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

When it comes to telling our story of the early years of our life whatever we come up with will be perfect.  For all the billions of people on this planet, every one of us has a unique life history.

I rarely remember my dreams any more, but earlier in the week I woke with a clear picture of something I had experienced in my sleep.  There was a huge field, mowed grass, scratchy not like a manicured lawn.  There were shallow dips and trenches in the ground and everywhere there were colored crystals.

Some were golden and shaped like half-inch beads.  Some were amethyst and shaped like larger tear drops.  Some were royal blue, some a light powder blue, along with all shades of turquoise, amber and red.  Some were prisms, some oblong.  There were lots of people walking around the edges of the field, but when these multifaceted ‘gems’ appeared the people went after them.

I stood back and watched until everyone satisfied themselves with their own personal collection of beauty they scampered around the field to collect.  When everyone had gone I entered the field and began to pick up my own choice of ‘stones’.  I filled my pockets.  I took off my cap and filled it.  Holding my collection in one hand I lifted the edge of the T-shirt I was wearing to make a little basket I could fill with more.

I woke up remembering the feel of all these various shaped objects in my fingers as I had carefully gathered them in this field, and I knew each one of them represented a story of my life just as the other ones did for other people.

These objects were not diamonds.  I knew they were humbler, made somehow from glass.  It didn’t matter to me, or to anyone else that these stories were small, each one different, each one colored with a different emotion and filled with a different tale.  None of these were grand or spectacular ‘stones’, but when I woke up I knew that the story that each one contained was specific to the person who picked each one up, as individual as were the fingers that gathered them and carried them away.

There were plenty of these pure colored objects left in the grasses on that field.  I knew they belonged to other people who would come along in the future to pick up their share.  There seemed to be no end to them.  No matter how many had been gathered there were plenty more.  I could see them glistening and sparkling in the sunlight.

++++

There is no writer or a teller of spoken stories who has not plied their trade with words.  Words, those gems in the fields of human understanding belong to no one.  Yes, they are gathered together in patterns, but the words themselves don’t actually leave us once someone else has plucked them from the invisible fields of the mind.  It strikes me what a miracle that is, and how different our existence would be in a different reality, in one where once a word was chosen it then belonged only to the first person who found it.

So is there such a thing as ‘the perfect story’?  That would mean to me that this perfect story could be written in ‘the perfect way’ — and no other.  Yet because there has never been such a being as the perfect human, how could a perfect story ever be told?  If humanity were to suddenly decide to only keep the perfect stories and to throw all the other stories away, what story would be left?

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

I can’t find a way to think about ‘my story’ or about anyone else’s story without at the same time thinking about the person-people who hear or read the story.  All the words that pass through another person’s mind in response to a story matter to me as much as the original story does, only I have no idea what those invisible responses really are.

THOSE invisible words, those ‘response’ words, simply exist for me within the realm of what I call ‘the mystery of creation’.  While they don’t belong to any actual story of mine I might tell or write, they are connected to the story.  Those response words come from connection between one’s story and somebody else’s and happen, as far as I know, only among the living.

Therefore story, to me, is a human part of being alive.  The field in my dream I watched other people mine for orbs and spheres and tear drops of faceted colored crystal glass, the field I mined myself for my portion and share, is the field of story:  Story lived, story remembered, story told, story shared.

Somehow I know that every one of these stories is perfect.

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

I am for some reason reminded right now of these words I found in this book written by a neuroscientist:  A User’s Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain by John J. Ratey (Jan 8, 2002)

“Consequently, I have decided that I will have to replace much of the technical language about the brain with a language more akin to what the brain itself uses.  Throughout this book I will be making constant use of metaphors and analogies….  Although metaphor and analogy are unconventional in scientific circles, I am firmly convinced that a more nonlinear kind of thought will eventually supplant much of the logical reasoning we use today.  Chris Langton, one of the primary researchers in the field of complexity theory, has speculated that in the future science will become more poetic.  Our troubled world, too, is becoming too complex for logical argumentation, and may have to change its thinking:  real trust, when emotions are running high, is based on analogy, not calculation.” (page 5)

At the same time I am thinking about yet another article I found this week in a magazine I pulled out of my friend’s trash:  The secret life of metaphor:  How metaphorical language inspires emotional insight and psychological change by James Geary, published in Ode magazine, Spring 2011 in which  Geary states —

“Metaphor lives a secret life all around us.  We utter about one metaphor for every 10 to 25 words, or about six metaphors a minute.”

And then I think about these words:

“When a thought of war comes, oppose it by a stronger thought of peace. A thought of hatred must be destroyed by a more powerful thought of love.” [from Paris Talks: Addresses Given by ‘Abdu’l-Baha in Paris in 1911-1912 (London: Bahai’i Publishing Trust, 1995), p. 2]

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

In my own way, with my own words, I am reflecting upon the story of my severely abusive infancy and childhood that I am in the process of writing for the book my daughter and I are ‘making’.  I often wonder why I do not feel anger about what was done to me.  It seems that ever since my earliest years I have always chosen ‘peace’ and ‘love’ rather than ‘war’ and ‘hatred’.  I find that I must not have any intention of changing my choices now.

At the same time I write I continually encounter the words of my abuser, my Borderline mother both as I remember them and as I have found them in her own writings.  While most of what my mother said to me and about me as well as what she did to me I can call EVIL, I do not look at ‘the story’ of her life as it included me as being evil.

It seems that as I lived within her Borderline world I had my own lines that were different from hers, and it is my own lines that I did not cross.  It is from within my own lines that define me that I tell my side of the story — my story.

My story is extremely complex because my mother’s story was extremely complex.  My mother became lost in a universe of metaphor very early in her childhood.  She ‘made those metaphors real’ — and as she did so she captured me within them — and certainly not in anything like a good way!

Yet in my thinking this does not make the story of my mother’s (or my father’s) life any less perfect than the story of my life is.  Our stories were very different, but each of them was a story of LIFE itself as that life played itself out.  Life itself is sacred to me.  Life itself is perfect because it is the great gift given by the One Who Creates all.

There must be a very fine line for me here, a line infinitesimally finer than a hair.  This is the line that ultimately divides life as we know it from death as we imagine it but it is not the line that divides a imperfect life story from a perfect one.

I was forced to spend the first 18 years of my life ‘hearing’ my parents’ life story as they lived it.  But because their life stories belonged to them and my story belongs to me, I know that how they responded to me, to my story as I lived it, had no more to do with me than how I responded then and how I respond now to theirs.  My response is a part of my story.

I choose to move forward in my life story leaving my parents’ stories in a state of perfection with them.  I am free to ‘name’ what they did to me as evil because it was evil.  It was criminal.  This ‘naming’ is itself a part of my story, but I am very clear that this ‘naming’ is my response and has nothing to do with my parents.

I do not join with them in their state of war.  I do not join with them in their state of hatred.  I am free to oppose those states in any way I can think of, and telling my own story in written words is part of how I am doing that.

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

SCARS THAT WON’T HEAL: THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF CHILD ABUSE

“Because childhood abuse occurs during the critical formative time when the brain is being physically sculpted by experience, the impact of severe stress can leave an indelible imprint on its structure and function. Such abuse, it seems, induces a cascade of molecular and neurobiological effects that irreversibly alter neural development.”

++

+WRITING A BOOK? MY STORIES? WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?

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

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

I am feeling very discouraged today about my book writing.  Maybe that’s a common state to enter — and hopefully to get back out of!  I feel like I am at least 50 years ahead of the curve on what I know and what I want readers to ‘get’ out of my book.  I feel like I’m writing it for my grandson’s grandchildren!!  It’s hard to build up my own head of steam and plow on through my writing with a target audience that far away!  I sure won’t be around for that readership!

Does it matter to me?  Not usually.  Just today.

++++

“When a thought of war comes, oppose it by a stronger thought of peace.  A thought of hatred must be destroyed by a more powerful thought of love.”  [from Paris Talks:  Addresses Given by ‘Abdu’l-Baha in Paris in 1911-1912 (London:  Bahai’i Publishing Trust, 1995), p. 2]

++++

A TRUE STORY:

This is more than a story about life and death.  It is a story about the glorious powers of human physiology that can be activated during the earliest stages of infant-child development to ensure survival in the face of death:  Threat of death of an individual self being responded to equally with threat of death to a body.  Standing in the face of this power to examine how it can operate as the onslaught of infant and child abuse can seem unbearable.

This reaction itself comes from wisdom in the body that lets us know threat is present.  Possessing the ability to consciously choose how to direct our response to threat matters.  Deep inside our body we will always, except in the rarest of circumstances, choose to turn in the optimistic direction of life.  Even my severely abusive mother made that turn, or she would not have survived to give birth to me.  And I certainly made that same turn with every breath I took through the hell of my infancy and childhood that my mother created for me as a result of the changes that happened to her in her development that ensured her survival.

++

To be fair to readers I would like you to be able to make your conscious decision about how you want to respond to this story right now.  I will share with you a memory I have always retained since I was 5 ½ years old:

++

I have always known in my memory that our family was in a car either going to or coming back from watching a play or a movie.  Because this was a school night we must have gone to an early evening showing of this movie.  I know it was not dark out though the shadows on the landscape we were driving through were long.  I could see mountains in the distance, and alongside both sides of the road there were what looked like fields of grasses bending golden in the light.

I was sitting by the window in the back seat behind my father who was driving.  My sister, Cindy was beside me and John sat by the other door.  Little Sharon at 20 months old sat in the front between Father and Mother.  I was relaxed, even feeling cozy with the family driving not very fast along the highway heading home.  I felt happy.  I had no thought that anything like one of Mother’s ACCIDENTS hitting me there.  I was doing nothing wrong.  I wasn’t making any noise.  I wasn’t bothering anybody.  I was simply enjoying myself very much as I played a game with myself that I had just made up.

I have always been able to shut my eyes and be in my body again in the back seat of that car seat playing this game.  I played that I was magic.  I carefully looked at all the details of the scenery we were passing by on my father’s side of the car.  Then I slowly dropped my eye lids and slowly turned my head to look toward the other side window of the car.  Then I slowly lifted my eye lids and MAGIC!  There was the exact same scene again on the other side of the car as if I had the power to capture that scene when I closed my eyes and take it with me inside of me.

I was playing that I created each scene like mirror images of one another that only existed if I opened my eyes and disappeared when I had my eyes closed.  Then, during one of these times of turning my head with my eyes shut back to my father’s side of the car when I opened my eyes again there was a beautiful red fox running alongside the car on the high side of the ditch just barely into the edge of grasses.  The fox’s nose pointed straight ahead and its back was in a line with the thick puffy tail streaming straight along in the line behind it.

I was delighted!  But I didn’t say a word about the fox to anyone.  This was MY fox.  Now as I played my game I made the fox disappear when I closed my eyes and turned my head to the right.  When I opened my eyes the duplicate scene was there, but no fox.  Then when I closed my eyes and repeated a turn to my left, opening my eyes I made that beautiful fox reappear right where I had left it.  And ……then…..when…..

My mother happened to turn her head to look at me in the back seat of the car and happened to catch me in right in the middle of a head turn with my eyes closed.  I heard her scream and opened my eyes to see her arm and hand swinging over the back of her seat and WHAM!  Right across my face.  Hard.  She rose in her seat, turned her body right over the head of my baby sister, lunged at me and began slapping me with both of her hands very hard, screaming, “You ungrateful child!  You don’t appreciate anything we do for you!  Here we took you to a movie and here your father is taking us all on a nice drive home and here you are sound asleep?  You decided to take a nap NOW?  How dare you!  You always spoil everything for everyone!  I don’t know why we bother to ever try to do anything nice for you!  You always spoil everything for everyone!  Bill, take us home right now.  I can’t stand to be in this car with this child one more minute!”  My father said nothing but drove a little faster.

On and on with the screaming and shouting words and the hitting and slapping and the pounding and screaming and I tried to tell her I WASN’T sleeping!  I tried to tell her about the fox and about the game I was playing a game and that’s why my eyes were shut but that only made her hit me harder and cream louder, “You are a LIAR!  You are a LIAR!” along with everything else she was shouting.

From what my mother recorded in her diary entry that day more bad things happened to me at home that I don’t remember — but I can well imagine.  I was also startled to read in this entry about Debby and the park and the holiday picnic planned for the next day because that is exactly what my bubble gum memory is about.  (I don’t know what holiday she was talking about here.  Easter was on April 21 in 1957.  Maybe she meant to add these entries for April but in her ‘madness’ wrote them instead of for March.)

°<>°<>°<>°

Thursday, March 21, 1957

We kept Linda home – only the 2^nd time in her life for lying from a movie we attended tonite. – “Westward Ho, The Wagon”.  I must find some effective punishment.  She accepts punishment so easily that it’s hard for it to be effective.  I told her we were going to the park tomorrow for a Holiday picnic and we would take her little friend Debby.  I hope it will be the beginning of a new week and start for Linda.  I read the children the story of Lincoln and Washington and emphasized – telling the truth and their good virtues.  She listens so carefully but goes on her own way.  Well, we’ll see!

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

But THIS is what matters to me.  THIS is what my mother did to me.  It wasn’t that she stole my childhood from me, this story above being the kind of thing that happened to me often during the 18 years I lived with my mother.

It is THIS that matters to me.  These changes are what stole the life from me that I could have had in the body I SHOULD have had — WITHOUT THESE CHANGES!

SCARS THAT WON’T HEAL: THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF CHILD ABUSE

“Because childhood abuse occurs during the critical formative time when the brain is being physically sculpted by experience, the impact of severe stress can leave an indelible imprint on its structure and function. Such abuse, it seems, induces a   cascade of molecular and neurobiological effects that irreversibly alter neural development.”

Today I feel pretty hopeless, I think to a large extent because I KNOW this information is already OUT THERE — and who is paying attention?  WHO CARES?  Is there something my book can say that can help MAKE PEOPLE CARE?  Tonight — I don’t think so…….

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

“When a thought of war comes, oppose it by a stronger thought of peace.  A thought of hatred must be destroyed by a more powerful thought of love.”  [from Paris Talks:  Addresses Given by ‘Abdu’l-Baha in Paris in 1911-1912 (London:  Bahai’i Publishing Trust, 1995), p. 2]

++++

This is more than a story about life and death.  It is a story about the glorious powers of human physiology that can be activated during the earliest stages of infant-child development to ensure survival in the face of death:  Threat of death of an individual self being responded to equally with threat of death to a body.  Standing in the face of this power to examine how it can operate as the onslaught of infant and child abuse can seem unbearable.

This reaction itself comes from wisdom in the body that lets us know threat is present.  Possessing the ability to consciously choose how to direct our response to threat matters.  Deep inside our body we will always, except in the rarest of circumstances, choose to turn in the optimistic direction of life.  Even my severely abusive mother made that turn, or she would not have survived to give birth to me.  And I certainly made that same turn with every breath I took through the hell of my infancy and childhood that my mother created for me as a result of the changes that happened to her in her development that ensured her survival.

++

To be fair to readers I would like you to be able to make your conscious decision about how you want to respond to this story right now.  I will share with you a memory I have always retained since I was 5 ½ years old:

++

I have always known in my memory that our family was in a car either going to or coming back from watching a play or a movie.  Because this was a school night we must have gone to an early evening showing of this movie.  I know it was not dark out though the shadows on the landscape we were driving through were long.  I could see mountains in the distance, and alongside both sides of the road there were what looked like fields of grasses bending golden in the light.

I was sitting by the window in the back seat behind my father who was driving.  My sister, Cindy was beside me and John sat by the other door.  Little Sharon at 20 months old sat in the front between Father and Mother.  I was relaxed, even feeling cozy with the family driving not very fast along the highway heading home.  I felt happy.  I had no thought that anything like one of Mother’s ACCIDENTS hitting me there.  I was doing nothing wrong.  I wasn’t making any noise.  I wasn’t bothering anybody.  I was simply enjoying myself very much as I played a game with myself that I had just made up.

I have always been able to shut my eyes and be in my body again in the back seat of that car seat playing this game.  I played that I was magic.  I carefully looked at all the details of the scenery we were passing by on my father’s side of the car.  Then I slowly dropped my eye lids and slowly turned my head to look toward the other side window of the car.  Then I slowly lifted my eye lids and MAGIC!  There was the exact same scene again on the other side of the car as if I had the power to capture that scene when I closed my eyes and take it with me inside of me.

I was playing that I created each scene like mirror images of one another that only existed if I opened my eyes and disappeared when I had my eyes closed.  Then, during one of these times of turning my head with my eyes shut back to my father’s side of the car when I opened my eyes again there was a beautiful red fox running alongside the car on the high side of the ditch just barely into the edge of grasses.  The fox’s nose pointed straight ahead and its back was in a line with the thick puffy tail streaming straight along in the line behind it.

I was delighted!  But I didn’t say a word about the fox to anyone.  This was MY fox.  Now as I played my game I made the fox disappear when I closed my eyes and turned my head to the right.  When I opened my eyes the duplicate scene was there, but no fox.  Then when I closed my eyes and repeated a turn to my left, opening my eyes I made that beautiful fox reappear right where I had left it.  And ……then…..when…..

My mother happened to turn her head to look at me in the back seat of the car and happened to catch me in right in the middle of a head turn with my eyes closed.  I heard her scream and opened my eyes to see her arm and hand swinging over the back of her seat and WHAM!  Right across my face.  Hard.  She rose in her seat, turned her body right over the head of my baby sister, lunged at me and began slapping me with both of her hands very hard, screaming, “You ungrateful child!  You don’t appreciate anything we do for you!  Here we took you to a movie and here your father is taking us all on a nice drive home and here you are sound asleep?  You decided to take a nap NOW?  How dare you!  You always spoil everything for everyone!  I don’t know why we bother to ever try to do anything nice for you!  You always spoil everything for everyone!  Bill, take us home right now.  I can’t stand to be in this car with this child one more minute!”  My father said nothing but drove a little faster.

On and on with the screaming and shouting words and the hitting and slapping and the pounding and screaming and I tried to tell her I WASN’T sleeping!  I tried to tell her about the fox and about the game I was playing a game and that’s why my eyes were shut but that only made her hit me harder and cream louder, “You are a LIAR!  You are a LIAR!” along with everything else she was shouting.

From what my mother recorded in her diary entry that day more bad things happened to me at home that I don’t remember — but I can well imagine.  I was also startled to read in this entry about Debby and the park and the holiday picnic planned for the next day because that is exactly what my bubble gum memory is about.  (I don’t know what holiday she was talking about here.  Easter was on April 21 in 1957.  Maybe she meant to add these entries for April but in her ‘madness’ wrote them instead of for March.)

°<>°<>°<>°

Thursday, March 21, 1957

We kept Linda home – only the 2^nd time in her life for lying from a movie we attended tonite. – “Westward Ho, The Wagon”.  I must find some effective punishment.  She accepts punishment so easily that it’s hard for it to be effective.  I told her we were going to the park tomorrow for a Holiday picnic and we would take her little friend Debby.  I hope it will be the beginning of a new week and start for Linda.  I read the children the story of Lincoln and Washington and emphasized – telling the truth and their good virtues.  She listens so carefully but goes on her own way.  Well, we’ll see!

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

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

This will really be a post that cannot be written because what I am learning about this topic needs to go into my book writing.  Yet I want to pass along a discovery I made this week — one that actually came as a gift from the Universe — for your consideration.  I visited a dear friend of mine Monday and pulled an May 26, 2011 issue of TIME magazine out of his trash.  I took it home and in the evening discovered within its pages this article:

“The Optimism Bias:  Those rose-colored glasses?  We may be born with them.  Why our brains tilt toward the positive – (In spite of all the negative)” by Tali Sharot.

Reading this article has forever and powerfully changed me and my life forever.  But it wasn’t only what was written in this article that had this effect on me.  The other IMPORTANT half of what severe survivors of infant-child abuse need to know was NEVER mentioned in this article.  That information I already had.  When I put these two pieces of information together I discovered one of the missing pieces of my life that I needed to know.

As you follow the title link above and read this optimism article, please also immediately go to the Wickipedia article on the amygdala  because this is not only one of the prime areas of the brain mentioned in the article within the optimism brain circuit, it is also the seat of operations that may well be the ones that make us human.

The amygdala has a primary role in the fight-flight-freeze survival response ALONG with its role in making sure humans turn always to the positive.  This brain region, as you will find when you follow the link by clicking on the word itself, associates parts of our experience together or dissociates them into pieces as it sorts out our experiences and prepares them for long-term memory storage and consolidation.

The stronger an emotion is when we have an experience the more certain the more certain the amygdala is to make sure we never forget the learning included in the experience.

Please also take yourself through an online meander using the Google search terms ‘amygdala child abuse’.  Pick some of the links that appear and check them out.

From this very important online article that includes information about how child abuse changes the development and operation of the brain — including the amygdala:   SCARS THAT WON’T HEAL: THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF CHILD ABUSE

“Because childhood abuse occurs during the critical formative time when the brain is being physically sculpted by experience, the impact of severe stress can leave an indelible imprint on its structure and function. Such abuse, it seems, induces a   cascade of molecular and neurobiological effects that irreversibly alter neural development.”

+++++

Most simply put what changed about me and my life yesterday as I allowed the new information presented in the optimism article together with all I know about trauma altered development of the body-brain in abused infants and children to come together, I received an answer to one of the most bothersome and long-term questions of my life:

“Looking back on my 18 years of being brutally abused by my Borderline mother, why do I ONLY have certain very clear and specific memories of this abuse?”

These memories have always stayed the same.  I have never ‘received’ another memory other than these same ones I have always had, and always the memories come to me with the same pictures, feelings, information and ‘story’.

Up until I read the optimism article I have always simply told myself that I remembered my memories because they were so clearly a part of my mother’s own memory device, the abuse litany she created of my ‘crimes’ and repeated all through my childhood every time she beat me.  These memories were literally beat into me.

That made sense until this week.  Now I can see that every single one of the memories of trauma I have — out of the thousands and thousands of memories I DON’ HAVE and that were also certainly a part of my mother’s abuse litany — share one thing in common:  Every one of these memories not only comes from ME at the center of experiencing the trauma, but ALSO is a memory where the strong emotional component of GOOD was directly followed by a powerful emotion related to my mother’s abuse intrusion into my experience of BAD.

Hope and promise — fear and threat.  This is the kind of emotional experience that the amygdala is best at processing.  Our optimism response and our ‘stress response’ are both tied to the information our amygdala processes and how it processes it.

Without saying much more I will add that what my mother’s amygdala did in her childhood during experiences of trauma is NOT what my amygdala did.  My mother’s amygdala dissociated the GOOD from the BAD in her experience and stored the memories separately without connecting the GOOD and BAD together in the same memory.  In other words, dissociation rather than association happened for her inside her memory of experience.

For whatever reasons that I don’t know (yet?) my amygdala stored inside the memories that I have always kept BOTH the GOOD and the BAD of what happened.  These memories are WHOLE!  I dissociated between memories of traumatic experience, NOT WITHIN THEM as happened inside my mother’s amygdala.

++

I needed this new information.  The question about why I have always remembered the memories I have of trauma and ONLY remember those memories has been answered.  Evidently everything I do NOT remember lacked that special component of BOTH good and bad being present in the experiences.  I forgot my experiences that were all bad — which was, of course, most of what my childhood WAS — all bad.

This is true because as my mother separated good from bad in her early memories, she in effect became a split and double-faced person with a bizarre Borderline dividing each of these sides of herself.  She made me into her ALL BAD child, the one that represented the broken parts of her memories of ALL BAD.

My sister born 2 years after me was made into the ALL GOOD child.  As I mentioned in earlier recent posts, these patterns were already in my mother’s mind when she wrote her Mischievous Bear story when she was 9 years old.

I needed this new information in order to write my story for the book my daughter and I are working on — so back to the ‘drafting table’ I go!!

++

PREVIOUS POSTS:

+IN THE WORDS OF A BORDERLINE CHILD: MY MOTHER’S STORIES

+WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR CHILDHOOD STORY: TRUE FOR THE BORDERLINE, TRUE FOR THE BORDERLINE’S OFFSPRING

+RHYTHM, LITANY CHANTING, BRUTAL VIOLENT BEATINGS – TIED TO MY MOTHER’S TRAUMA-CHANGED MUSICAL-LANGUAGE BRAIN

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

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

I have no way of knowing if what I am discovering about the inside workings of my mother’s Borderline mind relates to how a much less troubled Borderline mind might operate.  What follows here is a snippet of my thinking about the patterns my mother was stuck within in the projected mirroring universe of her reality that she created in her mind:

NOTE:  The five individual points that might exist in the creation of any Borderline’s inner-reality-projected-into-repeated trauma drama patterns would be based on the specific early traumas that person experienced in their earliest years.  My mother’s matrix patterns, as I describe briefly below, were created exactly this way based on HER earliest overwhelming traumas.

And also please note, humans have been remembering experience through repetition of word and action in story, dance and drama since our beginnings.  That repeated trauma-dramas are a memory device should not be at all surprising.  A Borderline’s universe like my mother made was designed like ‘do-overs’.  Each repeat of a pattern contained within it an effort to CHANGE the outcome so that my mother could WIN this time, not lose as she had in her childhood.

While it is outside the purpose of this book to delve deeply into the earlier beginnings of Mother’s Borderline condition, a brief illumination about the 5 points of my mother’s overriding outer Borderline matrix pyramid is important to understanding the dynamics of how the pyramid I was trapped and hidden in and the pyramid my sister was displayed in were set in relationship to one another.

Mother’s outer Borderline universe matrix pyramid:  Point 1 – being a wife and having ‘the perfect’ husband – was tied in her earliest years to both her relationship with her father (remote) and to the marriage of her parents and its dissolution between her ages of four and five, as well as to her grandfather who she was close to that died right at the time of the divorce;  Point 2 – being a mother – was tied to her birth mother (neglectful, cold and critical) , her grandmother (cold and abusive) and probably in its earliest beginning to the woman who was her nanny (probably also remote if not also neglectful-abusive);  Point 3 – having/making ‘baby doll children’—was tied to the fact, as written by my grandmother, that by the time children came into the life of herself and her husband Mildred’s father no longer wanted children.  In Mildred’s earliest doll play memories she was lonely and wanted a sister.  She repeatedly asked her mother for one and was repeatedly disappointed as she was given a baby doll each Christmas instead; Point 4 – ‘playing house’ which included her obsession with cleaning represented on this occasion by the making bed-making happiness connection – was tied I believe to Mildred’s brother destroying her doll play ‘house’ and to the break-up of her home through divorce and moving; and Point 5 – the repeating patterns the cycles of both moving and of making more baby dolls were each tied to specific patterns of words that belonged a related litany – that was tied from her earliest beginnings to the traumatic experiences of her earliest life no doubt including overheard heated and troubling adult conversations and to the resulting moves including the move when she was 19 across country from Boston to Los Angeles.

All of these patterns originated out of and hence forever after centered on radical confusing change, great loss and efforts to stabilize a reality that could be controlled.  I suspect that my mother’s focused efforts to maintain through control the ‘integrity’ of this main Borderline matrix pyramid could only succeed if everything remained ‘perfect’ (which is no doubt how she perceived herself in her world as a very young child – if she could be perfect all would be perfect).  Anything less than her perceived ‘perfect’ state would have had the power to – yet again – threaten and destroy her world as her world had been threatened and destroyed in her earliest years.

I believe the patterns of my mother’s adult matrixes that resulted in her being ‘stuck’ in neverending repetitions of the trauma-dramas of her earliest life were like cookie-cutter identical repeats and replications of what happened in her childhood.  While I don’t understand from a scientific point of view how memory works, it seems to be that there was a powerful memory-related quality to these repeating patterns.  The corresponding litanies for each of her matrix pyramids was then a kind of memory device, a mnemonic device that handled traumatic memory retention in a different way, in a way that prevented the remembered experiences from overwhelming my mother.  Her NEW and inventive Borderline way of remembering allowed her to manage and control what happened (in her mind) so that there could be a different outcome in her adult life from the one she experienced in her childhood.

These altered memory devices (her matrix pyramids), as they contained duplicates of her earliest traumas (very possibly connected to actual DNA replications over time within her very cells – DNA is humanity’s ultimate ‘memory device’), could be handled differently so that my mother could ‘win’ instead of ‘lose’.  Everything she ever did, and did to me, was an effort, then, to be ‘on top’ of the traumas so she wouldn’t be crushed by them instead.  Her matrix patterns were not random and they were not purposeless.  They were specifically created from the material her childhood provided her and were specifically designed to prevent those same traumas from ever overwhelming her again.

The matrix that was created about me and AS me was designed to fulfill the purpose of containing ANYTHING that was less than perfect and that could, therefore, destroy her Borderline universe.  My sister’s matrix helped to sustain perfection.  The world my mother created for me had to be kept as far away as possible from my sister in particular and eventually to increasing extent from everyone in her outer Borderline shell ‘baby doll’ matrix world itself.

This makes me wonder if the powerful forces that disallowed for resolution (cooperation) between the extremes of polar opposites came to increasingly DISTANCE points that were conceived of as opposite from one another so the ‘stability’ of Mildred’s mirroring universe could remain intact.  Not only could paradox and ambiguity in no way be tolerated, neither could the extremes they each contained tolerate any proximity to one another.

As my mother worked to push these polar opposites further and further apart from one another – because obviously to her they could not ever ‘cooperate’ with one another – the patterns of behavior she used to do so became increasingly intense and determined: “If the enemies cannot get along, then the best thing to do is to forever separate them from one another.”

This, to me, is the opposite of creation even though my mother’s Borderline matrix pyramid world was creative as a solution to overwhelming conflicts within my mother.  Her entire universe and the disease (resulting from overwhelming early trauma) that created it was a death trap of destruction.  No relationship could ever be formed between opposites – leading not only to the viral escalation of the brutal abuse I suffered, but also to the increasingly lengthy and strange patterns of when, where and how my mother confined, concealed and isolated me.

The damage done to a Borderline’s offspring like in my family’s case happens as the children are not allowed to grow up forming their own reactions of their own self to the real-time real world they were born into.  We were forever captured in the repeated trauma-dramas that were our mother’s memories of her own childhood (as she tried to change the outcome) – that had NOTHING to do with her children.

It might simply be a part of human constitution that we would in essence ‘practice’ to perfection using repetition that is deeply tied to the motor regions of our brain.  Like practicing to ride a bike, dance a pattern of steps or play an instrument, humans learn new things by repeating and repeating until we finally get things RIGHT.  If this is true, then the body-brain changes that happened to my mother to create her Borderline condition were actually based on this natural pattern – gone BONKERS!

But what my mother was trying to learn through the patterns she was remembering and trying to change was not trivial:  Her reality was centered on life and death itself.  It was centered on avoiding obliteration and annihilation.  Her Borderline matrix reality had been created to solve what some call the ‘impossible paradox’:  How to remain alive in the face of trauma that is certain to kill you no matter what you do to stop it.

Strange thought, but maybe in essence this is why I did not turn out like my mother did.  Somehow my mother took on the trauma drama of her childhood THAT DID NOT BELONG TO HER.  It belonged to the adults in her life.  As she somehow internalized that trauma itself this action changed her – into a Borderline.  I never took my mother’s trauma on as my own.  As I write my way through my story I hope to find out why (and how) not.

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My suspicion is that what I will discover is that unlike my mother in her childhood, I NEVER BOUGHT AS REAL what she said about me.  True, my thinking by the time I was 18 was profoundly influenced by what she said and did because I had no alternative point of view except for ONE, and that one was the most important:  Every memory I have retained includes at its CENTER an awareness I ALWAYS held inside of myself that what I KNEW was the truth.  What I KNEW was my reality.  This knowledge and this reality was very tiny in terms of its influence on my thinking for many years.  But when the time comes – even as it has come now as I write my own TRUE story – what I know of my own reality is there and I can access it.

Somehow in her childhood my mother did not retain this inner sense of her own reality.  She bought as REAL the lies the adults in her life told her about herself.  My mother therefore DID NOT HAVE an inner spark of her own truth, of her own perception, of her own reality to turn to.  She therefore could not untangle her own story from the story of the adults in her childhood as I have always been in the process of doing myself.

I did not perpetually repeat the memories that belonged to my mother.  Even though how she abused me directly influenced the memories I do have about my childhood, my mother did not influence the inner reality of each memory she forced me to keep through her litany repetitions.  I can go back to each of these memories and remember my OWN self in the experience.  I think my mother lost her connection to her own self and I did not.

I did not take my mother’s version of her memories of me as my own.  I did not believe her.  Although I could never avoid what my mother did to me, could not escape her, could not defend myself against her in any physical way (not even verbally), I defended my SELF in my own memory.  I remembered what I knew, and that is what saved me from the time I was born.

This is the way the brain is supposed to develop.  Autobiographical memory as it is tied to what’s called autonoetic consciousness is the ability to remember the semantics, or the detailed facts of what happens with a ‘remembering self’ – the one doing the remembering.  Very early in her life my mother missed the stage of remembering herself at the center of her life.

When this happened she did become a Borderline.  When the orientation of self-at-the-center of experience as the one who is HAVING the experience at the same time they are remembering their self having the experience is lost, there is nothing left but a mirroring universe in which the Borderlines between the details of experience and the one experiencing these experiences has been forever lost.

If this is true then Borderline Personality Disorder may well be a REMEMBERING disorder.  It is a disorder, yes, of the formation of a strong and stable self.  But the loss of this self happens when the self-at-the-center remembering ability is lost.  At that point there is no self separate from experience.  ‘Self’ remembering then changes into repeating patterns of the traumas that disintegrated the self-at-the-center-of-remembering in the first place.

I would then have to rename what experts might say was her complete mental projection of her own bad girl-evil-child-devil etc. onto me.  True, I was never a separate self to my mother.  But what I was to her was an active part of her repeating trauma remembering process.  She had no ability to REMEMBER me as a separate person in my own right.  Therefore everything she ‘knew’ about me was always – from the moment I was born — contaminated by her own faulty remembering process.

So complete was the damage in my mother’s remembering processes that what she saw when she saw me at any moment in time was instantly distorted as ongoing perception changed into faulty memory in-the-moment.  It would be easy for me to call the experiences I had with my mother as her ‘hallucinations’ but I think the process was different.  The distortion happened right as current information entered her brain at the same time it was sucked through her faulty memory ‘circuits’.  What she knew about me ran through a ‘remembering filter’ that changed her experience of me.  What she ‘saw’ WAS what she remembered as she was remembering it – wrongly.

(As she (erroneously) SAW me when I just turned 4 trying to murder my 2-year-old sister by drowning her in the toilet that in turn ended in a terrible abuse ‘incident’ happened because as she processed memory of me in real-time, ‘seeing’ me was instantly ‘remembered’ through the filter of her trauma-drama remembering processes.  So in this instance for example, I did not believe my mother that I was murdering my sister.  I knew the truth, and the truth was that I was not doing this.  I remembered my own truth.  This is something my mother did not develop the ability to do in her own early years.  This means when a Borderline appears to operate in a different reality that matches nobody else’s, this happens because their memory processes are operating differently from normal.  They can ONLY remember ongoing experience through the filter of early trauma that overwhelmed their ‘self’.))

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I just figured out that what I hear in my mother’s age 9 black berry story is the same rhythm, the SAME BEAT that later appeared in the rhythm of the litany chant of my ‘crimes’ she screamed and roared as she beat my body in time with the beat of the chant.

I have no doubt that the tapping rhythm of the beat that was the basis of the words in my mother’s age-nine story — even as I can feel this chanting in ‘BLACK berry BLACK berry BLACK berry BLACK berry’ like a heart beat behind the words — grew into my adult mother’s screaming, roaring chanting of the litany that she used as she brutally beat me all through my childhood.  I believe the direct pattern of beating-blows-litany-chanting happened for the first time that day during her beating of me when I was 20 months old.

I found this fascinating article on this webpage on ‘Music and the Brain’ – and I believe in the case of my extremely violent mother, the regions of her brain involved with both speech/language and with motor patterns (beating me) were changed during her earliest development in an environment of trauma.

The Neurosciences Institute website [http://www.nsi.edu/index.php?page=xii_music_and_language_perception]

“Our approach reflects the belief that research on music has the potential to illuminate fundamental aspects of human brain function, including language, the active nature of perception, and the processing of complex sequences that unfold in time.”

“Both music and spoken language feature rich rhythmic and melodic structure.  Furthermore, both emply a finite set of basic elements (such as tones or words), which are combined in principled ways to create novel, hierarchically organized sequences.  That is, music and language share the crucial feature of being syntactic systems.

“Given these similarities, are music and language largely independent brain functions, or do they have an important degree of overlap?  We have addressed this question in three different areas:  the relationship of syntactic processing in music and language, the relationship of music to the melody and rhythm of speech, and the relationship between musical tone deafness and speech intonation perception.  Our research has reveled [sic] a significant degree of overlap between music and language processing. 

“Perception is not just a passive registering of what is “out there” in the world, but a constructive process involving active interpretation, as well as integration across brain systems.  The phenomenon of a musical beat nicely illustrates this fact.  Every human culture has some form of music in which listeners perceive a regular beat, and in every culture, people move in synchrony with the beat of music.  Musical beat perception and synchronization may seem like simple abilities since they are so widespread, but appearances can be deceptive.  Humans are the only species to spontaneously move in synchrony with a musical beat, and can extract a beat from complex rhythmic patterns.  This raises the question of what aspects of our brain support this remarkable ability.  We have studied musical rhythm perception to examine the coupling between the auditory and motor system, and how this coupling differs from the coupling of visual and motor systems.  In addition, we have studied brain mechanisms of beat perception, suggesting a possible role for the motor system in how we hear a beat.  Understanding how the auditory and motor systems are coupled in beat perception and synchronization could help in the development of treatments for certain motor disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease, in which rhythmic music is known to help people initiate and coordinate movement.

“We believe that understanding the fine temporal details of brain responses to sound is important for understanding brain mechanisms of auditory processing.  We have developed novel methods for tracking stimulus-related brain activity from the auditory cortex as it unfolds in time using magnetoencephalography (MEG).  Using the method of “frequency tagging,” we have studied how brain activity evolves over time as a listener hears a melody, organizes complex incoming auditory information into perceptually distinct sources, or pays selective attention to an auditory stimulus.  Our results indicate that ongoing timing patterns of activity are influenced by melodic structure, and are also modulated by cognitive processing.  For example, we have found that selective attention to an auditory (vs. simultaneously presented visual) stimulus has a modest affect on the amount of neural activity associated with that stimulus, but a large effect on the timing of brain activity associated with that stimulus.  Specifically, when an auditory stimulus is attended, stimulus-related activity in distant brain regions becomes highly temporally correlated….  Thus the auditory and visual systems may have fundamentally different mechanisms for selective attention, suggesting that attention disorders in the two domains might need to be treated with different approaches.”

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I believe that verbal abuse during brain formation during early human development can cause changes such as what happened to my mother.  Any blog reader who suffered screaming along with beatings that probably included the chanting of a litany can understand from inside their body what I am talking about!

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If you read my mother’s age 9 story and FEEL the rhythm in the piece you will be able to identify the beat-in-the-language — that later found its way into the patterns of how she beat me while chanting/screaming/roaring her abuse litany of me and my ‘crimes’:

Once there was a black boy who was picking black berries and putting them in his black bowl for his mother to prepare for his black father to eat for his black berry supper but a big black bare came a long and while the black boy was looking he ate all the black berries from the black berries from the[she repeated this]  black bowl. The black boy soon filled it up again, so the black bear wasn’t satisfied so he took all the black berries on the bush besides in the bowl [the following was added between the lines] then the boy began to cry then the black bears heart was sofftened and he told the black boy that he was sorry the black boy wiped his tears. The black bear then took the black bowl between his teeth and filled it from a nother black berie bush and gave it to the black boy, and the black boy thanked him and went home and his black father had his black berry supper.

Mildred

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Another important reply to comment on: +IN THE WORDS OF A BORDERLINE CHILD: MY MOTHER’S STORIES

I am coming to a point of being able to actually SEE the internal universe of my mother. It is a place that existed in a time that was what I can call ‘other worldly’. True, her reality didn’t match ordinary reality — but I lived inside her universe as her captive for 18 years — it WAS real.

What I am saying is that as long as we are trying to place ‘our stories’ on anything like an ‘ordinary world’s grid’ our experience and our stories do not match up because they CAME from within a Borderline’s ‘other-worldly’ world.

I can now not only SEE the world I was trapped in, I can describe it and I can now graph-draw it. Until I could do this I could not possibly find my own story. I learned VERY QUICKLY from what you so tidily called my ‘loopy’ body memory that I could not possibly be safe to write this story in any coherent way unless and until I could create my own GPS to locate myself, orient myself, and track myself in this ‘other world’.

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Maybe in some way this is true for all individuals whose stories were intimately intertwined with especially a Borderline mother.

We are trying to place our stories in a world that did NOT exist for us — or we wouldn’t have the stories to tell that we do have!

Not being able to tell a coherent life story narrative, as I have said so many times before, is what attachment experts refer to as the symptom in adulthood of insecure infant-caregiver attachments.

That is profound! I have known for a long long time that my individual ‘stories’ of abuse, no matter how tragic or impressive (as you have read them) they might be, they mean ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO ME BY THEMSELVES!!

NOTHING!

Every single story I remember, and they are very few and remembered only because of my mother’s litany — is NOTHING more in reality than a DOT ON A GRID. Until I can define the grid — which was entirely built by my mother — so that I can orient myself and those stories as points on that grid I will NOT be able to tell my own story — the whole story. Otherwise I am left with a few archeological remnants of the past that cannot be put back together into an identifiable whole = my childhood.

I still believe it is important to collect/write the stories. I could not do the work I am doing now if I didn’t know what my stories were — and know the order in which those things happened.

But the stories themselves, like individual glistening previous (I meant to write precious) pearls of value because they are a part of ME, need to be put into a necklace, a finished peace (my right brain is having fun here – I meant to write piece) of work. THAT will be the WHOLE story — which will happen once I plot the dots of my stories on the grid of my childhood (the grid my Borderline mother made and I was trapped by/in) and connect the dots. THERE will be the bigger picture, the whole picture! The stories are the parts of the puzzle as they exist individually – for me and probably for you as you have written them.

WE ARE BIGGER THAN OUR STORIES — BIGGER THAN THE STORY MADE BY CONNECTING THE DOTS IN THE INDIVIDUAL STORIES TOGETHER. It is that bigger me that I am locating. It is that bigger me that does this work. It is that bigger me that is IN NO WAY WHATSOEVER STUCK IN ANY OF THOSE ‘LITTLE MEMORY STORIES’ or even in the big story itself.

But it is critically important for me to NOW clearly and forever distinguish my story from my mother’s. That is what I am doing. Primarily, I believe, with a Borderline mother (an abusive one), the life stories of offspring are entangled, enmeshed, tangled, and even at places fused together. The only way I know of to differentiate my story from my mother’s is to get (like I recently wrote RE: truth and lie) into the center of the story — which of course is IN MY BODY!

But I am NOT going to go again for that story, the one that is being told as I connect the dots between my ‘little memory stories’ together with one another, again until I can do so safely — and finding myself staggering and swirling around in my yard in a full blown age 20 month body memory IS NOT SAFE!! No matter how ‘loopy’!

I’m not saying that I am going to prevent body memory from returning when I am ready to go back to the stories-story process. But I am NOT going in that world again without my very new and very sophisticated GPS to use to orient myself in that other world I grew up in!

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So, lots of words, but what I think I am saying in response to you is that you have NOT wasted a moment in the work you have done so far in recording your memories! Now you need to clearly (in my opinion) create yourself a TIMELINE by month and year that you can line those memory-stories up along.

If you have already done this – I can give you a clue about what to do next – but it’s part of the book

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Below is an important reply I just wrote to a comment on my earlier post +IN THE WORDS OF A BORDERLINE CHILD: MY MOTHER’S STORIES that I don’t want to lose in the reply-comment shuffle.  I’ve heard it said before that the solution to any problem lies in the problem itself.  That certainly seems to be the case for the BPD mother-terribly suffering child story I am working my way through as my daughter and I write our book.

I can say that the story I will tell lies so far outside the range of ordinary or normal that I can only orient myself in myself and in that story by inventing what I call my own GPS to find my way around.  Not all Borderline Personality Disorder people EVER come CLOSE to how deeply, deeply disturbed my mother was.  The world I grew up in from birth and lived in for 18 years was an entirely different ‘place’ that existed in an entirely different ‘time’.  Nobody including me could begin to comprehend my story unless I find the ‘grid’ as I call it that my mother’s universe was built on.

This grid was entirely Borderline.  Not only that, as I work my way through my story I am discovering that my mother actually had a second Borderline condition within a Borderline condition.  I lived inside a separate Borderline universe she created at the time of my birth.  This reality was visited ONLY by her and by me because she forced me to live in there with no way out.

Everyone else lived in what I call her secondary outer-ring Borderline world.  It is not enough I now realize for me to find and describe JUST this outer Borderline world where my mother, father, siblings, other family and every other public person my mother was in contact could ‘see’ my mother in.

Within these mirroring mirroring mirrors of Borderline worlds I KNOW absolutely that there IS an order to it all.  There IS a grid.  There are identifiable patterns.  There IS a structure.  There was an orientation within my mother’s realities no matter how confusing and disorienting her world appears to have been.  If this were NOT true, I would not have survived — as odd as that might sound.

I was trapped in my mother’s innermost Borderline ‘psychotic’ universe.  But that will ultimately be my point:  There WAS an “I” in there.  There WAS a “me” in there.  I am finding my way to THAT person.  That person and only that person knows as much as is humanly possible to know about what such an inner Borderline’s Borderline universe actually IS LIKE from the inside out.

As I evolve my own understandings within my own story I had to develop my own GPS to find my way around and it is working.  I can ‘see’ the grid.  I can describe the multiple points that created this Borderline matrix — this mirroring mirrored mirror of a ‘mental matrix’ that was the inner Borderline universe.  It was a horrible place to be forced to live for 18 years, but I did live in there.  I stayed alive and I did not lose myself.  It was a different experience, so different from normal that even finding language in words to describe it is more than a challenge — it is a work of art in progress.

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Here’s a clue — that is SUPPOSED to be developing in the book: If you read my mother’s stories and watch what happens with MOTHER in them, all the way to the end — you can see the progression of her illness.

Not the ‘Hallmark card’ version of mother, but the powerful accurate NATURAL and REAL mother — physiological, evolutionarily designed, biological process of being a mother and of MOTHERING — critical for our species (as for all mammals but not as complex as human)

MOTHER is a matrix.  matrix — something within or from which something else originates, develops, or takes form related in its word origins to: Latin, female animal used for breeding, parent plant, from matr-, mater

Cognition — the process of thinking — cognition is also a female word, a female process word, a mothering word

Mothers and mothering build the foundation for cognition at the same time the matrix of the mother and mothering relationship from the womb onward through the earliest stages of development is building within offspring THEIR OWN MATRIX of self that is supposed to be healthy in all ways

My mother – follow the MOTHER patterns in her stories — she is NOT simply talking about her mother who failed her, but also the ‘matrix-mother’ of self with brain-mind-thoughts of her own THAT IS MISSING IN HER END STORY as much as her outer mother is missing

it is no coincidence that BPD is mostly a woman’s disorder — there is a definite connection between the missing-matrix-of-mother-mothering for every BPD from early childhood and the END RESULT of the missing-mother-matrix INSIDE OF THEIR OWN SELF that BPD creates in the changed-brain-mind of a BPD sufferer

I know this is probably adding confusion to confusion, but it’s important to think about. What our mothers give us is for better or worse our own brain-mind-self matrix that is the mother of our thoughts, our feelings, etc for the rest of our life.

A MATRIX disorder would be an excellent way to describe my mother — and in the book I will show how that is true

my mother’s stories provide for an inside look at the matrix-mind of my mother — until it dissolved as certainly as the end of her last story describes. after that she was ‘lost in the mirroring mirrors’ of split-off and projected matrixes within which she trapped and tortured me.

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I could say that somehow the switch was flipped on the railroad tracks I was happily cruising along on yesterday as I wrote my reply to Question #5 that my daughter sent me for our book.  Today I am off on another track, and so far my efforts to STOP my thinking in ‘this direction’ have proved not only ineffective, but have rather escalated my thinking in a direction that is not about what I am writing for the book!

The book is about MY STORY, not my mother’s!  And yet here I am pondering Borderline Personality Disorder itself — again.  So, I guess there is more I need to say on the subject right now and I might as well get on with it!

My current line of thinking is a combination of considerations both about my mother’s mind and about the comment made yesterday by a Borderline mother on a recent post about ‘parenting correctly.  Of course the tie-in for all of this is that my mother wasn’t parented correctly, she sure didn’t parent me correctly — ad infinitum as we think about the transmission of the unresolved trauma through the generations of all of us who have contact with BPD.

Today I am thinking (because this appeared on the National Institute of Mental Health’s webpage about BPD) that under no circumstances do I consider it accurate to use the term ’emotional dysregulation’ in any way that limits it to BPD.  Emotional dysregulation is what happens IN ANY EARLY ENVIRONMENT OF UNSAFE AND INSECURE INFANT-CAREGIVER INTERACTION.  This term simply describes body-brain changes that happen to a little one who suffers insecurely in these patterns of interaction.  It in NO way is specific to BPD.

Any anxiety disorder, bi-polar disorder, all of the ‘personality disorders’, schizophrenia, ADHS, autism — you name it!  All of these INCLUDE emotional dysregulation.

So, this being said I want to also mention that if Dr. Martin Teicher and his Harvard research group are correct in their assessment that early trauma can so change the development of a little one’s body-brain that they end up as an ‘evolutionarily altered’ individual, then what I just wrote in comment and post about Borderline parents (as well as all of us who parent even though we were altered through trauma in our beginnings) needs to be said much more clearly:

Evolutionarily altered means to me that the benefits that our species has reaped through our evolution into less troubled and troubling times simply did not exist for us.  All of the ‘more highly evolved’ abilities that come to a body-brain that is raised from birth with the best or near the best safe and secure attachment conditions was not given to us.

Because I also believe as I’ve said that the greatest creative gifts in our human gene pool are directly tied to the highest risks for troubles if things go wrong in our earliest life, there is an important connection here.

Only in very modern ‘evolved’ times have humans even attempted to raise offspring alone — in dual parent let alone as single parent families.  Old times, those ‘evolutionarily altered’ times as nature designed us ALWAYS meant that people lived collectively and they raised offspring collectively.

For those of us who were trauma altered it is therefore part-and-parcel of our resulting ‘conditions’ that we ALSO need collective help to raise our children.

Whether or not our society wants to accept these realities, the solution to Borderline parenting MIGHT be that those people never have offspring due to their inability to ‘parent correctly’ because their physiology of body-nervous system-brain-mind-self has been altered to a ‘more primitive’ condition in response to a ‘more primitive’ early environment.

The OTHER solution is NOT that these BPD parents have their children ‘removed’ from them as our society currently practices.  It is ALSO not to leave the BPD parents to parent alone — because they do not physiologically have the ability to do so without passing trauma onto their kids – no matter how they wish not to.

The OTHER solution is to find ways to offer at risk, including BPD parents, a way to access the kinds of collective parenting environments that raised up our species in the first place.

Just because a solution to a problem might not be easy or popular does not mean it isn’t possible.  If a nation considers its children to be just that — its children — creative ways CAN be found to resolve critically important problems that affect the future generations.

In my scenario, then, an emotionally escalating ‘dysregulated’ parent could simply walk away and take care of their self while someone else at that critical juncture in time takes care of the offspring.  Not only that, but what a trauma-altered development person needs, BPD or not, is to carefully tended at the same time.  This is social interaction.  This is social life-support toward healing.

Emotionally dysregulated people (including PTSD) will NEVER be able to process anxiety/stress/distress stimulation in ordinary ways.  It’s not hard to imagine all the complications FOR THE ADULT that enter into this picture.  But being able to down-regulate emotional response, intensity, duration and appropriateness didn’t come to ANYONE just because they are a wonderful person.  Those abilities were built into someone who has them in their body in safe and secure interactions within their caregiving environment by someone — or this person would not have them at all either.

If say a BPD parent could walk away and leave care periodically with the collective and go take care of their needs — including their needs for creativity and expression — this has nothing to do with loving one’s children or not!  NOTHING!

The fact is that nature NEVER intended people to parent children alone – and I am talking about far more than just extended family connections as we think of them today.  If BPD or some other trauma-altered development condition exists in a parent, it came from the environment that raised them — and it is very possible that the ‘disorder’ in the connected-extended family is NOT HEALTHY.

The collective needs to be a healthy one.  True, given the parameters of the culture we live in I can’t envision how this COULD actually work, but that does not mean that this isn’t the best solution possible.

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Our species essentially owns all of our stories, especially ones about trauma because if the trauma has not been resolved, it needs to be.  If it has not been resolved then more people are needed to get this job done!!  The importance of capturing stories in words — Here is a reply I just wrote to a comment on my post: +IN THE WORDS OF A BORDERLINE CHILD: MY MOTHER’S STORIES

When I wrote in the last piece I posted that I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that I ended up with her writings, even her childhood stories that survived for 70 years, I mean that I believe something like ‘divine destiny’ made sure all of this would happen exactly the way that it did so that in the end – if I can do my part of the job correctly – something good and important can come of all the suffering that happened in the past — my mother’s losses and mine included.

These patterns as they tumble down the generations are much, much bigger than the individuals that suffer under the burden of trauma. I believe that when we drop the perspective of individual ‘egos’ what we have left is a presentation on a much bigger level of what humans truly need to form a healthy, happy body-brain in the first place along with how the absence of what we need (along with abuse and neglect added on top) leads directly to the kind of suffering I knew, you knew, your mother knew, my mother knew……

Borderline Personality Disorder remains a mystery on most of its profound levels. The collection of my mother’s writings combined with what I know might be able to provide important links between the suffering grownups pass to their children and how those suffering children ‘handle it’ through trauma altered development that changes them.

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I have written about this before, and here is another opportunity to say this again: The road to healing trauma lies in giving words to its patterns. These patterns exist in the words of ALL the stories we know — those of our parents, of their parents, of our own, and of our children.

People, PLEASE consider writing down every single story you can find and that you can remember!!!!! There is no need to worry about whether or not the story is ‘true’ or whether or not you remember it accurately.

I DO WISH that I had ‘known then what I know now’ when I listened to my mother tell the stories from her childhood, but I remember the bulk of them — and every single one of them is a link in the chain of trauma and abuse that was passed to her and onto me and to my siblings.

Ongoing unresolved trauma that interferes with the ability to parent offspring through safe and secure attachment — and that interferes with our own ability to have safe and secure attachment with our own self and with the world we live in — happens because the INFORMATION contained in traumatic experience has not been processed, valued, understood or ‘made whole’. This making-whole happens when information contained in a traumatic experience comes to make sense IN A BIG WAY so that the species as a whole LEARNS SOMETHING NEW and critically important so that life can continue and these kinds of traumas can (1) be absolutely prevented and avoided in the future, or (2) brand new coping skills can be learned to deal with a future repeat of the trauma ASAP and completely effectively.

The nature of trauma is that it represents A CHALLENGE both to the individual who experiences but more importantly — if we can look at the bigger picture outside the range of individual ‘ego’ — to the survival of our entire species. If we assume that survival is not the only interest of nature, but that survival with ever increasing well-being IS ALSO important, then we can begin to understand that NONE OF WHAT WE KNOW of trauma – past, present, or how it might reappear in the future – is insignificant.

It then becomes each of our job not only to heal from our own individual traumas but also to understand how and why they got in our way in the first place! How THIS happened is that the people around us, most importantly those who caregive the youngest infants and children, were not able to do this job for their own trauma. Because it is the nature of this unresolved trauma NOT TO GO AWAY until someone, somewhere, somehow LEARNS WHAT TRAUMA HAS TO TEACH US, we HAVE to learn from it.

I absolutely consider the existence of my mother’s writings to be a GIFT not only to me but also as I can make them available to serious students of not only trauma itself, but also of unresolved trauma.

When I think about my mother’s earliest writings — even today as I prepare in a few moments to go back to the book-writing — I understand that in its most simple, simple, simple format ALL OF LIFE is about what developmental neuroscientist Dr. Allan N. Schore names as RUPTURE AND REPAIR.

Because these patterns form the basis of mother-infant brain-building interactions from the beginning of life — most especially as they occur on the emotional communication level in the interactions between mother-infant — it is these patterns that build the foundation of the brain and the body. Either there is rupture without repair which builds the ability to regulate emotions (emotional regulation) into the earliest forming right social-emotional brain OR there is rupture without repair WITHOUT adequate repair that builds emotional dysregulation into the body-brain instead.

Unresolved trauma is ABOUT RUPTURE WITHOUT ADEQUATE REPAIR. Learning from trauma is about repairing these ruptures.

Nature does not care that humans can ‘think’ about their life. Nature cares that life continues. Rupture without repair brings death on one level or another. Repairing ruptures brings life.

Write down all the stories you know about anyone close to you who impacted and/or impacts your life. Give those stories form. Give them words. It is healing to do so because what trauma needs to resolve itself is to become processed and integrated and LEARNED FROM. We cannot possibly begin to learn from trauma as human beings if we cannot process the information it gives to us — AND THIS IS CRITICALLY IMPORTANT — WITH BOTH SIDES OF OUR BRAIN.

As I write my book now I continue to be amazed that for all the thousands and thousands of words I have written elsewhere about this whole topic RIGHT NOW — because of the focus of my intent — I am coming to new realizations that astound me, and they are coming to me in various ways. But in the end my intention is that all the realizations form themselves into a coherent pattern IN WORDS — yes, that will take the form of a book.

It seems to be outside of my ‘range of vision’ to understand more comprehensively what nature actually intends to accomplish by so profoundly changing the physiological development of a traumatized infant-child’s body-brain development in ways that hamper the processing of trauma-related information. Because that is exactly what happens.

It seems that these changes are meant to ensure physical survival IN THE SHORT TERM long enough to allow for reproduction.  In our culture in this day and age humans survive LONG PAST what nature has intended. We also do not raise our offspring collectively which is what I believe nature has always intended.  (In nature’s design I believe those at ‘most risk’ for difficulties in parenting if there were ANY disruptions in an insufficient earliest environment ALSO have the greatest gifts.  In ‘the old world’ others in the ‘collective group’ would have stepped in to do the parenting, thus leaving these ‘gifted ones’ to do their creative ‘thing’ which in turn offered all kinds of benefits to the ‘collective’.) But putting all this aside for a moment I want to say this about the condition we are individually left with if we are severe early trauma survivors:

Our right brain hemisphere forms first. It is built on emotional and social information gained thru our earliest infant-caregiver interactions. These interactions either build regulation or dysregulation into our brain circuits. These interactions determine how our brain regions interact with one another — and with our developing self. A mother is literally downloading her brain into her infant through the patterns of interactions (safe and secure or not) that she has with her infant. She is feeding the infant her own self.

If the right brain does not get to develop in an ordinary way, the information our BODY feeds to our awareness through our right brain will not be handled normally, either.

Then comes the left brain, which forms more slowly from birth and takes it giant leap in growth after the first year of life. Our left brain, with its organizational abilities, cannot grow to organize right brain chaos if that’s what the infant was fed in the beginning (most simply put). Organizing experience in the form of language is one of the left brain’s major job. This process and the abilities that go with it are changed and disturbed by early experience — both as they affected the FIRST growth of the right brain and also as they affect the growth of the left brain.

The corpus callosum, the region between the two brain hemispheres in the middle of our head sends information back and forth between our left and right brains (and they are like two separate brains with different jobs to do).

This all means most simply that the most important information trauma has to teach human beings is NOT able to be processed PHYSIOLOGICALLY in normal ways for early abuse and trauma survivors. The perhaps cruel and/or crude way trauma information is then processed by our species is that those ‘informed others’ — those who DID not suffer early trauma and have their body-brain changed as a result — can simply read trauma survivors’ ‘reproductive fitness indicators’ with are ‘communication signals’ about the CONDITION OF THE ENVIRONMENT that created survivors in the first place.

Nature is NOT concerned with the egotistic personal individual – not remotely. Survival of the species as a whole is what matters. If survivors want to try to heal, to improve the quality of their own life and achieve increased well-being, then we have a major job to do!! On all levels!! And this is a job that non early abuse survivors WILL NEVER HAVE TO DO because the foundations of their body-brain development are very different from ours.

So it is WE who have to challenge our selves to learn about what happened to us. We have to learn how to LEARN from and about trauma so that we can find ways to understand it and learn from it — which is how trauma is ALWAYS processed and integrated — both individually and collectively.

In our modern world we certainly can and SHOULD be able to enlist the help of those who do have a more ‘ordinary’ body-brain. Those people’s BODIES know things ours do not. So, we end up WATCHING them — and learning — at the same time they are watching us — and learning.

Because humans have evolved the gift of verbal language abilities it is important to use our words as a part of these educational, learning and healing processes. Write down the stories. A WordPress blog is a perfect place to put them to publish privately or publicly.

Write down all the stories for everyone important to you. If you remember hearing them, write down also the context of the ‘hearing’. Like repeated nightmares, repeated stories that come again and again in the same words ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT ones.

As we transform trauma stories into written words we are using whatever abilities our trauma-changed body-brain has to process information — and it’s the best exercise for our brain! True, any art form of any kind is good, but I am specifically talking about VERBAL processes here because they take place using very specific channels.

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Interesting article:  Borderline Personality Disorder: Brain Differences Related to Disruptions in Cooperation in Relationships 

“Different patterns of brain activity in people with borderline personality disorder were associated with disruptions in the ability to recognize social norms or modify behaviors that likely result in distrust and broken relationships, according to an NIMH-funded study published online in the August 8, 2008 issue of Science.”

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Here is a list of books about Borderline Personality Disorder:

Get Me Out of Here: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder by Rachel Reiland (Sep 1, 2004)

Lost in the Mirror: An Inside Look at Borderline Personality Disorder by Richard A. Moskovitz (Mar 1, 2001)

The Essential Family Guide to Borderline Personality Disorder: New Tools and Techniques to Stop Walking on Eggshells by Randi Kreger (Sep 15, 2008)

Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder by Paul T. Mason and Randi Kreger (Jan 2, 2010)

The Borderline Personality Disorder Survival Guide by Alex Chapman and Kim Gratz (Nov 2007)

Sometimes I Act Crazy: Living with Borderline Personality Disorder by Jerold J. Kreisman and Hal Straus (Apr 14, 2006)

Borderline Personality Disorder Demystified: An Essential Guide for Understanding and Living with BPD by Robert O. Friedel, Perry D. Hoffman, Dixianne Penney and Patricia Woodward (Aug 4, 2004)

Borderline Personality Disorder For Dummies by Charles H. Elliott PhD and Laura L. Smith PhD (Jul 27, 2009)

I Hate You–Don’t Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality by Jerold J. Kreisman and Hal Straus (Dec 7, 2010)

Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder: A Family Guide for Healing and Change by Valerie Porr (Aug 12, 2010)

Surviving a Borderline Parent: How to Heal Your Childhood Wounds & Build Trust, Boundaries, and Self-Esteem by Kimberlee Roth, Freda B. Friedman and Randi Kreger (Nov 2003)

How to Spot a Borderline Personality by Joe Navarro (Aug 7, 2010) – Kindle eBook

Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship by Christine Ann Lawson (Jul 1, 2002)

Breaking Free from Boomerang Love: Getting Unhooked from Borderline Personality Disorder Relationships by Lynn Melville (Sep 1, 2004)

Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality by Merri Lisa Johnson (Jun 8, 2010)

Loving Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder: How to Keep Out-of-Control Emotions from Destroying Your Relationship by Shari Y. Manning PhD and Marsha M. Linehan Phd ABPP (Aug 15, 2011)

Borderline Traits: Her Life with Borderline Personality Disorder by Arlene Roberson (Jul 12, 2010)

How to Talk to a Borderline by Joan Lachkar (Nov 18, 2010)

Splitting: Protecting Yourself While Divorcing Someone With Borderline or Narcissistic Personality Disorder by Bill Eddy and Randi Kreger (Jul 1, 2011)

Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook: Practical DBT Exercises for Learning Mindfulness, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotion Regulation, & Distress Tolerance (New Harbinger Self-Help Workbook) by Matthew McKay, Jeffrey C. Wood and Jeffrey Brantley (Jul 2007)

Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder by Marsha Linehan (May 14, 1993)

Angry Heart by Joseph Santoro and Ronald Jay Cohen (Oct 1997)

New Hope for People with Borderline Personality Disorder: Your Friendly, Authoritative Guide to the Latest in Traditional and Complementary Solutions by Neil R. Bockian, Nora Elizabeth Villagran and Valerie Porr (Jun 25, 2002)

Borderline Personality Disorder in Adolescents: A Complete Guide to Understanding and Coping When Your Adolescent Has BPD by Blaise A. Aguirre (Nov 1, 2007)

Borderline Personality Disorder: New Reasons for Hope (A Johns Hopkins Press Health Book) by Francis Mark Mondimore and Patrick Kelly (Oct 28, 2011)

Borderline Mom by Georgiana Wright (Dec 21, 2009) – Kindle eBook

Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (The Master Work Series) by Otto F. Kernberg (May 1, 2000)

One Way Ticket To Kansas: Caring About Someone With Borderline Personality Disorder And Finding A Healthy You by Ozzie Tinman (Apr 6, 2005)

Mentalization-based Treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder: A Practical Guide by Anthony Bateman and Peter Fonagy (Nov 2, 2006)

A Primer of Transference Focused Psychotherapy for the Borderline Patient by Frank E. Yeomans (Jul 31, 2002)

The Integrative Treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder: Effective, Symptom-Focused Techniques, Simplified for Private Practice by John Preston (Apr 2006)

Psychotherapy for Borderline Personality: Focusing on Object Relations by John F. Clarkin (Jan 15, 2006)

Borderline Personality Disorder: The Latest Assessment and Treatment Strategies by Melanie A. Dean (Feb 1, 2006)

Schema Therapy for Borderline Personality Disorder by Arnoud Arntz, Hannie van Genderen and Jolijn Drost (May 26, 2009)

Understanding and Treating Borderline Personality Disorder: A Guide for Professionals and Families by Perry D. Hoffman, John G. Gunderson and Johng Gunderson (Feb 2005)

Understanding your Borderline Personality Disorder: A Workbook (The Wiley Series in Psychoeducation?) by Chris Healy (Dec 23, 2008)

Borderline Personality Disorder (Facts) by Roy Krawitz and Wendy Jackson (Apr 7, 2008)

On Knife’s Edge: A Young Girl’s Journey Through Borderline Personality Disorder by Michelle Karpus (Jul 28, 2010)

Borderline and Beyond, Workbook and Personal Journal, Revised by Laura Paxton (Nov 21, 2001)

Borderline Personality Disorder: A Patient’s Guide to Taking Control by Arthur Freeman and Gina M. Fusco (Nov 1, 2003)

Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder: A Guide to Evidence-Based Practice by Joel Paris (Mar 25, 2010)

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National Institute of Mental Health webpage on Borderline Personality Disorder

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