Tag: depression

+WHAT CHILD ABUSE, ADOBE-MAKING AND NAT KING COLE HAVE IN COMMON

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This post is an honest one about what I don’t let myself think about – or lately to write about – choosing when I can to work without words to try to distract myself instead:

From Mirriam-Webster’s online dictionary:

ANOMALY

1  : the angular distance of a planet from its perihelion as seen from the sun

2  : deviation from the common rule : irregularity

3  : something anomalous : something different, abnormal, peculiar, or not easily classified

First Known Use of ANOMALY

1603

The origins-roots of the word showed up under this form of the word:

ANOMALOUS

Origin of ANOMALOUS

Late Latin anomalus, from Greek anōmalos, literally, uneven, from a- + homalos even, from homos same — more at same

First Known Use: 1655

1  : inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected : irregular, unusual

2 a : of uncertain nature or classification b : marked by incongruity or contradiction : paradoxical

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I would not be exploring this word ‘anomaly’ if I didn’t have to.

For weeks I have avoided writing.  I work instead, trying not to feel or to think – at all if I can help it.

Today this word has appeared to me along with a realization that I have my nose to a wall, in another corner not unlike the ones my mother stood me in for many, many thousands of hours during my childhood.

I cannot move out of this corner in any direction until I DO think about and give words to what I have been experiencing – actually for my entire lifetime.

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I could say that after over ten years I remain ‘love sick’ for a certain man that I have never in all that time deviated one fraction of an inch from feeling the same way about that I do not only at this moment, but at every moment of my life.

I cannot escape my feelings, no matter what I do.  Working as hard as I do at distracting myself accomplishes only one thing – if I can do it:  no thinking.  The no thinking is an exercise that consumes horrendous amounts of my life force.  I know that it does.  And although I convince myself the best that I can that not thinking IS actually helpful and productive, it really isn’t.  I know that.

The problem is that I cannot make myself feel any differently than I do.  I miss this man.

But there is more to the problem.  Unfortunately, a lifetime of more.  A more that began when I was born and has so changed me down to my molecular levels that I have no hope that I really CAN change and adapt ‘better’ to the only very sporadic, undependable, and pitifully inadequate contact that this man now chooses to have with me without having what I do have – a broken heart.

I was not born with a broken heart.  My mother’s abuse, and my father’s neglect of me and support of my mother’s abuse, broke my heart.  This trauma changed my development in all the ways I have described in the past on this blog.

So what can I possibly add today to my descriptions of what the terrible abuse of my childhood did to me?

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Not only did my mother treat me as the nonhuman devil’s child her Borderline Personality Disorder psychosis believed me to be from the time of her labor of me forward HURT me and CHANGE me, it created physiological patterns in my body-brain-mind-self that I really do not believe I can alter.

That’s where this word ‘anomaly’ came from today.  My existence within my physiological reality IS an anomaly.

Yes, I was treated in ‘irregular’ and ‘unusual’ ways that were extremely traumatic and abusive.  But more than that, it was built into me that I was an ‘irregular’ and ‘unusual’ child from my birth – and that was NEVER A GOOD THING.

I was permanently convinced from birth that I WAS NOT THE SAME as any other human being – as can be seen in the root origins of this word I have to accept into my thoughts today if I am going to make any progress now – in any direction.  I was not even a member of my species – and I was completely unacceptable and a failure – not as a human being, but as a — WHAT?

Origin of ANOMALOUS

Late Latin anomalus, from Greek anōmalos, literally, uneven, from a- + homalos even, from homos same — more at same

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And then there’s this information connected to this word:

a : of uncertain nature or classification b : marked by incongruity or contradiction : paradoxical

There was nobody LIKE me.  I was unique in my family, unique in my mother’s psychotic abusive mind.  Where does one go to meet another ‘born of the devil’ child like one’s self?

I was told the entire 18 years of my childhood that I was this not-human devil child.  And yet there I was – caught in this state of being ONE of this family, though hated and not wanted.  An incongruity, a contradiction, a paradox I could not possibly handle.

This paradox has never left me.  I hope that this link on the consequences of infant-child abuse as it places the little one in the face of an ‘unsolvable paradox’ as Dr. Allan Schore describes it is active HERE.  If not, Google search these terms:  allan schore child abuse paradox.

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No infant-child asks to be severely and malevolently treated.  The survivors do not ask to have to live the rest of their lives with the physiological changes that happened in their growing and developing body-brain for the rest of their lives.

This broken heart that I live with constantly is NOT ‘just about’ this broken relationship with this man I love.  My disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment pattern-disorder has been severely triggered, and I cannot make the pain of it go away.  It is tied into the fundamental changes that the abuse I endured created in me – at my core.

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Take a look at the pictures here of what was left of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge after a 1989 earthquake.  This is what I feel like inside nearly all of the time.  And just as it wasn’t any fault of the bridge that it reacted to the severe trauma that changed it, a severe infant-child abuse survivor is not at fault for the changes our body had to make during the traumas of our childhood, either.

I can avoid feeling and thinking about how I AM inside – nobody wants to listen to me whine about it – least of all ME.

I have also been avoiding writing about how I feel.

Coming ‘up’ from the word ‘anomaly’ the other word that is stuck in my thoughts if I don’t distract myself most of the time is ‘wrong’.

WRONG

Middle English, from Old English wrang, from *wrang, adjective, wrong

First Known Use: before 12th century

NOUN — 1 a : an injurious, unfair, or unjust act : action or conduct inflicting harm without due provocation or just cause b : a violation or invasion of the legal rights of another; especially : tort

2  : something wrong, immoral, or unethical; especially : principles, practices, or conduct contrary to justice, goodness, equity, or law

3  : the state, position, or fact of being or doing wrong: as a : the state of being mistaken or incorrect b : the state of being guilty

ADJECTIVE — 1  : not according to the moral standard : sinful, immoral <thought that war was wrong>

2  : not right or proper according to a code, standard, or convention : improper <it was wrong not to thank your host>

3  : not according to truth or facts : incorrect <gave a wrong date>

4  : not satisfactory (as in condition, results, health, or temper)

5  : not in accordance with one’s needs, intent, or expectations <took the wrong bus>

6  : of, relating to, or constituting the side of something that is usually held to be opposite to the principal one, that is the one naturally or by design turned down, inward, or away, or that is the least finished or polished

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That was me, all right.  Eighteen years of having this beat into me in every possible, conceivable way.  Nobody EVER told me my mother was wrong, or that there was something wrong with my childhood.  By the time I figured that out – beginning when I was 30 years old – it was far, far, far too late to have this information help me where it mattered most.

By the time I began to understand how wrong my childhood was, how wrong the things done to me for 18 years were, how wrong my mother was that I was not human, that I was evil, that I was the devil’s child – all the physiological changes in my development had already taken place – a long, long, long time ago.

Nobody ever told me for those 18 suffering years that my childhood was the reverse of what most people’s were — turned inside out — nobody read the ‘wrong way – do not enter here’ signs of ‘thou shalt NOT NOT NOT do this to any child, certainly not your OWN’.  My body changed its development in such a WRONG world — and in its (my) essence it learned to know as a fundamental fact that there is something WRONG with me — in this world.

And in part, the powerful effects of the enduring isolation imposed on my by my mother in my childhood:  there is something WRONG with me that these people who I so wanted/want to love me do not even miss my presence or my company.

(I am trying to articulate some of the body-based information that I know and feel because I believe for survivors of severe infant-child abuse our concerns are much more profound, deeper, and physiologically based than anything that can be covered by such trite, overly simplified and inaccurate terms such as ‘addictive love’.)

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Dr. Martin Teicher refers to evolutionarily altered development as I mentioned in my December 22, 2009 post —

+CALM THE CRYING BABY — IMMUNE SYSTEM STIMULATES VAGUS NERVE TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT

There are obviously consequences to these changes – and living with a constantly broken heart – or more accurately a constantly activated insecure attachment system – HURTS.

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So all I know today is that I can’t work hard enough today to avoid the truth about how I feel, or avoid the words that go with both these feelings and my inner physiological reality.  A member of a species KNOWS when they are exiled, for whatever reason their ‘flaws’ have been discovered.  LOGICALLY trying to use my so-called (and evolutionarily altered in development) ‘higher executive functions’ to try to CONVINCE myself of anything other than what my body knows is useless.

No amount of self talk, no amount of great affirmations, no amount of logic, NOTHING changes this perpetual state I am in of a broken heart except being exactly in the presence of (physical or verbal) of my most important attachment ‘figures’ – and that includes ‘this man’ – whether I like it or not.  There is something wrong with me that the man I love does not love me in return — and that my parents did not love me, either.

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Which leads me around to music – something ELSE besides work that does sooth me – usually.  My musical nephew in Seattle was very kind to help with some guidance on reading ‘Coda’ in music, and he transcribed these lyrics to a song I found and LIKE –

Here’s a version with Nat King Cole singing it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kd1A0zVK9Y.

IF I GIVE MY HEART TO YOU

Words and music by Jimmie Crane, Al Jacobs and Jimmy Brewster

Copyright 1954 by Miller Music Corporation

If I give my heart to you

Will you handle it with care?

Will you always treat me tenderly?

And in every way be fair?

If I give my heart to you

Will you give me all your love?

Will you swear that you’ll be true to me?

By the light that shines above?

And will you sigh with me when I’m sad

Smile with me when I’m glad

And always be as you are with me tonight

Think it over and be sure

Please don’t answer ‘til you do

When you promise all these things to me

Then I’ll give my heart to you

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Which leads me to say in conclusion that had I known ten years ago when I met ‘this man’ what I clearly know now about my Trauma Altered Development and the incredibly high risk my disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment pattern-disorder puts me in for GREAT PAIN that does not end because it is connected to all that HURT me as my body-brain developed – I would have known that I needed to KNOW what this simple song says.

Yet even if I ever actually had asked anyone to do what this song suggests, I also have a corresponding disability – I cannot often tell if someone is lying to me or telling me the truth.  I cannot ‘read’ social cues well enough to know.  (Another consequence of early severe abuse changing the development of my right social-emotional brain.)

But give the song a listen – Nat King Cole is my piano playing role model!

All for now – thanks for giving a read!  I wish I had better news to report – but I think that will happen in ‘the next world’ when I am free from this body with its trauma-forced developmental changes.

Now I must go back outside, though it is baking-hot out today, and prepare three good holes to put the three remaining plants I have left in pots into before they die.

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+WORK WITHOUT WORDS: THE FRONT YARD ADOBE LANDSCAPING

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These are some pictures that show what I have been doing lately– this amazing work I love that requires no words and lets me think in an entirely different way…….

Before I show you what I have been working on, I will show you about what I started with. This is the west side of my front yard, and ALL of that is wicked Bermuda grass -- as my sister describes it, 'the cockroach of the plant world'.

Of course with the monsoon rains at their end, all green grass will dry and turn brown.  Our world down here on the Mexican border will remain mostly brown for another ten months.  How to work with that brown-red dirt?

By-the-way, in the corner of the yard in this picture (above) is a Honeysuckle on left and a Jasmine on right with a lovely Lantana starting here, buried in the grass…..

That is a thriving medium-size Pompas Grass -- more on the south west front to be done next

The little purple tips of this fall blooming sage coming into its showing time gets rain from the gutters, packed full at the roots with Bermuda grass that can NEVER truly be eradicated once it gets a hold — only pulled, cut, dug out the best I can.  There’s the adobe form, an array of junk I always seem to collect around me as I work and move move move forward until a project nears completion —

This yellow bell bloomer is a gorgeous plant once it gets rooted and begins to send up its branches -- getting quite large. My idea out front to control weeds including Bermuda...

I dug 8″ – 10″ ‘holes’ around and in between my newly planted perennials, sloshed some cement into a soaked mud slurry, leveled it off and randomly placed in stones — sort of like a creek bed.  I doubt either weeds or Bermuda can perk their way through this ‘pad’ once it hardens.  All the water that collects in these pads will flow onto the perennials when summer rains come.

My little wall around the perimeter is made from the adobes I showed pictures of last summer stored against the wall of my house.  They are too sandy and fragile to use to carry much weight, but are perfect — again — for a Bermuda defense wall.  There is creeping Bermuda outside my fence, but hopefully I can catch its nasty little runners as they come OVER the top of my little wall before they can take root on my GOOD side of the fence.

I have a colorful rooster picture I found somewhere years ago hanging on my kitchen wall by my microwave.  As I have studied that brightly colored picture over time, I found a perfect blue tucked in among the rooster’s tail feathers.  I took the picture to our local hardware store the other day and perfectly matched it with an outdoor paint.

Again (as I did with the turquoise on the back wooden fence), I mixed about a quarter cup of paint with two cups water and made a stain for my boards I am experimenting with in the front landscaping project.  Once the boards are stained, I wipe motor oil on them to bug and waterproof the wood.

Taken in the back yard, but this is the same gold trumpet flower getting its start back there
The flower trench --

This trench forms the ‘U’ around what you will see next.  That ‘dirt’ is a red clay, very dense, that turns into ROCK when dry.  No plant roots can penetrate its depths.  I have removed it from my trench as I did out back, and today’s work will be to remove weeds from the area in my back yard I get refill dirt from — that will also get hard when wet if not mixed with organic matter, but that contains far more sand and is Bermuda free.  I figure it will take about eleven cubic yards today to refill this ‘U’ trench.

I am working, also, at figuring out how to install drip irrigation.

The tree....

There are two silver Texas Ranger plants along this little wall — this next picture shows one I have started in the back yard.  They are a rain-prophet plant, gaining and losing their beautiful, delicate lavender flowers many times in a season as they predict the coming of moisture (though I haven’t seen a drop of the rain they are prepared for now!)

I'll eventually surround this plant with adobe blocks to help fight the enemy Bermuda grass -- This will grow into a tree if left without trimming (can be shaped into all kinds of hedge forms!)
Still wet mud

This is looking north east.  The stones I embedded in my adobe walkway are mostly buried, but add strength and durability to this area where the heavy monsoon rains are going to rush.  I moved and moved and moved the gravel (sifted from the dirt in the back yard when I was working back there) until I knew where I wanted it.  The blue board laying on its side is meant to contain the gravel so it doesn’t get kicked here and there where I don’t want it to end up.

Once I am done with the adobe work, including doing my best to create drainage ‘channels’ to let the water run off when it rains and not flood the colored boards, I will try to scrub and clean the boards so that their color shows more brightly.

In the left corner of this picture is a yellow climbing rose.  I bought it four years ago and didn’t remember it was a climber.  Every year I have trimmed it incorrectly, so now that I understand how to maintain a climber I am hoping to restore this one.  I have plans (again, cheapest possible on my budget) to build it an arbor over the end of the sidewalk.  Currently there is no gate on that end, but I plan to build one after I tear down the broken old shed in the back yard so I can use its wood.

North bed

This is the most light (morning) that this area gets, but I decided I can find something to put here next summer — hopefully begonias and geraniums.  This is where I ended last night, so these bricks are still quite wet.  In a few days I will be able to add bricks to either end to add some sculptural height and interest to this little wall without cutting much light.  Unfortunately my much-moved-around-gravel is very dirty and lots of it is sunk in wet mud — but…..

Again, the water runs off of the front house roof line here (no gutters).

And, just a quick shot — the back adobe walkways survived the monsoons just fine!

There are lots of pomegranates ripening.  Right in lower center is the little cedar tree my sis brought me!  AND, without the amazing garden cart my other sister gave me for my birthday I could not be doing the front project as hauling all the dirt in 5-gallon buckets all the way to the front yard would be more than I could do!  ‘Harvey’ the garden cart is a miracle on wheels!

ALL the plants will do so much better on drip — long story why that is — saving it for later!

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+SCIENCE ON THE SIDE OF MUSIC THERAPY

alchemynow1 Comment

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Thanks to a Yahoo group I ‘attend’ this article on music therapy popped into my email box today.  I especially appreciated it in light of the fascination I  have with my keyboard playing-learning to read music process in the hopes that I can help heal my severely verbally abused (plus) musical brain:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-11233452

Study to develop ‘musical prescriptions’ for patients

Patients could be prescribed music tailored to their needs as a result of new research.

Scientists at Glasgow Caledonian University are using a mixture of psychology and audio engineering to see how music can prompt certain responses.

They will analyse a composition’s lyrics, tone or even the thoughts associated with it.

Those behind the study say it could be used to help those suffering physical pain or conditions like depression.

By considering elements of a song’s rhythm patterns, melodic range, lyrics or pitch, the team believe music could one day be used to help regulate a patient’s mood.

Audio engineer Dr Don Knox, who is leading the study, said the impact of music on an individual could be significant.

He said: “Music expresses emotion as a result of many factors. These include the tone, structure and other technical characteristics of a piece.

“Lyrics can have a big impact too.

“But so can purely subjective factors: where or when you first heard it, whether you associate it with happy or sad events and so on.”

So far the team has carried out detailed audio analysis of certain music, identified as expressing a range of emotions by a panel of volunteers.

‘Emotional content’

Their ultimate aim is to develop a mathematical model that explains music’s ability to communicate different emotions.

This could, they say, eventually make it possible to develop computer programs that identify music capable of influencing mood.

“By making it possible to search for music and organise collections according to emotional content, such programs could fundamentally change the way we interact with music”, said Dr Knox.

“Some online music stores already tag music according to whether a piece is “happy” or “sad”.

“Our project is refining this approach and giving it a firm scientific foundation, unlocking all kinds of possibilities and opportunities as a result.”
BBC © MMX

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+CHILDREN BEAR TRAUMA SCARS IN THEIR GENES – IN TODAY’S NEWS

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In today’s news — something I figured out two years ago on my own — because it makes ‘body sense’ — and I was right:

View this article on Time.com

Genetic Scars of the Holocaust: Children Suffer Too

By JEFFREY KLUGER Jeffrey Kluger – Thu Sep 9, 4:45 am ET

The Holocaust is a crime that never seems to quit. Even as the ranks of survivors grow smaller each year, the impact of that dark passage in history continues to be to be felt. And it’s not just the victims who feel the effects; it’s their children too.

Psychologists have long been intrigued by the emotional profile of so-called second-generation Holocaust survivors. Parents who lived through the camps were forever changed by the horrors they witnessed. In the 21st century, many – probably most – would be recognized as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Back then, the absence of such a diagnosis meant the absence of effective treatments too. As a result, a generation of children grew up in homes in which one, and sometimes both, parents were battling untold emotional demons at the same time they were going about the difficult business of trying to raise happy kids. No surprise, they weren’t always entirely successful. (See photos of Auschwitz after 65 years.)

Over the years, a large body of work has been devoted to studying PTSD symptoms in second-generation survivors and it has found signs of the condition in their behavior and even their blood – with higher levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, for example. The assumption – a perfectly reasonable one – was always that these symptoms were essentially learned. Grow up with parents afflicted by the mood swings, irritability, jumpiness and hypervigilance typical of PTSD and you’re likely to wind up stressed and high-strung yourself. (See more on how children are also vulnerable to posttraumatic stress.)

Now, a new paper adds another dimension to the science, suggesting that it’s not just a second generation’s emotional profile that can be affected by a parent’s trauma, it may be their genes too. The study, just published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, was conducted by a team headed by neurobiologist Isabelle Mansuy of the University of Zurich. What she and her colleagues set out to explore went deeper than genetics in general, focusing instead on epigenetics – how genes change as a result of environmental factors in ways that can be passed onto the next generation. (See pictures of an army town coping with PTSD.)

To conduct their work, Mansuy’s team raised male mice from birth and continually but unpredictably separated them from their mothers from the time they were one day old until they were 14 days old. Thereafter, the animals were reared, fed and cared for normally, but the early trauma took its toll.

As adults, the subject animals exhibited PTSD-like symptoms such as isolation and jumpiness. More tellingly, their genes functioned differently from those of other mice. The investigators looked at five target genes associated with behavior – most notably, one that helps regulate the stress hormone CRF and one that regulates the neurotransmitter serotonin – and found that all of them were either overreactive or underreactive.

These mice, for the purposes of the study, were the equivalent of first generation of Holocaust survivors. The same mice then fathered young and, like most males of the species, had nothing to do with their upbringing. The pups were raised by their mothers with none of the trauma and separation their fathers had suffered, and yet when they grew up, not only did they exhibit the same anxious behavior, they also had the same signature gene changes.

“We saw the genetic differences both in the brains of the offspring mice and in the germline – or sperm – of the fathers,” says Mansuy.

Mouse studies, by their definition, are limited, particularly when the animals are being used as stand-ins not merely for human biology, but for human behavior. Still, in this case, the nonhuman models were actually an advantage, since you could hardly run a control experiment in which second-generation survivors of the Holocaust were separated from their fathers, ensuring that you were studying inherited – not acquired – traits. What’s more, says Mansuy, “with animals, you can study the brain in detail.”

That doesn’t mean that some studies couldn’t be conducted in human subjects that sought similar findings. Straightforward analysis of blood, plasma and sperm from volunteers could reveal signs of genetic changes similar to those seen in mice. And a deeper analysis of the mouse genes should yield other target genes to study in people. “We’re now doing a high throughput study of hundreds of genes that go beyond the first five,” says Mansuy.

The Holocaust is hardly the only life crisis that can shape behavior and genes. Survivors of Afghanistan, Iraq or Darfur – or even those who grew up in unstable or abusive homes – can exhibit similar changes. But Holocaust survivors remain one of the best study groups available because their trauma was so great, their population is so well known, and so many of them have gone on to produce children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. Humans, alas, may never run out of ways to behave savagely toward one another. But the better we can understand the price paid by the victims – and the babies of the victims – the better we might be able to treat their wounds.

See the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2009.

Buy reprints of TIME’s health and medicine covers.

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+THE PROCESS OF RUPTURE AND REPAIR NEED REPOSE AND RESTORATION

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Well, here I am at mid-day and I am not outside working in my yard.  It’s very hot outside, but that by itself is not what is stopping me.  I have lymphodema in my left arm after cancer in my lymph nodes on that side, and today my arm is swelling from my work outside these past few days, and I am always worried when I see puffiness beginning to move down into my left hand.  THAT will not do.  Today my arm needs to rest and I cannot WILL it any other way.

This leaves me with some free mental time to think further about my observation about whiners and workers.  As usual, my thoughts turn upon their own invisible fulcrum and in that expanding spectrum I ran into two recently found friend-thoughts:  Rupture and Repair.

Yet because of the past days I have needed to work on some repair for myself, my thoughts have slowed down enough that I can see some of what lies between these two big “R’s”.   And as I do, I look outside into my transforming front yard and because of the clearing, simplifying and patterning of my new layouts I can see something I never noticed before.

My brother and I planted a desert Sycamore tree out there while I was taking my chemo.  This is a fast growing tree, and I have been trimming off its lower branches as it stretches up in height and now I can see that this tall trunk with its bunch of neat branches at its top is actually working like something I have always wanted in my yard for a long, long time:  A sundial.

Within my new landscape plan I figured out yesterday how to dig 8″ deep rectangles between each of the perennial plants.  In these holes I wet and stir the mud with a little cement, and then place stones in them so they look like the bed of a stream.  I figured out that the weeds and Bermuda grass is not likely to be any more able to sprout through these ‘spacers’ than it does through the actual adobe bricks I have been making my walkways out of.

In addition, after watching the downpour the other day I can see that these ‘stone pads’ between the perennials will also be able to accomplish another important job.  They will create water runoff streams that will now go exactly where I want them too when the rains come — seldom and hard — right onto my perennials!

But as I looked outside today, somewhat begrudged that I can’t healthily be out there furthering my working plans, I see that those pads as they lie at the outside of my newly created garden give the shadow of my tree a place to land on as the sunlight scoots across the landscape.  Each of those stone pads now looks like a marker on a sundial!  How cool is that?

And in between the pad-markers are the plants themselves which of course vitally depend on the sunlight to reach them and NOT be overly shadowed by the tree leaves as the light passes them.  It seems to be working out OK.

And this whole visual experience this morning, combined with my ‘freed time’ to think helps me understand that in between the two fundamental poles that living in an ever changing and often challenging world creates — patterns of rupture and repair — are shades that can be named more specifically.  Because patterns of rupture and repair are what build our ‘operating system’ of secure or insecure attachment in and to the world from our conception, it is helpful and important for me to understand that in the cycles of living there is more detailed and specific information I can learn, name and use in my life.

Because of the severe abuse I survived, that altered my entire body’s development permanently in my early years, I understand that my resulting insecure attachment (along with the other Three Sisters I mentioned previously, depression, PTSD and dissociation), all happened to me because patterns of rupture and repair did not follow one another in supportive ways in my early years.

I have never found ‘functional’ or ‘dysfunctional’ to be useful terms to my thinking when I look back on my severely chaotic, traumatic, dangerous and harmful infant-childhood.  These terms do not name anything I can relate to, so I went searching for more accurate and useful terms.  Rupture and repair are REAL processes.  Yet as I think about them today I see some of what lies along the spectrum between them, and those things add more detailed information that I can use to think with.

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I have a collection of those little “Y” shaped hose end attachments, some metal, some plastic, some older, some new.  They all cost me money, all cost the planet resources, and they all eventually seem to fail for no reason I can determine other than planned obsolescence and shoddy craftsmanship.  Yesterday as I was working away on my project outside the one I have been using for several months at the watering end of my hose (I then have one ‘spigot’ open for running water and the other has a sprayer attached to it) simply fell apart.

I had been adding water in the shower formation to my adobe mud mix one minute, had dropped the hose end to the ground to stir, and when I picked the hose end back up the water could not be turned off on one end of the “Y.”  What on earth had happened in that split second?

It turned out that the tiny screw that held the turn-on-off on one side of the “Y” had fallen off and vanished!  I tried another “Y” I had on hand, it was flawed also.  I twisted on a new one I bought last week, and for no reason I could understand, my hose end had decided to spring itself a major leak also!  The washer was fine.  I ended up having to use the super (and very effective) Rescue Tape the hardware store people had convinced me to buy last week — along with a hose clamp (which I found out last week now costs $1.29 for one of the smallest ones they make!) to FIX the end of the hose before I could even screw on the new “Y.”

All said and done, I never expected to find the tiny pieces that fell off the first broken “Y” as they fell down somewhere between the tangled masses of Bermuda grass, the dug-up dark, damp earth and the mud.  But they DID appear!  A tiny rubber ring about 1/4″ inside diameter, and then suddenly the little turn-off handle itself!  Seemed like a miracle to me!

Well, to make a long story even longer, all of this fed into my thought channels about rupture and repair, and about the four things I mentioned in a post last week:  Make, Use, Fix, and Break.

I never until yesterday realized that there is maintenance required on some of those hose “Y” attachments.  I didn’t know that eventually the tiny screw that holds the little handle on that turns the spray on or off loosens — and then falls off!  Maintenance.  Obviously connected to FIX and to REPAIR.

Yet maintenance is more closely connected to another word that appeared to me yesterday, one that lies within my more finely-tuned understanding of the spectrum between Rupture and Repair.  The need to MAINTAIN something keeps it working BEFORE it needs to be repaired.  Maintainance is a form of RESTORATION.

As I mentioned, I never knew that these “Ys” needed to be maintained so that they would continue (at least some of them) their functionality.  Maintaining the proper tension on the little handle screw by checking it periodically would have RESTORED it to its ‘factory specs’ and kept it working properly.  The whole minor mess I encountered yesterday could have been avoided if I had both known this, and done it.

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Which now leads me on a minor diversion here.  I have instinctively known, as I have mentioned before, that the term RECOVERY did not have the same meaning to me as a severe infant-child abuse survivor that it has for others who did not have a severely traumatic childhood.  I do not have very much at ALL to go back and ‘recover’ of myself from ‘back then’.

What I do as a severe abuse survivor is something else — not recovery.  If I had maintained my “Y” over time, and adjusted it to RESTORE it back to its original operation, I would have been assisting that little piece of hardware to RECOVER what it once possessed.  To me this is a FINE and an important distinction!

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To get back to whiners and workers — to rupture and repair — to sunlight being marked by my growing single tree in my yard as the minutes of the day tick themselves along — and to the words and terms we use to explain the important processes of life — I will now add yet another concept here.

This word that came into my mind has virtually nothing to do with the mechanistic metaphors used to describe human experience such as ‘functional’ and ‘dysfunctional’.  It has nothing to do with a functional or dysfunctional “Y” watering attachment.  But it has everything to do with what happens to living organisms that are required to go through natural cycles of rupture and repair to stay alive.

The word is REPOSE.

My broken (ruptured) “Y” is, true, reposing in a bowl of vinegar water to remove the calcium within it so that I can try to repair it now that it’s broken and I miraculously found its tiny pieces in the muddy mess of my yard.  Will the repair actually restore it to use?  Time and effort will tell.

In the meantime, I am thinking that in my severely abusive home of origin, with my continually working father and my chronically whining mother, rupture without repair — or hope of repair — was the chronic state of our environment.

Along with all the ruptures without repair REPOSE was entirely missing.

Looking at it today, REPOSE and REPAIR are essentially tied together.

REPOSE only happens when safety and security are present.  REPOSE happens at the same time a safe and secure attachment in and to the world is possible.

REPOSE lets restoration that leads to repair happen.

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When it comes to understanding that our ‘stress response system’ in our body, the same one that is permanently altered and damaged as we grow and develop under malevolent infant-childhood conditions, is ALSO our ‘calm and connection system’.  They are THE SAME SYSTEM.

Without safety and security REPOSE doesn’t happen, REPAIR doesn’t happen, and our entire body-brain-mind-self lands smack on the STRESS end of things rather than on the CALM end of things.  We pay the price physiologically — and then in every other related way — for the rest of our lives.

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So in the sundial movement of the circle-cycle of life between ruptures that need repair, and the repair that either does or does not happen, lies MAINTAINANCE and  RESTORATION that only happens when REPOSE is possible, attainable and present.

Trauma does not offer repose.  Repose is an essential requirement for repairing a rupture (healing) so that both growth and an ongoing life of well-being can happen.

Neither continual working or continual whining allow for repose, and hence the cycle of rupture and repair is broken.

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Just as I did not know I needed to maintain my “Y” neither of my parents were able to maintain their own self.  I had to assess what went wrong with my “Y” yesterday (not hard when I saw pieces missing).  Neither of my parents ever knew the truth about what happened to them during their infant-childhoods that robbed them of well-being.  They never knew what happened to MAKE them BROKEN, so they could not either USE their full abilities or FIX what was wrong.

And REPOSE, what is supposed to be formed at the center of our physiology as our body-brain grows from conception forward, was completely missing.  REPOSE ability was missing because neither of my parents ever truly knew what safe and secure attachment even was.  Neither of them had it formed into the center of their body-brain as they grew up.  Repose, which lets restoration repair the ruptures life creates, was completely left out of the recipe both my parents used to create their life — and the life of their offspring.

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Just as rest and repose is what my swollen arm needs today — not whining without end, not work without end, it is what ALL of me needs — nearly all of the time.  So much trauma-based rupture without repose and restoration that leads to repair makes heavy demands on me, as it does for every severe abuse survivor whose life did not offer to them the opportunities to be safe and secure in the world.

But at least now I am beginning to find the words to think the thoughts that are more closely aligned with what I need.  I do not think in terms of ‘functional’ and ‘dysfunctional’ and I am glad for that.  I also know that my need for REPOSE is beyond great.  And I am learning why that is so.  I have to live in and with this body my mother so drastically affected in its development, but as I do so I hope to continue to understand what I can do to live a little bit better every step of the way.

No this isn’t easy.

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+WHINERS AND WORKERS. HUM……

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++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Today I accomplished some catch up with myself.  Yesterday we were showered well with a late monsoon rain — a real soaker!  The adobes I had made for my newly forming front yard walkway were aged enough to survive it, but I sure got to see how and where the rain off of my gutterless roof pounds down on some of them.  Today I did some repair in those spots, adding stones for the rain to beat upon — and let it come!

The ground was wonderfully wet.  I could dig away anywhere I wanted to without hard caliche (in Arizona, a layer of soil in which the soil particles have been cemented together by lime) to stop my shovel and demand a hose soaking before I could have my way with it.  And today the clouds obscured the punishing sun.  I worked all day out there — and now I feel better.

Only twice did I have to detour my thoughts away from the negative patterns that can crop up so quickly — and so unexpectedly, seemingly out of nowhere.  When those thoughts came today I could do one of two things:  (1) say a simple prayer, and/or (2) redirect my thoughts to the next physical action required of my task.

It worked.  Then five times after I told myself, “That’s enough for today. Your body is tired.  There’s always tomorrow,” I perched my sweat soaked rubber work gloves on the handles of my upright shovel and hoe — after sunset.

Today I made a low three-leveled adobe wall out of bricks I had formed last spring that are too sandy to support much weight without breaking.  The wall encircles the exposed two sides of my north-east corner of my front yard.

Everywhere I work I am hell-bent on digging up gone-wild Bermuda grass trying to clear the soil for planting of something else.  There is no way to eliminate this (to me) terrible pest.  It has roots two feet deep, and with every rain sends out four to six foot runners with little rootlets along it every two inches.  Left on its own, with its tiny little (to me) obnoxious seeds, it takes over everywhere it is planted, and everywhere it can reach.  (One square foot of Bermuda grass, if chopped up very finely, can solidly seed an acre — great if you are bovine or equine!)

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I did have one solid thought as I worked away out there today, sweat pouring into my eyes despite my headband and the cloud cover above me.  This thought, once it appeared, could not be chased away.  Not that it matters, but it is now stuck like it is a part of me.

“What if there are basically two kinds of people in the world, one being whiners and the other being workers?”

As this thought popped up in my mind, like a slice of toast just cooked in the toaster, another slice of toast popped up right along side of it.  “My mother was a whiner and my father was a worker.”

I don’t think I ever heard my father whine.  I BARELY ever saw my mother work.  So there.

“What on earth does this mean?”  I ask myself.  “Useful information?”  I can’t at the moment begin to imagine what possible use this observation is to me — or to anyone else!

What I do know is that I WORKED my way through the 18 years of my childhood!  I have no idea what would have happened to me given how much my mother hated me and how intensely she did work at proving it (Oh!  I see.  She WORKED at abusing me!) if I had been a whiner instead of a worker.  Collapsing in a pitiful heap on the floor with one flick of her finger upon me, or one bash of her fist, or one smack of a belt would not have done me any good whatsoever!

So I guess I, along with all five of my siblings, inherited my father’s working genes!  (Who would have wanted HERS?)

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Which reminds me, part of what I have been doing this past week is sorting through my inventory of all the ‘things’ I have made with my hands that I cannot seem to ever sell.  Some I priced and will send up to North Dakota to my daughter who will take them to a November craft show she exhibits at every year.  Good riddance, STUFF!  I have given away heavy crocheted rugs I made, donated  a bunch more STUFF — and……..  More to go!  I am determined to find this STUFF I have made a home — freely given, most often welcomed!

But I also had the thought appear several times these past days that in long gone days I would have been a valuable asset to some tribe or another for my making-things abilities, drive, ambition and accomplishments.  Whatever happens to people like me, deprived as we are as a true place in the grand scheme of our survival in today’s American world?

I don’t get to be a making-things blessing as my genes have dictated.  I am not a square peg meant for a round hole, or vice verso.  I simply don’t have a slot at all!  I just carry these WORK genes, designed for survival of a whole crowd of people — in a different time, a different world, a different culture than the one I have obviously flopped into in my lifetime!

Well, that’s getting awfully close to being a whine — so I better quit before I go THAT far!

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+’SHAKE IT UP BABY!’ — MOVEMENT MATTERS

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Yesterday I spent all of the generously given birthday money I received on drip-soaker irrigation supplies.  It just struck me as I decided to write a post that my thoughts FEEL about how that collection of pieces, parts, hoses and tubes looks like in their pile on my kitchen floor:  JUMBLED.

Then I thought, “Well, if one of the key indicators of a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment pattern-disorder is ‘incoherency’ in the narrating (and living) of one’s life, then figuring out how to put together a complicated working irrigation system for my back, side and front yard is actually a similar process to organizing BOTH jumbles — the one on my kitchen floor and the one inside of me.”

OK.  Then, “If it isn’t necessary to put together my irrigation system in a simple straight LINEAR way then it isn’t necessary to put my thoughts together in a linear straight way to make them organized, oriented and coherent, either.”

I will certainly admit that putting that watering system together so that it actually WORKS within the limitations I have both financially and expertise-wise, is intimidating.  Both involve a learning curve, and if I want to get both jobs accomplished, I have to start at one single place:  THE BEGINNING.

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Regarding my jumble of thoughts, I will go back and pick up a little piece of information I found on a website early in the week when my daughter and I were discussing (via email), “How important is it for an infant to crawl before it walks, and how is crawling related to the ability to read?”

From the Minnesota Learning Resource Center I found an article titled, Movement and Brain Development which states:

“Fascinating research informs us that the baby’s brain develops through natural movements of nursing, tummy time, rolling, creeping and crawling. Baby’s most complex senses, vision and hearing, are also organized by doing the same movements.

Developmental movements organize and structure the brain for cognition, attention asset (vs. attention deficit) and emotional regulation, the ability to modulate between calm and excited states. The earliest learning takes place through movement explorations. Baby’s natural movements also provide a baseline of core strength and good coordination.”

(Bold type is mine)

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I had never until the moment my eyes scanned these words heard the term ATTENTION ASSET.  “Well how cool is that?”  I thought to myself.  “Like in so many cases, what we tend to hear about is the negative side of things.”  That’s what I have finally come to understand about all the public hoopla around ‘the stress response’.  We are not likely to hear about the other part of the WHOLE that makes up our body-brain-nervous system responses to life — THE CALM AND CONNECTION SYSTEM which is exactly part of the SAME response system.

In the same way we are likely to hear of ‘attention deficit’ without hearing at the same time about ‘attention asset’.

So, I appreciated LEARNING something new just from these few simple words.  At the same time I know that ALL learning IS MOVEMENT — and also that because I have some particular prior learning, I also understand that the interactions an infant has with its earliest caregivers ALSO are also exactly building these same abilities in the infant body-brain at the same time!

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But what I am particularly thinking about right now is about how MOVEMENT is essential throughout our entire lifespan so that we can both continue to live as we continue to GROW.  We make no significant, meaningful progress on ANYTHING (even staying alive) without movement taking place.

All the so-called ‘anxiety spectrum’ disorders that pile up inside our body-brain due to our having had to grow and develop our body-brain in the first place in horrendously inadequate, traumatic, abusive, malevolent infant-childhoods ALL involve some complication with our attention.  As our body responds continually to our environment, we are often left with a disorganized-disoriented (dissociated) condition that saps our life force and deprives us of the ability to focus our conscious, self-directed desires and will power into the channels that would allow what REALLY MATTERS MOST TO US to manifest in our lives.

I am thinking not only about dissociation, but also about ‘depression’ and ‘posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)’.  If I don’t build my irrigation system exactly right, water is going to leak and spill, overflow itself in its hoses and in its tubes in the wrong direction, overwater, underwater, and basically NOT end up where I want it where it is needed.

That’s very similar to how my thoughts and my energies (ALL of them) end up much of the time if I am not very careful to take care of the JUMBLE inside of me.  The ability to focus ATTENTION and to be resiliently flexible and responsive to our inner and outer environment has been DISRUPTED through the horrific experiences in our infant-childhood that we survived.

As a consequence, I believe we survivors have to build our conscious awareness and power of directed CHOICE every moment we are alive.  We cannot take for granted that either DECISION or CHOICE comes easily to us.  All severe trauma has the power to change our body, and if the stress response end becomes overtaxed — and hence takes over the utilization of our energy and life force on the AUTOMATIC AND UNCONSCIOUS LEVEL, we will have (pardon me) a HELL of a job (if not a battle) getting control of our own energy and life force back again — for our SELF.

The ONLY way I see to improve our well-being and the overall quality of our (survivorship) life is by finding as many ways as possible to NOTICE both what is happening in us that DOES NOT HAVE OUR CONSCIOUS ATTENTION (attention deficit) and to what DOES HAVE OUR CONSCIOUS ATTENTION (attention asset).

If I simply turn on my outside water spigots and let them run, the water will go wherever it wants to because I have not both paid attention to how the water is directed AND found ways to make it go where I want it to according to my conscious CHOICE and intentions.  This jumble of $147 worth of irrigation ‘stuff’ piled in my kitchen has no use or purpose whatsoever until I make the movements — ALL of them — that are required to make something out of them according to my wishes and my intention.

On a personal level, I have to ask myself, “What is your investment, Linda, in directing the flow of your own life today?”  In the same way that I have invested all of my birthday gift money in my hopes for a finished and working irrigation system, I need to FIND, KNOW, VALUE, and INVEST in my hopes for myself in my life regarding every part of it-me that I can wrestle away from my body’s automatic pilot that my trauma-built body-brain runs on — naturally.

Sure, my body has hopes, plans and ways to keep itself alive — but, “Wait a dang minute here?  Where is MY choice in all of this living?  What do I want, need, desire, hope for?”

Staying alive isn’t enough.  Building my irrigation system right isn’t enough to promise me a beautiful yard.  I need the plants.  I need to amend the soil, pull the weeds, chose the right plants, feed them, give them enough water for their needs, make sure they have the right amount of sunshine.

And — I need to enjoy them!

I am making all this yard-related effort and movement for simply THAT reason — it is a part of who I am since my earliest memories that I love flowers.  Along the way I figured out that growing food is also a good thing.  What I love CAN have a ‘lionesses’ share’ of my attention.  No matter how great this struggle, the more I learn how to organize and orient myself according to what my passions can make clear to me, the more I can direct the flow and consequence of my own energy and life force — at the same time I diminish how ‘anxiety’ rules my life.

The physical exercise that gardening (and my addition of adobe into the landscaping) gives to me benefits me in exactly the same way the author referenced above says about little tiny growing babies.  We NEVER leave behind the need to MOVE.  (Contrasted to being miserably STUCK anywhere along our life’s journey!)

And if I can’t get outside due to weather to do what I want to, I can jog, I can dance — I can do SOMETHING.  And I have to because physical movement of the body is absolutely necessary to human well-being.  I am convinced of that fact.  Movement helps cure the ‘jumbles’ — so off I go with my attention focused on my intention to make SOMETHING GOOD happen in my life today!

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+I WILL FORGET THE ANGELS’ PRESENCE NO MORE

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

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

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

“I BLAME THE ANGELS!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It wasn’t there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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CLICK HERE – TALKING ABOUT THE POWER OF LOVE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CDC ACE STUDY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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+A TURTLE CAN’T STAY ON ITS BACK — AND LIVE

alchemynow4 Comments

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There is probably little else so disturbing, disorienting and disorganizing to a turtle or a tortoise than being flipped over onto its back.  It struggles and struggles to turn itself back over because if it stays on its back it dies.

It has taken me many disoriented and disorganized days to at last have this helpful image appear to me.  I have been feeling badly, on my way down from worse to ‘more worse’ and today realized that I absolutely had to figure out how to right myself because this downhill slide — well — SUCKS!

My anxiety level escalated right along with my disorientation and disorganization, and trying to understand what started all of this has taken some time.  Of course I know it all REALLY STARTED when I was born to my insane Borderline mother who knew nothing else to do with me than to batter and abuse me.

Thinking about this upside-down turtle image, I see how its disorientation and disorganization happens at the same time its anxiety level skyrockets as it tries everything in its power to right itself to save its own life.  I have been in some version of that state since the time I was born.  Every time my mother attacked me she in effect flipped me upside-down, creating within my growing body-nervous system-brain-mind-self a state of extreme anxiety (which actually never had time to leave me between attacks, either, because they were so frequent).

I don’t believe there is a way anyone can come out of their earliest childhood with a disoriented-disorganized insecure attachment to the world (and self) without the corresponding massive alteration to their nervous system-brain-body that is later named a so-called ‘anxiety disorder.  My dissociation, my major depression, my complex posttraumatic stress disorder are ALL anxiety-related complications from the severe and long-term infant-child abuse I suffered for 18 years.

What does this all mean to me RIGHT NOW?

I spent two weeks doing my friend a favor and babysitting the very quiet little office that she cares for otherwise.  There should have been nothing to upset me to the degree it did.  Yet at the end of those two weeks which ended last Thursday I could not find any place within myself that wasn’t fully anxious, disoriented and disorganized.  I am still not wholly ‘repaired’ inside from that experience — and the whole (vibrating) mess that is inside of me can also so upset me that everything just continues to get worse and worse until I find a way to stop this spinning while remaining right-side-up.

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While I was in art therapy graduate school 20 years ago I had a series of thoughts come to me — and these thoughts returned to me today.  Back then I drew a circle, like a compass, and in each of the four directions I placed a word:

East – MAKE

South – USE

West – FIX

North – BREAK

As I thought about it, it seemed that at any given time all of us are ‘doing’ one of those four things.  Then I thought about some people seem to be more oriented in their approach to the world in one of those four directions.

Because I have felt so flipped-on-my-back disoriented, disorganized and anxious lately I had to find something that could help me feel BETTER.  My body-self was created in, by and for such traumatic conditions that GOOD or BEST are almost foreign concepts to me.  When I am really off-kilter, just finding ways to feel BETTER rather than WORSE is about all I can manage.

Today I began to simply concentrate and focus on choices I can make right now while being very conscious about which of these four directions my actions are a part of.

We have had lots and lots of rain during our monsoon season this summer, such a blessing.  The weeds are unable to offer resistance no matter how big they have grown so I went out and pulled bunches of them up by their roots this morning — fixing my yard.

I then realized that if I want to go have pizza tomorrow evening for my birthday (59th) I HAD to finally fix my headlamps.  I had tried before and couldn’t budge the screws.  No doubt the passenger side light is the original on my ’78 El Camino.  But someone told me to get a can of PB Blaster to loosen the screws and it worked.  I did it.  I can drive in the dark now for the first time in four months.  Only problem now is I dropped one of those rusty little screws in the dirt and for the life of me can’t find it.  I hope it stays away from my tire and vice verso.

Then I began to clean my freezer and my refrigerator, fixing those too.  I repotted a little houseplant someone me gave last week, fixing that.  In spite of how crappy I might feel, I know that I can find little things, little tiny things that I can do that I can consciously connect to one of these four aspects of LIVING — as it contrasts to spinning down into a destructive cycle that has been familiar to me all of my life and can easily overwhelm my present if I am not very, very careful.

As I make my choices, direct my attention and energy, and accomplish even the smallest of tasks, if I connect what I am doing to one of the four directions of human activities I feel like I am turning these terrible BLUES around in a better direction.  And as I do this I can recognize that I am orienting myself and organizing myself around the things that I do to help things be better — both in my environment and within myself — one little action at a time.

(All of this is about the history of RUPTURES with or without REPAIR — and is what makes the difference between safe and secure attachment or unsafe and insecure attachment to and in the world.)

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