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Thursday, May 8, 2014.  People talk about the stages of dreaming.  From my life experience I suspect that there are life stages of dreaming, as well.  I certainly know that my own dreaming has changed over the years.  At least there is a major change in the dreams I remember.   VERY few.

It was in 1999 that I remembered the last of what I now see as my early life dreams.  Never mind I was 48 when that dream showed up.  I didn’t know that morning that it marked some kind of a major transition in my life.  I sure know that now.

Here I am 15 years later having made the decision to try to let my dreams touch me in some way at this current stage of my life.  I know I DO dream.  I just remember nothing.

So yesterday when I walked the baby in the stroller over to Wal-Mart I spent $3.88 on a kids’ closet-sized light with a switch on it and three AAA batteries inside of it.  Never mind it is in a baseball design.  I put it on a shelf near my sleeping area last night with a small spiral notebook I found to record SOMETHING of SOME dream within – if I might be so fortunate as to capture a few images or words from the lost land of my nights.

Inside that book I found two dreams I recorded in there three years ago.  Evidently I had this same desire, but only got this far that time:

6/13/11 — picking up cut-glass spheres from a field — all colors — waited until after everyone else got theirs

6/15/11 — no home — wandering w/o talking — young woman commented on my “ancient” haircut — nobody spoke to me — a man told a girl she had come back full circle

6/16/11 — troubled about book

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What I remembered as I woke this morning was going on right at the tail end of the night’s dreaming.

I somehow found a “lost” woman in need – as a therapist I took her with me – driving around looking for a place — it was dark, night – found a house with an “open house” sign in front – door unlocked – we went inside.

Furniture within, dim light, saw no windows.  We went from room to room, looking.  Shelter.  I told her lots of hard winter driving stories, took me a long time to remember the “name” of the 1973 Olds Cutlass Supreme I once had [when I went to art therapy graduate school].  Woman was small, very softly spoken.  I was her “therapist” – trying to help her?

At some point in the middle of the night the real estate agent walked in – not happy to have us there but not mad – he left before we did.  The woman — did she have a name? – took with her a bag – it had yarn in there and other stuff — that she said she COULD take because it was given to everyone who looked at the house – we left as equals — but to where?

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I have a sense that as I make this choice to eavesdrop, to become a kind of voyeur of my own dreams, as I barge in on an area of my life that might be off-limits for some very good reason — I am taking a risk.  This process might change the nature of some of my dreams just because a part of me will know I am watching.  Part of me might be perfectly capable of choosing while I am sleeping what details of which dreams I can – and therefore will – carry across the darkened threshold.

Maybe “fake” dreams will be created that are completely separate from my true dreams.  Decoy dreams?

Do I trust myself to treat myself better than that?  Would such a pattern of dream awareness actually BE in my best interest?

Do we NEED to keep some things apart as mysteries to self?  Is there a self-higher wisdom that intentionally protects us from dreamscapes?

Is dreaming an escape area for me, free of what troubles me in my waking life, free of what confuses me and complicates my waking states?  What filters dreams?  Who within us censors them?

Is dream remembrance something like shopping in Wal-Mart?  What I pick off the streaming shelf, toss in the cart, haul out the front door in a bag….  Will I choose what might be useful, helpful to remember?  Leave behind what might overwhelm or scare me?  I have never been a person to remember nightmares.  Sure, there have been a few powerful disturbing dreams but very few.

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Why now in my life am I trying to trap some part of my dreams on sticky paper?

I feel like I have come to the end of a leg of a maze that leaves me at a dead-end.  A box canyon without escape.  Blind alley.  Traveling in the utter pitch blackness without a future vision of where I want to be let alone why, or how I could get there.

Decisionless – except – moment by moment….

A great sense of impermanence.  Nothing is ever permanent in life.  But I just moved away from the only place on earth I have ever found (stayed 14 years) that felt comfortably like home to me.  Just no family near or even able to come visit me.  So now I am living in THEIR place — so NOT my own.

Nobody forces me to stay here or not to leave.  I am here by choice.  But I firmly believe that choices happen with great difficulties for severe early trauma survivors.  As Dr. Martin Teicher’s research presents, our brain simply did not develop in ordinary ways because of the effects of trauma.  How do we discover what those differences mean in the way we live, the way we decide?

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I didn’t use my little light last night to scribble down some words about this dream.  I was able to remember the bulk of it — or at least the part I was aware of as I awoke at 5 am.  I know I work hard in my dreamtime.  What happens there is too big to stuff through the window of waking.  It is too bulky to drag along with me into the morning light.  It is this gesture I am making for myself not to leave everything back there inside of me that seems to matter.  I want SOMETHING to come through.

This single piece of this single dream gives me a lot of information to ponder.  Who was that small woman who seems to have no name, the one who needed big-therapist-me?  Not too hard to “get that” part.  She seemed very resigned at the same time she was open to learning something new, something different, something significant.

Together we DID find a small safe place.  Safe at least for a few moments in dreamtime.  A place we could explore quickly.  Not a place we could stay.  We had to wonder away yet again.  True.

She insisted it was perfectly OK to take that bag of gifts.  It is I who spends my days in between the constant caring for a very large, very active 21-month-old cooped up in a room working with yarn I spun years ago.  Trying to make something useful, beautiful, salable down the road.  What else was in the bag?  I don’t know but I think there was a spiral notebook in there.

For the writer in me.

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Moody Blues – The Other Side Of Life –

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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

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Leave a Comment »

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Tuesday, May 6, 2014.  Most of the time of my childhood after age 7 our family struggled up and down the Alaskan mountain to and from our homestead.  By the time I was starting 8th grade (1963) a new high school had been built in the middle of a forest that is now, of course, surrounded by subdivisions.  Because there were not enough 9th through 12th graders to fill the school we 8th graders were allowed to step across that pure new threshold of Chugiak High Schoool into a new world built — from my point of view — around the gorgeous black stallion painted on the entry floor-way within a circle filled with aqua.  Black and aqua school colors.  Mustang school mascot.

I just went through a process of searching online to no avail until I finally called my great healing trauma buddy to find in my memory what the original school song was.  This is further testimony to the fact that my brain works better when I am talking to him!  School song?  Such a GREAT one though there is no mention of it online in today’s connection with the school:

Ghost riders in the sky – Johnny Cash – Full Song – YouTube

Uploaded on Jul 27, 2008

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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

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Leave a Comment »

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Monday, April 28, 2014.  I have certainly written about this topic before on this blog.  I don’t think it’s possible to consider what living life as a severe early trauma survivor is like without thinking about how especially very early trauma during the first year or two of life changes how the pathways are laid into the early-forming brain and nervous system so that they include dissociation — and, I believe — the inclusive patterns of processing the self within the passage of time differently than “ordinary.”

Learning about self is kind of like returning again and again to a revolving door as we repeatedly enter and explore areas within that have been changed through exposure to severe trauma particularly during our most rapid “critical windows” of early development.  Other adults who pay attention to the details of how they interact with circumstances in their lives also enter revolving doors to explore their own experience.  They just don’t find what survivors do on the other side!

I was thinking again this past weekend about why I cannot force myself to even get into the car my daughter bought for me since I returned to Fargo.  It’s a nice 2003 Mercury Sable wagon, so dark blue it appears pitch black except under streetlights in the dead of night!

This weekend thinking returned me to the day about 6 years ago, not long after I finished serious chemotherapy for my advanced, aggressive breast cancer, when I went for a walk along the rail line close to where I lived.  The rails had been pulled out as this 73 mile segment of line had been converted to a part of the nation’s Rails to Trails program.  The chips of black rock from the old copper smelter still covered the surface where the line had been.

There was a small bridge over a wash.  I knew a very large rattlesnake lived in the area.  I had seen it lying fully across the entire bed on previous days as it warmed itself against the fall weather’s coolness.  On those days I simply turned around and walked home.

However, on this particular day I noticed a light creamy tan blotch on the side of the black stone path long before I reached it.  “Hum,” I thought to myself.  “I wonder what has blown up onto the tracks.”

By the time I was about 12′ from the blotch my RIGHT brain, I am quite certain, had not only noticed that there were beautiful patterns on the blotch, but also that it was no doubt a piece of old parchment paper worthy of picking up and taking home.  It wasn’t until I had bent over with my hands reaching to pick it up that my LEFT brain, most probably, issued its clear statement to me, “That is a coiled rattlesnake, very much alive.  FREEZE!”

So I did freeze, and then backed very slowly away.  I scared myself silly!  I also never walked that rail line again because I knew I could not trust my own thinking process to keep me safe.

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This weekend I realized that due to the nearly overwhelming stress of my life now I cannot trust my brain not to repeat a similar VERY SLOWED DOWN process of taking in information at a critical time when I most need it.  Traffic here is TOO MUCH for me.  Other drivers do really stupid things and I cannot trust that I can react the way I need to when I need to.

My new learning, therefore, as I consider all of this is that the dissociation I experienced with the snake did not mean that I wasn’t taking in the right information.  I took it in and processed it in a slowed-way-down peritraumatic passage of time.  (When people speak of their entire life passing through their mind at a critically dangerous moment I suspect it is this peritraumatic passage of time they are gripped within.)

There is no way that rattlesnake would have slowed down its reaction to me to keep pace with how slow my brain’s reaction to it was.  Neither will any vehicle on the crazy rushing streets (and parking lots) of this town slow down their actions to match my peritraumatic processing, either.

Where I was living near the small town of 5,000 people in southeastern Arizona I would not see as many cars in one day as I see in a minute on the streets where I am living now.  I HATE having lost my mobility here!  I HATE IT!

But while my disappointment, frustration, irritation, aggravation continues here I also know a little bit more about HOW this condition appeared out of nowhere once I arrived here.  I have driven a lot and safely for many, many years.  I have pulled trailers up and down the highways.  I have even driven a gigantic sugar beet harvesting dump truck.

My problem now only makes sense when I consider it is the CUMULATIVE stress of my life and its changes right now that has stopped me FROZEN in my driving tracks.  That cumulative stress goes back, honestly, to the terrible distress/stress of my own birthing experience as I struggled as a breech baby with Mother in hard labor for over 24 hours before I was born — and then to find only a psychotically abusive mother there on the other end of the journey who so severely abused me for the net 18 years of my life.  ALL of the traumatic stress of my life has built itself into me.

Shucks.

There sits that sweet, practical little wagon in my #106 apartment parking spot.  There sits my el Camino waiting for its fate to be determined sheltered in a rented dirt floor garage.

Meanwhile — I write.  I do not know the ending of this story….

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Here are some earlier related posts created throughout the years:

+DISSOCIATION: MY MOTHER’S AND MY OWN STORY SHARE IT

+FIGHTING BACK AGAINST THE ABUSE SURVIVOR’S ALTERED PERITRAUMATIC SENSE OF TIME

+INFANT-CHILD ABUSE, ACUTE TRAUMA = PERITRAUMATIC ALTERED SENSE OF THE PASSAGE OF TIME

+FASCINATING NOTES ON LIVING WITH TRAUMA

+BEFRIENDING CHAOS? (EARLY ABUSE SURVIVORS AND CHOICE)

+BEING PROACTIVE TO TRAUMA TRIGGERS: WHAT DOES OUR BODY AND OUR TWO BRAINS KNOW?

+THOUGHTS ON DISSOCIATION’S ARM = DEREALIZATION

+A BREAK IN THE LONG STRING OF TIME

+STUCK IN A PERPETUAL TIME-SPACE CYCLE – AND ROTTING

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

+SIEGEL – DISORIENTED MIND

+SEIGEL ON EARLY TRAUMA, I CALL A BROKEN HEART

+VAN DER KOLK ON TRAUMATIC STRESS

**Survival

**Words

+VAN DER KOLK ON TRAUMA AND NOTES

++SCAER on trauma reenactments

+++MORE HENRY ON BRAIN AND EMOTION

**DAMASIO ON CORE CONSCIOUSNESS

**DAMASIO ON CONSCIOUSNESS

**Dr. Allan Schore on Emotional Regulation – Notes

**Emotion notes

*ADVERSIVE CHILDHOODS (notes from chapter 4)

*REMEMBERING THE SELF (notes from Chapter 1)

*OVERWHELMING TRAUMA CHANGES

 

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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

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Leave a Comment »

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Friday, April 25, 2014.  The basic information in this email that just came into my box first came to me at least a week ago.  I wanted to write a coherent post including this info — but even now, for some reason when I think about doing so something in my “disorganized-disoriented” insecure attachment disordered mind goes astray and awry so that my thoughts, at least in words, disappear.  Some kind of reactivity goes into motion and nothing remotely coherent remains of my thoughts.

SO I am going to go about this from another angle.  I will simply copy and paste this information into this post.  You can follow the links and see what you think — or don’t think – yourself!

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from Kathy Brous ksbrous@attachmentdisorderhealing.com

I’ve been reporting that Dr. Bruce Perry is in Washington May 4 to talk on healing developmental trauma at the National Council.

I’ll be in San Diego May 2 to discuss Perry’s use of rhythm to heal trauma — and my new idea about children’s choirs!  Click here:
http://attachmentdisorderhealing.com/developmental-trauma-4/

In all cultures, long before writing, the only way to pass down an idea was to sing it.  And gathering children to sing in choirs was the core of the Greek educational system since at least 700 BC.  There were choir schools for kids in Europe since the 900s AD.
http://attachmentdisorderhealing.com/developmental-trauma-4/

If a child can speak, he can sing; most kids can sing before they can speak. Training children to sing as young as possible is a principle of civilization.  Electronic culture has forgotten it to our peril as our kids whack out on machine-made noise.  We need children’s choirs and we need them on a mass scale.

And it gives kids a voice!  Just when we urgently need a new Renaissance, children have been known to sing in the most amazing ways even today.  You won’t believe the wonderful video of a 9-year-old girl singing that I have for you. Click here:
http://attachmentdisorderhealing.com/developmental-trauma-4/

Kathy

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The girl singing is directly here:  http://news.distractify.com/default-category/a-shy-9-year-old-girl-takes-the-stage-these-people-will-never-forget-what-follows/

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I have had a rough week with life in combo with my trauma-related disabilities!  I even found at one point that my “upsetness” interfered with my drumming practice.  Suddenly my body could not remember anything I have been so diligently practicing for weeks.  I plowed onward, and by tonight all of my learning came back and I cannot tell you how relaxing it is for me to put my sticks in my hand, wind up my old metronome and go to beating on my practice pad along with it.  EVERYTHING disappears except the beat and my focused attention on improving my technique.  I LOVE IT and have another lesson tomorrow.

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Saturday, April 26, 2014.  Kathy was most kind to stop by and leave the following information in a comment to this post.  I want to make sure anyone who comes across this post in the future has the information she provided in case they don’t get to the comment section!  Again, thank you, Kathy, who wrote:

Thank you for your re-post. Check my earlier blog where I laid the basis with more of Dr. Perry’s slides:

http://attachmentdisorderhealing.com/how-your-brain-works-101/

My 4 posts on Developmental Trauma are here:

http://attachmentdisorderhealing.com/developmental-trauma/
and http://attachmentdisorderhealing.com/developmental-trauma-2/
[ and -3 and -4 (total of 4 blogs) ]

Please check out my story of how I’m healing my own Adult Attachment Disorder in my book:

http://attachmentdisorderhealing.com/book/

Much love to you! Kathy Brous, http://www.Attachment.Disorder.Healing.com

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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

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Leave a Comment »

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Friday, April 25, 2014.  I read the first 1981 edition of this book – in 1981!

Women’s Reality: An Emerging Female System by Schaef, Anne Wilson (Jun 4, 2013)

This is a quick book to read and in today’s world might seem to be “old school” or at best, “retro.”  In 1981 the thoughts Schaef discusses were not far from radical.  It’s worth a read although I have no idea how this newer edition compares to the first one.

Schaef describes how she sees the differences between women’s reality and “the white male” reality.  At the moment I am finding myself thinking that the power plays in the white male world are probably about TAKING power from somebody else not only to prevent another from HAVING power of their own but also because the absence of others’ power makes one’s own power seem — well — more powerful.

Today’s emerging powerhouse women – and I don’t mean just a few here and there — I mean the GENERATIONS of women coming into their power OUTSIDE the home — might be tempted to continue to repeat the patterns of power mismanagement that white males – to use Schaef’s description – have used throughout history.

“If you want it, take it.  If you CAN take it, take it.  Take it even if you have plenty.  Take it even if you have absolutely no use for it.   Even if you truthfully don’t want it, take it.   Just take it.  Don’t pay any heed to how your power-theft impacts anyone else.  Don’t have empathy or compassion or consideration.  Just be a BULLY and TAKE it – just because you can.  And if you can’t take it by yourself, get a bunch of your cronies together and take it with joint forces.”  Etc.

(Interesting, “cronies” seems to be a male – good – thing.  Being “a crone” is a female – bad – thing.)

Women are beginning to move, as I mentioned in my last post, out of the impasse, passive position of being grossly and unfairly forced to disembody themselves in their life from the potential of their power.  The power to starch and iron skirts, shorts and shirts hardly matters.  Shining up the Westbend toaster, polishing the kitchen floor, even burping babies and kissing scraped knees on a daily basis hardly matters anymore.

But women do not have to become power-bashing, power-stealing, dominating women to be indomitable ones.  Women KNOW power lies within; certainly any who have given birth know this well.  Our power lies in our self as we create and recreate all the power we need just by using our integrity as we live our life.

Who said there ever was a shortage of power?  Not a woman.  And, looking at the rather big mess the world is in today I am not convinced that men have ever been able to use whatever power they have had wisely.

So, women.  Get a hold of your power and use it for good justly and wisely.  There is no possible reason to repeat the age-old patterns laid down for and before us, so resist falling into those traps.  We will do it better because we are women.

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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

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Leave a Comment »

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Friday, April 25, 2014.  Thirty-five years ago  in a small old house that looked like a barn but wasn’t a mother walked across the small landing of the tight stairs heading down with her arms wrapped around a load of family laundry.  As she turned the tight corner she saw her little girl, Sara, sitting on a square grass-green upholstered ottoman with its hinged lid shut upon the carefully stored family photograph albums that was tucked into the small nook under the landing.  Sara’s elbows were perched on her knees, chin held tightly in her palms as her small fingers curled up around her cheeks.  A frown too somber for one just turned three creased her brow and caused her mother to drop her load of clothes on the floor as she dropped with concern to her knees in front of her daughter.

“Oh, honey!  What on earth is wrong?  What are you thinking about all alone down here?”

With all the seriousness of a well-preserved centurion the miniature thinker directed her gaze into her mommy’s eyes as she asked a question her mother has never forgotten.  “Mommy, is my body the boss of my mind or is my mind the boss of my body?”

“Oh, honey,” Mommy responded as she gathered her baby into her arms, smoothing her hair as she slid the little one down between her knees.  “There is something else.  It is very important.  You have a soul and your soul is the boss of both your body and your mind.  Your soul helps you to choose things neither your body or your mind know anything about.  But you will have to learn to hear what your soul says to you.  You will have pay attention to it.”

In her mind Mommy was asking, “How can one who is just gaining the use of language be asking such a momentous question?”

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All these years later on a cloudy morning as the grass turns that brilliant shade of northern spring green Mommy sees for the first time, after hundreds of times of thinking about that question and talking with her daughter about it over the years, that the most important word contained within that little girl’s question has always been missed.  BOSS!

Not manager, of course.  Boss.  How did the little girl know that word and grasp the concept held within it?

Boss.  As in “dominant being.”  As in “having power over.”  As in “alpha.”

There is that concept as it has always been tucked, hidden, buried within that single word, boss:  POWER.

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Destiny is irresistible.  The destiny at issue here is the destiny of the forward advancement of the evolution of the human species which requires, demands, that women come into their own power as equals to men.

We are living in the newest generations in the history of our species when women are now becoming free enough to become increasingly power-filled beings.  What is happening around us as women move into careers of power in fields that have kept doors so tightly closed and locked to their feminine minds?

Where are our role models as women, where is the history before us that holds the wisdom we need as women, as mothers, as grandmothers of how to facilitate this vast and critical transformation of our species?  Most importantly, what is happening to the offspring of so many women who seem so easily able to basically abandon their little ones at birth into the care of strangers?

What of the grandmothers who arise to sacrifice of themselves in their own lives to try to fill the gap of care for the children their children are bringing into the world?

And women in the fields marching forward in ways, places and directions that are so sweetly new to half our species — what do they know of there new power?  How do they know how to wield it safely?  How often is it appearing in the guise of narcissism, selfishness and even misdirected anger?  What tender, nurturing, empathic, caring, compassion, dependency-based feelings are being banished out of their range of attention?  Is this all tied to HOW they can so blithely shove their little ones into the hands of strangers and walk away 10 or more hours of every work day?

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The BIG CHANGE is upon us.  Women are increasingly making the choice to be the complete boss of their own lives come hell or/and high water.  Believe me, they are armed with full intention and a focus of action that only destiny itself can forge.

Only advancing time will allow future generations to look back at what may well be a damaging kind of mayhem we are creating in the “safe and secure attachment” environments that create the physiological body-nervous system-brain-self of every tiny, dependent creature who cannot possibly be getting from their “out-in-the-world” mothers that they MUST have to develop into fully healthy human beings.  A few rushed morning and evening hours and a chaotic busy weekend cannot give little ones and their mothers and fathers enough time to complete the kind of attachment circuitry our entire evolution has required that we have to become the best humans we can be.

How do we as these women’s mothers, as the grandmother’s of their children, hold our own as we attempt to counter-balance the faulty social thinking that has been so hastily created to shore up the choices our daughters are making regarding the care and lack thereof they are “justified” in giving and not giving their very young children?

Our daughters are aiming the big guns of their forward-moving rage at us.

They do not want to hear or consider a single thing we are trying our best to tactfully and gently tell them.

They are out there, full-sailed in ferocious winds of change running without rudders.

We cannot stop them.  Certainly.  It is not destiny that we DO stop them.

But neither can we allow them to run us over, to assert their newly-found power, their dominance, their societal-fed alpha force over us.

Wherever there is power there is the potential for its misuse.  All forms of aggression, of abuse, of oppression will become increasingly available to women as they spread their powerful, beautiful wings to finally soar confidently and competently in the winds of change.

We, and our advancing daughters, are cutting the swathes into a new world that those in the future generations will look back across in wonder, in gratitude, and in cases where generations of little ones are being neglected IN SPITE of what their parents want to believe — in horror.

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We women, we mothers and grandmothers of the receding generation are naturally destined to relinquish dominance to the looming up-and-coming generation who are following us into a new world.  But we retain our honor, our integrity, our self and our presence as legitimate voices guiding those who are — not unlike cantankerous three-year-olds – chomping at the bits that we might try to rein them in with,

We do NOT let those powerful young women disrespect us.  That, come what may,  is OUR choice.  The power of one generation does not have to come from belittling the one that created it.  We ALL, as women, are learning how to BE in the world in a new, unfamiliar and different way.

The time has come for all of us to pay attention and to learn to let these transitions happen with minimal loss, minimal damage.  Whatever  we do we do  AS WOMEN.  We do as women what no man has ever done or can ever do BECAUSE we do what we do AS WOMEN.  Is this a big DUH?  I don’t think so.  We bring life into the world.  We are expanding the sphere of influence for how this bringing-life-into-the world operates.

This is a FEMALE process that men are of course a part of as supporters of our actions.  The time is rapidly coming when we will no longer be a second sex.  We will be an equal one.  And with any transition, any transformation, the change itself can be most chaotic and troubled especially in the sphere of raising very young infants and children that so many women are parceling out as if their offspring are cars to store in an airport parking garage until it’s “handy” to retrieve them.

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Where are the fathers and grandfathers in this transformation?  Although not the topic of this post, this question is central.

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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

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Leave a Comment »

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Thursday, April 24, 2014.  I wrote some time ago on the blog about the time around 25 years ago when I realized I had no clear idea what an enemy was.  I asked two of my friends who had never met each other and lived 130 miles apart to tell me their version of what an enemy was.  Both of them used the exact same sentence in reply:  “An enemy is someone who does not have your best interests at heart.”

I have always found it intriguing and a bit mysterious that they mirrored one another’s thoughts.  Of course I now know that I was born into an enemy camp.  Both of my parents were enemies to me — BIG TIME!  Mentally ill, psychotic, abusive Mother did everything in her power to try to ensure that everyone, including my siblings, my grandmother and my teachers all shared her view that it was I who was everyone’s enemy.  Tragedy.

I am here as I near my 63rd birthday in August finding that I also cannot find my own definition of what a friend is.  Sure, intellectually, I have believed I had “an idea” of what a friend and friendship is.  Truth?  I don’t really have much of a clue at all.  Friendship seems to be something that exists on the other side of The Great Divide.  As such a severe abuse, neglect and trauma survivor I never had the chance to experience friendship which IS connected to safe and secure attachment in a social world.

Right now I can’t assume I understand friendship.  But I did receive some interesting clues about its nature from a woman whom I consider a friend back in the little Arizona town I recently moved away from.  From her description of friendship as she described it I gather that in her experience — because Bisbee is a friendly town — one never has to worry about who is a friend versus who is not.  Most everyone there is FRIENDLY to one another.

My friend went on to describe for me patterns of her life and patterns of my life while I lived there that demonstrate friendliness and friendship.  PATTERNS.  Friendship is a PATTERN that includes friendliness shared mutually — kind of spread around permeating the daily life of those who share a particular environment.

I could say that her descriptions were a little too vague and nonspecific for me to get my questions answered.  But, then, I realize my friend has always lived on her side of The Great Divide that separates severe early trauma survivors from those who benefited from safe and secure attachment from birth.  In other words, my friend could not really comprehend the nature of the depths of my question any more than I could have those depths of friendship questioning answered by her.

I NEVER had anyone treat me with friendship during the first 18 years of my life — with the possible exception of teachers my mother could not convince of my evil essence.  Yet not one of those teachers ever recognized the depths of my suffering or offered a single word or gesture of assistance to me.  They lived in their professional teacher role and I suppose simply did not abuse me — which was as good as attachment ever got for me as a child.

Then, naturally, I entered my adult life acting as if I could be a friend and others could be a friend back to me although I could not have given one single sentence to describe friendship.  NOW?  I think I know less, truthfully, about friendship than I did when I was 18.

Another tragedy connected to severe abuse survivorship, and not a surprising one.

I think from what my friend was telling me if one lives in a friendly town (Bisbee is about 5,000 population now) one has their friendship needs met simply by being there.  If a person has a special need for help they simply need to ask and someone will “pop out” of the sea of friendliness in response.  My friend described for me what she sees of how I fit into that community so that my friendliness needs were naturally met.  Of course I missed my family while I lived there, but I could talk about that with people who listened and cared.  Otherwise I guess I took being a part of that friendly community just grew into me.

Someone attacked me verbally recently for talking about how I missed those people.  After all “not one of them offered to help you move.”  I asked my southern friend about this.  She said if I had ASKED anyone for help they would have been right there.  Otherwise, they knew one of my northern friends had come down to help me and that was simply that.

Writing this I am seeing that perhaps it is, in part, the absence of unnecessary complications that must mark the friendliness in that area.  Why add any degree of drama when it is not there naturally?  There is a kind of magnanimous though not showy or flashy equality in such a version of shared social existence.  There is some kind of mutual respect for individuality in such a friendly place that is taken for granted.  It almost seems like:  if there is an absence of enemies there is a presence of friendliness and the friendship that is simply such a part of such a place — like dirt is a part of the earth — that nobody has to question friendship being either present or absent.

So maybe it is exactly because I am not in that place NOW that these questions are coming up for me.  I felt at home there.  I have been criticized here for saying that.  Can anyone at any time simply FORCE that kind of connected and peaceful feeling to a place — if they only try hard enough?

The thing about THIS area is that I spent 13 years of my life — over 30 years ago — working as hard as I possibly could to do exactly that — FORCE myself to be happy in a place that I came to finally understand was a toxic environment for ME.  Not for others who live here, obviously.  But for ME.

My Arizona friend reminded me last night that I spent more than a year outside working on building my garden, only coming indoors to eat and sleep.  I think it was more than a year — but, oh yes, as I told my friend “I NEED THAT!”

Sometimes it is hard for me to accept my own truth as being exactly that.  Not right or wrong.  Not saying anyone else is right or wrong.  Just knowing what I need, what is comfortable, what sustains me.  Place is critically important to me as a trauma-altered person.  There will be a huge cost for me in missing my girls and grandsons here should I find my way back to “my place” down south.  I do not know how to cope with these conflicts.  I really don’t.

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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

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