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Monday, November 25, 2013.  Time seems to stretch out behind and in front of me – slowly – as if these recent huge changes in my life have shifted the way things appear in my own rear-view mirror of life and in front of me as I anticipate horizons I move along toward.  I have been in Fargo, North Dakota at my daughter’s house since October 12.  The skies hang heavy and gray above this flat landscape nearly all of the time.  As winter approaches the winds often slice at life harshly.  Much to adjust to.  Much that is wonderful.  Much that is hard.  Just plain MUCH sometimes!

It is wonderful beyond words to be with my two grown daughters and with my little grandsons (ages 17 months and 3 1/2 years).  I have been staying where the babies live but have finally secured a one bedroom apartment beginning December 1st.  I am a country (wilderness) woman, not a city dweller by nature.  Neither do I do well in apartments but that’s where I have placed myself — by choice.  Careful choice.

I often think now about the complexities of life lived as a human being — which is of course all I know.  I think about the range of the complex emotions I feel.  If I give myself permission to just LIVE with and through them I understand that ALL emotions are life.  There are not “good” ones and “bad” ones.  Not even “positive” emotions versus “negative” emotions.  I watch my young grandsons LIVE their emotions — and at their ages, at their stages of development, living only ONE emotion at a time is what they do.

It is going through these stages of early development being loved and safe and securely attached that will allow these boys to grow to increasingly more advanced stages of being able to feel MANY EMOTIONS AT THE SAME TIME!!  Feel them, live them, live with them — be alive to each moment whatever it brings.

The little ones cannot make the kinds of choices an adult or an older child can make about how to name feelings, change them, act upon them, let them go, rearrange them — and all the other kinds of more mature things humans can do with their emotions.  Of course for people like me and for many of this blog’s readers, we never had ANYTHING we needed to move through those early emotional-developmental stages in “ordinary” ways.  That certainly doesn’t stop us from FEELING!

Fargo is kind of known as a STOIC region of the country.  Well, that ain’t me, babe!!  I am working on toning down my comments and complaints tied to how much I detest cold winters (!!!) — but I will not deny my reality on the one hand in favor of a fancier, more “user-friendly” reality on the other hand!

Physical life on the material plane is temporary.  Transitory.  At 62 I suppose I think a lot more about that then I did when I was considerably younger.  I am going for the bigger gold now!  I wish to have a positive impact in the lives of my grandsons that might — should they ever have children — travel into the future along with shared DNA.  At the least I hope to help them in some ways to have a better life that will positively impact everyone they are ever in contact with.  I couldn’t do that sitting down there on the Mexican border in that place of mountains and so much milder climate!

I do worry about myself living in a 702 square foot apartment that has one small west window in the bedroom and one sliding glass door facing west in the living room — and the rest is just plain a CAVE in my universe!  I have much I am adjusting to, and complexities of PTSD, anxiety, well – all the rest of it – don’t make these kinds of adjustments “a walk in the park.”  But I needed this change.  I needed to grow stronger again not just more complacent.

My girls and I love one another – and have missed one another for YEARS.  They help me in every way that they can.  I am working to be balanced in what I expect of myself as these changes continue — but I will not settle for STUCK!!

This is the first blog post I have written for what seems like years (in that odd time-stretching sort of way).  I am NOT USED TO these kinds of heavy blanketing gray cloudy days!  Where is the brilliant Arizona blue splashed with the brilliance of sunlight?  Left behind me.  Left far, far behind me as I reach for a different, inner sort of warmth and light.  There is MUCH to be had of ALL of it!  That which is hard.  That which is easier.

Everything IS OK!  Everything WILL BE OK!!  I reassure myself nearly continually.  I CAN do this!  I AM doing this!  (The 17-month-old is no longer in daycare and is in my care.  He’s fussing about afternoon nap.  My anxiety level goes up like a thermometer!  I assure myself, “This is NOT a big deal!”  And – in such small ways – I am being useful!)

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Sunday, September 29, 2013.  I don’t expect this post to come out especially coherently.  Lack of coherence.  Remember?  That state is directly tied to adult insecure attachment disorders and the inability of severe early trauma survivors to NOT ONLY tell a coherent life story narrative but ALSO to the inability when under extreme stress/distress/duress in the present moment to even LIVE one’s life in what feels like a coherent fashion.

Trauma survivorship does not, in my opinion, lend itself in any way to leading a coherent (linear) life.

I also think about the brain (and nervous system) developmental changes that early trauma survivorship creates for us.  (Yet again, please read this article! +Dr. Teicher’s ARTICLE ON TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT)

Our brain hemispheres do not develop to process information within themselves and between one another in anything like an ordinary way.  Coherence is often one hard-worked-for result of paying very close conscious attention to what information is coming into us, what it triggers, what associations are created, etc.

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I fortunately was able to talk on the telephone several times today with my friend Cindy (I mentioned in my previous post) who is coming down this coming Thursday to boss me around (lol!) to get this move literally ON THE ROAD!  She is perfectly coherent!  I will literally borrow her coherency and as the long-time, close and dear friend that she is she does/will not mind one bit!

I am very clear when something in a conversation right now triggers my Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) lack of coherency.  There are several ways to name this state (besides frantic panic as I referred to it in a recent post.)  Dysregulation, disorganization-disorientation, dissociation — all are signposts for we survivors when a state of extreme demands of current life overtax our nervous system/brain.

I simply tell the people who love me “I cannot discuss this right now.”  I CANNOT because my brain goes blank, words disappear, high anxiety takes over my reality — etc.!!

My terminology with my friend today included “That is ahead of the curve.  I cannot think about that or talk about it right now.  I can only put one foot, one thought, in front of another until this move is completed.”

I found in talking with my friend that this “NO ZONE” includes all that is POSITIVE as it MIGHT arrive in my future life chapter as well as anything scary or troubling.

This left me (right before I sat down to write this post) thinking about the insanity (and brutality) of my entire childhood.  I could not predict ANYTHING about myself in my life.  Therefore — and this is a new thought/awareness for me — I could not look forward to the future with any kind of pleasant assurances.  I HAD no future!

I have known for a long time that even by the time I reached my older teen years I had no capacity to think about my own future.  I see right now that was because in the way my nervous system/brain formed during my 18 years of insane, psychotic, brutalizing abuse I had never been able to form the brain connections that would have attached myself not only in my own immediate life — but also prevented me from thinking my way into my own future.

Because my Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) mother’s reality was psychotic, disorganized, disoriented and entirely reactive SHE kept me — as her captive in hell in place of herself — forever in exactly that same state from the moment I was born.

At this point in my life nearly everything coming at me from the future is entirely unknown.  Yes, I have been to Fargo before.  I am mostly familiar with the place and with the climate.  But where will I end up living?  Will I have transportation?  How will I manage in my so-scrambled state to take care of all the grownup details such as finding a program to pick up my medicare premium costs each month, apply for secondary insurance with the state, deal with the HUD rental assistance voucher transfer details, find an apartment — etc.?

MANGO.  My code word I am training my brain to use when overwhelming feelings tied to thoughts I do not have to think in the present moment so i can refocus immediately only on the tasks at hand that will get me and my stuff out of here!

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Speaking of MANGO.  I was on the phone with someone this morning who said something to me that triggered my reactivity.  I spoke up and faced the conflict immediately – which was good for me.  However, whatever that conflict was about vanished from my conscious thought sphere so quickly — even without a MANGO moment intervening so that I could DECIDE to let the concern go away.  That was dissociation.  An unsettling and always scary process for me.

That means that I cannot CHOOSE to consider that episode in my conscious mind.  It was taken care of so automatically that I — as a conscious self — completely lost my right to choose and decide how I wanted to handle the related feelings and thoughts.  Whatever that episode was about is NOT necessary gone forever.  It can reappear with a trigger anytime — to take me unprepared.

Well, this was not a big deal by itself.  However being left with the knowledge that yet again dissociation enabled me to get through and past a difficult moment so fast and so automatically and so unconsciously alerts me yet again to the very real understanding of how this moving/life change stress has me very near the limits of what I can cope with.  “Be ultimately careful of yourself, Linda!” are words I cannot afford to let get very far away from me right now!

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No matter how careful I tried to be as a child to make mother happy — which meant it made her not dangerous to me at the moment, although I didn’t know that as a child — I could NEVER prevent one of her frequent horrible attacks on me.  Even though I have only in this past year really come to understand (at age 62) that it was Mother’s PSYCHOTIC BREAKS that created this permeating and pervasive instability in my life (and hers) — I can look back at my entire childhood now and see those patterns for what they really were.

I will never be able to “let go” or “forgive” those episodes as someone suggested to me recently.  The problems for me are built into my nervous system, into my brain, my stress response system.  Given unusually high pressure such as this monster move is creating for me I have nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide, no escape — just as I did not all the way through my so-abusive, insane childhood.

That I made the CHOICE to make this life change does not ameliorate the difficulties living through the experience of it creates.  I can rely on the rock-solid stability of my friend to get me through the very hard steps that are approaching.  This is an appreciated miracle I do not take for granted!

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Saturday, September 28, 2013. I am in the process of going through a most unpleasant experience of trauma drama that is fortunately connected to someone I “only” tried to be a friend with, someone is was only peripherally a part of my life.  There is NOTHING enjoyable about being caught in ANYONE’S trauma drama, but if such a pattern shows up it can be a very good thing to learn something important and useful from the experience.

I know an adult who was hated and therefore never loved by his mother.  From my point of view this gay man does not appear to have any male “friends” but does have a collection of women in his life that I think he does consider “friends.” 

Looking at anyone’s life from the outside leaves of course an inaccurate perception of “what is going on” inside that person.  But when that “going on” forces itself into my life I believe I have the right to pay attention at any edges where the other’s experience overlaps my own, ESPECIALLY when that spill-over is negative.

This person wrote me an email several weeks ago in which I was told I was “too much work” to be in this man’s life.  So be it.  I know a line when I encounter one.

Once I or anyone else draws that kind of line involving mutual interactions I consider the breach final, permanent, irreversible and – well – ugly but evidently necessary.  I began to figure out once I received that email that I was “too real” of a person insisting on equality of personhood in that “friendship” relationship.  Being a real person for someone with very ancient, deep, and unhealed/unrecognized “mommy concerns” DOES NOT WORK.

I simply refused to be “good mommy” as I believe the other women in this man’s life are.  I also – and more importantly – refused to be the “bad mommy” because I was not playing the “good mommy” role.  Either extreme or any pattern involving a good/bad mommy split is only one thing:  TRAUMA DRAMA.  In this case – mommy drama!

Because I know and know of some of these other women I suspect that my being alone in this area particularly without family left me in a position none of these other women are in.  I had “attachment village” needs that I have worked to fill through friendships.  Legitimate friendships!

Having such needs is not criminal, sick or wrong!  Attempting to grow and sustain one’s attachment village is a very good thing — among equals.

Twice in three weeks this person has arrived at our local farmers’ market while I was busily engaged with customers and attempted to engage me in his momma trauma drama again.  The first time I tried to be diplomatic.  When this person appeared today and interrupted sales and conversations with a group of customers I made clear that the line that man drew is a line he cannot cross in MY life.

I am done.  I am so done and I consider this man’s actions today harassment.  It was an ugly intrusion into my most pleasant bag-selling day.  I was upset.  I am still upset.  My customers were shocked and upset.  This better not happen again!

I have one more weekend to sell my bags at market – next weekend.  My friend from near the Canadian border will arrive here this coming Thursday and the serious packing will take place as the U-Haul is loaded the following Tuesday, my old el Camino will be rolled up its trailer on Wednesday the 9th and off we go into the next chapter of my life.

(After showing my gardens and this rental house 10 times the PERFECT next tenants have appeared who will make their home here and not only keep this garden alive – but deeply appreciate it and make it thrive.  They will keep my hens and my cats, as well!  WHAT A RELIEF!)

My friend is sturdy.  If this man appears again I will sick her on him!  What kind of dog breed is it that bites and does not let go?  Oh.  Yeah.  A bulldog.  That’s one very certain talent of my friend!

Meanwhile I see that “bad mommy” projections are always part of a “mommy complex” that require serious good therapy to resolve.  I have gifts related to doing therapy – but I am NOT a therapist and I do NOT earn $120+ an hour to take transference crap from anyone!

I was BORN to a psychotic abusive Borderline Personality Disorder mother who tortured me for 18 years.  All that went wrong between her mother and my mother was forced upon me.  I WILL NOT be anyone’s bad mommy – and if not playing the role of someone’s good mommy turns me into a bad mommy in someone’s trauma drama — well, my walls are sealed.

Ain’t gonna happen! 

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Wednesday, September 25, 2013.  Moon of the pomegranate harvest.  In mid-June when I knew I was leaving here to move back up north — a return — after 20 years of cycles much farther south — I knew my leaving date would not take place until the pomegranates on my so-gorgous tree were ready to pick.

Their harvest began today, always heralded by the long-legged beetles that arrive to carefully scour each fruit in search of a luscious crack to feast within.  I chased those harvesters away before their cracks could be found and stole from them what I want as badly as they do.

Harvests.  Focal points around which life has always revolved.  This one — after the equinox — as nights lengthen and earth prepares to sleep — even here in this high Arizona desert.

Breezes change with the light’s longer shadows.  A different whispering.  In between the sighing comes a growing quietude.

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A phone call came today that is sending relief into my cells and between them.  The perfect tenants have let me know of their decision to make this home of mine their home once I leave here.  I saw the love in the fingertips of the woman who came to view this garden over a week ago as she touched these plants.  Its beauty made her cry.  When I hadn’t heard back with an affirmative YES I had given up hope.

They will keep my hens.  They will allow my cats to stay in their garden.  The cats left me what I needed this morning — a great dead packrat lying on a garden pathway — so I could overcome any hesitancy in the new tenants about the rightfulness of the cats’ stay here.

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My friend Cindy from up near the Canadian border will arrive at my home on the Mexican-American line a week from tomorrow.  Without her help I don’t believe I could get out of here.  It is right I should hear today on the pomegranate harvest that the gift of this garden will continue to live — and thrive — through love and tender caring.

I can find the peace now that I need to close all the doors on my 14-year life here.  Such a gift it has been to live in this circle of mountains where each day has felt so gracious to me.

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Monday, September 16, 2013.  My nervous system (including my brain) was formed by abusive trauma not with the state of peaceful calm at its center through safe and secure attachment but rather with the state of frantic panic at its center.  The older I get the more I know about what this means to me – and I suspect also to other severe early trauma survivors.

Given enough pressure over time – no matter how well we survivors put ourselves together so we could endure, survive and continue to function as we moved forward through our lives – if we had no safe and secure early attachment with anyone as infants/children our trauma altered physiology will appear eventually in such clear ways that we cannot avoid being forced to cope not only with the stresses of our adult life but also moment to moment in our conscious felt experience with what happened to us through an early life of trauma.

Whew!  That was one long sentence!  Our state of frantic terror that we knew as infants and young children has never left us!

Call it Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD), anxiety, depression, Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) – whatever labels and “diagnosis” we use – we know what the disorientation, disorganization, and dysregulation of our entire being FEELS like – frantic panic.  Yes, when these states appear our experience of being alive is not one of well-being.  The worse our current distress/stress is in life the more our body and our entire nervous system will restore itself to this natural state for us.

Infants, young toddlers and very young children rely upon their adult caregivers to help not harm them.  I know that every time I was attacked (frequently) by my psychotically vicious mother when I was little (from birth) my entire reality shattered at that instant as I was forced into frantic panic.  I had no comprehension of what was happening to me and I had no options to prevent, escape or stop these attacks.  My entire physiology followed this trauma survival track.

Nobody protected or soothed me.  Nobody cared how I felt or about the harm being done to me and to my physiological development that has lasted my lifetime.

I did stay alive and I was able to fool everyone including myself for nearly 50 years that “It wasn’t really THAT bad.  I am strong.  I could take it.  Now those 18 years of horrendous abuse are over and I came through it OK.”

I am NOT OK!  I have never been OK!  At 62 I no longer have any inner resources in reserve to convince anyone, certainly not myself, that the lie of OK that formed with me at its center was/is true.  I live at that edge of frantic panic and I always have.  I was not born this way.  Early severe abusive trauma MADE me this way.

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Perhaps it is because of “my condition” that I might need more than most others can comprehend of helpful, soothing, calming, competent, patient, wise people who TRULY love me in a circle around me.  I can no longer pretend or fool anyone that I am OK.  People who love me are willing to listen to me and to learn right along with me how my experience of being alive is sometimes quite difficult to deal with.  People who love me — love me anyway.

These safe and secure attachment relationships are able to externally support, nurture and reinforce me, and even create substitutes for what my own body did not ever have a chance to create within itself as I grew up:  An alternative to my deepest, oldest, truest inner state of frantic frenetic panic.

I was left from birth and throughout my childhood in vast periods where that is all I felt.  This kind of chronic terror eroded me from the inside.  While my essential self was able to endure intact the body my self has to live this life within has nearly reached the end of its coping rope.

It’s really hard to create and sustain a beautiful life under these conditions but I refuse to think it is impossible yet I MUST have an attachment family/village to interact with.  I say “family” but I do not mean these people have to be our genetic relations though I am so fortunate to be able to include my own family as the core of my village.  I must, however, go through this major move to be physically close to at least some of them – my daughters and my little grandsons.

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Frantic panic, the horrible unending result of an over-stressed natural startle response while a young one’s nervous system is developing, is the antithesis of well-being.  These days it is often my overriding chore to hold it at bay – in some way – or I become paralyzed.  When frantic frenetic panic has my body in its grip I cannot think, choose, decide or act.  Being so frozen in hell will not get me where I want to go or be.

Courage, determination, patience, hope and willingness.  I must believe in GOOD possibilities in spite of what my body tells me.  But I cannot create the sense of safety and security I need — alone. 

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Friday, September 13, 2013.  I am in one world.  I am moving to the next one.  That is how I see death of the body and transition of the soul.  But I am not dying, at least not physically.  I am leaving one world of the glorious high desert on the American-Mexican border.  I am heading toward my daughters and my two very young grandsons who live in a city on land so flat a marble cannot roll. 

North.  I am moving very far north where predatory winters lie in wait.  But not for long.  POUNCE and HOLD.  I know those winters.  I left those winters.

I don’t write here currently because all I can do is repeat myself.  There is much about this place here that I deeply love, yet it is all material.  Mountains and plants.  Trees and flowers.  The colors of the soil.  The shape of the rocks.  My home.  My garden.  My physical freedom in the warmth so many months of each year.

What is love?

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I write.  I pause.  I sew.  I ponder.  Or, even while not pondering have thoughts appear and sometimes insights….

In a recent telephone conversation with my oldest brother he commented that of the four of us older siblings who were actively involved in the Alaskan mountain homesteading when we were young children (there are two younger brothers who were not), all four of us not only love to garden, landscape and spend all the time we can out-of-doors, we have a RELATIONSHIP with the earth itself.

Of the six children in our family it was solely me who was the focus of the psychotic, pathological, mentally ill terrible abuse by our mother.  Solitary confinement and forced isolation were a great part of the 18 years of my abusive childhood.  I have always been very clear that it was my relationship with the place of Alaska and our homestead in particular that saved me.  Any moment I could escape Mother’s hell and exist outside on the land I was in heaven.  But that attachment was nothing like ordinary.

This came to me in thoughts as I was just sewing bags to take to sell at Saturday’s local farmers’ market.  It is likely that the attachment I have to this glorious high desert place is not an ordinary one, either.  I and the land have grown together.  It is a surgical process that is separating me from it.

I grieve for Alaska, for our homestead and I will grieve for the incredible beauty of this place.  (I have lived in Fargo and in that area before and I could not find beauty there.  My soul has craved beauty for as long as I can remember.)

If I had the finances I would live a different life.  Certainly I could travel frequently to visit my family.  Destiny and poverty – coupled with my trauma-related disabilities – seem to be determining the direction of my life – yet again.

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These translate into spiritual concerns for me.  I KNOW it is the spirit of life that matters and not its material forms.  PLACE is, as is body itself, a mere practicality for the work of soul in this material life.

The real work for me right now is to let go of my attachment – my deep and abiding attachment – to this place.

Yes I believe humans are designed to have a reciprocal relationship with their environment – even to love it.  But we are a social species.  Given safe and secure early attachment relationships with our caregivers we bond – and forever after CAN bond – with humans FIRST.  When we lack these physiological abilities in our body due to severely traumatic earliest life we struggle all of our lives to find balanced attachment relationships.

My powerful bond with the earth cannot be limited to certain places.  I need to grow bigger than that.  I am still growing up!

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Simply put I have reached a point in my life at 62 where I know if I do not leave here to live near my family I will die of loneliness.  True, the earth here would dispassionately accept my remains.  I can, at this time of my life, have better than that premature sad ending. 

I am fortunate there are people in my life who love and cherish me and WANT me in their lives.  I leave this glorious yet dispassionate place to go offer my love to them and to accept theirs for me.

Yet on the level of my emotions life has never been clear or simple.  I have to FEEL what it FEELS like to be alive and living through all of these changes. 

One month from today I will be in Fargo and all of this leaving-transition process will be history.  A part of me is afraid that I won’t recognize myself when I get there.  In the most important ways – I will.  In the material ways I feel I will be starting my life all over again.  It’s too much to feel most of the time.  Too much to think about.  So – back to the sewing I go!

Yet I cannot help but grieve that I will not be here next spring to watch the tiny praying mantis –  being placed so carefully right now by their mothers in hard cocoons in safe places in the garden – chew their way out to help one another climb the gossamer threads to begin another season’s life here in this place I love.

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Thursday, August 29, 2013.  FOCUS.  Without being able to find my focus right now I am watching myself acting like I have its opposite:  Attention deficit.  I can still concentrate on my sewing most of the time but on little else.  I begin to do something moving related and find myself off on another task and then another one without completing much of anything.

All 6 of us kids (myself and my 5 siblings) seem to have what might be a genetic trait of extreme ability to focus.  (Signs of this are in my two grandsons, as well.)  Did this ability come to the six of us kids in consequence of surviving a childhood in hell with an out-of-control abuse psychotic Borderline Personality Disorder mother and her ineffectual husband?  Were we born this way?

I have never until now so clearly seen that the opposite of focus is certainly within me.  I am most uncomfortable this way – but this way I at least temporarily AM.  All of this is coupled with extremes of restlessness, although THIS I am familiar with in my life.  Now that I am moving perhaps my restlessness has come out of dormancy and is taking its place among the host of “Who is this person?” characteristics that seem to be hounding me right now.

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My garden has always soothed and solaced me.  The opposite of that is happening, as well.  I grieve leaving it and fear for all life it contains and supports.  Efforts so far to locate someone to rent here that will truly care about and for this garden have not been successful.  Now even my garden friend is a source of concern, stress and distress for me.  I cannot care for it, connect with it or interact with it as I have these past 7 years.

I am fading away as a part of that small ecosystem that is a part of all life on this planet.  My attachment relationship with my garden is failing me.

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Quilts start with pieces.  Never in the years I have had this blog have I not been able to write.  Never have I had to take the time to collect in handwriting a collection of my thoughts before writing a post.  Like the bags I am sewing — cutting pieces to create a whole other whole — something useful — hopefully appealing to people so they buy those bags (I need moving money) — all of my thoughts are in bits as pieces themselves.

I am planning to step out of my discomfort zone this coming Saturday — my 62nd birthday — to take these bags to our local farmers’ market to see if some of them will sell.

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Dissociation.  It came up this week in conversation with a friend this week that taking public speaking classes can be unsurpassingly difficult.  I was reminded of myself at 17.  Our family moved into Anchorage my senior year.  I was forced to attend a large school full of strangers. 

We were required to take a speech class to graduate.  I received a D+ on my first speech.  I quickly learned what the teacher wanted and that is exactly what I gave her.  Shy, abused, timid, terrified me in front of a class of 30+ students out performed them all.

Of the 400 students that teacher had this year only four As were given for the year.  I received one of those As.  My teacher highly complimented me.  ME? 

I simply dissociated myself from myself and created a different version of me while I put away the other real me — somewhere else where I couldn’t be bothered by her bothering me.

I lived my entire adult life like that as long as I had one of my children (I have 3) under the age of 18 and needing my care.  I gave 100%+ to being a mother just as I had to being a speaker.

But those pieces of me!!  They used to be bigger dissociated pieces.  Now they seem to be so much smaller and the dissociation happens so much more often.  These fragments only clumsily seem to fit together.  But not really.  They only do so because I am the one person in this one body having all these experiences.

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Of course strangers traipsing around my garden and house have no idea of my current struggles as they respond to the poster I put up about a garden for rent with a two bedroom house.  (I went into town yesterday and found that some jerk has been removing my posters.)  Nor would I want a stranger to have a clue about me personally, although this very messy house here is a sign of some distress — if anyone could tell that — which I know they cannot.

I cannot pack more than one small box before my anxiety sends me off to do something else somewhere.  Anywhere.  I certainly do not care about decor or dusting.  I just have to go through and get through all of this happening right now — on so many levels.

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I just finished sewing the most difficult bag I have created yet.  In a large part it is because I sewed together such vastly different kinds of fabrics which all acted so differently as if they did not want to be sewn together.  (Oh no!  Fabric bias!)

One was corduroy, one a faux suede and one was a thin rayon.  The bag was sewn with strong quilting thread on the machine.  All fall colors.  Very sturdy.  This bag will last a long time.

There is great satisfaction for me when I make things knowing they are all one-of-a-kind originals.  Never has there been one like it.  Never will there be another one like it.

It is the artist and the art therapist in me that created my adobe peace garden (link is on a tab at top of this page to pictures of it) and sews my way through the ending of a 14-year stage of my life.  Dirt and mud and seeds — or — repurposed fabric and thread.  Makes little difference to me in the end.  It is the living process of creating that fascinates, captivates and heals me.

Life is such a quilt!

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Thank you for caring enough to read this.  I have nothing fluent or gracious to say.  I have made a decision to radically change my life.  Making that happen has some anguish involved.

I think about myself as an abused child escaping Mother occasionally.  I had to disappear into some invisible nook of silence.  I often made wallets and purses out of cut and folded paper.  I became a kind of wizard in my lonely play.

It is these same hands that sews these bags now.  And in their final creation stages they are turned completely inside-out.  It strikes me as a kind of birthing each time a bag reaches that point of unfolding its desired and desirable form.  All rough seams disappear to be sealed away inside the bag and lining never to be seen again.  Only something lovely remains.

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I slide toward the small hole of a very large funnel.  I am being pared down in my old life to take the final steps into being born into a new and vastly different one 1,800 miles northeast of here.

There is a very large part of me that is a mother.  I am moving toward my children — and my two little grandsons — with every passing nanosecond.

Many parts of who I am are “organized” (sewn together) that have to do with those attachment relationships I am missing here.  I need that vitality.  I need and want this change which may end up feeling just that much more important to me because it’s taking some genuine struggle and sacrifice to get there.

I will endure this fire.  I will emerge from ashes.  At this instant I see that I believe in myself.  I believe in the future.  I will do what it takes to help make it a good one.  I will.

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Tuesday, August 20, 2013.  i highly recommend an online search for — “Dr. Gordon Neufeld – attachment” — to locate information on the author of the talk on preschooler attachment that the following text comes from.  There are excellent videos that appear with this search, as well.

Here is a place to start: 

Transformative Parenting and Dr. Gordon Neufeld

Many thanks to my friend Sandy who is transcribing the words  of Neufeld’s preschooler talks for us!  The following is presented here for information only – the purchase link is here: 

This is the first part of Dr. Gordon Neufeld’s Making Sense of Preschoolers talk:

The Making Sense of Preschoolers is the third item down at this link for purchase:

http://neufeldinstitute.com/products/dvds

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Preschooler Personality Profile

1.         A PURITY of emotion and an innocent belief in MAGIC.

2.         CERTAINTY in their thinking, no room for shades of grey.

3.         IMPULSIVE and given to displaced ‘return of the pendulum’ swings.

4.         SHORTSIGHTED – unable to make sacrifices towards a goal.

5.         UNRELIABLE – know better than they behave and their good intentions are easily eclipsed by the impulse of the moment. (they often have no clue why they do what they do)

6.         TERRIBLE at PROBLEM SOLVING – unable to take more than one factor into consideration at a time.

What’s missing and why

Preschoolers cannot do dissonance. They register only one feeling or impulse at a time. All conflicting impulses and thoughts are momentarily eclipsed.

WHY?

This is Nature’s way, making it as easy as possible for youngsters to find their dominant feeling by removing any confusing elements or complicating signals.

(eyesight analogy goes here)

As soon as both feelings are present, you have a fundamentally different psychology and person…

We would never get to both of our cerebral hemispheres operating at the same time if we didn’t start off with one at at time.

We will never get to being able to experience all of our emotions simultaneously and to have self-control, and have integrative functioning, and to be well-tempered, as a husband, a wife, an adult, unless we went through this phase and were able to experience one emotion at a time…

so rather than fighting it and trying to get them to hurry up, the problem is, if we try to get them to hurry up, we’re actually sabotaging that time (development). We’re busy trying to make little adults out of  preschoolers. We’re busy trying to figure out how to make them like us, and that is not Nature’s plan. Nature’s plan is that they need to be preschoolers, we need to be adults, and we need to allow them to have that time.

Nature’s solution to being untempered

ADDING the tempering elements by 5 – 7 years of age.

–   once a child can easily find his or her dominant feeling

–           this takes longer with sensitive and intense children, because their feelings are bigger and there are more incoming signals to complicate things

–           children who do not feel their emotions or do not practice their mixed feelings will not develop this capacity

We’re giving rise to very sensitive and intense children, for a number of reasons. Probably there is a genetic drift towards sensitivity that is happening in our society, but also because one of the primary results of any kind of birth trauma is hypersensitivity. And our children are surviving birth like never before; premature babies, etc. And so we’re giving rise to probably the most sensitive preschoolers that ever walked this Earth.

And this means that their feelings are highly affected and are very intense, and it’s pushing the time of transformation further and further back, so that for many intense children doesn’t actually happen until 8 or 9 years of age.

This means they’re fundamentally different from us, and this has HUGE implications for how we’re dealing with them. We’re trying to get them to be nice, and to get along…we’re trying to get them to have self-control; in some cases we’re trying to teach all kinds of reflective and meditative exercises to children who are just 4 or 5 years of age, and we’re getting this all wrong…

Because we have to find a way to work around this, we need to find a way of being able to include preschoolers in our society [as they are, not as we would have them be!].

This is Nature’s solution. But children who do not feel their emotions, who do not practice their mixed-feelings, will not fully develop this capacity.

If a child starts losing his feelings – and many, because of the wounding environment they’re in, and because of their precocious sensitivity, begin to start losing their feelings by 3 or 4 years of age…so we have many children who no longer say “I’m scared.” Children who are losing these feelings. And they are not developing their prefrontal cortex, which is the mixing-bowl of  the brain.

This is where the solution [adaptation & maturation] occurs. What is it that as humans have – that is, mature humans have – that preschoolers do not have? A functional prefrontal cortex.

What is it that humans have that no other mammals have? A functional prefrontal cortex. [I suspect elephants have this]

But the prefrontal cortex isn’t even wired up, the blood isn’t even going to the prefrontal cortex until 5 – 7 years of age. Just like with the eyes, there’s two shunts coming from the Limbic System, the emotional brain…and just like it is with the eyes, it’s only feeding one set of signals – one emotion – at a time. There may be other emotions there, sitting in the Amygdala, but only one emotion is fed to the prefrontal cortex.

So you have a child that’s only operating out of one (emotion). The child may be very afraid, but very frustrated – alarmed, frustrated, and insecure – but you only see one thing.

He’ll either be in pursuit, or he’ll be moved to caution, or that frustration will be there as aggression – but only one thing at a time.

This [the mixing bowl of maturation] is what needs to be exercised. This is the key to our being able to relate to each other in a civilized way.

What our preschoolers need from us

to COMPENSATE for what is missing in them.

–           to assume responsibility for keeping them out of trouble and for not pushing their buttons needlessly.

We’re all to frequently pushing preschoolers’ buttons. If we scare them we get alarm out of them.

If they face separation, we get pursuit out of them. But wait – we’re also getting frustration and alarm – but that doesn’t come until bedtime, when now they can’t sleep.

We’re pushing their buttons to try to get different behavior. But this doesn’t mean that their behavior is changing; it simply means that we’re playing them, emotionally, and that we ought not to be doing that…

–           to refrain from approaches that work because of substituting one emotion for another in the untempered child, as these set the stage for a return swing of the pendulum reactions (eg, ‘consequences’ and ‘time-outs’)

Consequences are a typical example of this. When we use consequences we’re typically using what a child cares about against them. So when we threaten separation from something they care about, we’re pushing a child’s face into separation. And when we push a child’s face into separation, the first emotion you always get is pursuit.

If you have a preschooler and you need to leave, and you give them the warning: “I’m leaving in 5 minutes” and it doesn’t work, so you say “It’s time to go,” and the preschooler is saying: “I don’t want to go! I don’t want to go!”

And so you say, “All right then,  bye bye, see you…” and you walk out of their sight, what you do is trigger off in them high pursuit, because preschoolers can’t do separation.

And so they say, “All right mommy! I’m coming, I’m coming!” And so they come. But what we don’t realize is how impactful it was for the child. We see the pursuit, and so they move towards us –  when we use what they care about [connection] against them, their behavior is to pursue whatever it is that we’re taking away [in this case, connection with us], their behavior is to pursue whatever it is that we’re taking away: “I’ll be good! I’ll be good!”

But what we don’t see is that we’ve triggered other emotions. And the other emotions will include frustration, because something didn’t work for them, and so we’re going to get aggression a little bit later out of the system – and we’ve also triggered alarm…because whenever they’re facing separation they get a little bit scared.

And so now we’ve got problems going into nighttime, at bedtime, in terms of insecurity…and we don’t see that.

So we’re doing things that are very immediate, and pushing their buttons, and we’re not realizing: these are emotional creatures. They have no ability within them to say “on the one hand, and then the other…”

They can’t get it that if you’re frustrated with them, you also love them. You can tell them that until you’re blue in the face – they can’t get it.

They’re not going to get it until 6 or 7 years of age (if they’re lucky), or even 9 years of age. They’re not going to get it because they CAN’T – it doesn’t matter how well you say it. So we need to…

to SET the STAGE for Nature’s ultimate resolution

–           to help them find ALL their feelings and impulses so that Nature has the raw material to work with.

The ultimate resolution is for their feelings to mix; for the prefrontal cortex to work. This is the main difference between them and us: and it’s a biological difference, and it makes a different creature out of them. They simply do not have brain that we have. They simply do not have the capacity to handle the world the way we can.

They are one at a time creatures, and we need to go with them. We need to help them find all their feelings: “Right now you feel this way, right now you want this…” We have to make room for all of their feelings. We have to make room for them to name their feelings, because until they name them, they can’t mix them…

You need to come alongside of them, and move into their feelings [and help them name them]: “Right now you didn’t like my bossy voice…”

It doesn’t mean that you need to indulge all of their feelings, it doesn’t mean that there’s no room for structure or order in their life.

What it does mean is that we have to cut them some slack emotionally.

They only experience ONE feeling at a time; the answer to most of life’s situation is to have two or three feelings simultaneously.

They can only consider one factor at a time. They do not do ‘cognitive dissonance’ –  they cannot disagree with themselves. And the answer, of course, is to be able to do more.

We need a LOT of patience to work around their deficits. They need to start where they are to get to where they need to go.

Discipline is NOT the answer to untempered nature: ‘consequences’ and ‘time-outs’ ONLY work because they push buttons; and when they push buttons, they cycle…

That’s why they never work over the long-run, why you have to start using them a lot – ‘1, 2, 3 Magic’ is just just another way of putting their face into separation. Because the greatest fear of any preschooler is separation.

So when you say: “1, 2, 3… what they fantasize next is some form of separation. It’s the same as saying “Bye, bye then – I’m disappearing…”

Or, all the other ways we do it: “No, you’re going to have to go to your room; I’m going to withdraw the invitation to exist in my presence…”

We push buttons [with those strategies]. We don’t change behavior. Or, we change behavior only because we push buttons; and it doesn’t last.

[Behavior] is not the issue: it’s the character that needs to be changed.

[And because they simply don’t have the prefrontal cortex that is required to do the problem solving with, we’ve simply made things worse for them and us.]

You will know adults with an untempered prefrontal cortex. They’re impulsive and untempered in experience and expression, and that is because they did not grow out of this stage.

In our next sessions we’re going to look at what is required to grow out of this. We’ll be looking at what we call the requisite needs, the irreducible needs of the preschooler to grow out of this period.

But in this session we want to know the character [of preschoolers] and understand them from inside out. And so our next session is also related to the prefrontal cortex…

–           to refrain from cut-it-out approaches as this will sabotage Nature’s ultimate solution

You’ll notice that Nature’s solution to their emotions

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The Making Sense of Preschoolers is the third item down at this link

http://neufeldinstitute.com/products/dvds

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Tuesday, August 20, 2013.  I certainly have turned into a fierce sewer!  I have completed nine more of my cloth bags since the post full of photographs of my first batch.  I have started another one at 2 in the morning.  I slept four hours, woke and cannot sleep again.

I realized that in the difficulties of removing myself from my life down here in the gorgeous high desert so that I can start another life 1800 miles north of here I am actually undergoing a significant amputation – of important parts of myself from myself.  Destiny demands of me that this happens.  I will never look back at this move and say it was easy.  For the hundreds of moves (I could probably count that many) in my lifetime this is by FAR the most difficult one.

I had the “fiddling while Rome burns” verbal image appear to me a few days ago as I sewed and sewed.  I am sewing while my life as I know it burns to ashes around me.  Since childhood I have thought that fiddling (or sewing) one’s way through tumultuous and destructive conditions was a sign of negligence and unfeeling uncaring – but I know differently now.  I care TOO MUCH!  Sewing is my meditation, my therapy – while the universe flings itself around – it seems – me at its emotional center.

Most untrue, of course.  But given the intensity of this experience how could I FEEL any other way being, as I am,  stone cold sober, unmedicated, very much alive and in the full experience of the inner and outer expression of the passion of being alive in my life?

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Tick.  Tock.  The pomegranates are ripening.  That is my chosen departure time.  “Moon of the pomegranate harvest.”  I am hoping the 2nd week of October is exactly that time because that is what the target time for leaving here is.  Meanwhile, I created a handwritten poster – bright yellow – and put it up in choice locations around town last week for the rental of the garden here – with house.

I put my email on there – I hate being interrupted by telephones.  So far – a complete irritating FLOP with the people who have responded!!  i will avoid all the negative I could say about my experience of wasting time giving a tour of this place to idiots and just report that a couple who seems perhaps hopeful for being gardeners is due to show up here 11 am in the morning – today.  At least the woman obviously LOVES EARTHWORMS!  My kind of gardener!

There needs to be a changing of the guard here on this property.  Someone needs to show up who understands that between earth and sky humans are equipped to be caretakers and caregivers of the earth wherever they live.  This place has a history of being loved and tended and I need that history to move on into the future through somebody else.  (see: LINDA’S ADOBE PEACE GARDEN)

I am looking for someone to rent this place who knows what it means to have a RELATIONSHIP with the land — THIS little piece of land.

I must be excited at the possibility of this couple being the right one – enough so that sleep is no longer an option for tonight.  So, back to sewing I go!!

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