The most important work we can do, individually and globally, is the healing and prevention of traumas so that we don't pass them down to future generations. This blog is a working tool to contribute to this good work.
As so often happens I have no idea what I need to say until I write it. If I don’t write my thoughts just continue to roll around in a jumble like long scarves swirling around in a tumble drier. I am thinking about how one’s social-emotional early forming right limbic brain develops must appear in action during conversation. (I almost said human-to-human conversation, but is there other kinds? Yes, I do think so.)
If patterns of safe and secure or unsafe and insecure attachment revolve around patterns of rupture and repair, then I suspect these same patterns govern our ‘people’ conversations. (My thoughts are spinning around very quickly so I will have to hope what I pick out of this swirl applies to what I really want to say!)
Resonance and mirroring, sending and receiving signals — along with activated safety and security attachment needs versus the ability to deactivate one’s own attachment system so that caregiving can happen — are a part of human interactions we have with others from the moment we are born.
What about the patterns of rupture and repair in conversations?
I wonder: If true empathy and compassion are present in conversation MUTUALLY do the patterns of rupture and repair never have to occur? Is this kind of conversation, then, the kind that leaves us feeling ‘balmed’ – listened to, hear, appreciated, valued, understood and BETTER for the conversation?
I would contrast these soothing, balming kind of conversations to ones where there is a disturbing competition between the speakers. Who is right? Who is wrong? Who is smartest? Who knows more than the other? How does the competition for the ‘goodies’ of conversation play itself out?
In patterns either of rupture with repair or rupture without repair. And we KNOW the difference. A competitive conversation leaves us feeling disturbed if not distressed like neither participant was able to truly say from the heart what they would have liked to say — and neither truly listened to or heard the other.
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I believe that some people are by nature, by design, or by trauma-altered early development far more competitive than others. There is a spectrum of aggression and on this spectrum lies those people who thrive on competition and those who find competition troubling and unnecessary.
I am one of those who see very little need for competition. When competition appears in conversation it means to me that someone is trying to override (in disrespect) the other. To me, competition does not happen when there is a mutual acknowledgment of ‘there’s plenty of resources to go around’.
Traumatic backgrounds often leave people feeling desperately unsafe and insecure in the world so that their attachment system never actually turns itself off. Rupture WITH repair allows for attachment needs to be met so that the system can turn itself OFF.
Rupture WITHOUT repair in relationships and conversations happens, I suspect, when one or both people’s insecure attachment systems remain ON so that one or both peoples CAREGIVING system cannot truly (honestly) be activated. Our attachment and our caregiving systems are so linked together than diminishing activation of one system allows for increasing activation of the other. Humans are not designed to operate with these two system dissociated from one another.
I am NOT saying that either attachment or caregiving remain separate from one another. I AM saying that the way that they are always linked together affects our patterns of human interaction either toward a center point of soothing calm or toward a center point of competition for scarce and needed (depleted) resources.
The fact that we are not educated in any way to usefully recognize these patterns so that we can identify them, name them, own them and then bring under our power of conscious choice our ability to ALTER how these patterns are operating creates (I believe) far more unsatisfying than truly satisfying conversations with others people in our world.
I suspect that the more we are in competition with one another (nearly always on the unconscious level) the LESS able we are to help ourselves and others increase our sense of safety and security in the world. This means we are then NOT increasing our ability to feel empathy and compassion because degrees of safety and security are what allows true empathy and compassion to operate.
Our body is designed this way. Our safety and security ‘sense’ system is directly tied to our (anxiety producing) stress versus calm/connection (soothing) response system. I do not believe that genuine connection between people involves active competition — on any level (I am not talking about ‘friendly games’). I also suspect that if a person has unacknowledged need competition with others for scarce resources will be present on some level.
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For the first 18 years of my life I was nearly completely barred from social opportunities to participate in banter, gossip, or any other (more?) meaningful human conversation (some experts suspect that humans acquired verbal language due to our motivation to include more members of a social group in gossip). I DID witness, listen and watch others any time I was around them. Nearly all of the time to this day some aspect of who I am is involved with this same process — which contributes to my sense of remoteness and disconnection from others. I believe I was wired this way from birth.
Being involved in this kind of remote watching even when I am involved in conversations with others often feels awkward — if not just plain ‘wrong’ — like part of me is spying upon and critiquing ongoing patterns of conversations, detecting what others were built-from-birth to know instantaneously and automatically and can simply accept as givens and ignore.
Because solitary confinement and social isolation was such a large part of the patterns of abuse I experienced the first 18 years of my life I do not believe that ordinary human conversation (even in my native English tongue) will ever be natural to me. I am an ‘outsider’ who can somehow ‘cheat’ in conversation like I am watching a movie and can detect in human conversations what others do not(though I was the one initially who was cheated and deprived of what most people take for granted).
Then after conversations I have participated in I have a whole basket full of information I have gleaned by watching the patterns that I have absolutely NOBODY to share the information with. So today I share this with you.
I was able to sit in my garden this morning to watch the first sun rays touch the delicate leaves of the Ballerina Rose bush I moved yesterday. “Ah-Ha!” I thought to the rose. “I can tell you will be happy there, and I am glad! No longer will you have to wait too long each morning for that light you so desperately need. You will grow into a beautiful plant now. Just wait until next summer. You will see!”
I hope 'my' rose reaches this fullest expression of beauty -- in its own time.
It was cool last night, though still not quite a hard freeze. There is no breath of wind, and I was able to hear each leaf collapsing off the branch of the old Mulberry tree I hard-pruned last summer. Plink! Click! Clatter! Each single leaf marked its falling with a sound hitting the hard adobe walkways.
Does a falling leaf remember its life growing upon the twigs and branches of a tree each year? Does it remember its falling? Can a leaf remember itself once its eaten by a worm and becomes new soil that in turn can feed the growth of something else?
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I thought about how hard my day was for me yesterday. I realized how critically important my garden is to me — for a reason I have not until now clarified in words.
My garden is a collective storehouse of my memories.
This helped me to understand more clearly that just as a leaf is not likely to remember itself in its life, I cannot really remember myself in my life, either. My memories are not ‘attached’ to me as I suspect ‘ordinary’ people’s memories are attached. My memories are attached externally to objects and to people.
Semantic memory is a memory for facts, I think always available in their connection to descriptive words.
Autobiographical memory is SUPPOSED to form so that a self is in the middle of the memory — because they were in the middle of the experience of not ONLY the experience as it happened in time — but most importantly they were in the experience of HAVING the experience as it happened.
This is connected to the critical FEELING FELT process that is supposed to happen for an infant as its body-brain is building through interactions it has with its earliest caregivers. The nature of the infant-caregiver interactions are SUPPOSED to mirror back to the infant, reflect back to the infant, and resonate with the infant in such a way that the infant begins — through the experience of FEELING FELT — to know that it has a SELF inside of it that is having the experience of feeling its own self in its own life.
I MISSED THIS STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT, and once this stage was missed and the ‘feeling felt’ neurons did not develop in an ordinary way, I have lacked the ability to FEEL FELT in my body in my own life — for ALL of my life.
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I thought again this morning about the very first time I encountered a literal awareness of the passage of time. When I was 18, fresh away from home and just out of Naval boot camp, I met a man I fell in love with, had a child by, and eventually married (and soon divorced).
This man had friends with money who lived high on a hill somewhere in the San Francisco Bay area. We went to visit them one day and I saw my first hammock. It was pure white, strong and new looking, hanging in the sun from the branches of two trees that overlooked a vineyard.
Nothing should have been especially noteworthy about my seeing the hammock, and there wasn’t until I returned 2 years later on another visit with my partner and encountered the hammock again.
There is STILL something intangible about my experience of having the experience of encountering this hammock a second time. There it was, the same hammock, but now it was sun rotted, broken and shredded, dirty and in threads half hidden in a growth of weeds.
I remember standing there gazing at the hammock in SHOCK!
It wasn’t the hammock itself that I was responding to so much as it was my very first experience of SEEING the passage of time.
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As I remember this memory this morning — the hammock as I first saw it, the hammock as I saw it next — and as I remember the stunned sensation that filled me at realizing PHYSICALLY in my body that enough time had passed by since I had first walked upon that spot that the hammock and disintegrated into nothing but a tangled web of broken strings — I realize that this is the clearest example I have in my life of how the passage of the time of me in my life is connected NOT to my own internal experience of myself passing through time but is rather connected to how everything I can notice OUTSIDE of myself passes through time.
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My memory returns to the second experience I am clearly aware of that again involves a physical object (as if these things have a life of their own — like a leaf) with its own ‘life in and over time’.
When I was 20 and first moved with my little daughter to Fargo, North Dakota I was blessed with the sweetest landlady anyone could every have — Lily. Over the few months that I lived in Lily’s basement apartment I often sat with her at her kitchen table and shared coffee with her and visited.
After many such encounters one day something came into my awareness — again with a sense of shock. There on the lowest shelf of her narrow shelves built into the wall next to her kitchen table was the exact same sand-filled, metal-topped, plaid cloth-bottomed ashtray — that had ALWAYS been returned to sit in that same exact spot.
Thinking about my own inner reaction to my realization that the ashtray ‘resided’ in that spot over time reminds me of something my son said when we were eating burgers at a restaurant when he was three. Well, actually, he was NOT eating his hamburger — a fact that created this specific memory for me.
We were ready to leave and as I looked at my son’s plate with its burger still intact I said to him, “You haven’t even touched your hamburger!”
He replied from his three-year-old’s perception, “Here, momma, I am touching it now,” as he gingerly placed the tip of his right pointer finger on the bun.
“Oh,” I said next. “I guess we’ll just have take it home.”
My son, in his young thinking-processing stage was NOT being sassy when he responded back. “But Momma! We can’t take the hamburger home! It already is home! This is where it lives!”
At three years of age and beginning at the end of the second year a child “can construct accurate representations of events that endure and are accessible over time.” These are imprinted into the right brain hemisphere as AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY.
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My son was very much involved in related growth and developmental processes that happen as ‘Theory of Mind’ develops — as he went through them HIS WAY. Eventually, of course, he grew to understand that hamburgers don’t ‘live’ anywhere and don’t have a ‘Theory of Mind’. Hamburgers also don’t have memory — at least not as we usually think of memory.
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I have a whole collection of sticky notes attached to this growth chart I am looking at. I have been waiting for years to be ready to address them, in all their simply stated accuracy, in my writing. These statements are about critically important inner growth processes that happen from age one to age four. These stages of development are built upon the first foundation of body-brain development that happens from birth to one through early attachment relationships an infant has with its caregivers.
So far I cannot look directly at these next stages of development because I personally know that NOTHING went as it should have in my development up until age one — and therefore all of my future development was altered, as well. I have not wanted to face what all these changes did to me!
Yet I also know that my ability to have ‘ordinary’ experience of having experience with the FEELING FELT in my own body as the experiences happen — and then storing those memories autobiographically — was stolen from me by severe abuse from birth. I was amputated from my own life, separated from it as surely as each leaf I watch plummet to the earth on a windless morning has been amputated from its tree.
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Identifying specifically HOW I experience my life is hard enough. Finding words to describe it is equally as hard. While I know I am the person who watched those leaves fall this morning, I cannot FEEL it.
As I have worked toward being able to write my own story about my own experience of my severely abusive infant-childhood I have struggled with being able to remember what remembering myself in my first 18 years was REALLY like.
As I do this work I increasingly realize that how I experienced those first 18 years is the same as how I have ALWAYS experienced myself in my life.
Perhaps nature had no better way to assist me in surviving those 18 years of traumatic hell other than to remove from me the ability to truly FEEL myself feeling myself as I went through those experiences.
Instead every experience, as an amputated individual snippet in time, appears to me as if I had remotely WATCHED what happened from a very great distance away (like watching a hammock or an ashtray over time). Today it is becoming even more clear to me that the process I use — have always used — to remember my life is SEMANTIC recall of the facts as they happened and does not involve what ‘ordinary’ people would use as autobiographical memory building and retrieval.
I have always been left outside rather than inside my own life. I believe I lack the neurological underpinnings that would have formed the circuits and pathways inside my body-brain so that I could CONNECT and ASSOCIATE and ATTACH my own self in a ‘feeling felt’ way through time as I live in this body in my lifetime.
On this physiologically-trauma-changed level I ALSO lack those same required neurological pathways and circuits that would enable me to truly feel felt WITH and BY anyone else. I am left wondering what the ‘ordinary’ experience of life is even like for other people — and I truly believe I will never know. Once these emotional-social patterns are built into the body-brain BEFORE THE AGE OF ONE they cannot be changed.
The earliest foundations of body-brain growth and development happened for me in the midst of terrible trauma in such a way that my pathways and circuits were made in a different-than-ordinary way.
As surely as the body of the little girl me in those two pictures I included in my last post look like they were cutout and pasted into a picture of ongoing life of OTHERS that had nothing to do with the reality of my life, I am STILL a cutout-and-pasted-in person in the midst of a stream of life that I experience very, very differently from others.
Yes, I experience feelings. Intensely. But somehow my emotions are disconnected from my memory process in such a way that the literal facts of events are stored (as they are for everyone) separately from the emotions. In my case the emotional of memory (stored by a different process in the body as it is for everyone) is ALWAYS disconnected, unattached and dissociated permanently from my memory recall.
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In rewinding the ‘movie’ of my thinking process this morning I need to add in the part about going to visit yesterday’s post commenter’s blog and reading what he says there about Dissociative Identity Disorder from his experience and perspective. As I read I found myself being envious of people who can experience the experience of having ANY identity — from inside their own self — at all!
I think about looking at my newly moved rose bush shining away in the sunshine this morning. I can only begin to try to imagine what the rose bush’s experience MIGHT be like. As I look at my newly planted apple tree, also shining away and gently swaying in the emerging morning breeze I can wonder what it MIGHT be like to be that apple tree.
As I remember myself yesterday I try to IMAGINE what it was actually like to be me, to have my feelings and thoughts as I did yesterday, because I cannot FEEL myself in my memory from yesterday any more than I can feel what it might have been like to be anyone else — yesterday.
I document all of this simply because I know I was formed in an extreme environment — yes, like in a perfect storm. My mother was so insanely focused on what she did to me from birth that she was able to effectively beat, terrorize and remove from me all of my own ability to know what it was like to actually be me in my own life in any way except in the exact present moment as it was/is happening. Not only did she cut me off from nearly all human contact other than with her, she also cut me off from my ability to be in contact with my own feeling-felt self in my own life.
I therefore have a version of Dissociative Identity Disorder without any real, stuck-together, feeling felt version of any identity at all. I exist from one moment to the next because I semantically (factually) KNOW that I do — and because I exist to other people. No wonder I responded powerfully to the quip about “If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” when I first heard it shortly after I left home at 18.
This post is for this girl — I am still the same person and feel the same way.
Me left out -- I have felt that all of my life, just a few times less left out - very much feeling this today (me with my father's back turned on me - in a different universe than my siblings were - and I still pay the price for that)So sad. Sadness beyond 'in my bones' - in all the cells of my body -- and still there
I know I can’t think my sadness away, but I spent the day garden-building and trying to ask ‘God and the angels’ to show me what I can learn from it.
I miss the man I love (who prefers another’s company) and I miss my children and all my siblings more as the holidays arrive than usual. I HATE ‘the holidays’.
One of the ‘helpful’ insights today was knowing that I am not alone in how I feel, and ‘things could always be worse’.
Far from happy thoughts — either of THOSE two.
Not that I did actually arrive at any happy thoughts today — but I did end up (perhaps mixing up my holidays) thinking about Jesus on the cross and how alone He was there — but for his Father and the angels.
Then I thought about how easy it might be for humans to forget about God when they are happy with one another — well, I don’t fit THAT picture!
Tomorrow on Thanksgiving I am going to a friend’s house to help her in the kitchen — be with people — eat good food. My friend feeds anyone in the community who wishes to come every Thanksgiving.
I went last year, and ‘hiding’ in the kitchen suit me. Serving food to others suit me. Being quiet suit me. Watching and listening to others (as if they belonged to a different species than I do) suit me. I am not sure that I have ever truly felt any more a part of a group than I did in the picture of my father and his three favored children on the big Alaskan rock.
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At 59 knowing that I can’t CHANGE how I feel pisses me off more than anything else. I no longer have the false desire to try, either. I am soul tired.
People say, “Everyone feels alone in a crowd sometimes.” I believe it takes a special kind of severely traumatic and abusive infant-childhood for anyone to REALLY even begin to have a glimmer of a clue what ‘feeling alone’ really feels like.
Then I thought some more about Christ on the cross. I thought some more about my horrible, horrible childhood and the ‘special hell’ my mother reserved for me (as my oldest brother put it once). I thought about how NO INFANT or CHILD ever deserves the treatment that some of us had any more than Jesus deserved what happened to Him during His time on this earth.
This thought cheered me up a TINY bit.
Maybe it is because I feel so sad and soul weary that I cannot find any way at all to fight to ‘get better than this’ any more. I can’t run around and ‘try this’ and ‘try that’ and ‘run here’ and ‘run there’ like I used to. I can’t distract myself any more. I can’t fool myself any more. I can’t pretend any more.
I was, most importantly, able to be different for the 35 years of my life that I had a child under 18 in my care to raise. My ‘caregiving system’ was able to combine with my attachment to my children to get me down the road without having to have to FEEL the depths of my sadness.
I know now that the sadness has always been at my center since my insanely abusive mother built it into me from the time I was born. I am so proud of myself that I was able to let my children GO, to let them fly, to let them create for themselves their OWN life. I certainly wish they didn’t live — all three of them — in Fargo, North Dakota!
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Another train of my thoughts today (again) followed the course of my wandering lost life that seemed to most importantly enable all three of the very special people my children are to be born. Yet I also NEVER felt that the life I lived along the way was mine, meant for me, belonged to me. Maybe it is ONLY to the future that the meaning of my own life will come true — in my children, in their lives, the people they encounter and affect — and in the next generations.
If my body processed experience and stored my memories in a safe and securely attached fashion (autobiographical memory) I know I would feel different and be different today. My dissociational patterns means that all of my memories feel remote to me and NOT a part of ME. That is so WRONG — and so directly connected as a consequence of my having to build a body-brain in the midst of such terrible and continuing trauma.
I don’t believe my memories comfort me in the way that they do more ‘ordinary’ people — and they never have.
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I think knowing and feeling all of this is directly connected to the most fortunate opportunity I have to work outside with the soil to build a garden.
I laid a big piece of the drip irrigation in the back yard yesterday, and today I planted there. In went poppy seeds, larkspur seeds, pansy seeds — all waiting now for winter rains to nourish them — and for spring.
I planted a lilac today and I planted an apple tree. (I moved a rose bush to a happier place for it with morning light so I could better improve the spot for the apple tree.)
I am digging out an area by the back turquoise wood fence as I imagine perhaps — just perhaps — I can tear down the remains of the old shed on my back fence and use that lumber to build a chicken coop.
I use the adobe from that digging to fill in a long planter along the tall yellow metal fence.
I have an adobe bench back there I can sit on in the sun and watch the apple tree grow now. If I can build a chicken coop I could sit there and watch my chickens. I would LOVE to be able to do that — though I don’t have transportation to get to a feed store to buy them feed — even if I can afford to buy it — and can find three chickens.
And maybe a little rabbit. I could sit like I did when I was a child with my warm fuzzy so-gentle rabbit on my lap — pat it and get to know its spirit.
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Someday I hope somebody comes to visit me. I find down here in southeastern Arizona that people do not go to one another’s house to be with one another like they do up north. I couldn’t handle the ‘stimulation-noise’ of too many people — or the ‘wrong’ people. But SOMEONE?
My daughter will bring my grandson down about the 4th to the 8th of this January. That will be — well — fantastically wonderful! Then they will go and then I will miss them…….
Meanwhile………. Perhaps the angels like it if I talk to them.
(Oh — and yesterday I laid the drip over the large compost pile filled with delicious garbage and the thousand worms my sister sent me from Seattle! I moved the buried tomb that contained all my mother’s writings into the big compost — and guess what? For the first time in the four years I’ve lived on this property I saw centipedes — nested within my mother’s papers. HOW GROSS! I hate centipedes! Very unsettling, but somehow didn’t surprise me — certainly not after my recent posts about eliminating the hideous oleanders! The wonderful composting worms can have those papers now — and I KNOW they will make me wonderful garden soil out of them by spring!)
I answered it with my response 24 hours later. What I think about the article and the ideas contained within it doesn’t matter to anyone, really. Simply put, leave Maslow’s Pyramid alone.
What interests me most about this topic is my thought process. I took a look at the information when my daughter’s email came in, didn’t have an immediate response, and relegated-delegated any further thoughts on the subject to ‘the future’.
This future arrived suddenly as I worked outside in my yard. I wasn’t remotely aware that I was even ‘thinking’ about this article and my daughter’s request until THERE IT WAS! My response!
The process I evidently went through in this past 24 hours about this silly little subject fascinates me. Once THE ANSWER appeared — literally like it came as a boulder falling out of the sky and hitting me on the head in a cartoon — I now understand a little bit more about HOW I think. (The email I sent to my daughter once I had THE ANSWER appears at the bottom of this post.)
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Because of the information I now understand about how I am different as a result of the Trauma Altered Development I had to go through to survive my extremely abusive infant-childhood I am always interested to learn a little bit more about ‘how I work’. On this particular point I have no idea what an ‘ordinary or normal’ thought process might be like so have nothing to compare what I just experienced with.
What I DO know is that humans (I would say ESPECIALLY women!) are capable of ‘thinking’ in ways that our culture might not value. When my daughter presented me with her question I simply tossed the whole dang question ‘into the hopper’ and ‘forgot it’.
Obviously I DID NOT forget it! On all sorts of levels within my body-brain I have evidently been sorting through LOTS of information so that when THE ANSWER appeared, I KNEW instantly it was MY right one.
The image that came to me about this ‘whole body-brain’ ability to ‘think’ is that I didn’t so much toss the question to ‘a committee’ as I did to some part of my being that knows how to run an elevator! Over these past 24 hours that elevator operator has been moving up and down all the floors in the skyscraper of my body-brain. The operator stopped at each floor, opened the door, wandered around the groups of ‘people’ who live and work on each floor, gathering information on the topic from all of them.
Up-down-up-down, returning more than once to some floors to converse again with some members of ‘the group’ until finally a synthesis was made of ALL this information — and (as a commenter said this week) POP!! There was THE ANSWER!
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For those of us severe infant-childhood abuse and trauma survivors being able to think without attention and without ‘attachment’ or ‘association’ to the thought process that is going on ‘behind the scenes’ — I believe — is something we learned to do in part because trauma was likely to and did appear ‘out of nowhere’ without our being able to predict or control it nearly ALL OF THE TIME.
Being able to form a MIND at all meant that we grew a body-brain that honed to perfection the human ability to apply the greatest flexibility possible to our knowing and thinking processes. I believe these abilities are connected to ‘dissociation’ — but as my experience of these past 24 hours showed me — our abilities can be amazingly efficient, effective — and impressive!
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — the fundamental human rights declared in 1776 as The United States of America took its form as an independent nation. Where do abused infants and children look for their portion of these rights? To their caregivers.
As I work again today out in the sunshine on this glorious day, and as I pay attention to how I feel in my body, I know I am not happy. I am aware that what I am accomplishing is to lessen my continual sadness. “What, then,” I ask myself, “might contribute to something MORE than a lessening of sadness? What — if you use the powers of your mind to think and dream, might actually give you some measure of happiness?”
Well, at least I am in PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS! That’s the right direction for me to go as far as I can tell.
Happiness is NOT ‘just’ a lessening of sadness.
I’ve also been thinking about the ‘all right’ feeling as being a measure of a state of well-being. Oh, how seldom, how very, very seldom have I EVER experienced THAT feeling state: All is right. I am all right.
Knowing one is all right in the world is, to me, the rock bottom accomplishment given to an infant-child by its attachment-caregivers from birth so it can build this feeling state into its body-brain from the beginning of its life. From that time forward this feeling state remains built into the body and is therefore accessible to a person.
Being slapped and hit and yanked and punched and dragged around by hair and limb, having one’s skin punctured by grasping talons of fingernails, being screamed at and…….. Well, as I an other severe abuse survivors well know, these threatening, dangerous, traumatic and terrible-terrorizing conditions of infancy and childhood simply COULD NOT POSSIBLY build into our body a feeling of being ALL RIGHT.
Nope.
Never happened.
So here I am in adulthood sunk in the ‘depression’ of terrible sadness in the Meteor Crater I found myself born and battered in (not perched precariously at the top of a high precipice fighting to the death with her anger and rage against all perceived attacks, as my mother was).
Today I am practicing using my mind, thoughts and dreams to see if I can modulate-moderate the feelings of sadness into something that might resemble what I guess happiness is — or at least make progress toward an inner feeling of ALL RIGHT.
This is what I have come up with so far: If I could finish this garden, and name it The Secret Garden, then perhaps I could search out programs in this region of Arizona that work with abused children and invite them to come visit.
When I was five, and before our family moved from Los Angeles to Alaska, we visited an immense garden somewhere on a hill. I have never forgotten that glorious garden, and every single time in all my 54 years since that day when I think of that garden I feel not only a little-bit-less-sad, but for a brief flash of time I feel almost-happy.
Perhaps if I can create a magical garden here, designed especially for the eye level and imagination of five-year-olds, and then these little people who have been traumatized, battered and abused could come wander around here, MAYBE they too could carry within their body-brain-mind-self a memory that would ALWAYS be happy enough to displace their sadness (or rage) and provide for them a glimmer of true — ALL RIGHT — joy!
Big people could come, too — but it is to the little ones’ joy that I now return to my digging and adobe creation. May all of us today pursue our happiness!
When, in my adulthood, I first heard people using versions of a saying, “The table was turned,” I envisioned in my mind someone being angry and turning a table upside down so that its legs stuck up in the air. It took me a long time before I overcame my embarrassment enough to ask someone what they meant when they said this.
“Oh,” this person said to me. “It’s like four people are sitting playing cards. Each of them has their hand laying on the table top and someone turns the table so that everyone has someone else’s hand and THAT hand, rather than their original one, is what each plays the game through with.”
I mention this today because as I described what I have been thinking about pampered versus not pampered people to someone I am very close to yesterday that person responded to me with, “But the word pampered has such negative connotations!”
In other words, they were expressing a sentiment that would probably be common among those people I would say were raised from birth in a ‘benevolent’ world that I am now calling a pampered one.
I can see where this sentiment could come from. Looking at Webster’s online dictionary for this word I found:
2 a: to treat with extreme or excessive care and attention <pampered their guests> b:gratify, humor <enabled him to pamper his wanderlust — New Yorker>
Well, how about that? I have my sense of the contrast between being pampered and NOT being pampered just about right for what I am intending to describe! Look at the antonyms!
We are not commonly used to using one word to describe in contrast its opposite, but in this case my meaning is extremely clear when I use it to describe how severe infant-abuse survivors experienced their world — yes, when they NEEDED to and SHOULD have been treated exactly the opposite from the way that they actually were.
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How many people among ‘the masses’, however, ever bristle and become concerned and defensive when someone calls someone else ‘mentally ill’, for example?
In contrast, how many of the pampered people are going to bristle and become concerned and defensive when someone calls them pampered?
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We are very comfortable in our society in using definitive explanations for things that rely on a linear black-and-white, either-or pattern of thinking. It’s EASIER than making sure we understand the full meaning of what we are talking about.
It is EASIER to simply say, “I was abused when I was little,” or “I was not abused when I was little” than it is to say “I was not pampered” versus “I was pampered.”
I could continue to accept this simplistic thinking if there weren’t so many drastic and terrible lifelong consequences for survivors of severe infant-child abuse that society THEN feels completely comfortable in blaming and shaming the survivors for.
It is THEN that I want to ‘turn the tables’ so that the pampered would need to play THEIR entire lifetime out living in the reality that severe abuse survivors know with their every breath.
And the survivors? What would we survivors know of living the truly, from-birth pampered life even if someone were to suddenly give us one?
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My case in point if ye be of those who can make this gigantic leap! Nature has mirrored the experience of those whose body was built in ONE kind of world ONE way — and not the other way — permanently.
Pampered-from-birth (‘good enough’) people have a body that knows that reality. Not pampered-from-birth people have a body that knows that reality.
Nature and its ways cares nothing for the individual personal comfort zone of anyone. Nature only TRULY cares that a species does what it needs to do to ‘continue on being’. This entire array of possible body building options that happens in direct response to either the pampered world that raised us or to the not pampered one is — and I am going to the Bigger Picture here — meant to accomplish this ‘continue on being’ by creating bodies that THEMSELVES signal-convey the kind of world that built the person who lives in it.
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So we could turn another table of laid-out card hands here so that Nature received the personalized individual’s perspective on the experience of being alive and the individual people received the hands that clearly expresses what Nature cares about, intends and accomplishes.
How I am in the world, having been raised in a not pampered infant-childhood directly signals to others (who could detect and understand these signals) exactly what the condition of my early world was like — because those conditions built me to be the way that I am.
Jump to the peacock’s tail. A brilliant, resplendent, gorgeous and healthy peacock tail is simply a signal and a sign that the experiences of that bird happened in an environment rich in resources. The tail has nothing PERSONAL to do with the peacock at all!
Another peacock with a pitifully shabby, dull and sickly looking tail is simply signaling to its hoped-for mates that this bird was not pampered in a world of plenty.
Which peacock’s tail is going to attract which kind of mating partner?
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Well, as the ‘superior species’ we don’t like to be pared down to our actual size so that we can not only recognize but also accept that HOW we are in the world (based on the conditions of the world that formed us) does exactly the same thing. HOW we is a signal that expresses the NOT personal reality of THE CONDITIONS OF THE WORLD and actually, as Nature intends, doesn’t have much to do at all with our personal wishes or concerns as individuals.
So again I will say when you read particularly the last paragraphs of Dr. Martin and Fellow’s paper here *SYMTPOMS: 120909 Scan of Teicher’s Research – Trauma Altered Development Paper you are reading a description of the MISMATCH that happens when not pampered people are born into a not pampered world and at the end of their earliest years are hatched out into a pampered one!
The problem is this mismatch. The problems we endure as individual severe early abuse survivors IS THIS MISMATCH.
If pampered people were the only ones who lived in a pampered world — OK. If not pampered people were the only ones who lived in a not pampered world — OK.
How can I say OK to a resource-scarce and traumatizing world? Think about what our species had to go through so that we could be here asking that question. Our species was able to experience pampering ONLY under conditions of plentiful resources. When times were really, really tough, we were able to use an INNER resource that nature has NEVER let us lose: We contain within our very young body the ability to ADAPTIVELY AND FLEXIBLY adjust to the conditions of the world we are born into.
Then we are able to move forward in time in a not pampered body — surviving — continuing on as individual representatives of our species — into a future where resources were better. THEN the future generations could adaptively and flexibly adjust to these more pampered conditions — and babies could grow a body that reflected those improved conditions.
In other words, as I write this, I understand that ‘the tables’ are DESIGNED to turn. Without that ability to adjust and adapt flexibly we would not have had the resilience we needed to survive — not as a species, not as individuals.
We need to understand the bigger picture so that we can depersonalize the facts. Pampered people do not need to take offense when someone points out the truth of the benefits they received from a resource-rich environment from the time they were born.
AND not pampered people need to be FREE to be people who are not condemned and judged for the fact that our body did EXACTLY THE SAME THING that pampered people’s did: Adjusted in development to the conditions of OUR environment — which happened to be a resource-scarce one.
If our proverbial turning table were laden on one side with rich and nutritious food an on the other side tree bark and bugs — and THEN this table were to be turned so that pampered and not pampered people had to consume a diet they were not familiar with — my points here in this post might be a little easier — or tougher — to swallow.
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(Of course, I suppose ALL the female peacocks would go for the prettier tale, and in this example of female selection, who wins? I don’t know…… What I do know is that this version of a mate selection process is about finding who came from the richest world that had the best resources — and who got them.)
As I began my re-search over six years ago in my desperate need to find information about how what had happened to me during my abusive childhood was affecting my adult life, I began to find the ‘bits and pieces’ of truth that eventually I was able to fit together into the bigger picture that I live with today.
The more I read about how trauma in infancy-toddlerhood changes development the more hopeless I felt. All I could interpret from the facts I read was DAMAGE! DAMAGE! DAMAGE!
Finally I stumbled over the paper you will find scanned at this link:
The proverbial light went on, and suddenly all thoughts about my being DAMAGED by the severe abuse I experienced from birth turned into thoughts about how I was a CHANGED being!
Yet I still believe that I carry my own internal light into my continued personal study about the topic of abuse-caused early trauma altered development. Although there certainly were years during my own ‘recovery’ attempts that began in 1980 where I bought and swallowed all the various self-help ideas about ‘what was wrong with me’, I now know looking back that while I might have put these thoughts in my mouth and chewed on them — they didn’t taste good and they didn’t taste right.
Something within me knew better — and knew that something very critical was missing from all the ‘recovery’ information I could find. The information I found didn’t feel right deep at my core.
Even though the attachment and developmental neuroscience information that I have most recently studied certainly applies and is a far better fit, I still don’t 100% swallow it?
Why? Because at my core I value myself too much to eat, chew, swallow and digest ANY information that simply tells me I am damaged, changed in such a way that I ended up ‘mentally ill’ or suffering from pathology, or am in any way FLAWED as a being due to the trauma altered development I was FORCED to go through as my body adapted from birth to a malevolent, traumatic and extremely toxic interpersonal world.
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Although my discovery of Dr. Martin Teicher’s writings elevated my re-search to a platform above writings that did nothing but highlight ‘damage’ that happens from infant-child abuse, I still have always known SOMETHING IS STILL MISSING! Even though Teicher seemed to see ‘the bigger picture’, I knew instinctively there is a bigger picture still.
Teicher’s work (and his fellows’) cannot be disputed as it stands, but I don’t believe it goes far enough that it can truly serve those of us who have experienced early trauma altered development through severe abuse so that we ended up with an ‘evolutionarily altered brain’ such as his work describes.
It is NOT ‘just’ our brain that changed. Not in my thinking. It is our ENTIRE BODY. All of it down to our innermost molecule and genetic operation including our entire nervous system and our immune system (I still believe future research will find that it was our immune system that instigated our trauma altered development from the beginning).
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO US AS SURVIVORS TO BE AN ‘EVOLUTIONARILY ALTERED BEING’?
I will NOT buy it that we are ‘mentally ill’ or ‘damaged’ or ‘suffering from pathology’ SIMPLY because we are these beings.
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Most simply put I, as the survivor I am, quite simply NOW live post-childhood in a world that does not belong to me, nor I to it.
Teicher’s paper (as you will find it at the link above) might put in a kingpin for true understanding of who-how we are as survivors, but his information is ONLY the beginning.
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As I write this post following the post immediately preceding this one, I think about the DIFFERENT world I would probably fit into a whole lot better than I do this one.
If I could locate people whose body formed in similar ways that mine did, I could discuss this topic on its most REAL and important level. For starters, my guess is that as a whole we are far less egotistical, self-centered, self-possessed, self-righteous, arrogant, greedy and selfish than are many others who live in ‘that other world’.
We survivors could get together and talk about ‘them’ from our point of view with the information that OUR body tells us and come up with conclusions that very few in ‘that’ world would want to hear — I guarantee it!
If we could escape together from our quarantine in the ‘pathological’ pantry, we could discover our own wisdom — and what I suspect we would find as a group is that we are very closely connected in our experience (and in our body) to our specie’s ancestors — the Most Ancient Ones who lived in a world and during a time when most certainly nobody assumed anyone was ‘safe and secure’ for very long!
THOSE Most Ancient Ones? I feel proud to think that I have developed in such a way that I could share along with them what OUR reality is like.
That we as survivors, and WE as the Most Ancient Ones were NEVER a part of the PAMPERED group does NOT make us damaged, ill or pathological! In fact, people from ‘that’ world might find us downright frightening (Are they envious of us?) in our power, our strength, our resilience, our toughness, our determination, our courage and our endurance. We know things that PAMPERED people are not likely to know in their lifetime — and what WE know is built into our body down to our essential core.
So what if we experience life differently, remember differently, gather different information and process it differently than those who have always lived in ‘that’ world?
Somebody needs to expand their thinking, and I am not at all sure that it is the severe abuse survivors that most need to do this. Every attitude that belittles us, judges us, criticizes us, condemns us and does NOT value, honor and respect not only WHO we are as beings in the world but HOW we are beings in the world is a victim of their own ignorance, bias, stereotyping, prejudice and superstition.
IN FACT, we severe infant-child abuse survivors are probably the closest to being physiological SUPERHEROES as our current generations of humans are ever going to know!
The problem seems to be for me that I can’t find the boat with my own kind on it. I am left feeling pretty darned alone with this information. Those superhero ancestors of ours that were tough enough to endure so that our species is still here are pretty silent these days! But what they knew we know — how to endure the unendurable to the end of our days.
That’s not a trivial project, folks! Infant-child abuse survivors share with our Most Ancient ancestors the most important piece of information any living being can have. In spite of all the distractions one might encounter along life’s way only one single thing matters: Keep moving forward — no matter what!
So, I will no longer take a bite of, put into my mouth (mind), chew on, nor swallow any information about myself (self-help or not) that in any way discounts not only WHO I am, but HOW I am in the world. I will no longer believe that I am flawed, damaged, mentally ill or pathological because I am not like the Pampered People are. I will not try to change myself to be more like them just because they determine that I need to.
I WILL attempt to learn as much as I can about myself so that I can empower myself to be a better me living a better life. The Pampered People can obviously also do what they want to do, but I now understand that what they know, how they know it, what they believe, and how they might judge me has NOTHING to do with me — and it never did.
We survivors are no more pity-able or pathetic than our Most Ancient Ancestors were — and THIS thought does NOT contribute to my sadness — not even one single, tiny bit! Hooray!
As I sit outside in this morning’s sunshine and look at the huge lump of still-drying adobe that marks where the oleanders are entombed, encased and enshrined (and hopefully approaching their death) I have the strangest sense: “Who put that thing there? Were there ever giant oleanders stretched out over this piece of ground, or were they there only in my imagination?”
If I didn’t know what I now know about myself perhaps I wouldn’t even notice how I FEEL today — along with my thoughts in my mind that accompany how I feel. And I sure wouldn’t have any idea in my mind what these thoughts mean and where they come from.
When I write about what the self-help books never told me, when I write about what I was never told about how and why being in a body in this lifetime has always been difficult for me, I am talking about ‘these kinds of things’.
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I woke this morning with a determination that I am NOT going to remain at the dead end ‘nose against the wall’ hope-less state that I found myself in yesterday. I want to move forward. At least during the terror, trauma and deprivation of my 18 year childhood I WAS able to access at least that one idea (although never consciously): “Being alive means that I am moving forward in time, always forward.”
So what does forward mean to me on this glorious, still sunny morning? What thoughts can I access today that might help me keep my terrible underlying-overlying, overwhelming perpetual sadness at bay? What can I tell myself today in my mind that represents something I learned and am able to learn today that did not come from any therapist or self-help book?
Two words appeared in my mind: TRANSITIONAL OBJECTS
So I did a quick Google search, adding ‘child abuse’ along the way. Here are three links I came up with but there are plenty there online for exploration:
“I believe that transitional objects are indeed very important to a child’s emotional development. These objects help the child deal with transitions such as the transition from wakefulness to sleep and transition from being with parents to being with a baby-sitter. Security objects are usually very soft and warm. They can be items such as a blanket, cloth diaper, stuffed animal, or even a favorite pillowcase. Children’s transitional objects are usually something that reminds them of their parents.”
“Children’s attachment to transitional objects is based on unique identity and not the properties or kind of the object. This reasoning is an early and spontaneous example of the same value that adults place of sentimental possessions.”
As you might take a look for yourself in an online search about this topic, notice words like ‘self soothing’, transition between states and experiences, ‘sentimental’ and of course ATTACHMENT.
Who in God’s Green Acres was there for me to BE ATTACHED TO? Certainly NOT my mother — who was the last person on this green and blue earth that ever did anything but traumatize me.
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Looking at Websters online database I see that SENSE and SENTIMENT share the same roots. As I think about how my body formed from birth in a malevolent environment, I know that way before I had the ability to think in literal thoughts my body-self knew without a doubt THROUGH THE SENSES OF MY BODY that I was NOT safe and secure in the world.
So to whom was I EVER going to form a safe and secure attachment to so that any possible physical ‘transitional object’ was going to help me sooth myself?
Nobody.
The conditions of malevolence that my body formed in — as I repeat again — built into the circuitry-wiring-patterns of my brain’s neuronal structures and in my body the ABSENCE of the ability to not only FEEL safe and secure in the world, but also the absence of a PERSON (other than my 14-month-older baby brother) to be safely and securely attached to.
THIS FACT MATTERS!
This fact changes how I am in the world.
When I wake this morning and see that giant lump of drying adobe where the old sprawling oleanders stood a week ago, it is ONLY within my conscious MIND that I can connect not only the fact that the oleanders once existed, that days of work were required to transition those plants into a lump of adobe, but most importantly THAT I, LINDA, MADE THIS CHANGE UPON THE PLANET.
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What is this all about? I lack the ability to FEEL in the circuitry of my body-brain that I had a damn thing to do with the changes that happened in my yard — any of them.
This means to me that my entire home and yard are my CURRENT TRANSITIONAL OBJECTS. I walk around outside and as I physically SEE (with my senses) the changes that have happened there and try to physically form a ‘feeling felt’ connection within my own self NOT ONLY that I am in this body, but AM this body doing the walking — and that I have been ‘here’ all along making these changes.
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When I write about the consequences especially of infant-toddler abuse as they impact development, I am talking about all of these kinds of experiences of having one’s own life experiences.
I encourage readers of this blog to spend some time with a Google search investigating what I am describing using terms such as ‘attachment feeling felt’, and ‘attachment child abuse feeling felt’.
During early infant developmental stages use of transitional objects is connected to not only the ‘feeling felt’ of SELF to others, but also the ‘feeling felt’ the SELF has TO OTHERS. If an infant never is given what it needs to FEEL FELT in the world so that in response it can ALSO feel other people in the world, an entirely different FEELING pattern is built into the infant’s body-brain.
This does NOT mean such survivors are ‘mentally ill’ because we cannot access this very real kind of FEELING information. We never got it built into us in the first place which gave us a CHANGED and DIFFERENT body.
If we are going to search realistically for the structural underpinnings of dissociation, depersonalization and derealization — along with an over or under active stress response system that feeds into depression and posttraumatic stress disorder, we need to be REALISTIC in our thinking — yes, within our mind.
“The mind emerges from the activity of the brain, whose structure and function are directly shaped by interpersonal experience.”
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How our brain is built, along with the body that feeds information to the brain, are directly guided in their fundamental development by the kinds of early caregiver interactions an infant has.
SO, as I try to understand my ACTUAL experience of being a self with a mind in a body in my lifetime in this world, I MUST go back and learn as much as I can about how what happened to me from birth changed how I am in the world.
Yes, I HATE how I am now. There is NOTHING redeeming whatsoever about what was stolen from me! How can I celebrate that I cannot remember in any ‘feeling felt’ way that I was the person who made ALL the changes not only in my yard, but over the course of my entire adult life?
I can’t FEEL myself transitioning along through moments of time unless I TRY to — which is NOT the same thing as actually being able to FEEL something.
My inability to feel connected to my own self in a body in my life of course impacts all of my human relationships, as well. NO PERSON EVER ACTUALLY FEELS REAL TO ME. How could they? The only version of a human being that I can FEEL FELT with is within the range of early development similar to what my baby brother was when I was born. He was the only human being who consistently looked into my eyes, talked with me directly (when he was old enough to have words), touched me gently with love, and recognized my ACTUAL existence.
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Adult Reactive Attachment Disorder. What that means to me is that because the feeling of ‘feeling felt’ and of ‘feeling myself in my own life’ was NOT built into my body-brain, ALL I can do is react to what happens in my life AS THINGS HAPPEN. I can factually remember things (as I could during my childhood) but I could not feel myself as a self having experiences then, and I cannot actually do it now.
Therefore there is no possible way for me to FEEL connected on the most fundamental physiologically-wired way. I have to consciously work toward how I think I imagine experiences MIGHT BE LIKE for nearly all other human beings (the ‘upper 95%) who did not receive the horrendous malevolent treatment I did from birth.
No wonder I fight this sadness! No wonder I have great difficulties when people who are important to me are not within my immediate physical range of experience. I missed the opportunity to experience nearly every single positive early attachment building (body-nervous system-brain-mind-self) experience that would have led to my having an entirely different experience of myself in my life — NOW!
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Because I know every day more clearly how right I am about how trauma changes early development, hence changes the body we live in for the rest of our life — I KNOW there is no self-help book out there that tells us what these changes are, how they affect everything we experience in our life, and what it all means to us.
‘They’ can tell us until we are all blue in the face about this self-help clue/tip or another one, but nobody EVER told me I receive different information in the world, in a different way and process it differently — and because my experience was so ‘unique’ in its severity I might be one of the very, very few ‘lay people’ who could POSSIBLY have come to figure this out!
Yet I don’t believe that even all the attachment experts and developmental neuroscientists have figured out either because they are all divisional in what they know according to which separate Ivory Tower they operate from within.
In my particular case I can fit together what these experts have found out together into a single picture because I LIVE what they describe. I do NOT agree with ANY OF THEM that who and how I am in the world is one single bit PATHOLOGICAL.
I (and other survivors like me) am simply a living example of what a trauma altered development changed being is like and how WE experience life!
How many people can erase the awareness of pain from a bone break with their mind? How many people can make a toothache disappear with their mind? Does our society call these people ‘mentally ill’ because their pain is real and their mind is not doing the trick of changing their condition — for the better?
I almost feel like the fog is clearing that I have lived in blind all of my life. I keep thinking today, “How would my life as an adult turned out differently if anyone had EVER told me along my life’s pathway what I know now more clearly every passing day to be true?
I can feel my terrible, terrible sadness today. I feel weighted by it physically. Moving is difficult as if my being is so heavy. It’s a beautiful clear, sunny, warm, breezy day. I am working outside. I sit in the sun when I want to and gaze south over the Mexican wall at the tall trees over there swaying, at the tall mountain behind them — gorgeous!
I have absolutely NO reason to feel sad in my body today. Yet I am.
This is NOT depression! This is Substance P I bet, telling my body that pain is present — and has been since I was born.
I wish there was some kind of surgery that could be done to remove this sadness. I pay close attention to my body — and to my mind — as this sadness permeates my life. How would I feel if THIS feeling were GONE? Can I make it disappear and vanish WITH MY MIND? Nope.
I live with this sadness, in spite of this sadness — which I believe is at the set point of my nervous system. If someone had told me as a young adult that I would be sad all of my life — and to be aware (beware!) that every single choice and decision I was going to make in my life would be a REACTION to the pain of this sadness — could I have learned a long time ago how to consciously construct my choices and decisions to better insure a LESSENING of this chronic sadness?
I don’t know. I do know the body-brain built during the first year of life forms permanent connections that cannot be changed. It is also true that the cortical ‘higher thinking’ region of our brain is still maturing until age 25-30. Yet it is ALSO true that severe child abuse can make this brain region atrophy early (see Dr. Martin Teicher’s work) so that it never develops ‘on schedule’ or ‘correctly’ at all!
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I would NOT call what I live with a mental illness anymore than I would call a broken bone or a toothache a mental illness. What I feel is equally physiologically present IN MY BODY!
What I am beginning to think, though, is that IF everything I ever do is really in reaction to the pain of sadness — then I have an adult version of a Reactive Attachment Disorder (do a Google search on adult reactive attachment disorder – fascinating reading).
This is, in my thinking, a very real physiological-biological REALITY that has very, very little to do with the MIND. When I read blog comments by readers that use the worn-out terminology all the self-help books preach, I want to SHOUT “IT IS IN OUR BODY!!!” All of the difficulties we experience are NOT IN OUR MIND. Our MIND IS NOT SICK. We live in a trauma changed body from the infant-child abuse we experienced — and how we feel in our body IS THE CONSEQUENCE.
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In my thinking quieting my life and myself as much as possible — a form of eliminating the variables as a scientist would do in an experiment — and then paying the closest attention possible to how my body FEELS and what it tells me I will learn more than any self-help book will ever be able to tell me about ME and my experience.
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I think about a television set that was built in its factory-of-origin so that it over-shows one of the three primary colors ALL of the time unless the watcher manually adjusts the color ranges every time the television is turned on.
Too much red, or yellow, or blue — similar to infant-child abuse survivors whose nervous system was formed under the stress of trauma so that peace and calm is not their set point at center. Instead they have too much anger, too much fear, or too much sadness at center.
I don’t have to question where my center set point lies. I feel it, and it’s my guess that all survivors can detect their set point in one of these three powerful survival-based emotional arenas.
Because our body reacts to what we do (the people we are around for example) we can ‘lift ourselves’ away from our center set point on occasion. But in my thinking we have a body built under so much stress, with so little safety, security, peace, calm and happiness when we were little that we ARE IN THE HOLE.
Just to escape the chronic nature of the emotion that is our center set point requires huge input. We might just escape our central feeling — but to get to PEACE and CALM — and from there to HAPPY? HUGE input is needed!
And we do NOT stay in the peaceful or happy place once we are not in contact with whatever/whomever HELPED us out of our hole temporarily because we are REACTING to external rather than internal conditions.
Again, this is not a ‘mentally ill’ condition. It is body-based in our physiology. Although I am nothing like an expert, I FEEL the truth of what I say.
Adequate early caregiver interactions in a safe and secure environment transmit to the infant’s growing body-nervous system-brain the ability to grow into itself a drastically reduced tendency to REACT to external stimulation and conditions. THAT state, as different as it is from that of severe infant-child abuse survivors, IS IN THEIR BODY-physiology, too!
All the self-help razmahtaz in the world can be confusing jibberish to early abuse survivors, more like dandelion fluff blowing in the wind than it is useful. What happened to us was not in our mind. It affected how our body developed. These trauma changes affected how our body FEELS every moment of our life except when we are reacting to the world around us — which creates temporary feeling changes that do not last.
I don’t HAVE any answers today other than STOP INFANT-CHILD ABUSE because it hurts for a lifetime! And don’t call us ‘mentally ill’ because we FEEL the consequences of this hurt for a lifetime. What we endured built itself into us from the beginning of our lives and guess what? We cannot simply ‘get over it and move on’, ‘put our abusive childhoods in the past’, ‘forget our past’, or magically ‘forgive our abusers’ so that we will be ‘better’ and more like ‘normal people’.
It became very clear to me as I replied to the comments that what I do with my work out in my yard is not only ‘gardening therapy’ for me, it is an expression of myself in an art form: Adobe.
Today completes the basic work on destroying these two oleanders in my yard (see: +MY TOXIC MOTHER AND THE OLEANDER). What interests me about my thinking in response to today’s comments is the similarity I see between this oleander project and my severe infant-child abuse survivorship: While I do not believe in ‘getting over it and moving on’, ‘putting our abusive childhoods in the past’, ‘forgetting our past’, ‘leaving our abusive childhoods behind’, etc., I do believe in positive change.
I am reminded of the posts I wrote some time ago in which I described my realization that my mother as the abuser and my father as her enabler would have deserved a minimum jail sentence each of 14,500 years for what they did to me — and that was figured using the tip of the iceberg and vastly minimizing my mother’s attacks on me over the 18 years of my childhood.
Crimes against a child that could have/should have resulted in 14,500 years of incarceration is NOT something I can even conceive of resolving for myself with ‘forgiveness’.
This does not mean that I simply accept what happened and how I am today as a result of it mildly! Nope! Not this woman!
So, my latest project has been teaching me how I understand that a severe infant-child abuse survivor can emerge from their earliest years being an extremely TOXIC person — or NOT! Nobody is perfect, but my mother didn’t earn her 14,500 year jail term assessment from me by simply being a little bit flawed. Nope!
So — my mother and the metaphor of the deadly poisonous oleander.
I would — and I am serious! Need a bulldozer in this yard to remove the roots of these two hundred year old oleanders — or dynamite. I have no access to either — and I have no possible way to remove those roots.
Parallel: I have no way to remove the damage my mother did to me through her mentally ill devastating abuse of me. The ‘damage’ was built right into my developing body-brain from birth, as I describe so many times on this blog.
But, I can do the best I can to pare all of it down — put boundaries around what was ‘her’ and what was ‘me’ — and most importantly I can CONTAIN and QUARANTINE the toxic poison to minimize what is affecting me ever day — to the best of my ability.
This is, to me most certainly NOT about forgiveness. This is about continuing to survive the best way that I can.
SOOOOOO…… Here are the latest pictures, including one from the previous post showing the start of this project:
Starting to hack down the two oleandersDown to the stumps. All surrounding ground that these plants have polluted is toxic -- I will never be able to grow anything edible in this groundWithout a chainsaw this is as low as I could cut the stumpsOver the fence into 'no man's land' (Mexican American wall/fences behind the pile) - no way does this picture show the extent of the PILE of scrap I threw into QUARANTINE!The most toxic thing I had around to use as a weapon against these plants was LIME -- 50 pounds dumped into the ball of stumps (each), whole mess contained within dried adobe blocks -- and salt thrown on tho I wish I had MOREI felt badly for all the bugs that crawled up out of the soil once the lime was on, so I put these sticks up as bug escape routes -- only the 'smartest' survived, which included spiders but only a few beetlesHere I started covering up stumps with a heavy cement mix of wet adobe mud -- notice the delightfully sickly green the stumps turned with the lime -- YAY!Layers of cement-adobe, sandwiched with slabs of broken cement from the back of the yard over the stumpsEach wet adobe block weighs 50 pounds (35 pounds dry), each block contains nearly 5 gallons of soilEnd of the day today, sunset -- filled UP!I will need to put another layer down the center over the stumps --
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I WILL make something beautiful out of the mess! I hope the height of this will be right for bench around the outside — place to put flower pots down the center — I can plant flowers in this toxic soil — I hope to find the money over time to put up a TALL privacy fence along my neighbor’s chain link — the oleander did give some privacy, but at way too high a price!
And every moment I have worked on this project I have thought about my mother and her toxic abuse. I can’t change what she did to me, but I sure can work to chop it all down to size (perspective-gaining), contain it, quarantine as much toxic parts as possible, and BURY THE HELL out of the mother I have NEVER yet been able to feel ANGER toward. I hope I am moving in that direction – so I can learn what anger has to teach me and move on from THAT — which is possible — and mine to do!
Stop the Storm 
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