rights of grown up people who certainly DID NOT — for whatever reason — even begin to assure that I had those same qualities protected in my childhood — is ironical.  It presents me with my own experience of ambivalence as I consider ‘both sides of the picture’.  And you bet there is a profound, fundamental paradox present in this situation.

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But I CANNOT CHANGE THE REALITY!  None of it.  Whenever anger, resentment, bitterness appear, there is a sure chance that irony, ambivalence and paradox has appeared RIGHT within the conditions that stimulated our ‘fight’ stress response reaction.  How do we find and create our own inner point of calm in the midst of this STORM?

In other words, how do we make our own self ‘RIGHT WITHIN’ while we live in the real world?  Simply finding a way to ‘intellectually (left brain)’ understand reasonably what this whole mess I am experiencing right now is all about will NOT solve the emotional experience of it.

Those of us who have suffered from extreme abuse have an entire universe of body memory, body feeling, and right-brain emotional experience connected to these HOTSPOTS in life.  We have to be aware of this — as I was 30 years ago when I entered so-called ‘recovery’ and could find no one to help me include my own inner wisdom and knowledge with the 12-step ‘plan’ for ‘recovery’.

“Follow your instincts,” would be my most simple and accurate advice.  If you FEEL anger, range, bitterness, resentment — you are face-to-face with SOME kind of injustice that has been committed and still might exist.  LOOK AT THE INJUSTICE that is at the heart of what stimulated your reaction.  You have been ‘trauma triggered’.  WHAT DO YOU TRULY KNOW ABOUT IT?   WHAT YOU HAVE EXPERIENCED?   Tend to the wound that needs healing within YOU (and within those you love and care about, as well).

But do not pretend that the injustice does not exist.  If we HAVE these reactions I am talking about, I firmly and absolutely believe that they are physiologically triggered by our immune system’s response to harm and to threat of harm!  This HAS to be a fact because all our emotions, especially our most intense, powerful, primitive survival-based emotions of FEAR AND ANGER (as well as SADNESS) are directly tied into our basic nervous system (body-brain) which is PROTECTED by our immune system response.

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Human life is complicated.  No way around this fact.

What stimulated the immune-triggered developmental changes in my mother than made her grow into the ‘kind of person’ she was meant that the powerful inner bitterness of a terribly wounded, powerless but still FIGHTING little child removed from my mother the power of consciousness about what had happened to her, ‘what’ she became as a result of it, how bitter she was – AND HOW MEAN AND DANGEROUS SHE WAS.

Every single time my mother uses a single, solitary word ‘against’ another adult in her life 50 years ago is PROOF of the quality of MEAN my mother was.  But these tiny words, no matter what they were, no matter how disparaging and offensive they might appear NOW for the people she was writing about — were NOTHING compared to what was going on within the ‘home’ she terrorized and controlled.

Yes, I DO profoundly wish to expose the kind of ‘monster’ my mother was.  I want to DO SOMETHING to help others ‘out there in the world’ begin to wake up and pay attention when their own INNER WARNING system goes off inside of themselves that SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH THIS PERSON!

How else are we truly going to make any progress whatsoever toward protecting suffering infants and children who are being tormented, tortured, traumatized and abused — by viciously cruel, mean and dangerous parents — FREELY and without consequence.?

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I am within conflict.  I am willing to change the names of the people my mother wrote about.  But I do not wish to alter the pattern of my mother’s mean words.  They are what this story is about.

My personal feelings right now are mine to deal with.  They let me know that I have great JUSTIFIABLE anger at the adults in my childhood that did not HELP me or my siblings.  But as the 12-step programs DO SAY, holding onto the anger, bitterness and resentments do not make anything better.  They can educate us about right and wrong, about choice, about opportunities for improving life all the way around.  But left alone as simple physiological states tied to mental patterns that are destructive help no one.

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In case there are readers who are unfamiliar with my ‘story’, here are some links to read (warning:  may trigger):

*Age 3 – THE TOILET BOWL

*Age 5 – THE BUBBLE GUM

*AGE 6 – FIRST GRADE — NIGHT ON THE STOOL

*Age 9 – BLOODY NOSE

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+FEELING BITTER – BITTERNESS AS A STATE OF MIND, A STATE OF BEING: “NO THANKS!”

alchemynow8 Comments

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The word ‘bitter’ came up in some comments recently.  All the time I’ve been out working this morning on my adobe project I have been thinking about this word and about its corresponding ‘state of being’ or ‘state of mind’.

Looking at the definition (see below) I see that the origins of this word are connected to BITE, and that the word has been in our modern Enlglish language for a long time (since before the 12th century).  This is not a new word, and does not apply to some distant, remote intellectual concept or idea.  I suspect that the feeling of bitter, and the experience of bitterness are primary and fundamental to the human condition.

I am trying to imagine at what age a child might be capable of feeling bitter.  I can’t imagine that it is a feeling that is even humanly possible before the age of three, perhaps four.  What developmental stages must a person have completed before the potential for feeling bitter becomes active-activated?

This looks to me to be one of those comprehensive emotions that involves thoughts as well as very real emotions in the body – as they are processed through the right emotional brain.  It’s a tough one, one more than I can begin to comprehend today.  I will just say that I am ‘thinking about it’.

This feeling and/or state of being is NOT one of well-being, joyfulness, or of peace and calm.  It sounds like one that can eat a person up alive — like a cancer.  I would guess that crashed hopes, disappointments, betrayal, perhaps retained childish fantasies of a perfect world, inability to tolerate ‘any more pain’, confusion about how to resolve conflict (i.e. ruptures without repair), along with a sense of powerless must all contribute to the complexity of ‘bitter’.

While I was working outside today before it got too hot and I had to retreat inside for shelter, I was thinking that this word, ‘bitter’, makes me think of ‘soul sickness’.  Of course I don’t really, actually KNOW what soul is, I can’t make logical sense out of this idea that came to me:  Bitterness can be healed through informed compassion and forgiveness.

It would seem to me that ‘bitterness’ would create such an imbalance within a person that vast amounts of life force would be removed from the actual LIVING of a person’s life because the life force would be all tied up in the dead-end condition that bitterness creates.  Of all emotional states of being that I can imagine today, it strikes me that this one, feeling bitter, might be one that needs to be on the absolute top of the priority heap for removal and/or transformation.

Talk about a ‘monkey wrench’ thrown into the gears of a person’s ongoing life, ‘bitterness’ could do that.  From an autonomic nervous system, and vagus nerve system, and stress response system perspective — bitterness to me would take its place when all other responses to trauma, threat, challenge (as well as growth) have proved inadequate and completely ineffective and useless.

The antidote to bitterness must be in taking actions connected to clearly identifying the ‘problems’ at the heart of the bitterness — and then finding active ways to try to gain new confidence, competence and ‘coping resources’ to be able to move off of the ‘stopped dead in your tracks’ state of bitterness that solves absolutely NOTHING.

I have been searching and searching inside of myself today trying to find any ‘sore spot’ within me where bitterness might lie.  I honestly can’t find one — which is some ways amazes me — and makes me curious.  How could I have experienced 18 years of terror and abuse as a child and NOT feel bitter?  It feels like a miracle, a gift — something that was spiritually given to me that I take completely fore granted.  I don’t think it’s something I avoided by myself!  Which leads me today to realize how grateful I am for this gift, and how I wish to say, “Thank You” to Creation for its absence in my life.

It must be some kind of mercy that has been shown to me — and on a ‘soul’ level, I know it’s not something that I either earned or deserved.  That’s what’s so special about gifts.

But this does not mean I am not vulnerable to ‘bitterness’ in the future.  I hope I can pay attention, be wary and vigilant — so that if ever the tiniest shred of bitterness appears within me, I will be able to either root it out or pray it out!!

Bitterness is NOT ‘a keeper’!  I am a big fan of things that are constructive (rather than things that are destructive).  I don’t want bitterness in me, in my relationships, in my life.  Perhaps I learned this lesson because of how SUPER bitter my mother was, and saw its potential for harming others.  Maybe I was ‘helped’ to be free of bitterness myself because I SO DIDN’T WISH TO HARM anyone else — and as a side benefit, I don’t have to suffer from it either!  Hey!  That’s pretty cool!

(Maybe I see being bitter like being bored – a waste of time!)

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BITTER

Etymology: Middle English, from Old English biter; akin to Old High German bittar bitter, Old English bītan to bite — more at bite Date: before 12th century

1 a : being or inducing the one of the four basic taste sensations that is peculiarly acrid, astringent, or disagreeable and suggestive of an infusion of hops — compare salt, sour, sweet b : distasteful or distressing to the mind : galling <a bitter sense of shame>
2 : marked by intensity or severity: a : accompanied by severe pain or suffering <a bitter death> b : being relentlessly determined : vehement <a bitter partisan> c : exhibiting intense animosity <bitter enemies> d (1) : harshly reproachful <bitter complaints> (2) : marked by cynicism and rancor <bitter contempt> e : intensely unpleasant especially in coldness or rawness <a bitter wind>
3 : expressive of severe pain, grief, or regret <bitter tears>

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In case there are readers who are unfamiliar with my ‘story’, here are some links to read (warning:  may trigger):

*Age 3 – THE TOILET BOWL

*Age 5 – THE BUBBLE GUM

*AGE 6 – FIRST GRADE — NIGHT ON THE STOOL

*Age 9 – BLOODY NOSE

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+WORD WARRIOR NEWS: MY BROKEN, BROKEN, BROKEN MOTHER

alchemynow2 Comments

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I just spoke on the telephone with a woman in her mid-80s in Alaska, JV,  who other than my mother’s mother, maintained the longest relationship with my mother of Mildred’s lifetime.  I visited with JV last when I visited Alaska last summer.  It had been about 38 years since I had seen her.  Now when I talk on the phone to JV that visit certainly helps.  She and I can ‘see’ one another now.  And I am grateful beyond words for JV — as an amazing woman — and for the friendship she had with my mother.

I needed to talk with JV about the issue of what my mother says in her letters about her.  JV very reasonably said, “I have to see what she said about me.”  I assured JV as I go through my next edit I will pull out all the references to her and to her family my mother makes and print a copy to send to her.  JV, out of all people on earth, knows exactly the entire context for the entire story of my mother, and probably knew her better than anyone ever did.

JV and I made an appointment for a telephone visit a week from this Saturday, on the 17th of July.  She would have spoken to me this coming Saturday, but I have to prepare myself for this conversation.  JV is not a writer, but she wants to tell me what she knows.  I will be sitting at my computer and will document everything that JV has to say.

JV is the last person, other than the hospital personnel in the emergency, to speak to my mother before her death.

Here is one thing JV told me tonight that will give you an idea of the kinds of things JV knows and wishes to tell me about my mother.  Long after I had left home, after my mother and father’s divorce, my mother had rented a very expensive two bedroom apartment that was beyond her means to keep.  She charged all kinds of expensive furnishings for it, even though both JV and her husband tried (as they did probably hundreds and hundreds of times during the years they knew my mother — 1957 to 2002) to warn Mildred about her actions — to no avail.

During this period Mildred was becoming increasingly paranoid of her grown children, JV says, until it reached the point that my mother wrote “666” on her forehead and on her hands “to protect herself from the devil and from her children because the devil had taken them from her.”

When I talk, as I did in my earlier post today about the seriousness of Borderline Personality Disorder, I am thinking about how even this one single action of my mother’s had roots in the entire spectrum of illness that had swallowed my mother whole from the time she was a little, little girl.

JV told me tonight that many times she knew there were things mother was doing with her children (meaning in particular with me) that were terribly, terribly WRONG.  There was no talk of ‘reporting’ abusive parents to authorities back then in the late 50s-early 60s.  JV did her best to intervene, and talked with my mother — and every time this happened my mother broke off contact with JV for a long, long time.

JV wants to tell me these stories.  I think in the year that has passed since last summer when she and I and my youngest brother visited, at which time I gave JV the ‘handle’ on my mother that Mildred was not simply ‘eccentric’ but was severely abusive and severely mentally ill — JV has been thinking about our family’s situation.  She wants to help us to heal, and I explained to her tonight that the potential for healing with this story is far greater than ‘just’ for the Lloyd family children.

When I mentioned earlier today in a post about the dream I had last night about fighting the good fight and causing no harm or hurt, I mentioned San Miguel, or Saint Michael as well as the Cherub image regarding the combined image of the bull and the lion that relates to guarding the gates — of truth.

St. Michael, in Catholic belief, leads the Army of Light against the Army of Darkness.  The story at the link I posted earlier about St. Michael (San Miguel) is a fascinating one — and is specifically about healing.

My mother’s story, and my and my siblings’ stories as her offspring, carry within them the seeds of healing because they present the potential of harm the absence of the ‘light’ creates.  My mother’s mind was dark, no matter how bubbly, vivacious, creative, determined, etc. she might have appeared to others.  JV knows the truth about my mother.  My mother – also – shared with JV (as perhaps the only human being she ever did so with) the awful, dark truth about her own horrific childhood.  It is very possible that JV wishes to share some of those stories with me as well.

I feel like a vessel.  I feel like a tool.  I feel like a conduit or a channel for a story that resonates with others who suffered severe, unbelievably severe child abuse.  But it is NOT just the story that matters, in spite of all the words that the story is crafted from.  What matters are the patterns that exist within the story — and it is my part, my job, my mission, my responsibility, and my greatest hope that I will be able to FIND, identify and clearly point to these patterns in my mother’s life.

Borderline Personality Disorder IS ABOUT PATTERNS.  We can call these patterns symptoms – but they are, to me, so much more than that.  These patterns are the outward signs of an evolutionarily altered being (as Dr. Martin Teicher and his research group describe).  Although Teicher, et. al. do not specifically point to or even mention BPD, I personally believe that in cases as severe as my mother’s was, the signs, the patterns are clearly visible.  My mother was a gifted child, whose body-brain-mind-self was formed within an early environment that was hazardous to her health — and changed her development so that she ended up becoming an entirely different person than who she would have become if her needs had been met from birth.

I am grateful for the gift that JV is going to give me – give us.  I have to prepare for this interview conversation with her.  Any of you readers who understand what I am presenting here and wish to offer prayers that this work be done well and reach those who can be helped to heal from it — thank you!

We are doing battle with the darkness, though I will not call it evil.  We are talking about dis-ease here — and one that we need as much information about as possible.  Mine is an information and fact-finding mission.  Mercy!  I even have to wish myself well on what is coming up next!

I believe there is a constellation of patterns with the severely abusive Borderline psyche-body-mind that can be identified, and I believe the comprehensive story of my mother’s holds a vitally important key that can unlock the mystery behind ‘splitting-projecting’ severely abusive parents.  I am looking for the patterns and I am looking for this key.  I am looking.  I am looking.  I am looking……

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+BE VERY CAREFUL OF A ‘BORDERLINE’ NAME CHANGE – WE DON’T YET KNOW ENOUGH

alchemynowLeave a comment

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I do not agree that the name for Borderline Personality Disorder can be accurately or effectively changed – YET!  This post is about why not.

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From the BPD Today website:

“The term BPD was coined during a time when little was known about this disorder. This name does not describe the disorder accurately and a new name needs to take it’s place. Emotional regulation disorder is very commonly used along with emotional intensity disorder.

Feel free to vote yourself on the name for this very painful disorder and read information on other’s thoughts.”

NAME SUGGESTIONS ON THIS SITE

Emotional Regulation Disorder

Emotional Intensity Disorder

Impulsive Disorder

Impulsive-Emotional Dysregulation Disorder

Impulse Regulation Disorder

Emotionally Unstable Disorder

Emotional Impulsive Disorder

Emotionally Impulsive Disorder

None of the above

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I would expect a collection of possible names for a change from Borderline Personality Disorder like this one to appear through some joint effort of a group of 5th graders!

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Every single one of these name suggestions (except the last one!) is a simple description of what nearly half of our population suffers from to one degree or another:  A developmentally changed emotional processing ability caused by an insecure attachment disorder.  (Remember – feeling NOTHING is not a healthy way to regulate emotions, either!)

Early infant-caregiver interactions FORM the right emotional-social brain’s regulatory abilities – or not.  Given that currently experts suggest that 50% to 55% of the population has a secure attachment brain, and that the other 50% to 45% of the population does not – then – DO THE MATH!

If there is a problem of ‘stigma’ with the name for BPD, deal with the stigma.

If there is a problem with many people being misdiagnosed and tossed into this disorder’s category because it is being used as some sort of catch-all – deal with professional inaccuracy.

BUT – until researchers can specifically and accurately pinpoint the nervous system and brain changes that are FUNDAMENTAL indicators that Borderline Personality Disorder exists within the physiological BODY of a person, we cannot safely or reasonably change the name of this disorder.

This day is coming.  We might get the willies thinking about the ramifications of being diagnosed with a so-called ‘mental disorder’ through such specific and accurate means – but why would it be any different that all the current ‘medical’ diseases being diagnosed through blood tests, MRIs, etc.?

Not one single ONE of these suggested ‘new’ names carries any useful information about what is unique about Borderline Personality Disorder other than having difficulty regulating emotions – which happens to nearly half of our population that has some degree of insecure attachment disorder.

This would be like someone identifying one of my little pinky’s fingernails, and then suggesting they know EVERYTHING possible about my body from that tiny fragment of information.  ‘Emotional dysregulation’ is a result of inadequate early infant-caregiver brain building interactions.  Yes, a MAJOR problem, but nothing more than the very tip of the beginning for understanding WHAT Borderline Personality Disorder is and what it does to a human being.

My advise?  “Be extremely careful here, folks!  Do not let the ‘snake’ charm you!”  Until we can identify exactly what the venom of the ‘snake’ of the disease of Borderline actually IS, where it came from, how to handle it safely, and how to protect especially the offspring of BPD parents from the extremely dangerous potential that BPD carries for child abuse, we better quit wasting time trying to invent a senseless, meaningless, useless (innocuous?) name for a devastating disorder that we know VERY LITTLE about!

I believe that Borderline Personality Disorder is a symptom of trauma-altered infant=child development that has affected all areas of development.  The central nervous system – including the brain – has been changed so that the regions, circuits, pathways and patterns of the BPD brain DO NOT MATCH “NORMAL.”  The autonomic nervous system (the stress response (HPA-axis) and the calm/connection systems) have been changed, along with the vagus nerve system.  I believe that in approximately 10 years serious and fruitful research into BPD will also identify alterations in immune system response, as well.

THIS IS A VERY BIG DEAL!  The development of ‘self’, of consciousness, of conscience, of perception of reality, of the ability to recognize ‘self and other’, of the ability to ‘feel felt’ and have a ‘Theory of Mind’ that allows for true empathy and appropriate response, of the ability to process ‘time and space’, formation and operation of all memory-related abilities, and the operation of dissociation, ‘splitting’ and ‘projection’ are all aspects of BPD that delineate this disorder into one that requires far more than a modicum of attention from 5th-grade level imagination – and its ‘pretend’ belief that the ONLY thing that is disturbed in BPD is regulation of emotions!

To ignore the facts is dangerous as well as stupid, no matter what the supposed intentions might be to ‘spare a poor Borderline’ from social stigma.  Once upon a time someone might have been able to sanely say, “Give Hitler a cup of hot chocolate and he will get better.”  Are we smarter now about the massive complications of human early development that could create such a monster?  I suppose we might be.  There are people today who have advanced to this level:  “Give that man a cup of hot chocolate and ADD MARSHMALLOWS and NOW everything will be better.”  (i.e., “change the name.”)

Is making a reference to Hitler insensitive and just plain rude?  Think about it.  What power especially MOTHERS have to influence the total body-brain-mind-self development of their offspring!  They are affecting not only the lifespan of their children, but their children’s children.  True, a much smaller universe.  But believe me — my Mother was not a whole lot ‘less evil’ than any Hitler could have been within the domain of her very own home.

If there are currently people diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder – I say again — who do NOT BELONG in that diagnostic category — THIS IS A PROBLEM in itself that has nothing to do with the diagnostic criteria for this disorder itself.

Guess what?  I don’t think so.

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FYI:

Psychobiology and molecular genetics of resilience

Adriana Feder1, Eric J. Nestler2 & Dennis S. Charney2

Abstract

Every individual experiences stressful life events. In some cases acute or chronic stress leads to depression and other psychiatric disorders, but most people are resilient to such effects. Recent research has begun to identify the environmental, genetic, epigenetic and neural mechanisms that underlie resilience, and has shown that resilience is mediated by adaptive changes in several neural circuits involving numerous neurotransmitter and molecular pathways. These changes shape the functioning of the neural circuits that regulate reward, fear, emotion reactivity and social behaviour, which together are thought to mediate successful coping with stress.