Tag: dissociation

+SILENT TRUTH – MISSING FROM MY PARENTS’ 29,000 WORDS IN THEIR JUNE 1957 LETTERS

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Having just completed the transcription of the nearly 29,000 words contained in the *JUNE 1957 LETTERS BETWEEN MOTHER AND FATHER I now face the most difficult task of all.  Do I do what I suggest in the title I have found for the collection of my essays if I ever publish them, “Breaking the Silence that Binds,” or do I let the silence of the words NOT written in my parents’ letters remain intact?

First of all, I know about the silence because I was there, and because 53 years later I can feel that silence now.  I know I feel it, because it upsets me.  “How dare I speak about what I know?”  “DARE” is a word my mother frequently used against her children, especially me.  “How DARE you look at me that way?”  “How DARE you – blah – blah – blah…..?”

How DARE I, 53 years later, speak my own truth about what I know about what went on in my family?  Well, do I dare?  Can I dare?  Will I dare?  It’s as if I stand at a silent, invisible boundary line at which I need to summon my courage, my willingness, my commitment to my own self (and to those who suffered abuse within a family similar to mine), and all of my ability to differentiate myself from both of my parents so that I CAN break this binding silence contained within these letters.

“Dive in, Linda.  What is most troubling you?”  I find it hard to think at this moment.  It’s like I am at the center of a powerful vacuum that sucks all my thoughts along with my whole version of my own reality away from me.  How do I begin?  I will simply locate the passages within my mother’s writing that I need to use my voice about.

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I can feel my fear.  I can feel the inner experience of DARING to challenge my mother, even now, all these 53 years later.  Where are my thoughts?  Where are my words?

First, there are seeds of my truth within these words from mother’s June 12, 1957 Wednesday letter to my father:

“Darling I can’t stand being away from you.  I must be with you.  I’ll never let anyone separate us again.  Never, never, not even the Army – oh darling, I love you.

We loved your letter and cards.  Linda didn’t get one – I hope you didn’t forget, I know you wouldn’t.  I gave her mine.  They were so proud and happy.  Come to think of it mornings and afternoons aren’t so bad, but far from good.  But from 4:00 on I am SICK!!  All this I’ve heard of mind over matter, I must put it into practice.  Can I??“

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Second, there are seeds of my truth within these words from my mother’s June 27, 1957 letter:

“Oh darling, my heart never ceases aching for you.  I had ‘the feeling’ this afternoon I should check again to see if there was mail again.  I usually only go in the morning but I had to go again and there was!

It was the letter written before the one I got this morning.  It was written Friday.  It’s funny to read them backwards.  I drove over to the little park in Glendora and let the kids play awhile, took a few impromptu pictures, which I’ll send to you, and read your letter there!  I took one close-up of Linda as she lost her 2nd front tooth today.  Isn’t nature wonderful, right on time?  Tonight the angel will visit her – usually you do that – I know.”

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Finally, the contrast I am going to speak about relates to this in her ‘fun filled’ descriptions in her June 27, 1957 Thursday night letter:

“I wish you could have seen John when he caught his trout!  He was so excited, he swung his line around and caught it in a tree.  Naturally, he had had several bites and near catches before he actually caught one.  It really was priceless!  He jumped up and down and exclaimed.

Cindy was such a ‘patient fisherwoman’ and soon caught a big one.  I took a picture of her holding the line with the fish on it, with the others standing close, admiring it.  J  I surely hope IT comes out!

Linda caught the biggest and is so proud!  We got home at 8:00 P.M. and so will cook them tomorrow!  Grandma will be here then, as I have errands in Pasadena (what a let-down) to do tomorrow.  I know she loves trout and I’m afraid the children might not eat it.

The only one that minded ‘hurting the fish’ was John.  He couldn’t stand to see it bled and naturally I had to get someone else to pull the hook out.  J  I was glad cleaning them was part of the price and I even had her cut the heads off.“

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OK.  Step one is completed.  I have used my net woven of my bravery and determination to snatch this collection of my mother’s words out of her letters, out of the context that she wrote them within, and I have moved them into MY universe – 53 years later.

How telling it is to me that the power of my mother’s severe abuse of me, coupled with my father’s unwillingness to EVER stop her or to even recognize that the abuse was happening, makes it this difficult even today for me to DARE to speak about what I know about my parents’ version of reality.

Now, as I try to locate MY OWN SELF, my own feelings, thoughts, words, perceptions in relationship to my mother’s words, I need to distill this down if I can into my own crystallized words about these letter passages.

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(1)  My mother’s Borderline reality began to take shape from the time she was very, very young.  The neglect, abuse, trauma and malevolent conditions that she was born into influenced the body-brain changes that led to her condition.

(2)  My mother’s Borderline reality was already well in place before she ever met and married my father on June 11, 1949.  They knew one another six months before the marriage took place.

(3)  My the time my oldest brother, John, was born on June 15, 1950 my mother’s Borderline reality had expanded to not only include the existence of her ‘perfect husband’, Bill, but also had grown to include the appearance of this firstborn ‘perfect son’.

(4)  A healthy, balanced relationship between my mother and her mother had been trashed beginning with my mother’s birth.  While I became the victim-pawn within the complex interplay of the disturbances between my mother and her mother, I was not the cause of them.

(5)  Patterns of chronic and severe abuse in a family happen because these patterns both grow into the family dynamics and shape them.  These patterns are especially well-disguised within a Borderline-based brain-nervous system-mind-self focused home.

(6)  These patterns are at the same time NOT detected because their disguise is perfect and because they have shaped every single interaction and transaction that occurs over time between the people that are part of the close family.

When my mother writes to my father in one of her June 27, 1957 letters, “We’re not ordinary people – we’re a close knit family and should never be separated!”  I believe she is recognizing within herself that her entire reality depends upon the ongoing patterns that were not only established within her own Borderline mind when she was a little girl, but also is recognizing that her ongoing reality is completely intertwined with my father’s presence in her life.

(7)  The patterns that formed the fabric of the ongoing interactions within our family worked because they were silent.  The silence of the truth about what was really going on was as completely necessary to maintain ‘reality’s existence’ as was the presence of my father.

(8)  The key point I know about the passages I selected above is that it wasn’t just the presence of my father in my mother’s life that was required for her reality to remain intact.  It was absolutely essential that my father completely understand my mother’s version of reality as it regarded me as the kingpin of her mad illusions.

My mother very effectively, efficiently and expertly manipulated how my father saw me throughout my entire childhood.  My mother had to convince my father of her mother’s love for me so that she could then justify and defend her abuse of me.

The pattern of the dynamics of my mother’s abuse of me with my father’s acceptance if not approval happened over time because:

(a)  My mother could ensure that my father knew she had undying love for him.

(b)  My mother could ensure that my father’s entire life involved his love for her at its center.

(c) My mother could ensure that my father could not understand what she did to me in any way than I ‘abused my mother’ by being such a terrible child.  My mother was ‘put upon’ by a ‘curse child’ – she bore her burdens with glorious magnanimity.  My mother created a pattern of reality that meant my father never questioned her version of the truth.

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In the two first passages I include here from my mother’s writings to my father, I know the truth is invisibly included in her words.  Both of my parents, whether they made the choices consciously or not, DID exactly choose what words they included within their letters.

Although my mother does mention their other three children in her letters, it is exactly and specifically Linda that she draws attention to in terms of her magnanimous ‘good mother’ actions toward me.  In both of these incidents she includes about me in her letter, she directly hooks my father – and his role as my father — into ‘the story’.

(a)  Father evidently ‘forgot’ to send Linda a card.  Magnanimous ‘good mother’ gives me hers.

(b)  Mother makes sure to mention that she took a picture ‘close up’ of just Linda as she hooks in my father by also drawing his attention to his usual role as the lost tooth routine.  Magnanimous ‘good mother’ takes his place and performs his job for him.

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In the third passage I included above a different dynamic is operating (from my point of view).  As mother describes the fishing adventures of her group of children, she does include Linda as one of the group.  This mention, to me, is not one that involves the kind of husband-father-conning-manipulation that she used in the first two passages.  In the fishing scene, she actually ‘forgot’ to separate me from the rest of ‘the pack’.

The problem with this thirdly-mentioned experience is that any time I was ‘accidentally’ left out of my mother’s psychosis regarding me at the same time I was ‘accidentally’ included as a member of the sibling group, I never, never, never knew when to expect my mother’s psychosis to reappear in some random violent extreme outburst against me.

I mention this fact here because these ‘happy Linda as part of the group’ experiences did as much to create major dissociational patterns in my ongoing experience of my life in the world as did the violence.  I never could anticipate ‘which was going to be which’.  I could not predict, I could not prevent, I could not understand any of it.

So when something good actually did happen, when I actually was allowed to be a child, it always happened not because I WAS a child, but happened because mother was in one of her “giddy-happy let’s-do-something-fun isn’t-this-fun” moods that NONE of us could understand.

NOTE:  My mother seems to have some peripheral comprehension of the difficulties her shifts of mental state, mood and attitude had on her children when she described this in the same letter where she talks about the fishing trip:

“Next door to us there’s a beautiful trailer court (I don’t think they allow children).  Mostly, the people seem to be retired.  It really is nice.  They have a lovely swimming pool, shuffle-board etc.  Some of them have their patios fixed so nicely with ferns, tropical plants etc.  We all enjoyed seeing it.  You can’t imagine how much I enjoy the children – they’re truly fun to be with – if no other adults are along.  When we’re alone I treat them more as adults.  We talk and laugh and have fun.  When other adults are there or in the car they’re treated as children and resent it.  I can’t blame them.  It must be hard (Pals and friends one minute and a mere child, the next).“

But it is obvious to me that even as she wrote these words, even as she noticed the process she described here, it doesn’t MEAN ANYTHING TO HER.  My mother remained consistently at the center of her own universe and everything that happened always happened to us with her at this center.

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With the exception of the simple report that I caught the biggest fish and I was proud (she doesn’t’ describe to my father what her reaction to my pride might have been), the other two examples regarding me have nothing to do with Linda.

In both of the other two events mother is the star player.  Father becomes the blind, manipulated hooked-into-my-mother’s-version-of-reality player.  All I am is the actress-prop being used to continue the solidification of the pattern-dynamics that HAD to be protected and maintained in the family even though my father was not physically present in the home.  There could be no lapse of pattern.

My mother had to SHINE.  My father had to see her SHINE.  My father had to stay entranced.  He had to see my mother SHINE as his wife.  He had to see her SHINE as a mother.  And, for the overall, overriding, overarching dynamic of my mother’s psychosis – with me at its center – to continue to operate as my mother’s Borderline madness HAD to have it happen, my father ESPECIALLY had to see my mother SHINE as MY magnanimously good mother.

My mother had to so comprehensively control the pattern-dynamics in her home that when she acted viciously toward me, even her insane, mad violence would be seen by my father as just another aspect of her SHINING ability to be this terribly BAD child’s magnanimous good mother.

To say that ‘my mother as martyr’ was an aspect of the pattern-dynamics of our home is such an understatement it’s almost ridiculous.  At the same time, my grandmother did the ‘martyr thing’ to near perfection.  Adding another bizarre twist, it was a part of my mother’s abuse litany against my father that HE played such an excellent martyr role!

All the while these dynamics were slithering around among the only grown-ups in my child life, it was ME that was being sacrificed.  I was not ‘a martyr’, I was martyred.

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I need to take my word-search detour here for a moment:

MARTYR

Etymology: Middle English, from Old English, from Late Latin, from Greek martyr-, martys witness

Date: before 12th century

1 : a person who voluntarily suffers death as the penalty of witnessing to and refusing to renounce a religion
2 : a person who sacrifices something of great value and especially life itself for the sake of principle
3 : victim; especially : a great or constant sufferer

MARTYRED

Date: before 12th century

1 : to put to death for adhering to a belief, faith, or profession
2 : to inflict agonizing pain on : torture

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As an infant-child I certainly had no ability to volunteer as a martyr.  At the same time, I was accused from birth of being sent as an agent of the devil to kill my mother, I was not given any means of defending myself.  I could not ‘renounce’ the devil!  I had no principle or religion to denounce.  I had been assigned a religion as being ‘the devil’s child’.

Yes, I witnessed.  Yes I sacrificed.  Yes, I greatly and nearly constantly suffered.  But this truth only appears in my parents’ letters by its silence.

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Letters: 

*JUNE 1957 LETTERS BETWEEN MOTHER AND FATHER

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+IT’S IN THE BODY: TAKING THE TRAUMA AND THE DRAMA OUT OF RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHERS

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Here’s a quick note:  I just spent 90 minutes in telephone conversation with a friend I’ve had for 30 years.  It was wonderful.  But I wanted to take a minute before I run on into town to write down here something that became very clear during that conversation.

When a person is in close relationship with anyone else – children, spouse, intimate friend – even less close relationships with coworkers and others – there can be patterns that will best be dealt with if we can depersonalize problematic interactions and step back – way back!

Attachment disorders and all so-called ‘mental disorders’ take place within the body.  Changes in patterns of information transmission in the body always show themselves in how the BODY of a person responds to and within their environment.

Our culture is very short on realizing that the MIND is not the problem.  What happens within the body, brain, and nervous system – especially within our stop and go autonomic nervous system (ANS) – which is our calm-connection – stress response (fight, flight, etc) system can determine how a PERSON is because they live in and with their body.

I saw the image of two people taking a pleasant walk down the road of their lives together (in any kind of interaction).  Suddenly, one of the people trip and fall down.  Maybe they didn’t see a stick, a stone, a pothole in their way.

So the other person turns to say something to their partner, a low and behold, nobody is beside them.  This person who has not fallen has to stop, turn, look to find where back there their partner is.  They can walk back to help them.  They can erupt in rage that their partner has abandoned them.

In the worst of trauma drama situations, the falling partner grabs onto the person beside them and takes them on down, too.

We don’t gain objectivity, detachment, or our own clear sense of who we are in the world separate from other people if we don’t understand that what is most often blocking the pathway of someone else – those sticks and stones and troublesome potholes – are

physiologically in the body!  Often our body’s reactions take us completely by surprise – bowling us over, sucking us under, getting us stuck – tripping us and making us fall so we can skin our knees – and maybe not even be able to get up again.

When a person experiences anxiety, depression, eruptive uncontrolled rage and irritability, wide ranges in mood states, shame-based reactions — and so much more — all these changes are happening at the speed of light within the body itself.  I say speed of light because they happen as the electrical signals between the cells happen.

As long as we cut our ‘mind’, ‘brain’ and ‘self’ off from the body that keeps these others alive, we miss our greatest opportunity for removing trauma drama from our lives.  How thrilling is it to realize that ‘it’s just my body’ responding this or that way – ?  I mean this literally.  It is not a thrilling trauma drama reenactment to be able to recognize instantly when something in our body has happened that is affecting us now.  We can simply recognize these changes, understand how they affect us, and begin to be able to gain increasing CONSCIOUS control over our life.

Simply put – nothing could be more complicated.  But it is NOT impossible for us to accomplish as adults (obviously difficult for children).

For adults, it’s important to realize when someone we care about has had or is having one of these mishaps.  No, we didn’t cause it (can’t control it, can’t cure it).  How DO we react?  Get mad, blame self or other, get knocked down with them, get stuck so we can’t get out?  Do we turn around and help, sit down by the side of the road and whistle Dixie while our buddy figures it all out and ‘gets better’?  Do we go back for them, tow them out, or walk on ahead into our own life and leave them far behind?

Tripping on the pathway and falling down takes all kinds of time out of living a good life.  We often find ourselves trying to anticipate what is going to appear ahead to trip our partner so we can perhaps remove the stumble factor for them.  This helps us keep them beside us on OUR walk because that’s what having a relationship is.  Well………  sorry to say, more on this later……. I’m taking myself on a walk now right out the door, into my car, and………

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+UNSPEAKABLE MADNESS: INSIDE A CHILD ABUSING BORDERLINE MOTHER’S MIND

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Oh, lordy, I see that the entire article Dr. Bruce Perry refers to about Borderline Personality Disorder — in his new book, Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential–and Endangered by Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz  — is available for public viewing online at this link:

The borderline empathy effect: Do high BPD individuals have greater empathic ability? Or are they just more difficult to ‘‘read’’?

By Judith M. Flury, William Ickes, William Schweinle

While I haven’t begun yet to read Perry’s book, I have begun to thumb through it, beginning with a search of his index for information specifically about the Borderline condition as it might relate to my understanding of my abusive mother and what she did to me.

As Perry succinctly summarizes this article he mentions, this study found that Borderlines are very likely to have enough of a ‘social’ right brain to be able to read other peoples social cues-minds, but nobody else can read the Borderline’s – because a Borderline brain is JUST TOO DIFFERENT from normal for anyone with an ordinary mind to comprehend.

Because I am nowhere near ready yet to approach the reading of this article, I will take Perry at his word that both he and these researchers know what they are talking about.  Perry also mentions in his two paragraph presentation of this Borderline mental condition that the “character in the film Fatal Attraction, a movie I don’t intend to ever see, was a Borderline.

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While this ‘weird brain-mind’ information is affirming and confirming to me about what I have experienced, learned and know about my mother and the 18 years of abuse I went through thanks to her advanced Borderline condition, it doesn’t improve how I feel at this moment.

My return to complete the transcription of my mother’s remaining letters has put me on trauma-trigger overload.  I could say I’m like a space shuttle with damaged heat tiles trying to approach reentry back to earth.  At the same time I know that reading my mother’s 1957 (from the time right before my 6th birthday), I also know that I have vowed to myself to complete this job.

Perry’s reference to the ‘different mind’ of the Borderline that ordinary people cannot comprehend (I’d have to read the article above to see if they mention whether or not Borderlines are better equipped to read EACH OTHERS minds) does give credence to my sense as I read my mother’s letters that NOBODY CAN SEE HER MADNESS IN THEM.  “It’s NOT just me,” I can tell myself.  “NOBODY could see the madness of her mind.”

This also confirms that I have found exactly the right title to stick onto the front end of her writings when I publish them:  UNSPEAKABLE MADNESS.  If nobody can comprehend the Borderline mind, then OF COURSE we then correspondingly lack any ability to speak about it.  That’s true for those of us who were raised from birth by an abusive Borderline, and it’s true also for those on the outside who could not see what was happening THEN and are inexplicably (to us) prevented from understanding the depth of our stories when we try to speak about them NOW.

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My mother’s letters are triggering implicit, or body memories that are so impacting my body that I cannot eat or sleep right now.  I have to talk to myself when I step into the shower (I don’t have a bath tub) about being able to tolerate the feel of the water hitting my skin.  The water seems to POUND on the surface of my body.  All the thousands of blows I received as a child are in my body in memory that is very close to the surface right now – way too close.

Until I have finished transcribing these 50 or so remaining letters, I will be in some risky and very uncomfortable limbo danger zone – like out in space without the ability to protect myself completely from the consequences of this work.  My ‘heat tiles’ that will allow me reentry back into my present time and space of my life will be repaired when this job is done, though I will remain bruised and ICKY for some time afterward.

I know this.  I also know that I cannot afford an editor to prepare ALL of her letters for print and publication.  This last job has to be done by ME, even before a single one of her words can be uploaded through Kindle publishing.

But by the time I reach the final reading of her letters for editing I will be able to know that her ACTUAL words I am encountering now in her handwriting, in these envelopes, in these physical, material paper forms that she touched as she created this written record I have to face in the transcription process, will be buried outside in my compost pile for the worms to eat.  I will then be working ‘with a memory outside of a memory’ because her digitalized words on my computer screen are one step more remote to me than are these physical remnants of her life I am confronting right now.

Right now I am unwrapping my mummified mommy in every envelope I touch, every piece of paper I pull out, unfold and begin to read.  The contaminated dust of her mind is still here, preserved in her writings.  The implications for good with this collection as they provide this comprehensive view of a child abusing Borderline mother is profound.

I can do this job, I can complete it because I WILL it so.  My greatest hope is that someone will pay attention to her words as they reflect the mysterious and nearly unknowable-from-the-outside view of am abusive  Borderline brain-mind.

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I am reminded of the well-chosen title of this book about Borderline Personality Disorder:  Lost in the Mirror, 2nd Edition: An Inside Look at Borderline Personality Disorder by Richard A. Moskovitz

Although I haven’t read this book because I do not want to ‘contaminate’ my own thinking, sensing and knowing about my mother and her condition, I recognize the truth in this book’s title.  I think about the value that the collection of my mother’s writings will offer to anyone interested in understanding this ‘unknowable, unseeable, incomprehensible, invisible, undetectable’ kind of human brain-mind we now call Borderline Personality Disorder.

It is my opinion that because most people who suffer from so-called mental illness DID suffer from unsafe and insecure early attachments to their caregivers — and Perry’s book on empathy goes into great detail about how our current society is creating a national condition of ‘relational poverty’ that I see as nearing a national crisis of insecure attachment disorders —  suffered from neglect, maltreatment and abuse on some level.  Those deprivations along with direct malice change the developing body-brain.  They directly change the physiological ability to utilize human empathic abilities.

Our growing national ‘relational poverty’ is creating an increased risk for Borderline conditions within our population.

Any professional who works with ‘mental illness’ (as well as infant-child abuse survivors themselves) must be able to recognize patterns within their infant-child abuse survivor clients that mirror or mimic  Borderline.

My mother’s letters and diaries, I still believe, will provide the most comprehensive published opportunity to actually experience the reality of the Borderline condition as a Borderline sees it within ONE set of their brain-mind mirrors – in my Borderline mother’s words.

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In today’s modern world of electronic communication and cell phone connections, I believe it would be nearly impossible for any survivor of Borderline madness in their childhood to put together the kind of comprehensive, serial pattern of Borderline thinking that my mother’s letter contain.

Although her letters after she arrived in Alaska, written to her own mother who HAD to be one of the main contaminating influences that impacted my mother’s development, it is particularly within this batch of 1957 letters that my mother’s and father’s patterns of relational insecure attachment disorder becomes most clear and apparent.  Facing this picture of my parents in these 1957 letters is the most difficult part of the entire letter transcription process, and is the reason I know I put this part of my job off until the end.

Although Perry’s work and the work of all the attachment experts and developmental neuroscientists are providing valuable and necessary steps in the right direction, naming what is going on within our culture as ‘relational poverty’ still lets us avoid the extremely painful reality of what insecure attachment disorders and their corresponding empathy disorders are DOING to us as human beings:  They are making us suffer in nearly inconceivable and unmentionable ways.  They are HURTING US!  This hurt is rocking ‘n rolling itself right on down the generations.

When the day finally arrives that the experts at last agree, and the public finally understands, that nearly every single malaise that humans experience with other humans is because of INSECURE ATTACHMENT DISORDERS – and that nearly every known so-called ‘mental illness’ comes about directly through the influence of ‘relational poverty’ in early body-brain forming stages of development in INSECURE ATTACHMENT ENVIRONMENTS that builds the insecure attachment right into the body-brain — well, I fully expect to have left this world far behind.

That does not mean that as many people as possible can’t join me way out in front of ‘the envelope’ (of air, like a jet pushes through) and begin to understand NOW, way ahead of the pack, that we all suffer from insecure attachment disorders.

As I work my way through these paper edifices that contain what was wrong with my mother’s body-brain-mind, I know that first SHE made this great contribution by writing her words down and by holding onto these papers for the rest of her life, that I made a contribution in my commitment to paying her words serious attention no matter what the cost is to me personally, and that someone somewhere at sometime is going to read her words and my introduction to them and BEGIN to comprehend how extremely damaging insecure attachment patterns are in the very months and years of a human being’s growth and development as they determine the developmental trajectory of a person’s body and brain.

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The genesis of a Borderline is reflected in my mother’s writings.  Because of this fact, the genesis of an extremely violent infant-child abusing parent is ALSO contained in her writings.  That those of us on the outside – with me being still on the outside, fortunately, because I did not end up with a Borderline condition – are being given the chance to share an insider’s view of a Borderline brain-mind along with my mother by carefully reading her written words as they unfold this large section of her life, is really a miracle with great potential for helping us all understand what can happen when safe and secure infant-child attachment goes so very, very wrong.

Meanwhile, I am going into town to pick up some needed supplies as I take a short recess from hell, and then I will return to my work.

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+WORKING TOWARD MY LITTLE ADOBE CHAPEL OF THE PEACEFUL HEART – TODAY – ROSES

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I woke up with continued thoughts related to being five, moving to Alaska and losing my grandmother.  In thinking about my mother’s letter I referred to in my last post, and about the pattern of my mother’s words about her mother as they appear in those summer 1957 letters she wrote to my father, I see the words ‘sulk’ and ‘pout’ appear frequently in her assessment of her mother.

These two words are directly connected to abuse in my history with my mother, primarily and especially vicious face-slapping which always involved verbal abuse (see:  *Age 9 – BLOODY NOSE).

In order to escape my thoughts today I have gone outside to work on my yard projects, and am only taking a brief break here to mention the theme of the thoughts I am avoiding.  I want my emotional turmoil related to this letter of my mother’s and the associations connected to them to settle down.  I am outside self-soothing with the exception of appearing here with my fingers on this keyboard for a very brief period of time.

Part of what is upsetting me right now is the realization moving throughout my entire body that all of the violence turned toward me, especially the verbal abuse connected to violent face-slapping was ACTUALLY meant for my grandmother!  Thousands of times in my childhood I was attacked by my mother because, according to her, I was pouting and/or sulking.  I NEVER knew what she was talking about, so there was no chance ever that I could avoid her abuse when she took off on that track.

As I see these words ‘sulk’ and ‘pout’ appearing in her writings as she describes her own mother, I have to wonder if her mother attacked her in the same way for the same so-called facial crimes when my mother was a child.  I will never know.

But this is the FIRST TIME EVER IN MY ENTIRE LIFE that I have been faced with my own thoughts that I was probably NOT just the projection of badness and evil that my mother could not tolerate accepting about her own self, I was ALSO – in addition to that — the projection of all that my mother hated and despised within and about HER OWN MOTHER (and possibly of her no-doubt abusive own grandmother, as well).

All this is making the reality of my mother’s devastatingly negative projections ONTO me grow like the marshmallow giant in the Ghost Busters movie within my emotional body.  Because these realizations are related to the terrible traumas of my childhood, they do not belong here as a part of my day today.  Yet I don’t want to avoid learning whatever I can learn about myself in relation to the dynamics of the Borderline condition my mother suffered from or of the abuse dynamics themselves.

But I don’t want an emotional avalanche, tornado, or tsunami to swallow me whole – AGAIN as it did for my childhood and well into my adulthood.

So I am outside planning where to put the amazing collection of 10 bare root roses I just received in the mail yesterday as a Mother’s Day present from my first born child, my eldest daughter.  There are 8 climbers and 2 large shrubs now soaking their roots in a large tub of water outside in the shade of the Mulberry tree.

They will be the plants the garden I will build to surround my planned-for adobe chapel on the borderline wall down here right on the American-Mexican line.  I am going to make a circle garden even though I don’t have a LOT of space that will be the ‘on earth – in earth’ physical mirror for me of the book I am working on, “360 Degrees of Change for Survivors of Difficult Childhoods.”  There will be an adobe walkway out there with The Ballerina rose plant my daughter sent me at its center.

This garden will exist right beside

The Little Adobe Chapel of the Peaceful Heart

I especially like the description of this plant: Ballerina is a lovely shrub rose with small pink and white flowers. It strikes really easily from cuttings - Ballerina roses grown on their own roots and are strong and healthy.

That is exactly the way infant-child abuse survivors are learning how to be:  Strong and healthy as we grow on our own roots!  And, as with all survivors, its goodness and beauty can be easily propagated and spread around all over the place!

So, back to work outside.  Today I will do what I CAN do and give as little thought as possible to what I cannot.  I am learning how to use the assets that come with dissociation, disorganization and disorientation – I can choose what I organize and orient myself toward at every moment – if I can practice and learn how to do it!

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See last post here with mother’s letter included:   +ONE OF MOTHER’S 1957 LETTERS – INVOLVING MY GRANDMOTHER

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THIS ROSE WILL KEEP ITS BALLERINA SISTER SAFE

I just planted the first of the ten roses, The Mermaid– a voracious and protective highly thorned climbing rose.  I put it on my south boundary (Borderline) fence line.  Seemed appropriate to me as I ‘imaginally and metaphorically’ heal my own inner boundary issues by putting my Borderline mother and her madness OUTSIDE of who I AM.  She would not be able to get across THIS borderline protective fence once my Mermaid grows for protection!

Mermaid

1918

“‘Mermaid’ is a rose to take seriously. While it doesn’t have the objectionable suckering habit of its invasive parent, ‘The Macartney Rose,’ it is remarkably vigorous. It can be grown as a thorny, yet handsome mound of shiny, green foliage and saucer- sized, 5-petal, creamy yellow flowers. It will also happily climb into trees or over fences and is a good choice for smothering ugly outbuildings. ‘Mermaid’ is both fragrant and remontant once it is established.”

As one grower reports:

“Mermaid grows on my back fence–in fact, it dominates the fence. The rose grows vigorously with no fertilizing and puts out huge amounts of new growth and blooms. It is unapproachable, however, with nasty thorns, making it difficult to prune and try to control its growth. Put it in an area where people do not pass by. A truly impressive plant.”

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NOTE:  Blog is a matter of hours away from being able to appear on Kindle via subscription.

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+ONE OF MOTHER’S 1957 LETTERS – INVOLVING MY GRANDMOTHER

alchemynow2 Comments

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I can’t imagine that anyone who studies Borderline Personality Disorder can begin to understand a Borderline without trying to find out as much information as possible about a Borderline’s mother and about their mother-daughter relationship.  If possible, as with my mother’s case, an inclusion of the grandmother of the Borderline in the case history would also be important.

Because my mother’s grandmother came to live in their household when my mother was 5 and HER mother divorced, my great grandmother was probably another powerfully negative (if not outright abusive) influence within my mother’s childhood.

It has taken me five years to get very near the bottom of the pile of my mother’s letters as I have worked to transcribe them.  I have had to remove myself from her writings at times and then force myself back to the job again.  I am back at the job, as I recently mentioned.

While there remains a small batch of assorted letters from the 1960s left for me to transcribe, it is this large collection of letters from the summer of 1957 that I have put off for last – and avoided.  My father left my mother and his four children (ages nearly 2, nearly 4, nearly 6 (me) and my brother who turned 7) behind in Los Angeles while he went on to his new job in Anchorage, Alaska – and to look for housing so that we could join him.

The letters flowed between them daily.  My mother often wrote 2 or 3 letters to him per day.  My father left on June 11, 1957 and by June 13th my mother writes as if he had been gone a life time.  (The rest of us joined dad on the 1st of August.)

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I am sharing this one letter right now that my mother wrote about her feelings related to her mother’s ‘interference’ in mother’s parenting, and actually says what I always have suspected to be true, that one of the reasons (a MAJOR reason) my mother wanted to go to Alaska was to get away from her mother’s interference.

I really doubt that any reader of the collection of my mother’s writing will ever be able to see the twisted mind – even a wisp of it or a glance of a glimmer of it – in my mother’s words.  In this letter my mother is showing her classic Borderline self – at the same time she succeeds in hiding it.

My mother would not allow her mother to rescue me.  True, my mother is referring to an incident here that involved my grandmother and my brother John – but it is a pattern that happened continually with me, not occasionally.  It is important for me to affirm this for myself because the only two people in my life that could have ‘interfered’ with my mother’s abuse of me were my father or my grandmother.

My mother describes in this letter the dynamics – not healthy ones between herself and her mother – that operated throughout my childhood to prevent my grandmother from being able to help me.  Tonight as I transcribed this letter I saw more clearly than ever how impossible my mother’s relationship with her own mother was, and had always been.

Her statements about her mother in this letter follow a whole string of them within these 1957 summer letters, such as this one in her June 13th letter to dad:

“It breaks my heart but I just had to spank Cindy – it’s 10:30 p.m and she won’t go to sleep!!!  I feel so sorry for them and Grandma does not help things.  Please Bill, don’t let me be like her and expect perfection in little children.“

I see a receding succession of roaring fire alarms going off down the corridor of time straight back to my mother’s childhood in that statement about expecting “perfection in little children” (as my mother DID expect it of all her children).  I hear the echo of the stories my mother repeated over and over to us as we grew up about how this was true in her own childhood.  NOW if I heard her tell those stories I could tell her she was abused.  But of course I couldn’t when I was a child and heard her tales.

These letters traveling back and forth between my mother and father are so strange for me to read.  All I can see in my mother’s is her disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder.  She seems to have entirely organized-oriented herself around my father and in his absence suffered great distress and duress.  She could not self-sooth herself without him.

I will post the link to all of these letters when I have finished transcribing them.  As they are read in order the pattern of their attachment blares back at me throughout these many years since they were written.  Somehow my mother was PERFECT at keeping the shadow of her ‘humanity’ alive in her words while completely disguising the violent monster.  The monster doesn’t show in her letters, but I can feel the monster between her lines.

It makes me think of driving down a highway, seeing a tree looming on the horizon, watching it grow as it’s approached, watching it diminish once it has been passed by.  That’s like the invisible monster hiding between the lines in my mother’s letters.  Even as that tree shrinks in size until it seems to be gone – we know it is still there.  It is still big.  We just can no longer see it because we have moved as its viewers, not because the tree went anywhere other than where it always is.

The monster was always in my mother.  How she maneuvered and manipulated our home’s environment so that nobody SAW the monster but its victims still  amazes me.  At the same time, I believe my grandmother DID see the monster – and my mother could not tolerate it.  She had to make grandma ‘go away’, and the only way she could truly do that was to leave her mother in Los Angeles as she moved the rest of us to Alaska.

Mother made her mother ‘go away’ as surely as we make a tree ‘go away’ as we drive on past it and leave it to shrink into invisibility over the horizon behind us.  Once that had happened, there was no hope for me.  When my connection with my grandmother vanished, when the only safe and secure person in the universe disappeared that I could TRY to attach to, the monster in my mother became invisible to my grandmother.  My mother HAD TO MAKE THAT HAPPEN.  I was getting old enough that hiding the monster from my grandmother was becoming increasingly difficult for my mother to do.

I loved my grandmother.  She was my only hope.  My mother made her disappear.

That my grandmother was part of the problem, I didn’t understand.  My grandmother certainly helped to MAKE the monster my mother was from the start.

But read this letter.  See how insidiously mother hid the truth about what was really going on (the important parts, the dangerous-to-Linda parts) as she kept the invisible monster invisible on the invisibility  side of her Borderline, between the lines of her written words, cunningly twisted in her justifications.

After all my time in trying to find a way to describe how my mother operated in some hope that I could help prevent from happening to another child the absolute holocaust of a childhood I had with my mother – I am so very close to giving up.  It seems impossible.  Any child caught in the deceiving world of a Borderline such as my mother was probably has no chance of being helped or saved – NONE WHATSOEVER!

I did endure in hell.  I survived.  I did not become a Borderline like my mother.  Maybe that’s the best it can ever get under these kinds of conditions.  Maybe sometimes there are too many monsters in the mirror that can turn sideways just exactly right and disappear so nobody else can see them and you can’t even see them to show them to someone else – and nobody, not anybody believes you when you tell them the monster is real.

Maybe that’s the way it was for my mother when she was a little girl.  Her mother was a monster the same way my mother was a monster.  Only my mother put that information somewhere where not even she could really see it in the end (though some of that conflict IS in this letter).  That put me in the middle between them, just as it put me being the projection of everything my grandmother hated about my mother when my mother was little – like I was little when this letter was being written.

How does any abused child know what’s going on between the big people, what happened down the generations that leads to their abuse?  How can a child recognize the lies?  How can they think about them, who do they tell, who would believe them when the lies are so much bigger and older than the children can even begin to imagine?

I still can’t SHOW anyone what I know about my mother.  It’s as if it were a dream.  “You were just dreaming, Linda.  It wasn’t real.  What you say happened didn’t happen.  You imagined it all.  You are making it all up.  Why are you doing that?”

The Borderline abusive mother IS in this letter!  I can see her!

My father and mother were so entangled in their mutual dependency on one another my mother could not afford for my father to see the monster – and he couldn’t afford to see it, either.  Maybe she had him so mesmerized by her madness that he never stood a chance against her.

Recipe for disaster….. that’s what I know as the principal victim target of my mother’s violent abusive madness.  What my mother writes is simply on one side of her Borderline wall.  What’s on the other side she keeps secret and hidden, even from herself – and in this letter, also from my father.

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June 19, 1957 post mark

Darling Bill,

What a day I have had – what a time I have had since you left my dearest.  I need you, I need you.  Don’t ever leave me again – I can’t stand being parted from you – find a place soon, soon, soon!  Just to be together again.  Have you investigated those apartments – they were supposed to be close enough to the base so we wouldn’t need a car!

I wish with all my heart – soul you were here with me now.  I’ve never needed you as much.  I’ve never in all my life felt so alone.

Yet, I wanted to be alone – I just sent Mother home with all her blankets and she was boiling – I don’t mean because it’s so hot out either!

She comes over tired – all full of her hectic day and I am also tired and neither of us cheer each other up.  I miss you so terribly and she can’t understand that – she says she can.  “Well, I should hope so after all you’re used to him after 8 years.”  Bill, I’ve been sidetracking comments until I can’t stand it any longer!  Yet, Bill I’m frightened to death to be alone – I long to be close to you, Oh darling, when I write to you my ‘whole being’ cries to you.

Mother, I think, is dissappointed [sic] !  She thought we’d have fun together and I’m a wet rag.  I only want YOU.  It’s all I live for, all I think about!  I feel as if I was torn away from you and will ache until I am put together again.  [Linda note:  Father has been gone 8 days – it was their choice that he start work in Alaska and find housing so the family could join him.]

If she had loved her husband it would be different but she’s truly a ‘spinster’ now and it irritates me and my complete love for you irritates her.

We enjoy each other occassionally [sic] but to have my mother come every night when I ache for you – I can’t stand it.  Darling, darling, darling.

I haven’t written many things about ‘Mom’ in the letter because I have been trying so darned hard and she has been going way out of her way for me.  I tried staying one night alone and it wasn’t too bad, I did sleep.  I went out to call her the next night not to come and no body [sic] answered.  At 6:00 she appearred [sic] and has been coming every night since.

She was here from noon Saturday until Monday morning.  Too much!!!!!  [multiple underlines]  Several times she has over ridden my discipline, pouted or grimaced and I ignored it until Sunday at the park.

It was only a little thing but important to me.  I can’t have her ‘butting in’, which she doesn’t hesitate to do!!

We had sandwiches!  John ate ½ and I gave him another.  He didn’t want it and I insisted saying he couldn’t play on an empty stomach.  Grandma had promised ice creams.  When the time came, I got up and noticed he had gone around in back of the tree and thrown the sandwich away.  I said he couldn’t have the ice cream then as he didn’t etc. etc.   Grandma pouted, stormed, said I wasn’t fair etc. etc. and I told her “It was none of her business.”  I had been wanting to for ages.  He didn’t get ice cream then but later I got him some after a talk.  Right or wrong I can’t be interfered with – perhaps parents make mistakes but they’re not as important as the children not having confidence in us!

Well, today has been bad anyway but I have managed fine (this darn pen) I didn’t want a red refill and it doesn’t work right anyways.  I can hardly write with it.  Please pardon.  Most maddening when I have so much to say!

It was another beautiful day but we didn’t get a letter.  I know you can’t write everday [sic] but I am so anxious to know if you like it or not.  We’ve had so much trouble and I still don’t know how you like the D – place!

Well, we decided to go to the beach!  More of that later.  We were almost set when John complained of his foot hurting.  It had swollen up this morning and I had gone up to get Epsom salts but realized we couldn’t go anywhere now!

Yesterday while getting I the pool, on the grass, in the backyard, he stepped on a thorn.  It was pulled out and I put lots of tincture of Methyolate on it – all over – thinking of you.

By 11:00 today it was pink, blue and red and purple and very swollen.  He couldn’t even get a slipper on.  The doctor said to soak it, which we did almost all afternoon!  By 5:00 it was still bad so I took him to the doctor before I had only inquired, and he gave him a shot of penicillin and told me to come back in the morning.  He can’t walk on it and I am quite worried.  Could blood-poisoning set in?  The doctor said all the poison is centered in that one area now and he doesn’t want it spreading.  I will let you know tomorrow.

As soon as Mother came, after supper tonight and we had a very pleasant one too – She was concerned and does love us but she has to try to manage.  Anyways, she said it was as she says, the children don’t mind.  It was due to that indirectly they were told to go out back and sit on the cot until I cam out and got off but my heavens I had already explained that as a lesson, but they’re children and I don’t want her lecturing them.

After they were in bed and asleep 10:00 again (this house is like an oven until then – it’s been well over 100 all day!)  Sharon was still awake.  Last night Grandma excused her and the neighbors etc. [Linda note:  I think she’s saying the neighbors wouldn’t like the 2-hear-old’s crying) so I took her up and rocked her well tonight I spanked!

When I cam out I told her I didn’t care if she did cry I can’t rock her every night.  She said “I never interfere.”  I said something about the day and the children.  Well, one thing led to another and I told her I thought it best I stay alone nights now and that she does interfere and always has.  And it was one reason I was going to Alaska!  I told her very quietly and calmly and did not lose my temper.  [bold type is mine]

I told her I was grown and had 4 children and it wasn’t good for them to know I was afraid to stay alone and that it isn’t good for any of us to have her over every night.

Well, naturally you know the answers!  “So I’m being put out, am I.  I am soft but not that soft to come back again after that.”

Bill I’ve had so much lately that I told her I couldn’t argue but I thanked her and told her I’d see her tomorrow.  I have an appointment with Cartwright which I can’t keep if she won’t baby-sit.  Why can’t we just discuss things.  She can’t be criticized.

Really, darling even the times I’ve tried to talk to the children – she says “Now, listen to Grandma – – – – – and starts in too.”  Several times I’ve said nicely it’s easier for just me to tell them etc. and she sulks.

I know, as I said before, she’s dissappointed [sic] in me and rubs it in that you haven’t written you liked it [in Alaska] and what a mistake we’ve made and why did we want to go there anyways etc.

What with all the troubles I’ve had, mother and not knowing from you I don’t know!

I’m so cheerful every day but something new happens every day!

Poor Johnny.

Poor Grandma too.  I couldn’t talk to her and she left in a huff.  I kept on knitting.  She probably won’t speak to me tomorrow and I am frightened.  I need you, you, you, you.

Write me, advise me.  I am so lonely.  The days aren’t bad because I am used to having you at work but the nights – are terrible!

Poor Grandma can’t take you place.  I feel so sorry but I told her I’ve had to talk to her about this many times before and she swears she doesn’t ever interfere and always tells me how well I do!  (Sometimes she does) but also is plenty quick to criticize them too if they’re naughty until I do then she jumps in.  Grandma is nice to visit with sometime.

I want to live with you.  How can I wait?  God guide me and give me strength I need it so!  My darling husband I love you!  Mildred

Late.  I find it so hard to stop writing and there are so many things I have left unsaid – business things – but I will write them tomorrow.  I just made myself an iced tea and told myself that there are thousands of women alone tonight – this D. pen!  All over this [can’t read word].  Some of them probably widowed, working during the day and lonely at night.

Yes, what is it I tell the children and have told myself recently?  “One has to do with out to appreciate and place yourself in other’s position in order to understand more fully what others go through.”  I do have you.  We’re temporarily separated but you’re waiting for me – I am lucky!!  I am not widowed, my husband is not at war, but we’re separated and it’s so hard, my dearest.

I wish I could really talk to Mother and make her understand that I love her dearly but I am grown up and have 4 children and I must be let alone to bring them up as I see fit.  She can’t understand my love for my husband, I know.  It deeply upsets me.  I pray tonight for so many things.  Perhaps God can make her understand!

John awakened a few minutes ago.  He says the pain is so bad.  Darling, I get so afraid without you and I pray for guidance and strength.  I have relied on yours so much!  I gave him aspirin and will take him early to the doctor.  His foot is so puffed and unnatural looking.  I don’t like it at all!

It’s past midnight and I must try to get some rest.  I sleep on the bumpy hard couch and my life is frugal too – in it’s own way.

I love you dearly and live for your letters.  I need them until I have you.

I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

I kissed John for you and he says “I miss my Daddy – I love him so.”  We all miss you, my sweetheart!

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Blog will be available on the Kindle Store in 48-72 hours

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+WORD WARRIOR NEWS: PRESENTING MY CURRENT 8 WORKING BOOK TITLES

alchemynow2 Comments

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This post includes a copy of the working paper about the 8 books I am currently preparing for publication (you asked for them, here they come – to the best of my ability).  It lists their working titles along with a list of information to include in my BIG BANG BOOK that everything else I ever write is pointing toward.  (I just sent this paper off to my family and friends as fyi.)

I plan to dedicate as high a portion of the profits (above what’s needed to moderately improve my own well-being and my children’s) to the non-profits I mentioned in my earlier post, +WHAT WORD WARRIORS SAY – A BOOK BEING BORN.

I know that money needs to be generated in creative ways to build up the required capitol to afford to pay for at least the first 500 softcover copies (about $3330-$3600).

I am eager to get these projects completed – thank you again to each and every one of this blog’s readers who have affirmed my writing, my work, and my potential.  I am becoming increasingly concerned about not having done what I bet I came into this life to do before (if/when) the advanced-aggressive breast cancer comes back to snatch me.

Along with formalizing information categories into book-size sections so that I can apply for a block of 10 ISBNs (same price for ten as for one), I am forcing myself to finish transcribing my mother’s writings.  I intend to publish them with the titles listed below (barring anyone’s title-changing input) ASAP on Kindle.  I am not sure they will ever appear in hard copy.  They are voluminous and I want them accessible to people without having to cut them apart.

As I can afford it – with money from the Kindle sales if they show up – I will be able to afford a simple and efficient website that will allow for people to pay, download and print their own pdf copy of my mother’s writings if they want to.

I believe that if anyone is truly interested in how a severe Borderline’s brain might work from the outside looking in, especially a severely abusive one, my mother’s writings are a gift to the world toward this end.  Because the Borderline parent can be extremely dangerous to her offspring, and because the Borderline condition even by definition can be extremely difficult for ANYONE to detect, gaining insight into the workings of the Borderline mind has great potential for helping to understand how severe child abuse can happen as it improves all of our potential to both prevent child abuse and to intervene effectively in cases where the abusing parent is a Borderline like my mother.

I believe interested readers of my mother’s words will have to make a commitment to follow her life’s trajectory over time as it unfolds itself in her writing.  Perhaps one of the reasons the abusive Borderline is so difficult to detect is that they are the masters of illusion-delusion.  Magic happens for professionals when they can create the perfect distraction for their audience.  I believe my mother also created so many distractions within herself over time with her constant MOVING in particular, that her magic show simply spilled itself out her front door, into the street, and across the parking lot (like the ‘Porridge Pot’ overflowing in a children’s book).

If conditional so-called love and the withholding of affection, approval along with manipulations of give-and-take ‘mercy’ – in other words, deception, lies and betrayal contribute to Borderline Personality Disorder, maybe the deception builds itself into the BPD changed brain in such a way that it just grows and grows and grows……  (like a cancer).

Someone would have had to notice from a distance, and would have had to care enough to follow the porridge path of my mother’s mad illusions all the way back – inside our home – to the pot itself:  how my mother’s trauma-changed Borderline brain was working inside her skull to produce such masses of bizarre thoughts, behaviors and dangerous actions toward her offspring – that nobody – EVER – noticed.

Well, I better get back to work!! tyl

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The Devil’s Child: How 18 years of abuse by my mother did not make me like her

(I don’t like “at the hands of “) ———  need your take on this?

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360 Degrees of Change for Survivors of Difficult Childhoods


(with or without subtitle?)

This title is meant to include degrees related to the range of abuse that can happen, the range of resiliency and risk factors as they work to balance reactions to trauma, the range of dis-ability resulting, as well as the degrees of healing possible.

This book breaks down the scientific information (including attachment) in terms of a Native American format (told to readers or not?) – a circle of 360 degrees – idea that simply reading the book will create changes in people whether they actually realize what those changes are or not.

I do not want to use a calendar based concept – want this to be familiar enough from the 12-step recovery inspiration and daily reminder books – but different without ANY religious intonations.

I don’t want any ‘brain’ disruptions to happen due to ‘OH NO!  I missed March 3rd!  NOW what do I do?”  They need implicit permission to read as slowly or quickly as is comfortable, and to skip around.

Also, don’t want to identify the ‘age patterns’ below specifically, this is to organize my thinking – living with consequences of abuse WILL last a life time.  Either we recognize how abuse might have changed our physiological development or we don’t.

I am creating the subject area breaks (as per below) like they might happen over a natural lifespan, but the idea of this book is that healing happens in its own time and major healing can happen in an instant.  Every time ‘the circle’ is completed (like moving in a spiral) new perspectives are gained, new insights.  The Native elders talk about how we go through these cycles daily – and also go through them every time we are dealing with any particular problem –

I believe that even if ONE significant point (degree? – how do I connect these two ideas?  ‘degree’ and ‘point of fact’?) happens for one person, not only will their life be changed for the better but the changes in one can and probably WILL affect the many.

The Medicine Wheel actually follows ‘natural’ patterns of seasonal change as well as our human developmental life ‘segments’.  (large type underlined below is my ‘section name’)

(1) EAST (air – color yellow – spring – mind) – birth, new beginnings, childhood = ATTACHMENT (0-20)

(2) SOUTH (earth – color red – summer – body) – young adulthood, learning and practicing by ‘doing the work’ – BIOCHANGES (20-40)

(3) WEST (water – color black – fall – emotions) – our more maturing years includes introspection, self-reflection, pondering- SURVIVORSHIP (40-60)

(4)NORTH (fire – color white – winter – healing and wisdom) – our grandparent years, helping the younger generations with our wisdom – DISCLOSURE (60-80 — completes the circle so that 80 is right there with death and birth, oldest and youngest together)

My ‘sorting’ of thoughts related to these – I have around 400 points-degrees-separate pieces of information – haven’t tried sorting into these categories yet – might need to adjust my thinking, certainly need to work it through (after I have mother’s writings on Kindle) – if I keep these categories, need to NOT contaminate one with info too related specifically to a different one, need to keep them as clear as 4-seasons in Fargo are

PROCESS OF MAKING THE UNKNOWN AND THE INVISIBLE – KNOWN AND VISIBLE – THESE THINGS DON’T BENEFIT US BY REMAINING MYSTERIES!  ALL the other writings must point to this one – it’s the peak of the fireworks display!  I will need to be greatly in-spired to do this right, each of the 360 degrees need two paragraphs with a catchy title!  (just made me smile – the first one that popped into my mind as I wrote this was “the mom and pop store’ for the sperm and the egg process!)

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1st half of the book is more distant, objective and ‘technical’ – inoculate readers to get them ready for the emotional reactions they will have 2nd half

(1) – ATTACHMENT – beginning at the beginning with the involvement of our ‘feel good’ body chemicals as they orchestrate attachment of sperm and egg, zygote attachment to uterus, in placenta and breast milk, connecting attachment with food and social contact in our approach/avoid patterns of life – rupture/repair– etc – all about attachment – what it is, how it forms, clearly and without ‘malice’ describe the possible attachment disorders as they are ‘given’ by parents to children, etc. – and the growing brain – origin of self firm by two – brain tracks to consciousness and conscience – introducing terminology of development:  critical windows of development, windows of tolerance, mirroring, hemisphere growth, feeling felt, theory of mind, magical thinking (tied to denial later on) – being sent off-trajectory – built by good or bad world to represent the conditions of that world to others of our species (starts in womb) – ‘hatching’ and foundation of exploration connected to shame and dissociation in nervous-system and brain –

(2) – BIOCHANGES – all the known possible ‘invisible’ changes that can happen – nervous system, vagus system, stress-calm response system, immune system – clear description of environment-genetic interactions – phenotypes and genotypes – epigenetics – how these forces affect what our cells are going every millisecond of our life time – placing our self in context of evolution, genetic memory in our DNA – changes for a malevolent world –  how we COULD have been different – stuck with memories we cannot even recall that influence our entire lifetime (explain developmental process of memory ability) – what dissociation might be caused by – how stess fries memory region (hippocampus) brain cells for both victim and perp – describing ‘limbic kindling’, emotional dysregulation, inability to self-sooth, no trust region of brain – itty bitty left brain happy center – what brain plasticity really means – describing, say, how completely different from normal a borderline’s brain is – what’s coming down the road in terms of brain research, how that will change ‘mental illness’ categories – resting brain state, consciousness and involvement of the self in brain – how many of these changes (I believe science will show) mimic (and shown to cause in some) emotional limbic kinding/seizures, autistic-symptoms, bi-polar etc – changes in social brain at same time in emotional brain connected to stress-calm response – involvement of internal steroid system – cannabinoid and opioid systems – substance P (pain hormone) – (provide a brain term word glossary – cluster the tech brain terms together – some might skip them or come back) – book has to increase vocabulary so we can include new info in our thinking) –

PREPARING READERS TO LOOK (PERHAPS WITH SORROW, SHOCK AND DISMAY – ALONG WITH DAWNING INSIGHT) at what happens in our survivorship when we don’t have the info already presented in this first half of book as we ACTUALLY entered into our life past childhood) –

2nd half of the book is up close and personal – heading toward transformation – ‘break the bone and set it right’ – opening up realizations (and closed pussy wounds) for new healing

(3) – SURVIVORSHIP – entering our adult life with wrong information, no information – unprepared and wounded and not knowing it – making major decisions while our cortex is completing growth – having no clue what is really wrong, trying to ‘recover’ and gain understanding while most critical info we need is missing – what it’s like to live in a ‘good’ world while we were formed in a ‘bad’ world – trauma drama, etc – looking around and comparing how we are doing with others – measurements of success in our culture, impossible standards, not knowing why we fail, make mistakes, can’t keep up, can’t plan for the future – asking the questions = introspection, preparing for getting the answers – how attachment works ‘invisibly’ in our relationships and parenting – what it’s LIKE living with dissociation – contamination of present with intergenerational unresolved trauma – passing on abuse and attachment disorders and can’t control, don’t understand – stuck in bad relationships – nothing but rocky road if we try to look backwards – no tools (no road grader) to smooth things out – spiritual issues (stemming from attachment disorders) – having no words even to think about what happened (no info) – oh, and NO CHILD WITHIN or ADULT CHILD! – struggle with sensory overload and don’t know why – going to war already ‘broken’ – stuck in peritrauma – too hot, too cold – buying ‘diagnosis’ – drugs – nobody talks about what REALLY happened, taboos, conspiracy of silence – feeling isolated and alone – screwed up feel good feel bad reward system biochem – tracing all back to attachment-designed physiology in the body – trying to hatch into adulthood without secure outer or inner foundation – shutting off attachment needs to experience caregiving system correctly – taking some of what we can find (AA, parenting classes, etc) and using it best we can, always feeling something is missing
(4) –DISCLOSURE – getting real about how what was done to us changed us – need the right information and get it (of course MUCH from this little book) – disclosure is about letting our own self know what happened and about ‘telling’ someone else – gaining the WORDS – knowing how to keep our self safe – not hunting for memories, etc. – comes full circle to growth in infancy, learning to TALK about our story – understanding emotional dysregulation personally – clearing the pathway of obstacles, increasing the ‘coherency’ of our vision of our life, etc – passing our healing changes on to others – being able to clear ‘the wreckage of the past’ (as 12-steppers say) about how our changes hurt others – making new, better, healed connections all the way around in self, body, relationships – gaining informed compassion and coming to terms with what was done to us (and our version of forgiveness) – turning our dis-abilities into gifts by recognizing how changes saved us – recognizing how they affected our choices and decisions so we can LEARN to do it differently while living ‘within our means’ (what is truly POSSIBLE for us considering the changes – knowing our weaknesses and strengths, knowing how to get help, where, limitations within our CULTURE on getting what we need versus NOT and not taking that lack personally – pushing for social change – connecting the circle from victim to survivor to helping victims (prevent, intercede) – reach out and connect to others – discuss healing of attachment (‘earned secure’ versus my term ‘borrowed’) – breaking taboos in breaking the silence that binds (just found a book title for my collection of essays!) –

HAS TO include reading list and resource links along with complete (I wish LEGAL disclaimer – maybe I can find one to copy)

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I could do

360 Degrees of Change for Survivors of Difficult Survivors:

Study Guide, Workbook and Exercises

Maybe will be generated at same time I am pulling the book together, that would be good – could apply for the ISBN for it

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For Mother’s writings:

Unspeakable Madness:  No Word in Our Borderline Mother’s Writings about Her Reign of Terror

Book One: Pre-Alaska diaries and letters

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Unspeakable Madness:  No Word in Our Borderline Mother’s Writings about Her Reign of Terror

Book Two: Alaskan homesteading era diaries and letters

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Unspeakable Madness:  The Making of an Abusive Borderline Mother –

Her Childhood Stories and Background with Commentary

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My adult survivor book:

Disowning Mother:

Travels of a Child Abuse Survivor from Empty Wraith to Empowered Warrior

This works for me – I know what I mean here!

And, I HAVE traveled, all of my life – and my process is directly mirrored in my travels – could organize the material, even, by geographical settings

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and last, if I ever pull this together:

Breaking the Silence that Binds:

A Collection of Essays by a Severe Infant-Child Abuse Survivor

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+PAYING SOME ATTENTION TO MY MOTHER’S ‘DARK RAINBOW’ DREAM

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As the book heads into editing, I am finding myself wondering about my mother’s dream (posted at above page link for “About This Site”).  It troubles me that for all my thinking, research and writing, I have no more of a clue what this dream might ‘mean’ than I did the day I discovered it written in her long ago journal.

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MY MOTHER’S DREAM as recorded in her journal on March 29, 1960 during the early months of Alaskan mountain homesteading:

“The whole family was out walking and suddenly we looked up to see a dark rainbow appear – then it got bright and behind it a skyline appeared outlining massive dormed buildings such as I’ve never seen and skyscraper buildings – then it all disappeared and a big wind came.

We realized it was a hurricane. We could hardly stand up against the wind. We saw big apartment buildings on the sides of the streets but the entrances faced another street and we were on the wrong side. The wind grew stronger – finally a door appeared and we went in the building and the person asked us what was wrong? We told her of the great wind but as we pointed outside – all was silent and the wind was gone … and I awoke.”

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Making the connection between the work I hoped this blog would promote and this dream led to my naming this site Stop the Storm (of intergenerational trauma).

I of course had advance notice well before I discovered her dream record about the fact that she was a very disturbed woman (like from the  moment I was born).  Yet if I were to ever have a ‘wind in my sail’ about her treatment of me being intentional, or something that she ever REALLY had any control over or choice about, this dream would deaden that wind.

I didn’t wake up one morning and discover that I am a Word Warrior.  I am a member of a family with a history of word-warrioring.  There were professors on both sides of my family.  My mother’s mother was a Word Warrior.  I have Word Warrior brothers and sisters and children.  We are a family who loves literacy and books.  This is not the same thing as being a family of gifted story tellers within the oral tradition, although I recognize that I have such a yen – if not a gift.

I have spent hundreds of hours (as you readers know) transcribing my mother’s letters and journals that found their way into my hands after her death.  It is very clear throughout them that my mother WAS a writer, although her words never found their way into publication.

I have the advantage of digital equipment and information access that my ancestors never dreamed of.  No matter what has happened to me in my lifetime, having this advantage gives me a power that they never had.

In looking again at my mother’s dream, and as I think about if I am going to include it in my ‘Devil’s Child’ book, I continue to notice that when I read it I feel worms snaking their way around in my gut.  Part of this is because of the insider information I have about my mother being so out-of-control in her violence and in the patterning of her life.

Part of my reaction comes from a suspicion I have that I don’t often name:  My mother was as powerless over who she was, what she did, and what happened in her life as I was powerless over her actions toward me when I was a child.

My mother suffered enough trauma in her early life to turn her into the equivalent of a disastrous storm in our family home.  In this dream I get the sense that she was as helpless to understand or to change the course of what happened to her or how she felt and acted as she was powerless to stop this storm in her dream.

In the dream she was innocently out walking with her family.  First there was the dark rainbow, it changed into light temporarily, and then the big wind came.  She sought shelter along with her family that was denied to her along with everyone else.

I thought about how profound this truth is all afternoon as I worked making adobes outside.  When trauma is passed down in a family through the generations, EVERYONE is its victim.  The storm that is created by the existence of the unresolved trauma remains mostly unseen by outsiders who are not a part of a family’s inner circle.

“The wind grew stronger – finally a door appeared and we went in the building and the person asked us what was wrong? We told her of the great wind but as we pointed outside – all was silent and the wind was gone….”

My mother’s use of the words ‘the person’ here fascinates me.  Why didn’t she say “a woman?”  What inner unknown and desperate need do trauma survivors have to find ‘the person’ to whom they can SHOW the storm to that they know in their own lives?

‘The person’ never appeared in my mother’s life that could truly understand who she was.  The mystery person who did not have to endure the storm, and who could have offered safety and security to my mother along with the rest of her family remained missing – not only for the 18 years I suffered the worst of her madness, but also for the rest of my mother’s life.

Peering into what my Word Warrior mother wrote about her dream today ended up helping me to realize what a terrible, terrible tragedy my mother’s life was.  She COULD NOT find ‘the person’ to rescue her – or us.  She could not even find ‘the person’ she was inside of herself.  Like a missing word we can’t remember or find when we know we know it, my mother on some level might have known how desperate her condition really was, and her family’s as a result of her condition.

But she could not do anything about it in her lifetime, nothing to ever make anything better.

Which makes me think about the power of my words, what I hope for them, that in some small way some of them might be ‘the person’ someone else needs so that they might experience some version of this for themselves if they need it:  “finally a door appeared and we went in the building and the person asked us what was wrong?“

How can we be ‘the person’ and better ask this question, “What was wrong,” both of ourselves and of one another in a caring and compassionate way?  Is it this question that when asked by ‘the person’ (if we ever find one) that can Stop the Storm of unresolved trauma?

“We told her of the great wind but as we pointed outside – all was silent and the wind was gone….”

I don’t believe it was a ‘bad mother’ that had or wrote down this dream.  I believe ‘the person’ who had and wrote this dream had suffered greatly very early in her life while her body-brain was forming and developing.  As a result of the changes that early trauma forced her body to make, many abilities that we consider most vital to being human were taken from her.

This dream might be the closest she ever got to knowing the truth about herself, her life and the life of her family.  It might be the closest she ever got to understanding what was needed for the storm to stop.  Fifty years later her Word Warrior’s dream can still sound an echo about what being powerless in the face of danger is like.  It also shows the power one open door and one person can have to help Stop the Storm for others.

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My first experience with my editor as she does what editors do – morph things!

First morph – the title!

She Believed I was the Devil’s Child:

18 Years Of Abuse By My Mother Didn’t Make Me Like Her

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+WHAT WORD WARRIORS SAY – A BOOK BEING BORN

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Because I was born into an extremely hate-filled, insanely abusive home, and my universal human rights all but obliterated, I am NOT willing to sell or give away any of my rights to my story!  I am, however, more than willing to give a sizable (yet to be determined) percentage of the profits of my book’s sales to the programs I mention in this letter (below).

See related posts:

+ALIGNING OUR NATION WITH UNITED NATIONS CHILD RIGHTS IS AGAINST OUR OWN LAWS

+AMERICANS MUST NOT BELIEVE THAT CHILDREN ARE HUMAN BEINGS — THUS, NO HUMAN RIGHTS

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From here on out, any post with WORD WARRIORS in the title will have information about the progress being made to get the first book about the abuse of my childhood (in stories) into publication.

A Word document was created last night of everything I have already written at +DEVIL’S CHILD – My Childhood plus related background information posts, and emailed in attachments to Amy Elaine Long, my writing assistant and editor.

I know just as certainly as I know I am alive that this book will not be born without Amy’s assistance.  I am grateful to her for being the amazing woman she is, for her talents, and for her efforts well beyond the power of words to describe.

I am including here the letter I just emailed to her and family involved in helping this process along.  This is a low budget (actually zero budget) operation to start off with, but I have high hopes.  This letter also makes mention of the nonprofit funding support channels I want to build into the financial structure of support this book has the potential for creating.

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Hi again

LOTS OF INFO HERE BUT VERY IMPORTANT!!

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I sent this link previously:

http://www.sfwa.org/for-authors/writer-beware/pod/

but it’s worth a good read

“Booksellers don’t like dealing with POD services. E-commerce currently accounts for about 20% of book sales. But brick-and-mortar bookstores, especially the large chains, still represent the most significant single sales source. For volume sales, most books require a balance of online and offline presence.”

Makes me think about a ‘business plan’ even if sketchy

If the book goes onto Kindle, and if it generates any ‘buzz’ at all – and if people want to recommend it to others they know who do not have Kindles – the book HAS to be available via some kind of hard copy edition

From a biz plan point of view, I would count on low priced Kindle edition as marketing and advertising.  Book would then pay its own way.  (If the book cannot sell enough copies via kindle to do this, then there might be something wrong-missing with the whole deal)

Availability of hard copy and source has to be included in the Kindle edition.

Part of the issue for me is to avoid ‘used copy selling’ of the book before I/we have it settled firmly into its sale’s source.

I think print on demand could accomplish this – but would it list on Amazon?  (will have an ISBN and protected rights)  I suppose it could be listed the way our family lists any book on Amazon.

A print on demand limited signed edition would only work if orders for the book were made through me – the book would first have to come to me for signing and I would ship to customer.  If Amy Long is listed as a ‘with’ author, the book would also have to travel to her for signing – so obviously shipping would be slow and ridiculous!

But actually paying to print a limited run of 100 books would cost more than the book would sell for.  So, that’s probably out.

At double the profit for run of $500 (cost to print around $7, sale at $12.95) would need initial investment of around $3300.  The first 250 books sold would have to go toward covering the $3300 first investment.  (again question as before if another printing of 500 would have to be listed as ‘2nd printing’)

All money made from book for some time would have to go toward cost of printing more copies.  But the print on demand option would allow this to happen simultaneously – no huge initial investment, no books sitting around unsold.

I have to know if there is a contract required for POD – I will not give away or sell ANY rights to this book

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Another point:  I want the percentage of profit that’s going to nonprofit clear from first.

How is ‘profit’ determined when just getting started, don’t want to be deceptive – needs to be clear, right and up front from beginning.

I think I know what I want to do on this – is easy, solid, practical:

I want to send the first completed copy of the book to Dr. Bruce Perry (“Boy who was raised as a dog, with new book out on empathy”) – I want his, and only his ‘blurb’ on the book if it’s going to have one.

He has a nonprofit organization called The Child Trauma Academy see educational products

We could set up some kind of a ‘scholarship – grant’ process to help disseminate their information.  I particularly want to reach teens!!  I guess I’m thinking some kind of ‘small’ partnership with their organization and their work to channel my book’s $ contribution to helping prevent child abuse and provide healing for survivors.

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If the timing is right and the book takes off, another thing I would support is to get copies of Siegel’s book on parenting, Parenting From the Inside Out, out into the hands of people nationwide who are teaching and/or taking part in the STEP parenting programs .  SEE:  Center for the improvement of child caring, their site.

I just called them, they also are a nonprofit.  AND, they have a mailing list of over 30,000 – if we send a copy of the book to their director, Dr. Alby, and approved, they will add it to their list of recommended readings and market it!  How sweet is that!

Leonard and I were most fortunate to be able to take a STEP parenting class right after we went through treatment and began to recover.  I do not believe there is a more worth while channel for investing $.

I can ear mark the ‘donation’ – and if the book is very successful, they need $50,000 to put together the arm of their curriculum that is specifically geared for Native American communities.  (they lost the funding they had for this a few years ago).  They have targeted programs currently for African American and Latin American parents.  Absolutely WONDERFUL work they do – and they also have programs targeted specifically for ‘high risk for abuse’ parents!

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All feedback, input, ideas, suggestions, inspirations welcome.  Blog readers, send comments – thanks!

AND, for your information:

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11 May 2010 – Child Rights at the Human Rights Council 62

___________________________________________________________
– Human Rights Council: Session 14 [event]

– UNIVERSAL PERIODIC REVIEW: Reports and analysis of child rights references [reports]

– ELECTIONS:  Membership to the Human Rights Council [event]

– SPECIAL PROCEDURES: Upcoming Vacancies [news]

– MIGRATION: Consultation in the context of children’s rights [event]

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IN MEMORY OF MY BORDERLINE MOTHER:

From Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD, your Guide to Borderline Personality Disorder

It’s no secret that many people with BPD have difficulty controlling anger. But you may be surprised to learn that much of the “common sense” advice that you may get about ways to manage anger are actually flawed. This week, learn healthier ways to manage your anger.
The Myth of “Letting Off Steam”

Have you ever been told to punch or scream into a pillow when you’re angry in order to “let off steam?” Before you take that advice, read this article.
10 Healthier Ways to Manage Anger

Instead of venting your anger, try these 10 healthier anger management strategies.
New Research: How Does An Active Life Lift Your Mood?

For some time, we’ve known that increasing your activity level (through exercise, social activities, hobbies, etc.) can lift your mood, but we haven’t known exactly how this effect happens.
Borderline Personality Disorder Frequently Asked Questions

Answers to the most frequently asked questions about borderline personality disorder.

Must Reads

What is BPD?
Symptoms of BPD
Diagnosis of BPD
Treatment of BPD
Living with BPD

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+WRITING ABOUT WORDLESS TERROR IN A CONTAMINATED CHILDHOOD

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I am about to set my feet upon a path today that I will at times lay upon as if I am dying, at times crawl upon, at times slink along, and hopefully at times march along strongly as I try this week to prepare a manuscript of my childhood stories to send to an editor I am blessed to have found who is willing to help pull together this first book on my childhood.

There is bound to be some spill-over as I fight out this battle over words to describe what happened to me in enough detail to convince readers of two things:  I am telling the truth and it matters.

In order to tell this truth I have to use words, and because words were used from the time I was born as viscous and deadly weapons by my mother, all words that I consider and use to tell my story are contaminated by definition.

At this moment as I prepare myself for this week ahead I am afraid.  I can use logic all I want to tell myself that “It’s OK.  You are all grown up.  You survived what was done to you by your mother.  She can’t reach you.  She can’t touch you.  She is dead dead dead.”

But I cannot do this work without going “back there” into the 18 years of hell I spent being inhuman, being evil, being The Devil’s Child sent as a curse upon my mother’s life.  With all the information I now have about how broken my mother was, about how the neglect, maltreatment, abuse, lack of love and acceptance, lack of WHATEVER coupled with WHATEVER dark and toxic forces that shaped my mother’s genetic constitution to permanently remove her from the universe of sanity and reason – I see at this moment no way to take this factual information into my past with me so I can be two places at the same time – here – and there.

It might help to wrap myself tightly within a sort of invisibility cloak as I travel back there to retrieve some version of MY childhood story.  The fabric of this cloak is woven of threads made up of the awareness that I only have to do this once.  One time only.  THIS one time only.

But in order for this journey to be a ‘one time’, I am aware that I have to do it right.  I need protection.  I need a gas mask.  I need a suit to keep my mother’s contamination of my childhood, her contamination of me as her growing daughter off of my skin, out of my airways.

My mind wants to KNOW what the title of this book is as if having the title shuts Pandora’s Box forever with the scary, awful stuff inside.  I don’t WANT to jump inside that box and wrestle again with the demons that infected and overwhelmed, in fact consumed and BECAME the mind of my mother.  I cannot tell my story without being there with her madness because WHO and WHAT she believed me to be WAS the darkness within her.

Only I didn’t know it.  How could I have known it?  From the first breath I ever took on this earth I was already guilty of being a murderess.  “The Devil sent you to kill me while you were being born.”  That being the beginning of my life, the beginning of my relationship with my mother, being just the BEGINNING of her verbal attacks, nothing ever got any better.

My infancy and childhood with my mother happened within a thick, gooey, sticky, slurpy poisonous stew of malevolent darkness.  Sometimes this stew was volcano hot.  Sometimes it was glacial cold.  My mother had all the power in the universe to keep me a hidden captive underneath its scummy, putrefying crust.

But I stop myself here.  I have the power to CHOOSE the words I will put in this book of my infancy-childhood.  I will encounter words that suck me into that horrible place.  I do not want those words.  I am hopeful that I can JUST do my best to tell what few stories I have about what few memories I have and let THAT be THAT.

As I work to write staying on MY path I will need to watch carefully for the defining edges of it so that I don’t fall into the infernos of my mother’s madness.  My mind did not form itself for the first 18 years of my life having any idea at all where the boundary line was between my own self and my own mind – and my mother’s.  Because she was a severe (though undiagnosed) Borderline, the borders of the universes that separated us did not exist.

My childhood was contaminated.  I was born contaminated.  There really is no story to tell.  There is a description of profound contamination that has more in common with being born out of my mother’s womb into a deadly radioactive environment – that exploded while she was in labor with me.

The truth of what happened to me, even of what happened to my mother IS beyond words.  The core of trauma that shaped her and hence shaped me does not exist where words are.  In fact, this trauma acted itself out beyond the range of anyone’s detection as if what cannot be named does not exist.  It is time to name it.

The so-called stories of my childhood?  They are no more about the reality of what happened to me than is my cat’s lose hair stuck to the cushion where she sleeps ACTUALLY my cat.  (Great line for the book’s intro, by the way.)

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I think about my piano keyboard right now, and imagine that there are notes that are so high and so low that they don’t actually exist on the keyboard because they lie outside the range of human ability to detect them.

My life with my mother was like that.  What actually happened DID happen because NOBODY detected the ‘notes’ my mother was playing for me.  It is my challenge as a writer to transpose the experience of being raised as my mother’s inhuman, evil devil’s child into a range of notes-words that CAN be heard by others.

Because in the reality of my childhood with my mother words were contaminated weapons, I have to chose words now carefully and run them through a filter so that they can be cleaned and detoxified, decontaminated and made safe for human consumption.

What happened to me from the moment I was born and continued over the next 18 years of my childhood happened ‘under the cloak of darkness’.  My mother was able to effectively construct and maintain two worlds.  One of these worlds on one side of her Borderline was designed to deceive the public.  On the other side of her Borderline was the world that she designed, constructed and maintained JUST FOR ME as her evilness projection.

It is evidently my job to transpose what happened to me on the darkest side of her Borderline into language that can be understood by ‘the public’.  I ask two questions:

(1)  Is it possible write about wordless terror?

(2)  Is it possible to write of this terror beautifully?

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In other words, it is time for both me and my newly found writing assistant to become WORD WARRIORS.

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+PUKING IN THE HIGH CHAIR: PATTERNS OF RUPTURE AND REPAIR BEFORE THE AGE OF ONE

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Now I am having ‘second thoughts’ related to the post I just finished:  +IN THE EPIC OF MY ABUSIVE CHILDHOOD THE MOUNTAIN RAISED MY SOUL

In light of my thinking about the book title for my collection of childhood stories as they relate to the absence of mercy, I am wondering about SHAME transactions as they relate to human attachment interactional patterns of rupture and repair.

As Dr. Allan Schore writes, an infant’s nervous system has not developed itself enough prior to the age of one for shame to be physiologically experienced.  The timing of the nervous system’s development that DOES allow for the experience of shame corresponds with an infant’s physical development that allows it to ‘hatch’ from its caregiver’s lap.

As an infant begins to explore the wider world, and as it returns to its caregiver, the experience of rupture and repair with the caregiver take on a bigger purpose.  If the infant returns to a caregiver that does not express joy, the infant’s nervous system will ‘crash’ in the autonomic nervous system’s STOP reaction – which is the first experience of shame.

At this age the infant is beginning to be an active participant in the repair-of-the-rupture process.  If the infant returns to a caregiver that is NOT joyful at the return-reunion-attempt to repair a ‘rupture’ caused by the infant’s distancing itself physically from its caregiver, the TWO (infant and caregiver) can now begin to actively negotiate what needs to happen for the joy-filled repair of the rupture to happen.

Schore is very clear that prior to the age of one it is almost entirely up to the caregiver to repair ruptures in the safe and secure attachment pattern with an infant.  That is because prior to age one it will always be the responsibility of the caregiver to accomplish repair because the infant is not fully equipped to begin to do this on their own.  The parent is building rupture and repair patterns into the physiology of the infant’s growing body-nervous system-brain so that in time the infant can internalize actions that lead to needed repair.

Schore states that whomever initiated the rupture is BEST able to repair it, and needs to be the one that initiates it.

I think of an example from my own early mothering experience that happened when I was just 20 and my first born was 9 months old.  Being quite astute and very smart, she had figured something out to do that would guarantee her LOTS of attention!

As soon as I finished feeding my daughter in her high chair, and turned away from her to carry her dishes to the sink, I would hear her throwing up.  Oh, the POOR BABY!  “Oh, honey, WHAT’S WRONG!”  Over I would go to her, and you can imagine the scene that followed in my concern for her obvious lack of well-being!

That worked until the moment one day that I happened to catch what she was doing out of the corner of my eye as I turned toward the sink.  She had figured out how to stick her finger down her throat and MAKE herself throw up!

OK.  End of that game!  I did not get mad at her.  I did not SHAME her.  I did not punish her.  I simply began to completely ignore her.  Of course I had to continue to clean her and the mess up a few times afterward, but I gave her ZERO reinforcing attention for the ‘trick’ and she soon ceased it completely forever.

At nine months of age, my daughter’s nervous system had not developed enough for her to be able to handle or process a shaming interaction.  Of course I had not neuroscience information to tell me that.  I knew it intuitively and acted appropriately.  While I could say that SHE was the one that initiated ‘rupture’ that needed repair, it was appropriate and necessary that I as her caregiver handle this situation appropriately – and safely and securely.  As she grew into a bigger body-brain that had the capacity to negotiate rupture and repair, of course she became increasingly responsible for her own actions.

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This all ties back into what I just posted about the rupture and repair attachment-related experiences I had as a child with our mountain homestead.  There was NEVER any shame-based transaction about those patterns of rupture and repair.  Whether we stayed, left or returned had nothing to do with me.

Of course in my universe that was a very good thing, but that also left me with no safe and secure experience growing up with healthy, stable, sensible, or even reasonable patterning of how to repair ruptures in human attachment relationships.  BIG PROBLEM for me on some fundamental levels of how my body-brain developed.  As a consequence, I continue to struggle to work my way around the complexities of human relationships and I always will.

Because I didn’t CAUSE the patterns of rupture in my attachment relationship with the mountain, I didn’t gain any experience in PERSONALLY either initiating or accomplishing repair.  But I did gain experience both in safe and secure attachment (love) to the mountain and experience in the rupture-repair patterning process.  What got left out was ME being an active agent in the whole process.

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