*1963 – August 23 – Dad’s Letter to Mother
*1963 – September 6 – Dad’s Letter to Mother
*1963 – September 8 — Dad’s Letter to Mother
*Grandmother’s 9-8-1963 Letter to Mother
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Tag: dissociation
+HECK OF A LETTER! MY FATHER’S SEPTEMBER 3, 1963 LETTER TO MY MOTHER
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*1963 – September 3 – Dad’s Letter to Mother While the Rest of Us Are In New Mexico
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This September 3, 1963 letter is — of course — a private one my father wrote to my mother just after she and we kids arrived in Santa Fe, New Mexico while he stayed in Alaska and worked. It describes that immediately after they received title to 120 acres of the homestead, they mortgaged it.
This letter is telling because it describes my father’s thoughts as they parallel all the confused, “mixed up” statements my mother makes in her ongoing letters. He is her husband. He appears to participate with her in all of it. My father writes in this letter about the homestead, more than four years after they first moved onto it: “But after all the wondering, worrying, fretting, back-and-forthing, this is it! Either that’s our home or it isn’t, and now’s the time to decide.”
Reading this letter does not help me one single bit in understanding my father! That disappoints me, but it’s a fact. Their marriage was none of my business. The decisions they came up with over time directly affected all of their children, as any parental decision is likely to do. But here I feel as if I am still trying to peer though a closed door without a window to see anything about what’s really going on past it — no different now than if I was trying to understand their world when I was a child myself (though it certainly never occurred to me to think about trying to).
How does one judge ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’? Even to me now their problems seem so strangely proportioned. They are not talking about what color to paint the house they’ve been living in for 20 years here. It seems that chaos was so ‘ordinary’ in our lives that nobody, certainly not my parents, ever noticed they were in the thick of it. Perhaps it’s like thinking that living in the center of a tornado was normal. Our family reality just WAS, without question, in part because there never was any other reality visible within our world to compare our version of life against.
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This letter belonged to a private conversation between my parents. The contents of it related to decisions that of course affected all of their children. Yet, 46 years after it was written I still feel like a voyeur reading it, let alone transcribing it, let alone publishing it here on the world wide web. Obviously it survived. Obviously it somehow found its way into my house, into my hands, onto this clipboard of mine sitting here beside my computer at this moment.
But I ask myself the questions, “What is your purpose in doing this, Linda? What do you hope to learn, think you might be able to come to understand about your parents, about their thinking, about their relationship, about the way they made their decisions together — and about how they observed their lives separately and then combined their two separate selves to create a marriage and hence created THE LIFE of their children?”
Do I see in this letter, for example, any of the mental, emotional, verbal and psychological abuse I suspect — no, I KNOW — went on with my mother as perpetrator and my father as victim — during my childhood? It seems that they so shared their reality that there wasn’t a separate ‘her’ and a separate ‘him’. I could say that was ‘ordinary’, but I also know long after I left home my father divorced my mother after staying with her for more than 30 years.
Was my father such a ‘giving’ man and such a ‘giving in’ man that he simply found a way to let her push him, push at him, for all those years and he just kept moving in whatever direction the force of her force — forced him?
Reading my father’s letters leaves me feeling as if I am standing dangerously close to an erupting volcano. I am completely cloaked with soot and ashes. I see the roiling lava swiftly approaching me where I stand. Yet my feet are so fixed in place that I cannot move to safety, even if I had the thought to do so.
The air becomes so dark with smoke that I can no longer see my hands in front of my face. I hear a deafening roar, and a cracking, breaking sound. The earth begins to quake beneath my feet and I crumple to the ground and I cannot get up.
Unlike my mother in her childhood story of a city devoured by flames, I am completely alone. My only hope is that my father will love me enough to save me. He never did.
This September 3, 1963 letter shows me why he never could. It unsettles me to realize that my father was absent to me because he absolutely shared my mother’s reality. There was no ‘other dad’. Just this one. He did not exist in my world, only in hers.
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So what can I make of it when father writes this in his letter?
“I enjoy the notes and post cards the kids have sent. I love them all (the kids, I mean), and not just as a group but each one for himself and herself. It all seems so familiar, writing something like that, only difference is there’s one more now.”
I do not know! The very old, often beaten into me by my mother, thought pattern arises — “We would all be fine if it wasn’t for Linda. Linda is the cause of all the troubles in the family. She’s more trouble than all the other children put together. ‘Trouble’ should have been her middle name.”
Yes, my left intellectual brain knows now that I was my mother’s dissociated imaginary enemy. But that fact does not always comfort me. I have to reach for it — like I would have to reach for an umbrella before I wandered out into a soaking rain.
Mental illness. Illness that affects the mind. This letter is in the thick of it, and it’s an effort at this moment as I transcribe this letter not to feel sucked right back into it! Crazy. Crazy making! “Stop this train! I want to get off!”
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Letter appears in context with *1963 – Mother’s Letters
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JUST FOR YOUR INFORMATION:
+LINK TO MY MOTHER’S HIGH SCHOOL PICTURE – AND A PIECE OF NEWS
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*1943 Mother – Her Senior High School Picture (and her high school sweetheart’s)
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*1963 – August 18 – Letter From Dad to Grandma
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*1963 – August 19 – Letter From Dad to Mother – He’s in Alaska, we’re on way to Santa Fe, New Mexico
*1963 – August 26 – Letter from Dad to Mother –
*1963 – August 5 – Fire Damaged Copy of Patent Number 1232827 for 120 Acre Homestead
*1958 – August 26 – Mother Voted on the Alaskan Statehood Referendum
*1966 – May 3 – Letter from Eagle River Baptist Church – Mother Born Again
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This just in from:
| Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog
|
| New Medical Specialty Approved for Treating Child Abuse
Posted: 07 Oct 2009 08:31 AM PDT After nearly a decade of work, physicians have succeeded in getting the American Board of Pediatrics to offer a specialty in child abuse treatment. Supporters of the specialty said such experts are needed to teach medical students and residents about child abuse. The first exam in the specialty will be offered at sites around the country on November 16. An estimated 225 physicians are expected to take the test, which will be given on alternate years, and the first certificates will be issued by January 2010. The boards issue certificates in 37 general specialty and 94 subspecialty areas. Board certificates are held by about 85% of physicians licensed in the U.S. |
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+BEING TRANSCRIBED NOW – My Mother’s 1963 Letters
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COMING SOON! The finished transcription of my mother’s 1963 letters, including her August 14, 1963 letter with her ‘in-famous’ quote: “I’d hurry faster but I don’t know where I’m going….” Those words alone could sum up the bulk of my mother’s Borderline Personality Disordered tragic life!
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PLEASE NOTE: I’m working to find emotional abuse recovery resources for men, as well as for women (if anyone knows a super site, please post a comment with info). My father was a severely mentally, verbally and emotionally abused spouse. Most Borderlines are women, which means it is mostly men who suffer from the devastation of being in relationship with them. If my father had been able to seek recovery for himself, he could have been able to help his children — even me.
CHECK OUT EMOTIONAL ABUSE RECOVERY FOR WOMEN:
| Annie Kaszina
<annie@EmotionalAbuseRecoveryNow.com |
The Accelerated Healing Journey Teleclass Series
Will YOU Leave The Emotional Abuse Behind You?
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+LOST-AND-FOUND – ME IN THE 1957 CHRISTMAS TREE HUNT
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Current Top Searches that lead readers to this blog:
“borderline personality disorder” + “abuse” + “denial”, how insecure attachment person can think like secure attachment, what is insecure attachment disorder, mother with borderline personality disorder
Don’t forget, you can use the search window feature on this blog! Otherwise, feel free to stroll around-scroll around these pages. There’s a LOT of information here! And thanks for stopping by for a visit!
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So precious! I dug in the lost-and-found, and here I am out on the great 1957 Christmas tree hunt with my family when I was 6 — our first Christmas in Alaska. Although I disappeared before the tree was dragged into the log house, I am certainly in on the first part of the expedition! I never take it for granted when I see myself (in my turquoise parka with the white ruffs) as a ‘bona fide‘ part of my family!
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See these in context with rest of this 1957 day’s photos:
*Age 6 – Where Am I? Not In These Xmas Tree Photographs
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+OK – MORE LINKS TO MORE NEW PICTURES
What a gift that land was — and what a tragedy we couldn’t make a happy home there!
*1960 Walking Up Mountain in Snow (Me and Cindy)
*1960 – April 3 – Dad Stuck in Snow on Tractor
*1959 – May – Walking the Mountain – Barely A Road
*1959 – Children New To the Mountain – Loving IT!
*1959 – Jeep Truck With Jamesway, Pollard, Tractor
*1959 – Can barely see it – trailer parked at bottom of Horror Hill
*1959 – January – Dad and Jeep station wagon at Pollard’s house
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+BEING MY MOTHER’S IMAGINARY SWORN ENEMY
Deadly Child’s Play
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The consequences of some childhood imaginative play can be so destructive when carried into adulthood that we have no real choice other than to call it deadly. My mother’s play fit this category.
For all the writings that attempt to describe and explain the behavior that some Borderline Personality Disorder parents, particularly mothers, engage in with some or all of their children, fit this category.
The reference for this post about the symptoms of dissociative disorders in children can be found below. There is only one single aspect of the material contained in it that I wish to address right now:
4. The child’s belief in alternate selves or imaginary friends that control the child’s behavior may reflect disorganization in the development of a cohesive self.
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I am also writing a reply to a comment my second to the youngest (1961) brother wrote today. I believe that my mother suffered from a pre-Borderline Personality Disorder condition from the time she was no older than 6 years old. I believe that what went wrong for her prior to that age had already spawned this condition so that without immediate and adequate childhood intervention, the course of the progression of her mental illness was – by today’s enlightened standards and knowledge about the disorder – entirely predictable.
She was, therefore, already mentally ill when my father married her. The ‘up side’ of her disorder allowed my mother to appear as a vivacious, charming, stunningly gorgeous catch of a wife. That she was too vivacious, charming, stunning and gorgeous could not have alerted anyone at that time to the terrible troubles that lay down the road of her life – and down the road of anyone’s life that she captured in the web of her illness.
My mother had a mind that could ‘think’ only in terms of the imaginary world of her early childhood. My father fit the image of her perfect imaginary Perfect Husband – with only one fixable flaw. As she used to tell us, he did not smoke a pipe. That was easy. She convinced him to start smoking one.
The birth of a son for a first child also fit her perfect imaginary world image of motherhood. EVERYONE wanted a boy to be born first. It amazed me that my oldest brother’s wife could hear the hysterical tone of my mother’s psychotic mind in the ‘voice’ used to comment in my brother’s baby book. My brother and I were evidently still so captured in my mother’s web, even three years ago, that we could not detect that crazy woman’s crazy voice. My astute objective sister-in-law sure could!
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So, yes, in response to my brother’s comment, my mother did become the woman she already was when my father married her – just more so. By the time I was born, through complications of my being a breach birth that nearly killed the both of us, and due to a psychotic break that seemed to have happened to her while she birthed me, Linda, the first born daughter and second child to be born into this perfect imaginary married life of motherhood for my mother, was assigned a role all of her own.
I need to mention that according to the way my mother described all during my childhood how I tried to kill her before I was born, that the devil sent me to kill her — that part of the psychosis could easily have happened with its resulting consequences no matter which sex I had been born as. After all, back then she had no way of knowing if I was a boy or a girl until I actually appeared. Which brings me to the clearest way I have yet found to explain and describe what happened to me next – and through contamination, to my siblings.
My mother did not have imaginary friends from childhood that controlled her as the above number 4 symptom of childhood dissociative disorder suggests. She formed her imaginary mental and emotional structure, I believe, while playing alone with her dolls. They were her initial imaginary friends, and she could, of course, control them absolutely. When she began to have children of her own she simply slid her imaginary friend structure over on top of us. With one exception.
For whatever reasons, no doubt stimulated by the difficult circumstances of my birth, I was NEVER my mother’s imaginary friend. I was her imaginary mortal enemy – so bad that I was assigned the status of being so evil that I was not human. I was a demon, the spawn of the devil, the devil’s child. I strongly suspect that her psychotic break in labor was facilitated by the use of the anesthesia used at that time for women in labor, Twilight Sleep. This drug combination is know to have induced severe nightmarish hallucinations that were SUPPOSED to be ‘not remembered’ along with the pain of birthing. For some women, particularly those with pre-Borderline or other psychosis-related underpinnings, administration of this drug became their demise.
In taking a short-cut here, I can clearly see the pattern my mother applied to her children as we were forced to assume the cloak of her imaginary friend/enemy projections upon us. First born (1950) son was the Hero, second born (1951) daughter the sworn mortal Demonic Enemy Satan’s Child, third born daughter (1953) God’s Child, the Angel Saint, fourth born daughter (1955) the Fairytale Princess, fifth born son (1961) the Alaskan God Son. I cannot yet name imaginary friend status of the sixth son (1965).
My mother had no conscious capacity to recognize these patterns. I think my father believed her fantasies without question, as well. I doubt he had any more of a capacity to recognize what he was dealing with than she did. She was his wife, the mother of his children, and he evidently believed her — lies about Linda.
I see us all in a police line up. I see us all having our mug shots taken, and instead of our actual name and identity being recorded, we each have our chosen imaginary friend – or enemy – designation attached to our existence in my mother’s – and my father’s – world.
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We were all simply a part of my mother’s mentally ill child’s play. I differ from authors who might suggest the ‘imaginary’ role belonged to my mother – witch, waif, etc. The imaginary designations with their resulting and correlating treatment we received from her, belonged to her broken mind. The source of all of our suffering, including to a large extent the suffering of her imaginary Perfect Husband, came from whatever combination of trauma and adaptation to trauma and neglect that my mother made well before she was six years old.
Because my mother was by physiology a female, and raised a ‘traditional doll playing girl’, her psychosis centered around home and family. Had she been a boy, who knows where her psychotic imaginary play would have taken her in adulthood. Perhaps she would have been likely to murder us, chop us into little pieces and store us in a wall, bury us in the yard, or eat us.
Fortunately, that’s not the story being told here. What I know of what happened to me was on the level of soul murder, and that’s bad enough. Because the imaginary friend status assigned to my siblings was not enemy, they were able to ‘escape around the edges’ and form some self of their own. My history with her was of her continually controlling me and abusing me as much as she possibly could. When it comes to being able to empathize with my mother enough to truly understand her underlying unconscious motives, nobody who did not share my mother’s psychosis can ever know what it all seemed like and felt like inside of herself. I probably come the closest because she so pervasively invaded and obsessively controlled me.
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Herein lays the difference between siblings that are not often apparently abused by a mentally ill parent and the Chosen One that is insanely and chronically abused. My mother did not have the ‘benefit’ of knowing who her imaginary enemy was until I was born. Once she KNEW, she then had a specified target upon which she could focus the full destructive intent of her psychosis. And believe me, that’s exactly what she did.
All the moving around we did, what my mother refers to in her letters as “shifting” from place to place, simply HAD to happen as a result of the unanchored mercurial madness of her extremely disturbed mind. It began very early in her marriage and became far more pronounced with the progression of her illness once we reached Alaska when I was five.
This “shifting” deprived all of us of any stable footing beneath our childhood feet. Coupled with the toxic contamination of being raised by an unstable mother who was obviously capable of severe depressions and violent rage attacks, all six of her children can no doubt say that they “did not have a happy childhood.” This does not mean that there were not positive aspects to our childhood, because there were. Yet each of our separate, individual experiences of our childhood, even with the underlying madness, depended to the largest extent upon which one of my mother’s inescapable imaginary friends – or enemy – identities we had been assigned at our birth.
Excluding and excusing my father from responsibility for either his active or passive participation in my mother’s madness places him on the level of being a child rather than of being an adult. He was no doubt a traumatized adult, but as one of my commenter’s wisely points out, he WAS an adult and we were his children. At the same time that he might have been my mother’s imaginary husband, he was our very real father, as she was our very real mother.
There is no judge and jury here. There is no real question of accountability. It’s far too late for that. My intention is to uncover what I can of the clues, the evidence and the seeming facts about my childhood of unimaginable suffering. That it could have been worse is obvious. That it never got any better is equally obvious. I am, at best, simply a survivor of a childhood that should NOT have been allowed to happen. And it wouldn’t have, if anyone, anywhere, had cared enough to pay adequate attention and take some appropriate action on behalf of my parents’ traumatized children.
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Because the early experiences of my mother’s own childhood left her with a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder, focusing on fighting her ‘war’ against the enemy that was me allowed her to find a purpose (other than homesteading so she could have her imaginary Kingdom) that to some extent allowed her to organize and orient her inner life. Hers was a war waged in the private confines of our home. It was a war of terrorism. It was a clandestine war, as most wars against innocents are, with me as the victim because my mother lacked the capacity to know I was her precious little girl, not her enemy.
Main Entry: clan·des·tine
Pronunciation: \klan-ˈdes-tən also -ˌtīn or -ˌtēn or ˈklan-dəs-\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle French or Latin; Middle French clandestin, from Latin clandestinus, from clam secretly; akin to Latin celare to hide — more at hell
Date: circa 1528
: marked by, held in, or conducted with secrecy
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REFERENCE as presented in this October 1, 2009 post: +CHILDHOOD DISSOCIATION, DEPERSONALIZATION, DEREALIZATION – I NEVER HAD A CHOICE TO BE OR NOT TO BE
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Guidelines for the Evaluation and Treatment
of Dissociative Symptoms in Children
International Society for the Study of Dissociation
Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, Vol. 5(3) 2004
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1300/J229v05n03_09 119
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Please follow (above) link to read this entire article and to find the exact references the authors are referring to in this section of their article (below):
“There is no consensus yet on the exact etiological pathway for the development of dissociative symptomatology, but newer theoretical models stress impaired parent-child attachment patterns (Barach, 1991; Liotti, 1999; Ogawa, Sroufe, Weinfield, Carlson, & Egeland, 1997) and trauma-based disruptions in the development of self-regulation of state transitions (Putnam, 1997; Siegel, 1999).
Newer theorizing ties maladaptive attachment patterns directly to dysfunctional brain development that may inhibit integrative connections in the developing child’s brain (Schore, 2001; Stien & Kendall, 2003).
From the vantage point of treating children and adolescents, a developmental understanding of dissociation makes the most sense.
That is, dissociation may be seen as a developmental disruption in the integration of adaptive memory, sense of identity, and the self-regulation of emotion.
According to Siegel (1999), integration is broadly defined as “how the mind creates a coherent self-assembly of information and energy flow across time and context” (p. 316).
In other words, Siegel sees the development of an integrated self as an ongoing process by which the mind continues to make increasingly organized connections that allow adaptive action.
Children and adolescents may present with a variety of dissociative symptoms that reflect a lack of coherence in the self-assembly of mental functioning:
1. Inconsistent consciousness may be reflected in symptoms of fluctuating attention, such as trance states or “black outs.”
2. Autobiographical forgetfulness and fluctuations in access to knowledge may reflect incoherence in developmental memory processes.
3. Fluctuating moods and behavior, including rage episodes and regressions, may reflect difficulties in self-regulation.
4. The child’s belief in alternate selves or imaginary friends that control the child’s behavior may reflect disorganization in the development of a cohesive self.
5. Depersonalization and derealization may reflect a subjective sense of dissociation from normal body sensation and perception or from a sense of self.
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What are the Causes of Borderline Personality Disorder?
Conditions Related to Borderline Personality Disorder
Treatments for Borderline Personality Disorder
Getting Help for Borderline Personality Disorder
Life With Borderline Personality Disorder
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Check out this super website!
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+COLD FISH – AGE 11 – LETTER I WROTE TO MY GRANDMA
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Moving into the more ‘recent history’ of my childhood as I search through my mother’s accumulation of papers begins to make my stomach queasy and gives me a feeling that something icy is crawling around on the inside ‘surface’ of my skin. I feel very small, nearly caught by the cast of a massive creeping shadow.
The following link is to a letter I wrote to my grandmother while we were living in the Eagle River log house the winter of my 6th grade of school. I enjoyed very much reading about the ‘clappers’ because I have never forgotten that experience — though now I know that at the time I was (just to make you a little curious) sick to death of ‘clapping’! I have always remembered being a part of the group with all of my classmates, on equal ground and on equal footing with them as we practiced our unique musical skills. I have always thought what joy it would give me to be able to repeat the experience with a group of adults!
I can sense the same lack of emotion in this letter that I sense in the ones I wrote to my own mother well into my adulthood — before I disowned her. I hear the cold distant ring of the left-brained intellect, devoid of any in-formation from passion, from body memory or emotion from the beating heart of the right brain.
It’s like I hear myself speaking in a vast, empty hollow chamber so big that all sound dissipates into nothingness before it can actually reach anyone — and I am absolutely alone. More accurately, it feels to me today like I opened my mouth, pantomiming communication but not a single word or sound came out. I see the image of Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’. How does a child create a self in a world of violence, where the inner and the outer world feels exactly like a vacuum?
Perhaps it’s the contrast and contradiction between supposedly attempting to communicate in my letter, while at the same time knowing that ‘Linda wasn’t at home’ when she wrote it that bothers me most. She/I was not connected to any feeling center that was informed with the warmth of being alive in a body in her/my world.
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*Age 11 – My May 30, 1963 Letter to Grandma
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+BELOW THE SURFACE – THE CONNECTION BETWEEN SEVERE EARLY CHILD ABUSE, EAGLES AND BUZZARDS
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In two of the places I have lived for any length of time in my life I’ve been able to watch one of two kinds of great soaring birds. Both in Alaska and in northern Minnesota I watched the great soaring eagles. Down here in the high Arizona desert right on the Mexican-American border I watch great soaring buzzards. Each of these two bird species operates with completely different energy and drive systems.
I think about these birds today in relation to the forensic autobiographical work I am doing as I try to understand what happened to my mother in her early childhood that pushed her so far over the Borderline wall that it destroyed her life, and nearly destroyed mine in the process.
Common sense tells us that an eagle is not meant to be a buzzard. A buzzard is not meant to be an eagle. And yet, strange as it might seem, the developmental alterations and adaptations that a tiny developing human body must make to adjust to a malevolent early world ends up creating some fantastic combinations than we can begin to see as if they were the result of some cross-hybridizing between these two impressive species of birds.
Both species are able to soar around, floating on air currents, surveying the world far beneath them. They have the same intent — to stay alive. But how they do so differs greatly between the two.
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Eagles are designed with a super adrenaline system as their source of energy. They are birds of prey with keen eyes that can see the smallest movement of prey from hundreds of feet in the air. They can swoop down to earth at incredible speeds and unerringly nab their meal.
Buzzards, on the other hand, are designed with a thyroid-based very low energy source. They are not solitary hunters that are designed to swoop and kill. They are designed to hunt dead prey with conspecifics. They can still see from hundreds of feet up in the air where they soar in great lazy circles. Once one hunter spots food the rest are notified, and they simply settle themselves down to earth for a shared feast – the more putrefied the better. This is the easy life! The buzzard has broken out of the predator-prey cycle.
See: +TOMKINS ON EVOLUTION OF AFFECT
Contained in a section from the above link Silvan Tomkins notes the following:
“In man, the thyroid is relatively larger than in any other land animal and is larger than the adrenal in comparison with the ape and virtually all the wild land animals who have a larger adrenal than thyroid. In the fetus and human infant the adrenal gland is larger than the thyroid. At the time of birth there begins a gradual decline of the adrenal gland dominance which continues until the twenty-first year at which time the thyroid is 2 ½ times the size of the adrenal glands. Crile attributes some of the volatility of the infant to this early, more primitive endocrine balance. (Tomkins/aic/157)” [Affect – Imagery – Consciousness” volume 1: The Positive Affects and volume 2: The Negative Affects by Silvan S. Tomkins (Professor of Psychology, Princeton U) Springer Publishing Company, NY 1962]
In other words, what this information tells me is that very young human infant-children are designed with a hyper-drive adrenaline system that will respond to trauma with much more force and power than an adult human is even capable of. I imagine that this is so that the tiny human’s body can receive trauma-related signals from its early environment while there is still yet time for biological developmental processes to shift all possible growth and development to allow for future survival (with hopes of reproducing offspring) in a most hostile and malevolent world. Early malevolent conditions thus stimulate massive adrenaline responses in the human infant-child that have the most profound impact possible on the development of a tiny human being — for one single purpose — to give it the best possible odds for continued survival.
Infant-children are by design vulnerable prey. It is important to understand that Nature has designed both predators and prey with similar, finely tuned compatible stress response systems. If an infant-young child is born into an early malevolent environment, particularly when the predator is its early caregiver(s), the potential buried in genetic memory that allows prey to survive will become activated so far as is possible — but not without life long consequences being caused by these alterations.
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From the instant of our conception to the instant of our death, we are, as individuals, on some level ‘in charge’ of the property of our body. We seldom consciously know, however, what direction the ‘development’ of that property is taking. These changes happen on the molecular signal and response level. Evolution has provided us with massive amounts of genetic information and sophisticated mechanisms that tell our genetic memory what to do in any given situation. Is our property dry? We best find water. Is our property too swampy and wet? Find a way to dry it out. Is our property in need of soil amendments? Find some. Is our property in need of protection? We better find some of that, as well.
All of this works smoothly and effortlessly – no matter what the conditions are surrounding the fetus-infant-child as it grows and develops just so long as physical life of the ‘property’, or the body, is maintained. Whatever problems forced adjustment to malevolent early conditions create will, however, show up eventually as the altered body, including altered brain-mind, later experiences conflict with the more benevolent world such an individual might find themselves living in during their life span.
Our body is our real estate. It is the ONLY estate we will ever have. But the conditions of our earliest beginnings do the major job of developing this property, and once that major development has occurred, we will NOT be able to change it.
The young human body is geared like an eagle is to respond from its adrenaline base. If all is well in early childhood, the adult human becomes more like a buzzard who can soar around in a relatively relaxed state with its human social-specie mates in a state of cooperation and sharing of the relatively easy-to-spot-and-devour requisites for staying alive. What I see of my mother is that her early distress environment signaled her body, including her brain-mind, to anticipate and prepare for a malevolent world of trauma and deprivation. She existed in a chronic state of amplified anxiety that manifested itself in all sorts of destructive ways throughout her entire life time.
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She also communicated to my growing infant-child body that the world was malevolent, and shared with me – by building it right into my body – that an adrenaline-based anxiety system was needed as the best bet for staying alive. My developing body-brain-mind-self had to adjust itself to survive the world that she knew from her own early childhood, and then created for me. Hence, I have all sorts of anxiety-related manifestations within myself that damage my ability to exist in a benevolent rather than then malevolent world I was designed to exist in.
When it comes to the truth of a harsh reality, the problem for both my mother and for myself is that we simply LIVED TOO LONG. The adjustments and adaptations that our body-brain-mind-self was forced to make as we developed came from our genetic memory ability to manage the property of our body in a world that far more closely matched an evolutionarily remote malevolent world of human earlier beginnings than it later matched the far more benevolent one we left home to join.
As I see it, the length of time we survived comes from a combination of factors. Our genetic memory contained powerful adaptive potential, and the world we grew into was not completely distressful enough to destroy us physically at an early date.
There is no magic wand to be waved, no simple switch to flip that will ever readjust a human body once it has grown into adulthood to be a ‘different body’ designed to survive in a malevolent world. The hands of the clock of evolutionary time can not be simply wound forward so that we can NOW live in a wonderful, benevolent world of plenty of safety and security. What we need to do is face the facts, own the truth, understand the FULL consequences of infant-child development in a toxic and dangerous world of trauma and deprivation, and then learn how to recognize these consequences for what the truly are.
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+CHILD ART – THE THREE DRAWINGS I HAVE OF MY MOTHER’S
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Three pencil drawings. That’s it. That’s probably all I will ever find of my mother’s childhood artwork. There was one other drawing, well framed and carried from place to place with every move of my childhood. When I get the family slide shots down from Alaska, I think there’s one that actually has THAT drawing showing as it hung on a wall.
THAT is the one my mother bragged about to me when I was the age she was when she did the ones included in this link below. THAT one was done when she was 13 and took an art class. She was proud of it, and well she should have been — but leave it to my mother to be mean about it.
One time when I was about 9 or 10 I drew a picture of her, the very best that I could do. I was so proud of it, but when I showed it to her she said it was the ugliest picture she had ever seen, and I better never show her another one like it. She pointed to THAT picture on the wall — a picture of a young child’s angelic face that looked like it was copied from one by a ‘great master’ — and told me that THAT was what good drawing looked like. Certainly not what I had carried in my small hands to show her.
She hurt me, and I never did show her anything I drew again after that, but fortunately I didn’t stop drawing. I did it in secret, in private — the same way she did these three drawings you will see when you follow this link. And they are NOT masterpieces! But they are fascinating little forensic clues in my search for evidence that who my mother turned out to be was already visible in her childhood.
At the same time I find a little comfort, nearly 50 years after her nasty criticism of MY drawing to see these ones of hers. They are no better than mine was!
*Fascinating – Three Childhood Drawings of My Mother’s
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I also thought it might be interesting to actually show mother’s child handwriting from her childhood stories — they were written just before to just after her 10th birthday (Dec. 1935 – Jan. 1936). It is interesting to note that my mother’s grandfather, the same one that died right after the stock market crash in 1929 (when my mother was 4) that so devastated her family and right before her parents divorced, is buried in Wyoming Cemetery. WYOMING, as you can see in these original pages, is very noticeable:
*Mother’s Childhood Stories — A Few Scanned Pages from Original
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Stop the Storm 
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