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

OK, so I am choosing not to let this turn of the seasons that has brought us all to another American Mother’s Day pass without saying something about my own mother.  I can’t say I am happy at doing so, but here I am.

I believe that I wrote recently in a post about what my daughter and her husband finally remembered about what made their little dog, Who Who, perpetually wish to destroy all children.  A gathering in their home, a friend’s five-year-old daughter alone in the kitchen with the dog, a sudden screech of pain from puppy followed by the menacing snarl of a wolf (all from this then 2 1/2 –year-old Pomeranian-Chihuahua mix small dog).

Of course the child denied hurting the dog.  Nobody every knew what she did.  But the dog, being a very smart animal, decided at the instant  she suffered pain at the hands of this child that forevermore she would simply do everything in her power to vanquish children of ANY age from her universe.

Of course this pattern only worked as clearly as it did because Who Who has always been a cherished pet raised without abuse of any kind until that moment.  If she HAD been previously abused, abused from birth, how would she be any different than she is now.  After all, it’s only possible to HATE children so much – and this dog appears to be maxed out in her defensive hate just as she is.  (She nipped my grandson, hence her new home with grandma.)

++

I don’t see my mother’s hatred of me as operating much differently than I see it in this dog.  True, my mother in her human body was SUPPOSED to operate differently, but she didn’t.  She didn’t, I believe, because she was operating on the level of physiological reaction only and had no choice any more than this dog does.

(Not that I ever did anything to hurt my mother, even though she was convinced I tried to kill her when I was being born.  But SOME people had hurt my mother when she was very little and what she did to me was caused by this early harm.)

Trying to think up reasons why a mother such as mine was could continually do what she did to me for 18 years is actually ridiculous.  She was simply so changed in her physiological development in reaction to the traumas of her own earliest years that what was left of her was an ANIMAL rather than a HUMAN being.

It would have been as impossible for anyone to have reasoned my mother out of how she felt/thought of me and acted toward me as it would be to change this dog of mine.  Considering that our species has the distinction in all of Creation to have BOTH animal and a higher-order spiritual side to us, it is when early trauma changes a body that the animal side takes over that potential for the kind of insane abuse my mother rendered toward me becomes not only possible, but as likely as it is for a dog like Who Who to ‘decide’ in an unconscious instant that destroying children is preferable for her own survival rather than to act any differently.

To think any differently about my mother would be to anthropomorphize her.  Sorry, big word – but the right one:

: to attribute human form or personality to

: to attribute human form or personality to things not human

My mother was NOT fully human – certainly not a ‘modern’ evolved human being.  She was a trauma-changed, evolutionarily altered VERSION of a human being.  This is NOT the same as having modern human abilities.

Do I PITY my dead mother?  Yes, I do.  I do not believe that she ever knew during the 18 long years I lived in her home that what she did to me was wrong.  Not once.  Not for an instant.  Never.  She did not have the capacity to know that any more than Who Who does – or ever will.

++++

S.T.E.P. Parenting Program – CHECK IT OUT HERE!

AND please think about this:

+CALL FOR GUEST WRITERS HERE!! PLEASE CONSIDER….

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

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

My daughter has now sent me Question #2 to respond to for our book.  I woke this morning with the fear that during my book writing process I will not be able to write for this blog.  How will I maintain Stop the Storm if I can’t write here?  Responding to commenters is a separate writing adventure.  I know I can do that.  But writing here?  Now what?

I have mentioned before that I have identified that I have found ways to continually deplete the reservoir that holds ‘my story’ both by writing posts here and by talking to people I am close to when I need to.  This process I have agreed with myself – and my daughter – to participate in so that an actual book can come out at the end of it will NOT allow me to continue to do either of these two things while the book is being written.

In time perhaps I can find a way to keep my writing processes completely sequestered and closed off from one another, but I don’t know how to do that yet.  The simplest solution that I could hope for is that with this invitation to this blog’s readers to write some posts of their own that I can post here the gap that will continue to exist in my blog-writing-posting patterns will not be so worrisome to me over the next 3 to 5 months while I answer the 19 questions my daughter will be asking of me for this book.

The only way I can think of for readers to post their writings here is for any who wish to to send me a comment anywhere on this blog that lets me clearly know you are offering your writing for a post.  I can then email the commenter back privately and they can send a word document back to me as an email attachment that I will then post.

This means that guest posts cannot contain complicated formatting that I cannot reproduce here.  Any photograph would have to come as an attachment also with instructions about where I should put it in the guest post once I have received it here.

The other option is for readers to create introductions to their own blog posts that can be sent to me in the same way I just mentioned that includes the active links to their own blog posts.

I hope readers will think about the possibilities I mention.  It is very clear to me today that ‘there is only so much of me’ and that ‘so much of me’ is going to be channeled into the answering of the 19 questions — first and foremost.

++

My brain is very busy with a very rapidly running mind-chatter this morning that I haven’t experienced since I started this blog because I have freely allowed myself to use the blog to STOP IT.  I had a therapist one time describe these kinds of rapid overlapping and tumbling thought patterns as being ‘thought racing’, which they tied to depression.  This is so much more than that!!

But at this point for my writing to be productive towards the creation of an actual book I have to work with myself differently or no book will ever be written.

So, those of you who might be able to help me, this blog and readers out over these next 3 to 5 months — please think about what I mention here!  Much appreciation and thanks to you ALL!  I KNOW you have much to say — !!

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

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

Today I completed my response to Question #1 of the 19 questions my daughter has designed for me to answer for the book about my story that she and I are writing.  I will take the rest of today off and she will send me #2 tomorrow.  I will then spend the following four days – 96 hours – letting myself inwardly prepare to respond to that question.

So far I am much impressed with how things went writing #1’s response, though there were agonizing moments during the process in which I thought, “I will not survive the writing of this book.  It will kill me.”

Perhaps that will prove to be true, but I do not care.  I will do whatever it takes over the next 3 – 5 months to complete my part of this mother-daughter writing project.

One surprising reward so far is that in contemplating in writing my #1 response (after spending my first 4 days dutifully NOT writing it) my brain recombined information in the answer that truly amazed me.  I asked myself how it was possible that I had never before SEEN what appeared to me so clearly as I wrote my response.

I have a friend who tells me that no doubt every single thing that has happened to me prior to this time along with all the hard work I have done in researching from the inside out, has fully prepared me for what I am doing now.  After my experience with #1 – I believe it.

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

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

Truthfulness is the key to healing and the key to good living.  Truthfulness is NOT what anyone could have found in my family of origin.  NOBODY knew the truth within our walls, and I believe this is directly tied to the Borderline Personality Disorder my mother suffered from.  If a person doesn’t know something is lost they will not find it.  Truthfulness simply did not exist because my mother had lost sight of her truth from the time she was a very tiny child.

I think about what the developmental neuroscientists say about the absolute importance of putting experience into words — that other people who care listen to us speak the truth of our experience — for the healthy growth and well-being of children from their earliest ages and stages of development in the world.   But it isn’t just the telling of one’s personal experiences of life that creates healthy patterns in a little one’s body-brain.  It is the telling of TRUTHFUL stories of our experiences that makes us well.

So it stands to reason in my thinking that part of the reason nobody listened to how I and my 5 siblings felt about ourselves in the world had to do with this missing and completely absent quality of truthfulness.  In fact, the entire environment of our very abusive and very sick home (and the people in it) was fed and sustained by the absence of truth.  Truth was never let inside our door.

++

I suspect that this missing truth is what contributes to the incoherency that is a part of insecurely attached adult life-story telling.  Our narratives become lost in time and space without truth as our anchor point.  Our stories swirl around without having a focus.  Our words become scrambled.  Our tale becomes lost in a vortex of unreality because the one single factor that would most give us stability and structure in our life does not exist.  Truthfulness, knowing THE truth, knowing OUR truth allows us to orient and organize our SELF in the world.  Without it being present no story can truly make sense.

There is much said and written about how SECRETS and ISOLATION foster infant-child abuse in families and facilitate the passing-down of ongoing unresolved traumatic patterns of being (and relationship) within families.  As I think about Karpman’s article that I mentioned in yesterday’s post (+OVERWHELMED BY TRAUMA, OVERWHELMED BY WORDS: LINK TO AN ARTICLE ABOUT TRAUMA DRAMA THAT CAN HELP US) I can think about secrets in terms of their existence in CLOSED PRIVATE spaces.

Closed and private is what we can usually say about what goes on within a person’s mind.  That is supposed to be the most closed and private domain a person possesses.  It is within our mind that we contain aspects of our truth that we can choose to speak about — or not to speak about.

It is within our mind that we hold our most sacred personal secrets within which we can cherish (for good or for ill) our own truths.

Yet within the mind of my Borderline mother there were no clear boundaries between the internal workings of her mind and the external projections of her mind.  My mother’s brain had not formed during the early traumatic stresses of her life to know the difference between what was supposed to stay inside her mind as a part of who SHE was and what was ‘appropriate’ to share with others.

My mother’s truth was trauma.  She acted out trauma for her entire life.  She had no words and no way to THINK about the truth of her trauma.  It simply existed in patterns of mostly horrible drama that she acted-enacted throughout her life.

++

NOBODY listened to my mother when she was little.  She was left within the privacy of her own developing brain-mind to figure out what was what in the world — and why.

NOBODY cared what my mother’s truth was.  Nobody spoke the truth in her home of origin.  Nobody helped my mother to sort out the truth from lies or to understand the family secrets that were acted out through the drama her family acted out all of the time.

Leaving a child alone to figure out the complexities of life in an environment of neglect and maltreatment is a recipe for disaster.  My mother was very much a part of the generations who believed that keeping the family skeletons in the closet had to be done at all costs, and that ‘airing one’s dirty laundry’ in public was the worst of crimes.  The public image of perfection based on pretense was just the way many people lived out their lives.

It was EXPECTED that EVERYONE kept their secrets within their family.  Better yet, it was even better to keep secrets FROM your family.  “See, speak, hear no evil” fostered lies disguised as secrets, a perfect environment to grow the nasty moldy infectious and toxic patterns of lies, silence and abuse that so often ends up as family trauma and abuse.

++

As I search for and describe today in my healing what I know as truth I realize that the inner and outer circumstances of my mother’s particular universe from birth had acted to create for her an actual cult of mistruths and lies.  She had been so brainwashed from birth by the people who held all the power in her world to believe what they told her (in word, action and lack of action) that her powers to know truth from fiction was stolen from her for her lifetime.

I have read and transcribed millions of my mother’s words that were ‘accidentally’ left to me after her death.  Of all those words I can feel the ring of truth in only a few handfuls of letters combined into coherency.  When I look at her writing now in the order I have placed them in time and space-place I realize that the only time in her writings that she was free enough to try to express her reality was in the stories she wrote around age ten:  +MY MOTHER’S CHILDHOOD STORIES

Because I know a lot about my mother I know that nothing in my mother’s life ever truly made any more sense to her than it did when she wrote her childhood stories.  My mother needed someone to TALK to her, to tell her the truth, to ask her how she felt, to let her ask questions, and to help her understand how the truth of the people who controlled her life was hurting, scaring and confusing her.

But, no, none of that happened for her.  Whatever the truth actually was did not exist in her infant-childhood world any more than it existed in mine.

For whatever reasons I did not leave my earliest years having lost the three most important qualities I have:  The ability to know there is such a thing as the truth, the ability to search for it (which includes desire and willingness) and the ability to know the truth when I encounter it.

That retaining these abilities — or losing them — actually happens on a physiological level might seem so fantastic as to be unbelievable.  But this is exactly where the ability to negotiate a life with truth IN IT actually resides.

Did the grownups in my mother’s life have the ability to know a lie from the truth?  Did they have the ability to CHOOSE whether or not they included the truth in their lives?  Or were they like my mother was having been built from the time of their own birth so that their innate ability to include the truth in their lives had been physiologically robbed from them, as well?

++

I don’t have access at the moment to the 12th step Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book, but the topic of the truth (of honesty) is addressed in the ‘how it works’ section that is read at the start of their meetings that contains reference to those ‘unfortunates’ who ‘are incapable’ of being honest with themselves.  The reading says something like ‘They seem to have been born that way.’

People ARE NOT BORN to leave the truth out of their version of reality.  They are MADE that way 99%+ of the time.

As an infant-child’s body-brain is growing and developing what is fed to it during those critical stages actually forms the wiring and the patterns for processing information about the self and others in the world.  If the truth is completely left out of the picture during these critical stages, it is entirely possible that the trauma that ALSO simultaneously exists in the earliest environment will remove from a person the ability to negotiate a life that has the truth in it.

Of course the truth can be permanently missing from a person’s life if they were formed in environments that did not allow the truth to be present (recognized, spoken of and talked about).  In fact, the truth can be missing within entire families.  It can be missing down generations.  It can even be missing from entire civilizations, cultures and societies.

++

What we survivors of severe early trauma and abuse actually do as we heal is to flip the chalkboard over and begin again on the other blank side.  Those of us who managed to escape the atrocities of trauma and abuse that happened to us during our infant-childhoods with our ability to know the truth intact have this ability on the PHYSIOLOGICAL level.  We can FEEL the truth — in our body — and we can THEN process this information within our brain-mind — and express it in images and words.

There is nothing magical about having this ability at the same time it can seem pretty mysterious that some people have it and some people do not have it.

I believe this is a FACT.

For some reason the patterns of Alcoholics Anonymous spring to my mind again.  Just as that program states, ANYONE who has the desire and the willingness to begin to allow truth into their life CAN DO IT, no matter how difficult the process might be.

But again, for people like my mother was (and my father by proximity to her) who have no way of knowing the truth is MISSING are not likely to value the truth enough to go seeking after it.

If we come from families that were infested with and infected by intergenerational patterns of trauma (drama) that happened within environments of the ABSENCE of truth, it is NOT to them that we can turn to (obviously) locate the truth.  With one exception:  If we educate and inform ourselves about trauma and the dramas that living-trauma creates we can learn to recognize the truth by deciphering the ACTS and ACTIONS of other people’s lives.

But ‘the truth’ is not a ‘thing’ that we can find and then try to pass over to anyone else.  The ability to know truth exists within the privacy of a person’s body-brain-mind — or it doesn’t.  If a person’s ‘truth switch’ was turned off during their earliest stages of development in an environment of trauma — like my mother’s was — such a person will be left with their own constructed-in-childhood version of the truth that is NOT PHYSIOLOGICALLY open to negotiation except in the rarest of circumstances.

Sadly, I suspect that it is along the spectrum of so-called ‘personality disorders’ that this inability to negotiate the truth is most often found.    To be able to accurately understand the factors that ACTUALLY contribute to the formation of ‘personality disorders’ we would have to expand the tiny island of what is currently known about these disorders into a land mass the size of a continent.

In other words, we do not currently know the truth about what happens during the early stages of development to remove from some people the ability to process the information that ‘the truth’ contains.

I do not believe that the truth is ‘relative’ as many people claim.  Whatever might exist of ‘relative truth’ lies within the private realm of individual minds.

The actual truth, I believe, lies within the public domain.  While it can be accessed on the private, personal level it exists outside the private sphere within the public domain.

++

This post leaves me with the suspicion that there is a direct connection between the ability to negotiate truth and the ability to practice true empathy.  It would be through true empathy that the truth is discovered and processed.

Because the quality of earliest infant-caregiver attachment interactions — be they safe and secure or the opposite — in interaction with genetic potential combinations — directly impacts the physiological development of the human ability to experience true empathy, the quality of these earliest interactions with the infant’s environment ALSO and at the SAME TIME affects a person’s forming abilities to know the truth.

For members of our human species both of these connected abilities — being able to know the truth and to experience true empathy — are directly connected to WORDS.  In our primitive beginnings back to about 140,000 years ago our species did not have the ability to use words.  But we evolved this ability, and now our verbal abilities are a necessary and required component of both our ability to negotiate a life based on truth and true empathy.

Our highest brain-functioning abilities are based on the ability to consciously THINK and communicate to our self and to others in words.  But having the ability to use words is not enough to guarantee that a person has the physiological ability for either ‘truth’ or ’empathy’.  True, preverbal humans no doubt had finely tuned abilities to communicate with one another through empathic abilities just as infants (and even many animals) do.  But until words came into human’s existence the ability to live a life based on false-truth probably did not exist.

++

My mother’s entire life from start to finish was a life constructed from false-truth.  Any life story my mother would have narrated would have been incoherent because without the REAL TRUTH there was nothing to glue her story into a coherent whole.

Gaps and holes and missing pieces, skipped passages, circular thinking, redundancies and repetitions, misdirections, inaccuracies, strange twists and turns, denials, warped distortion of facts, mis-attributions, discrepancies, avoidances, dismissiveness, exaggerations, projections, obsessions — all of these appear in the patterns of words used in life story narratives where the truth is missing.

For ALL of us who have survived our early years in hell — the first step is to admit this FIRST FACT.  My mother could NEVER do this!!  The fact that I can, that this blog’s readers can admit the truth about the hurt and trauma in our earliest life (along with all that has followed) means to me that we are the ones that have the chance to heal in ways that in her illness my unfortunate mother never could.

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

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

Here is the information about an extremely important article about how trauma drama operates in our lives.  I found it on The International Transactional Analysis Association website.  PLEASE click on the title of this article and read it!!!  It contains the best description I have ever read of creative ways to look both at what happened to us in our home of origin and what has happened in our adult lives as well.  I believe this information is important not only for severe infant-child abuse survivors, but for all of us.  These patterns can operate without our conscious awareness within every human interaction that we have.

Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis

by Stephen B, Karpman, M.D.*

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

This articles contains gems of wisdom that can help us to begin to change how we view our history — our history of our past, of our present moments, and our yet-to-be-written history that lies in our future.  This article clearly defines patterns that can operate outside the range of our current understanding, but we can change these patterns through one simple (!!) act:  Bring the patterns into our conscious awareness.

I personally don’t believe there is a better way to begin to make these changes than to thoroughly read and contemplate what Dr. Karpman has written in this article.

I know some of the specific terminology used might not mean a thing, but as you read pay close attention to how your body feels.  It will tell you when words you read are making very real sense!  This is worth the read, and is the only literal description of the patterns of trauma-in-drama that actually fit the patterns of abuse that my mother did to me.

++

As I have mentioned before I have inherited my daughter’s much loved 2 1/2 year old PomChi (Pomeranian-Long-haired Chihuahua) dog.  She had to come to live with me after she bit my one-year-old grandson.  Who Who used to be just fine with children until she was hurt by a five year old girl outside the range of any adult’s vision during a dinner party my daughter held.  Ever since that afternoon’s sudden screech of pain and the immediately following very serious snarl, Who Who has never been safe around children (nor will she ever be again).

So, I now have the pleasure of the companionship of Who Who.  This morning as I pondered the story I am going to tell in the book my daughter and I are writing, I remembered that I once heard that an intelligent dog can learn 300 words in its lifetime.

I often see Who Who responding to words she knows with a flash of intelligence in her eyes when I say specific words to her like ‘toy’, ‘ball’, ‘eat’, ‘walk’, ‘kennel up’, ‘sit’, ‘down’, ‘come’, etc.  Each immediate response of intelligence is then followed by a correspondingly appropriate action.

She learns rapidly.  I have recently taught her the word ‘chicky’ in relation to caring for our one-week-old new chickens that are sequestered behind closed doors in safety.  I say the word and off she bounds enthusiastically to the door of the ‘chicky room’ as she eagerly waits for me to open it for her so she can check on our brood.

As I was thinking about my book-writing process this morning I imagined how Who Who would react if I were to speak all the words that she knows in rapid succession without a pause in between them.  I can see her golden brown eyes looking puzzled, her head cocked, her body poised to respond — to WHAT?

What ‘comprehensible structure’ could any dog actually create out of this pattern of words?  Who Who would be overwhelmed, confused, disoriented – and ultimately ‘disorganized’ if I spoke to her without first making sure HOW I said WHAT I said to her was given in a way that she could understand.  Karpman’s article can give us some tools we can use as we attempt to structure a comprehensible story of the traumas of our life.

++++

The simplest way that I can think of to think about trauma is to remember that trauma is in its essence an OVERWHELMING experience.  Those of us who suffer for our entire lifetimes with the aftermath of infant-child abuse trauma (most powerfully because the stress of trauma altered our physiological development and gave us an insecure attachment disorder) can remain caught in that same kind of moment that I imagine Who Who would be in if I overwhelmed her with too many words.

Trauma can be extremely difficult to put into words at the same time that naming and describing trauma is an important step to healing it.

In the same way my dog can become overwhelmed with words, so too can we be as we try to use words to describe ourselves in a life that has extreme trauma at is formative basis.  This is why adult attachment shows up for assessment through the inability to tell a coherent story-narrative of their life.

This is why I cannot write my book without my daughter’s assistance.  My disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment pattern by definition makes it impossible for me to tell my story — or to write it — in anything other than a disorganized-disoriented way.

And this is why I am recommending the article I mention at the start of this post.  It offers an organized and orienting framework for looking at our trauma-drama lives.  It can give us within this framework space and time to pause in between the words that come to us about our experiences so that we can begin to make a new sense of things.  (The same way that creating spaces around the words I tell Who Who allows her to understand what I am saying.)

++

Some examples:  Every single trauma-abuse experience that we endured contained combinations of the dynamics that Karpman describes.  Most severe infant-child abuse occurs in what Karpman describes as the ‘closed-private’ settings.  For my mother, what was better than to find a ‘private’ setting on a remote Alaskan mountain homestead to serve as her abuse setting?  Her abuse of me could then be done both inside our dwelling as a ‘closed-private’ setting OR outdoors as this was only barely an ‘open-private’ setting.  There were no neighbors anywhere near us — the PERFECT isolated abuse stage!

Of course she was nicey-nice in public.  Even a telephone call from the ‘public’ sphere would change her from ‘private’ demon back to public nicey-nice.

Of course she confused (and contaminated) public and private, like when she sent a paddle to my school’s principle with a note telling him if I behaved badly he had her full permission to spank me.  Or how she could so terrorize me at home that I carried my terror of her out the door with me like a mummy carries its shroud, afraid to do or say anything that might be wrong and travel back home to her somehow causing her yet again to ‘have to’ punish me.

In fact, every other human being was a part of her ‘public’ world, my siblings, grandmother and father included.  That meant that even though these others were certainly witnesses to her abuse of me, there was a whole other world of private-private to which she made certain only she and I were admitted.  (Now THAT was world was REALLY scary!!)

In my mother’s sick mind I victimized her.  I had persecuted and victimized her as ‘the devil’s child’ since the time of my birthing when I tried to kill her!  Yet even as she victimized and persecuted me, my ‘release’ or my ‘rescuing’ happened when SHE stopped a beating, fed me, let me use the bathroom, go to school, get out of the corner or out of bed after days/weeks of being confined there by her.

My mother made sure everyone else in the family ‘knew’ I victimized them, also.  “If it weren’t for Linda and the trouble she causes…….”

And NEVER would my mother allow anyone else to ‘rescue’ me.  She forbid even my siblings to speak to me most of the time.  She moved from LA to Alaska to prevent my grandmother from ‘rescuing’ me, and my father sure didn’t do it!

++

I have included many posts on this blog about how unsafe and insecure early caregiver-infant/child attachment relationships can be assessed during adulthood through the Adult Attachment Interview process.  Rather than repeat any of this information I am including the following links to some of these posts:

+ENCOURAGING A READ OF THE ADULT ATTACHMENT ASSESSMENT INTERVIEW (protocol link here)

+ADULT ATTACHMENT INTERVIEW PROTOCOL

+NEEDY PEOPLE AND BUMPY CONVERSATIONS (GRICE’S MAXIMS, AGAIN!)

+HOW NICE TO SAY, “BYE! BYE!” TO TRAUMA DRAMA

+TRAUMA SIGNALS THROUGH ATTACHMENT

+EXCLUSIVE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY OWNED BY SEVERE ABUSE SURVIVORS

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

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

This post started out to be a simple accumulation of this blog’s posts on right and left brain development – but the list of links a search of the blog brought to my attention on the topic was a massive one!  I gave up trying to figure out which ones were best to highlight to help newly arrived blog readers understand the context of this blog, so here is (still only a partial) list of previous posts that form a foundation to the things I currently tend to write about on this blog related to how severe infant-child abuse and neglect can change early physiological development of the body-brain:

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

+IMPORTANT NEW RESEARCH ON ‘EXECUTIVE FUNCTION’ OF THE BRAIN – AND INFANT EXPERIENCE IMPACTS THESE ABILITIES

+WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO US: VIOLENT TRAUMA, MALTREATMENT, ATTACHMENT – BIRTH TO AGE THREE (and beyond)

+A COLLECTION OF POSTS RELATED TO — CALM — AND ABUSE RELATED COMPLICATIONS

+THE POWER OF LEARNING HOW TO SHORTCUT THE TRAUMA CYCLE

+NO REAL CHOICE: WE HAVE TO UNDERSTAND OUR DEVELOPMENTAL CHANGES FROM INFANT-CHILD ABUSE – NOW!

+A COLLECTION OF THIS BLOG’S LINKS ON DISSOCIATION AND DISORGANIZED-DISORIENTED INSECURE ATTACHMENT

EARLY TRAUMA BUILDS DISSOCIATION INTO THE BRAIN

+’DIS-ASSOCIATION’ BETWEEN RIGHT-LEFT BRAIN HEMISPHERES AND DISMISSIVE-AVOIDANT INSECURE ATTACHMENT DISORDERS

**Containment and the hemispheres

 ++

+WHICH HAND DO YOU USE?

++

+SIEGEL ON DEVELOPING CHILD’S BRAIN – ATTACHMENT

+SIEGEL – ANTICIPATION, TIME AND COHERENCE OF MIND

+SIEGEL ON MINDS CREATE MINDS

+ANTI-DISSOCIATION: REMEMBERING THE FEELING OF FEELING ONE’S SELF IN ONE’S LIFE

+DISSOCIATION: MEMORY OF ONGOING EXPERIENCE FROM THE PREY’S POINT OF VIEW

+INFANT-CHILD ABUSE: WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS, THE BRAIN CHANGES

+INFANT-CHILD ABUSE: WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS, THE BRAIN CHANGES

+SCHORE ON BRAIN AND NERVOUS SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT

+HOW DOES THE SELF GET FORMED? HERE’S A WHOLE LOT OF IMPORTANT INFO

+HEALING TRAUMA AT OUR BODY-BRAIN CENTER

+SIEGEL – UNRESOLVED TRAUMA – INFLUENCE SELF-ORGANIZATION THROUGH GENERATIONS

+INFO ON WINDOWS OF EMOTIONAL TOLERANCE

+OUR STRESS RESPONSE IS WHAT WE PASS DOWN TO OUR KIDS

+INFANT-CHILD TRAUMA CHANGES THE VAGUS NERVE’S DEVELOPMENT

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

+MY MOTHER’S VAGUS NERVE: THE MAKING OF HER PERFECT BORDERLINE STORM?

++

+IT WASN’T FUNNY: THE BUZZARD THAT ATE MY MOTHER

+SOMETHING WENT TERRIBLY WRONG WITH MY MOTHER’S PRECUNEUS

+ABUSIVE PARENTS HAVE THE WEAKEST SELVES POSSIBLE

+THE TOPIC OF TEASING: TOO HARD TO CONSIDER?

+A LONG, THOUGHTFUL LOOK AT VERBAL ABUSE AS MALIGNANT TEASING

+THE ‘TERROR-ABLE’ CONSEQUENCES OF INFANT-CHILDHOOD VERBAL ABUSE

+IN THE PRESENCE OF LAUGHTER WE ARE SAFE, SECURE AND FREE

 ++

+REALLY COOL WEBSITE ON THE BRAIN

 ++

+LEFT BRAIN, RIGHT BRAIN — ‘WHO’ HAS THE TRUTH?

++LIMBIC SYSTEM

++NOTES ON RIGHT BRAIN DEVELOPMENT

++SCHORE ON DEVLOPMENT OF RIGHT BRAIN

++NOTES ON SCHORE – RIGHT BRAIN

+SIEGEL ON LEFT BRAIN DEVELOPMENT

+SIEGEL ON RIGHT BRAIN DEVELOPMENT

+SIEGEL – LEFT BRAIN – REASON

+SIEGEL ON BRAIN INTEGRATION PROCESSES – SELF ORGANIZATION

+SEIGEL ON BRAIN LATERALIZATION

+SEIGEL ON LATERALIZATION (more)

+SIEGEL ON BRAIN HEMISPHERE CONSCOUSNESS

+SIEGEL – DISORIENTED MIND

+SIEGEL ON EMOTIONS

++NOTES ON SCHORE – EMOTIONS

+SIEGEL – EMOTIONAL REGULATION

** Schore – Notes on Developmental Emotional Dysregulation

**Dr. Allan Schore on Emotional Regulation – Notes

*Notes on Schore

+SIEGEL – DEFINING EMOTIONS

+SEIGEL ON EMOTION AND BRAIN REGIONS

+SIEGEL – EMOTIONS AND A SENSE OF TIME

+SIEGEL ON MINDSIGHT

++SCHORE ON MATERNAL-INFANT MIND SHAPING

+SIEGEL – EMOTIONAL REGULATION AND DISORGANIZED ATTACHMENT

+SEIGEL ON EARLY TRAUMA, I CALL A BROKEN HEART

+SEIGEL ON RESPONSE FLEXIBILITY

+EXTREME STATES AND BRAIN REWIRING

+LEFT, RIGHT, CENTER AND HIGHER BRAIN: MY RIGHT TO WRITE!

+GENDER AND THE BRAIN — DIFFERENCES AND EARLY TRAUMA

 ++

+HAVE FUN WITH THIS SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL BRAIN BUILDING EXERCISE!

+WHAT WE MOST NEED TO KNOW: HOW MOTHERING BUILDS THE INFANT BRAIN

+MOTHERING: WHEN IT’S RIGHT, WHEN IT’S WRONG

+ATTACHMENT – HOW WE ARE WHO WE ARE

+TO BE OR NOT TO BE A TRAUMA-CHANGED HUMAN — THE QUALITY OF MOTHERING HOLDS THE ABSOLUTE KEY

+”MOTHER! WHERE ART THOU?” — RESPONDING TO AN INFANT-CHILD’S CRY OF NEED

+PLAY AS AN INDICATOR OF SAFETY AND SECURITY IN A BENEVOLENT WORLD

 ++

+THOUGHTS ON THE TRIGGER POINT OF SHAME

++ DR. SCHORE ON SHAME

 ++

+PTSD AND SEVERE CHILD ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – PART ONE

+PTSD AND SEVERE ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – PART TWO

+PTSD AND SEVERE ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – PART THREE

+PTSD AND SEVERE ABUSE SURVIVORSHIP – CONCLUSION

 ++

+EARLY ABUSE AFFECTS OUR REACTION TO ADULT TRAUMA EXPOSURE

 ++

+DISSOCIATION AND THE TRAUMA-SPECIALIZED BRAIN

+DISSOCIATION FROM CHILD ABUSE NEVER LEAVES US

**Dissociation

*FURTHER UNDERSTANDINGS ABOUT DISSOCIATION

+SCHORE ON DISSOCIATION

+CHILDHOOD DISSOCIATION, DEPERSONALIZATION, DEREALIZATION – I NEVER HAD A CHOICE TO BE OR NOT TO BE

 ++

+ALL OF ME. I DON’T HAVE ‘A CHILD WITHIN’

+RETURNING WITH AGE TO HOW I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AND DIDN’T KNOW IT: DISSOCIATED+I WILL NEVER BE ORDINARY. IT IS TIME FOR ME TO KNOW THIS TRUTH.

+BEING MY MOTHER’S IMAGINARY SWORN ENEMY

+CRY FOR THE NIGHTBIRDS – SOME CHILDREN NEED TO BE SAVED FROM THEIR PARENTS

+THE COMPLEXITIES OF SECURE AND INSECURE ATTACHMENT – DO-IT-YOURSELF STUDY LINKS

+BELOW THE SURFACE – THE CONNECTION BETWEEN SEVERE EARLY CHILD ABUSE, EAGLES AND BUZZARDS

+BEING HUMAN, ANIMAL OR OBJECT?

 ++

+SECURE AND INSECURE ATTACHMENT AND THE CHILDHOOD NARRATIVE

+THE POWER OF JOURNALING – ASKING A QUESTION THAT HAS AN ANSWER

*THE ADVANTAGES OF DISCLOSURE

+WRITING ABOUT OUR SEVERE EARLY TRAUMAS FROM THE INSIDE OUT

+WHEN OUR TEARS TAKE AWAY OUR WORDS – WHAT IS THE TRUTH ABOUT OUR TRAUMAS?

+WE NEED NEW WORDS TO DIALOG WITH OUR BODY ABOUT TRAUMA

*BEING WITNESS TO MY OWN ABUSE

+HOW DO WE LIVE WELL WHEN WE HAVE TOO MUCH TRAUMA INFORMATION

+MARCHING ON TO VICTORY OVER TRAUMA

+EARLY CHILDHOOD ADVERSE EXPERIENCES

 ++

+OUR DISTURBED NATURAL INTERNAL OPIOID (OPIATE) SYSTEM

+PANKSEPP ON BRAIN OPIOIDS

 ++

*DAMASIO NOTES – feeling of what happens

**DAMASIO ON NEUROLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

**DAMASIO ON CONSCIOUSNESS

**DAMASIO ON CORE CONSCIOUSNESS

++CONSCIOUSNESS AND ATTENTION

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

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

Here are a collection of links to important posts on attachment from this blog, October 22, 2009:

*Attachment Simplified – Secure Attachment (Organized)

*Attachment Simplified – Our Infant Attachment Systems Organize our Brain-Body-Mind-Self

*Attachment Simplified – Disorganized Insecure Attachment – Disorganized-Disoriented

*Attachment Simplified – Organized Insecure Attachment – Preoccupied-Ambivalent

*Attachment Simplified – Organized Insecure Attachment – Avoidant-Dismissive

*Attachment Simplified – Attachments in Therapy

*Attachment Simplified – The More Complicated Yet CRITICAL Information

*Attachment Simplified – Still More Complicated Information Including ‘Feeling Felt’ and ‘Healing in Solitude’

+THE COMPLEXITIES OF SECURE AND INSECURE ATTACHMENT – DO-IT-YOURSELF STUDY LINKS

++

Other related posts:

*Introduction on attachment disorders

*EMOTION AND ATTACHMENT

+SIEGEL – DESCRIPTION OF ATTACHMENT STYLES

+SIEGEL – EMOTIONAL REGULATION AND DISORGANIZED ATTACHMENT

+SIEGEL ON ADULT UNRESOLVED ATTACHMENTS

+SIEGEL ON DEVELOPING CHILD’S BRAIN – ATTACHMENT

**Further notes on attachment

**NOTES FROM FIELD ON ADULT ATTACHMENT

**Notes on Schore – Development of Attachment

*ATTACHMENT (chapter 5 notes)

*Ambivalent Attachment

*Empathy preschoolers

+SECURE AND INSECURE ATTACHMENT AND THE CHILDHOOD NARRATIVE

+WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO US: VIOLENT TRAUMA, MALTREATMENT, ATTACHMENT – BIRTH TO AGE THREE (and beyond)

+’DIS-ASSOCIATION’ BETWEEN RIGHT-LEFT BRAIN HEMISPHERES AND DISMISSIVE-AVOIDANT INSECURE ATTACHMENT DISORDERS

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

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

I ask myself at the start of this post, “What’s my point in writing it if I can’t say that I know what I hope to accomplish by doing so?”  There can only be one point to this post and that is to begin to illustrate how complex the topics are that this blog discusses and that its readers are personally concerned about.  At this point in the history of science, and correspondingly to this point in the evolution of the human species, not one persona actually has ‘the answer’ to the questions we ask.  So what this post simply intends to do is to present the results of one most-recent research study about Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) in its ‘purist’ state as connected to the operation of these people’s brain.

I am not going to try to decipher the findings of this research.  I am not going to try to distill it into some kind of format any one of us lay people could begin to wrap our thinking around.  I am going to present here the link to this article.  Interested readers can follow this link and then spend some time trying to plow their way through it!  I don’t believe any of us can begin to understand what is being said here except in these simplest of terms:  Borderline Personality Disorder includes within it changes in brain operation that are beginning to be narrowed down as they are discovered.

I would guess that any one of the many brain changes that researchers can now SEE and detect in BPD would be enough to change the way a person operates in the world.  The particular brain change that is highlighted in this research I mention today has to do with regions of the brain that are being found to concern the brain’s physiological relationship to and with what we commonly refer to as ‘the self’.

++

When you click on this link you will be taken to a readable version of this entire research article:

[PDF] Aberrant connectivity of resting–state networks in borderline … [personality disorder]

this article is written by a team of psychiatrists from Germany and Italy.  It was early-released on March 15, 2011 and is probably the most current research article on this topic.

Most of the terminology used in this article will be foreign to lay readers.  The basic premise is that any human brain shows various patterns of operation depending upon what it is doing.  There are regions – “the default mode network” — that normally-ordinarily show up in combination with one another as being at REST when the person-brain is not being called upon to respond to a specific task that demands action.  Researchers are discovering that these resting brain regions ‘seem’ to correspond to the brain’s perception of a ‘self’.

All that this information really tells me is that for all the current attempts being made to define, diagnose and treat many so-called ‘mental illnesses’ current science is mostly shooting at a hoped-for target in the dark.  The importance of this suggestion for me personally is that my efforts to understand how maltreatment during the first 33 months of life (conception to age 2) creates traumatic stress in little ones that in turn changes body-brain development comes the closest to providing me information that can matter most – both in terms of coming to glimpse what happened to ME at the same time it begins to tell me what happened to my mother to turn her into the abusive monster that she was.

All the information that science can glean about what maltreatment of infant-toddlers (in particular) is and about what it does to alter physiological development of the body-brain of survivors directly relates to the best-of-the-best in human attachment research and its findings.  In my thinking any research about BPD and about all so-called ‘mental illnesses’ including Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that does not include in its considerations the quality of the earliest caregiver-infant attachment environment will be missing the point and will NOT connect directly to the ‘bigger picture’ that we all need to understand.

Most research I am alluding to is in effect studying a glass turned upside-down.  The characteristics of the bottom of the glass are meticulously observed and described.  What is seen of an individual, in effect its phenotype, has to be connected to the forces and influences in an individual’s earliest life that set in motion the direction of physiological development that can be observed (and is experienced) at the end of this earliest developmental process.

When the proverbial glass is placed correctly with its bottom on the bottom, this bottom rests firmly on the platform that is the environment that influenced its formation in the first place.  Everything that is put into this glass and that comes out of it throughout the lifespan of an individual is actually connected to how this glass itself was created in the first place.

++

I mention this today in part because of two books on trauma that a post reader found in the library and is reading.  I found the titles for sale at Amazon.com:

I Can’t Get Over It by Aphrodite Matsakis and A. Matsakis (Nov 1996)

and

Unchained Memories: True Stories Of Traumatic Memories Lost And Found by Lenore Terr (Feb 24, 1995)

I am not familiar with these books (have not read either one), but I notice immediately the date range of their publication and know that all current developmental neuroscientific information will be missing from their pages.  While I would suspect that they both contain good and helpful information, I also know that this information will not be presented specifically for adult survivors of early infant-toddler neglect, abuse, maltreatment who suffered Trauma Altered Development at the start of their life and during the most critical body-brain formative stages.

Any book that survivors of extreme stress, maltreatment and trauma during especially the first 33 months of life reads will NOT contain the information we most need to know unless the early infant-caregiver patterns of attachment are included within the book’s covers.  This does not mean that these ‘other’ books are not useful.  It just means that there are monstrous holes in the information they present.  It is within these holes and within the missing information these holes contain that our truest understanding about our own self and the self of our abusers is most likely to be – NOT found.

This missing information, for the most part, is still being discovered.  What we do know still lies mostly within the fields of study of attachment and developmental neuroscience.  That information is still being translated into terms that the lay public (including survivors) can begin to comprehend.  This means to me that we survivors know as much about what really matters as any expert does because our trauma-changed body-brain is living the consequences of what the researchers are attempting to discover and describe.

++

A human body-brain is designed (one way or the other) to process information through the equivalent of our two brains – our left brain and our right brain.  Information that is NOT jointly and cooperatively processed by BOTH of our brains is not WHOLE information.

Any attempts we might make to understand our self in our own reality by reading information presented by ANY source outside of our own self has to be processed this same way.

I consider ‘outside’ information to be the equivalent of left brain information (most often presented in words that the left brain assumes to comprehend).  This information means NOTHING if it is not EQUALLY considered by our right brain – and I mean OUR RIGHT BRAIN.

We are the only person who can do this task of understanding for our own self.  No matter what any other human being tells us about ANYTHING – it has no meaning to us personally until we ‘eat it up’ with BOTH of our brains.

The other important point here is that it is mostly our RIGHT BRAIN that gives us the information that our BODY knows about anything we consider in our lifetime.  In other words, when we read what anyone else has to say we HAVE TO listen to what our body tells us!!

We can call this body information our ‘gut reaction’.  Our body-based reaction (which is intimately connected to every memory of every experience we have ever had) will (I believe) appear as feeling translated into images that our right brain will attempt to ‘put on the table’ for the left brain’s edification (enlightenment).  (These images can be body sensations, smells, senses of movement and motion in time and space, music, etc.)

So in essence, outsider information will mean nothing to us any more than information presented just to our left brain will.  For information to make sense to us it has to ALWAYS be processed in its whole form as we take our left brain-right brain-body factors into consideration.  I don’t care where we find ‘facts’, who wrote them down as they discovered them in the first place, or how ‘scientifically valid’ and up-to-date the source is.

I do believe that ‘truth has a ring to it’.  I believe when we hear/read something that is true for us our body will tell us, not just our intellect.  It is that resonating ring-of-truth that I found when I discovered attachment and developmental neuroscientific research such as Siegel’s, Shore’s and Teicher’s (all mentioned frequently on this blog).

Reading ‘self-help’ information that left me feeling befuddled and muddled felt entirely different to me in my body.  I am very happy that I now know the difference!

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

But I have work to do outdoors now finishing the roof of my chicken coop.  It is a beautiful day!

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

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

Yesterday was a beautiful, quiet (still) warm and gentle day, and I loved it!  I could be outside working in the garden without impediment, without interference, without struggle.  BUT TODAY?  The sound of the raging wind against my house woke me this morning well before 5 a.m.  And here I am closeted against its force here on the inside of the four walls of my house — and I hate that!

There is something different about the winds that are tormenting us down here in southeast Arizona this year.  Coupled with the dryness that is also unusual, the winds bring with them clouds of dirt-filled dust and irritating pollens.

But for me?  The wind is somehow MORE than ‘just the wind’.  I sat down to write here because I am realizing these winds are a ‘trauma trigger’ to me because they remind me so much of my first 18 years of life with my mother!

Now darkness.  One can bring light into the darkness.  Too much sunlight?  There are choices about coping with that, too.  Find shade!  Rain?  There are always umbrellas and awnings.  Cold and heat?  There are ways we can deal with those conditions, also.

Of course any time we can seek shelter from weather conditions that are overwhelming us we can try that option.  Whether we can actually locate and access such shelter might be another matter.

Extreme weather (and I have to say this wind is not THAT extreme – just chronic!) very often causes trauma to people and to the ‘environment’ it impacts.

And then there is THIS wind, this frequent fitful threatening predatory wind down here this year that howls and roars, whines, bellows and gasps, shoves and bangs and pounds and batters.  This wind tosses things in the air and chases them while it shakes and tears at whatever else it can’t get loose as if to rip everything apart.  It changes directions nearly all of the time.  It rarely pauses.  It pulses and twists and turns.  It blasts the world it enters and the only way I can cope with it is to close my doors and windows and hide inside my house.

Which I HATE to do!

Yes, I myself frequently whine against these winds, but I NEVER win.  I cannot fight the wind (though I have a good friend who got so mad at wind one time she threw a cast iron lawn chair at it).

But however I feel about these winds and whatever I think about them, I realize today how much these winds, THIS wind (they always seem on each new day’s attack to be a different wind with its own personality) reminds me of my first 18 years with my mad abusive mother!

There was never a way to truly escape her.  Her madness permeated every molecule of the world she ruled (pretending to be nice when it suited her, becoming a raging monster when that mood suited her) just as this wind does.

This wind is NEVER quiet when it is here.  While I am certainly glad it is not double or triple (or more) its strength, the way it is behaving out there is NOT nice from my point of view.  And there is nothing I can do outside today in spite of its force.

So I am trapped in the house today — and being TRAPPED is exactly how I feel.  This feeling of being trapped always corresponds for me to a feeling of being sick and not-well.  I can still hear the wind.  It has a continual presence.  There is no true escape from it until it stops — and nobody can control the wind any more than anyone could control my mother!

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