Tag: dissociation

+BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER – LEARNING ABOUT MY MOTHER’S BRAIN-MIND

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Several years ago when I first began research for my writing I had no intention of focusing on Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).  The more I work with the transcription of my mother’s Alaskan homesteading letters, the more I realize that it is impossible for me to avoid the subject.

According to the statistics at the bottom of this post, approximately 1 in 50 adult Americans suffer from BPD disorder.  If I think about how BPD affects our population, I realize that the offspring of these people are severely affected.  From that ‘contagion’ the grandchildren on down are affected, as well as every person intimately (and even not so intimately) connected to the BPD person.

My mother’s letter that I present here is simply another tiny slice of the words she expressed from within her own psyche, from within her own perspective of the world.  Having been her abused child for 18 years, I can read a universe of twisted darkness not only behind the words she chooses to write, but in all the spaces between those words and between those lines.

Taken together, my mother’s letters (once I have completed transcription of them) has the possibility of being the single most comprehensive ‘case history’ of a severe Borderline Personality Disorder person ever collected.

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My mother intended to write her book about her story — her way.  She could not do it.  I believe her true story is ABOUT the mental illness that kept her from doing so.  In her September 26, 1959 letter to her mother she states:

“Please now send back all letters and this – it’s my only record and I’m determined – a book I will write!!  — I will — !!”

This letter this sentence is taken from is longer and perhaps sheds more light on her psyche than does the one I post below, and is well worth reading.  It can be found at:

*September 1959 Mother’s Letters

I cannot personally imagine any scenario in which a BPD parent can be a truly adequate parent.  I see that all such a parent’s offspring are in danger of being used in the twisted inner psychic reality world that the Borderline condition creates — used as pawns and props of an externalized psyche of a parent that has no idea what “ordinary” reality is.  These children will not be recognized as the individual actual people that they are, and will not be related to as such by their BPD parent.

Nor do I believe that Borderlines as severe as my mother was ever have the capacity to understand “ordinary” people or reality — ever.  It is an admirable effort should these people seek therapy and desire to change — and some progress might be able to be made IN THE DIRECTION of ordinary — but they will never get there.

BPD individuals do not have “ordinary” brains.  Part of their condition is that they will NEVER understand how different their thinking and acting is.  From the outside — such as from the position of readers of my mother’s letters — the difference in their thinking is almost imperceptible.

But it IS there.  Hopefully by the time I complete the job of transcribing my mother’s letters I will be able to CLEARLY pinpoint and point to examples that will make these differences as clear as possible.  In addition we can more clearly discern the insecure disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder that lies at the root of the Borderline Personality Disorder’s condition.

So how do those of us who had such a parent, usually a mother, begin to untangle for ourselves the twisted childhood that has confused us at our basis from the time we were born?  I urge readers to take a long, close, hard, thoughtful look at these letters my mother wrote, both the one copied here below and the one at the end of the link to the September 1959 letters provided above.

But most importantly, pay attention to your body as you read them, particularly to your gut. Note any sensation that your body, through your right emotional brain sends you — not what your left brain very limited logical side might wish to convince you is real.

We also have hosts of cultural admonishments not to ‘think badly’ about other people.  I learned a long time ago that by looking for the truth about my mother I am NOT judging her.  I am trying to understand the devastatingly cunning and destructive mental illness that consumed her, and therefore her life.  My mother’s was an insidious disease.  My mission-possible is to offer some small insight into how to recognize both the conditions that contributed to its onset (almost always through childhood traumas) and the damage that it does particularly to the BPD’s offspring — especially to THE CHOSEN ONE for abuse such as I was.

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October 22, 1959 7:15 PM

Dear Mother,

Just a short ‘Hi’.  Bill is only working 10 hours now and I’ve been getting children’s meals and then he arrives and another meal to get so – tonite I’m waiting for HIM – so thought I’d write a note while waiting.

Just read your long letter – so nice and informative and interesting.  It’s funny how things work out.  Now you’re $ tight and we got that loan and can start paying you back.  Thank God.  We are watched over – for certain, for certain.

We’re tight too and eat beans and potatoes (Carrs gave us 100 pounds) but at least we can keep those D – vehicles.

I just finally got truck started.  All week it wouldn’t run but today it’s warmed up and now it’s raining and then will freeze!!!

Anyways went to garage to see about jeep and called Bill at work and he talked to mechanic.  I’ll know when he gets home.  It will cost but we’ve GOT to get it fixed.

Took truck up to get Linda at Brownies and J. at Cub Scouts.  I feel they need that.  {Linda note:  Brownies didn’t last long in my life, but it was at least something positive while it did.}

Those D – Vanover boys still don’t like J. and Julie came over and told him and that they say “none of the boys like him” and did I tell her.  I told her.  I told her they don’t even know HIM or his friends etc. etc. and I told her they were impolite and unmannerly to say such a thing and I knew plenty who didn’t like them!  [Linda note:  Chuckle!  Oh, great mom!  Look who’s talking!]

He felt terrible but I felt worse.  [Linda note:  That sucks having a mother like ours was!  She could only care about herself!] He must play baseball, ice skate, ski etc.  He MUST – we need $ for those things.

Oh Mom, it’s not easy to be a child – or a Mother.

They got report cards.  Linda got all B’s, J. got D in spelling and otherwise B’s.  I can’t understand it and wrote her a note about it.  She said when I visited school it was his arithmetic and he got C+ in that and all other B’s.  I’ll drill him now in that too!

Work work work

I worry over our 2 months [proving up time on the homestead].  Our neighbors – Pottle, Gunter etc. say “Who will know?”  Oh, I hate that.

I say We Know!  We’re Honest.

Spring is not good, roads are impassable – mud and all.  Remember?  Must be Nov, Jan, Feb or 2 of these.  Unless you come up in March and April.  I hate to depend on that.

Still no children – just Gracie.  I don’t feel she’s good publicity.  [Linda note:  Terrible thing to say about the “artist’s retarded daughter” in her Happy Time Nursery School, and read below!]

She’s a moron but easy for me!  She does say 20 words, plays dolls etc. ? But what do others think?

Oh Mom – I want a home and to live like other people.  I’m tired of all this mixed up MESS.

Tell C and C ‘Hi’ I’ll write Carolyn this week.

You come up in March and April and I’ll go back with you for a month – kids get out of school May 15th.  I could — ?  Love, Your Loving Daughter

+++ [in same envelope – says Friday]

Dear Mom,

Enclosing your scarf – I never wear it.  It just looks like YOU – please wear it again.

Also Bill forgot your letter so you’ll get 2.

No new news!  It’s rainy today.

I’m going to try and take children out of school for 2 months.

Seriously could you come up for 2 months or would it completely throw you?

Jo Anne just was over – told me not to tell a soul – nobody – just sold 80 acres he homesteaded in Mountain View for 150,000.

Imagine!

But Jerry got 3 F’s and is on 3 week trial.

Oh Mom – she’s so interested in our place I’m suspicious and sick until I get back [there]!!!  Love, Me

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The rest of October 1959 letters here:

*October 1959 Mother’s Letters

The rest of the 1959 letters here:

*1959 MOTHER LETTERS

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Prevalence and incidence statistics for Borderline Personality Disorder:

See also prevalence and incidence page for Borderline Personality Disorder

Prevalance of Borderline Personality Disorder: 2 percent of adults (NIMH)

Prevalance Rate: approx 1 in 50 or 2.00% or 5.4 million people in USA [about data]

Incidence (annual) of Borderline Personality Disorder: 3,019 annual cases in Victora 1996 (DHS-VIC)

Incidence Rate: approx 1 in 1,510 or 0.07% or 180,074 people in USA [about data]

Incidence extrapolations for USA for Borderline Personality Disorder: 180,074 per year, 15,006 per month, 3,462 per week, 493 per day, 20 per hour, 0 per minute, 0 per second. Note: this extrapolation calculation uses the incidence statistic: 3,019 annual cases in Victora 1996 (DHS-VIC)

Prevalance of Borderline Personality Disorder: BPD is more common, affecting 2 percent of adults, mostly young women. (Source: excerpt from Borderline Personality Disorder: NIMH)

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+AMAZING DISCOVERY – YET ANOTHER OF MY MOTHER’S CHILDHOOD STORIES

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Found 091109

[enclosed old piece of paper with April 22, 1959 homesteading letter mother had written to her mother, and that grandmother had returned to my mother.  The writing of this story on this paper is in my grandmother’s handwriting.]

Grandmother’s note on the bottom of the page says:

“Dictated by Mildred Cahill Lloyd when about 8 years old”

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The Laughing Brook

Once there was a beautiful, gurgling Brook.  Its name was “Laughing Brook.”  The animals in the nearby woods gave its name to it because the wind came and wrinkled it up and made it murmur, and gurgle, and smile all the way down the hillside.

The animals came to drink at this brook, never knowing it was a fairy brook.  Some animals were good and some were bad.  Those that were bad turned into snakes after drinking the water from the brook, but those that were good stayed as they were, beautiful and kind to each other.

There was one good fairy that lived in the Black Forest where this Laughing Brook flowed by.  That fairy had a firefly that lived with her near a waterfall.  The fireflies lit up her way as they flew about the country.

There was a lovely meadow near the brook where daisies and buttercups and clover grew.  In the meadow there was a big red barn where the farmer kept his cows and hens and pigs and horses.

One night as the fireflies were flying around with the fairies watching over the good people they saw a fire in the hay in the barn.  At once the [written they] fireflies and fairies flew in the window of the farmer’s bedroom and flash their lights so brightly and after that the farmer and his wife woke up, saw the fire from their window, and rushed out in time to save all the animals and most of the barn.

Ever after that the farmer and his wife watched every night to see the fireflies at work and play.

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Although I cannot at present access this article, in light of my mother’s childhood writings I find the following to be a fascinating concept, as reflected in this article:

Rites of Passage and the Borderline Syndrome: Perspectives in Transpersonal Anthropology By LARRY G. PETERS

The following seems to be all that is available as an abstract for this article, found in Questia, Vol. 17, 1994.

How, but in custom and ceremony, are innocence and beauty born?

— W. B. Yeats

The purpose of this study is to compare and contrast certain prevalent contemporary pathological symptoms — parasuicide (especially im­pulsive “self cutting” or wrist cutting and other forms of self-mutilation), anorexia/bulimia, substance abuse, and a predisposition to frequent tran­sient psychotic episodes, all of which, as a constellation, combination, or in some cases individually, are identified by clinicians as presumptive signs of “borderline personality disorder” (BPD) — with those same behaviors in tribal societies. The focus is anthropological and cross-cultural; it is a study of rites of passage, many of which in­volve food deprivations (fasting and purgations), body mutilations (cir­cumcision, scarification), accompan­ied by episodes of altered or nonordi­nary states of consciousness (visions, loss of boundaries). It is argued that there is a relationship between BPD and the failure of Western culture to provide context and myth for mean­ingful rites of passage. The typical symptoms of borderline disorder have neither an appropriate cultural chan­nel nor symbol system to provide di­rection and consequently are not fully appreciated by clinicians. However, these “symptoms” may actually be at­tempts at self-healing gone astray in a culture bereft of an integrative spiritual and ritualistic context, and there­fore without an education for tran­scendent states of consciousness.

Cultural Bound Syndromes (CBSs)

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Peters’ writing seems connected to a field of study called ‘The Anthropology of Consciousness.’  The work of Dr. Larry G. Peters, a Tibetan Shaman, presents the most accurate link I have yet found between my mother’s Alaskan homesteading obsession, her spirituality, and her mental illness.

A child has a different consciousness than an adult does.  I have always been able to sense my mother’s childhood consciousness within her childhood writings:  +MY MOTHER’S CHILDHOOD STORIES.

Having tonight discovered this additional piece of her childhood writing confirms for me that her mind, even by the age of 8, was already grappling on a profound – though unconscious – creative level with archetypal issues related to death and destruction, salvation, punishment and consequence, transformations, relationships with the natural world, and with the fundamental issues related to GOOD and BAD, RIGHT and WRONG that connect to the Borderline Personality Disorder spectrum of symptoms.

I absolutely believe that my mother had child onset pre-borderline conditions that are reflected in her childhood writings – if anybody then could, or even anybody now can make those connections.  I know a lot about my mother.  I was the victim of her insane severe abuse for 18 very long years.

My mother’s inner mental structure was built from very early childhood and probably from her earliest infancy upon a BROKEN understanding of good versus bad.  Whatever psychotic break occurred during her delivery of me was enough to toss her completely over the edge.

I was not saved from the fire as her child.  She used the term ‘snake’ in reference to me.  She believed I was not human, that I was the devil’s child.  I was the outward personification of everything BAD she could not accept about herself.  The OTHER mother, the OTHER Mildred desired to live with the fairies and the fireflies.

I believe the homestead became the outward objectification of the good world her “Laughing Brook” existed in, and the act of homesteading itself became a perpetual rite of passage for my mother as she sought what could not ‘follow her around the bend’.  Homesteading was about her need for healing.  Even her abuse of me was about her need for healing (because if she could ‘deal’ with me her own projected badness would be healed).

The most amazing thing is that Alaska DOES have the power to heal.  It even now remains mostly pure and that natural purity is what raised-up humans throughout our evolution, and it does have the power to heal.  In my mother’s case, however, it was not enough.  (Read PRESENTING THE HOMESTEADING – her letters.)

The rites of passage that Peters makes reference to occur within a healthy brain, mind and psyche.  The sick psyche of my mother’s could not have been saved past the age of 8 no matter what culture she had been a part of.  My mother was born an extremely fragile, at-risk child.  The conditions within her childhood environment from birth might have been adequate to a less sensitive and vulnerable child.  I believe that the conditions of my mother’s childhood conspired to destroy my mother.  She, in turn, very nearly destroyed me.

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This work that I am doing with my mother’s letters does seem to be about retrieving a life of suffering from the ‘lost and found’ — both hers and mine.

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Mother’s letter to Grandmother May 23, 1959 about the homestead:

“I told Bill I hope to live to be 90 and never leave here.  (I want to be buried here!)  I told him I even yearn to be a child again and live here – such a kingdom….”

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+WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT TRAUMA?

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I would think that in their own way everyone in our great nation recognizes today as the 8th anniversary of one of the most terrible crisis that ever occurred within the boundaries of our country.  Our hearts continue to go out to all those who suffered terror and unimaginable trauma as a result of the destruction brought upon them by the acts of terrorists whose own agendas allowed them to kill and destroy wantonly.  At the same time we remember each person and their loved ones whose lives have been touched in the aftermath of war, destruction and bloodshed that has followed 9-11 and the World Trade Center attacks.

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The most devastating consequences of trauma to humans can never be measured in financial terms.  Neither do we yet know the true reality of the way humans respond to extraordinary traumatic stressors.  Continued research into the ongoing, intergenerational consequence of the Holocaust’s traumatic effects shows that trauma can be CLEARLY passed down to offspring.

Researchers will be working to uncover the long range consequences of trauma caused by 9-11 for a long time to come.  They know that babies of women pregnant during the 9-11 terrorist attacks have been found to be born with the ‘markers’ for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a result of their mother’s exposure to the attacks.

We are learning more and more both about how resilient humans are and about our fragility.  Every-day people do not usually pay attention to the results of millions and millions of dollars spent on research about the consequences of trauma to humans, and yet this research can inform our thinking in new and more enlightened ways.

The Atlanta study looked at genetic potential as it interacts with children’s responses to trauma.  It found, among other things, that a child’s safe and secure attachment to ANY adult in its life influences to the positive that child’s ability to overcome traumatic experiences.  In another corner of the world researchers have discovered the same thing.  Although exposed equally to unimaginable terrors and traumas, the children of South Africa end up with severe longterm traumatic responses while the children of Kenya do not.

The more damaged South African children live in a country long torn apart, in fact all but dismantled by generations of influences that have destroyed the secure social attachment fabric of their culture.  Kenya has not suffered this intergenerational destruction of its ongoing cultural strengths so that their children have the benefit – in spite of current terrible traumas and tragedies – of being ‘held’ within a culture that still has its social supports and secure attachment systems somewhat in place.

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We cannot realistically consider the long range consequences of traumatic experience without considering the attachment contexts that form and support (or don’t) the members of any human society.  These attachments begin before birth, as the responses of infants still very much physiologically attached to their mothers during 9-11 demonstrated.

Children are held and supported by the fabric of the attachment support net that their parents either do or do not have in their lives.  Without firmly safe and secure human attachments from the beginning of our lives, we are at astronomically increased risk of suffering long term devastation in our adult lives from any traumatic experience that we might later have.  It is time that all of us realize that attachment is the single most important aspect of our lives because we are a social species.

What this means to me is that all of us, including and perhaps most importantly any mental health expert that works with troubled people of all ages, must begin to include attachment disorder understanding, concepts and vocabulary into our cultural base of knowledge about what makes our lives ‘good’ and what makes them ‘bad’.  I doubt that more than a small handful of mental health experts EVER talk with their adult clients about insecure attachment disorders.

We reserve any discussion or awareness of secure and insecure attachment disorders ONLY as it might relate to ‘troubled’ children.  Where do we think child attachment disorders disappear to once someone magically crosses some invisible line into adulthood?  They go nowhere.  Our attachment orders or disorders are as much ingrained into us as any other physiological response system our brain, body, nervous and immune system has.

We HAVE to begin talking about our attachment system as it operates in our adulthood because it formed who we are and affects how we respond both to the good and to the bad in our lives – at all times!  Those who might be having the most difficult time recovering from the devastating trauma of 9-11 are no exception.  But has ANYONE ever talked to them about their attachment system?

I am willing to bet that any adult who was formed in an extremely malevolent childhood environment and who did not have the benefit of having a safe and secure adult attachment person in their childhood life, is among those who lack the necessary resiliency to recuperate fully from any traumas that they experience.  We are doing nobody any favors by ignoring the absolute, fundamental reality of how our secure or insecure attachment system governs our ability to cope with trauma.

I therefore encourage readers to spend some time investigating some of the information connected to the live-links provided in this post.  You might help yourself beyond belief, or be able to assist someone you know in their efforts to deal with any ongoing traumatic consequences in their lives – including their ability to parent effectively.

Trauma is not bliss, and neither is ignorance.  It is the response-ability of all of us to arm ourselves with any and all information that can help us understand what we can better do to improve secure attachments in the world – no matter who we are, what age we are, or what we have experienced.

Thank you for reading this post.  Comments are welcome and appreciated.

+ATTACHMENT: SMART AND STUPID RESEARCH

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+HUMAN AND HORSE MOTHERING – WHAT’S IN COMMON?

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I wanted to share something from a book I’m reading, The Body Language of Horses by Tom Ledbetter, Bonnie Ainslie.  My brother gave it to me while I was visiting him in Alaska.

I’ve never really had the longed for luxury of being able to spend time with horses.  I’ve always been too poor, too involved in keeping my children clothed and fed with a roof over our heads.

I find as I read this book that I feel like the authors are talking about me.  How can that be?  I am not a horse, yet I am like them.  Because of the extreme abuse I suffered from the time I was little, and because of the overall and overriding insanity present in the home I grew up in, I did not grow up to be an ordinary person.

I have tried to fit in.  I’ve tried to learn the ‘human language’ that others speak not most importantly with their words, but with their body language and the expressions on their faces.  Because my mother was psychotic, because she could not interact with me normally, I simply did not get the same brain circuitry.  Not even the regions of my brain developed according to ‘ordinary’ experiences or patterns, as I have been explaining in my writings.

I can, therefore, more closely relate to what these authors are saying about horses than I can any book I ever read about people.  I might understand a book about all sorts of other kinds of animals if one was written like this one is, but these authors express a rare and comprehensive understanding of how it is to be a horse.  I am amazed and I am feeling calmer as I read it.

Ainslie and Ledbetter explain that every time a human overwhelms a horse with human demands and misconceptions, the horse has no choice but to act like less than what it is – less than a horse.  I understand.  I was not allowed to be a child.  The way my mother treated me did not allow me to be a child just like some humans do not allow horses to be horses.

All the many parallels I find between horses and myself create inside of me a sense that I am so much more correct in my understanding of the changed body and brain of a severely abused child compared to how a child is SUPPOSED to have been allowed to develop that I really do feel like I am a member of nearly a completely different species than are ‘ordinary’ people.

And I know I am not alone.  Therefore, as I share this single paragraph from this book (so far) I wish readers to understand that human mothers create in their offspring the kind of person their infants and children grow into.  I am aware that genetics plays a part in who we become, but researchers are becoming more and more clear that severe abuse alters how genetic potential expresses itself.

Every time an infant and a young child is not given what it needs to develop into its optimal self some life long consequence to the negative is going to appear.  Only in situations where the most important resiliency factor of the AVAILABILITY of some other adequate early caregiver’s interference in the harmful influence of the severely maltreating mother is there, in the end, hope that the effects of the mother’s severe abuse will not permanently and seriously alter the person her offspring turns out to be.

I encourage readers to FEEL the following words.  Enlarge your perspective and imagine what these words are saying if you think about them in terms of the variances in the quality of human mothering and caregiving.  In human terms mothers are not forced, for the most part, to compete with other mothers for what is needed to care for their infants and children.

And yet the end result of a human continuum of living a quality, happy and successful life is still directly connected to what our mothers (or other early caregivers) gave to us.  Harm and hatred to infants DOES NOT allow them to develop into fundamentally happy people – and I don’t care how financially well-off such an offspring turns out to be.  Look at their relationships as well as financial standing.

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From The Body Language of Horses by Tom Ledbetter, Bonnie Ainslie:

“The lead mare wins dominance by physical and psychological means.  She rules as long as she remains vigorous.  Her powers serve twin purposes – first choice of food and space (a) for herself and (b) for her young.  By natural selection, the other mares organize in declining order of priority, with the lowest and most subservient getting the last and least for herself and her foal.  Unless the pasture is inhumanely crowded, everyone subsists.  But the psychological effects on the foals are substantially important.  As Number One in its own age group, the lead mare’s baby becomes habituated to the deference of its peers and their dams.  If well bred, soundly constructed and not too severely disoriented by premature weaning, the Number One foal emerges as Number One weanling, most likely to succeed in what humanity calls the Game of Life.”  (P. 64)

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We are not used to thinking about human success, including psychological success, in these terms.  We do not FIRST and FOREMOST understand that it is the health and well-being of mothers (early caregivers) that MOST affects the lifelong outcome of her offspring.

In American, in particular, we want to believe that everyone is equal, and that all can “make it” if they want to and if they work for it.  We do not want to face the fact that deprivations of a serious enough nature from conception to age 2 (and then through age 7) can so set a person off course that they will never be able to completely make up the difference.

Yes, humans may be far more complicated than horses are.  That means to me that we are at an even higher risk for negative consequences from malevolent mothering – not less.  Once our culture truly understands this fact, they will be able to give us the chances we TRULY need to find a way to live well in spite of our malevolent childhoods.

In my thinking, we have to be very clear and very careful about how we assess who and how we are in the world made mostly by people who had the benevolent childhoods we all deserved – and some received the opposite of.  Most do not become members of the ‘lower hierarchy’ because we choose to be there, any more than a horse chooses to me maltreated by a human being.

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+LINK TO TODAY’S WRITING: MEETING MY BORDERLINE MOTHER’S FRIEND

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J.V. was probably the calm to my mother’s storm.  J.V. was unshakable.  She was invincible.  She was consistent, steady, not emotionally involved, clear, outspoken and wise.  My mother could not throw the lasso of her insanity around J.V. and yank her in.  She could not employ J.V. to join with her in craziness in any way.  My mother could not cajole J.V. into any role in her ongoing destructive drama of her life.  Somehow J.V. had something rarer than any precious gem.  She had the ability to be a severe borderline’s friend for 46 years.

This link below connects to this piece that I wrote today about my visit in Alaska with my mother’s friend:

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*Age 58 – MEETING MY MOTHER’S FRIEND

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

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While Dr. Martin Teicher and his Harvard Medical School research group have at least – and at last – finally told us the facts about how early brain development can be altered from extreme early child abuse, I can find no one who talks about what this altered brain feels like from the inside.

I am living with such an altered brain.  Every day I discover how that changed brain impacts on my ability to life anything like a quality life.

Since my return from Alaska, and since my decision to actually write a book rather than simply pouring all my words down the hole (whole) in the cup of my blog, I find that I cannot do it.  I think I know part of the reason why.  Perhaps if I articulate what this seems like I can move past what it is that is stopping me?

As Jill Bolte Taylor describes it in her book ‘My Stoke of Insight’, the right brain does not process anything like a sequence of time.  It also cannot write a book by itself.  Taylor describes how her thoughts operated in words even though she lost the ability during her left brain stroke to either verbalize or to comprehend others’ spoken words.  I wonder how a brain allows us to speak to ourselves within our skulls in word-thoughts even at those times that we cannot use language to communicate outside of ourselves?

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When my brother described how writing a book is like forming a shape from carving a block of wood, my right brain understood exactly what he was saying.  Yet I am now stuck with the dilemma of knowing that a book is a tangible, physical THING.  That means to me that my creative right brain efforts must become directed to the formation of an object.  That must require a multiple level of word-thinking, goal direction and focus that I don’t seem able to do – at least not right now until I LEARN how!

My experience with making anything creatively is that I enter what I understand is a right brain creative space that does not require words.  Some might call this FLOW.  In fact, only during brief periods of needing to organize specific actions (like getting materials together, or actually deciding how big to make something, etc.) do words ever enter my ‘making’ process.

How, then, do I creatively write a book?  My brain seems stuck in this dilemma.  Blogging is writing.  It is not about making a tangible, physical object.  I can evidently utilize my familiar brain circuitry and patterns while blogging that do not seem remotely available to me if I try to force my brain to make the switch to ‘writing the book’.

How interesting!  And currently, how impossible!  I suspect that an ‘ordinarily formed’ brain can enter FLOW space and not lose its orientation and organization in the process.  Based on my current experience, I don’t think my ‘evolutionarily altered’ brain can do that!

I understand that it is the higher cortical areas of the brain that are designed to direct the entire show of how we use our brain-minds to BE in the world.  Teicher’s group and other infant brain development specialists talk about how extreme early child abuse alters the development of BOTH brain hemispheres, of the corpus callosum that lies between them and sends information back and forth between them, and also changes how the higher cortices develop (causing early atrophy rather than normal development).  And these are certainly not the only regions, circuits and operations that are affected!

Great!  And we are supposed to live an ordinary, normal life with THAT brain?  Or write a book with it!  I can make jewelry, crochet rugs, make mosaics, draw a picture, make a clay pot, spin wool, weave, make a garden – in short, do all kinds of creative things with this brain because ‘making things’ has always been a part of who I was born to be.  But the process, or the FLOW of making things seems dissociated for me in certain ways from being able to set a concrete goal toward a specific concrete expression of that FLOW.

Throughout my childhood my mother berated and belittled me for being a stupid child because I sat in the middle of the living room floor making and remaking necklaces out of pop beads before I was two years old.  I doubt that as a young child I had any plan as my tiny fingers ‘worked’ with those beads.  I could interact between process and objects in the material world so that some ‘thing’ came out of it.  It was a natural, nonarticulated process that could happen without any higher cortical goal in mind, without self-censorship, and without any ‘attachment’ to outcome.

How do I do that with words?  Taylor has a lot to say in her book about how silent her brain became as her left brain lost its ability to ‘run the show’.  She applauds the benefits of finding ways to access that silence for ourselves as a good thing even when our whole brain is in operation.  (After eight years of focused and dedicated effort Taylor repaired her brain after her stroke at age 37.)

I say that along with thousands of other suggestions given by people who had safe and securely attached childhoods and were thus able to build ‘ordinary’ brains, that those of us with these malevolently-formed changed brains need to be very careful about taking what an ordinary brain person says about how THEIR ‘ordinary’ brain works and applying it across the board to ourselves.

I can assure you that having a silent brain caused by disconnection with the left hemisphere, and having predominantly right brain experiences without correct cooperative processing of information with the left brain, and being denied ordinary-kind supervision and direction from an ordinarily-formed higher cortex is NOT a blissful experience.  It is unsettling, difficult, challenging, disorienting, disorganizing, and SCARY!

Again, I highly recommend reading My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Ph.D., Jill Bolte Taylor.  It at least gives us a clear language and frame of reference to BEGIN to understand – from deep within our own altered experience – how an ‘ordinary’ brain works in contrast to how our ‘evolutionarily altered’ brain does!

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Enough words about this for the time being.  I do not have a co-writer or a publisher or an invested editor to help me write my book – or to act in place of the higher cortex I need to complete this task as I wish to accomplish it.  I have to find a way to argue this out for myself.  If I cannot do this, the blog will remain as my continual FLOW repository for words that seem to stream out easily in this format, but flee into invisibility if I try to direct them toward a final, finished, tangible, physical object – a book!

The silence that Taylor describes as her left brain shut down was in part about the vanishing voice of judgment and criticism that the left brain seems so prone to offer us.  Blogging is not about being right or wrong, not about succeeding or not, not about approval or any of the operations and expectations that the left brain sinks its teeth into.

If my efforts at ‘making a book’ are being sabotaged by my left brain’s critic, does it have to respond by holding its ability to process language at bay where my right brain can’t get to it?  Does it have to seal my words off from my writing, creating right brain that needs them?  “Come on, you two!  Let’s do better than that!  Cooperate, already!”

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Speaking of books, I am in the process of  reading my way through two of them:

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin

The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature by Daniel J. Levitin

I am not reading them for any particular insight into music, per se.  Levitin mentions that the word for song and the word for dance are the same in many world languages because singing involves body movement.  I know that we had both abilities, and their corresponding brain networks firmly implanted within us long before the 140,000-year-ago benchmark when our FOXP2 gene became activated and we evolved to speak.

It seems obvious to me that we evolved ways to express ourselves and to communicate through song, dance, drama, pantomime and all sorts of gestures from our earliest beginnings.  It was only after those brain regions and circuits were very well formed that we were able to use them – MUCH LATER in our development – to talk and think in words!

I am reading this book because I am looking for ways to think about how screaming, shouting, yelling and all forms of verbal violence and auditory assault in the world of the unborn and the very young child affect the development of sound (and language) processing in the developing brain.

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+BEING HUMAN, ANIMAL OR OBJECT?

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This is a complex article (link below) but concerns the important considerations about how does a severely abused young child build into its brain the correct ability to differentiate people from objects and animals if it is NOT treated as human?

Even though experts say, a young child before the age of two just IS and has not yet developed a Theory of Mind, this does not mean that all the underlying brain circuitry necessary for this ability to form after the age of two is not well in place long before that age.  If an infant and child before the age of two has been severely maltreated and does not have the benefit of a safe and secure attachment with an early caregiver, the faulty foundations within the brain will not easily – if ever – allow for an ‘ordinary’ Theory of Mind to form – at any age.

At age 58 I can clearly feel now what I believe is a major difference in the way my brain processes information from contact and experience with people from how I strongly suspect ‘ordinary’ people do.  I can become increasingly aware of HOW I operate in relation to people, but it is far too late for me to change the brain circuitry that formed during malevolent interactions with my mother and is the foundation for who and how I am in the world.

(I talked with a moose while I was visiting my brother last week in Alaska.  It came to graze under his deck and took a nap on my brother’s lawn.  Except for a very few special people in my life, I am far more comfortable conversing with a moose than I will ever be in the presence of humans.)

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Thinking About Actions:

The Neural Substrates of Person Knowledge

ABSTRACT:

“Despite an extensive literature on the neural substrates of semantic knowledge, how person-related information is represented in the brain has yet to be elucidated. Accordingly, in the present study we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of person knowledge.

Focusing on the neural substrates of action knowledge, participants reported whether or not a common set of behaviors could be performed by people or dogs. While dogs and people are capable of performing many of the same actions (e.g. run, sit, bite), we surmised that the representation of this knowledge would be associated with distinct patterns of neural activity.  Specifically, person judgments were expected to activate cortical areas associated with theory of mind (ToM) reasoning. The results supported this prediction. Whereas action-related judgments about dogs were associated with activity in various regions, including the occipital and parahippocampal gyri; identical judgments about people yielded activity in areas of prefrontal cortex, notably the right middle and medial frontal gyri.

These findings suggest that person knowledge may be functionally dissociable from comparable information about other animals, with action-related judgments about people recruiting neural activity that is indicative of ToM reasoning.”

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Two other related article links:

Linking Form and Motion in the Primate Brain

And another related article:

The Representation of Object Concepts in the Brain

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+SHARING LAST NIGHT’S NATURAL WORLD ATTACHMENT DREAM

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I am thinking today about the ‘evolutionarily altered’ brain as Dr. Martin Teicher’s research group describes it, that those of us who were severely maltreated from birth may have developed.

I am thinking about the special gifts, abilities and wisdom (as well as the risks) that having such a brain has given us as we attempt to negotiate survival in the greater, wider world that we ‘hatched’ into once we left our abusive homes.

While I am not presently free to share with you the neighbor homesteader’s email that this one of mine is in response to, I am going to share what I wrote to back to him today (see below).

I am particularly thinking about any relationships with the natural world that those of us so abused might have had in our childhoods that built themselves particularly into our right brains as we grew up.  I am very clear, especially since my recent trip to Alaska, that my experiences with the wilderness were critically important to my development.  As my ‘evolutionarily altered’ brain was developing, information from the wilderness was able to build itself into me in such a positive way that I credit it to the largest extent with creating who I am today.

I suspect that childhood attachment experiences to pets, gardening, anything to do with the out-of-doors in any way fed us as abused children and as a result we have special gifts today that ‘ordinary’ safe and securely attached-from-birth people very possibly do not have.  We very well might have ancient DNA ancestral memories that were activated within us for our very survival that the ‘ordinary’ people did not have any particular use for.

While all people need air, water, food, shelter to survive, our circumstances as severely abused children very well pushed us toward the ‘evolutionary altered’ reality that Teicher’s group describes in more ways than our current thinking has allowed us to realize.

I believe it is worth our thought to consider how our childhood experiences with the natural world not only allowed us to survive, but helped us to do that in the best way possible.  I believe as we define for ourselves who we REALLY became, and shed the shallow half-truths of mental illness diagnostic categories, we will find within ourselves some powerful gifts that belong not only to us, but to the entire human race.  Do we, indeed know a more ancient human reality?

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My email today to fellow Alaskan homesteader who grew up on his family’s homestead at the foot of the mountain in the Eagle River Valley where I spent most of my childhood:

Dear Valley Brother,

Thank you for your words.  I absolutely hear what you are saying.

I went on a 8-mile hike to Rabbit Lake with my brother and his wife, a long one for me as I am out of shape and do not have my same body back from post-chemo.  My left foot has been sore and swollen ever since.  I rubbed an Arnica gel onto it last night, and the pain left instantly.  Yet I wonder if my foot didn’t talk to me in my dream last night.

I so rarely remember my dreams these past 12 years that it seems to me often that they have left me.  Last night I woke many times but could not leave this dream.

I heard that the pristine earth has a language that humankind once knew, but that now is all but forgotten.  I heard that the last person who spoke in that language passed away and I knew in the dream that the language is at present one of human’s lost ancient languages.

Yet in my dream I understood that the language is still spoken by the earth itself in certain places, and when we walk over that land that language speaks to us through our bodies with words that form themselves exactly as our feet touch the land as we walk over it.

I heard many forgotten words, for many aspects of the world.  As I walked in sleep over Alaska in my dream I heard many ancient words that spoke of the ancient world that is itself seeming to pass away as humans change the land in different ways in modern times.

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I am reminded of another dream I had 12 years ago when I lived for two years in Sioux Falls, SD.  The most beautiful black stallion came to me pleading with me to do something to help him and his People.

“We have always before now been able to run and sleep in quiet places on the land.  We can no longer find any place that is peaceful.  Everywhere the land is always noisy now.  It can find no rest and neither can we.  Please help us.”

I knew what the stallion was saying to me.  I felt his desperation and his sadness.  But I could think of nothing I could do to help him.

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My brother and I also went down to Seward while I was in Alaska, and walked down the path to Exit Glacier.  There is a sign post there for where the edge of the glacier was in 1951.  (I hear from your mom that you were born November of the same year that I was).  In my dream last night I knew that where the glaciers are leaving the land there is a quickly vanishing purity still held within the rocks themselves as they lay exposed to the sky, perhaps for the first time.  That is where the ancient words can most strongly be heard.

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I am happy to share these words with you because I know you will understand.

Again, thanks!  Linda

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+SOME FANTASTIC LINKS ON CHILD ABUSE AND BRAIN CHANGES!

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Greetings to each and every person who has visited this blog during the seven weeks of absence from writing here.  I am home now after more than 10,000 miles of traveling during the past seven weeks as I visited family and friends whom I love and who love me.

The time I spent in Alaska, the home of my heart, was everything I needed it to be in order for me to move forward with the writing of my book.

I will at this point be dividing my writing clearly between my book (which will not be appearing on this blog) and other assorted writing specifically for the blog.  As my precious Alaskan baby brother (now 44) told me, if it is my desire and my intention to write a book, then I need to do it.  He explained it to me this way:

A person might pick up tools and a block of wood intending to carve an image.  Perhaps they are not quite sure what image lies within the wood so they begin carving in process until that image becomes clear and the carving can then give it form.  If, however, that point never occurs where the image within the wood is found, shaped and born, all that will result from the effort of carving is a pile of wood shavings and dust.

I heard and understand the wisdom contained in my brother’s words, and I recognize that continuing to pour words out into my blog will not accomplish the creation of my book.  I will now separate the words that belong in my book from those that do not.

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As I continue through the process of getting my ‘home legs’ under me, I will at least post a few interesting links here for reader consideration!  Please follow some or all of these links – THEY ARE IMPORTANT!  Please also join me in my gratitude to every single person who is involved with this quality of work to further our understanding about the impact of severe child abuse on human development – and the work of everyone committed to ending child maltreatment around the globe.

Please also remember the abuse being done to the fragile web of life on our glorious planet and the suffering of so many species being caused by the thoughtless harm of all kinds caused by humans.

And, for a load of Alaskan MOOSE FUN….

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Back to School Tips: Parents Should Get Ready, Too!

Posted: 27 Aug 2009 08:21 AM PDT

Tips for parents on helping their kids succeed in school, adapter from information provided by our friends at Prevent Child Abuse New Jersey.

Amid the shopping trips for sharpened #2 pencils, crisp notebooks and new shoes, parents should start thinking about what they can do to become the best possible support system for their child this school year. The beginning of the new academic season is often the most important, as it sets the tone for a meaningful and successful year.  Research shows that students are more equipped to thrive academically and socially when parents are actively involved in their child’s education.

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Emotional Abuse Recovery NOW

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Going Big: Harlem Children’s Zone on This American Life

Posted: 18 Aug 2009 02:17 AM PDT

Hats off to This American Life for shining a spotlight on the solutions to the many problems that plague our nation’s impoverished families. Going Big, this week’s episode, profiles Geoffrey Canada, a pioneer in the fields of child and family support and poverty prevention. His organization, Harlem Children’s Zone, boasts tremendous outcomes for the families and community it serves, including:

  • l00% of students in the Harlem Gems pre-K program were found to be school-ready for the sixth year in a row.
  • 81% of Baby College parents improved the frequency of reading to their children.
  • $4.8 million returned to 2,935 Harlem residents as a result of HCZ’s free tax-preparation service
  • 10,883 number of youth served by HCZ in 2008.

Listen to the This American Life podcast.

Below is a five-minute video of moms talking about the challenges of raising children in Harlem and the difference HCZ is making in their lives.

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

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Brain Development Altered by Violence

By Dale Russakoff
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 15, 1999; Page A3

LITTLETON, Colo.—More than a week had passed since Krystie DeHoff felt bullets and bombs explode all around her, since she ran in horror past young, dead bodies to safety. Now she was inching toward normality, shopping at King Soopers grocery, when the most innocent sound–a baby crying in his mother’s arms–set the Columbine High School massacre in motion again, this time in her mind. Her heart raced, her muscles coiled. She heard not a baby, but her classmates, shrieking. “All I could think was: MAKE HIM STOP!” she said.

READ MORE……

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Using Mental Strategies Can Alter

The Brain’s Reward Circuitry

ScienceDaily (June 30, 2008) — The cognitive strategies humans use to regulate emotions can determine both neurological and physiological responses to potential rewards, a team of New York University and Rutgers University neuroscientists has discovered. The findings, reported in the most recent issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, shed light on how the regulation of emotions may influence decision making.

READ MORE….

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The Neural Self: The Neurobiology of Attachment

By Phil Rich, Ed.D., LICSW

It is its basis in biology that makes attachment theory unique among theories of psychology and child development. From the biological perspective, attachment is simply an evolutionarily-evolved process to ensure species survival, and is thus as much a part our biology as that of any animal.

From this perspective, cognitive schema and the resulting mental map is not merely a psychological phenomenon, but a physical entity, hard-wired into neural circuits and reflected in neurochemical and electrical activity within the central nervous system.

The mental map into which our experiences and memories are imprinted is thus a neurobiological structure, the result of synaptic processes, out of which human cognition and behavior emerges, resulting in LeDoux’s (2002) description of our “synaptic” self.

Siegel (2001) describes the pattern and clusters of synaptic firing as “somehow creat(ing) the experience of mind” (p. 69). He writes that “integration” reflects the manner in which functionally separate neural structures and processes cluster together and interact to form a functional whole – in this case, our selves.

READ MORE…..

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Child abuse marks genes, affects ability to cope: Study

By Margaret Munro , Canwest News Service

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Stress

Your Three Brains

The neurologist Paul MacLean has proposed that our skull holds not one brain, but three, each representing a distinct evolutionary stratum that has formed upon the older layer before it, like an archaeological site – he calls it the “triune brain.” MacLean, now the director of the Laboratory of Brain Evolution and Behaviour in Poolesville, Maryland, says that three brains operate like “three interconnected biological computers, each with its own special intelligence, its own subjectivity, its own sense of time and space and its own memory”.

READ MORE….

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+SUGGESTED BOOK ON BRAIN HEALING!

alchemynow2 Comments

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I am still in the middle of traveling (went 4-wheeling and horse back riding today), and leave northern Minnesota tomorrow morning for a night’s stay at my son’s in Grand Forks, ND and then back down to my daughter’s in Fargo for another ten days before heading ‘home’ to Alaska to see my brothers and the land.

I could write volumes about my experiences thus far, but there’s only one thing I really want to mention right now.  My youngest sister generously sent me a copy of a book she was reading on her Kindle when I visited her in Seattle recently, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Ph.D., Jill Bolte Taylor.  I want to mention it here so that any of you who might find her book of value will have time to get a copy to read before I finally get a chance (after my travels) to write here about my own perception of the value of this book.

Although I highly recommend Jill’s book, because of the specific issues I present on this blog regarding the life long consequences of early severe child abuse as it affects — and alters — the development of the young brain, I suggest that readers might wish to actually begin their reading of “My Stroke of Insight” with Chapter 15 that begins on page 138.  Of course it would be preferrable to begin at the beginning, but the information that the author presents beginning on the page I mention here is most specifically related to “our” topic.

I have never read in any single book so many clear and helpfully identified suggestions about how to manage one’s BRAIN and therefore one’s quality of life!  Jill’s descriptions about how the two hemispheres of the brain operate cannot be matched!  As you read this book you will come to understand how hard-won her suggestions about how to live a ‘better’ life are.  Yet while it is not my intention to in any way demean, belittle or criticize Jill’s perspectives, I do wish to urge this blog’s readers to practice what I call the ‘cautionary’ approach to her statements about her experience with healing her own brain post-stroke. 

Reading the latter chapters in Jill’s book provide an excellent experience in finding the middle road between what people might be able to know and understand about their brains when those brains were formed under benovolent conditions (as Jill’s seems to have been pre-stroke damage), and what those of us whose brains formed under malevolent severe child abuse and neglect conditions need to learn and understand about our altered brain and how to heal it.

Interestingly, Jill’s professional life as a neuroanatomist is intimately connected to Harvard, the same educational and research ‘facility’ that birthed the concept that those of us who were severely abused as children have a changed (‘evolutionarily altered’) brain as a result of our development under extremely adverse conditions.  While there is much in Jill’s writing that I can see as being of value to me (on the middle road) I do not get the sense that she knows about the ‘Martin Teicher’s Group’s’ research about child abuse and how it changes brain development.  Jill’s book does, however, give an impressive jump-start opportunity to learn valuable information about healing a wounded brain – and a wounded self – and that certainly includes me/us.

I won’t go into any more detail at the moment, but I wanted to get this information onto the blog about this book with the hopes that readers will take a little time to pop on over to amazon.com (at least) and explore the value of this book for themselves.  It is a very reasonably priced book and is worth much more for the dime than any book I could possibly recommend!!

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I am far from feeling comfortable using other people’s computers, so will wait for a better  and more appropriate time  to activate those parts of my own brain and being that wait for a future date — when my current play-visit-self-expansion-challenge time has drawn to a close.  I wish you all the very best — and suggest that you read My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Ph.D., Jill Bolte Taylor as soon as you can get your hands on a copy!!  I promise — you will be glad that you did!  Rarely, in my opinion, does a book appear that more than carries its own weight in VALUE such as this one does!! 

Be sure to post your comments here about what you think of Jill’s book once you read it!!

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 Who’s Mother of the Year? 

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Step-up to Prevent Child Abuse!Promising Practices for Preventing Child Abuse and Neglect