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Having just written my last post, +DO EARLY ABUSE SURVIVORS HAVE THE GIFT OF QUESTIONING? and as I prepare to enter my arena of garden creation for today I had the thought:  “Can I apply what I wrote in that post to my own abuse survivor mother?  Can apply it to my father who so perfectly participated with my mother in her insane, terrible abuse of me?”

Well, I both can and can’t apply my ‘theory’ about severe early abuse survivors having the ability to ask questions!  To my knowledge my mother never questioned the rightness or wrongness of anything she ever did to me.  My father never questioned it, either.

I am not talking about minor crimes against an infant-child here — if such a thing even exists!  All crimes against little ones are major crimes – but my parents performed HORRENDOUS acts of abuse that went on and on and on for the 18 years of my early life.

This awareness of patterns of abusive realities makes me wonder if there might be something very specific about the way early abuse can combine to create trauma altered development in body and brain that completely excludes the ability to ask meaningful questions.  This seems to indicate a rigidity of harmful thought and action that could defy belief if we didn’t know that they DO happen.

My mother seemed incapable of asking questions from the OUTSIDE of her psychosis, so pervasive to her complete existence was her ‘mental illness’.  Thus, no opportunity for self-intervention of extremely damaging patterns of living could possibly exist.  Questioning would have had to come from the OUTSIDE of our family.  This did not ever happen.

It seems to me, from my point of view, that the inability to question the perpetration of the horrors of abuse especially against one’s own child might be particularly related to personality disorders including Borderline and Narcissistic.  In these patterns of survival-mode within such a trauma-altered body-brain all ongoing patterns of action are a PART OF the disordered personality — by definition as demonstrated by repeated, ongoing and unquestioned thoughts, feelings, perceptions and actions.

When ‘experts’ note that the inability to ‘self reflect’ is a key side effect of personality disorders perhaps they are at the same time describing what happens when a trauma-altered person has LOST the ability to question anything that might really matter.  Without the ability to question there will be no opportunity to find answers that can lead to critically-needed self-change.

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Of course this post reflects my bias that given the possession of the ability to question how is it possible that someone wouldn’t USE IT?  Did my mother actually possess the power to question?  If she did, could she have chosen to question and change?  Or, did she have the power to question but had lost the power to choose?  More of my questioning…….

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I could say ‘long ago and far away’ I spent a quarter of a century being around, participating with, studying from the heart, and learning about Native American Indigenous ways of being.  Yet what I learned and what I came to understand has, I most hope, become connected within my soul-self with all that I was born to be.  In this way, all of those experiences have become a integral part of who I am this moment in some important ways.

Even though I grew up a white child within a mostly white culture, the abusive environment within my home was its OWN culture.  I don’t believe, therefore, that I was ‘acculturated’ the way an ordinary child would have been.  Of course my infant-childhood left many holes within me because I was so deprived of early interactive experiences with any other world (except for my very narrow experiences at school) other than the abusive world that encased me.

Yet as I struggle to learn who I am as a person I know that my mother’s abuse of me changed my physiological development but it did not SATURATE me.  I was left with one of  my greatest gifts:  Questioning!

As time has gone by in my adult life I have used my ability to question to my advantage.  Left with huge gaps in my social development, at the same time I was deprived of any ordinary pattern of acculturation within my own ‘society at large’, my open, questioning soul-self-mind has been able to range freely to find answers to my questions.

I hardly believe that I have accepted the dominant ‘Western worldview’ that would probably have filled so many questioning gaps within me that there would have been little room (or freedom) for me to INVENT myself the way that I have.  I have been able to seek — search for — answers to my inner questions without being overly hampered by a solid mass of cultural beliefs, prejudices, and assumptions about life that COULD have automatically filled me up from the time of my birth.

In many ways the emptiness that followed me throughout the first 18 years of my life and on through into my adulthood has been my greatest gift.  That emptiness, coupled with my ability to question, has left me free to learn on my own based on a matching-up process within my own self.

I can notice things like, “Does what this person believe make sense to me?  How does what they say and what they do FEEL LIKE to me?  Do I truly believe ‘it’?”

I look instinctively for what resonates within me.  And I have evidently used my freedom to fill up the empty spaces the abuse left within me with goodness.

The Native American people were banned by national law from outwardly practicing any aspect of their Indigenous spiritual ways until they were legally given their freedom to do so in 1974.

One of the most fundamental aspects of Indigenous belief that I discovered is the understanding that every aspect of life is engaged continually in a CO-CREATIONAL process.  Humans are not only included in this process, they are prime movers on its stage.

Creation was never a static activity that some obscure and distant Creator performed alone.  Creation PARTICIPATES together at all times.

My innate desire to ‘make things’ or to ‘be creative’ is intimately tied to my desire to both ask questions and to look for answers.  These patterns within me are both intimately tied to my desire to find – and to contribute to – that which is beautiful.  Although any contributions I might make to adding into and onto the beauty that exists in this world are humble and meager, I also understand that the Most Great Picture of how everything fits together is beyond my ability to comprehend.

But because I was left without human relationships for the first 18 years of my life I am free to explore relationships on many levels that I might not otherwise have looked for them.  I wonder about the breath I just exhaled – how does it relate to the bird I hear outside my door chittering away as it pecks tiny insects off of my sidewalk.  I wonder how the action of my fingertips clicking away on this keyboard are connected to the motor that just kicked in for my refrigerator.  I wonder how my every thought connects to my past and to my future as I wonder about this great web of life that envelops this globe – and beyond.

While I try not to be prejudiced or judgmental about other people, I can’t help but often notice how so many people don’t seem motivated in any way to question!  The more complex the world becomes the more narrow I see so many people becoming in their thinking.  As if the process creates some illusion of safety in response to threats people feel helpless to combat, so many people simply takes tiny pieces of information and put it together in such a way that no questions need to be asked – and therefore no solutions need to be found.

To me, that way of being excludes opportunities for ongoing creativity.  Humans are innately creative!  Perhaps I share with many, many early abuse survivors the need, desire and ability to QUESTION in ways that ‘ordinary people’ do not have.  At this moment I would not want to miss the opportunities this gift of questioning I possess!  This ability has kept me anchored in the co-creational process of life on a conscious level.  I like that!

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Haven been given only a small handful of truly useful information about how to be a happy, healthy human being during the first 18 years of my childhood (coupled with continual severe abuse during these years) has left me trying to create a patchwork quilt of a life.  Just like I would choose a pattern for a quilt and place within it color and fabric combinations that will work together to create something useful and beautiful after my work would be done, I continually try to piece information together about how humans actually ‘work’ compared to the overwhelming information I received as a child that showed me how humans are NOT supposed to ‘work’.

I learn a lot from the nonhuman world of earth and plants.  Even animals are a source of mystery to me.  I have been given my daughters long-haired Pomeranian-Pekingese mix 3-year-old dog, Who Who.  She is absolutely NOT child friendly and will never be safe to trust around little people.  She growls and snarls, snaps and will bite them if allowed to.  That’s evidently who she is.  She bit my grandson — and was flown 1700 miles south from North Dakota to be my friend and companion down here where I life along the Mexican-American border line.

I don’t really even understand animals.  While a lot of people might be in my similar shoes, at least most people can understand their peers – fellow human beings.  But being abused and mostly sequestered in isolation even away from my 5 siblings taught me nothing about how humans relate to one another except on the most surface of levels — in other words, I could see the ACTIONS (including the abuse) but I did not develop an emotional-social brain that would allow me FROM THE INSIDE to FEEL the feeling-felt experience of being a member of a social species.

Of course I never actually new what was being done to me from the time I was born was wrong.  I never knew what being treated RIGHT felt like.  I simply endured and survived until enough time went by that I was ‘all grown up’ so that I could enter a different life.  Here I am at 59 a long long way into that different life, but with so much emotional-social information missing (as my body-brain was built in the midst of terror, pain and trauma) I simply spend every waking moment of my life trying to learn how to get along better in a world I doubt I will ever truly understand.

So I watch – even my new dog’s eyes.  I watch her movements, her body language, and listen to the changes in the tone of her voice.  Most humans, formed in safe and secure attachment environments – who are not abused, neglected, maltreated and traumatized – naturally develop well before the age of four with enough information of the right kind given to them that they can be ‘people whisperers’ for the rest of their lives.  People take these abilities for granted.  We are NOT meant to develop in such a way that members of our own social species are a mystery to us.

But, mystery they are to me (myself included).  This mystery is no less great to me as the mystery of how I heal the soil of the land I live on so that it can grow food to nourish me (and to be given to others to help nourish them).  Every positive interactions humans have with one another is actually a form of nourishment for all involved.  To learn about how to nourish my soil — and believe me, this soil that was long ago the floor of a great ocean was never built to provide nourishment to any but the most hardy native plants — I have to learn what a healthy soil is.  Then I have to take steps to provide the nourishment this soil needs so that it can be, in fact, healthier than it has EVER been since the time it was made.

I have lived up north much of my adult life.  I took nourished and nourishing soil completely for granted.  In an abstract way I knew that over-farming and maltreatment of the land could hurt soil, but this is the first time in my life I have been faced with the kinds of problems this soil actually has if it is expected to produce something quite basic to my life:  FOOD!

I did receive basic FOOD of the physical kind as a child (yet even my need for food was manipulated in abusive ways).  I DID NOT receive the food of kindness, compassion, love, respect, or any other kind of nourishment a human being needs to build a body-brain-mind-self on the INSIDE that could come out at the end perfectly able to be what is called in agricultural (and cultural terms) SUSTAINABLE.

I fully believe that humans around the globe are soon going to be forced by the backlash of misdirected greed and ignorance to redefine and to change patterns of living toward a SUSTAINABLE way of living so that both the health of our planet and the continued survival of our species (and MANY others) can be supported.

As I work now to build my chicken coop and run, as I work to add all kinds of amendments to my soil – in the proper amounts and combinations, in the proper depth, at the proper time, in the proper way – I think a lot about what I am working to achieve on this little piece of property with my little financial resources reflects what I have done all my life as a human being who somehow grew to know absolutely that violence and the maltreatment of all life is the incorrect way to live.  Correcting mistakes — my parents’ grave, profoundly hurtful and damaging mistakes  toward me — has been the major job of my lifetime.

Animals (in my thinking) do not make mistakes that they, on their own, would choose to correct later on.  They simply move forward through time being their self!  Plants don’t make mistakes.  If they are in a damaging environment they have very limited ways provided to them to improve their condition.  As a gardener and as a person who might be fortunate to have a few animals in my life (my Mexican-American neighbor children, all native Spanish speakers, refer to every tiny bug they see as an ‘animal’) I come to understand how to take care of these life forms so that they can be happy and healthy.

I am most grateful that I somehow came out of my hell of a childhood instinctively and intuitively knowing what nurturing is so that I could be a wonderful mother.  I learn by watching others – people and animals alike – who they are and what they need.  I am learning about this soil here so that I can work to heal it toward a health it has never known – but I am not fooled into thinking that this healing process will ever NOT need repeated tending.

All this learning is not unpleasant.  Much of it should have happened a long, long time ago.  Now it happens at a different pace, in different ways – but often I approach the world from a simple place as if I were still a child.  At least at my age I know enough to understand that if this is what it takes for me to repair at least some of the damage done to me through 18 years of continual abuse — so be it!  I have found a niche on this planet, and have been given plenty of gifts from without and from within, that allow me to continue my simple path one single breath, one single step, one single feeling and one single thought at a time.

I’m not sure that even if I had been loved and protected, not abused and maltreated from the time I was born, that I could ever ask for more than this!

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Maybe like an astronomer who has detected an anomaly in the sky, I have my telescope trained upon the spot where this ‘irregularity’ first appeared.  I watch it hoping that someday what I learn will turn what seemed so strange into something that is just plain ordinary.

Trauma triggers are often like that for me.  Even if I can detect what the trigger actually was, I don’t usually understand how the trauma trigger and my reaction to it are even connected.  So I train my inner telescope on both the trigger and my reaction to it, hoping that in time whatever the trigger turns out to be can be made benign to me.  Maybe someday at least that trigger will no longer create any reaction in me at all.

Yet today I feel my ‘crater’ inside, my ‘black hole’ of deep and enduring sorrow.  I didn’t feel it yesterday.  Why it is resonating within me so strongly today?

As I track backwards in time (and event) I realize that what I suspect triggered my deep sorrow was not a ‘single thing’.  The trigger was actually an accumulation of experiences that I never knew were even related – until my inner telescope showed me that they WERE connected.  These seemingly tiny triggers all seem to add onto one another until – like a log jam that can grow so big it can change the course of a river – suddenly I find myself ‘somewhere’ inside of myself that I don’t want to be.

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A cumulative trigger can show me something helpful if I know how to look at it.  But this looking can be difficult when I am in the middle of my reaction to the trigger!

What I see THIS time is that as I encounter people in the world around me I am often comparing myself to them on some level I am not even aware of, and I come up lacking.  Then I begin to notice in someone else’s honestly cheerful approach to life, or in their competent management of their life and resources that keeps them from poverty, or in their ability to maintain a stable partner relationship – whatever the POSITIVE is that I detect in someone else I see myself having lost my own ground to the negative.

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As a severe infant-child abuse survivor I understand that whatever I was given in my earliest environment was enough to keep me physically alive, but not enough to allow me to gain ground in important ways that ALL non-infant abuse survivors (in particular) have.  I know enough now to translate this thought into its truest meaning:  I did have resiliency factors available to me that kept me alive, and inner ones that kept my self intact (although not integrated into my body-world).  At the same time my earliest environment of severe abuse by my mother created overwhelming risk factors that – in truth of fact – could not possibly balance themselves out with an equal ‘number’ of resiliency factors.

In other words, I was robbed of what I desperately needed to grow up as a happy, healthy infant-child.  Being robbed changed the course of my physiological development so that today there are certain abilities non-abused, non-traumatized (during their earliest years) people take absolutely for granted.

Why should it occur to these people to appreciate or be grateful for what they received as infants and children?  WE NOTICE!  We severe early abuse survivors DO NOTICE – and I suspect that we have ALWAYS noticed that other people have ‘things’ we do not have – because they were given these things just as every little person SHOULD be given them.  These ‘things’ we were robbed of (at the same time we lived in an environment of pain-filled terror) were not trivial extras.  They were essential to the growth and development of an optimal human being.

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It has never occurred to me so clearly as it has today that being around BOTH ‘optimally formed’ people AND being around sad and troubled people that were obviously deprived in their own earliest years of what they needed to grow up ‘well’ are BOTH triggers for my own grief and sadness.

I can’t go back and change what happened to me in the first critical months/years of my development that so changed the body-brain I live with.  What I want to achieve is some kind of immunity against the triggering of my deep, deep grief-filled sadness that lies within every cell of my body and that can snag me out of a day of ‘well-being’ like a gigantic fish-hook that captures me and drags me down to the bottom of the sea.

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In case I might try to take a simplistic and erroneous path toward my hoped-for goal, I have an image that appears to me every time I think I am ‘making a mountain out of a molehill’.  I see a young child, one old enough to notice, having been invited to a birthday party.  The child is left out of all the games and laughter, ignored like it is invisible.  When it is time to sit at the table for lunch and cake with the other children, who all gaily giggle with their party hats on, everyone else is served the party sustenance while this single child receives nothing (not even a party hat)!

In our culture I believe we are trained not to complain (or ‘envy’ others).  The child says nothing.  Nobody even notices what is happening.  The child experiences all this sadness, and to make matters worse it does so ALONE.

I do not wish to blame my own self for noticing the deprivations and traumas, the horrendous abuse, or minimize anything that happened to me or be ashamed to speak my own truth.  Just because very few if any people want to hear what our reality was (and is) doesn’t mean our reality doesn’t matter.  When the contrast between non-abused people and our reality as survivors strongly catches our attention – when we notice consciously or not that there is difference between us – I believe those experiences of contrast will most often trigger our trauma in our body memory.  Being as aware as possible when this is happening might be able to thwart a full-blown trauma ‘allergy’ attack in reaction to these subtle (and very common) and extremely powerful triggers.

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A corner of my thoughts has been with those in northern Japan who are enduring the great trauma (see video footage of water here) caused by the Tsunami created by the massive earthquake last Friday, March 11, 2011.  Japan lies on the ‘Pacific Ring of Fire’:  “About 90% of the world’s earthquakes and 80% of the world’s largest earthquakes occur along the Ring of Fire.”

I was 12 in 1964 when the great earthquake struck Alaska, and how well I remember that experience.  Yet to me, a survivor of severe and nearly continual child abuse, the aftermath of that earthquake actually felt good to me.  My mother, like most adults in Alaska at the time, was completely focused on that disaster, which meant she completely ignored me.  Being ignored felt like heaven to me.

Yet as overwhelming an experience as a major earthquake and tsunami can be, that kind of trauma – not one caused by human beings – is actually easier to bear and heal from for people than is a major trauma of the other kind – one that IS caused by humans.

When I think of severe infant-child abuse I always think about it within the realm of great traumas, knowing that all the parameters of suffering, distress, terror, pain and confusion are actually greatly increased for young infants and children when faced with trauma caused by the very people who are supposed to love and care for them.

Even though today was a gorgeous day, and I spent all of it outside working toward being able to plant my garden, I could not entirely block out my awareness that there are things happening to others of all ages around this nation and this globe that are causing them to suffer.  I am very glad that I believe in the spiritual power of prayer to help all of us, even though most of what happens in this lifetime remains a Great Mystery to me.

As I work hard and humbly with my hands in the dirt I know there is a God that cares about everyone and about everything.  I ask that God to help all of us this whole world over.

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Why is there no looting in Japan?

Discipline in the face of disaster: no looting in Japan

“Three days after a magnitude-9 killer quake devastated Japan, triggering Pacific-wide tsunamis and a likely nuclear plant meltdown and then consigning millions of Japanese to darkness, thirst and hunger in the wintry cold, I still have yet to read reports of widespread looting,” wrote Frederico D. Pascual Jr. of The Philippine Star. “This Filipino watching 3,200 kilometers from Ground Zero finds this disciplined behavior of a huge population in distress awe-inspiring. Let us pray that they stay that way — and that we learn from them.“

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My company-related thoughts concerning my experiences of this past week have come to include what I am trying to learn and understand about the interplay between our human attachment and our caregiving systems.  It is most common for those of us who are survivors of severe infant-child abuse to have a body-brain that was changed in its physiological development in such a way that our stress-distress (insecure attachment) system works differently from ‘normal’.

Our ‘warning’ system shows its nearly continual activation through our patterns of attachment to self, others and to our world around us as it manifests in our insecure attachment patterns that are very difficult to ‘turn off’.  This means that when we ‘caregive’ we are accomplishing this feat in different ways from ‘normal’.  A body-brain built in a safe and secure earliest attachment-relationship environment will activate when ACTUAL threat exists in the environment.  At other times it will turn itself off and caregiving smoothly happens within these times.

These two systems — our attachment system and our caregiving system — are not ordinarily designed to operate at the same time.  Once our attachment needs are met the system turns off (and body-felt anxiety all but disappears).  I believe many people, especially parents, can react appropriately in caregiving their offspring because they can accomplish BOTH system activations at the same time.  Experts refer to Earned Secure attachment when this happens.  Based on my own experience I call this Borrowed Secure attachment.

When it comes to adult-to-adult interactions it can be harder to gain clarity about how these two systems are operating within relationships.  Needing ‘more than normal’ is an understandable and very normal consequence stemming from abuse, trauma, neglect and maltreatment of infants and children.  Gaining clarity about WHAT we need, WHEN we need, HOW we need, and WHO we feel we need what from are part of our never-ending healing process.

Give and receive is what our rupture-repair patterns are about.  I am very clear about how these patterns work when I am in interaction with children, but am having to learn as much as I can about adult interactions that seem foggy to me in these areas.  In the meantime as I continue to learn, I try to achieve a gentle forgiving stance that is most clearly connected to this thought as I struggle in adult relationships:  “Linda, this isn’t the end of the world!”

From the time I was born everything in my universe felt like ‘the end of the world’ or ‘the world is ending NOW (or very soon)’.  Just taking a breath, backing up from the specific details of a troublesome experience and giving myself time to process accomplishes a lot for me!  The experience of the passage of TIME itself becomes altered in the midst of trauma.  I try today to literally manage time so that it slows down.  In that slowing down I can allow more and more information into the picture that can help me gain a better, clearer perspective about what matters most — and what doesn’t.

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