Tag: child abuse

+IN MY MOTHER’S WORDS: WHY SHE HAD TO ABUSE ME

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I just surprising discovered in my mother’s 1957 diary her own written account of her version of reality related to one of the most long term and vicious child abuse memories of my young childhood.

I am stunned by her words, by the fact that she EVER allowed herself to write them, that this diary has survived these 52 years, that I have them in my possession, and that I found them last night.

I have done my best to describe my present day reaction to these writings, though I feel I have very nearly failed completely in my efforts to understand their true value or meaning.

I wish I knew more.  I wish I understood better, could see more clearly, and comprehend more objectively how twisted my mother was and how much I suffered as a result of her insidious, malicious mental illness.

It is a bizarre and strangely bizarre experience to actually have the words of a perpetrator in the hands of the victim.  However inadequate my efforts may be, all I can offer today is my presentation of

my mother’s version of what happened to me about the bubble gum

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+OPENING OUR OWN HEARTS AND MINDS TO THE REALITIES OF CHILD ABUSE

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There are too many new letters being transcribed to include them all on the temporary page.  I am spending time right now working on the 1960 letters and am currently working on April and May of that year – with more to follow as they are filed within the months of 1960.

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I especially would like to recommend to readers the important comments made today on this blog by Paul M. McLaughlin.

Please visit the two comment pages he posted to:  Stop the Storm’s Contact Information Page and to the post HOW DID THE ABUSE CHANGE US?  Valuable links to his website, to the record of his work to prevent child abuse, and to his personal story are contained in his comments.

I am honored that Paul has shared the heroic story of his life as a survivor of 20 years of terrible childhood abuse with me and with my readers.  Thank you, Paul!

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I have benefited over the years from the efforts of many therapists that I was able to access on my pathway of healing.  Some of the words that I heard them tell me have returned when I have needed to remember them.  I would like to say a heartfelt “THANK YOU” to all the professionals working in a wide variety of fields to help not only prevent child abuse, but to help those of us who survived it, to heal.

After my work on the ‘writings’ yesterday I had great difficulty in sleeping last night.  It is now 9:30 at night and I am only now feeling ‘strong enough’ to approach any writing for today.

The words of two separate therapists from my past echoed in my mind today.  One of them said to me, over and over again, “Linda, always do what YOU need to do to take care of yourself.”  When I look back at the sessions I had with this woman, I remember that I had to take a tape recorder with me to record every session.  Without these recordings I could never remember one single thing we talked about together.

I didn’t understand dissociation at that time.  Nor did this therapist ‘waste’ any time explaining it to me.  We simply together found a way around the problem as it related to our sessions.  I would play the tapes over again several times between sessions, and doing so helped me to ‘grow into’ the topics we discussed.  But the single most important gift I received from this woman are the words I just mentioned.  “Always do what YOU need to do to take care of yourself.”

Those simple words contain within them a universe of healing potential.  They will never be words I will outgrow, or afford to ignore.  Today has been a day when I had to take special good care of myself.  Survivors need to learn how to do this for ourselves, always.

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The other set of words a therapist of my past told me that came into my mind today are about the process of healing itself.  She told me that this process is like a finely crocheted, beautiful doily.  What makes them attractive is the balance between tight and wide open spaces within the pattern.  She told me that when we sometimes work very hard on an ‘issue’ we are making the tight, close together, denser part of the pattern of our healing.  But we need the loose times, as well.  There are times we have to leave all of it completely alone, take a break, do whatever we need to do to give ourselves a rest from the ‘work’ itself.

I thought about these words today and am so grateful for the opportunities I have been given in the past to access quality therapy.  Each time of contact I have had with each ‘specialist’ gave me what I needed at that point in time.  Today I carry so much within me of what these people gave me – as well as the work I did for myself each step of the journey along the way.

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Reading Paul McLaughlin’s words echoed with the sadness inside of me about how hurtful ANY abuse is, but particularly the abuse of infants and young children.  I believe that we have a social taboo against truly allowing ourselves to look severe abuse of the tiniest of people straight in the eye.  No species endures if their most helpless offspring are not cared for and cherished.

While the taboos against harming infants and children exist for a wide purpose, I want to encourage all of us to build up our tolerance – like building and strengthening muscles – so that we can allow ourselves to know in our minds and in our feelings what the reality of early terrible abuse of young ones really is – that it exists, that it happens, that it has severe and lifelong consequences.

I am not suggesting that we pursue a morbid approach – just an educational one for ourselves as members of a culture that continues to need to ‘raise consciousness’ about child abuse and neglect.  Paul’s writings contribute to this denial-smashing.  True, Paul was born in 1948 and I was born in 1950, both of us in a time when public awareness and consciousness about child abuse was still in the stone ages.

But what touched me most today when I visited his website is that there were no doubt many, many, many people surrounding this boy and his twin sister who SHOULD have used common sense to intervene to protect these children.  I’m not going to be the one here to point the finger, but read his story and look at it yourself.  If we were all actors and actresses in a stage play of his childhood, what would each of us have been able to do differently from what the people actually did who were there?

Where and how in today’s world, where we each live our lives, can we apply new insights and new information so that if history ever repeats itself within the sphere of our individual influence we can do something BETTER to help a child – to help many children – that so desperately need someone to notice, pay attention, and care enough to help them?

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As always, thank you for reading – your comments are welcome and appreciated!

+LOOKING FOR MY STORY IN THE CHAOS OF MADNESS

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This is the link to one of the ‘article’ pieces I have found among my mother’s papers.  It was with August 1960 letters, but had no date on the paper it was written on.

My mother was certain that she was going to ‘someday’ write a book on homesteading, She specifically planned that her letters to my grandmother, written during this time were saved, and returned back to her.  Yet very, very few of the letters had any date placed on them at all.

I can estimate letter dates by the envelope postmarks, but many letters are NOT in envelopes and without dates it makes it extremely hard to know where to place the letters along the ‘timeline’ of my childhood years that I am trying to create!

My grandmother, an educated and astute woman, obviously knew of my mother’s plan because she was a participant in it.  Yet she did not make sure on her end, once she had received a letter, that she wrote at least the date the letter came into her hands if there was no clear postmark on the envelope – which happened often!

The inability to ‘tell a coherent life story’ in adulthood – or even during an abusive childhood – is a prime hallmark symptom of an insecure attachment-disordered pattern formed by ‘inadequate’ early infant and childhood interactions with caregivers.

My mother had such an insecure attachment pattern, which she GOT in her childhood from her interactions with her mother (and others).   It looks to me as I work with the writings — that went back and forth between these women for years — as if this total lack of organization or coherent ordering of all these carefully written and preserved letters about the story of homesteading, are themselves in a state that is a clear indication of the MESS that the insecure attachment patterns created in my mother’s life as well as in my own childhood.

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It is almost as if these letters, journal pages, pieces of articles my mother wrote, my grandmother’s response letters to my mother’s letters – all of them, in the tattered, confused, disorganized, often undated, never been sorted, hauled around in this box or that over thousands of miles and many, many moves, stored in assorted storage lockers for decades – are themselves all remnants of once-lived lives that were lived in a very similar fashion.  Yet they also reflect a certain value shared in common – they endured and they survived.  They are still here, as I am.

It seems to be my life’s work right now to find the stories in the stories.  I have amazing advantages that my mother and my grandmother never had in their lifetimes.  I have the very real gift of a computer, the gift of the internet, and the gift of this free blog space so generously provided by WordPress.com.   My sister gave me this computer for my writing.  My brother gave me this printer.  My children pay for my internet.  I am grateful to all of them.

My mother and grandmother cared enough about one another to write all these letters.  They cared enough to hold onto them, to keep them, to preserve them.  In the same strange way that I can never ‘blame’ my mother for her abuse of me because I understand how sick she was, I cannot ‘blame’ her for never, in her entire lifetime, being able to accomplish with them what she had hoped to do.  She could never write her own book.  She could never publish.  She could never tell her own coherent life story for the same reason she could not adequately mother her own children.

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These papers are in their own form of chaos, and within their words they tell stories of the chaos that was my childhood.  It would take an almost super human effort to actually create the coherent story now.  I would be very surprised if I can do it in my lifetime.  My process does not feel like ‘blogging’ to me.  It feel like ‘plogging’ as I spend hundreds and hundreds of tedious hours trying to find and create order out of this madness.

For every step I take I hope that if I can’t actually finish bringing this whole story together, maybe at least the work I am doing now will be picked up by another generation so it can be ‘finished’ in the future.  We are a family of writers.  Perhaps that is our curse.  Yet I feel as if all my ancestors’ words are being placed in safe keeping as I enter them into this clean white screen of my computer.  I feel honored to be able to share them with you., including this article piece that my mother wrote 49 years ago.

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+LINK TO MY MOTHER’S 1955 (short) DIARY

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Although there were very few pages written in my mother’s 1955 diary, they was enough information there to provide some me with some insights about the year I turned four.  No doubt my mother was very busy during this year caring for the 3 children she already had under the age of five while she carried her 4th baby and gave birth on July 20, 1955 to my youngest sister.

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+APPROACHING MY MOTHER’S 1953 DIARY

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These are both completed now:

*MY INTRODUCTION TO MY MOTHER’S 1953 DIARY

**1953 – MY MOTHER’S DIARY – PART ONE

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I could not complete the transcription of my mother’s 1953 diary without stopping half way through the year.  I had to give myself permission to create a context of safety for myself as I continue to read her words.  The platform that I created for myself as I wrote my introduction to her 1953 diary feels secure enough for me to continue the transcription of her writings.  The transcription is not complete yet, but I will let you know as soon as they are published online as they will be contained within the following pages:

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*MY INTRODUCTION TO MY MOTHER’S 1953 DIARY

**1953 – MY MOTHER’S DIARY – PART ONE

**1953 – MY MOTHER’S DIARY – PART TWO

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+LINK TO THE JUNE 2009 ONLINE CHILD WELFARE DIGEST

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Here is an information-packed child welfare site, the Children’s Bureau Express.

Their June 2009 Online Digest contains such information as:

The month of June brings a new PSA campaign to encourage adoption from foster care. Helping youth is a focus, with a site visit report and a Federal interagency effort for all disadvantaged youth. And, as always, find great new resources from the T&TA Network.

This month, CBX looks at how community efforts can effect change in families’ lives. Examples from across the country show the benefits of collaborations across community agencies and populations.

CBX highlights evidence-based practices in parent training, housing-based efforts for transitioning youth, guiding principles for rural research, and the impact of parents’ probationary status on their children.

CBX offers tools for practitioners, including guidelines for community investigations of child injury, resources for implementing Fostering Connections, and an international manual to measure indicators of well-being.

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Check it out!!

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COMING SOON:  I am in the process of transcribing my mother’s 1953 diary, the year John turned 3, I turned 2 and Cindy was born.  Will be posted as soon as I complete it.

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+THE ABILITY TO WONDER AND BEING A WITNESS TO MY OWN ABUSE

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I began the page I wrote today (published under My Childhood Stories) in response to a reader’s post on my mother’s letters that I transcribed yesterday.  My writing rapidly led me in the direction of beginning to understand that I am both a witness abuse survivor of my own abuse at the same time I am a survivor of the abuse itself.  I am beginning to understand that these were two separate and different experiences that I had, NEARLY but not exactly at the same time, as I lived in one body, and that each affected me in different ways.  Like two different rivers feeding into one, both experiences are linked in differing ways to dissociation.

Today’s writing pathway also led into the subject of the gift of having the ability to wonder (or not ) and into a clear infant abuse memory that came to me shortly after I wrote the letter disowning my mother.

This entire writing is an important contribution to my growing understanding of a new ‘real reality’ that is separate and different from the reality that was built into my body-brain-mind during 18 years of abuse by my mother.

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+NEWLY TRANSCRIBED LETTERS

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My own story of The Fire Ants has been placed in the section on My Childhood Stories.  It describes my growing reality as it differs from my mother’s version of the event she describes in her letter to my father, June 17, 1957.

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The rest of the new 1957 letters I transcribed today, 060909, including the fire ant letter, can be seen at Take Care of Mothers.

These files are in a temporary location, but can be seen after they are filed on that blog in their permanent location.

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+MARCHING ON TO VICTORY OVER TRAUMA

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I wish I could remember my dreams!  Using the super powers of retrospect, I am learning how to understand and accept that the loss of awareness about my dreams today must be some further manifestation of the aging process.

About two months ago I woke in the middle of the night and sat up in bed with a revelation.  I knew when I woke up that I had been in the midst of a series of dreams that seemed to be moving in fast-forward motion.  At the instant I woke up I heard these words in my mind:  “Of course you don’t remember your dreams any more, Linda!  Look at the dreams you just woke up from.  They are so complicated and contain so much information that it would be impossible for anyone to actually remember them.”

Did I somehow receive a massive addition of a computer’s version of memory processing abilities ‘back there’ a few years ago at the time that I no longer remembered my dreams?  The ‘not knowing’ my dreams started about 10 years ago.  I distinctly remember the last GOOD dream I had.  I was living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota just prior to moving down here to the desert in southeastern Arizona.  I wrote the dream down, though I don’t know at the moment where that piece of paper is.  I remember it, though, and someday I will write it to include in my story.

Oh, that IS what I was going to write about yesterday before my ‘cyber house’ came crashing down around my fingertips.  I was going to write about the origin of the flying dreams I had as a child, and I was going to insert links to other pages on this post.  That is, until I discovered the links were dead and went absolutely no place!  Hence, the house cleaning.

What I will say from my present position of grand mother-dom (even though I have no actual grandchildren), is that for those of you ‘youngsters’ who get to still experience vivid and clear dreams when you wake up, realize that those dreams and the ability to clearly remember them is a gift.  I know that now because my gift has either disappeared or transformed itself into something else that works for me in some other way.

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What I think happened is that at that time in Sioux Falls ten years ago when I could sense that the dreams were changing, if not leaving me, I was physically preparing for the onset of menopause, or parimenopause, though I did not realize it at the time.  By the time I made it through that major female transition period, my dreaming states that had been such a vital part of my life since childhood had disappeared, and I never had a chance to even consciously bid them goodbye.

It seems as if I was ‘supposed’ to be ready for this new phase of my life, and in fact I guess I am ready or I wouldn’t be here experiencing this life in my ‘older self’ at this moment.  I can whine all I want to about how much I miss my dreaming abilities — the experiences of dreaming them, the experiences of remembering them — but it will not change the fact that I now seem to be processing an increasingly massive amount of information  in my dreams in my present life.

Sometimes when I wake now I just know that ‘something, some how’ seems to have ‘downloaded’ this information into my brain.  Because of what I now know about how the right and left brain work out information processing while we sleep, I suspect that this isn’t REALLY new information I am gaining at all.  I rather suspect that I am being able now to release from my right brain vast amounts of information that has been stored there, waiting, since the beginning of my life.

As this information is integrated with the knowledge of my left brain while I sleep, I just wake in the morning with no single detail of the dreams I have had the night before.  It might be like switching from analog to digital processing.  But what I do know is that I am being in-formed in my sleep.

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This morning I woke up knowing that part of what I am accomplishing through this cyber-house cleaning I am undertaking at the moment, is a quarantine of my mother.  When I first started my blogging process, I created the other two blogs, Take Care of Mothers and Workspace for Stop the Storm, at the same time as I created this one.  I only vaguely knew that as time went on my ‘blog house’ would have to expand.  This morning I have a clearer sense of how this is actually working.

When I thought, Take Care of Mothers, I was looking at it from a sort of warm, fuzzy place — like I might should I think about buying one of our commercialized sentiment cards to recognize our culture’s version of Mother’s Day for someone.  When I woke up this morning I KNEW in a different way that some huge circle related to the wholeness of the act of caregiving itself had completed itself within me.

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I should not be surprised that one end of the ‘caregiving circle’, or hoop of life has connected itself to the other end today — like plugging two ends of an extension cord into itself.  Now I sense from within myself what it means to have the one end of caregiving (seen perhaps from the point of view of being a woman) of bringing a new life into the world and caring for it as it grows into life, to the other end of seeing the necessity for ending something, and thus for the necessity of caring into death.

When looking back at our childhoods, most of my siblings would agree with me that given our particular circumstances, the only way to have resolved our troubles with my mother would have been to kill her.  Ideally, she needed to be removed from our lives and placed into quarantine.  As we begin to truly understand how early childhood trauma changes an infant and young child’s developing brain-mind-self, we will begin to clearly see that the ‘dis-ease’ of unresolved trauma effects that they carry within themselves will be passed onto these people’s offspring in some way.

In my case, my mother’s trauma was passed on to me in the form of terrible abuse.  Now as I work to separate my mother’s writings from my own I am in fact FINALLY experiencing some version of quarantine for my mother as I remove her to the Take Care of Mothers blog space.  I am ‘taking care’ of her, not by shooting her like one might shoot a rabid animal or a broken horse, not like one might if they could actually imprison her for 14,500 years, but by beginning an actual physical process of my own where I find ways to extricate her mind OUT OF my own mind.

This kind of caregiving is necessary only for me.  She is dead and my actions have nothing to do with her.  But in this process of examining what it means to allow myself a full range of action, even in my thoughts, about what taking care of mothers can ACTUALLY mean, I see that there are mothers who have always needed the most extreme kind of caregiving — so that they could be protected from harming innocent others, if not also themselves.

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The extreme forms of isolation my mother was able to affect for me during the 18 years I spent being abused by her meant that she had an almost super human ability to control the development of my mind, including my thoughts and my thinking process itself.  This process that I am working on as I ‘banish’ my mother to the kingdom of my other blog is helping me to further clarify the distinction I make between ‘memory retrieval’ and ‘disclosure’.

As I work to explore and connect all the fragmented pieces of my own history as it relates to the whole person I want to be (more of) today, I realize that as I return for my own memories I am forced to re-member myself with my mother in the picture (in the memory).  Obviously she was there.  She was the one that traumatized me in the first place.

That is where the power of disclosure enters into my process of healing my dissociations.  This is what I was evidently ‘working on’ during my dreaming state last night.  As I work with my own fragmented memories of myself in my life as they affected the formation of who I grew up being, through disclosure I can separate my mother from myself in those memories.  I can place HER in a different place and ME in another, safe one.

I find it interesting that within my own mind I have created the third blog of Workspace for Stop the Storm in the MIDDLE between the blog where my mother has been banished to and the one where I am knowing-through-telling my own story.  This workspace is a buffer zone between us.  Perhaps because I am trying to heal particularly from the abuse against me perpetrated by a Borderline Personality Disorder mother, creating this definite boundary zone between us is of utmost importance in my process.

Only in the most physically literal way was the umbilical cord connecting my mother to me ever severed.  On every other level — except for what I believe to be the spiritual one where she could not touch my essential self — that connection between the two of us remained intact.  Not only was that true for the 18 years I was continually exposed to her maliciousness, but it has also been true as she has infiltrated my mind to this day.

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I am going to divide and conquer, all right.  She ruled my life during all of my formative years, yet she could never completely rule me.  This is a war of wills as I continue to empower myself to rule my own body-brain-mind and soul.  She trampled where she had no business being.  She trampled on me, she trampled me.  But she did not conquer me and I aim to prove it.

“March on, oh wounded ones, march on!”

I am in fact reclaiming the soil of my own selfdom!  When I am done cleaning my own house, my mother will not be in it.

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As always, thank you for reading.  Your comments are welcome and appreciated!  Linda

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+SITE CLEAN UP – THE ALASKA LETTERS

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I am becoming very frustrated with the limitations of my site.  It is deactivating links to pages that USED to be there, and runs very slowly. There seems little I can do about it because I do not have the financial resources right now to be able to afford better site working conditions.  I am very thankful to WordPress for providing blog space free-of-charge, and need to continue to find ways to work within the resources that are currently available to me.

I am therefore going to work today to move all of my mother’s writings to another blog connected to this one, Taking Care of Mothers.  I will then be able to link to those pages from this Stop the Storm site, and hopefully things will work better.

I will also move all of the more technical brain information over to another section of my blog working space at Workspace for Stop the Storm.  I’m not sure how these 3 blogs operate together, but my guess is they are all sharing the same allocated 3 gb of space.

I’ll just have to work my way through this and hope for improved accessibility to this important information as it all relates to intergenerational transmission of unresolved trauma and insecure attachment disorders.

Thank you very much for your continued interest and support.  Frankly, I am worried that as I work to update and improve my WordPress personal blog I am going to lose the whole thing and have to start over.  I hope this whole process does not blow up in my face!!  I certainly HOPE NOT!! – Wish me luck!  Linda

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Just like any other aspect of ‘healing’ I guess.  I have to try to go back and ‘clean up the wreckage of the past’ as things have become overwhelmingly ‘dysfunctional’ within the workings of this blog IN SPITE of my best efforts to ‘do it right’ from the start.

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PLEASE NOTE:  As a result of some of the changes that I will be making today, active links in some of my previous blog posts will no longer work.  Rest assured,the information still exists and can be found under the most ‘logical’ page heading on one of these 3 related blogs.  For example, I will be sorting the most recent of my mother’s letters into their proper year category, and they will all appear at the Take Care of Mothers blog:  http://takecareofmothers.wordpress.com/

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