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Saturday, July 12, 2014.  Muted thoughts this morning, observations about life.  Like muted wind.  Sunlight muted by clouds.  Just not muted mechanical noise as I sit outside my apartment as very old and worn air conditioners fill the air with roars and drones and high-pitched screams and whistles echoing shrilly like giant boiling teapots from wall to wall between these brick apartment buildings.

There will be no quiet here until this brief summer passes and the frigid air again grips the great northern plains in long, long winter.

Yet as I think about my days, there are many glistening moments.  Just as I did during the seven years I lived on the Mexican-American border line in Arizona, I love the visits of young children.  I keep a tray filled with water and all kinds of small toys outside my door on this cement slab.  The children, mostly resettled refugees from Nepal and Africa, stop by in little groups to get their hands wet, pouring water to and fro from this into that.

Children without guilt or guile.  Futures of possibilities awaiting them in this rich land of America they know nothing about except that they and their loved ones are safe, fed, can go to a doctor, have a roof over their head and are not passing suffering, starving, dying humanity alongside the roads.  Unlike where they came from.

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Really, there are nothing but stories.  We live with the stories of our ancestors as their lives found their way to influence our own.

One I heard yesterday as a young man gave me a lift home from a friend’s house.  An energetic, so-positive young man of 27 shared a part of his story with me during that 10-minute drive.  He is in Fargo for a few weeks from Fresno, California teaching a group of Native American young people from the terribly distressed Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota and from the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota how to start junior youth groups in their areas for young people ages 11-15.  To give them hope.  To give them direction.  To help give them a better future.  (The youth suicide rate on Standing Rock, once the ‘forced’  home of Sitting Bull, the great chief who beat Custer at Little Big Horn, is the highest in the nation.  Obama visited that reservation on June 13th of this year.)

This young man told me his mother’s father was killed in a car accident by a drunk driver when his mother was 8 months old.  Her mother had to go to work full-time and left the baby during the day (her two older sisters were in school) with a babysitter who tortured, tormented, abused her.  It took too long for the abuse to be detected and stopped.

In a car filled to overflowing with the gentle love this young man has for his mother – now in her 60s – I heard him tell of the lifelong struggles of his mother from the abuse in her early life.  “She never abused her own children.  She did her best.  But that kind of trauma cannot be erased in one generation.  I did suffer because of my mother’s suffering.”

“She never fit into the world.  She had a hard time.  She supports herself giving piano lessons.”  And after a long, tender pause, “She has a musical mind.”

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I heard another story yesterday from an 85-year-old woman whose father immigrated nearly 100 years ago to homestead a farm in the middle of North Dakota because he refused to raise a family in war-torn Syria, place of his birth.

This woman, who still keeps foster children in her home, has over more than 50 years had many dozens of parentless refugee children pass through her home as she cared for them until they could be settled permanently into this area.  “Why,” she voiced her tormented plea, “do so many people hate one another around this world?  Why do wars and killing continue?  Why is there so much greed and corruption?  Why can’t the religions agree?”

This woman, who has been a member of the Baha’I Faith for all of her adult life, already has the best explanations possible in this lifetime for why humans act the way that they do and for what it will take for peace to finally encircle this planet.  She continues to work ceaselessly for the betterment of the world.

Yet she cannot stop asking the questions because she will never stop caring.

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are welcome.

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Tuesday, July 8, 2014.  I have too many questions without answers.  Sometimes, like now, my questions scare me.

I am so very grateful to have a computer and access to internet.  My next thought, however, ties directly into my questions:  Does the (to me, dangerous) escalation of problems in this world simply directly correspond to the escalation in knowledge-finding resources available to humans that we must have to begin to find solutions to these same problems?

I dove into the internet today to land ……  UhOh – In read time at this moment…..  Speaking of problems, I look out my window and see the poison hose of hundreds of feet being dragged around the apartment complex’s lawn by the herbicide man.  Does ANYONE ever ask what these poisons are doing to LIFE itself – and especially to our children’s health?  Why do we wonder about the terrifying rise in autism in our kids, for example?  I certainly just gave the poison man – who wears no protection against his own toxins – the evil eye as I slammed my window and door shut.

“Leave it, Linda.  You can do NOTHING but ask the questions and modulate your own rage at human shortsighted stupidity!”

BEFORE this vision appeared…….

I went searching and found these highly intriguing books:

The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine N. Aron Ph.D. (Jun 2, 1997)

The Highly Sensitive Child: Helping Our Children Thrive When the World Overwhelms Them by Elaine Aron (Oct 8, 2002)

Parenting the Highly Sensitive Child: A Guide for Parents & Caregivers of ADHD, Indigo and Highly Sensitive Children… by Julie B. Rosenshein (Apr 24, 2013)

The Highly Intuitive Child: A Guide to Understanding and Parenting Unusually Sensitive and Empathic Children by Catherine Crawford (Jan 1, 2009)

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Trauma in the world ends up in the physiology of the people in or near it.  It ends up in the epigenetic powers that control the operation of DNA – very probably and often right on down the generations.

How does the ‘body of the world’ react to the devastation of combined erroneous actions toward life?  Who pays the price?  AND HOW?

Who is considered ill or subversive if they raise an eyebrow against mass stupidity, let alone a voice?

Are there children being born now on this planet with a supersensitive physiology that can simply not tolerate the toxins infesting our planet on every level – including social-emotional toxins of all kinds even when outward “abuse” does not seem to be remotely present?

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I was telling my oldest daughter last weekend that I am always glad I believe in a life after death – as crazy as this world seems to me – where – and I meant to say “All my questions will be answered” – but it came out – “Where all my answers will be questioned.”

Today as the horrible odor of this weed poison invades all these apartment dwellings and will contaminate every romping, happy child who plays on this grass, I find myself thinking there are a whole lot of supposed ANSWERS being implemented in America, certainly, that will need to be questioned in that next world!

Meanwhile, we and our children live on this earth suffering from and dealing with consequences of being here that are having and will continue to have massive effects on the NERVOUS SYSTEM and IMMUNE SYSTEM of increasing numbers of children who are probably being born in super-sensitized bodies in reaction to the toxic forces already present in their parents – certainly sent right into the fetus through its mother.

I remember the perfection of the Alaskan wilderness where I was raised on that mountain homestead.  I fear – in reality – that era was the last of wilderness.  The systems on this tiny planet are so interconnected pollution circles in the air, in the water – in myriad ways and patterns that have removed purity from the planet.

This morning – I don’t think purity exists any more for us here on this planet.  What of our children’s futures?  What is the cost of their adapting to the conditions we continue to create here?

Will it “all come out in the wash?”

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are welcome.

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Friday, July 4, 2014.  Who was I to badmouth blackbirds?  Shame on me.  And I mean that!

Two days ago baby and I were out strolling around (he turns 2 on the 20th – weather was great – a rather rare treat – and the stroller is our transportation).  When I came back I noticed a small plastic tub I don’t own under a little white table on my “patio” I had scrounged one day a month ago from the apartments’ dumpster.  What?

And then the sound of whispering wings flapping on the ground.  A broken legged, broken winged small blackbird?

Within moments of my arrival back home a young boy, I suppose about 12 who seemed autistic rushed up to me.  “Will you take the bird to a doctor?”

“Oh, no,” I had to tell the boy, who immediately problem-solved.  “Well, I will go tell the office then.”  Off he ran with all the innocent blessed faith a human can muster.

He did not come back.  The bird did not leave.

Terror in its little wise eyes, the bird scooted itself into the cool damp shade between my 5-gallon white buckets on my cement slab that serve as my flower garden (often robbed beyond my sight of any bloom that can be captured by child fingers).

In the heat of afternoons the apartments’ many young children romp around the cattail pond – and up to my little area – this time terrifying the helpless, wounded bird.  I tried to talk to the children about leaving the bird alone.  Moslem refugee children from Africa.  Little immigrant children from Nepal.  All too young and so innately enthusiastic and curious.  So busy.  So LOUD.

I was afraid to pick the bird up for fear of hurting it further so herded it down to the reed pond where it instantly disappeared into welcoming fallen brown sticks and stiff growing greenery.  End of story?

After the hot sun disappeared over the tallest northwest apartment building’s roof I went outside and the bird was back.  Devouring cracker crumbs.  I spoke to it and left it alone to determine its fate the best it could.

Yesterday morning the bird was gone.  The neighbor’s large black cat prowled the reed pond all morning.  The bird?

Last evening at 5:00 pm the bird was back searching for food in the area of the grass by my cement slab upon which I throw crumbs.  What to do?

The bird is now ensconced in my bathtub on an old towel with a box to hide itself in.  I cannot tell the extent of its injuries.  Leg, wing AND tail?  The bird can spread both wings out beside it and pull itself forward with one good leg at AMAZING speed.  Sometimes if I approach it very slowly with quiet speech it lets me stroke its feathers.  Other times it becomes frantic.

So – I have a little wounded representative of the wild bird kingdom living in my tub.  Such stamina!  What a life force!  I will need to create some kind of safe haven in the house for it – somewhere the baby cannot reach.  It eats and drinks water just fine.  How long will it live?  What kind of pain is it in?

Meanwhile — there is an entity in my apartment.  A friend.  A teacher.

I will not put it back outside to be torn apart by a cat.  One moment at a time this bird and I will move forward through time the best that we can.  What else is new?

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are welcome.

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Saturday, June 28, 2014.  I am unfamiliar with what it feels like to go so many days without being inspired to write a blog post.  I miss the writing.  I miss the feeling of inspiration that has always been a part of my writing.  It seems that at present I am simply left to examine whatever change of direction I have taken in my life that seems to threaten my feeling that perhaps I have something helpful to offer others who suffer the lifelong effects from a terrible childhood.

Yet as soon as I wrote those words I saw it is a narrowing of extreme focus that has captivated most of my attention at present.  I am pouring my efforts into my youngest grandson who turns two July 20th.  He is in my care at least 9 hours each weekday.

On the grand scale it is being trapped by weather in one room of my small apartment that adds so many layers of difficulty to my task.  It continues to rain often here.  Winters in Fargo provide at least five months of frigid temperatures coupled with deadly wind chills.  My own natural inclinations towards being outdoors year round in my southern high desert lifestyle have no way to be fulfilled here.

Yet for whatever personal struggles I am going through here it is my effort to provide this little boy the best opportunity I can give him to form his little self in an environment of supportive peaceful calm that now directs my life.

The terrible noise pollution of this place seems more than I can bear.  I could list difficulties that challenge me here as if my essence is being forged in a blast furnace.  I do not wish to write about what I do not wish to focus upon.  The energy it takes for me to reside here is massive.

I think about the heat it takes in a kiln to turn a piece of clay into an enduring object of  beauty.  On the human level it takes the instant-to-instant living of life to provide what a rapidly developing little one needs to grow a nervous system-brain and emerging mind and self that will be the dwelling place that little one will move forward with for a lifetime.

Experiences of early life can never be repeated in terms of their critical impact on setting the trajectory of a life.  Doing the job of providing whatever I can toward whatever this little boy needs when he is with me is the focus of my life.  I can weather the challenges of my life but such a little person as my grandson is can weather very little on his own.  At this point words fail me and vanish.

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I see in  my mind a circle I create within which this little boy is completely safe and secure.  It is my attention —  as I attend to his developmental needs —  that maintains this circle which itself is a living “thing” upon which a newly forming life depends.

I am, of course, simply a part of this child’s life.  Yet both of his parents work full-time which leaves 50-55 hours per week open in the daily life of my little grandson during which he is without his primary attachment people to meet his critical needs — which certainly do not cease while they are away from  him.

My grandson will never consciously remember any part of this time he and I spend together and yet I believe these hours during these months of critical development add central value to the betterment of his future.

In the grand scheme of life on this planet our little theater is minuscule.

Or is it?

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PS.  I have a drumming lesson today which I am greatly looking forward to!  Interestingly, I am learning a great deal about how my dissociation is operating as I practice.  Perhaps I will write a post about that one of these days….

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are welcome.

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Monday, June 23, 2014.  I used to have a friend many years ago, an older man with 35 years of sobriety who kept my old car running to perfection through the years I worked on my art therapy master’s degree in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  He used to tell me that hard times grew pathways into a person’s heart through which increased wisdom and compassion could flow.  Therefore “tests and difficulties” were a very good thing.

I have been wondering about my tears being so close to the surface since my son returned home far away after his visit here.  What is it about our culture that shuns sadness and tears as if they are a sign of flawed weakness, inefficient and ineffective at best, a sign of “depression” and sickness at worst?

Two words appeared in my thoughts today:  Affection and tenderness.  Wouldn’t these be among our chosen, favored feelings to keep close to us as a good, strong glue to hold both our inner and outer life together?  And is there any reason why tears themselves could not be accepted as being one main ingredient of these states of being?

I suffered greatly through my childhood because nobody in my life ever felt these feelings for me (except my brother who was 13 months older than me and my grandmother who had her access to me denied by Mother).  It was one of the great areas of neglect in my early life that nobody ever noticed the absence of affection and tenderness toward me.  Rather, terrible abuse and hatred came my way and yes, I cried a LOT.

The sickness in Mother as it poisoned my father LIKED to see me suffer.  In Mother’s broken mind my suffering expunged all other suffering from Mother and her family.  No wonder I have personally grown to see tears as being associated only with harm.

We normally respond to other people’s suffering with compassionate, helpful concern.  I guess I turn that same ray inward toward myself when I detect my own tears present.  Yet when my tears are tied to deep affection and tenderness, appreciation, even awe, they are not a bad thing.  They are a sign that I have found ways to let life create what my friend described as bigger, deeper places in the heart.

That is something to aim for, not condemn, fear or always try to “fix.”

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are welcome.

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Leave a Comment »

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Sunday, June 22, 2014.  I want to write about something else for a few moments:  Joys.

One evening my son laid out on my daughter’s kitchen table exquisite pieces of porcelain and stoneware wheel-thrown pottery he made for us and carried to us wrapped inside his clothing inside his carry-on suitcase when he flew out for his visit.  We admired.  His two sisters, my older grandson (age 4) and I each chose pieces we liked best to take into our own lives.  There are no words for such an experience.  So achingly full of love and precious.

Later that night I realized I still have the collection of clay tools that my son and I shared as we worked at a large table on clay in our home the year between his second and third birthdays.  I found them and showed them to him the next day when he stopped by here.  How affirming and joyful to me it is that he chose ten of them to take into his life.

Some of the tools are sharp and could not be carried with him on his flight home yesterday.  I am going to mail them to him but first I am going to make a cloth storage holder for them — long with a pocket for the handle of each tool to slide into — that can be rolled up and tied.

(What is it about being human that love and joy and tears all seem to live together within?  I feel this as I write these words.  I miss my beloved son just as I will miss my beloved daughters and grandsons if I find in a year that I really cannot inwardly afford to continue to live in this horrendous cold winter climate and return to my own desert place that feels like home to me.)

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Yes, we child abuse survivors did live through hell that put us through a process that seems to have enlarged and honed some amazing gifts.

Something else quite special happened last week as my son and I an my daughter and her two little boys traveled to visit a zoo an hour south of here.  There were no crowds.  The weather was perfect.  The zoo vibrates with the loving care from humans who care for those confined – and mostly protected – animal species members.

Not unlike my experience of sharing at the smaller local zoo here with that so distressed wild goose who needed to be noticed, heard, helped to calm from its terrible crying as I wrote about it in a post a month or so ago, this past week it was the buffalo who especially touched my soul.

As I approached their double-fenced enclosed pasture to stand at one end all eight of the animals within turned to walk to meet me.  They lined up against their fence, glorious massive heads turned sideways enough that I could see one huge dark eye of each animal and without any sound we spoke to one another of days gone by individually and for one’s species.  Of enduring what is hard and not even just or fair.  Of strength.  Of dignity.  Of not being able to roam around in one’s own world – the pure wild world being destroyed.

Of the sadness that must be contained and lived with well — graciously —  courageously — no matter what.

As I finally turned to find and follow my family they all turned and walked slowly away.  “I will miss you.  I will remember you.  I know you.  I love you.  We are all OK.  Thank you.”

The sentiments flowed out mutually between us without sound until from across the zoo came the mournful, powerful bellow of a Bactrian 2-humped camel, of which there are only 950 left on the planet.

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Such moments in life where the light shimmers and gleams sustain me.  Heal me.  Help me.  They remind me nobody is alone on this earth.  But for some reason I may never understand in this lifetime not even such moments seem to pass me by without tears along with the joy.

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are welcome.

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Sunday, June 22, 2014.  It is time for me to write something, no matter how incomplete and inadequate I may feel my writing to be.  I doubt many stop along the way to document in written words what their experience of rappelling a cliff side feels like in mid-climb.  Or in mid fall because falling is what I felt like yesterday.  Free falling into a bottomless well or falling helpless over a cliff as I worked to grab anything I could find to hold onto to stop my fall.

I called good friends who know, love, accept and understand me best because they, too, live under the effects of lifelong consequences of severe early abusive trauma.  They offer me a kind of rescuing.  This rescuing comes from them helping me to verbally describe what I am feeling at the same time I work to clarify triggers for my feelings of deep distress both in my current life and in my past so I can begin to fit puzzle pieces together of a picture where I can feel more solid again.  More cohesive.  Less desperately fragmented and far less hopelessly lost.

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Over a decade ago one of my sisters recognized how good things happening in my present life can themselves be directly tied to trauma in my childhood.  She knows what my childhood was like.  She was there even though she lived with my other siblings in the “good” world our psychotic Borderline Personality Disorder mother’s mind created for everyone else in our family to live in except me.

So I am today calming down enough within — becoming more oriented, my thoughts more organized — to pick up the knowledge and truth in that puzzle piece to identify that during this past week when my baby (who is 29) was here visiting a hotbed of good experiences directly shook up my inner trauma-built reality — because he had to leave.  (It had been five years since I had seen all three of my children together.  This was the first time I was able to see my son with his nephews.)

My son has gone home over 1500 miles away from here and such a wake of massive sadness in me arose to greet his departure I became nearly swallowed up whole by the tidal force of its power to disrupt what is now always my fragile — and vulnerable — equilibrium.

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Overload and overwhelm.  How familiar that feeling is to me from my 19-year insanely abusive childhood (from birth).

Absolutely NOTHING stood between infant-child me and the force of the violent, brutal, on-going abusive rage and hatred of Mother toward me.  Any solace I found, any break of temporary reprieve I ever found was generated by me inside my own young body-brain-mind.  And then always my inner sense of fragile equilibrium would be exploded again by yet another insanely abusive attack my Mother.  I then had no choice but to pass through those times being obliterated as a person on every level but my suffering through what she forced me to endure on a daily basis.  This pattern usually happened to me many times a day and often during the worst of Mother’s rage-filled storms for days, weeks and even for months on end.

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Raising my three children — an occupation that took the span of 35 years of my adulthood due to their age spacing until all three had reached age 18 — somehow miraculously stabilized and solidified me.  When my youngest left home ten years ago my world really did crumble, disintegrate and fall apart and I never saw it coming.  I did not (because I could not?) prepare myself to lose myself at my children’s leaving the nest I did everything in my power to create and sustain for THEM.

Yes, the trail my children had to take through their childhoods had to follow the tangle of me trying to make my way in a world I can never understand and was profoundly and absolutely NEVER prepared to live in.  But being a mother centered on raising my children to be whole, healthy and happy was the glue I used to keep me in my own life together.

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I knew none of this consciously.  And there seems to be an infinite number of levels to awareness.  As I told my dear friend yesterday as soon as my son returned home from his visit here I was plunged again into a boiling cauldron of powerful, trauma-created emotions (being conveyed to me through my super-charged right limbic brain centers).

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Love coupled with joy overwhelmed by sorrow.

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This is what my body knows and it inextricably combines my past with my present.  The speed, the force, the power of right-brain-fed emotions to disintegrate any cohesive sense I have of myself moving through time in my life is as stunning as it is unimaginably devastating.

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Dr. Allan N. Schore writes about the neurobiology of early infant rapid right brain development that takes place through the infant-mother attachment relationship as the mother literally, according to Schore, downloads her right limbic brain into her infant’s rapidly forming right limbic brain.  Face-to-face extremely rapid interactions create and sustain this infant brain building process.  (Google search the terms “schore mother infant attachment stop the storm” for background information.)

Because in the past 24 months of my life (I am approaching my 63rd birthday) I have finally achieved the most bedrock understanding of how Mother’s hatred of me was entirely created and sustained by the psychotic workings of her sick m ind, I am learning how absolutely devastating to my own efforts to live a balanced life the impact of her psychosis was and will always be to me.

There was NO SANITY in Mother’s interactions with me from the first breath I took.  Oddly enough it was during my drumming lesson with my most professional teacher yesterday afternoon that I was stunningly presented with one of the most fundamental effects of the abusive trauma I suffered as it continues to impact me.

I marched my feeling broken and most sad self the mile walk to lesson, sat down across from Brett in that tiny sound-proofed practice room with the drum pad stand between us — both of us with our drum sticks gripped in our hands.  Arms raised in the beginning classical drumming position.  And the freezing began for me.

My teacher is amazing.  I chose to tell him some of what I was experiencing because he asked (and I could tell he could hear me).  I WILLED myself to bring my hands down, each in their own time, slow sticks to the practice pad head.  As if I could BEAT my way forward and through and free of the trauma triggered block I was trapped by and within.

A few strokes of each hand later and my left hand froze in midair and would NOT move.  I was staring forward directly across the pad into Brett’s eyes as I spoke the words that formed at that instant in my mind:  “It is not safe to force my left hand into motion at this time.  Doing so activates my right brain which is currently overloaded with emotion.  I have to let it rest.  It is not at all wise to further stimulate my right brain by left had movements at this time.”

I saw nothing in Brett’s eyes but complete calmness and acceptance of what I was saying.  He held our gaze and what immediately happened for me next felt like an instantaneous opening of a tunnel or a channel through time directly to myself as a very young child.  This sensation then changed into a fast-forward in time until I was around age six or seven.

As I stared into Brett’s eyes — the only physical action I could muster at that time — a profound awareness came to me both in feeling and in words within my mind:  “Oh my God!  What I survived!  HOW IN GOD’S NAME WAS I EVER ABLE TO LEARN ANYTHING?”

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Dr. Martin Teicher’s research (Google search the terms “stop the storm teicher article” for more information) describe’s from the top down what kinds of brain changes happen during traumatic infant and childhood development.  I know that what I experienced so clearly yesterday in that lesson was a living example of what that trauma altered brain development feels like for my right limbic (emotional) brain hemisphere, my left (rational) brain hemisphere and for my trauma-altered corpus callosum region that transmits and integrates information between brain hemispheres — as I try to live my life under these circumstances.

The freezing of motion in my left arm and hand was clearly intended to PROTECT my right brain — and through that protection to protect and preserve the integrity of ME.

It seems, then, that when life in my childhood overloaded me that the horror of the forced isolation and stationary solitary confinement patterns that were a part of Mother’s ongoing psychotic abuse of me were necessary to my own survival of everything Mother did to me.  The truth of this seems so darkly bizarre in its essential consequences that no part of my rational thinking processes can grasp it.  How could it be that something as horrible as this isolation and solitary confinement I was forced to endure throughout my childhood in between horrendous beatings and attacks HAVE BEEN GOOD FOR ME?

In fact it appears most likely they were required by me so that my body-brain-self could in some way recuperate enough to go on living.

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What I see today is that I am a miracle of survival.  I need not berate myself for needing to have QUIET times within which my entire self on every level can recuperate enough to settle down from the extremes of stimulation that happen for me just by being alive (AKA PTSD, etc.)  My life has to be very simple and as clear as possible from unforeseen events that can so easily topple my inner balance — that has grown to be more and more fragile the older I become.

It seems I have nearly maxed out my bank of inner resources.  My son is fine.  All three of my children are fine.  I could not be happier for them!

I, on the other hand….

I am a special needs case.  I am continually learning more about what that means.  All I know today – right now –  is that most gratefully I have yet once again stopped falling.

Not that everyone isn’t special.  Just that truth and fairness indicate that severe early abusive trauma survivors live a special kind of life in a special kind of trauma-altered body that requires a special kind of knowledge to facilitate anything like smooth passage through life.

We are the only ones who really know what living “in here” is like.  There is very little we can take for granted.  Yet we do have shimmering glimmers of light rippling across pure waters just as we do sometimes have hard times of darkness.  At this moment I am most grateful I am seeing glimmers and I hope the same for you.

PS.  I am practicing drumming again – most gently so when that need appears.

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are welcome.

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Leave a Comment »

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Wednesday, June 11, 2014.  My friend Sandy, who stays on top of a lot of fascinating brain research stuff sent me this link yesterday —

Science Shows How Drummers’ Brains Are Actually Different From Everybody Elses’

By Jordan Taylor Sloan

It’s a great FUN  article!!  Well, at least to me.  Which my friend knew it would be.  If you click on the title above you will be able to watch videos — which really make me smile —  included in the article which I repost parts of here….

“For starters, rock steady drummers can actually be smarter than their less rhythmically-focused bandmates. A study from the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm found a link between intelligence, good timing and the part of the brain used for problem-solving. Researchers had drummers play a variety of different beats and then tasked them with a simple 60-problem intelligence test. The drummers who scored the highest were also better able to keep a steady beat. Apparently figuring out how to play in time is just another form of problem-solving.

But even though a steady drummer may be more intelligent than his or her bandmates, the drummer’s gifts can be shared: a tight beat can actually transfer that natural intelligence to others. In studies on the effects of rhythm on brains, researchers showed that experiencing a steady rhythm actually improves cognitive function. One psychology professor at the University of Washington used rhythmic light and sound therapy on his students and discovered that their grades improved. Similarly, one researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch used that method on a group of elementary and middle school boys with ADD. The therapies had a similar effect to Ritalin, eventually making lasting increases to the boys’ IQ scores.

Granted, these studies focused more on the effects of rhythm on the mind rather than on the mind behind the rhythm. That being said, drummers’ consistent rhythmic focus has positive effects on them and those around them (yes, even their neighbors). That’s because when drummers bring a steady rhythm (and corresponding problem-solving abilities) to a group setting, they actually create a “drummer’s high” for everyone around them. University of Oxford researchers discovered that when drummers play together, both their happiness levels and pain tolerance increase, similar to Olympic runners.

Observing that high led researchers to hypothesize that drumming was integral to community-building and that sharing rhythms could be the sort of behavior necessary for the evolution of human society.

Drumming is a fundamentally human thing. A lot of modern music has shifted towards drum machines over humans to create ultra-precise electronic rhythms. But it turns out that what we typically perceive as error is really just a uniquely human sense of time: Researchers at Harvard found that drummers harness a different sort of internal clock that moves in waves, rather than linearly as a real clock does. They match an innate rhythm that has been found in human brainwaves, heart rates during sleep and even the auditory nerve firings in cats. When a human drummer plays, he or she finds a human rhythm.

A lot of these studies have to do with rhythm just as much as with drumming, but drummers are more engaged with those mental elements than most. They are people tapped into a fundamental undercurrent of what it means to be human, people around whom bands and communities form.”

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Some people think it was the sitting-around-a-flickering-light-like-a-fire-in-a-pit that so captured humans when televisions hit the scene.  Makes sense to me.

Meanwhile, back to drumming practice I go!

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  Click here to view or purchase –

STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are welcome.

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Wednesday June 11, 2014.  This post is about my need to create a subtitle for the ebook I have published with my daughter Ramona — STORY WITHOUT WORDS.  It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.

Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are welcome.  However, it will most likely be a long time before I will read any of them.  I don’t wish to be derailed in my writing by criticism, something that already exists in one of the three reviews that have been posted for this book as a good friend of mine told me.  My friend doubts that the review came from someone who read the whole book.

My daughter is suggesting that a subtitle to the book needs to be attached to the main title, and that the book’s cover should stand as it is.

With all of the major changes in my life over this past year I have taken no time to think about my books.  Yet this morning my mind is captivated by what a subtitle for STORY WITHOUT WORDS might look like.  As soon as a line of possible subtitle words appears in my mind it is followed by another one.  I would much rather have clear-sighted focus rather than find myself caught up within a word tumbler.

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Central to my book is my consideration of what could have happened in my my mother’s childhood to break her mind and to turn her into the super abuser of me.  While the truth will never be known about Mother I believe it is critically important that we at least make attempts to understand what risk and resiliency factors combine to create child abusers.  While I am not afraid to write about this topic I understand that there will be people who are afraid to read what I write.

So for now my choice for a subtitle  for STORY WITHOUT WORDS would simply be Child abuse and the death of hope.

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I don’t think the human mind can survive without hope.  That’s just my bias.  When hope is crushed and broken especially during very early mind stages of development it may be that this distortion of hope builds itself right into the fabric of the brain-mind’s physiology.  If, as seems to have been true in Mother’s case, genes for mental illness are present that are put into motion as child abuse occurs, a mind distorted by both the abuse and the mental illness will appear in consequence.  This is essentially what this book is about.

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