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January 20, 2013

What in the world are we talking about?

What does it mean to us and for the quality of our life when we are deprived – because we were deprived from the start of our life – of the ability to “safely” regulate our emotions?  We are most certainly not born with this ability.  It comes with the growth, development and advancement of our body. 

When we were tiniest, when we were born, we could do very little of anything by ourselves.  We could breath.  We could swallow.  We could do what a newborn mammal can do.  But given the complexity of being human we were meant for so much more.  But without being given what we needed to move toward our potential for advancement, we suffered then and will suffer in ways invisible to our comprehension for the rest of our life.

Time passes by.  We stay alive.  We appear to have made it through all of the common developmental milestones.  We grow and grow as we pass one milestone after another until we’re all grown up.

Here we are in adulthood.  We’ve made it!  Nobody ever tells us what we might have missed out on during our development.  Nobody tells us what mattered most.  Nobody told us what shortages of inner supplies plagued us from the beginning of our lives – and thus – always will.

If anything goes wrong as we make it through our life we are told that we’re to blame.  We are expected to be autonomous.  We are expected to be self-sufficient, self-reliant, self-motivated, self-contained.  If we need something, go get it.  If we want something, go get it.  If we fall flat on the ground with our face in the dust, it’s our own fault.  Pick yourself up.  Don’t expect anyone to be there to help you.  Don’t expect anyone to care.  You are on your own.

Don’t you dare complain, either.  Don’t look around you and notice that there seems to be some kind of invisible inner difference between people who seem to fall naturally into the confident, competent and therefore successful category while there are others who seem to never make it ‘there’ no matter how hard they try.

It’s like some people know something we don’t know, have something we don’t have.  They seem to live in one kind of world while the rest of us live in a different one.  Some people just seem somehow blessed.  They “get it” and we don’t.  Whatever “it” is, “it” seems vague to us and impossible to understand or define.  We move through our life being nagged with a feeling that we missed something somewhere but we don’t know what.  There’s a secret ingredient that is absent for some and present for others.  We don’t know what that ingredient is and we sure don’t know where to get it.

We don’t even know where to look for what’s different between us and so many others who seem to feel, yes, a different rhythm than we do as they live their lives.  If we turn and look within we know there’s a kind of emptiness in us.  Somehow we have a hollow space inside our body.  Some of us know this.  Others have found a way to walk around believing it’s not possible to fill this place of void, so it’s best to find any way possible to ignore that it exists.

Don’t look inward!  Look outward!  If we’re missing something then, by golly, there must be a way to find it.  We believe this because if we didn’t we know there’s a certain time coming when we will fall down and we will not be able to get back up.

What if someone told us that what we are missing, what we have lost, what has been stolen from us lies not inside of us because it was never put there in the first place?  How is it possible to go all the way back, back before we could walk or crawl or sit up or even roll over to look for what got left out of the story of our lives?  To even try to imagine what happened to us when we were so small seems to make our mind go blank.  Blank without words.  How can we think?  Yet I ask you, “What did you know before you could first think in thoughts about yourself in the world that you have never forgotten and can’t quite remember?”

Sending a part of our self back there from this present moment to that distant past requires only one ability.  Simply trust what you know.  Don’t read your life in words.  Read it in feelings.  There is no part of our body that doesn’t remember all it has been through.  All the way backwards we remember the sound of the voices of who welcomed us into this world – or did not.  We know the feeling of our small self, vulnerable, fragile in the hands of giants.  What did they do with us and to us when we needed them most? 

We haven’t forgotten.  We remember and we know in every fiber of our being if we started from our beginning being loved and feeling completely safe and secure in the world at all times, or if we did not.  Our body, if we pay attention to what it can tell us – if we ask and we listen – will never lie to us.

This process of being able to hear what our body tells us might seem to be mysterious because it is so foreign in our culture to believe that which our physical self can tell us about everything else we think we know.  We take up space.  We move around.  We think in noisy thoughts with words.  If we find something is wrong we look for solutions.  If something is broken we either fix it or throw it away.

After all, being in a body is no different than being tuna in a can or jelly in a jar.  It’s what’s inside the container we place the value on.  That we ARE our container-body with a self all put together inseparably until the moment of our death has to matter to us.  Once it does we will then be able to grow to understand that both how our body grew along with our self cannot be taken apart from one another.  Each exists as a whole entity whose patterns of being in the world were set into place long before we knew we had a name.

For those of us who have always known there was something terribly wrong with how we were raised, and for those who listen to the memory that is in their body itself and discover this very same thing, chances are that what happened so long ago has always directly caused difficulties in our lives we have never been able to describe.  We can’t expect anyone to appear, either, who will say to us, “Oops!  So sorry!  Please excuse the mess.  We never meant for this to happen.  Let me fix this for you.”  Nope.  Not going to happen.

So what is the point of searching backwards for the missing ingredient in our life if nobody is going to be able to fix now what went wrong for us way back then?  How are we supposed to change the past, anyway?  Are those who stand on one end of the tug-o-war rope having all they need within them to win the game equal with those on the other end who were born missing out on what they needed most to find a smoother way through life?

As my mother wrote in one of her childhood stories when she was nine, “I don’t think you would like to hear what happened in the cave that night but I will tell you….”  Yes.  We are equal.  We are also very, very different.

Just because we look around and see other people whose containers seem so alike in all the essential ways does not mean if we looked a little deeper we wouldn’t find that in the ways that matter most – as they hold the greatest power to influence how we live a life in this world – we wouldn’t find exactly that same dividing line we already really know exists.  There are those of us who were loved and cherished into this world and there are those of us who were not.  And between these two groups of people, according to degrees of deprivation from birth, lies the greatest chasm we could imagine.

We either grew a body-brain-self that knew it was safe and secure in this world or we didn’t.  It is exactly within this difference between us that we must search for what we have always known and cannot name.

There is one word we can use to begin to explore the differences I am describing.  That word is “attachment.”

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Post following: +THE LIGHT READING FLEW OUT THE WINDOW – LOOKING AT THIS NEXT

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January 19, 2013

Having never traveled there I have no idea what London is like, or Britain, or anywhere outside of the U.S.A.  I do think at age 61 that it is telling that I contemplate this morning these ideas not in response to some tantalizing leisure vacation but rather in response to an internet search serendipity  through which I discovered something about the work of Dr. Paul Renn.  “Oh, Gee!”  We severe infant and child abuse and trauma survivors might say, “I want to travel to London to access some high quality therapy for what nobody I have ever found in my country in my lifetime has ever even spoken to me about.”

Well, somewhere between “Oh, JOY” and “Oh, SHIT” there is another part of reality that really matters most to me.  The truth is that nobody alive could begin to turn me into an ordinary person no matter how much skill, care, effort and expertise was applied to “my case.”  The most anyone could do – can do – is to explain to me how the severe traumas of my early life vastly altered the way my entire body developed.  No quality therapist would ever begin to assume or suggest they could FIX me or that (if I wanted to, if I try hard enough) I could fix myself.  They would not dig around searching for sealed-off trauma memories. 

An excellent therapist would establish a trust relationship with me ASAP, but they would never try to change the level of trust I am capable of achieving inside my own self.  The only card that would be in play in the trust game for me would be the one that shows how worthy of my trust would the therapist be?

 I’ve never met a therapist yet who didn’t have a power play of some kind in play.  I have no time for this, nor would I ever again choose to continue to participate when such a power play was in play. 

I’ve never met a therapist yet who wasn’t human.  Humans are not perfect.  They do not have all the answers and most often for trauma-development changed survivors, therapists don’t even vaguely have the answers we need because they’ve never been inwardly motivated (as we are) to ask the right questions that could lead to – asking the right questions.

I don’t think I am bitter.  I think I am realistic.  I woke up this morning thinking there’s not enough time in my lifetime – if I had multiple high quality therapy for the rest of my life – to FIX what is different about me.  There wouldn’t have been enough time – or enough ‘good’ therapy to turn me from a trauma-changed person into an ordinary person if high quality therapy had started when I first sought help in my 20s.

So what would I want therapy-wise if I could access the best therapy on earth – which all of us deserve?  Best would of course first mean that the therapist be trustworthy.  This means to me that such an individual would first be able to listen and HEAR me.  The little ‘theory and technique’ wheels and gears  in their own mind would have to be absolutely SILENT until I asked a question for which I seek an answer.

I would know where I get my information.  I would want to know where the therapist got theirs.  My hope with someone like Dr. Paul Renn would lie in the fact he has combined the BIG THREE areas of study in his thinking and therapy work:  Attachment, developmental neuroscience and trauma.  However, even though I am thousands of miles away from London, through the powers of the internet I have already found a RED FLAG concerning the work this man does.  I scanned the reference pages of his 2012 book — The Silent Past and the Invisible Present: Memory, Trauma, and Representation in Psychotherapy – and did not find the one name there that I know I most needed to see.  There is no mention of Dr. Martin Teicher.

If I were to consider (ha!) being able to work with (rather than ‘have therapy with’) such a dedicated, knowledgeable, skilled and experienced capable practitioner such as Dr. Paul Renn is, I would next need to know if he would honestly and truthfully be willing and able to listen to me about why I believe the work of Dr. Teicher and those he works with is so vitally important to severe early trauma survivors.

I look at the still photograph of Renn’s face on his website.  He does look like an open-minded compassionate man.  But it would only take one question from me about what Teicher’s group knows about how we survivors have been changed through early trauma and abuse into “evolutionarily altered” people for me to know the truth about this man’s work – where it matters most to me.

No truth = No go.

I suppose I could imagine scenarios where I could access therapy through Mclean’s Hospital where Teicher’s ‘Harvard research group’ studies.  They should know what I need to know.  They coined that phrase “evolutionarily altered,” but so what?

How could anyone actually determine what I most need to know?  I don’t want to be compared to anyone else.  I want to be compared to someone who does not exist – because that person was not given what they needed at the start of their life to ever grow into this world in the first place.

THAT person I most need to have information about in every possible way would be my OWN sole self that had never been exposed to any horrific debilitating trauma in my development in the first place.

The question would never be “Who would that person be?”  The only question that matters is, “HOW would that person be in her body in her lifetime?”  Me is Me.  I have always been me since the instant I was conceived and my soul was made and attached to this body I live in.

Well – once this correct question is asked in therapy or out of it the pathway to exploration is presented that would bear fruit.

I am left answering the correct question on my own.  I do believe Renn’s book has some of the answers I seek because he does apparently concern himself with a study of what is currently known about memory processes.  I am a huge fan of the idea that if we could understand the bigger picture of how early trauma changes every aspect of our physiological development on every level of our body, this (it seems to me) is exactly where to look for the correct answer to every correct question we as a species are learning to ask.

If we were raised in a dangerous malevolently harmful early attachment world, natural processes made sure not only that we remember absolutely everything we experienced so our body could continually prepare itself to survive in that kind of a world.  Natural processes at the same time made equally sure that the only way to improve our personal condition would be that other people in the world learn to listen to everything we survivors have to say about trauma.

The very processes that built our body built trauma right into us.  We are living testimonies that all is NOT well in this world.  We will never be able to forget this fact.  Our very body on every level keeps this memory.  What trauma wants us to do as a species is to learn what traumas are so we can prevent them from happening again.

It is on the level of learning all that trauma has to say so it can be prevented that all therapy must first begin.  Yes, as individuals we suffer.  We suffer from a CAUSE – and therefore we suffer for a reason.

We need to be heard.  We have within us information — vast bodies of critically important, relevant information — about what trauma is, about what it took for us to survive it, about what surviving trauma does to people, and about what needs to be done to prevent the same kind of traumas from happening to somebody else.

All of this is, from my point of view, about memory.  Trauma changed our body so that we could survive long enough to – yes – reproduce.  But for most trauma-changed people the best we can expect to do is to pass trauma-related information (in memory form) down to succeeding generations as life itself continues to put it into the BODY of survivors – like a message is put into a bottle – to be carried along within the current of the life of our species until someone – someday – can decode the trauma messages, understand what ongoing trauma has to say about conditions in the world – so that those conditions can be FIXED so that these traumas will never happen to anyone else again – EVER.

This is why at this point in the advancement of the civilizations of our species that I believe Teicher’s work presents the correct imperative for all efforts toward healing change.  The difficulties severe early trauma survivors live with exist because of changes our body-brain made to keep us alive long enough for someone to ‘catch the signals’ that can give our species information about preventing trauma.  Not so anyone continues to suffer in the ways that we do.  NO!  The truth lies in the opposite direction.

We suffer so in the bigger picture nobody else will ever have to suffer what we did and do – EVER AGAIN!

Therapies that begin from this point of understanding can do two important things at the same time:  (1) They can inform us about how trauma changed us so that we can hopefully find ways in our personal lives to identify how those trauma change patterns operate within us.  This allows us to make conscious efforts to diminish the negative impacts these changes create in our lives.  (2) At the same time the information contained in the ‘messages’ we convey in our body and hence in our life will be heard.  Because we are living memory of trauma the information our shared traumas contain will be used – TO END IT.

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In important ways my way of thinking about trauma tells me that those of us who have survived the un-survivable are the smartest members of our species.  What we know about in our very body matters.  What we know (as our body reminds us with every breath we take) has great power to change the world.  But we are left with a continuing problem.

Nobody is willing to listen to us.  We are members of a social species.  The truth is that what concerns one of us in reality concerns all of us.  The suffering of one is the suffering of all.  The lesson learned by one improves the life of all.

It seems to me that humanity has not yet matured far enough past the selfish conditions of our own collective childhood to yet grasp this fact.  We therefore are missing the most important point.  We are designed physiologically to respond to our environment.  We are designed to remember and display in our body and life what the conditions of our environment are.  We all pass through this life carrying messages about what these conditions are truthfully like.  Who is paying attention to these messages?

Trauma survivors – we are.

We have not been given any other choice.  We know and we remember the truth.

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Something special in the writings of Dr. Paul Renn has captured my attention.  I posted a section of his writings in an earlier post this week:  +WHAT IN THE WORLD IS ADULT ATTACHMENT?

I contacted the webpage that hosted Renn’s  article I discovered as presented at the above link and received a nearly immediate response.  Dr. Renn has since emailed me personally and I have emailed him in return with a hopeful request that he might assist me by reading my manuscript for Story Without Words.  I need a clinical opinion about my mentally ill mother.  I hope he will consider providing that for me.  (I am relying on crossed fingers and prayers at the moment that this might be so.)  My second email to him on this subject read as follows as I tried to narrow done my request:

Hello Paul,

I welcome your suggestion.  My parents filed their claim in 1958 on some of the last land available within commuting distance from Anchorage.  We were NOT in remote Alaska, but rather up the mountain on the far end of Eagle River Valley above where the park is now.

My first book, Story Without Words is not about the Alaska experience (the other 7 books are).  Story is about the invisible silence of psychotic child abuse by a woman who I believe suffered from severe Borderline Personality Disorder (never diagnosed or treated).

My purpose in writing Story is to introduce the invisible silence of the story without words that I believe led to Mildred’s ‘contracting’ this severe illness due very possibly to trauma triggers in her earliest development.  I want readers to have the opportunity to understand the invisible side of Mildred’s story as it most definitely does not appear in her ‘upper good world’ story.

The 7 volumes present her story in her own words – which I see as being like an opportunity to view a movie before watching it with the director’s commentary.  My next writing ventures now that I have (as of today) completed the manuscripts (missing now their rich photo illustration) will be to shred apart Mildred’s writings to expose what I see as the patterns of her madness hidden even in the words she did use to tell her version of her story.

I believe BPD mother’s are very possibly the most dangerous kind of mentally ill parent — especially when there is psychosis present.  The fact that nearly all naive readers will read the entire 7 volumes of Mildred’s writings without EVER being able to detect either her severe mental illness and its psychosis or her abuse of me motivates me to find an interested, invested, and extremely credible reader to explain how BPD can be so undetectable to others — including family members.

It is on this level of concern that I make the request to you for this kind of assistance.  The 7 volumes of Mildred’s story will read without anything more than proofing.

When I do have my forensic biographical work done with M’s writings an entirely different editorial and review process will need to be implemented — but this is a ways down the road.

Well, I tried to be succinct!!  Thank you for reading.  I understand that you must be extremely busy in your professional life but I thought I’d ask you for this clinical assistance for Story Without Words.  I will never be able to assess Mildred’s patterns clinically.  I have created what I call ‘an intellectual foray’ in Story Without Words to present my own observations about BPD/psychosis based on my 18 years of terrible abuse that was orchestrated by a disease that I believe needs all the help anyone can give it toward an understanding of it.

Mildred’s writings, I believe, will probably be the most comprehensive self-report ‘case study/history’ ever published.  That her story includes homesteading in Alaska matters only as it contrasts the extreme patterns of the operation of her ‘upper good world’ split of her psychosis (search for the perfect home/kingdom on earth/and what it took to ‘get there’) with her ‘lower evil world’ half of her psychosis that she trapped me within as the replacement for herself in hell. 

So, more than anything else I need help from an interested professional who has extensive experience with BPD clients.  I believe, even from what little of your writing I have read, from the title of your book, and from what was covered in the book review, that your unique and well-honed approach to the human mind could best assist me.

Thank you again – so much!  Linda

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In the meantime I have hunted up a brilliant online piece about his clinical work.  Given that this doctor resides in London, there’s not much of a chance I could ever go to him for therapy – but in a MOST rare lean toward the impossible, I find myself wishing I could move to London to receive therapy with this man.  I DESERVE this kind of quality therapy.  It would help me.  It’s not possible.  Nor is it any more likely that any of the millions of suffering Americans who need this kind of therapy could ever ever ever access it or afford it.

This fact does not prevent me from posting here the link to Dr. Paul Renn’s page.  Scrolling down through the information he presents here led me to the discovery of these articles he has written.  I thought some of them might be interesting to this blog’s readers.

Published Articles

• The Link Between Childhood Trauma and Later Violent Offending
• Attachment, Security, Separation and Psychological Differentiation: Developmental Implications
• Psychoanalysis, Attachment Theory and the Inner World: How Different Theories Understand the Concept of Mind and the Implications for Clinical Work
• Security, Separation, Recognition and Power
• Stop Thief! But What Has Been Stolen and By Whom?
• Effective, Ineffective and Iatrogenic Treatment
• The Development of Attachment Theory
• Commentary and Critique of Mann, D. (1997). “The Psychotherapist’s Erotic Subjectivity”.
• Brief verbatim extracts from: Solomon, J., George, C. and De Jong, A. Children classified as controlling at age six: Evidence of disorganized representational strategies and aggression at home and at school. IN Development and Psychopathology, 7 (1995),
• Summary of The War Neuroses – Their Nature and Significance (1943), in Fairbairn, W.R.D. (1996). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, 256-288. London: Routledge, with Comments from an Attachment and Trauma Perspective.
• Infant Observation and Adult Psychotherapy: How Developmental Studies are Informing Clinical Work with Adults
• Summary and Critique of Klein, M. (1945). The Oedipus complex in the light of early anxieties. In The Oedipus Complex Today, (1989). J. Steiner, (Ed). London: Karnac Books.
• Notes on Dissociation and Dissociative Identity Disorder
• Notes on Sexuality, Perversion and Neosexuality
• May Ethical Codes Be Unethical?
• Introduction to Attachment Theory
• The Intergenerational Transmission of Affect
• Four Patterns of Adult Discourse Observed in the Adult Attachment Interview
• The Therapeutic Process Using an Attachment-based Approach
• Summary of Home Office and NSPCC Statistics Relating to Violence and Abuse
• Violence as Attachment Gone Wrong – Three Case Vignettes
• Serious Violence, Trauma and Disorganised Attachment
• Violence and Gender – Similarities and Differences
• Understanding the links between adult attachment styles and violence in intimate relationships: when should couple therapy be the choice of intervention?
• Summary and Comment from a Contemporary Relational Perspective on ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (‘Dora’)’ by Sigmund Freud
• ‘The Mirror Transference in the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy of Alcoholism: A Case Report’
• Contemporary Views of Psychological Trauma
• Relational Psychoanalytic Perspectives On Psychosis

VERY impressive.  The above article on dissociation caught my attention immediately.

So often – no, more accurately nearly 100%  of the time in America those of us who have suffered from the effects of severe traumas are left along the wayside of the mainstream to wither up and die.  We can pretend all we want to that we are a compassionate nation.  I don’t believe it.  If we cared as a nation about the suffering of survivors of severe trauma – especially the suffering of those of us who paid the price to stay alive while being under threat our entire infant-childhoods — we would make available to everyone wherever possible the quality of therapeutic care Dr. Paul Renn provides.

My friend and fellow lay scholar, Sandy, immediately located a copy of Renn’s new book, purchased it for me and made sure it was in the mail to me ASAP. 

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The Silent Past and the Invisible Present: Memory, Trauma, and Representation in Psychotherapy (Relational Perspectives Book Series) [Hardcover]  

Paul Renn (Author)

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I will have some thick and fascinating reading ahead of me once this book arrives.  I have completed my work on one branch of my book writing as those books move on to others to complete the photograph process for them, and then their edit and proof.  Meanwhile, I have full confidence that what Renn has to say in this book will direct me correctly toward my next writing goals.

(For those readers who remember this, my first choice for my book’s title was, Story Without Words:  The invisible silence of Mother’s abuse of me.

My editor daughter forbid me to use that subtitle — partly, it seems, because she did not like the feel of it as she read those words.  It intrigued me to see the title of Dr. Renn’s book.  On some level I believe he will understand what I say in my book perhaps more clearly than can anyone else on earth.)

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As I reach the end of my self-assigned task of presenting the collection of my mother Mildred’s papers I see myself facing the transparency of time.  As I struggle to recreate the history of the homestead dwelling I also find myself left with this part of history as it has been preserved not in Mildred’s letters but rather in this small surviving pile of photographs such as they show me where my parents created within ever-changing walls a version of home as it was meant to separate the lives of those who lived within them from the wilderness that surrounded and encapsulated our family.  There is also a transparency that has appeared as the story told by Mother fades into what is left of her story as it survives within me.

There is a certain quietness that surrounds the ending of a story as the words belonging to it vanish with an inevitable certainty into the vastness of the future.  I am left thinking about the very language of homesteading itself, homesteading as the law defined it, homesteading as my father’s one word snatched our family’s history from the legal parameters of fulfilling specified requirements to obtain ownership of a tract of land equalling 160 acres.  “Entrymen” is what the government called those who pushed past a boundary of civilization into an area whose natural history did not include humans.

As Father was the entryman of our family, Mother was the entrywoman and we six were the entrychildren.  From what I know of myself it was the wilderness that entered me.  I resided for only a short period of time within the final homestead dwelling that had been built from the beginning only upon poplar tree posts set upon that land high on a mountainside a short distance below timberline.  Because it was my experience to be the chosen child for Mildred’s mentally ill psychotic abuse, the walls of the shelter that protected us from the elements of nature at the same time trapped me inside of them with Mother.

I therefore have many sets of memories connected not only to the passage of time covered in Mildred’s words, but also to every one of the physical structures our family lived inside with her, especially the homestead dwelling.  It was there that she could do whatever she wanted to do outside of the range of human comprehension.  At the end of the literal road that led to the door of our home I have finally found my way to the end of my task to set to order the shambled record of all that can be known of the Lloyd family’s Alaska homesteading saga except as that history continues to exist in my memory and within the memories of my five siblings.

At this point I pass through the invisible transparent portal of time past into time present.  Any step forward I might now take leads me into my own story and out of my mother’s.  I welcome that transmission.  I have, in reality, worked in some way all of my life to reach exactly this point in time. 

A few chosen pieces of Mildred’s writings have been passed into the hands of my youngest daughter who asked for them.  All of the rest of Mildred’s papers are gone.  I buried them in the earth, watered the dirt, introduced garden worms that I received through the mail from my sister to the east of me and from my sister to the west of me, and then I waited for nature to take its course.  After a few short months there was nothing left but some twisted rusted wire spirals left behind from Mildred’s journals.  Everything else was consumed to become rich, palatable soil that supports new life.  I cannot imagine a better ending for Mildred’s story as she recorded it in her own words.

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Having just finished my last post – +THERE I AM – SKINNY 16-YEAR-OLD ME – there is more I need to say about me and the story that is not going into these seven books of my mother’s writings I have nearly completed.  It matters to me today to discover I am cooking on a hot plate – rather than on a full size stove with an oven that I KNOW was in that spot – at SOME TIME – because I have a memory – I will only mention now – that I have never written about – that I have not known WHEN it exactly happened – that involved in my memory a STOVE in THAT spot.

In the very lowest corner on the right of the picture in my last post where I am so sweetly smiling as I make candied apples (carmel?) you can see the raw end of a painted 2’x4′ board.  That was the edge/top of a little wall that gave just enough room behind it to turn around and sit down at the table you see there in the bottom picture.

In my memory Mother had flown into one of her deadly rages at me.  I have never yet written about the tortures of doing the family’s dishes.  I always washed all of them.  Only me.  I had been doing so since I was 9, in 4th grade.  It is marked in Mother’s letters where that began.  I found it.

Dishes.  100 rules to doing the dishes.  Perfectly.  100 steps.  All of them had to be done in order and done perfectly.  I am not ready to write about the beatings I suffered because I could not do the impossible.  Even when I tried my absolute hardest — then I didn’t do them FAST enough.  When I tried to do these dishes by all 100 steps, never forgetting ONE of them, never doing one of them out of order — when I did this all faster, then I MADE TOO MUCH NOISE.  Hundreds of times I had to write the 100 steps.  Over and over and over again.  Beginning when I was 9.

But that’s not what I think of as I look at this picture of me at 16.  What I want to know is WHERE IS THE STOVE as I feel a strange kind of shock at seeing a hotplate where the stove should be – because I have a crystal clear memory of my two sisters standing behind that little wall as Mother Mildred was in one of her abusive rages at me – because I had not cleaned the top of the stove well enough after doing the dishes (one of the 100 steps).  At the instant Mildred grabbed my right hand and forced my pointer finger into the exposed pilot light of the STOVE – I see the instantaneous look of ABSOLUTE HORROR on the faces of my beautiful sisters.

When I look at this hotplate picture, and realize the date this was taken – Halloween 1967 has to be it — which leaves this horrible memory belonging to the following year when I was 17, my sisters 15 and 13.  I do not discount the details of my memory even though there’s a hotplate instead of a stove.  This just informs me that the stove must not have appeared in that spot until after this Halloween age-16 picture was taken.

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This leads me around in a circle to another post recently published here – +WHAT IN THE WORLD IS ADULT ATTACHMENT?.  In the second paragraph of the article mentioned in this post the author states this:  Such conflict and inconsistencies indicate the operation of parallel memory systems and the dissociation of painful affect. The AAI is designed to detect conflict and inconsistencies in the discourse and narrative style of the interviewee.

Parallel memory.  Nearly every single memory from the 18 years of my abusive childhood exists as ‘parallel memory’.  I know this WAS me sweetly smiling making sweet treats.  I also know there was another time I was forced to stand in nearly that exact spot while another kind of memory was being formed.  Parallel memory.  How well I know what THAT kind of memory is.

I stay away from those memories, most of my memories.  I write what I need to — when I need to — for very specific reasons.  There’s another kind of memory I have.  I remember why I LET my mother hold my finger in the pilot light.  Yes.  There was something I could have done to stop her.  One thing.  Only one thing.

I could have killed her.

That is the ONLY action I could possibly have taken to stop my mother from doing what she did to me.  This is the truth.  I remember this truth along with everything else.

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I did not finish my work today with the last ten pictures out of the probably 300 that I have already sorted and planned where they belong in these 7 volumes of my mother’s writings.  Ten pictures.  I feel like I accidentally discovered a wormhole.  Ten little pictures that show portions of the changing stages of our family homestead dwelling.

I feel like I am taking some kind of final exam.  “How much did you really learn about your family story through all of your forensic work, Linda?”

500,000 of my mother’s words, all these scrambled up, fire damaged, undated pictures — all finally in a dang good straight line for the first time EVER — and I am stuck at the very end of this journey — on the story of a HOUSE?

I am a stranger in a strange land.  There are too many refracting rays of light coming at me from so many directions.  These pictures pertain to a segment of my childhood I have spared myself from writing about for the most part, spared myself from thinking about — having told myself I would get to this part of my abuse history — later.  Much later.  MUCH MUCH MUCH later?

Certainly I did not anticipate staring my 16-year-old self in the face in a picture in THIS series of books.  I mentally looked the other way, not preparing myself in the least for whatever it is I am going through now as I am SO CLOSE to finishing this part of my work.

I am reminded (strangely, it seems) of what the developmental neuroscientists say about very young babies who are overly stimulated by interactions with people.  This happens even when the interactions are entirely playful – and positive.  The fact of the matter is, too much of ANY kind of stimulation to an infant is harmful.  Babies will instinctively take care of their needs for down-regulation and self-soothing — by simply turning their head and facing away from the source of the stimulation.

We can watch that happening in the middle of this research video (if this link doesn’t work just Google this) –

Still Face Experiment: Dr. Edward Tronick – YouTube

The turning away is only one of MANY stress reactions this infant in the video displays.  But it is the one I am thinking about now.

Because a baby younger than one year old is so rapidly building their right limbic social-emotional regulatory brain hemisphere, most of the time the baby will turn away to the LEFT – which means it is processing information in the RIGHT side of its brain.

I have been choosing to turn away from any information about myself in my teens.  For the most part I have not gotten up close and personal with my teen self – even though I have written some of my ‘stories’ from that time in my life.

Here I am finding myself — of all places — showing up right here in this book’s writing process as I try to make sense out the changes the very structure of our family home went through.  I am IN THE HOUSE.

Today, IN THE HOUSE – means more to me than I have ever thought about before.  I can tell my mother’s madness was literally IN THE HOUSE – in the fibers of that canvas Jamesway – in every material and every object in that house — or should I call it a SHOEBOX?  384 square feet for 8 people – it wasn’t any bigger than a shoebox.  BUT, as I discovered today as I examine one particular photograph closely — the top one here – (I have no way to divide these scanned pictures at present) – I see my teen self – this must have been Halloween 1967 – I was 16 – such a thin 16 – smiling as if I had never had a care in the world and BOY did I have cares!  I am sweetly making carmel apples for my family…….  So thin, remembering how often I was HUNGRY.  Noticing the details of this little kitchen in our ever-morphing house — noticing the metal bread box I had to keep meticulously clean, same with the little metal matching spice cans I can see there…..

BUT — what shocked me most today is the fact I am cooking on a hot plate.  In our shoebox we did not evidently have a stove.  Nor, as I can see in this picture ’cause I know where SOMETIMES there was a refrigerator — did we have a refrigerator at the time this picture was taken.  No running water, but we did have an electric generator (power plant, light plant) — but we didn’t run it all of the time.  It would not have supported an electric refrigerator.

Well, I don’t know where this part of the story about the living-crazy-house is going.  I have not run that guantlet all the way through yet.  The lower picture is of our father, and the two youngest of the six of us kids.  I can tell by the tablecloth and the little Santa cups on the table…… what season this was, but the YEAR?  I can see the addition was on the living room end of the house by this time.  I guess the shoebox had grown a bit.  But that is all a part of tomorrow’s work……..

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Followed by this related post – +SOMETHING ELSE I NEED TO SAY….

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I just emailed some people dear in my life to whine to them about the fact that at this moment I am severely plagued by an attack of mental fleas.  How to write coherently when each demands attention from me?  In the end I might consider what each of these fleas might have to say in the bigger story — but right now I would rather shove them all in a flea circus box and send them packing off to perform — somewhere else — hopefully for money.

Story.  Healing story.  As I think about how important this topic is to me all I begin to see are concentric rings like ripples in some gigantic lake upon whose shores each human alive resides — somewhere — in a box, under a tree, inside a mansion or a cute little mobile home on wheels.

The point is there is no beginning or end to the interplay of one part of a story with another part.  Healing the story of our family as we heal our own story — as we bring coherency into a tangled chopped apart disowned-sectioned arena of story — we are healing ALL story known to this planet.  The past is part of our story.  Even the future is part of our story.  Our shared story.  Our great big tale of what it means to be human alive within a complex world of creation that we belong to as it belongs to us.

But one cannot open one’s writing mouth and out-shout an entire story at one time!  NO!  A story requires a particular kind of attention.  It requires a deep listening, down and through the center of the earth, all around its circumference, out into the farthest (spellcheck does not like this word) reaches of our expanding universe to the edges that have not even formed themselves yet.

I see a problem in the fact that if we are not willing to listen to and tell even to our own self our own true story how are we going to be able to listen to anyone else’s?

Splitting off what parts of the story we want to hear from those parts we do not want to hear keeps our own story in broken pieces (sick) at the same time this brokenness contributes to the brokenness of the entire story of the human race.

And.  Then.  There are the mental fleas.  I suppose they are most used to feeding off of cut-off emotions, lost story lines, confusion, fear, distress, shame, and mass denial.  Well, I am here today to deal with at least some of the fleas that happen to be pestering me.  I have a story to tell — and as I work to tell it, against all available odds, I will turn each flea into a dragonfly with magnificent multi-colored wings, or a lightning bug, or into some other fantastical creature I cannot even imagine — because those imaginings belong within the edges of someone else’s story where their ripples overlap mine.

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Because I am in a holding pattern today waiting for someone my landlord told me yesterday would show up today to ‘look at’ the frozen water pipe situation at this house – although it’s already half an hour past when that person was slated to arrive – I can’t quite think straight about anything else.  (Of course I am realistically fearing the worst on this pipe situation.)

In the mean time I thought I’d take a diversionary trip into an area I believe I will at some point in my book writing have to take a serious and thorough look at:  Adult attachment.

I found an interesting website whose information I am going to post here today FOR INFORMATION and EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY.  It’s on a British website that is a Register of Trauma Specialists in London.  The title of the piece is Four Patterns of Adult Discourse Observed in the Adult Attachment Interview written by Paul Renn.

“Coherence is a central construct in attachment interviews. Coherent discourse is based on what the linguistic philosopher Grice calls the ‘Cooperative Principle’. This has four maxims, namely:

> Quality: be truthful and have evidence for what you say

> Quantity: be succinct, yet complete

> Relevance: be relevant

> Manner: be clear, brief and orderly

The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) is a semi-structured interview devised by George, Kaplan and Main, based on Grice’s principle. It provides researchers with a standardized method to assess adult mental representations of childhood attachment experiences, the influence of these experiences as perceived by the interviewee and the current relationship with one’s parents. The participant is also asked about loss of loved ones and about other traumatic experiences. During the interview, the interviewee is faced with the dual tasks of producing and reflecting upon memories related to attachment while simultaneously maintaining coherent discourse with the interviewer.

Bowlby drew attention to the ways in which information is stored in distinct systems of memory. Episodic or explicit memory consists of information that is stored in the form of temporally dated autobiographical details. Each remembered event or episode has its own distinctive place in the person’s life history. By contrast, semantic or implicit memory consists of generalised information about the world and the person’s sense of self in relation to significant others. Such generalised information is encoded in internal working models and mediates the person’s attachment-related thoughts, feelings and behaviour in a largely non conscious or procedural way. Implicitly encoded information may be at great variance with information stored in the explicit memory systems. This gives rise to cognitive and emotional conflict and to gross inconsistencies between the generalisations a person makes about his or her parents and what is explicitly implied or actually recalled in terms of specific episodes. Such conflict and inconsistencies indicate the operation of parallel memory systems and the dissociation of painful affect. The AAI is designed to detect conflict and inconsistencies in the discourse and narrative style of the interviewee.

The AAI operationalizes Bowlby’s construct of the “internal working model” as a “state of mind with respect to attachment”, as expressed in discourse about early relationships. The researcher shifts attention from the content of autobiographical memory to the form of discourse in which those memories are presented. For example, the mother’s state of mind in respect of her attachment history may be classified as secure-autonomous and her child as securely attached, despite her having experienced early trauma in the form of separation, loss and/or abuse. Such findings indicate the resolution of trauma and the attainment of ‘earned security’ via subsequent secure attachment experiences which, of course, may include a therapeutic relationship. AAI classifications, then, reveal differences in discourse style, in access to attachment memories, and in ability to coherently discuss past attachment experience.

The following four patterns of adult discourse in the AAI have been observed:

Secure-Autonomous: Adults termed secure-autonomous provide discourse that is open, free, coherent and collaborative, presenting even difficult early attachment experiences in clear and vivid ways. Discourse includes no contradictions between semantic and episodic memories of childhood attachments, a focus on the goal of the discourse task and rich use of language and expression. The interviewee demonstrates an ability to discuss and reflect upon personal attachment experiences in collaboration with the interviewer without disorganization, lack of memory or passivity of thought. These interviews are characterized by recognition, acceptance and forgiveness of imperfections and injustices in parents and in self, reflecting an integration of positive and negative feelings. As noted above, even adults with extreme and abusive attachment histories, who have come to understand coherently their early difficulties, may provide a coherent and autonomous narrative.

Discourse termed insecure or non-autonomous may show one of three patterns:

Dismissing: Transcripts coded as dismissing tend to be excessively brief and are characterized by notable contradictions in the interviewee’s discourse about early attachments, with generalised representations of history being unsupported or actively contradicted by episodes. Strong idealization of caretakers is common, along with contradictory and impoverished memories of actual events. The interviews are notable for restriction in coherence and content, indicating a deactivating strategy with respect to potentially painful memories. Some adults in this group minimize the importance of close relationships and derogate or dismiss the influence of attachment experiences, emphasizing, instead, extraordinary self-reliance.

Preoccupied: The transcripts of adults termed preoccupied may be excessively long and embellished, including information that is irrelevant to the discourse task. Interviewees are not able to describe their attachment biography coherently and show an inability to move beyond an excessive preoccupation with attachment relationships. There are frequent examples of passive speech, sentences begun and left unfinished and specific ideas that disappear in vague expressions. The boundaries between present and past and self and other are often confused. There is a diffuse self-concept and a notable inability to reflect upon experience. In some transcripts coded as preoccupied there is notable anger, passivity or fear, which is displaced from past childhood events to the present discourse task, indicating a continuing intense involvement and preoccupation with attachment experiences. The reliving of the affective experience of historical events interferes with the interviewee’s consciousness of the current discourse task.

Unresolved: Transcripts of adults are termed unresolved/disorganized when there is evidence of substantial lapses in the monitoring of reasoning and discourse, specifically surrounding the discussion of traumatic events involving loss, physical or sexual abuse. The interviewee may briefly indicate a belief that a dead person is still alive in the physical sense, or that this person was killed by a childhood thought. The individual may lapse into prolonged silence, engage in eulogistic speech or enter a trance-like dissociated state. It should be noted that the unresolved classification is made solely on the discussion of trauma, abuse or loss experiences and is superimposed on one or other of the three main attachment classifications.

Findings from research utilizing the AAI show that psychopathology is associated with non-autonomous patterns of attachment and that people classified as preoccupied and unresolved/disorganized are strongly over-represented in clinical samples.”

All rights reserved – Copyright 2009 ©

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My own interest in thinking about the Adult Attachment Interview has to do with the largest picture of the writing and publishing work I am involved in.  I have an idea (I can hardly call it a theory) that the work we do to heal our own trauma story has great power to heal us.

I am deeply engaged in preparing for publication seven volumes of mostly by severely abusive psychotic Borderline Personality Disorder mother (as regular readers of this blog clearly know).  Mother Mildred left behind her a completely disorganized mess of letters and diary notes containing around a ½ million words.  Among these papers were some of her childhood stories, her age-19 diary, her early 1950s diaries, and her entire collection of saved letters about the details of her move to Alaska and of her homesteading experience.

Any mother as deeply troubled as Mildred was leaves behind in the body of her children patterns of the same broken trauma history stories that she had herself.  So broken were the patterns of our family’s life that until I did the work of organizing Mildred’s papers, which allowed me to create a time line of events including many, many moves that Mildred dragged her family through, her children had no way to place memories in either time or place.

No matter what good and bad events occur during a childhood, without having access to a coherent story as it provides a context for when and where those events took place, we cannot create for ourselves a coherent story of our own life.  I absolutely know that is true for me.

It seems to me that most often the facts about how our earliest attachment experiences conception to age 2 shape the way our body, brain, nervous system, stress-calm response system, memory storage and retrieval system, even our immune system and the way our genetic information manifests itself over the course of our lifetime, is left out of nearly all so-called ‘healing’ and ‘recovery’ work.  Very few therapists have training in what matters most.  Once we move through the corridor of the first 33 months of our early development we already have all the systems in our body physiologically set to follow the main course of our life.  Either we were made in, by and for a safe and secure world or we were not.

That these patterns can display themselves through how we tell our life story – through how we remember ourselves in our own life both consciously and unconsciously – seems extremely important to me.  However, I also deeply know that when the words of our story are not available to us for whatever reason, and available to us in a coherent form, these stories will tell themselves through DRAMA.  These trauma drama reenactments usually tell the story of our own and of our family’s unresolved traumas until these stories have been given words.

This suspicion I have about the healing power of healing our story suggests to me that given the fact that very, very few people in America can actually access or afford any kind of quality ‘mental health’ care, we are left on our own to figure out what we need and how to get our needs met.  Working out our story is something we can do on our own.  It is lonely, difficult and very scary work.  But this work MATTERS and I believe it is possible.

This is enough words right now.  I leave readers to ponder the British piece on adult attachment.  Although there is more to the story this is a very good place to start gaining perspective on the connection between how we FEEL in our body in our life – as it connects to what we know of our story.

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If nothing else, the events I mentioned in my previous post have stopped me dead in my book writing tracks.  Nothing thawed out.  I now have the water turned off to the house at the main.  Tonight is again supposed to be super cold — and my house with its poor pipes is a sitting duck for absolute freeze in every one of its pipes.  There is nothing I can do – but stew.

I certainly have not had the heart to return to the work I was so engrossed in last night.  Until the words that belong in the Lloyd family story are set to the music of their accompanying photographs, there is no possible way anyone other than my siblings could begin to imagine what our living environment and conditions actually were.  In fact, as I worked my way through details I have never thought about before last night, I realized that I have never truly let myself know the bigger picture of what all of the Lloyd children lived through.

There are a few pictures here that are descriptive of a very late transformation process of our ‘home’

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It is now 3:30 in the afternoon.  My current stress/distress began last midnight.  I assure myself that the troubles I face are fully of my own making.  So what?

I live at around 5,000 feet in the high American southwest desert.  I does get cold here, but last night was one of the worst.  We’ve had this cold spell for days now.  I’ve lived up north all of my life.  I know there are times when inside faucets have to be left running to prevent pipes from freezing.  This is even more true down here where most houses have no insulation, truest when temperatures drop below 15 degrees, which certainly happened last night.

A main line into the house is frozen.  There is no water moving anywhere.  I have no idea where the freezing in the lines is.  The sun is warming the west side of my house right now, but only for a little more time.  Nothing has thawed yet.  I dragged my blue 100′ extension cord out the door (which means I can’t shut my doors, which means I am losing heat in here).  I have my hair dryer running on high aimed at the main water line in the nasty dirty shallow crawl space under the house.  I dragged a fan out there which is also aimed to blow under the house.  Not a drip is stirring.

Of course I can’t control the weather, but I could have done things differently starting with going online last evening to see what temperatures were expected.  Usually I head to bed at 10 p.m. and turn on a kitchen faucet then.  Last night I was so engrossed in my work on the 8th book going into line for publishing I lost track of time.  I came up for air at midnight, was readying for bed, went to turn on the faucet to drip — and not a drop.  Too late.

I spent so many hours last night focusing so hard on my work I did not flush the toilet for hours.  I did not turn on any faucets.  I just worked — and there was a price to pay — a price still be determined.

If nothing thaws today — I hate to think what’s going to happen in the cold of tonight.  I can’t imagine a single water line in this house that isn’t going to freeze solid.  True, this is a rental — but there’s a limit to ‘what Linda can get away with’.  This is all my fault.

Is this an accident?

Is this a mistake?

No, I did not intentionally let my water lines freeze — but so what?  Frozen they most definitely ARE!

Why – last night on a record low temperature night did I HAPPEN to run the course of time the way that I did?  Never do I go that many hours in a row without using some water — somewhere!

Just chalk this up to more of the cost of doing business on these books.  But I cannot blame the weather.  Dare I blame myself?

More importantly, do I dare NOT TO BLAME MYSELF?

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