++++

Tuesday, April 22, 2014.  Emotions are powerhouses of information.  They are the torch-lights into our own reality as they tell us about our self.

Humans are fallible beings.  We are not born knowing everything.  Our fallibility applies even to who we are.   Why would we not be a mystery to our self?  We are fundamentally a part of the Great Mystery.

Emotions are our truthful clues to what is REALLY important to us.  What we value.  What we need.  What we know in our heart-of-hearts.  To ignore our emotions and the information they contain as they communicate to and through us is to live “at risk” and “in peril.”

In my thinking the more materialistic our culture gets, the more we lose track of what it means to be a soul-full creation with a guiding spirit connected to everyone and everything surrounding us, the more emotions become unwieldly DANGEROUS – if not SUBVERSIVE – operations running lose in the world.  HOW MESSY!

Emotions?  How uncontrollable (yet how mainipulate-able)!  How un-machine-like!  How intangible (can’t have THAT in a materialist society!)  How anti-status quo.  How TRULY HUMAN OF US!  How impeccably honest!

++

What would our society and culture (and research findings) look like if there was absolutely NO money to be made by creating pharmaceuticals that manipulate, dash, squash, numb, alter, erase (ha, like that’s possible), deaden, etc. EMOTIONS?

ALL the panaceas?  Even alcohol, street drugs, nicotine, processed sugar, caffeine?  What of adrenaline rushes?  What of sex?  What of “buying the right product?”

Am I preaching anarchy?  Chaos?

I can think of only one other kind of change that would no doubt result in an equal disequilibrium of “the great American way.”  Remove all laws back to our Constitution.

++

What inner laws do people allow themselves to live by?  Why are we so terrified of what the purity of our own – and of others’ – emotions are telling us?

When did it become an as-yet unspoken American law that it is illegal to FEEL, pay attention to, honor and respect and LEARN from our emotions – ALL of them?  What would happen if we lived lives based upon the honest integrity of how we FEEL?

We seem to have, for example, a massive epidemic of depression in our nation that we are told MUST be medicated away.  How much power for truth-filled living are we erasing by depleting our storehouse, our power-house of truth connected to choices in our lives that are – actually ARE – making us “sad” or “angry” or even – heaven forbid!  FRIGHTENED as we tread through the moments of our lives?

How much MONEY is being made both by the corporations that create these drugs and the “professionals” that are paid the big bucks to PUSH them?  How about the universities and other institutions whose bucks are made by swaying research findings in favor of drugged living?  Where is the outright propaganda in these scenarios?

Where is the terror hidden among us connected to what might or likely would happen if we actually listened to our truth-filled emotions and then CHANGED ourselves and our lives so that our emotions could change toward the positive all by themselves?

Would there be nothing left within and around us but unbridled PANIC?

Oh, no!  Better panaceas than panic.  To keep this imbalance in balance in our society we better put all the pressure we possibly can on those errant few who refuse to accept DRUGS as the answer to their life concerns and conflicts.

In the meantime….

Those who do not literally BUY into “the system” better keep their thoughts AND their feelings silent.

Where, exactly, IS the safety in these faulty patterns?

Don’t ask.  Don’t tell.  And no matter the cost to your own well-being — DON’T FEEL!

Erase the emotions and all truthful information contained within them and connected to them disappears, as well.  Better that than chaos and anarchy.  Or honest change.

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono (we are still waiting to hear that he has accomplished this job – I think we will have to find an alternative!).  Click here to view or purchase –

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site

++++

 Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Monday, April 21, 2014.  One of the most obvious and yet so easily overlooked aspects of being a severe early abuse, neglect and trauma survivor is that while we live INSIDE our world being trauma-altered in our development in nearly every way — which makes us and our experience of life so very different from that of people who did not experience what we did — those other people so thoroughly live OUTSIDE our world that they are not likely to ever really understand us.  What limitations does this disparity of experience create on both sides of “the great divide?”

Who notices?  What kind of balance can be built into important relationships we have with each other?  How do both parties achieve “safe and secure attachment” in their relationship when the essential quality of true empathy is most likely missing?  WE will never truly be able to understand the life experience of those NOT traumatized in their early life while the non-traumatized will never be able to know us on the levels that are most important in how we are in the world?

I wish I knew a simple way to denote these two kinds of extreme and often very different and even opposed realities.  I guess this morning I will simply use “survivor” and “nonsurvivor.”  Hardly anyone really makes it through a childhood without having experienced some kind of trauma.  But I think we all know what I am saying.  There is a great difference between someone like me and most others.  That is a fact of existence.

Nobody makes it through a severely traumatic, abusive, neglectful infancy and childhood without being greatly changed on the “output” end.

++

I am thinking today about what happens when one of our primary attachment relationships suddenly changes shape and form.  I suspect that often all the signs that the relationship is not what we accept that it is long before the full awareness of the meaning of these changes to the relationship becomes at all clear.  Yet no matter how non-traumatized one person in a relationship is there are times when circumstances of life can simply change them.  When this happens it is very possible that the dynamics of any relationships they have will change — sooner or later.

I am processing such a massive shift in what has been one of my most important attachment relationships for a long, long time.  What I thought was real in this relationship is simply not real.

This is a family but not a partner-type relationship.  I feel as if the ground shifted and a different world has appeared so that very little of what I thought I knew seems to remain.  It seems the “family” part is left without what I thought was the “friendship.”

Picking friendships — not picking family — comes to mind, of course.  And yet on some levels it seems that family members should know us more deeply than anyone on the planet.  There can come a time, evidently, when “So what?” gets added into this equation.  Knowing someone’s past, their weaknesses, vulnerabilities, hopes, conflicts, difficulties can mean that if circumstances change enough that person has an arsenal of weapons to use against us that can hardly be imagined until they are unleashed.  When this happens the gulf between survivor and non-survivor can become so vast that nothing but the most tenuous threads of attachment remain.

What once was a mainstay safe and secure attachment relationship can become its opposite faster than the strike of a lightning bolt.

True, the signals were no doubt present.  But who wants to see these kinds of changes coming?  Can’t peace be maintained, peace be made – somehow – so that the friendship part of a close family relationship can remain intact?

Not always.

I am suspecting that there is something particularly powerful about the ROLES that family members are conditioned to take in our culture.  When a ROLE takes precedence over the very real person forced (one way or the other) into a role I question what is left.  Suddenly, it seems to me, what was a rich and multidimensional relationship becomes flattened into a mere show of a 2-D puppet-like demonstration of connection.

It makes sense to me as I look around our culture to see that this must not be an unusual happening in families.  People are not encouraged to be their full-range self, as I call it.  Only some emotions, some thoughts, some beliefs, some whatevers are to be tolerated while the rest must be cut-off, cut-out, cast aside, buried, disowned-within, drugged into oblivion, criticized, rejected and denied.  We can then all be puppet-livers together.  We are defined by the roles we live out and NOT by the depth and breadth of who we are as unique, creative, emotional, thinking, questioning and often in-conflict individuals.

Who wants the MESS?  Turn us all into BOX PEOPLE to match the boxes we live in, race around in, shop in and – if we are not turned into cinders at the end of our life – buried in.

++

One of the identifiers of trauma is the fact that those experiences are far outside the range of ordinary.  They are extraordinary experiences that create extraordinary survivors.  Severe early trauma survivors never “got” to live “in the box” of safety and security or of anything like ordinary experience.  We came out of our early years being trauma changed into very fascinating and most often very-different-from-ordinary people.  Of course our EXPERIENCE of being alive in our world is very different from non-survivors’.  We are still in the minority so we – along with our experience – can be marginalized in our culture.

How do such interacting factors affect our relationships?

Those of us who tried as hard as we could not to pass onto our offspring what happened to us may well have ALSO created for ourselves a situation where our offspring will NEVER be able to truly understand or truly hear or truly relate to us because we made DAMN sure they did not grow up in a world like the one we grew up in.

HA!

So our children, for example, fit into the world differently than we do.  They can have different roles in different ways — and escape the depths of inner experience that we live with.  Other siblings in families who did not receive abuse in the same way that others of the siblings did will end up following these same kinds of patterns.

What’s to be made of all of this?  I have always hoped I would never have to find out, never really have to face what this disparity means in my own family.  I wanted to be safe from the kinds of conflicts that lie underneath the kinds of relationships we have with one another.

That bubble has burst.

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono (we are still waiting to hear that he has accomplished this job – I think we will have to find an alternative!).  Click here to view or purchase –

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site

++++

Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Friday, April 18, 2014.  Being such an important part of the early growth and development of this little boy, my grandson who will be 21 months old on Sunday, is showing me how every single interaction he experiences is helping him become the person he will be in his body for the rest of his lifetime.  Oh, the things I did not know when I raised my own children!  There are spotlights of realization throughout each day.  Sometimes I simply gently tease him, knowing that NOTHING that is happening to him now – as important as these things actually are – will be available to him later as conscious, explicit, autobiographical memory.

Implicit memory forms us.  Those are the memories that are both forming the body a little person lives within at the same time they form themselves INTO that body.  Yesterday (and other earlier days when the crabbies overtake him) I tease him by showing him my false teeth.  There are many different ways to entertain a fussy baby with portable teeth I have come to find out.  All of them create the most precious look of “WHAT?”

Will he remember grandmother with the removable teeth?  He points to mine in their cup, points to his own in his mouth, and having no words with which to TALK about what he is seeing implicit memory regarding teeth is being formed for and within him.

Yes.  A tiny thing.  But a reminder to me of how every early experience matters in the formation of a human being.

One of the most delightful yet intriguing patterns of this little boy is the verbalized thrill he expresses at least 100 times a day while I care for him.  ‘I DID IT!”  Yesterday this verbal expression of absolute self-confidence was followed by what I thought was “OH!  YAY!”  My daughter told me later that there’s a cartoon video the boys watch (my other grandson who goes to a daycare center just turned 4) in which a character shouts HOORAY after an accomplishment, so I suppose that is what the baby was saying.

HORRAY?  Never that I can imagine during the 18 long years of my severely abusive childhood can I imagine I could recognize this feeling inside of myself.  Long-time readers here know that I have spent many, many months working through my mother’s letters in the creation of what is now 9 more waiting manuscripts.  (The first one is epublished, see below.)  The last two of these include my commentary on my mother’s letters which exist in the first 7 manuscripts.

I quit writing suddenly one day at a point where I realized I was DONE with manuscript #10.  At that point I was halfway through my 1st grade of school.  As I read in mother’s letters the horrible things she said to me to her mother about having to watch that “Linda doesn’t get too proud” because I was such an ACE of a student — I felt for one of the only times in my life true RAGE at my mother and what she did and was allowed to do to and with me.

++

Perhaps the easiest and simplest way to detect abuse in anyone’s childhood is to listen to any “story” (crime report) of an event that triggers this reaction:  “How could anyone do such a thing to a child?”  This is the healthy reaction to childhood abuse.

I have, of course, faced that question thousands of times as I have worked to heal from the tragedy of the abuse that happened to me from birth.  As I have written on this blog in the past it was a very helpful turn for me to realize one day that 15,000 years would have been a minimum jail sentence for Mother in response to what she did to me — and that would have been ONLY in response to her physical abuse of me.  Of course there is NO possible way to estimate the kind of damage parents (and others) can do to infants and children.  What I gave to myself the day I came up with that number was a freeing reality check.

It is (was) the removal of the positive along with the presence of the terrible negative that so harmed me.  Where was the tipping point in my early life beyond which there was no possibility of complete repair?  Because I know of Mother’s psychotic break during her birthing of me I know that that point came for me by the time I was my youngest grandson’s age.

++

How strange it all seems?  Why these words as a title to this post?

I continue to watch time extend a small event I experienced into the increasing distance of my past.  I am having many “repercussion” thoughts from this event.  To understand it would take several more lifetimes.

As I have mentioned in previous posts it has mystified and amazed me that I made this 2000 mile move north last October only to find when I arrived here I did so as a complete non-driver.  What happened?  I still don’t know.  How will I “get past this?”  I still don’t know.

One afternoon about a month ago now my son-in-law drove me to the car insurance office so I could switch my account from covering my dear ’78 el Camino which is parked in an old garage for storage to the 2003 Mercury Sable station wagon my oldest daughter so sweetly bought for me to drive here.  Never mind I still CANNOT drive.  The switching of the insurance must have felt to me like a step in the right, hopeful direction.

Then he drove me to the music store so I could arrange for my first drumming lesson.  As I returned to the car where he sat waiting for me my daughter called.  An arrangement was being made to go eat (with a great coupon) at the mall food court which was very near.

No big deal!  None of it really!  I see the family often.  BUT!!  All of a sudden as I picked out my own dinner and sat with my family, including my little grandsons, there in that court I felt something I had not felt for so many years I could not really even name it.

I felt OK!

I felt HAPPY!

Suddenly it was like the darkness that I evidently live with continually was replaced with a brilliant light.

A weight that surrounds and nearly crushes me every moment of my life disappeared.

I felt FREE!

Yesterday, as I continue to watch that half hour of true pleasure vanish past the horizon I realized every description I have come up with so far has missed the most important point:  Because of my dissociation, a direct and permanent condition allowing survival of what was done to me from birth, I am out-of-sync with the experience of the passage of time as experiences of myself experiencing my own life happen.

The result is the dissociative sensation of “depersonalization” and “derealization” I evidently live with ALL of the time with hardly any exceptions.

That half hour to 45 minutes in the food court held a POWERFUL exception that mystifies me.  It is a mystery that I am continuing to both marvel at and attempt to understand.  If I could understand WHAT happened during those moments could I reproduce those conditions so that I could enjoy — and I mean IN-JOY that state more often?

I cannot remember the last time I felt that way.  Ten years ago?  I don’t know.  It is THAT rare.  I felt real.  My family felt real.  That small world felt real.  I now look back and view those moments in the light of, “I never before realized how feeling real could feel so good.”  The rest of the time?  I am so, so lonely for that feeling.

++

I do not deserve to suffer the way that I continually do because of the changes in my physiological development that trauma caused me.  Two years ago or so as I wrote on the blog I had a full-body memory come to me of being severely beaten when I was only a month older than my youngest grandson.  Making it through even that one of THOUSANDS of severe beatings in my childhood was a miracle.  I live with the price that has to be paid to endure such trauma.

I find myself feeling disappointed that I cannot write more clearly about this topic.  I want to be remote, clinical, objective, detached, “scientific” about a condition that controls my experience of myself having this life.

Nothing interrupts my grandson’s experience of himself living his life.  He is building a CONTINGENT and CONGRUENT and CONTINUOUS self — in a body that will allow him to operate from this state for the rest of his life.

My experience was in polar opposition to his.

Yet on some level, and I believe it is at the level of my soul’s perception, MY way of being in this world as I was forced to be “this way” is very, very strange.  I KNOW from the depths of my soul that “this” is NOT RIGHT.  I also increasingly know how impossible it is for me to change HOW my body operates during my lifetime.

I cannot CHOOSE to make “all of this go away.”  I cannot reform my body (nervous system, brain, calm-stress response system, etc.) into the kind of body my grandson currently has and will have.  We can “simply” say this is the difference between those raised in safe and secure attachment environments versus what happens for those who are not.

But it is SO BIG!!  When it comes to trying as an adult “to make things better” for myself there are simply too many variables at play.  Sorting them out IS taking my lifetime.

Why a food court for heaven’s sake?  Why that slice of magical time, of “perfect grace” in THAT spot at THAT time?

++

Obviously it makes no sense and is not remotely helpful for me to ask “What is wrong?” in my life.  The hard question is, “What went so right at that point in time?”

I am reminded of a very clear dream I had about 25 years ago.  Even then it seemed strange to me that it took place in a mall!  I was wandering along the corridors, turned a corner in the sterile harsh mall maze and found myself facing a massive glass floor-to-ceiling window that ran for many feet along the hallway.  There were bottom hinged small windows that were pushed in.

I knew I COULD climb through at the same time I knew I COULD NOT do so.

I gazed at a gloriously beautiful technicolor world full of lush plant life, heavily laden fruit trees, joyous people playing together — all back lit by the most brilliant display of stars in a ink black sky banked on the sides by brilliant rose, peach and gold colored clouds.

There was a world I was forbidden by circumstances beyond my comprehension from entering; a world I could not be a part of.

I am a wilderness person, not a mall or even a city person.  This mall experience is “something else,” a mystery I do not give up on unraveling.  Not for myself.  Not for others who know exactly what I am describing.  I seek answers.  How could I not?

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono (we are still waiting to hear that he has accomplished this job – I think we will have to find an alternative!).  Click here to view or purchase –

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site

++++

Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Thursday, April 17, 2014.  I am not a happy camper as far as this computer change fiasco is concerned.  I have FINALLY dared to open up a sheet of paper here in this transported Office configuration on this sweet new Dell computer, Sara Lee – who is most unfortunately POSSESSED in assorted, irritating if not obnoxious ways by a Microsoft NEW mess currently known as 8.1.

Obsolete Windows XP was murdered last week by its creators.  It ran perfectly for me.  Cannot have perfection floating around on this planet, can we?  Microsoft, the poisonous elixir of the poor folks.  If I had had $1,500 to replace my old system with a Mac instead of the $500 I did have to buy this Dell replacement, I could have almost eliminated Microsoft from my existence.  Alas.

If I want to traipse around any part of the computer universe in my worn out clod hoppers I have to learn how to cross this bridge without falling.  I am not quite there yet.

++

One of the small pleasures I have discovered in living in this so-not-me environment here is the feeding of finch, chick-a-dees and sparrows.  I tossed out my small allotment of seeds onto this small cement slab outside my sliding glass door (my only window in this apartment) this morning only to look outside at the arrival of a flock of blackbirds devouring in minutes what the smaller birds can enjoy over the course of an entire day.

Life in this material world.  Keeping things in balance?  If there is pleasure in feeding finch there will ALSO HAVE to be irritation in the arrival of hordes of blackbirds.  Now I must be either vigilant in watching for “the enemy” so I can chase them away or I give up.  I am still not able to drive (another story), so replacing seed is not an entirely simple matter.  Neither is the cost of feeding a cityscape of blackbirds – oh, and yes, the first dove just joined the feast – very possible for me in my poverty, either.

++

Now, to see if I can save this little document on this new computer – and then find it again somewhere in Microville….  Well, I saved this.  Will look for it later.

++

This morning my thoughts have been playing in a new way with the ideas behind my Libra rising sign.  There is more to this “balancing things out in fairness” than this ascendant of mine would suggest.  Take one side of the scale and add into it lots of cute finch and life will SURELY bring a ton of blackbirds to – BALANCE the scale?

Hummm…… I am left with the struggle – aren’t we all??

++

Oh.  Turned away.  30 seconds I am back.  Screen is blank.  Have to watch this magic cursor.  Puts itself up into a paragraph.  I don’t notice.  Type away, no words appear HERE.  Part of some previous text has highlighted itself, vanishes, new words appearing where I did not want them.  Have to – what?  Cut a piece of cardboard, tape it over the computer’s own mouse version?

Wait.  I’ll be back….

Baby has filled his pants.  Has run off somewhere with a cardboard piece of the new Clifford puzzle.  He’s eating it.

++

Kashi brand Organic Promise cereal box cardboard piece taped to computer – doing so suddenly turned my Word page HUGE.  I am so out of my element.  Why do I TRY?

Chased away more blackbirds.  Or the same ones?  Diaper changed.  Peace returned.  For how long?  Oh.  Stuffed fuzzy kitten toy suddenly appears.  WHOPP onto my keyboard.  Out of nowhere?  No.

Out of SOMEWHERE and that somewhere is just LIFE.

I am reminded in the back of my mind that for all the 18 years I was abused by psychotic Mother, being told in every possible way that if I were not such a bad child, if I didn’t exist at all, everything in Mother’s world, and through her in her family’s world, and beyond us all to the whole wide world as it existed – all would be perfect.

I have worked since my earliest memory to keep my own self right-side-up in such a dark and malevolent, turbulent, hopeless kind of universe.  Even though I might not – moment by moment – believe that I am ALL THAT BAD, I have not managed erase even the tiniest corner of my corresponding belief so programmed, beaten into me, that there IS such a thing as a Perfect World!

I continue to think this is true – both that the world MUST be perfect and that I so deeply believe this to be true that I still, at age 62, have not found any way to alter or to eradicate this belief, that I am continually shocked and dismayed to find that there ARE just as likely blackbirds in that proverbial pie as anything else I would consider “so much better.”

++

I am left with the continual question, “WHY?”  Why is the world not perfect?  (Running in the background, a faulty operating system:  “Would the world be in its perfect condition if I were not in it?”)

Where is the end of the line of this kind of thinking?

++

I had something written here:  “It’s all my fault.”

Then this computer magically did something obnoxious, changed my page so that I could no longer type a dang thing, did not let me fix it.  I shut down the page and prematurely was forced to go look for it.  Short story = I found this and continue what I was doing before mayhem appeared!

“What did I do to cause THAT glitch?”

Dared to try to write a blog post.  That must be it.

It’s the stress, distress, anxiety provoked by all these asundry occurrences and disturbances that dismays me nearly continually.  I do not have the inner resources to flow through any kind of water that feels threatening to me!  Continually life asks of me that I readjust – not my choice of words but baby is effectively demanding all of my attention – yet again – ‘cause that’s what babies do….

He wants cereal.  Not the banana he just demanded and will not eat.  Cereal that comes in the box whose cardboard is now taped to my computer.  Hodge podge, makeshift, demanding world we live in.  Of course PTSD and other inner trauma-related disturbances in this body I live in prevent me from simply COPING in any kind of easy way – with ANYTHING these days.

++

Like the constant roaring drone in the walls and ceilings of this apartment I am living in.  I am sure I have (“bad me”) COMPLAINED about that drone in a previous post.  It is one of the very WORST conditions my PTSD could be forced to cope with.  It’s on the blackbird side of the scale as it attempts to balance out – what?  That I at least can gaze out my one window at a little open area that has a cat tail pond full of flickering little wings that send bits of last year’s fluff off into the sunlight instead of another building’s dead-end wall crowding in on me?

“It’s my own damn fault I am poor.”  Huh?  Like being tormented, tortured, terrorized, traumatized from the time I was born and for the following 18 years – conditions that caused so much damage to the development of every system in my body – that all created permanent forms of disabilities I live with that prevent me from living a full, healthy life (PTSD, reoccurring major depression, dissociation, depersonalization, derealization) are ALL MY FAULT?

Blackbirds.  That feed on my own thoughts.  Self-sustaining blackbirds.  How tiring to ALWAYS have to be fending them off, chasing them away, trying to eradicate them, or transmute them into something positively sustaining.

++

Meanwhile.  The only surface that supports this laptop for working on it out of reach of baby is NOT a location with internet access.  Yes, the wireless router my daughter so sweetly bought for me sits here in its pristine box awaiting time when she can work all those angles out for me.  (Fortunately.  I am grateful).

So, how do I get this post onto the blog?  And when?  There are blackbirds in my way.  My problem is I let that bother me.  I think I will go stare at the cloudless sky on this windless day and be happy more snow is melting while I await the arrival of my TechnoCalvary.

There goes that magic cursor again.  This time I caught it elevating itself up into my document before it could devour portions of my post.  So much for my cardboard Band-Aid.  Harken!  Do I hear trumpets?

++++

NOTE:  My drumming lessons – over there on the goodness side of the scale of my life – are FANTASTIC!!  I am being trained in “classical drumming!”  What a HAPPY HOOT!!!  I am working hard to use the positive in my drumming experience to counterbalance the negative I feel at living in a city, in a frigid climate, etc.  (complete with AWFUL droning walls and ceiling surround noise).

I am working to convince myself that I have moved to a town to attend drumming college!  I cannot imagine ever again in my lifetime living somewhere with this kind of opportunity.  My instructor, Brett, has a doctorate in percussion and is a perfect (!!) teacher!

No “sloppy” slap dash of my hands on conga drumheads.  This is precision training with sticks on a practice pad.  (Cursor moved itself up again.  SHUCKS!)  I get to watch my trauma-altered brain LEARN what I am being taught.  It reminds me of 30 years ago when I took college trigonometry.  My brain had to find entirely new and unusual ways to process that information.  But I DID IT!

And I will do this, too!  I am learning how to do extremely fast drum rolls in perfect form.  Once I have mastered THAT I suppose everything else will seem easy.  Eventually, I suppose, I will be able to move so fast I can then bop those blackbirds on their little greedy heads before they know I am coming.

“Linda.  Shame on you!”

Nope.  I simply do not APPRECIATE blackbirds.

I will have to find a faster metronome, I suppose.  I will ask Brett about that.  There are probably online versions once this internet mess is straightened out.  My old windup metronome has a top speed of 230 (or so) beats per minute.  That SOUNDS fast to me until I begin to drum.

At that point each hand takes on 115 of those beats.  And at that magic moment it’s like stepping over a threshold.  I am no longer on the outside of the beat listening in.  Once I begin to match the beat with the sticks I step inside the rhythm and become one with it.  How exciting!  Now – to ask Brett, “Exactly how fast is a drumroll?”  Incredible.  This is an incredible experience.  And I so do NOT want to worry about that other shoe falling.

(Moved computer over to attach internet cable.  Baby is napping so the coast over there is clear.  Computer would not recognize the internet link until I rebooted it.  Say, WHAT?  Now, let’s see if I can post this motley collection of words.)

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono (we are still waiting to hear that he has accomplished this job).  Click here to view or purchase –

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site

++++

Please click here to read or to LEAVE A COMMENT

++++

++++

Monday, April 07, 2014. I just tried out my daughter’s pedometer. I walked 45 minutes on “a track” around this small apartment for 45 minutes, burned 165 calories, walked 4900 steps which equaled about 2.4 miles. Too bad I have become addicted to Snickers candy bars! I would have to walk 6 or more hours per day to get rid of those calories!

Actually, on my all-green organic vegetable “diet” I lost 45 pounds in less than 3 months. That losing got a little scary – so, back to eating basic crap for the most part. I had actually discovered that not even 1% of what’s sold in grocery stores is GOOD for me. So, for now, I gave up and decided, “What the ever-lovin’ HECK! I’ll just eat dang Snickers!”

Too high of a stress level is evidently nearly as bad for one’s health as is improper diet – and my stress level remains ridiculously high! I figure – “Snickers are good anti-stress agents!”

AND, when I do my walking in the house I can practice with my drumsticks the entire time, strengthening my hands and fingers, etc.  Not sure I’m quite up for doing all of THAT out on the public sidewalks yet.

++

Overall I am sad at the ending in the next few hours of support for Windows XP. It ran SO WELL!! My poor only Suzy Cute, old computer – too bad, so sad….

I am with her until the bitter end. Captainess going down with her ship?

Nearly so.

++

A friend sent me a great link today that reinforces my own thinking about the harm of daycare centers. This is a British article. (I challenge my friend to find a comparable American take on this condition!)

Infants ‘institutionalised’ by overexposure to childcare

Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), says that pressure on parents to work for long hours is damaging family life and failing to meet the needs of children

I don’t think very many people have a clue what this article is talking about. Although I do use the term “day orphanages” I had not directly connected the situation considered by this article to “institutionalization” but I clearly get the point.

As one commenter to this article mentioned, “…the state agenda is all about controlling future generations by becoming their parent instead.”

The reality of the neurophysiological consequences to infants and preschoolers who are being robbed of close safe and secure attachment relationships means that how these children develop will be different than it would be if the attachment relationships were present. To continue to use the argument that “poor and disadvantaged” and “abused and neglected” children are “better off being cared for outside of the home” and in “early schooling environments” simply carries NO weight when it comes to applying it to ALL THE REST of the children!

Personally, at least at this moment, I am not thinking too highly of those people who occupy “mainstream America.” Maybe not their parallel in Britain, either.

(Insitutionalized: That’s what people used to say about what happened to those locked up in mental hospitals. It’s what happens to prisoners whose institutionalization keeps them permanent returnees. It’s what Red China used, what Hitler used….. The truth of the matter is that MANY, MANY mothers would NEVER choose to stay home to care for their children, not even their newborns, not their children under five or of any age. Their fathers would not make that choice, either. These parents do not WANT to stay home with their children. DO-NOT-WANT-TO. So, blaming “the state” is exactly – how helpful to the little ones growing up most of their waking hours of their lives in these day orphanages?)

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono (we are still waiting to hear that he has accomplished this job).  Click here to view or purchase – 

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site

++++

Please click here to read or to LEAVE A COMMENT

++++

++++

Saturday, April 5, 2014.  I did not sleep well last night.  Today is the day of the big percussion extravaganza I so want to attend at one of the local colleges here.  I am moments away from my daughter’s arrival to take me over there.  Am I nervous?  Yes.  Nearly unreasonably so.

Something in my dreams last night, dreams that I will never consciously remember, told me when I woke up the last time as morning arrived that I am dangerously missing one of the most essential ingredients to having a good life.  Self-confidence.

Oh what a blessed attribute of self self-confidence is.  Now that this concept has arisen to the surface of my thoughts I am understanding something differently about myself in my life.

Few things – other than disappointment itself – can hurt and hinder me as much as having my extremely fragile sense of self-confidence threatened.

Suddenly this morning hosts of situations from my life going all the way back to my so-abusive childhood have arisen to show me exactly where, when and how my self-confidence was destroyed.  I have so LITTLE of it from the beginning of my life my self-confidence might be the most valuable, precious, scarce, necessary and missing resource I so barely have.

I sure don’t have enough of it to comfortably take me out my apartment door this morning to attend a (to me) strange event in a strange place swarming with strange people.

For one thing I have lived long enough to be growing old – and I look it.  Being this old – all by itself – brings to mind how my having been diagnosed with advanced aggressive breast cancer in July 2007 tumbled my perceptions of myself in my body and therefore in this lifetime into the ground.

Added to that, after a year of fighting that cancer, the very person who should have been most in support of my continued survival, my oncologist, said to me at my last visit to him, “I wouldn’t bother having breast reconstruction if I were you.  You won’t live long enough to enjoy them.  And besides, we’d just have to cut them off when the cancer comes back again.”

8:00 am.  My daughter is here to pick me up to take me over to the college.

++++

Monday, April 7, 2014. Here I am perched on top of the fat book I ordered online to help me plow my way through Windows 8.1 on my new laptop. The book sits on top of the usual stool I use at my makeshift computer table (high, to keep baby fingers off of my keyboard), but today I am writing on my old laptop whose support for Windows XP expires today. The old computer is sitting on top of the new computer – which has been nothing but a pain in the you-know-what since I first turned it on.

My office? A shambles, actually. I have no idea how to make this area user-friendly for me, the person who is supposed to function as something else other than grandma babysitter. My body-brain is in no better shape. Scrambled. Off-key and off-kilter. That’s me.

Backing up to the percussion event I attended last Saturday. All went remarkably well! The set-up on the college campus was perfect. A large instrument staging area sat on the floor of the auditorium that doubles as a basketball court. It was surrounded by sound panels. The permanent seating went up above it in steps that allowed me to situate myself at a distance from the moderate crowd of about 150 interested people.

At one point the MC asked everyone to “please move to the area over there” as he pointed. 99% of the crowd got up and shifted as directed. Not me. And the place where I remained was the perfect spot to witness the unfolding, note by note, of a perfect musical extravaganza in percussion.

Interspersed between the performances were clinics on sight reading for snare drum and drumming technique by a visiting fantastic drummer from the east coast. I soaked it all up, wandering alone around areas of the campus during the “lunch on your own” (I ate Snickers) portion of the day.

I called my daughter to pick me up 2 hours before that day ended. We took the little ones to a park for an hour and then I was dropped off for my drumming lesson. I walked home across parking lots in the midst of roaring traffic. But I made it.

(I also slept 12 exhausted hours Saturday night in consequence.)

++

Yesterday began the nightmare of the NEW COMPUTER. The computer is the nicest I have ever had but Windows 8.1 is insane. Just saying. I am eternally grateful to my 28-year-old son for his help yesterday as he accessed my computer remotely and set it up to run as smoothly as possible. He is of the techno-love generation. I am not.

I hate change for the most part under the best of circumstances. I, along with everyone else running an older computer with Windows XP is being FORCED to abandon ship and jump into shark infested waters while I bleed techno-incompetence into the churning polluted waters. (Just saying.)

“All good things come to an end,” question mark?

I have never used a Mac computer nor do I have the finances to own one. I hear my tolerance for computer mayhem would be better served by that technology. In the meantime I have exactly TODAY to safely navigate the internet world on this old computer. If I could have gotten – FINALLY – a decent computer, which the new one is – that simply ran Windows XP I would be just fine. But sharks and barracudas do run the entire globe where money is concerned.

If it did any good to complain, inwardly and outwardly, I assure you I would be at the top of the heap.

++

Drumming. My Saturday lesson was fantastic. My fingers were not, however, remotely cooperative with their instruction. “SAY WHAT?” I had to tell my teacher as he positioned my fingers properly on my drumsticks for their next new move, “I am sorry. I kid you not, but those fingers are not connected to my brain! Therefore, I CANNOT DO THAT!”

So, my practice this week will not be particularly fun unless I sneak away from teach’s instructions to bouncing around willy-nilly to beats I enjoy. I have to snap my attention back to those errant fingers of mine, “Pay attention! I am TALKING TO YOU!”

The point is I am supposed to learn to separate signals to the digits between my thumb and my pinky so that the lightly and responsively roll in their balancing of the stick. The point is that I need to learn meticulously correct form in order to move into the direction of eventually being able to create 120 beats a measure in clearly defined 2-distinct-movement movements!

Something to aim for. So is being able to smoothly boss my new computer around.

Long ways to go? Am I confident I can reach my goals? I have to be. I can’t come up with another choice.

++

(Later I might write about my realization yesterday that I feel like a wild animal confined in a zoo living in a city.)

(Meanwhile, I will spend a chunk of this day watching YouTube videos about how to make peace with Windows 8.1 — ha.)

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono (we are still waiting to hear that he has accomplished this job).  Click here to view or purchase – 

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site

++++

Please click here to read or to LEAVE A COMMENT

++++

++++

Friday, April 04, 2014. I am not fond of days when I have nothing constructive to say. I do not see that I am even able to think constructively today. I cannot even define for myself what I think constructive thought even is. But whatever it may be I am identifying its existence by its absence.

It is warmer here in the north but yet again it is cloudy. I do not do well in cloudy climates any more than I do in frigid ones. I continually struggle to think and feel positively in this place, as I have mentioned many times in my posts since I returned here last fall after a 20-year absence from the northland.

I have to try to focus on miniscule aspects of my existence right now to find the positives. There ARE positives. I am having a hard time tuning into them so that I can feel positive resonating within. Like trying to listen to a radio station that is too far out of range to dial into. Static. Neuroscientists might even describe what captures my attention as “brain noise.”

I am never a fan of noise!

++

Two words popped into my thoughts: chattering tires. I cannot remember the last time those two words appeared in my thoughts. No doubt they are tied to a message I am receiving from my creative right brain hemisphere in some kind of an image form.

I Googled the words. What is tire chatter?

One site defines it this way: “It is when you are trail braking hard on the front, and you get a nasty vibration or even sometimes a hopping sensation from the front tire!”

Another site says this: “Wide, ultra-performance radials when turning sharp at slow speeds may “chatter” a bit. The severity depends on the surface, but some chatter is to be expected.”

Or, do I want to learn what aviation experts have to say about brakes, tires and landing gear?

Not so much…..

++

I can tell from even this simple search that what I am experiencing has to do with GOING, rate of speed, STOPPING…. Oh, I get it. My stress response system is out of whack. Surprising?

Not so much….

++

I Googled “brain noise” and received many thought provoking replies.

How about Wickipedia on NEURONAL NOISE? “Neuronal noise or neural noise refers to the random intrinsic electrical fluctuations within neuronal networks. These fluctuations are not associated with encoding a response to internal or external stimuli and can be from one to two orders of magnitude. Most noise commonly occurs below a voltage-threshold that is needed for an action potential to occur, but sometimes it can be present in the form of an action potential; for example, stochastic oscillations in pacemaker neurons in suprachiasmatic nucleus are partially responsible for the organization of circadian rhythms.”

+

How about, “Our Startle Response and Noise?” Oh, I bet this one is getting closer to a description of my current state!

“Crucial to survival, this instinctual reaction to noise enables us to go from a deep sleep to a quick sprint in a matter of seconds. . . or to do battle with surprising strength. Today, however, our stress response is getting knee-jerked around by all the bells and whistles of modern civilization. From the clatter and jar of diesels and dump trucks, to chest-thumping teenage car tunes, noise is almost impossible to block. It’s very uncontrollability further adds to the stressful impact.”

I have NO silence solace in this place I live in – inside or out. The ventilation system in this building drones with a dull roar throughout my walls and ceiling. In this tiny place I cannot escape the noise of my refrigerator, either. I timed it yesterday. It runs every 15 minutes for 15 minutes 24/7.

There is NO quiet outside. NOTHING but traffic noise. I have also lost all the privacy I created for myself in my walled Arizona garden. No privacy outside. Not good for me.

My stress response system is NEVER quiet where I live. I hate cities. Period. My body tells me why and how all of the time.

Is this CHATTERING? Yes! I cannot stop the sound here. I tried earplugs. I can hear the droning in my apartment wearing them. I created 3 fountains that run all of the time in this one room I am living in. The water chatters as it flows – but at least I CREATED those fountains. I manage them. But this is all wearing on me.

I am on edge.

I need to remind myself that this is normal for me here.

+

From ScienceDaily: Brain Noise Is Good: New Study Overturns Notion That Brain Noise Quiets Down With Maturity

Date: July 7, 2008 Source:Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care

Summary: Canadian scientists have shown that a noisy brain is a healthy brain. “Brain noise” is a term that has been used by neuroscientists to describe random brain activity that is not important to mental function. Intuitive notions of brain-behavior relationships would suggest that this brain noise quiets down as children mature into adults and become more efficient and consistent in their cognitive processing. But new research overturns this notion.

+

Does Background Noise Make Consumers Buy More Innovative Products?

June 19, 2012 — Moderate background noise enhances creativity and makes consumers more likely to buy new and innovative products, according to a new … full story

+

Brain Waves Control the Impact of Noise on Sleep

Sep. 6, 2011 — During sleep, our perception of the environment decreases. However the extent to which the human brain responds to surrounding noises during sleep remains unclear. Researchers have now used brain … full story

+

Playing White Noise in Class Can Help Inattentive Children Learn, but Hinder Others

Sep. 28, 2010 — Playing white noise in class can help inattentive children learn. Researchers tested the effect of the meaningless random noise on a group of 51 schoolchildren, finding that although it hindered the … full story

+

Oh, and there’s this –

‘Butterfly Effect’ in the Brain Makes the Brain Intrinsically Unreliable

June 30, 2010 — Next time your brain plays tricks on you, you have an excuse: according to new research, the brain is intrinsically … full story

+

The Noisy Brain – Edmund T Rolls

http://www.oxcns.org/b9_text.html Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-958786-5. The activity
of neurons in the brain is noisy in that their firing times are random when they are
 …

Brain ‘Noise‘ Increases With Age | LiveScience

http://www.livescience.com/2662-brain–noise-increases-age.html2008 … Noise in brain increases with age, could be sign of normal functioning.

++++

So. I recognize that I feel trapped in this apartment in this city in this climate. I recognize that the feeling state that resonates within me about being TRAPPED goes all the way through the 18 years of psychotic abuse I suffered from Mother. She trapped me nearly ALL of the time one way or the other, which included massive amounts of isolation and confinements.  TRAPPED is hard for me to ignore.

I have to turn to choices. I chose to come here. At some point I imagine I will choose to leave, hopefully to return to the region I left last October, although are many complications, nearly all of them tied to my poverty, about how any such transition can happen for me in the future.

Meanwhile I do look forward to the very NOISY percussion day event I plan to attend tomorrow followed at 4:30 in the afternoon by my second drumming lesson. I DO want to learn how to “chatter” my drumsticks as fast as I want to! Meanwhile….

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono (we are still waiting to hear that he has accomplished this job).  Click here to view or purchase – 

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site

++++

Please click here to read or to LEAVE A COMMENT

++++

++++

Monday, March 31, 2014. (#2) It comes to me as I inadvertently consider the implications contained in the first post I wrote today that severe early trauma survivors carry within us both the toxins of that trauma and the cure for those toxins. We are living paradox. How could we, how did we, how do with LIVE with what defies life?

We are not mediocre people and perhaps in a society that denies the fact that it more than welcomes mediocrity we threaten just by the fact that we are PEOPLE OF POWER. There could not be anything mediocre about us or we would not be here – as in, we would be long gone DEAD.

We are not status quo people, either. We were not formed in a status quo environment. Trauma is anything BUT status quo. Trauma exists at the same time it is the epitome of a challenge to what ordinary is. Trauma is an EXTRAORDINARY experience. If it was ordinary it would not be traumatic.

We are EXCEPTIONAL PEOPLE. We found ways to endure what could not be endured, many of us from the time we were born.

How do people who were not trauma-challenged during their most formative developmental stages of life ever come to KNOW that they are capable of greatness? We as survivors know we are capable of greatness because if we weren’t we would be – well, you know – DEAD.

Are we celebrated as the heroic warriors against the darkness of pervasive evil that we are, for that is what we survived?

I am just wondering, are there times (plenty of times) when nonsurvivors are not willing to know they are fully capable of listening to us tell of our reality simply because if they DID listen to us they would have to (1) recognize our greatness at the same time they would also have to (2) recognize that they have never grown as individuals so strong, so resilient or so powerful as we have?

Now. Make no mistake about it. “Shooting the messenger” is a pattern that exists all around us. Did we CHOOSE to be terrorized when we were little people, without solace, comfort, safety, protection or even love to sustain us?

We most certainly did NOT make this choice. But once in the broiler of early trauma that would have left us cinders and smoke if we had not been able to find what we needed inside of our self to endure and fight back we obviously made the right choice.

What of people who have never been put into any situation that would have required of them such choices, such actions?

What do people of trauma awaken in those without such horrible early histories of abuse and neglect?

I’ll let you know if I ever find such a person willing and able to tell me.

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono (we are still waiting to hear that he has accomplished this job).  Click here to view or purchase – 

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site

++++

Please click here to read or to LEAVE A COMMENT

++++

++++

Monday, March 31, 2014. I was talking on the telephone to a good friend last week when the word surreptitiously popped into my thoughts. I admit. I didn’t really know what it meant. Not specifically enough to know why it came to me in connection to how I feel – have always felt – when walking through ‘regular’ city housing neighborhoods.

I remember all the way back to how I felt at 18 shortly after I got out of Naval boot camp and into computer training school in San Diego. (Computers? What a horrible mismatch that field was for me!) I used to walk very late at night to and fro from Ocean Beach to the training center through such neighborhoods. What was always mirrored within me was a nearly devastating loneliness. “I don’t belong here. I’ve never fit in here. All those people. Secure in their solid cozy homes. Sharing their lives with each other, with their neighbors.”

Me? Having spent so many years of my abusive childhood living in a curved canvas Jamesway hut on the side of an Alaskan wilderness mountain. Fit in? Nowhere. I didn’t know what that feeling was then. I could only guess. I still have those same feelings walking down city sidewalks past ranch homes and ramblers and split-levels but I no longer have to guess why I have them.  I no longer wonder what I long for.

++

SURREPTITIOUS

1: done, made, or acquired by stealth :  clandestine

2:  acting or doing something clandestinely :  stealthy <a surreptitious glance>

 ++

That’s me. Me living a clandestine secret life as a trauma-changed severe early abuse and neglect survivor among ‘the regulars’, the ones who create and own the civilization I reside within.

Walking – invisible to all – down any street at any time. An unknown entity. But what I am grateful for is that now after all these years I know why.

++

I mention this word as it appears to me again in connection to a pleasant and informative telephone conversation I had last night with my ex, Joe. We were talking about events that transpired in connection with the lives of his friends over 40 years ago. All his friends.

He was born and raised in this area. Of course he would have had a circle of old friends. He fit in. He was (seemed to me) most appreciated, valued, loved, respected and welcome. Me? Living surreptitiously undercover in stealth mode as Joe’s wife? I went along but I felt inadequate. An outsider. Painfully excluded and not through any fault of my husband or his friends.

I was telling Joe about my feelings back then at the same time I told him where they originated, how and why.

“STOP IT!” he said to me right in the middle of one of my sentences. “JUST STOP IT!”

I did what I have done as a surreptitious individual all of my adult life. I shut up. Instantly. As if a barrier wall stronger than any metal on earth slammed down with me on the inside and everyone else on the outside.

We went on talking. About other things. Things acceptable to Joe. Things familiar. Things comfortable. Tolerable.

Meanwhile shut-up-me within this wall pounded and SHOUTED, “Wait one minute! I have something to say! I have a right to say it.”

After about ten minutes I was able to allow myself to bring up the “STOP IT” to talk about it.

I learned something.

Joe is not alone in needing to keep the truth of early abuse and neglect survivors silent. If our truth is NOT heard it does not really exist. Not in ‘their’ world. My truth could not be tolerated my Joe now. I can take that fact all the way back in my thinking past 40 years to realize NO possible way could we have maintained a marriage because who I am, what I know, how I feel, what happened to me, how that affected me, changed me, affects me for my lifetime had to be kept on the surreptitious side of a world of comfort for others that I cannot LIVE IN.

Living a lie in silence to keep other people comfortable in their reality is so not my thing. That’s what I was forced to do during those long 18 years when my life was hell within hell. I was forced by the circumstances of my life to live that way, even being surreptitious to myself. Surreptitious came natural to me when I was married to Joe because I knew no other way to live.

I had no friends in my childhood. Never. I didn’t know what a friend even was except as I watched other people being friends within circles of friendship. In order to have a relationship – something I define by the honest sharing with caring within it – I HAVE to be fully me. Not that I have to ‘burden’ other people with any projection that they have to cure or heal me. But anyone I would call a friend today knows exactly who I am and is not afraid of me or of my reality.

I AM a person, not a shadow/wraith/ghost of an un-dimensional being. Skittering, tramping, lying on my belly desperately trying to move forward in my life. Always in hiding, hidden, living surreptitiously behind a phony front designed to keep my reality apart from the reality of nontraumatized people so they do not have to feel uncomfortable.

I appreciate the opportunity I has last night to see these kinds of patterns in actions. I tested what I saw by bringing the conversation back to the “STOP IT” point. Why did Joe say that? What was he saying?

I know. He doesn’t and probably never will. In his reality – he can’t. WHY this is so is really none of my business. Not anymore.

Survivors tolerated trauma because it was a MUST. We had no choice. We had to in order to live.

It is not surprising that most ‘regular’ people cannot tolerate ANY PART of our trauma reality. They don’t have to. Yes, that leaves us in one world and them in another one. Yes, that mostly leaves us alone and lonely. Yes, that gives them the advantage. They can set the social rules.

When they say STOP IT to us – they mean it. Past that point we cannot go with them nor can they go with us.

++

I feel a surprising and unfamiliar sense of freedom this morning as a result of the part of last night’s conversation I am describing here. I somehow dissolved a wall of “surreptitiousosity” last night. I pulled myself BACK from that part of my past, from those patterns that operated for so long within me in my life when I so desperately wanted to be a part of some social group without knowing how much I wanted that. I set myself free by accepting my feelings AND the feelings of Joe.

Back then, how desperately I wanted to be liked. I wanted to have value to other people. I wanted to be accepted. I wanted people to want me in their life. I wanted to mean something to someone. I wanted to MATTER to others as if mattering to them meant I could BE BORN into that other world – as if I could become one of them.

What a joke.

I see that now.

Couldn’t happen.

No fault of mine. No fault in others. This is “a no fault state.” But as long as other people will not tolerate our full being with all we have been through TRAUMA will not be healed. As I have said so many times on this blog the BIG traumas we survived did not belong to us. They belonged to the bigger society that let those traumas happen.

Society has to hear the lessons within trauma, LEARN from what they hear and then CHANGE conditions so those traumas STOP!! As it is, trauma and those who survive it are forced to live a surreptitious life – hidden invisibly in silence. And the traumas go on….

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono (we are still waiting to hear that he has accomplished this job).  Click here to view or purchase – 

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site

++++

Please click here to read or to LEAVE A COMMENT

++++

++++

Saturday, March 29, 2014. Above my head. Blue sky this morning. And an eagle circling. So high above me. One solace taking me away, for a few moments, from this ugly, foreign city. I was comforted. The eagle has long since left this place where I could watch it. I won’t forget its visit.

++

Stricken with a surprise – of course unexpected – unanticipated in any way. My new computer arrived at a friend of mine’s office, delivered there to avoid any possibility of loss as I am not sure what happens in this apartment complex when something arrives here that does not fit in a small mailbox. I was grateful for this help and looking forward, finally, to this new computer’s arrival in my life.

A “not really but yes really” kind of dreaded hopefulness. I am not technosavvy. I hate change. My current slow laptop runs Windows XP which will not be supported by Microsoft after April 8^th. I really didn’t have a choice. I needed a new one.

Intimidating. At my son’s recommendation I bought a Dell 17 with a processor upgrade running Windows 8.1. Everyone I know runs Windows 7, but I figured that I would try to get a little bit ahead of the curve knowing in the future 7 will drop off of Microsoft’s radar before 8 will.

I ordered David Pogue’s, “The Missing Manual” for 8.1. In my own way I have been mentally and emotionally preparing for my “new baby” knowing I know next to NOTHING about all-this-jazz. But I’ve been PLANNING for this (unwanted but necessary) change, creating the most positive attitude I could manage. Last night my friend called, had the computer up, running, online – NOT at my house!?!?!

I could not explain my reaction. My friend was instantly enraged that I could possibly object to their assistance in “setting the computer up.” That rage shut me down so completely I have been leaking emotion out the soles of my feet ever since.

A BIG DEAL?

I had internally arranged to meet-n-greet this intimidating new technopartner-of-mind right out of the virgin box. MY hands taking the computer out. Nobody else’s.

I find now that I WANTED to “do this” my way. I WANT very little as I have written about on this blog before. WANTING anything during the 18 years of my childhood was TOXIC to me because psychotic abusive Mother USED any wanting/wishing/hoping I managed to touch inside of myself against me in VICIOUS ways.

Over and over again she set me up to want/wish/hope KNOWING somewhere in her deranged mind EXACTLY what she was going to do to crush me next. It always worked, too. In my innocence I never saw her evil attacks coming. NEVER. (Dissociation was handy that way.)

++

Nobody’s perfect. “Everyone has glitches,” as someone said to me last week.

It’s not my business what contributed to my friend’s explosion last night over the phone as I “dared” to have FEELINGS about – especially – not being ASKED if I wanted “help.”

Blah blah blah – fast forward through my emotional mined-quicksand to this moment nearly 24 hours later. Yes. The computer is here, delivered sweetly by a third party. I took it out of its box (but not FIRST and without the joy I had “planned for”) and it sits on my kitchen table like a lump of dead, broken toy.

Am I overreacting? From an outsider’s view, I suppose so. But not from mine.

I KNOW my history. And I know that this is the first new computer I have ever scraped the money together to buy for myself. I know how hard this move has been for me. How hard living in this cramped dark gardenless cage of an apartment through the horror of a frigid North Dakota winter has been for me. More fast-forwarding through blah blah blah.

How fragile any state of well-being — real and hoped for — is for severe infant-child abuse survivors.

I have been blessed with two long calls with a friend who lives far away from me but is very close in my heart that have helped me process the crushedness that arose for me over this teensy miscommunication and the explosion that followed. He is a survivor like I am. His kindness, compassion, empathy, understanding and wisdom helped me stop the inward craters from opening within me any further.

I don’t believe humans evolved to process information at the pace required in today’s frenetic world. My friend, meaning good, not harm, is evidently moving far too fast through life to be able to slow down far enough to HEAR ME. Truly hear me.

That is OK. It has to be.

But I am reminded yet again about how hard it is for me to make peace inside of myself and when I find any way to do that, how terribly delicate that peace really is.

Not a lasting peace. I have to come up with an entirely different plan about how I am going to cross the chasm that exists between my comfort and dexterity with this old computer and the entirely new, intimidating, downright scary transition I will have to do to make peace with a new computer which will, eventually, give me so much more of what I need than this old one does.

Peace again with my well-intentioned friend? I trust our relationship. We will of course “get past this.” At the same time – having been built through trauma the way that I was – I have yet another strange wound ricocheting down the corridors of time within which I have more wounds than I can barely bear as it is. So – something has now CHANGED inside of me regarding my relationship with this person. I learned something the hard way. I don’t forget these things.

Not even if I want to.

++

While all the sweetness I had worked to put in to the computer change in my life has gone away, I did manage to hold onto the precious sweetness of happiness about my decision to invest in professional drumming lessons for myself.

A friend took me to my first lesson today and I could not be more tickled. Gently, sweetly tickled. Brett spent this first 30 minutes carefully – and I mean CARE-FULL-ly arranging my shoulders, arms, wrists, hands and fingers into precise shape as he dictated precise motion. I felt like an awkward mannequin assemblage, clumsy and lost – but also feeling delighted in being on that little stool in that tiny (I have claustrophobia) room with that amazingly gifted musician-teacher.

Lucky!

I was not scared. I was not crushed. Nothing big like a mammoth trampled my joy or my hopes that I can ACTUALLY learn to play DRUMS!

Not a note. Not a tap of sound today. Hey! This is the RIGHT way to learn an instrument! I am SO Happy!

And happy has such precious value to me. I was formed to be nearly constitutionally incapable of feeling safe enough in the world to feel joy – or to play! All three are intimately connected — safety, joy and play are inextricably intertwined.

So while any possibility of playfulness has at least currently been removed from my interactions with this new computer in my kitchen, I DO have hope at least I can plow forward, trudge along forward, live through whatever it takes next to get my computer-plan back online in some sort of fashion.

And I most certainly have drumming hopes! Next weekend is the all-day percussion event at a local college I mentioned here recently, so no lesson again for two weeks. By then I hope to be a much-skilled mannequin moving my elbows this way while my wrists don’t swivel as my drumsticks go that way – and then reverse. I will PRACTICE as if my life depends on it, you can bet!!!

I am STARVED for the experience of inner personal joy (is there some other kind?) that I imagine non-abused people can at least some of the time simply take for granted.

++

PS. Personally, I don’t think anything about being alive is simple for early severe abuse and neglect survivors. EVERYTHING has a cost – good or bad. Trauma survivorship requires HUGE outputs of resources that we have ALWAYS had great difficulty in providing for ourselves. We simply pay our entire life for the shortages of goodness we did not receive and the abundance of harm we did receive.

Yet sometimes I just marvel at the SWEETNESS inside of me. It was there in me as a child. It has always been there, always been a part of who I am. I am extremely tender – and yes, that does mean I am extremely sensitive.

I am done apologizing for that fact.

++++

Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono (we are still waiting to hear that he has accomplished this job).  Click here to view or purchase — 

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment

++++