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I was conceived in and born into this storm reflected in a dream my severely abusive mentally ill (probably Borderline Personality Disorder) Mother recorded in her diary on March 29, 1960 (when I was nine years old) —

“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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What did I understand about my life in this storm?  Certainly as a newborn I ‘logically’ understood nothing.  Mother’s abuse of me was so persistent and comprehensive that I was left without any other frame of reference to think about myself in my life but hers.  As I work now to write the whole connected story of my childhood, can I look back and see that there was EVER a point in the 18 years and one month I lived being abused by Mother that I actually had any more information about the reality of my life than the one I was born with?

Nope!  Mother and HER reality ruled and only on one occasion did I have one important sentence appear in my thoughts to counteract all the abuse Mother did to me from the time I was born.

I’ve written about it on the blog before – and will write about it again when I get to the age in my story I was when this single sentence appeared.  Without presenting any other details, I will tell you what that sentence said:  “Linda, it is not humanly possible for anyone to be as bad as your mother says you are.”  I know this piece of information saved me (I have not yet tracked in my book-writing my exact age when I heard this statement but I was somewhere between age 11 and 15).

Up until that moment I had never been given a conscious clue that I was even human.  People who have been following this blog know that my mother suffered a psychotic break in delivering breech me, believing ever after that I was not human, that I was the devil’s child sent to kill her while I was being born, and that because we both survived I was sent as “a curse upon” her life.  By the time I was 17 and a senior in high school I know for a fact that in my conscious mind (such as it was) I completely believed my mother.  She had spent my entire infancy and childhood making sure I did.

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But RIGHT NOW in my book writing process I no longer give a single solitary HOOT about ANY of that abuse that violently happened to me FROM THE OUTSIDE OF WHO I WAS/am from the moment I was born (and in Mother’s thoughts even AS I was being born).  I want to know what was happening for me on the inside of who I was/am.

Who among us can remember what we knew at the moment of our conception?  That is how far back I am having to travel as I retrace my own story of existence to find out what I indeed ALWAYS knew in my soul — because that information was outside the range of what crazy mean Mother could touch.

I am looking for what my SOUL knew.  I will not write any further in my story than I already have as I crossed my 11th birthday without first retracing my existence to find this out.

In the most profound way possible I am beginning to suspect that the MASSIVE abuse I suffered was at the same time my greatest blessing.  Never in my childhood was I betrayed as my mother was in her childhood.  Nobody ever told me they loved me.  Nobody pretended to love me and then tortured me with withholding that so-called love from me.  I just plain never had human love, and that fact probably saved me.

I did NOT become confused as my mother did.  Her story is not my story to tell although I have a great deal of information about what happened to her, as I write about elsewhere.  At this point, it is MY story and my story only that concerns me.  Because I was not allowed to exist as a person in my own right, I never got myself mixed up in the affairs of the world — and as strange as that statement sounds, this fact matters most.

I am leaving here a link to what I believe are God’s words about the conception and creation of every human soul.  These words describe our only relationship that truly matters to our soul.  I had this relationship with God from the instant I was conceived — and I did not lose it by becoming entangled in my own affairs as a child.  I was created innocent and I stayed that way.

True, I was beaten black and blue, verbally abused nearly continuously, exiled from my grandmother, my father, my siblings and nearly all other people.  But Mother could not exile my soul from God.

I did not exile myself from God, either.  I did not feel anger at Mother.  I did not covet what my siblings had that I did not have.  I resented no one.  I felt no self pity.  I asked no questions nor did I wonder about what happened to me or why it happened.

I endured with the patience born of soul, and I did it without contaminating who I am with darkness.

Did my soul CHOOSE to remain pure and unsullied by the tortures inflicted on me, or was this process outside the range of my control?  Did I have some kind of spiritual protection that kept me from being contaminated by the massive sickness and horrors directed at me by my mother and allowed by my father?

I lived the first 9 months unharmed in Mother’s womb.  That was all I had before my suffering began.  What was my true experience of enduring the next 18 years of terrible abuse?  I don’t have the answers I want right now.   I did, however, find the very clear words recorded at this link — *THE 1ST 21 HIDDEN WORDS posted today on this page — GOD LOVE to guide me as I retrace my steps of searching back to what I knew from the moment I was created as a soul with this body.

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Just want to highlight a link in my previous post — Bonding and Attachment in Maltreated Children: Consequences of Emotional Neglect in Childhood

By Bruce D. Perry MD, PhD

Introduction

The most important property of humankind is the capacity to form and maintain relationships. These relationships are absolutely necessary for any of us to survive, learn, work, love, and procreate. Human relationships take many forms but the most intense, most pleasurable and most painful are those relationships with family, friends and loved ones. Within this inner circle of intimate relationships, we are bonded to each other with “emotional glue” – bonded with love.

Each individual’s ability to form and maintain relationships using this “emotional glue” is different. Some people seem “naturally” capable of loving. They form numerous intimate and caring relationships and, in doing so, get pleasure. Others are not so lucky. They feel no “pull” to form intimate relationships, find little pleasure in being with or close to others. They have few, if any, friends, and more distant, less emotional glue with family. In extreme cases an individual may have no intact emotional bond to any other person. They are self-absorbed, aloof, or may even present with classic neuropsychiatric signs of being schizoid or autistic [and VERY often is related to the range of personality disorders such as Borderline].

The capacity and desire to form emotional relationships is related to the organization and functioning of specific parts of the human brain. Just as the brain allows us to see, smell, taste, think, talk, and move, it is the organ that allows us to love – or not. The systems in the human brain that allow us to form and maintain emotional relationships develop during infancy and the first years of life. Experiences during this early vulnerable period of life are critical to shaping the capacity to form intimate and emotionally healthy relationships. Empathy, caring, sharing, inhibition of aggression, capacity to love, and a host of other characteristics of a healthy, happy, and productive person are related to the core attachment capabilities which are formed in infancy and early childhood. [I added the bold type for emphasis]

Read the rest of this article by clicking on its title — Bonding and Attachment in Maltreated Children: Consequences of Emotional Neglect in Childhood

The more stressed mothers become, the less likely the right kind of bonding and attachment is going to happen.  The individual, society and the planet suffer as a result.

Please also take a look at what the longterm consequences of early neglect and abuse are according to Center for Disease Control research – THE PYRAMID

We need to know these FACTS!!

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For all of the scholarly articles ‘out there’ on the subject of insecure attachment disorders, tonight I turn to what might be the simplest baseline description that can be found online about how early attachment patterns are observed and ‘diagnosed’.  Wikipedia has a page titled Attachment in children. 

Although the basics about attachment are informative and interesting, it is this I post below in italics that matters most to me in the Wikipedia article — (I added the bold type and left in the reference numbers.):

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Disorganized attachment

“A fourth category termed disorganized attachment (Main & Solomon, 1990) was subsequently identified and empiricized when a sizeable number of infants defied classification in terms of Ainsworth’s original tripartite classification scheme.^[9] It can be conceptualized as the lack of a coherent ‘organized’ behavioral strategy for dealing with the stresses (i.e., the strange room, the stranger, and the comings and goings of the caregiver) of the Strange Situation Procedure.

Evidence from Main et al. has suggested that children with disorganized attachment may experience their caregivers as either frightening or frightened. A frightened caregiver is alarming to the child, who uses social referencing techniques such as checking the adult’s facial expression to ascertain whether a situation is safe.

 A frightening caregiver is usually so via aggressive behaviors towards the child (either mild or direct physical/sexual behaviors) [and/or VERBAL] and puts the child in a dilemma which Main and colleagues have called ‘fear without solution.’

In other words, the caregiver is both the source of the child’s alarm as well as the [supposed-to-be] child’s haven of safety.

Through parental behaviors that are frightening, the caregiver puts the child in an irresolvable paradox of approach-avoidance.

This paradox, in fact, may be one explanation for some of the ‘stilling’ and ‘freezing’ behaviors observed in children judged to be disorganized.

Human interactions are experienced as erratic, thus children cannot form a coherent, organized interactive template.

If the child uses the caregiver as a mirror to understand the self, the disorganized child is looking into a mirror broken into a thousand pieces.

It is more severe than learned helplessness as it is the model of the self rather than of a situation.

There is a growing body of research on the links between abnormal parenting, disorganized attachment and risks for later psychopathologies.^[10] Abuse is associated with disorganized attachment.^[11][12] The disorganized style is a risk factor for a range of psychological disorders although it is not in itself considered an attachment disorder under the current classification.^[13][14]”

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I absolutely believe that disorganized-disoriented IS an attachment disorder.  I would have to distract myself by running around the www for some info to back myself up – However, I have other things I need to be doing right now…..

“Model of the self rather than of a situation” — I personally find this terminology useless in a discussion of severe early abuse survivorship with its corresponding attachment disorders.  As an adult survivor of 18 years of severe abuse from birth I know more from within myself about what this topic is about than any non-abuse so-called expert will EVER know.  Every time parental abuse disorganizes-disorients the experience of an infant-child, pathways and circuits are created in the brain-nervous system-body accordingly.  This has NOTHING to do with SELF in the beginning!  These patterns DISTORT the victim’s ability to form a self in the first place.  When a little one is forced to remain in a traumatic environment without end the ‘situation’ all but becomes ‘the self’.

Making any distinction between situation/environment and ‘self’ during the most critical brain developmental stages before age one – that FORM the social-emotional brain and the pathways and circuitry that regulate (or dysregulate) social and emotional experiences for a lifetime – cannot be done.  Only when a little one is safe and secure ENOUGH to begin to develop a self that is something OTHER than a ‘survival machine’ can we think about the luxury of the formation of a self.

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I sat to write this post because I wanted to TRAP into a text two words that have been periodically appearing in my thoughts over this past week:  FRANTIC PANIC.

As I track ‘anxiety’ in my body I usually do not let myself follow it far enough to its source, which was (and is on some level today at age 60) exactly this state of feeling/being:  FRANTIC PANIC.

I recognize that this feeling state was forced upon me by a TERRIFYING, brutal Mother who did not hesitate to attack me from the time I was born.  Mother attacked me for the following 18 years – and I know especially before the age of 9 or 10, FRANTIC PANIC was my response.

Mother’s attacks usually came at me out of the blue.  She was psychotic.  What she saw either did not happen at all, or did not happen the way Mother said that it did.  I was unable to predict anything about what she did to me, when she did it, or why she did it.

From my child point of view, her attacks DISORGANIZED AND DISORIENTED me.  I believe the disorganizing and disorienting experiences of repeated traumas built dissociation into my body-brain – and just like there is electricity inherent in a bolt of lightning, there was FRANTIC PANIC in my responses to Mother’s attacks.

FRANTIC PANIC is not “fear without resolution” in my thinking, it is a natural, physiological TERROR response to an attack for which a young child has no possible resolution abilities – hence, very often dissociation is the result – not AS attacks happen but BETWEEN the attacks.

Anyone who doesn’t know what this feeling state is like, just think of a giant bigger than your house attacking you right this moment out of the blue – violently, terrifying you, startling you, crashing your world – and you have NO defense, no escape, no understanding of ANYTHING that is happening to you.  There I was, over and over again more times than I could now count, being a little person – and suddenly out of nowhere BOOOMMMM!!!

My FIRST response?  FRANTIC PANIC.  What do the ‘professionals’ want to call that feeling left in the body of infant-child abuse survivors?  Anxiety:  What a paltry, pasty, pathetic, completely inadequate word!

SEE ALSO:

*Attachment Simplified – Disorganized Insecure Attachment – Disorganized-Disoriented

Bonding and Attachment in Maltreated Children:  Consequences of Emotional Neglect in Childhood — By Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.

THE EFFECTS OF EARLY RELATIONAL TRAUMA ON RIGHT BRAIN By Dr. Allan Schore

+LINK TO IMPORTANT ARTICLE ON EFFECTS OF CHILDHOOD SEXUAL ABUSE

+BRAIN INSIGHTS THE EASY WAY – GREAT WEBSITE!

+DISORGANIZED-DISORIENTED INSECURE ATTACHMENT – 2 ARTICLE LINKS

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Two words suddenly popped into my mind while I was washing my dishes this morning.  POP!  There they were:  TENSILE STRENGTH.

TENSILE by itself concerns 1: capable of tension 2: of, relating to, or involving tension, and is a word most often used as a metallurgy term, such as the tensile strength of steel cable.

Looking at this definition at Webster’s online I also found:  TENSILE STRENGTH: the greatest longitudinal stress a substance can bear without tearing apart and ULTIMATE TENSIL STRENGTH, which has no definition of its own other than “tensile strength” itself – being a combination of words, I guess, that appears blatantly obvious in meaning!

So, how about infant and child abuse survivors (and survivors of other severe traumas)?  This is what WE have always had – one degree or another (depending on the degree of stress/distress we were/are under) of tensile strength and of ultimate tensile strength when needed!  But there has been a price for most of us to pay to continue down the road of living.  Given way too much trauma/stress/distress/tension/pressure to bear often from the time we were very tiny, adjustments had to be made inside our body-brain as it developed.  I refer to this as the experience of Trauma Altered Development (TAD).

Here are some posts on this blog on TAD:

+TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT (TAD) – A NEW DESCRIPTIVE CONCEPT

+Dr. Teicher’s ARTICLE ON TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT

+THE GOOD-BAD INFO ABOUT TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT FROM CHILD ABUSE TRAUMA

+A LIFE COMPLICATED BY TRAUMA-ALTERED DEVELOPMENT (CHILD ABUSE RELATED)

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Many of the physiological changes that happen inside the body-brain of a traumatized infant-child, most often through early attachment caregiver relationships that are unsafe and insecure, take place at the weakest points, the most vulnerable ones, where the traumas have created too much pressure on the ‘system’ of the little one.

There is another branch of information on the TAD tree of knowledge:  Allostatic Load.

Here are some links to posts on this blog that illumine what allostatic load is and how it is related to RESLIENCY FACTORS and to RISK FACTORS that influence how trauma survivors endure:

*Allostasis and Allostatic Load

*Chapter 4b – Risk – allostatic load

RELATED ARTICLES:

Allostasis and Allostatic Load: Implications for Neuropsychopharmacology

Bruce S. McEwen, Ph.D.

(Click on his name for most current info on his work – he is a brain researcher who heads a neuroendocrinology lab at New York’s Rockefeller University)

Among the useful concepts I found as I began to study about allostasis and allostatic load a few years ago was Dr. Bruce S. McEwen’s discussion of a human continuum variation in terms of our basic constitution that has some of us on one end with a body McEwen refers to as “DOVE-like” on one end and those who are more “HAWK-like on the other end – with an entire range in the middle.”  Doves are naturally more sensitive (most simply put) and hawks are more aggressive (read article HERE).

Much of our DOVE or HAWK nature is genetic, but it is important to understand that even in the womb the mother’s stress level is communicating to her unborn the conditions of the environment which in turn can alter how DOVE- or HAWK-like genes manifest in the body being formed.  Vasopressin and oxytocin are both involved.  See also:   The End of Stress As We Know It by Bruce S. McEwen (Oct 16, 2002)

Blog posts here:

+ARE YOU A ‘SENSITIVE?’

WELL-BEING

The new thoughts that are beginning to filter into my writing-learning process have to do with widening my perception of ‘all things related to surviving traumas’ to include consequences of surviving early infant-child abuse trauma not only on the physiological level and the psychological level, but also how severe trauma affects the relationship between a child and its soul.

In order for a human soul to be able to fully express the wonders of its full potential in this world it needs to be able to work with a HEALTHY human body.  When early trauma causes Trauma Altered Development as a consequence of too high of an allostatic load on the developing infant-child, very often sickness invades the body in one way or another.   Consequences of a sick body that blocked the expression of my mother’s soul in her lifetime so that what we call ‘evil’ erupted from her is, to me, but one small example.

(This blog post is simply meant to present some information for further investigation to those readers who find the topic helpful.)

Research on Allostatic Load HERE

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